The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  The last thing he wanted was a surprise, and he said so.

  “You won’t hate it” was all Dary would say.

  For the occasion the Donnellys’ house was lit top to bottom, with winking white lights wound around the banisters, and lamps placed in the windows, and candles arranged in twos and threes on end tables and nested into fir boughs laid across the mantel. The Christmas tree, an enormous tentacle of green life swaddled in stiff gold ribbons, still had gifts beneath it, some surplus that Gene imagined Gayle never allowed to dry up as long as guests were visiting the house. A procession of desserts with glossy chocolate tiers, concentric circles, and frosted piping stretched the length of the dining-room table on a pressed tartan runner.

  Dary had insisted on his bringing a gift. It wasn’t enough for her to give a gift from both of them; Gene had to hold it in his hands as he walked through the door. He added it to the stash beneath the tree and then made a circuit through the party, searching for Brian. He went upstairs and poked his head into the guest bedrooms; they appeared as they always did, immaculate and untouched. He returned to the party and asked Gayle if she expected Brian later.

  “There was an argument,” she said.

  It was just like Gayle to say, “There was an argument”—not to assign blame or divulge what it was about. Gene trailed her around as she refreshed drinks and collected dirty dessert plates until she finally elaborated: Ed had discovered Brian smoking; Brian knew how his father felt about smoking; Ed got upset and yelled at Brian; Brian in turn got upset and called his father something that couldn’t be repeated. Then Brian packed his things and left for White Pine Camp.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Gene said.

  “He’s upset that Allison’s going around telling everyone that he’s mentally unstable.”

  “Is he?”

  “He’s devastated, that’s all. Wouldn’t you be?” She spoke with a fluttery briskness. “It’s appropriate to be devastated when your life falls apart. Wow, did he really love her! And she didn’t have a clue. She probably thinks every man will love her like that.”

  “You’ll find a way to help him.”

  “Sometimes all you can do is just love your kids and hope they won’t be as stupid as you were.” Her face colored as if she found it distasteful, even garish, to be talking about herself. “I told Ed this was an opportunity for him. To start over in his relationship with his son.”

  “Someone finally had to say it to him.”

  “Oh, but you know Ed. Just the idea of being told in advance how he might deal with his son probably got him agitated. He doesn’t like anything to be decided beforehand. Besides, he probably blames me for the argument in the first place.”

  “But he’s never gotten along with Brian.”

  “Probably I ruined Brian before he was born or something like that. You know, back in those days I had a cigarette before I knew I was pregnant.”

  They were standing close together, closer than they’d been when the conversation began. Gene put his hand on the small of her back, allowing it to alight there a moment before pulling it away. “One cigarette didn’t do anything,” he said.

  “Well, it turns out I don’t know anything about anything.” She laughed, but it was a laugh of discomfort. Her scent, some combination of flour and sweetness, made him want to touch her again. They both watched as Ed made his way toward them through the crowd. “I could have gone to college,” she said, “but instead I married that man.”

  “Surely that wasn’t a mistake,” Gene said.

  She was silent.

  “You wouldn’t call it a mistake,” he said.

  “What’s a mistake?” Ed said, looking pleased with himself for having seized the end of the conversation.

  “Oh—only—the chocolate ganache is a little gritty,” she said.

  “And I didn’t notice,” Gene said. “I thought it was wonderful.”

  “I was out of regular sugar so I substituted turbinado,” Gayle said. “You can’t use a substitute and expect the same outcome.”

  Ed threaded his arm around Gayle’s waist and squeezed her to him. “Let me explain something to you about this woman,” he said, addressing Gene. “If she wants you to compliment something, she’ll tell you how awful it is.”

  “The ganache was wonderful,” Gene said.

  “You fell right into her trap.”

  Gene said, “If I tried to make something like it—”

  “—it wouldn’t be edible,” Ed said. “What was it Maida used to say? That it was a miracle you could find your shoes under the bed every morning?”

  “The point is,” Gene said, ignoring this and speaking to Gayle, “you have no reason to doubt yourself.”

  A tenderness spread across Gayle’s face and Gene could feel her reaching out for the next thing he would say.

  Ed said, “I’ve always told her that when she decides to leave me, she can open a restaurant.”

  Gayle smiled a brave, disheartened smile. Then she excused herself, mentioning a sweet-potato pie that had to be heated up.

  “Did Dary tell you she picked out some photos for this evening?” Ed said. “She found some nice old photos. Don’t worry—everyone looks young. Young and happy and handsome. We had no idea how lucky we were with our problems back then.”

  Just then a woman Gene initially mistook for Esther Prince (she was not Esther Prince) arrived at the party, and it was evident from the restrained happiness emanating from Ed’s face and the terrible effort he was making to stand still that he was eager to greet her. He promptly left Gene standing alone.

  Gene heard Patty Luce say to Regina Harmon, “We never stay less than ten days in Burgundy—Burgundy simply can’t be done in less than ten days.” Soon he found himself trapped in a conversation with a man who was an emeritus professor of something. He ceased to pay close attention as soon as he discovered that whether he understood the man’s work or didn’t, there would be no change in the course of the conversation. A painting of a bathing nude hung on the wall slightly to the left of the professor’s head, and Gene studied it as the professor went on about “the problem of speculative redundancy in a two-system model” between ample mouthfuls of chocolate ganache. The nude was holding a pitcher of water above her head and though the pitcher had not yet been tipped, though her head was still dry, her hair fell in loose waves that looked sculpted by the imminent flow of the water. Her eyes—heavy-lidded, contoured with a paste of dingy yellow and a streak of ashy violet—were half-closed, as if she’d been persuaded to get out of bed only a moment before. He’d been to enough parties to know how to sound smart about a painting like this. He had only to point out a detail such as the parakeet-green shadow on the woman’s cheek where a flesh tone would have been expected and declare that the artist was a genius for knowing such a color would be exactly right in that spot.

  When he was finally able to get away he went to the kitchen, where he found not Gayle but Ed and Dary. Ed had an oven mitt shaped like a lobster claw on one hand and he and Dary were drinking red wine and talking across the tiled kitchen island.

  “But do you think it’s common for two people to experience love the same way?” she was saying.

  “You have to understand,” Ed said. “The whole idea of marriage is founded on something generally recognizable to other people. It’s conventional by definition.”

  “But marriage doesn’t dictate feeling,” Dary said.

  “There has to be some agreement. A negotiated peace.”

  “That sounds so formal,” Dary said, turning toward Gene for the first time. “And not especially thrilling.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Marriage and whether it’s become obsolete,” Dary said.

  “And I was telling her,” Ed said, “that there’s some value to an official commitment. That stability’s nothing to scoff at.”

  Gene wondered how they had arrived on the topic—whether Ed had brought it up and succeed
ed in engaging Dary, or Dary had sought Ed’s opinion. Either way, Gene felt a pang of envy.

  “But what’s stability?” Dary said. “Is it staying with the person you fall in love with in your twenties when you still have a lifetime of changes ahead of you? Years and years of developing into somebody who hardly recognizes the twenty-something-year-old who made that decision?”

  “You get old no matter how you do it,” Ed said.

  “But no agreement extends infinitely,” Dary said. “Within a person, it shifts around or falls apart all the time. Why shouldn’t life reflect that?”

  Just then Gayle entered the kitchen and asked Ed if he was keeping an eye on the sweet-potato pie as she’d asked him to.

  Ed opened the oven and rotated the pie. When this was done, he removed the lobster claw and tossed it on the island. He said, “Marriage only makes sense in cultures where divorce is acceptable.”

  “Why do you talk about such serious things?” Gayle scolded. “This is a party! All of you, you should be out there eating and drinking and having a good time.” When none of them moved, her face grew stern. “Out!” she said, making a shooing gesture.

  They filed out of the kitchen, though not before Ed grabbed a bottle of wine to bring with them. He asked Dary to help him carry up some folding chairs from the basement, and soon he and Dary and Gene were setting up the chairs in the living room.

  The guests were invited to take their seats. This was the signal to some of them to hurry to the dessert table and load up their plates. The lights dimmed.

  The Donnellys had driven up the California coast in the spring. Here was a stiff Gayle standing beside an erotic statue in the Hearst Castle courtyard. Here she was again fully clothed on the beach, searching for rocks to weigh down paper napkins for a picnic. Then they were loose in the streets of Istanbul—or at least Ed was for a couple of days while Gayle recuperated at the hotel (she should never have eaten that fruit salad). Men in brocaded red vests served tea on trays, and laundry flapped from TV antennas mounted on concrete balconies covered in graffiti. The summer days in Vermont came next. The Donnellys had rented a historic farmhouse with a defunct dairy, and all the grandchildren had come and played games in the pasture. Wheelbarrow contests, pail-hauling contests, wood-chopping contests, and all other manner of hearty outdoor games had been comprehensively documented, so that you might have thought the Donnellys had spent a whole season on the farm rather than just three days.

  It had never failed to surprise Gene that Maida, who had a much lower tolerance for romantic notions than he did, accepted the idea that travel represented an automatic deepening of the soul. She had always wanted to travel more than Gene did, and perhaps she also had felt, as the Donnellys appeared to, that one’s trips were achievements, credentialing a life. He didn’t know if he was resistant to going to new places, or just to the way some people talked about where they had been. Why did the Donnellys need an audience for their experiences?

  After a brief intermission (the professor helped himself to the top tier of a ziggurat-shaped cake), the historical portion of the evening commenced. A young Gayle, pregnant with Michael, was looking charming and bashful in a navy smock dress with an appliquéd strawberry on the pocket. A baby-faced Colin threw sticks at a duck in a pond, while a gawky Brian stood slightly to the side looking on with disapproval but without intervening. A snowsuited Dary posed next to a bank of snow, the blob of the child and the blob of the snow in harmonious composition. Gene had to concede that Ed had a knack for catching people in dynamic relation to their surroundings. He himself was represented looking a bit more sunburned and soft-stomached than he remembered, his expressions surprisingly vague and abstract given the intensity of the feelings he recalled. And there was Maida: lying on her back on the dock, the water visible not as water but as a backdrop of pure light. There she was again emerging from the lake, stripping her head of its thick bathing cap, which always reminded him of a formidable prophylactic. There was a provocative twist in her smile, an expression of simultaneous indifference to and interest in the camera’s attention, a feint at resistance that was both impasse and invitation. In another she was laughing girlishly with her head tossed back, her spine arching gymnastically in the way that made him crazy every time, her eyes half-closed like the nude’s in the painting.

  Each time a photo of her was shown, it was as if his heart was being pumped mechanically to exude its only output, love. It was urgent and automatic. Then, belatedly, his mind reminded him of Maida’s death, confirming it not once but successively, as if his body might be in danger of forgetting again.

  That Dary was enthralled with this period of her mother’s life didn’t surprise him—plenty of children possessed a curiosity about their parents’ fluidity as people before they became the known characters of their world. There was something almost sweet and devotional about her fascination. That she embraced these images, that in some sense she was proud of them, suggested that her understanding of her mother was more nuanced than she let on, encompassing not only the mother of her direct experience, but also the woman she had been before Dary retroactively decided who she was.

  Yet there was a moment after the projector was switched off and before the lights came up when his body whirred with an awful energy. He thought of all the times he had stood before his young wife with a camera and all the times she had dissuaded him, saying in that light, carefree tone, No, no, I already know what I look like. All along he was afraid that later, when they got older, there would be no images of her when she had been young and happy and beautiful. But somehow he had missed something that was happening, something that Ed had managed to capture even as it was passing Gene by. Because here she was over and over again, young and happy and beautiful.

  18.

  THE LAST DAY of his daughter’s visit, New Year’s Day, was clear and brilliant with cold sunshine. They were spending the morning at his office, sorting through and packing his old wares into boxes, the destination of which he wasn’t exactly sure. Dary said he didn’t have to worry about that part right away—getting things packed up was the intermediate step. She worked quickly, taping up boxes as soon as they were filled and easily filling all the boxes she had allotted herself. It was different for him—he felt he had to pause and consider every item, recalling how he had acquired it and why, knowing he wouldn’t have kept it so long if it didn’t have value.

  At noon they paused to take stock of where they were. For the first time since they’d arrived, he sat down in his office chair, which in the process of moving things around had ended up not behind the desk but instead in the middle of the room, surrounded by his half-filled boxes. He and Dary were supposed to pick up Annie from the Donnellys’ in half an hour, and he suggested it would be nice to drive out to Fisher Lake.

  “Isn’t Brian staying out there?” Dary said. She was sitting on his desk. The roll of packing tape she’d been using hung around her wrist like a bracelet.

  “Does that affect the decision?” Gene said.

  “I just find him so awkward sometimes. Is he as bad as he used to be?”

  “I never found him awkward.”

  “The last time I saw him he was wearing adult braces. He’s the only person I know who’s had braces twice. I wanted to go up to him and say, ‘Look, if you made it this far with your teeth, why bother with all of this now?’”

  “He hasn’t had braces for years.”

  “At least when he did, it was something to talk about.”

  “I bet the two of you have more in common than you think.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “You probably don’t remember this, but Brian reads.”

  “So do eighty percent of first graders,” she said, with a lightness that was acrid. “Do you remember the Christmas he went around telling everyone that perestroika was a terrible development because it would mean the end of American dominance in the world?”

  “Was he right?”

  “That’s irrelevan
t! It’s about a worldview. He and I probably wouldn’t agree on the same map of the world.”

  “I see plenty of similarities between the two of you.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “How about leaving Colton for college and never really coming back? How about the challenges of raising kids?”

  “And don’t forget nostalgia for the threat of nuclear catastrophe.”

  “How about—loneliness?”

  “All right, that’s enough.” She slid off the desk and stood, ready for her next task.

  “How about the difficulty of trying to date when you’re a parent?” he said.

  “I said that’s enough.” She knelt down and in a hurried, imprecise way, began closing up a box that wasn’t completely full. Her hands fussed at the box’s flaps and then abruptly fell still. “Where do you get this idea?” she said. “When have I ever complained of being lonely?”

  “You don’t have to complain about it for it to be true. I just want you to be happy.”

  “By foisting me off on some man you’ve met for thirty seconds at the airport? Or better yet, Brian Donnelly?”

  “Now that’s not fair. You’ve known Brian your whole life.”

  “That’s like saying, ‘I’ve smoked cigarettes my whole life, so they must be good for me.’”

  “You know he comes from a good family.”

  “I’m not looking for another family! The one I’ve got is hard enough.” She was consolidating herself in her gaze, hitching up in preparation for something. “Why don’t you just admit you’re trying to find me a husband?” she said. “That’s what this is all about. You would be happier if I had a husband.”