When she was hardly older than Nathan was now, Eleanor had spent two triumphant years on the L.P.G.A. tour; then she’d fallen from a horse and broken her left elbow. Nathan had seen her trophies once, in a glass cabinet up in Eleanor and Major Ray’s bedroom. Her real-estate company went down under a hailstorm of lawsuits and threats of criminal prosecution, which Nathan and his mother had read about in the Huxley New Idea and even, eventually, in The Washington Post. Cayenne, her New Orleans — style restaurant in Huxley Mall, closed after only a few months. And there had been a pale little baby, a redhead named Sullivan, who lived so briefly that Ricky, Nathan’s little brother, did not even remember him.
All these tales of misfortune, all the melancholy under Eleanor’s eyes and around her mouth, had the surprising — to Nathan — effect of causing him to fall helplessly in love. It began one August when, after a hiatus of several years, he resumed his ancient habit of visiting the Parnells’ house every day, for soft drinks and conversation with Eleanor. He was driven to her, at first, simply by loneliness and by the sadness of boredom. Ricky was gone — he had gone to live in Boston with their father the previous spring — and during the tedious, spectacular afternoons of August the house was distressingly empty. All month, Mrs. Shapiro, who was a nurse, had to work late on the ward, so Nathan ate dinner with his friend Edward St. John and Edward’s bohemian family more often than usual, and he was glad to spend the last afternoons of the summer down the street at the Parnells’. Major Ray — Major Raymond Parnell, of Galveston, Texas — did not get home from the base until seven o’clock, and Nathan would sit in the kitchen until Major Ray’s boisterous arrival, watching Eleanor smoke cigarettes and squeeze lemons into her diet Coke, of which she drank sixty ounces a day — enough, as Major Ray often declared, to reanimate a dead body. She would ask Nathan for his opinions on hair styles, decorating, ecology, religion, and music, and he would offer them only after a good deal of consideration, in an airy, humorous, pedantic tone of voice, which he borrowed, without knowing it, from his father. Eleanor had treated him without condescension when he was a little boy, and she now listened to him with an intentness that was both respectful and amused, as though she half expected him to tell her something new.
Nathan’s love for Eleanor followed hard on the heels of his long-awaited and disastrous growth spurt, and it wrenched him every bit as much, until his chest ached from the sudden and irregular expansion of his feelings. In the mirror the sight of his heavy-rimmed eyeglasses and unfortunate complexion; of the new, irregular largeness of his body, of his suddenly big — his fat — stomach, would send him off on giddy binges of anxiety. He ate sweet snacks and slept badly and jumped at loud sounds. The sight of Eleanor’s red Alfa Romeo — the sight of any red car — disturbed him. He was filled with deep compassion for animals and children, in particular for Nickel Boy, the Parnells’ dog, a sensitive, courtly old beagle. In fact, Nathan spoke at length to Nickel Boy about his feelings for Eleanor, even though he knew that talking to a dog was not really talking but, as he had read in Psychology Today, simply making a lot of comforting sounds in order to secrete some enzyme that would lower his own blood pressure and slow his pulse.
Every night before he switched off the lamp, and every morning when he awoke, he took out the collection of photographs of Eleanor Parnell he had pilfered from his mother’s album and looked deeply into each of them, trying to speak to Eleanor with the telepathy of love. In his freshman-English class they arrived at the writing of poetry, and Nathan, startled into action, composed haiku, limericks, odes, and cinquains to Eleanor, as well as an acrostic sonnet, the first letters of whose lines daringly spelled out E-L-E-A-N-O-R P-A-R-N-E-L–L; whenever, in these poems, he referred to her directly, he called her Jennifer — like “Eleanor” a dactyl.
On the Saturday before the start of his freshman year of high school, as Nathan wandered home through the woods from Edward’s house, trying to walk erect, he saw Eleanor under the tulip poplars, in a battered pith helmet, wildly shooting down wasps’ nests with the pistol nozzle of a garden hose. Great golden, malevolent wasps had been something of a problem all summer, but after all the rain in July they proliferated and flew into the houses at suppertime.
“Is it working?” called Nathan, trotting toward her. One of the things he loved about Eleanor was her inventiveness, however doomed.
“Oh, no,” Eleanor said. As soon as she glimpsed Nathan she began to laugh, and the stream of water shivered and fell to the ground. Her laugh, which was the first thing Nathan remembered noticing about Eleanor, had always been odd — raucous and dark, like a cartoon magpie’s or spider’s — but lately it had come for Nathan to be invested with the darkness of sex and the raucousness of having survived misfortune. She had been in the sun too long, and her face was bright red. “No one was supposed to see me doing this. Do you think this is a bad idea? They look pretty pissed off. Major Ray thought this wasn’t a good idea.” Major Ray did not appreciate Eleanor.
“I disagree,” said Nathan, gazing up at the treetops, where the wasps had hung their cities of paper. A dense golden cloud of wasps wavered around them. “There’s a lot less of them now.”
“Do you think so?” said Eleanor. She took off her hat and stared upward. Her bangs clung to her damp, sunburned forehead.
“Yes,” said Nathan. “I guess you drowned them. Or maybe the impact kills them. Of the water.” The cloud of wasps widened and descended. “Uh, Eleanor. Could I — Maybe I should try it.”
“All right,” said Eleanor. She handed him the squirting, hissing nozzle and then, solemnly, the pith helmet, all the while keeping an eye on the insects and biting her lip. Almost immediately Nathan got the feeling that a blanket, or a net, was about to fall on him. Eleanor jumped backward with a cry, and Nathan was left to fight off the wasps with his lunatic weapon, which he did for fifteen valiant seconds. Then he ran, with Eleanor behind him. He tore around the front of the Parnells’ house, crossed the front lawn, and ran out onto Les Adieux Circle. At the center of the cul-de-sac lay a round patch of grass, planted with a single, frail oak tree. No one on the street knew who was supposed to mow this island and so it generally went unmown, and, according to the local children’s legend, it harbored a family of field rats. He and Eleanor fell into the weeds, and Nathan’s eyeglasses, which were photosensitive and had darkened in the afternoon sunshine, flew from his face. Dazzled, frightened, he rolled laughing in her rosy arms, and they embraced like a couple of fortunate castaways. Then, his heart pounding, he scrambled to his knees and sought the comforting weight, the protection of his glasses.
Of the four stings that Nathan received, three were on his thigh and one was on his shoulder. Eleanor took him into the house, up the stairs, and into the bedroom, where blue laundry lay folded on the big bed and where Eleanor’s gold trophies, like so many miniature Mormon temples, sat shining dimly in their cabinet. Then she led him into the bathroom, lowered the lid onto the toilet, and sat him down.
“Roll up your cutoffs, Nathan,” she said. She found a box of baking soda and mixed a little with some tap water in the plastic bathroom cup. Nathan pulled upward on the frazzled leg of his shorts and tried to keep from crying. She knelt beside him to daub his pale, fat, blistered thigh. Nathan flinched, but the paste was cool, and he was overcome with gratitude. He didn’t know what to do, and so he stared at the parting of her hair, at Eleanor’s miraculous scalp, white and fine as polished wood.