Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  Martin was appalled. Martin was repelled. He hadn’t wanted to imagine the scene she described. He hadn’t wanted to get further involved, and although he was rarely unkind, he knew he was about to be ungenerous to Netta after all she had revealed to him. He sat there studying the pizza, noting that the cheese had gone cold and opaque, and closed the box, putting it aside. He placed Netta’s manuscript squarely between them, shuffling through the pages to see where it was marked. When he finally looked up at her, he smiled in apology. “Well,” he said, “be careful, Netta. Take care of yourself.”

  Anna Tyson sat at the kitchen table with David and Sam, tucking her legs beneath her to give herself enough height to reach her piece of pizza and her glass of chocolate milk. Without even thinking of it, David used her as a foil to avoid Sam’s questions about Christie. Why didn’t David care, Sam wanted to know, that after three years of going out with her, he was hurting her feelings so much? David got up to dampen a napkin so that Anna Tyson could wipe the tomato sauce from around her mouth.

  David was hardly able to pay attention to what Sam was saying; his head was filled with the thought of Netta, and he was sluggish and stunned by the amazing eroticism of the time he spent at her apartment. He was dazed by the combination of sex and the luxury of guiltless, irresponsible domesticity. Even while Sam was talking to him, David couldn’t distract himself enough to think much about Christie.

  Finally Sam gave up. He was tilted backward, and he let his chair fall forward with a thump. He took a piece of pizza and began to eat it as he got up and made for the door.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I told Meg I’d pick her up after work. I’ll see you.”

  “Yeah. Okay,” David said. He looked up just as Sam reached the doorway, and David experienced an abrupt sense of loss, then, just for a moment. It moved over him like a shiver, and he didn’t want to see Sam go out of the kitchen into the dark, his shoulders still stiff with reproach. “I feel bad about Christie,” David said. “But she’s so young. And next year… I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen next year. I’ll talk to her, though.”

  Sam was silhouetted in the doorframe beyond the light of the kitchen, but David saw the white flash of Sam’s quick grin. “That’ll be good,” Sam said, and then the screen swung to and Sam disappeared down the back steps.

  But while David sat with Anna Tyson, who was concentrating in silence on the piece of pizza she was eating, the thought of Christie slipped out of his mind. He had helped Netta arrange furniture in her apartment the previous afternoon, and she had begun fixing supper for the three of them. David had read a story to Anna Tyson while Netta made noodles Alfredo from a packaged mix, peeled carrots at the sink, cut three apples into eighths on a wooden cutting board, and set the table.

  All the while that David was reading Frog and Toad Are Friends, which he remembered from his own childhood, he couldn’t help but be aware that later on, after he washed the dishes and Netta had put Anna Tyson to bed, he might again have leisurely access to Netta’s body. Maybe they would unpack another box of books, or her records, and then they would sit and talk for a while. But eventually, he was sure, she would stretch out next to him on the futon, or maybe on her bed. Netta wasn’t so young and so ardent as Christie. And Netta didn’t urge him toward her with her arms and legs wrapped around him; she merely cradled him. But neither did she become agonized or guilt-ridden. It all seemed another amazing part of a normal evening.

  He would rummage through her refrigerator, if she asked him to, and bring something back to bed for them to eat—two plums, or a box of raisins, or two plastic cartons of yogurt. So much sensuous freedom numbed his intellect; he was sated and stuporous with the dailiness of it all. It was an easy leap of his imagination to think of the days continuing in just this way.

  David realized that it was true, as Netta had explained—as she had cautioned him—that he had no idea why he was going to Harvard in a few weeks. He had applied and been accepted; it hadn’t occurred to him that he should have a reason to go, a sense of purpose. The idea of deadlines, classes, roommates, communal meals—the work of being a student—depressed him and made him anxious. Certainly it filled him with wonder that he had so cavalierly planned to do such a thing. He thought of his undemanding, routine job waiting tables at the café, and realized that it would be even easier in September when the tourists had gone. And also, to his surprise, he felt a powerful melancholy at what he now realized would be his departure from all that was familiar to him. He had been excited about going away, but now the thought of it frightened him.

  David would sit next to Netta in her twin bed while she leaned back against the wall, stirring the blueberries up from the bottom of her yogurt, telling him about one thing or another, and he would sometimes fall into a dazed sleep for moments at a time. Eventually she would get up and start to dress, urging him to do the same, hurrying him out. If Anna Tyson were to wake up in the night, Netta explained, she didn’t want him to be found there.

  The long evenings he spent after work helping Netta unpack had led to their having sex together only three times in about as many weeks, but the familiarity of such easy householdery enhanced David’s idea of their intimacy. He spent a lot of time in Netta’s and Anna Tyson’s company, lending a hand whenever Netta had to attend to some chore or other. He went with the two of them to the Laundromat, for instance, and hefted the heavy baskets of wet clothes and sheets and towels into the back seat of Netta’s car. If he didn’t mind carrying them, Netta said, she much preferred to bring the laundry home right out of the washer and hang it to dry on the communal clothesline in the backyard of her apartment, but the baskets were too heavy for her to lift alone. She handed him clothespins while he pegged up blouses and skirts and shorts and towels on one of the three lines, strung between tall poles, which were hard for her to reach.

  They went to the supermarket in Bradford, where David wheeled the cart with Anna Tyson facing him in the fold-out compartment of the basket, eating animal crackers while Netta stocked up on paper towels and canned tomatoes—items that were overpriced, she said, at The Whole Grain Elevator.

  “Your mother told me that she didn’t think it was worth the trip to come all the way over here, and that it was depressing, too. It is sort of like a warehouse. Pretty grim. But it’s so much cheaper. It seems strange to me that Dinah would spend so much money just for cheerful surroundings. Especially since she does such elaborate cooking.”

  “She doesn’t really,” David said, not knowing what prompted him to say that, and feeling uncomfortable. “She doesn’t have much time for cooking.” He knew that his mother cooked dinner every night, often cooked breakfast if she was around when any of the rest of the family got up, and he didn’t know why he felt compelled to deny it. In his own kitchen, though, one evening later that week, when he was opening a can of frozen orange juice concentrate, he stopped abruptly and glanced at the price stamped on the top. He turned to his mother, who was reading the paper at the kitchen table. “Don’t you think it’s a waste to spend so much money on this stuff when you could get it for almost a third less in Bradford?” But his mother hadn’t answered him; she only looked up at him briefly with a bewildered expression.

  He didn’t know, either, that in the past two weeks there had been moments when he was lugging baskets of Netta’s and Anna Tyson’s wet laundry out under the clear sky while his own mother was dividing the laundry at his house into separate stacks of colors and whites. He didn’t know that, once, at the very moment he was impressed by Netta’s idea of wanting Anna Tyson’s T-shirts to dry in the fresh air, Dinah, in his own house on Slade Road, had taken up a handful of his shirts—damp and musty-smelling from having lain in a moldering pile that she had repeatedly asked him to do something about—and tossed them all into the wash together, the navy and red and white polo and T-shirts intermingled. “What the hell,” she had muttered as she slammed the top down and set them to run on “Warm/ Cold.”

&nbs
p; The fact of Netta’s involvement with such mundane things as buying and cooking food, ironing, hanging her clothes out on a clothesline never failed to surprise and intrigue David. It didn’t cross his mind that anything of the kind went on at his own house.

  Dinah spent the rest of the week making repeated trips to the mall in Albany or to outlet stores in the area in search of various things that David would need for school. But she was vague and forgetful and slightly disoriented. She could not shake Ellen’s warning about the association between Netta and Martin, but she didn’t want to consider it head-on just now.

  She was driving along a familiar stretch of Route 7, on her way to a small store that sold Pendleton blankets, when she began to feel she couldn’t get her breath. She was flushed and clammy and panicky by the time she brought the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road. She rested her forearms against the steering wheel and lowered her head into her hands. Her breathing slowed, but she was nauseated with the visceral acknowledgment of the feeling of abandonment. It seemed to her that she was being left to fend for herself on every front, and yet she wasn’t at all sure what it was she was fending off.

  Ellen had dropped by early that morning and joined her once again in David’s room as she was just finishing packing David’s trunk. Dinah sat on the lid while Ellen closed the hasps. “You’ve packed enough towels and sheets to carry this child through middle age,” Ellen said as she strained to fasten down the second latch. She glanced up when Dinah didn’t respond.

  “Oh, Ellen, you know, this is just so incredibly hard,” Dinah finally replied, embarrassed to find herself near tears.

  Ellen concentrated on the clasp and snapped it home. “Yes, it must be. Remembering David’s first step, and all that.”

  Dinah nodded, although she couldn’t, in fact, remember David’s first step or his first word; she was not particularly sentimental. She did not grieve over visions of David as an infant, a toddler, a little boy—she could not even successfully place herself back in that time and experience. She could, of course, recall innumerable happy occasions of all her children’s early lives, but in recalling them she didn’t reexperience the happiness.

  What was haunting her was the memory of the condition of unqualified, unguarded, untentative goodwill between her and her children. She remembered the assuredness—even when they were in the midst of some furious argument—of unconditional love. She had thought there would always be an enduring conspiracy among herself and her children in the face of the world. But even the idea of attempting to explain this to Ellen filled Dinah with a sense of futility.

  Now and then, in unguarded moments—in dreams, coming out of snatches of sleep—she was overtaken by the most suffocating apprehension. If she could not keep militant control of her emotions, sorrow encroached on all of Dinah’s sensibilities. She could not eat, she could not sleep, she could not read. Her attention was diverted utterly to the prospect of losing David, and this puzzled her because, love him as she did, right now she didn’t much like him. She didn’t like the way he was choosing to leave, cold and aloof to his parents, ignoring his friends, apparently superior to any sentiment.

  That morning, when they were sitting at breakfast, she and Sarah and David and Martin, she had sipped her coffee and watched David finish an English muffin. It was rare these days that the four of them were at the table together. As she got up to get some more coffee, she leaned over and gave him a quick kiss as she passed behind his chair. “You know, sweetie, it’s going to seem so strange when you aren’t here next year. We’re going to miss you.”

  Dinah hadn’t understood that she was hoping for reassurance from the last person who could give it to her. The best response David could have made was to say that he would miss them, too, but he was far too endangered to say such a thing. She had no way of knowing that he was full of alarm on his own behalf. He had no practice at leaving behind every familiar thing in his life. But she was astounded when, after a few moments, David had given her a quick smile and said, “Right, Mom. The empty nest syndrome, huh? When Sarah leaves that’ll be it. Just you and Dad.” His tone was bantering and brittle, and she turned to look at him, but he had folded the newspaper into a rectangle and was reading the baseball scores, and Martin was smiling at her rather absently. Dinah was hurt and taken aback at being so diminished—as though she were just anyone at all and not connected to these two smug males sitting at the table. She had refilled her coffee cup and left the room without another word.

  But now, as she sat resting against the steering wheel at the side of the road, no longer able to avoid considering the possibility of Martin’s betrayal, she was overwhelmed by an appalling and sorrowing… lackfulness. For a good part of her life, she had had so much, and then that remarkable abundance had begun to dwindle.

  A car pulled onto the gravel shoulder ahead of her, and a tall girl was getting out of the driver’s seat and heading back toward her. Dinah straightened a little as the girl approached her window.

  “Are you okay?” the girl asked, bending considerably to gaze in at Dinah, a look of concern on her pleasantly long face, her thick hair swinging against the metal window frame.

  Dinah nodded. “I think I’m fine, now. I just felt nauseated for a minute. You’re so nice to stop.”

  “You know,” the girl said, “maybe you ought to see if it would make you feel better if you had something to eat. Or maybe a Coke. I’ll follow you. The Red Hut is right up the road.”

  Dinah was embarrassed. The intense sensation that had swept over her had dissipated somewhat, and she felt better. “Oh, I’m not even going that far. I’m just going to Carmichael’s Outlet Store up ahead. I really am fine, and you were awfully kind to pull over.” Dinah hesitated for a moment, wondering how to say what she knew she should say and not sound churlish. “You know, though, you really shouldn’t stop when you see a car parked on the shoulder. There’ve been some terrible incidents….” She fell silent because the girl was nodding at her in agreement.

  “Oh, I know, but I’ve been behind you for about ten miles, and I noticed when you began to slow down. I could tell you were having trouble. Actually, I’ve figured the odds on these things. Grown women in Volvo station wagons are not a big risk. I think it’s the middle-aged guys in those kind of anonymous green sedans who worry me most. Those cars that are always dusty and dented. I mean, it’s like they’re designed that way. Born to be a heap. You know? And some guy’s driving who has on a white T-shirt and his elbow out the window….” The girl straightened away from the car and mimicked a man slouching at the steering wheel. She pretended to take a long drag from an imaginary cigarette while steering casually with the other hand. Dinah laughed, and the girl dropped her arms to her sides and grinned back at her. “Why don’t you pull in front of me and I’ll follow until you turn off? In case you don’t feel as well as you think?”

  Dinah pulled ahead, and in a few miles turned off into the graveled lot at Carmichael’s, flashing a wave at the girl, who tooted her horn and accelerated up the long grade of the mountain. While Dinah sorted through the heavy wool blankets, she felt sure that the girl who had stopped to offer her help had parents who had no idea that they had a daughter so kind, so clever, so responsible in the world. So adult. Dinah let herself think about the incident, but she didn’t allow a single thought of its cause to enter her mind. The memory of the girl loping back toward her along the highway cheered her through the rest of that day, and she completed every chore on her list.

  In the next few days she was at loose ends. Until David had enough time off work to try on his jeans and slacks and shirts and jackets, to see if they needed to be altered, there weren’t any more preparations for his leavetaking with which Dinah could busy herself. She made a halfhearted attempt to get back to a book Ellen had persuaded her to review for a new local literary magazine, but she knew she would do the author a disservice if she read his book now. Her attention was vague and indirect, having the quality of a pointillist
painting. At the end of a day she had a memory of a cohesive unit of time, but, in fact, during that day each moment registered more or less out of context. She was reluctant to allow herself periods of long, uninterrupted musings. She wasn’t sleeping well, and she put her fuzzy-headedness down to that.

  She began to think it was important—perhaps only for herself—that there be some sort of occasion to mark David’s transition from living at home to a life of his own. After all, David would leave them only once, and it seemed to her imperative that the family do something together, something that David could enjoy and could add to the picture of how his life had been. It was possible that David was taking leave of them with such ease because he simply didn’t understand how much they loved him. He would be able to think back and say to himself that when he had gone off to school his freshman year, his parents and his sister had… and Dinah was at a loss. She couldn’t think of anything appropriate, and one part of her unkindly wanted David, at about age thirty-four, to look back and think, “When I went off to school my freshman year… I was an ungrateful little shit.” This was not in any way admirable, Dinah knew that, but she had come to a flinty peace with herself these past few months over the fact that her maternity was not selfless.

  She considered a surprise party, but most of David’s friends were going off to school also, and she imagined each family would mark the transition in its own way. She thought briefly of the customs of some of the early Irish immigrants to the United States. The families held an “American Wake,” on the night before the final leave-taking, to give form to the agony of the coming separation. They had accorded dignity to the grief of having to live on as childless parents and parentless children—an unnatural condition because the lost children and absent parents were alive in the world, but lost forever to each other. For almost five minutes, one late afternoon, this appealed to Dinah as an appropriate ceremony, but then she snapped out of her gloomy reverie and decided she didn’t really think any sort of celebration was worth the trouble, given David’s current state of mind.