At two-thirty the next morning, Nell was roaming through her house in the dark, barefoot in order not to wake the children, carrying an enormous glass full of water. She had drunk too much alcohol at her dinner party. She had fallen asleep when her guests left just after midnight, but she had tossed and turned and finally awakened with bad dreams. Terrible dreams. Now she was caught in one of the nighttime frenzies she had come to call her Panic Nights, a state of irrational alarm, when she worried desperately about money, her children’s mental health, her own lonely life, the fact that she was growing older, the years she had wasted in her twenties … everything.
These spells had begun just after her divorce and for a few months were so overpowering that she had developed insomnia as a defense against them. The insomnia had left her exhausted and wired up at the same time, which made the Panic Nights even more gripping. At last she had seen a doctor, who prescribed a tranquilizer for her, and it had helped immensely. She still had a vial of the small yellow tablets in her medicine cabinet, but she used them only as a last resort, only in states of real desperation.
She would not use one tonight. She knew that now her nervous state was due to having too much alcohol in her system. She was dehydrated. So she wandered around in the dark, going into the kitchen or bathroom for glasses of water, staring out different windows, hoping the gentle moonlight on the lawn would eventually calm her.
Some nights she loved being the only one awake in the house. In the winter she would often sit up in bed as if summoned, instantly lucid and pleased, because the moon was full and shining on the snow and the outside world gleamed magically. Then she would pull her gray robe over her and curl up on the floor, her head on the windowsill, gazing out at the moon-illuminated world that surrounded her house, elated by the mysteriousness of the natural universe, all this lovely silver air that went on and on in spite of her petty life. On some nights in the summer she would creep out at three or four in the morning and sit curled up on the wicker porch swing, smug to be alone and awake, listening for the first bird calls, watching for the first lights of morning to come silently sliding across the horizon and down through the trees onto her lawn. Her children had often found her there in the morning, asleep on the wicker swing, and when she awakened, she would be damp and shivering from the misty morning, but rested and optimistic, as if the night air had provided some kind of mental cure for her.
But this was a night of a different sort, an unpleasant stretch of time she had experienced before, too often: a Panic Night. Tonight when she walked through her house, she looked out the window and saw that the back steps off the kitchen were still broken. Last fall, running up the steps to answer the phone, her left leg had hit the rotting wood just the right way so that the wood gave and her leg plunged through to the thigh. That had been an awful feeling, her leg suddenly trapped in the splintered and shattered damp boards. The steps were old and rotten and dangerous, but it would be expensive to replace them. She didn’t think she could afford to have them replaced this year.
And she didn’t know what she was going to do about the two dead elms at the back of the property. They were dangerous, too, with their arching dead limbs that crashed to the ground during wind storms. Part of one elm hung over a neighbor’s yard, and Nell knew it was her responsibility to have those elms taken down before they fell on the yard in a littered mess or, worse, on an animal or person. But the cost of taking down those elms …
What was she going to do? How could she manage it? She couldn’t. She would have to sell the house. She couldn’t possibly keep up any longer with the outside of her house, not even with the lawn. The first summer she’d been divorced, she had dated Steve, and he had done her lawn work for her—mowed the grass, trimmed the bushes—and had been pleased to do it; he liked doing that sort of thing. Perhaps this year, if she continued seeing Stellios, he would mow her lawn—but she couldn’t stay with a man just because he might mow her lawn; that was an awful way to think and she hated herself for the thought. Oh, looking out her windows tonight at the April ground that would soon be overgrown with all that damn grass—that did not calm her at all. It made her stomach clench.
When the Panic Nights were especially bad, and this promised to be one of them, Nell would quickly move from worry about the present to the definite philosophical belief that this, her frightening life, was what she deserved, was what she had coming to her, for being such a terrible little vain fool in her youth. She hadn’t known a thing then, not a thing. All she had cared about were her clothes and her hair and her fingernails and the length of her eyelashes, all she had attempted was to attract men and be envied because of her looks and acting abilities, all she had wanted had been more of everything for herself, and she had had no compassion, and she had never thought that she could get older.…
And now here she was. So much gone, so little left.
Why had she been such a little fool? She wasn’t genetically stupid, she had only acted that way.
It was hard not to blame her parents for spoiling her, but after all, really, what had they done but love her and believe in her? She was their only child. She had been beautiful and unusual, with lots of reddish-brown hair and unusual reddish-brown eyes and wide cheekbones, a wide mouth. She had been tall and willowy, lovely. You can do anything, her parents had told her; you can do anything, her high school teachers had told her; you can do anything, they had said to her in college; you are one of the special ones, you can be a Broadway star, a Hollywood star, you will be famous, wealthy, successful. You are one of the lucky ones.
She had believed them all. When she graduated from the University of Iowa, she had been ready to take on the world—she had been ready for the world to see her. She had been accepted as an apprentice with a summer theater company that performed at a tourist resort in Maine. She went, prepared to be discovered.
Now she did not know, and she never would know, if she had married Marlow because she loved him or because she had seen all those other beautiful, talented girls and had gotten scared, had run into marriage for the safety of it. Now, leaning against a window, Nell smiled at herself: ha, she thought, so much for the safety of marriage. Well, then she had reveled in her little victory: she had married Marlow St. John and had secretly thought of him as her prize, her trophy, her bouquet of roses at the end of the performance. If she was never to win an award for her acting, she would at least win this award for her life.
Oh God, had she loved him? She honestly did not know. She had been so young, dumber than she should have been at twenty-five, and he had been so powerful, so truly enchanting. Even before meeting him, she had thrilled at just his name: Marlow St. John. He had lived up to his name, Marlow had, with his rangy sleek body and his mane of prematurely graying hair and his passionate black eyes. He looked dangerous. He was dangerous. Everyone knew that. It was common knowledge among the women in the acting company: Watch out for Marlow St. John, they said. He’s divorced and he charms women and he’s had affairs with hundreds. He is irresistible. Nell was half in love with him before she even set eyes on him.
When she did see him, he took her breath away. He was so powerful, so handsome, so romantic.… She stopped longing for parts in the plays he directed and began to long for him. Oh, had she loved Marlow then? Or had she only loved the illusion of it all?
She had truly thrilled when he first touched her, backstage, so lightly on the cheek, and later, leaned to kiss her so gently she felt his breath but not his lips. Those late nights after rehearsals, when they met far out at a lonely beach and walked along the water, holding hands, talking, embracing, saying elaborate things to each other: if that had not been love, at least it had been lovely.
What was true? How could the reality be untangled from the vision? She had written a love poem to him. But even as she sat writing it, she was aware of herself doing this romantic deed; she could see herself sitting on a flat rock by the ocean, her cotton skirt rippling up with the sea breeze, her sunstreaked hair falling over her shoulders, her pen poised at her lips as she sat deep in thought. She liked it that others came walking along the beach and, seeing her so intensely involved with her pen and paper and her thoughts, passed on without speaking. She saw herself as a fascinating woman, and she adored Marlow endlessly because he was making her fascinating. He was casting and directing her in the ultimate role.
When they finally did make love, she was terrified. She was so stunned to be in Marlow St. John’s arms, so afraid that he would be judging her, so shocked to be really there doing that physical and private act, that she did not feel a thing. She felt nothing. She was so disappointed in herself—how could she feel nothing; she was with Marlow St. John!—she feigned ecstasy. It was probably the best acting she had done in her life. It certainly convinced Marlow. In a way it even convinced Nell. It was years before she could admit to herself just how much pretense was involved in her lovemaking with Marlow. What if she had been more honest? What if she had been able to say: Marlow, I’m so terrified that I can’t feel a thing? Perhaps he would have slowed down, consoled her, soothed her, waited for her to calm down and be there in reality. Marlow was capable of such kindness. But she had not known that then—she had known so little then—and she had lied. So their love affair had gone thundering on like a summer storm of heat lightning, flashing and thundering, leaving the earth untouched. Nell loved the drama of it and did not know until later just how superficial a spectacle it was.
At the end of that summer, she had been aware of several facts of life. She knew now that hundreds of other girls in the country had played the lead in college productions of Joan of Arc or West Side Story. Scores of other girls were more beautiful than she, or more talented or more ambitious or, finally, just braver. And she, at twenty-five, was already considered “older.” She had no offers, she had not been singled out. Or rather, she had been singled out, by Marlow St. John, and she had an offer from him, of marriage. She could stay single, go to New York, become a waitress, and slug it out on her own against enormous odds, or she could marry Marlow, travel with him, let him cast her in the lead of the plays he directed. Perhaps any woman would have made the choice she made.
Remembering it all, Nell shuddered with revulsion at the woman she had been. Oh surely, she thought, surely she had not been so practical! She had been as much in love with Marlow as she could have, at that time of her life, been in love with any man.
Nell thought that if she could have one wish, it would be that she had been given a talent and desire for any other thing in the world than acting. This acting business—well, it had caused her to live her life in such a make-believe land. She couldn’t even read her old diaries now, because they made her so mad, they were so full of lies. She had written her diaries to be read not by her, but by the public. She had lied in her most intimate life, hoping to be envied by the millions of women who would read her diaries once she was a famous actress.
The week before she married Marlow, she wrote: “In a week I will marry Marlow St. John. Marriage. What an ordinary, common thing to be doing; it does not seem grand enough a ritual to mark a joining such as ours, for ours is no ordinary passion, no pedestrian union, no mediocre love. No, it is a grand passion, a fierce relentless ardor that would burn most mortals, a raging need and devotion for one another that consumes us: how brilliantly we will burn together, illuminating the pale world.”
Christ. Nell didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she read entries like that. She knew on the one hand that she had almost believed what she wrote. She knew on the other hand that that week, when she had written that incredibly conceited bunch of junk, she had almost run off with another man. Billy Roe. He was just her age, an actor, a Marlon Brando type, all muscles and grunts and inarticulate hulking desire. He was scarcely bright enough to memorize his lines, but he had that intangible quality called stage presence or charisma or magnetism—or pure sex appeal.
She and Billy had been giving each other looks all summer, and that last week they had ended up one evening in the back of his rusty VW van. They had messed around, kissing, touching. It had been exciting.
“I think we’d be really good together,” Billy had said. “I’ve been thinking that ever since I saw you.”
She had been lying on top of him, her long hair falling down in his face. They had had on shorts and T-shirts, and the cotton had felt like nothing at all between them.
“We oughta go to New York together,” Billy said. “We oughta go be poor struggling actors together. Then if we starve”—he pulled her hair hard back from her face, and with one swift powerful movement rolled over so that he lay on top of her, had her pinned by the hair, had her caught with the intensity of his look—“at least then we won’t be love-starved.”
He had kissed her.
Oh God, Nell often thought, if only she had kept still, how different her life would have been. If only she hadn’t talked, if only Billy hadn’t responded as he had.
“Billy, don’t,” she said. “Billy, wait a minute. Listen, I’m kind of—well, I’ve been thinking of marrying Marlow St. John. He’s asked me to marry him.”
Immediately Billy had rolled off of her, had sat up, leaned against the metal wall of the van, and stared at Nell as if she had transmogrified before his eyes.
“Marlow St. John!” he said. “Holy shit.” He looked Nell up and down carefully, as if searching for something he had up to now not noticed. Nell could almost hear Billy thinking: What’s so special about her that Marlow St. John would want to marry her? “Jesus, Nell, that’s just wonderful,” he said. “Christ, Marlow St. John. You must be ecstatic.”
“Well,” Nell said, sitting up and straightening her wrinkled clothes, “I wouldn’t exactly say ecstatic.” She had been puzzled and hurt that Billy’s passion for her had so quickly disappeared in the face of his awe of Marlow St. John.
“You wouldn’t? Are you crazy? He’s one of the most important young directors in the United States! He can give you any part he wants. He can choose his plays in order to cast you. Jesus, you women get all the breaks.”
“But what about love?” Nell had asked. She had been so young, so confused, so easily swayed. She had wanted to believe in love, real, true, definite love; she had wanted to believe every single word that the love songs said. If Billy had said to her then that she was right, she shouldn’t marry someone unless she loved him, or if Billy had had the sense to try to compete for her, to tell her that he loved her, he wanted her, that she shouldn’t go to Marlow St. John, she just very well might have lain back down in that van and taken Billy into her arms and believed she loved him. If he had only leaned toward her again, kissed her then as he had a few moments before, the entire course of her life might have changed.
Instead, Billy had said, “Love? What do you mean, what about love?” He had been nearly screaming, he was so excited. He threw his arms out in such a wide gesture that he hit the sides of the van. “Who couldn’t love Marlow St. John? Christ, I could love him, and I’m not even a faggot. Listen, you dummy, he’s one fascinating, powerful man. He’s going to be a great man. If he really wants to marry you, you’d be absolutely crazy not to. God, we’re not talking about just anyone here. We’re talking about Marlow St. John.”
If only she had had a little more courage. If only she had not lived so completely on the opinion of others. It hadn’t even occurred to Nell until years later that she didn’t have to marry Marlow simply because Billy hadn’t dissuaded her. Her opinion of her life had been as good as his; she just hadn’t known that. She could have brushed off her clothes, crawled out of the van, and said, “Well, I don’t want to marry Marlow, and I don’t know why, but I don’t, so I won’t.” The choice had always been hers. But she had been such a coward. That was the fatal and recurring flaw of her life: cowardice. She had been too afraid to face the world alone, too afraid to turn down what everyone else thought was a fabulous chance, too afraid not to take what promised to be the easy and golden road into the future. There it was, all laid out before her: Marlow St. John. She had been too terrified, too insecure, to turn her back on that in order to hack her own road into life.
It didn’t bother Nell so very much that she had been married and that that marriage had broken up. But it did matter to her that she did not know just how much of her life had been a lie.
Had she been happy? She didn’t really know. Had she ever loved Marlow? She didn’t really know. Those last few weeks in Maine she had certainly been high, high on the envy and awe of all those other pretty girls, who suddenly saw Nell as someone different, someone special, because she was going to marry Marlow St. John. After their marriage, they had traveled around the country to universities and local theater companies, where Marlow did stints as guest director, and for Nell it had been more of the same: she had been the woman Marlow St. John had married. That had been her identity. Men had flirted with her, people had praised her acting, women had acted like friends, but Nell would never know whether all that warmth was directed at her or at the wife of Marlow St. John. She had been a stepmother of sorts to Marlow’s daughter, Clary, but that relationship had had a schizophrenic vagueness about it: Clary came only in the summers, and because it was legally decreed. Not until Nell’s divorce from Marlow was she to discover whether Clary cared for Nell herself—or really, whether she cared for Clary. Nell had moved through her life like a woman always in costume, onstage, doing the best job she could in a prescribed role: wife to Marlow, stepmother to Marlow’s child, the chosen companion of a moderately famous, and therefore justifiably egocentric, man.
Then two more events beyond Nell’s control had changed her life: she had accidentally gotten pregnant, and Marlow’s star had faded.
Funny, how Marlow had blamed the latter on the former.
When she had studied the past—and she had had plenty of time during the long nights when she was first separated to do just that—Nell finally was able to decide conclusively about one fact in her life with Marlow: she was not responsible for his downfall. He had received lukewarm reviews, bad reviews, cool receptions, long before she got pregnant. She was not responsible that grants did not come through. She really was not responsible that other, younger directors were shooting up like fire rockets into the skies of public adoration while Marlow’s star slowly fizzled and fell into semi-oblivion. These things happened to artists all the time. It was luck. And maybe it was talent. But she was not accountable for it. It had begun happening long before her first baby started growing in her womb.
It was not her fault. But somehow it had become her fault. Somehow Marlow had convinced himself and her that he had had to take the teaching and directing job in the drama department at the college in Boston because she had gotten pregnant and he had to provide financial stability for his wife and her child. The baby had trapped him, had ruined his career. It was all clear to Marlow, and he had expressed his feelings to Nell with equal clarity. And with anger.
In response, she had acted even more frantically: she had pretended that everything between them was still marvelous and enviable. They wanted to live in Arlington in an old rambling shambles of a house—the house had such potential. They wanted to settle down—all that traveling had been so exhausting. Marlow wanted to teach college students, for they were the future of the acting profession and where else could he make such an important impact on the world of drama? She wanted to stay home for a while, furnish a nest, have babies, settle down. They wanted what they had; they were happy.
Oh Lord, Nell thought now, thought often: Had any of her life been real?
Nell had gotten pregnant on purpose the second time. She didn’t want her son to be an only child. By then Jeremy was two, and she had spent almost three years working hard at making a clever and comfortable life for Marlow and their son. Perhaps she had really convinced herself that Marlow was happy. They gave a lot of parties, and the college plays had received great reviews; she had thought that Marlow had come to terms with his life and was even enjoying it.
So she had been taken by surprise when she told him she was pregnant and he had responded by saying: “You bitch.” He had gone berserk with anger. He had thought she was special, that she had understood how special he was, he had thought she would nurture his talent because she was unique, and instead she was just like all the others, a bitch, a sniveling, clinging woman who trapped a man with babies and forced him to betray his possibilities for magnificence. If it were not for her …
Marlow went out that night and drank, and probably slept with someone. It became no secret that he slept around during Nell’s burgeoning pregnancy and during the first two years of Hannah’s life. He didn’t try to hide it. He even tried to flaunt it. He was punishing Nell.
The New Year’s Eve when Jeremy was five and Hannah three and Nell thirty-three and Marlow forty-five, Nell and Marlow came home at three-thirty from a party. The babysitter had gone to sleep in one of the bedrooms, the children were fine, asleep. Nell slipped into a nightgown—not a flannel granny one—remembering the resolutions she had made at midnight: This year she would somehow get their marriage back on track. This year she would help Marlow somehow. This year she would manage to get him to love his children. This year she would manage to make him happy again. This year would be different.
“Shall I bring us up a little nightcap?” she asked, smiling.
“What?” Marlow asked, looking surprised. He continued to button his blue striped pajamas. “Oh, yeah. That would be nice.”
Returning with the brandy and soda in snifters, Nell said, “Marlow, here. Let’s drink to this new year. I want it to be different for us.”
Marlow studied Nell, gave her the critical searching look that he often gave actors when considering them for a part. “Nell,” he said, “there’s something I have to tell you. I want to start the new year off differently, too. I want a divorce. I’m in love with Charlotte, and I want to marry her.”
Charlotte was Nell’s best friend, had been her best friend for the four years they had lived in Arlington. Nell sat down on the bed with a plop that caused her drink to spill over the side of the snifter and onto her lace nightgown.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding,” Marlow said.
Nell, hurt, struck back. She laughed, shaking her head as she did. “You and your ego, Marlow, really. Ever since I’ve known you you’ve been so concerned about being unique, and here you are having an affair with my best friend. God, you’ve just waltzed us right into a perfect cliché. My best friend. God. What’s happened, are you getting too old to attract the little students?”
Marlow slapped Nell across the mouth. He had never come close to striking her before. It had been years, since she was a child, that she had been struck, and Nell felt an explosion of anger within her at the blow.
“Go on to Charlotte,” she said. “I don’t want you. I’ve never wanted you.” She glared at Marlow, defiant, hurt, mad, not caring that he might hit her again, not caring that she did not know if her words were true.
Marlow sat down on the bed next to her then, sat there quietly in a sort of slump. Then he said, “You know, I’ve always suspected that. And if it’s true, Nell, then you and I have led a pretty sad life.”
Was it true? Nell didn’t know, didn’t think she would ever know. Oh, what a thing to say to the man she had been married to for eight years! And if he was right, if that were true, then how sad their life had been. In the dark depths of that New Year’s morning, they just sat there on their bed side by side for a while, unable to go on from that moment of truth. Their house spread all around them, full of sleeping children, the world spread all around them, and they sat there together, silent in a pool of light from the bedroom ceiling.
Nell looked at Marlow. How could she not love him? He was her husband, the father of her children, a man with a sense of humor, a talented man, a man as good as any, she supposed. She did care for him. She had long ago stopped worshiping him and learned to care for him. But the best she could summon up for him now was the kind of love that made her hope he would be truly happy with Charlotte. Yet she did not say this to him, for she knew it would be an even greater proof of her failure to love him as a wife.
They sat there side by side on the bed, which was spread with a quilt hand-sewn by Marlow’s mother, and drank their brandy and sodas and had nothing else to say to each other. Finally they crawled into bed together and lay there, side by side, husband and wife, not touching, never to touch again—they lay there until they fell asleep.
Marlow fell asleep first. Within fifteen minutes he was snoring deeply, his body and mind safely sunk in the depths of sleep. He was not aware of Nell, who lay very still but felt her thoughts scrambling frantically at the heights of her consciousness. Marlow wanted a divorce. What did that mean? She could pretty much guess what it would mean in practical terms: the mess and bother of legalities; the anguish of breaking the news to the children and the work of protecting them; boxes packed; change everywhere. Maybe they would have to sell the house. Where would she live? She could live anywhere now, in any city, state, country. She was free to go. But she found this sudden freedom confusing. Even if she had not been happy with Marlow, still he had brought order to her life, anchoring her firmly to the ground, giving her something to center her life on. Now she was going to drift free, and she was scared. She hadn’t yet figured out what it meant that they had married, and now she would have to figure out what it meant that they were divorcing.
Five years later, here she was wandering around her house at night and she still hadn’t figured it all out. She still hadn’t decided a thing.
But she had survived. She had managed. She had kept her children safe, healthy, and happy. She had found a job and kept it. She had gotten them this far.
Nell drifted down the stairs of the dark house and carefully opened the front door so that the Indian wedding bells hanging from the nail below the knocker wouldn’t chime and wake the children. She slid outside into the night, and as her bare feet touched the cold wood of the porch, she felt a shiver ascend inside her. She walked to the edge of the porch and sat down on the steps. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the lack of light and she could make out the figures of trees and bushes, street and streetlights. The April air was chill and the porch wood was damp; her gown clung, moist and cool, to her bottom and legs. She would probably catch a cold. But she liked these cold, definite, unambiguous physical sensations. She needed them.
Once, when she was a senior in high school, Nell had driven from Des Moines to Chicago to spend a weekend seeing theater. Laura Morrison, her best friend, another aspiring actress, had gone with her. They had sped along the highway in Nell’s red Thunderbird, with the white top down and the wind blowing their hair. They had felt young and lovely and glamorous and adventurous, singing with the radio, passing a cigarette or Coke back and forth between them, waving at other cars. There had not been such severe speed limits in those days, and Nell had driven very fast, proud of her driving. As they approached Chicago, Laura had unfolded a gigantic map.
“Do we want 94 or 294?” she yelled.
“What’s the difference?” Nell yelled back.
“I don’t know,” Laura said, her words carried away on the wind.
The map rattled and whipped in her hands. It was big and awkward and flapped like a great colored sail, seemed to fight like a live bird.
“Hell!” Laura said, and began ripping away at the map. She tossed complete sections of the map over her shoulder so that the paper flipped away behind their car. “We don’t need this part, or this,” she said. “We’ve already been there.” Finally, she had nothing in her hands but a small square of paper covered in a complicated checkerboard of the vicinity immediately around Chicago. “Now,” she said, “I’ll be able to make sense of this.”
But she had thrown so much of the map away that they couldn’t figure out where they were, not even when Nell finally pulled the car to the side of the road and studied the jagged remnant seriously. They didn’t know anything, couldn’t tell anything. They didn’t know if 294 was different from 94 or the same road. They stared at the flat corn land around them and realized they didn’t even know which towns they had just passed. In the end they had had to get off the highway eight times in order to find service stations and ask directions, and that had added two hours to their trip.
Still, Nell liked that memory. She and Laura had found the whole trip hilariously funny. And even now Nell liked knowing that once she had been brave and carefree enough to speed down a highway while her friend threw pieces of map to the wind.
Then, getting lost had been an adventure.
Now Nell worried that she’d never get on a good clear road to anywhere, because she wasn’t sure where she’d been or where she was. She was just lost. And it seemed that when she tried to remember parts of her past, she found that they had been carried away, out of sight, beyond memory, and she could only remember scenes of her life, scenes sailing past too quickly to catch.
She was thirty-eight, and she had lost so many people.
She had lost Laura very early. Laura had gotten pregnant shortly after that trip and had married her boyfriend. They lived in a tiny apartment, and talented Laura spent her time there taking care of twins, while her young husband worked at a factory in the day and went out drinking with the boys at night. Laura had been every bit as attractive and talented as Nell, both girls knew that. But their situations had changed. Nell was envious of Laura for about fifteen minutes, during Laura’s wedding shower, when her friends had given her three sexy beribboned peignoirs and Laura had shown off her diamond engagement ring. But Nell had never been envious of Laura after that, especially not the time she saw her coming out of Sears with two babies squalling in a basket.
When Nell went off to college in Iowa City, she wrote to Laura regularly, but Laura never replied. During Christmas vacation her freshman year, Nell had gone to Laura’s house with presents. But Laura had been cold. She had looked so much older, so beaten down, that Nell wanted to cry. Still, Nell had cooed and oohed over the babies and acted as if the minutiae of Laura’s life—the blue spotted ashtray on the Salvation Army table, the curtains Laura had sewn for the bathroom window—were marvels. Laura had not been taken in by Nell’s effusiveness.
“Nell,” she had said when Nell was leaving, “please don’t come here again. I know you want to remain friends, but honestly, I just can’t bear to see you. I can’t stand reading your letters. I can’t stand knowing about your life. I need to have friends who are doing what I do, raising babies, making tuna and potato chip casseroles. When I think of what you’re doing—well, it sends me into a depression so serious that I sometimes think of killing myself.”
“God, you don’t mean that, Laura!” Nell had cried.
“I do mean that,” Laura had said. She managed a wry smile because at that moment the babies awoke and began to wail. “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t commit suicide. I won’t find the time or the energy to commit suicide. But please, do me a favor and don’t write me again. Don’t come to see me again. I don’t want to know you or anything about you. It’s too hard for me to bear.”
Nell had complied with her friend’s request. She had not seen Laura again.
One time, in their junior year of high school, they had worked on a play about Anastasia, the woman who claimed to be the long-lost surviving daughter of the murdered Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra. They had taken turns being the pleading young amnesiac Anastasia and the skeptical old noblewoman grandmother to whom she appeals. They had played one particular scene over and over again with each other, wishing they were on the Broadway stage so they could thrill the world as much as they thrilled themselves with their passionate acting. At the end of the scene, the grandmother had come to believe that Anastasia was her own, and the two women had embraced, weeping with joy at having found each other. Then, in high school, in their teens, Nell and Laura had believed all that—that life was a process of people discovering each other, that life would be a series of joyful embraces, breathtaking revelations, passionate reunions. They had thought that only through death would people be taken from them.
How little they had known. Nell had written Laura when she was divorced from Marlow. Now she won’t envy me, Nell had thought. But Laura had never replied. She was really gone from Nell’s life.
Laura had been Nell’s best childhood friend. Charlotte had been Nell’s best grown-up friend. During the first few years of Nell’s marriage to Marlow, she had had no real friends, only brief and spotty and often competitive relationships with the actors and actresses who passed through the repertory company. It had been her own fault that she had no friends; she knew that. Friendship had not been important to her then. She had been too busy creating and defending the image of her marriage to Marlow; they were so clever and so much in love, the two of them, that they needed no one else. When Marlow began to have professional difficulties, Nell really cut people off, afraid she might slip and reveal just how hard times were for them. She did not want to betray Marlow to anyone. Even when Jeremy and Hannah were born, when Marlow was sleeping around, when things were rotten between them, still Nell pretended. It had been her only defense.
When they settled in Arlington, Nell at last found a friend. Charlotte was an actress on stage and off. She was a student of Marlow’s, a beautiful tall girl of twenty-three. Her image was that of a lovely fool, a brilliant, bony, talented nitwit with chopped-off hair who could not be called upon to get the tea kettle from the stove to the cup without a mistake. She took to hanging around Nell every day, openly admiring Nell’s maternal competence, marveling at Nell’s nurturing abilities, and Nell needed that. She was a mother; she became a mother figure; warm, generous, benign, patient. Dressed in a loose-fitting navy blue corduroy jumper that hid her pregnancy-acquired fat, her hair clumped up in a bun for efficiency, Nell graciously moved through her house and life, doling out homemade cookies to her little children and anyone else who passed through the house. Marlow always did fill the house with actors and actresses and students and general hangers-on, but Charlotte was the guest who transcended all the others. She would sit in the kitchen, idly stirring a cup of herb tea, leaning her cheek in her hand, and watch Nell with admiration and longing all over her face. Nell would be kneading bread or spooning mush into a baby’s mouth or chopping vegetables, her hair falling out of the bun and around her face in tendrils as she worked.
“Oh, I’ll never have all this,” Charlotte would sigh, gesturing with her hands, and Nell would see her grimy kitchen with the handprints on the cupboard doors and the cat and dog hair blowing like tumbleweeds in the corners and the trashbasket overflowing with used Pampers transformed into a warm room wealthy with life. Charlotte looked so skinny and lonely. Nell felt opulent by contrast. She bloomed under Charlotte’s admiration. She often dressed for the day thinking of Charlotte, how she would look to Charlotte; Charlotte became more than her best friend—she was Nell’s perfect audience.
Charlotte was always being pursued by passionate lovers who were going to commit either murder or suicide because Charlotte had broken off with them. Sometimes Charlotte came to spend the night at Nell’s for protection or simply just to get some rest.
“Why is that woman always here?” Marlow would grumble.
Nell would reply, indignant, “She’s your student, Marlow. And she’s my friend. Besides, she’s having problems. Mark just won’t leave her alone. She needs to get away from him for a while, poor thing.”
During the winter that Hannah was one and Jeremy three, Nell spent many nights sitting up in the living room, drinking brandy or Kahlua and cream and talking with Charlotte. Charlotte fascinated her; she was so honest.
“I want a grand passion,” she said. “Nothing else will do. None of these simpering little boys I keep running into will do, not at all. You are so lucky, Nell. You have Marlow St. John.”
Nell would listen to Charlotte, enthralled. Charlotte had slept with so many men. She was forever saying, “Of course, he’s a dreamy lover, but—” Charlotte would talk in graphic detail about things she had done or felt with various men, and Nell would listen, entranced. She hadn’t done or felt half those things with Marlow, but of course she didn’t tell Charlotte that.
One evening, though, when Marlow had stormed out of the house in one of his rages and Nell was spent from tending two sick babies, she ended up drinking by the fire and confessing all sorts of things to Charlotte.
“I’m an awful, awful person,” Nell had said drunkenly. “I must have something genetically wrong with me. Here I am, married to this wonderful man, and I don’t even know if I love him. I know some of the people I love—I love my children. I love my parents. I love some of my friends—I love you, Charlotte. But I don’t know exactly what it is I feel for Marlow. I used to worship him, and that’s a kind of love. But now it seems the strongest emotion I can dredge up for him is—concern.”
“Oh that’s so sad, Nell, that’s so sad,” Charlotte said. “I thought you had everything. I thought you were perfectly happy. I’ve always wished I had your life.”
Well, Charlotte had gotten Nell’s life, or at least a great part of it. Marlow had divorced Nell and married Charlotte, and now when Jeremy and Hannah went to visit their father, it was Charlotte who made the hot chocolate and cookies. She was a good stepmother, and Nell, who had once been a stepmother to Marlow’s daughter Clary, was a good judge of that. Charlotte loved Marlow, and she was kind, in her vague way, to Marlow’s children. Nell wished she could like Charlotte, but she couldn’t anymore. She couldn’t trust her. She felt more betrayed by Charlotte than she did by Marlow. All those weeks when Charlotte had sat in the kitchen smiling dreamily at Nell, she had been remembering the night before or the day to come, when she would lie in Nell’s husband’s arms and say, “Darling, I don’t see how your genius can survive in such a chaotic place. Nell’s so busy nurturing others, she doesn’t seem to ever have time for you.”
“How could you have done that to me?” Nell had asked Charlotte during their one angry confrontation. “How could you have lied so much to me!”
“I didn’t lie to you, Nell,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t lie to anyone. I envied you your life. But I also really felt sorry for Marlow there. He is a genius, and he was getting lost in your household.”
“It was not my household,” Nell said. “It was ours. Marlow’s and mine. Marlow’s children as much as mine, his litter and mess as much as mine. Just because I was the one who cleaned it all up doesn’t mean I was the one who made it.”
“Oh, I don’t see how you can be so upset,” Charlotte had said, running her hand through her ragged hair. “After all, you told me more than once that you didn’t really love Marlow. I think you should be a little grateful to me. I’ve set you free. Now maybe you can go out and find someone you can really love.”
Cunning Charlotte. She was not even wrong. She honestly didn’t believe she had done anything wrong at all. Arguing with Charlotte, Nell had felt only more and more frustrated. She knew she had been betrayed, but she couldn’t logically prove just how. Finally, she had let the matter drop. It was done anyway, there was no going back, no changing things.
Now she and Charlotte were pleasant to each other when making the necessary arrangements for the children to visit Marlow, but other than that they seldom spoke. Nell often thought she missed Charlotte as much as she missed Marlow. Charlotte had certainly admired her more, or pretended to, and it was even possible that Charlotte understood more about Nell, the real Nell, than Marlow ever had. It was a very complicated tangle, their relationship, but in the end, Charlotte was one more person whom Nell had really lost.
When Nell was a little girl, she had been taught a song in her Brownie troop that went: “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” It was a pretty song when sung in rounds, and the sentiment was pretty, too, but now Nell thought that perhaps the moral was inaccurate, at least for someone Nell’s age. She did not think she was the same person she had been ten years ago or six years ago. Having children and getting divorced had taught her self-sufficiency, courage, and compassion; she knew she had those qualities now, and she did not have them when she was younger. Now she knew how to be a good friend, and the friendships she had developed over the past six years were of great importance in her life. These people might not have known her ten years ago—if they had met her, they might not even have liked her ten years ago—but they knew her now, they knew her: Nell St. John. Not Mrs. St. John, the wife of the director, but Nell. It was a very rich reward, this being known and liked for herself; it was a real feast. At first her friendships had been a sort of medicine, a tonic, that helped her get well. Now these friendships were almost a food. They sustained her life. She was fit and full in the world because of her friends.
And she hadn’t lost Clary. Her relationship with her stepdaughter had lasted in spite of everything. Their friendship had been like the straw that Rapunzel spun into gold: straw at first, it had been spun and toughened and twisted and tested by the wheel of time and had come out gold.
Nell had been twenty-five when she became Clary’s stepmother; Clary had been thirteen. She had been a cynical child, and it had taken Nell a long time to realize that what she thought was arrogance on Clary’s part was really a kind of fierce caution. Clary looked like her father. She was long-limbed and lanky, with blond hair and fair skin and dark eyes. But she did not act like her father. Marlow was impetuous, dramatic, quick, and obvious. Clary was analytical, still, and slow to action. It drove Marlow nearly wild that Clary did not want to act onstage. She had even refused to learn to play an instrument. She did not like to play tennis. She preferred biking and swimming, solitary sports. She preferred reading books or watching television to being with people. Marlow couldn’t understand her at all, and she irritated him.
Clary came to stay with Nell and Marlow every summer, and every summer she refused to learn to act. Marlow made Clary a part of the set crew for whatever play he was directing. Clary would grudgingly and quietly do exactly what was asked of her. “Bring the hammer, get some coffee, tell Marlow we need him—” These were orders she could and would follow. Otherwise she would just stand around the stage, waiting, watching, chewing her thumbnail, looking bored. She drove Nell crazy, too; Nell would have died to have had a director for a father, would have given up anything to have been around actors and the theater as a teenager. She couldn’t believe that this beautiful young girl couldn’t see how lucky she was, what chances had fallen into her lap.
The first few years of her marriage, Nell paid small attention to Clary. Nell was still too busy trying to be the most beautiful and talented actress in the world, and then too busy trying to buttress Marlow’s falling ego. There was not much room in Nell’s narcissistic thoughts for a surly teenager. She cooked Clary’s meals, washed Clary’s clothes, and did what had to be done, but her life and Clary’s revolved around Marlow—around his schedule, his needs, his desires. Nell had no experience as a mother, and so it did not occur to her very often to wonder whether or not Clary was happy. It did not occur to her to ask Clary if there was any other thing in the world she would prefer doing to hanging around the theater where Marlow worked all summer. After Nell became a mother, she realized how few motherly feelings she had had for Clary, how she had not protected her.
Still, she was only twelve years older than Clary, and although she had never done things with Clary out of charity, she had done things with her out of pleasure, and that counted for something. Both Clary and Nell loved horror movies, which Marlow considered trash. Whenever they had a chance that first summer, they would go off together to sit munching popcorn and squeezing each other’s arms while vampires or zombies or man-eating wasps terrorized the world. They loved the psychos best. They loved being scared. They loved playing games together, too. Nell was always glad when it was summer and Clary was there to play with, for Marlow was always too intense and busy to settle down to what he considered childish activities. Nell and Clary spent their summers playing Clue, checkers, card games, elaborate games of Monopoly that went on for days. These were frivolous acts, Nell later realized, not the sort of enterprise shared by parent and child. But, Nell also realized, they were the sort of thing shared by friends, and over the years that was what Clary and Nell became.
Clary was in college when Nell’s children were born and she worked all summer to make money for college, so Nell and Marlow saw very little of Clary those four years. The summer Clary graduated with a degree in biology, she came up once to visit her father and his family. In spite of the years of friendship between Nell and Clary, that visit had been a disappointment.
It was the last year of Marlow and Nell’s marriage, although they did not know that yet, and the air between them was tense with unadmitted anger. Clary could stay only two days, and both those days Hannah and Jeremy, then two and four, were sick with a ghastly intestinal flu. Nell was tired, overweight, and generally miserable. But she was so excited about seeing Clary that she shampooed her hair, put on makeup, and stuffed herself into her best dress. The moment she heard Clary’s car pull into the driveway, she grabbed the wailing, sick Hannah from her crib and raced to the top of the stairs.
She stood on the landing a moment, just looking at Clary, who had come in the door and was kissing her father and who looked, all of a sudden, grown-up and devastatingly lovely. Clary had had her thick blond hair cut Dutch-boy style and it swung evenly at her shoulders, making her seem substantial and decisive, a woman who knew what she wanted. The blunt bangs across her forehead accentuated Clary’s dark brows and eyes. She turned, and looked up at Nell with a frank, almost stern look. Nell knew at once that Clary had become a person to be reckoned with in the world.
Nell was so glad to see her, this person who was part child of hers, part friend, and she started down the stairs, hoping she looked at least not dowdy in her blue dress.
“Clary!” she called.
And at that moment poor Hannah, who was in Nell’s arms, threw up. Thick white vomit erupted from the sick baby’s mouth and flowed in a milky waterfall down Nell’s dress and, as Nell watched, down one step and the next step and the next. Warm acid-smelling liquid coated Nell’s arm and dress. Hannah cried and choked. Nell had to comfort and clean her poor daughter, then turn to the stairs. The thick vomit had soaked the carpet. It was not an easy task cleaning up the mess.
The visit did not much improve from that moment. Clary seemed to Nell to have become elegant, self-sufficient, and haughty. She was impressed with herself for gaining a degree in biology, and she talked endlessly about the experiments she was doing on gypsy moth research at a lab in Connecticut. She was doing important work in the world.
Nell scrubbed the carpeted stairs, fixed and served dinner, tended to sick children, and listened to Clary when she had the chance, but as each moment passed, Nell felt more and more hopeless. She thought she must look such a drudge to Clary. She envied Clary’s flat stomach, trim hips, smooth skin. She envied Clary her youth, her freedom, her clothes; she envied everything of Clary’s. And Clary didn’t do anything to make Nell feel better. She scarcely looked at Jeremy and Hannah, and when she did look at them, it was with a sort of scientific scrutiny, as if the babies were bugs or some other kind of slightly bizarre form of life. Nell cried that night when she went to sleep, because she felt old and somehow forlorn.
The next year, when Marlow and Nell were separated and then divorced, Nell didn’t know whether to contact Clary or not. Clary was Marlow’s daughter, after all, not hers. People tended to choose sides during a divorce, and it was only right that Clary would choose her own father. Blood tells, Nell thought. Besides, Clary had made it pretty clear that she had no interest in Nell or her messy children.… Nell did not call. That Christmas Nell sent Clary a card and pictures of the children and received a card and a cool message in return. But the summer after that, one long evening when Nell was wandering around picking up the toys that the children she babysat had strewn across every possible surface of the house, she began to think of Clary, of the good times they had had together. On impulse, she called Clary and they talked for an hour, spilling out the news of the past year, getting to know each other again. They began to write, to call. Finally, their friendship faced what Nell would always in the back of her mind call the rat test.
The summer that Hannah was four and Jeremy was six, Nell had done a thoroughly modern thing: She had left her children with her ex-husband, their father, and driven down to spend a weekend with her ex-stepdaughter.
By this time, Clary had given up on gypsy moths, or rather the government grant ran out and she had gone to work at a lab at Rutgers. She lived in a small apartment in Piscataway, New Jersey, with a roommate named Sally, who was a waitress at a local bar because she couldn’t get a job teaching school. Sally and Clary were both pretty, single, and clever; they had worked their life together into a sort of chic comedy routine. They slopped around in baggy painter’s pants and tiny striped cotton shirts, drank countless beers, bopped around their apartment singing Devo songs. Nell sat in their living room drinking beer and just watching, thinking. Here was Clary, who had been thirteen when they first met; here was Clary, who had started having periods the first summer she stayed with Marlow and Nell; here was Clary now, a grown woman, a sexual sophisticate, a competent lab technician. Clary and Sally taught Nell to play a game called asshole dice. They drank more beer. Around midnight they decided to smoke some grass, but Nell declined and said she wanted to go to bed. It was not that she cared whether they smoked or not, it was just that whenever she had tried grass she had anxiety attacks. She didn’t need grass anyway, tonight; she was already in a strange enough land. Here she was visiting her ex-stepdaughter, who had been thirteen and was now twenty-two, and she, Nell, didn’t feel any older at all. Here she was visiting her ex-stepdaughter, who had spent part of the evening telling Nell about her latest lover’s strong and weak points in graphic detail. Here she was visiting her ex-stepdaughter, who told her that she would sleep on the living room sofa so that Nell could have her bedroom.
“The rats won’t bother you,” Clary said. “They make a little noise at night, but you’ll get used to it.”
Clary worked with lab rats at Rutgers and had taken two home as pets. Carlos was a white rat with pink eyes, Sophia gray and white with black eyes. They were not large rats, but they were live rats, complete with long buck teeth and very long, skinny, rubbery tails. They lived in a cage at the foot of Clary’s bed. They had an exercise wheel and other toys.
Rats were intelligent, Clary said, more intelligent, more affectionate, than gerbils or hamsters. They made great pets. Nell told Clary she didn’t want to put her out of her own bedroom; she, Nell, would be delighted to sleep on the living room sofa. But Clary and Sally were planning to stay up till three, watching a horror movie and smoking grass, and there was nothing for Nell to do, once she had made the announcement that she was tired, but to go to bed in Clary’s bedroom with the rats rustling and chittering in their cage all night long.
Nell stayed with Clary for two nights. They talked and laughed and drank and went to a movie and ate pizza and Nell was happy. She and Clary had reestablished their connection. Now that they were no longer bound by their association with Marlow, they discovered they were bound by something stronger: They had known each other for a long time, they had gone through changes, and they still liked each other, not as family, but as friends. In spite of the fact that Nell didn’t sleep well for two nights—she really couldn’t help but fear those rats might get out of the cage—she considered the visit a complete success.
In March of the next year, Nell got a phone call from Clary. Sally was going off to Mexico with a lover, and Clary had to change apartments. She had found a new roommate in a new location, but the landlord did not allow pets of any kind. She wondered if Jeremy and Hannah might like to have her rats.
Nell was speechless. She knew that if she insulted the rats, she would be obliquely insulting Clary: Love Clary, love her rats. These were baby rats, Clary hastened to add in the long-distance silence caused by Nell’s dismay. Sophia and Carlos had lived out their natural lives and gone on to rat heaven; Clary had just gotten these new baby rats three weeks ago. They were so tiny, so cute, and if Jeremy and Hannah played with them every day, they’d become the sweetest pets.… Clary wanted to drive up during the weekend with the rats. She’d bring a cage; she’d show Jeremy and Hannah how to care for the rats.
Nell hesitated. She wanted so very much for Marlow’s children, Clary and Jeremy and Hannah, to get to know and like one another, and here was the first chance that had presented itself. She did not want to turn Clary down. But rats … Finally, she told Clary to come ahead and tried to sound enthusiastic as she spoke.
It was a five-hour drive from Piscataway to Arlington. Clary arrived on a Saturday afternoon with the two rats, an old aquarium with wire over the top to make a cage, a sack of pine chips, and a bag of Purina Rat Chow.
Nell sat on Jeremy’s bed, smiling, as Jeremy and Hannah, enraptured, let the baby rats run up their arms. Jeremy let his rat go under his shirt and run along his chest and stomach. Nell could see the outline of the little body and the long thin tapering tail through the cotton of her son’s shirt. She felt there was something unnatural about watching a rat run over her son’s body—she felt a primitive revulsion at the sight—but she bit her tongue. The children were so happy, and Clary was sitting on the floor talking to them, writing out a list of instructions.
The rats were to have fresh water put in their drinking bottle every day. They were to be given dry spaghetti or noodles every day. They needed hard stuff to chew or their front teeth would grow too long and they wouldn’t be able to eat. Jeremy and Hannah should never approach the cage and stick their hands in without warning; this would scare the rats. The children should gently tap on the cage and make a little chittering sound before reaching in. The rats would soon learn that this meant a friend was near and would be picking them up. Every now and then the rats could be given a treat, but not too much sugar, which was bad for them. Clary had often made scrambled eggs for her rats; they liked that sort of thing.
Nell had sat on the bed, looking at Clary, marveling. Clary, who was so blond and tall and sleek and lovely, who could have done anything, was here before her, seated cross-legged on the floor, writing serious instructions about rat care. How strange people’s lives were.
Clary spent the night with them before going back to New Jersey, and it was a successful visit, with much laughter. Jeremy and Hannah kissed Clary good night when they went to bed and again when she left. They looked at Clary with earnest faces as she admonished them to be good to the rats: “Be nice to the rats, and they will be the best pets you’ve ever had,” she said seriously as she bent to kiss them goodbye. Her face was as earnest as theirs. She was such an elegant, regal-looking young woman; she looked like a queen handing over a charge. Nell knew there was nothing for her to do but to survive with the rats, to remind the children to feed them, love them, let them out for exercise, clean their cage. This was not what she would have chosen to bring these three people together, but it was what had presented itself, and she tried to be grateful for it. The important thing was that now Clary and Jeremy and Hannah were in touch, had a mutual interest.
So she lived with the rats. She made rules. One week Jeremy got the cage and the responsibilities in his room and the next week Hannah got it. She kept an eye on the children’s friends and limited the amount of visitors, reminding the children that too many eager little hands might harm or frighten the rats. She vetoed the children’s plan to sell tickets to other children to see the rats. She doled out dry sticks of spaghetti to her children so that the rats would not get long teeth, and she told them yes, she thought it was adorable how the little rats sat up in the cage and reached out their skinny little hands to grab for the noodles. When both her children spent the night at friends’ houses, she fed the rats herself, although she could not bring herself to let them out for exercise. She tapped on the cage, went “Chee-chee-chee,” to the rats, just as Clary had said. She stuck her own hand down into the cage to drop the pellets and the apple slices and the spaghetti. “Here, little rats,” she said. “Here’s your D-Con.”
The rats seemed to thrive. Then one evening Hannah stuck her hand in to pick up her rat and the rat lunged and bit her hand. Hannah ran to Nell, crying. Nell put medicine on the small bite and read Clary’s instructions aloud to Hannah: Rat bites were cleaner than human bites. These rats were lab rats with no disease, no germs. If by any chance at all one of the rats got scared and bit, they were not to worry, it would be a clean bite. Rat mouths were much cleaner than human mouths. Nell tried to be reassured by Clary’s instructions.
But the next day, when Jeremy reached in to pick up his rat, Hannah’s rat bit him. Nell put medicine on his wound.
“We’ve got to go ‘Chee-chee-chee’ more,” she said to her children.
“But I did, Mom, I did!” Jeremy protested.
“Well, do it more!” Nell said. “This rat is obviously scared.” That evening, however, both children were reluctant to stick their hands in the cage. Nell found an old pair of gardening gloves and put one on. She tapped on the cage, went “Chee-chee-chee,” then spoke to the rats in her sweetest, kindest, most soothing voice. When she stuck her hand into the cage to drop the dry noodles, the gray and white rat rose up on its hind legs and, as fast as a snake striking, lunged at Nell’s hand. It snatched at her hand with its long scrawny fingers and bit.
“That does it,” Nell said, jerking her hand away, shaking with disgust and fear even though the rat had not been able to get through the gardening glove. “This rat is going.”
“Mom, we can’t kill it,” Jeremy said. “That’s not fair. Maybe it’s just a cowardly rat. Maybe it’s just sensitive.”
“I don’t care what its psychological problems are,” Nell said. “We are not keeping this rat any longer. I will not have this rat biting any other person.”
Jeremy made a fuss, but Hannah, who had had her feelings hurt because her rat bit while Jeremy’s didn’t, agreed with Nell. They wanted to call Clary to ask her advice, but she had moved apartments without leaving her new number or address, and she was using her new roommate’s phone and had told Nell only the roommate’s first name.
Finally, Nell carried the cage with the rats in it out to the car and they drove to the country. There, she and the children went through an elaborate procedure, involving sticks and gloved hands, in order to get the bad rat out of the cage without having it bite and still prevent the good rat from running away, too. At last the bad rat was out in the countryside. It ran off into the tall grass. Nell drove home, exhausted. This escapade had taken three hours out of their Sunday afternoon. And Hannah was teary, thinking there was something intrinsically wrong with her that made her rat bite, and Jeremy was grumpy and worried, saying that now his rat would be lonely.
Three nights later, at bedtime, Jeremy called Nell to his room. “Look at my rat,” he said.
His rat was huddled in a corner of the cage, shrunken into itself, not responding when Jeremy tapped on the glass. Nell put the gardening glove on and put her hand into the cage. She dropped a fresh slice of apple in. “Chee-chee-chee,” she said.
The rat did not respond except to shiver weakly.
“God, Jeremy,” Nell said. “I think your rat is sick.”
“But it can’t be,” Jeremy said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve done everything Clary said!”
“I know, honey. But it’s sick. Listen, let’s take it down to the kitchen. I can’t stand the thought of you going to sleep in a room with a sick rat in it.”
They carried the cage downstairs and set it in the middle of the kitchen table. The rat fell over on its side and lay there, limp.
Jeremy started to cry. “I loved that rat,” he said. “I took the best care of it I could.”
At this point Nell got paranoid enough to wonder if this entire rat bit was some bizarre and convoluted ex-stepdaughter’s revenge on Clary’s part. She tried to soothe Jeremy. She promised him the rat would be better in the morning. Finally, she called a friend of hers who was a vet.
“Marilyn,” Nell said, “I’ve got a problem. Jeremy has a pet rat and it’s sick. What can I do? I know it’s too late tonight to bring the rat into the clinic, but can you give me any advice?”
Marilyn laughed. “Nell,” she said, “people have been trying for thousands of years to find out how to destroy rats. Rats are the best survivors on the planet. That rat will either get well by itself or die.” She laughed again. “You would have a sick rat.”
Nell translated the conversation into a more optimistic and kindly message for Jeremy: “Marilyn said that rats are very hardy creatures and that this rat will undoubtedly be better soon.” It didn’t entirely convince Jeremy, but it worked well enough to get him to go off to bed.
Just before Nell went to bed, she returned to the kitchen to check the rat. It was shivering, and when Nell came close to the cage, it began to cry out in tiny whimpers. “Eeee-eee-eee,” it went, and Nell looked at its limp dreadful body and was overcome with pity and revulsion.
“I’m sorry, rat,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” She still did not know how to locate Clary. She truly did not know what to do. Finally, she heated some milk and set it, in a small plastic bowl, inside the cage, close to the rat’s face.
She arose early the next morning and hurried downstairs, wanting to get to the rat before the children saw it. She was certain it would have died overnight.
But it had not died. It was now stretched out full-length in the cage on its back, its whole body wrenched with convulsions. It shuddered, its skinny legs jerked, and after one quick look, Nell raced to the kitchen sink and splashed cold water on her face, trying not to vomit. Then she went back across the kitchen to the phone on the wall and dialed Marilyn’s home number.
“Marilyn,” she said. “I’m sorry to call you at home. But this poor rat is having convulsions. What can I do? The children will be awake any moment now. Can I bring it into the clinic? Will you please meet me at the clinic and give it a shot to put it to sleep?”
“Nell, don’t be silly,” Marilyn said. Marilyn lived on a farm; not only was she a vet, but she lived among all sorts of animals. “You don’t want to spend the money to have a rat put to sleep. Just reach in and break the poor creature’s neck.”
“Aaaaargh,” Nell said. “Marilyn, I can’t do that. I can’t. I cannot put my hands around a convulsing rat’s neck and break it.”
“You’d be surprised,” Marilyn said. “It will snap quite easily—”
“Stop it!” Nell yelled. “Marilyn, this is awful! Help me.”
“Look,” Marilyn said, her voice soothing. “Here’s what you can do. And it won’t cost you a thing. Do you have a gas oven? Put the rat in the oven, turn the gas on, and gas it to death.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Nell said. “That’s disgusting, Marilyn. I can’t believe you’re saying this. Do you think I could ever cook a roast in my oven after gassing a rat in it? Jesus. You’re weird. Besides, thank heavens, I have an electric oven.”
“Nell,” Marilyn said. “Remember we are talking about a rat. Why don’t you just take a hammer and hit it on the head?”
Nell retched. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the rat’s scrawny leg spasming. She began to cry. “Marilyn, please,” she said. “This is making me sick. But I’m just not capable of doing that to anything, not even a rat. I want it put to sleep peacefully.”
Marilyn sighed. “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you put it in a paper sack, a lunch bag, for example, and attach it to the muffler of your car with a rubber band. Then run your car for a while and the carbon monoxide is bound to put it to sleep quite nicely.”
“You want me to sit in front of my house with a rat in a sack attached to my muffler?” Nell said. “What will the neighbors think? What will the kids think? Marilyn, please meet me at the clinic and give the rat a shot!”
“Well, all right,” Marilyn said. “But you know I’ll have to charge you. Dr. Hebers is getting very sticky about what I do for friends.”
“Charge me a million dollars, but put this poor damn rat out of its misery!” Nell cried.
She got the children up and dressed, carried the cage with the rat in it to the car, and drove it to the vet’s. She had secret hopes that the poor animal would die on the way and save her the fee, but she was not to be so lucky. It was still convulsing when she carried it into the animal hospital. Marilyn took the rat—Nell and the children agreed they did not want to keep the cage or watch her give the shot—and went into the back room. Nell drove home in a funk. She got the children off to school, then went to their rooms and stripped the sheets and washed them in hot water. When she got home from work, she spent two hours washing every surface in the children’s rooms with hot water and Lysol disinfectant. Still she felt queasy. And she did not know what she would say to Clary about the rats. She didn’t want this new, fragile connection among them all to be broken. She was sick at heart.
Three nights later, Clary called.
“Clary!” Nell said. “Give me your new phone number before you say another word. I’ve been going crazy, unable to reach you.”
Clary gave her the number, then said, “How are the rats?”
“Oh, Clary,” Nell said. “I have bad news.”
“I was afraid of that,” Clary said.
“What?” Nell asked, nearly shrieking. “You were? Why?” It turned out that all the rats who had been born at a certain time in the lab at Rutgers had been exposed to a virus, and all the baby rats had eventually died of this virus. The rats Clary had given the children had been part of this group.
“I’m so sorry,” Clary had said. “I wouldn’t have exposed the children to such a sad experience for the world. I didn’t know the rats were ill when I brought them up; we only just found out. Believe me, Hannah’s rat wouldn’t have bitten anyone if it hadn’t been sick. Please don’t dislike rats just because of this one experience. Listen, do you want me to bring the children new rats?”
Nell had hesitated. Then she said, “Clary, to be honest, I don’t want any more rats in the house. I know you like them, and the children loved them, but I just can’t. I can’t help it. They give me the creeps.” She waited for Clary to speak, waited to hear the sound of injury or pique in her voice. She waited to lose Clary.
“Oh well,” Clary said calmly. “Lots of people feel that way. Too bad. I think if you spent more time around them, you’d get used to them, and they do make good pets.”
“We have two cats and a dog,” Nell said. “And the kids barely keep up with feeding them. I think we’d better forget the rats for a while.”
“Okay,” Clary said. And they went on to talk of other things.
Nell had hung up the phone feeling oddly jubilant. So it was possible to be honest with people she cared for and still not lose them! It was an exciting lesson to learn, and she only wished she’d learned it earlier in life.
The rat test had happened three years ago. Clary and Nell wrote and called each other often now, growing closer and more easy in their friendship with each passing year.
Now Nell shivered and hugged herself, remembering all those early years, foolish mistakes, mysterious losses. “Why was I so dumb?” Nell asked, and the sound of her voice breaking the deep silence made gooseflesh break out along her arms.
Well, she thought, she was still dumb, to be sitting out on the porch in the middle of the chilly night. Or—maybe not. Maybe this was, if nothing else, a sign that she had progressed this far, far enough to be outside in the dark. When she was a child, and even in her twenties, when she was married to Marlow, she had been frightened of being alone in the dark. She had seen monsters in the shadows, heard bogeymen rustling in the bushes. In her twenties, whenever Marlow went off on a trip, she was always so terrified at being alone in the house in the dark that she could not sleep. She would sit up all night reading, nervous and alert, listening for the sounds of rapists, robbers, maniacs; only when the sun finally shone in the window would she be able to relax and sleep.
In a way, that fear was a kind of luxury. She could not afford to be so cowardly once she was the lone adult raising two small children. She had to be able to sleep all night, because she had to be awake and alert in the day to take care of the children and to work to support those children. Of necessity, she had become brave. She had grown up just that much; if she was not naturally a brave woman, she was learning to behave like one. That was worth something.
But it was more than that—more than pretense, more than whistling in the dark. She really did like being out here alone in the night. The soundless shadows, the dewy air, the inescapable night, reduced her to an elemental Nell. She had lost so many people. But she had gained so many people, and it seemed that she still lived her life through other people, as if always trying for the prettiest pose in front of an endless mirror. Out here in the night it did not matter what she looked like or how old she was or whether she was loved or loving. She just existed, bones and skin and nerves and senses, hard and substantial against the soft elusiveness of night. She was Nell, and by herself she was real.
And cold. She rose, stretched, and pulled her moist nightgown from the back of her legs and bottom. She knew now that when she sank into the cozy warmth of her bed, she would fall asleep. Again she had settled nothing, had reached no conclusion about the meaning of her life. Who was she? Would she ever be able to use her acting talent again, or was that part of her life lost to her forever? Would any man ever really love her? Would she ever really love any man? Would she have to sell this house? Could she repair those damn steps by herself? She had not found the answers to those questions tonight. But the Panic Night feeling had abated. She was now more tired than scared. She somehow at least had made enough peace with herself so that she could sleep. She would rest in the midst of her confusion and loneliness, like a bird managing to sleep on the most sheltering branch of a wind-tossed tree.