Nancy and Nick

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Why was this perfectly fine, handsome, funny boy just a friend? Why didn’t either of us feel like kissing? Just remembering Nick pressed up against me in the pizza booth could make my heart race. The chemistry of this seemed unfair—to be crazy about Nick, and only fond of Rod.

  In July a letter came from Nick. Addressed to me.

  Dear Nancy:

  Plans for the family reunion are moving right along.

  We’ve rehearsed the battle scene enough, I’m told—once! My aunt Marge is the Historical Society President, and has been from time immemorial. She thinks it’ll be so much more spontaneous and interesting if we have no idea what we’re doing.

  Aunt Catherine will be writing to you about where you’ll be spending Friday and Saturday nights, but everything has gotten quite complex. Basically the situation is that my mother has decided that since I’m not going up to see her, she’ll come down to see me. She also wants to see me in this battle, since I’m the Tory captain. She perceives the role as being some great honor; she doesn’t know that when they chose parts I just happened to be standing there. It may be a sticky reunion. She and my father have not laid eyes on each other for six years, and that time was most reluctantly, at the airport, to hand me over.

  I’m really nervous about her coming down, but I’m not as nervous as my father. He’s getting ulcers.

  Anyway, what we thought we’d do, if you and your mother can stand it, is sort of use you as buffers. We’ll sleep you two and my mother and Aunt Catherine all at our house, and Dad and I will go over to Aunt Marge’s. If Mom gets tense because I’m not around, I’ll sleep on a sleeping bag in the living room (there is a couch, but you know these antique couches) to keep her from saying I don’t love her anymore.

  Aunt Catherine and Mom always got along pretty well, and your mother is a real pleasant person (she got along with me, and I wasn’t pleasant) so let’s hope for the best.

  Let me know if this is okay, or if we should make motel reservations for you.

  Your cousin,

  Nick

  I stuck my face into one of the pillows on the couch and screamed, “Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!”

  Mother looked up at me a bit nervously. Understandable reaction. “Yes, dear?”

  “Cousin,” I explained, spitting out the consonants. “Here I am just being friends with a perfectly fine Rod Holmes and wasting time being in love with a complete dolt who thinks I’m his cousin. I am beginning to hate that word. You know why he wrote, Mother? He wrote because he needs somebody to absorb the shock waves his mother is going to make and he thinks you and I would be the perfect candidates.” I made a long series of unintelligible noises at the pillow and ground my teeth.

  “Ah hah!” said my mother, in her antique-find voice.

  “What?” I looked around, but I saw no spectacular treasures lurking in our totally cleansed corners.

  “I wondered about you and Nick and Rod. I never understood, and you, close-mouthed thing that you are, haven’t shared a single thought with me since that morning after the Final Fling. Now I see. You expect better things out of Nick than he’s prepared to give. It makes me feel like cross-stitching a motto for you.”

  “I don’t want a motto. I want Nick.”

  Mother laughed. “How about: I never promised you a rose garden. Or: Life is unfair. Or maybe: Before you meet the charming prince, you have to kiss a lot of toads.”

  “Neither Rod nor Nick is a toad.”

  “Has either of them kissed you?”

  “The motto I cross-stitch for you will be: Mind thine own business.”

  We both giggled. “Well,” she said, “are we going to buffer or go to a motel?”

  “Since the only reason I want to go to this reunion is to be reunited with Nick,” I said, “a motel seems self-defeating.”

  “Since the only reason I want to go to this reunion is to finish tracking down who your father was, and I am unlikely to be able to do that from the Holiday Inn,” said Mother, “I will have to agree with you. Another plus of the buffer agreement is that I can go off my diet. No more cauliflower and broccoli salads.”

  “What does dieting have to do with it?” I said.

  “Did you ever hear of a thin buffer?” she asked me.

  We giggled again and poked each other, as excited as little kids going to a birthday party. “I plan to lose weight before then. I intend to look terrific.”

  “I always say if you have to be a cousin, you may as well be the most attractive cousin of all, right?”

  “Now there’s a motto.”

  When we arrived at the Nearings’ at a little after three on Friday, I was five pounds thinner, Mother was wearing a sundress that made her look lovely, and we were driving our brand-new five-year-old station wagon. Right up until the moment we saw the crowd of maybe fifty or sixty people milling around on the grass between the antique shop and the split-level house I was excited and eager. And then I didn’t even want to get out of the car. What if I couldn’t find Nick, among all these strangers, and had to wander among them trying to look as if I belonged? What if Nick came up to me with some pretty slender girl on his arm and introduced her as his girlfriend and me as his cousin? What if they had forgotten we were coming? We didn’t really know any of these people, and we didn’t really belong here, except for the coincidence of my initials. What if—

  “Hi!” said Nick, opening the door on my side at the same instant his father opened the door on Mother’s side. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  He astonished me by kissing me immediately right in front of everybody. I didn’t have time to revise my opinion of the situation because it became clear that introductions to Nearings involved kisses and hugs with Nearings; Mother and I were festooned with kisses and hugs like Christmas trees with popcorn.

  “And this is my cousin Maude,” said Nick, and Maude kissed both my cheeks. “And her husband Dirk.” Dirk kissed me on the forehead. He asked if it was true that Nick had cut his hair for me and I said no, I didn’t think so. Dirk and Maude laughed and passed me on to Mrs. Earl. “Soon to become a Nearing,” she explained. “I’m marrying Nick’s uncle Stephen.”

  “I don’t have an uncle Stephen,” said Nick, frowning.

  “Yes, you do,” said Mrs. Earl impatiently, hugging me at the same time. I felt like a library book, being taken in and out. “Marcia’s brother.”

  “Oh, him. He’s my cousin Eric’s uncle—he’s hardly related to me at all. Go ahead and marry him.”

  They made friendly faces at her and Mrs. Earl was lost in a swirl of Nearings. I said, “If he’s your cousin Eric’s uncle, why isn’t he related to you much at all?”

  “Because Erie is about a third cousin twice removed. I don’t know Eric either. If I have to introduce you to some man and I don’t say his name because I’ve forgotten it, it’s probably Eric.”

  Another couple bobbed up in front of me. “Cousin Sue, Cousin Arnold, this is Nancy Nearing.”

  Sue was about twenty and expecting to deliver another Nearing that very day, from the look of her. We beamed at each other, but with the unborn Nearing between us hugging was out. Arnold kissed me twice instead. “They get prettier every year, don’t they, Nick?” he said.

  Relatives came and went like the tide.

  “How do you keep them all straight?” I said to Nick.

  “I don’t try. I just call them all cousin.”

  “Do we get an intermission, or does this go on steadily until Sunday afternoon?”

  “It sort of goes in cycles. Like phases of the moon. There’ll be these big swells of people you haven’t met since last year and then they’ll fade away and be replaced by another batch. No coffee breaks allowed. From here on in, it’s solid cousinry.”

  A great big bear of a man came up, put his arm around me, and kissed the top of my head. “So this is Nancy,” he said. “You’re the one who convinced Nick to cut his hair ahead of schedule. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, little lady.�
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  Nick had on the sort of smile that meant his taped voice would come on soon.

  “I knew you’d have to be attractive,” said the bear, “and you are. Congratulations, Nick. You were a little shy about entering the race, but you’ve—”

  “And this is my mother,” I said loudly. “Eleanor Nearing. Perhaps you knew my father, Robert.”

  The bear immediately took the bait and entered a long discussion about the various Roberts in the Nearing clan. Nick and I withdrew. In fact, we withdrew so much I began to wonder if we were getting an intermission after all. We ended up way behind the split-level at the back of the flower garden, which was just a huge golden blur of marigolds, in a little grove of high bush blueberries. “I see you’ve been getting all the expected static about having your hair cut.”

  “I’m used to it now.”

  “The short hair or the static?”

  “The short hair. I’ve gotten static all my life.”

  There was nothing to sit down on. We stood awkwardly and looked at each other. My hands had been so useful in shaking relatives’ hands but now they dangled around with nothing to do. I wanted to hug Nick but my arms couldn’t quite bring themselves to do it. So they hung there, like separate people, arguing with each other.

  “Tonight is a dinner at the Barbecue House,” said Nick. “Do you like barbecue?”

  “Actually I’d rather have one of your famous peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” He kind of smiled. He was so handsome, standing there, I thought about what the bear had said to him: You were a little shy … I said, “What’s on the agenda for tomorrow besides the battle?”

  “Southern-style breakfast at nine. Ham, biscuits, grits, sausage, and so forth. Genealogy exchanges from ten till noon at my Aunt Marge’s, hot dog and bean lunch on the lawn at my cousin Willard’s, battle reenactment at three-thirty, and pig-pickin’ at six on Nearing River house grounds.”

  “Sounds like a full day. When does your mother arrive?”

  “Her plane comes in at 11:07 in the morning. I have to drive up to the airport to get her, which is about an hour and ten minutes each way. I’ll have to miss the genealogy and the hot dogs.”

  I laughed. “You actually sound sad about it.”

  He shrugged. “Getting Mom is going to be a little harder than sitting through an ancestor-matching ceremony.”

  “She sounds pretty awful.”

  “Oh, no, she isn’t. I don’t want you thinking that. She’s fine. It’s just that she doesn’t like the family.”

  “I’m not family,” I said, deciding that only one of us at a time could be shy. “Would you like company driving to the airport? I’d rather go with you than hang around putting chili on hot dogs.”

  Nick beamed at me. “Great. I’d love it.” His face closed in again on a frown. “I wonder how I can introduce you.”

  “How about using my name?”

  “Mom isn’t very fond of Nearings, except me. She took back her maiden name, you know. She’s Mrs. Graham, not Mrs. Nearing.”

  “I guess she does feel strongly about it.”

  “Oh well. I’ll just say you’re a cousin and leave it at that.”

  That certainly wasn’t where I wanted to leave it, but he was off the topic of me and onto his mother. It seemed that she was paranoid about losing her luggage. She would bring at least six suitcases to last the six days she was staying and Nick would have to carry them all.

  “Six days?” I said. “Mother and I are only planning to buffer through Sunday night.”

  “Right. It’ll be pure unbuffered Mom from then till she leaves.”

  Actually, his mother sounded pretty neat, although I could see that this problem in dealing with people named Nearing was going to loom rather large. “Do you think she’ll be polite?” I said.

  “Oh, hideously polite. That’s what she does best, being polite. It drives my father crazy.”

  By that time we were holding hands and I had high hopes for the next ten minutes. “Yoo hoo!” came a voice. “Nancy! Yoo hoo!”

  It was my mother, calling for me. Nick and I sighed simultaneously, which was something, although I would rather have done other things simultaneously. We waded back through the relatives to the house. Every single Nearing misinterpreted our hand-holding, and I’m sure none of them suspected that what we were talking about in our low voices was Nick’s mother. There were lots of remarks and catcalls, and even one whistle. I said to Nick, “No wonder your mother detests these Nearings.”

  “They are a little nosy,” said Nick.

  My mother was almost hopping up and down on the little back porch. “We’ve found him, honey,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes, although she was smiling widely.

  “Found him?” I said.

  “Your father. We’ve figured out who he is.”

  We went inside the kitchen, where a pleasant plump woman was seated at the Sears table, and several people were crowded in there fingering the notebooks spread out in front of her. “This is Elsie Chipley,” said Mother. “Her great-grandfather was a Nearing in a little town near here called Scotland Neck. She brought along all her genealogy notebooks and she recognized your father from our wedding picture. She says he’s her cousin’s son, Robert Nearing.”

  Elsie did not use the huge rolled charts that Nick’s father favored, but kept her facts in three stenography notebooks. The Nearing section of her ancestry seemed to be in the middle portion of book number two. I stared at the little pale green page which had my father’s name written on it. “Why did he leave Scotland Neck?” I asked Elsie.

  “You know, I wasn’t very close to Bob, he was at least fifteen years younger than I. I don’t seem to have his birthdate written down here, but as I recall he absolutely detested small town living. He felt cramped and cut off from the day he was born. Yearned for bigger, more exciting things. Other worlds, and other people. I love Scotland Neck, but a surprising number of people feel trapped in the country.”

  “Do we have any close living relatives?” asked my mother.

  “No, not really. Bob’s parents died in a car accident when he was in his early teens and he lived with this cousin of mine for a while. They didn’t get along too well and Bob definitely didn’t want to grow up to work in the family insurance business. And when he didn’t marry a local girl, what was there to bring him back?”

  “What was his mother’s name?” I liked, wondering if my grandmother had been Nelle Catherine, too.

  “Mary Elise Spencer,” said Elsie. “Now she wasn’t from Scotland Neck, she was from farther south. Rocky Mount.”

  I grinned to myself. Rocky Mount was about thirty miles away.

  Nick said, “What’s the relationship between Nancy and me?”

  “You tell us, Nick,” somebody said, and Nick chewed his lip and didn’t respond to the quip.

  “The relationship to our branch of Nearings,” said his father, “seems to be with this common grandfather, here.” He tapped a name on his own charts and flipped pages in Elsie’s notebooks to show where it came up again. “Samson Nearing, born 1799, died 1881. I’d have to sit down and figure out what you two should call each other, but you’re about eight generations removed, counting from Samson down to Nick.”

  I looked at Nick and my eyes blurred, wondering about that other young man, Bob, son of Mary Elise, who left Scotland Neck for wider worlds.

  Elsie Chipley took a pencil from her voluminous purse and very carefully, in a squat but pretty hand, added two names to her little section on Nearings.

  Robert Nearing (?)

  is what it said. She erased the (?) and wrote in

  m. Eleanor Bruce—one dau.—N. C. Nearing

  There was something ceremonial about it, there in the kitchen’, crowded around a Sears table with a room full of Nearings. My mother looked at the wedding picture of herself and Robert Nearing. I thought it was sad to have to look at a photograph to remember the man you loved enough to marry. The man who died too
young to have found many of the wider worlds he wanted.

  “Hey, don’t cry,” whispered Nick in my ear. He pulled me out of the kitchen. I resisted for a moment, thinking maybe Mother needed me, but she caught my eye and smiled a little and nodded. I was glad Mother and I were sharing a bedroom that night. We’d certainly have a lot to talk about.

  But I was just as glad to talk about it with Nick first.

  Sixteen

  THAT NIGHT NICK AND I skipped the get-together at the Barbecue House. His father said not to worry; he’d keep an eye on Mother, see she had a good time. Mr. Nearing’s interest in us had doubled since he had found the right slot for us on his genealogy tables.

  Since hordes of relatives had commandeered all the other cars, we took the “new” station wagon and I drove. “Where are we going?” I said. “Let’s not get lost again. Give me very explicit directions. I need to know at least a mile ahead if we’re going to turn.”

  “Actually,” said Nick, “I sort of had getting lost in mind. Drive anywhere.”

  I wondered if I were reading all sorts of unintentional things into that remark. “I’d prefer to get lost someplace picturesque.”

  “There’s a real dearth of pretty spots around here,” Nick told me. “Boy, do I understand your father wanting to run out! About all we can go to look at is the sunset.”

  “Sunsets are the same everywhere, Nick.”

  “Exactly. So why not watch them from San Francisco or London?”

  I turned right on a gravel-surfaced road that looked interesting.

  “It isn’t,” said Nick. “It won’t get interesting unless we follow it for five or six hundred miles.”

  I laughed. “Well, they’re not expecting us till midnight.”

  “Let me drive. Then I won’t have to give directions.”

  “Okay.” I stopped the car on the shoulder, put it in park, and slid over to the passenger side. I never drive without a seat belt. It makes me feel unzipped or unbuttoned not to have that strap over me. Nick got in, fixed his belt, and started driving. Now I could see a real drawback to our big wide station wagon. Nick and I were fastened down at least two feet from each other. I should have thought of this, I told myself, and insisted that Mother buy a compact car. Oh, well.