Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  She had marched them down the stairs with a black plastic trash bag and made them clean up the mess while she loomed over them, threatening them with rat bites and disease and finally the definite possibility that they would be orphaned because if she did see a rat in the basement while doing the laundry, she would die on the spot of a heart attack, from terror.

  Just cleaning up the mess was lesson enough for the children: the ketchup had congealed on the clothes in disgusting sticky splotches that not even they wanted to touch.

  “I will never eat ketchup again in my life,” Hannah had said quietly.

  Nell had made them remain in the basement protecting her while she did the laundry.

  But this afternoon she would throw open the hatchway door that led up from the basement to the backyard. That would let the warm April air in to freshen the basement—and give any scrambling little live thing the opportunity to scurry up and out while Nell and her children cleaned. She would sleep better tonight; she always slept better after the spring-cleaning of the basement. The children played in it often during the long cold winter days when they were trapped indoors, and over the months things accumulated. Nell knew they would discover lost socks and underpants, books and jewelry, batteries and Lego blocks. She was eager to get to work.

  But first she wanted to finish the cassoulet. Nell loved cooking and having people to dinner, but since her divorce, she had learned to serve only those dishes that could be prepared beforehand. Otherwise she would end up in a frustrated snit, feeling like Cinderella, stirring away like an old drudge alone over the stove while far away in the living room her guests laughed and gossiped and she felt like an outcast at her own party.

  Or even worse, she would invite the guests into her kitchen while she finished a dish and, incapable of being sociable and efficient at the same time, ruin the food. There was the night when she was so enthralled with a friend’s description of his ex-wife’s anger that she had measured tablespoons rather than teaspoons of curry into a sauce: What a party that had turned out to be! Everyone had sat around the dining room table with flushed faces and tears in their eyes, blowing their noses into handkerchiefs or, in sheer desperation, the cloth napkins, and finally drinking too much in order to drown the terrible heat of the curry sauce. God, they had gotten drunk and silly. It had turned out after all to be a wonderful time, but the next day they had all had vicious hangovers.

  And there had been the time when a friend had confided a sorrow to Nell at the very moment she opened the oven to take out a loaf of bread.

  “Oh no, I’m so sorry,” Nell had said to her friend, and at the same time had reached her hand in to pull out the rack. But she had forgotten to put an oven mitt on and grabbed the rack with her bare hand.

  “Oh dear,” Nell had said earnestly, when she had longed to yell, “Oh holy shit!” Fortunately, she had been only heating the bread, so the burn was not bad, and she had been able to soothe it with ice water and first-aid cream, and her guest, so overwhelmed with her own problem, had not even noticed. But Nell didn’t want to do that again.

  So now she did most of the cooking for a party beforehand. And it worked out well, for this allowed her to make huge casseroles and stews, which were not only delicious, but inexpensive. For tonight’s party she was making a cassoulet—full of all those wonderful cheap fat white beans. Peasant food. She did like peasant food best. And this dish made her feel so thrifty and prudent, for she could sneak in the leftovers: chunks of roast lamb and roast pork, chicken wings and duck legs, all cooked for other meals and left over and frozen and now appearing from her freezer so that she could turn out this elaborate and time-consuming dish in very little time at all.

  Now she stood at the sink peeling a spicy sausage and cutting it into small slices. She brought out her huge white ironstone casserole dish and layered it with the cooked beans and meat, then poured the thick garlic-flavored bean stock over it all. Now she would bake the casserole slowly, and it would come out crusty, brown, and pungent. She would serve the dish with a crisp green salad, French bread, beer, and fresh fruit for dessert. She licked her lips in anticipation and closed the oven door. She would have only to reheat the cassoulet tonight, after the flavors had mingled together all day. She could concentrate on talking with her friends rather than cooking for them and yet serve them with a delicious meal.

  She especially wanted to please the people who were coming tonight, because she liked them all so much. The Andersons were coming: John and Katy. He was a pediatrician; she was an artist taking time out to have babies. She was pregnant now with their first child. They were a beautiful couple, John and Katy; they were a lucky pair, and it made Nell happy just to know they existed, just to know such a golden, happy, busy pair could exist in the world. They were proof that good fortune could happen. And they were wonderfully funny and always knew the best jokes.

  The Shells would also be coming. Nell had met Ilona through the shop: Nell sold the clothes, and the beautiful, elegant, willowy Ilona bought and wore them. Over time Nell and Ilona had become aware that they had similar taste in clothes and men and music and a similarly offbeat, slightly bizarre sense of humor. They had become good friends.

  They had become such good friends, in fact, that at first Nell had been baffled; she could not figure out why a woman as wealthy and sophisticated as Ilona would want to spend her time and friendship on a woman who lived a life as relatively poor and disorderly as Nell’s. Then she met, at a party at the Shells’, the polite and nearly embalmed social set that was part of Ilona’s life, and she met Ilona’s husband, Phillip.

  Phillip was an insurance executive who was apparently doing his best to live his life out of some handbook on appropriate executive behavior. He was handsome and well dressed, and Nell didn’t think he was stupid, but how would she ever know? For Phillip was cold, aloof, secretive, a real tight-ass, a stiff, brittle stick of a man. At one dinner party in which all the people gathered around the table were parents or parents-to-be, the subject had been circumcision—whether or not to circumcise baby boys. Phillip had said, in his. I-am-making-a-pronouncement voice: “Circumcision is just another way for doctors to make money. Personally, I’ve always thought it was a rip-off.” And he never did understand why the rest of the table went into waves of groans and laughter.

  Well, Nell couldn’t have Ilona to her party without Phillip, so he would be coming too, the old bore.

  Stellios would not be coming. Stellios was Nell’s lover now, but he was younger than Nell and less educated, and he worked for the city road crew. He had told her that he would not feel comfortable with this group. Nell often wondered, on days like this, or nights when she was alone at a party without an escort, what on earth she was doing going with a man like Stellios. He was really not her type. Then she’d spend a night with him and remember quite clearly and intensely just why it was she was going with him.

  People knew she was going with Stellios, and they asked about him when they saw her and she always said he was fine, and they moved on to another topic. Some of her friends had met Stellios—Katy Anderson had. Katy had dropped in one evening when Nell and Stellios were drinking beer and watching a football game on TV. Katy had joined them for a while. When she had to leave, Nell had walked Katy to the door, and they had stood in the back hall laughing in whispers like schoolgirls.

  “Hubba-hubba,” Katy had said. “Boy, do I envy you.”

  “Well, he is cute,” Nell had said. “But, Katy, I envy you.”

  She did envy Katy Anderson, very much. She envied Katy especially for her husband, who loved her completely and who paid the mortgage and the bills without blinking an eye. More than anything else in the world, Nell wanted for herself the plain old traditional joys: a loving husband, a solvent bank account, a peaceful life.

  But she didn’t have that, and couldn’t. So she went back up the stairs and changed out of her old gray robe and into grubby jeans and an old flannel shirt. She went to the bathroom; her diuretic
was working, thank heavens. She had Hannah send the four little kids back to their own homes and she told Hannah to change into jeans. As the little kids went out the front door, Jeremy came in. Nell marshaled Hannah and Jeremy into the kitchen. She would give them lunch, then force them to help her clean the basement. Her desires, she knew, would quickly diminish once they all went down into the damp, dim underworld of their house; she would wish not for a husband or wealth, but only and entirely that they would not find any little furry body, living or dead, mingled with the children’s litter.

  Nell put a plate with two peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and a banana and a pile of cookies in front of her son. Jeremy had Nell’s reddish-brown hair and eyes, her pale freckled skin, and he also had her lean body, which on his ten-year-old frame looked gawky, scrawny, and almost painfully thin. He was all knees and elbows and energy.

  “How was soccer, Jeremy?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Jeremy said. He took a bite of his sandwich, then grinned at his mother. “Hey, Mom,” he said. “What’s hard and red when you put it in, and it comes out soft and pink and wet?”

  “Jeremy!” Nell said, aghast, dropping the butter knife on her foot. “May I remind you,” she said sternly, “that your sister is only eight years old?”

  Hannah laughed at Nell. “I can guess that joke, Mom,” she said. “Duh. Bubble gum.”

  Two

  At two-thirty the next morning, Nell was roaming through her house in the dark, barefoot in order not to wake the children, carrying an enormous glass full of water. She had drunk too much alcohol at her dinner party. She had fallen asleep when her guests left just after midnight, but she had tossed and turned and finally awakened with bad dreams. Terrible dreams. Now she was caught in one of the nighttime frenzies she had come to call her Panic Nights, a state of irrational alarm, when she worried desperately about money, her children’s mental health, her own lonely life, the fact that she was growing older, the years she had wasted in her twenties … everything.

  These spells had begun just after her divorce and for a few months were so overpowering that she had developed insomnia as a defense against them. The insomnia had left her exhausted and wired up at the same time, which made the Panic Nights even more gripping. At last she had seen a doctor, who prescribed a tranquilizer for her, and it had helped immensely. She still had a vial of the small yellow tablets in her medicine cabinet, but she used them only as a last resort, only in states of real desperation.

  She would not use one tonight. She knew that now her nervous state was due to having too much alcohol in her system. She was dehydrated. So she wandered around in the dark, going into the kitchen or bathroom for glasses of water, staring out different windows, hoping the gentle moonlight on the lawn would eventually calm her.

  Some nights she loved being the only one awake in the house. In the winter she would often sit up in bed as if summoned, instantly lucid and pleased, because the moon was full and shining on the snow and the outside world gleamed magically. Then she would pull her gray robe over her and curl up on the floor, her head on the windowsill, gazing out at the moon-illuminated world that surrounded her house, elated by the mysteriousness of the natural universe, all this lovely silver air that went on and on in spite of her petty life. On some nights in the summer she would creep out at three or four in the morning and sit curled up on the wicker porch swing, smug to be alone and awake, listening for the first bird calls, watching for the first lights of morning to come silently sliding across the horizon and down through the trees onto her lawn. Her children had often found her there in the morning, asleep on the wicker swing, and when she awakened, she would be damp and shivering from the misty morning, but rested and optimistic, as if the night air had provided some kind of mental cure for her.

  But this was a night of a different sort, an unpleasant stretch of time she had experienced before, too often: a Panic Night. Tonight when she walked through her house, she looked out the window and saw that the back steps off the kitchen were still broken. Last fall, running up the steps to answer the phone, her left leg had hit the rotting wood just the right way so that the wood gave and her leg plunged through to the thigh. That had been an awful feeling, her leg suddenly trapped in the splintered and shattered damp boards. The steps were old and rotten and dangerous, but it would be expensive to replace them. She didn’t think she could afford to have them replaced this year.

  And she didn’t know what she was going to do about the two dead elms at the back of the property. They were dangerous, too, with their arching dead limbs that crashed to the ground during wind storms. Part of one elm hung over a neighbor’s yard, and Nell knew it was her responsibility to have those elms taken down before they fell on the yard in a littered mess or, worse, on an animal or person. But the cost of taking down those elms …

  What was she going to do? How could she manage it? She couldn’t. She would have to sell the house. She couldn’t possibly keep up any longer with the outside of her house, not even with the lawn. The first summer she’d been divorced, she had dated Steve, and he had done her lawn work for her—mowed the grass, trimmed the bushes—and had been pleased to do it; he liked doing that sort of thing. Perhaps this year, if she continued seeing Stellios, he would mow her lawn—but she couldn’t stay with a man just because he might mow her lawn; that was an awful way to think and she hated herself for the thought. Oh, looking out her windows tonight at the April ground that would soon be overgrown with all that damn grass—that did not calm her at all. It made her stomach clench.

  When the Panic Nights were especially bad, and this promised to be one of them, Nell would quickly move from worry about the present to the definite philosophical belief that this, her frightening life, was what she deserved, was what she had coming to her, for being such a terrible little vain fool in her youth. She hadn’t known a thing then, not a thing. All she had cared about were her clothes and her hair and her fingernails and the length of her eyelashes, all she had attempted was to attract men and be envied because of her looks and acting abilities, all she had wanted had been more of everything for herself, and she had had no compassion, and she had never thought that she could get older.…

  And now here she was. So much gone, so little left.

  Why had she been such a little fool? She wasn’t genetically stupid, she had only acted that way.

  It was hard not to blame her parents for spoiling her, but after all, really, what had they done but love her and believe in her? She was their only child. She had been beautiful and unusual, with lots of reddish-brown hair and unusual reddish-brown eyes and wide cheekbones, a wide mouth. She had been tall and willowy, lovely. You can do anything, her parents had told her; you can do anything, her high school teachers had told her; you can do anything, they had said to her in college; you are one of the special ones, you can be a Broadway star, a Hollywood star, you will be famous, wealthy, successful. You are one of the lucky ones.

  She had believed them all. When she graduated from the University of Iowa, she had been ready to take on the world—she had been ready for the world to see her. She had been accepted as an apprentice with a summer theater company that performed at a tourist resort in Maine. She went, prepared to be discovered.

  Now she did not know, and she never would know, if she had married Marlow because she loved him or because she had seen all those other beautiful, talented girls and had gotten scared, had run into marriage for the safety of it. Now, leaning against a window, Nell smiled at herself: ha, she thought, so much for the safety of marriage. Well, then she had reveled in her little victory: she had married Marlow St. John and had secretly thought of him as her prize, her trophy, her bouquet of roses at the end of the performance. If she was never to win an award for her acting, she would at least win this award for her life.

  Oh God, had she loved him? She honestly did not know. She had been so young, dumber than she should have been at twenty-five, and he had been so powerful, so truly enchanting. Even
before meeting him, she had thrilled at just his name: Marlow St. John. He had lived up to his name, Marlow had, with his rangy sleek body and his mane of prematurely graying hair and his passionate black eyes. He looked dangerous. He was dangerous. Everyone knew that. It was common knowledge among the women in the acting company: Watch out for Marlow St. John, they said. He’s divorced and he charms women and he’s had affairs with hundreds. He is irresistible. Nell was half in love with him before she even set eyes on him.

  When she did see him, he took her breath away. He was so powerful, so handsome, so romantic.… She stopped longing for parts in the plays he directed and began to long for him. Oh, had she loved Marlow then? Or had she only loved the illusion of it all?

  She had truly thrilled when he first touched her, backstage, so lightly on the cheek, and later, leaned to kiss her so gently she felt his breath but not his lips. Those late nights after rehearsals, when they met far out at a lonely beach and walked along the water, holding hands, talking, embracing, saying elaborate things to each other: if that had not been love, at least it had been lovely.

  What was true? How could the reality be untangled from the vision? She had written a love poem to him. But even as she sat writing it, she was aware of herself doing this romantic deed; she could see herself sitting on a flat rock by the ocean, her cotton skirt rippling up with the sea breeze, her sunstreaked hair falling over her shoulders, her pen poised at her lips as she sat deep in thought. She liked it that others came walking along the beach and, seeing her so intensely involved with her pen and paper and her thoughts, passed on without speaking. She saw herself as a fascinating woman, and she adored Marlow endlessly because he was making her fascinating. He was casting and directing her in the ultimate role.

  When they finally did make love, she was terrified. She was so stunned to be in Marlow St. John’s arms, so afraid that he would be judging her, so shocked to be really there doing that physical and private act, that she did not feel a thing. She felt nothing. She was so disappointed in herself—how could she feel nothing; she was with Marlow St. John!—she feigned ecstasy. It was probably the best acting she had done in her life. It certainly convinced Marlow. In a way it even convinced Nell. It was years before she could admit to herself just how much pretense was involved in her lovemaking with Marlow. What if she had been more honest? What if she had been able to say: Marlow, I’m so terrified that I can’t feel a thing? Perhaps he would have slowed down, consoled her, soothed her, waited for her to calm down and be there in reality. Marlow was capable of such kindness. But she had not known that then—she had known so little then—and she had lied. So their love affair had gone thundering on like a summer storm of heat lightning, flashing and thundering, leaving the earth untouched. Nell loved the drama of it and did not know until later just how superficial a spectacle it was.