Nell (20 page)

Nell first went to Nantucket by plane. It was May, and the weather was fine and the O’Learys were paying her way so that she could fly over for the weekend to get acquainted with the town and the boutique. But Nell began the trip disgruntled. It had taken the patience of a saint and the tactics of a four-star general to organize her household so that she could make the trip. She had had to wheedle a neighborhood child into caring for the animals the days she would be gone, pack up weekend clothes for Hannah and Jeremy, make certain that Jeremy didn’t forget his homework, pack weekend clothes for herself, leave the Cambridge boutique early in order to drive the children to Newton to leave them with Marlow and Charlotte, drive back home, lock the car, take a bus to the Park Square bus station in Boston, change, and take the subway to the airport. Finally, at six in the evening, she was on her way to Nantucket.

The O’Learys had made it clear that they were doing her a favor by buying her airplane ticket, so Nell kept quiet about the fact that one of the things she hated most in the world was flying. During any week before she had to board a plane, she had nightmares about plane crashes, and she was stiff with terror for the entire flight. Optimistic statistics were no help to her; her fear was not rational, it did not help her to know that her fear was not rational. She did not like to fly. She was not even sure yet that she believed it was possible to fly; she couldn’t understand it, and every time she boarded
a plane, she did so believing that the insane leap of faith required here was the same that operated for mystics who believed they could walk through fire without being burned.

Still, Nell knew that this kind of attitude was useless on her part. Her friends said to her, “Oh,
Nantucket
, you get to go to Nantucket, how
lucky
you are.” As Nell entered the airport, she said to herself: Look, Nell, you’ve got a weekend free of children, knowing they are safe with their father. You’ve got on pretty clothes, and you’re on your way to a vacation spot that people would kill to visit. The plane ride will be short and safe. Don’t be such a drag. It’s all in your attitude. Enjoy.

There was a bar at the PBA gate at Logan Airport, and while Nell waited for her flight to be called, she bought herself a Bloody Mary, which was served in a plastic cup. Just the idea of this—of being a woman alone in an airport at six o’clock in the evening, wearing a turquoise silk wrap dress and drinking a Bloody Mary—made Nell feel adult and even slightly wicked and glamorous (which just goes to show, Nell thought, how pathetically tame my life really is). But the act of buying the drink helped. The alcohol helped, too.

Nell strolled up and down the waiting area, looking out the great high walls of windows at departing and arriving planes, and felt the alcohol ever so slightly curb the bite of anxiety within her. A handsome man in jeans and loafers and a blue cotton shirt bought a drink and smiled at Nell, was looking at Nell each time she looked over at him. This made her feel even more brave. She stopped thinking of plane crashes and thought of plane adventures. Fifty years ago people used to have romantic encounters on ocean voyages; now they had them on airplanes, Nell thought. Forty-five minutes wasn’t much time for an encounter, she mused, but then, just as planes moved faster these days, so did people. By the time her flight was called, she was feeling almost devil-may-care.

The plane was a Cessna 402. It held nine people. It was smaller than most station wagons; narrower than Nell’s car. There was no bathroom, no steward, no curtain or door shutting off the front windshield and the pilot and co-pilot’s seat and equipment from view, no way to look into the middle of the plane, as Nell did in larger planes, to pretend she was in a movie theater full of people instead of in a metal mechanical can. Two rows of seats ran side by side, with a window at each seat. There was only one door, and it was necessary to duck to get through it. Nell buckled herself into her seat and felt the anxiety
in her stomach begin to slither up past the power of the calming alcohol.

Four other passengers got on. The handsome man in jeans was among them, but a little old man of perhaps eighty came before him and took the seat next to Nell. A chubby kid with rosy cheeks, wearing black slacks and a white shirt with black and gold epaulets got on and sat down at the front of the plane. How cute, Nell thought, the pilot must be teaching him how to fly. Someone behind her shut the door. The apple-cheeked boy put the headphones on his head and began playing with the controls. Oh my God, Nell thought,
that child is the pilot
! Nell couldn’t help herself; she leaned over to the little old man seated next to her.

“How old do you have to be to get a pilot’s license?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” the old man replied. “I think you can get one if you’re old enough to have a driver’s license. But I’m not sure.”

I think I want off this plane, Nell thought, by now shot through with adrenaline and fear. But it was too late. The boy had gotten the plane off the ground. Nell could only sit, staring out the window at the propellers that spun like deranged pinwheels at the front of the wings of the plane. Well, she thought, at least they would all be the first to know if something went wrong.

The plane flew south, low, the shoreline of Massachusetts and the Atlantic Ocean passing beneath them in a curving harmony of green and tan land, blue and green sea. Nell had never flown this low to the earth before; all her other trips had been on commercial planes that immediately zoomed way above the clouds. But now she could look down on fields and forests and highways and houses and the ocean, with its occasional dot of white ship or black boat. She could not, in fact,
not
look down unless she closed her eyes, which she was afraid to do because the motion of the plane was making her slightly dizzy. The plane was small enough so that Nell could feel the buffeting of the wind. Sometimes the wind came as a blow she could feel at the side, sometimes the plane simply dropped a few inches in the air. Nell kept looking at the solid earth, hoping it would make her feel secure.

Then the solid earth disappeared. Or rather the plane disappeared, into a cloud. Nell thought the plane rose, and at last they were suddenly above a cloud, with blue all around them and white down below them. She checked her watch; the plane was due to
land soon. She hoped she would get a view of Nantucket from the air.

“Fog again,” the old man next to her said aloud to no one in particular.

“Yup,” said a woman from behind Nell. “Wouldn’t you know.”

The plane began to descend into the cloud. It continued to go down in fog. The apple-faced boy at the controls was muttering into his headphone. All Nell could see out of any window was the grayish-white blur of fog.

“Won’t be able to land in this weather,” said the old man next to her.

Still the plane plummeted into the vaporous gray. I’ve had a good life and the children will be okay with Marlow, Nell thought. Then, as she watched, the fog disappeared from the front of the plane and immediately there in its place was the runway and the boy was landing the plane on it. They touched down, bounced lightly, slowed.

It seemed everyone in the plane sighed at once.

“That was an unbelievable landing,” said the old woman behind Nell. “I’m surprised you could get us in.”

The young pilot took off his headphones, turned to his passengers, and grinned. “The airport’s officially closed now,” he said, pleased. “They closed it as we were landing. Fog,” he added, as if anyone needed the explanation.

Nell stared at the boy, weak with gratitude and admiration. Now there was someone with confidence, she thought. She admired him and envied him for his ability to trust not only the mechanics of the universe but his plane, the ground controller, and, most of all, his own abilities. She wanted to thank him somehow—but then she always felt enormously grateful to pilots who had landed their planes safely, and she knew better than to make a scene. People didn’t thank pilots; it just wasn’t done. So she rose and squeezed herself out of the plane and onto the ground.

The Nantucket airport was small, a cluster of gray and white buildings all by themselves beside a field of tarmac. Elizabeth O’Leary was waiting for her in the PBA building. She offered Nell her cheek.

“Hello, darling,” Elizabeth said. “I’m surprised you could make it in.” Before Nell could reply, she went on, “Oh dear, you’re too dressed up. You’ll die in high heels here. The streets are cobblestone, the sidewalks are crooked and broken brick. You’re bound to break either the heel of your shoe or your ankle. Your dress is all right, but just barely.
You don’t have quite the right look. But you’ll get it. Do you have any other luggage besides that bag? Good. Come on. Let’s go to the boutique.”

It took only five minutes to drive in from the airport to the main street of Nantucket, which was called, appropriately enough, Main Street. This part of Main Street was straight, wide, and cobbled, bordered with charming shops. Nell could tell immediately, from the ride through the town and down Main Street, just how tasteful this place was. The streets were wonderfully winding and narrow, and the houses were mostly gray-shingled saltboxes with an occasional red brick Federal or white Greek Revival mansion here and there. Flowers and trees flourished everywhere, and even the small hills seemed to be dotted tastefully through the town, providing now and then a gentle rise and dip in the landscape. The golden dome and white spires of the local steeples rose gracefully above the town. Shining tidy boats bobbed in the harbor, while a few larger yachts lay still on the ocean, smug in their grand size. The people strolling Main Street seemed to have walked straight out of Ralph Lauren or L.L. Bean advertisements: they wore cotton sweaters tossed loosely over their shoulders and khaki slacks and loafers without socks, and even though it was May, they were tanned. Ah, Nell thought, how very New England this place is, how quintessentially Episcopalian. She knew that Nantucket would have little trade with ambiguity: everything here was clean, crisp, and clear. You knew at once if you belonged here or not.

The O’Learys’ shop was just off Main Street, on the corner of Main and Orange, tucked behind the savings bank. It was a small shop with a discreet little sign that said simply,
ELIZABETH’S
. The building had at one time been a small cottage and was now made over, for the O’Learys’ purposes, into a long, narrow boutique downstairs, with office and storage space on the second floor. They had decorated it much like the Cambridge boutique, with plain sanded wooden floors, plain white walls with dresses hanging, angled, like clever decorations, and dressing rooms at the back, papered in Laura Ashley and furnished in brass and wrought iron.

Nell and Elizabeth spent two hours in the store, going over the inventory and the books, discussing the other saleswoman who would be working in the store during the month of May, looking at the clothes. The O’Learys were selling a type of clothing slightly different from that in their Cambridge shop, though it all had Elizabeth’s
trademark: expensive casualness. Nell’s favorite dress was one made of white cotton. It was wide and sort of permanently wrinkled and looked on the hanger like nothing so much as an old sheet, but it was cut so beautifully that anyone who put it on would look elegant immediately, and it would hide a multitude of physical flaws. There were blue-and-white-striped shirts, pink-and-white-striped sweaters, green-and-white-striped dresses, sweaters in oatmeal and cream cotton, in thick chocolaty wool.

“The clothes are delicious this year,” Nell murmured, and thought to herself how working with these clothes would satisfy so much within her, even her sense of taste. She felt calm and optimistic in this airy store, where so much was pleasing to the eye and the touch. This kind of luxury had a lulling effect for Nell.

When Elizabeth decided they’d done enough, Nell went through the store with her, locking up. But when they stepped outside, Nell did not go to Elizabeth’s small Mercedes right away. She walked a few steps down the street to the corner. She turned, looked, and there was Main Street spread out in front of her with its brick sidewalks and cobblestone street. It was twilight now, and the air was cool but mild. The street glowed gently from shop lights and lamplight. The tall old elms that lined the street shone a soft green where the light fell on the leaves, then rose up out of the light and into the darkness of the night in a leafy gray, so that it looked as though the trees were made of mist. This town had an otherworldly beauty and Nell felt as though she were in Europe, on a side street in an English village, or perhaps not in another place, but in a different time: this could almost be the nineteenth century. Things moved at a different pace here; she could feel that. The air was different here, and why shouldn’t it be, for this was an island, and no matter how many new people walked here or how many modern contraptions were placed here, still the land itself was an island, surrounded by water, separate from the rest of the world, and Nell could sense how the elements of this island continued to rise from the earth, from the sidewalks, from the old red brick of the buildings so that the air was and always would be just that much different.

Nell was entranced. She could have stood at the corner staring at the beautiful street forever if Elizabeth hadn’t honked her horn several times. “For heaven’s sake, Nell,” she snapped when Nell got in the car. “What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you hungry?”

“It’s just so beautiful,” Nell offered in her defense. “I could look at it forever.”

“Yes, well, it will look a lot more beautiful to me when the tourists get here and it’s raining and they stroll into my shop to pass the time and spend their money,” Elizabeth said, deftly slipping the car into third gear and taking a corner.

Nell looked out the window as Elizabeth drove, trying to establish where they were in connection with the shop, but there were too many twists and turns. Some of the roads were so narrow, scarcely wider than one car. They drove very close past houses with heavy wooden doors with brass knockers, white picket fences, ivy-covered arched trellises leading into arbors. Again Nell had that sensation of being in another time, another land.