Real Life (2 page)

Her moving to the country had been, in part, a defiant tailoring of circumstances to the reality of her life. All right, if no one will love me, I'll retreat from them all; I'll be alone if that's what they want: something like that had buzzed in her mind as she drove the back roads of Connecticut looking at property—along with her natural love of peace and quiet and her growing affection for the dinky, forgotten towns she was getting to know. It took her nearly a year to find the right place. She hadn't much money, and she wanted a view, something beautiful to look at when she raised her eyes from her wheel. She had an image in her mind of serenity, and when she finally found it on Little Falls Pond she had to spend a bit more than she had planned, so that she was in over her head for a year or two, but she got what she wanted.

She bought the place after ten years of teaching in an arts and crafts school in New Haven. Mostly, she had taught women suffering from empty-nest syndromes how to make plant-holders and ashtrays, but she had also helped run the office and organize exhibitions. For this she wasn't paid very well, but she saved every cent she could because, from the time she used to drape a blanket over the clothesline to make a haven for herself and her dolls Junie and Janie, what she had always wanted was a house of her own. All through childhood and for an appalling number of years afterward, it had been an unexamined article of faith that the house would come complete with a husband—would, in fact, be supplied by him as a reward for the inner wonderfulness he would discover under her increasingly thorny and difficult exterior. But at some point when she was approaching thirty, and the men were getting scarcer, didn't seem to notice her at all, and—except for Teddy—left her faster when they did notice her, she became aware that if she wanted a house she had better buy one for herself.

Her shop and studio were downstairs, a large space where once an entrance hall and parlor and kitchen had been. In the front, on white walls, there were plain pine shelves to hold her work, with a hooked rug on the floor and two Shaker rocking chairs Dorrie had made herself, from kits. In back, behind a low partition, were her wheel, worktable, tools, plastic bags full of clay, the blue mug for her tea, a clutter of cans and jars, the old farmhouse sink with its green stains, shelves full of pots and bowls and mugs in various stages. Out back was the little deck, and the salt-kiln shed, and then the pond itself down a stretch of patchy lawn, and the various green of the trees beyond it: her view. Upstairs was her tiny kitchen and the three narrow-windowed, chaotic rooms where she lived, and where every spare corner, every windowsill and tabletop, was crowded with what anyone but Dorrie would have called junk: feathers, photographs, old magazines, ancient mail, bits of clothing, her mother's sketchbooks, and too many pots and mugs and vases (she was her own best customer) that contained everything from flourishing plants to sick plants to buttons and paper clips and bills and dust. And then the cellar, where she kept her kiln, and the washer, and the shelves full of experiments and near-misses and outright flops that nonetheless told her something. She seldom threw anything away.

Dorrie was fond of the orderly elegance of her shop—her mother's side of her—but she loved her private mess more, her father's legacy. Her cluttered rooms could have been the offspring of her father's overstuffed library with its heaps of flyaway student papers and unread scholarly journals mixed up with garden catalogs and newspapers and ashtrays overflowing with pipe ashes and petrified apple cores. “Creative disorder is one thing, Martin, but absolute squalor is something else,” his wife used to say when she entered his room, an act she'd performed as seldom as possible. She had said something similar, with her hand on her heart and all her frownlines showing, when she visited Dorrie for the first time, and she'd never gotten used to the chaos. Her infrequent visits had been visibly painful; she'd even implied, in one unguarded moment, that Dorrie's failure to find a man to marry was due to her bad housekeeping. But to Dorrie the mess was sacred; she believed it was an authentic expression of her deepest self that, after years of trying vainly for her mother's kind of order, she had finally given in to, had let herself deserve. The house had its own crazy organization; there was seldom a time she couldn't put her hands on what she needed. And, at the time Phinny's son barged into it, she looked on her wild domestic habits as a vital part of the contentment she had wrestled from the ruin of her life.

Hugo did his load of wash without complaining. He liked being alone in the cool cellar, with its rough stone walls and pleasant clutter of junk, its damp smells of clay and detergent and mildew. He needed to get quietly used to being at his aunt's, to compose himself; saying good-bye to David and his family had hit him harder than he'd expected.

While his clothes slogged around in their suds he examined the pottery collection on the shelves down there: cracked jugs, odd-colored bowls and jars, multicolored shards with numbers painted on them, a series of clay animals with an uneven, bubbly green glaze he found pretty, though he could see it hadn't worked out. He arranged a calf beside its mother, set fat sheep in a row, picked up a tiny cat and put it in his pocket. The washer emptied out suds, filled up, slogged again.

He became restless and went upstairs. His aunt was working on a bowl at her wheel. He stood and watched; she held a wooden implement next to the bowl and as it spun a long coil was sliced off, and a pedestal was created for the bowl to stand on. “Neat,” Hugo said.

She turned, smiling her horsey smile. She sure wasn't pretty. She had one of those narrow prune-faces, and she was too thin and bony, though he noticed now that she had nice breasts, for an older woman. She had on cutoff denim shorts and a red T-shirt and no shoes, and her hair was put back with a rubber band. Her legs needed shaving. “How's the wash coming?” she asked.

“It's down there doing its thing.”

“It shouldn't take much longer. Then you can hang it out.”

He stared at her. “You mean with clothespins and all that?”

“Of course. People don't use dryers on beautiful sunny days.”

“On TV they do.”

“This is not TV, Hugo.”

Something occurred to him. “You don't have a TV.”

She laughed. He didn't like her laugh. It was too sudden, and usually too loud for the joke. What was so funny, anyway? “The way you say that,” she said. “An accusation. The way you'd say, ‘You don't have indoor plumbing.' As if it was serious.”

“It is.” He hated her.

“Oh, Hugo, for heaven's sake.” She turned back to the bowl. Her back was better than her front, at least. He thought he might cry. What was he going to do without Claudette and Tiffany and Prescott and the whole Upton family? It hadn't occurred to him she wouldn't have a television; he hadn't even thought to ask her—that one lousy time she had called him before he arrived. Everyone had a television. The Wylies had three; they even had one in the kitchen so Mrs. Wylie could watch while she made dinner. He looked at the clock on the wall: He had just an hour.

He asked, “How can you not have a TV?”

“It is possible to get along just fine without one, you know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”

“You can always read a book.”

“I don't like to read.” She made a noise he couldn't interpret. “You could have taken Grandpa's, at least,” he said.

She turned again. He could see she was sick of the conversation, sick of him. He didn't care. She said, “I didn't want Grandpa's. I have one, in fact—a little old black-and-white set somewhere, I think it's in the garage. It's never worked very well out here in the country. I don't have much time for television, Hugo. I go over to the Garners' when there's something I want to see. But you can drag out that old set and try it, if it'll make you happy.”

“Can I go and get it now?”

“Hang out the clothes first.”

He took a deep breath. He knew tears were threatening behind his eyes. “I watch this program. It's on in an hour. Fifty-eight minutes.”

“Do the clothes first, Hugo, or they'll never dry.”

He listened. The washer was still making noise. “It's really good,” he said.

“What is?”

He knew she would hate his saying it, so he said it anyway. “
Upton's Grove
.”

She stared at him. “A soap opera? That's what this program is?”

“All the kids watch it.”

“Boys? Watch soaps after school?”

“Some.” He and David, at least. He didn't think many other guys did, actually, but he'd never admit it to her. “Most of them do.”

“Good Lord, what happened to basketball? What happened to kickball and paper routes? And homework!” She lifted the pot off the wheel and set it on a shelf, then turned to face him. She was so much taller than he that he had to either crane his neck up at her or look straight at her breasts. He looked out the window, at the pond, listening for the washer to stop. “It's time you broke the habit, Hugo. A bright boy like you watching soap operas, for heaven's sake! It's pathetic.” Her voice was too high for such a tall person. It went on, “There are plenty of things to do out here, Hugo. There's the pond. I have a little boat, or you could swim. It's kind of weedy, but—” She stopped, thinking. He could tell she was trying to be nice. The washer churned on, then began to make a whining noise. “Or there's a pleasant walk into town, two miles along a very pretty road. You could borrow my bike if you wanted to.”

“Who are the Garners?”

“A nice old couple across the pond. You can just see their house through the trees.”

He looked. “Do you think they watch
Upton's Grovel
”

“I sincerely doubt it.” The washer noise stopped. “There,” she said. “The lines are out by the garage, and the clothespins are in a red bag hanging from the post. Bring the basket in when you're done so it doesn't get all buggy.”

She looked about to laugh again. She was enjoying his unhappiness, the old biddy—or no, not that exactly. It wasn't a nasty laugh, it was worse than that, as if she thought he was cute or something. “I'm really sort of addicted to it,” he said. “I mean, it's not a little thing with me.”

“I see that, Hugo,” she said, and the amused look changed again to the impatient one. “For the moment, why don't you just get those clothes on the line?”

He hung up the clothes, thinking of Tiffany, who might be having her operation today, though what he really wanted to find out was if Charles Upton would discover that Claudette had taken the necklace and if she could manage to explain why before he did something drastic like call the cops. And there was a new character, that guy Marvin, or Marlin, with the moustache. He'd have to get a new notebook to keep his charts in. He and David had tallied the results from the old one with a calculator, and he'd bequeathed all his material to David as part of his policy of starting everything fresh. Tomorrow he'd go into town and get himself a new notebook, a ruler, a felt-tip marker. For today he'd have to borrow paper from her—if he could get the old set going. What if he couldn't? He looked across the pond, beyond his ratty gray underwear, to the Garners' yellow clapboards. How long would it take to row across the pond? Could you walk around it? he wondered. His fingers fumbled with the clothespins. What if he couldn't see it? The prospect was unimaginable, unbearable.

He found the television set wrapped in a plastic bag in the garage, stuck down in a corner as if it were a moldy flowerpot or something. It wasn't a bad set, wasn't that old. He carted it up to his room, his hole-in-the-wall—which was really what it was, not much more than that, a sort of cavern hollowed out of the end of the living room that must once have been a big closet. Just room for bed and bureau and Hugo. He set the television on the bureau and plugged it in. Static. He turned to channel 8. Static. He clicked the dial through all its paces. Static on all channels. All right, men—stand back. This is a job for the captain.

He worked on each channel in turn, fiddling with the fine tuner, then with the antenna attached to the back of the set. He pressed down on the top of the housing, tipped the whole thing back at an angle, held the antenna in one hand while he worked the fine tuner with the other—experiments that had coaxed his grandfather's Philco into action before he gave up and bought the Sony. Nothing. He had a quick vision of his grandfather's pink face bent over the set, his fine old fingers on the knobs. Grief overwhelmed him, and he had to bow his head over the bureau, his eyes squeezed shut. The static from the television was giving him a headache; he could hear tantalizing hints of voices behind it, mocking him. For the second time that day he would have liked to cry. Despising himself, he began twiddling knobs. Don't worry, men—hang in there, we're getting it, it's coming, it's coming.

He had never tried to analyze his dependence on
Upton's Grove
. He and his grandfather had begun watching it a couple of years ago. Hugo assumed their addiction was related to their lack of relatives, but he didn't worry about it. So they were loners, bachelors together—widower and orphan. So what? Plenty of people watched soap operas; it didn't mean you were weird or anything. His grandfather was deeply embarrassed by the situation: “Our little vice,” he called it, and made Hugo promise not to tell Aunt Dorrie—not that he ever saw Aunt Dorrie, not that he'd tell her if he did.

“At my age I think I'm entitled to a bit of frivolity,” his grandfather said to Hugo. At least he wasn't like Harley, Hugo thought. Harley was the aging lecher on
Upton's Grove
, always making a fool of himself with women. But Hugo didn't say that to his grandfather. He said, “I don't think it's that frivolous, Grandpa,” and his grandfather laughed.