Nell (48 page)

Ten

The phone was ringing when Nell and the children arrived home. They had taken the subway from the bus terminal, then walked the five blocks from the stop. It was pouring here in Arlington, too. Nell could hear the phone ringing as she unlocked the door of her house. The sound irritated her. Everything irritated her. She was exhausted and soaked and starving and miserable. She hoped the phone would stop ringing before she got inside the house.

But the phone kept ringing. Nell told the children to run upstairs and change their clothes. She turned up the thermostat to 67; to hell with the gas bill. Then she trudged in to answer the phone.

“Nell!” Andy said. “What are you doing? Why are you back in Arlington? What’s the matter?”

Nell leaned against the wall. She had no energy left. Andy’s voice seemed to be coming to her from so far away, from the moon, from a former life. “I have such a bad cold,” she said. “And it was raining again. I thought it best to come home.”

“But you should have awakened me,” Andy said. “You didn’t have to sneak out like that.”

“Andy,” Nell said, “I just got in the house this minute. I’m sick and I’m cold. Let me take a hot bath and call you back.”

“All right,” Andy said. “Call me back as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting.”

Nell went to the bathroom, ran a tub of hot water, stripped off her clothes, and sank into the steamy warmth. The children called to her through the door: Jeremy was going over to Bobbie’s, Cathy was coming over to play with Hannah. Good, Nell thought; Cathy was one of Hannah’s quieter friends. The two girls would spend the afternoon playing with dolls.

Nell lay in the bath until she was warmed to the bone. Then she dragged herself out, dried off, and slipped into the comfort of her old familiar gray robe. She globbed her hair up off her neck with pins and cleaned her face. She saw her reflection in the
bathroom mirror. Well, she thought, I’m no movie star, but I’m not exactly a dog, either. She took more aspirin, then went down to the kitchen. She fixed herself hot chocolate instead of coffee, and scrambled eggs and a childish treat: cinnamon toast. She made three pieces just exactly the way she liked it, thick with butter and sugar, heavily speckled with cinnamon, toasted under the oven broiler until the sugar and cinnamon were crunchy on top and soft in the middle. She put out granola bars, apples, peanuts, and crackers spread with cheese for Hannah and Jeremy, in case they got hungry while she slept. Then she carried her tray of food up to the bedroom.

The house was growing cozy with the heat from the furnace, and from behind Hannah’s bedroom door came the sound of the two little girls playing, whispering, laughing, clues that happiness could exist in the world. Nell sat in bed like a patient, eating her toast and eggs, drinking the hot chocolate, warming up. She felt better, but she did not feel sharp-minded and alert. She longed for rest, oblivion. She slipped down into the covers and fell asleep.

When she woke up, it was dark. She was disconcerted. For a moment she didn’t know where she was or what had happened in the past few hours. Her room was completely dark, though the hall light was on and she could hear sounds coming from the rest of the house. She rose and stumbled downstairs, trying to shake off the fog of sleep and decongestant. Her mind and body were all rubbery. She found the children in the living room in front of the TV. They had brought in the plates of crackers and fruit she had prepared.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Sssh,” Hannah said. “Oh, this is so sad.”

Nell looked at the TV. Someone was dying again on
Little House
. That meant it was somewhere between five and six o’clock at night.

“Are you kids okay?” she said. “I’m sorry I fell asleep. I have such a bad cold.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said vaguely, engrossed in the TV show but knowing he had to make some reply to his mother.

Nell wandered into the kitchen. She poured herself a large glass of orange juice and just sat at the kitchen table for a while, still stupefied. Then she took a deep breath and dialed Andy’s number.

“That must have been some bath,” Andy said when he heard her voice.

“I’m sorry, Andy,” she said. “I have such a terrible cold. I must have some kind of flu. I fell asleep right after my bath. I couldn’t help it.”

“You should have stayed here and let me take care of you,” Andy said.

Nell was quiet a moment. I don’t really have the energy for this, she thought. But in a way her cold was a help; it muted her feelings, it made everything numb. “Well,” she said, plunging in. “I don’t think so, Andy. I don’t think you actually wanted me there at all.”

“What’re you talking about?” Andy said. “How can you say that?”

“Well, for one thing,” Nell said, “you kept trying to shove me out of bed all night. Face it, Andy, in your deepest subconscious you don’t want me in your life. You don’t even want me in your bed.”

“Nell,” Andy said. “What has gotten into you? I wasn’t trying to shove you out of bed.”

“Andy—” Nell began.

“Nell!” Andy said, his voice harder now. “Nell, I was not shoving you. I was shaking you. I had to shake you all through the night. I was trying to get you to change positions. You were snoring.”

“I was what?” Nell asked, indignant.

“You were snoring,” Andy said.

“I don’t snore,” Nell told him.

“You do snore,” Andy said. “You snored last night. You snored terribly. You woke me up two or three or four times. You sounded like a chain saw. It must be your cold.”

This is absolutely the worst thing that anyone has ever said to me, Nell thought. She was mortified. She had tried so hard to be beautiful for Andy, she had even aimed for a little glamour with her black lace nightgown. And there she had been, lying next to him, snoring away like a chain saw.

“I didn’t hear myself snore,” she said petulantly.

“Of course not, you were asleep!” he said. “Once or twice I sort of rocked you and you turned over and got in a different position and stopped snoring. I tried to do it as
gently as possible so I wouldn’t wake you up. But I guess I did wake you up and you didn’t know what was going on. Is that why you left? Are you angry?”

“Oh, Andy,” Nell said. “I don’t know what I am. I don’t think I should talk about anything now. I’m all confused, and mostly I just feel tired and sick.”

“But, Nell,” Andy began.

“Look,” Nell said. “It was hard being there with the children in the rain. They were bored and had nothing to do. The trip was difficult. Our whole—relationship, oh God, I hate that word—is just too difficult, I think.”

“You
are
tired,” Andy said. “Nell, don’t think that way. You are tired, and you’re sick. Listen, go to bed. Get some rest. Get well. Call me when you feel better and we’ll talk about all of this.”

“All right,” Nell said.

“Nell, I love you,” Andy said.

Nell was quiet for a while. I don’t want to say this to him anymore, she thought, because I don’t want to feel it. It hurts too much to feel it. But she said, in a voice that held no strength, “I love you too.”

She hung up the phone. The kitchen was a mess of dirty dishes and pans. She spent the evening sitting on the sofa with the children, watching Thanksgiving specials and cartoons. Finally, they all went to bed.

“You won’t mind if I snore, will you, Medusa,” Nell said to the cat as she crawled back under her covers. She felt so cold that she was wearing socks and a sweater over her robe. The cat looked at her with slanted eyes, indicating neither affection nor dislike, and Nell turned off the light and fell into bland and dreamless, snoring sleep.

Nell slept almost all Saturday and Sunday. The sun came out over the weekend, so the children played outside during the day. They were good, understanding how sick she was, and made their own lunches. At night Nell staggered down the stairs to heat up soup or canned ravioli for them and to clean up the kitchen from the mess they had made at lunch. Her cold was so bad that she could not taste anything, so she ate very little but drank great amounts of juice. By Monday she felt well enough to go to work.

* * *

As she walked the three blocks to the boutique from the subway stop, she noticed how all of Cambridge, just like the rest of the world, was gearing up now for Christmas.
Christmas
. It seemed to Nell the dreariest of all holidays for a single parent, because it was supposed to mean so much. It was so important to be
happy
then, and all the commercials on TV showing beautiful people drinking champagne under the mistletoe only emphasized her own lonely state. She enjoyed playing Santa Claus for the children; she loved their excitement and pleasure at opening presents, at finding what was left under the tree. But with all the childishness left inside her, she always felt so sorry for herself, stuck there among the glitter and wrapping paper with so little given to
her:
books and a small check from her parents, perhaps a consolation present of perfume or fancy chocolates from a thoughtful woman friend, dime-store treasures of heart-shaped soaps from Hannah and Jeremy. Almost always some friend, trying to be kind, gave Nell a fruitcake. Nell hated fruitcake, and the thought that she would go through yet another Christmas with only books, cheap soap, and a
fruitcake
made her want to cry.

If she was still seeing Andy, she thought, he would certainly give her some kind of present. It would be a present just to be with a man she loved at Christmas. But she did not think she would still be seeing him. She was certain that she would break off with him. Yet she thought about him constantly as she worked through the day.

And that night, after the children were in bed, when she finally crawled into her own bed, exhausted from work and the bleakness of November and decongestant, Andy called.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Better,” Nell said. “A lot better, I guess. But tired.”

“Too tired to talk?”

“No, I guess not. Although I’m probably not going to be Miss Merry Sunshine,” Nell said.

“Look,” Andy said. “Nell, you really left me hanging, just leaving me that way. You—”

“Andy,” Nell interrupted, “I feel like you are
always
leaving me hanging.”

“I am? How?” Andy asked. He sounded genuinely puzzled. “I don’t mean to,” he went on. “I always tell you I love you. I call you a lot. What more would you like for me to do?”

Oh shit, Nell thought, this is so demeaning. “Andy,” she said. “Oh, Andy.” She was silent for a moment. Then she swallowed her pride. “Andy, I guess it’s that you and I mean different things when we say we love each other. I haven’t said ‘I love you’ to anyone except the children for years. It means so much to me. Part of what it means is—is that I want to live my life with you. I want to plan a future with you. I want to know what’s going to happen between us. If I didn’t love you, I could just go on day by day, without a commitment. But because I do love you—”

They were both quiet for a while. Then Andy said, “No one can plan the future, Nell. You and I should both know that. We’ve both been married and divorced. We both know that there are no guarantees. There is no way to promise that anything will last. Can’t you just enjoy what we have now? It’s so good between us. And I do love you. I’m not going to wake up some day and not love you just because we haven’t made some kind of formal commitment to each other.”

“But don’t you miss me?” Nell asked. “You seemed to like living with me this summer. You seemed happy. Wouldn’t you like us to live together, to be together more?”

“Of course I would. That would be nice. But it’s not possible, is it? I don’t want to leave Nantucket, and you can’t leave Arlington. You’ve got your job there and your house and your children.”

Nell was quiet. I could leave here if you’d ask me to come, she thought. If we were married. “I could give up a lot to be with you,” she said. “Oh, Andy, I miss you so much. It hurts me to be without you. Don’t you feel that at all?”

“Well, I guess a little,” Andy said. “I love being with you. But I can’t say it
hurts
me when you’re not here. I’m so used to living alone, you see. I like living alone.”

Well, Nell thought, I’ve known from the start he was painfully honest.

“Well, it hurts me,” Nell said. “It hurts me a lot not to be with you. It hurts me a lot not to know how long we’ll be together. I want to plan. I want to trust. I want to have—Andy, I want to have a permanent relationship with you.”

“But we don’t know that what we have is temporary,” Andy said. “No one is saying it’s temporary.”

“And no one is saying it’s permanent,” Nell said.

“But wouldn’t it be worse not to have it at all?” Andy asked. “Wouldn’t you be hurt more if we didn’t see each other at all? I don’t understand your reasoning.”

“It’s not just
reasoning
,” Nell said. “It’s—feeling. And I guess I’ll have to decide whether or not it will hurt more to have you sometimes than to have you not at all.”

“Oh, Nell,” Andy said. “I hope you make the right decision. I love you.”

Nell wanted to throw the phone across the room and hit the wall. She wanted to throw the phone across the ocean and hit Andy in the head. She was frustrated:
I hope you make the right decision
. What a pompous thing that was for him to say! He was giving her no help at all. He was not giving her an inch. He was not going to commit himself. He would always expect her to continue with things as they were.

“Anyway, it’s early to talk about the future, don’t you think?” Andy said. “We really haven’t known each other that long.”

“I suppose,” Nell said. “I suppose. Look, Andy. I’m tired. These cold pills have wiped me out. Can we talk more another day?”

He said of course, and Nell hung up the phone.

Over the next two weeks they did talk to each other again, several times, but although the words varied slightly from time to time, the messages remained the same. Nell felt she was pushing for a commitment, and was demeaned to be doing it, and Andy did not respond in any way that helped. What it finally came down to was the sad truth that she really did love and need him more than he loved and needed her. She would have to decide if she could live with that.