Nancy and Nick (2 page)

And then came the real surprise.

The very first recipe had been put in by a Nearing lady who said she had gotten it from her grandmother: Nelle Catherine Nearing.

I was so startled I nearly tore the page in half and ruined Mother’s investment.

Nelle Catherine Nearing is
my
name. Mother had wanted to call her new baby daughter Melissa, but Father, the father I can’t remember, had insisted on Nelle Catherine. And after all that arguing to settle on such an old-fashioned name, he called me nothing but Nancy.

It was weird to find my own name scattered throughout a cookbook dated 1915. As far as I could piece it together, there were no fewer than four donors whose names were Nelle Catherine. I read every recipe in the little volume. Susannah Nearing had a sweet potato pie recipe. Nelle Catherine Nearing Roberson submitted a recipe using cold potatoes, something apparently unheard of, because she had to explain that she really did mean cold potatoes; she called her novelty potato salad. Elizabeth Mollison and Jeannie Nearing Brown had cake recipes and Constance Nearing Fitzhugh gave out hints on how to use the new electric irons that were just coming out. Kate Firth was cooking with gas now, which was her bread-making secret, and Nancy Nearing MacDonald told how to dry spices in the attic.

Nancy Nearing MacDonald had something else to say, too.

Since 1748, when the Nearings first came to North Carolina, the women had been named Nelle Catherine and nicknamed N. C., for their initials. “Nancy” was not a name at all, but a quick way of saying “N. C.”

“Mother?” I said. I was actually breathing quickly and my hands were getting prickly. “Mother, do you really think this is me?”

“Nannie, how could it be anyone else? Your father insisted on naming you Nelle Catherine. But he would never call you anything but Nancy.”

“But, Mother, if we are related to these Nearings, we must have rafts of relatives. Didn’t Father ever say anything to you about them?”

“The only thing your father ever said to me about his past was that he had grown up in a small town and hated it. He never wanted to see another one again and wanted to make sure no wife or daughter of his was ever going to have to endure small town life.”

“Mother, you’ve failed. We are unquestionably living in a small town.”

“I think by comparison with wherever he came from, this is quite a city, Nan. I think small town means, you know, say, a thousand people. Or even less.”

“We have twice that many people in our high school.”

“Precisely. I wonder where Nearing River, North Carolina, is and how many people it has.”

We grabbed the atlas and flipped to North Carolina. We pored through the town listings till we found Nearing River. F-7 on the grids. We ran our fingers over the page and there was a teeny tiny open circle with a teeny tiny label that said
NEARING RIVER
.

Mother got out her mileage pen and ran it down the thready little secondary roads leading from our home to Nearing River. “Not bad. Only a hundred and seventy miles. We’ll go next Saturday.”

“Mother,” I said irritably, “one hundred seventy miles is not
only.
One hundred seventy miles is a
lot.”

“A town that produced a cookbook like that,” murmured Mother. “It must be a nice place.”

I began to get embarrassed just thinking about going there. What would Mother do? Cruise up and down the streets calling “Yoo-hoo, Nearings, here we are”? A woman who would run up and down the same stairs fifteen times in a row would do anything. I could just see us going into the banks and the post office demanding to meet all Nearings, especially those with the initials N. C.

“I wonder if Kate Firth’s gas stove is still around,” said Mother dreamily.

“Mother! We do not have room for an old stove in here!”

“Or Nancy Nearing MacDonald’s spice jars.” Her eyes took on a rhapsodic gleam. I have such a one-track mind. All I could wonder about was whether Nancy Nearing MacDonald had a handsome grandson. Or would he be a great-grandson?

I
T MAY HAVE BEEN
“only” one hundred seventy miles, but let me tell you, they were one hundred seventy hard, long, tough miles. “Mother, can’t you ever take a turn driving?” I said desperately.

“Nancy, love, I’m trying to read that sign. Does it say hamburgers or antiques?”

“If it says hamburgers I’ll stop.”

“Antiques, Nan, antiques! Stop, stop!”

I refused to stop. My fingers had been wrapped around the steering wheel for three hours, and except for food I wasn’t going to unwrap them until we tottered into Nearing River. Mother sat and sulked. I did battle with some wild teenagers in a dune buggy and an old lady in a Dodge Dart. After that I played footsie with a truck that was having a love affair with the dotted line in the middle of the road. When we finally hauled into Nearing River I had to sit and pant for a minute. Mother vaulted out right away, of course, and began scouring the village for antique shops.

When I had calmed down, I caught up to her. “For this I drove three and three-quarter hours?” I said, looking at the pitiful rundown main street that seemed to be all of Nearing River. Half the stores were unoccupied. The other half looked in dire need of customers. Probably it was like so many other downtown shopping areas: a shopping mall or two had ruined it.

“You should have made better time than that,” said Mother. “Why do you drive so slowly, anyway?”

There seemed no point in mentioning the antagonists I’d encountered on the road. I concentrated on trying to find the river, creek, stream, or even swamp for which Nearing River could have been named, but there was no evidence of one.

“Ah ha!” said Mother triumphantly.

I need hardly say this is the exclamation that prefaces entrance into yet another antique shop. I tried to look interested in case any handsome young man were in there, although it is my experience (and let me tell you, I am experienced with antique shops) that it is a rare teenage boy who hangs out at an antique shop.

As a matter of fact, we didn’t find
anybody
in the antique shop. It didn’t take too long to putter through on our own. It wasn’t Mother’s kind of shop at all, featuring chairs for eight hundred dollars and candlestands for five hundred. I went back out on the sidewalk to look for hamburger signs, since starvation was rapidly setting in and candlestands do nothing for me even at ten dollars. I knew Mother would be at least another fifteen minutes. The true hunter does not give up easily. The harder it is to find a find, the harder the true antique hunter hunts. No doubt Mother was poking into every spider-webbed corner, opening drawers that hadn’t worked in four generations.

She came out very dispiritedly. I handed her a damp washcloth. I always keep one in a plastic sandwich bag in my purse because she gets dusty hands, and if she has found something, without fail I am wearing a white shirt and she will be seized with the desire to hug me.

“No, huh?” I said. I was thinking how nice it was that there was nothing in Nearing River to buy. The place had something going for it after all. With all the money we had not spent on antiques, we could have an extra big lunch. And possibly a long and tasty afternoon snack. I don’t know why Mother accuses me of having my mind on boys all the time. I think of food a lot, too.

“Ah ha!” said my mother.

“Oh, no,” I groaned.

“Look at this, Nan!”

“I’m afraid to. What does it cost? Do we already have six of it?”

“Really, Nancy. You are so difficult. I can’t remember why I always bring you along on these trips.”

“You bring me along to drive.”

“Oh, That’s right. Well, anyway, look at that notice.”

I cringed. If it was an auction, we were sunk. I would have to pick Mother’s pocketbook if I wanted to have lunch the following week.

The notice was a faded old rectangle of poster-board with a photograph of something indistinguishable but square. It read, “The Historical Society of Nearing River is sponsoring a tour of the Nearing River House.”

“What do they want for that piece of paper?” I said. “A hundred dollars?”

“Ding-a-ling. The paper isn’t for sale.”

“One of a kind, huh? Worth millions.”

“Nancy,” she said irritably, “you know perfectly well that notice is not an antique. It’s a recent advertisement of an open house.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“The paper is sunbaked, that’s all. Come on, let’s go. According to the map there, it’s just down the road and to the right and then to the left and you circle a little bit and it’s on the right.”

“What is?”

“The Nearing River House. Come on. We might miss the tour.”

“Mother!
That tour was obviously years ago. The owners of this shop are so sloppy they never got around to removing the notice.”

“It says Saturdays. See? ‘Tours on Saturdays.’”

I moaned from lack of nourishment.

“And even if they aren’t giving tours the house is still there and we can poke around,” she said, bounding into the car.

I detest touring historical houses. How many rope beds and bullet-riddled walls can a person admire? The tour guides are either plump old ladies, who tell you six hundred more things about the original owner of the house than you ever wanted to know, or else bored skinny Junior League volunteers, who can’t tell you anything. Besides, you can’t touch and Mother does anyway. Somebody is always scolding her and it embarrasses me so much I have to leave the tour and pretend what I like best is gardens.

“Let’s have lunch,” I said. “My stomach will growl through the whole tour.”

“It’s only eleven-thirty. Come on. We’ll eat later.”

My friends argue quite successfully with their parents. Holly is especially good at it. Her father says: No, Never, Certainly Not! And fifteen minutes later Holly is back on the phone saying: It’s fine with them, Nan. Me, I always end up sighing and agreeing.

I studied the little map, verified the left and right turns and drove my mother to the historical house. Maybe I’d get lucky and they’d have a concession. Or at least a vending machine.

We went down a long drive bordered by the kind of fence that is stacked at angles and always looks as if it’s falling down, even when the maintenance staff just fixed it yesterday. There was Nearing River House: your typical eighteenth-century Southern farmhouse. If you’ve toured one, you’ve toured them all. One room deep and two rooms wide, the lower floor divided by a wide porch-hall combination. Two bedrooms upstairs: one for parents and their current infant, the other for older children and for spinning and weaving. Outdoors: the kitchen, smokehouse, barn, and so forth. “You go in,” I said to Mother, noting without interest that tours hadn’t ended years ago after all and were in fact starting up again that moment. “I’ll just sit here and admire the lilies.”

“Irises,” she said. “Try to be observant.”

“Whatever.”

“Nancy, I cannot abide it when you display such a bad attitude. Now get up this minute and come with me. It’s open. I can see the tour guide on the porch. Nice long hair she has, too—see it shine in the sun? We’ll ask her if she knows any Nearings.”

“I’ll go with you on the tour if you promise
not
to ask if she knows any Nearings.”

“But, Nancy, that’s why we drove down here. To find the other N. C. Nearings.”

“Mother, I’ll be too embarrassed. Don’t ask anybody anything, promise?”

“Certainly not. I’ll ask what I please. Now march.”

Other people whose mothers address them like kindergartners would rightly refuse to cooperate. Mother looks and sounds daydreamy, but she definitely falls into your stereotyped Southern picture of the iron hand under the velvet glove. I seem to be velvet through and through.

Someday, I told myself, trailing after Mother past the irises and up onto the narrow porch, I am going to stand up to Mother. She is not right all the time. Sometimes I am right.

I walked up the steps, and there in the doorway the girl tour guide with the nice shiny long hair turned out to be a boy tour guide with nice shiny long hair.

Thank goodness I hadn’t chosen this particular occasion to start my rebellion. The guide was the best-looking boy I had ever seen. He wore a loose white muslin shirt, dark baggy pants (breeches, I guess), old scuffed boots, and a cotton scarf at his neck. And his long, thick, honey-colored hair was tied in a Revolutionary War type ponytail with a leather thong.

And immediately I was embarrassed.

Whenever I see a good-looking boy I am impressed first and embarrassed second. I am never quite sure what embarrasses me, but I start blushing as if I had written down a dozen wild fantasies about him in a diary and he had just read it.

I couldn’t even look at Mother to see what her reaction was to the long hair that belonged to a male. I couldn’t take my eyes off the boy. He was my age, or a little older, and he was perfect.

For a moment I daydreamed that when he looked at me he would forget his speech about the Nearing River House, fall immediately in love with me, and stagger toward me. We would shock the bridge club (also touring the house) by going off together behind the English box shrub nestled beside the porch.

The boy had clearly given enough tours to be able to lead them in his sleep. “This,” he said, “is called a dogtrot. It is the central hall and also a sleeping porch, with doors open at both ends, so that in the hot humid summers every possible breeze would be captured.” He had the kind of trained voice that sounds so much like a tape you wonder why they don’t just
use
a tape, and let you poke a button in each room. “The dogtrot also had safety uses, separating the fireplaces in the hope that if the house ever did catch fire it would be easier to put out.” But in his case I could understand why they didn’t use a tape. If you were bored by the fine fanlight over the front door, you could feast your eyes on the tour guide.

I feasted my eyes.

When he finally did look my way he didn’t react in the slightest. He didn’t cry out, ask me for a date, or even drop a syllable of his talk. I was so embarrassed about pretending he would that I blushed anyway. “Originally,” he said, “the house faced east.” His voice droned along. I wondered if other tours, other groups, were less boring to him. If sometimes a girl appeared on the tour who could put a spark in his boxed voice. “Therefore the door you came in was the back door when it was built and the finer molding and elaborate interior detail is on what is now the rear.”