Nell Read online

  Nell is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2014 Ballantine Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1985 by Nancy Thayer

  Excerpt from Nantucket Sisters copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer

  Author photograph: copyright © Jessica Hills Photography

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by William Morrow and Company, Inc., in 1984.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39107-7

  Cover design: Eileen Carey

  Cover Image: © Michelle McMahon/Flickr Open/Getty Images

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Nantucket Sisters by Nancy Thayer. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  An Introduction from the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Nantucket Sisters

  An Introduction from the Author

  Nell is the story of a divorced young woman with two small children who is asked to manage a clothing store on Nantucket for the summer. I began to write this novel in 1983, when I was a divorced mother with two small children, living on Nantucket for a month in the summer, so naturally many of the events and most of the emotions were echoes from my life and heart.

  Nell was my first book set on my beloved Nantucket, and I fell in love as I wrote it—I fell in love with a man and with the island. Fortunately, the man, now my husband of twenty-nine years, lives on Nantucket. Nell echoes my life again as she falls in love, too—as you will see.

  I’m delighted that my early novels are now being made available to readers as eBooks. As the world has grown faster, my style has changed slightly, but family relationships remain as infinitely mysterious and intriguing to me as they were in these early books. On the whole, the challenges we face stay the same: falling in love, raising children, friendships, betrayals, and forgiveness.

  Looking back at all my books, I note another consistency: most are set near water. From an island in Finland to Vancouver, British Columbia on the Pacific Ocean, to Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, and finally to my beloved Nantucket, I’ve found the blue immensity of water inspirational. And of course the storms and sunny beachside days provide gorgeous settings and dramatic metaphors.

  I hope you enjoy my early novels and discover some new friends there.

  Nancy Thayer

  One

  This fine Saturday morning in April, Nell woke up alone. As always. Sunlight flooded through the windows of the bedroom and lay across the floor in such delineated golden rectangles that Nell fancied the day spread out before her like a length of shimmering bright cloth. She yawned and twisted about in her bed, pleased with the luxury of the easy morning, smug, messy-haired, lazy-limbed. Stretching, she knocked a paperback mystery, two cookbooks, a three-ring notebook, a box of stationery, and a pile of catalogs off the bed onto the floor. They all went with a great slither and thump.

  For five years now, Nell had used the vacant half of the queen-size bed as a sort of table. It worked well. There was so much space, and things were so handy, at just the right height. Nell loved her bed and was seldom more pleased than when, after an exhausting day, she could crawl into it, plump up the pillows, and rest her body while her mind roamed off in new directions. She made lists, wrote letters, read books. When she was especially tired or anxious, she looked through the glossy, optimistic pages of mailorder catalogs. She was oddly reassured by the knowledge that this was a world in which there were people who spent their lives inventing dog jewelry or writing such copy as “Nouveau is better than not riche at all.” She would look at all the pretty dresses and imagine which ones she would buy if she had the money—although where she would ever wear the sweeping white silk with the sequined waist was past the powers of her imagination.

  Sometimes she came across a dress or top that she thought the boutique she worked at might sell, and she would clip out the photo and mail it to her boss. At other times the catalogs worked like sleeping pills. The bright and orderly pictures would then seem inanely comforting, like children’s building blocks, lulling Nell into such a state of relaxation that she had only enough energy to reach out her arm and switch off the bedside lamp before falling asleep.

  Now and then in the middle of the night, her turning might cause a magazine or book or box to go over the edge of the bed and fall to the floor with a thud, but now such sounds no longer awakened her. She had assimilated into her subconscious the harmless nature of such noises, just as she had learned to sleep through the knocking sounds of the dog scratching herself under the bed or the eerie morning cry of her cats singing just outside the window about their springtime catch.

  Nell loved being alone in her bed. She loved sleeping there, reading, writing letters there; she loved eating there. Almost no pleasure surpassed reading a mystery in bed while eating a giant bowl of salty buttered popcorn or a hot fudge sundae. It was true that her sheets were often less than clean. She had gotten used to sleeping with grits of salt against her skin and thought this was surely no stranger than sleeping in a beach house on sheets speckled with sand.

  Her secret desire in life was to own a hospital bed. She often dreamed of the power of it, of pushing a button and having the back of the bed automatically raised or lowered, the section under her knees bent and angled … To have a hospital bed and one of those wonderful tables that would swing over her or away to hold her sundae or popcorn and book—well, those seemed like real luxuries in life, and ones that, if ever obtained, could not fade or vanish like other, more social pleasures.

  When Nell got divorced, she vowed to herself that she would not disconcert her children with the sight of a man in her bed in the morning. She had kept that vow for five years now, and she was glad. Not only for the children’s sake: It seemed to her such a commitment, sleeping all night and waking up to face a new day with someone. Making love was one thing, but waking up in the morning was something completely different, a serious act. She did not want to confuse her children by that—and she did not want to confuse herself.

  When her children were smaller, they used to crawl into bed with her at night after a nightmare or a tummyache, or simply when they awakened early and wanted to cuddle. It had been a long while since that had happened. Jeremy was ten now and didn’t want to climb in bed with her anymore—Nell was not sure whether this was because of prepubescent shyness or simple indifference. Hannah, at eight, still had an occasional nightmare, an occasional need for a long warm snuggle, but those too were becoming rare. The children did always come into Nell’s bedroom first thing in the morning, though, just to look at Nell. Often they tiptoed up—Nell could hear them—and peeked their heads around the corner of her bedroom door.

  “Hi, sweeties,” Nell would call from her bed. “Come give me a kiss.�
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  “Oh, Mom,” they would say, and would wander away.

  Nell came to realize that they just wanted to be sure she was there so they could feel free and safe in the world and could get on to more important things. She saw that her body had taken on a sort of utilitarian function in the lives of her children. On arising, Jeremy and Hannah visited her and the toilet, then were able to enter their day. Well, her body always had had a utilitarian function for her children: she had grown them in her body, nursed them, rocked and carried them in her arms until they were too large for her to lift; she had bathed and shampooed them and tended to their injuries. These days they needed only an occasional hug; their need for her body was taking on a necessary distance. Her children were growing up.

  She could hear them now, mumbling around in their rooms. Because it was Saturday morning, they didn’t have to go to school, and Nell didn’t have to go to work, and there was no need to rush. Still, she couldn’t stay in bed all day, dreaming like this. She had things to do.

  Nell rose, put the dog out, let Medusa in, made coffee, set out an easy Saturday breakfast of milk and doughnuts for her children, put a load of laundry in the wash, glanced at the morning paper, polished Hannah’s good shoes because they had been sitting in the fruit bowl on the middle of the kitchen table for two weeks waiting to be polished, talked on the phone to a friend, stared at the doughnuts for five minutes, longing to eat one, forced herself from the kitchen, doughnutless, nagged her children into actually brushing their teeth, braided Hannah’s hair, and pulled some cockleburs off the coat of Medusa, the unappreciative long-haired cat. Her day had begun.

  It was time to do her exercises. She hated doing her exercises about as much as she hated anything in the world. But they made an enormous difference in the way she looked and felt. And they provided her with a sense of achievement—afterward, she always felt smug.

  They also helped her view the world differently. She managed to force herself to exercise because she knew from past experience that, at a certain point in the middle of her exercises, she would have an adrenaline high. She would put on a rock record—ABBA, Bob Seger, Supertramp—and after ten or fifteen minutes of vigorous movement, she would smile. Bob Seger would be singing his secrets to her, about her. As she felt her limbs grow warm and supple in their moving, so she felt her whole life grow more supple in its meaning—and if this optimism was some kind of lie, she didn’t care. She was old enough to know that the cause of any pleasure or optimism was not the point. If she felt good, she wanted just to go with that as far as it would take her. Life was too short to live any other way.

  Now she lay on her back in her white tights and lavender leotard on the blue living room rug and did scissor kicks to ABBA. Whenever she lay here, she found herself confronted with five gray oval-shaped blotches on the white ceiling. They were her daughter’s fingerprints, and as Nell kicked her legs back and forth, she amused herself by wondering just which man it had been who had lifted Hannah above his head so that she could touch the ceiling. It couldn’t have been Steve; he was too short. It hadn’t been Ben, either, though he was certainly tall enough; Ben hadn’t been the type to lift Hannah. Hadn’t been the type to touch Hannah. Ben, with his trim clipped beard, his careful clothes and body. Ben, whose touch made Nell’s blood turn to ice. Yet he was the one man since Marlow whom Nell had seriously considered marrying, and only because he was rich.

  She was not proud of herself to remember this; she had not been proud of herself when she had dated Ben. She had met him just a year after her divorce from Marlow, and for a few months she thought that perhaps Ben was the one chance for security left to her in all the world. She had not married him because she had not loved him—although that first year after her divorce she had been too nutty to love any man—but she had not married him in spite of the promise of easeful security he offered.

  Of course at times she deeply regretted her decision. At times life overwhelmed her and made her long for the order that Ben had offered.

  Just this week, for example: Nell had been racing out the door on Monday morning, and it was the usual Monday morning free-for-all of getting the three of them ready for the day, for the week. Jeremy had wandered out of the house to check his pail, which held some elaborate and inexplicable experiment he had set up involving water and air and leaves, but he had, of course, again forgotten his school books and violin.

  Nell had yelled at him in exasperation: “I can’t take this anymore, I can’t do this anymore, you are ten years old and old enough to assume some responsibility for your life. Get your violin. Get your lunch box. Jesus, I should make a tape of me nagging you and attach it to your Walkman and turn it on every morning, that would save my voice and my sanity.… ”

  Jeremy had drifted back into the house to collect his things while Nell fumed at the front door, thinking for the thousandth time: Weren’t boys of divorced mothers supposed to naturally take on the role of the man of the house; hadn’t she read somewhere, in lots of magazines, that young boys of divorced mothers protected their mothers, became mature at an early age in order to help and shelter their mothers? Sometimes it seemed Jeremy couldn’t even remember his mother, let alone his lunch box, homework, or violin.

  But finally he had gotten everything, and Nell and Hannah and Jeremy came out of the house, and Nell turned to lock the front door, wondering if she should make Jeremy go back in one more time to get his raincoat. The early April sky was ominous. It was going to rain today. And Jeremy was prone to chills and colds and croup and bronchitis. But he had already made it to the car with all his apparatuses.… Nell decided to forget the raincoat.

  She had walked along the long wooden porch and down the wooden steps, suddenly aware for one bright moment of the kind of day it was: it was spring. The air wafted against her softly, sweet with the scent of the hyacinths blooming near the house. This kind of morning—well, it was so fresh, so gentle, like a lover’s first tentative kiss; Nell stood still for a moment, rapt. She did not want to move from this magic moment when she could almost feel what it was like to be a young girl like Hannah again, with the world all sweetly mysterious, with the whole world as tantalizing as spice. Nell took a deep breath. She was thirty-eight, but she could still feel, on a morning like this, that there were amazing possibilities waiting for her in this world.

  “Oh God,” Hannah said, walking past Nell to the car.

  Hannah had heavy blond hair and intensely dark eyes, an unusual combination she had inherited from her father, along with a tendency toward the theatrical. She was always striking poses; Nell was always having to remind Hannah that she was only eight years old. Now her voice was matter-of-fact, world-weary.

  “Hannah,” Nell said. “I’ve told you not to use profanity.”

  “Well, I’ve got a dead mouse in my umbrella,” Hannah said. She tossed the bright green umbrella that said HANNAH in white script away from her onto the lawn with a shrug of contempt and strolled on down the walk to the car.

  Nell stood frozen, sick with disgust. “Hannah?” she asked. “Hannah? What do you mean you’ve got a dead mouse in your umbrella?”

  Hannah turned and looked at her mother with slight impatience. “I’ve got a dead mouse in my umbrella,” she said.

  Nell picked up the umbrella and looked. A small gray and slightly decayed mouse lay inside the umbrella at the point where all the spokes met, stuck, in its moist and hairy decomposition, to the wire and fabric.

  “Oh, God, gross, yuck!” Nell said, and flung the umbrella across the yard. “Oh, how awful, Hannah, oh, honey, I’m sorry. God, what if you had opened the umbrella and it had fallen out in your hair? Oh, this is disgusting, it makes me sick. Oh, I can’t stand it, a dead mouse in your umbrella, I can’t take any of this anymore!”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Hannah said. “It could have been worse. It could have been alive.”

  “I can’t take any of this anymore,” Nell repeated. She stood there on her front lawn in the spring
grass, shaking, wishing she could change her life, wishing she could change it so drastically that her daughter would never have a dead mouse in her umbrella again. The house was clean enough—but the umbrella had been hanging on a hook in the basement, and it was the time of year when small creatures began to venture in from the open land near them. Nell knew in the back of her mind that it wasn’t a sign that her house was filthy; it was just that the poor mouse had gotten into the umbrella and then been unable to climb up out of the slippery funnel. Still …

  “We might as well not even have cats,” Nell said. “Here we have two cats and we still have a mouse in the house. Where are those damn cats? Why don’t they do what they’re supposed to? No one helps out around here!”

  She had felt so alone then. She had felt so defeated. She had felt so keenly the chaos of her life. She had wished right then she had married Ben; she could have married him and not worked and stayed home all day cleaning the basement. If she had married Ben, he would have supported her financially, she could have protected her daughter from this sort of thing. She could have checked the umbrellas for mice if she had married Ben.

  But she had not married Ben, and now, as Nell rolled over onto her side to do leg lifts and extensions, she knew that in spite of money and mice, her decision had been the right one. She hadn’t loved Ben. She hadn’t even particularly liked Ben. She had just been lonely and at the stage in her life when she was so poor and frantic about money that the mere thought of dinner in a good restaurant had made her nearly tremble with desire. Nell wasn’t proud of the fact that for three months she had gone out with Ben simply because he took her to nice restaurants and the theater and to concerts she couldn’t afford. On the other hand, she wasn’t ashamed of herself for going out with him, either. She could have done worse: she had been so scared and wretched then that she could have started drinking or taking drugs or become truly hysterical in front of the children. She hadn’t done any of those things. But after Marlow left her, she had lived for a while on the edge of her nerves, mad as a beast, staring out with wild eyes, scavenging what she could, always alert for dangers to her babies. She had had to learn to support herself financially and to be the sole protection for her children at the same time, and so she lived for a while on her animal instincts, moving through life in terror and anger, ready to spit and claw.