Nell (7 page)

During the winter that Hannah was one and Jeremy three, Nell spent many nights sitting up in the living room, drinking brandy or Kahlua and cream and talking with Charlotte. Charlotte fascinated her; she was so
honest
.

“I want a
grand passion
,” she said. “Nothing else will do. None of these simpering little boys I keep running into will do, not at all. You are so lucky, Nell. You have Marlow St. John.”

Nell would listen to Charlotte, enthralled. Charlotte had slept with so many men. She was forever saying, “Of course, he’s a dreamy lover, but—” Charlotte would talk in
graphic detail about things she had done or felt with various men, and Nell would listen, entranced. She hadn’t done or felt half those things with Marlow, but of course she didn’t tell Charlotte that.

One evening, though, when Marlow had stormed out of the house in one of his rages and Nell was spent from tending two sick babies, she ended up drinking by the fire and confessing all sorts of things to Charlotte.

“I’m an awful, awful person,” Nell had said drunkenly. “I must have something genetically wrong with me. Here I am, married to this wonderful man, and I don’t even know if I love him. I know some of the people I love—I love my children. I love my parents. I love some of my friends—I love you, Charlotte. But I don’t know exactly what it is I feel for Marlow. I used to worship him, and that’s a kind of love. But now it seems the strongest emotion I can dredge up for him is
—concern
.”

“Oh that’s so sad, Nell, that’s so sad,” Charlotte said. “I thought you had everything. I thought you were perfectly happy. I’ve always wished I had your life.”

Well, Charlotte had gotten Nell’s life, or at least a great part of it. Marlow had divorced Nell and married Charlotte, and now when Jeremy and Hannah went to visit their father, it was Charlotte who made the hot chocolate and cookies. She was a good stepmother, and Nell, who had once been a stepmother to Marlow’s daughter Clary, was a good judge of that. Charlotte loved Marlow, and she was kind, in her vague way, to Marlow’s children. Nell wished she could like Charlotte, but she couldn’t anymore. She couldn’t trust her. She felt more betrayed by Charlotte than she did by Marlow. All those weeks when Charlotte had sat in the kitchen smiling dreamily at Nell, she had been remembering the night before or the day to come, when she would lie in Nell’s husband’s arms and say, “Darling, I don’t see how your genius can survive in such a chaotic place. Nell’s so busy nurturing others, she doesn’t seem to ever have time for you.”

“How could you have done that to me?” Nell had asked Charlotte during their one angry confrontation. “How could you have lied so much to me!”

“I didn’t lie to you, Nell,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t lie to anyone. I envied you your life. But I also really felt sorry for Marlow there. He
is
a genius, and he was getting lost in your household.”

“It was not
my
household,” Nell said. “It was ours. Marlow’s and mine. Marlow’s
children as much as mine, his litter and mess as much as mine. Just because I was the one who cleaned it all up doesn’t mean I was the one who made it.”

“Oh, I don’t see how you can be so upset,” Charlotte had said, running her hand through her ragged hair. “After all, you told me more than once that you didn’t really love Marlow. I think you should be a little grateful to me. I’ve set you free. Now maybe you can go out and find someone you can really love.”

Cunning Charlotte. She was not even wrong. She honestly didn’t believe she had done anything wrong at all. Arguing with Charlotte, Nell had felt only more and more frustrated. She knew she had been betrayed, but she couldn’t logically prove just how. Finally, she had let the matter drop. It was done anyway, there was no going back, no changing things.

Now she and Charlotte were pleasant to each other when making the necessary arrangements for the children to visit Marlow, but other than that they seldom spoke. Nell often thought she missed Charlotte as much as she missed Marlow. Charlotte had certainly admired her more, or pretended to, and it was even possible that Charlotte understood more about Nell, the real Nell, than Marlow ever had. It was a very complicated tangle, their relationship, but in the end, Charlotte was one more person whom Nell had really lost.

When Nell was a little girl, she had been taught a song in her Brownie troop that went: “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” It was a pretty song when sung in rounds, and the sentiment was pretty, too, but now Nell thought that perhaps the moral was inaccurate, at least for someone Nell’s age. She did not think she was the same person she had been ten years ago or six years ago. Having children and getting divorced had taught her self-sufficiency, courage, and compassion; she knew she had those qualities now, and she did not have them when she was younger. Now she knew how to be a good friend, and the friendships she had developed over the past six years were of great importance in her life. These people might not have known her ten years ago—if they had met her, they might not even have liked her ten years ago—but they knew her now, they knew
her:
Nell St. John. Not Mrs. St. John, the wife of the director, but Nell. It was a very rich reward, this being known and liked for herself; it was a real feast. At first her friendships had been a sort of medicine, a tonic, that helped her
get well. Now these friendships were almost a food. They sustained her life. She was fit and full in the world because of her friends.

And she hadn’t lost Clary. Her relationship with her stepdaughter had lasted in spite of everything. Their friendship had been like the straw that Rapunzel spun into gold: straw at first, it had been spun and toughened and twisted and tested by the wheel of time and had come out gold.

Nell had been twenty-five when she became Clary’s stepmother; Clary had been thirteen. She had been a cynical child, and it had taken Nell a long time to realize that what she thought was arrogance on Clary’s part was really a kind of fierce caution. Clary looked like her father. She was long-limbed and lanky, with blond hair and fair skin and dark eyes. But she did not act like her father. Marlow was impetuous, dramatic, quick, and obvious. Clary was analytical, still, and slow to action. It drove Marlow nearly wild that Clary did not want to act onstage. She had even refused to learn to play an instrument. She did not like to play tennis. She preferred biking and swimming, solitary sports. She preferred reading books or watching television to being with people. Marlow couldn’t understand her at all, and she irritated him.

Clary came to stay with Nell and Marlow every summer, and every summer she refused to learn to act. Marlow made Clary a part of the set crew for whatever play he was directing. Clary would grudgingly and quietly do exactly what was asked of her. “Bring the hammer, get some coffee, tell Marlow we need him—” These were orders she could and would follow. Otherwise she would just stand around the stage, waiting, watching, chewing her thumbnail, looking bored. She drove Nell crazy, too; Nell would have died to have had a director for a father, would have given up anything to have been around actors and the theater as a teenager. She couldn’t believe that this beautiful young girl couldn’t see how lucky she was, what chances had fallen into her lap.

The first few years of her marriage, Nell paid small attention to Clary. Nell was still too busy trying to be the most beautiful and talented actress in the world, and then too busy trying to buttress Marlow’s falling ego. There was not much room in Nell’s narcissistic thoughts for a surly teenager. She cooked Clary’s meals, washed Clary’s clothes, and did what had to be done, but her life and Clary’s revolved around Marlow—around his schedule, his needs, his desires. Nell had no experience as a mother, and so it
did not occur to her very often to wonder whether or not Clary was happy. It did not occur to her to ask Clary if there was any other thing in the world she would prefer doing to hanging around the theater where Marlow worked all summer. After Nell became a mother, she realized how few motherly feelings she had had for Clary, how she had not protected her.

Still, she was only twelve years older than Clary, and although she had never done things with Clary out of charity, she had done things with her out of pleasure, and that counted for something. Both Clary and Nell loved horror movies, which Marlow considered trash. Whenever they had a chance that first summer, they would go off together to sit munching popcorn and squeezing each other’s arms while vampires or zombies or man-eating wasps terrorized the world. They loved the psychos best. They loved being scared. They loved playing games together, too. Nell was always glad when it was summer and Clary was there to play with, for Marlow was always too intense and busy to settle down to what he considered childish activities. Nell and Clary spent their summers playing Clue, checkers, card games, elaborate games of Monopoly that went on for days. These were frivolous acts, Nell later realized, not the sort of enterprise shared by parent and child. But, Nell also realized, they were the sort of thing shared by friends, and over the years that was what Clary and Nell became.

Clary was in college when Nell’s children were born and she worked all summer to make money for college, so Nell and Marlow saw very little of Clary those four years. The summer Clary graduated with a degree in biology, she came up once to visit her father and his family. In spite of the years of friendship between Nell and Clary, that visit had been a disappointment.

It was the last year of Marlow and Nell’s marriage, although they did not know that yet, and the air between them was tense with unadmitted anger. Clary could stay only two days, and both those days Hannah and Jeremy, then two and four, were sick with a ghastly intestinal flu. Nell was tired, overweight, and generally miserable. But she was so excited about seeing Clary that she shampooed her hair, put on makeup, and stuffed herself into her best dress. The moment she heard Clary’s car pull into the driveway, she grabbed the wailing, sick Hannah from her crib and raced to the top of the stairs.

She stood on the landing a moment, just looking at Clary, who had come in the
door and was kissing her father and who looked, all of a sudden, grown-up and devastatingly lovely. Clary had had her thick blond hair cut Dutch-boy style and it swung evenly at her shoulders, making her seem substantial and decisive, a woman who knew what she wanted. The blunt bangs across her forehead accentuated Clary’s dark brows and eyes. She turned, and looked up at Nell with a frank, almost stern look. Nell knew at once that Clary had become a person to be reckoned with in the world.

Nell was so glad to see her, this person who was part child of hers, part friend, and she started down the stairs, hoping she looked at least not dowdy in her blue dress.

“Clary!” she called.

And at that moment poor Hannah, who was in Nell’s arms, threw up. Thick white vomit erupted from the sick baby’s mouth and flowed in a milky waterfall down Nell’s dress and, as Nell watched, down one step and the next step and the next. Warm acid-smelling liquid coated Nell’s arm and dress. Hannah cried and choked. Nell had to comfort and clean her poor daughter, then turn to the stairs. The thick vomit had soaked the carpet. It was not an easy task cleaning up the mess.

The visit did not much improve from that moment. Clary seemed to Nell to have become elegant, self-sufficient, and haughty. She was impressed with herself for gaining a degree in biology, and she talked endlessly about the experiments she was doing on gypsy moth research at a lab in Connecticut.
She
was doing important work in the world.

Nell scrubbed the carpeted stairs, fixed and served dinner, tended to sick children, and listened to Clary when she had the chance, but as each moment passed, Nell felt more and more hopeless. She thought she must look such a drudge to Clary. She envied Clary’s flat stomach, trim hips, smooth skin. She envied Clary her youth, her freedom, her clothes; she envied everything of Clary’s. And Clary didn’t do anything to make Nell feel better. She scarcely looked at Jeremy and Hannah, and when she did look at them, it was with a sort of scientific scrutiny, as if the babies were bugs or some other kind of slightly bizarre form of life. Nell cried that night when she went to sleep, because she felt old and somehow forlorn.

The next year, when Marlow and Nell were separated and then divorced, Nell didn’t know whether to contact Clary or not. Clary was Marlow’s daughter, after all, not hers. People tended to choose sides during a divorce, and it was only right that Clary
would choose her own father. Blood tells, Nell thought. Besides, Clary had made it pretty clear that she had no interest in Nell or her messy children.… Nell did not call. That Christmas Nell sent Clary a card and pictures of the children and received a card and a cool message in return. But the summer after that, one long evening when Nell was wandering around picking up the toys that the children she babysat had strewn across every possible surface of the house, she began to think of Clary, of the good times they had had together. On impulse, she called Clary and they talked for an hour, spilling out the news of the past year, getting to know each other again. They began to write, to call. Finally, their friendship faced what Nell would always in the back of her mind call the rat test.

The summer that Hannah was four and Jeremy was six, Nell had done a thoroughly modern thing: She had left her children with her ex-husband, their father, and driven down to spend a weekend with her ex-stepdaughter.

By this time, Clary had given up on gypsy moths, or rather the government grant ran out and she had gone to work at a lab at Rutgers. She lived in a small apartment in Piscataway, New Jersey, with a roommate named Sally, who was a waitress at a local bar because she couldn’t get a job teaching school. Sally and Clary were both pretty, single, and clever; they had worked their life together into a sort of chic comedy routine. They slopped around in baggy painter’s pants and tiny striped cotton shirts, drank countless beers, bopped around their apartment singing Devo songs. Nell sat in their living room drinking beer and just watching, thinking. Here was Clary, who had been thirteen when they first met; here was Clary, who had started having periods the first summer she stayed with Marlow and Nell; here was Clary now, a grown woman, a sexual sophisticate, a competent lab technician. Clary and Sally taught Nell to play a game called asshole dice. They drank more beer. Around midnight they decided to smoke some grass, but Nell declined and said she wanted to go to bed. It was not that she cared whether they smoked or not, it was just that whenever she had tried grass she had anxiety attacks. She didn’t need grass anyway, tonight; she was already in a strange enough land. Here she was visiting her ex-stepdaughter, who had been thirteen and was now twenty-two, and she, Nell, didn’t feel any older at all. Here she was visiting her ex-stepdaughter, who had spent part of the evening telling Nell about her latest lover’s strong and weak
points in graphic detail. Here she was visiting her ex-stepdaughter, who told her that she would sleep on the living room sofa so that Nell could have her bedroom.