Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  “You shoot cats?” Nell asked, incredulous.

  “Just wild ones,” Steve said. “Just strays.”

  Nell knew at that moment that this was not the man for her life. If she had been in college, she would have said something righteous and insulting to Steve: “I don’t want to have anything to do with a kitten-killer,” she might have said. But she was not in college. At that moment in time she was a thirty-three-year-old woman who had not been to bed with a man in months, a woman who was standing next to a man whose sexuality exuded from him and twined around her and pulled her to him like vines around a tree. A flash of memory rescued her, made the decision for her. When Steve came to pick her up that evening, she had not been ready. He had waited for her in the living room. When she came down the stairs, she had found him sitting on the sofa, with Medusa purring in his lap. Steve had been calmly stroking Medusa; Medusa had been nudging her head into his chest, into his crotch, kneading him with her claws, snuggling into his body. Medusa had not shed on him. Her instincts had been to get close to the man—and Nell’s were the same. She decided to forget the stray cats and go with Medusa’s instincts and her own.

  Still, all those petty facts about Steve—that he shot stray cats, used incorrect grammar, and was less sophisticated and educated than she—all those little pieces of knowledge added up to a great gift for Nell. They added up to freedom. She knew that for once in her life this man could not hurt her; if she could laugh at him or even slightly, secretly, deride him, then he could not hurt her. And so she was not afraid of losing him and she was not afraid of his judgment, and when she finally went to bed with him, she had the most wonderful time she had ever had in her life.

  Because Steve thought that she was so delicate and frightened, he took care to be a considerate and gentle lover. He spent a long time lying on his double bed with Nell, caressing her, stroking her, kissing her, lifting her hair up and licking her neck, whispering to her not to be afraid. Nell was shivering all over again, and this time with real desire. When he was finally inside her, there in his dark bedroom where no light shone, not even a candle, so that he could not see her expression or body, could only feel her flesh and responses, then she was able to give way to her desire more completely than ever before in her life.

  She had always been so afraid with Marlow, right from the start, that she would do something wrong, that she would look odd or not come quickly enough or not be passionate enough or be too passionate—she didn’t have any idea about how to make love. She had always, with Marlow, pretended, until she was incapable of doing anything else.

  But as she lay with this strange young man’s body moving against her, she became aware of these things: that Steve did not love her and so he could not stop loving her. He had promised her nothing and so he could not betray her. She did not love him and so he had no power in him to damage her. He had not committed himself to her and so she would not have to worry that he would ever leave. If he judged her, it did not matter, for they were in the dark and she could not read his face and she trusted him to be kind enough never to let her know if he held her in any contempt. All this knowledge gave her the courage to say at a certain point in their lovemaking: “Please, if you can, don’t stop now.” And a little while later to say, “Oh, oh, please, could you not stop again?”

  As they lay in bed together afterward, flat on their backs, their hands crossed to lie on each other’s bare stomachs, Nell wondered if this meant that she was in love with him. Even though she hadn’t done a lot, she had certainly read a lot, so she considered herself fairly sophisticated. She knew everyone slept around these days; it didn’t mean anything. But at heart she was still a romantic. She still wanted to love the person she had sex with: it was called making love, after all. Also, it was pretty hard to believe that a person could have this kind of ravishing transcendent pleasure with just anyone. And she felt so very fond of Steve as she lay there next to him, naked and sweaty and exhausted and triumphant and fulfilled. She felt such affection for him because he had made her so replete. She decided that if she did not already love him, perhaps she was on the way. He seemed to be returning the favor, for when at last he drove her home, he held her to him closely at the door and kissed her hair. He treated her gently, with care.

  They saw each other almost constantly for three months. He came over after work and ate dinner with Nell and Hannah and Jeremy. He mowed Nell’s lawn on Sundays and did other handyman work around her house. In turn, she fixed him wonderful meals. He climbed thirty feet up into a tree, barehanded, to hang a rope-swing for the children; Nell and the kids stood stunned with awe to watch his strength and courage and agility. When he swung down the rope to the ground and landed with a thunk near Nell, his arms bulging with muscles, his shirt full of his powerful chest, Nell nearly smashed her body into his. But the children were there, so she refrained. That night they made wonderful love together, and Steve went on and on inside Nell until Nell, her hair tangled and damp, her body frenzied, cried out, “Oh God, Steve, I love—” She turned her head to one side and bit her bare arm. “I love this,” she finished weakly. She was not sure what she meant. She knew that she thought of Steve when she first awoke in the morning and smiled herself to sleep with memories of his body at night. She knew she really was pretty much obsessed with him. While dressing herself or the children, the slight brush of a soft garment against her bare wrist would make her catch her breath. She would stand there a moment, so caught in the vivid memory of their mutual desire and their sweet obeisance to that desire that everything else seemed a dream. She knew that if she went a day without seeing him, she missed him. This was not what she had ever felt for Marlow. It was closer to the emotions she felt in high school, when she was dating quarterbacks and tennis jocks, although she had never slept with any of those boys.

  She had taken to watching Little House on the Prairie in the evenings when Steve was there. She had even begun to think it wasn’t that bad a show, and she tried to push out of her mind the knowledge that Marlow, in his intellectual scorn, had called the show Little Shack. When she and her children and Steve were all snuggled together on the sofa, all those touching bodies, all that responding skin, why then Nell was as happy as she had ever been in her life. She didn’t actually watch the television. Covertly, she stared at the hairs on Steve’s arms, at the long curve of thigh muscle beneath the cloth of his jeans. She and Steve didn’t talk much. But when they did, they were very courteous with each other, even gallant in their conversation. Nell began to think that maybe they were really in love. She even began to wonder if they could have a life together.

  On Labor Day Steve asked her to come with him to a picnic some friends of his were having. Nell was delighted. She hadn’t yet met any of his friends. For three months they had pretty much kept to themselves. She found a babysitter. She went to a secondhand store, the Like-New Shop, and found a loose and silky shirt, which she wore with a pair of jeans and sandals. She dressed casually, thinking that Steve’s friends would be casual, and she was right. They were not only casual, they were what her parents would have called uncouth.

  The picnic was at the “farm” of one of Steve’s friends. It was a thirteen-acre piece of land with a small house and a big shed full of tools such as hydraulic drills and winches. There was plenty of beer in cans in a trash barrel full of ice, and chips were set out in bowls on a picnic table. Nell stood awkwardly looking around at the possessions of the owner—they were all out in sight, spread all over the land: a broken bulldozer, an old pickup truck without wheels, a goat in a pen, a pig in another pen, some spare tires, some motorcycles, some mounds of dirt erupting all over the property, looking like Indian burial mounds without the grass. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. Two groups quickly formed: the men by the beer, the women by the chips.

  The men were the sort Nell lusted after briefly when stopped at a service station or for road work. They were truckers, road construction workers, factory laborers. They wore jeans, drank
beer, smoked pot, talked sports, laughed loud, and looked good. They looked very good. Nell didn’t know how they thought, for she was quickly relegated to the group of other “girl friends’—she was by far the oldest. She stood sipping her beer, leaning against the picnic table, listening to the women talk. She was fascinated, not by what the girls had to say, but by their intense absorption in their topics. Nell knew that she often had clever things to say, but she never tried to dominate the conversation in any group, thinking that monologues were rude and often boring, that it was kind to draw others out. But these girls had no such qualms.

  “So I said to him,” said a skinny brunette who was chewing gum and smoking and flicking her hair and ashes with enviable flair, “ ‘I put my money in the tip bowl and I told you already I put all my money in the tip bowl, so what are you trying to do, make me out to be some kind of a liar, huh? I don’t go for this kind of insult, you know.’ And so he says, ‘Cheryl, I’m not trying to say you’re a liar. I’m not trying to insult you. I’m just trying to figure out how come the money in the tip bowl don’t balance with the checks.’ So I says, ‘Well, that’s not my problem, it’s yours, and anyway, I think this is some kind of stupid and unfair system you’ve got going here anyway, you know, because I don’t go for this putting all our tips in the tip bowl and then dividing it up at night. I think we ought to be able to keep the tips we get. We earn them.’ So he says, ‘I know that’s how you feel, so that’s why I suspected you were probably the one who didn’t put all your tips in the tip bowl out of spite.’ So I says, ‘I don’t appreciate this kind of insult at all, you know, I am not a spiteful person.’ You know I’m not a spiteful person, don’t you, Donna. God, would you call me a spiteful person? I am not a spiteful person. I would never do anything dishonest out of spite. By this time I am really getting steamed, you know, I am really getting pissed. So I’m standing there with my arms folded, kind of like this, and looked at him right in the face and thought, okay, Twerp, I’m mad at you, now what are you gonna do? So he says …”

  Nell stared and listened for a long time, engrossed. There seemed to be no end to such stories, no punch lines, not even a satisfactory solution. But the women continued to listen and respond and talk with a mixture of passionate interest and lazy indifference. No one tried to draw Nell into the conversations. They smiled at her, though, and when it came time to eat, they handed her a paper plate with a hot dog on it, but they didn’t try to get to know her or make her feel at ease. Nell was relieved when the conversation stopped so that the women could watch and scream while the men took turns jumping over mounds of dirt with their dirt bikes and motorcycles.

  Again Nell watched, fascinated, but now also a little embarrassed. Here she was, less than an hour from the city of Boston, with its ballets and operas and libraries and museums and theaters, standing with a bunch of young women, watching a sort of impromptu dirt bike rally. The men got on their bikes and at first seemed to spend a lot of time just competing to see who could make the most noise revving up. Then, one by one, they went shooting off into the field. Nell could see that it took great strength and a certain athletic skill to get those bikes over the dirt mounds—the men had to pick up the bikes, weighted with their own bodies, and somehow heft or launch them over the mounds. They would go flying up and over the mounds and land with a huge thud on the ground on the other side, then spin away in a turn with a great deal of screeching of wheels. While they were waiting for another turn at the mounds, the men drove their bikes back and forth in front of the women at a terrifying speed, leaning with their bodies so that the bikes tilted at alarming angles to the ground, screaming around in unnecessary hairpin turns, hoisting their machines back and forth over the ground as if they were wrestling with monsters. The men, Steve included, had such determined expressions on their faces; they looked so serious about all this. Nell decided finally that they were all engaged in some unadmitted fantasy: They thought they were on CHiPs or The Dukes of Hazzard. It did seem as if everyone at this picnic was somehow engaged in a bizarre sexual ritual involving the newest technology and the oldest ceremonies: men showing off their power in front of adoring women. Finally, Nell was only embarrassed and sad for everyone there. The only consolation she could find was in knowing that no one else could tell how she felt—and if they did know how she felt, they would only, in turn, feel sorry for her. They would think that she was the strange one. These people were so assured, so confident in their actions.

  But when Steve finally shut off his bike and got off, slightly swaggering, to walk over to Nell and take his beer from her—she had been holding his can of Pabst for him like some medieval admirer holding a jouster’s colors—Nell felt a cold wash of knowledge rush down the inside of her torso, chilling her blood, stilling every sexual response she had felt toward this man. She could not feel sexually desirous of a man she was embarrassed for. The minor mistakes he had made in grammar or sophistication did not really matter; they had only freed her from his judgment. But this bike-jumping business, well, it changed things for Nell. It ruined things. She thought Steve looked so silly jumping a bike over a pile of dirt—why not go around it? And the men took it all so seriously—they might have impressed Hannah and Jeremy, perhaps, and they certainly impressed the other women at the picnic, but they did not impress Nell. She only wondered how on earth she had gotten to such a place.

  “You know what I’ve been doing to strengthen my thigh muscles?”

  It was Steve talking. He had taken the beer from Nell, slapped her bottom with hard affection, then gone back to the other men. But Nell was within hearing distance, and she went alert at this question of Steve’s; she hoped he wouldn’t say that making love to her had strengthened his legs.

  “I go out to my dad’s farm and ride his cows,” Steve said. “Both my horses are too easy; I can’t get any challenge out of them. I just climb on the cows bareback with a rope around their necks and hang on … those mothers really move.”

  Nell stared at Steve as he walked off talking to the other men. She saw that he was still the same man she had lusted after: he was still tanned and tough and powerful and handsome and hard. He was all those sexy things. But Nell’s mouth twitched and she took a drink of beer in order to stop a grin.

  “Hey, Susan,” Steve called to a blonde in a halter top and cutoff jeans who was standing near Nell. “Did the McCarthys sell you and Tom that pig?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Susan answered. “Yeah, and we got a good price. But the bastard wouldn’t deliver. We had a hell of a time getting it home on the bike.”

  Nell couldn’t help herself. She didn’t know Susan, but she addressed her directly. “You brought a live pig home on a motorcycle?”

  “Well, yeah,” Susan said. “Tom’s pickup broke. We’re gonna feed this pig all spring and summer and butcher it this fall. We had to get it home somehow.”

  “Well, well, how did you do it?” Nell asked.

  “It was hard,” Susan admitted. “I couldn’t hold on to Tom and hold on to the pig at the same time. Now of course if we had had two pigs, Tom could of put them each in a bag and put one on each end of the handlebar. That would’ve balanced out nicely. But with just one pig, even a baby pig on a handlebar, well, it throws the balance off, especially around curves. So finally Tom just stuck it inside his jacket. It scratched him like crazy, but we got it home.”

  “Well,” Nell said. She didn’t know what to say now. “Well, that’s good,” she said.

  “We’re raising chickens now,” another woman said, and Nell eased her way out of the group. On the pretense of getting another beer, she walked away slowly and stood by the picnic table with her back to the women. Pigs and motorcycles, she thought; well, there had probably been stranger combinations. These were young people she was with, young people starting their lives in the best way they knew how. Nell did not feel superior to them, but she did feel different. And uncomfortable.

  She sipped her beer and looked at the group of men who were now
leaning against their trucks, drinking beer, talking, passing around a joint. Every one of the men was as handsome, in one way or another, as Steve. They were all hard, masculine, muscular, tough, sexy young men, full of health and laughter. Perhaps they weren’t all as kind as Steve, but she imagined that almost any of those young men would be as good in bed as he was. They were young studs. They were not like the men in movies, the road crew men and contractors who secretly read Camus or had degrees in English literature but did manual labor for philosophical reasons. They were honest-to-goodness working class men who loved their beer, their motorcycles, their farms, and who aspired not to travel to Europe but to Indianapolis to see stock car racing. They didn’t read books, attend concerts, see plays, and they wouldn’t be impressed by anyone who did. These were Steve’s friends, and this was his real world. Nell knew that if she continued seeing him, she would have to see more and more of this world. The two of them couldn’t stay in bed all the time.

  After the picnic, they rode back to Nell’s house on Steve’s motorcycle. She had ridden with him twice before, feeling both terrified and amused about it. Jeremy and Hannah had been wild with jealousy to watch their mother go off on the back of a bike, and Steve had given each child short rides up and down the block while Nell held her breath with fear. She couldn’t understand what it was about motorcycles that attracted men so. Was it that they liked having all that power between their legs? Didn’t they already have enough? Nell rode with her arms wrapped tightly around Steve’s waist and her eyes squeezed closed. It made her ill to see the road and houses fly by so fast and to know there was nothing but air between her body and the hard cement or glaring metal of a car. She knew that when she was in her twenties, she would have loved this, would have found it romantic, but now as her hair and shirt fluttered back from the wind, she could only think of the scene in the movie Isadora when Isadora Duncan threw her long scarf over her shoulder as she sat in a low convertible and the wind suddenly whipped it behind her into the spokes of the tire and broke her neck.