Real Life (3 page)

But it wasn't. It was just life: love, death, birth, murders, operations, those Russian spies, people's little weaknesses. As his grandfather said, “It's not so different from literature, I suppose. It's shallow, of course—that's its limitation. But it's just stories. What people crave are stories, Hugo.”

Well, Hugo knew that; it was no big deal.
Upton's Grove
was stories, it was company, and it was something he and his grandfather could do together before he began his homework and Grandpa started dinner. And it was something to speculate over at dinnertime, trying to second-guess the writers. Grandpa was fantastic at predicting. He knew Tara would be kidnapped two weeks before it happened, and that Prescott would try to kill Tom, and fail. Let's face it, Hugo said to himself.
Upton's Grove
is about the only thing we have in common. But he didn't say that to his grandfather, either.

At the end of half an hour, damp with sweat, he had achieved part of a picture on channel 2 (a snowy man in a raging blizzard croaking out what seemed to be lawn-care tips), and an even snowier, voiceless drama, apparently involving a dog (a tiger? a coyote?) on channel 5. Channel 8, no matter what he did to it, was an undifferentiated sea of light gray dots vibrating against dark gray. Hugo wiped his forehead on his pillowcase. He was hot, his head throbbed, his hands were shaky. We've run into a snag here, men—this calls for drastic action.

He had eight minutes. He ran down the stairs, past the sound of her radio and the whir of the wheel, and out the back door, down to the pond.

The static was like a bad smell drifting across the peaceful afternoon, and Dorrie put on the radio to drown it out. Something baroque, with nervous violins—not her favorite kind of music, but she left it on. She threw another lump of clay on the wheel and centered it: soup bowl number nine; one more and she could take a break. The cold clay revolved between her palms, between her fingers, and she pulled it open, began to shape the bowl, thinking: Hugo. She was aware that she hadn't even begun to comprehend this change in her life. She had expected—what? She'd barely thought about it. “You have the most incredible talent for shutting out real life,” Teddy had said to her once, and he had added, “I just wonder what you put in its place.” Well, her work. She'd been busy all spring with commissions and the Springfield show, she hadn't had time to prepare for Hugo's coming. And how do you prepare for an unknown quantity, anyhow? If she'd thought of anything these two months, besides plates and bowls and mugs, it had been her father, the same thoughts, the same regrets: who could have known he'd die so young? She had thought there would be years and years, once Hugo left the nest, to make everything up with her father and retrieve the old affectionate closeness that they'd had before Phineas's brat took over her parents' lives.

She removed the bowl and set it gingerly on the table. It wasn't right; there was some kind of imbalance between the lift of the sides and the width of the middle. It would barely do. She had to concentrate. The bowls were part of a commissioned set for a restaurant in Chiswick, her hometown—a trendy vegetarian restaurant by the shore. She had tried for a suggestion of water in the design of the dishes; it would be mostly in the glazing, the wave of blue washing the white, with a greeny-brown band that could suggest, if you wanted it to, a far horizon or the shore: sea colors. But the shape too was part of it; she had devised a low-slung bowl on a wide foot that added up to some sort of natural, unstudied grace, a form that seemed tossed off, a gift of the sea. She didn't articulate it very well, but the proprietors of the place seemed to understand. They liked her designs, at any rate, and the samples she showed them. It was a big job, big enough to pay off the loan for her salt kiln.

She threw another lump on the wheel. The violins were suddenly loud: the static from upstairs had ceased. The back door slammed and she saw Hugo run down across the lawn, ducking under the grayish underwear he had jumbled up on the line. Hell! The child couldn't even work a clothespin; half the things were on the ground. She could just see him between the underpants and shirts, making straight for the pond, and she imagined him throwing himself into the water, floating there dead with weeds in his hair. But he was pulling the boat across the grass to the edge, and she realized he must be going over to the Garners'. Oh, Lord. She should call Mary and Ross and tell them that a maniac was about to invade their sunny little house for the purpose of defiling their television set—that innocent machine, flanked on a shelf by books and records, that had known only the dignified virtues of
Masterpiece Theatre
and
Live from Lincoln Center
—with the hysterical excesses of
Upton's Grove
.

But she didn't call. Let him fend for himself. Maybe the Garners would love him. Maybe he could become their pet, go bird watching with them, get involved in Mary's little theater group. He would have to do something with his days. Dorrie had imagined him reading away the summer. What else did kids do, out in the country without friends? She rehearsed a speech in her head: I want to get a couple of things straight, Hugo. I work very hard. I work in my studio and in my shop all day, every day. I have to if I'm going to support myself, much less you. No—leave that out; she had sworn she wouldn't make him feel a burden. Leave out too the fact that she liked the long hours of work—that she so preferred her solitary labor to just about anything else that it was beginning to worry her. Thanks to Teddy, who had kept plugging away at it. What I'm trying to say, Hugo, is that I won't be much company. I won't be able to entertain you. You'll have to…

She looked up from the wheel. Hugo was in water to his knees, pushing the boat back up on the shore. Had he forgotten the oars? Apparently. Dorrie watched him, amused. The poor kid would never make it. She tried to imagine his six years with her father. What had a man whose whole life was books have made of Hugo's dislike of reading? She and her father had hardly ever discussed Hugo; Dorrie wasn't interested. Now that would have to join her list of regrets, that she hadn't let her father talk about this pathetic boy. She knew only that he was Phineas's son, that his first eight years had been spent in turmoil, that her father's absorption in him had been her own personal sorrow. And then Mrs. Wylie had sent her his last report card (straight A's, even in English: how could that be?) and had said that Hugo was a nice boy, they were all fond of him, he'd been so good for David—who Dorrie gathered was some kind of misfit. “He has a good appetite,” Mrs. Wylie had said. What else? She couldn't remember. Was that all? Smart, nice, overweight, illegitimate, gets along with weirdos? And now she could add his addiction to
Upton's Grove
.

Oh, God, she didn't want Hugo. She gathered the bowl on the wheel back into a lump and dropped it into her pail of slurry. No more today, it was hopeless. She stood up and filled the electric kettle and, waiting for it to boil, looked out the window again. Hugo was in the boat, the oars were in the locks, and he was rowing in a circle. She could see his frantic efforts to control the oars, and the oars skimming the surface futilely. Dig, Hugo, she urged him on. From where she stood he appeared to be crying. She pitied him, then hardened her heart. Tears for a soap opera! The kettle boiled, and she made her tea. When she looked again, the boat was moving unevenly across the water, roughly toward the Garners'. Her heart lifted. She looked at her watch: quarter past. If Ross and Mary were willing to indulge him, he'd see at least part of his ridiculous program.

Sipping her tea, she watched him make his way to the Garners' dock. He stood up in the boat, precariously, and guided himself to shore by hanging on to their metal railing, then climbed out and pulled the boat onto the grass. At least he'd had the sense not to leave it drifting. He disappeared into the Garners' fir grove, and Dorrie finished her tea and went, after all, back to her wheel.

The clay always fascinated her; as if it were her lover, she couldn't keep her hands off it. Even when she was bored with the repetition, or distracted by troubles, or physically worn out, with pain in her lower back and twinges in her forearms, the clay drew her: the magic potential of it, the transformations that could be worked, the clean hollows she saw in her mind and felt between her hands. “It's so fitting that you make empty vessels,” Teddy had said during their last hard days. She would have given a lot not to keep recalling Teddy. He was two years gone, and for the first months after the breakup she'd thought of him scarcely at all; she had been filled with the relief of his leaving, the way a tree might feel when its leaves finally dropped. And then the fact of all their time together—four years—began to haunt her. Certain words of his, the facial expressions that went with them, meals they'd eaten while their interminable talks went on, afternoons and evenings in bed—all of this dogged her and added up to a gallery of failure. She couldn't even answer the phone without recalling Teddy. She still, when she couldn't catch herself, greeted the ringing of the phone with a mild curse at the intrusion. “Why curse your phone calls, Dorrie?” Teddy used to scold her. She'd never liked the way he thinned his lips out and clamped them together after one of his earnest pronouncements. “It could be good news,” he said. “It could be something positive happening, something exciting—it could be life.” Clamp.

“It's usually someone trying to sell me insulation or eternal light bulbs.”

“But it's not healthy, the way you automatically reject the outside world.”

“It's not healthy for light bulbs to outlive their owners,” she said. But when he was in his reforming mood he couldn't be distracted by joking.

“He sounds like your mother,” Rachel told Dorrie when she used to complain about Teddy. During the same period, Rachel was separating from and then divorcing her husband, and she and Dorrie spent long hours dissecting their relationships with Teddy and William.

“But he must love me,” Dorrie said. “Or he wouldn't spend so much time trying to whack me into shape,” though even she could see there was something wrong with her conclusion.

“He loves you the way a missionary loves his flock,” Rachel said. “Is that what you want? To give up your native rites and customs for Teddyism?”

Unlike Teddy, Dorrie could always laugh. In her worst moments, she could be as caustic as Rachel about the tenets of Teddyism. But when she was with him, Dorrie slipped back into the role of disciple with a readiness that dismayed her.

“You're so damned humble,” Rachel always said.

“Humility is the cardinal virtue of Teddyism.”

“I honestly don't see what you get out of the relationship.”

“I get Teddy,” Dorrie said, surprised.

She had loved him because he had bright brown eyes, he seemed to know everything, he tanned a beautiful honey-color in the summer, and he had loved her first. And now—it wasn't that she missed him, exactly, after all this time; and it wasn't that she didn't know, even better than she'd known back in those tough times, that they weren't good for each other.

“You're lonely,” Rachel said when Dorrie told her that Teddy was often on her mind. “You need a new messiah.”

No messiah had presented himself. Dorrie edged close to forty and began to believe that Teddy had been her last chance. She could have pushed it and married him—and should have, she told herself sadly but perhaps without conviction. She did want to be married; wherever she went she saw homely married couples, cozy together, and wished she was like them. She had to comfort Rachel once when, shortly after her divorce, she found a shopping list in the depths of an old purse:
PAPER TOWELS, BREAD, TUNA,
it said in Rachel's handwriting, and below that, in William's,
JELLY, CLEANSER, TEABAGS.
“I just miss that,” Rachel wept, and Dorrie almost wept too, because she'd never had it to miss, that snug, unthinking conspiracy.

She hadn't had a beau (her father's word) since Teddy walked down the path for the last time. In the mirror she saw her face erode as surely as any vulnerable surface that suffered the seasons. She thought of herself as an old maid, and said the words to herself with a certain cruel pleasure: old maid, spinster, old bat. She plucked gray strands like weeds from her black thatch of hair. She bought an expensive rejuvenating cream called Jolie Jeunesse. She read articles on facelifts, and periodically considered one. She pressed her palms together hard, as if in prayer, to keep the flab from her upper arms and the droop from her bosom. She could see herself growing more cantankerous, like Miss LaPorte, the old lady who had lived next door when she was a child. Dorrie expected any day to find herself ordering the neighbors' kids off her property and badgering the police with complaints about a man looking in her window.

Working at the wheel Dorrie was free from the mirror, from her collection of regrets and guilts and wishes. In the studio, she was a person who made empty vessels; filling them wasn't her business.

Tiffany's operation was postponed. Dr. Wendell couldn't face operating on someone he used to be in love with, and Tiffany didn't want anyone else to do it. There was a big scene between them, and another between Tiffany and Michael, her husband, so that even though Charles and Claudette thrashed it out again about the missing necklace (for a moment he thought Claudette was going to confess!), and Paula and Gus talked for quite a while about Crystal's baby, it looked as though Tiffany won out in the air-time category. But of course he couldn't be sure; he'd missed the whole first half. There was no point in beginning his record keeping today, but he did it anyway. He borrowed some paper (pale blue stationery, with flowers in the corners) from Mrs. Garner, and a pen, and thank God there was a clock on the shelf above the television. Tiffany chalked up six whole minutes: not quite a record, but a respectable showing for a mere half hour.