Real Life (8 page)

His smile was enormous; he hugged himself. “Oh, boy—would I,” he said, and she felt bad, even angry with him, that he was so transparently grateful for an offer so grudgingly made.

He beat her. She couldn't believe it. It had been years since she had lost a Scrabble game. She and Teddy used to play, and she had always beaten him—narrowly enough to give him hope, but consistently and without mercy. It had been, she suspected, one of the unacknowledged elements in the breakdown of his love for her. Since Teddy, she had played from time to time with the Garners, whom she beat easily. They didn't mind; a Scrabble evening was a social occasion, and on the nights when they switched to poker Dorrie always ended up a few dollars poorer. Scrabble, though: it was her strong point. “My one talent,” she called it apologetically to the Garners. She probably hadn't lost a game since college.

Hugo played silently, swiftly, with a concentration so intense it changed his appearance; he looked almost gaunt, his features sharpened, his eyes narrowed. At first they were close, but Hugo pulled way ahead of her with RAJAH on a triple word score and then a seven-letter word worth eighty-two points:
HALCYON,
winning finally by nearly a hundred points.

He relaxed when the game was over, clearly pleased with himself but chagrined at her loss. “You really play a good game,” he said. He gathered up the letters into a pile. “I mean, that game could have gone either way right up until the end, and then I had some luck.”

“Nonsense, Hugo—you're an amazing player.” She watched him as, in careful handfuls, he replaced the letters in the old felt bag her mother had made:
SCRABBLE,
it said in bold, fraying embroidery. His face was as round and innocent as a doll's. His plump forearms were dotted with mosquito bites. He looked no older than eleven or twelve, and he never read a book unless he had to. “Where did you get your vocabulary?” she asked him, not so much because she expected he could really tell her but to see what he would say.

He closed up the bag, thinking. “Oh—well—I listen pretty hard, I guess. Whenever I hear a weird word or an unusual word it keeps going through my head, sort of. Like music? And then if I learn a word in school or someplace I just sort of keep remembering it.” He grinned. “Whether I want to or not.”

It puzzled her, that he could have such an affinity for words and not want to use them for anything except to rack up points at Scrabble. “But you don't like to read. Or write? You've never wanted to write poetry or—” She searched her mind. Or what? Do crossword puzzles? Enter spelling bees? And she couldn't imagine Hugo a poet; for all his improbable gifts he seemed the most literal, the most prosaic of boys.

“Reading makes me nervous. It seems so phony or something, but it's really real. Do you know what I mean?”

“I'm afraid I don't.”

“Well, like Hercule Poirot. Or even Huckleberry Finn. I've read all that stuff for school; I did a book report on Huck Finn last year. But take somebody like Poirot—”

“Hugo? Where did you get your French accent?”

“Huh?”

“Your accent. Where did you learn to pronounce French like that?”

He looked puzzled. “I've had French in school for the last two years.”

“Yes, but—”

“We learned how to talk French. We had a language lab and everything.”

“But—” He looked at her politely, waiting, weighing the bag of letters in one hand, and as she looked back at him his face crumpled in a yawn. “Never mind,” she said, “I'm sorry. Go ahead with what you were saying.”

“Well—I mean guys like Poirot and Huck Finn.” He came out of the yawn, grinning, shaking his head. “Excuse me. I mean here we are talking about them as if they're real. Like how Huck Finn escaped from his father by pretending he was dead or how Hercule Poirot solved the crime by asking the gardener what time he was pruning the rosebushes, just like we could talk about Mrs. Garner or my grandpa or somebody, but they're not real, they're just made up.”

“But your soap opera people aren't real, either, Hugo.”

“But they are. I mean, I know they're just actors and everything, but at least they're real people on TV pretending to be the people on
Upton's Grove
. But in books they're just words.” He looked at her helplessly, on the verge of another yawn. “Doesn't that seem really weird? All those little black squiggles on a page and we sit around in English class and talk about how Huck Finn escaped from his father? Doesn't that give you the creeps? That it's so phony and everything?” He let the yawn loose and gave himself up to it; she could see all his molars.

“Not so that I can't read,” she said, suddenly impatient with him. What a baby he was, after all, wasting his good brain on petty abstractions and excuses. She stood up. Her hair was hot on her neck, and she gathered it up in her hand. If she were alone she would take a cool shower and go to bed naked. She said, “Speaking of reading, Hugo, I'm going to read a bit more before I go to bed. I'll go in the bedroom so the light won't bother you.” She wanted to be rid of him—this bizarre, unwelcome nephew with his useless skills. She wanted her old life back. Empty though it might have been, it had suited her; she was used to it.

“Are you mad that I won?” Hugo asked her.

“Good Lord, of course not!” It was true. She wasn't mad, she was flabbergasted, but her denial sounded unconvincing, and she made herself say, “We can play again tomorrow night if you like.” Even that: it sounded as if she was upset by her loss, wanted another chance. “If I'm not too busy,” she added.

“Oh, great,” Hugo said. “That would be so great.”

She stretched out on her bed with her book, the fan blowing in cool air, and listened to Hugo run water, pee, brush his teeth, spit into the sink (
pyuh, pyuh, tyew
), and then climb heavily into bed. The springs squeaked.

“Good night, Aunt Dorrie.”

It touched her: Aunt Dorrie, in his husky boy's voice. “Good night, Hugo.” She got up and closed the door gently, then opened it again a crack and sat on her bed, listening. The night before he had lain awake; she'd heard him thrashing around, he'd gotten up twice, restlessly, for drinks of water. Tonight, she could tell, he dropped off immediately. Well, if a Scrabble game a night would send him peacefully to sleep, she'd play him one until he got over his grief. She wondered how long it would take him to settle down—whatever that meant. How could a kid like Hugo settle down into her life? And if he did, what would it do to her existence?

She opened her book and tried to read, but she had lost interest in Spenser and his wisecracks and his perfect though fortyish girlfriend. She thought about the mysteriousness of Hugo, the magnitude of her responsibility, the horrors of parenthood, the unfairness of life. What was she to do with him?

The more she tried to read, the more her mind stuck at Hugo. Finally, she turned out the light and sat in the dark, trying to look on the bright side: it had crossed her mind, when she first contemplated taking him on, that Hugo would save her from a lonely and meaningless old age, the curse of the single person. She had seen herself aged, desperate, foolish, susceptible to causes, an old crone in a kerchief lighting candles in some church, signing away her life's savings to the Moonies, carrying signs on behalf of hamster rights or the banning of fluoride. Hugo would be the antidote to all that. She would be lovable old Aunt Dorrie, who had raised Hugo from a pup, the matriarch of his large and loving family.…

She said to herself, What a pathetic hope, and felt tears begin at the corners of her eyes. What a goal in life, to be someone's beloved aunt. She turned off the fan. The light from the rising moon laid whey-colored strips across the sheet. She fell asleep and dreamed, as she often did, that she was locked in a room without doors or windows, that she was hopelessly, horribly late for an urgent appointment, that everything depended upon her escape, and that (as she ran in circles and pounded the walls and screamed for release) she would never get out no matter what she did.

3

At the end of June, Hugo moved out of the house and into the garage loft. The room up there was cramped and triangular, rising to a point with the roof, and splinters of light came through between the roof boards where shingles had disappeared. But Hugo considered it far superior to his cubicle off the living room. It had, at least, two small windows.

“One for sunrise, one for sunset,” Dorrie said when she climbed the ladder for a look. “I suppose it'll be all right if you clean it up a little.” She kicked at a dead mouse with her foot. “A lot,” she said. But she didn't question his preference for the garage.

He swept the floor, hitting his head on the low beams where the roof angled down, and then scraped off the bird droppings and scrubbed it. He removed spiders' nests and dried-out cocoons from between the wall joists. He patched a worn-through place in the floor with scrap lumber he found in the garage. He tacked screening to both windows and devised a heavy curtain, from an old canvas awning, for the sunrise side. He had had enough of early rising—his aunt was always up by seven. He packed his clothes into his suitcase and his duffel bag and hauled them up the ladder; eventually, he would put up shelves or something, maybe a system of boxes, to keep things in. It didn't matter. The important thing was to take possession.

He had wanted to do the whole job himself, but he had to let Dorrie help him drag his mattress out there and then twist and wedge it through the trapdoor, a task that left them both sweaty and laughing. “It's like the birth of an elephant,” Dorrie said when it was done. They both flopped down on the mattress at opposite ends, each cautiously aware that times like this, when the tension and hostility fizzled away and they liked each other, hadn't been frequent. Most of the last two weeks had been, Hugo thought, like
Annie
, the movie he'd gone to with the Wylies about the kids in the orphanage, except that here nobody sang.

His aunt didn't seem to mind that the mattress had become dented and grimy on its trip over the lawn and up to the loft. Not that it had been that great to begin with. Hugo liked the way his room looked with the mattress in it, like hippie pads he'd seen pictures of. “I've got a cover somewhere that you can zip over that,” Dorrie said, and got up to stand by the west window, looking out. “It'll be gorgeous up here with the light from the sunset coming in. I bet it'll turn the whole room pink.”

Hugo said, “Actually, I'm going to need a flashlight or something, if you have anything like that—or I could go into town and buy one.” He still had the twenty dollars Mr. Garner had paid him for cutting back the shrubs and clearing out the cellar—hard work but good money. He would have liked to earn more, but when he'd finished the shrubs Mr. Garner had said, “Looks like you've just about cleaned us out of chores, Hugo. I bet this place hasn't looked so good since it was first built,” so that it was clear the Garners didn't want anything else done—couldn't afford it, maybe. Now it was just lawn mowing for TV time.

“I guess I could get a kerosene lantern,” he said.

“My God, Hugo—I didn't realize,” Dorrie cried, whirling around from the window. “There's no light!” He was afraid she'd refuse to let him sleep up there after all. She'd see all of a sudden it was too dirty, too dark, too buggy. The problem of winter—snow, dark, no heat—loomed unspoken between them. Hugo couldn't believe he'd still be there by winter; maybe she couldn't, either. He was half convinced that, while he was at the Garners' every afternoon, she was on the phone tracking down orphanages, foster homes, boarding schools. It was the fantasy that put him to sleep on rough nights, the possibility of a nice family somewhere, or a school full of really nice kids, where he would fit in and be cared for and liked.

“Well, you don't read in bed,” his aunt said. “So that's no problem. But—” She surveyed him closely, as if trying to figure out just what a nonreader would need light for. “You could probably get along with a good flashlight, don't you think? Or a lantern. No kerosene, please. That's one worry I don't need. But maybe some kind of battery-powered gizmo?”

Why did she always have to be so vague about everything? Mrs. Wylie would have known, Mrs. Garner, Grandpa—they'd know just what to get and where to get it. His aunt merely gazed out the window again in a worried way: did she expect a battery-powered lamp to come whistling through it? She turned to him again and smiled, and he made his face blank, unirritable.

“Make up a list, Hugo,” she said. “We'll go into town and get what you need. My treat. We'll make this into a really nice room. Maybe you should have a rug—one of those woven grass things that smell so good? Or a piece of scrap floor covering? What is this place—about fourteen by twenty? And I'll get you a new mattress cover, Lord knows if the old one will turn up. And how about proper windowshades? Or something to keep the rain out—now I wonder what would do it.”

He didn't want her horning in, but he liked the sound of all the new things and the idea of shopping. It made him feel good, that she was going to buy him something, even if it was only practical things like rugs and shades, and even if it meant she was glad to get him out of the house. He didn't mind that; it worked both ways.

He was looking forward to going into town again too. They had driven there twice before, both times for groceries. He'd had a bad experience on each occasion. On the first, she had said, at the Stop & Shop, “Why don't you check out the main drag while I get the groceries?” and he left her pushing a cart through the produce department while he walked on down the street. It wasn't much of a town, but Hugo liked the way it looked—dusty and old-fashioned and forgotten in the sun. He passed a drugstore with a display of wheelchairs and crutches in the window, an auto parts store whose windows were so grimy you could hardly see in, a bar in whose gloomy depths he could see a gray game show on TV, a Carvel that looked unchanged since about 1952, a luncheonette, a Laundromat, and at the end of the block a pizza parlor. In front of the pizza parlor were three girls and a boy, maybe a little older than he. The girls were all pastel and white and tanned, in short shorts and sneakers with little white socks, and they had hairdos like Claudette and Tara, those millions of combed-back waves that scalloped over their shoulders like half-moons, like scimitars flashing. The boy they were talking to looked like Crystal's boyfriend, Jamie—Mr. Cool. Hugo had always hated Jamie, with his big biceps and that mumbling way of talking. “In real life, that boy would be in reform school,” his grandfather used to say.