Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  Now Nell crawled into her own bed. The sheets were gritty with crumbs from sandwiches. She didn’t care, she was too tired to care. She didn’t even particularly care that when the new year came she would probably be asleep instead of celebrating its arrival. She would be sleeping truly alone tonight—she had shut Fred and Medusa in the kitchen for once. Her tolerance for her animals had ended earlier in the day, when Fred had butted his sickly head against her stomach, leaving a long trail of greenish eye-slime on her sweatshirt. Nell didn’t want to awaken to the sound of either cat throwing up or sneezing. She didn’t want to feel any material rubbing off a cat and onto her during the night. The cats would get well, too, she knew, but until then, she didn’t want to sleep with them.

  It had looked like such a promising New Year’s Eve. Nell had been up for it in every way. She had been invited to a huge party at Ilona’s and had asked Stellios to go with her. She had found a silver sequined tube top at a secondhand shop that looked great with an old long black velvet skirt. She had planned to greet the new year looking as gorgeous as she could, dancing the night away in Stellios’s arms, drinking Ilona and Phillip’s first-class champagne, putting into practice Ilona’s new philosophy of “saying yes to life!”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever said no to life,” Nell had said to Ilona when her friend exploded with her newly found catchword and religion. “I mean, after all, here I am,” Nell had said.

  “Oh, don’t be so literal,” Ilona had cajoled. “Don’t be so stuffy. You know what I mean. I mean, grab life by the balls and run with it!”

  “What?” Nell had asked, aghast. “Ilona, aren’t you mixing your metaphors?”

  But Ilona was in too good a mood to be sensible. She had come into the boutique to buy a special dress for the party she and Phillip were giving New Year’s Eve—a party with a live band and a champagne fountain and catered breakfast at dawn. Ilona looked through dresses, trying to get Nell to share her excitement. She kept saying things like, “You’ve got to grab your joy where you find it! You can’t always wait for it to come to you, you have to create it! You’ve got to start saying yes to life!”

  The season has scrambled your brain, Nell thought, but she was glad that Ilona was so cheerful. And Nell had been looking forward to the big party. But Cora Donne had invited Nell to a New Year’s Day brunch, and Nell wanted to go there even more than to Ilona’s. She knew who Ilona’s crowd would be, but Cora’s guests would be all new faces to Nell, new people, mostly professors from the university where Cora taught. Cora had hinted to Nell that there would be quite a few single men at her party who would be delighted to meet Nell. They’ll probably be stodgy old intellectuals, Nell thought cynically, but she was still excited about going. She was gladly missing Ilona’s party so that she could go to sleep early and fight off the flu. She wanted to be fresh and bright-eyed for the new day.

  The new day. The new year. Nell stretched out all over her bed, loving the soft warmth, and smiled at the thought of tomorrow. She felt so clean about it all. She felt so fresh.

  For the past two days she had worried about her scene with Andy in the same way the dog worried her leather bone, poking at the thought of it over and over again, twisting it around, wondering if it had been the right thing to do. She had half thought, half wished that Andy would, in a mad flare of desperate passion, rush to Arlington, pound on her door, take her in his arms and, eyes swollen with allergies, declare eternal love for her.

  At the least, she had thought he would call her. But he hadn’t. Last night, as Nell sat by the fire listening to the music with her flu-sedated children, she had felt all her sorrow turn into a numb exhaustion much like apathy and all her love for Andy become disdain, an emotion too weakened by the memory of love to be real contempt. She supposed that finally what she felt for him was pity. He had said he loved her, but either he was lying, in which case he was a creep, or he was telling the truth but could do little to show his love. In that case he was a limited man. Oh, he was a limited man. He did not know his daughter’s size or favorite color, he had found no charm in her children, he was even allergic to animals! She thought of how his enormous, sparsely furnished house spread around him like a protective bubble around a person allergic to the world. She thought of him making his careful, precise, repetitive movements in that house as he worked with his computers or made his meticulous gourmet meals. He did not have to deal with the real world because of his family’s money; he would never have to get messy or dirty. If they had married and lived together, it would have ended in disaster, Nell could see that now. He would not be able to bear the fuss and bother of her life, the children, animals, friends, drama, action—and she would have been driven, sooner or later, to screaming at him: “For God’s sake, stop organizing the food and just cook it!”

  Nell thought that perhaps she had fallen in love with Andy in much the same way she had fallen in love with severe black suits when she was seventeen and punk hairstyles when she was thirty-five—all yearnings for what was inappropriate for her, for what was basically wrong, for what would never work. She knew she had made the right choice in breaking off with Andy. She felt like some small country that had declared its independence from some dictatorial nation. Perhaps she’d no longer get shipments of sugar from that country—but she could learn to do without sugar. In her new freedom, she’d learn to love honey.

  She had been only slightly melancholy last night. The cats had snoozed, drugged by the heat, on the hearth; the dog had gnawed on a new rubber bone; the children had read books, Christmas gifts, and littered the floor with used tissues. They drank hot chocolate. Hannah had asked, “Do you miss Andy, Mommy? Are you sad?”

  Nell decided to be honest. They had seen a lot this summer. She didn’t want to pretend that nothing of importance had happened. “I’m a little sad,” she said. “Not broken-hearted, but a little sad. You know, I had kind of wanted to marry Andy.”

  “Why?” Jeremy asked, surprised.

  Nell had to be so careful here. She needed to explain to them in terms they would understand just how she had felt about Andy without at the same time inadvertently insulting Marlow or making light of the marriage she had had with him. She thought a moment. Finally, she said, “Well, you know, there are very few people in the world that you like enough to live with. And if you meet someone you like that much and love that much, then it’s as if you’ve found a home. And that’s nice. That feels good. But if the other person doesn’t want to live with you, then it’s sad. But then you go off and make your own home somewhere else.”

  “You have a home with us,” Jeremy said.

  Nell looked at her son. “Yes,” she said. “I do. You children are my home, and I love you and I like you and it’s wonderful living with you. But you know someday you’ll go away—to college, to get jobs, to marry and live with a husband or wife. Then you’ll have new homes, your own homes.”

  “Then what will you do, Mommy?” Hannah asked, alarmed.

  “You can come live with me and my wife,” Jeremy offered.

  Nell smiled. “Thanks, Jeremy,” she said. “But no, I won’t come live with you; you’ll have grown-up lives. But don’t worry. I’ll have my own home by then. I’m making my own home now.”

  “Daddy’s divorcing Charlotte,” Hannah said. “So he’s leaving his home.”

  “Yes.” Nell smiled. “That’s true. Well, your daddy’s sort of a wanderer. He likes the travel, the adventure; he doesn’t need a home. Some people don’t.”

  “Maybe Andy’s a wanderer too,” Hannah said.

  “Or a hermit,” Jeremy said.

  “Well, whatever he is,” Nell said, “he’s out of our lives now, and I’ll be blue for a while, but don’t worry. Just bear with me while I get over it—like you’re getting over the flu.”

  “Mom,” Hannah said. “I’ve got an idea! When I get married, I’ll throw you the bouquet! Then you’ll get married and we’ll all have homes.”

  Nell looked at Hannah,
who had a red nose and watery eyes. My sophisticated, optimistic children, she thought. “That’s a great idea, Hannah,” she said. “That’s thoughtful of you. But, sweetie, don’t worry. Even if I never get married again—and I’m pretty certain I won’t—I’ll still be happy. I’ll make my own home. I really can do that. I am doing that.”

  And it was true. Here she was, on New Year’s Eve, in her own house, her own bed, her own room. It hadn’t always been this way. There had been years when Marlow had possessed this room, too, had thrown his clothes down on the floor for her to pick up and wash, had scattered his papers around the room and claimed his share of the bed. When the children were small, they had also possessed this room, by right of necessity; there had been soiled diapers, sticky bottles of orange juice, stuffed animals, half-gnawed crackers everywhere.

  The room was pretty much all hers now. From time to time one of the children left a shoe or a book, but they were old enough to keep their belongings in their own rooms, and this bedroom was now Nell’s own private place. Only her clothes hung in the closet or were scattered over the back of the chair, only the magazines and books she was interested in took up the extra space in the bed, and recently she had driven a nail into the wall and hung her ice skates there, as if they were some kind of symbol or trophy or good luck charm.

  She had gone skating three times since Christmas, and each time had been better than before. The first time out she had made Jeremy hold one hand and Hannah the other as she went out onto the ice—but suddenly, to her surprise, it all came back. She was wobbly in the beginning, but by the end of the two hours she was impressing her children with her speed and spins. It all came back to her. They played rock music at the rink she went to—the same sort of music she exercised to—and as she skimmed across the glistening white ice, she had been at once lost and found in the matching of music and movement. She liked skating along alone, at her own speed, folding into a spin whenever she felt like it, racing past her children, coming up behind them, passing them with a laugh, skating backward and making faces at them. She liked the occasional admiring glance she saw tossed her way by men who skated past. She liked the way her red fuzzy scarf flipped when she turned, the way her hands, encased in red fuzzy mittens, darted gracefully along with her, like giant cardinals. She knew she looked pretty, skating along in her blue jeans and sweater and red hat, scarf, and mittens; she knew she was a cheerful sight. She liked all that, being pretty and being seen.

  But more, she liked the feeling of gliding on ice, the way her legs worked for her, how reliable her body was, after all. She liked the way she could disappear from the outer world into a world of her own, so that she became simply muscles and limbs that were taut and cooperative; she loved speeding, spinning, dancing on cold ice as if the music she heard became the movements she made. For a while on the ice, she was in a state of grace; she felt as if she were the very definition of grace. There was no time in her life when she was happier or more herself than when skating in her own glistening, private world. She would slice the ice with her blades, hear the responsive shushhh … she would glide.

  Nell was using her parents’ check to buy membership in the skating club so that she could use the rink twice a week. She had decided it was good therapy for her—physical and mental therapy. It had been a very long time since she had skated in her youth, but those times were with her somehow, there in the very strength of her ankles, there in the tension of her legs. Just so, she knew, all the years of her life were somehow with her now in the form of strength and agility; she could not remember them all, did not want to remember some of them, but she was what she was because of them. Now she was going to take skating lessons. She was going to improve herself. She was not going to stop or rest. And the ice skates hung on her bedroom wall, a testament to her determination.

  She didn’t feel like skating tonight, though. She was tired, and she could feel an ominous tickle in the back of her throat. She could almost sense cold germs thriving and multiplying in the air around her. She didn’t want to get sick—she had too much to do. She drank the rest of her orange juice in one long swallow, then slid down beneath her blankets. She wanted to be well tomorrow.

  Yet she felt the need for some small sense of occasion, some slight celebration. She had had to phone Ilona to tell her she was too sick to come to her party. She had canceled her date with Stellios, who had been very disappointed. He had wanted to bring champagne to her house that night so that the two of them could welcome the new year together. But she had told him no, she was too sick, too groggy for champagne or company. She had promised to see him as soon as she was well.

  In fact she was glad she had the flu. She was glad to be spending this New Year’s Eve by herself. It was honest this way. She did not want to gaze soulfully into Stellios’s eyes and pretend they were facing the new year together. She wanted to do exactly what she was doing: greet this coming year surrounded only by those things that were genuinely hers—her animals, her children, her house, her memories.

  “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind,” Nell sang softly to herself. She grinned while she sang, thinking: What a goofy thing to do, singing to herself in bed! “We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne,” she sang.

  Her song floated out into the night air and disappeared. She reached out her arm and switched off the light. She snuggled down into bed, content. Nell turned onto her side, closed her eyes, and fell asleep, alone.

  To Charley, my husband

  With all my love

  BY NANCY THAYER

  A Nantucket Christmas

  Island Girls

  Summer Breeze

  Heat Wave

  Beachcombers

  Summer House

  Moon Shell Beach

  The Hot Flash Club Chills Out

  Hot Flash Holidays

  The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again

  The Hot Flash Club

  An Act of Love

  Belonging

  Between Husbands and Friends

  Bodies and Souls

  Custody

  Everlasting

  Family Secrets

  My Dearest Friend

  Nell

  Spirit Lost

  Stepping

  Three Women at the Water’s Edge

  Morning

  Nancy Thayer is the New York Times bestselling author of Island Girls, Summer Breeze, Heat Wave, Beachcombers, Summer House, Moon Shell Beach, and The Hot Flash Club. She lives in Nantucket.

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  It’s like a morning in Heaven. From a blue sky, the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school, shines down on a sapphire ocean. Eleven-year-old Emily Porter stands at the edge of a cliff high above the beach, her blond hair rippled by a light breeze.

  The edge of the cliff is an abrupt, jagged border, into which a small landing is built, with railings you can lean against, looking out at the sea. Before her, weathered wooden steps cut back and forth down the steep bluff to the beach.

  Behind her lies the grassy lawn and their large gray summer house, so different from their apartment on East 86th in New York City.

  Last night, as the Porters flew away from Manhattan, Emily looked down on the familiar fantastic panorama of sparkling lights, urging the plane onward with her excitement, with her longing to see the darkness and then, in the distance, the flash and flare of the lighthouse beacons.

  Nantucket begins today.

  Today, while her father plays golf and her beautiful mother, Cara, organizes the house, Emily is free to do as she pleases. And what she’s waited for all winter is to run down the street into
the small village of ’Sconset and along the narrow path to the cottages in Codfish Park, where she’ll knock on Maggie’s door.

  First, she waves back at the ocean. Next, she turns and runs, half skipping, waving her arms, singing. She exults in the soft grass under her feet instead of hard sidewalk, salt air in her lungs instead of soot, the laughter of gulls instead of the blare of car horns, and the sweet perfume of new dawn roses.

  She flies along past the old town water pump, past the ’Sconset Market, past the post office, past Claudette’s Box Lunches. Down the steep cobblestoned hill to Codfish Park. Here, the houses used to be shacks where fishermen spread their nets to dry, so the roofs are low and the walls are ramshackle. Maggie’s house is a crooked, funny little place, but roses curl over the roof, morning glories climb up a trellis, and pansy faces smile from window boxes.

  Before she can knock, the door flies open.

  “Emily!” Maggie’s hair’s been cut into an elf’s cap and she’s taller than Emily now, and she has more freckles over her nose and cheeks.

  Behind Maggie stands Maggie’s mother, Frances, wearing a red sundress with an apron over it. Emily’s never seen anyone but caterers and cooks wear an apron. It has lots of pockets. It makes Maggie’s mother look like someone from a book.

  “You’re here!” Maggie squeals.

  “Welcome back, Emily.” Frances smiles. “Come in. I’ve made gingerbread.”

  The fragrant scent of ginger and sugar wafts out enticingly from the house, which is, Emily admits privately to her own secret self, the strangest place Emily’s ever seen. The living room’s in the kitchen; the sofa, armchairs, television set, and coffee table, all covered with books and games, are just on the other side of the round table from the sink and appliances. In the dining room, a sewing machine stands on a long table, and piles of fabric bloom from every surface in a crazy hodgepodge. Frances is divorced and makes her living as a seamstress, which is why Emily’s parents aren’t crazy about her friendship with Maggie, who is only a poor island girl.