Nell (3 page)

She still had fun with her hair, wearing it in different ways, just as she had fun with makeup. She had the definite, slightly exaggerated features that suited an actress or an opera singer: large eyes, high cheekbones, wide mouth. When she first worked in the boutique, she had used her skill with makeup to create an impressively dramatic face that
“went” with her clothes each day. But soon she gave that up, believing that the makeup intimidated her customers—and she preferred to use the early morning half hour for extra sleep. Now she wore some blusher and occasionally a touch of eyeliner, mascara, lipstick. When she worked at it, when she was wearing the perfectly right clothes and makeup, she could look like the sort of woman who would fly to Japan or France to attend a fashion show or an auction of antiques.

The gray elephant robe was not that sort of garment. Nell pulled it over her head and immediately was enveloped in a tent of shapeless warmth. She felt comfortable and cozy, but in the mirror she saw a new brown stain down the front of the robe.

“God,” she muttered to herself. “What a glamorous creature I am.”

She had intended to be a glamorous creature. She even had actually been a glamorous creature. She had been a cheerleader and homecoming queen in high school, an actress in college, and, in her early twenties, then the stunning wife of an important young director. Now she was the not-so-stunning ex-wife of a not-so-important director, and all the acting she did was purely personal. Sometimes she was her only audience.

Now she grabbed all her long reddish hair and stuck it up in a glob on the back of her head with some long barrettes so that it wouldn’t get in her way while she was cooking. She was having friends to dinner that night.

“Listen,” she said to her reflection in the mirror as she went out of her room. “God gave you your children and your cheekbones. Don’t expect any other gifts.”

It was about eleven o’clock. Jeremy had biked off to the school for soccer practice and wouldn’t be home till afternoon. Hannah was in her room, playing “teacher.” This morning she had rounded up the younger children in the neighborhood and brought them up to her room. Before going down to the kitchen, Nell peeked in the door and saw four little children sitting dutifully on the floor while Hannah stood at the other end of her bedroom, holding up a stuffed animal.

“Squirrel,” she said. “This is a squirrel.”

“Squirrel,” Hannah wrote on the blackboard.

“Squirrel,” the four children said.

“Good!” Hannah said with sugar in her voice. “Now, Heather,
you
may hold the stuffed squirrel.”

Hannah was wearing the navy blue suit her grandmother had sent her for Easter and a pair of Nell’s old black high-heeled sandals. She had smeared pink lipstick over her lips and cheeks and stuck her blond hair back in a severe bun that had several bobby pins dangling down, swinging with every definite nod of Hannah’s head. She looked absolutely demented, but the four children at her feet seemed completely at ease and even fascinated, so Nell shut the door without saying a word and went down the stairs to the kitchen.

When Nell had been married to Marlow, they had bought this old, rickety shambles of a Victorian house, intending to restore it over the years to its former solidity, if not grandeur. Marlow had thought the large high-ceilinged rooms would be perfect for theatrical gatherings. Nell had thought all the bedrooms would be perfect for all the babies she would have. When Nell and Marlow divorced, Nell had gotten the house, along with full custody of the children; she had thought of selling the house immediately—it was so large and falling apart, it needed constant repair.

But at that time the real estate market changed, and she found that in order to buy a smaller house, she would have to pay a much larger mortgage, much more interest on the principal. She had decided to keep the house and for the first two years had been glad to stay there. It had provided a sense of continuity and stability for her two small children, whose lives had been upset by their parents’ divorce. And when, in desperation, she had begun a babysitting service in her home in order to make survival money and still be with her children, she had been glad of the size of the house.

She had been especially glad on rainy days, when she had nine children under five years of age and two infants to take care of. What had once been a library became the napping room, where the children sprawled on the antique Oriental rug with their sleeping bags and blankets and comforters. The living room had been for quiet play, the kitchen for juice and snacks and lunch, and the dining room, the once-elegant dining room with the intricate parquet floor and the crystal chandelier, had been where little kids rode their tricycles and scooters around the long oak table during blizzards or rainstorms. The landing to the second floor was large enough for the television set, and the children could gather there in a group, sprawling on rug samples Nell had begged from a furniture store, to watch
Captain Kangaroo
or
Sesame Street
.

My God, what a time that had been.

That was four years ago. Nell had been ready to go on that way forever, and would have if the parents of one of the children hadn’t intervened. The O’Learys owned one of the best women’s boutiques in Cambridge; they specialized in understated cotton dresses and simple cotton sweaters that cost around two hundred dollars. They had decided to move to Nantucket to open up another shop there, and they asked Nell if she would be interested in running their shop on “the mainland” for them. They would do the major bookkeeping and buying; she would be a saleswoman and manager.

“I don’t know a thing about running a store!” Nell had responded.

“But you’ve got such a long, lean body!” Elizabeth O’Leary had said, studying Nell with her buyer’s eye. “You’d look super in our clothes. You’d be the best ad we could get.”

“Are you kidding?” Nell cried. “I’d never be able to afford the clothes you sell!”

“Well, honey,” Colin O’Leary said, “you won’t have to buy them. Just
wear
them—while you’re working in the store.”

“You don’t want to be stuck here all your life with these—these
children
,” Elizabeth had said, looking at the horde of jam-smeared midgets who straggled in and out of the kitchen as they talked. The O’Learys’ own child, Priscilla, was a lovely little girl of five who wore immaculate and expensive hand-smocked pinafores and Mary Janes with white socks every day. The O’Learys were sending Priscilla to live with her grandparents in Greenwich, Connecticut, so she could go to a good private school. “We can pay you
very well
,” Elizabeth had continued.

And they did pay Nell very well, and she had found, after she grew accustomed to the change, that she quite liked dressing up in fabulous designer clothes and working regular hours with human beings who did not spit up on her. Still, she missed the grand chaotic richness of those babysitting years.

Not that there wasn’t plenty of chaos in her life still. This afternoon Nell was going to clean out her basement or die. The washer and dryer were in the basement, and a playroom for the children was there, too, in a corner of the basement where the cement was covered by a torn and faded piece of linoleum. Jeremy’s electric train table was in the basement, as were many of Hannah’s dress-up clothes and baby dolls. Still, the
basement was not Nell’s favorite place. In fact, it made her skin crawl. The ceiling was low, with old pipes that crossed just above her head, growing cobwebs and dust jungles in spite of all her efforts to clean. It was not a modern basement, and the floor was cracked here and there and the furnace was monstrous and creepy and there was another room leading off the main room, a room that didn’t even have a cement floor, a room with one lightbulb in the middle. Nell hadn’t gone into that dirt-floored room for years. She pretended it didn’t exist. The dark door loomed behind the furnace like the portal to hell. She was always amazed that her children liked playing in the basement. She could scarcely bring herself to stay down there long enough to do the laundry.

Just last night, on her way down the stairs with a load of laundry in the willow basket, Nell had noticed in one dark corner of the basement an unusual and foreboding object: a bundle of what? Old clothes? A sheet? Blood-covered fabric?

“Jesus God!” Nell had shouted, dropping the basket and rushing back up the stairs. “Jeremy! Hannah! Help! Come here! I think we have to call the police!”

Her children had come thumping down the stairs at once. “What’s wrong, Mom?” they had asked.

“I think there’s a—oh, sweeties, I don’t want to scare you, but I think there’s something
dead
in our basement.”

Jeremy looked at Hannah. Hannah looked at Jeremy.

“Where?” Jeremy asked.

“In the corner across from your playroom. By the door.”

“I, um, don’t think it’s exactly a, um,
dead
thing, Mom,” Jeremy said.

“Do you know what it is?” Nell asked, aghast.

They had known what it was. They had heard at school, from an older child, that if you went to a darkened room and put ketchup on a mirror, a ghost would appear. The ghost of the house would think the ketchup was blood and his spirit would be summoned up. Several nights ago Jeremy and Hannah had sneaked a sixteen-ounce bottle of ketchup to the basement and spread the mirror with ketchup. And
spread
the mirror with ketchup—they had not realized how ketchup flowed on a surface that did not absorb. In desperation, trying to clean up the mess, they had grabbed whatever was at hand: Hannah’s dress-up clothes, some old baby doll clothes, and a sheet.

“I have told you
never
to take
food
to the basement!” Nell had screamed, freaking out. “Food in the basement will bring rats! God. I’ve told you
never
to take food to the basement.” Her children looked at each other, conspirators’ looks, looks that indicated they were now going to have to deal with a madwoman’s raving with their superior patience. “
I’m serious about this!
If you leave food in the basement, rats and mice and moles and
God knows what
will come. You aren’t taking me seriously. Oh, I just hope you wake up in the night with a rat in bed with you, it would serve you right. No wonder you had a mouse in your umbrella!”

She had marched them down the stairs with a black plastic trash bag and made them clean up the mess while she loomed over them, threatening them with rat bites and disease and finally the definite possibility that they would be orphaned because if she did see a rat in the basement while doing the laundry, she would die on the spot of a heart attack, from terror.

Just cleaning up the mess was lesson enough for the children: the ketchup had congealed on the clothes in disgusting sticky splotches that not even they wanted to touch.

“I will never eat ketchup again in my life,” Hannah had said quietly.

Nell had made them remain in the basement protecting her while she did the laundry.

But this afternoon she would throw open the hatchway door that led up from the basement to the backyard. That would let the warm April air in to freshen the basement—and give any scrambling little live thing the opportunity to scurry up and out while Nell and her children cleaned. She would sleep better tonight; she always slept better after the spring-cleaning of the basement. The children played in it often during the long cold winter days when they were trapped indoors, and over the months things accumulated. Nell knew they would discover lost socks and underpants, books and jewelry, batteries and Lego blocks. She was eager to get to work.

But first she wanted to finish the cassoulet. Nell loved cooking and having people to dinner, but since her divorce, she had learned to serve only those dishes that could be prepared beforehand. Otherwise she would end up in a frustrated snit, feeling like Cinderella, stirring away like an old drudge alone over the stove while far away in the
living room her guests laughed and gossiped and she felt like an outcast at her own party.

Or even worse, she would invite the guests into her kitchen while she finished a dish and, incapable of being sociable and efficient at the same time, ruin the food. There was the night when she was so enthralled with a friend’s description of his ex-wife’s anger that she had measured tablespoons rather than teaspoons of curry into a sauce: What a party
that
had turned out to be! Everyone had sat around the dining room table with flushed faces and tears in their eyes, blowing their noses into handkerchiefs or, in sheer desperation, the cloth napkins, and finally drinking too much in order to drown the terrible heat of the curry sauce. God, they had gotten drunk and silly. It had turned out after all to be a wonderful time, but the next day they had all had vicious hangovers.

And there had been the time when a friend had confided a sorrow to Nell at the very moment she opened the oven to take out a loaf of bread.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry,” Nell had said to her friend, and at the same time had reached her hand in to pull out the rack. But she had forgotten to put an oven mitt on and grabbed the rack with her bare hand.

“Oh
dear
,” Nell had said earnestly, when she had longed to yell, “Oh holy
shit
!” Fortunately, she had been only heating the bread, so the burn was not bad, and she had been able to soothe it with ice water and first-aid cream, and her guest, so overwhelmed with her own problem, had not even noticed. But Nell didn’t want to do that again.

So now she did most of the cooking for a party beforehand. And it worked out well, for this allowed her to make huge casseroles and stews, which were not only delicious, but inexpensive. For tonight’s party she was making a cassoulet—full of all those wonderful cheap fat white beans. Peasant food. She did like peasant food best. And this dish made her feel so thrifty and prudent, for she could sneak in the leftovers: chunks of roast lamb and roast pork, chicken wings and duck legs, all cooked for other meals and left over and frozen and now appearing from her freezer so that she could turn out this elaborate and time-consuming dish in very little time at all.