Fortunate Lives (8 page)

David hated to have company when he was working in his garden, although he had never said so. He still didn’t understand why
anyone else’s presence seemed to him such a profound intrusion. He knew his irritation was both unreasonable and ungenerous,
but it didn’t abate.

Dinah stooped and began to collect the various lettuces she would use for the salad. She looked over at him once more. “Is
Christie coming tonight? She isn’t working over the Fourth, is she?” Dinah considered Christie for a moment: she was a small,
shy girl with whom Dinah found it difficult to have a conversation.

“Christie!” Dinah would say. “It’s so nice of you to drop by. How are you?”

Christie would smile and duck her head of curly brown hair. “Fine,” she would say, not meeting Dinah’s eyes.

“Well, it’s so cold out. Come on in!” And Christie would come in without a word.

“I’ll see if David’s upstairs. Did you want to see him?” And Christie would just smile and look at Dinah, with her soft brown
eyes glancing up from beneath her bangs. She reminded Dinah of a cocker spaniel her family had inherited from neighbors who
moved to England when she was a little girl. The dog had been sweet but disappointingly retiring, and Dinah’s mother always
suspected the poor animal had been traumatized by the two little boys of its former household. Perhaps Christie, too, had
been somehow disturbed and wounded. It was impossible to dislike her, but privately Dinah found her tiresome.

“You’d think that simple curiosity would prompt her to ask just
one
question,” she had said once to Martin as she sat drinking coffee after a dinner at which Christie had been a guest. “It
seems to me that—at least after a while—any sort of intelligent person would be
interested
in other people. You know what I mean? I mean, it could be pretty basic stuff. ‘How are you, Mrs. Howells? What do you think
about the Brazilian rain forest? Eastern Europe? The depletion of the
ozone layer? The stoplight they might put up on State Street?’ You begin to wonder if she ever has a single thought! A pinpoint
of curiosity! When I try to talk to her I feel as if I’m conducting an interrogation!” She was staring down at her coffee
as she stirred it absently, but she had looked up to see David standing behind Martin in the kitchen doorway.

He had been so angry at his parents at that moment that it was reflected even in his stance, his shoulders tensed, his whole
upper body seeming knotted, exactly as he had stood at age two before losing control and falling into an incoherent tantrum
at being misunderstood or thwarted. But that night he had been alarmingly icy with unforgiveness. He had very calmly accused
his parents of being nothing more than academic snobs, of knowing nothing of any real importance, of being incapable of understanding
anything at all.

Dinah had apologized profusely, but ever since she had been so uneasy around Christie in David’s presence, and so intent upon
being fair and friendly, that her behavior had escalated into a kind of hysterical animation. Now she not only determinedly
asked Christie all sorts of two- and three-part questions, but she answered them for her as well.

“Are you enjoying your part in the musical, Christie? Or do you find that it just takes up so much more time than you ever
imagined? Is Mrs. Hartwick able to direct with the same
real
authority as Mr. Walters, or is it actually better to have someone a little less arrogant? Sometimes, he was really insufferable.”
Dinah’s questions were always multiple choice, and her answers were equally frantic and complex.

“Of course,” she would continue, after increasingly minimal pauses during which Christie would smile at her blankly, “anyone
would enjoy performing if they had a voice like yours even if it does eat into your life. Not your
voice
! I mean, so much rehearsing leaves you almost no time for yourself. David says you’ve had to give up Saturday
mornings and even the evenings. There’s always
some
moment to be squeezed out of the day though, I suppose, to fit in what you absolutely have to get done. They say that it’s
the busiest people who always have a moment to spare. You’re very organized, I imagine. I had forgotten that Mrs. Hartwick
assisted in last year’s production. She’ll probably be fine!”

Whenever Dinah came to a full stop, Christie would sometimes smile and mutter an agreement, sometimes not. “Well!” Dinah would
exclaim, with the air of a person who can scarcely bear to pull herself away, “I’d better get busy! I have a million things
to do.” And she would exit the room, exhausted.

In fact, she was rather hoping that Christie wouldn’t be able to get off work for the evening. To Dinah’s astonishment, Christie
had gotten a much-coveted part-time job at the tourist information desk of the Freund Museum, a job usually staffed by teenagers,
but one that was always advertised as requiring “interpersonal skills.”

“Frankly,” David said, while still transferring plants from small green containers to the darkly troweled earth, “I’ve always
thought this whole party is a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Christie said she would do the songs. I’m not crazy about
having those kids fool with my guitar.”

Dinah was surprised by David’s bad mood; he had been so cheerful yesterday. “Well, sweetie, you could use your old one. Of
course, I didn’t mean you should let them handle the one you play.” She heard her own voice wheedling in revolting supplication
over the space between them. When he didn’t respond, she was quiet.
She
had bought both guitars, the first one expensive, the price of the second one horrifying to think about even now. But they
were gifts to him, she counseled herself; they were his own. “Anyway, I may need you to operate Moonflower’s pulley,” she
said with an old note of authority. “Ellen called this morning
with a terrible cold. I don’t know if she and Vic are coming.”

“Okay… Well… you takes what you can, and you deals with what you gets,” he said, clearly mimicking someone clever, someone
black, someone he admired, and someone she had never heard of.

She cast her eye over the rigorously organized rows of vegetables and flowers that defied inherent grace. She viewed it as
a slight to any natural aesthetic sense. She didn’t really like to give parties, she thought, and she only repeated this one
summer after summer because she knew, even if they didn’t, that it was a custom her children would miss. But she put the thought
aside and tried to calculate how many heads of lettuce she would need, how much parsley; would there be enough dill flowers
for decoration or should she not bother with them?

“You know,” she said mildly, while she bent to unearth another head of curly Winter Density lettuce, “you didn’t have to plant
these flowers in
rows
like this, sweetie.” It seemed to her a waste that David took such care with a garden that was not in itself very pretty
at all. “But these carnations are lovely, aren’t they?” He didn’t answer because she wasn’t asking a question as much as commenting
to herself. “For years I wondered what the British meant—in all those books—always talking about ‘pinks,’ and I finally found
out that they were just carnations. If I had only known sooner I would have called them pinks myself, and I would have liked
them better. Like all those lime trees in Chekhov. Well, one of the Russians, anyway. Whenever I thought about limes I felt
languorous… it probably isn’t Chekhov…. But it was years before I ever saw any carnations
growing
! When they come from the florist they look as if someone has made them out of crepe paper. Really, I still hate them in arrangements.
But big masses of them together… You’ve had good luck,” she went on. “I’m awfully glad you’re so interested in gardening.”

She spoke to her son with such hearty encouragement that he was suddenly alert. He heard the false cheer that often obscured
a dangerous edge, and he paused to glance at her where she bent to her chore with efficiency and a determined smile which
she turned toward him. “This is so good for you, I think. Most people start a garden when they’re already too old. It’s always
seemed to me that gardening is a hobby that should be for the young. It’s such a good way to learn about life!” She was emphatic,
her words tumbling into the day with blocklike certainty.

Dinah had no idea how she looked squatting on her haunches in the flowerbeds, with her hands slightly chapped and her clothes
and hair in early-morning disarray. She used a trowel to dislodge a clump of bishop’s-weed, and she tightened her lips in
a little moue of concentration. She was pleased that she had managed not to betray her irritation at David, and she attacked
the weeds with vigor, but David had stopped his work and turned to look at her when she spoke.

All at once she seemed monstrous to him. He was almost light-headed with sudden loathing as he watched her bend her head with
the effort of prying loose the root system. She stood up slowly to stretch, grasping herself at the waist, elbows cocked at
an angle to lean backward. Her mouth went round in an exaggerated exhalation, and she smiled toward him as though she were
innocent. He could scarcely bear to continue looking at her.

In one moment she had destroyed the pleasure of his garden. He had planned it all so carefully during the last long months
of high school, and over the past month it had begun to seem to him that the balance between the effort he made and the actual
result was a perfect thing. Just as she was forming the words she had tossed out into the air, he had been wrestling with
the notion—as he transplanted the stringy little seedlings—that
he was at last getting a grip on something so much larger than his limited experience. Now he was abashed and infuriated.
With one casual sentence his mother had made the need for
meaning
into a trivial thing that one merely cultivated on a sunny day.

He had pinned his hopes on the belief that, if he was careful with his garden, the nature of things would be made perfectly
clear to him. He had his own idea of how to go about discovering how things really were. He was looking for the plan of things
to become apparent. It was unbearable to him to think that his desire for understanding was commonplace, and that his mother—in
all about her that suddenly struck him as simplistic—was an insensitive fool.

He was bereft as he looked at her with her sturdy smile and her graying-blond hair wisping free of the pins that held it back.
How was it that he had never realized how oblivious she was to the consequences of what she said and did in the world? He
turned his back on her and bent again to the tray of seedlings. He didn’t trust himself to say another word; in fact, he felt
alarmingly suspended between sorrow and rage.

For her part, as she made her way up the steps with her laden basket, Dinah was thinking how uncommunicative, how… cruel!…
David was on this particular morning when she was going to so much trouble on his behalf and on Sarah’s, too. It shocked her
when one of her children was unkind. And she was frightened that over the past year David’s newfound glibness and cynical
humor—often amusing only by her sufferance, only if she agreed to be laughed
at
and not
with
—might be merely a veneer that covered some real dislike of her that she could not get at, that she could not fathom.

Franklin M. Mount

Dean of Freshmen

Harvard College

12 Truscott Street

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Dear Mr. Mount,

Of course, I don’t know how old you are, or whether or not you have children yourself. If you do then you’ll understand that
if you have a child of four who suddenly learns how to tie his or her shoelaces after weeks of frustrated attempts, then that
child will be happy. (Although I do know that if you have a child of four, he or she probably has shoes with Velcro straps,
but those were invented too late for my children. I’m simply trying to give you an example.) When your child is sick and running
a fever you can give her Tylenol and spend time helping her connect a dot-to-dot picture, and she’ll be pleased and comforted.

Well, I’m trying to explain that when I was the room mother for David’s first grade class, and the door decoration I made
won the West Bradford Public School’s “Best Halloween Door Decoration Contest,” it seemed to me that I had done all I could
do to be sure David was content with his life. And after each birthday party, and every Christmas morning, every time he made
up with a friend or had some small triumph of one kind or another—after every one of those instances and many others, David
was happy. And I also knew, just in general, that he loved
all the people in his life—his brother, his sister, his father, and me. But I may well have failed him, because it never crossed
my mind, you see, to teach myself or to warn him that it might not always be so.

S
HE WAS TOO DISTRACTED
by the problem of David’s strange mood to take much notice of the children’s prizes Sarah had left spread over newspapers
on the table to dry. Dinah made an effort to turn her mind to lists, to chores ahead of her in the day, and she filled the
sink with tepid water and added a handful of salt, swirling it until all the crystals dissolved. The loose-leaved lettuces—Winter
Density, Boston, romaine, and escarole—fanned out gently when she immersed them, heads down, sloshing them plungerlike so
the water reached up into the curly, innermost leaves where the slugs recluded. She wished her thoughts would run through
her mind in the same manner that a child runs a thumbnail along the keys of a piano so that each note sounds with equal resonance.
She was weary of considering, weary of measuring all the tremors of her life in order to keep herself balanced in the aftershocks.
Without thinking, Dinah brought one dripping hand from the water and brushed
it across her cheekbone and through her hair, resting her temple in her palm for just a moment.