Real Life (7 page)

The place was in a state of anarchy that was like another world. The living room was bare of furniture except for a sagging sofa that had once been light blue but was now greasy gray and spilling its stuffing, two wobbly upright chairs—one seatless—and a wood-grain Formica coffee table, thick with grime, that supported several empty beer bottles, an overflowing ashtray, a doll's arm, and a pair of cracked eyeglasses fixed with a Band-Aid. On the floor was a piece of tan carpeting, filthy and fraying at the edges. There was an ancient console television, one of its rabbit ears bent at an angle and linked to the window via masking tape and a long piece of wire. Everything in the room was broken in some way: toy trucks without wheels, a mirror with a lightning crack, the latticed mahogany base of the television that looked kicked in, the table propped up with a block of wood where one leg was missing. There was a generalized reek of dirty diapers and a specific, close-up stink that was Rose's bad breath. She said, “I know you can give him all the advantages, Anna, which is something I sure can't,” but she seemed unbothered by the state of the room, the lack of clean glasses for the beer, the thin baby-cry from a room down the hall, or the fat sausage of flab like an inflated beach toy that bulged pink from beneath her T-shirt and over the straining band of her jeans.

“He's a good boy,” Rose said. “He's my baby. Even though I got two younger than him my heart goes out to that kid, maybe because he's my sister's boy. Iris and I were that close!” She held up two fingers, intertwined like slugs mating. The nails were bitten down. “And now his daddy, poor Phinny—” Her blue eyes filled up. “I just wish that child would have some good luck, for a change.”

They called Hugo in, and Rose told him to get his things together, he was going with his grandparents. Hugo looked from face to face, at Rose, at Dorrie, as if one of them might be an escape, the look in his eyes getting wilder and more desperate. Dorrie had a mad impulse to kneel down by the boy and hug him and let him bawl on her shoulder. “You're going to come and stay with us, Hugo,” said Anna. “Remember you used to visit us sometimes, when you were little? You're going to live with us now. For good. Won't that be fun?” Hugo let out a howl and leaped at Rose where she leaned in the doorway.

“Whoa there, boy.” She set down her beer and picked him up with surprising strength and held him against her shoulder, rocking him while he cried. He locked his legs around her middle. “He'll get over this,” she said calmly. “It's just strange to him.”

Hugo did, finally, stop crying, but he wouldn't smile when Anna asked him to. He stood looking down at his shoes. He wouldn't kiss Rose good-bye, either; he pulled away, frowning, but she kissed him loudly on the top of his head and said, “You come back and see us, you little monkey—hear me?”

When they left, Dorrie's father pressed twenty dollars into Rose's palm and said, “Buy the kids something,” and Rose, surprised, uncrumpled the bill and held it up. “Twenty dollars? Oh, you shouldn't, Martin. But thank you. This'll buy a hell of a lot of diapers.”

Three of the cousins gathered at the door to say goodbye. The baby continued, somewhere, to whine. A little girl of perhaps five cried and said, “Hugo, Hugo,” and a bigger boy picked his nose and said nothing. A tall boy with pimples said, “So long, shit-head,” and went back into the house. Rose paid them no attention. She got down on her massive knees by Hugo and said, “You be a credit to me now,” half the solid edifice of her fat pink back coming into view as she lifted her arms to force a hug on him.

His Aunt Rose told him that his father had died in a car crash, and so for a while Hugo was afraid to ride in cars, especially when his grandmother drove. She tended to slam on the brakes and point out the window at a bird or scream at someone she knew. He loved his grandmother; he thought she was the busiest, smartest person he had ever met. But he missed his calm, smiling Aunt Rose. His grandparents never talked about his father; for a long time, Hugo tried not to think of him, but after a while the idea that he might forget his father filled him with panic and he began to try to remember. He spent the boring parts of arithmetic and social studies telling himself stories of Hugo and Phineas—the long drive to New Jersey, the walks to the cemetery. He always came back to that last visit, his father leaving early, giving him the photograph, backing fast down the dirt driveway—still a little drunk, a little high, even after his nap. Hugo wondered if his father had been sober when his car crashed, if he had died instantly or later in the hospital, if he had been conscious, if he had spoken before he died. No one had told him a thing. He kept recalling Tiger the dog lying still by the side of the road, blood coming out of his mouth.

When Hugo was ten, his grandmother died, and his grandfather sold the house, finally. Hugo started fifth grade in a new school. Everything was always the same: the boring school day, the kids avoiding him, the teachers nice, the school bus where he sat alone, and the quiet evenings and weekends with his grandfather. His grandfather didn't do much, now that he was retired. Most of his friends had moved to Florida. There were no more theater tickets and dinner parties, no more babysitters for Hugo. His grandfather knew hardly anyone but the neighbors: a young housewife on one side with whom he exchanged courtly remarks about the weather, old Mr. Murdoch on the other side with whom he played bridge, the Molinos across the street whose dog ran wild and crapped on lawns. Hugo sometimes played with the other children on the street, but they considered him a pest and a sissy and laughed at him when the Frisbee sailed right through his hands. He and his grandfather played Scrabble; by the time he was ten, Hugo was winning regularly, and, when his grandfather bragged to Mrs. Molino or Miss Crake, his teacher, Hugo could tell they suspected the old man of throwing the games. But he wasn't throwing the games. Hugo knew, in fact, that behind the bragging his grandfather—a retired professor of English!—was upset by his losses; if Hugo occasionally let him win his grandfather always knew, and looked sad.

But there was no real sadness, no bad trouble. Life flowed by as smoothly and lazily as the creek down at the end of the street. It was the easiest life in the world, Hugo thought, and the safest. After the daily drudge and humiliation of school, his life at home was neat and simple: TV, food, a few chores, the predictable Scrabble drama, enough money, infrequent intrusions. In sixth grade, he met David, and they became friends. Sometimes he went to the movies with David's family, or stayed overnight. But he didn't mind just being home, talking with his grandfather about
Upton's Grove
. His grandfather never tired of his chatter, and he never tired of his grandfather's old pink face—absorbed, nodding, fond.

Once in a while, his Aunt Dorrie came to dinner. Hugo had no opinion about her. He knew she didn't like him to hang around, and that disappointed him a little. Not that there hadn't always been people who considered him a nuisance, but usually they were kids; adults tended to like him, and to consider his conversation appealingly precocious, though his father used to get impatient and say things like “Drop it, Hugo, for Christ's sake, quit trying to pin me down,” or just plain “Shut the fuck up!” His aunt was brisk and unfriendly, with a worried face. She looked like his father, but older and uglier. Her eyes were exactly the same: the light blue irises ringed in black; every time he looked at her, he couldn't believe it. When she wasn't around he never thought about her.

He dreamed several times that his father wasn't really dead, there had been a mistake, and his father called him up and said, “Hugo? It's Dad. I'm coming home.” But his chief waking fantasy was that Rodney and Starr and Rose—shorn somehow of Shane and Monty—would come to live with him and his grandfather. Rose would settle her huge self into the chair by the fireplace and drink beer, and she and he and his grandfather would talk, and Starr would play with her Barbie doll, and Rodney wouldn't be crying the way he always did but would be cooing happily on the rug, saying things to himself in baby talk.

It was Dorrie's habit to work all day and to read in the evenings. She liked travel books, biographies of artists, and fiction, and she had a weakness for murder mysteries. During the months before Hugo came to stay she had been reading some of her father's blue-bound Trollopes, but she'd made an excursion to a bookstore in Providence and picked out a stack of mysteries, and Hugo's arrival caught her in the middle of the new Spenser.

“What's that?” he asked her when she settled down with it after dinner on his second evening.

“A mystery.”

“Oh—like Agatha Christie?”

“Well—not much, actually.”

“Does somebody get murdered?”

“Yes, somebody gets murdered.”

“And there's a smart detective? I read an Agatha Christie once for a book report, and there was a really smart detective named Hercule Poirot.”

His French accent was impeccable and unselfconscious. Dorrie frowned at him. “Would you like to read this when I'm done, Hugo? It's a lot better than Agatha Christie. It's quite funny, in fact, and the characters are human and real; it's not just a puzzle.…”

Hugo was shaking his head, standing with his hands in his pockets looking at her and smiling politely. “Oh, no, thanks. You could tell me the plot when you're done; I'd like to hear what it was about.”

“But Hugo—”

They were sitting out on the deck, where the breeze was almost cool. The light was fading. Soon she would have to go inside, but the house was stuffy and she resisted, even though her book turned gray in her lap and the sun was setting rose and purple over the Garners' roof. Hugo had been exploring the neighborhood; he'd strolled down Little Falls Road as far as the Verranos' and had penetrated the woods—not very far—on the other side of the road. He'd reported to Dorrie a black snake in the woods and what sounded like guitar music coming from the Verrano place.

“A harmless garter snake,” she told him. “And it must have been the radio. I don't think either of the Verranos plays guitar.”

“Do they have any kids?”

“No—they're a young couple, not married very long. He works for the phone company and she's a nurse, I think.” She hated to think of the Verranos. They often walked down the road in the evenings, hand in hand; once they had stopped to kiss right in front of her house; and one evening, walking along the pond picking wildflowers, she had come to the waterfall that marked the property boundary and seen them standing in it as if it were a shower, embracing, the water glancing like diamonds off their naked bodies. Dorrie had dropped her jewelweed and lilies and hurried back home, mortified and near to tears. They hadn't seen her; it was her envy of them, her painful longing, that mortified her. She always thought she was safe, cured, resigned, until someone else's happiness cast its radiance on her meager contentment and bleached it out to nothing.

“But Hugo—” He stood before her, his round stomach straining against his T-shirt and his face cheerful. “Hugo, if you don't read, what do you do? I mean—” She could see he found the question absurd—and it was, in a way. Plenty of people didn't read. What did Phineas use to do while his sister sat in her room with her nose in a book? Get in trouble. “When you lived with Grandpa, how did you spend your evenings?”

“Oh—” He shrugged, paused, smiled again to himself as if recalling good times. “I guess I did my homework. And we played Scrabble or Monopoly or crazy eights or something, or we watched a little television. And then we talked quite a lot.”

It was still unimaginable: her ponderously cultured, quiet, bookish father and this restless boy. “What did you talk about?”

“Oh—this and that.”

“Well.” It really was too dark to read outdoors, she could hardly see her book, but Hugo's face loomed pink above her, vivid in the sunset glow. He looked disappointed, his smile gone. He had expected something from her—the magical breaking, with a word, of the spell of his sad boredom. She closed her book. What she wanted, desperately, was to get into her coolest nightgown, pour a cold glass of wine, settle into the comfortable chair by the window fan, and open her book again. The longing to read was sometimes almost a physical sensation, of the same order as the need to drink water or rub her eyes or stretch her arms above her head after a long day at the wheel: reading released tension, it soothed her, it gave her something to think about, it provided company. It did everything
Upton's Grove
did for Hugo; it did what a love affair would have done for her.

She hugged her book to her chest and looked up at Hugo. He said, “Maybe I'll take a walk down to the pond and then turn in early. This country air sure makes me tired.”

He would be down on the dock again, crying for those dear dull evenings with his grandfather, and then he'd go off to bed in his alcove to weep himself silently to sleep. She appreciated his good humor, the genuine attempt to conceal his unhappiness from her, even his tries at friendly conversation. He seemed, actually, to like her, and she wondered why. She hadn't begun to be reconciled to his invasion of her life, nor did she have any particular liking for him. She pitied him, tolerated him, would do her duty if it killed her. If they could only get through the summer, school would start and he would occupy himself with schoolwork and friends and the usual adolescent activities. Until then … If she thought about it, her heart sank. It wasn't even the end of June.

“The mosquitoes are really something!” Hugo said, slapping his neck.

“I think we'd both better go in.” Dorrie stood up and looked out over the water. The trees were spiky and stark against the colored sky; the pond was black. “Would you like to play a game of Scrabble before bed, Hugo?”