Dale Loves Sophie to Death (8 page)

Dinah explained what she needed, and Jim went back into the meat locker to get a side of beef from which to cut it. When he returned and was standing at his porcelain table sideways to her, he continued his part of the conversation. “It’s a funny thing, though, about Dr. Briggs, you know. Sometimes I think he’s kind of gone to pieces. Do you remember my son, Pete? He’s up at OSU now?”

Dinah nodded.

“Well, last year he had to have an operation.” He looked up at Dinah with a reassuring shrug. “He’s fine, now. It turned out not to be anything serious. But, anyway, he was pretty scared beforehand. He was working here in the store with me, and he was real worried about the idea of being cut open.” Jim paused to pull out a long sheet of paper, in which he would wrap Dinah’s roast, from the serrated-edge holder over his table. “Do you want me to cut this into cubes for you, or do you want to do it yourself? It’s no extra charge.”

“Oh, no. I can do that,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what size I want them.”

Jim nodded in agreement, and went on, “Well, I really got to be afraid he wouldn’t go through with it, and I finally called up Dr. Briggs, you know, and just asked him if he would talk to Pete about it. I knew your dad was still seeing some patients, and he’s known Pete all his life. Anyway, he said he’d be glad to. He asked me if Pete could bring along some meat and groceries when he came, just to save him the walk that day. I guess your father has some pain still, getting around.”

By this time Jim had wrapped and tied the meat and put it on the counter in front of Dinah, but he was standing with both hands resting on the glass and leaning toward her, so Dinah didn’t take up the package yet. She saw he had more to say.

“Well, Pete took all the groceries over to him. He carried them through to the kitchen for Dr. Briggs and waited while your father checked over them all and put them away. But your dad had ordered a thick T-bone”—and Jim held his fingers up to approximate the thickness—“and he didn’t put that away. He just put it there on the table, and began to ask Pete all about his operation and when it was going to be and all, while he was unwrapping that steak. And then when he got it all untied, and the paper off of it…well, then your father took one of those long carving knives out of a drawer. The kind of knife you use to carve a turkey or a ham, Pete said. And he kind of flung it point down into the beef, so that it stood straight up there on the table. Then he looked up at Pete and said, ‘You see, your surgery won’t be any different than that. No different than that at all.’” Jim looked earnestly over the counter at her, declining to judge the incident, but anxious to impart it, nevertheless.

Dinah just stood there a moment, struck dumb by so much information. But finally she responded, “Well! That’s terrible! Poor Pete. What did he do?”

“Oh, Pete went on and had the operation. It turned out fine.”

Dinah had all the things she needed, and she paid the cashier and walked out of the store into the sunshine dappling down onto the shaded sidewalk and went slowly home carrying her groceries. A smile slipped down over her face; she was intrigued by her father’s splendid misbehavior—well, cruelty. The smile stayed there; it took over her entire face, but she could not excuse her peculiar pleasure. After all, a little kindness among the civilians was what she had longed for and valued above all else in her life. Nevertheless, her father’s performance had a certain gruesome elegance that she admired. But as she walked on down the street, careful along the sidewalk, which rose and fell precariously over the ancient tree roots, her smile dried on her face as though it were set in clay. Her smile lay over her lips, and her eyebrows remained lifted in amusement, as if her expression had just been extracted from a plasticine mold. It was one of those times when her mind raced ahead with new thoughts and neglected to signal her body of the altered direction. She stepped carefully along, embracing a brown paper bag with each arm, thinking about what her father had said to
her
. What boy did he mean? What child of hers could her father have access to?

When she passed by her father’s house in order to get to the corner where she would cross, she slowed slightly and turned her head, still with its rigid, powdery smile, to that house being so elaborately turned out. She was suddenly so uneasy that a tingling spread down her back and arms. She was beyond judging this situation; she didn’t even attempt to reach an objective state. She only knew that she did not want her children to encounter that evanescent, chill cynicism her father possessed. She did not want that cloud to envelop David or Toby or Sarah.

But all she saw of interest as she approached her father’s house with an eye out for something sinister was the large gray cat hunched on his doorstep, and he only stared at her audaciously, assured of his domain. Her father doted on this cat; Dinah saw him in the evenings allowing the cat to climb over him and sit on his newspaper as he was trying to read it. She had watched from her window as her father cut up bits of cheese from the tray of hors d’oeuvres at his elbow and fed the little pieces to the cat. Sometimes the cat would eat a bite, condescendingly, and sometimes he would flick his tail and walk away around the corner of the house. Dinah had come to a standstill at her father’s gate, and all at once she put her groceries down on the sidewalk and stooped so that she could reach her hand through the wrought-iron bars and wriggle her fingers enticingly at the cat. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” But the cat just looked back at her solemnly, unmoving, and Dinah found herself stooping there, feeling the kind of fool that only a cat can make you feel. She picked up the two sacks and went home.

D
inah was a good cook. She often suspected that the pleasure she found in preparing a meal, step by step, with careful calculation and order all around her, was a substitute for the pleasure she would have felt if she could have applied such sensible organization to the other aspects of her life. It wasn’t everyday cooking she enjoyed, and in fact, that had fallen by the wayside, a victim of her summer listlessness. Sometimes in the mornings, though, she would decide to make a stew for the children’s evening meal. She would begin meticulously, peeling carrots and slicing them on the diagonal so that she could carve them into little ovals, and then she would carve the potatoes the same way. It gave her great pleasure to serve a stew with coordinated vegetables. All the little olive-shaped carrots and potatoes would lie in segregated heaps on waxed paper next to the sink, and then she would cube the meat, carefully cutting away all the fat. But when she took out the wide skillet in which she would have to brown each separate cube of beef, she would envision herself standing there by the stove, closely monitoring the heat and turning each little cube from side to side—six sides for each, in all—so that when she finished, the sizzling oil would have risen from the pan in a transparent mist that would coat the stove and her hands and the teakettle on the rear burner. With that picture in the back of her mind, she would carefully rewrap the cut-up meat and put it in the freezer, and she would drift out of the kitchen indecisively to begin some other project. In the evening she would open some tuna and canned peaches and make do one way or another, and the children preferred this laxity. Meanwhile, as the children slammed in and out of the back door during the day, they would pass the sink and take up a few of the delicately carved carrots and eat them out of hand. When Dinah cleared away the dishes and cleaned up after dinner, she had only the little pile of graying potatoes to dispose of.

Now, with a party to cook for, Dinah took stock of all the little cans and bottles of spices lined up so carefully by Mrs. Horton, who had left a note encouraging Dinah to use them up. Dinah had cubed the sirloin for the shish kebab, and with rubber gloves over her hands she rubbed each separate piece with a cut clove of garlic and then with powdered ginger, being sure that the deep golden powder adhered to every surface. She stirred the cubes into a marinade of sour cream, rosemary, and bay, and left the bowl in a shady place on the counter.

Pam kept the children for most of the day, and Dinah was lying on her bed, idly watching television and resting when she saw Pam’s car pull up in front of the house about four o’clock to drop them off. When she looked out to see that the children had been delivered home, she was surprised to find that she had become inordinately interested in the show she was watching. She didn’t want to get up and leave it, but she did, because she needed to feed the children their dinner early. Her guests would arrive about six o’clock; since they would eat outside tonight, she must cook while the light held.

She gave the children a dinner of hot dogs and potato chips and then suggested that they ride their bikes down to the school playground, where there were swings and a jungle gym. She knew they were tired, and she had noticed that Toby was limping again slightly when he had come up the sidewalk from Pam’s car, although he seemed to be fine now. Dinah wanted them out of the house, because she knew she was too preoccupied to be kind to them if they were hanging about to hinder her dressing or final preparations for dinner.

It was Sarah who objected. “I only have a Big Wheels, Mama! I can’t go as fast.”

Suddenly Dinah was feeling very tense about the evening ahead, the dinner she would serve, the dress she would wear. She felt uncomfortable at the idea of giving a party without Martin to back her up in the face of any emergency, irrationally uncomfortable, since Pam and Lawrence and Buddy and her mother—her only guests—knew her at her most casual. But she bent down to Sarah and encircled her with one arm.

“Sweetie, David will watch you. He’ll just walk his bike down, and you won’t have to cross a street, you know. It isn’t very far.” She looked at David, but he didn’t make any sign of disagreement, and she recognized that this was one of those rare moments when she had stepped into the scope of the children’s empathy. They had caught on to her nervousness, and it crossed her mind fleetingly how foolish it was to require these three children, whom she cared about so desperately, to accommodate her in order that she might impress other people, whom she could only regard with mixed affection and wariness. But the children went along, Toby and David with their bikes, and Sarah clattering horribly over the pavement with her wide-wheeled plastic tricycle.

Her guests arrived all at once; they had walked down together through the village from the direction of her mother’s house. Dinah saw them coming leisurely along the sidewalk. Lawrence had dropped back to walk alongside her mother, and Pam and Buddy were walking more briskly, several paces ahead of them. She sat in the living room with a glass of wine and glanced out at them through her windows. All the preparations were made, and she had no reason at all to be uneasy, but the wine was comforting even so.

She went outside to meet them so that she could lead the way around the house to the narrow space of yard between the vegetable and flower gardens. They all sat under the oak tree and around the table, over which Dinah had simply spread an unhemmed length of brilliant green dotted swiss. Down the center of the table she had aligned six little clay pots of begonias interspersed with short, fat candles set out in miniature versions of the same clay pots. It was all very pretty, and she knew at once that it had been a mistake. Even this simple decoration said plainly that this was a party, and the inherent demand in that idea made everyone stiffen a bit. But when she brought out a huge jug of California wine and passed around plastic cups, an ease fell over the group.

“This is nice, Dinah,” Buddy said. “It all looks so pretty.” He poured wine for everybody from the heavy bottle.

“Well, I was just in the mood to do something special,” she said. “Thank you.”

They began to enjoy themselves, all of them together, because it was so usual to be this way. This gathering seemed perpetual; sometimes Dinah thought it might be a way of capturing a bit of immortality at its most elusive—the imprint on time made by this particular selection of people.

When she began to arrange the charcoal in the grill, Lawrence came over to help, and he put his arm around her waist in a companionable hug, so she leaned against him as one does with a friend. These hugs and casual touches of hands between herself and Lawrence were new since any previous summer, and she was glad they had overcome their long uneasiness with each other and could relax again. When they were sitting under the tree once more, Dinah found herself looking at Lawrence and Pam as they sat there across from her. Lawrence was still attractive, but they were of an age, and he had altered in the same ways she had: his cheekbones more prominent, small creases at his mouth and eyes. When she looked at Pam sitting beside him, so much younger than the rest of them, she felt aged all at once. She evaluated her thoughts to see if it was jealousy she was feeling, because for years she had been slightly possessive of Lawrence.

For a long time it had been Lawrence, not Isobel Brooks, his younger sister, who had been Dinah’s closest childhood friend, even though she and Isobel were the same age and Lawrence two years older. But so much of their childhood Dinah and Lawrence had spent together in exclusion of Isobel and Alan Brooks, the oldest of the four of them. One afternoon she and Lawrence had been sitting in her bedroom playing checkers while she held her cat on her lap as she pondered the game. Lawrence knew all the strategies and often tricked her into a position where she could be triple-jumped. He almost always won.

“I wish I were Thompkins,” Lawrence said, all of a sudden.

Dinah had looked down at Thompkins’s notched ears and battered head in surprise, until suddenly she was paralyzed with a shock of understanding as she observed how comfortably Thompkins was nestled in the space made by the triangle of her legs as she sat cross-legged on the floor over the checkerboard. That was all he had said then, but they had played together less and less after that, and for a while she had resented and been intrigued at the same time, that he had brought such a thing out into the open between them. She had lain awake long nights thinking about it.