Nell (9 page)

“You want me to sit in front of my house with a rat in a sack attached to my muffler?” Nell said. “What will the neighbors think? What will the kids think? Marilyn, please meet me at the clinic and give the rat a shot!”

“Well, all right,” Marilyn said. “But you know I’ll have to charge you. Dr. Hebers is getting very sticky about what I do for friends.”

“Charge me a million dollars, but put this poor damn rat out of its misery!” Nell cried.

She got the children up and dressed, carried the cage with the rat in it to the car, and drove it to the vet’s. She had secret hopes that the poor animal would die on the way and save her the fee, but she was not to be so lucky. It was still convulsing when she carried it into the animal hospital. Marilyn took the rat—Nell and the children agreed they did not want to keep the cage or watch her give the shot—and went into the back room. Nell drove home in a funk. She got the children off to school, then went to their rooms and stripped the sheets and washed them in hot water. When she got home from work, she spent two hours washing every surface in the children’s rooms with hot water and Lysol disinfectant. Still she felt queasy. And she did not know what she would say to Clary about the rats. She didn’t want this new, fragile connection among them all to be broken. She was sick at heart.

Three nights later, Clary called.

“Clary!” Nell said. “Give me your new phone number before you say another word. I’ve been going crazy, unable to reach you.”

Clary gave her the number, then said, “How are the rats?”

“Oh, Clary,” Nell said. “I have bad news.”

“I was afraid of that,” Clary said.

“What?”
Nell asked, nearly shrieking. “You
were
?
Why
?” It turned out that all
the rats who had been born at a certain time in the lab at Rutgers had been exposed to a virus, and all the baby rats had eventually died of this virus. The rats Clary had given the children had been part of this group.

“I’m so sorry,” Clary had said. “I wouldn’t have exposed the children to such a sad experience for the world. I didn’t know the rats were ill when I brought them up; we only just found out. Believe me, Hannah’s rat wouldn’t have bitten anyone if it hadn’t been sick. Please don’t dislike rats just because of this one experience. Listen, do you want me to bring the children new rats?”

Nell had hesitated. Then she said, “Clary, to be honest, I don’t want any more rats in the house. I know you like them, and the children loved them, but I just can’t. I can’t help it. They give me the creeps.” She waited for Clary to speak, waited to hear the sound of injury or pique in her voice. She waited to lose Clary.

“Oh well,” Clary said calmly. “Lots of people feel that way. Too bad. I think if you spent more time around them, you’d get used to them, and they do make good pets.”

“We have two cats and a dog,” Nell said. “And the kids barely keep up with feeding them. I think we’d better forget the rats for a while.”

“Okay,” Clary said. And they went on to talk of other things.

Nell had hung up the phone feeling oddly jubilant. So it was possible to be honest with people she cared for and still not lose them! It was an exciting lesson to learn, and she only wished she’d learned it earlier in life.

The rat test had happened three years ago. Clary and Nell wrote and called each other often now, growing closer and more easy in their friendship with each passing year.

Now Nell shivered and hugged herself, remembering all those early years, foolish mistakes, mysterious losses. “Why was I so dumb?” Nell asked, and the sound of her voice breaking the deep silence made gooseflesh break out along her arms.

Well, she thought, she was still dumb, to be sitting out on the porch in the middle of the chilly night. Or—maybe not. Maybe this was, if nothing else, a sign that she had progressed this far, far enough to be outside in the dark. When she was a child, and even in her twenties, when she was married to Marlow, she had been frightened of being alone in the dark. She had seen monsters in the shadows, heard bogeymen rustling in the bushes. In her twenties, whenever Marlow went off on a trip, she was always so terrified
at being alone in the house in the dark that she could not sleep. She would sit up all night reading, nervous and alert, listening for the sounds of rapists, robbers, maniacs; only when the sun finally shone in the window would she be able to relax and sleep.

In a way, that fear was a kind of luxury. She could not afford to be so cowardly once she was the lone adult raising two small children. She had to be able to sleep all night, because she had to be awake and alert in the day to take care of the children and to work to support those children. Of necessity, she had become brave. She had grown up just that much; if she was not naturally a brave woman, she was learning to behave like one. That was worth something.

But it was more than that—more than pretense, more than whistling in the dark. She really did like being out here alone in the night. The soundless shadows, the dewy air, the inescapable night, reduced her to an elemental Nell. She had lost so many people. But she had gained so many people, and it seemed that she still lived her life through other people, as if always trying for the prettiest pose in front of an endless mirror. Out here in the night it did not matter what she looked like or how old she was or whether she was loved or loving. She just existed, bones and skin and nerves and senses, hard and substantial against the soft elusiveness of night. She was Nell, and by herself she was real.

And cold. She rose, stretched, and pulled her moist nightgown from the back of her legs and bottom. She knew now that when she sank into the cozy warmth of her bed, she would fall asleep. Again she had settled nothing, had reached no conclusion about the meaning of her life. Who was she? Would she ever be able to use her acting talent again, or was that part of her life lost to her forever? Would any man ever really love her? Would she ever really love any man? Would she have to sell this house? Could she repair those damn steps by herself? She had not found the answers to those questions tonight. But the Panic Night feeling had abated. She was now more tired than scared. She somehow at least had made enough peace with herself so that she could sleep. She would rest in the midst of her confusion and loneliness, like a bird managing to sleep on the most sheltering branch of a wind-tossed tree.

Three

Sunday evening Nell locked herself in her bathroom. She had a date that night, and she wanted one half-hour of uninterrupted solitude in which to get ready. She had settled Hannah and Jeremy in front of the TV with a pizza, milk, and a giant sack of fresh peas in the pod, which the children would crack open and eat like peanuts from a shell. She had asked Jeremy to answer the phone if it rang and threatened them both with death or worse if they got into an argument loud enough to reach her ears. Then she gathered up her paraphernalia and locked herself in the bathroom.

Actually, the lock was a joke. Years ago, when Jeremy was three and Hannah one, Jeremy had managed to lock himself in the bathroom by turning the key in the old-fashioned brass lock. He shut the door, turned the key, took it out, then could not figure how to put it back in.

“Be a brave boy and don’t worry,” Nell had called to him through the door after fifteen minutes of attempting in vain to instruct him in the art of inserting keys into locks. “I’ll call Mr. Milton and ask him to come over and open the door. You just sit down and wait, honey.”

Even at three, Jeremy was a resourceful child. “Okay, Mommy,” he said cheerfully. “I can play with my bath toys while I’m in here. And if I get hungry, there’s lots of candy in here to eat.”

Nell’s hair had nearly stood on end. “Jeremy! Jeremy,
no
. You must not eat anything that’s in the bathroom.”

“But, Mommy, I can see some candy in a bottle—”

“Jeremy!” Nell screamed. “
No!
That is
medicine
. That is
not candy!
Don’t eat it or you’ll get
very sick!
”

Jeremy was quiet for a while. “Well,” he said, “can I drink the pretty red stuff? You gave it to me when I had a cold. You said it made me
well
. I could—”

“
No
, Jeremy,” Nell said. “That red stuff is medicine, too. Don’t drink it. It only works if you’re sick, and you’re not sick now, and if you drink it you’ll be very sick.
Honey, be a nice boy for Mommy and promise you won’t eat or drink anything. I’ll get Mr. Milton over here right away. And if you promise not to eat or drink anything, I’ll—I’ll take you out and buy you a
big
ice cream cone.”

Jeremy was silent again. Nell waited, leaning against the locked bathroom door. The silence grew more ominous. Nell knew that Jeremy was in there weighing the power he had now to disobey his mother while she couldn’t get her hands on him against the wrath he knew would fall if he did disobey and she finally got through the door.

“Jeremy?” Nell said, her voice threatening.

“I won’t eat anything,” Jeremy said at last.

And he hadn’t. But Nell had been unable to reach the handyman, and it had been almost two hours before Nell found a friend with a skeleton key who managed to get the door open. By then both Nell and Jeremy were nearly hysterical. Nell had thrown the key in a river, as glad to see it sink as if it were a gun. Then the children had been so little and so connected to her that she could not envision a time when she could lock any door against them. For years she took baths, brushed her teeth, and put on her makeup with them crawling or toddling or rushing in to ask her a question or show her a toad or demand that she arbitrate an argument.

But now they were older and could be left alone, and Nell had put a hook and eye lock on the door herself. It wasn’t strong: one good blow and the door would fly open. But it was powerful symbolically.
She
could get in to her children if she had to, but they could not get in to her. They would turn the handle, push, hear their mother yell, “Go away! I’m taking a bath!” and then they would actually go away. Of course they could still stand outside the door and call to her. It often seemed they waited until she was locked in the bathroom to ask her questions. She could wander the house for hours, cleaning, vacuuming, dusting, she could sit on the sofa and try to engage them in conversation, and they would get restless and ignore her. But once she had locked herself in the bathroom, they positioned themselves at the door and whined out their questions: “Mom, where’s my hairbrush—pink barrettes with the hearts—sneakers—boy baby doll?” The list was endless. Often they were clever at asking questions that needed her to be physically present to answer. “Mom, have I done this math problem right? I can’t get it and it’s due tomorrow,” Jeremy would call. “Mom, is this how you French braid?”
Hannah would ask. And often, especially, questions such as, “Mom, do you think I should put a Band-Aid on this cut or just let it bleed?”

The children would turn the handle and push the door so that it opened the one and one half inches the latch allowed. They would stand outside the door and jiggle the handle and sigh until Nell screamed at them. Then they would sulk off with their feelings hurt, only to ignore her when she finally rose from the tub. Nell would sink into the solace of her bath and try to pretend she did not hear the cats scratching and buffeting and mewing at the doors.

The cats disapproved of Nell shutting herself off even more strongly than her children did. If Nell laid out a dress on the bed, then shut herself in to bathe, Medusa, the female cat, would often go sit on the middle of the dress and shed. Nell was sure the cat had the ability to shed at will. She had actually seen Medusa do it to the trouser legs of men the cat didn’t like: Medusa would jump on a man’s knee, sit there a minute, then yawn and jump off, casually leaving the man’s slacks covered with long, fine hairs.

Usually, Nell warned her dates about the cat: “You may not want her on your lap,” she’d say. “She sheds terribly.” But there had been two or three times when Nell knew exactly what the cat was doing and didn’t move to stop her. Those times Nell had disliked the men as instinctively as Medusa had. Then Nell had sat across the coffee table from the man, sipping her drink, talking politely, and smiling at Medusa with affection, while Medusa lay on the man’s legs, her slanted green eyes narrowed in smug slits as she stared, smiling a cat smile conspiratorially back at Nell, and kneaded the man’s trousers, and purred, and shed, and shed.

Nell and Medusa were about as close as creatures of different species could get, but still there were times when Nell wanted to be alone, and this was one of them. Nell had put both Medusa and the gentle male cat, Fred, outside when she fed the children this evening. She was organized for this bath. She needed the time not just to soak and relax and get clean, but also to think. She often did her best thinking in the bathtub. A kind of comforting magic happened to Nell when she bathed. She’d run the water so hot it was almost painful and put in so much bubble bath that when she sank into the water, the white and iridescent foam closed over her from head to toe, a blanket of bubbles. Heat, steam, and silence radiated around Nell’s naked body like the rainbows rounding through
the bubbles. Nell would lie back, her head propped against the tub’s edge, and drift into a state of complete relaxation. And whatever problem she brought into this wet heat with her seemed less significant when she finally rose, dripping and pink-skinned, from the bath.

Now she lay submerged in hot water and wondered whether or not she should stop seeing Stellios, her current lover.

It was strange. It was even humorous, taken the right way, taken, say, with a good friend and a bottle of wine, how Nell had felt, as soon as she was divorced, so optimistic. She had felt: Well,
now
I’m ready for
real love
! She had been as hopeful, as naïve, as an infant. There had been a halcyon summer, when Marlow was still paying the bills and she didn’t know enough to worry about money yet, when she had lost the weight she’d gained from having the children by being nervous over the divorce—the weight had just fallen away easily, to her amazement—when she looked radiant, better than ever in her life, and felt that way, too. She had thought that now she was ready for the real thing. She had thought that now she would do things
right
. She had never thought that now she was set up to get hurt—or to hurt someone else.