Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew Read Free Book Online Page A

interest at all in its structure or appointments. Besides, Dinah invariably believed that a household was a manifestation of the woman who lived within it, no matter how undetermined or careless her influence seemed to be. No matter how little that woman herself might perceive or care about it. It did not seem to Dinah that men belonged to houses; she thought that in spite of themselves they could always only be tourists in their own rooms.
    She knew, for instance, that Martin relied on her to interpret his environment for him if she happened to be there. Even as small a gesture as touching his arm at a party might settle for him the fact that the gathering was hospitable, not unfriendly. Dinah could discern the nature of the atmosphere immediately by taking into account even the rugs on the floor or the arrangement of the chairs. It was not the quality or stylishness to which she gave credence, but she was alert to any sympathetic alignment of the most ordinary objects. The place need not be handsome; it was just that about her surroundings Dinah was like a dog: some rooms raised the hackles on her back. If Martin saw her come into a room and relax and enjoy herself, then she knew he could enjoy himself as well. So it puzzled her that her father had come to such an involved domestic situation independently. She sometimes wondered if the girl jogging along in the picture had one day run right up her father’s sidewalk and sat down with him there on the porch, where he had a drink each evening—Dinah watched him from her window sometimes. Perhaps that girl had engaged him in conversation and had managed to ask him all these questions—about his house, about how he liked it—because Dinah didn’t visit her father anymore; they were so estranged.
    This morning the hammering and carrying about of ladders and such had begun very early, and finally Dinah got up and went down to the kitchen, thinking to anticipate the children. She meant to make them some special morning treat, since the noise hadn’t awakened them yet and she would have time. But now Martin was so much on her mind that she sat down at the round wooden table with a legal pad she had found in a drawer and a ballpoint pen, and began a letter to him.
    But the truth was that Dinah was frightened of writing down words. She felt that as the word spread itself across the paper to the left of her pen point, then there she was, more and more committed to that paper, pinned there like a butterfly. She always thought that it was essential to get down precisely what she meant, and she never realized how relentlessly she relied on a gesture or a touch to convey a message. She was restless as she struggled with her letter, and she thought with envy of the skill with which Martin could dash off a note. He didn’t even watch the letters forming as he wrote, or reconsider the intent compressed within the skeleton of words he established with authority in his thick, full handwriting. His written words rolled exuberantly forward, while hers lagged back toward the left-hand margin, as though they might flee the page altogether.
    With all that Dinah meant to say to Martin, what could she write? Anything she might want to tell him, and all that she meant, could only look trite on paper. How could she be anything but mute about her caring? And sometimes this speechlessness reminded her alarmingly of her parents and the long, bewildering looks that had passed between them in lieu of ordinary communication. Whenever she wrote to Martin and folded the paper and sealed the envelope, she felt as though she held a potential explosion of misunderstandings and possible injury. Her letter already reeled with underlinings and parentheses, because she could not help but labor toward reproducing the exact emphasis with which the words proceeded in her mind. She sat poised over her letter in exasperation.
    In any case, here were the children, who had been asleep only ten minutes ago, but who