Nancy and Nick (8 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’d be Father’s cousins,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

I ran back to listen to the phone call.

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

“What’s happening?” I demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know?” said Mother.

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

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

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

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

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

I was extremely nervous.

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

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

“Fried pies.”

“I thought you hated to cook.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I need a place for books.”

“Use the library.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My
room!” I yelped.

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

“Except I don’t know what to keep,” she said. “I love everything.”

“So much for streamlined, shelfless privacy,” said Nick, grinning.

“It’s a common problem for antique dealers,” said his father to my mother. “Logically you should sell what’s worth the most and keep the junk, but of course what you want to keep are the real goodies.”

“I bought them for a rainy day,” said my mother, “and it’s definitely raining.” She didn’t sound glum, though, but as if she were having fun. Making a party out of selling her treasures had definitely been the right idea for her.

“Nancy?” said Nick. “Since I have to live and breathe antiques at the Richmond show for two solid days, I’d love to escape them tonight.”

“Sounds good to me. What would you like to do?”

Nick looked suddenly awkward and uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to make of it—unless he felt like escaping from me, too, and I had misinterpreted his remark. He said, “Well, I’m kind of broke, actually. So something like a movie would be, well—”

“You can’t be as broke as I am,” I said. “I can’t even get an ice cream cup at school anymore. Otherwise I’d treat you.”

“What kind of neighborhood is this? Walking type? After dark?”

It was definitely a walking-after-dark type neighborhood. Nick didn’t know it, but sauntering slowly, hand in hand with a special boy, in my own neighborhood, as the sun set, was a particular little tiny fantasy of mine. Holly says I have crummy fantasies: I should at least daydream about walking over the moors of Scotland, or something.

“You shouldn’t spend all this money on a brand-new car,” said Mr. Nearing. “Get a good buy in a used one and get a station wagon or a van this time. You need hauling room. Say, Eleanor, I love this cupboard. Flour sifter, knife holder, and meat grinder original and intact. Gosh. Wouldn’t you like to build a house just for your stuff, Eleanor? You know, with a huge old-fashioned kitchen for all your tables and cupboards and stoves and irons?”

Shuddering simultaneously, Nick and I left. “Look on the bright side,” said Nick. “By the time one of them figures out where to get the money to build such a house, we’ll be safely off at college.”

We walked six blocks to the city lake and sat down on a bench. The sun was setting in front of us and we stared into threads of gold and pink and silver. A jet trail whipped a diagonal line through the sunset.

It’s funny. Whenever I daydream about a date with a boy (not Nick) I always have us
doing
something. Going to the ice cream store, seeing a movie, driving the car, hitting the tennis ball, riding horses. I never include
talking
in the daydream, mostly because I can never imagine myself succeeding in this. What did one say to a boy, a breed I was the first to admit I did not understand?

But now, with this boy—we were doing nothing
but
talking, and it was wonderful. We traded stories and ideas and thoughts as easily as we had the other time.

Nick stretched out, half off the bench, balancing on the back of his neck and the base of his spine. It looked very uncomfortable to me but Nick claimed to be relaxed. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t a position to kiss in.

Still, I could study his face and think about kissing it.

And then the turkey repeated the only line from our first evening that I hadn’t liked. “Always nice to be talking to a cousin,” he said, yawning, as if I were blending in very nicely with the rest of that crowd. “I always find a cousin easier to talk to than a regular girl, know what I mean?”

“A
NN LANDERS HAD A
column about that,” said Ginger. “You can marry your cousin unless he’s a first cousin, and in some states you can even do that.”

“Ginger, will you get off this marriage thing? I just want a boyfriend.”

“Take mine, I’m done with him.”

“Listen, you couldn’t
sell
Keith,” said Holly. “You couldn’t even give Keith away.”

“He wasn’t that bad. I got out, at least.”

We had to admit that going out was more than Holly and I had achieved.

“When is the big kitchen sale coming up?” said Holly.

“I’m not, sure we’re having one after all. Nick’s father called up a few dealers in New York he knows and one of the big department stores is having a kitchenwares display and they want to take a look at Mother’s entire collection—to use as background.”

“You mean all her pretty things would be somebody’s purple plastic stacking mug set’s scenery?” said Ginger. “Tacky, very tacky.”

“Ginger, you’re the only person I know who talks like a tongue twister,” said Holly. “Are either of you going to the Final Fling?”