Nell (12 page)

The men were the sort Nell lusted after briefly when stopped at a service station or for road work. They were truckers, road construction workers, factory laborers. They wore jeans, drank beer, smoked pot, talked sports, laughed loud, and looked good. They
looked
very good
. Nell didn’t know how they thought, for she was quickly relegated to the group of other “girl friends’—she was by far the oldest. She stood sipping her beer, leaning against the picnic table, listening to the women talk. She was fascinated, not by what the girls had to say, but by their intense absorption in their topics. Nell knew that she often had clever things to say, but she never tried to dominate the conversation in any group, thinking that monologues were rude and often boring, that it was kind to draw others out. But these girls had no such qualms.

“So I said to him,” said a skinny brunette who was chewing gum and smoking and flicking her hair and ashes with enviable flair, “ ‘I put my money in the tip bowl and I told you already I put all my money in the tip bowl, so what are you trying to do, make me out to be some kind of a liar, huh? I don’t go for this kind of insult, you know.’ And so he says, ‘Cheryl, I’m not trying to say you’re a liar. I’m not trying to insult you. I’m just trying to figure out how come the money in the tip bowl don’t balance with the checks.’ So I says, ‘Well, that’s not my problem, it’s yours, and anyway, I think this is some kind of stupid and unfair system you’ve got going here anyway, you know, because I don’t go for this putting all our tips in the tip bowl and then dividing it up at night.
I
think we ought to be able to keep the tips we get. We earn them.’ So he says, ‘I know that’s how you feel, so that’s why I suspected you were probably the one who didn’t put all your tips in the tip bowl out of spite.’ So I says, ‘I don’t appreciate this kind of insult at all, you know, I am not a spiteful person.’ You know I’m not a spiteful person, don’t you, Donna. God, would you call
me
a spiteful person? I am not a spiteful person. I would never do anything dishonest out of spite. By this time I am really getting steamed, you know, I am really getting pissed. So I’m standing there with my arms folded, kind of like this, and looked at him right in the face and thought, okay, Twerp, I’m mad at you, now what are you gonna do? So he says …”

Nell stared and listened for a long time, engrossed. There seemed to be no end to such stories, no punch lines, not even a satisfactory solution. But the women continued to listen and respond and talk with a mixture of passionate interest and lazy indifference. No one tried to draw Nell into the conversations. They smiled at her, though, and when it came time to eat, they handed her a paper plate with a hot dog on it, but they didn’t try to get to know her or make her feel at ease. Nell was relieved when the conversation
stopped so that the women could watch and scream while the men took turns jumping over mounds of dirt with their dirt bikes and motorcycles.

Again Nell watched, fascinated, but now also a little embarrassed. Here she was, less than an hour from the city of Boston, with its ballets and operas and libraries and museums and theaters, standing with a bunch of young women, watching a sort of impromptu dirt bike rally. The men got on their bikes and at first seemed to spend a lot of time just competing to see who could make the most noise revving up. Then, one by one, they went shooting off into the field. Nell could see that it took great strength and a certain athletic skill to get those bikes over the dirt mounds—the men had to pick up the bikes, weighted with their own bodies, and somehow heft or launch them over the mounds. They would go flying up and over the mounds and land with a huge thud on the ground on the other side, then spin away in a turn with a great deal of screeching of wheels. While they were waiting for another turn at the mounds, the men drove their bikes back and forth in front of the women at a terrifying speed, leaning with their bodies so that the bikes tilted at alarming angles to the ground, screaming around in unnecessary hairpin turns, hoisting their machines back and forth over the ground as if they were wrestling with monsters. The men, Steve included, had such determined expressions on their faces; they looked so serious about all this. Nell decided finally that they were all engaged in some unadmitted fantasy: They thought they were on
CHiPs
or
The Dukes of Hazzard
. It did seem as if everyone at this picnic was somehow engaged in a bizarre sexual ritual involving the newest technology and the oldest ceremonies: men showing off their power in front of adoring women. Finally, Nell was only embarrassed and sad for everyone there. The only consolation she could find was in knowing that no one else could tell how she felt—and if they did know how she felt, they would only, in turn, feel sorry for her. They would think that she was the strange one. These people were so assured, so confident in their actions.

But when Steve finally shut off his bike and got off, slightly swaggering, to walk over to Nell and take his beer from her—she had been holding his can of Pabst for him like some medieval admirer holding a jouster’s colors—Nell felt a cold wash of knowledge rush down the inside of her torso, chilling her blood, stilling every sexual response she had felt toward this man. She could not feel sexually desirous of a man she
was embarrassed for. The minor mistakes he had made in grammar or sophistication did not really matter; they had only freed her from his judgment. But this bike-jumping business, well, it changed things for Nell. It ruined things. She thought Steve looked so silly jumping a bike over a pile of dirt—why not go around it? And the men took it all so seriously—they might have impressed Hannah and Jeremy, perhaps, and they certainly impressed the other women at the picnic, but they did not impress Nell. She only wondered how on earth she had gotten to such a place.

“You know what I’ve been doing to strengthen my thigh muscles?”

It was Steve talking. He had taken the beer from Nell, slapped her bottom with hard affection, then gone back to the other men. But Nell was within hearing distance, and she went alert at this question of Steve’s; she hoped he wouldn’t say that making love to her had strengthened his legs.

“I go out to my dad’s farm and ride his cows,” Steve said. “Both my horses are too easy; I can’t get any challenge out of them. I just climb on the cows bareback with a rope around their necks and hang on … those mothers really move.”

Nell stared at Steve as he walked off talking to the other men. She saw that he was still the same man she had lusted after: he was still tanned and tough and powerful and handsome and hard. He was all those sexy things. But Nell’s mouth twitched and she took a drink of beer in order to stop a grin.

“Hey, Susan,” Steve called to a blonde in a halter top and cutoff jeans who was standing near Nell. “Did the McCarthys sell you and Tom that pig?”

“Oh, yeah,” Susan answered. “Yeah, and we got a good price. But the bastard wouldn’t deliver. We had a hell of a time getting it home on the bike.”

Nell couldn’t help herself. She didn’t know Susan, but she addressed her directly. “You brought a live pig home on a motorcycle?”

“Well, yeah,” Susan said. “Tom’s pickup broke. We’re gonna feed this pig all spring and summer and butcher it this fall. We had to get it home somehow.”

“Well, well, how did you do it?” Nell asked.

“It was hard,” Susan admitted. “I couldn’t hold on to Tom and hold on to the pig at the same time. Now of course if we had had two pigs, Tom could of put them each in a bag and put one on each end of the handlebar. That would’ve balanced out nicely. But
with just one pig, even a baby pig on a handlebar, well, it throws the balance off, especially around curves. So finally Tom just stuck it inside his jacket. It scratched him like crazy, but we got it home.”

“Well,” Nell said. She didn’t know what to say now. “Well, that’s good,” she said.

“We’re raising chickens now,” another woman said, and Nell eased her way out of the group. On the pretense of getting another beer, she walked away slowly and stood by the picnic table with her back to the women. Pigs and motorcycles, she thought; well, there had probably been stranger combinations. These were young people she was with, young people starting their lives in the best way they knew how. Nell did not feel superior to them, but she did feel different. And uncomfortable.

She sipped her beer and looked at the group of men who were now leaning against their trucks, drinking beer, talking, passing around a joint. Every one of the men was as handsome, in one way or another, as Steve. They were all hard, masculine, muscular, tough, sexy young men, full of health and laughter. Perhaps they weren’t all as kind as Steve, but she imagined that almost any of those young men would be as good in bed as he was. They were young studs. They were not like the men in movies, the road crew men and contractors who secretly read Camus or had degrees in English literature but did manual labor for philosophical reasons. They were honest-to-goodness working class men who loved their beer, their motorcycles, their farms, and who aspired not to travel to Europe but to Indianapolis to see stock car racing. They didn’t read books, attend concerts, see plays, and they wouldn’t be impressed by anyone who did. These were Steve’s friends, and this was his real world. Nell knew that if she continued seeing him, she would have to see more and more of this world. The two of them couldn’t stay in bed all the time.

After the picnic, they rode back to Nell’s house on Steve’s motorcycle. She had ridden with him twice before, feeling both terrified and amused about it. Jeremy and Hannah had been wild with jealousy to watch their mother go off on the back of a bike, and Steve had given each child short rides up and down the block while Nell held her breath with fear. She couldn’t understand what it was about motorcycles that attracted men so. Was it that they liked having all that power between their legs? Didn’t they
already have enough? Nell rode with her arms wrapped tightly around Steve’s waist and her eyes squeezed closed. It made her ill to see the road and houses fly by so fast and to know there was nothing but air between her body and the hard cement or glaring metal of a car. She knew that when she was in her twenties, she would have loved this, would have found it romantic, but now as her hair and shirt fluttered back from the wind, she could only think of the scene in the movie
Isadora
when Isadora Duncan threw her long scarf over her shoulder as she sat in a low convertible and the wind suddenly whipped it behind her into the spokes of the tire and broke her neck.

She was tired when she got home. She felt much older than she had when she started for the picnic. Well, she thought to herself, people have affairs like this all the time: older women, younger men. She had read about it, seen movies about it; she could do it, too, couldn’t she?

She couldn’t.

She couldn’t shake from her mind the image of Steve and his friends hauling their motorbikes over the dirt mounds. He came in the house with her and talked to the children and hung around in the kitchen while Nell fixed Hannah and Jeremy dinner, but now everything Steve did irritated her. The children were tired because their babysitter had been a young one who loved to play outdoor running games with them. It was eight o’clock, late for their dinner. They were tired, they were cranky. Nell stood at the sink, slicing fresh tomatoes to go with the cheese sandwiches she was grilling for them.

“Go wash your hands,” she said to them over her shoulder.

“Ah, Mom,” Jeremy wailed. “My hands are clean enough.”

“Do what your mother tells you and don’t talk back,” Steve said, and flicked his finger hard against Jeremy’s head, just above his ear.

Jeremy whipped around in his chair to glare at Steve, startled. Then, before Nell could do anything, he jumped up from his chair and left the kitchen. Hannah sat, stunned, staring at Nell and Steve.

“Hannah,” Nell said evenly. “Please go wash your hands now.”

Hannah quietly got up from the table and left the room.

Nell turned to Steve. “Don’t you ever lay a hand on either one of my children again,” she said, her voice murderously low.

“Hell, Nell,” Steve said. “I scarcely touched him. I didn’t hurt him. He’s gotta learn to mind his mother.”

“It’s no business of yours what he has to learn,” Nell said. “He is
my
son, and
I
will discipline him and you have no right to touch him. Don’t you ever do anything like that again.”

“Well, Jesus, how come you’re getting so hot under the collar?” Steve said, backing away from her, looking exasperated and hurt.

The children came slinking back into the room then and silently sat down at the table to eat.

“Look, Steve,” Nell said. “I’m awfully tired. Why don’t you go home. We can talk later.”

Steve paused, stared at Nell, his face full of confusion. She knew she was hurting him, surprising him with her sudden lack of warmth, and she regretted it.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll call you.” He started to move toward the door, then stopped and turned to Jeremy. “Jeremy,” he said. “I’m sorry I snapped you in the head. Your mom told me never to touch you like that again. I was only trying to remind you to mind your mom. But I’m sorry if I hurt you or hurt your feelings. Okay?”

Jeremy took on the sort of shifty-eyed look he always got when confronted by adults with a touchy situation. “Okay,” he said.

“I’ll call you,” Steve said to Nell, and went out the door.

“Fine,” Nell said, but did not have the energy to say it loudly enough to be sure he heard.

She sat down at the table, where her children were eating their sandwiches in silence, and she leaned her elbows on the table and put her head in her hands. Steve had so many of the wrong instincts—and so many of the right ones. If only he hadn’t apologized to Jeremy, how clear-cut things would be for her.

“I’m sorry Steve hit you, Jeremy,” she said. “I told him not to do it again, and I’m sure he won’t.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Jeremy said. “He didn’t hurt me.”

“Don’t look so sad, Mommy,” Hannah said.