Free Family Dancing by David Leavitt Page A

dinner—a huge, decadent, drunken meal. Halfway through Mark fell to the floor in a fit of laughter so severe it almost made him sick. They went to bed at three, slept dreamlessly late into the morning. By the time Mark woke up, Lydia was irritated, and Alex had disappeared, alone, to go fishing. That evening, Ellen and Julie baked a cake, and Lydia got furious at them for not cleaning up immediately afterward. Douglas and Julie rose to the occasion, eager to appease her, and immediately started scrubbing. Douglas was even more intent than his parents on keeping up a pretense of normality over the vacation, partially for Julie’s sake, but also because he cherished these two weeks at the cottage even more than his mother did. Ellen chided him for giving in to her whim so readily. “She’ll just get angrier if you take away her only outlet,” she said. “Leave the dirty dishes. If this house were clean, believe me, we’d get it a lot worse from her than we are now.”
    “I want to keep things pleasant,” Douglas said. He kowtowed to his mother, he claimed, because he pitied her, but Mark knew it was because he feared more than anything seeing her lose control. When he and Douglas were children, he remembers, Lydia had been hit on the head by a softball one afternoon in the park. She had fallen to her knees and burst into tears, and Douglas had shrunk back, terrified, and refused to go near her. Now Douglas seemed determined to make sure his mother never did that to him again, even if it meant she had to suffer in silence.
    Lydia is still in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, when Mark emerges from under the cottage. She is not drinking coffee, not reading a recipe; just leaning there. “Dad and Doug told me to pack up and come inside,” Mark says. “I was more trouble than help.”
    “Oh?” Lydia says.
    “Yes,” Mark says, and sits down at the table. “I have no mechanical aptitude. I can hold things and hand things to other people—sometimes. They knew my heart wasn’t in it.”
    “You never did like that sort of thing,” Lydia says.
    Mark sits silent for a few seconds. “Daddy’s just repairing everything this vacation, isn’t he?” he says. “For next summer this place’ll be tiptop.”
    “We won’t be here next summer,” Lydia says. “I’m sure of it, though it’s hard to imagine this is the last time.”
    “I’m sorry it’s such an unhappy time for you,” Mark says.
    Lydia smiles. “Well,” she says, “it’s no one’s fault but my own. You know, when your father first told me he wanted a divorce, he said things could be hard, or they could be very hard. The choice was up to me. I thought I chose the former of those two. Then again, I also thought, if I go along with him and don’t make trouble, at least he’ll be fair.”
    “Mom,” Mark says, “give yourself a break. What did you expect?”
    “I expected people to act like adults,” she says. “I expected people to play fair.” She turns to look out the window, her face grim. The table is strewn with gum wrappers.
    “Can I help you?” Mark asks.
    She laughs. “Your father would be happy to hear you say that,” she says. “He told me from the beginning, I’ll let them hate me, I’ll turn the kids against me. Then they’ll be there for you. He was so damn sacrificial. But no. You can’t help me because I still have some pride.”
    There is a clattering of doors in the hallway. Male voices invade the house. Alex and Douglas walk into the kitchen, their clothes even more smeared with mud, their eyes triumphant. “Looks like we fixed that pipe,” Alex says. “Now we’ve got to wash up; Henry’s expecting us to pick up those lobsters ten minutes ago.”
    He and Douglas stand at the kitchen sink and wash their hands and faces. From her room, Julie calls, “You fixed the pipe? That’s fantastic!”
    “Yes,” Douglas says, “we have repaired the evil leak which has plagued this house for