Dale Loves Sophie to Death (20 page)

And Dinah
was
the Homecoming Queen. She waved and smiled; she accepted the roses; she was kissed by the football captain; but the event progressed for her in unsynchronized motion. At one moment she felt speeded up, as though she were moving through a tunnel at a terrifying acceleration, and then the proceedings would take on the nightmare aspect of slow motion, hideously exaggerated, so that she had the alarming notion that her frozen smile hung luminously over the stadium long after she had taken her seat, just like the Cheshire cat’s. By the end of the game she was sick and sad sitting there on the dais surrounded by the pretty princesses of her court. She might have been sick; she had felt terrible, and she had been unable to believe, anymore, that this event was special or fun. She was supposed to go on to the dance with Lawrence, but she asked him to pick her up later at home, and she would go back with him if she felt better. She was encircled by friends and teachers, and she had seen from their faces that she must look as peculiar as she felt. Her mother had already left the game in her own car, and so Dinah asked Buddy to drive her home in the borrowed convertible before he returned it, and he had sullenly agreed.

“Maybe I’m just hungry, Buddy. I was too nervous to eat. Would you mind stopping to get us something to eat?” She had been beyond caring that he hadn’t answered her at all but had just pulled up in front of the only pizza place in all of Fort Lyman. It was nothing more than a little closet of a building sandwiched in among a string of sleazy bars and restaurants. Buddy had gone in, and Dinah had leaned her head against the seat to wait for him. In a little while he had come out and bent over the side of the car to hand her the pizza and the keys.

“You go on home, Dinah. I’m going over to Snow’s. I’ll get a ride home later, and I’ll take the car back in the morning.”

Now she looked across the living room at Buddy, but she felt more as though she were looking from the bottom of a well at someone peering down from the top. “Why did you leave me there with that pizza, Buddy? Why were you mad at
me?
”

“Good Lord, Dinah,” he said, and grinned down that distance to her, about to laugh. It made her numb that he still viewed this as a prank. “That whole weekend you had just about driven us all crazy. You were so damned
pleased
with yourself!” He shook his head in renewed wonder. “You were wearing that horrible dress—really horrible. The kind girls wore then, like a net wedding cake.” He laughed. “And when you left Lawrence behind at the stadium, he just about died. He wanted to drive that car, too. Oh, I don’t know…I guess I just couldn’t resist it.”

When Buddy had left her sitting with the pizza and the keys outside the greasy little shop, she had struggled to slide across the seat and arrange her hoop skirt so that she could drive. Just as she managed to adjust the seat and start the car, a short, thickset man came bounding out the door and leaned into the window. “Hey, that guy said he’d be right back to pay me! I don’t have any money for that pizza!” He had stared at her aggressively; he didn’t even seem to notice that she was unusually dressed. She had been dumbfounded for a moment, trying to put it all together.

“Well, I don’t have any money with me. I’ll have to bring it to you tomorrow,” she said. “I just came from the Home-coming game”—and she gestured down at her billowing white dress, but he hadn’t paid any attention.

“Listen, you’re not leaving here with that pizza! I don’t like this a bit, I’ll tell you! Don’t you think you’re going anywhere!” He had leaned farther into the car and she had felt that his swarthy, angry face represented real menace. She had apologized to him with as much guile and charm as possible.

“Well, here,” she said, holding the pizza out to him, “take this back. I’m just so terribly sorry all this happened.”

“Are you kidding me?” He was beside himself. He was incredulous. “That pizza will be dead stone cold by now. It’s no good to me!”

So it ended up that she stood waiting in the little pizza parlor in her great mushroom of a skirt and her rhinestone tiara for a long, humiliating interval while Isobel drove into Fort Lyman with some money.

For all she knew, now that she thought of it, Buddy may never even have known the consequences of his own actions; she had never had the energy to tell him about them. He was still sitting on the couch vastly entertained by his own idea of that weekend.

“Dinah, do you
remember
what you said the day I picked you up at the shopping center after you’d had that dress fitted?” He laughed now with affectionate goodwill. “Lord, you came out of that store and got in the car and said, ‘Buddy, not one of those people I passed—not a single one—knew that they were walking right past the Fort Lyman Homecoming Queen!’ That knocked me out! It really did!”

Dinah thought that Buddy had this all wrong, all of it. She thought that he still did not know his motivations for the bind he had left her in that weekend, but she sat there listening to her brother relate this last incident and reflected that surely she had never, never been so innocent as that. Surely not! Suddenly she said, “I never forgave you for that, Buddy. I never really forgave any of you for that night!”

Buddy grew serious very slowly in the long silence that deadened the room, and Isobel got up and moved restlessly to the windows, pacing from one to the other like a house-bound cat. Then he was thoroughly abashed. “No,” he said, “well, I don’t guess you have. Well, there’s no reason you should, either. In fact, I felt pretty bad about it right away. I think I did.” And he looked especially sorry just now, and so Dinah had an apology of sorts, but it didn’t fill any need. When she grasped on to it, it had no more substance than a balloon. “In fact, Dinah,” he went on in a voice suddenly devoid of any reminiscent glee, “what I really think is that you
have
forgiven us. I think you don’t really blame any of us enough!” So now, even Dinah’s need for an apology was confirmed. She sat there motionless.

Isobel paced clear around the room, and finally she turned on Buddy. “Jesus Christ! What are you talking about? If ever there was a winner—if ever there was one—it’s Dinah! Dinah’s always known the key! She’ll always be one step ahead of the rest of us. Good God, Buddy!”

Dinah had the feeling she was seeing an old argument rekindled, and she didn’t do anything but sit there transfixed, and then Isobel turned to her, much calmer now. “You’ve always known, haven’t you, Dinah…Well, and the thing is, you’ve always been able to
do
it, just sit back and do it! You’ve always known that it’s much better to be more sinned against than sinning.”

Dinah just sat on quietly, not quite realizing she had been asked a question. She sat there pondering that suggestion and wondering if she could believe that and still be happy, if she could believe that and still like herself at all.

Chapter Nine

Sorrow and Responsibility

T
he three grownups stayed as they were in the living room for a few moments, and Isobel finally turned to Dinah with an elaborate shrug, lifting her hands in a pantomime of helplessness, so that the gesture might be taken for a diffuse apology. She moved to the tray to pour herself some more coffee. Buddy sat frowning down at his own empty cup. “I guess you always have been jealous of Dinah, then,” he said, but there was no force in his words; they didn’t require an answer from anybody, and if anything, he seemed to be bored with the situation.

Dinah heard what Buddy said, but his tone reflected her own mood. A kind of dolorous unease had settled in, a peculiar tedium, as it always did at the possibility of a confrontation. Dinah remained in a state of suspended judgment about Isobel. It wasn’t the moment, just now, to wonder if there was any truth in Buddy’s idea. But Isobel
did
know her so well, and Dinah sat rocking gently in her chair with the unwelcome knowledge that it was absolutely true that for a long time she had made a great virtue out of being wronged. Her assurance that she had often been reproached at moments when she was, in fact, beyond reproach had been one of her greatest strengths; it had seen her through her worst depressions. “But I was right,” she had always been able to say. Dinah worked hard to like herself; this new notion jeopardized her well-being.

Toby and Sarah came into the room gradually, because they had mastered the art of making their presence among adults acceptable by degrees. They talked outside the doorway, and then Sarah moved to the hearth and sat in the child’s rocker for a moment before coming farther into the room. Toby went first to the table behind Dinah’s chair and quietly splayed out a collection of coasters, imprinted with various butterflies, which were kept in a box there. At last he came to rest on the arm of Dinah’s chair. He stood on one rung of her rocker and bobbed slightly to make it rock. She had to lean to one side to keep from bumping his head with her chin.

“The cartoons are over,” he said. “Can we call Daddy now?” She had put her arm around his waist to steady him, and she looked at his pale profile as it swung up and down with the movement of the chair. He was oddly flushed across the cheekbones, and jittery. The skin of his forehead had the dry translucency of parchment. Dinah knew at once the tension and apprehension he must be feeling, and she felt a brief twinge of distaste at her own self-involvement this morning.

“This is a good time to call, I think,” Dinah said. “Let’s do go call him.” And all of them collected napkins and cups and saucers and made their way to the kitchen.

David was sitting at the kitchen table working through the maze on the children’s page of the morning newspaper. Isobel began to gather up the breakfast dishes and stack them in the sink, and Buddy went to the coat closet to get their raincoats and Isobel’s umbrella. Dinah dialed the number, but she let Toby hold the phone to his ear, so that he could be the first to speak to Martin, since it was his birthday call. Dinah could hear the faint ring of the phone, and she could tell when it ceased, but Toby didn’t speak. She looked down at him, and he seemed oddly frozen and rigid, with the phone clasped so tightly that his knuckles were white. “Toby!” she said. “Say something! Say hello!”

Toby looked up at her, mute. Finally, he said, “Hi,” not at all like a greeting.

“Toby!” Dinah said, irritated at his unusual reticence. She could hear Martin’s voice on the other end of the line, but Toby just stood there wrapped in a quiet and inexplicable terror. She reached down to take the phone from him, and he handed it to her, defeated.

“Martin,” she said, “it’s Toby. He wants to talk to you before we go to his birthday party. Here, I’ll put him on,” and she held the phone out to Toby, who didn’t lift his hands to take it; he just stared at her in an appeal she couldn’t decipher. “Don’t you want to talk to Daddy, Toby?” she said in that way of asking that is a command. She was cross; these calls cost money, and the kitchen had become entirely quiet while they all waited to see what Toby would say. She put the phone back to her own ear. “Martin, Toby’s feeling shy, I think. How have you been? I almost called the Hofstatters’ first. I thought you might be there. How is everyone?” Both of them spoke so carefully across the distance between them that their words were overly enunciated, and Martin’s tone seemed peculiarly officious, perhaps because the sound was immediately at her ear, with no time to interpret any inflection. It wasn’t at all like talking to Martin, in fact, and she was always bothered by their stilted long-distance conversations.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ve been doing a lot of work at home, but I guess everyone’s fine. I had planned to call this evening and talk to Toby after the party was over. And I wanted to talk to you, too. How are you?”

Dinah was distracted by the activity in the kitchen, which had resumed somewhat when she took the phone. David was having to hold Sarah away from his work with a hand pressed against her chest and his arm stiff, and she was giggling frantically. Dinah saw that her daughter was too excited, that even her present tentative composure might dissolve any moment. She reached over with one hand to pull Sarah aside. It was mildly distressing to make polite conversation with her own husband. “Is the fall issue almost ready?” she said. “You must be almost done with it.”

“Oh, that’s going along just fine. I’ve been working away at it.”

“Good,” Dinah said, and she stooped to untangle the phone cord from around Sarah, who was in the way wherever she moved. Dinah and Martin talked a little bit about what he had heard about the shop; they talked about Toby’s party; and both David and Sarah took a turn. While she stood waiting for them to finish, she realized that she would have liked to have a long conversation with Martin all by herself, so that silences could fall or not. She resented having to perform for all the people in the kitchen. She wished Isobel and Buddy, at least, would leave, but she knew they were only being polite, waiting to make their departure when it wouldn’t be an interruption. She took the phone from Sarah.

“Dinah, I’ll call you back this evening when Toby won’t be so excited. Will you be there or at your mother’s?” he said, but Dinah looked down at Toby while Martin spoke, and saw that his face was blurred with tears.

“Oh, well, Martin, wait a second,” and she even put her hand out to stop him. “I know Toby wants to talk to you before we hang up.” She thought she understood what was bothering Toby, and she turned to the rest of the room while she still held the phone; she pinned it between her raised shoulder and her ear so that she could shoo everyone away with a whisking motion of her hands. “Out! All of you, out! Anyone needs a little privacy just before his birthday party.” She heard her own voice sounding crisp rather than conspiratorially jolly as she meant it to, so she turned to smile at Toby, holding Martin there in silence as the room emptied. Isobel and Buddy took this chance to shrug on their raincoats and leave, only after promising the children that they would see them later. David and Sarah were reluctant to go, and Dinah gave them each a gentle shove through the door into the dining room. “Go on! Go on! You can talk to Daddy when he calls tonight. I promise.”