Nell (35 page)

The children loved Surfside best because the waves were the perfect height for jumping. They swam, they built elaborate sand castles, and Nell lay tanning on a beach blanket, reading a paperback novel, or talking with Clary about the more ineffable mysteries of men and women and love. One day Nell buried her children in sand and took pictures of them that way, with only their heads showing, their faces bright with smiles.

Clary was a good swimmer and would go far out. When she came back to shore, walking up out of the water, Nell would shake her head in wonder: How effortlessly graceful Clary was. Clary would emerge from the ocean in her scarlet bikini with her taut belly and long thighs glistening and slick from the sea water. She would raise her arms up to press her streaming hair back from her face, a young, beautiful woman, glowing with health, unaware of her glory. She would plop down on the blanket next to Nell and squeeze water from her suit. “God,” she would say to Nell, “I’ve got so much sand in my suit I could lay a pearl.”

On the days that Nell worked, she started going out for walks during her lunch hour instead of hiding away up in the boutique’s second-floor office. She liked strolling
around the town in the afternoon. Nantucket had a holiday feeling about it every day. The people were all so pretty. They wore short flounced skirts, halters, visors, flowered dresses, polka dots and wide stripes, T-shirts the colors of ice cream. Everyone looked tan, and everyone looked in love. Couples lazed along with their hands in each other’s back pockets or with their arms linked or around each other’s waists. The streets were congested with traffic, not just with the cars and the four-wheel-drive vehicles that people brought over to use on the beaches, but with bikes and mopeds and silly little pedal-carts. Men and women pushed babies in strollers and a variety of cheerful dogs trotted up and down the streets, busy with their own mysterious errands. Flowers bloomed everywhere, and two different groups set up farmers’ markets on Main Street, so that Nell could look to her left and see a window full of lacy lingerie and look to her right and see brown-tasseled sweet Nantucket corn, green grapes, watermelon, avocados. On South Beach Street there was a shop that sold nothing but hammocks, and to advertise their goods they had put two hammocks just outside their store. Every time Nell walked past Lyon Hammocks, she would see children or teenagers or even adults lounging in the long hammock, swinging from the chair hammock, and she would think that this was no ordinary street, no ordinary town. It seemed to her such an amiable and good-hearted thing to do, to let passersby have the luxury of being silly in a hammock.

On Sundays or other days that Nell had off, she took Hannah and Jeremy to the museums. They learned all about whales and spermaceti candles and how wealth was accumulated by the sea captains, who built their mansions on the main streets of the town. They saw a ship complete with oars and masts and sails built entirely of cloves; a dollhouse made of ivory. The museum the children loved best of all was the
Lightship Nantucket
, which had once been anchored on the Nantucket shoals and was now retired, docked permanently in the harbor. Jeremy and Hannah went through the lightship whenever they could, fascinated by the sailors’ wooden bunks and the great brass steering wheel, by the engine room, the maps of Nantucket, and the pictures of marine disasters. A long piece of wall, painted with constellations, had been brought up out of the Zodiac room of the sunken ship
Andrea Doria
. The passengers who had been in the cabin of the Zodiac room had drowned when the ship sank, but this much of the ship had been brought up to light. The children touched it lightly, superstitiously, wondering about life
and death and the whims of giant forces such as the sea. One day an official of the ship took the time to explain to Nell and the children that lightships were still used on the Nantucket shoals, so that their beacons and foghorns and lights could warn the trading ships of the treacherous shallows. Jeremy could not believe that in this age of technology it was still necessary for human beings to bob about day in and out on lightships to warn other people. Nell watched her son question the official and wondered if it was something in Jeremy’s male genes that made him want to believe that modern technology could replace the lightship people. She was rather heartened to know that little human beings and their humble lightships were irreplaceable, and she liked the thought of those men out in the vast ocean, waiting to help others through a storm or fog.

Jeremy and Hannah began to develop a sense of independence. Because Nantucket was small and safe, they were able to roam around the streets by themselves, something they couldn’t do in Arlington. Now and then, when Andy and Nell went out to dinner or to a cocktail party, she sent the two children off with some money to eat dinner at the Sweet Shop or at Vincent’s restaurant. The first time Nell let them go alone, she had skipped out of the cocktail party and hurried down to the restaurant to peek in the window. She wanted to see if the children were safe, if they were behaving themselves. She was delighted to see Jeremy reading the menu to Hannah, who sat with her thrift-shop pocketbook in her lap like a little lady. When the children looked up to find their mother peering at them through the window, they made disdainful faces at her. Nell left. Later they scolded her for her sneakiness. From then on, she let them go off when they wanted to, and she could tell each time how they grew more sensible, less dependent on her decisions.

Some evenings she and Clary took them to the movies:
Return of the Jedi, Octopussy, National Lampoon’s Vacation
. On Wednesday nights they went to the Coffin School to watch the slides and hear the lectures presented by Greenpeace; they learned to tell right whales from killer whales. On rainy days they read or walked down to the beach in their raincoats, carrying bags of old bread to throw to the gulls. They watched the adolescent gulls with shabby gray feathers squawk and bully the white-and-gray adult gulls. The young gulls would swoop down, screeching, to claim any bit of bread. They would proclaim in loud and nasty cries their dominion. “Gee, those young gulls are mean
and selfish,” Hannah said. “Like
all
youngsters,” Nell replied snidely, and was rewarded with a chorus of “Oh, Mom,” from the children.

They climbed the steps to the tower of the Congregational Church one afternoon and saw all of Nantucket spread around them. They browsed in the Seven Seas gift shop, foolishly lusting after shell necklaces and cranberry-scented candles. The children bought Turk’s head rope bracelets to wear on their wrists, and their skin glowed brown and smooth against the white knots. They sat at Brant Point—which Jeremy renamed Bug Point because of the tiny long-horned sand fleas that hopped frenetically up out of the sand—to watch the yachts and ferries and sailboats coming in and out of the harbor, so close that the people on the boats would call and wave to those on shore.

One evening Andy took Clary and Nell and the children to a play put on by the Nantucket Theater Workshop. The play was
Picnic
, which Andy remembered as a movie starring Kim Novak and William Holden. But Nell remembered it more distinctly as a play: During the second year of her marriage to Marlow, she had starred in the play, acting Kim Novak’s part of Madge. Madge was a young Kansas girl, falling in love and experiencing passion for the first time. Nell watched the young actress who played Madge, a woman with hair almost as red as Nell’s, and she remembered what it had been like to be an actress in that play and what it had been like to be a young woman in the Midwest falling in love for the first time. The production was a good one, and it both pleased Nell to watch the play and made her sad. When she had played Madge, she had still believed she would be a famous actress. Now here she was, only a saleswoman in a clothing store, only a working divorced mother, who hadn’t acted in even an amateur performance in years and who might never act again in her life. All those dreams that didn’t come true, Nell thought. All those dreams that I just let slip away! During the play, Madge heard the whistle of a train and talked dreamily to her sister about escaping their little town for adventures. But at the end of the play it was clear that the only adventure Madge really wanted was that of being with the man she lusted after. Madge packed her bag and ran off after Hal. Nell sat, silently impressed with Inge for holding tight to what was true.

Out of the corner of her eye she studied Hannah, who had gone through the entire performance displaying a multitude of emotions on her mobile face, hoping that people
would see her and be amazed at her sensibilities, imagining, as Nell had at her age, that people were watching her instead of the play. Nell could see how Hannah wanted all the things she had wanted as a girl: fame, success, luxury, a sense of being gloriously above the rest of the human race, a life of magnificent achievement. Nell wondered if Hannah would give up this dream for the love of a man. She imagined Hannah probably would.

The days and nights just flowed by, that August. Nell worked, took care of her children, gossiped with Clary, made love with Andy, did the dishes or laundry all in a dream. Everything was a pleasure. She and the children made a game out of finding a space in the parking lot at the grocery store; they called it the A&P Gamble. She bought models of shrimp boats and schooners and paints for Jeremy and satin cord in crimson and mauve and gold and indigo for Hannah. Hannah would wash and dry the shells she had found on the beach, coat them with several layers of clear nail polish, and glue the satin rope to the shells, making necklaces to take to friends or to send to grandmothers. Kelly and Mindy got slaphappy at the boutique from working so hard, and when Nell entered the store, they would greet her with laughter and chatter, like a pair of drunken squirrels. Clary went out almost every night, and whoever was at home ended up writing endless messages on the chalkboard for her from all the men and women who called for her.

Nell gained weight from banana daiquiris at parties, hot fudge sundaes with the children, and Andy’s gourmet meals. She stopped wearing her bikini and wore only her black one-piece suit. Even then she felt like a collection of pillows were stuffed inside the fabric whenever she walked down the long slope of sand to the beach. One evening Clary cut Nell’s hair and put a lightener on it, so that again it looked more strawberry blond than auburn. By the end of August, Nell’s face was so tanned and freckled and glowing that she didn’t need to wear any makeup except for a little mascara.

One night, stewing because she was bored with her dresses, she put on a long cotton skirt with an elastic waist. It was violet. She looked at herself in the mirror; the skirt was old and so long that it came to her ankles. She pulled it up just above her breasts and smiled: Now it looked like a strapless dress. When she and Andy arrived at the cocktail party, the hostess and several other women made a fuss over Nell’s dress—so simple, so sexy, where did she get it, did they sell the dress at Elizabeth’s? And Nell was
able to smile smugly and say honestly that it really was just an old dress. She enjoyed herself immensely at the party, passing through the various rooms of the house to get herself a drink or greet an acquaintance. She felt unusually young that evening. All the other women there were wearing stylized frocks, clusters of jewels, heavy makeup. Nell felt in contrast fresh and charming, like a real flower in the midst of artificial ones.

But at one point in the evening she saw Andy in the corner of a room talking intimately with a woman who was so gorgeous she made Nell’s blood turn cold. She was a blonde in a red dress and diamonds. She kept touching Andy as she talked, in playful ways, in serious ways, now on his arm, now fiddling with his tie, now ever so lightly touching the side of his mouth with one finger. Nell was so stunned that she forgot to listen to the man who was speaking to her. She just stared. Jealousy surged within her. Clearly, Andy and this woman were familiar with each other. Were they old lovers? The woman’s dress was skin-tight everywhere, so that it was perfectly clear how flawless her body was. Nell felt her pleasure in her old cotton skirt disappear. She realized how much a camouflage it was, falling full from the elastic band just above her breasts. She could never have worn that tight revealing dress the blonde wore. Andy and the blonde looked so cozily attracted to each other that they might as well have been wearing neon signs that blinked
OLD LOVERS
—and they could have run the signs on the electricity of their obvious mutual attraction.

Nell excused herself from the man who was speaking to her and went into another room on the pretext of getting a fresh drink. She was handed an icy Chablis spritzer, and she took it with her into the downstairs bathroom. She stood there a moment, leaning against the closed door. What did you think, dumbo? she asked herself. Did you assume that because Andy never talked about them, he never had any other lovers? Of course he’s had other lovers! Nell realized that she had simply put Elizabeth’s warnings out of her mind because she could not bear to think of them. She could not bear to think of Rachel Woods, who had been a lover of Andy’s—when, how many years ago, what had Elizabeth said? Three years ago? Four? She had not asked Andy about her because she did not think she could stand to hear anything he had to say. Maybe I am just the latest in a long string of lovers, Nell thought. And maybe by love he means something completely different from what I do. Maybe when he says, “I love you,” he means only that he likes
to take me to bed and cares enough for me that he doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. While when I say, “I love you,” I mean much more intense, passionate, serious things, I mean I need him and want to live my life with him and am miserable without him and …

Nell bit her lip. She could feel tears welling up, and she didn’t dare cry because she had come into the bathroom without a purse and if she cried her mascara would streak down her face and her nose would turn red. She knew she had to get herself out of the bathroom, to go back out into the crowd of people and laugh and talk and mingle. She couldn’t simply hide in a bathroom all night, indulging in a wild funk of jealousy and misery. She took a sip of her drink and ran her fingers through her hair. She looked at herself in the cabinet mirror above the sink. She knew that earlier in the evening her happiness had made her look so radiant that even her old cotton skirt had been transformed. But now she felt as though a light had gone out within her, and she thought she looked only tired and the clever skirt/dress seemed to her only plain, drab, and silly.