Real Life by Kitty Burns Florey Page B

certainly good company—”
    â€œRachel, stop. Just forget it.”
    â€œYou make me so angry.”
    â€œI can’t help it. I don’t want to be fixed up. I don’t want to be put through it. I just want to—” She paused, looked out over the pond. It didn’t sound convincing, that she wanted her solitude, lonely though it might be. It wasn’t even entirely true. And wasn’t it gone forever, anyway, now that Hugo was here?
    Rachel had lost her exuberance. “You’re scared,” she said. “I guess I don’t blame you. You’ve had a lot of rotten romances.” Was that the secret of Rachel’s charm? Her ability to switch gears, to shape discord into amity like clay into a pot? And to glaze it over with a bit of undeserved flattery?
    â€œNot a lot,” Dorrie corrected her. “If I’d had a lot it wouldn’t be so bad. There’ve only been Mark and Teddy, actually.”
    â€œWell.”
    They were silent, watching the sky begin to hint at the sunset.
    â€œThe pond’s high,” Rachel said.
    â€œIt was a wet spring.”
    Another silence. What if, by some crazy fluke, Charles Lind was attractive and nice and smart and talented? He would hate her. She imagined Rachel’s little dinner party: Rachel being charming, Leon slobbering all over her, Charles wishing Rachel were his date—anyone but Dorrie—and herself ugly and tongue-tied, dressed wrong, drinking too much, becoming garrulous and overfamiliar and driving the long road home—alone—to hate herself.
    â€œListen, Dorrie,” Rachel went on in a rush. “Think about it, will you? I promise you, you’d like Charles. He’s a watercolorist. On the side, of course. By day he’s a librarian or something. By night he paints these incredible pictures. I’ve seen them. They’re really remarkable.”
    â€œRachel?”
    â€œOh, all right.” Rachel sat back on her elbows again. Dorrie looked at her face. She was genuinely cross, and Dorrie was sorry.
    â€œI’m just not up for it,” she said.
    â€œAll right, all right. I get the idea.” Rachel sighed, drank, changed the subject. “I’ll have to grill Hugo about Upton’s Grove . I wonder if Tara and Prescott ever got married. And that awful woman—Colette? Claudette! Enough hair for six people, and this screaming-pink lipstick, and the acting ability of a halibut. She found out about this plot to kill her father—no, I think it was her stepfather, this pompous jerk of a doctor—I’ll tell you, I’d rather die than have this guy operate on me—”
    â€œSpare me Upton’s Grove ,” Dorrie said—but amiably. “I get it every night at dinner.”
    Rachel grinned and kicked her legs in the water; luminous drops flashed in the sun. The pond shone dark as a seal’s back. “It really was terrible stuff, but I kind of miss it. I think the reason it’s so addictive is that you keep watching it partly to see how bad it can get.”
    â€œThat’s not why Hugo watches it.”
    â€œWell, you should watch it with him, Dorrie. Teach him to analyze, teach him to think—since you don’t believe he knows how.”
    â€œI’ll leave Hugo’s intellectual development to Sterling High School. It starts two blessed months and one day from now.”
    â€œOh, Dorrie—is it that bad?” Rachel touched her arm in sympathy. “That you count the days?”
    â€œI suppose I’m exaggerating. It’s just that whenever I turn around there he is. My brother’s wild oat. And it’s not as though he came with a dowry. The child is costing me an arm and a leg. Do you know how much a teen-age boy can eat?”
    â€œIt really is something, taking on a responsibility like this just when your life is all sort of set.” They looked out over the pond, examining Rachel’s