Fortunate Lives (16 page)

For months after Toby’s death, Martin had envied Dinah her ability to hold her grief in the forefront of her mind and move
through it in all her sleepless nights, while his stupid body betrayed him and sought solace in sleep so deep and dreamless
that each morning he had to become reacquainted with the actuality of the loss of his son. He would wake in the mornings rested,
interested as always in the idea of the day ahead, only to be blindsided by the dismal task of discarding all the promising
possibilities.

Martin felt compelled to seek out Owen’s company, if only to test himself. He knew that it was the leap to unthinking acceptance
of his son’s death that had marked his transition from grief to sorrow, and he felt sure that he had hurdled across that abyss,
but somehow it was necessary to turn around and see just how far he had traveled and be sure his footing was relatively secure.

When Martin returned in the late afternoon he settled in the kitchen with a weak Scotch and soda. Christie arrived shortly
afterward, returning a sweater that David had left
in her car. She stood by David’s side as he worked with Netta at the stove. Anna Tyson grew restless and querulous, and Sarah
took her in hand without even being asked, whisking Anna Tyson out to the porch while Dinah came in and out, setting the table,
slicing bread, moving the things she needed in the cupboards with a clatter.

Sarah had seen the furrowed expression of concentration on her mother’s face that generally foreshadowed familial disharmony,
an explosion of bad temper, hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and she did what she could to forestall it. While Anna Tyson
drew pictures at the table on the back porch, Sarah slipped away to phone her friend Elise and tell her that she wasn’t coming
over that afternoon. “I can’t help it,” Sarah said. “We have company for dinner.” Sarah was like a seismograph within the
family; she could register oncoming tremors.

But Martin didn’t notice any discordancy in the household; he was simply relieved to be at home after spending the afternoon
getting Owen settled into the little anteroom in Jesse Hall.

Martin took a sip of his drink and reveled in an almost smug pleasure at being in the company of friends, with all the easy
time of the summer days still ahead that would fit into the rooms of Dinah’s house. He had given the house over to her emotionally
a long time ago. The interiors were however she had invented them—the pictures on the walls, the furniture placement. When
he was preparing for a seminar to meet at home and she came into the living room while he was arranging things, she became
truly distressed.

“For God’s sake, sweetheart! You’ve lined all the chairs up straight. It’s not an auditorium in here, you know. It’s a real
place. I thought that was the point of having the class here.” He would leave the room while she rearranged the chairs he
had brought in from the dining room, and it was a long time before he had understood that this was a gift she had: to arrange
the rooms, to place the chairs, to hang
the pictures, to maintain the physical equilibrium of their domestic arrangements.

Christie was scrubbing the built-in cutting board next to the sink, and David was washing the huge stainless-steel stockpot,
which was encrusted with pink scum from the boiling beets. Netta went back and forth from one to the other, and finally she
sat down beside Martin at the table. He found himself so filled with affection for his wife, his children, his house—even
Bob, the cat, circling sharklike around his ankles, campaigning for an early supper—that Netta’s narrow presence appealed
to his largess. He wanted to extend to her his idea that serenity could be achieved only in this particular turmoil, this
remarkable domesticity. He wanted urgently to explain the chemistry of families.

She was leaning forward, her chin cupped in her hand, her eyes lowered and ringed underneath by dark circles that made her
look excessively fragile. Her fine hair was in its usual frizzled disarray, and her fingertips and nails were tinged bright
red, as though she were bleeding.

He looked around the kitchen, shadowed now at the far end, where Dinah came back and forth from the dining room, stepping
over Taffy who had settled stubbornly in the center of her path. He watched his wife as she navigated through the swinging
door and around the hunched yellow cat without apparent thought, just habit, and everything about her exact passage to and
fro seemed to him just for a moment to be an example that—if he could only articulate it—would be the explanation for everything.
The answer to a search for God, a small instance of order in the universe, the plain fact of how every human, regardless of
circumstances, will live the largest portion of his life—in pieces, in small, rote moments that are not
considered
.

He thought that Netta hadn’t hit upon how to do it yet, how to live any sort of daily life with her daughter. He had felt
sorry for her last night at the party, surrounded by families. He attempted to put himself in her corner so that she
would pay attention to what he wanted to explain, would learn to give herself over now and then to action without consideration,
would relax and lapse occasionally into the mundane. “You know, Dinah has always understood houses… the things in them, how
we live in them,” he said, unintentionally falling into a didactic cadence, persuasive and gentle, but deliberate—a tone and
attitude that had an agenda. He gestured toward his wife, who was carrying a large soup tureen in from the dining room, and
then he expanded the sweep of his arm to indicate the room, the house, the enclosure. “It’s more important than you can understand
at first…. Well, for instance, when my mother sent us some antiques that had belonged to my grandmother, it threw everything
out of kilter.”

Netta straightened as he spoke, sitting back in her chair with a resolute expression on her face, as though she wanted to
say something, but Martin didn’t notice and simply continued on conversationally. “I’m not sure how to explain it except that
we had lived for years and years without these things, and suddenly we had to accommodate them, because they had emotional
weight as well, you see. We just put the furniture here and there, wherever any piece would fit. But Dinah couldn’t stand
it. She drew all the rooms to scale on graph paper, measured all the furniture, planned it all so…
cautiously
. And finally she called in movers and put everything in a chosen place—I mean, she figured it out and rearranged the house.
And you see, she knew how to do it. And I don’t even think she cares much about visual effect.” He paused to think about it
for a moment.

“When the movers left she insisted that I follow her through the house, and she said, ‘In case I die I’ve fixed it so you’ll
know where the furniture goes if you have to move it to clean, or something.’ She’d marked the placement of everything with
safety pins in the rug, or tape under the edge of a picture, or a pencil mark behind a desk. I thought it was funny then,
you see. Alarming, too.” And he glanced
at Netta to be sure she understood that he was illustrating the profound with the ridiculous. “But the thing is… what she
knew… was that to hold on to sanity it’s absolutely necessary to believe that where the chairs go really is important. Do
you see what I mean?” He leaned toward Netta enthusiastically, certain that she would understand. “There are ways in which
each family defines itself. Not necessarily where the
chairs
go, of course.”

Martin had thought of this often as he pondered the continuing functioning of his family after they had experienced a tragedy,
and he had become ardent about his theory of the human tendency to define and cling to a structure of normalcy within one
domestic unit. He and Vic or Ellen or Dinah had discussed and argued variations on this theme many times, expounding upon
it, retreating from it. He smiled over at Netta, who had put both beet-stained hands flat on the table in front of her in
preparation for what she was going to say.

But Dinah, who had overheard bits and pieces of Martin’s conversation, was overwhelmed by a feeling of betrayal. She was astounded
that he would reveal her most vulnerable self to this most literal of people, and she turned around and went back through
the swinging door into the dining room, where she couldn’t hear any more of what was said, so that she could collect herself.

She remembered the incident exactly. After the movers had gone, she had asked Martin to come with her into the living room.
She had pushed a chair to one side and explained the solution she had come up with, pointing out to Martin the little golden,
rustproof safety pins fastened to the heavy oriental rug they had also inherited from Martin’s grandmother. He had laughed,
and she had glanced up at him, surprised, and then laughed, too. But she hadn’t been able to give it up, this insistence on
order in—or control of—her surroundings.

For a long time Dinah had taken to readying things for
the rest of her family in case she, too, might die while she was still needed. She realized she had become obsessive when
she would catch a fleeting look of exasperation as she insisted to Martin or David or Sarah that they pay attention. “Here’s
the shish kebab recipe written on the inside of
The Joy of Cooking
in case I die, or something.”

“If anything happens to me, the red napkins and the red placemats are in the cupboard under the stairs. They’re the only ones
that will all fit on the table if you’re serving twelve.”

By now the compulsion had mostly dissipated, and she fought whatever remnants of it that remained, although only last week
she had filled eight large aluminum pans with lasagna made from her own recipe, and carefully labeled and arranged them in
the freezer as a barrier to catastrophe. Her lasagna, frozen and ready to be whipped out and heated up in the face of disaster,
was a red herring. That’s how she had really felt as she stocked the freezer. It was magic thinking. If she was ready for
the worst, it might not happen.

As she stood stock-still in the dining room, with her hands to her face, which was flushed with embarrassment, she was visited
with an image drifting across her sensibilities: Martin was driving a car, and Netta was in the front passenger seat, her
hair shoulder length and blowing in dry wisps across her mouth. When she flicked her head to settle her hair on her neck,
Dinah had a glimpse of David and Sarah and Toby sitting behind her in the back seat. The children were very young—Sarah’s
head didn’t reach the top of the back seat—and Toby was leaning his forehead against the glass, mindlessly watching the landscape
pass by.

Then the image was gone, as though a film had run inside her mind. She lowered her hands and stood alone in the middle of
the room, dismayed and perplexed. What could it be that she was having? Not daydreams, which unwind logically from an idea,
and certainly not flashbacks or
premonitions, and not anything as full-blown as hallucinations. It was as if, in that supercharged state of insomniacs’ exhaustion,
some deep, interior part of her mind could not rest and was combining images, actualities and imaginings at random, and delivering
them to her as waking dreams—flash-
ins
—as though she were party to an existence that
might
have happened.

When Dinah went back into the kitchen, it was so filled with various guests and activity that she was able to pour herself
a glass of wine and slip out the screen door without getting involved in any of the conversations. She made her way down the
slate stepping-stones, around the garden, and down to the bottom of the yard. She moved slowly, considering the cedar hedges
and making a mental note, as she paused now and then to sip her wine, of just where they needed cutting back.

She couldn’t decide how she felt about being overtaken by these persuasive little moments of impossible visions—that first
image of Netta making soup while her husband and her friend retreated to the bedroom, and now this. It was pleasurable, in
a way, to be visited with intimations of other realities, as though it were she who was imaginary and Netta, in her Cambridge
apartment, or the children, so young in the back seat of the car, who were real.

She walked the long hedge all the way around before settling on the old garden bench that had deteriorated and been pulled
around to the side of the shed just beneath the garden. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, putting her
glass of wine down on the wide arm of the bench.

The evening wasn’t hot, but the twilight was humid and heavy, and she didn’t move when she heard the screen door slam. It
might be someone looking for her, but she wasn’t eager to be found. She assumed it was Christie leaving or Anna Tyson coming
outside to play on the old swing set,
but then she heard David and Christie in the garden. It was clear from the conversation that David was bending to tend to
the plants, because his voice was muted, although she couldn’t discern the actual words Christie spoke, either. Dinah really
didn’t care what they were saying. She simply remained where she was, not wanting to get up and muster cheerful small talk
with the two of them.

She rested her head against the wall of the shed and closed her eyes. She was frozen in place just like that when Christie’s
voice suddenly rose in an anger so intense that her enunciation was chillingly precise. Dinah was trapped within earshot,
having waited too long to make her presence known.

“What will you do, though, if I am?” Christie said. “I mean, just exactly how will you
feel
if I’m not just late? Those tests are just over the counter. I mean, they’re not perfect. It could be wrong. I don’t think
you even give a shit about anything that happens to anyone else in the world anymore! I don’t know what’s wrong with you!”
Christie’s voice had gotten high and raspy against tears. “I’m not sure anymore about you, David! I’m not sure you’re worth
caring anything about. We’ve been going together for three years, and I won’t be able to just
stop
caring! But I don’t like you very much. And I don’t want you to even think of me as a friend anymore. Not even that! Not
even a friend!”