Nell (32 page)

Then she told them about Andy. She told them how she had met him and about his house and that he would be eating dinner with them a lot and sleeping with her in the cottage, because she loved him.

“What about Stellios?” was Jeremy’s first question.

“What?” Nell asked. It was the last thing she thought the children would think of.

“Well, aren’t you going to see Stellios anymore?” Jeremy asked.

“No, honey,” Nell said. “I’m not. I never did
love
Stellios. Although he was a special, good friend.”

“I’m going to miss Stellios,” Hannah announced.

“Well, sweetie, I know,” Nell said. “But I think you’ll like Andy, too. Although he is quite different.”

“Well, why do you love Andy instead of Stellios?” Jeremy asked. “Stellios was
nice
.”

Why do these children persist in talking about Stellios, Nell wondered. “It’s hard to explain love,” she said. “I don’t know
why
I love Andy. He’s older than Stellios, for one thing, so we have more in common. And we both like the same sorts of things. We read. We like the same sort of music and food and movies. I love being with Andy. He’s nice and he’s kind and he’s funny, and oh, darlings, I can’t explain just why, but I do love him.”

“Are you going to marry him?” Jeremy asked.

“Oh no,” Nell said. “I mean, I don’t think so, I don’t know. It’s too early to think about that yet, Jeremy. But we are going to sort of live together. We’ll be together a lot. He’ll be in the house a lot, and as I said, he’ll sleep with me in my bed all night.”

“Like Stellios did,” Hannah said.

Nell was stunned. “Hannah,” she said, “Stellios never spent the night with me. How can you say that? You never saw him spend the night with me. You never saw him in my bed.”

“But we saw you kiss him in the living room,” Hannah said. “And we know what
that
means.”

Nell turned to Jeremy. “Did you think that Stellios was spending the night at our house?” she asked.

“Sure,” Jeremy said. “I guess so.”

“But you never saw him there!” Nell said.

“I thought he just got up and left before we woke up,” Jeremy said. “And you always go to bed after we’re asleep. I just thought he went to bed with you.”

“Oh Lord,” Nell said, and she sighed.

“Well,” Hannah announced. “If you didn’t go to bed with Stellios, that’s too bad. He’s a lot of fun to cuddle with.”

Nell looked at her daughter and smiled. “Yes,” she admitted, remembering. “Stellios is a lot of fun to cuddle with.”

“Maybe if you
had
gone to bed with him you’d be in love with him,” Hannah said, looking at her mother with exasperation.

Nell wanted to put her head down on the table and weep with frustration. The intricacies and nuances of this delicate conversation seemed beyond her capabilities. At last she said, “Just because you like going to bed with a person doesn’t mean you love him.”

Nell thought about trying to find out just what her children thought they meant by “going to bed with someone,” but she was too tired. She wanted so much to guide her children safely through the perils of sex education, to somehow get them on that sensible and comfortable middle road of knowing that sex was not the sacred and holy act that should be feared, as her mother had taught her, but also that it was not as casual and insignificant as TV seemed to indicate, either. Children knew so much these days. They had sex education in school, and they saw things on TV and could easily check out books from the library that described the sexual act in clever and whimsical words with accompanying drawings that in Nell’s mother’s time would have been labeled pornographic. It was hard to know just what they actually did know, Nell thought.

One day in early spring Nell had been fixing dinner and talking with Stellios, who sat at the table drinking a beer. Hannah had come into the kitchen, sat down at the table, scribbled on the telephone message pad. Obviously she was bored and had no one to play with and thought she might be entertained by the adults for a while.

“Mom,” Hannah had asked casually, “do you bawl a lot?”

My God, Nell thought: Do I ball a lot? She was chopping onions at that moment; at Hannah’s question she almost chopped off her finger. She didn’t know what to do. Should she scold Hannah? Send her to her room? Sit down with her and have a serious discussion? She didn’t dare look at Stellios. She turned a hypocritical face to her daughter.

“Why, darling,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I’m not sure just what you mean.”

“I mean, do you bawl a lot,” Hannah said. “Like on
Little House on the Prairie
. Whenever Laura Ingalls cries, the kids all say, ‘There goes Laura, bawling again.’ ”

Nell felt her eyes go into slits rather like Medusa’s as she stared at her darling daughter. “Yes, Hannah,” she said evenly. “I do bawl a lot. I think it’s a good thing to cry when you feel like it. You’ve seen me. I bawl at sad TV shows, I bawl when I hurt myself, sometimes even when I’m just tired.”

Hannah seemed satisfied with that answer and talked some more before wandering off.

“Wow,” Stellios had said when Hannah left the room. “For a moment there I thought she was talking about something else.”

“She might have been,” Nell said. “I wouldn’t put it past her to try something like that just to see if she could get a rise out of me.”

“But Hannah’s only eight years old,” Stellios had said.

“I know,” Nell had replied. “But it’s amazing what kids know these days.”

And it’s amazing, Nell thought as she sat at the table on the ferry looking at her children, how little can be explained about love and sex. No matter how explicit the technical details of the sexual act were made, the truth about love and sex remained a mystery. There was no way to explain why you fell in love with someone. Nell talked with Hannah and Jeremy a bit more, but finally ended up with the same vague advice her mother had given her: “Well, you’ll just have to wait till you’re grown, then you’ll see what I mean. You can’t help who you fall in love with.”

The children grew bored with the subject, and after they finished eating, they wandered around the boat a bit and finally sat down on the hard benches to wait out the end of the trip. They were tired, and the ferry didn’t dock until midnight.

By that time Hannah had fallen asleep and was hard to awaken. She didn’t want to carry her backpack, but Nell insisted, because she had to carry the enormous old suitcase that held all the children’s clothes and toys. She cajoled Hannah into putting on the backpack and following her down the ramp.

“We’re in Nantucket. You’re here at last!” Nell said, trying to be enthusiastic.

But after all, it was too dark for the children to see anything, and they were so tired. Nell and Andy had agreed that for the children’s first night on the island she should
probably sleep alone, and so he was at his house. Nell didn’t know where Clary was—out drinking with friends, or perhaps asleep in her room at the cottage. But Nell felt an irrational anger at both Clary and Andy because they had left her alone to struggle down the ramp with two sleepy children and a heavy suitcase. She took a taxi to the cottage in spite of the expense. Clary wasn’t at the cottage when they arrived, and all the rooms were dark. Nell paid the driver, hauled the suitcase into the house—she couldn’t expect the taxi driver to do it; he was so ancient and shriveled he undoubtedly weighed less than the suitcase—and took the children through all the rooms, flipping on the lights, trying to sound cheerful and hearty. But Hannah and Jeremy were exhausted and, Nell realized, so was she. She got the children into bed, kissed them good night, and knew they would fall asleep instantly.

Then she went back through the house, turning off the lights, relaxing. She poured herself a glass of wine. She went into the large back living room and sat down in a chair in the dark. She took a deep sip of wine, then put her head in her hands.

Here she was, alone again, with the weight of her two children pulling on her just as definitely as the suitcase had weighed on her, and she felt she was managing their lives with the same cumbersome sense of solitary struggle. She replayed in her mind her last conversation with Andy. He had been the one who had said, “I imagine that the first night with your children you’ll want to spend alone.” He had not thought to ask if he could help in any way, help carry the luggage, pick them up at the ferry, and drive them home—and after all, why should he think of such a thing? He didn’t even know the children, and he and Nell were only lovers. And Clary, well, Clary, would be glad enough to see Jeremy and Hannah again, but they weren’t part of her life, really.

It had been that damn arriving on the ferry bit that had sent Nell into this depression, she decided. It had been that exhausting lugging of the suitcase and the effort of cheering the children on that had tired her—and the sight of so many other people going off the ferry and into the waiting arms of friends or lovers or family. It had seemed to Nell that everyone else on the boat had been met and embraced. One little boy had run down the ramp, calling, “Daddy! Daddy!” and his father, waiting on the wharf, had held out his arms for the little boy to jump into. The father had lifted him up in the air and hugged him in a great squeeze of love. The mother had come more slowly down the
ramp, and the father had shifted his son onto one arm so that he could wrap his other arm around his wife and pull her to him in a lingering kiss. Nell had wanted to cover her children’s eyes, to turn their heads away from this sight, because she was afraid they would be as hurt by it as she was, by the contrast of this happy, whole family with their own.

“I’m just tired,” Nell said aloud to the dark and empty room. She finished her wine, put the glass in the kitchen, then went upstairs to bed. When she was brushing her teeth in the bathroom, she saw a T-shirt of Clary’s tossed over the clothes hamper. It was pink and it said
LIFE’S A BEACH
. Earlier this summer they had laughed over it, saying that the back side of the shirt should read
LIFE’S A BITCH
. It could be your basic manic-depressive T-shirt, Clary said. Now Nell tried to reassure herself: it’s all a matter of attitude. Your life can be as miserable or as happy as you make it.

Sometimes, though, she felt she just did not have the energy to keep at it, to keep trying to turn the sow’s ear into a silk purse. Sometimes she wished she had just a little more, a little better, raw material to start with. Finally she fell into bed and was grateful to stop her trudging thoughts.

The next morning, refreshed by her sleep, Nell started the day off cheerfully. She got the children up and dressed and off to camp, bought lots of groceries at lunch hour, and worked hard in the boutique. She was planning to have Andy over for dinner that evening.

But when she got home, she was confronted with problems: Jeremy had liked the camp well enough, but Hannah hadn’t. Only two other little girls were in the group, and they were best friends; they ignored her, and she had had to play alone. Nell said she’d discuss this with the counselors. Then the children were so clingy; Nell could understand this, for they were always clingy after spending a long period of time away from her, but she wanted to shower and change and prepare a nice meal. And she had gotten into the marvelous habit in the past two months of having about thirty minutes of time to herself after the wild days of constantly talking to people and taking care of customers in the boutique. Now Hannah and Jeremy followed her from room to room, demanding that she arbitrate arguments, help them decide who got to choose the television shows, and so on. They had been away from her for two months. They wanted to be with her every minute
now, here in this strange new place. Nell understood this, but as she walked around the house, she kept bumping into them, nearly tripping over their feet as they trailed next to her, demanding her attention. Nell unpacked their suitcases to find that all their clothes were dirty—every single item. Good old Charlotte, Nell thought.

She carried armfuls of clothes down to the laundry room off the kitchen and started a load of wash. Hannah and Jeremy went with her, complaining about their stay with Marlow and Charlotte: they had been bored, Charlotte wasn’t a good cook, Dad hadn’t spent any time with them, why did they have to go?

Nell fixed herself a drink. She had envisioned a lovely evening, with all four of them sitting around the dinner table and Jeremy and Hannah saying the clever and charming things they were capable of saying while Andy looked on, impressed. But now Nell could see this vision was not going to make it to reality. She fixed the children tuna sandwiches and chips and carrots, celery, and green pepper chunks, and let them eat early, because they were starving after their day on the beach and would get crabby if they had to wait. If Andy hadn’t been coming for dinner, she would have eaten a tuna fish sandwich herself and put her feet up and watched television with the children. But she washed lettuce to make a salad and started the charcoal for the barbecued chicken, even though just lifting the bag of charcoal seemed a monumental effort.

When Andy arrived at the cottage, he wanted to sit with a drink and watch the news, as he and Nell had become accustomed to doing. But the cottage had only one TV set, of course, and Hannah and Jeremy were engrossed in a children’s show. And so, even though the children and Andy had said hello nicely enough to one another, in only a few moments the room was full of tension, and then resentment, because Nell told the children they could watch TV all evening, but for just this half hour she and Andy were going to watch the news. They could play in their rooms.

Hannah and Jeremy sulked off upstairs. Nell sat glaring at the TV, hating Andy because he wanted to watch the news—which was boring tonight—instead of donating this first half hour of time to getting to know Nell’s children. She felt he had slighted her children. While she sat there watching TV and smoldering, the chicken burned on the outdoor grill, and although Andy said not to worry, it didn’t matter, he still only picked at it, pushing away the blackened skin with his knife, leaving most of it on his plate. Clearly
it was not up to his standards. In defense, Nell chewed away greedily at her share of chicken, pretending it was delicious even though it had gotten tough and tasted dry.