Nell (2 page)

Just this week, for example: Nell had been racing out the door on Monday morning, and it was the usual Monday morning free-for-all of getting the three of them ready for the day, for the week. Jeremy had wandered out of the house to check his pail, which held some elaborate and inexplicable experiment he had set up involving water and air and leaves, but he had, of course, again forgotten his school books and violin.

Nell had yelled at him in exasperation: “I can’t take this anymore, I can’t do this anymore, you are ten years old and old enough to assume some responsibility for your life. Get your violin. Get your lunch box. Jesus, I should make a tape of me nagging you and attach it to your Walkman and turn it on every morning, that would save my voice and my sanity.… ”

Jeremy had drifted back into the house to collect his things while Nell fumed at the front door, thinking for the thousandth time: Weren’t boys of divorced mothers supposed to naturally take on the role of the man of the house; hadn’t she read somewhere, in lots of magazines, that young boys of divorced mothers
protected
their mothers, became mature at an early age in order to help and shelter their mothers? Sometimes it seemed Jeremy couldn’t even
remember
his mother, let alone his lunch box, homework, or violin.

But finally he had gotten everything, and Nell and Hannah and Jeremy came out of the house, and Nell turned to lock the front door, wondering if she should make Jeremy go back in one more time to get his raincoat. The early April sky was ominous. It was going to rain today. And Jeremy was prone to chills and colds and croup and bronchitis. But he had already made it to the car with all his apparatuses.… Nell decided to forget the raincoat.

She had walked along the long wooden porch and down the wooden steps, suddenly aware for one bright moment of the kind of day it was: it was
spring
. The air wafted against her softly, sweet with the scent of the hyacinths blooming near the house.
This kind of morning
—well, it was so fresh, so gentle, like a lover’s first tentative kiss; Nell stood still for a moment, rapt. She did not want to move from this magic moment when she could almost feel what it was like to be a young girl like Hannah again, with the world all sweetly mysterious, with the whole world as tantalizing as spice. Nell took a deep breath. She was thirty-eight, but she could still feel, on a morning like this, that there were amazing possibilities waiting for her in this world.

“Oh
God
,” Hannah said, walking past Nell to the car.

Hannah had heavy blond hair and intensely dark eyes, an unusual combination she had inherited from her father, along with a tendency toward the theatrical. She was always striking poses; Nell was always having to remind Hannah that she was only eight
years old. Now her voice was matter-of-fact, world-weary.

“Hannah,” Nell said. “I’ve told you not to use profanity.”

“Well, I’ve got a dead mouse in my umbrella,” Hannah said. She tossed the bright green umbrella that said HANNAH in white script away from her onto the lawn with a shrug of contempt and strolled on down the walk to the car.

Nell stood frozen, sick with disgust. “Hannah?” she asked. “Hannah? What do you mean you’ve got a dead mouse in your umbrella?”

Hannah turned and looked at her mother with slight impatience. “I’ve got a dead mouse in my umbrella,” she said.

Nell picked up the umbrella and looked. A small gray and slightly decayed mouse lay inside the umbrella at the point where all the spokes met, stuck, in its moist and hairy decomposition, to the wire and fabric.

“Oh, God, gross,
yuck
!” Nell said, and flung the umbrella across the yard. “Oh, how
awful
, Hannah, oh, honey, I’m sorry. God, what if you had opened the umbrella and it had fallen out in your hair? Oh, this is disgusting, it makes me sick. Oh, I can’t stand it, a dead mouse in your umbrella, I can’t take any of this anymore!”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Hannah said. “It could have been worse. It could have been alive.”

“I can’t take any of this anymore,” Nell repeated. She stood there on her front lawn in the spring grass, shaking, wishing she could change her life, wishing she could change it so drastically that her daughter would never have a dead mouse in her umbrella again. The house was clean enough—but the umbrella had been hanging on a hook in the basement, and it was the time of year when small creatures began to venture in from the open land near them. Nell knew in the back of her mind that it wasn’t a sign that her house was filthy; it was just that the poor mouse had gotten into the umbrella and then been unable to climb up out of the slippery funnel. Still …

“We might as well not even have cats,” Nell said. “Here we have two cats and we still have a mouse in the house. Where
are
those damn cats? Why don’t they do what they’re supposed to? No one helps out around here!”

She had felt so alone then. She had felt so defeated. She had felt so keenly the chaos of her life. She had wished right then she had married Ben; she could have married
him and not worked and stayed home all day cleaning the basement. If she had married Ben, he would have supported her financially, she could have protected her daughter from this sort of thing. She could have checked the umbrellas for mice if she had married Ben.

But she had not married Ben, and now, as Nell rolled over onto her side to do leg lifts and extensions, she knew that in spite of money and mice, her decision had been the right one. She hadn’t loved Ben. She hadn’t even particularly liked Ben. She had just been lonely and at the stage in her life when she was so poor and frantic about money that the mere thought of dinner in a good restaurant had made her nearly tremble with desire. Nell wasn’t proud of the fact that for three months she had gone out with Ben simply because he took her to nice restaurants and the theater and to concerts she couldn’t afford. On the other hand, she wasn’t ashamed of herself for going out with him, either. She could have done worse: she had been so scared and wretched then that she could have started drinking or taking drugs or become truly hysterical in front of the children. She hadn’t done any of those things. But after Marlow left her, she had lived for a while on the edge of her nerves, mad as a beast, staring out with wild eyes, scavenging what she could, always alert for dangers to her babies. She had had to learn to support herself financially and to be the sole protection for her children at the same time, and so she lived for a while on her animal instincts, moving through life in terror and anger, ready to spit and claw.

Jesus
. She hadn’t thought about those times, those feelings, for a while. Now she was more financially secure, or at least more relaxed about her financial insecurity.

Nell stopped her exercises, sat up with her legs crossed lotus-style in front of her, and lay her hands gently, palms up, between her thighs. She took deep breaths, rolled her head slowly from side to side. Calming down. Regaining control. Looking for peace.

Nell knew that people liked being around her because she was attractive and because she had a sunny disposition. She also knew what work it had become to remain attractive and sunny. Her optimism and figure were no longer given to her free and easily by the fates: both had become matters of daily philosophical choice and hard daily personal labor. Much of that work had to do with going on in spite of the past. Ignoring the past took up a great deal of her energy. For when she stopped to turn around, she saw
her past lying behind her in the most awful confusing scramble, she saw her past in a real snarl of people and fears and dead dreams. If she paid close attention to her past, she wouldn’t have the courage to go on into the future.

Oh no, it hadn’t been
that
bad. And she had the children: Jeremy, Hannah, and her ex-stepdaughter and friend, Clary. She had true friends and memories that would always make her laugh. It was not so bad. It was just that she had supposed as a child—and now that she thought about it, even as an adult—that she would live her life in one true bright line; her life would make a straight kind of sense like a bold beam of sunshine. Instead, her life had taken on no meaning at all; the years, and the sense of those years, had gotten muddled and tangled and broken and even lost. Her past did not illuminate her future with a steady glow. Instead, it sputtered and flickered behind her like a candle that might burn out, leaving her to pitch forward with the next step into total darkness, or like a strobe light, battering her vision of the future with random spatters of glare and blackness.

“I am so
depressed
!” Nell yelled, jumping up from the blue rug, jumping up from her thoughts. She shut off the stereo, stretched one time, then raced up the stairs to her bedroom. She dug through the papers on her desk in the alcove, found her diary, flipped it open to the calendar of the year.

“Thank
God
!” she said aloud. “I’m premenstrual!” She slammed the diary back down and hurried into the bathroom. “It’s diuretic time, it’s diuretic time,” she sang to an old Howdy-Doody tune.

Sometimes she thought the things she loved most in the world were her son, her daughter, her ex-stepdaughter, and her diuretics. They made such a difference in her life. She took one with a full glass of water. Then she went into her bedroom and zipped her old saggy gray sweatshirt robe over her leotard and tights.

Nell loved this robe like she loved her cats and dog, like she loved a bubble bath. This robe was
home
. Hannah reminded Nell at every opportunity that Nell looked like a dying elephant in the robe, but then Hannah had always been critical of her mother. Nell knew in her heart that if Hannah had been able to speak at birth, her first words would have been, the instant she was pulled from between her mother’s legs: “Oh gross, Mom,
look
at you. Your hair’s all wet and tangled, your stomach’s all blubbery, and that
hospital gown is really the pits. Couldn’t you at least put some lipstick on?” Hannah smothered compassion on every living thing, and even on nonliving things: she could cry for a rock that Jeremy threw in a pond and thus “drowned.” But she was a pitiless judge of her mother’s looks and seldom could stretch her compassion past her criticism. Still, Nell would wear this robe when she could, when alone in the house cleaning or reading or being sick or paying bills or cooking. It was a comfort, this robe. It just felt right.

But now, before going down to the kitchen, she sighed and unzipped the robe and took it off in order to strip off her leotard and tights—if she left them on, she’d have a hell of a time getting everything down and off when the diuretic made her rush to the bathroom. She dropped the tights and leotard on a pile of clothes that needed to be hung up or folded and stood for a moment, naked, in her bedroom. The mirror on the back of the closet door gave her a full-length reflection of herself, and Nell turned slowly in front of it, scrutinizing her body.

Nell was accustomed to mirrors. She worked around them constantly in the boutique and had learned how to ignore her own image while concentrating on that of a customer. All her life she had practiced poses, acting parts in front of mirrors. They had become her familiars and seemed to speak to her in a sort of ghostly feminine whisper. “Pull those shoulders back! Hold in your stomach!” they would say. The voices of course were her mother’s, her dance instructor’s, her acting coache’s, all echoing in her head. It was her own voice, too—her own judgment, really—that was reflected back at her, but now that her parents were aging and far away, she often felt that a mirror gave as much mothering as she got these days.

Then, too, mirrors reminded her that she was lucky, after all. Directors and friends often said it was her personality that made her so attractive—her intensity, her vivacity—but Nell knew that it was really just that she had been lucky enough to have a body that would always look good in tight jeans. She was tall—five foot eight—and worry had kept her slim, and the early years of dance and the later years of disciplined exercise had kept her limber and taut, so that now as she turned in front of her mirror, she saw that from the back she looked like a smooth young girl. It was on her breasts and belly that time, experience, childbirth, and nursing had made their marks—there the flesh had stretched and now sagged slightly. No amount of exercise would ever bring her small pink-tipped
breasts back up to their former plumpness. Never large, her breasts before she’d had the children had at least been firm, even pert. Now—now she had fantasies of having silicone implants, but she knew she could never afford them. And there was a little bowl-like bulge beneath her belly button, a kind of soft round insistency there that would never go away and that, unless Nell exercised diligently, threatened to expand and take over her entire torso. But she looked wonderful in clothes and not repulsive in a bikini, so it was all right, she supposed.

Also, she liked the colors of her body; she had always liked how everything seemed to be of the same tone. Her skin was creamily pale, covered here and there with freckles, which were of the same reddish-brown color as her eyes. When she had been younger, she had lightened her hair slightly, so that she was a strawberry blonde, and then her large eyes had seemed darker. But now strands of gray were showing up here and there, and Nell had taken to darkening her hair slightly to a deep reddish-brown, dramatic against her pale skin, more sophisticated than the lighter color. Her hair was thick, slightly wavy, and she kept it long so that she had a variety of ways to wear it—it was a lot, after all, to have long lean thighs and thick rich hair.

When she was younger Nell had worn her hair in odd, extravagant ways: pulled up to the side in a spout of ponytail, or braided when wet so that it frizzed out softly all around her face in the style of a pre-Raphaelite heroine’s. But now she had laugh lines around her mouth and eyes and, when she was tired or worried, little bluish pouches under her eyes; she could seldom get away with flamboyant hairstyles now. When working, she wore her hair pulled back in a chignon or she let it fall down and loose, held off her face demurely with a headband or clasp. The rest of the time she just let it go; she brushed it out full so it flew around her head, and she went around that way happily. She liked the scent and swish of her long hair when she turned her head. It gave her a feeling of exuberance. Men liked her long hair, too, the way it would sometimes fall forward over her bare shoulders.