Iris hadn’t said a word, just smiled and drank, with one hand resting impersonally on her vast stomach. “Good luck, Iris,” Dorrie said at the door, and Iris said, “Oh—thanks,” as if she’d just noticed Dorrie’s existence. And then she added, politely, with a strained smile, “I’m so glad I finally met you, Dorrie,” in a small, squeaky voice that sounded seldom used. On an impulse, Dorrie gave her a quick hug: God, to be put in this predicament by Phinny—the poor girl … Her cheek was cool as clay, her stomach harder than a basketball. Her hair smelled of something Dorrie couldn’t place right away; it came to her later: marijuana smoke.

Then, on Thanksgiving, Phineas was due for dinner at his parents’ house with Iris and the baby. When Dorrie arrived (late on purpose), Phineas was storming around the living room saying, “Jesus Christ,” and “Goddamn shit.”

“You ought to sign up for a vocabulary-building course, Phinny,” Dorrie said, taking off her coat. She kissed her mother, then her father. They were standing together silently by the piano, she in an apron, he holding a teddy bear by one leg, both of them wearing the cowed looks that only Phineas could produce. Iris sat in the wing chair nursing the baby under a tea towel. Dorrie imagined her mother running to get the towel when Iris opened her blouse. Iris wore a flowered shirt, her blond hair was in braids around her head, her eyes were blue and her cheeks pink. If tears hadn’t been running down her face she would have looked like a Mary Cassatt madonna.

“Nobody asked for your goddamn opinion, either,” Phineas said to Dorrie, then whirled around and said, “Fuck it, goddamn shit, I don’t have to take any of this,” and headed for the door. Iris buttoned up her shirt—they all had a glimpse of pearly breast, rose-red nipple—and followed him, weeping. Phineas stormed out without another word, but Iris paused in front of Dorrie and held the baby up, a fat pink object with a milky chin who resembled neither her nor Phineas. “Hugo,” Iris said, and smiled through the tears. Hugo took one look at his aunt and howled.

“Don’t forget Pooh.” Dorrie’s father offered the bear.

“Oh, Mr. Gilbert,” said Iris, her eyes filling again.

“Dad,” he said, and his wife chimed in with “And Mom.”

“I’m so sorry about this,” Iris wailed, and left. Phineas was gunning the motor, Hugo was screaming, and Dorrie’s mother, in the doorway, began to sniffle.

“What’s he mad at?” Dorrie asked. The car pulled away, and the lull left behind was like the silence after a bombing raid.

“He’s on something,” her father said. “Again.”

“I think they both are,” Mrs. Gilbert said through her handkerchief. “Oh, that baby, that poor little thing.”

“Is Phineas still planning to marry her?”

“That’s what your mother wanted to know.”

“That’s what started him off, Dorrie,” her mother said, weeping. “I don’t know where he gets that language. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do.”

They ate the cold Thanksgiving dinner and tried to cheer up: a familiar scene. Holidays had always keyed Phineas up to his worst pitch, arousing crazily unreal expectations in his parents of happy families at peace around the groaning board. Holidays had never been cause for celebration.

Nor did they improve. By Christmas, Phineas was in jail for selling heroin, and by the Christmas after that Iris was dead.

And Hugo, the pink, bawling baby: Hugo was sent first to Iris’s twin sister, Rose, who lived in a country slum with her children—two at that time, but there were four by the time Phineas was dead. When Hugo was eight, Dorrie’s parents adopted him. First his grandmother died, then four years later his grandfather. That was when Dorrie inherited Hugo, along with her father’s house and his collection of books on Victorian life and literature.

She put the house on the market right away. She felt no connection with it. It was the house of her father’s old age, of Hugo’s childhood. The repository of her own growing up had already been sold, when her mother died and her father retired and, with Hugo, moved away from the shore and his memories—inland, near Hartford. The new house was in a desirable school district and wasn’t hard to sell. Its contents (minus the books), from the rusty bread box and the ancient Hoover to the rolltop desk and her mother’s piano, were sold at auction. Then the library—or so Dorrie still called it, although the cartons containing her father’s books were still in the attic of the new house, unpacked. She sorted through them for three days, and kept for herself a calf-bound set of George Eliot, Trollope in the Everyman edition, a few biographies and art books, and (surprise!) a collection of photographs of naked women, c. 1880. She unloaded the rest on a smirking rare-book dealer who handed her a check for three hundred dollars as if he’d put something over on her, so that she racked her memory for days trying to recall what in her father’s collection of brittle-paged volumes of literary criticism and history and obscure Victorian novels could have been worth anything. The book dealer’s smirk seemed the culmination of something—a lifetime of being cheated?—and it bothered her unreasonably.

She was left with the prospect of Hugo. She took him in because she was all he had. He had no parents, and with his grandfather’s death no grandparents—no relatives at all, that anyone knew of. Rose had disappeared—though even Dorrie, who God knows didn’t want Hugo herself, couldn’t have sent him back to Rose. Dorrie had gone with her parents to retrieve Hugo and had vivid memories of Rose’s tumbledown trailer, the stink and the filth, the empty beer bottles, and Rose’s vast backside swaying like the padded panniers on an Elizabethan gown. And it had been her father’s wish that she be responsible for the boy, if necessary. She had promised—a vow that meant nothing to her. Why should it? Her father had been only sixty-seven on his last birthday, and spry. He liked to boast that he’d never been sick in his life except for Asian flu in 1956. His wife would have knocked on wood and said, “Don’t tempt fate,” and Martin Gilbert would have replied, “Nonsense,” but sure enough fate intervened with a swift, fatal heart attack one spring evening and dropped Hugo into his aunt’s life.

He boarded with his friend David Wylie until the school year ended in June, and then David’s family delivered him to Dorrie on their way to the Cape. Dorrie didn’t like to ask why Hugo couldn’t go with them; she rehearsed a dozen ways of offering them money to keep Hugo for the summer and rejected all of them as cold and peculiar sounding. In the end, she could think of no alternative to the delighted smiles, the carefree small talk, the happy wave to the Wylies’ departing car. And there was Hugo: short, verging on overweight, looking curiously like old photographs of her father, and grinning at her expectantly.

He arrived nearly bare of possessions. He didn’t own a book, didn’t have anything resembling a hobby, not even sports equipment. He brought only himself, plus a spare pair of jeans, a suit that had belonged to Dorrie’s father and was too long in the leg (Hugo had worn it to the funeral, with sneakers), and a duffel bag full of dirty clothes he expected Dorrie to wash, an assumption that affronted her. She was his legal guardian, his only relative, but she hardly knew the boy, and his presence in her house was disorienting, as if it were a stranger’s house she had wandered into. Life seemed impossibly skewed and out of focus with this fat little fourteen-year-old sitting in her favorite chair.

“Why should I wash your dirty clothes for you?” she asked, and the exasperated question emerged so automatically, as if it had been waiting there for its chance to pounce, that she knew exasperation would be one of the motifs of the boy’s residence with her. Her heart sank. “Who do you think I am?”

“My surrogate mother,” Hugo replied, completely serious.

“The hell I am,” she said, and marched him down to the cellar, where the washing machine was.

Dorrie was a potter by trade. At thirty-eight, she made her living by it, and had done so for five years. Not a sumptuous living, but one that supplied her with what she needed. She didn’t need much. Just after her brother’s death—that had been nearly six years ago—she had bought her house, an old and undistinguished little farmhouse with a pond and an acre of land on a back road in East Latimer, a town tucked next to Rhode Island in the northeast right angle of Connecticut: depressed country, cheap and down at the heels and isolated. Her friend Rachel Nye suggested Dorrie call the house Erewhon, and addressed her letters that way. Dorrie’s last lover, Teddy, after a long drive from Hartford, said (coming up the walk grinning, with a bottle of wine in each hand), “Why didn’t you tell me this place was way the hell out in Bumfuck, Egypt?”

She liked its isolation, and took pride in the complicated directions to the place. “What’s it near?” people would call up and ask her desperately, pondering the tangle of back roads they were expected to follow. “It’s not near anything,” Dorrie would say into the phone, laughing, and then, seriously, pretending to be helpful, “Actually it’s about halfway between Lemuel Forks and the Marsden River—well, creek really, Marsden Creek—and it’s on Little Falls Pond. You can’t miss it,” and her giggle would spill over.

People did find it, of course. They came to her shop to buy what she made, and they came for lessons in her studio, though she did less teaching now that her things brought more money. And she ventured forth herself, to Providence and Boston, where her pots were sold on consignment in shops, and to the three or four best craft shows in the area. But she preferred, increasingly, to be alone in her little house. She thought of her solitariness as something that had been forced on her at an early age—like piano lessons, or creamed codfish—that she had come to appreciate.

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.

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.

Mr. Garner wasn’t there; he had gone to Providence, to the dentist. But Mrs. Garner sat and watched with Hugo. It was interesting to him that his aunt wasn’t unique; here was another person who had never seen a soap opera, and she said her husband hadn’t either, that she was aware of. “Unless he has a whole secret life,” she said, smiling at Hugo as if that was pretty improbable.

“It must be living in the country,” he said. This was during the commercials. “I guess you get a little out of touch with things.” First they advertised a cake mix, and showed a big chocolate cake, kids snitching slices and then the mother, looking guilty (why?), taking the last one. Then there was a commercial for diet soda. Hugo hated the commercials—most of them, anyway. He hated the ones where some perky mom worried about her family’s nutrition, for example, and the ones full of phony girls in bathing suits drinking soda from straws, with close-ups of their big lips.

“I guess we do,” Mrs. Garner said, still smiling. She was in her sixties, at least—tiny and pretty with plain white hair, something like the way he remembered his grandmother. “We’re really out in the sticks here, you know. I don’t suppose there’s going to be much for you to do, Hugo.”

“It’s pretty, though,” he said quickly. “The pond and everything. It’s a lot nicer than Hartford.”

“You like living with your aunt?”

The Diet Pepsi commercial was winding down. The girls all stuck their hips out and shook their hair forward into their faces while they sang the jingle. “I’ve only been there a day,” he said to Mrs. Garner, with caution. “She’s real nice, though.”

“If only she had a television.”

He looked at her gratefully. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s my only complaint. I mean, otherwise—”

Mrs. Garner nodded, and Tiffany appeared, crying. Hugo was glad he didn’t have to finish the sentence.

When the show was over, he passed his notes over to Mrs. Garner. “Tiffany used to be just a minor character. Even last summer, she was just this waitress who worked at the club—that’s the Grove Club, where everybody always goes for dinner and stuff. Of course, even then she was nice and everybody really liked her, but then she had an affair with Dr. Wendell—he’s Claudette’s stepfather? Claudette’s the one with the necklace? Anyway, then she started being on all the time. It wasn’t even gradual, which is what surprised me. She went boom! like that! from two minutes a week to seven or eight minutes a day, and now—” He shrugged, and indicated the flowered stationery. “She’s definitely a star. See for yourself.”

“How long have you been keeping your records, Hugo?” she asked him.

They were sitting on a kind of enclosed porch, where the television was—the sun room, Mrs. Garner called it, but she had pulled the drapes to shut out the light, and it was like evening in there. Hugo thought he would like to live in that room, he wondered if he could move in, he would sleep on the short fat little sofa, he could do chores for them and watch television.

“What?”

“Your records,” Mrs. Garner said. “How far back do they go?”

“I started the first of this year. January third, to be exact. I didn’t miss a day, even when I had the flu. I was really sweating, I was throwing up—I felt really awful, but I knew I’d feel worse if I screwed up my records. And then—” He stopped. He had been going to say he had managed to see it even on the Monday his grandfather was buried, that Mrs. Wylie had insisted he sit down to it with David. “Your life should go on as normally as possible,” she had said. “That way you’ll be able to handle this better.” He didn’t think he’d handled it particularly well. David had kept the records that day. Hugo had watched Upton’s Grove in tears. One good thing about David was that you didn’t have to hide things like that from him. Hugo wasn’t even sure he’d noticed. “My friend Dave and I used to do it together.”

“I suppose it’s educational, in its way.”

“My grandfather said it was. He said you don’t find all that many good practical uses for math. Of course, he was an English professor.”

She gave him another glass of apple juice, and then he went outside to mow the lawn. He hauled the mower (a hand mower! first clothespins, then no television, now a hand mower!) out of the garage, thinking what a nice lady Mrs. Garner was. She hadn’t hesitated: “Of course you can watch your program!” and led him into the sun room, talking all the way. “You’re Dorrie’s nephew. Well, she told us you’d be coming, I think. I didn’t even know she had a nephew, but of course—and how about a cookie or two? a glass of apple juice? We had some blueberries, but I think—” He liked that kind of chatter; it was just being friendly, you didn’t have to listen to it. He was afraid she’d continue it during Upton’s Grove, but she was silent and attentive, and waited for the commercials to ask him questions. He wondered if he’d made a convert, and the possibility thrilled him.

He mowed an H, filled it in, mowed another. Years ago, his grandfather used to mow the lawn with a hand mower much like this one, old and on its last legs. Wheels, he corrected himself, snickering. Then his grandfather had got an electric mower. He never let Hugo use it, always mowed the lawn himself. Hugo mowed another H. He could look across the pond and see his aunt’s house. From here it looked shabby, in need of paint, the yard full of tumbledown sheds. His underwear on the line. He thought of how she had laughed at him and wished he’d leave so she could work in peace. He began to miss his grandfather again. Not even a week ago he’d told himself he was finished with missing him, he was handling it, he was coping, adjusting, accepting—all the things Mrs. Wylie, who was a psychologist, had said he should do. And now it was back, rising in his throat like apple juice—sour but with an undertaste of sweetness that he wished he could just give in to, just huddle in a corner somewhere and cry it out all over again, huddle in the dark sun room or in the room he had shared with David. It was lonelier over there with a blood relative than it had been at the Wylies’ house. What a life: a life of missing people. He pondered that for a minute, pleased with his pun, and then he began to list them.

First his mother. He couldn’t remember her but he knew he’d missed her because Rose had said he’d cried for a week when she died, and wouldn’t eat. Then Rose and his father. He’d been sometimes with one, sometimes with the other, sometimes with both together, so that when his father died and he was taken from Rose there were two of them to miss, not to mention his cousins—the little ones, not Shane and Monty. Then his grandmother in her coffin, looking stuffed, with too much rouge on her cheeks. Then his grandfather, and that was the most recent and hardest because he was older and knew what death was, as Mrs. Wylie put it. He did know what death was: Death is missing people, he thought. If he were the type to write poetry—which he wasn’t, except when forced to in English class—he would begin a poem with the line “Life is missing people,” and end it with “Death is missing people,” and the idea would be that first you stress “missing” and then you stress “people.” He wondered how that could be done. A poet would know. David would know.

Upton’s Grove