Nancy and Nick Page 6

  “He just told me in the future I am to transport my apple cores in a more sedate manner. I humbly promised so to do.”

  We giggled, and then the second lunch bell rang and we had to scurry off to our classes. We have only a two-and-a-half minute passing period and only the luckiest can saunter, those whose classes happen to be next door. The rest of us have to charge up two flights of stairs or chug down nine corridors. (Going to the bathroom is a luxury.) I clutched my books to my chest like a battering ram and launched myself through the crowds to the basement and history.

  I went into history feeling pretty good. Talking things over with your best friend always loosens things up. Holly and I hadn’t resolved anything by talking about Nick and how I’d never see him again, but at least I felt more cheerful about it.

  And in history the teacher passed out an exam.

  I had completely forgotten about it. Completely. Friday night Mother and I spent watching movies on cable television, and of course Saturday was our Nicholas-antique-operetta night and we didn’t get home till after three A.M. Sunday I slept very late, and we had brunch and lazed around talking, and Mother got out an old knitting project (she keeps old-fashioned wooden needles and twisted natural wool skeins in an antique basket by the Shaker rocker, but that’s just to look good—she really knits with acrylic on steel needles). I picked up my cross-stitch and we went to bed early.

  I never even glanced at my history. I never even thought about my history.

  It was one of those awful, cruel essay tests: only two questions. I like true-false, fill in the blanks, matching columns or one sentence answers. I hate essays. In an essay, you can’t guess; you have to know.

  In about thirty seconds I had a fierce headache and my stomach was in knots. I just didn’t know enough about either question to answer them. I felt myself beginning to cry and despised myself for it. Other people never seem to get so worked up about quizzes. Win a few, lose a few. I seem to be the only one who can cry herself to sleep over a terrible job on a test. It’s so humiliating.

  We once read a wonderful essay by Winston Churchill about taking his entrance exams for a British boarding school, in which the only thing he could manage to do was number the page. First he wrote a 1. Then he put a period after the 1. Then he enclosed it in parentheses. And that was all he wrote.

  He got to be Prime Minister, but I was going to be a prime failure if I couldn’t think of something to say about the rising wave of conservatism in the United States and how it is manifested. I thought of writing, “In my house, we manifest our conservatism by collecting kitchen antiques,” but I didn’t think Mr. Kane would be amused.

  I wrote down some notes but they seemed irrelevant. The minutes ticked inexorably by. Everybody else was filling in reams of paper. Two people actually asked for more paper. All I could think of was the funny door handle of Nick’s jeep and the way Mrs. Dixon’s auditorium seat creaked when she laughed and the hugs from the possible girl cousins and Nick’s raspy cheek I’d never touched.

  In the end I had to submit my test practically blank. Mr. Kane gave me a very odd look, but I managed not to cry and I fled from the room.

  The problem was that I had liked Nicholas Nearing too much. Stumbling into possible relatives is emotional enough without falling in love with one of them. Really, Ginger was right. It was tedious.

  I am normally quite self-disciplined. When the time comes that I absolutely can’t postpone doing my paper on Lord Byron another minute, I say to myself, “Nelle Catherine, shape up and get to work.” And I do. I almost never have late homework—and forgetting a history test was a first.

  But that night, in spite of forty-eight algebra problems, a long French translation, and a chapter in biology to read, I sat at my desk and tried to compose a letter to Nick. “Dear Nick,” I wrote.

  Mother popped in. “Listen to this, Nannie. Did you happen to read this when you went through the cookbook? Our cookbook? It’s a little dedicatory poem. It says—”

  “Mother, really. I have homework to do.”

  “You’re not doing homework, you’re writing a letter. Listen.

  ‘Cooks will find their labor less confusing

  Whilst preparing viands succulently good

  By selecting for their daily using

  Nearing River’s recipes for food.’”

  “Magnificent,” I said.

  “Who are you writing to?” said Mother. “I can’t ever remember you writing a letter before.”

  I covered the Dear Nick with my hand. “To whom am I writing?” I corrected her.

  “Whatever. Whom? Whom, then?”

  “Nobody, just practicing.”

  “Oh. That reminds me. I have to write to David and Catherine and thank them for their hospitality. They were so nice to us. Really, I don’t know when I’ve met nicer people.”

  Second that, I thought.

  I pulled out my algebra. Nelle Catherine, I said to myself, forget about Nicholas Charles. And his eyebrows. And his grin. And his taped voice. And his funny remarks. And his silly pony tail.

  It was remarkable what a long list I had about a boy I barely knew. Here I was in school with boys I’d known all my life and I could not have listed one thing about most of them. I felt as if I knew Nick intimately—yet not at all.

  I put my mind on algebraic formulas and removed N. C. Nearing from my mind. If ax squared plus bx plus c equals seventy-two …

  “Thank you for taking me to The Mikado,” I wrote. Boy, did that sound stilted. I wrote on a fresh sheet, “Dear Nick, What a good time I had with you Saturday.” It sounded worse.

  My mother came back in. “Listen to this, Nan. An advertiser on the back pages of the cookbook says, ‘Beware of Flavoring Extracts peddled from house to house claiming to be equal to McMonagle & Rogers’ Premium Vanilla. Our thousand-dollar guarantee—’”

  “Mother, please, I’m trying to do my math.”

  “Oh, all right.” Mother straggled back out.

  I remembered that the rubber band holding Nick’s hair in the ponytail was red.

  Good grief, I thought. I have already failed a history exam and I have this huge algebra assignment and I’m fantasizing about the rubber band in his hair.

  I got down to business.

  I wrote, “Dear Nick—”

  Seven

  IN JUNE OUR CAR died.

  It was not a spectacular or speedy death. The poor old thing just began sputtering in the mornings and choking in the evenings. We kept taking it back to the dealer and complaining that we had checked our oils and fluids and tires religiously, so why was this happening, and the dealer kept saying, “Ladies, your car is eleven years old. You got a hundred and sixty-two thousand miles on it. What that is, is fantastic. Super. Terrific. I don’t think you have any complaints coming. What you need to do is, you need to buy a new one. We got a fabulous new model that—”—that cost about ten times what we could possibly afford.

  For two weeks we tried living without a car. Mother could take a bus to work if she walked five blocks to catch it and nine blocks from there to the office. Grocery shopping is not fun when you’re a half mile from the store. We did that twice without a car and twice with a taxi and each time the ice cream melted. Going to the library required a car. Going to the doctor or school games or the shopping malls required a car.

  We were, however, getting enough exercise that Mother never wanted to run up and down the stairs fifteen times to limber up.

  Then one day she could not pick up a client, I could not get home from a club meeting, and neither of us had taxi fare. That was the day we realized we were going to have to get another car. “Five hundred for your old one,” said the dealer, as if he were being incredibly generous. Maybe he was.

  Which meant, even buying a completely stripped-down model, we needed several thousand more dollars.

  “I guess,” said my mother, almost crying, “it’s time we found out if kitchen antiques are really an investment.” For
another few days she walked around the apartment stroking her jars, bowls, choppers, spoons, toddy sticks, graters (carefully), butter molds, and candle boxes. I went baby-sitting and earned six dollars. Some spectacular contribution. I job-hunted. Fast food places had waiting lists. Department stores had hired all the temporary help they needed. Factories were laying off, not extending. Offices only wanted people who typed.

  Mother went to a bank to see about a car loan and found that since she had last borrowed for that purpose interest rates had gotten very high. The car would cost so much that the car loan would actually be higher than our rent. There was no way we could afford payments.

  “Okay,” said Mother. “Time to start pricing this stuff. It’s got to go. All of it.”

  “But Mother, you’ve spent years collecting this. Just sell some of it, Mother. If you sell it all you’ll be depressed. We’d just end up buying it back on our weekend hunts.”

  “No. We’re not doing that anymore. I’ve thrown away far too much money and time on that silly hobby.” She stroked a cherry dough trough that still had its milk-base paint on two sides. “We need to start thinking about how on earth you’re going to get through college.”

  “Mother, we decided years ago I’d go to college right here and live at home and go on loans for tuition if I can’t get scholarships.”

  “Just my Coca-Cola collection could probably pay for your first year,” she said. She knelt over a dusty cache of Coca-Cola memorabilia—bottles, caps, trays, clocks, ads, carriers, and so forth—that filled up the corner under the hanging antique baskets.

  There was truthfully not one object of Mother’s that I would miss. The clutter exasperates me. Sometimes I fantasize about having an apartment of my own. It’ll have wall-to-wall carpet, either deep rust or bright navy blue; sometimes I change my mind and visualize beige. Cream-colored walls to show off artwork. One single clock—long, thin, and modern. Tailored custom Roman shades at the windows. No clutter. No dust. No mess. No collections of anything except friends.

  Mother sat at the kitchen table (all our tables are kitchen tables; we’ve got about six kitchen tables) and began composing the advertisements she’d need to put in dozens of newspapers. She wasn’t crying, but she looked sort of beaten.

  It was so unfair. Mother worked hard and sometimes she was lonely, and this hobby was really a major part of her life. How awful to have to dispose of it in order to have four wheels.

  “Perhaps,” said Mother thoughtfully, “perhaps I’ll call David and Catherine Nearing and ask their advice. One of them might be willing to come up and help me run the sale. They’ve been in the business for thirty years. And if they’re not my cousins, they ought to be.”

  “They’d be Father’s cousins,” I said.

  “I’ve been a Nearing half my life. Let’s see if blood runs thicker than water.” She reached for the telephone.

  “Mother, how can you ask such a big favor of somebody you’ve only met once? What if he can’t remember you? We already owe him a lot for all that time and dinner and everything. What if he doesn’t want to do it except for a fee?” I felt embarrassed just thinking about the phone call.

  “I wouldn’t ask him to do it without a fee,” said Mother. “Stop worrying. The worst that could happen is that either David or Catherine will say no.”

  I actually had to leave the room when she was calling. Sometimes I have to do that during television comedies when you know the girl is going to be in a perfectly humiliating situation and do something stupid and get laughed at. I can’t stand it. I have to walk away and come back during the ads.

  Then I thought: What if Mr. Nearing brings Nicholas with him?

  I ran back to listen to the phone call.

  Mother was laughing and nodding into the phone. Lots of unrevealing umhmms, and yes in-deeds, and for heaven’s sakeses. “Wonderful,” she said at last, and gave him street directions to our apartment.

  “What’s happening?” I demanded.

  “David is coming. He’s going to an antique show in Richmond to exhibit and he’s going to leave one day earlier and come by. We’ll take a look at what I have and talk about how to handle the sale. Oh, Nannie, I’m so glad I called him. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to go ahead with something when you have someone else agreeing that it’s intelligent. It’ll be so much easier to price things, for example. And decide what to list in the ads.”

  “Is he bringing Aunt Catherine or Nick along?” I said casually.

  “Catherine can’t get away for three whole days. Isn’t that a shame?”

  “Yes, it is.” I waited. Mother didn’t say anything more. At last I had to say, “And what about Nick? Is he coming?”

  “Oh yes. David says he always forces Nick to come to help man the booth. Nick hates it. David is dreading the day Nick leaves for college because he doesn’t think Nick will ever come back.”

  I was grinning from ear to ear. “Oh yes, he’ll come back,” I said. I felt carbonated: My heart was tickling.

  “How do you know?” said Mother.

  “He told me.” I went to my room and shut the door so I could think about Nick.

  In honor of their visit, we cooked everything from the Daughters of the Confederacy Cookbook. We had N. C. Nearing’s corn gems (which were just molasses-flavored corn muffins), Miss Mary Metcalfe Nearing’s chicken and onions, Mrs. Anne Kingsley’s stewed collards, and Miss Nelle Nearing’s fried apple pies.

  We had a terrible time with the pies. Nelle of course knew just how to do it, but she assumed that you did too and only gave you the ingredients. “Add flour till dough is ready,” she wrote—only neither Mother nor I knew when we were ready. Nor did old Nelle tell how long to fry the pies. We found the answer to that in a New York Times Cookbook a neighbor had. We finally got them done, but they were so fragile that if you picked one up carelessly, you got a lap full of apple filling.

  “Gosh, they’re good, though, aren’t they?” said Mother, wolfing one down.

  I ate one too. It was terrific. We could hardly manage to keep our fingers off them so as to leave enough for Nick and his father.

  I was extremely nervous.

  Oddly enough, what worried me most was that Nick would not be as wonderful as I remembered him. Perhaps I had made him all up, and he was really just a boring ordinary boy. We might not know what to do with a long blank evening ahead of us.

  “Hi, Nancy,” he said, strolling in as if he’d visited this set of cousins dozens of times. “How’ve you been? You’re right, it’s a rotten drive up here. No direct route at all. I don’t know how you did it, after midnight, being so tired. What smells so good?”

  “Fried pies.”

  “I thought you hated to cook.”

  “I do, but it was fun cooking for somebody that …” I almost said, “somebody that I really care about,” but I stopped in time and said, “… that I feel like feeding well.”

  Nick deftly palmed one of the little half-moon shaped pies. He had obviously eaten them before and knew enough to hold it carefully. He’d eaten the whole thing before Mother could tell him not to eat his dessert first. “That’s as good as Aunt Catherine’s,” he said. “She doesn’t make them much anymore. Too hard.”

  But Mother wasn’t watching Nick eat his dessert first. She was taking Mr. Nearing around the apartment and he was exclaiming appropriately over this and that, uttering little cries of delight and thin whistles of appreciation. Nick said, “Is it like this all the time around here?”

  “Antiques, you mean? Yes. Wall to wall.”

  “When I have an apartment of my own, it’s going to be streamlined. No nothing in there but me and my clothes and maybe a chair and a television.”

  “Sounds like the one I’m going to have. Although I’ll add a chair for guests and a bookcase.”

  “Nope, you don’t want shelves.” Nick shook his head vigorously and his ponytail bounced. “You get shelves, next thing you know you’ll be wanting things to put on them. Before lon
g you’ll need more shelves, and maybe even a drawer or two. Next thing you know, you’ll have to move to a bigger place to hold all your junk. No, Nancy, you do not want shelves.”

  “I need a place for books.”

  “Use the library.”

  “You’re even worse than I am,” I said. “How can you possibly convince any of your father’s customers to buy anything when you hate everything he’s selling?”

  “Are you kidding? I love selling the stuff. Then there’s less of it.”

  We burst out laughing. Nick ate another fried pie. “Have one,” he said, “they’re good.” So I had one.

  His father took out a stenography notebook and busily wrote down descriptions while he and Mother haggled about prices as if one of them actually intended to buy. “All right, all right,” he said, “if you really think so. I still believe you could get eighty for that. Now this one over here is in mint condition.”

  I heated up the dinner and served it. Conversation was erratic, to say the least.

  “Did you ever locate my father in your genealogy tables?” I asked Mr. Nearing.

  “No, Nancy, I never did. Now, Eleanor,” he said to my mother, “I think we’ve got to decide if you’d do better selling the butter molds as a group or singly.”

  “Have another corn gem,” said Nick to me, as if he had made them.

  “Frankly, this is such a good collection I think we should call up one of these high-powered New York dealers and see if somebody would like to buy the whole thing. In case we get some interest from that angle, we need to have a complete price in mind,” said Nick’s father.

  “I think these have too much molasses,” said my mother.

  “What molasses?” said Mr. Nearing, looking around—for antique molasses, I suppose.

  “The corn gems,” said my mother. “Now, David, I have to keep some things. I’ll be desolate if we clear it out completely.”

  “Well, stack the things you’ll be keeping in Nancy’s room.”

  “My room!” I yelped.

  “It’s the only one without antiques. That way we won’t get mixed up.” He buttered another corn gem. Nick ate the last fried pie.