Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  Nell turned over and lay on her back. She could hear the seagulls chortling. Now and then a gull would fly low over her, and that was slightly alarming, the way its black shadow swooped over her body like an omen. Then Nell would raise her head and see the cheerful red or blue sails of windsurfers and be reassured.

  After Nell and Clary had been at the beach about an hour, they noticed that all the people who had been swimming or wading in the ocean were coming out of the water. “Look,” Clary said, and Nell and Clary sat up. The lifeguards in their orange trunks and suits were passing up and down the beach, blowing their whistles, motioning for the people to come in. Their gestures were definite. It looked like a scene from Jaws.

  “Sharks?” Clary asked the people on the blanket next to her.

  But no, it was not sharks. A child had been lost, a little boy, and the lifeguards wanted every single person out of the water. As Nell watched, all the people on the beach who had been lying on their blankets just as she had gradually begun to sit up, and then to stand, to cover their eyes and search the water, the horizon. Fear passed through the crowd like a shiver.

  “The boy is four years old,” someone told Nell and Clary. It could be my child lost out there, Nell thought, and felt chilled. It was very quiet all up and down the long stretch of beach. Then came the murmur and then the swell of news: The little boy had been found. From the people on the blankets and those standing in the sand, from all up and down that whole great long expanse of beach, there came a sort of exhalation of relief, and more than that, a sense of joy, like a balloon being let into the air.

  “The child’s been found,” people said to one another. “The child is okay.” They passed the news up and down the beach, and all at once, when the news reached everyone, people began to applaud.

  “That’s good luck,” Clary said to Nell.

  Nell smiled at Clary. “Yes,” she agreed. “You see, there is such a thing.”

  That night, which could have been any of many nights that summer, so alike were all those warm and gentle evenings, Nell dressed for a party she was going to with Andy. Her skin was brown from the sun and smooth from lotions. She was radiant with happiness. Nell took a scarlet dress from her closet and thought to herself that now it was as if her life were flying out around her as full and bright and vibrant with color as the skirt of a dancer spins out from a woman in a rapturous turn. She realized that she was happy in her life. She knew she would always remember these days.

  Seven

  One evening in July, Nell walked back to the cottage after work and found Bob Walker sitting on the front steps. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said NINE OUT OF TEN MEN WHO HAVE TRIED CAMELS PREFER WOMEN. His eyes were the sort of crystalline blue that made women feel just helpless in their love.

  “Hi,” he said, smiling his engaging smile. “I thought I’d stop by and see how Clary is.” He was so casual, as if he lived just around the corner or down the street, as if it hadn’t taken a major effort to get to this island, this house.

  Nell grinned. “She’s working,” she said. “At the Golden Island on Main Street. She doesn’t get off work till nine. You can go on down and see her there—or you’re welcome to wait here for her.”

  Bob followed Nell into the house. “If she’s working, she might be too busy to talk, right?”

  “Right,” Nell said.

  “Then if it’s all right with you, I’ll just hang around here till she gets back.”

  “That’s fine,” Nell said. “I’m going out for dinner, but you’re welcome to make yourself at home. Watch TV—find something in the refrigerator if you’re hungry. There’s a lot of food around.”

  “Great,” Bob said. “Thanks a lot. That’s awfully nice of you.”

  Nell went upstairs and got ready to go over to Andy’s. She wondered if she should call Clary and warn her. She knew from discussions with Clary that she still loved Bob and that behind all the surface laughter was a well of misery because she missed him, because he was all she wanted in life and she could not have him. Nell decided not to call Clary. Bob’s appearance could only mean something good, could only mean, at the least, that he still cared about her, too, cared enough to come back to see her even though Clary had said it was over forever. Perhaps Bob was coming to propose! Nell’s heart leaped with anticipation. Then she grinned sardonically at herself in the mirror. Jesus, she thought, even now, after all I know, I get a buzz from thinking a man might ask Clary to marry him. It must be physical, hereditary, she thought; that second X chromosome that women are born with and men aren’t must be the one that fishtails inside us with joy at the thought of marriage, that drives us like salmon upstream, blindly wishing for marriage above all other things.

  When she went back downstairs, she couldn’t resist saying to Bob, “I’m going now, and I won’t be back until later, if at all. And I suppose I should warn you, Bob. Clary might not come back after work—or she might not come back alone.”

  But Clary had come back alone, as Nell found out the next day. And she had talked with Bob and he had spent the night and they had said they loved each other … and then he had left, because after all, they still could not agree and would not change their minds. Bob wanted Clary to move in with him as a lover, and she wanted to go with him as his wife.

  Nell sat with Clary awhile that morning. They drank coffee and talked. Clary’s face was swollen again from crying.

  “It’s so humiliating,” Clary said. “It’s so embarrassing. That I am the one who has to push marriage,” she said. “It’s so degrading.”

  “What do your parents think?” Nell asked.

  “Oh well, you know Mom,” Clary said. “She’ll always be old-fashioned. She doesn’t think I should sleep with a man until I’m married to him. And Dad, well, his advice was, ‘Why should a man buy a cow when he can get the milk for free?’ ”

  “God, gross!” Nell said. “Marlow said that? To you?”

  Clary laughed. “Well, Nell, it may be crude, but it’s not wrong. Oh, I don’t understand it. Why can’t Bob want what I want? All that stuff that marriage means—that we announce to the world that we love each other, that we’ll plan our lives together, that we belong to each other …” Clary started crying again. After a while she looked up at Nell and asked, “What about you?”

  Nell was startled. “Me?” she asked. “You mean what about me and Andy? Oh, Clary, it’s way too soon to even think about that. I’ve only known him a little over two months.”

  Of course that was a lie. Already Nell was wondering if there was a chance that she and Andy could have a life together, could have a marriage. They seemed to be so good together; it was such a pleasure to live as they were living, spending as much time together as they could. But Andy hadn’t mentioned the future, and Nell hadn’t, either. She tried not to think of the future. She tried to live for the day.

  That night Nell took Clary to see Flashdance. Andy didn’t want to go, and Clary had told Sam and her friends that she didn’t feel well, that she just wanted to go to the movie with Nell and then go home to bed. Nell loved Flashdance, and at the end of the movie everyone in the theater cheered and clapped. But as Nell and Clary were walking home to the cottage in the warm July evening, Clary said, “I hate that movie. I really hate it.”

  “Good grief, Clary, why?” Nell asked.

  “It’s a lie,” Clary said. “It’s a schmaltzy lie. It’s the 1983 Sound of Music. In that movie Julie Andrews was a nun and a governess who ended up getting happily married, getting what she wanted. Now here’s Jennifer Beals playing a welder and a dancer who gets to be a ballerina and have that gorgeous man, her boss, be dithering around after her with love. That just doesn’t happen in real life. Not even to girls who look like her.”

  “Oh, Clary, you’re as beautiful as that girl in the movie.”

  “Yes I am!” Clary said, turning on Nell as if Nell had insulted her. “I think I am. But it’s not much good to me, is it? Look, I worked as hard and l
ong to get my degree in biology as that girl did to get into ballet school. And what has my degree gotten me? I can’t even get a decent job unless I want to go with one of the huge firms in Piscataway and spend my days cleaning out rat cages—a rat janitor. And I’m as pretty and clever and nice as that girl, and I don’t see Bob running around after me, trying to make my life easier.”

  “Well,” Nell said, “maybe someone will make Flashdance Two. In which the girl realizes after working for four years that there are other women who are better ballerinas than she is and that she’ll never be the star, she’ll never get the roses. And her boss will end up chasing after another woman and he’ll never ask her to marry him, because why should he buy the cow when he’s already getting the milk for free? Would you like that? Would you like it if they made a movie like that? Flashdance Meets Real Life?”

  Clary walked along beside Nell in silence for a while. “No,” she said quietly. “No. I’d hate that movie, too.”

  Nell worried about Clary. She was afraid she’d sink into a slump. But when they got back to the cottage, Clary said, “I’m going to call Sam,” and after she called him, she said, “I’m going to go down to meet him at the Atlantic Café. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  So Clary was pushing on with her life, Nell thought. Still she felt melancholy, for Clary and for men and women in general. She called Andy to say good night, then went to bed alone. She couldn’t fall asleep, although she was tired, although she very much wanted the oblivion that sleep offered. She missed Andy’s body next to hers in bed, missed his warmth and bulk. And she thought how it would be very soon, when the children came back and then in September, when she went back to Arlington. Then she would be sleeping alone again every night. She was beginning to sense just what sort of price she would be paying for the rich pleasures she was reaping this summer. She lay in bed, on her side, hugging herself with her arms, feeling hollow and melancholy, deep into the night.

  Andy was a funny man. She had known him for more than two months now, and in some ways she knew him very well and in some ways she didn’t know him at all. She knew that he liked Dan Rather and why, and what jazz musicians he liked and why, and what he thought of Russian/American relations and American foreign policy—she knew that sort of thing in great detail. She didn’t know how much he had loved his wife or why they had divorced or whether he had loved other women or whether or not he preferred his solitary life. Whenever Nell talked about Marlow or her children or the divorce, Andy would listen for a while, but gradually he would show a kind of polite impatience—he would get up to fix himself a drink and remark on an interesting boat or sunset out the window, or he would remember a note he needed to jot down for his book. He never returned the favor of confiding the intimate details of his life. He did not seek out such details from Nell.

  She tried, in what she hoped were subtle ways, to draw him out.

  “Where did you go to school?” she asked one night after talking about Jeremy’s love for science.

  “Snotty New England prep school,” Andy had replied.

  “Oh,” Nell said, trying not to be daunted. “Well, where did you go to college?”

  “Snotty New England college,” he had replied shortly.

  “You’re pretty snotty yourself,” she had said, teasingly, smiling, “if you won’t even tell me the name of your college.”

  “Harvard,” he had admitted. Then, with a combination of deft sidestepping and obvious complimentary interest, he had gotten Nell to talk about her college experiences.

  Another time, Nell had been telling him about the way Hannah and Jeremy often squabbled. “Did you have brothers or sisters?” she asked.

  “No,” he had replied, his tone flat, ungenerous.

  “Did you want one? Were you lonely? I always longed for a brother or sister,” Nell said.

  “I don’t know,” Andy replied. “I can’t remember. I don’t suppose I did. It wouldn’t have mattered. I was sent off to school in first grade. I was always at school or camp. I never would have seen a sibling if I’d had one. I seldom saw my parents.”

  “Why?” Nell asked.

  “Well, they were busy,” Andy said, calmly stating the fact. “Then they got divorced and my mother moved to New Zealand. We lost touch. When I was old enough, though, I spent a lot of time with my father, going through his factories. He wasn’t ready to deal with me until I was old enough to understand concepts like quantum mechanics. He died soon after I reached that stage.”

  “How awful. I’m so sorry,” Nell had said. “You had such a lonely life.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Andy replied, genuinely surprised by her sympathy. “I was happy. I didn’t miss people. People aren’t everything, you know.” He paused, then said, looking right at Nell, “Maybe you should know that someone once told me that I have more meaningful relationships with machines than with people. She thought that as a newborn I must have been imprinted by a computer.”

  Andy’s voice had been full of warning then, Nell thought, and when he tried changing the subject, she let him. At first a romantic fantasy, a throwback to the times when she believed in fairy tales, rose in her, so that she thought, well, it will be different for us. But as time went on, she could not seem to make it different. Andy obviously wanted things to stay on the surface, in the present. And it was lovely that way, Nell had to admit, but now and then she felt lonely, and more, she felt a sad twinge of foreboding. She was afraid that Andy’s unwillingness to entrust her with some knowledge of his past indicated an equal unwillingness to entrust her with a share in his future.

  Still, he could charm her. He could please her as no other man ever had. It was easy, it was the easiest thing in the world, to stop worrying about the future when she was with him, with his hand on her arm as he guided her across the street, or when his long, lanky body was stretched out next to hers in bed. He was always courteous and undemanding and understanding. He was a marvelous cook—what a treat it was for her to be presented with gourmet meals, which included artichokes, shrimp, capers, and other items her children made gagging noises over! He loved modern technology and would grow as excited as a little boy when describing the possibilities of computers, robots, satellites. He had a vision of the future that was extravagantly optimistic.

  Many evenings Nell would sit with him, sipping a creamy liqueur, gazing out at the water, trying to turn the conversation toward some intimate, personal subject. Andy would be bored, monosyllabic, and even petulant until they had come to a more neutral topic: politics, the weather, Nantucket gossip. Before she knew it, and without her knowing just how it happened, Nell would find herself listening to Andy going on about something scientific—the theory behind space flight, the history of aeronautics—until Nell felt her eyes nearly crossing with boredom. She tried to console herself at such times by believing that he was at least sharing something he considered of great importance with her.

  He had not told Nell that he loved her, but he had said, “You are beautiful.” And “You are special.” And “You mean so much to me.” And “God, how wonderful it is when you are around.”

  On Mondays, Nell’s day off from the boutique, Andy would rise early, as was his habit, to walk to the beach. Sometimes Nell would rise with him, but more often than not she would stay in bed, sleeping late. Andy would awaken her after he had had his walk and his coffee. He would take off his clothes and slip into bed with her, his skin cool from the ocean air, his breath smelling like coffee. He would hold Nell in his arms. He would press her up against him, all up and down, until her legs touched his legs and her stomach touched his torso and her face was nuzzled into his chest and his lips were pressing against her forehead. He would hold her like that against him for a long time, and it seemed to Nell at those times that she could feel the need in him. That she could feel how he needed to come back and find her in his bed, to be able to lie down and hold her in his arms, and that when he lay naked against her, holding her against him, he was trying to tell he
r that he loved her. Sometimes it even seemed to Nell that she knew Andy better than he knew himself, that she was able to admit what he felt—love and need—while he was still incapable of articulating these feelings.

  “You are so beautiful,” he would say over and over again, stroking her hair, running his hand down her back. “You are so beautiful.” And Nell would think how she must really look, in the morning with the sun exposing all her wrinkles and stretchmarks and sags, with her hair matted and her eyelids so swollen with sleep that she knew she looked beady-eyed, pig-eyed, and she would think: I am not so beautiful, Andy, or I am beautiful only to you, because you are in love with me. Those mornings in his arms she felt an almost indescribable peacefulness and security.

  But those mornings did not last long, and the effect of them evaporated like a sweet perfume in the air by the next day. Nell would go into work at the boutique and a married couple would come in, fussing slightly in their married way about what sort of present to buy their mother or their daughter. The woman would say, “This is like the blouse you bought me last year.” The man would say, “Why don’t we get this for Annie for Christmas? We’ll never find one we like as much.” And Nell would look on with yearning, with envy, at this couple who shared a past and a future with such carefree reliability.

  As the first of August drew closer, Nell began to dream of her children. Andy had not yet met them; he would be surprised, she thought, at how beautiful they were. She thought about Jeremy, with his boyish bony body that was just now beginning to show signs of manhood—his shoulders were so wide, his chest broadening, although his skin was still as smooth as a baby’s. She thought of Hannah’s eager laughter, her willingness to share good news or bad, her self-reliance. Hannah was never bored. She could always turn the dullest day into gold. She was a powerhouse of energy, and when she was around, the world seemed brighter. If a friend couldn’t come over for the day, Hannah would put on a record, dress up her dolls or Fred the cat, and create her own friends. She would argue, discuss, share, laugh, all with her dolls or an imaginary friend, and she would be just as satisfied, it seemed, by that illusory presence as by the presence of a real person.