Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  Then the solid earth disappeared. Or rather the plane disappeared, into a cloud. Nell thought the plane rose, and at last they were suddenly above a cloud, with blue all around them and white down below them. She checked her watch; the plane was due to land soon. She hoped she would get a view of Nantucket from the air.

  “Fog again,” the old man next to her said aloud to no one in particular.

  “Yup,” said a woman from behind Nell. “Wouldn’t you know.”

  The plane began to descend into the cloud. It continued to go down in fog. The apple-faced boy at the controls was muttering into his headphone. All Nell could see out of any window was the grayish-white blur of fog.

  “Won’t be able to land in this weather,” said the old man next to her.

  Still the plane plummeted into the vaporous gray. I’ve had a good life and the children will be okay with Marlow, Nell thought. Then, as she watched, the fog disappeared from the front of the plane and immediately there in its place was the runway and the boy was landing the plane on it. They touched down, bounced lightly, slowed.

  It seemed everyone in the plane sighed at once.

  “That was an unbelievable landing,” said the old woman behind Nell. “I’m surprised you could get us in.”

  The young pilot took off his headphones, turned to his passengers, and grinned. “The airport’s officially closed now,” he said, pleased. “They closed it as we were landing. Fog,” he added, as if anyone needed the explanation.

  Nell stared at the boy, weak with gratitude and admiration. Now there was someone with confidence, she thought. She admired him and envied him for his ability to trust not only the mechanics of the universe but his plane, the ground controller, and, most of all, his own abilities. She wanted to thank him somehow—but then she always felt enormously grateful to pilots who had landed their planes safely, and she knew better than to make a scene. People didn’t thank pilots; it just wasn’t done. So she rose and squeezed herself out of the plane and onto the ground.

  The Nantucket airport was small, a cluster of gray and white buildings all by themselves beside a field of tarmac. Elizabeth O’Leary was waiting for her in the PBA building. She offered Nell her cheek.

  “Hello, darling,” Elizabeth said. “I’m surprised you could make it in.” Before Nell could reply, she went on, “Oh dear, you’re too dressed up. You’ll die in high heels here. The streets are cobblestone, the sidewalks are crooked and broken brick. You’re bound to break either the heel of your shoe or your ankle. Your dress is all right, but just barely. You don’t have quite the right look. But you’ll get it. Do you have any other luggage besides that bag? Good. Come on. Let’s go to the boutique.”

  It took only five minutes to drive in from the airport to the main street of Nantucket, which was called, appropriately enough, Main Street. This part of Main Street was straight, wide, and cobbled, bordered with charming shops. Nell could tell immediately, from the ride through the town and down Main Street, just how tasteful this place was. The streets were wonderfully winding and narrow, and the houses were mostly gray-shingled saltboxes with an occasional red brick Federal or white Greek Revival mansion here and there. Flowers and trees flourished everywhere, and even the small hills seemed to be dotted tastefully through the town, providing now and then a gentle rise and dip in the landscape. The golden dome and white spires of the local steeples rose gracefully above the town. Shining tidy boats bobbed in the harbor, while a few larger yachts lay still on the ocean, smug in their grand size. The people strolling Main Street seemed to have walked straight out of Ralph Lauren or L.L. Bean advertisements: they wore cotton sweaters tossed loosely over their shoulders and khaki slacks and loafers without socks, and even though it was May, they were tanned. Ah, Nell thought, how very New England this place is, how quintessentially Episcopalian. She knew that Nantucket would have little trade with ambiguity: everything here was clean, crisp, and clear. You knew at once if you belonged here or not.

  The O’Learys’ shop was just off Main Street, on the corner of Main and Orange, tucked behind the savings bank. It was a small shop with a discreet little sign that said simply, ELIZABETH’S. The building had at one time been a small cottage and was now made over, for the O’Learys’ purposes, into a long, narrow boutique downstairs, with office and storage space on the second floor. They had decorated it much like the Cambridge boutique, with plain sanded wooden floors, plain white walls with dresses hanging, angled, like clever decorations, and dressing rooms at the back, papered in Laura Ashley and furnished in brass and wrought iron.

  Nell and Elizabeth spent two hours in the store, going over the inventory and the books, discussing the other saleswoman who would be working in the store during the month of May, looking at the clothes. The O’Learys were selling a type of clothing slightly different from that in their Cambridge shop, though it all had Elizabeth’s trademark: expensive casualness. Nell’s favorite dress was one made of white cotton. It was wide and sort of permanently wrinkled and looked on the hanger like nothing so much as an old sheet, but it was cut so beautifully that anyone who put it on would look elegant immediately, and it would hide a multitude of physical flaws. There were blue-and-white-striped shirts, pink-and-white-striped sweaters, green-and-white-striped dresses, sweaters in oatmeal and cream cotton, in thick chocolaty wool.

  “The clothes are delicious this year,” Nell murmured, and thought to herself how working with these clothes would satisfy so much within her, even her sense of taste. She felt calm and optimistic in this airy store, where so much was pleasing to the eye and the touch. This kind of luxury had a lulling effect for Nell.

  When Elizabeth decided they’d done enough, Nell went through the store with her, locking up. But when they stepped outside, Nell did not go to Elizabeth’s small Mercedes right away. She walked a few steps down the street to the corner. She turned, looked, and there was Main Street spread out in front of her with its brick sidewalks and cobblestone street. It was twilight now, and the air was cool but mild. The street glowed gently from shop lights and lamplight. The tall old elms that lined the street shone a soft green where the light fell on the leaves, then rose up out of the light and into the darkness of the night in a leafy gray, so that it looked as though the trees were made of mist. This town had an otherworldly beauty and Nell felt as though she were in Europe, on a side street in an English village, or perhaps not in another place, but in a different time: this could almost be the nineteenth century. Things moved at a different pace here; she could feel that. The air was different here, and why shouldn’t it be, for this was an island, and no matter how many new people walked here or how many modern contraptions were placed here, still the land itself was an island, surrounded by water, separate from the rest of the world, and Nell could sense how the elements of this island continued to rise from the earth, from the sidewalks, from the old red brick of the buildings so that the air was and always would be just that much different.

  Nell was entranced. She could have stood at the corner staring at the beautiful street forever if Elizabeth hadn’t honked her horn several times. “For heaven’s sake, Nell,” she snapped when Nell got in the car. “What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you hungry?”

  “It’s just so beautiful,” Nell offered in her defense. “I could look at it forever.”

  “Yes, well, it will look a lot more beautiful to me when the tourists get here and it’s raining and they stroll into my shop to pass the time and spend their money,” Elizabeth said, deftly slipping the car into third gear and taking a corner.

  Nell looked out the window as Elizabeth drove, trying to establish where they were in connection with the shop, but there were too many twists and turns. Some of the roads were so narrow, scarcely wider than one car. They drove very close past houses with heavy wooden doors with brass knockers, white picket fences, ivy-covered arched trellises leading into arbors. Again Nell had that sensation of being in another time, another land.

  The O’Learys�
� house seemed wonderful to Nell too, although Elizabeth called it the cottage and seemed impatient with Nell’s exclamations of pleasure. Elizabeth hurried Nell through the house, showing her the various rooms (“You’ll sleep in the guest room tonight, but of course in June we’ll be gone and you can have the master bedroom for yourself”), flicking on lights, calling down to Colin (“Fix me a martini, we’ll be right down!”). The front part of the house stood squat and four-square, four small rooms up and down, with new bathrooms making rectangular intrusions into two of the rooms. It had not been an old cottage or an especially pretty one, but the O’Learys had spiffed it up with their special flair. All the rooms were carpeted (“because the floorboards were nothing to look at, unfortunately”) in a thick nubby golden brown, so that it was like walking through a field of ripe wheat. The walls were all white, and the oak woodwork was natural and pale. The furniture was new, low, modern. There wasn’t much of it. This gave the small rooms a feeling of airiness. A narrow hall led past the front two rooms into the small square kitchen, and the back kitchen door had been removed and widened so that the addition to the house beckoned: It was one great open room with a cathedral ceiling and windows all the way around. The wheat carpet was here, and the walls had been paneled in a wood of similar texture and color. It was like walking into a pot of honey. The furniture was teak, glass, tubular aluminum, and somehow these hard and shiny materials had been made to curve and soften, or perhaps it was the effect of the plump cushions on the sofa and the depth of the carpet beneath it all, but the room seemed new, clean, clever, and yet still comfortable, inviting repose.

  “It’s a marvelous house,” Nell said when she sat down with her hosts in the living room.

  “It has no architectural integrity,” Colin replied.

  “There’s no view,” Elizabeth added. “No view of the water, no view of the moors, and the rooms are far too small.”

  So Nell said nothing else, not wanting to expose her ignorance, but she was eager to finish drinks and dinner so she could go back and just sit in the small bright guest room. Dinner and drinks went on and on, however, and the talk was mostly business, about clothes and the people Nell should meet and take care to please; the evening was as much work for Nell as pleasure. She didn’t get back to her room until almost midnight. It was too dark for her to see anything from her window, and she knew that she’d have an entire summer to enjoy the house, so she just climbed into bed and fell asleep. It might have been the effect of the sea breeze that came in the window Nell had opened or, more likely, the effect of all the wine she had had with dinner and the Bloody Mary earlier, but she had no trouble falling asleep in the strange house and she did not waken all night long. She slept a perfect and restful sleep.

  She awoke because the room was full of sun. She felt instantly awake and marvelously rested, as if she had slept deeply for days. She stretched and listened, and heard only silence in the house. “Shit,” she said softly, thinking that she must have overslept and that Elizabeth and Colin had gone off to the boutique without her. Elizabeth would be in a snit. Nell sat up in bed, ready to fly into action, and grabbed her watch off the bedside table. It was five forty-five.

  She went to the window and leaned on the sill, looking out. The street lay below her, vivid and bright in the morning. Gray-shingled cottages were scattered at random in a rather merry muddle of trees, shrubs, flowers, and grassy yards. Nell knew that once she was on ground level the street would take on an appropriate regularity; she would see how the picket fences and great hedges divided properties into their official lots. It was very green outside and the sky was purely blue. The fog of the previous day had gone.

  Nell looked at her watch again. Surely no one would stir in the house for an hour or so, and the shop didn’t open until ten.… She quickly dressed in jeans, a cotton shirt, a wool sweater, and sneakers, then grabbed up her old windbreaker and tied it around her waist in case it was chillier out than it looked. She went to the trouble of brushing her teeth, but couldn’t be bothered to put on any makeup, and why should she bother? she thought; she didn’t know anyone here and she doubted that she’d run into anyone at this time of the morning. At any rate, she was going to go walk by the ocean, and she knew that ocean walkers always left one another alone.

  She felt rather gay and childish, sneaking down the stairs and out of the house, and upon shutting the cottage door behind her, she felt a strange sensation in her chest, as if her soul were a kernel of corn that had just popped. She was alone! She was free! She was by herself, on her own, to do whatever she wanted for the next few hours.

  She began to walk down the street in what she hoped was the direction of the ocean. The O’Learys had said their cottage was only six blocks from Jetties Beach, so she knew she couldn’t go too far wrong no matter which way she went. She didn’t quite run, but she walked very fast, exhilarated by the cool morning air, and each time the cushiony rubber soles of her sneakers hit the solid pavement beneath her feet, she felt a great satisfaction run right up her legs and through her body. How much time she had spent in her life not walking! Usually she wore dress shoes, in the boutique, or boots in the winter, or anything other than sneakers—she wore these only when cleaning the basement or garage. They had been work shoes, but now they were play shoes and she was delighted. She could tell after a block or two that sneakers were right for Nantucket, because the sidewalks were so cracked and broken, bulging up from the roots of trees, or simply old. It didn’t matter. The sidewalks seemed right. Everything seemed right. Here she was alone, without her children, without her bosses, without any man to please or desire, without even her dog and cats—she was just walking down the street in the very early morning, and no one else was in sight. She couldn’t remember when she had ever done this before in her life. She turned a corner and saw a sign pointing to Jetties Beach.

  It was a longer walk than the O’Learys had indicated, for although the cottage was close to the water, it was not close to any public way to the water. Nell walked for blocks, past streets of cottages, large houses, summer houses, summer mansions, until she came to the street that led down to the sandy beach. She ran down that street, pleased with each step that she could see more and more of the blue. No cars were parked at the end of the road, and the concession stand was closed. The beach was quiet. Nell walked about two hundred yards down the stretch of sand until at last she came to the water. Then she sat for a while at its edge, just looking out at the expanse of blue. This was the harbor side, the Nantucket Sound side, the safe side, and the waves that came in gently were breaking into a flat washing. It was shallow for a great way out, or seemed to be. Nell decided not to test the water today. It would be too cold. She rose and began to walk down the beach slowly, kicking aside seaweed aimlessly, stooping to pick up interesting shells, tucking ones she liked into her pocket, tossing the others into the water when she had finished studying them. She wasn’t really even thinking, she was just walking along.

  After a while she saw another person on the beach, a very tall slender person, walking toward her. As the figure drew nearer, Nell saw that it was a man, wearing khaki trousers, old docksiders, a heavy long pullover sweater. He was very tall and lean and dark-haired, and he had a sort of huddled look about him, as if he were trying to withdraw into himself. His shoulders were hunched and his hands were in his pockets and he stooped a bit, as if he were the sort of man who had gained all his height as a young boy and never did learn how to handle it.

  When she and the man were just a few feet from each other, they both nodded. Serious, short, silent nods, acknowledging each other’s presence but not intruding. They passed each other by.

  Nell walked on. The sun was rising higher, and all the water danced, and she wanted to look everywhere at once. Although she couldn’t see the mainland, she knew she was facing it, that if she could see far enough, the easy shores of Hyannis would be in view. But the expanse gave her the illusion that she could see forever until the world curved aro
und until she could see herself from the back, a lone woman on the shore. She walked. She found an especially hideous skate egg case, a long black swollen thing with four creepy antennae sticking out, and she put it in her pocket to take home to Jeremy.

  As she bent to pick it up, she noticed that the man she had passed was no longer walking away from her. He was moving toward her. He was perhaps fifty yards away and moving toward her very fast and deliberately.

  Nell froze. She tried to act casual, as if she were frozen casually, on purpose. She worked hard at putting the egg case in her jeans pocket. No doubt about it, the man was coming toward her. He was very tall, very thin. Anthony Perkins, Nell thought: Psycho.

  She looked up and down the beach. No other human being was nearby. There wasn’t even a dog. Some seagulls were flopping about, but of what help could they be? They only added to her fears with their awful chilling cries. Nell turned away from the man and began walking down the beach a little faster than she had before. She was suddenly cold in spite of the beaming sun. She looked up at the houses that loomed on the hills above the beach—they were too far away, set too far back, and most of the houses seemed empty, with uncurtained windows revealing no signs of life.

  Oh my God, Nell thought, I’m going to be killed. Stop it, she told herself, don’t be ridiculous. You’re not in the city, you’re in Nantucket. But why had he changed his course, why was he coming back this way, and why was he walking so much faster?