Waiting four hours outside X-ray with a patient who needed to go to the bathroom didn’t sound too good. But I did need something to do all summer, and after hearing all the things Rod wanted to do I felt sort of ashamed for not wanting to do more myself. “How do I sign up?” I said.
“Come down with me right now. I’ll introduce you to the lady in charge of volunteers.”
“Nancy,” said Mrs. Perkins, “we’d love to have you. How many hours can you work? Can you start Monday—day after tomorrow? We need workers everywhere. You can choose flowers, library, transportation, gift shop, linens—you name it.”
“I think I’d like to be with people,” I said, “moving around. Not … not stuck in some room somewhere.” I felt nervous saying that so bluntly but Mrs. Perkins nodded. “Just the way I feel. I hate this office. Walls between me and all the action. How about flowers? There’s plenty of action there. You rush around with a little metal cart taking the flowers from the delivery drop up to each room. You get to chat with the patients and their families. Receiving flowers always cheers people up and that will make you feel good about what you’re doing.”
“Okay. Flowers sound fine. Are there really enough deliveries to keep me busy?”
“Oh, yes. You’ll be scurrying around every minute. And if by some chance you run out of things to do, they always need help in the gift shop.”
We settled on four afternoons, from noon till six. Mrs. Perkins gave me a funny little smile. “Most people just work one afternoon a week,” she said. “You may find your enthusiasm dwindles after a bit. Feel free to come back if you want a change, Nancy. Now. Wear a dress and stockings and comfortable shoes. Not sneakers. We used to have uniforms, but we dropped that. You’ll just wear a bright pink apron. See you Monday!”
I rode my bicycle home and the world I passed looked a lot better. It was very hot, but there was a breeze, and I made another breeze of my own, zooming along on my bike. The hospital happened to be a nice distance from home and on roads where biking was fairly safe. Even if we did get a car, I’d ride my bike. Keep me trim all summer.
I would not call Rod a second time. It was his turn now.
I hoped he would call me, and yet I wasn’t counting on it. Nice as Rod was—and he was very nice—I didn’t feel about him the way I had about Nick.
I wished I did. Nick was difficult and mysterious and sulky and far away. What good was a crush on Nick? Why couldn’t I be crazy about Rod, who was interesting and funny and easy and close by?
I rode halfway up the big hill before I could no longer push the pedals down. I dismounted and walked the rest of the way up. I could not write Nick off, much as I wanted to. He was right there, filling up my thoughts.
Oh, Nelle Catherine, I said to myself, puffing at the top of the hill. Some guy you met three times, you’re going to go into a decline over? Come on, lady. He’s not worth it.
I coasted down the other side of the hill and into the little cramped parking lot of our apartment. Mother and I were going to spend the afternoon car shopping. We had pretty well decided that a new car was not for us. We could save thousands of dollars by buying a good used model. Of course, we wouldn’t get very good gas mileage, but the car would run. We’d have our freedom back. Life without a car in a town as spread out as ours is not much fun.
The car in our space was not a new one Mother was trying out.
It was Nick’s jeep.
Fourteen
“HELLO, NANCY.”
“Oh, hi, Nick.”
His presence seemed to swirl about me. Rod had been a friend, relaxing and fun. Nick was more than I could think about at one time.
“Did you forget something?” I said. Now it was my voice that sounded tape-recorded! I tried to control it and get it back to normal.
“Yes.” Nick looked so unbelievably handsome. He was wearing the blue jeans he’d told me he hadn’t brought and a striped shirt with an open collar. He looked terrific. I swallowed.
“What did you forget?” I said. “I’ll go up and look for it.”
He moved between me and the apartment building door. “I … ah … I forgot to apologize for last night.”
He was about three or four inches taller than I was. I looked up at him. He was squinting into the late afternoon sun, and it gave him a pinched tense look. At least, I hoped it was the sun.
“That’s all right,” I said, and to my relief my voice was perfectly calm and normal. Wouldn’t it be awful if Nick’s retread voice were infectious! “Some evenings just don’t work out that well. I wasn’t much to boast about either. It’s hot, isn’t it? You want to come in and have some iced tea? I’m dying of thirst, myself. I’ve been outdoors all day. How were the interviews? Did you like the colleges? Did they like you?”
Now I was babbling. I decided the absolutely worst thing about learning to be with a boy you liked was talking. Rod wanted to be a hang-gliding instructor. I just wanted to be able to talk.
I unlocked the apartment. Mother wasn’t home, which seemed good at first, but in a moment I realized it meant I’d have to do all the talking to Nick myself. “Want sugar?” I said, words pouring out of me like water from a faucet. “Or lemon? Both? I take it with both. Mother takes it plain, without anything, that is, because she likes it that way. How’s your father, anyway?”
Nick had been listening to me with his mouth slightly open, as if he had a sentence ready but no place to put it. I flushed. “I like mine plain, too, thanks. My father’s fine. I guess the interviews were okay. I don’t know how to tell. Have to wait until I hear from them, I guess. Listen, I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know what happened. I just couldn’t make myself be pleasant. You were right, I could have. I just didn’t, and I’m sorry.”
I handed him his glass of tea. The outside was wet with condensation and it slid out of my hand into his. I dried my hand on a towel and handed him a napkin. The only thing I could think of to say were Mother’s explanations for his behavior. “You behaved strangely because you were with this beautiful, romantic, slender girl in tight jeans,” I thought—but I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t say anything. It was as bad as last night. There was so much to be said that there was nowhere to begin. It made my chest hurt. I could not understand why not being able to talk would be so painful, physically painful. Finally I said, “Why didn’t you just tell me how much you didn’t want to go out, and then we’d have been spared all that.”
“I didn’t know I didn’t want to until I got there.”
“Kind of like a final exam, huh?”
“It even felt like an exam, Nancy. Your friends grilling me about who and what I am. That Holly. I had the feeling she knew everything about me from my brand of underwear to my phone number.”
“I’m sorry, Nick. She didn’t quite know that much, but I had talked about you a lot and she was looking forward to meeting you.”
Nick seemed puzzled by this, as if I were contradicting something. “I thought you just asked me on the spur of the moment, when I called about coming up for those interviews.”
“Well,” I said, turning scarlet (the color Mother wanted her walls to be, not her daughter), “it was sort of a big spur and a long moment.”
“Really? I thought you were just trying to, you know, entertain the cousin when he’s in town mooching a meal.”
“Nick!” I was really hurt. How could he think that?
But then, I had said nothing to indicate how much the evening meant to me. Had I expected him to figure out by osmosis that I was crazy about him? I choked on my tea—my second choke of the day. He looked at me strangely. “Just went down the wrong way,” I said, and I hoped fervently I would not start hiccupping, which I often do when I’m nervous and drinking something cold and sitting in the draft of the air conditioner.
“So did last night,” he said ruefully. He twirled his glass on his palm. “I hate for new cousins to part on bad terms. Can we try again tonight?”
“Try again?” I said.
Why did he have to say cousins? I didn’t want to be his cousin. I’d had enough of this relative business. I wanted to be his date.
“A movie or something? Bowling? Dinner?”
“I thought you were broke,” I said.
Nick’s features were tense again, and I thought, why didn’t I just answer him? Why did I delay giving him an answer, tease him, string it out? I hate it when people do that to me! “I mean, I’d love to,” I said, and for once I managed some of the words I wanted to use. “I don’t want to be just cousins. If you want to ask me on a date, I’d love to go. Although I thought you were broke and needed everything for college, so we can just sit here and watch television if you’d rather.”
Nick looked at the ceiling where the old basket hooks still hung, waiting, I guess, for another generation of little old baskets. “I am sort of poor,” he said, “but I have plenty of money. I’m saving it for important things, but I’d take you out anyway.” He looked appalled. “I didn’t mean that, Nancy, not the way it sounded. I want to spend the money, it’s not that you’re not important, it … Jeez, it was easier to talk to you when you were a long-lost cousin, Nancy.”
“Cousins,” I said, starting to laugh, “I don’t need.”
“Need a date for tonight?”
“Very much.”
It seemed logical to get a little closer, which we did. I had never kissed, not real long happy kisses. It was like being under water. I kept thinking, I’m going to suffocate if I don’t figure out how to breathe and be with Nick at the same time.
I was just getting the hang of it when Mother walked in.
“Now that’s what I call affection,” she said. “Have you written off last night?”
Nick sprang away from me as if we’d been caught doing something criminal. He blushed. Oddly enough, for the first time in my life, I didn’t. I just grinned. “Cheshire cat,” said Mother to me. She poured herself some iced tea and rescued our glasses. Our ice had melted down and the glasses were half full of pale gold water. “I’m having supper here,” she said. “Lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, and carrot salad. If you are attracted by that description, by all means stay. Otherwise I have a very good book to read.”
“I feel thrown out,” said Nick.
“I,” I said to him, “feel like a pizza all the way.”
“Funny, you don’t look it.”
It was the oldest line in the world and we both laughed insanely about it all the way to the pizza place.
The pizza wedge I was working on had an extra glop of mozzarella and little strings of cheese were hanging from the edges of my mouth down to my fingers. We were talking across a tiny scarred wooden table at a booth for two along the back wall. The only light was a stump of a candle in a smoke-stained red glass. Nick reached across and wrapped the cheese strands around his finger until he had a little wreath of white cheese on it and then I ate the cheese off his finger.
“You and your mother are coming to the family reunion in August, aren’t you?”
“Nick, you know we aren’t really cousins.”
“We might be. I’m assuming we are. I like to think that we are. Anyway, I’m going to ask Dad to give you an official invitation.”
So we were back to cousins. I decided not to make an issue of it. I took another pizza wedge instead. It’s only good when it’s hot.
“I’m not giving tours this summer,” he said. “I memorized those talks about the furniture and the history and it got into my voice. Everybody complains about my voice and I have to kick that habit, I really do.”
“You think the voice comes from giving the tours?”
“That’s when I started it. I felt so silly at first, in those britches and that huge muslin shirt, talking about door lintels. When I used my fake voice it felt as if somebody else were giving the tours. I didn’t feel silly anymore.”
“I thought you looked neat. Especially the hair. I kind of miss your hair.”
He said, “Wait till you see our battle in August. Last year I was just a member of the militia, but this year I’m the Tory captain who leads the charge. I have a really neat uniform.”
“You’re the Tory captain? Which side are you on, anyway?”
“The British side, obviously. As a matter of fact at the end of the battle the Revolutionaries surrender and the King’s men win Nearing River House and the surrounding areas.”
“We celebrate that?” I said, incensed. “I thought we only reenacted the victorious battles.”
“Somebody is victorious in every battle. It just happens that this one was a Loyalist victory, and if we’re going to participate in Revolutionary reenactments, that’s what we’ve got. It’s a lot of fun. My men attack the house where a small but intrepid band of Revolutionaries have taken refuge.”
“I guess Revolutionaries are always intrepid.”
“Absolutely. But they’re not as clever as I am. Not only do I order my men to fire upon them, but I roll carts filled with burning straw against the wooden siding of Nearing River House and they are forced to surrender after several casualties on each side. I do all this whooping and hollering to goad my men into dangerous action and weep over their broken bodies and stand triumphant in the doorway at the end.”
“And what does the audience do?”
“What do you mean? They enjoy it, of course.”
Like me enjoying Nick. I would be the most receptive audience he ever had. “No, I mean, do they cheer or boo when the Loyalists win?”
“Oh, they just clap indiscriminately. It’s late in the day for worrying about sides. Besides, most of the outsiders who come to watch it think it’s a Civil War battle and that the Loyalists are Union soldiers. It’s amazing how many Northerners think the only battles ever fought in the South were Civil War battles. They think of the American Revolution as this Massachusetts thing, with maybe a little New York and Saratoga and Benedict Arnold mixed in. Northerners always look confused when you tell them there was heavy decisive action in the Carolinas during the Revolution.”
“You’re really interested in it, aren’t you?”
“I love it. My father loves the remains of history—the antiques and the tools and the buildings. I love the conflict of war. I wouldn’t love a real war, you understand, I don’t ever want to see one, or be in one, but wars in the past fascinate me. My favorites are World War I and the American Revolution. I read about World War I all the time.”
“Are you going to major in history when you get to college?”
“No. Why pay good money to have professors tell me about things I’ll be reading about all my life? I think I’ll major in math. Go into computers, or something. But I’m not really sure.”
There was one cold wedge of pizza left on the round aluminum platter. Nick got up, and I almost did, too, thinking he wanted to leave, but he came around the tiny table and sat beside me. There was definitely not room for a second person. We were terribly squashed, and I loved it. Nick felt very solid next to me. I wondered if his pulse were racing like mine.
“I have to leave,” he said, which I considered a totally inappropriate remark for the position we were in. “It’s a long drive, I have to get going.”
I sighed. “Maybe you can stop in here again on your way up to Pennsylvania this July.”
“I’m not going up there this summer, remember?”
It amazed me that I could have forgotten one word Nick had ever said. I’d spent a lot of nights rerunning our conversations in my mind. “Yes, you did,” I admitted, “I’d forgotten.”
“My mother’s pretty upset over it.”
“I can imagine.”
We left the pizza parlor and got back into Nick’s jeep and suddenly, depressingly, we were as awkward as before. Nick not only didn’t kiss me, he didn’t even look at me. “Thanks for a nice evening,” I said.
“Oh yes, sure,” he said, negotiating a turn.
“It was nice of you to come back.”
“Back?” he said, as if he’d
forgotten the night before.
It made me seasick, swinging back and forth from being relaxed with each other to being strangers. I wanted him to kiss me good night and I knew he wasn’t considering it, or he’d considered it and decided against it. We went up the stairs separately and he yelled for my mother to unlock the door—to prevent me, I suppose, from being able to waste time looking for my key. Time in which his cue would be a kiss.
When he left, his good-bye to my mother was as cordial as his good-bye to me. He clattered down the stairs like a man without a care in the world. I felt like a debt that had been paid off. He’d come back, apologized, behaved well, bought me a meal, and now he was done with that scene. Whew! Back home to better things.
I felt very tired that night, but I slept poorly. I kept trying to transfer my feelings from Nick, who didn’t want them, to Rod, who might.
It didn’t work.
Fifteen
THE SUMMER PASSED SLOWLY, but pleasantly enough. It was oppressively hot. We weren’t able to turn off the air conditioners at all, and my whole life was accompanied by hums and whirs of cold air.
Hospital work left me with mixed feelings. Once I took a bouquet in to a very old lady who thought I was her granddaughter. I held her curled arthritic hand and felt the thick tunnels of her veins tremble. I told her yes, I loved her, yes, Grandmother, everything will be all right, don’t worry. She fell asleep after a while and I really felt good, as if I’d done something really worthwhile. But other times the same sort of room and the same sort of patient would make me feel as grim and sterile and gray as the hospital corridors. All I knew for sure was that I did not want a career in medicine.
Rod and I talked these things over at length. We went out together a great deal, and it was a lot of fun. Rod was reliably funny and nice. But we weren’t going out on dates, we were friends. That was one topic we never discussed and I never could quite bring it up because I, for one, did not want the situation to change. I just wondered about it.