Meditations from a Movable Chair by Andre Dubus

Author:Andre Dubus [Dubus, Andre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80192-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Carrying

IT IS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN JUNE, and most of our family is gathered at my house to celebrate the tenth birthday of my daughter Cadence. The sky is blue, the air is dry, and we can sit by the pool without sweating. The water is cool. Pat is with us: she is my first wife and has driven from western Massachusetts for the party. Three of our grown children are here: Suzanne and Andre and Jeb; Nicole is living in California. They are thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one, and twenty-nine. Pat must have been tired for years in her twenties, when our children were very young. I only think of this now because being in a wheelchair has made fatigue a part of my life I must outwit. Andre’s wife, Fontaine, is here, and Suzanne’s boyfriend, Tom, and our friends Tina and Jack. Cadence and Madeleine are the children from my third marriage; Madeleine is five, and their young nanny, Lynda, is here.

Earlier in the week, I asked Cadence what she wanted for dinner at the family party. Child of a divorce, and connected by blood to her father’s first marriage, she is today celebrating for the third time in three days: Thursday was her birthday and one of my days with her, and Lynda and Madeleine and I gave her presents, and Suzanne joined us for dinner on her way home from work in Boston. Friday, she went with her mother and Madeleine and a friend from school to lunch in a Japanese restaurant where the chef cooked at the table. She said she wanted pizza on Saturday. But in the pool, my sons are talking to her. The water is three feet deep and they stand and push her on a blue float and their faces are collusive. I sit in my wheelchair near the pool and hear chicken, sausage, charcoal.

The women are in lounge chairs in the sun and Tom sits in shade at the picnic table; a beach umbrella is above the table, its shaft in a hole Andre cut in the wood. Beyond the pool, toward the road, green bushes and trees hide the tree house Andre and Jeb and Jack built for Cadence on her ninth birthday. Across the road are wetlands and woods and a long green hill where cows graze. From the float on the water, Cadence says: “Dad? Can we have sausage and chicken on the grill? Instead of pizza?”

The boys volunteer to go to the grocery store. They resist taking my money, but I give it to them and they leave, and Lynda goes inside to make barbecue sauce. Two doves perch on the power line above the driveway. Plastic bottles of sunscreen are scattered about, and we are all anointed. I look at Pat and think of her sunbathing on lawns when we were young, in California and Iowa, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. A woman who was Dorothy Day’s friend said that lying in the sun is giving glory to God.

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