Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  But Sarah caught the brief expression of disdain that crossed her brother’s face at his mother’s words. He settled his shoulders against the back of his chair and crossed his arms tightly over his chest in a posture Sarah had come to recognize as his way of controlling his impatience toward his parents. She knew from watching him over the past year that their parents were often foolish, often absurdly sentimental, and that he was having a harder and harder time forgiving them for it.

  She trusted his opinion even when she envied him, because in the small world of the teenagers in West Bradford—a world which she was about to join—it seemed to her that he was the recipient of so much approval. What she admired most was his indifference to the whole business. Sarah could see that he had achieved a kind of star status in his own realm, but either he didn’t know it or he knew that it wasn’t in the least important. Sarah knew it wasn’t important, too, but she only knew it; she didn’t believe it.

  When she was with her friends at the college hockey game and David and Sam came in late, pausing for a moment to unzip their jackets and glance around the bleachers to decide where to sit, three high school girls sitting two rows down from Sarah had grasped each other’s arms and leaned toward one another. “I swear to God I’m going to save myself for David Howells!” one of them said, and the three of them laughed together and continued to watch David and Sam as they found their friends in the stands. Various older girls had attempted to befriend her so they could come by her house to see David, but Sarah had carefully studied David’s genuine indifference to his social status and pretended to it herself, which really did work; it really did enhance her desirability as a friend or girlfriend.

  Now and then she could feel the atmosphere around herself become supercharged when a collective attention focused on her: a group of teachers in the school cafeteria suddenly glancing her way with beneficent expectations. Adults genuinely interested in her when she came through to pass the cheese and crackers at one of her parents’ dinner parties. Her parents’ guests didn’t merely nod and thank her; conversation stopped momentarily and they turned to ask a question and listen to her expectantly.

  “Another one of those gorgeous Howells children,” she had heard a woman she vaguely recognized say to another when she made her way past them on the Carriage Street sidewalk. The limelight David inhabited in this last year he would really live in West Bradford was wide enough so that the soft edges illuminated her, too. There was no one, therefore, whose wisdom she trusted more than she trusted David’s, because she knew from everything her parents had ever said that they would disapprove of her desire for popularity and acclaim. They would think her frivolous. But she also knew beyond a doubt that they didn’t understand the real world of political life in which she had to operate.

  “It doesn’t matter about my birthday!” she said. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just a birthday! You know this is much more important, Mom. This is Netta’s real life!” David met her glance with a surprised and dazzling smile that entirely opened his expression, lighting his face with a look of unusual pleasure. In someone less sternly featured, it would have been a cartoon smile, with the corners of his mouth curling up, his eyebrows lifted in delight. Ever since he was a child, that smile had been an amazing transformation of his strong features, but these days its appearance was more and more rare.

  “Goddammit, Sarah!” Dinah finally exploded. “Your birthday is your real life! This is the only day you’ll ever turn thirteen! We’ve planned this for months! All of this…” and she gestured around the room with a sweep of her arm to indicate the overheated atmosphere, “… this is not your responsibility!” She leaned across the table toward her daughter, unconsciously venting all of her aggravation on Sarah in what she thought was Sarah’s behalf.

  But it was Martin at whom Dinah was really angry, so angry that it made her face tingle with suppressed rage. When she had told him about the conversation she had overheard between David and Christie, a pained expression had crossed his face as he looked away from the baseball game he was watching on television and absorbed what she was saying. They had been propped in bed, side by side, late on the same evening of the afternoon when Dinah had overheard that conversation. She had been trying to read, or at least to appear to read, while she considered how to tell Martin that Christie might be pregnant. Dinah had still felt bruised from her confrontation with her own son that afternoon, still baffled, and she was both horrified and terribly saddened at the situation Christie and David might be in.

  Martin had turned to listen to her as she began relaying Christie and David’s conversation, but he had glanced back toward the television for just a second when a roar arose from the crowd at Fenway Park. He hadn’t turned fully away from her—he had merely been distracted—but she reached over and flicked off the remote control and the screen went black. He had started to say something, perhaps to apologize, but she had glared at him, and his face had set in resignation as he heard her out.

  “Oh, Christ!” he said, but quietly with a note of resignation. He rubbed one hand beneath his jaw, running his fingers along the sides of his face and brushing his thumb over the cleft of his chin as though he were assessing his need of a shave. Dinah was familiar with that gesture from other times in their lives, moments of anxiety and pain. “Jesus Christ! How could they be so stupid? I mean, it’s hard to think of David being so irresponsible!” And she could hear that he was as anxious as she. Then he dropped his arm and lifted both hands helplessly, palms up, and she immediately felt abandoned. “Well, Dinah… I don’t know what we can do unless David asks us to do something. It sounds like Christie hasn’t told her parents anything yet. It seems to me that most of all it has to be her business.”

  “What the hell do you mean? You mean it’s all Christie’s fault?”

  He gazed levelly at her for a moment, and then spoke with pained elaboration. “For God’s sake, Dinah. Of course I don’t mean that. I mean that it’s her body, her choice whether to tell us anything about it. It may turn out that she’s fine, and she might be mortified that we had ever known anything about it. And not only that, it seems to me that you would normally be saying exactly the same thing.”

  “Normally! Oh, right! Well, normally David hasn’t gotten anybody pregnant! Sweetheart, Christie might be pregnant with David’s baby.” Her anger had turned into a sort of pleading. “How can you not care about that? I can’t think about anything else! I wouldn’t even know what to suggest they do about it. Oh, Martin, I can’t believe you’re not on my side. At least you could talk to him!”

  “He knows we know about it,” he said to her reasonably, “and my whole point is that I don’t think you and I have a side. David’s eighteen years old. I don’t think we have the right to make this our business.”

  “How can you possibly believe that?” She was truly astonished. “Christie’s not eighteen, you know. She’s only sixteen. But Martin, no matter how old he is, David’s still our son! We still owe him some sort of guidance… or… protection!”

  “David is like an explosion getting ready to happen this summer. We’ve got to give him his privacy, too,” Martin said. “And we owe him some dignity. He knows he can come to us if he needs help. I think Christie knows the same thing. I mean, I think she would come to us if she wanted us to help! Or if she wanted us to know about it.”

  To her own frustration Dinah had started crying. “God damn you, Martin! Goddammit! You have so much trust in reason! In logic! This is too much for anyone to handle in some sort of orderly way you seem to think exists in the world! You are so stupid sometimes that I can hardly believe you’re smart!”

  “Dinah.” He sounded worn out. “Why don’t you talk to him if you want, but I think…”

  “God! That’s the whole point, dammit! I can’t talk to him anymore about anything. You need to find out what’s going on!” She hadn’t been able to stop crying, and she wiped her eyes repeatedly with Kleenex, dropping them in scrunched puffs into h
er lap. Martin put his arm around her and they simply sat leaning against each other for a while, Dinah waiting to see what Martin would come up with. But Martin hadn’t replied. He had hugged her toward him comfortingly, and within half an hour or so, when she had let her head fall back against the headboard and had closed her eyes, he had reached over and flicked the game back on, keeping the volume low.

  And in the kitchen on Sarah’s birthday, as he did nothing to stop the celebration from slipping through the cracks, she had wanted to turn to him and say that he had been loved too well for all of his life and it had left him diminished. Today, for the first time, that’s what she believed. It was not so much that he lacked empathy, but she thought he misdirected it; he never considered, he refused to be reflective. With Netta’s presence this morning and almost constantly over these summer weeks, Dinah had been too constrained ever to get anything sorted out within her family, and time was suddenly out of control, flying by, her family separating from her as though she were the whirling center pushing them away by centrifugal force.

  But in that exact moment, when a new way of knowing her husband had clicked into place, Martin looked over at David and spoke calmly and in a reasonable voice. “David, I can’t believe you expect us to give up what we’ve planned for Sarah’s birthday. I don’t understand how you could be that thoughtless. I really don’t.” He was sincere and rational in the wake of Dinah’s impassioned outburst. She began to clear away the mixing bowl and baking powder from the counter. Martin spoke between bites of pancake, which he alone seemed maddeningly determined to finish. “Netta, you need to get this settled with Bill….”

  David’s brows drew down, and he tucked his chin into his chest, his shoulders lifting and falling in a long, resigned sigh as he rocked back on the legs of his chair. Sarah watched him carefully; she was attuned to every nuance, and she was overcome with sorrow at his frustration—she felt a kind of grief that she was too inexperienced to name; she was only able to translate it into anger.

  “My birthday is not a big deal! Okay?” Sarah said, each word deliberate, her tone scornful, a verbal sneer, her fists knotted alongside her plate. “It’s only a big deal to you! You’re the one who made all the plans!” she said across the room to her mother.

  Dinah was startled. “What? But Sarah, I asked you what you wanted….”

  “I know. But I didn’t really care what we did. I know you and Dad like to go to Tanglewood. I mean, it was fine with me whatever we did, but obviously this is much more important.” Dinah settled back against the kitchen counter and crossed her own arms in an unconscious but exact replication of her son’s posture, cocking her head at her daughter and staring her down in the face of the huge injustice of what she was saying. Sarah was hoping to intern at Tanglewood in voice when she was sixteen, and it was for her sake that Dinah always bought box-seat tickets—so that Sarah could see the stage.

  And Sarah did flinch away from her mother’s gaze and back down a little. “I mean, I really think this is great. These pancakes and everything. But this is just more important!” She looked to her mother for a signal, but Dinah didn’t give an inch, and Sarah’s own anger flared. “And, besides, wouldn’t we really all have a great time with you in the mood you’re in! I’ll baby-sit with Anna Tyson, Netta, if that would help!” She left the table abruptly, her pancakes uneaten, her presents unopened, and her face far less defiant than her words had been.

  Martin sat still, with his elbows on the table bracketing his plate of neatly partitioned pancakes, miserable at the unpleasantness that suddenly pervaded the room. David straightened in his chair, all at once evasive and uncertain. Netta remained oblivious, her face glazed with exhaustion. Dinah was bewildered, wondering how, once again, her championship of her children was so unacceptable to them.

  Generally New Englanders believe that their favorite time of year is summer, when the days are long and gentle and the mountains are verdant. But as the days lengthened, Dinah felt a sort of frantic distress when confronted by the abundance of green, the warmth, the excessiveness of everything growing. By late July, she was overwhelmed by the cloud of seasonal expectations as persistent and bothersome as gnats.

  Martin said that she resented enjoying herself, and Dinah thought that it was quite possible that her disposition simply wasn’t suited to it, but it irritated her that Martin had so easily categorized her.

  “I do enjoy summer, Martin. I just don’t think I should have to. But you’re right. I resent it. I do resent having to be so cheerful all the time! I hate the… forced spontaneity in the summer. The articles in any magazine you pick up at the dentist’s on how to have ‘your pantry stocked for that unexpected guest.’ My God! I’d have to hang a side of beef and keep a poultry farm and plant an orchard.” This was what she had said to him in her own defense on the day that Netta had dropped by to make soup. Dinah wasn’t always so cranky, but by midsummer she was in the midst of her worst emotional season.

  Now and then she consoled herself with the fact that at least she hadn’t grown up in California, where there wasn’t any weather at all according to Ellen. Just sunshine and eternal flowers, or so Ellen recounted frequently. Dinah didn’t think that she herself could make it through the year without January and February, with their severe clarity, their freedom of non-celebration, and their confirmation of the fact that fluctuations of mood were necessary, were natural.

  But, to her surprise, this day that had begun so inauspiciously had come together quite nicely, genuinely spontaneous, and Dinah luxuriated in her lack of responsibility for the success of the rest of the afternoon. Wandering through the beautiful grounds of Tanglewood, she was delighted with the summer air and the crowds of people spreading over the lawn with their picnic baskets and folding chairs. One couple had set up a little table with candles and flowers and china plates arrayed with avocado and shrimp, varied lettuces, and pale white cucumber fans. It was a bit of showing off they were doing, of course, but they were delighting in the attention they received from passersby, the acknowledgment of their unabashed romanticism.

  The mood of the afternoon was buoyant. Dinah was caught up in it all around, and she thought with pity rather than disdain of those friends of hers who were such purists that they wouldn’t come to Tanglewood but waited to go to Boston to hear the orchestra in Symphony Hall.

  Dinah loved the tourists who enthusiastically applauded between movements, who always leaped to their feet during Handel’s Messiah for the “Hallelujah” Chorus, despite the tactful plea in the program guide not to do so. It was clear that many of them had never seen a major orchestra before, and it delighted Dinah to spot someone in the audience who was as overwhelmed as she had once been at witnessing the astonishing mutual effort of all the disparate elements of an orchestra and the chorus to produce a miraculous sound. It was newly breathtaking to Dinah every time despite twenty years of acquiring a little musical sophistication. After every performance, she was angry the next morning at Matthew Bardwell, whose reviews in the paper pointed out inadequacies she hadn’t noticed, and whose dour recounting of a concert diminished the memory of her pleasure. She had privately decided that Matthew Bardwell had no capacity for joy.

  At the end of the school year one of David’s closest friends, who had been away for his freshman year at Harvard, had unexpectedly joined Dinah in the auditorium at West Bradford High School while she was waiting for the seniors’ musical recital to begin. “Jay!” Dinah had exclaimed. “How brave of you to come back and sit through two hours of this just to hear David play.”

  “Oh, great!” Jay had replied. “Actually I didn’t know David was playing. I really wanted to hear the xylophone player. She’s great!”

  Dinah had laughed and hugged him, and gone on to ask him about Harvard, about what David could expect his freshman year. Jay was one of David’s friends whom she dearly loved. He was interested in everything, sophisticated but never smug. She was delighted to be in his company. And she was astonished when,
indeed, a xylophone was wheeled onto the stage midway during the evening, and a girl she didn’t recognize approached it with seeming trepidation and played quite a complicated piece. Dinah had thought Jay was kidding, but she clapped loudly along with him when the girl stepped forward to take a bow.

  “Isn’t she terrific? God!” he said. “Isn’t that fantastic? She didn’t miss hitting a single note!” He was jubilant, and Dinah had remembered his pleasure and recognized it in herself every time she watched a singer, a quartet, a choir, or an orchestra. She and Jay shared the disproportionate admiration of the musically nongifted for any of these performers.

  This afternoon, with the concert still ahead of her, as she and Ellen and Sarah and Anna Tyson made their way across the Tanglewood grounds, she was even feeling sorry for Martin and David and Vic, who had taken Martin’s car and the Hofstatters’ van into Cambridge to help Netta pack up whatever she needed from her apartment.

  Dinah and Ellen spread a blanket under a tree near the building in which the chorus was rehearsing. Ellen had taken charge of unpacking their picnic, and Dinah walked over to the hedge surrounding the grounds to peer out at the landscape, which fell away down the steep sides of the Stockbridge Bowl where a lake glimmered flatly, like a pewter plate, unshadowed by clouds, before the mountains rose again in gentle folds until they met the horizon. She stood for a bit in mindless and entirely pleasurable contemplation of the view, and then she came back to their blanket and began to open out the webbed lawn chairs they had brought.

  “Okay, tell me the truth, now, Ellen! Don’t you really think”—and her voice was light and sweetly teasing—“in your heart of hearts, at the core of your being, that Sarah is absolutely the loveliest girl in the world?” Dinah pulled her daughter to her in an amiable hug. “And the most pleasant company!” Ellen was sitting on the blanket arranging plates, and she smiled up at them, but Sarah pulled away, with Anna Tyson still attached to one hand, and Dinah grinned an indulgent apology toward her daughter for having embarrassed her with a public display of affection.