Nancy and Nick (9 page)

The Final Fling is a big dance open to all three grades of the high school, held the second-to-last weekend of the school year. It’s casual, with people mostly wearing jeans and sneakers. There are a lot of prizes for each dance, which are more elimination contests than dances. Last year I went with Peter Franciola but he only asked me because he wanted to go to the Final Fling and not because he liked me very much. I wouldn’t even classify it as a date, because we hardly even talked to each other, although he did bring me a glass of punch.

Holly was going this year with Chuck Summers. She didn’t even like him. The only thing worse than not going would be going with someone you don’t want to spend ten minutes with, let alone an evening of public dancing. Ginger, it turned out, was actually going with a cousin, having broken up with Keith.

“You should have timed your break-up better,” Holly told her.

“My cousin’s all right. He’s safe, if you know what I mean. I won’t get embarrassed,” said Ginger. “Why don’t you ask Nick, Nancy? We could double. Double cousins.”

Since I had the perfect excuse for not calling him I handled that one easily. “If he lived next door I would,” I said, “but I can’t ask him to drive one hundred seventy miles just for a dumb dance.”

“You are overly fixated on that one hundred seventy miles,” said Ginger.

“Try driving it. You’d think it was quite an obstacle, too.”

“I keep thinking of that phrase ‘regular girl,’” said Holly. “I guess Nick feels the same way Ginger does about her cousin. Safe.”

“Correct,” said Ginger. “Nicholas was saying he, too, is awkward on formal dates and in conversations with girls with whom he is supposed to be forming romantic relationships, whereas cousins preclude such nervousness.”

“That was very good, Ginger,” I said. “You get one hundred in vocabulary.”

“Would you like me to reiterate my statements? I could embellish on that theme.”

We declined Ginger’s offer and parted company to go to our classes. And there I was, two weeks before the end of school, and Holly and Ginger were going to the Final Fling and I was not.

I had sort of thought that getting practice talking with Nick would show on me. As if the boys passing in the corridor would now take a second look at Nancy Nearing and see right off that this girl would be easy and funny to talk to. A real joy to be around. The perfect date.

No such luck.

“Nancy, the man from Bloomingdale’s was here,” said Mother.

“Bloomingdale’s?”

“In New York, silly. The department store. Actually there were three of them. One man who was very slim and elegant and two women who were terribly slender and fashionable. I felt like a blimp.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Anyway, they offered a package price for everything I have—from the three quilts right down to the lemon squeezers—that was two thousand dollars more than the maximum David and I had figured on!”

“Oh, Mother. How fantastic!”

“You haven’t heard anything yet. I sort of stood there, completely stunned, and tried to take it in. My head was just spinning with thoughts of all that money, and darn if they didn’t up their offer another thousand.”

“Wow. You should have gone right on standing there.”

“I tried it for a while, but they seemed to revise their opinion of me. No longer a shrewd businesswoman, just a retarded housewife.”

We giggled and patted each other.

“They’ll be here in a van tomorrow,” she said, “and I sold everything.”

“Mother! Everything?”

“Everything. They went into your room and of course they loved all that stuff too, and in the end I agreed to sell every single antique we had.”

I opened my bedroom door. Selling what lay on my bed and filled my floors would be like selling her children. When I turned around again my mother was sitting on the couch, weeping. “Oh, Nancy,” she said, “it’s so
stupid
to care about things like cheese graters. Imagine crying over them! But I can’t help it. Oh, honey, I hope the money is worth it.”

In the morning’s mail was a letter from Nick.

I had never mailed my own note to Nick. I had never gotten past the first line. I held the letter and tried to think when I had ever gotten any personal mail.

I had actually hugged the envelope to my chest when something struck me. It was Nick’s name on the return address—but it was my
mother’s
name on the mailing address!

I almost tore up the envelope! Writing to my mother—how could he! A thank you note, obviously. How courteous and proper of him.

The turkey.

I gave the letter to Mother and had to restrain myself from stomping all the way into my bedroom. I wanted to slam the door so much that I had to tuck it gently into its grooves.

Mother barely glanced at it. The moving men had arrived and were packing her antiques as if they were going on exhibit beside a Michelangelo sculpture—piles of excelsior and peanut-shaped styrofoam filled every box.

It was like watching an orange being peeled. Bit by bit the living room was no longer hers, no longer the lifelong collection she’d built. It became a naked, stark place with just a few old rugs and a sagging sofa and an old television. In fact, the room that emerged from beneath the clutter of Mother’s treasures was—there’s no nice way to put it—a dump.

For some time Mother’s face crumpled, like the packing paper the moving men were so carefully using. She was watching her antiques leaving as if it were her children being sold.

“What did Nick want, Mother?” I said.

“Oh, he’s got some college interview scheduled in the area. He wants to spend the night here or something. Call him up and tell him it’s okay, Nannie. If he doesn’t mind lumps, he can have the couch. Or he could bring a sleeping bag. I don’t know but the floor might be better than that couch.”

Planning a phone conversation as important as that would take time and privacy. I made myself a cup of tea (I always think better with my hands wrapped around something hot—it’s almost as good as a hot shower for meditating) and walked slowly, not letting it spill over, into my bedroom.

There were two moving men in there. “Hey!” I cried. “You’re not supposed to pack those! Those are my stuffed animals and my bed pillows! Bloomingdale’s only bought the antiques.”

“Sorry, lady,” said one of them, “they looked old to me.”

I don’t know which was the odder idea, that my Barbie doll sets belonged in the kitchen antique collection or that this guy should say to me “Sorry, lady.” I got no privacy, though. I had to spend the afternoon supervising, because they wanted to pack my torn gothic paperbacks and my set of heart-shaped throw pillows and the empty perfume bottles lining the window sill.

When they finally left, Mother and I sat down in the living room, almost panting with relief. It was horribly empty. Large dust kittens and spider webs were revealed where piles of old spice containers and hat boxes had stood. The ceiling hooks where the basket collection had been hanging were silly metal dabs on a fingerprinted ceiling. The tear in the carpet that had been covered by the thread chest and the old cash register was exposed again, and on the wall where the sunburst quilt had hung was a dusty depressing rectangle.

In the entire apartment, there was no color, no texture, nothing pretty, and nothing interesting.

We sat listening to the refrigerator hum, and Mother looked at the check they’d given her and told me about eleven times that it was worth it, yes, Nannie, it was definitely worth it. And then she burst into tears.

“Oh, Mom, it’ll be all right,” I said desperately. “We can get more. That’s enough money for a car and some college savings and lots left over to redecorate. It’ll be pretty again, you’ll see.” I perched on the sofa back and tried patting Mother’s shoulder.

“Oh, honey, it’s so awful to see this place without my things. I could pretend it was a home before. Now it’s just a nasty cheap little apartment.”

I sat beside her, and she was right, the couch was awfully lumpy. I tried to hug her, but it’s hard to comfort your own mother.

“Oh God, Nancy,” she said, wiping at her tears with the back of her hand. “In another two years you’ll be leaving, and I won’t even have any of the things I’ve built my life around. This is so stupid, this is so colossally
stupid,
weeping like this for cheese graters, for heaven’s sake.” She tried to laugh, but it wasn’t very successful.

“It’s okay to love things, Mom. It isn’t stupid.”

She stopped crying and looked at me with an expression that was almost dislike. It scared me. “You never thought so before, Nancy. I’m surprised you’re not rejoicing. Having a party. Calling all your friends over to see the nice bare modern apartment, the one you’ve always dreamed about.”

“Mother! That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh, really? You’ve been talking about your wall-to-wall carpet and your chrome etagéres ever since I can remember. You were actually in there helping those moving men.”

“Mother, I was just making sure they didn’t take any of my things.”

“Exactly. They can take everything
I
have, but nothing of yours!”

“But, Mother, Bloomingdale’s didn’t buy any of
my
things! What would they want with secondhand Harlequin romances? And it was your idea to sell it all, not mine. I said to keep at least a few things for yourself.”

“You need the money for college,” she said, “and we couldn’t manage without a car. There was no choice. I hate it when there aren’t any choices. I hate all these women’s magazine articles about everything being okay if you just have faith in yourself.
I hate this apartment!”

I felt as if some stranger was yelling at me. My mother, who was always sweet and understanding and willing, unable to control her feelings. All the raw edges were exposed in front of me. She kept saying that it wasn’t a
home
anymore, it was just an apartment.

“You want me to call the state police and have them stop the van?” I said, only half joking. “We could return the check and pay the movers ourselves for their time.”

“With what money? The only money we have
is
this check.” Mother walked into her bedroom and shut the door in my face. I had done that to her many times, but she had never done it to me. I knew how she felt, needing that door between her and everything else, needing to be shut in privately to think. But it hurt terribly to watch that door close and know she just did not want me near her.

“N
ICK,” I SAID, USING
my sexiest voice (or at least, the one I think is sexiest—never having had a reaction to any of my vocal selections, I don’t really know), “this is Nancy Nearing. The one from Virginia, remember?”

No, no good. I didn’t like that choice. I sounded as if I didn’t expect anybody to remember me, faceless personality that I was. I rehearsed it another way. “Hello there, Nick! It’s Nancy!”

And what if he really wasn’t sure which N. C. Nearing I was?

Maybe I should skip the name. “Hi, Nick. Mother says to tell you we’d be glad to have you spend the night.”

Actually, she wasn’t glad at all. She was ashamed of the apartment. We’d cleaned it ferociously, and somehow that made the place worse. Now it was scrubbed emptiness and there was no trace of it ever having any character or hominess. Mother didn’t feel like having visitors.

When I finally did manage to get my fingers up to the telephone dial and make the call, I got Aunt Catherine. “Nancy Nearing?” she said, puzzled. “It doesn’t sound like you, honey, we must have a bad connection. How’s Everett doing? He over his strep throat yet?”

“I think that’s a different Nancy Nearing,” I said. “I’m the one who drove in from Virginia and we tried to figure out if we were related?”

“Oh yes. That’s right. And are you?”

“Excuse me? Am I what?”

“Related.”

“Oh. I don’t think we ever found out.”

“Uh huh. Well. Were you calling about antiques, then?”

“No, ma’am. I wanted to speak to Nick.”

“Nick?” she said, as if she had never heard of him. I began to wonder if I myself had the right Nearing in mind. In great embarrassment I said, “Nick Nearing? With the ponytail?”

“Oh.” She laughed heartily. I held the phone away from my ear and my stomach knotted up again. I hate phone calls that don’t work according to my rehearsals. “You mean Ency,” she said. “Yes, of course, he’s right here.”

I had this terrible fear that “Ency” would be somebody else entirely. I would have this long conversation with some girl, also named N. C. Nearing, who happened to have long red hair in a ponytail. Nick was a mirage and his letter a dream.

“Hello, Nancy,” said Nick. “Sorry about that. Aunt Catherine gets very confused sometimes. Thanks for calling back.”

I sagged with relief. “We’re looking forward to having you,” I said.

“Oh, terrific. You sure I won’t be a nuisance to your mother?”

Maybe he knew he’d be no nuisance to me. “No problem,” I said, although in fact, Mother was uptight at the idea of an overnight guest on her dreadfully lumpy couch. “You might want to bring a sleeping bag, though. We haven’t got a guest bed.”

“I could sleep on the couch, couldn’t I?”

“Sure, if you like lumps.”

“I like lumps better than floors. I’ve got an interview that Friday afternoon in Richmond so I’ll get to your place about supper time. And Saturday morning I’ve got two more scheduled, one at ten and one at eleven-thirty. Your place is really convenient and I really appreciate your mother saying I can stay.”

Your mother, your mother. Why did he have to keep dragging my mother into this? At least he wasn’t using his retread voice.

He sounded like another person altogether. Brisk and efficient. I’d met the funny Nick, the tape-recorded Nick, and now here was another Nick. Brisk and efficient. No doubt a fine way to approach things. I reminded myself that anything Ginger could do, I could do. I told myself that cousins were easier to talk to than regular people. I said—out loud, without rehearsal or planning or dreaming—“As a matter of fact, there’s a dance at my school that night. Would you like to go with me?”