by Nancy Thayer
“I don’t know whether to eat this or photograph it,” Nell said, smiling.
“I like to cook,” Andy said. “Food tastes better to me if it’s well prepared and served. We are human beings, after all, not animals, and eating should be a pleasure, not just a necessity.”
Jesus, Nell thought, how can he be so serious about this? She thought eating was always a pleasure, even if it was a junk-food hamburger served in a cardboard box. Often nothing was more pleasurable than standing over the stove at the end of a meal, scraping the crisp, oil-soaked crusts of meat from the bottom of the skillet and eating them while the cats and dog stood glaring at her with greed, or scooping hardened homemade fudge from the sides of the pan, or surreptitiously spooning uncooked cookie dough into her mouth when the children weren’t around to see.
“I’ll never be able to have you to dinner,” she said as he served her. “I’m already completely intimidated. Honestly,” she said, smiling.
“Well, don’t be,” Andy said, looking gruff.
They ate for a few minutes in silence.
“This is delicious,” Nell said. “This is unbelievable.” She grinned. “Awesome,” she said. “Totally.” Seeing the expression on his face, she added, “That’s what the kids say when something’s good beyond description.”
Andy was silent for a while, still looking gruff and rather worried. Then he looked at Nell, leaned his elbows on the table, and said, “Well, you see, if you live alone and eat alone, if you aren’t careful, you can eat all your meals in just about five minutes. Then your stomach might be full, but you don’t have that satisfied feeling of having had something. I mean, the times before and after eating are different. Eating is a sort of timeout, and it makes each part of the day different. But if it only takes five minutes to eat, then the whole day just sort of stretches out, all the same. I’m not making very much sense, am I?”
Nell studied Andy a moment and wondered to herself how she would cook if she lived all alone and didn’t have to work. She doubted very much that she’d start cooking escalopes de veau à la chasseur for herself. More probably, she’d lie around all day reading and eating candy bars and chili from cans. But it touched her that Andy did this, and it touched her that he told her about it. It made him seem endearing and a little vulnerable.
“You are a strange man,” she said, smiling. “But a great cook.” They smiled at each other for a long moment, then went back to eating.
After a while Andy said, “Well, how do you cook? What do you cook?”
Nell laughed. “It depends,” she said. “I’ve told you I have children eight and ten and that I work in a boutique—well, somedays I’m too tired to cook at all. Then we order pizza, or eat frozen TV dinners—don’t look so disgusted, some of them are quite good—or just sandwiches. I’m really pretty limited by the children, actually, because they like so few things. Hamburgers. Tacos. Pizza. Chicken. Baloney. Hot dogs. Don’t look so alarmed! You must have liked all that stuff when you were a kid.”
Andy shook his head. “It’s been a long time since I was a kid,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a hot dog, for that matter. I can’t remember when I last had one.”
“Well, now, I know what I’ll serve you when you come to my place,” Nell said. “Nice juicy grilled hot dogs on a bun with mustard and relish and tons of chopped onions.” Nell laughed. “I’m afraid I sort of equate the deliciousness of food with the amount that drips on my hands when I eat it.”
This made him laugh, and Nell was pleased. They talked more about food, and he asked her about her children. He removed her dinner plate and set a green salad in front of her. When they had finished that, he put a board with various cheeses and fruits on the table. He placed grape scissors and a heavy ornate fruit knife next to the board. He served her aromatic coffee in a china cup. Nell watched Andy as he moved around the kitchen, handling all his delicate dishes with an unconscious awkward gentleness. He was beginning to seem to Nell more and more like some exotic and slightly melancholy creature caught in a strange world. He had the elegance and bewilderedness of, say, a giraffe who had through some sort of spell been constrained to wear the clothes and live the life of a man.
“I can’t stay much longer,” Nell said. “My plane leaves at seven. I hate to eat and run, but …”
“When will you be back?” Andy asked.
“In two weeks,” Nell said. “For the weekend again.”
“Will you have dinner with me in two weeks, then?”
“Of course.” Nell smiled. “And I’ll be able to have you to dinner, too. The O’Learys won’t be here. They have to stay in New York. I’ll have their house then, and for the entire summer.” She smiled at him and he smiled back and they sat like that awhile until Nell felt embarrassed and warm all over. “I’d better call a taxi,” she said, shaking herself a little and looking away.
“No, no, I’ll drive you to the airport,” he said.
Nell rose and walked through the house to the front hall, where she had left her bag. Andy followed, taking the keys from his trouser pockets as he walked.
“Here, let me,” he said, taking the bag from her. There was an awkward moment as he tried to take the bag too quickly from her shoulder while her arm was still caught in it so that their arms were caught together. Nell was too shaken by the touch of his arm against hers to have the sense to smile, and then, thank heavens, he put his other arm around her and drew her to him and kissed her. They stood kissing in the hall with her suitcase hanging from both their arms.
When they finally stopped kissing, Andy drew back a bit and studied Nell’s face. “You’re wonderful,” he said.
“Oh,” Nell said. “Oh my. Well, you are, too.”
“I wish you could stay,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted anything like I want you to stay right now.”
“I wish I could stay, too,” Nell said, and her voice cracked a bit. She was having trouble talking. She was having trouble breathing. She wanted to press herself back up against him and wrap herself around him and get lost in his kiss again, but instead she pulled back. “I really do have to go. I’m sorry.”
They got to the airport on time, and he kissed her again, and she boarded the plane and it lifted off the ground. This time it didn’t occur to Nell to worry about plane crashes.
Six
On June fourth, at three-thirty in the afternoon, Nell drove her old and very heavily loaded Toyota up a ramp, off the mainland of Massachusetts, and into the bowels of the giant ferry that would take her to her summer in Nantucket. She parked where instructed, just inches away from a station wagon in front of her, and saw a yellow Jeep convertible come looming up behind her. Next to her a golden retriever sat calmly in the driver’s seat of a Volvo, looking as if he himself had just parked the car. All around her car doors were slamming as people left their cars to go to the upper decks for lunch or to watch the ferry take off or simply to sit in a more comfortable spot. But Nell sat rooted in the seat of her car as if glued there. She was having trouble getting her breath. She did not think it had to do with the fumes from other cars and trucks on the ferry. She knew she was close to hyperventilating from fear and joy and anxiety and hope
If her children had been with her, they would have been clamoring at her by now to move. She could almost hear them: “Mo-om. Come o-on!” they would whine, full of impatience. But they were not here now, forcing her to act normal. It was not normal that they were not here. That was one of the reasons she was hyperventilating.
Hannah and Jeremy were in a car with Charlotte and Marlow, somewhere in the United States, on their way across the continent to Chicago, where Marlow would direct summer theater and Charlotte would reluctantly play stepmother to Nell’s children. The children would not be wearing seat belts on this cross-country trip. Marlow was rabid on the subject of seat belts; he almost equated them with a communist plot to hinder Americans in their expression of personal freedom. No restraints in his c
ar! Nell nearly got sick thinking about it. It was very hard to give the children over to Marlow, to give over the responsibility of their lives and health and welfare to the wildman who was their father. She had done it physically just this morning, when she kissed them goodbye as they got into Marlow’s car. But she was having a hard time doing it symbolically. It was as if by sitting in her car, thinking of them, she could keep them safe, but by going up on deck and beginning the summer, she was somehow consigning them to the careless whims of fate. Oh God, she missed her children so. She wished she hadn’t let them go. But Marlow had wanted them with him, and they had wanted to go, and legally it was his right, and she would have them back with her on Nantucket for the month of August.… Still. It was almost intolerable for her to be without them for such a long time.
The world seemed a very odd place to her today. It seemed so odd that it wouldn’t have surprised her if the golden retriever in the car next to her had lit up a cigarette and started reading a newspaper. The world seemed topsy-turvy. There her children were, zooming across the earth in a car with Marlow and Charlotte, who had dyed her short spiky hair orange and had taken to wearing silver glitter stars at the outer corner of her eyes even in the day—Nell thought that Charlotte was having this fit of punk because she was going to be thirty this summer—and here Nell was, on her way to three months in Nantucket, where she would live with her ex-stepdaughter, who would be arriving the next day.
Nell wondered if her children would ever have the sort of relationship with Charlotte that Nell had with Clary. Certainly Hannah and Jeremy liked Charlotte well enough. It didn’t bother them that she didn’t remind them to brush their teeth or eat their vegetables. Last summer the children had spent a month with Marlow and Charlotte. When they returned to Nell, their hair felt like wire. They had not washed it for the entire month. No one had told them to. On the other hand, Charlotte was not mean to them, and apparently, when she fixed food for Marlow, she fed the children, too, and that was important. Charlotte was undemanding and occasionally amusing. She let them watch television as much as they wanted and wear dirty socks to bed if they wished, and now and then when she was bored, she would play a game of cards or Monopoly with them. She was really more like another child, Marlow’s favorite child, with Hannah and Jeremy, than she was a stepmother. Oh, it was fine, they would be fine.
Stellios would be fine, too. Nell had put off seeing him for almost three weeks, afraid that when she told him she was involved with someone else, he would be hurt. But when they were finally seated across a tiny table from each other at a cozy Greek restaurant, he confided that he, too, had met someone else. An American girl of Greek ancestry, a young student. His family thought she was a very fine woman. Nell wished Stellios well, and he wished her well, and they toasted each other’s future luck and love with red wine over a plate of stuffed grape leaves. And so that part of Nell’s life ended, more pleasantly than she had thought it would.
Nell felt a thump and shudder pass through the long boat as it pulled away from the dock and began its trip across the water. The ship’s motion was actually very slight and pleasant. She knew that she should be on deck, because today was a beautiful day, bright and clear and warm. But still she sat in the relative gloom of the car deck, huddled in the safety of her car. She did not want to be exposed to the beauty of the voyage. She especially did not want to watch the ferry pull away from shore. It would move her too much. She was afraid of beauty, afraid of change, afraid of leaving the security of her known life for this Nantucket summer. She was afraid for herself, because she thought it very likely that she was falling in love.
Falling in love: an apt phrase, Nell thought, for she did feel like Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit’s hole, with the entire world whirling and revolving around her with no place ever to catch hold. This was really more frightening than fun, she thought. This was not just infatuation or lust or the silly smug pleasure of being admired by some good-looking man. No. She was afraid this was it, the Real Thing, the dreaded falling in love.
After Nell returned from her first trip to Nantucket, Andy had called her almost every other night, and when she flew over for the second time in May, he met her at the airport. Nell worked at Elizabeth’s—worked hard, worked well, flying about with a giddy manic energy that let her accomplish twice as much as usual. When she wasn’t working at Elizabeth’s that weekend, she was with Andy.
Friday and Saturday evenings when she closed the boutique, he drove her around the island, showing her the different beaches and moors, which shimmered under the clear sunlight, full of the promise of spring. He knew a lot about Nantucket and told her what he knew in the same earnest, slightly amazed way that Hannah and Jeremy told Nell about all the discoveries they were making about the world. He stood on a large flat rock at Jetties Beach and said, “You know, when I was a boy, this very rock was surrounded by water. Surrounded. Now the water doesn’t touch it even when the tide comes in. Think of how the sea is endlessly, silently, constantly depositing sand. How it builds up. Such persistence.”
With his hands jammed into the windbreaker pockets and his head and shoulders hunched forward, Andy perched on the rock, pondering the ways of the natural world. Nell stood away from him, admiring him because he loved what could not love him back. It seemed the quality of a superior man. She was not particularly impressed that the ocean deposited sand on the beach—she was much more impressed with the storky length of Andy’s legs—but she liked him for his thoughts.
Friday he took her out to dinner, and Saturday he cooked another gourmet meal for her at his home. Both times he continued to regale her with Nantucket tales. She liked the ones about the wives of sea captains who, missing their husbands so desperately, turned to the use of laudanum. She liked hearing stories of passion and desire on this island. More often than not, however, Andy would wander off from such tales onto his pet topic, the environment. Sometimes Nell was interested, sometimes bored—and once they got into an argument.
They had been in his kitchen. It was dark, they were seated at his long table, and he had just served Nell Nantucket scallops sautéed in wine. She was eating them slowly, savoring the delicate sweet white flesh.
“You know,” Andy said, “you must never buy tuna in cans.”
Nell grinned at him; she couldn’t help it. He spoke so very seriously. “Why not?” she asked. “God, Andy, we live on tuna at our house.”
“I know. It’s not the tuna. Tuna’s good for you, and there’s enough of the fish so that it’s not endangered. No, it’s the dolphins. They swim along just over the tuna, you see, and the fishermen who catch the tuna do it in such a way that they also bring up the dolphins, which are then killed and thrown back into the sea. Useless deaths of intelligent creatures. Horrible. Fortunately, there’s been a national organization formed to lobby and protest, to try to stop the companies from using that method to catch the tuna. They have other ways.”
“But would the other ways be more expensive?” Nell asked.
“That doesn’t matter,” Andy said.
“Oh, but it does,” Nell replied. “I mean, Andy, I think dolphins are nice, they’re cute, the pictures I’ve seen of them, I mean. They seem endearing enough. But I also find eating an endearing thing. I mean, tuna is something that I can afford to feed my children, and it’s nutritious and non-fattening. I’d hate it if the price went up. It would really make a major difference in my life.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Andy said.
“But it’s true!” Nell protested. “Andy, it’s true. You’re living alone, but believe me, if you’ve got two children to support … and it’s not just me. There are lots of families who would be hurt if the price of tuna went up.”
“There have to be some things more important than money—” Andy began.
“That’s easy to say if you’ve got plenty of it,” Nell interrupted.
“—and man’s the only creature on earth who puts acquisition first in his set
of values.”
“Man’s the only creature on earth that has a set of values,” Nell said. She was so upset, she stopped eating her scallops and took a big drink of wine. “Do you think the sharks, or whatever it is that eats dolphins, something out there in the ocean must, do you think they feel any guilt about it? No, they just go up and take a bite out of whatever neighboring fish looks tasty to them at the moment. Human beings at least don’t do that.”
“No, what we do is worse,” Andy replied. He, too, had stopped eating and was leaning forward now, speaking quietly but determinedly. “We kill what we can’t eat, as in the case of the dolphins and the tuna. We kill and waste. We litter the seas of the world with unnecessary death.”
“Perhaps. But not on purpose. It’s accidental, it’s a consequence of necessary actions. Man has always had to plot to eat, and we can’t foresee everything.”
“Man is evil,” Andy said. “Wasting lives is evil, wasting the world, using it up greedily, is evil. It’s not just the dolphins, Nell. Everywhere you look you’ll find man wasting the natural world. Just look at Nantucket sometime. Drive out into the moors and see how that fragile landscape is being trashed up, its natural beauty becoming ruined forever. People build houses and drive their cars and Jeeps and mopeds on the beautiful moors. They scar the land; they waste it forever. It’s terrible what man does to nature.”
“Yes, Andy, I think you’re partly right, but what is the world for? Isn’t it for men to use and love and enjoy?” Nell asked.
Andy leaned back in his chair, pondering Nell’s question. He ate a scallop as he thought, and as Nell watched, a strange, worried expression came across his face.
“What’s wrong?” Nell asked, slightly alarmed.
“We’ve let the scallops get cold,” Andy replied, his voice funereal.
