Real Life (32 page)

She had been sleepless all that Saturday night. Hugo got up twice to go into the bathroom and vomit. Around 4
A.M.,
she took his temperature. “Leave me alone,” he said. His pillow was wet with sweat.

The rain dripped down. At dawn, she could see nothing out the window but mist: no pond, no road, no trees, as if her little house had been cut loose from the rest of the earth. When she turned on the light and tried to read, there, all over her bedroom, were Alex's leavings: a sweatshirt, a pair of gray wool socks, a worn-out belt. A copy of
The Great Gatsby
that he was taking notes on for his class. On the wall, the absurd photograph of his sneakers: grungy black basketball sneakers—no Nikes for Alex. What would she do with these things? They constituted a little museum of Alex Willick—all sides of his personality represented: literary, poor, old-fashioned, humorous, lovable. Cruel? There was no room for cruelty, for shouts and insults, in her picture of him. Nothing made sense. Was she dreaming this cold, wet, wretched night?

She shivered in her bed, and got out of it to turn the heat up, but it didn't do any good. The icy rain and the slamming door had chilled her to the bone. Winter was coming; already, on these cold mornings, there was a delicate skin of ice at the edges of the pond. Winter would come, and it would go on forever, every night as cold and comfortless as this one.

Alex didn't call: he must have dropped exhausted into bed. He would call her when he woke up. But Sunday passed, and half of Monday. The rain was over, and she sat at her wheel hoping for solace from the cold clay and the pale sun out her window—some comfort for the silent phone. Was this it, then? The course of her life changed so radically, blown apart as if by a bomb, only because of an accident of fate—because Hugo had had a mad whim to get drunk and impress his beloved? No bomb, just the juices of puberty. Or some genetic madness, a spark from that sick flame that had made Phinny what he was.

The bowl she was making was wrong—lopsided and heavy-bottomed. She mashed it into a ball and dropped it into her pail of slurry, took another hunk of clay and began to center it. She wished she could talk to Rachel; Rachel was in Paris, sleeping off her jet lag by the side of her new husband. Was it only two days ago—less—Dorrie and Alex had plotted to get married? It seemed like weeks—long weeks of sorrow and sleeplessness and the sound of Hugo being sick in the bathroom. “We'll fly out to Arizona,” Alex had said. “We'll hike down into the canyon from the North Rim—that's where nobody goes. We'll climb down to the river, and then we'll look up, and we'll see the canyon rising all around us, and—that's it, Dorrie. That's what I need to do. I feel almost religious about it, as if it's a pilgrimage—don't ask me why. I need to see it, and I want to see it with you.”

Maybe that was the ridiculous thing, the idea of herself and Alex on that pilgrimage, on any pilgrimage. Maybe what she had foreseen all those years ago was true, after all: she was destined to be alone, to be husbandless and childless, to live by herself in a little house with immensity and grandeur denied to her. She looked out the window. Instead, she had Little Falls Pond. It was choppy and dull, swollen looking after the rain, nudging the top of the dock. She felt a fierce love for it, for her house, for what she possessed—the sure things in her life. Her own personal pilgrimage stopped here. This would have to be enough.

She worked at the wheel longer than she needed to, and she quit only when she was exhausted, her shoulders and back tight and sore. She stood up, bent from the waist, and dangled, shaking her wrists, moving her neck to unkink it. One thing about having a husband, there was always someone there to rub your back.

Upstairs, Hugo coughed, but when she looked in on him he was still asleep, the kitten curled up in the bend of his knees. His breathing was even; his cheek felt cooler. His hair had dried in slick points across his forehead. What to do—how to make the rest of the day pass? She sat in the wing chair and tried to read. She was in the middle of a book about a train journey through Italy. When this is all over, she thought, I'll have to go traveling. The thought brought her up short: when what was over? Her grieving for Alex? Her responsibility for Hugo? Her anger and disappointment and worry? She threw the book aside; it was impossible to concentrate on olive groves and piazzas.

She felt the need, all of a sudden, to get outside, away from the silent house. She combed her hair. Her face, in the mirror, looked aged and pale—eyes sunken, cheeks thin: her pre-Alex face. He had transformed her, over these few months, into a “handsome woman,” a woman whose face, if nothing else, reflected the certainty of being loved. Now, like the evil queen, she had reverted to a hag. She rubbed in some Jolie Jeunesse and put on blusher, wondering why she bothered. She peeked at Hugo again, left a note saying
BACK SOON
on his bedside table, and took the phone off the hook.

Outside, the late-afternoon sun was struggling to shine. The leaves that were left on the trees gleamed from the rain, and the air smelled clean. She walked over the wet grass down to the water. She remembered the magical day she had looked out of the window and seen a deer make its slow, dignified way along the shore to the pond—just here, by the lightning-struck oak—where it had bent its beautiful head and drunk, the spring sun on its brown back. She had gone out and seen the prints of its hooves, felt them in the grass with her fingers as if they were messages left for her to interpret. And the day the snowy egret had stood for long minutes on the tiny, bushy island at the north end of the pond. She had watched it through binoculars the whole time—it did nothing, except to turn its head around, inspecting things with its wicked black eye and darting its black bill into the water—and then, seemingly for no reason, it lifted its wings so that she saw its bright yellow feet, and then it slowly, slowly rose into the air, away.

Now there were a pair of Canada geese near the shore, gliding on their own reflections, browsing in the weeds. Alex said they looked like accident victims, their necks bandaged in white, their heads held stiffly. They mated, she knew, for life.

She turned away from the pond. She was tired, she had nowhere to go, she should stay upstairs with Hugo, but she didn't want to be up there with the uncooperative phone, the book she couldn't concentrate on, the Alex Willick museum. She got in the car and sat there pondering. There wasn't much to do on a Monday evening in East Latimer. She could go to McDonald's and get a Big Mac. She could go bowling. She could go to Ernie's, the town's one bar, and drink a beer. She could walk along the darkening streets, skirting puddles, and look at the shabby old houses and stripped trees.

She started the motor. For want of anything better to do she could drive to the discount store and buy some Tampax. Get Hugo some more ginger ale, some ice cream. See normal people doing their normal shopping. Smile at the clerks, chat a little. She would treat herself to something nice—a plant, a nightgown, maybe a magazine. Go home and eat a bacon sandwich. Listen to the Monday night concert on public radio. Go to bed early.

A thought struck her as she eased the car out of the driveway: what if Alex showed up instead of calling? What if he arrived while she was gone, to find only Hugo and Daisy? She pondered this idea, driving steadily toward town. Well, he would have come for her—that was the point. He would have shown he wanted her. Even if he didn't wait, even if he turned right around and drove back to Boston—the gesture would have been made, the reprieve given. She imagined Hugo saying, in a tone of disapproval,
He
was here. She would call him, and he would say, Damn it, Dorrie, I drive all the way down there to see you and all I find is the kid coughing at me. And everything would be well. She would be summoned back to Saturday, back to the edge of the Grand Canyon. She would be a handsome woman again.

Fat chance, Dorrie. He's not going to show up. But the hope persisted, even as she drove into town, parked the car, pushed a shopping cart around the discount store: you never know—an irrational hope that came from the same source that had prompted her to put on blusher, to contemplate a new nightgown, to think about the deer and the snowy egret with simple happiness, to defend Hugo to Alex. You never know: even when you do.

“Dorrie?”

She turned around in the appliance department (she was considering a new hairdryer) to see Monica Scully, a woman who had taken pottery lessons from her a few years ago. Monica raised an electric kettle in the air, gesturing hello.

“How are you doing, Dorrie? I haven't seen you since Lord knows when.”

She was a stout, pretty woman, still in her late twenties, who wore her hair in two blond braids, thick as skeins of yarn. She and her husband struggled to keep a small dairy farm going. The Scullys had been dirt poor, barely making it, and Monica'd had to give up pottery and devote her time and money to the farm.

“Roseanne's helping me pick out a new teakettle,” Monica said. “Aren't you, honey?” She beamed down at her daughter, a timid little girl in a sweatshirt that said
THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT.
“Ours burned out this morning just in time for breakfast, wouldn't you know.” Dorrie remembered Monica's jokey self-deprecation: “wouldn't you know” and “just my luck,” and the rueful grin.

“How are things going, Monica?”

Monica's grin widened. “Just terrific, thanks to the goats. I saw a thing on television about making goat cheese, and we added a couple of goats to our herd, and now I'm the goat cheese queen of northeastern Connecticut.” She burst into laughter. “I'll tell you, Dorrie, they're bad-tempered, smelly little devils, but they've turned our lives around. I don't mean we're rich or anything, but we sure are doing a lot better. Hey—maybe I'll come out and do some pottery with you again.”

“That would be great, Monica,” Dorrie said, and realized that she meant it. She had sworn not to teach anymore, now that she didn't have to, but she had enjoyed having Monica around—a large, relaxed figure, always in a tent dress. That had been back in the Teddy days. Seeing Monica, she was reminded of Teddy: for some reason, she thought of a shirt he'd had, one she'd always disliked, a dark purplish plaid. “I'm glad to hear things are going so well. You were having a tough time for a while there.”

“How are things with you? I'm sorry we lost touch, Dorrie. I've been so busy. Did you ever do any more with your salt kiln?”

Dorrie said she'd neglected it, she'd love to get back to it, maybe Monica could come out and they could work together. She heard herself saying these unaccustomed things and realized how solitary she had become. Before Alex, she'd seen hardly anyone—occasionally the Garners, sometimes Rachel. Then there was only Alex—and now, nothing, no one. She barely knew her neighbors. Her customers were strangers—even the steady ones like the movie star, and the galleries she sold to. When her one good friend was in Paris, she had no one to talk to.

On impulse, she said, “I've got my nephew living with me now. My brother's boy—Hugo. An orphan, just turned fifteen.”

“Oh, my God, I feel sorry for you, Dorrie.” Monica raised her eyes to the heavens. “That has got to be the worst age. My sister Linda's fifteen.”

“She's my aunt,” Roseanne piped up.

“That's right, baby, she is. Dorrie, she's putting my mother through hell. Tantrums? Hostility? Let me tell you. I can imagine what you're going through, taking him on. That's wonderful of you, to do that.”

“I didn't have much choice,” Dorrie said.

“Still, he must be company for you.”

“Oh—” She thought of Hugo telling her to mind her own business, to quit fussing. “I suppose he is, when we're speaking.”

They laughed, and parted. It was agreed that Monica would call her to arrange a time for lessons. She would bring Dorrie some cheese. She wished her good luck with her nephew. “It'll pass,” she said. She took Roseanne's hand and steered her toward the exit. “Before you know it, he'll be away at college and you'll miss him like crazy.”

The hell I will, Dorrie thought, but then—passing bemused through the appliance department, thinking of Hugo going away to college, of the pristine little pots Monica used to make, of Teddy's plaid shirt—she saw a display of television sets on sale. Small ones, color, really very cheap. Why not? He could keep it in his room; she wouldn't even have to know it was there. The idea entered her mind without her permission. She turned guiltily, as if she expected Alex to leap out from behind the refrigerators shouting, This is discipline?

She needed advice, but Monica was nowhere in sight. And how absurd, to ask if she should buy a television set. You don't have a TV? Monica would say. Well, Dorrie, no wonder that child doesn't speak to you!

One set was tuned to
Monday Night Football
—men crashing into each other, pulling each other down, slipping in the mud. Football meant nothing to her; it looked like insanity. She stood watching, figuring out her finances, and then, feeling insane herself, she removed the Tampax and the philodendron from her shopping cart and hefted in a boxed television set. Put back the Tampax and the plant. Wheeled it all to the check-out counter, thinking, What the hell, why not, and damn Alex.

On Tuesday Hugo's temperature was normal, his flu gone. The doctor had diagnosed, over the phone, “this forty-eight-hour thing that's going around,” and prescribed bed rest, no food but ginger ale, and, once his stomach calmed down, aspirin for his headache. Dorrie drove him, wrapped in a shawl, to the Garners', where he presented the wine and made his apologies. He felt her stern eye on him the whole time, but the Garners were nice about it. Mrs. Garner fussed over his flu, and wanted to make him some hot tea with lemon. Mr. Garner had ready a little speech about learning from his mistakes; he twanged his watchband as he talked, and his voice sounded embarrassed and dutiful. Hugo cried a little. Mrs. Garner hugged him, saying, “Who cares about germs?” And then Dorrie hustled him home, where he fell into an exhausted sleep.