Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
Nanette has forgotten all about Sandra Tackett, which seems almost impossible given the circumstances, but true nonetheless. In the post-Alex confusion, she doesn’t forget that Sandra Tackett exists; she just forgets that they have given her a copy of The Bubblegum Reaper and that Sandra has probably finished reading it by now, unless she is a terribly slow turner of pages. Maybe Nanette forgot that there is still a mystery to solve. She suddenly wonders what Sandra thinks of Booker’s novel and if the old classmate of Nigel’s is able to identify the real-life inspirations for the main characters. Does she know for whom Booker wrote T.B.R.? It seems to matter a lot again, all of a sudden, sitting here with Oliver. Like finding a bread crumb in the woods after months of wandering lost and suddenly remembering that bread crumbs can lead one out of the woods to safety, if only in fairy tales. Nanette is beginning to think that her life is a fairy tale—that fairy tales are much more real than we originally suspect when we first read them as children.
“Nanette hasn’t even really thought about Sandra Tackett for a while,” Nanette says. “But now that you mention her, Nanette should probably drop in on—”
“We could go this afternoon.”
“No car.”
“I have a bike. You have a bike. And we have legs to pedal!”
There is no end to this kid’s optimism, Nanette thinks, and wonders if that is a good or bad fact.
Wild optimism puts a big target on your forehead.
Oliver and Nanette ride their bikes through the snow and ice, which proves to be slowgoing and very cold, but somehow they manage to reach Sandra Tackett’s home. Their pants are soaked with slush, and Nanette’s socks are wet, too. When she sees herself reflected in the glass of the storm door, her lips are blue.
They ring the doorbell and are shocked when Booker—wearing nothing but an undershirt and boxers—opens Sandra’s front door and then immediately slams it in their faces.
“Was that who I think it was?” Oliver says, because he has never officially met Nigel Wrigley Booker, but has seen pictures of the faux-reclusive fiction writer.
“Um, yeah,” Nanette says, smiling ear to ear. “It most definitely was. And he apparently wasn’t wearing clothes, which is very interesting.”
“Does his not wearing clothes mean that he is getting it on with Sandra Tackett?” Oliver asks.
“Most likely—yes,” Nanette says.
After the doorbell is rung five or so times, Sandra appears wearing a silk Japanese-looking bathrobe—a kimono, maybe?—and says, “Hello, children, I’m afraid you’ve caught me at an inconvenient time. Where have you been for so long? I finished the book many weeks ago, but you never came back and, well, your timing today honestly couldn’t be worse. I’m sorry, but I simply cannot speak now.”
“Booker answered just a second ago, and he was in his underwear,” Nanette says. For some reason she remembers a fitting expression from Shakespeare’s Othello, which she just read in her senior literature class. Her rather boring and average teacher, Mr. Sherman, did not offer an explanation when they read it aloud, and so the joke went over most of her classmates’ heads, but Nanette had laughed and jotted it down in her notebook for future use. “Are you two perhaps ‘making the beast with two backs’?”
“What’s the beast with two backs?” Oliver asks.
Nanette smiles as she watches Sandra Tackett squirm in her kimono.
“Oh my,” Sandra says. “Would you children like to return tomorrow afternoon for tea and cookies? Tomorrow would be so much better for me. Yes, it would.”
“Sure,” Oliver and Nanette say in unison.
“Very well, then. Four o’clock?” Sandra Tackett says.
“We’ll be here,” says Oliver.
“Tell Booker hi,” Nanette says, “and that Nanette O’Hare misses him a lot.”
Sandra nods once before she shuts the door.
As Nanette and Oliver pedal through the slush and snow, Oliver says, “I think I just figured out what the beast with two backs is. If I’m right, I really don’t want to think about Booker and Sandra making it.”
“You’re right,” Nanette says.
They have to stop pedaling and put both feet on the ground because neither of them can stop laughing.
“I wish Alex could have been there,” Oliver says.
“He could have been,” Nanette says coldly. “He chose not to be.”
Oliver stops laughing and says, “So you’re breaking up with him?”
“How can you break up with someone who is no longer in your life? He abandoned us.”
They pedal on, and when they climb through Oliver’s bedroom window, his mother is there waiting.
“I was worried! You could have left a note, you know,” she says to Oliver. To Nanette, she says, “Didn’t think we were going to see you again. Have you heard from Alex?”
“No,” Nanette says. “Maybe he’s not such a saint after all.”
“He got those boys to stop picking on Oliver.”
Nanette pedals home, plays Scrabble with her parents, ghost-floats through another school day, pedals to Oliver’s. They both ride bikes much easier through the newly plowed streets, and then they wait for Nanette’s iPhone to read 3:59, at which point they knock on Sandra’s door.
“Hello!” she says, fully dressed and much too enthusiastically. “Come in!”
Nanette and Oliver follow Sandra inside through a living room with a grandfather clock and couches and a glass coffee table and into what looks like a greenhouse but is really a kitchen, the walls of which are made entirely of windows. The red-orange light from the setting sun pours in from all angles. Nanette and Oliver sit down at the breakfast bar, and Sandra serves them orange tea with cream and lemon-drop cookies. Nanette is reminded of eating cookies with Mr. Graves, which makes her nostalgic and temporarily melancholy.
“I want to thank you for giving me a copy of The Bubblegum Reaper,” Sandra says. “Just as soon as I finished it, I looked up Nigel in the phone book, and after a very long phone conversation that allowed us both to reminisce, well, we started seeing each other. I can’t really explain what happened other than to say we fell head over heels in love!”
“Really?” Nanette says.
“It’s like I’m a schoolgirl again!”
“So he wrote the book for you?” Oliver says. “You were the twin he was referring to in the novel? Wrigley was in love with Stella and not Lena?”
“Well,” Sandra says, “it’s not quite that simple. If you’re trying to find out the real-life circumstances that led to Nigel’s writing The Bubblegum Reaper, I’m afraid the whole twins business is merely a red herring. Albeit a weird tribute. Unless Booker is just flattering me, those characters are indeed inspired by my late sister, Louise, and me. He admitted it. Although neither my sister nor I talked to turtles in the woods, and by his own admission, Booker never asked either of us to the prom.”
Oliver says, “You didn’t confess all your problems to a turtle by the creek? Booker really didn’t ask you to go to the prom?”
“No,” Sandra says. “Those things never happened.”
“How do you know for certain that it wasn’t your sister who did those things?”
“Booker told me,” Sandra says. “And I knew my sister better than anyone. She was much less likely to fall for a boy like Nigel. Believe me. She went to the prom with the captain of the football team. The quarterback. She was the quintessential popular girl until the day she died. If one of us were going to talk to turtles in the woods, it would have definitely been me. I wish it were me and that Nigel had found me back then. I was desperate to have some sort of real, meaningful conversation with a boy when I was in high school.”
“So for whom was the book written?” Nanette says. “And why was it dedicated to the archery pit?”
“I don’t know,” Sandra answers.
“How can you not know?” Oliver says.
“Because I never spoke with Nigel even once when we were in h
“How can you just accept not knowing?” Nanette says. “Don’t you want to know? Especially now that Booker and you are dating? How can you just let a big part of his life remain a mystery?”
“One of the more pleasant things about getting older is that you stop wanting to know everything. When my sister and then my husband died, I think that’s when it really sank in—we don’t have a lot of time here on this planet. When your time has almost run out, you just try to enjoy whatever you can. To the world, he presents himself as such a grumpy old fool, but really Nigel’s a big softie. A true teddy bear. I haven’t had this much fun since I was a girl. Who would have ever believed that I’d end up dating the kid who didn’t talk to anyone in high school? Think of the most unlikely person in your class now, and then picture dating them almost fifty years later. Uncanny. And it’s all because you kids dreamed up some cockamamie theory and brought me a photocopy of The Bubblegum Reaper.”
“Is Booker ever going to speak with Nanette again?” Nanette asks.
Sandra pours more tea. “May I ask why you’re speaking in third person?”
“Her therapist is making her,” Oliver explains.
“Actually, Nanette chooses to speak in third person. Her therapist merely recommended it.”
“Yeah, that,” Oliver says.
“So will Booker ever forgive Nanette?” Nanette asks.
“Oh, you let your aunt Sandra handle all that.”
Nanette finds Sandra’s quick use of the word aunt creepy, but she must admit that it thrills her a little bit, thinking about talking with Booker again, and having another family in addition to the one she inherited—almost like a backup family.
As they pedal home, Oliver says, “So we didn’t learn jack crap.”
“The lemon-drop cookies were good, though,” Nanette says.
“Who knew that I liked orange tea with cream?” Oliver says.
“Oliver?”
“Yes?”
“Would you like to be Nanette’s friend?”
“Weren’t we already friends?”
“Yes. Nanette just wants to make it official.”
“Okay, then.”
“So Nanette and Oliver are official friends. Starting… now!”
“I considered you an official friend the moment you climbed through my window.”
The kid’s words stun Nanette, mostly because he means them. Is that what the pretty boys were trying to kill in Oliver? His ability to be indiscriminately kind to everyone he meets?
“Don’t ever change, Oliver, because you’re going to be an amazing boyfriend for someone someday when you grow up. Whoever ends up with you is going to be very lucky and loved and content.”
“What?” the kid says.
“Do you think Nanette will ever hear from Alex again?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s Alex.”
“He is.”
“But you don’t love him anymore? You no longer want to date him?”
“Nanette doesn’t know.”
“Okay. I’m glad that we’re hanging out again.”
“Yeah, Nanette is happy about that, too.”
Nanette watches Oliver climb back into his bedroom through the window, and then she pedals home in time for that night’s Scrabble game, which she intentionally loses—setting her parents up again and again for the triple-and double-word scores—in an effort to boost their egos. She imagines that healthy egos are aphrodisiacs and hopes that her parents also begin to make the beast with two backs again on a regular basis—that they might even stay married when Nanette’s crisis is over and she eventually moves out of her parents’ home. She would like them to grow old together, as platitude-ish as that sounds.
Nanette cannot sleep.
She can’t stop thinking about Booker.
For the first time, as she tosses and turns, she realizes that she is very angry—mad at her favorite author for abandoning her when she didn’t do anything wrong.
Mad at him for putting her romance with Alex in motion and then washing his hands clean of Nanette when it blew up in her face.
The next morning, she skips school and goes to Booker’s.
Booker opens the door when Nanette knocks, and she’s glad to find him fully clothed this time.
He says, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“School is merely a social construct. Nanette says, fuck it.”
“Why are you cursing? And, perhaps more important, why are you speaking in the third person?”
“Nanette’s therapist, June, theorizes that first-person Nanette is far too accommodating.”
“So you’re in therapy now? Was it my book that drove you to a psychologist? Please don’t tell me that my book did that. I’m not taking responsibility for you, too.”
Nanette thinks about how her reading The Bubblegum Reaper actually was the catalyst—what put her in the rocket ship headed to wherever she is now, but she knows better than to say that to neurotic Booker, and so, taking a page out of first-person Nanette’s playbook, she instead says, “Don’t flatter yourself, old man.”
Booker looks relieved as he says, “Come in.”
Nanette follows him into the living room.
“So,” Booker says.
“So,” Nanette answers.
“A game of Scrabble perhaps? To break the ice?”
Nanette explains that she plays with her parents now. She’s sort of maxed out on Scrabble.
“I’m not sure I like Nanette in the third person.”
“Get used to it.”
“She’s much more sassy, apparently.”
“And openly sad.”
“Oh.”
“Are you in love or something? With Sandra Tackett?”
“As unbelievable as it sounds, I believe I very well may be.”
“Yeah, Nanette thought she was in love, too.”
Booker shifts his weight and says, “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that my effort to set you up with Alex led to catastrophe for you and romance for me. I’m so very happy and you are clearly miserable. What do you make of that? I feel there must be a moral, but I cannot seem to figure out what it might be.”
Nanette shrugs.
“I’m sorry that things with Alex didn’t work out,” Booker says. “Have you heard from him?”
Nanette says she hasn’t and now she’s no longer sure she wants to.
Booker says he feels the same way.
“So are Nanette and Booker quitting Alex?” Nanette says, just to be a bitch.
Booker frowns and says, “Why do you think people do bad things after they read my novel?”
“Are we allowed to talk about it now?”
“Just this once.”
Nanette doesn’t know. She says, “Maybe because it upsets the balance. It makes you think and makes you mad. Challenges you. Gives you the illusion of permission for once to be on the outside who you really are on the inside all the time. It’s revolutionary, and so, in the hands of rebels, it creates action.”
“And some people should never take a stand. Some people shouldn’t let what’s inside escape into the world. Is that what you’re saying?”
Nanette says she doesn’t know about that. She’s glad that Booker is happy. That he found Sandra and is getting laid.
“Excuse me?” Booker says, but laughs.
“You deserve to get lucky, Booker. Nanette is happy for you.”
“I’m sorry I pushed you into therapy.”
“
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but your talking in third person is positively unnerving. It’s like a punishment for the rest of the world.”
Nanette shrugs.
Unnerving.
Maybe that’s a fringe benefit.
Nanette is more comfortable in third person.
And maybe she wants to punish the world.
“Well, Ms. Third-Person O’Hare, I suppose I’ll have to get used to it. Doctor’s orders.”
And just like that, Booker and Nanette are friends again. It is the first time she ever recovered a friend after having a falling-out. Shannon and the rest of the soccer team had lost their first playoff game back in November, and based on the dirty looks they sent Nanette’s way the week after, she had become the scapegoat for their failure. She didn’t really mind, because she couldn’t care less about soccer records, but it also felt as if a door had officially closed, especially when it came to Shannon, who so desperately wanted to please their coach by becoming a girls’ soccer champion.
22
Confident and Brash and Defiant
June brings up the expression “a reason, a season, or a lifetime” in their last therapy session before Christmas, and Nanette says, “Booker quotes that in The Bubblegum Reaper. ‘People enter our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.’”
“I know, but he didn’t coin the phrase. It’s a cliché,” June says. “And sayings become clichés mostly because they are true. People tend to repeat what they feel is real—authentic.”
“Will Nanette ever find a lifetime person?”
“Maybe,” June says. “We all hope for that.”
“Do you have one?”
“Thought I did once,” June says. “Ended in divorce a few years ago.”
“So love didn’t win in the end.”
“Love is still out there doing her thing. I’m not dead yet, after all. And neither are you.”
“You just used the pronoun her. Do you think love is a woman?” Nanette asks.
“What do you think?”
“Never thought about it before.”
“I tend to think of love as a woman. The male version—Cupid, for instance—always seems so dumb to me. Shooting arrows like love is a weapon. Although Pat Benatar is a woman and she sang ‘Love Is a Battlefield,’ so maybe that theory is stupid. Because I love Pat Benatar.”