I thought about our evening. If I had just had more experience with boys—dated a lot, been popular—I’d have been able to handle Nick. He had been under a lot of pressure, and I shouldn’t have dragged him to a function where things could only get worse. I should have known enough to forget it and go home after that horrendous meal with Chuck and Holly. And the one chance to make things better, in the Quick-Stop parking lot (how unromantic could a place be?), I’d messed up by snapping at him.
The three of us sat chewing popcorn. When you really chew popcorn—instead of crunching it, laughing, reaching for another handful, passing the towel to mop your greasy fingers, laughing about that too—things are pretty bad.
Bedtime was horrible. Mother and I made up the couch and Nick stood there looking as if he were a non-somniac with no sleep requirements. When the lights were out and all the awkward good nights had been said, I quietly shut my bedroom door. I pulled the covers up in spite of the heat, put my head under my pillow, and cried.
Twelve
WHEN I WOKE UP Saturday morning I heard the unfamiliar sounds of a third person in our apartment, shuffling around, and getting up. Everything looks better in the morning. That morning I felt more than able to have a waffle with Nick, smile at him, make friends again, and get rid of the bad taste of the evening before. I hopped out of bed, throwing the sheets back and making it quickly before I did anything else. I hate an unmade bed. It’s the only thing I’m always neat about.
Then I remembered that my hairbrush was in the bathroom. My bathrobe was in the bathroom. My toothbrush was in the bathroom. To get to them I’d have to go past Nick in the living room. I took a look at myself in the dressing table mirror. My hair was bumpy rather than wavy. My cheeks were wrinkled from the pillow and my eyes were puffy from last night’s crying. And my nightgown. My nightgown was a joke gift from mother last year. It was short and brilliant pink and in purple glittering letters astride a forked symbol, it said KILLER WOMAN!
I moaned softly, pulling open a bureau drawer to see what else I could throw on. There was a long undershirt style nightie with a profile of the Incredible Hulk on it. There was last year’s bathrobe with the sleeve torn out on the left side that I’d never mended because it didn’t fit me anymore and why mend something you can’t wear, right?
“Nancy?” called Mother. “Nick’s finishing up his breakfast. He’s leaving in a moment. Don’t you want to say good-bye?”
“No,” I said. “I mean—yes, I do want to say good-bye, but I’m not up yet.”
“Then get up,” she said reasonably enough.
“No, no,” said Nick hastily on the other side of the door. “It’s really early. And this is Saturday, you two would be sleeping late if it weren’t for me. I have to run. Thanks a lot for everything, Mrs. Nearing, I won’t impose on you again like this.”
Well, that settled that. I stopped trying to pull on my jeans and shirt to get out there in time to say good-bye. He wouldn’t impose on us again like this.
I wondered why he could talk so easily with Mother. “Good-bye, Nick,” I called. “Good luck on your interviews.”
“Thanks.” His feet were much noisier than Mother’s. He sounded like a thudding giant. Her soft patter followed him to the door. “Goodbye, Nick. Drive carefully. Come again.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, though whether he meant to drive carefully or come again I couldn’t tell. And then the door closed behind him.
I got back in bed. Who wanted to face a day like today, filled with all the things I should have said and could have done and ought to have been?
I listened to Mother getting herself another cup of coffee. There was an abrupt end to the gurgle of the percolator. She’d unplugged it.
“Nannie?” she said, knocking on my door. “May I come in?”
She had never asked permission to come into my room before. It made me feel terribly sad, as if I had crossed some line into a bleak life where people had to tiptoe around each other, worrying about hurting each other.
Oh, good grief, Nelle Catherine, I told myself. So a spoiled seventeen-year-old boy ruins your evening by being stuffy and stupid about his dumb hair. So he explains it to you and you ruin your chance to show him you care and you understand. So that’s going to ruin your Saturday?
Yes, I told myself, yes, it’s going to ruin my Saturday. Not to mention all my daydreams about Nicholas Charles Nearing. “Sure, Mother, come on in.”
She sat on my bed looking at me as she sipped her coffee. Mother drinks it black. It makes me gag even to think of black coffee. She set her cup down on the night table. “Roll over, sweetheart. I’ll give you a backrub.”
I love backrubs. If I were being executed and they gave me one last request, it would probably be for a backrub. I flopped on my stomach and Mother began kneading my back. “So what happened?” she said softly. “Pretty bad?”
We had joked a lot about boys. Exchanged quips about looking at boys and thinking about boys and drawing boys in sketch pads. But we’d never actually talked about boys: what they thought, or wanted, or needed. Even with Holly and Ginger, I don’t think I had ever done more than gossip about boys: who was dating whom, and was he or she worth that attention.
But I found myself telling Mother everything. From the taped voice syndrome to the getting lost and the haircut bit and the insults exchanged.
Mother stopped massaging my back and started in on her coffee again. By that time it must have been cold. The only thing worse than black coffee would certainly be cold black coffee.
“He really was embarrassed, wasn’t he?” she said. “I thought of Nick as being a bit more smooth than that, but I suppose seventeen is really pretty young. He just got thrown a few more curve balls than he was ready for.”
“Embarrassed?” I said. “Curve balls? Like what, Mother?”
“Oh, Nancy, how much could go wrong for a boy?”
“How much could go wrong for a girl?” I countered.
She laughed and patted me. “Look. He was wearing the wrong clothes. Nobody likes wearing the wrong thing in public.”
“But he didn’t have to wear them. We could have come back to change.”
“He was feeling contrary, I guess. He probably didn’t realize just how obvious and foolish he’d feel in a vested suit when every other boy was in jeans. And he’d had that haircut. I’m amazed he confessed so much to you about his feelings about that. But obviously he felt silly and different from top to bottom.”
“Believe me, he acted it, too.”
“And then he got lost driving home. What red-blooded American boy enjoys confessing to his date that he’s lost?”
That I could see. I hadn’t at the time, it had just irritated me, but now I could see that he must have been humiliated by getting lost. “But, Mother,” I said, “what were these curve balls he got sent? I don’t understand what you meant by that. The college interviews? My friends at the dance? He must have been ready for that stuff.”
“You,” she said.
“What about me?”
“He told you twice, Nannie. A cousin is not like a regular girl. After all, honey, Nick has even less experience dating than you do.”
It was not possible for me to think of Nick as inexperienced and unsure. He was a boy and a year older. He had everything—looks, personality, brains, body … and that awful voice.
“Nan, when you two left this apartment Nick started to panic and wanted me along. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He expected some old girl cousin and a boring evening being polite with all her dumb old friends. Instead this beautiful slender girl with long blonde hair and an excited smile is there ready to go out with him. She’s dancing around in these tight jeans thinking about a dance, and all of a sudden it’s a date. He’s supposed to dance with her, squire her around, make interesting conversation with her, open doors for her, maybe even kiss her—and he panicked.”
I could understand panic. There were a couple of boys in the senior
class whose smiles made me panic, whose greetings for some reason made it impossible for me to greet them back, although that was what I wanted to do most. But panic over me? “Mother, I love the adjectives you’re using, but you are, as my mother, rather prejudiced. I think Nick just didn’t want my company and he felt like being rotten, because it made him feel better about his rotten day to make my day rotten.”
“Whew!” said Mother, laughing. “People hardly ever feel like being rotten on purpose, honey. Everybody wants to have a good time. Nobody wants friends to shrug and walk away and have to leave early and not have anything to say or share. Nick probably feels as terrible as you do. Worse, because he started it. He didn’t sleep much last night. Tossed around for hours. I don’t know if it was the lumps on our terrible couch or his thoughts that kept him awake, but he was pretty bleary-eyed this morning. Poor boy. And facing two more interviews, too.”
I got up and went into the kitchen to have some shredded wheat. “Mother, why do you think he suddenly starts talking in that awful annoying smooth voice?”
“It may be that he thinks it’s attractive. Or he may feel safe behind it. Like somebody else. Or he may not be aware of it. It may be a nervous tic. I’m sure it’s just an adolescent habit. He’ll outgrow it, Nancy.”
Much good that would do me. I’d never see him again. How would I know if he ever outgrew the habit?
I sat over my shredded wheat. Things have to be pretty bad to sit over shredded wheat for any length of time. I told myself it didn’t matter one bit to me if Nick quit talking like that. He was stupid and I didn’t care.
But he wasn’t stupid and I did care.
At eleven o’clock I picked up the telephone and called Rod Holmes. My second time calling a boy. It might be as much of an error as the first time, but I could not face a weekend of just sitting there running my mind over my ought to haves and should have dones.
“Rod?” I said. “Nancy. You want to bicycle out to the waterfall and have a picnic?”
Mother gaped at me. I guess she thought I was calling Holly or Ginger. But nothing would be worse than them, today. They’d want to dissect Nick, and I couldn’t face that. Not until I knew what I felt about Nick first.
“Great idea,” said Rod instantly. “I’ll meet you in forty-five minutes. I’ll bring potato chips and soft drinks if you’ll bring sandwiches.”
It was so easy! As if we had done this several times before, and had known before the phones rang what we’d be doing this time. Why hadn’t it been that easy with Nick?
“My goodness,” said my mother, shaking her head. “Two weeks ago, nothing would have made you do that.”
“I’m sick of just thinking about boys, Mother. Rod likes me. I need somebody who likes me, after last night.”
“Nick likes you,” she said. “A lot.”
“Right,” I said sarcastically. “So much he can’t dance or speak with me. Now, do we have any ham or do I have to make peanut butter and jelly?”
Peanut butter and jelly conjured up the memory of that really nice night with Nick. Last night was pretty painful compared to that night. I made ham sandwiches, found some pickles and a few Oreo cookies, and dropped them in my little backpack. Tying a red bandanna over my hair, I ran down the stairs to get my bike from the storeroom.
I didn’t feel happy yet, but at least I was doing something, and Rod would be good company. I didn’t think Rod would object to being chosen as a friend in time of need, rather than a date.
Thirteen
“I DON’T THINK WE should sit there, Nance,” said Rod, when I set my backpack down on a large, flat, sunbaked rock with a perfect view of the waterfall. “Snakes are out in this heat,” he said. “I don’t see any, but I’d rather not chance it.”
I jumped about a foot.
Rod grinned. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I just hate snakes. Let’s go over to the picnic grove and eat there.”
We locked the bicycles together and chained one to a little sapling and then walked through the woods to the picnic area. The park was new. Fifty-five acres along the river’s edge had been donated to the town by the hosiery mill, when they finally realized they were never going to build there. The Cub, Boy, and Girl Scouts had spent three years carving trails through the woods and over the meadows, building tables and shelters, and painting trash receptacles in woodsy colors, like wartime camouflage. I had never been a Scout. When I saw how much they’d accomplished I found myself wishing I had been part of it all, instead of out toting Mother hither and yon in search of the perfect antique.
“How was the dance last night?” Rod asked.
“Horrible. My cousin was a complete jerk. We left early and he got lost driving home and we ended up spending the evening in front of the television.”
Rod laughed. “Poor guy. Getting lost in this little burg. Bet he feels like a jerk today, too. What was horrible about the dance?”
“The dance was probably fine. It was my cousin.” Funny—I didn’t feel at all cousinly toward Nick. I really wanted to say “my date,” but Nick had made it pretty clear he wasn’t my date, so that didn’t seem the right word either.
“What did you watch? That Barbra Streisand thing? I like that movie. You really want them to live happily ever after, but all along you can see they never will. They are too different. It makes you worry about the sort of person you’ll fall in love with, you know?”
I choked on the pickle I was nibbling. “Yes, I know.”
“Are you choking?”
“Yes,” I gasped, “but only a little.”
Rod whacked me on the back, almost dislocating my vertebrae. “That’s not what you do for choking anymore,” I said. “You make a fist in the person’s stomach, and jerk the fist hard into his abdomen to kind of whomp the choke out of him from the bottom up.”
“Oh, really? Show me.” Rod’s eyes glinted and he was half grinning.
I put my hands around his waist and pressed my fist into his stomach.
“You’re not pushing hard enough Nance. That doesn’t even flatten my belly button.”
I was suddenly too embarrassed to do it any more and I broke away, blushing, but it was a different kind of blush from the painful ones of last night. We ate facing each other, chewing ham sandwiches and crunching potato chips and then just sort of giggling. I felt silly and stupid but I was enjoying myself tremendously. I couldn’t think of anything at all to say, but it didn’t seem to matter. Giggling and eating were plenty for Rod. After lunch we retrieved our bikes and rode all up and down the Scout trails. We chased each other, vaulted our bikes over one fallen log (it was a stick; we just called it a log to sound more adventurous), and pretended to find snakes in the tree limbs so we could rescue each other from certain death. I felt about nine years old. I couldn’t believe we were really playing in the woods like this, and yet it was so much fun.
“I have to go,” said Rod suddenly. “I’ve already started my summer job and I’m due there at three.”
It was like the end of Mary Poppins’ laughing gas. “Oh,” I said.
We rode solemnly out of the park. “What’s your summer job?” I asked.
“Information desk at the hospital. Three to eleven shift. I log visitors in and out. I tell them what room their friends are in. How many can go in at a time. Where X-ray is. Where the gift shop is. When the city bus leaves. The work is boring and yet I really love it. All those people moving past me, Nancy, wrapped up in lives I don’t know anything about. Everybody is worried and tense and concerned, unless they’re there to see newborn babies. It’s amazing to think of all these people leading their lives and you aren’t part of them at all. They don’t even know you exist. Even when you tell them how to find the elevator to Memorial West Wing third floor they don’t really see you. It makes you feel half visible.”
“You like that feeling?”
“I don’t like it or dislike it. It’s a watcher’s feeling. I want to be a journalist, you know, and I think that’s
the kind of sensation journalists must have a lot. Standing there watching and thinking and taking notes while other people’s lives whisk by.”
I had never been anywhere really except school. I began to think of how much I was missing, not getting out in the world, not seeing the lives of all those other people whisking by. I said, “But if you want to be a journalist, how come you didn’t get a summer job at the newspaper?”
“Oh, wow!” Rod shook his head, grinning at the dusty ground. “Forget that! Everybody wants a summer job at the paper and there aren’t any. Besides, my father says I have to have wide experience so I can make intelligent analyses of the stories I write.”
“Wide experience,” I repeated. “Is hospital work wide?”
“Well, it’s a wedge. What I want is to have a resume like you read on the jackets of spy novels. Where the writer has paddled a canoe in northern Canada, studied archaeology in Crete, taught mathematics in Paraguay, tended bar in San Diego, been a hang-glider instructor off the Outer Banks, repaired pre-1910 electric automobiles, and taken advanced degrees in Manchurian dialects.”
“I like to see a person with a few goals,” I said, laughing. How interesting people were, once you talked to them! Who would have thought Rod Holmes wanted all that? That wild, different excitement-packed life! It made me embarrassed about my own daydreams, which consisted of little goals, such as holding hands, going steady, getting kissed …
I sighed. Everybody but me had his act together. “You have a summer job?” asked Rod.
“Couldn’t find one.”
“There aren’t any more paying jobs left at the hospital, but I’ll tell you, Nancy, they’re desperate for volunteers,” said Rod seriously. “Nobody volunteers anymore. All the women who used to be able to give an afternoon a week have gone back to work and they’re too tired to come in evenings. It’s rough down there, without the volunteers filling in.”
“What do volunteers do?”
“Oh, they take patients down to X-ray and walk them after their surgery and exchange their library books and water their flowers. It sounds rinky-dink, but nobody likes to wait four hours for X-ray and then go in alone. Especially if the patient has to go to the bathroom, or something.”