Real Life (10 page)

He had been with her not quite three weeks. There had been four shopping trips into town; once he had helped her unload the kiln; they had toasted marshmallows one night over the hibachi while she told him about pottery making, and the next day she had given him a lesson on the wheel and let him glaze a couple of mugs and bowls. He had decorated them sloppily with slashes and arrows and lost interest before he was half done. They had driven into town to see a movie. On the way there, Hugo had chattered about other movies he had seen; on the ride home he'd been silent. They had had several arguments about what he ate: too much junk, not enough vegetables, Dorrie chided him. Hugo claimed she never made anything he really liked and he had to fill up on dessert. And they had argued about the television. He offered to mow the lawn for her, to pay for one; she told him he would have to help mow the lawn anyway, and she certainly couldn't afford to pay him. After conversations like this, he took refuge in the boat, or sat down on the dock looking at the water for hours and hours, and Dorrie sat inside with her lonely anger, unable to concentrate on working or reading, unable to do much of anything but indulge in vain wishes that things were different.

“What about summer camp?” Rachel asked her.

“I don't know anything about camps, Rachel. And they're expensive. And it's undoubtedly too late.”

“He can't be as idle as he looks, if he's an intelligent kid. He must think a lot.”

“He doesn't have anything to think about. And his conversation, to say the least, is not the conversation of a thinker. Just about all he can talk about is his favorite soap opera. His one passion in life.”

“Which one?”

“
Upton's Grove
, for God's sake.”

“I used to watch that.” Rachel sat up, smiling, and took a long drink of beer. She was a short-story writer, beginning to be known, her first book on the verge of publication. Dorrie still had moments of disbelief in the Rachel who had emerged after their suffering adolescence, when they were in their twenties: attractive to men, sure of herself, almost glamorous. Everything she did had a shine to it, even watching a soap opera. What was dreary or pathetic in other people became magical when it happened to Rachel: desertion, divorce, overweight, rejection. Dorrie had observed her all these years with wonder and curiosity, and with intermittent hope that was always dashed but always lurking somewhere: if good things could come to Rachel, who used to be ugly and cynical, who spent entire summer vacations in tears over her pimples and braces and flab, couldn't they come to Dorrie too? And yet they didn't, so that her fondness for Rachel was tinted, faintly, with bitterness.

“When William left me and I was so depressed I couldn't eat or work or sleep,” Rachel said, “I got pretty involved with good old
Upton's Grove
.”

“I vaguely remember this,” Dorrie said. She could remember clearly, in fact, Rachel's flamboyant depression; even that had had charm, had caused all sorts of people to rally round.

Rachel laughed. “Don't make such a face, Dorrie. It was entertaining, like eating pastry. Probably bad for you but fun—sort of like William, actually.” She sighed. “I still miss that selfish bastard.”

“I doubt it.” Dorrie knew it wasn't William Rachel had come to talk about, either—that the reference to William was Rachel's way of leading up to her announcement. Dorrie didn't want to hear it, not until she'd had more to drink, but Rachel said, “Well, maybe I don't. Anyway, I've met someone, Dorrie. A man named Leon, a lawyer, forty-two years old, divorced. I've been seeing him every weekend.”

“I suspected it,” Dorrie said—briefly pleased, after all, that she had read the signs right.

“I met him in my dentist's waiting room. He had an abscess,” Rachel went on. “He was pretty doped up. We talked about cheese, and he'd seen one of my stories in
The Atlantic
and liked it. He had to have a root canal, and I waited and drove him home afterward. He was really in bad shape. The next day he sent me flowers, to thank me, and I sent him flowers, because of his tooth, and it just went on from there.” It sounded like one of the wacky, improbable courtships in Rachel's stories: in the story they would go to the zoo; she would tell him about her dog Montmorency; he would show her his membership card in the International Telephone Book Collectors' Association; she would give him her straw hat to hold and disappear into the monkey house; she would watch two chimps mating and then look out the window at him, squinting into the sun, patiently dangling the ribbons of her hat in the dust, and she would fall in love with him. Dorrie always had trouble liking Rachel's stories; they didn't seem to be about anything.

Rachel continued: he was nice looking, considerate, good in bed, prosperous … Dorrie knew she would meet him eventually, and he would turn out to be a pleasant middle-aged chap with a Williamish taste for silly jokes—Rachel's inevitable choice. “And here's the best part, Dorrie,” she said. “He has this absolutely terrific friend. His name is Charles Lind. Divorced, a painter, quite attractive—”

“Sorry, Rachel,” Dorrie said immediately. “I'm not interested.”

“Why? Have you found a new messiah?”

“I would have told you if I was seeing anyone.” As if a prior commitment were the only reason to pass up the divine Charles.

“Then why not just meet him? You don't have to marry him, Dorrie. Just come for dinner, just a nice casual evening, the four of us.”

Dorrie closed her eyes. There had been men, since Teddy, whom she had met and liked and who hadn't responded. One she'd met at a craft show and made a fool of herself over, another she'd pursued at a party until his beautiful blond girlfriend had come and taken him away in an instant. Petty humiliations, little failures. And there had been men interested in her too, like the pharmacist in town, newly divorced and pushing sixty, who had invited her for a drink at the Elks' club.

“I'm simply not interested, Rachel. Is that so strange? I'm old and ugly and I don't want to start anything. I don't want to let myself in for it. And I know what you mean by quite attractive. He's a loser just like me. Losers don't like other losers. It's not like matching up tennis players or something. Dog breeders. Losers have their pride, Rachel.”

“Dorrie, you're not a loser.” There had been many similar discussions over the years. “Christ, you're not beautiful, honey, you're not a glamour girl, but hell—who is?” Rachel was genuinely upset, as always. “You're extremely attractive, Dorrie, you've kept your figure like no one else I know, you're certainly good company—”

“Rachel, stop. Just forget it.”

“You make me so angry.”

“I can't help it. I don't want to be fixed up. I don't want to be put through it. I just want to—” She paused, looked out over the pond. It didn't sound convincing, that she wanted her solitude, lonely though it might be. It wasn't even entirely true. And wasn't it gone forever, anyway, now that Hugo was here?

Rachel had lost her exuberance. “You're scared,” she said. “I guess I don't blame you. You've had a lot of rotten romances.” Was that the secret of Rachel's charm? Her ability to switch gears, to shape discord into amity like clay into a pot? And to glaze it over with a bit of undeserved flattery?

“Not a lot,” Dorrie corrected her. “If I'd had a lot it wouldn't be so bad. There've only been Mark and Teddy, actually.”

“Well.”

They were silent, watching the sky begin to hint at the sunset.

“The pond's high,” Rachel said.

“It was a wet spring.”

Another silence. What if, by some crazy fluke, Charles Lind was attractive and nice and smart and talented? He would hate her. She imagined Rachel's little dinner party: Rachel being charming, Leon slobbering all over her, Charles wishing Rachel were his date—anyone but Dorrie—and herself ugly and tongue-tied, dressed wrong, drinking too much, becoming garrulous and overfamiliar and driving the long road home—alone—to hate herself.

“Listen, Dorrie,” Rachel went on in a rush. “Think about it, will you? I promise you, you'd like Charles. He's a watercolorist. On the side, of course. By day he's a librarian or something. By night he paints these incredible pictures. I've seen them. They're really remarkable.”

“Rachel?”

“Oh, all right.” Rachel sat back on her elbows again. Dorrie looked at her face. She was genuinely cross, and Dorrie was sorry.

“I'm just not up for it,” she said.

“All right, all right. I get the idea.” Rachel sighed, drank, changed the subject. “I'll have to grill Hugo about
Upton's Grove
. I wonder if Tara and Prescott ever got married. And that awful woman—Colette? Claudette! Enough hair for six people, and this screaming-pink lipstick, and the acting ability of a halibut. She found out about this plot to kill her father—no, I think it was her stepfather, this pompous jerk of a doctor—I'll tell you, I'd rather die than have this guy operate on me—”

“Spare me
Upton's Grove
,” Dorrie said—but amiably. “I get it every night at dinner.”

Rachel grinned and kicked her legs in the water; luminous drops flashed in the sun. The pond shone dark as a seal's back. “It really was terrible stuff, but I kind of miss it. I think the reason it's so addictive is that you keep watching it partly to see how bad it can get.”

“That's not why Hugo watches it.”

“Well, you should watch it with him, Dorrie. Teach him to analyze, teach him to think—since you don't believe he knows how.”

“I'll leave Hugo's intellectual development to Sterling High School. It starts two blessed months and one day from now.”

“Oh, Dorrie—is it that bad?” Rachel touched her arm in sympathy. “That you count the days?”

“I suppose I'm exaggerating. It's just that whenever I turn around there he is. My brother's wild oat. And it's not as though he came with a dowry. The child is costing me an arm and a leg. Do you know how much a teen-age boy can eat?”

“It really is something, taking on a responsibility like this just when your life is all sort of set.” They looked out over the pond, examining Rachel's words. “I mean, I know I've been nagging at you about meeting Charles, I'd love to see you hook up with some nice man, but I have to admit your life here is pleasant. It's so—”

Lonely. Isolated. Set in its tracks. The life of a spinster. The kind of life Rachel, soon, would leave, with one of her lawyers or another. Later, when Hugo was asleep out in the garage, Dorrie knew they would go over it all again—Rachel's relationship with Leon and her advocacy of his unlovable watercolorist friend. It was as inevitable as the sunset.

“He's not much like Phineas, is he?”

“Hugo? Well, he certainly doesn't look like him.”

“He looks like your father, I thought.”

“He does, I suppose.” Dorrie didn't say how much she grudged Hugo that resemblance. “He doesn't take after his mother at all.”

“I wonder if he knows what happened to her.”

“Oh, God, Rachel, I don't know, I suppose so, in a general way. He never mentions her. Or Phineas, either. He really misses my father. They were pretty close.” That too she grudged him.

“He doesn't seem to be a troublesome kid,” Rachel said. “I mean—like Phineas.”

They were silent, thinking of the troublesomeness of Phineas. At Hugo's age, Phinny had already had a succession of girlfriends. Dorrie had caught him with one on the porch glider, seen the girl's little breasts like snouts and her brother with his pants down, and screamed before she could stop herself. She had been fifteen then, Phinny twelve. The moment (it had been a warm summer night, the sky just losing its color over behind Miss LaPorte's house) was branded into her memory, still hot, still vivid, her horror and embarrassment and comprehension and envy still fresh after twenty-odd years.

“No,” Dorrie said. “He doesn't seem to be much like Phinny. Of course, he hasn't had a lot of opportunity. When school starts—” She broke off and smiled at Rachel unhappily. “I have to confess, I don't really care what happens when school starts, Rachel. As long as he's away all day and not wandering around doing nothing and waiting for me to break down and play Scrabble with him or something.”

“I suppose you can't blame him. What a life the kid's had.”

Hugo's voice came over the grass to them. “Fire's ready!”

Dorrie and Rachel got to their feet. “At least he's always had someone to take him in,” Dorrie said.

They walked slowly up to the house. “I envy you in a way,” Rachel said. “It must be sort of nice to have a kid around the house.”

“You want to borrow him? You want to adopt him?”

“Oh, Dorrie—” Rachel smiled her secret smile again, and paused to finish her beer. She envies me, Dorrie thought. Like hell.

Hugo ran down to meet them. “Fire's ready,” he said again. “I think it's just right.” The shadow of the baseball cap cut diagonally across his face so that only his big-toothed grin could be seen. His mindless cheeriness, Dorrie thought. The human smile-button. And then the thought jolted her: He's alone in the world, no one loves this boy, and she considered, fleetingly, putting her hand out to touch his pink cheek, but she refrained: he would think she had lost her mind. “I got the hot dogs out of the fridge,” he said. “They look sort of strange.” He held out the package. “Sort of too brown. Look.”

“Those are nitrite-free, organically grown, all-beef hot dogs,” said Rachel. “They're delicious, Hugo. Really they are.”

“Well—” Hugo fell into step with them. “Dorrie made plenty of macaroni salad. And there's pickles.”

“And we can always make peanut-butter sandwiches,” Rachel said with a laugh, and punched Hugo lightly on the shoulder, a gesture that startled Dorrie. How did Rachel do a thing like that, so casually? “Don't worry, Hugo, you're going to love these hot dogs.” Rachel opened the package and arranged six of them over the coals. “This is a nice little fire.”