by Nancy Thayer
Only last summer at a pond she had been shocked to realize how happy it made her to say to nine-year-old Jeremy: “Come over here; let me put some lotion on your back or you’ll get a worse sunburn than you already have.”
“Oh, Mom,” he had said, exasperated.
But she had taken her time rubbing lotion into his shoulders and down his long bony back, down his arms. She did not get to touch him so much anymore; he did not need physical tending. He did need more verbal supervision, though: that was the hard thing. More and more, her interaction with her children was becoming verbal rather than physical. Unfair, unfair. The pleasure was hers for such a short period of time—and so much of that time she had been too tired or just too shortsighted to appreciate it. Her children were slowly removing themselves from her, and the physical nurturing was the first part to go. Often before, Nell had wondered why her friends had been so accommodating to their teenage children, why they had been so almost servile. How her friends had rushed about, making special foods for their teenagers, doing the teenagers’ laundry when the kids were certainly old enough to do it themselves, even making their beds.… Now Nell knew why. She would do it, too. She would smooth the sheets on her children’s beds, she would bake them brownies, cakes, pizzas, she would wash and fold and iron and sew their clothes as those clothes grew bigger in size: In this way she could touch them, even though once removed.
She had never physically tended Clary. There had never quite been that guardian-child connection between them. Yet the commitment Nell felt toward Clary was stronger than those she felt to most of her friends. It was not any old niggling sense of duty. It was a more vigorous, definite, immediate response, as she might turn and run toward any child who cried or fell from a bike. Something of the maternal was in Nell’s reaction—but Nell was glad for that, trusted that. And there was more of the friend in her reply to Clary’s call for help; there was even, Nell thought, a particle of wisdom, for Nell knew that Clary did not at this point in her life need to be simply taken care of again. Clary did not want to be taken as a child, a child who has goofed up again and has to come home in defeat. Clary had to earn her way. Well, that was not just philosophically true, it was financially true; none of her relatives was rich.
Nell was pleased to offer what seemed to be an excellent solution. She told Clary about the job and the house she would have in Nantucket that summer. She told Clary she would be welcome to come live with her and that Clary could either look for a summer job on Nantucket or Nell would try to see if Elizabeth O’Leary would hire her at the boutique. That would carry Clary through to the fall, when she could try getting a job in the Boston area, with Marlow’s help.
Clary was delirious. “Nantucket! Oh wow, oh wow, Nell! I’ve always wanted to spend a summer on Nantucket. Oh, heaven!”
They talked some more, making arrangements, and finally hung up. Nell looked at her watch; it was almost midnight. She slid out of bed and went into Jeremy’s room to check him. He was sleeping peacefully, his forehead cool. He really was over the flu and would be able to go to school the next day. She slipped into Hannah’s room for a moment and stood there, just watching her little girl sleep: what peace. Hannah had always been able to fall asleep easily, sometimes right in the middle of a sentence.
Well, Nell was not going to fall asleep easily, not tonight. She was tired, but she was wired up. Too many things had happened, she had too much to consider. She roamed through the darkened house down to the kitchen, turned on the light, and began to heat a cup of milk. She had heard that warm milk had different properties from cold milk, could actually induce sleep. And sometimes this had worked for her. So she stood over her stove, stirring the milk, waiting for it to get warm.
As a girl, Nell had never been able to decide which life she wanted to have. She had known she was going to be an actress, and a famous one—that much was given, she thought. She would never give that up. But then her visions split into two extremes. On the one hand she dreamed of being a wonderful earth-mother woman, competent, caring, full of deep and healing laughter, making the theater company she worked with and her own husband and children into a giant family revolving around her. She saw herself settled somewhere near New York—so she could easily go in to perform—living in a vast rambling house, with ponies in barns and ducks on a pond, with a husband who adored her absolutely, and with endless, countless children. Eight children, ten children. Always pregnant, smug, and the house buzzing with life, all those children, all their friends; she would be a marvel of womanhood, an actress and mother par excellence.
Or: She would be an actress, but not a mother. Not a wife. She would be too wild, too impetuous, and far too much sought after to settle down to just one man. In her second dream life, she saw herself as a willful, romantic siren, always fleeing from lovers on trains while wearing fur muffs, kissing one man goodbye in London and being met at the airport in Paris by another, being courted with jewels, mansions, and flowers by endless, countless hopelessly adoring men. She would never marry, though she might have a child or two—never knowing just which lover was the father.
As a child, there had been many days when Nell had been sincerely worried about which life she would choose to lead.
How her dreams had changed.
Now the life she would choose if she could would be much more modest: she wanted John and Katy Anderson’s life. She wanted a secure marriage, real love, and goodwill and humor and caring shared with a man; she wanted to look back on memories with a man, to plan for the future with a man. She had stopped caring so much about the acting; she realized that not much joy was to be found in a string of lovers, and her two children made her life absolutely bulge at the seams, unlike the phantom children of her dreams, who drifted by without problems. She didn’t care about jewels, flowers, furs, or mansions; but she thought it would be nice to have a little peaceful love.
She had been trying for a few years to make a bargain with God. Or fate. Look, she would say, I know I’m lucky. I know I’m full while others on this planet starve, I know I’m healthy while others lie ill, I know I’m spoiled and often think I’m deprived. But here’s a deal: I still want more. I want to live with a man I love. I don’t think that’s asking too much. I think that’s a fair request. Let me have that, and as soon as I get my kids raised, I’ll turn whatever talents and energies I have to doing some good work in the world. How about it? What do you think? Okay?
Of course there had been no answer from God, or fate—unless the answer was in the negative, which Nell did not want to believe. But though she did not want to be cynical, she was having trouble being optimistic. She was having such trouble believing that her life made any sense. Everything was so random, chaotic, disorganized. She was an intelligent person, but she could not seem to get her life in control.
And now she was faced with this summer, this Nantucket summer. She would not be in her house—what would she do, just let the grass grow, let the place look deserted and be broken into? Who would take care of her animals? How would Medusa and Fred and Ginger fare without her for three months? Would Marlow and Charlotte take the children? She didn’t want them gone from her for three full months, but what would she do with them on the island while she worked? She could ask Clary to babysit—no, she couldn’t. Wouldn’t ever do that. That would be stupid. Oh, it was so irritating, this Nantucket thing. She felt like a derailed train. A car side-tracked on a detour. What a waste of time it would be, three months away from her home, away from her real life; she wouldn’t be able to get on with things. She felt like some poor damn little ant, some little black female ant, carrying her children and her house and her animals and her dreams on her back like a piece of food, some plodding old ant creeping along, trying to get over to some shelter that she could just barely see, and here Elizabeth O’Leary had come, like fate with a broom, knocking her sideways off the path. She would have to struggle to right herself and gather her life together and get back on the road.
Nel
l stuck a finger in the pan. The milk was warm. She poured it in a cup, looking down at the white liquid, and sighed. She could feel the Panic Night feeling coming on again. Warm milk was good for normal sleeplessness, but it did nothing against the Panic Nights. Nell got some brandy and poured a great slug of it into the milk and added a touch of sugar. Now she had a deadly drink that was sure to give her a headache in the morning but would be a great help toward sleep tonight. She desperately needed sleep, needed to stop thinking for a while.
She went back up the stairs and settled into her bed, knocking Medusa sideways. She picked up the paperback mystery once more and stared at it while she drank her milk and brandy. But the words swam before her eyes, and she could only think: Nantucket. Clary. Ilona. Stellios. Hannah. Jeremy. Marlow. Charlotte. What a bizarre mixture, what a glop her life had become. At the front of the mystery was the detailed drawing of a family tree and Nell sat staring at it, admiring the clean lines, the definite arrowing and connecting and conjoining of the lives and histories. Those people’s lives were lived as cleanly as roads laid out on the earth. They knew where they came from, and they had a sense of destination, and they knew with whom they were traveling. Their lives made sense.
Nell let the paperback fall to the floor. It filled her with envy. Even this paperback mystery, this fiction, filled her with envy. She finished off her drink in one great swallow, then clicked off the light and slid down into the bed. She felt slightly dizzy from drinking so much all at once, but was glad for the dizziness; she knew now she would soon fall asleep. She lay on her side, looking out her window at the sky, and as her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw more and more stars come twinkling into view. The night sky was speckled with them like a great bird’s egg. All those random dots that made no pattern. That was what her life was like, Nell thought, musing, and Medusa at this moment came creeping back over to settle in a warm ball on Nell’s hip. Nell was lonely, frightened, and confused. She felt that she was wandering through the vast space of her life like a child struggling through a complicated dot-to-dot puzzle; she could not find the clue; she could not find the meaning. She was roving through her life when she longed to be settled. There was no map for her to follow, there were no instructions, she was lost. Nell lay staring at the stars that had been thrown out in the universe in a pattern as mysterious and fluky as the pattern of her life, until the stars blurred before her eyes and she slept.
Five
Nantucket island lies twenty-five miles off the coast of New England, just south of the most southeastern mainland point of Massachusetts. It’s shaped like a fat quarter-moon lying on its side, with two tips pointing back to the continent. It is approximately fifty square miles in area, and its year-round population is about seven thousand. Its summer population is somewhere between forty and fifty thousand. Its first era of prosperity began with the capture of the first whale in 1668, and its second era of prosperity began sometime in the twentieth century, with its capture of rich tourists.
Because it is an island, there are only two ways to get to Nantucket: by boat or by plane. Either way necessitates an element of trust in the traveler.
Nell first went to Nantucket by plane. It was May, and the weather was fine and the O’Learys were paying her way so that she could fly over for the weekend to get acquainted with the town and the boutique. But Nell began the trip disgruntled. It had taken the patience of a saint and the tactics of a four-star general to organize her household so that she could make the trip. She had had to wheedle a neighborhood child into caring for the animals the days she would be gone, pack up weekend clothes for Hannah and Jeremy, make certain that Jeremy didn’t forget his homework, pack weekend clothes for herself, leave the Cambridge boutique early in order to drive the children to Newton to leave them with Marlow and Charlotte, drive back home, lock the car, take a bus to the Park Square bus station in Boston, change, and take the subway to the airport. Finally, at six in the evening, she was on her way to Nantucket.
The O’Learys had made it clear that they were doing her a favor by buying her airplane ticket, so Nell kept quiet about the fact that one of the things she hated most in the world was flying. During any week before she had to board a plane, she had nightmares about plane crashes, and she was stiff with terror for the entire flight. Optimistic statistics were no help to her; her fear was not rational, it did not help her to know that her fear was not rational. She did not like to fly. She was not even sure yet that she believed it was possible to fly; she couldn’t understand it, and every time she boarded a plane, she did so believing that the insane leap of faith required here was the same that operated for mystics who believed they could walk through fire without being burned.
Still, Nell knew that this kind of attitude was useless on her part. Her friends said to her, “Oh, Nantucket, you get to go to Nantucket, how lucky you are.” As Nell entered the airport, she said to herself: Look, Nell, you’ve got a weekend free of children, knowing they are safe with their father. You’ve got on pretty clothes, and you’re on your way to a vacation spot that people would kill to visit. The plane ride will be short and safe. Don’t be such a drag. It’s all in your attitude. Enjoy.
There was a bar at the PBA gate at Logan Airport, and while Nell waited for her flight to be called, she bought herself a Bloody Mary, which was served in a plastic cup. Just the idea of this—of being a woman alone in an airport at six o’clock in the evening, wearing a turquoise silk wrap dress and drinking a Bloody Mary—made Nell feel adult and even slightly wicked and glamorous (which just goes to show, Nell thought, how pathetically tame my life really is). But the act of buying the drink helped. The alcohol helped, too.
Nell strolled up and down the waiting area, looking out the great high walls of windows at departing and arriving planes, and felt the alcohol ever so slightly curb the bite of anxiety within her. A handsome man in jeans and loafers and a blue cotton shirt bought a drink and smiled at Nell, was looking at Nell each time she looked over at him. This made her feel even more brave. She stopped thinking of plane crashes and thought of plane adventures. Fifty years ago people used to have romantic encounters on ocean voyages; now they had them on airplanes, Nell thought. Forty-five minutes wasn’t much time for an encounter, she mused, but then, just as planes moved faster these days, so did people. By the time her flight was called, she was feeling almost devil-may-care.
The plane was a Cessna 402. It held nine people. It was smaller than most station wagons; narrower than Nell’s car. There was no bathroom, no steward, no curtain or door shutting off the front windshield and the pilot and co-pilot’s seat and equipment from view, no way to look into the middle of the plane, as Nell did in larger planes, to pretend she was in a movie theater full of people instead of in a metal mechanical can. Two rows of seats ran side by side, with a window at each seat. There was only one door, and it was necessary to duck to get through it. Nell buckled herself into her seat and felt the anxiety in her stomach begin to slither up past the power of the calming alcohol.
Four other passengers got on. The handsome man in jeans was among them, but a little old man of perhaps eighty came before him and took the seat next to Nell. A chubby kid with rosy cheeks, wearing black slacks and a white shirt with black and gold epaulets got on and sat down at the front of the plane. How cute, Nell thought, the pilot must be teaching him how to fly. Someone behind her shut the door. The apple-cheeked boy put the headphones on his head and began playing with the controls. Oh my God, Nell thought, that child is the pilot! Nell couldn’t help herself; she leaned over to the little old man seated next to her.
“How old do you have to be to get a pilot’s license?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” the old man replied. “I think you can get one if you’re old enough to have a driver’s license. But I’m not sure.”
I think I want off this plane, Nell thought, by now shot through with adrenaline and fear. But it was too late. The boy had gotten the plane off the ground. Nell could only s
it, staring out the window at the propellers that spun like deranged pinwheels at the front of the wings of the plane. Well, she thought, at least they would all be the first to know if something went wrong.
The plane flew south, low, the shoreline of Massachusetts and the Atlantic Ocean passing beneath them in a curving harmony of green and tan land, blue and green sea. Nell had never flown this low to the earth before; all her other trips had been on commercial planes that immediately zoomed way above the clouds. But now she could look down on fields and forests and highways and houses and the ocean, with its occasional dot of white ship or black boat. She could not, in fact, not look down unless she closed her eyes, which she was afraid to do because the motion of the plane was making her slightly dizzy. The plane was small enough so that Nell could feel the buffeting of the wind. Sometimes the wind came as a blow she could feel at the side, sometimes the plane simply dropped a few inches in the air. Nell kept looking at the solid earth, hoping it would make her feel secure.