Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  When Toby was alive, dinner had so often been a turbulent affair—the time of day Dinah dreaded most. Stranded between his two siblings, he had been defensive in every direction. He had believed that David got more respect and Sarah got more attention. He and Dinah had frequently been locked in a brooding combat, although away from the table they could at least retreat from one another. But they were unyielding at dinner, Dinah brisk and Toby sullen. He had been able to sense any criticism she did not speak, and even now she wondered if sometimes she had intended her expression, her tone of voice, to reveal her irritation.

  Once, when he had slammed away from the table and out the back door, Dinah had leaped up and followed him. She had stood just outside the screen and shouted after him. “Goddammit! Goddammit! If you won’t be happy, damn it, you’ll ruin my life! My whole life. You don’t have the right to do that, Toby! You don’t have the right to make me so miserable!”

  And she had turned back to the table to be shocked by her children’s bleak faces. Sarah, only about four or five years old, had sat paralyzed on her booster seat, truly frightened by so much anger, and David wouldn’t meet her eyes. But her husband’s expression had been flat with grief, his fine mouth slackened in a pained grimace and his voice oddly without fervor. “Sometimes, Dinah…” Martin said. “Jesus Christ! Sometimes you say the most terrible things!”

  It was true. She and Toby had said the worst things they could say to each other. She had believed they were equals; with Toby she had always lost her grip on the fact of her own adulthood. Nothing slipped by him, not one injustice, not the smallest inequity. There were other times when even Martin had said, “That kid’s a real clubhouse lawyer! You can’t win with him! There’s no way to make him listen!”

  But Toby had listened to them; he had listened all the time. He had simply never been sure of what he heard. On his fourth Thanksgiving, when Dinah was pregnant with Sarah, they had decided to have a formal meal in the dining room. Over the course of the preceding week, Dinah had impressed on them that this was a grave event—the first year that they would not eat casually in the kitchen, or at the local Howard Johnson for the sake of quick service to small children.

  As Martin carved the turkey at the table, the children grew restive, and Dinah became cross at his perfectionism as he painstakingly cut away nearly transparent slices from the breast. She urged him on. Everything else was getting cold. In exasperation he had finally severed the drumsticks, one for each child. Toby had recoiled in astonishment when his father had deposited the huge drumstick on his plate with a flourish of the silver-handled carving fork, and Martin had laughed. “That’s the part I always wanted at every Thanksgiving,” he said. “You get the whole thing, Toby,” he said. “The best of the dark meat.”

  Toby sat stoically through the meal until Dinah noticed that he hadn’t eaten any turkey at all. “Sweetie, don’t you like that? Do you want some gravy?” He had looked up at her doubtfully for a moment, not replying.

  “Can I have some turkey?”

  “Well, honey, there’s plenty of turkey. Don’t you like what you have?”

  “Daddy said he gave me the dog meat. I don’t want it. I just want some turkey.” He was not accusing them; he had always been generous in his forgiveness. He just wasn’t sure how he stood in the family; he didn’t trust his hold on them. When he was seven and went off to camp for two weeks, he signed his letters: “Your son, Toby Howells.”

  He had believed completely in right and wrong, and after a daylong battle with his mother, if he finally did think that her argument had merit, he would say so. He was willing to make amends, to say he was sorry. If he and she had been edgy together, their attachment was fervent. They had violently disapproved of any trait in the other that they loathed in themselves.

  The summer following Toby’s death, David had come across the two orphaned cats. Dinah had taken David with her when she went shopping. She had asked him to come along and help with all the grocery bags, but it was a time when she could scarcely bear to be without one of her children.

  In the parking lot in the summer’s heat she had thought at first that she was hearing the squeak of her grocery cart as it rocked slightly every time David hefted another sack of groceries from the basket to the back of her station wagon. But David recognized the tiny mewling sound for what it was. He had lain down flat on the graveled asphalt and maneuvered himself all the way under the bronze-flecked Trans Am, which was parked next to their own car.

  Dinah had stood looking down at David’s long legs emerging from beneath the car and realized with surprise that they could have been connected to an adult body. David was just thirteen, and, still, that was Dinah’s most vivid memory of that day—gazing down at her son’s darkly haired, muscular legs.

  “I need something to bribe it with,” he had called out to her from beneath the car, and she had torn open a package of raw hamburger.

  A little crowd gathered, three middle-aged women and an elderly man, drawing their carts into a semicircle and watching David in silence. One of the women had moved forward abruptly when David emerged far enough to hold a kitten out to them. The woman swooped toward him and grabbed it in a peculiar, greedy lunge, and Dinah had not interfered. David had disappeared again beneath the car, and when he finally wriggled out, he held a second kitten, grease-spotted and clutching at his arm in panic.

  “Twins,” he announced with a real grin, unselfconscious and slightly quizzical, his dark eyebrows lifted. Dinah had been so smitten with him—momentarily at ease and handsome in the sunlight, ready for any small irony that might come his way, and with his beautiful, beautiful smile—that for a moment she had been dazzled right out of her grieving.

  But none of the onlookers smiled back. They just gazed at him blankly as he sat propped up on one hand in the parking lot and extended the other kitten to them for their inspection. Dinah took the tiny cat, and David scrambled up by himself, still smiling with satisfaction at the people who stood around him.

  “I don’t want this cat,” said the woman who had taken the first kitten from David’s hand. She seemed to mean that she would have kept it if it had proved to be something else, but now she turned and deposited the kitten inside one of the grocery bags in Dinah’s station wagon. The poor cat sprawled miserably over a netted bag of oranges.

  And the elderly man who had been standing on the outskirts of their small assembly became quite upset. He rose up on his toes for a moment in agitation, rocking back and forth. “Those cats belong to the people who have this car. Now, that’s what I think. You could go in the store, okay? They would announce it over the loudspeaker right in the store if you go to the office.”

  But Dinah cast her eye doubtfully over the car, obscenely canted up at the rear on a raised axle. “Would you go get a box from the manager, please?” she said to David. “One that’s pretty deep.” He had loped off, brushing bits of sand and gravel from his nylon running shorts.

  The three women had wheeled their shopping carts away to find their own cars in the wide lot. One woman turned back for a moment. “Well, bye-bye,” she said, “and good luck.” The woman who had taken the first cat from David’s hand moved off, though, without a word. The man stood there a little longer, still agitated, still rocking back and forth from heel to toe. But Dinah didn’t feel the slightest qualm about the propriety of taking the kittens away with her. The shiny car that had produced them looked to her as if it were still at the height of its mating season. She merely nodded at the elderly little man who was filled with alarm at this unnerving turn of events in his day. But he finally calmed himself and had gone on his way before David returned.

  On the drive home the two kittens had shat pitifully, terrified in the high-sided box, filling the front seat with the scent of their mother’s milk, so Dinah reasoned that they hadn’t been weaned. “Let’s name them Bob and Ray,” David said. “I’ll give them a bath when we get home.”

  David was enamored that year of Bob Ellio
t and Ray Goulding—all their old records that Martin had and their program on public radio. Dinah glanced over at him as she drove and had been entirely happy at that moment that she was connected to her own son. Now and then, in that first year of paralyzing grief after Toby’s death, she had been granted a few moments like that—rare occasions when she was startled out of her preoccupying sorrow by a resonating glimpse of one of her other children who was absolutely filled up with his or her own personality.

  And that day David had possessed joy, too. She had been so pleased for him. Despite Toby’s death, that had still been a time when Dinah believed in happy coincidence. She had thought that David’s discovery of those two abandoned kittens meant that they would be a source of special solace to him and that they would be more than usually his own.

  The two new cats had become hers, of course, by default. It was she who was most in the house; it was she who fed them and checked their water. One day she had taken them along to the Vet Clinic to get their shots, and Melissa had not been behind the reception desk. While she waited to get the attention of a tiny, pert girl who was busily flipping through a box of file cards, Dinah had stood at the high counter idly contemplating a display of various parasitic worms suspended in jars of formaldehyde and arranged along the counter next to the flea collars.

  “Be with you in a sec!” the girl said over her shoulder. At last she got up and came over to the counter, standing on her toes to peer over it at the wire carrying cage at Dinah’s feet. “Oh, you have two little kitties, don’t you? Have we seen you before?” Her name tag said Annie.

  “Yes,” Dinah said. “But I haven’t brought these kittens in before. My account is under Howells.”

  From the bank of filing cabinets Annie retrieved Dinah’s folder, glancing through it to check the information. “Neither one of those is Taffy, then?” she asked.

  “No.” Dinah agreed.

  Annie stretched up on tiptoe again to look at the kittens. “Aren’t they cute! What are their names?”

  “Well,” said Dinah, “the striped one’s Bob and the tortoiseshell is Ray.”

  Annie glanced up at her intently for a moment, and then bent over the chart to write the information down. “What unusual names for little kittens,” she said as she was writing.

  “Oh, well… you know… they’re the comedians.”

  Annie didn’t respond for a moment; her face went solemn while she turned the pages back to be sure the carbon had copied. Then she smiled brightly at Dinah. “Oh, I know! Kittens can just be so funny!”

  The feline Bob and Ray weren’t ever funny, though. They were fierce in practicing their survival skills. They tumbled and skidded across the wooden floors, but they were so clearly purposeful, so determined, that their kittenhood was never amusing. Sarah and David lost interest when the kittens proved to be unaffectionate—not at all mean, but diffident. Dinah, though, had been fascinated. In that long period of time, which she still thought of as being “after Toby’s death,” they distracted her, and she watched them by the hour. Bob was distrustful, and Ray was affronted by every human foible that he witnessed around him, especially hers. He glared at her if she dropped a glass or slammed a door or made any sudden noise. If she forgot to feed him, he found her wherever she was in the house and reminded her to give him dinner with a soft tap-tapping of his padded paw, claws scrupulously sheathed.

  The two kittens slept curled together, but as they grew into cats they became less and less a pair. Bob went off on his own, tucking himself into a tight ball to sleep on the tops of bookcases or in the depths of a closet during the winter, and disappearing for weeks at a time during the summer. Ray took it upon himself to guard her behavior, and for a while this seemed to her miraculously coincidental. For a while it was with him, not Toby, that her daily wars were waged. If she sat down for a moment to get some of her own work done and she failed to notice Ray come into the room, he would knock some object off a table or a mantel.

  “Oh, Christ!” she would shout at him, leaping up explosively, but he would only turn his back with a flick of his tail and direct all his attention to washing his leg. It was Ray who knocked the iron off the board onto the floor when she had left it turned on. She had come back into the room to discover him sleeping on its accustomed resting spot while a thin stream of smoke rose into the air from the hot iron plate lying flat on the wood floor. He curled up quietly in her chair at the kitchen table and was outraged if she didn’t notice him before she sat down. She had often dropped a plate or let a fork clatter to the floor as she leaped forward after almost sitting on him. But he always slipped away just in time.

  In retrospect Dinah could never pinpoint that one instant in which she stopped measuring the progression of the days from the moment of Toby’s death. The end of her active grieving slipped up on her and caught her unawares, leaving her oddly at loose ends, uneasy and fearful. On some level was the belief that, as long as she held on to her overwhelming grief at his loss, then Toby might not really be gone.

  Nevertheless, eventually and unwittingly, she loosened her grip on her fury and sorrow, and all the other elements of her life receded into their proper perspective. Over the years she stopped regarding Ray’s intrusion, his persistent guardianship, as particularly coincidental or significant one way or another. She automatically made her way around him when she was working in the kitchen; it became a habit to hold any book she was reading up in the air so that he could not settle on it and prevent her from turning the pages. And despite all his apparent devotion to her he repelled any affection she extended toward him. If she put him on her lap, he would remain only so long as she held him beneath her hand.

  His behavior interested David. “His choices are pretty limited. Bob’s never around, and how would you like it if you had to have Taffy as your best friend?”

  Dinah had laughed, but she thought David was probably right. She had become Ray’s main focus of interest by a process of elimination. Once, when the cat was just a little over a year old, Dinah was working at her desk, and she had straightened up for a moment and rolled her chair backward a little to stretch her legs, Ray had let out a terrible hiss and a warning screech because he had settled on the rug just behind her, and she had unwittingly rolled onto a bit of his fur before he jumped out of the way. He was incensed, but so was she. She hadn’t known he was there, and the awful sound he made had caused her skin to prickle. She swiveled all the way around in her chair and matched his furious glare.

  “You stupid, stupid beast! What the hell do you think?” And quite unexpectedly she began to cry, a deep, alarming sobbing. “You don’t own this place! You think you’re God’s own cat, don’t you? You’re just a pest! And I don’t care if I roll over you and squash you flat! I can’t have any peace in my own house!” And she had raised her hands to her face, trying to stop her own weeping. “You’re driving me crazy! I’m sick of thinking about you and you’re driving me crazy!” Although she yelled straight at him, crying and shouting, he didn’t even flinch. She turned her chair again and bent forward, laying her face against the cool wood of her desk and weeping on and on, not thinking at all about the cat but simply given over to grief. When she finally rose from her chair the cat regarded her with disdain. You’re loud and raucous, he seemed to be thinking. You are all alone in your own room yelling at a cat.

  But as time passed, Ray’s preoccupation with her became merely a function of the household, a part of the secret life of her days when she was home alone. If the house were otherwise inhabited, she bent the shape of her hours to encompass her husband and children and friends. And this summer the intensity of the lives lived within the rooms of her house was shifting and dissipating in a way that she could not understand.

  Sarah, now twelve, was still willing to answer some of the questions Dinah asked her directly, but David, at eighteen, revealed as little as he could without being rude, as though any knowledge she might have of him bequeathed to her some sort of power over him. And w
hile the life of the family inevitably drew in around him as they waited through the warm months before September when he would leave for college, Dinah grew increasingly desperate to be given a little access, once again, to some part of David’s state of mind.

  It seemed to Dinah that he was unreasonably intent on his absolute privacy. At one point, on her way out the door, Dinah had leaned back around the doorframe into the kitchen, where David was finishing his breakfast. “I’m going to the grocery,” she said. “Is there anything special you need or anything particular you’d like for dinner?”

  He gazed up at her in silence, with his eyebrows drawn together in pained outrage. “I don’t know why,” he said, “you need to know everything about my life!”

  Dinah only sighed and pulled the door firmly closed behind her, but in the car she found that her eyes smarted with tears. What had she done to warrant such resentment?

  Another day, though, when he came home from work, David sat amiably with her in the kitchen, drinking a beer while Dinah stood at the sink, sipping a glass of wine and washing lettuce for dinner.

  “Oh, guess what!” he said. “I saw a girl who’ll be in my class next year. We were in the same tour group after my interview.”

  “You did?” said Dinah, not remembering to make her voice sound less avid. “Did you speak to her? Is she a girl you might go out with?”

  “Of course I spoke to her. She was having lunch with her mother at the restaurant. They were on their way to Manchester to go shopping.” He had waited tables three summers in a row at The Green River Café, and just this week he had managed to be put on the shift that served lunch and afternoon tea instead of the breakfast shift, which started at 5:30 in the morning.