by Nancy Thayer
There seemed to be no way to win this person over, either, and Nell was certainly adept at charm. Nell had put a bouquet of wild flowers in a water glass in Clary’s room in the little house the theater had rented for them for the summer. Clary’s first deed in the house was to bring the flowers into the kitchen. “I have hay fever,” she explained curtly. Clary’s second act was to unpack the portable record player she had brought. She shut the door of her bedroom, turned the stereo to its highest possible volume, and stayed in her room all afternoon, listening to David Cassidy and The Monkees. That was what she did most of the time she was in the house. When Marlow requested that she join him at his rehearsals, she did; when he asked her to go anywhere with him, she would, but not gladly.
Nell made a few halfhearted attempts to be chummy. She was only twenty-five, she didn’t know about kids.
“Want to help dry the dishes, Clary?” she asked the first night, envisioning them sharing the work, chatting away, getting to know each other.
“Huh-uh,” Clary said, and left the room.
Well, Nell had thought, now what? Do I demand that she help with the dishes? Marlow had already left the house for rehearsal. She let the matter drop.
They were on the road then, living in a rented house in Maine. Nell had no friends there, although if she wanted, she could always socialize with the theater company. And those people might be fickle, dramatic, foolish, or vain, but at least they talked; they believed that part of human life involved interacting with other human beings. Nell let Clary go her own way. She did not try to woo her any more—she did not want to woo her—she felt no responsibility for her, and after a few days began to feel a deep resentment toward her. Always slipping back into her room, her face sullen, to listen to her insipid music. Little churl, Nell thought.
Poor Clary. One morning after she had been with them for three weeks, with perhaps thirty-two words passed between her and Nell, she came into the kitchen, where Nell was finishing her coffee. Marlow had gone for the morning. Nell had a list of errands to run for him. She thought she’d ask Clary if she wanted to join her—it couldn’t be that much fun staying in the bedroom all day—but the past few times when Clary did join her, it had been like having a robot along.
“The ocean’s beautiful, isn’t it, Clary?” she would ask.
“Um,” Clary would answer, noncommittal even about the ocean.
You don’t like the ocean? Let me find you a nice filthy slum, you creep, Nell would think. She was always silently retorting to Clary in her mind; it saved her sanity. She knew that she was the adult and Clary the child, Marlow’s child, so she had the responsibility of courtesy. But it was hard work.
“Good morning. Want some breakfast?” Nell asked that morning when Clary entered the kitchen. It was not a warm greeting, but it was the best she could do given that icy stare.
Then she looked at Clary, who seemed to have passed from icy to bloodless. Her lips were white. Her dark eyes were wide and tremulous around the edges, as if she were straining to keep back tears. She looked mummified standing in the kitchen doorway, erect, tense, wrapped rigidly in her white skin as if in a binding. She seemed to be holding herself together with her skin and her own thirteen-year-old will power. God, Nell thought, what has she seen? Did she hear me and Marlow making love? Is she going to kill me? Is she going to kill herself? Is something dead in the house that I haven’t seen? Is she insane?
“Clary …” she began. “What’s wrong?”
Clary stood white and frozen in the doorway. She raised her lovely judgmental head and glared down at the seated Nell. “I need—” she began, then stopped. “I’ve started having my period,” she said, her voice excessively casual. “Do you have—I just used some toilet paper, wadded up …”
That’s why she’s walking that way, Nell thought, weak with relief.
“Oh Lord, I thought you’d seen a ghost,” Nell laughed. “I thought you were a ghost! Come on into the bathroom.” Then, seeing that Clary still remained rigid, she knew in a flash what was going on, and it made her brave enough to be intrusive. “Is this your first period?”
Clary nodded. Nell got up and led her to the bathroom and dug out the necessary equipment for Clary from a shelf.
“Do you know how to use all this stuff? Do you know all that’s happening? Do you want me to explain anything?”
“No,” Clary said. “It’s okay. Mom told me everything. And school. And my friends have all started. They all started long ago.” Her face began to crack. “I thought I was never going to start,” she said. “I’m thirteen years old. I thought …”
Clary could not go on, but Nell knew what Clary thought. Clary thought she was either ill or doomed. She thought that she out of all women on the earth was deformed, did not have all the necessary sexual apparatus functioning within her. Boys were lucky. They could look right down at any time and see proof of their masculinity. But women had so much hidden away from sight; it wasn’t fair. Nell remembered how it was to be a teenager, when your own body was such a frustrating mystery: would you start your period, ever? Would you be “regular,” or would you live life in a series of surprises and embarrassments? Would you ever have breasts, or would they always be this size? Everything was so far beyond any pitiful control you might try to exert. Things just popped out, or not: pimples, pubic hair, breasts, blood. And it all seemed so weighted with significance, seemed to mean so much.
Nell walked over to Clary. She put her arms around her and hugged her. Clary stood rigid, her arms at her side, not breathing. Still Nell held her. Like it or not, kid, you get this, Nell thought, hugging Clary. She stroked Clary’s blond hair one time, gently, then released her.
“Well,” she said. “Welcome to the real world. Look, here’s all the stuff. Why don’t you call your mom when you’re fixed up; she might like to know. You might feel better after talking to her. And then I’ll tell you about when I started!”
Clary did not smile, did not say thanks, but slowly, color was returning to her face. Nell left her alone in the bathroom. After a while, Clary came out, called her mother, who wasn’t home, then sat down at the kitchen table across from Nell.
“Do you feel okay?” Nell asked. “Any cramps?”
“No. I’m fine,” Clary said.
Nell set some juice and toast in front of her. “I fixed you a nice piece of liver while you were in the bathroom,” she said, then, seeing Clary’s horrified face, hurried on, “That’s a joke, Clary. I won’t ever fix you liver. But you do need to start taking vitamin pills with iron now, you know. You can take mine. And I use Midol for cramps. If you feel bad, let me know and I’ll share my medicine box with you. Having your period can make you feel really bad sometimes. Or maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones.”
Clary didn’t respond. She drank her juice, ate her toast, did not speak. But there was a new look in her eyes now; one layer of defense the thickness of a fish scale had fallen away from her face, and even that much made a difference. She’s not really such a bad kid, Nell thought. I wouldn’t want to be thirteen again.
“Let me tell you about my first time,” Nell said. “This was in Iowa. In the summer. We went to a little farm town, Solon, to visit some relative’s relatives. Old people. I can’t remember why, maybe it was a funeral. At any rate, I was there with my parents, staying in some old relative’s big old house, and there were some other people there, too. I was twelve. The only other kid there was a girl who was sixteen. Carol. She was so cool. She was so experienced. Sophisticated. She wore a bra; I didn’t. She had a charm bracelet; I didn’t. She had a picture of her boyfriend in a gold locket around her neck. I didn’t have a locket, a picture, or a boyfriend. She kept perfume in the refrigerator to spray on her wrists or the back of her neck—she would lift her long ponytail up and it seemed the most exquisite thing anyone could ever do. My hair was chopped off in a sort of pageboy, God, I looked like a little Sir Lancelot. Boys came by in their cars to pick her up and take her off for C
okes, and my relatives made Carol take me with her! Oh God, it was agony. I knew she hated me.
“ ‘Now, Carol,’ the old farts would say, ‘don’t be rude. Nell doesn’t have anything to do. You children should stick together.’
“Carol would stand there, just looking at me. I knew she thought I was a worm. I kept saying I didn’t want to go, I wanted to read, I wanted to hang around the house, but they pushed me off on Carol. It was just shit. We’d drive around that town, Carol and the two boys in the front seat and twelve-year-old me in the back. Can you imagine how I felt? I wanted to die. The three of them would sit up there, smoking, laughing, making jokes I couldn’t understand. And I would just sit back there wishing I could die.
“Well, one night when we got back from driving around with these boys, as I was getting out of the car, I felt this wetness on my thighs and underpants. I couldn’t get into the house fast enough. It seemed I could hear them all giggling in the car behind me. It was dark, and surely no one was looking at me anyway, but still I felt—like I had a phosphorescent, glow-in-the-dark bottom. Carol stayed outside, flirting with the boys. I went on in, went right to the bathroom, pulled down my shorts and pants—oh God, I can still see the awful sight. Blood on my pants.
“Now here’s the worst part: When Carol had deigned to talk to me, she had of course asked me if I had started having periods yet, and I had of course said of course I had. I was desperate to appear grown-up. I had been so blasé when I answered her. I said, of course I’ve started. She said, oh, isn’t it a drag. I said, yes, thank heavens I had just finished my period last week before coming.
“So there I was, stuck. I knew from life-science class that your period comes only once a month, not every week. I didn’t have anything to wear, and my pride wouldn’t let me ask Carol for anything, and my mother was asleep. I couldn’t think what to do. So do you know what I did? I just decided I wouldn’t have my period. I sat there in that old bathroom—I can still see the floor, I stared at it forever, it was covered in little white octagonal tiles lined in black, those octagons repeated themselves endlessly—I sat there and thought, well, damnit, I just won’t start yet. This isn’t a good time to start having my period. I don’t want it now. And that’s all there is to it. So I pulled up my pants and brushed my teeth and put on my nightgown and went to bed. And when I got into bed, I didn’t lie there thinking, oh gee, I’ve started my period. I just forgot it. I thought about what a bitch Carol was. I fantasized about those boys driving by and asking Carol to sit in the back and asking me to sit up front. I daydreamed about that till I fell asleep, and I really forgot about my period.
“Well, when I woke up the next morning, you can imagine what my nightgown and the sheets were like. I sat up in bed, looked down, and wanted to scream: I looked like a disaster victim. Blood everywhere.”
“Oh, gross,” Clary said.
“Yeah, it was gross,” Nell replied. She laughed. She went still. “It was also scary. I sat there in bed looking down at those awful stains on the sheets and my nightgown and the gob of stuff all over the bed, the horrid mess of it all, and realized what had happened to me and that there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. My body was doing it without my permission. It was like—it was as if I had awakened speaking Chinese, unable to say another word in English. It was that strange, that radical a change.”
“Hadn’t your mom told you about periods?” Clary asked.
“Oh yeah, of course,” Nell said. “And thank heavens she was there then. Finally I got up, pulling the sheets off the bed and wrapping them all around along with me, and waddled over to the door and called her. Thank God she was upstairs and heard me. She came in and helped me clean up the mess and fix myself up, and she didn’t tell anyone anything. But then I spent the next two days until we left in fear that something would show or someone would say something and Carol would know I had only just started my period. I never did see Carol again. I wonder where she is now. The little bitch.” Nell sat in silence for a minute. “Well, look,” she went on, “do you want me to tell Marlow? Do you want to tell him?”
“Why tell him? You think he’ll give me a banquet?” Clary said, and she grinned, so that her braces flashed briefly.
Nell was stunned. She looked at Clary, looked away, so that Clary could not see just how astounded she was. Those words of Clary’s, so cynical, so bitter, so realistic, mixed with her tone of voice and smile, which indicated good humor and sympathetic understanding, seemed to be characteristics of a child far older than thirteen. She has some idea of just what kind of man her father is, Nell thought in surprise, and in further surprise she knew that Clary was okay about it. She could handle it.
“I mean,” Clary went on, “I don’t think this will exactly be a magic moment in his life.”
“No,” Nell conceded. “Still … he’s a man, and they don’t know …”
“Wait till I’m back in Denver to tell him. He’s only going to take it as some kind of inconvenience to him if you tell him while I’m here. He’ll think, oh hell, now Clary will probably have cramps when I need her to carry props.”
Nell was quiet. If she agreed with Clary, she felt she would be in some vague way betraying Marlow, but to disagree would be to lie. How does she know her father so well, she wondered, then realized that Clary had known Marlow for thirteen years; Nell had known Marlow for only a little over one year. Nell could not remember having had such acute insight into her own father’s personality in her teenage years.
“Okay,” Nell said. “I’ll wait to tell him. I think you’re right. When he’s directing, everything that happens in the universe somehow directly ties into his play. We won’t bother him with this now. But I feel we ought to do something, Clary. I think we ought to, oh, not exactly celebrate, but do something to make an occasion of this day. I mean, you have started having your period. You’re not a child anymore. I remember, after I started my period, when we got back to Des Moines, my mother took me out to a store and bought me my first pair of high-heel shoes. White high heels. And a bra. Even though I didn’t need one. And a hat for church.” Nell saw the horror springing into Clary’s eyes. She laughed. “Oh God, don’t worry,” she said. “I promise I won’t take you out and buy you a pair of white high heels. Or a bra. Or a hat. But I do think we ought to do something. God, what would be appropriate for these days? I suppose I should take you to an X-rated movie, something like that.”
Clary’s face brightened. “I wouldn’t care about an X-rated movie, Nell, but it would be neat to see a movie.”
Nell grinned. “It would be neat to see a movie, wouldn’t it,” she admitted. The town they were living in on the Maine coast was certainly quaint and picturesque, and for that reason tourists flocked to it and to the celebrated summer theater. But there was no movie house. Marlow was delighted about this, of course—it meant no competition for his plays. But Nell found it a drag. “Look,” she said, inspired. “Let’s drive to Bangor tonight. If we go in early enough, we can see two movies, an early and a late. How would that be?”
And Clary smiled again.
They went to the movies that night. They laughed and talked in the car on the long drive to and from Bangor. But the next day Clary spent most of the time in her room, listening to records. She never did offer to help Nell with a single chore. They didn’t immediately begin to share intimacies. But they were on their way to becoming friends. There were times during the years of their relationship when Nell simply wanted to kill Clary, and knew that Clary felt the same way about her. But there were also times—for example, at a restaurant with a theater company, when some particularly vain actor was holding forth—when Clary and Nell would glance at each other and quickly look away, conspirators in judgment, and times, especially in the past few years, when they would both fall all over the sofa in a mutual laughing fit over some joke or episode, and times when they could say in writing or over the phone, “I love you.” Some friendships happen as effortlessly as a natural act, like the
seed of a tree lodging in the earth, the deed is at once instant and complete, containing the future in the moment. Unless there is some disaster, that seed will grow and flourish with each year, with roots as deep and powerful as all natural forces. Other friendships do not have that ease, but take the kind of painstaking nurturing that a parent gives a sickly child; it is as if nature is not willing this friendship and so the human has to fight for it against all sorts of setbacks and odds. That was the sort of friendship Nell and Clary had. Now here they were, ex-stepdaughter, ex-stepmother, and their friendship often seemed to Nell as exotic a thing as a Hawaiian orchid in a New England greenhouse, but then it was that beautiful and valuable, too.
Now Nell lay in her bed in Arlington, Massachusetts, and spoke to Clary in Piscataway, New Jersey, and Nell thought how odd it was to be so close like this while so far away physically. Sometimes when on long-distance phone calls, Nell would hold the receiver of the phone away from her ear so that she could look at the little round holes in the earpiece. She could never see the voice, yet it was there, real, powerful, instantly recognizable as the voice of the specific person, capable of arousing any number of emotions in the listener. From this incredible plastic instrument in Nell’s hand came Clary’s voice now, filled with all of Clary’s present needs, with the resonance of all the years and the history of their friendship.
Nell was awfully glad the development of the world had not been up to her. She did not have sufficient imagination for the world. She could never have invented the telephone. She could still scarcely conceive of the telephone. She read with pleasure and wonder about Sally Ride, that appropriately named first American female astronaut, and she was so glad to know that here was a woman who was expanding the work of women. She was so glad that Sally Ride existed in the world, for she, Nell, would never have been able to do what that woman did. It was not that Nell was not brave or intelligent enough. It was just that she was so limited in her desires. And Nell’s desires did not have anything to do with space or machinery or invention or money or numbers or chemicals or power or corporations. Nell’s desires all had to do with people. She had started off her life as an actress, wanting to entertain people, wanting to be other people. She could never get enough of people. In time she had realized that her desires also had to do with tending people: God, what a dreadfully embarrassing thing to know about herself in this day and age. But it was true. She loved tending to people, especially to their bodies: more than that, she needed to. She missed rubbing sweet-smelling talc into a chubby baby’s body. Now she knew that was a thing she had needed to do in her life. She could still remember rocking her children in her arms when they were babies, rocking them in the middle of some dark night, humming to them softly, feeling their moist warm baby’s breath, the breath of life, on her arm or breast, rocking, holding the real and delicious life against her and thinking: Who is getting more pleasure from this rocking, the baby or me?