Nell (21 page)

The O’Learys’ house seemed wonderful to Nell too, although Elizabeth called it the cottage and seemed impatient with Nell’s exclamations of pleasure. Elizabeth hurried Nell through the house, showing her the various rooms (“You’ll sleep in the guest room tonight, but of course in June we’ll be gone and you can have the master bedroom for yourself”), flicking on lights, calling down to Colin (“Fix me a martini, we’ll be right down!”). The front part of the house stood squat and four-square, four small rooms up and down, with new bathrooms making rectangular intrusions into two of the rooms. It had not been an old cottage or an especially pretty one, but the O’Learys had spiffed it up with their special flair. All the rooms were carpeted (“because the floorboards were nothing to look at, unfortunately”) in a thick nubby golden brown, so that it was like walking through a field of ripe wheat. The walls were all white, and the oak woodwork was natural and pale. The furniture was new, low, modern. There wasn’t much of it. This gave the small rooms a feeling of airiness. A narrow hall led past the front two rooms into the small square kitchen, and the back kitchen door had been removed and widened so that the addition to the house beckoned: It was one great open room with a cathedral ceiling and windows all the way around. The wheat carpet was here, and the walls had been paneled in a wood of similar texture and color. It was like walking into a pot of honey. The furniture was teak, glass, tubular aluminum, and somehow these hard and shiny materials had been made to curve and soften, or perhaps it was the effect of the plump cushions on the sofa and the depth of the carpet beneath it all, but the room seemed new, clean, clever, and yet still comfortable, inviting repose.

“It’s a marvelous house,” Nell said when she sat down with her hosts in the living room.

“It has no architectural integrity,” Colin replied.

“There’s no view,” Elizabeth added. “No view of the water, no view of the moors, and the rooms are far too small.”

So Nell said nothing else, not wanting to expose her ignorance, but she was eager to finish drinks and dinner so she could go back and just sit in the small bright guest room. Dinner and drinks went on and on, however, and the talk was mostly business, about clothes and the people Nell should meet and take care to please; the evening was as much work for Nell as pleasure. She didn’t get back to her room until almost midnight. It was too dark for her to see anything from her window, and she knew that she’d have an entire summer to enjoy the house, so she just climbed into bed and fell asleep. It might have been the effect of the sea breeze that came in the window Nell had opened or, more likely, the effect of all the wine she had had with dinner and the Bloody Mary earlier, but she had no trouble falling asleep in the strange house and she did not waken all night long. She slept a perfect and restful sleep.

She awoke because the room was full of sun. She felt instantly awake and marvelously rested, as if she had slept deeply for days. She stretched and listened, and heard only silence in the house. “Shit,” she said softly, thinking that she must have overslept and that Elizabeth and Colin had gone off to the boutique without her. Elizabeth would be in a snit. Nell sat up in bed, ready to fly into action, and grabbed her watch off the bedside table. It was five forty-five.

She went to the window and leaned on the sill, looking out. The street lay below her, vivid and bright in the morning. Gray-shingled cottages were scattered at random in a rather merry muddle of trees, shrubs, flowers, and grassy yards. Nell knew that once she was on ground level the street would take on an appropriate regularity; she would see how the picket fences and great hedges divided properties into their official lots. It was very green outside and the sky was purely blue. The fog of the previous day had gone.

Nell looked at her watch again. Surely no one would stir in the house for an hour or so, and the shop didn’t open until ten.… She quickly dressed in jeans, a cotton shirt, a wool sweater, and sneakers, then grabbed up her old windbreaker and tied it around her
waist in case it was chillier out than it looked. She went to the trouble of brushing her teeth, but couldn’t be bothered to put on any makeup, and why should she bother? she thought; she didn’t know anyone here and she doubted that she’d run into anyone at this time of the morning. At any rate, she was going to go walk by the ocean, and she knew that ocean walkers always left one another alone.

She felt rather gay and childish, sneaking down the stairs and out of the house, and upon shutting the cottage door behind her, she felt a strange sensation in her chest, as if her soul were a kernel of corn that had just popped. She was alone! She was free! She was by herself, on her own, to do whatever she wanted for the next few hours.

She began to walk down the street in what she hoped was the direction of the ocean. The O’Learys had said their cottage was only six blocks from Jetties Beach, so she knew she couldn’t go too far wrong no matter which way she went. She didn’t quite run, but she walked very fast, exhilarated by the cool morning air, and each time the cushiony rubber soles of her sneakers hit the solid pavement beneath her feet, she felt a great satisfaction run right up her legs and through her body. How much time she had spent in her life
not
walking! Usually she wore dress shoes, in the boutique, or boots in the winter, or anything other than sneakers—she wore these only when cleaning the basement or garage. They had been work shoes, but now they were play shoes and she was delighted. She could tell after a block or two that sneakers were right for Nantucket, because the sidewalks were so cracked and broken, bulging up from the roots of trees, or simply old. It didn’t matter. The sidewalks seemed right. Everything seemed right. Here she was alone, without her children, without her bosses, without any man to please or desire, without even her dog and cats—she was just walking down the street in the very early morning, and no one else was in sight. She couldn’t remember when she had ever done this before in her life. She turned a corner and saw a sign pointing to Jetties Beach.

It was a longer walk than the O’Learys had indicated, for although the cottage was close to the water, it was not close to any public way to the water. Nell walked for blocks, past streets of cottages, large houses, summer houses, summer mansions, until she came to the street that led down to the sandy beach. She ran down that street, pleased with each step that she could see more and more of the blue. No cars were parked at the end of the road, and the concession stand was closed. The beach was quiet. Nell walked
about two hundred yards down the stretch of sand until at last she came to the water. Then she sat for a while at its edge, just looking out at the expanse of blue. This was the harbor side, the Nantucket Sound side, the safe side, and the waves that came in gently were breaking into a flat washing. It was shallow for a great way out, or seemed to be. Nell decided not to test the water today. It would be too cold. She rose and began to walk down the beach slowly, kicking aside seaweed aimlessly, stooping to pick up interesting shells, tucking ones she liked into her pocket, tossing the others into the water when she had finished studying them. She wasn’t really even thinking, she was just walking along.

After a while she saw another person on the beach, a very tall slender person, walking toward her. As the figure drew nearer, Nell saw that it was a man, wearing khaki trousers, old docksiders, a heavy long pullover sweater. He was very tall and lean and dark-haired, and he had a sort of huddled look about him, as if he were trying to withdraw into himself. His shoulders were hunched and his hands were in his pockets and he stooped a bit, as if he were the sort of man who had gained all his height as a young boy and never did learn how to handle it.

When she and the man were just a few feet from each other, they both nodded. Serious, short, silent nods, acknowledging each other’s presence but not intruding. They passed each other by.

Nell walked on. The sun was rising higher, and all the water danced, and she wanted to look everywhere at once. Although she couldn’t see the mainland, she knew she was facing it, that if she could see far enough, the easy shores of Hyannis would be in view. But the expanse gave her the illusion that she could see forever until the world curved around until she could see herself from the back, a lone woman on the shore. She walked. She found an especially hideous skate egg case, a long black swollen thing with four creepy antennae sticking out, and she put it in her pocket to take home to Jeremy.

As she bent to pick it up, she noticed that the man she had passed was no longer walking away from her. He was moving toward her. He was perhaps fifty yards away and moving toward her very fast and deliberately.

Nell froze. She tried to act casual, as if she were frozen casually, on purpose. She worked hard at putting the egg case in her jeans pocket. No doubt about it, the man was coming toward her. He was very tall, very thin. Anthony Perkins, Nell thought:
Psycho
.

She looked up and down the beach. No other human being was nearby. There wasn’t even a dog. Some seagulls were flopping about, but of what help could they be? They only added to her fears with their awful chilling cries. Nell turned away from the man and began walking down the beach a little faster than she had before. She was suddenly cold in spite of the beaming sun. She looked up at the houses that loomed on the hills above the beach—they were too far away, set too far back, and most of the houses seemed empty, with uncurtained windows revealing no signs of life.

Oh my God, Nell thought, I’m going to be killed. Stop it, she told herself, don’t be ridiculous. You’re not in the city, you’re in Nantucket. But why had he changed his course, why was he coming back this way, and why was he walking so much faster?

She stopped on the pretense of inspecting another shell and looked sideways as she bent over and saw that he was gaining on her. He was almost running.

Then he called out to her. She couldn’t hear well over the thump of the waves, but it seemed he yelled, “Wait!”

Nell didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t outrun him. If she screamed, no one would hear. He was so tall and intense a figure but it was broad daylight, a beautiful May morning! So she turned, heart pounding, toward the man and stood watching him as he came up to her.

“I think this is yours,” he said, and held out to her her sodden old windbreaker.

“Oh,” Nell said, chagrined. She took it from him and held it out from her so that it could drip away from her clothes. “It must have fallen off when I was looking for shells,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Bye.” Then he turned and plodded steadily back down the beach away from her.

Nell stood and watched him go. She wondered if he could feel her eyes on his back. She wondered if he had felt her fear, her impulse to run. The man really did resemble Anthony Perkins, which would have been all to the good if the movie
Psycho
had never been made, but Nell had been terrified of showers and tall lean men ever since she had seen that film. She wondered if the tall man was aware of this resemblance. She thought he had to be. Maybe that was why he looked so hunched and—lonely. He had a kind face, though, an intelligent face, God, she thought, I wonder what he thought of me.
And she put her hand up to her hair, which the sea wind had blown into a thicket of tangles, and remembered that she had no makeup on at all. Oh well, she thought, who cares, I’ll never see him again.

She walked on down the beach until she saw, up past the sand dunes and eel grass, steps leading up and up the hill. She climbed the steps and was rewarded with a panorama of the beach and the water. Then she walked along the streets, finding her way through the winding and slanting roads back to the O’Learys’ cottage. Some streets were broad and spacious, with large gray-shingled cottages set on well-kept lawns and adorned with carved and painted wooden quarterboards announcing the cottages’ names: Blue Harbor, Sans Souci, Little Spouter, Paradise. The closer she got to town, the smaller the streets got, until, near the O’Learys’, she once again walked down streets so narrow they could hold only one car at a time. Untrimmed branches of rose or yew brushed her arm as she passed. Here the lawns were smaller but the houses more stately, set closer to the road. Nell could see through the windows of these houses the glitter of crystal chandeliers, the sweep of ornately bannistered staircases, and large gilt-framed oil paintings of ships and seascapes. All the yards were small and neat. Ivy grew up the sides of houses and over picket fences, and daffodils and tulips abounded. Occasionally, Nell saw a metal hitching post in front of an especially old house. Green and yellow wooden weathervanes, shaped like ducks, with wings that flapped in the wind, stood on posts in some yards, but that seemed to be as frivolous as one got around here.

Nell thought of her own yard, which now in the spring was adorned with bikes, trikes, roller skates, Hula-Hoops, balls, and other more or less predictable outdoor stuff, and also with oddly shaped pieces of furniture the children had dredged out of the basement to build a fort, old plastic bowls and cheap spoons (the children had been playing house, or perhaps Jeremy had been doing another experiment), and, on closer inspection, a multitude of miscellaneous little plastic items that had sunk into the grass—old straws, pink wands used for blowing bubbles, popped balloons, a doll’s bracelet. Every time Nell looked out the kitchen window, she could see a yellow knit baby dress that Hannah had worn when she was six months old and that was now hanging from a shrub. Two or three weeks ago Hannah had dressed Fred the cat in baby clothes and wheeled him around the yard in her baby carriage. Fred was as good-tempered and
obliging a cat as Medusa was bitchy; Fred was the sort of cat who drooled when petted. He quite liked wearing baby clothes and being wrapped and cuddled and pushed about in a carriage. But a neighborhood dog had come through the yard one afternoon, sending Fred out of the carriage, past the shrubs, and up a tree in a flash. Nell had had the foresight to insist that Hannah not put the baby clothes on Fred tightly, and so as Fred scrambled through the shrub and up the tree, his yellow baby dress had been torn off by a protruding twig. Now it hung there like a limp flag. Once or twice in the past few days when Nell went by the window she stopped quickly and looked, thinking she had spotted a rare bird, a goldfinch perhaps. Then she would realize that it was just the baby dress. She meant to make the children get the dress, just as she meant to make them clean up the yard. But it was spring, and there was so much to do, and the children were so glad to play outside, and she was so glad to have them outside so she could get organized for the summer.… Thinking of the children, she walked past the O’Learys’ house without realizing it and had to retrace her steps.