Nancy and Nick (7 page)

There were comments to make on hospitality, antiques, the weather, and driving safely, and then we were all calling, “Goodbye, nice to have met you, thanks again.”

Somehow I was in the driver’s seat after all, and Mother on the passenger side, and Mr. Nearing was slamming the car door and going back into his house and Nick was nowhere to be seen and I was driving away.

And that was that.

“O
H, NANNIE,” SAID HOLLY
. “And you’ll never see him again. How utterly romantic.”

I choked on a long thread of spaghetti. “Tell me one thing romantic about
not
seeing him again,” I demanded.

Holly was eating cottage cheese and applesauce. Every morning at eleven I am determined to eat the salad plate but when I get to the cafeteria line I always end up with a loaded tray. Holly put an eighth of a teaspoon of food into her mouth and said, “It’s very bookish, Nan. The heroine shuts herself in her lacy boudoir to weep for the fine figure of a man she’ll never be able to marry.”

Ginger crunched through an apple and said juicily, “However, in books, the reason for never being able to marry is always conquered, with the insane wife dying, or the blackmailer meeting his just end, or the inheritance coming just in time. But this time the reason won’t go away. He’ll always be her cousin and he’ll always be one hundred and seventy miles away.”

“I’m not thinking of marrying him,” I said crossly. “I’d just like to have a boyfriend. And there’s nothing romantic about an absentee boyfriend.”

“Especially when he doesn’t consider you to be a regular girl,” agreed Ginger. “I consider that the remark of a skunk.”

“He wasn’t a skunk.”

“Laura Burns’ boyfriend is at college,” said Holly, partaking of another two calories, “and you think that’s romantic.”

“Yes, but he knows he’s her boyfriend and he writes to her and calls her up and she visits him on weekends. Nick does not know he is, or could be, or ought to want to be, my boyfriend.”

“A tedious situation,” said Ginger. She aimed her apple core at the wastebasket and hit a sophomore boy in the cheek. I speedily removed myself from the table because the sophomore clearly intended to retaliate with a plate of spaghetti. For once I was glad when the cafeteria monitor intervened, hauling poor clumsy Ginger off to the vice principal’s office to explain this aggressive behavior. Holly and I cleared the table, stuck her apple core in the trash, and tagged after her in case character references were in order.

“Write to Nick,” Holly suggested.

“Holly, I haven’t written a letter in my life except in fourth grade when we had to study where to put the inside address and how to phrase a complimentary closing. I’ve never even licked a stamp.”

“That’s impossible. How do you pay your bills? What do you do about Christmas thank you notes to relatives in Seattle? Or letters to your congressman? Dear departed friends who jumped rope with you in fourth grade and are now living in Boston? Jewelry that is absolutely perfect and you can only get it by mail order?”

Holly was finally struck dumb when she grasped the extent of my non-letter writing. She kept shaking her head at me. Considering how few calories she ran her slender body on, I thought it remarkable she had the energy to shake it so often. “Never licked a stamp,” she said. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Sixteen.”

“And you’ve never even done volunteer work where they had mailings?”

“In all my volunteer work they’ve used the phone.”

We sat down on the redwood picnic bench that decorates the hall outside the vice principal’s office. It’s where offenders wait to find out the punishment for their offenses. I had never sat there. The looks we got from kids we knew walking by were priceless. It was interesting that nobody stopped to speak to us and ask why we were there. They obviously wanted no conversation with girls who had joined the criminal element.

“Well,” I said defensively, “how many letters have you ever written, Holly?”

She meditated. “Every Christmas I have thank you letters to my cousins in—”

“Skip the thank you notes. Besides them.”

“Hmmm. I write my grandmother Beale every other week. I had a friend named Annie Wood back in elementary and we’ve written every month since she moved to Canada. I got a pen pal through a magazine once. She lived in Australia and her name was Patricia Woolley and we wrote about ten times until Patricia got a better pen pal.”

“A better pen pal!” I exclaimed. “How do you know that’s why she stopped writing?”

“She told me. She wrote, Dear Holly, I have now found a more interesting pen pal who lives in New York City and since I’d rather visit New York someday than Virginia and since I can’t afford postage to both of you, I’m not writing to you anymore. Thanks anyway. Love, Patricia.”

“Now that was low,” I said.

“I didn’t mind. I’m pretty sure she’d already told me everything she knew about Australia. But if you think you’re getting me off the subject, you’re mistaken. You should write to this Nicholas.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“You get straight A’s in English comp. You could write a good letter. I have faith in you.”

“Actually I usually get A-minus.”

“That’s good enough for a letter. Really, Nan, I think you should thank him for taking you to the operetta. For introducing you to all those lovely people who might be your cousins. End up with a witty line about loving his ponytail and for him not to cut it off until you get there to share the big moment with him.”

I could not imagine writing such a thing. Just imagining Nick opening a letter like that, and reading it, made me blush.

Ginger came out of the vice principal’s office looking hunched and beaten. “What’d you get?” said Holly. “Forty lashes?”

“He just told me in the future I am to transport my apple cores in a more sedate manner. I humbly promised so to do.”

We giggled, and then the second lunch bell rang and we had to scurry off to our classes. We have only a two-and-a-half minute passing period and only the luckiest can saunter, those whose classes happen to be next door. The rest of us have to charge up two flights of stairs or chug down nine corridors. (Going to the bathroom is a luxury.) I clutched my books to my chest like a battering ram and launched myself through the crowds to the basement and history.

I went into history feeling pretty good. Talking things over with your best friend always loosens things up. Holly and I hadn’t resolved anything by talking about Nick and how I’d never see him again, but at least I felt more cheerful about it.

And in history the teacher passed out an exam.

I had completely forgotten about it. Completely. Friday night Mother and I spent watching movies on cable television, and of course Saturday was our Nicholas-antique-operetta night and we didn’t get home till after three
A.M.
Sunday I slept very late, and we had brunch and lazed around talking, and Mother got out an old knitting project (she keeps old-fashioned wooden needles and twisted natural wool skeins in an antique basket by the Shaker rocker, but that’s just to look good—she really knits with acrylic on steel needles). I picked up my cross-stitch and we went to bed early.

I never even glanced at my history. I never even
thought
about my history.

It was one of those awful, cruel essay tests: only two questions. I like true-false, fill in the blanks, matching columns or one sentence answers. I hate essays. In an essay, you can’t guess; you have to know.

In about thirty seconds I had a fierce headache and my stomach was in knots. I just didn’t know enough about either question to answer them. I felt myself beginning to cry and despised myself for it. Other people never seem to get so worked up about quizzes. Win a few, lose a few. I seem to be the only one who can cry herself to sleep over a terrible job on a test. It’s so humiliating.

We once read a wonderful essay by Winston Churchill about taking his entrance exams for a British boarding school, in which the only thing he could manage to do was number the page. First he wrote a 1. Then he put a period after the 1. Then he enclosed it in parentheses. And that was all he wrote.

He got to be Prime Minister, but I was going to be a prime failure if I couldn’t think of something to say about the rising wave of conservatism in the United States and how it is manifested. I thought of writing, “In my house, we manifest our conservatism by collecting kitchen antiques,” but I didn’t think Mr. Kane would be amused.

I wrote down some notes but they seemed irrelevant. The minutes ticked inexorably by. Everybody else was filling in reams of paper. Two people actually asked for more paper. All I could think of was the funny door handle of Nick’s jeep and the way Mrs. Dixon’s auditorium seat creaked when she laughed and the hugs from the possible girl cousins and Nick’s raspy cheek I’d never touched.

In the end I had to submit my test practically blank. Mr. Kane gave me a very odd look, but I managed not to cry and I fled from the room.

The problem was that I had liked Nicholas Nearing too much. Stumbling into possible relatives is emotional enough without falling in love with one of them. Really, Ginger was right. It was tedious.

I am normally quite self-disciplined. When the time comes that I absolutely can’t postpone doing my paper on Lord Byron another minute, I say to myself, “Nelle Catherine, shape up and get to work.” And I do. I almost never have late homework—and forgetting a history test was a first.

But that night, in spite of forty-eight algebra problems, a long French translation, and a chapter in biology to read, I sat at my desk and tried to compose a letter to Nick. “Dear Nick,” I wrote.

Mother popped in. “Listen to this, Nannie. Did you happen to read this when you went through the cookbook? Our cookbook? It’s a little dedicatory poem. It says—”

“Mother, really. I have homework to do.”

“You’re not doing homework, you’re writing a letter. Listen.

‘Cooks will find their labor less confusing

Whilst preparing viands succulently good

By selecting for their daily using

Nearing River’s recipes for food.’”

“Magnificent,” I said.

“Who are you writing to?” said Mother. “I can’t ever remember you writing a letter before.”

I covered the Dear Nick with my hand. “To whom am I writing?” I corrected her.

“Whatever. Whom? Whom, then?”

“Nobody, just practicing.”

“Oh. That reminds me. I have to write to David and Catherine and thank them for their hospitality. They were so nice to us. Really, I don’t know when I’ve met nicer people.”

Second that, I thought.

I pulled out my algebra. Nelle Catherine, I said to myself, forget about Nicholas Charles. And his eyebrows. And his grin. And his taped voice. And his funny remarks. And his silly pony tail.

It was remarkable what a long list I had about a boy I barely knew. Here I was in school with boys I’d known all my life and I could not have listed one thing about most of them. I felt as if I knew Nick intimately—yet not at all.

I put my mind on algebraic formulas and removed N. C. Nearing from my mind. If
ax
squared plus
bx
plus
c
equals seventy-two …

“Thank you for taking me to
The Mikado,”
I wrote. Boy, did that sound stilted. I wrote on a fresh sheet, “Dear Nick, What a good time I had with you Saturday.” It sounded worse.

My mother came back in. “Listen to this, Nan. An advertiser on the back pages of the cookbook says, ‘Beware of Flavoring Extracts peddled from house to house claiming to be equal to McMonagle & Rogers’ Premium Vanilla. Our thousand-dollar guarantee—’”

“Mother, please, I’m trying to do my math.”

“Oh, all right.” Mother straggled back out.

I remembered that the rubber band holding Nick’s hair in the ponytail was red.

Good grief, I thought. I have already failed a history exam and I have this huge algebra assignment and I’m fantasizing about the rubber band in his hair.

I got down to business.

I wrote, “Dear Nick—”

I
N JUNE OUR CAR
died.

It was not a spectacular or speedy death. The poor old thing just began sputtering in the mornings and choking in the evenings. We kept taking it back to the dealer and complaining that we had checked our oils and fluids and tires religiously, so why was this happening, and the dealer kept saying, “Ladies, your car is eleven years old. You got a hundred and sixty-two thousand miles on it. What that is, is fantastic. Super. Terrific. I don’t think you have any complaints coming. What you need to do is, you need to buy a new one. We got a fabulous new model that—”—that cost about ten times what we could possibly afford.

For two weeks we tried living without a car. Mother could take a bus to work if she walked five blocks to catch it and nine blocks from there to the office. Grocery shopping is not fun when you’re a half mile from the store. We did that twice without a car and twice with a taxi and each time the ice cream melted. Going to the library required a car. Going to the doctor or school games or the shopping malls required a car.

We were, however, getting enough exercise that Mother never wanted to run up and down the stairs fifteen times to limber up.

Then one day she could not pick up a client, I could not get home from a club meeting, and neither of us had taxi fare. That was the day we realized we were going to have to get another car. “Five hundred for your old one,” said the dealer, as if he were being incredibly generous. Maybe he was.

Which meant, even buying a completely stripped-down model, we needed several thousand more dollars.

“I guess,” said my mother, almost crying, “it’s time we found out if kitchen antiques are really an investment.” For another few days she walked around the apartment stroking her jars, bowls, choppers, spoons, toddy sticks, graters (carefully), butter molds, and candle boxes. I went baby-sitting and earned six dollars. Some spectacular contribution. I job-hunted. Fast food places had waiting lists. Department stores had hired all the temporary help they needed. Factories were laying off, not extending. Offices only wanted people who typed.