Nell (19 page)

Now Nell lay in her bed in Arlington, Massachusetts, and spoke to Clary in Piscataway, New Jersey, and Nell thought how odd it was to be so close like this while so
far away physically. Sometimes when on long-distance phone calls, Nell would hold the receiver of the phone away from her ear so that she could look at the little round holes in the earpiece. She could never
see
the voice, yet it was
there
, real, powerful, instantly recognizable as the voice of the specific person, capable of arousing any number of emotions in the listener. From this incredible plastic instrument in Nell’s hand came Clary’s voice now, filled with all of Clary’s present needs, with the resonance of all the years and the history of their friendship.

Nell was awfully glad the development of the world had not been up to her. She did not have sufficient imagination for the world. She could never have invented the telephone. She could still scarcely conceive of the telephone. She read with pleasure and wonder about Sally Ride, that appropriately named first American female astronaut, and she was so glad to know that here was a woman who was expanding the work of women. She was so glad that Sally Ride existed in the world, for she, Nell, would never have been able to do what that woman did. It was not that Nell was not brave or intelligent enough. It was just that she was so limited in her desires. And Nell’s desires did not have anything to do with space or machinery or invention or money or numbers or chemicals or power or corporations. Nell’s desires all had to do with people. She had started off her life as an actress, wanting to entertain people, wanting to
be
other people. She could never get enough of people. In time she had realized that her desires also had to do with
tending
people: God, what a dreadfully embarrassing thing to know about herself in this day and age. But it was true. She loved tending to people, especially to their bodies: more than that, she needed to. She missed rubbing sweet-smelling talc into a chubby baby’s body. Now she knew that was a thing she had needed to do in her life. She could still remember rocking her children in her arms when they were babies, rocking them in the middle of some dark night, humming to them softly, feeling their moist warm baby’s breath, the breath of life, on her arm or breast, rocking, holding the real and delicious life against her and thinking: Who is getting more pleasure from this rocking, the baby or me?

Only last summer at a pond she had been shocked to realize how happy it made her to say to nine-year-old Jeremy: “Come over here; let me put some lotion on your back or you’ll get a worse sunburn than you already have.”

“Oh,
Mom
,” he had said, exasperated.

But she had taken her time rubbing lotion into his shoulders and down his long bony back, down his arms. She did not get to touch him so much anymore; he did not need physical tending. He did need more verbal supervision, though: that was the hard thing. More and more, her interaction with her children was becoming verbal rather than physical. Unfair, unfair. The pleasure was hers for such a short period of time—and so much of that time she had been too tired or just too shortsighted to appreciate it. Her children were slowly removing themselves from her, and the physical nurturing was the first part to go. Often before, Nell had wondered why her friends had been so accommodating to their teenage children, why they had been so almost servile. How her friends had rushed about, making special foods for their teenagers, doing the teenagers’ laundry when the kids were certainly old enough to do it themselves, even making their beds.… Now Nell knew why. She would do it, too. She would smooth the sheets on her children’s beds, she would bake them brownies, cakes, pizzas, she would wash and fold and iron and sew their clothes as those clothes grew bigger in size: In this way she could touch them, even though once removed.

She had never physically tended Clary. There had never quite been that guardian-child connection between them. Yet the commitment Nell felt toward Clary was stronger than those she felt to most of her friends. It was not any old niggling sense of duty. It was a more vigorous, definite, immediate response, as she might turn and run toward any child who cried or fell from a bike. Something of the maternal was in Nell’s reaction—but Nell was glad for that, trusted that. And there was more of the friend in her reply to Clary’s call for help; there was even, Nell thought, a particle of wisdom, for Nell knew that Clary did not at this point in her life need to be simply taken care of again. Clary did not want to be taken as a child, a child who has goofed up again and has to come home in defeat. Clary had to earn her way. Well, that was not just philosophically true, it was financially true; none of her relatives was rich.

Nell was pleased to offer what seemed to be an excellent solution. She told Clary about the job and the house she would have in Nantucket that summer. She told Clary she would be welcome to come live with her and that Clary could either look for a summer job on Nantucket or Nell would try to see if Elizabeth O’Leary would hire her at the boutique. That would carry Clary through to the fall, when she could try getting a job in
the Boston area, with Marlow’s help.

Clary was delirious. “
Nantucket
! Oh wow, oh wow, Nell! I’ve always wanted to spend a summer on Nantucket. Oh, heaven!”

They talked some more, making arrangements, and finally hung up. Nell looked at her watch; it was almost midnight. She slid out of bed and went into Jeremy’s room to check him. He was sleeping peacefully, his forehead cool. He really was over the flu and would be able to go to school the next day. She slipped into Hannah’s room for a moment and stood there, just watching her little girl sleep: what peace. Hannah had always been able to fall asleep easily, sometimes right in the middle of a sentence.

Well, Nell was not going to fall asleep easily, not tonight. She was tired, but she was wired up. Too many things had happened, she had too much to consider. She roamed through the darkened house down to the kitchen, turned on the light, and began to heat a cup of milk. She had heard that warm milk had different properties from cold milk, could actually induce sleep. And sometimes this had worked for her. So she stood over her stove, stirring the milk, waiting for it to get warm.

As a girl, Nell had never been able to decide which life she wanted to have. She had
known
she was going to be an actress, and a famous one—that much was given, she thought. She would never give that up. But then her visions split into two extremes. On the one hand she dreamed of being a wonderful earth-mother woman, competent, caring, full of deep and healing laughter, making the theater company she worked with and her own husband and children into a giant family revolving around her. She saw herself settled somewhere near New York—so she could easily go in to perform—living in a vast rambling house, with ponies in barns and ducks on a pond, with a husband who adored her absolutely, and with endless, countless children. Eight children,
ten
children. Always pregnant, smug, and the house buzzing with life, all those children, all their friends; she would be a marvel of womanhood, an actress and mother par excellence.

Or:
She would be an actress, but not a mother. Not a wife. She would be too wild, too impetuous, and far too much sought after to settle down to just one man. In her second dream life, she saw herself as a willful, romantic siren, always fleeing from lovers on trains while wearing fur muffs, kissing one man goodbye in London and being met at the airport in Paris by another, being courted with jewels, mansions, and flowers by
endless, countless hopelessly adoring men. She would never marry, though she might have a child or two—never knowing just which lover was the father.

As a child, there had been many days when Nell had been sincerely worried about which life she would choose to lead.

How her dreams had changed.

Now the life she would choose if she could would be much more modest: she wanted John and Katy Anderson’s life. She wanted a secure marriage, real love, and goodwill and humor and caring shared with a man; she wanted to look back on memories with a man, to plan for the future with a man. She had stopped caring so much about the acting; she realized that not much joy was to be found in a string of lovers, and her two children made her life absolutely bulge at the seams, unlike the phantom children of her dreams, who drifted by without problems. She didn’t care about jewels, flowers, furs, or mansions; but she thought it would be nice to have a little peaceful love.

She had been trying for a few years to make a bargain with God. Or fate. Look, she would say, I know I’m lucky. I know I’m full while others on this planet starve, I know I’m healthy while others lie ill, I know I’m spoiled and often think I’m deprived. But here’s a deal: I still want more. I want to live with a man I love. I don’t think that’s asking too much. I think that’s a fair request. Let me have that, and as soon as I get my kids raised, I’ll turn whatever talents and energies I have to doing some good work in the world. How about it? What do you think? Okay?

Of course there had been no answer from God, or fate—unless the answer was in the negative, which Nell did not want to believe. But though she did not want to be cynical, she was having trouble being optimistic. She was having such trouble believing that her life made any sense. Everything was so random, chaotic, disorganized. She was an intelligent person, but she could not seem to get her life in control.

And now she was faced with this summer, this Nantucket summer. She would not be in her house—what would she do, just let the grass grow, let the place look deserted and be broken into? Who would take care of her animals? How would Medusa and Fred and Ginger fare without her for three months? Would Marlow and Charlotte take the children? She didn’t want them gone from her for three full months, but what would she do with them on the island while she worked? She could ask Clary to babysit—no, she
couldn’t. Wouldn’t ever do that. That would be stupid. Oh, it was so
irritating
, this Nantucket thing. She felt like a derailed train. A car side-tracked on a detour. What a waste of time it would be, three months away from her home, away from her real life; she wouldn’t be able to get on with things. She felt like some poor damn little
ant
, some little black female ant, carrying her children and her house and her animals and her dreams on her back like a piece of food, some plodding old ant creeping along, trying to get over to some shelter that she could just barely see, and here Elizabeth O’Leary had come, like fate with a broom, knocking her sideways off the path. She would have to struggle to right herself and gather her life together and get back on the road.

Nell stuck a finger in the pan. The milk was warm. She poured it in a cup, looking down at the white liquid, and sighed. She could feel the Panic Night feeling coming on again. Warm milk was good for normal sleeplessness, but it did nothing against the Panic Nights. Nell got some brandy and poured a great slug of it into the milk and added a touch of sugar. Now she had a deadly drink that was sure to give her a headache in the morning but would be a great help toward sleep tonight. She desperately needed sleep, needed to stop thinking for a while.

She went back up the stairs and settled into her bed, knocking Medusa sideways. She picked up the paperback mystery once more and stared at it while she drank her milk and brandy. But the words swam before her eyes, and she could only think: Nantucket. Clary. Ilona. Stellios. Hannah. Jeremy. Marlow. Charlotte. What a bizarre mixture, what a
glop
her life had become. At the front of the mystery was the detailed drawing of a family tree and Nell sat staring at it, admiring the clean lines, the definite arrowing and connecting and conjoining of the lives and histories. Those people’s lives were lived as cleanly as roads laid out on the earth. They knew where they came from, and they had a sense of destination, and they knew with whom they were traveling. Their lives made sense.

Nell let the paperback fall to the floor. It filled her with envy. Even this paperback
mystery
, this fiction, filled her with envy. She finished off her drink in one great swallow, then clicked off the light and slid down into the bed. She felt slightly dizzy from drinking so much all at once, but was glad for the dizziness; she knew now she would soon fall asleep. She lay on her side, looking out her window at the sky, and as her eyes adjusted to
the light, she saw more and more stars come twinkling into view. The night sky was speckled with them like a great bird’s egg. All those random dots that made no pattern. That was what her life was like, Nell thought, musing, and Medusa at this moment came creeping back over to settle in a warm ball on Nell’s hip. Nell was lonely, frightened, and confused. She felt that she was wandering through the vast space of her life like a child struggling through a complicated dot-to-dot puzzle; she could not find the clue; she could not find the meaning. She was roving through her life when she longed to be settled. There was no map for her to follow, there were no instructions, she was lost. Nell lay staring at the stars that had been thrown out in the universe in a pattern as mysterious and fluky as the pattern of her life, until the stars blurred before her eyes and she slept.

Five

Nantucket island lies twenty-five miles off the coast of New England, just south of the most southeastern mainland point of Massachusetts. It’s shaped like a fat quarter-moon lying on its side, with two tips pointing back to the continent. It is approximately fifty square miles in area, and its year-round population is about seven thousand. Its summer population is somewhere between forty and fifty thousand. Its first era of prosperity began with the capture of the first whale in 1668, and its second era of prosperity began sometime in the twentieth century, with its capture of rich tourists.

Because it is an island, there are only two ways to get to Nantucket: by boat or by plane. Either way necessitates an element of trust in the traveler.