As a matter of fact, we didn’t find anybody in the antique shop. It didn’t take too long to putter through on our own. It wasn’t Mother’s kind of shop at all, featuring chairs for eight hundred dollars and candlestands for five hundred. I went back out on the sidewalk to look for hamburger signs, since starvation was rapidly setting in and candlestands do nothing for me even at ten dollars. I knew Mother would be at least another fifteen minutes. The true hunter does not give up easily. The harder it is to find a find, the harder the true antique hunter hunts. No doubt Mother was poking into every spider-webbed corner, opening drawers that hadn’t worked in four generations.
She came out very dispiritedly. I handed her a damp washcloth. I always keep one in a plastic sandwich bag in my purse because she gets dusty hands, and if she has found something, without fail I am wearing a white shirt and she will be seized with the desire to hug me.
“No, huh?” I said. I was thinking how nice it was that there was nothing in Nearing River to buy. The place had something going for it after all. With all the money we had not spent on antiques, we could have an extra big lunch. And possibly a long and tasty afternoon snack. I don’t know why Mother accuses me of having my mind on boys all the time. I think of food a lot, too.
“Ah ha!” said my mother.
“Oh, no,” I groaned.
“Look at this, Nan!”
“I’m afraid to. What does it cost? Do we already have six of it?”
“Really, Nancy. You are so difficult. I can’t remember why I always bring you along on these trips.”
“You bring me along to drive.”
“Oh, That’s right. Well, anyway, look at that notice.”
I cringed. If it was an auction, we were sunk. I would have to pick Mother’s pocketbook if I wanted to have lunch the following week.
The notice was a faded old rectangle of poster-board with a photograph of something indistinguishable but square. It read, “The Historical Society of Nearing River is sponsoring a tour of the Nearing River House.”
“What do they want for that piece of paper?” I said. “A hundred dollars?”
“Ding-a-ling. The paper isn’t for sale.”
“One of a kind, huh? Worth millions.”
“Nancy,” she said irritably, “you know perfectly well that notice is not an antique. It’s a recent advertisement of an open house.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“The paper is sunbaked, that’s all. Come on, let’s go. According to the map there, it’s just down the road and to the right and then to the left and you circle a little bit and it’s on the right.”
“What is?”
“The Nearing River House. Come on. We might miss the tour.”
“Mother! That tour was obviously years ago. The owners of this shop are so sloppy they never got around to removing the notice.”
“It says Saturdays. See? ‘Tours on Saturdays.’”
I moaned from lack of nourishment.
“And even if they aren’t giving tours the house is still there and we can poke around,” she said, bounding into the car.
I detest touring historical houses. How many rope beds and bullet-riddled walls can a person admire? The tour guides are either plump old ladies, who tell you six hundred more things about the original owner of the house than you ever wanted to know, or else bored skinny Junior League volunteers, who can’t tell you anything. Besides, you can’t touch and Mother does anyway. Somebody is always scolding her and it embarrasses me so much I have to leave the tour and pretend what I like best is gardens.
“Let’s have lunch,” I said. “My stomach will growl through the whole tour.”
“It’s only eleven-thirty. Come on. We’ll eat later.”
My friends argue quite successfully with their parents. Holly is especially good at it. Her father says: No, Never, Certainly Not! And fifteen minutes later Holly is back on the phone saying: It’s fine with them, Nan. Me, I always end up sighing and agreeing.
I studied the little map, verified the left and right turns and drove my mother to the historical house. Maybe I’d get lucky and they’d have a concession. Or at least a vending machine.
We went down a long drive bordered by the kind of fence that is stacked at angles and always looks as if it’s falling down, even when the maintenance staff just fixed it yesterday. There was Nearing River House: your typical eighteenth-century Southern farmhouse. If you’ve toured one, you’ve toured them all. One room deep and two rooms wide, the lower floor divided by a wide porch-hall combination. Two bedrooms upstairs: one for parents and their current infant, the other for older children and for spinning and weaving. Outdoors: the kitchen, smokehouse, barn, and so forth. “You go in,” I said to Mother, noting without interest that tours hadn’t ended years ago after all and were in fact starting up again that moment. “I’ll just sit here and admire the lilies.”
“Irises,” she said. “Try to be observant.”
“Whatever.”
“Nancy, I cannot abide it when you display such a bad attitude. Now get up this minute and come with me. It’s open. I can see the tour guide on the porch. Nice long hair she has, too—see it shine in the sun? We’ll ask her if she knows any Nearings.”
“I’ll go with you on the tour if you promise not to ask if she knows any Nearings.”
“But, Nancy, that’s why we drove down here. To find the other N. C. Nearings.”
“Mother, I’ll be too embarrassed. Don’t ask anybody anything, promise?”
“Certainly not. I’ll ask what I please. Now march.”
Other people whose mothers address them like kindergartners would rightly refuse to cooperate. Mother looks and sounds daydreamy, but she definitely falls into your stereotyped Southern picture of the iron hand under the velvet glove. I seem to be velvet through and through.
Someday, I told myself, trailing after Mother past the irises and up onto the narrow porch, I am going to stand up to Mother. She is not right all the time. Sometimes I am right.
I walked up the steps, and there in the doorway the girl tour guide with the nice shiny long hair turned out to be a boy tour guide with nice shiny long hair.
Thank goodness I hadn’t chosen this particular occasion to start my rebellion. The guide was the best-looking boy I had ever seen. He wore a loose white muslin shirt, dark baggy pants (breeches, I guess), old scuffed boots, and a cotton scarf at his neck. And his long, thick, honey-colored hair was tied in a Revolutionary War type ponytail with a leather thong.
And immediately I was embarrassed.
Whenever I see a good-looking boy I am impressed first and embarrassed second. I am never quite sure what embarrasses me, but I start blushing as if I had written down a dozen wild fantasies about him in a diary and he had just read it.
I couldn’t even look at Mother to see what her reaction was to the long hair that belonged to a male. I couldn’t take my eyes off the boy. He was my age, or a little older, and he was perfect.
For a moment I daydreamed that when he looked at me he would forget his speech about the Nearing River House, fall immediately in love with me, and stagger toward me. We would shock the bridge club (also touring the house) by going off together behind the English box shrub nestled beside the porch.
The boy had clearly given enough tours to be able to lead them in his sleep. “This,” he said, “is called a dogtrot. It is the central hall and also a sleeping porch, with doors open at both ends, so that in the hot humid summers every possible breeze would be captured.” He had the kind of trained voice that sounds so much like a tape you wonder why they don’t just use a tape, and let you poke a button in each room. “The dogtrot also had safety uses, separating the fireplaces in the hope that if the house ever did catch fire it would be easier to put out.” But in his case I could understand why they didn’t use a tape. If you were bored by the fine fanlight over the front door, you could feast your eyes on the tour guide.
I feasted my eyes.
When he finally did look my way he didn’t react in the slightest. He didn’t cry out, ask me for a date, or even drop a syllable of his talk. I was so embarrassed about pretending he would that I blushed anyway. “Originally,” he said, “the house faced east.” His voice droned along. I wondered if other tours, other groups, were less boring to him. If sometimes a girl appeared on the tour who could put a spark in his boxed voice. “Therefore the door you came in was the back door when it was built and the finer molding and elaborate interior detail is on what is now the rear.”
He was also tall, muscular, and had started—or ought to start—shaving. All I could think of was that his cheek was probably raspy-feeling. I had this terrible fear that when I moved past him into the parlor, I would actually touch his cheek to see if it was. “Notice the large double-shouldered Flemish bond chimneys,” he said.
“Cute, huh?” my mother whispered.
“The chimneys?” I whispered back.
“Nancy, you are truly peculiar. The boy.”
“Oh yes. Yes, he’s okay.” It’s odd. Usually when Mother and I agree on something we admit it right away and grin. Now I couldn’t bring myself to admit how terrific I thought this boy was. It was like Mother hunting for a find—when you do find it you don’t admit it, in case the seller realizes you want it and charges you more.
I was actually standing there feeling nervous. As if saying how neat he was would jinx something. And the funny thing is, I hate it when a girl judges a boy just on his looks. If it were Holly falling in love at first sight I’d really be on her about it. I’d lecture her on personality and conversation and depth and manners and habits and how you couldn’t possibly fall in love with somebody when all you’ve done is look at him and the only words he’s uttered are out of a history text privately printed by a local historian. I thought, he’s perfect. I wonder what his name is.
“The wing chair by the fireplace,” he said, “is a most interesting example of—”
I didn’t think it was particularly interesting. Surely there were ten hundred more interesting things for someone like that to consider than wing chairs by the fireplace. Me, for example.
I wondered why he was leading tours of the Nearing River House. Perhaps his mother was president of the Historical Society and blackmailed him into it. Perhaps he was paid immensely well and was saving up to go to college. Or, conceivably, he might like giving tours of ancient bedrooms and showing the afternoon bridge club ladies how little Mary Elise Nearing in 1841 left the “Q” out of her sampler. I wanted to ask him, “What’s a nice boy like you doing leading historic home tours?”
On the way downstairs again to tour the interesting buildings on the grounds my mother muttered, “I’ve been studying his hair, Nan. It’s real.”
“Did you think it was a wig?”
“For a tour like this it could have been. Sort of to match the breeches.”
“I like his hair.”
“The hair is fine. I would just prefer hair that long to be on a girl.” Clearly Mother felt if she were in charge such things would not go on.
His hair was much longer than mine. It would be odd to date a boy with hair longer than your own. A terrible fear began rising in me and I grabbed Mother’s arm. “Mother,” I hissed, “don’t you dare say anything to him about not liking his hair.”
“Nancy, if people don’t tell him their viewpoints, how will he know?”
“I’m sure he’s not interested in your viewpoint.”
“Nancy, he’s been giving me his viewpoint for the last half hour and I intend to give him mine.”
“Oh, God,” I said prayerfully. But it is my experience that even God does not like to interfere with Mother when she decides to offer her viewpoint. I thought I couldn’t stand it if she said anything to him. Our tour group consisted of the bridge ladies, who were giggling and gossiping with each other, and Mother and me. There was no way I could pretend not to be with Mother. And I could not stand it if she spoke to this boy. “Mother,” I said firmly, “if you say anything about his long hair I will not drive you home.”
Mother gaped at me. I felt quite proud of having spoken up.
The boy said, “That’s okay. Somebody tells me at least once a day that I ought to get my hair cut.” He was grinning at me.
I nearly died. The blush was back worse than before. After all that, I was the one to make the comment about his hair! I’d been so intense about reprimanding Mother I had raised my voice instead of whispering. All the bridge group was frowning at me with pursy little lips of disapproval. But they were obviously interested.
One of them said, “You really should cut your hair, you know. That phase has passed. Nobody wears it long like that now.”
The boy grinned. Easily. Not a trace of a blush. “I do,” he said, with complete courtesy. “Now if you would like something to drink, there’s a vending machine in the barn, and bathrooms, and a pay phone. The Historical Society does not charge for the tour and would be glad to accept all donations which you may place in the wooden chest beside the barn door. Thank you for coming and I hope you enjoyed the tour.”
He wound down his speech, sounding like an airline hostess demonstrating rescue equipment. Bored. Practiced.
Another bridge lady said to him, “If I make a donation, would you use it at the barbershop?”
Now if it had been me getting that kind of ribbing—smiles along with it, yet basically rude and barbed—I’d have died long since. The boy merely grinned again and said, “No, ma’am, I wouldn’t. It would go to the restoration of the chestnut fences which have begun rotting in several places and need repair badly.”
“Who does the repair work? You?” said my mother.
“Yes, ma’am. I also mow the lawns and weed the gardens and pick up the trash.”
If I’d ever heard a line, that was one, but Mother and the bridge ladies were consoled by the thought of his doing all that hard work for such a good cause. They left him alone and went into the barn for vending machine sodas, bathrooms, and donations. The boy and I were left alone. I tried to think of something to say to him. For instance: What is your name? Do you love me too? How are we going to get together when you live one hundred and seventy miles away?
But I couldn’t think of anything I could really say out loud. I wanted to say that I liked his hair, and also his costume and his grin, and the way he parried their remarks. But by the time I’d decided to frame a question about his clothes he had turned and walked away.
So that was that. Fall in love with your tour guide and off he goes to lead another tour. You’re nothing but a face in the crowd.
I sighed.
Mother waylaid him. “Young man,” she said.
In a very nice way he raised his eyebrows to answer her. I thought every inch of him was cute. Especially his eyebrows. What would I say to Holly? He has the cutest eyebrows, Holly. When will I ever meet anybody again with eyebrows that cute?
And yet I couldn’t bring myself to ask about the Nearings. Much as I wanted his attention I really didn’t want it. I wasn’t close enough to stop Mother’s questions. I braced myself for a long and embarrassing flow of family history. “Where is a good antique shop?” said Mother, and for once I blessed her one-track mind.
“There’s one in downtown Nearing River,” he began.
“You mean there’s an uptown?” said Mother incredulously.
He laughed. “No. There’s downtown and there’s country.”
“We went to the one downtown. Is there another?”
“Yes, ma’am. About two miles up the road. Nearing’s Antiques and Junk.”
Mother practically salivated. Not only antiques, but also junk. And some Nearings who might be alive to tell her about other Nearings, such as my father and the Nelle Catherines before me.
“Thank you,” she said, but he had already gone up on the porch to lead the next tour. I looked at him for a bit but he was not thinking of me. He was trying to keep a woman from breaking off stems
from the English box to plant in her own garden.
The best adjective to apply to my crush on him was “short.” The only forty-five-minute love affair on record. No, it hadn’t been an affair. Affairs take two. I had been thrilled by his eyebrows but he hadn’t even seen mine.
I slid behind the wheel and told Mother I didn’t care whose antique shop it was, I had to have lunch first.
Three
IT IS MUCH EASIER to face another antique shop when you are full of french fries, a triple burger, and a chocolate shake.
I was positively enthusiastic when I pulled our poor old car up in front of Nearing’s Antiques and Junk. (Our car practically qualifies as both.) “Thank heaven,” said Mother, “they didn’t spell it junque. I like them better already.”
We hopped out. I didn’t roll up the windows or lock the doors; it was already hot, although it was just May, and I didn’t want to get back into a cooker. I stick to the seat, and then I’m afraid to get out of the car in case I look damp around the edges.
We went in to begin poking around.
It was Mother’s kind of shop. Rickety little chairs with piles of mismatched crockery on them. Sagging old photographs and odd Victorian portraits all over the walls. Torn rag rugs and pieces of quilt draped on the tops of bureaus that lacked one drawer or all knobs. A cash register as ornate as a bride’s embroidery. A headboard desperately in need of refinishing and a rocker minus the cane seat. A proprietor who is middle-aged, smiling, smoking a pipe, and eager to talk antiques with other true antique hunters.
He and Mother were buddies in about sixty seconds and I could see it was going to be a long visit. It was one of the times when Mother was right that I should have a little hobby. Cross-stitch or crochet or needlepoint would be a useful sort of thing to do when Mother gets into an antique huddle. I looked for a chair that didn’t have junk stacked on it, but there were none. I leaned against the least cluttered wall in the room and patiently waited. As I say, a girl fortified by french fries and so forth can be much more patient than a girl who has had nothing since breakfast.