Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  After dinner, Ilona excused herself to go to the ladies’ room and signaled with her eyes that Nell should join her. As they walked down the stairs, Nell wondered just how much to tell Ilona—should she tell her that she loved Andy? She was afraid that if she told her what Elizabeth had said, she’d start to cry.

  But Ilona didn’t give her a chance to talk about Andy. Ilona was too enraptured with her own luck and happiness in meeting Frank. It seemed to her only natural that everyone should just fall easily and marvelously in love, and Nell knew she would be a spoilsport to bring in her own doubts to darken Ilona’s bright joy. Ilona babbled as much of the short and happy history of her relationship with Frank to Nell as she could while they were in the restroom. She was almost divorced, Ilona said: Phillip was being cooperative—he would be—she said, frowning for once; he was too damn recessed to care enough to make any kind of trouble. But Phillip didn’t matter anymore, she had met Frank, and he was the most wonderful man in the world, and he loved her, and finally, finally, she had found true love!

  Nell said she was glad for Ilona. When they went back upstairs to their table to join the men for coffee and dessert, they found that the men had gotten into a discussion about the Boston Red Sox. Nell and Ilona listened for a while, then leaned together to chat between themselves. Nell studied Ilona as she talked. Ilona was clearly flourishing. She had pulled her long blond hair straight back from her face in a chignon adorned by a green silk ribbon. She was wearing huge earrings made from what looked like emeralds and diamonds and a jade green silk dress, a deceptively plain dress with a wide boat neckline that was always falling off one shoulder or another, easily, innocently exposing a gleam of bare skin. Ilona’s nails were very long, tapered and painted, and she wore an enormous ring that looked like a flower, with each petal made up of pebble-sized opaque green stones.

  “Your ring is fabulous,” Nell said. “I’ve never seen one like it. But I don’t recognize the stones. Are they jade?”

  “Oh no,” Ilona said, casually studying her ring. “They’re emeralds.”

  “Emeralds,” Nell breathed. She stared at the ring, quickly calculating that it was worth an amount equal to the mortgage on her house.

  “Oh, they’re not good emeralds,” Ilona said. “It’s sort of a tacky ring, really. The emeralds aren’t good at all. But it is pretty.”

  “Yes,” Nell agreed. “It is.”

  “Phillip gave it to me for some anniversary,” Ilona went on. “I guess that was his way of showing affection. Lord knows he doesn’t do it well any other way.”

  Nell turned slightly away from Ilona to mess around with her coffee, putting the sugar and milk in, stirring and tasting it. Now Frank surreptitiously slid his hand under the table to rest on Ilona’s knee, and Nell noticed how Ilona and Frank flashed each other private smiles. She has so much, Nell thought: a husband who loves her with emeralds, great beauty and wealth, and now this handsome doctor who loves her, who loves her. Nell felt desolate and jealous. She felt hateful and envious. She looked at Andy and remembered what Elizabeth had told her about Rachel. If only, Nell thought, if only Andy would reach over and put his hand on hers or touch her arm or her knee or even look at her with love. Please, Andy, she willed, if you love me, give me a sign. She sat like a child, wishing he would make the smallest gesture of love; if he did, she thought all her envy and misery would evaporate. But he talked on with Frank, oblivious to her need. Nell wanted to cry. Stop it, she said to herself. He was not being unkind or rude or slighting her in any way, he was only talking about baseball. He was only not touching her the way Frank was touching Ilona.

  I hate you, Andy, Nell thought. She stared at her coffee, thinking: Only three and a half more weeks till Labor Day. Four days after that she could go back to Arlington. Away from Nantucket, away from this man who drove her so crazy. She would start seeing other men. She would do all the brave cheering-up things she had learned over the years to do to keep going on. She would paint Jeremy’s room. She would have a dinner party and invite people she hadn’t seen all summer—and she wouldn’t invite goddamn cheerful Ilona and her love-sick doctor. She would get involved with the community theater workshop. She had been wanting to do that for a long time. The problem, of course, was finding the money to pay a babysitter so she could go out in the evenings to rehearsals. But perhaps, if she fiddled with her budget, and if Elizabeth continued to pay her this salary …

  She was so immersed in her thoughts that when Andy reached over and put his hand lightly on the back of her neck she jumped and almost screamed.

  “Look at her,” Andy was saying to Ilona and Frank. At the same time he lightly, teasingly tousled her hair. “I’ll bet she’s thinking about that shop. Listen, never fall in love with a workaholic.”

  Nell looked at Andy. He was grinning at her affectionately.

  “You look tired,” he said. “Are you ready to go? We’d better get you to bed.”

  Nell felt tears spring to her eyes. She felt like an orphan who had just been given a home, a dog just let in out of the rain. Did you hear that, she wanted to say to Ilona, did you hear what he said—he was talking as if he’s in love with me, admitting it in public! Before she could sort out her emotions, the moment had passed and the other three were pushing back their chairs, rising, commenting on the delicious meal.

  The two couples said goodbye. Nell and Andy walked back to the cottage. Andy was in a good mood and really seemed to have enjoyed meeting Ilona and Frank.

  Nell got up the courage to say, “You know, I liked it when you touched my hair like that in the restaurant.”

  Andy looked at her. He pulled her to him for a moment and they walked along, side by side, his arm around her. “You did?” he said. “You funny thing. Just wait till we get home, you’ll like the way I’ll touch you there, too.”

  And she did. When she came into the bedroom after putting on her black nightgown, he was waiting for her in bed. “You are special to me, you know,” he said to her, and pulled her to him. They held each other and kissed and ran their hands over each other’s bodies. He removed her nightgown with a slow tenderness that made Nell teary-eyed again, “Oh, Andy,” she said over and over. “Oh God, Andy.” And he said, “Nell, I love you.” He made love to her, and she cried out of happiness the whole time, except for a while when lust overtook sweetness; then she got greedy and grabby and wild. After they were sated, and she lay holding him between her arms and legs, feeling his weight all up and down her body, she cried some more, quietly. “Am I too heavy for you?” he asked, and she said, “Oh no,” and would not let him move. She loved holding him like that, feeling such great profound affection for him because he had pleased her so, because she had pleased him so. It seemed to her, as it seemed every time after they made love, that what they had between them was worth everything, meant everything in her life.

  Eight

  August was a month of splendid days. The sky stayed a calm clear blue, and if the temperature rose to the eighties, one had only to go to the beach or step inside an ice cream parlor or sit at an outside café sipping a Chablis spritzer with ice and lemon to be glad of the heat.

  Nell took Elizabeth’s advice and worked less. If the day promised to be particularly nice, she kept the children home from camp and went with them to the beach. Sometimes Clary came along. At Andy’s suggestion, they drove to find new beaches away from the crowded ones. They went to Dionis, with its high dunes, Surfside or Cisco, where the waves came crashing out of the Gulf Stream, Tom Nevers Head, which was too dramatic and dangerous for swimming, where the terns soared screaming out their domain, ’Sconset, which meant a ten-minute drive on a straight road alongside the moors.

  The children loved Surfside best because the waves were the perfect height for jumping. They swam, they built elaborate sand castles, and Nell lay tanning on a beach blanket, reading a paperback novel, or talking with Clary about the more ineffable mysteries of men and women and love. One day Nell buried her children in sa
nd and took pictures of them that way, with only their heads showing, their faces bright with smiles.

  Clary was a good swimmer and would go far out. When she came back to shore, walking up out of the water, Nell would shake her head in wonder: How effortlessly graceful Clary was. Clary would emerge from the ocean in her scarlet bikini with her taut belly and long thighs glistening and slick from the sea water. She would raise her arms up to press her streaming hair back from her face, a young, beautiful woman, glowing with health, unaware of her glory. She would plop down on the blanket next to Nell and squeeze water from her suit. “God,” she would say to Nell, “I’ve got so much sand in my suit I could lay a pearl.”

  On the days that Nell worked, she started going out for walks during her lunch hour instead of hiding away up in the boutique’s second-floor office. She liked strolling around the town in the afternoon. Nantucket had a holiday feeling about it every day. The people were all so pretty. They wore short flounced skirts, halters, visors, flowered dresses, polka dots and wide stripes, T-shirts the colors of ice cream. Everyone looked tan, and everyone looked in love. Couples lazed along with their hands in each other’s back pockets or with their arms linked or around each other’s waists. The streets were congested with traffic, not just with the cars and the four-wheel-drive vehicles that people brought over to use on the beaches, but with bikes and mopeds and silly little pedal-carts. Men and women pushed babies in strollers and a variety of cheerful dogs trotted up and down the streets, busy with their own mysterious errands. Flowers bloomed everywhere, and two different groups set up farmers’ markets on Main Street, so that Nell could look to her left and see a window full of lacy lingerie and look to her right and see brown-tasseled sweet Nantucket corn, green grapes, watermelon, avocados. On South Beach Street there was a shop that sold nothing but hammocks, and to advertise their goods they had put two hammocks just outside their store. Every time Nell walked past Lyon Hammocks, she would see children or teenagers or even adults lounging in the long hammock, swinging from the chair hammock, and she would think that this was no ordinary street, no ordinary town. It seemed to her such an amiable and good-hearted thing to do, to let passersby have the luxury of being silly in a hammock.

  On Sundays or other days that Nell had off, she took Hannah and Jeremy to the museums. They learned all about whales and spermaceti candles and how wealth was accumulated by the sea captains, who built their mansions on the main streets of the town. They saw a ship complete with oars and masts and sails built entirely of cloves; a dollhouse made of ivory. The museum the children loved best of all was the Lightship Nantucket, which had once been anchored on the Nantucket shoals and was now retired, docked permanently in the harbor. Jeremy and Hannah went through the lightship whenever they could, fascinated by the sailors’ wooden bunks and the great brass steering wheel, by the engine room, the maps of Nantucket, and the pictures of marine disasters. A long piece of wall, painted with constellations, had been brought up out of the Zodiac room of the sunken ship Andrea Doria. The passengers who had been in the cabin of the Zodiac room had drowned when the ship sank, but this much of the ship had been brought up to light. The children touched it lightly, superstitiously, wondering about life and death and the whims of giant forces such as the sea. One day an official of the ship took the time to explain to Nell and the children that lightships were still used on the Nantucket shoals, so that their beacons and foghorns and lights could warn the trading ships of the treacherous shallows. Jeremy could not believe that in this age of technology it was still necessary for human beings to bob about day in and out on lightships to warn other people. Nell watched her son question the official and wondered if it was something in Jeremy’s male genes that made him want to believe that modern technology could replace the lightship people. She was rather heartened to know that little human beings and their humble lightships were irreplaceable, and she liked the thought of those men out in the vast ocean, waiting to help others through a storm or fog.

  Jeremy and Hannah began to develop a sense of independence. Because Nantucket was small and safe, they were able to roam around the streets by themselves, something they couldn’t do in Arlington. Now and then, when Andy and Nell went out to dinner or to a cocktail party, she sent the two children off with some money to eat dinner at the Sweet Shop or at Vincent’s restaurant. The first time Nell let them go alone, she had skipped out of the cocktail party and hurried down to the restaurant to peek in the window. She wanted to see if the children were safe, if they were behaving themselves. She was delighted to see Jeremy reading the menu to Hannah, who sat with her thrift-shop pocketbook in her lap like a little lady. When the children looked up to find their mother peering at them through the window, they made disdainful faces at her. Nell left. Later they scolded her for her sneakiness. From then on, she let them go off when they wanted to, and she could tell each time how they grew more sensible, less dependent on her decisions.

  Some evenings she and Clary took them to the movies: Return of the Jedi, Octopussy, National Lampoon’s Vacation. On Wednesday nights they went to the Coffin School to watch the slides and hear the lectures presented by Greenpeace; they learned to tell right whales from killer whales. On rainy days they read or walked down to the beach in their raincoats, carrying bags of old bread to throw to the gulls. They watched the adolescent gulls with shabby gray feathers squawk and bully the white-and-gray adult gulls. The young gulls would swoop down, screeching, to claim any bit of bread. They would proclaim in loud and nasty cries their dominion. “Gee, those young gulls are mean and selfish,” Hannah said. “Like all youngsters,” Nell replied snidely, and was rewarded with a chorus of “Oh, Mom,” from the children.

  They climbed the steps to the tower of the Congregational Church one afternoon and saw all of Nantucket spread around them. They browsed in the Seven Seas gift shop, foolishly lusting after shell necklaces and cranberry-scented candles. The children bought Turk’s head rope bracelets to wear on their wrists, and their skin glowed brown and smooth against the white knots. They sat at Brant Point—which Jeremy renamed Bug Point because of the tiny long-horned sand fleas that hopped frenetically up out of the sand—to watch the yachts and ferries and sailboats coming in and out of the harbor, so close that the people on the boats would call and wave to those on shore.

  One evening Andy took Clary and Nell and the children to a play put on by the Nantucket Theater Workshop. The play was Picnic, which Andy remembered as a movie starring Kim Novak and William Holden. But Nell remembered it more distinctly as a play: During the second year of her marriage to Marlow, she had starred in the play, acting Kim Novak’s part of Madge. Madge was a young Kansas girl, falling in love and experiencing passion for the first time. Nell watched the young actress who played Madge, a woman with hair almost as red as Nell’s, and she remembered what it had been like to be an actress in that play and what it had been like to be a young woman in the Midwest falling in love for the first time. The production was a good one, and it both pleased Nell to watch the play and made her sad. When she had played Madge, she had still believed she would be a famous actress. Now here she was, only a saleswoman in a clothing store, only a working divorced mother, who hadn’t acted in even an amateur performance in years and who might never act again in her life. All those dreams that didn’t come true, Nell thought. All those dreams that I just let slip away! During the play, Madge heard the whistle of a train and talked dreamily to her sister about escaping their little town for adventures. But at the end of the play it was clear that the only adventure Madge really wanted was that of being with the man she lusted after. Madge packed her bag and ran off after Hal. Nell sat, silently impressed with Inge for holding tight to what was true.

  Out of the corner of her eye she studied Hannah, who had gone through the entire performance displaying a multitude of emotions on her mobile face, hoping that people would see her and be amazed at her sensibilities, imagining, as Nell had at her age, that people were watching her instea
d of the play. Nell could see how Hannah wanted all the things she had wanted as a girl: fame, success, luxury, a sense of being gloriously above the rest of the human race, a life of magnificent achievement. Nell wondered if Hannah would give up this dream for the love of a man. She imagined Hannah probably would.

  The days and nights just flowed by, that August. Nell worked, took care of her children, gossiped with Clary, made love with Andy, did the dishes or laundry all in a dream. Everything was a pleasure. She and the children made a game out of finding a space in the parking lot at the grocery store; they called it the A&P Gamble. She bought models of shrimp boats and schooners and paints for Jeremy and satin cord in crimson and mauve and gold and indigo for Hannah. Hannah would wash and dry the shells she had found on the beach, coat them with several layers of clear nail polish, and glue the satin rope to the shells, making necklaces to take to friends or to send to grandmothers. Kelly and Mindy got slaphappy at the boutique from working so hard, and when Nell entered the store, they would greet her with laughter and chatter, like a pair of drunken squirrels. Clary went out almost every night, and whoever was at home ended up writing endless messages on the chalkboard for her from all the men and women who called for her.

  Nell gained weight from banana daiquiris at parties, hot fudge sundaes with the children, and Andy’s gourmet meals. She stopped wearing her bikini and wore only her black one-piece suit. Even then she felt like a collection of pillows were stuffed inside the fabric whenever she walked down the long slope of sand to the beach. One evening Clary cut Nell’s hair and put a lightener on it, so that again it looked more strawberry blond than auburn. By the end of August, Nell’s face was so tanned and freckled and glowing that she didn’t need to wear any makeup except for a little mascara.