Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  Once, when she was a senior in high school, Nell had driven from Des Moines to Chicago to spend a weekend seeing theater. Laura Morrison, her best friend, another aspiring actress, had gone with her. They had sped along the highway in Nell’s red Thunderbird, with the white top down and the wind blowing their hair. They had felt young and lovely and glamorous and adventurous, singing with the radio, passing a cigarette or Coke back and forth between them, waving at other cars. There had not been such severe speed limits in those days, and Nell had driven very fast, proud of her driving. As they approached Chicago, Laura had unfolded a gigantic map.

  “Do we want 94 or 294?” she yelled.

  “What’s the difference?” Nell yelled back.

  “I don’t know,” Laura said, her words carried away on the wind.

  The map rattled and whipped in her hands. It was big and awkward and flapped like a great colored sail, seemed to fight like a live bird.

  “Hell!” Laura said, and began ripping away at the map. She tossed complete sections of the map over her shoulder so that the paper flipped away behind their car. “We don’t need this part, or this,” she said. “We’ve already been there.” Finally, she had nothing in her hands but a small square of paper covered in a complicated checkerboard of the vicinity immediately around Chicago. “Now,” she said, “I’ll be able to make sense of this.”

  But she had thrown so much of the map away that they couldn’t figure out where they were, not even when Nell finally pulled the car to the side of the road and studied the jagged remnant seriously. They didn’t know anything, couldn’t tell anything. They didn’t know if 294 was different from 94 or the same road. They stared at the flat corn land around them and realized they didn’t even know which towns they had just passed. In the end they had had to get off the highway eight times in order to find service stations and ask directions, and that had added two hours to their trip.

  Still, Nell liked that memory. She and Laura had found the whole trip hilariously funny. And even now Nell liked knowing that once she had been brave and carefree enough to speed down a highway while her friend threw pieces of map to the wind.

  Then, getting lost had been an adventure.

  Now Nell worried that she’d never get on a good clear road to anywhere, because she wasn’t sure where she’d been or where she was. She was just lost. And it seemed that when she tried to remember parts of her past, she found that they had been carried away, out of sight, beyond memory, and she could only remember scenes of her life, scenes sailing past too quickly to catch.

  She was thirty-eight, and she had lost so many people.

  She had lost Laura very early. Laura had gotten pregnant shortly after that trip and had married her boyfriend. They lived in a tiny apartment, and talented Laura spent her time there taking care of twins, while her young husband worked at a factory in the day and went out drinking with the boys at night. Laura had been every bit as attractive and talented as Nell, both girls knew that. But their situations had changed. Nell was envious of Laura for about fifteen minutes, during Laura’s wedding shower, when her friends had given her three sexy beribboned peignoirs and Laura had shown off her diamond engagement ring. But Nell had never been envious of Laura after that, especially not the time she saw her coming out of Sears with two babies squalling in a basket.

  When Nell went off to college in Iowa City, she wrote to Laura regularly, but Laura never replied. During Christmas vacation her freshman year, Nell had gone to Laura’s house with presents. But Laura had been cold. She had looked so much older, so beaten down, that Nell wanted to cry. Still, Nell had cooed and oohed over the babies and acted as if the minutiae of Laura’s life—the blue spotted ashtray on the Salvation Army table, the curtains Laura had sewn for the bathroom window—were marvels. Laura had not been taken in by Nell’s effusiveness.

  “Nell,” she had said when Nell was leaving, “please don’t come here again. I know you want to remain friends, but honestly, I just can’t bear to see you. I can’t stand reading your letters. I can’t stand knowing about your life. I need to have friends who are doing what I do, raising babies, making tuna and potato chip casseroles. When I think of what you’re doing—well, it sends me into a depression so serious that I sometimes think of killing myself.”

  “God, you don’t mean that, Laura!” Nell had cried.

  “I do mean that,” Laura had said. She managed a wry smile because at that moment the babies awoke and began to wail. “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t commit suicide. I won’t find the time or the energy to commit suicide. But please, do me a favor and don’t write me again. Don’t come to see me again. I don’t want to know you or anything about you. It’s too hard for me to bear.”

  Nell had complied with her friend’s request. She had not seen Laura again.

  One time, in their junior year of high school, they had worked on a play about Anastasia, the woman who claimed to be the long-lost surviving daughter of the murdered Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra. They had taken turns being the pleading young amnesiac Anastasia and the skeptical old noblewoman grandmother to whom she appeals. They had played one particular scene over and over again with each other, wishing they were on the Broadway stage so they could thrill the world as much as they thrilled themselves with their passionate acting. At the end of the scene, the grandmother had come to believe that Anastasia was her own, and the two women had embraced, weeping with joy at having found each other. Then, in high school, in their teens, Nell and Laura had believed all that—that life was a process of people discovering each other, that life would be a series of joyful embraces, breathtaking revelations, passionate reunions. They had thought that only through death would people be taken from them.

  How little they had known. Nell had written Laura when she was divorced from Marlow. Now she won’t envy me, Nell had thought. But Laura had never replied. She was really gone from Nell’s life.

  Laura had been Nell’s best childhood friend. Charlotte had been Nell’s best grown-up friend. During the first few years of Nell’s marriage to Marlow, she had had no real friends, only brief and spotty and often competitive relationships with the actors and actresses who passed through the repertory company. It had been her own fault that she had no friends; she knew that. Friendship had not been important to her then. She had been too busy creating and defending the image of her marriage to Marlow; they were so clever and so much in love, the two of them, that they needed no one else. When Marlow began to have professional difficulties, Nell really cut people off, afraid she might slip and reveal just how hard times were for them. She did not want to betray Marlow to anyone. Even when Jeremy and Hannah were born, when Marlow was sleeping around, when things were rotten between them, still Nell pretended. It had been her only defense.

  When they settled in Arlington, Nell at last found a friend. Charlotte was an actress on stage and off. She was a student of Marlow’s, a beautiful tall girl of twenty-three. Her image was that of a lovely fool, a brilliant, bony, talented nitwit with chopped-off hair who could not be called upon to get the tea kettle from the stove to the cup without a mistake. She took to hanging around Nell every day, openly admiring Nell’s maternal competence, marveling at Nell’s nurturing abilities, and Nell needed that. She was a mother; she became a mother figure; warm, generous, benign, patient. Dressed in a loose-fitting navy blue corduroy jumper that hid her pregnancy-acquired fat, her hair clumped up in a bun for efficiency, Nell graciously moved through her house and life, doling out homemade cookies to her little children and anyone else who passed through the house. Marlow always did fill the house with actors and actresses and students and general hangers-on, but Charlotte was the guest who transcended all the others. She would sit in the kitchen, idly stirring a cup of herb tea, leaning her cheek in her hand, and watch Nell with admiration and longing all over her face. Nell would be kneading bread or spooning mush into a baby’s mouth or chopping vegetables, her hair falling out of the bun and around her face in tendrils as s
he worked.

  “Oh, I’ll never have all this,” Charlotte would sigh, gesturing with her hands, and Nell would see her grimy kitchen with the handprints on the cupboard doors and the cat and dog hair blowing like tumbleweeds in the corners and the trashbasket overflowing with used Pampers transformed into a warm room wealthy with life. Charlotte looked so skinny and lonely. Nell felt opulent by contrast. She bloomed under Charlotte’s admiration. She often dressed for the day thinking of Charlotte, how she would look to Charlotte; Charlotte became more than her best friend—she was Nell’s perfect audience.

  Charlotte was always being pursued by passionate lovers who were going to commit either murder or suicide because Charlotte had broken off with them. Sometimes Charlotte came to spend the night at Nell’s for protection or simply just to get some rest.

  “Why is that woman always here?” Marlow would grumble.

  Nell would reply, indignant, “She’s your student, Marlow. And she’s my friend. Besides, she’s having problems. Mark just won’t leave her alone. She needs to get away from him for a while, poor thing.”

  During the winter that Hannah was one and Jeremy three, Nell spent many nights sitting up in the living room, drinking brandy or Kahlua and cream and talking with Charlotte. Charlotte fascinated her; she was so honest.

  “I want a grand passion,” she said. “Nothing else will do. None of these simpering little boys I keep running into will do, not at all. You are so lucky, Nell. You have Marlow St. John.”

  Nell would listen to Charlotte, enthralled. Charlotte had slept with so many men. She was forever saying, “Of course, he’s a dreamy lover, but—” Charlotte would talk in graphic detail about things she had done or felt with various men, and Nell would listen, entranced. She hadn’t done or felt half those things with Marlow, but of course she didn’t tell Charlotte that.

  One evening, though, when Marlow had stormed out of the house in one of his rages and Nell was spent from tending two sick babies, she ended up drinking by the fire and confessing all sorts of things to Charlotte.

  “I’m an awful, awful person,” Nell had said drunkenly. “I must have something genetically wrong with me. Here I am, married to this wonderful man, and I don’t even know if I love him. I know some of the people I love—I love my children. I love my parents. I love some of my friends—I love you, Charlotte. But I don’t know exactly what it is I feel for Marlow. I used to worship him, and that’s a kind of love. But now it seems the strongest emotion I can dredge up for him is—concern.”

  “Oh that’s so sad, Nell, that’s so sad,” Charlotte said. “I thought you had everything. I thought you were perfectly happy. I’ve always wished I had your life.”

  Well, Charlotte had gotten Nell’s life, or at least a great part of it. Marlow had divorced Nell and married Charlotte, and now when Jeremy and Hannah went to visit their father, it was Charlotte who made the hot chocolate and cookies. She was a good stepmother, and Nell, who had once been a stepmother to Marlow’s daughter Clary, was a good judge of that. Charlotte loved Marlow, and she was kind, in her vague way, to Marlow’s children. Nell wished she could like Charlotte, but she couldn’t anymore. She couldn’t trust her. She felt more betrayed by Charlotte than she did by Marlow. All those weeks when Charlotte had sat in the kitchen smiling dreamily at Nell, she had been remembering the night before or the day to come, when she would lie in Nell’s husband’s arms and say, “Darling, I don’t see how your genius can survive in such a chaotic place. Nell’s so busy nurturing others, she doesn’t seem to ever have time for you.”

  “How could you have done that to me?” Nell had asked Charlotte during their one angry confrontation. “How could you have lied so much to me!”

  “I didn’t lie to you, Nell,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t lie to anyone. I envied you your life. But I also really felt sorry for Marlow there. He is a genius, and he was getting lost in your household.”

  “It was not my household,” Nell said. “It was ours. Marlow’s and mine. Marlow’s children as much as mine, his litter and mess as much as mine. Just because I was the one who cleaned it all up doesn’t mean I was the one who made it.”

  “Oh, I don’t see how you can be so upset,” Charlotte had said, running her hand through her ragged hair. “After all, you told me more than once that you didn’t really love Marlow. I think you should be a little grateful to me. I’ve set you free. Now maybe you can go out and find someone you can really love.”

  Cunning Charlotte. She was not even wrong. She honestly didn’t believe she had done anything wrong at all. Arguing with Charlotte, Nell had felt only more and more frustrated. She knew she had been betrayed, but she couldn’t logically prove just how. Finally, she had let the matter drop. It was done anyway, there was no going back, no changing things.

  Now she and Charlotte were pleasant to each other when making the necessary arrangements for the children to visit Marlow, but other than that they seldom spoke. Nell often thought she missed Charlotte as much as she missed Marlow. Charlotte had certainly admired her more, or pretended to, and it was even possible that Charlotte understood more about Nell, the real Nell, than Marlow ever had. It was a very complicated tangle, their relationship, but in the end, Charlotte was one more person whom Nell had really lost.

  When Nell was a little girl, she had been taught a song in her Brownie troop that went: “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” It was a pretty song when sung in rounds, and the sentiment was pretty, too, but now Nell thought that perhaps the moral was inaccurate, at least for someone Nell’s age. She did not think she was the same person she had been ten years ago or six years ago. Having children and getting divorced had taught her self-sufficiency, courage, and compassion; she knew she had those qualities now, and she did not have them when she was younger. Now she knew how to be a good friend, and the friendships she had developed over the past six years were of great importance in her life. These people might not have known her ten years ago—if they had met her, they might not even have liked her ten years ago—but they knew her now, they knew her: Nell St. John. Not Mrs. St. John, the wife of the director, but Nell. It was a very rich reward, this being known and liked for herself; it was a real feast. At first her friendships had been a sort of medicine, a tonic, that helped her get well. Now these friendships were almost a food. They sustained her life. She was fit and full in the world because of her friends.

  And she hadn’t lost Clary. Her relationship with her stepdaughter had lasted in spite of everything. Their friendship had been like the straw that Rapunzel spun into gold: straw at first, it had been spun and toughened and twisted and tested by the wheel of time and had come out gold.

  Nell had been twenty-five when she became Clary’s stepmother; Clary had been thirteen. She had been a cynical child, and it had taken Nell a long time to realize that what she thought was arrogance on Clary’s part was really a kind of fierce caution. Clary looked like her father. She was long-limbed and lanky, with blond hair and fair skin and dark eyes. But she did not act like her father. Marlow was impetuous, dramatic, quick, and obvious. Clary was analytical, still, and slow to action. It drove Marlow nearly wild that Clary did not want to act onstage. She had even refused to learn to play an instrument. She did not like to play tennis. She preferred biking and swimming, solitary sports. She preferred reading books or watching television to being with people. Marlow couldn’t understand her at all, and she irritated him.

  Clary came to stay with Nell and Marlow every summer, and every summer she refused to learn to act. Marlow made Clary a part of the set crew for whatever play he was directing. Clary would grudgingly and quietly do exactly what was asked of her. “Bring the hammer, get some coffee, tell Marlow we need him—” These were orders she could and would follow. Otherwise she would just stand around the stage, waiting, watching, chewing her thumbnail, looking bored. She drove Nell crazy, too; Nell would have died to have had a director for a father, would have given up anything
to have been around actors and the theater as a teenager. She couldn’t believe that this beautiful young girl couldn’t see how lucky she was, what chances had fallen into her lap.

  The first few years of her marriage, Nell paid small attention to Clary. Nell was still too busy trying to be the most beautiful and talented actress in the world, and then too busy trying to buttress Marlow’s falling ego. There was not much room in Nell’s narcissistic thoughts for a surly teenager. She cooked Clary’s meals, washed Clary’s clothes, and did what had to be done, but her life and Clary’s revolved around Marlow—around his schedule, his needs, his desires. Nell had no experience as a mother, and so it did not occur to her very often to wonder whether or not Clary was happy. It did not occur to her to ask Clary if there was any other thing in the world she would prefer doing to hanging around the theater where Marlow worked all summer. After Nell became a mother, she realized how few motherly feelings she had had for Clary, how she had not protected her.

  Still, she was only twelve years older than Clary, and although she had never done things with Clary out of charity, she had done things with her out of pleasure, and that counted for something. Both Clary and Nell loved horror movies, which Marlow considered trash. Whenever they had a chance that first summer, they would go off together to sit munching popcorn and squeezing each other’s arms while vampires or zombies or man-eating wasps terrorized the world. They loved the psychos best. They loved being scared. They loved playing games together, too. Nell was always glad when it was summer and Clary was there to play with, for Marlow was always too intense and busy to settle down to what he considered childish activities. Nell and Clary spent their summers playing Clue, checkers, card games, elaborate games of Monopoly that went on for days. These were frivolous acts, Nell later realized, not the sort of enterprise shared by parent and child. But, Nell also realized, they were the sort of thing shared by friends, and over the years that was what Clary and Nell became.