Nell (53 page)

And yet some wild voice in her mind was screaming such a vast number of insulting things about Andy and about what kind of sucker Nell was for loving him that she couldn’t think straight. She could sense that Hannah was following them at a distance; she could sense that other people in the mall were staring at her. She knew that her anger and her fierce determination to control her shaking were making her have the kind of blazing good looks that had often served her well onstage. She was brave now because she was truly furious.

“Nell,” Andy said, turning to her. “Here, sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down,” Nell said, yanking her hand away from him, glaring at him.

“Well,” Andy said. He shoved his hands into his pants pockets so that his jacket bunched up around his arms a little. He always had such an endearingly unaware charm. “I hate to see you so upset,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“Okay,” Nell said. “Let me see if I can make it clear to you. You say you love me. Yet you never come to see me. I always have to make the trip to see you. You’ve told me that you hate leaving Nantucket. I’ve accepted that. Yet here you are—oh
shit
, Andy!” Nell said, losing her logical pace. “How can you
not
see how insulting it is to me that you won’t make the trip to see
me
, but you will make the trip to see a fucking
computer
! You should have planned to see me, too. If you didn’t want to come to my house because of your allergies to my animals, you should have called and asked me to meet you here for
lunch or dinner. If you were making the trip anyway, you should have booked a room in a hotel so we could spend some time together. You should have—oh
God!
”

Andy stood there looking worried and sorry, but most of all, perplexed. At last Nell couldn’t take it anymore. “You are not
that dumb
!” she yelled, so loud that from behind her Hannah whispered, “Mo-om.”

Andy blinked. Nell wanted to burst into tears. She wanted to jump on him, kick him in the crotch, scratch his eyes out. She wanted him to take her in his arms and kiss her for the rest of her life. She wanted to burst into tears and to blither and whine, to plead, “Oh, Andy, I love you so much, I want you so much, I’d do anything in the world for you, why can’t you love me the way I love you?”

But she would not let herself do any of those things. She held herself in control so fiercely that she thought she might explode; she held still for one long moment, thinking:
Nell, are you sure about this? You’ll never see him again, Nell. Is that what you want? Don’t be rash, Nell
. She stood there in the mall, quaking and glaring at Andy, thinking that she was going to end it now, and she was going to do it with some kind of pride.

“Well,” Andy said slowly, obviously trying to figure something out. “I can still do all those things, Nell. I mean I can still make a hotel reservation. And I’d like to take you out to dinner. You know how I get, my mind just goes along on one track, but, Nell, I never meant to hurt you, to make you so upset. Look, let’s get out of here and go someplace where we can be alone.”

Nell shook her head. “Oh, Andy,” she said. “You are such—” She stopped, feeling tears shimmering in her eyes. She had used up all her sassy cleverness with the term
casual user
and now she was just in despair. She held her hands up in front of her in a hopeless gesture, hopeless of finding the word that would express exactly what Andy was.

“A dumb fart,” Hannah prompted from behind her, her voice calm.

Nell turned to look at her daughter. Hannah grinned. Nell grinned back. She turned back to Andy.

“You are such a
dumb fart
,” she said. And now she really was triumphant. The tears had vanished. “You’ll never meet another woman who could love you as much as I did, as well as I could have,” she said. “Oh, Andy, you really blew it.”

Andy reached out to grab her shoulders, but Nell stepped back. “Nell,” he said. “Why are you talking this way? It’s not over for us.”

“Oh yes, yes it is,” Nell said.

“Because I came to see computers instead of seeing you? Just because of that? That’s crazy,” Andy protested.

“No,
you’re
crazy,” Nell said. “You’re crazy not to have loved me better.
You’re crazy to have let me get away
.” She knew that exits pulled more punch if they were done unexpectedly, and she knew a good exit line when she said it. So she tossed her head and turned around and took Hannah’s hand. “Come on, honey,” she said, and stalked off, majestic in her determination.

“Nell,” Andy said. He came a few steps after her. She could feel his presence. “Nell,” he repeated. “Don’t go off like this.”

Nell did not turn around.
If he wants me, he’ll pursue me
, she thought. In her mind she envisioned him running after her down the length of the mall. In her mind she heard him say at last, “I don’t want to lose you, Nell—marry me!”

But that was only in her mind. In reality, she felt the invisible bond between her and Andy stretching as she walked, until it snapped and broke in two.

“He’s standing back by the computers, Mom,” Hannah said.

“I know,” Nell said, her head held high.

“How do you know?” Hannah nagged. “You don’t have eyes in the back of your head.”

“Sometimes I do,” Nell replied. “Sometimes I really do.”

She strode down the mall, full of energy, purpose, and determination, a madwoman among all the lazy strolling holiday shoppers. Her mind was wild with words and images. At the last moment, before she came to the door leading out to the icy parking lot, she heard someone running toward her. She could feel the crowds of people parting as someone pushed through to her. There was one last nearly ecstatic moment when Nell felt Andy rushing to her, finally desperate with need, and then Nell heard her son yelling, “Hey,
Mom
! Wait a minute. Where are you going? How come you didn’t come get me?” And she turned to find that her pursuer had been her son. Andy was nowhere to be seen.

No one spoke while they ran through the freezing air and crammed themselves into the cold Toyota. They sat, teeth chattering, waiting for the engine to warm the little car. Hannah was in the front seat, buckled in with a safety belt so that she could turn only halfway around to see Jeremy.

“Mom broke up with Andy,” Hannah said to her brother. “She was wicked good.”

“Andy? Andy was there? I didn’t see him,” Jeremy protested. “Hey, Mom, why did you break up with Andy?”

“It’s a long story,” Nell said. “I guess you could say I broke up with him because he cares more for computers than for me.”

“Boy, is he stupid,” Jeremy said loyally.

“Mom called him a dumb fart,” Hannah said gleefully.

“She did?” Jeremy grinned. “Mom, did you really say that right to him?”

“I did,” Nell said, grinning back. “I really did. I said, ‘Andy, you are a dumb fart.’ ”

“Wow!” Jeremy said, laughing. “I bet no one’s ever called him
that
before.”

Hannah and Jeremy got into one of their contagious laughing fits then, saying “dumb fart” whenever they needed inspiration for a fresh burst of laughter. Nell drove home smiling. Her children were right, she knew: Without them she might have told Andy he was an insensitive egotist or a selfish fool or any number of other things that he had undoubtedly been called by other women. She doubted very much that anyone had called him a dumb fart before. It was such a nice, short, definite, disgusting phrase. Nell was pleased with herself for using it. She was very pleased with herself for breaking up with Andy. She would have hated herself if she had weakened.

At home, she distributed the new underwear to her children and told them to put it away before playing. They ran off, eager to call friends, start games, watch TV. Nell went into the kitchen and fixed herself a celebratory glass of white wine. She stood very still for a moment, holding the wine in her mouth, then letting it slide down inside her, and she waited for a similar cold tang of grief to join the taste of wine. But there was no grief now. She had no tears. She realized that only when she had felt hope had there been sorrow. Now she had neither. Andy was truly gone from her life, and she felt her life expand with his absence, the way a stage expands with light and sound once the heavy
curtain has been raised.

New Year’s Eve, even the cats were sick. Fred and Medusa were disgusting, slinking around the house with watery mucus streaming out of their eyes, staining their fur. Fred even had laryngitis; when he opened his mouth to meow, he could only squeak. It would have been a funny sight if it weren’t so pathetic and if the children hadn’t been feeling as bad as he did. Hannah and Jeremy were both sick, too. They both had a fever, runny nose, congested head, upset stomach, aching arms and ankles, sore throat, the works. Nell had called the doctor, who had said nothing could be done but to wait it out—it was yet another new flu bug. A very contagious flu bug. Nell was so tired and achy tonight that she was afraid she had caught it, too.

* * *

For two days now she had been the soul of patience and sympathy, carrying trays with aspirin and ginger ale and chicken broth to her children, rubbing their backs, coddling and cuddling them. But now she was exhausted, and when they crabbed because the orange liquid medicine she gave them tasted so foul, she heard herself snap, “Shut up, damnit, and take this stuff or I’ll kill you.”

God, what a nasty-mouthed mean old mother I am, Nell thought, carrying the sticky spoon back down to the kitchen. But she knew instinctively that her bad temper came as a sign of relief—the children were over the worst part. They were sick, but not dangerously sick anymore. They would be tired and cranky for the next few days, but they were going to get well. They were not going to die. And that was really the only thing that mattered.

Thank God, Nell thought, for her children. They drove her crazy, but they saved her life. When she looked at them, she thought, I have done this much in the world, I have made these children and kept them safe and healthy and taught them to be good, and that is a wonderful thing.

Someday, Nell thought, these children will leave me. They’ll go off to college, to work, to marry. I’ll be really alone then. I’ll manage—I’ll even enjoy it. I’ll be able to
travel, to have more freedom. We’ll learn to live without one another. But for now—for now, thank heavens, they were still little children who had to live with her, who needed her love, and who gave love back so naturally.

Nell poured herself a huge glass of orange juice and carried it upstairs with a handful of chewable Vitamin C. If she could help it, she was going to stay well. She peeked into the children’s bedrooms—both Hannah and Jeremy had drifted off into sleep already, carried away on waves of the decongestant medicine. It was nine-thirty. Nell left all the doors open so she could hear the children if they called her. At least they were old enough now to call her if they needed her; she no longer had to spend the night on the floor wrapped in a blanket, only half sleeping, trying through the night to monitor the breathing of a sick child.

Now Nell crawled into her own bed. The sheets were gritty with crumbs from sandwiches. She didn’t care, she was too tired to care. She didn’t even particularly care that when the new year came she would probably be asleep instead of celebrating its arrival. She would be sleeping truly alone tonight—she had shut Fred and Medusa in the kitchen for once. Her tolerance for her animals had ended earlier in the day, when Fred had butted his sickly head against her stomach, leaving a long trail of greenish eye-slime on her sweatshirt. Nell didn’t want to awaken to the sound of either cat throwing up or sneezing. She didn’t want to feel
any
material rubbing off a cat and onto her during the night. The cats would get well, too, she knew, but until then, she didn’t want to sleep with them.

It had looked like such a promising New Year’s Eve. Nell had been up for it in every way. She had been invited to a huge party at Ilona’s and had asked Stellios to go with her. She had found a silver sequined tube top at a secondhand shop that looked great with an old long black velvet skirt. She had planned to greet the new year looking as gorgeous as she could, dancing the night away in Stellios’s arms, drinking Ilona and Phillip’s first-class champagne, putting into practice Ilona’s new philosophy of “saying yes to life!”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever said no to life,” Nell had said to Ilona when her friend exploded with her newly found catchword and religion. “I mean, after all, here I am,” Nell had said.

“Oh, don’t be so
literal
,” Ilona had cajoled. “Don’t be so stuffy. You know what I mean. I mean, grab life by the balls and run with it!”

“What?” Nell had asked, aghast. “Ilona, aren’t you mixing your metaphors?”

But Ilona was in too good a mood to be sensible. She had come into the boutique to buy a special dress for the party she and Phillip were giving New Year’s Eve—a party with a live band and a champagne fountain and catered breakfast at dawn. Ilona looked through dresses, trying to get Nell to share her excitement. She kept saying things like, “You’ve got to grab your joy where you find it! You can’t always wait for it to come to you, you have to create it! You’ve got to start saying
yes
to life!”

The season has scrambled your brain, Nell thought, but she was glad that Ilona was so cheerful. And Nell
had
been looking forward to the big party. But Cora Donne had invited Nell to a New Year’s Day brunch, and Nell wanted to go there even more than to Ilona’s. She knew who Ilona’s crowd would be, but Cora’s guests would be all new faces to Nell, new people, mostly professors from the university where Cora taught. Cora had hinted to Nell that there would be quite a few single men at her party who would be delighted to meet Nell. They’ll probably be stodgy old intellectuals, Nell thought cynically, but she was still excited about going. She was gladly missing Ilona’s party so that she could go to sleep early and fight off the flu. She wanted to be fresh and bright-eyed for the new day.