The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  In the study, a new model of an older type of wood ladder provided access to the heights of the bookshelves, which contained a treasury of literature and history: novels, poetry, dramas, natural histories, biographies, political treatises. Interleaved here and there among the books were souvenirs of the Donnellys’ travels: African wood nesting bowls, a small jade Buddha, a bamboo ladle. For one of Ed’s birthdays Gayle had framed photographs he had taken over the years at Fisher Lake—a picnic table strewn with spent lobster claws and discarded lemon halves; strange clumps of wet laundry clinging to the line; the back of Gayle’s head against a blurry white sky. It was a room that felt like the culmination of a life, and Gene alternated between finding it repugnant and desirable.

  Ed explained that soon he might be spending more time in his study. When he sold his practice the previous year, he had negotiated to remain in control of all aspects of the medical side, with the buyer, Integrated Health, assuming responsibility for billing, insurance, and other nonmedical aspects. But the reality was turning out to be somewhat different. Ed said he felt under pressure to see more patients and spend less time with them, to order more expensive tests and prescribe more drugs. He had always employed an office manager—he’d hired her twenty-six years ago and now she was the grandmother of nine—but Integrated had slashed the payroll, insinuating her responsibilities could be absorbed by the nurses. Ed told Gene he’d been left no choice but to take money from Integrated’s side of the business to keep his office manager.

  “Does Integrated know about that?” Gene asked.

  Ed shrugged, releasing himself from responsibility. “They’re the ones making everyone unhappy.”

  It was a bad situation, not easily remedied, and Gene felt the difficulty of Ed’s position. At the same time, he marveled at the bewilderment Ed expressed in finding himself in this predicament. It was as if nothing in his life had prepared him to cede control.

  Before long, Gayle called them to the table. Gene had assumed Brian wouldn’t make the trip from Florida, but he’d hoped he might see Colin or Michael. But Colin was spending Thanksgiving with Justine’s parents, and Michael had flown his family to Hawaii. As Gene and Ed and Gayle took their seats at the table, Gayle seemed a touch melancholy about all the empty chairs. But Ed chided her, saying they didn’t have a right to complain, since they would be seeing Colin and Michael and their children at Christmas.

  Gayle had made her traditional spread. In addition to the turkey, buttery and golden, there was a mound of stuffing lumpy with raisins, cranberry sauce with flecks of orange zest, garlic-roasted green beans, and bouffant mashed potatoes. A peculiar aspect of Gayle’s hospitality was that once she had called people to the table and urged them to start eating, she would often disappear, slipping off to the kitchen. She would reappear a minute or two later bearing some dish that had refused to declare itself ready on time, and then she would sit down for a while, but her presence was never really permanent. A knife that would cut the meat more quickly, or a jar of rosemary salt that someone had brought them from France, or a saucer to keep the gravy from dripping onto the tablecloth would call her away, and she would disappear and return again. Gene didn’t mind it anymore. There was something almost touching about it, how she hadn’t given up perfecting what she had already perfected. But it clearly bothered Ed. The crease in his forehead deepened with each new trip she made to the kitchen.

  That evening a good deal of time was spent talking about the children, which was their way of talking about themselves without expending the energy to do it in a purposeful way. Gene found himself repeating something Dary had told him in a phone call that morning about how the dog had been given a bone and carried it happily into the yard. Then he heard himself and loathed himself and loathed all of them, speaking of their children and animals as if their own lives were devoid of immediacy and vibrancy.

  He missed Maida in that moment and longed for his companion. He wanted her beside him, wearing her wry expression as some new feature of the Donnellys’ well-appointed dining room was pointed out, or for her to reach over and put her hand in his lap under the table after she’d had two glasses of wine and grew bored with the talk. These were not the gestures of high romance that anyone dreamed about when they got married, yet they cohered in one of the most underrated experiences of having a spouse: the way you provided clandestine cover to each other in the midst of the company of others, the small private gestures toward your society of two, shielding both of you from the strain of performing the rituals of polite company. It was a tacit lifelong vow Gene and Maida had made to each other, and he felt a desolation and something sharper too, something like anger, that Maida had abandoned this responsibility to him. But of course it was absurd, this sharp feeling, this bitterness. It hardly lasted, and the purer ache of missing her took over again soon enough.

  The three of them were conspicuously not talking about Maida, as if the subject was a circle drawn on the floor they had all agreed not to step into. There was nothing hidden about the circle, it was in plain view, and Gene understood that nothing and no one was preventing him from stepping into the circle, he could do it at any time. But the unspoken collusion made him fear that by speaking he could ruin something that belonged to all of them, though he couldn’t have said what it was.

  The telephone rang and Gayle got up to answer it. While she was gone, Ed asked Gene whether Dary was planning to return to Colton for Christmas as usual. Gene wasn’t aware of any reason why she would deviate from the tradition, but he acknowledged he had no idea what his daughter’s plans were. After this there was a brief silence between them, in which they listened to the rain that was beginning to fall.

  Gayle returned to tell Ed that Brian was on the phone, and Ed got up and left Gene and Gayle sitting before their half-eaten meals.

  “Your hair looks good,” she said. “Are you doing something new to it?”

  “It’s just shorter.”

  “Well, you look better,” she said, a confiding note in her voice. She lowered her eyes. “You’re looking better every day.”

  Ed returned to the table and announced that Brian’s soon-to-be ex was dating someone new.

  “What a nightmare,” Gene said.

  “He’s totally fixated on finding out who the guy is,” Ed said. “He’s got bills to pay, he’s got two kids who are depressed as hell that their parents are splitting up, and all he can talk about is Allison sleeping with some guy who isn’t him. He’s obsessed. It’s a disease.”

  For a moment Gayle looked ashamed, as if she was the one to blame. But she couldn’t remain dour for long; she brightened as she told them how, while looking for the holiday decorations in the basement, she had come upon a trove of old photos from their summers at Fisher Lake. “There’s the cutest one of Brian sitting on his training potty on the deck, looking across the lake like he’s the king of it all. Imagine that—a potty with a lake view!”

  “He was always the smart one,” Gene said.

  “We used gummy bears to train him. I always said, ‘It’s not a bribe, it’s a reward.’”

  “You knew what you were doing,” Gene said.

  “Don’t you remember, honey?” Gayle said, turning to Ed. “Don’t you remember Brian carrying his little potty onto the deck?”

  “I believe you.”

  “You don’t remember? It was so funny!”

  “Then I’m sure it was.”

  “But you don’t remember how it used to make us laugh?”

  “I guess my mind’s somewhere else.” He said it flatly, unapologetically, and there was something almost cruel in his indifference to Gayle’s enthusiasm. The implication seemed to be that if she insisted on prattling, it was her fault if his mind wandered off. “I was just thinking about the day Maida swam across the lake.”

  There was a brief silence. Then Gayle said, “I never did understand why anybody would do that. Whenever I’m in the water for more than ten minutes, I get so cold I can’t feel any p
art of my face except my tongue.”

  “The tongue isn’t part of the face,” Ed said.

  “Well, you know what I mean. You have to be a little cuckoo to spend so much time in the water.”

  “Plenty of people do it,” Ed said. “They’re all cuckoos?”

  “I can’t think of anyone who did it besides Maida.”

  “What’s her name—the Olympian, Amory Johnson—she used to go all the way across and back for training.”

  “Amory Johnson looks like a man! How would you like to smooch a woman like that? No, don’t answer that. But she does look like a man.”

  A decades-old image of Amory Johnson flashed into Gene’s mind. It was true: with her short hair, waistless slab of torso, and hulking shoulders, she was sexless and androgynous. “Whatever happened to Amory Johnson?” he said. “You don’t hear much about her these days. I wonder what life was like after all those medals.”

  Ed reminded them of the controversy over naming the swimming pool after her.

  “I never understood that,” Gayle said. “Was it something political? You know how I go deaf when it’s politics.”

  Ed explained that people hadn’t liked it when she came out of retirement while her son was still an infant. As he spoke, elaborating the nature of the controversy, a slight hint of color rose in his face and his speech became animated. For every declaration he made, he looked to Gayle for a corresponding ripple of appreciation. Her expression said that it was her delight to furnish this to him, her delight and also her usefulness to him.

  “Subconsciously it all comes down to breast-feeding,” Ed said. “People don’t want public evidence it’s taking place, but they also feel it’s a problem if mothers aren’t doing it.”

  “I breast-fed,” Gayle said. “I breast-fed each of my babies for a whole year.”

  “Of course you did,” Ed said. “You’re my wife.”

  “But what happened with the pool?” Gene said.

  “Oh, she got it. But the plaque was very small.”

  “Only a man needs his name on a very big thing,” Gayle said.

  “Gene doesn’t need a plaque,” Ed said. “Isn’t that right?”

  The rain was still coming down when he left. The low places in the road were swollen with water, and every now and then he drove through one and it seemed to lift his car like a boat. The wind had picked up and it drove the rain against the windshield. It bent the trees on the side of the road into snarls, which snapped open with sudden violence the moment the wind passed. When he came around a curve in the road, his car planed over the water and the tail swerved back and forth. He tried to correct this by wrenching the wheel in the opposite direction, but the car began to spin. He let go of the wheel. The car scraped against the curb and eventually came to a stop. Gene grabbed the keys and pulled them out of the ignition. He sat in the dark, his heart rapping against his chest. His hands were shaking, nearly crawling in his lap. He waited until his heart slowed. Then, with trembling hands, he drove the rest of the way home.

  He was still agitated when he got to the house—surprised to be alive and also terrified not to be. In truth, he didn’t understand why he was still alive, not when there were so many stupid, easy ways to die. He drank a cup of cocoa, thinking it would calm him. He could feel the sugar in the cocoa mix eating away at the enamel on his teeth, but he drank another cup, thinking the second would wash away the feeling of the first. He brushed his teeth and put on his nightclothes. By the time he got under the covers, his heart was hammering again and he was wide awake.

  He hadn’t thought about the day Maida swam across the lake for a long time. It was the summer Brian’s crying had kept them up at night, when everyone was a little on edge from not sleeping enough. There had been a fight the night before in front of the Donnellys. Gene thought Maida shouldn’t swim the distance alone. What if she got a cramp? What if she got tired? At least she should let him row a boat beside her. It was only a few miles, she said. By the time he found a pair of oars she’d already be across. Don’t be stupid, he almost blurted out, but instead he said, “Don’t be selfish,” which was perhaps closer to his real feeling. He tried to cajole some sense into her, and the argument went on for some time until Ed finally said, “Oh, leave her alone already. She’s going to do what she wants and you’re going to do the same.”

  It turned out to be a fairly apt description of what happened. The following morning Maida slipped out of bed before Gene was awake, and when he realized she was gone, he found the oars under the house and began rowing toward her splash, which from a distance looked like a small mar on the surface of the water. It was hard work catching up to her—he was no champion rower—but he made progress, and eventually he slowed down so as not to get too close to her and minimize her sense of achievement. When at last she reached the shore and hobbled out of the water, she had no idea he was the vigilant speck in the boat. In the end, they had both gotten their way, yet he never enjoyed the memory. Some unpleasant aftertaste clung to it.

  There had been countless such spats over the years: not just Maida and Gene but Ed and Gayle, each of the couples airing their differences or just failing to conceal them in front of one another. It was almost as if the presence of an audience gave voice to what might otherwise have remained unvoiced. There was something both satisfying and humiliating in this—the satisfaction of having one’s grievance verified, and the humiliation of having craved that verification in the first place, while being forced to acknowledge that one’s relationship suffered the same mortal dysfunction known to other people. The audience somehow heightened the sense of injury, as well as the deliciousness of the eventual repair, and in this regard the couples had shamelessly used each other, though it was a victimless kind of using.

  It was strange and almost funny that while they had all gotten older, their arguments had been immured in a permanent adolescence, never developing much beyond their original themes. Ed was generally permissive in a way you might think would make everyone happy, but somehow this permissiveness didn’t reliably extend to Gayle. Gene and Gayle had both encountered its limits, and they had broad empathy for each other as creatures who were devoted to Ed in spite of his flaws. Maida didn’t extend such a deferential welcome to Ed. She was more liable to tell him outright when he was being an asshole. Over the years Gene had sometimes wondered if they might have made the better pair, in the same way that he’d wondered about himself and Gayle. Had Ed ever considered marrying Maida? Clearly there was feeling between them, but whatever it was, it hadn’t looked consistent over the years. Sometimes they found each other amusing, which seemed tied to their respect for each other, and at other times they were openly prickly, as if they had forgotten the respect and regarded the other as essentially careless and condescending.

  It was hard to know for sure why any of them had stayed in their marriages. Was it all so wonderful? Or were they all just lazy by default, just trying to squeeze another year out of the connections they had formed when they were young?

  This was the sort of moment when he ached for Maida. This predicament of mind, when everything looked ordinary on the outside but inside felt like it was coming apart; when his speculative mind went on generating one question after another, the second meant to answer the first but in reality only taking him deeper into unknowable territory, where he began to believe that the only way out of the situation was to find an answer that would resolve the questions. Then Maida would bring him back to his life. Often she brought him back through touch, something as simple as tousling his hair or clasping his hand. And somehow the recognition that his agitation hadn’t leaked into her and that his life was still continuing outside his mind in a completely normal fashion allowed him to glimpse the absurdity of his questions, and how they had at best a tenuous relationship to the actuality of living. This was the reaching of the hand of safety into the world of danger, and he couldn’t do it for himself. That Maida was not available to do it for him—that she would never do
it for him again—made him almost frightened of himself, the fear a sense of separateness from something stronger and more stable than himself.

  He got up and took one of the sleeping pills Dr. Fornier had prescribed for him. Then it seemed that he listened for a long time to the rain blasting the side of the house. Of the many things he thought, waiting to fall asleep, one was how the pills that were supposed to defuse your mind never quite did their job when you most needed them to.

  After a while, finding himself still awake, he looked at the clock. It was after midnight, too late to call anyone under ordinary circumstances. But it had not really been an ordinary kind of day, and some intuition told him that Adele would forgive him.

  She was surprised to hear from him—was everything all right? Almost immediately he was embarrassed he’d called her. He told her he would see her on Monday and hung up the phone. Then, afraid he’d been rude, he called back to apologize.

  She didn’t sound the least bit angry. She sounded just like herself. Was he all right? she asked. He told her the truth.

  When she arrived he was still in shock from having told someone the truth. She said nothing about his appearance, his bathrobe dusted with powdered chocolate and the belt trailing off to one side. He offered to make her a cup of cocoa, but she treated the suggestion as amiable nonsense. If he was too agitated to sleep, they should put their energies toward reducing his agitation.

  He thought it would feel strange to have her in his bedroom. But she had been in his room many times before—to change the sheets, or vacuum, or put away his clothes—and it almost seemed natural to have her there. She lay down next to him and told him she would stay until he fell asleep.

  He waited in the dark for her to change her mind. He figured that after one minute, or two minutes, or three minutes had passed she would get up quietly and leave him. But every time he checked, she was still there. Eventually he rolled toward her until his body was wedged against hers. Her skin smelled of something cooked, rice or pasta or maybe a pilaf.