Real Life by Kitty Burns Florey Read Free Book Online Page A

to a small university press (Anna practically had to pry it out of his hands), it was returned with a letter saying half of it was out of date and the other half had already been done; he hadn’t kept up with the scholarship. He burned the manuscript in the fireplace, a few pages at a time, while out in the kitchen Anna pounded her fist on the countertop, cursing the insensitivity of publishers. And then, that evening, they had beef stew for dinner—Martin’s favorite—and wine, and apple pie for dessert, and a rousing discussion of Pop Art. Dorrie’s parents were as jolly and sanguine as ever. The book was never mentioned again, and the rejection seemed to have left no mark.
    Anna Gilbert was a failed artist as surely as Martin was a failed scholar. Failure was her way of life, a source in its own way of pride—proof that she was above the common herd, that her violent, murky oils were a rare and special taste. “I apparently haven’t caught the knack of pleasing the masses,” she used to say. Her true-grit smile had a wry twist to it, just in case she wasn’t a good enough painter for such false modesty. Each time Anna took the train to New York with her portfolio, or sent slides of her work off to a gallery, or submitted pieces to one of the big art exhibitions, Dorrie knew as sure as winter that nothing would come of it—just as she knew that Martin’s neatly typed articles would come back speedily, rejected, and that he’d be passed up for promotions and fail to get the grants he applied for. And she knew that his few unimpressive publications, and her mother’s occasional group shows in New London or New Haven, were nothing but variations on failure.
    They never stopped trying, either of them. There was always hope, always a new scheme: a gallery opening up, a grant available only to World War II veterans, an acquaintance with connections—or, in Phinny’s case, a different school psychiatrist, or an innovative program for wayward boys. MAKE THE BEST OF IT, Dorrie thought, should be engraved on their tombstones. And she often wondered how they had produced her and Phineas.
    Dorrie’s one close friend, Rachel Nye, a fat girl with braces, was even more soured on life than Dorrie. Her witty cruelties made Dorrie feel, by contrast, like a nice person. The two of them used to sit at either end of Dorrie’s ruffle-trimmed bed while Rachel ticked off, in alphabetical order, their classmates, first at Chiswick Elementary School, then at Shoreline High, and commented on them one by one. She was impartially nasty. She invented nicknames for the kids they despised most—the popular girls, the goody-goodies, the dumb macho boys they both secretly lusted after. Mary Gonorrhea Harper, No-Tits Farina, Nicholas the Prickless, Gross Gretchen … though, even as they sat there laughing until their faces ached, Dorrie wondered if, in another frilly bedroom, No-Tits and Gross Gretchen were cracking up over Horse-Face Gilbert and Fatty Nye. When she said as much to Rachel, Rachel looked at her with what seemed to be loathing and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gilbert, who cares what those jerks think? Are you going to squander your entire precious youth worrying over trivial crap?”
    She did, actually. She spent long hours, whole days, enormous chunks of her precious youth worrying: about her looks, her social failures, her unrequited crush on Nicky Moore, and what she would do if she got her period in the middle of English class; about overdue library books whose fines she had to pay out of her allowance; about where she would go to college and what on earth she would study there; about what hanging around with Rachel Nye was doing to her image; about a dream in which she was passionately kissing Lawrence Wynn, the creepiest boy in the class.
    And then Phineas. Merely living in the same house with him seemed wrong, a crime against nature, as if a