Fortunate Lives (12 page)

E
VERY YEAR WHEN THE
college and the public schools released their faculty and students in early June, Dinah’s house began to fill with people
who came and went at all hours: her children’s friends, various contributors to
The Review
, Martin’s ex-students who wandered back into town with spouses or new children. The Hofstatters often dropped by, together
or singly, as did other friends, neighbors, and assorted acquaintances. Any day of the summer Dinah might find herself drinking
midmorning coffee with David’s former best friend from eighth grade, who was only an amiable acquaintance of David’s now,
but had attached himself to the household in general.

Each summer teenagers who had first witnessed Moonflower on a long-past Fourth of July would drop by. They felt a special
association with Dinah in the magical conspiracy she had engineered against their younger selves. And even outside her own
house, anywhere within the town, they often confided in her. She ran into them at the grocery
store or at the college pool. They told her about the repression of their own households, their foolish parents, their secret
lives.

And yet, every summer Dinah was surprised when she wandered through her rooms and found them occupied, or when she was hurrying
to get errands done and was helping the check-out girl bag the groceries and was suddenly involved in an intimate conversation
about the girl’s college choices, love life.

When she was pondering the cheese selection at The Whole Grain Elevator—a store displaced from the seventies—she found herself
commiserating with a long-ago Moonflower devotee who didn’t know how to tell her parents that both she and the boy they thought
was her lover only had in common the fact that they were each involved with the same woman at their college. “Kate cares about
us both, but sexually she’s still ambivalent…. God,” the girl said, “I really, really wish I were just one bit ambivalent!”
She paused after drawing the wire cheese cutter through the cheddar Dinah had chosen. “It would be easier to be in love with
Tim. And you know what? He’s a much nicer person than Kate.” She wrapped the cheese in brown paper and began tying it with
twine. “But one of us is going to end up so unhappy.” She handed Dinah the cheese and took payment for it, and Dinah left
the store feeling sympathy for her, although Dinah had scarcely been able to place her and, at first, hadn’t remembered her
last name.

Dinah wasn’t aware of encouraging or discouraging anyone who chose to confide in her. In fact, she didn’t know such random
intimacy was uncommon, but it was Dinah’s instinct to ease any other person’s anxiety in a conversation. Perhaps it was only
cowardice masquerading as courtesy, because after cocktail parties or college functions she was often filled with self-loathing
as she re-imagined her smiling, acquiescent self listening with apparent fascination
to some fool pontificating about one thing or another. And she always despaired of herself when she realized that she had
once again probably overwhelmed Christie with aggressive amiability in a desperate effort not to appear judgmental.

But her courtesy was a habit she could not break. Invariably, she inclined her head forward and raised her eyebrows in an
expression of anticipation at whatever information or opinion was being divulged to her in any conversation. People were shockingly
forthcoming now and then. It never occurred to her that they didn’t speak this way to everyone.

She was surprised and discomfited every summer by her lack of privacy, but her restiveness in the warm weather merely became
part of her own climate, part of her daily life, just as the animals were who moved with her from place to place, in and out
of doors. When friends of hers or acquaintances of her children dropped by to chat with her, she treated them as visitors;
she didn’t understand that her house had become a haven to other people’s children.

And the morning after Moonflower’s visit, it became a haven for Netta, too, and her daughter Anna Tyson. Netta phoned at eight
in the morning and spoke to Martin, who answered the phone out of a sound sleep, but the call also woke Dinah, who listened
to his side of the conversation with mounting exasperation.

“What would you have said?” Martin asked in his own defense. “She started crying, for God’s sake, and I was hardly awake.
She said she’s been up all night. You wouldn’t have told her no.” Martin was as irritated as Dinah, who had gathered that
Netta had invited herself over for dinner.

“I’m exhausted, Martin! I’ve been up all night myself. I couldn’t get to sleep until almost five-thirty, and I’m just exhausted.
I really don’t want any company.” He turned his
back to her and sank his head deeply into his pillow to shut out the light filtering into the room. He pulled the sheet up
to the tip of his nose.

“I would have thought of some excuse,” Dinah continued. She had turned to lie on her back, wide awake now. “I would have told
her we were going out or something.”

“She said she couldn’t stand to be so lonely after being with people last night. For God’s sake, Dinah! She’s had an awful
time, and she’s going to bring a special dish for dinner, she said. She just wants to join us for leftovers. I’m no good on
the phone. You know that. I’m not good at lying.” Martin’s words were muffled by his pillow and by the sleep that he was allowing
to overtake him.

“Oh, God! Just because you don’t tell the truth doesn’t mean you’d be
lying
, Martin!” She believed this absolutely. “To protect yourself without hurting someone’s feelings! That’s called avoiding unpleasantness.”
She didn’t expect a reaction, because she knew that Martin had sunk deeply into sleep again. For years she had suffered in
restless aggravation while Martin turned his head to one side and slept, even in planes and trains and waiting rooms, and
often in the midst of appalling circumstances. She had been in love with Martin, and now she loved him in a way that was simply
a condition of her life, but there had been times when she had looked over at his sleeping face, loose in repose, his mouth
slightly open, the muscles around his eyes and along his chin gone slack, and wondered if she
liked
him at all. Her own ideas or worries—thrilling or sorrowful, grave or frivolous—rarely relinquished their grip on her consciousness
and never in any public place. Dinah thought of the sleep she got as coming to her in dribs and drabs, and not necessarily
when she needed it.

Just as Martin and Dinah were clearing up after a late breakfast Netta arrived as she had the previous day, before lunch,
and with Anna Tyson at her side. But she
had brought a contribution, and she was agitated and pleased with the idea she had. “I thought that a really wonderful summer
soup would be just right to go with sandwiches! You had so much ham and turkey left over last night. Oh, this is a wonderful
soup. Bill and I used to spend Sunday mornings reading the
Times
and clipping recipes….”

Her animation dimmed as she put down her two grocery bags. Her expression became somber as she unpacked ingredients: a plastic
produce bag of three oranges and another one with several rubber-banded bunches of green onions, whipping cream, a quart of
chocolate milk, and a medium-sized, rumpled paper bag, from which emerged masses of long, broad, muddy, red-veined leaves
that shed droplets of brownish water all over the white counter and the cutting board next to the sink.

She turned to Dinah and held out her empty hands, as though to illustrate something. “Oh, God! It was all
planning
,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears. Anna Tyson was hanging on to her skirt, and Netta urged her along to the table
and settled herself in the same spot she had occupied yesterday. She lifted Anna Tyson into the chair beside her own and appealed
again to Dinah. “The only time I made this soup no one ever ate it. Anna Tyson ate some,” she amended, with a little more
control, her voice less tremulous. She leaned back in her chair and gazed at the table a moment, collecting her thoughts.
“We had planned to eat it, and Celia was going to make dark bread. I don’t know what happened. You know, that’s what I can’t
ever understand. I just don’t know what happened. I’ve always thought that people are fated to meet each other.”

She held her hand up to stop any possible misinterpretation. “I don’t mean anything mysterious when I say that. Well, I do
believe in a kind of
particular
ESP, you know. A sort of instinctive selection. I met Bill because I had checked a book that he needed out of the library,
and I’d forgotten
all about it, so it had been out a long time. He came and
found
me! We talked for two hours, standing in the hall. I mean, other people were passing by. My roommates. After he left I went
to the library and wrote him a twenty-page letter! You see”—and she bent forward to close the space a little between herself
and Martin and Dinah so that they wouldn’t miss the point—“I had met someone I
had
to talk to. You know that experience! I don’t know how to say it, but it’s as though there’s an intention in the
world
that you reveal yourself to this other person.”

To Dinah’s astonishment, Martin nodded in solemn agreement. It heightened her edgy irritation with the direction the whole
day was taking. She remembered the fleeting look of condescension that had crossed his face just last week when she had told
him that she and the upholsterer, who was making slipcovers for the living room chairs, had some sort of shared sensibility.
A shared sense of time. Something. Within the space of a week one of them had phoned the other at least five times to check
on this or that, only to find the other had picked up the phone just before it rang. They had begun sentences simultaneously
and with the same words. And yet, Dinah couldn’t discover anything else they had in common. She, too, had always believed
in some sort of ESP operating in the world, but she had assumed it would be dramatic or profound—just what Netta was describing.
Dinah had never suspected it would be as indiscriminate as her experience with the upholsterer—a sort of mundane chemical
function.

But Netta took heart from Martin’s nod and went on. “It was the same with Celia. Since I was ten years old there was Celia.
I was so glad when she and Bill had that same sort of… connection. I didn’t even mind when Celia and Bill had a sexual relationship.
I don’t think that’s what I minded….” Her voice dwindled off into a silent musing, and Dinah took in the fact that David and
Christie had come quietly into the kitchen from the garden, and that
Sarah was in her robe at the counter across the room, making toast. Sarah didn’t seem to be paying any attention, but David
had put his hand on Christie’s arm to stop her from coming farther into the room and interrupting Netta by making their presence
known. Netta was oblivious, in any case.

“I
did
mind that he wasn’t having sex with me,” she murmured, seemingly to herself but quite audibly. She put her elbows on the
table and lowered her head to her palms in obvious despair. “Oh, God! That was so painful!” She exhaled the words as though
she could not stop them, and then she straightened slightly and took in the room again, becoming more brisk. “Of course, I
was pregnant when it all started,” Netta continued in a stronger voice, with just a hint of weariness, as though she were
gathering her forces against enormous odds.

Dinah got up from the table and went to the counter. She was sure she detected the unmistakably heraldic note of the beginning
of a much longer story. “I’ll put this chocolate milk in the refrigerator unless you want some now, Anna Tyson,” she said,
and she looked questioningly at Netta and Anna Tyson. “What do you have here, Netta?” Her own tone was light, and she lifted
the paper bag a bit, which precipitated another rain of muddy water from the clustered greens. “Ah… beets. Well, I have a
wide colander somewhere. You’ll need that, won’t you?” And she bent to search the lower cupboards. “And the kettle with the
strainer insert. This soup? Is it borscht?”

One of the reasons some people stopped Dinah in the drugstore, or leaned nearer to her at a dinner party to tell her something
they might not have told someone they knew much better, was that they instinctively trusted her to stop them from revealing
too much. Dinah was always alert to the honesty of strangers. She had a horror of being held responsible for any part of their
well-being later on, in case they remembered that they had told her more than they
should have. To any person in distress she possessed the seductiveness of polite and kindly interest combined with an obvious
reluctance to participate in any sort of overly intimate confession.

This morning, though, Dinah appeared to her family, whose attention suddenly shifted her way, not to be much interested in
anything Netta said, not to be taking Netta’s anguish into account. Martin glanced curiously at Dinah as she put the chocolate
milk away and stood in the center of the kitchen pinning her hair up haphazardly to get it out of her face. David, too, shot
her a speculative glance filled with censure. But Dinah didn’t even notice; she was offended by Netta’s emotional sloppiness,
her almost obscene social naïveté. She was embarrassed for and disturbed by her, and she was also daunted by the prospect
of the mound of produce Netta had piled on the cutting board.

“Oh, no, I don’t think it’s borscht,” Netta answered, once again falling into that soft sibilance that marked her speech.
She began to search through a canvas carry-all that was propped against her chair. Anna Tyson slid off her own chair to lean
against her mother and peer inside it. “I don’t think I’ve ever had borscht. This was in an article on summer soups. I’ve
got the recipe with me here,” she said, “and I would have done all the cooking at my apartment, but Bill has all the pans
and knives—he even has the Cuisinart—at the apartment in Cambridge. Of course, he says I can come get anything I need, but
I’ve been afraid to go alone. All I have to cook in is what was left by the former tenants of my apartment, and they didn’t
leave much. But this soup is so
beautiful
! I found everything I need to make it. Oh, but I couldn’t find raspberry vinegar. Do you have any?” When Dinah merely shook
her head, Netta smiled warmly, full of forgiveness. “Oh, well. Don’t worry about it! This soup will be delicious anyway.”