Nancy and Nick

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Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney

M
Y MOTHER COLLECTS KITCHEN
antiques. An investment, she says. Personally, I think an investment is something you’d be willing to sell, but nothing would induce Mother to part with any of her collection.

Last week we took one of our usual fourteen-hour Saturday excursions to the mountains, supposedly (as always) to admire the laurels and rhododendrons, but really to scour the Blue Ridge for any antique shops that might have popped up since our last trip there. Mother found a very early Jell-O box and a wire carpet beater with an entirely different shape from any of her other carpet beaters. She also spotted a very old Moravian cookie cutter shaped like a hand, but by then we were broke.

Also, I was reminding her at five-minute intervals that the remaining cash had to buy me a new pair of shoes, because my toes were becoming slowly deformed in my old pair. You could see that Mother was really torn between having a daughter with bent toes and owning that cookie cutter. I will be the only girl in town whose mother thinks of cookie cutters every time she looks at my feet.

When we get back home from our typical excursions we stagger into the apartment, trembling with driving fatigue. But this week, thank goodness, we went to Richmond, which is only an hour away. Sensible people go there quite often. Of course, sensible people are going to art museums or concerts or visiting civilized friends, while we are hitting the flea markets.

I am not a connoisseur of flea markets (connoisseurs presumably like the thing they’re expert in) but I have been to my share of them. I think it would be fair to say I have been to about one hundred times my share of them. They’re all alike. Booth after booth of garbage—old tacky junky stuff from a box somebody’s aunt meant to throw out in 1964 but forgot and stashed in a corner and now they want two years’ worth of your allowance for every scrap of it. When my mother sees a booth like that, her eyes kind of glaze over and her breath comes faster. She is totally transported with the belief that somewhere in that heap of junk is a genuine find.

She paws, strokes, taps, and fingers every object she sees. And at a flea market, that’s a lot of objects. I come along not to buy and not to browse, but to keep Mother from spending the tent money.

“Nancy! Pssssst!” Mother was giving me her frantic but coolly disguised as totally bored look. This meant she had found a find.

“Yes, Mother?” I strolled over. I am well-trained. We each picked up a piece of Depression glass and fondled it while Mother whispered in my ear. “Those books, Nancy—silly woman has those books marked for only two dollars apiece.”

Now if it were a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, I might be able to tell if it was underpriced. These books, however, were tired-looking Book-of-the-Month-Club editions of ten-year-old best sellers. “That’s why there are libraries, Mother,” I said. “So you can read that stuff free.”

“No, no, no,
no,
Nancy.” She was quite put out with me. Setting down the Depression glass, she lost all caution and led me to the book row. From between
The Robe
and
What’s New in Color Photography: 1963,
she drew out a slim worn volume that had once been pale blue with tiny flowers in a diagonal latticework. About a third of the way down the front of the cover was a large light rectangle with lacy corners. It contained the title in tangled complex script:
The Nearing River Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy Cookbook of 1915.

“Whee,” I said dutifully.

Mother, obviously wafted to kitchen antiques heaven, smiled dreamily.

When the century was young, women’s clubs and church groups loved to put together cookbooks. A fair number of these have survived and Mother feels it is her purpose here on earth to perpetuate the survival rate. We have, I believe, eighty-three ancient cookbooks. Mother reads them over and over, lovingly, the way other women read romances and gothics. Mother loves the recipes, the advertisements, the contributors’ names, the peculiar measurements, the illustrations, the little family histories that can sometimes be deduced from odd paragraphs here and there … but she detests actually cooking.
That,
at least, is a feeling with which I can identify.

While I maneuvered through the late-afternoon traffic, Mother sat in the passenger seat happily muttering to herself about Miss Mary H. Metcalf’s recipe for Boiled Cider Pie. It’s sort of like driving with the radio on. After a while you don’t notice it.

I am always the driver in our little duo. Mother hates to drive. She wants
me
to drive so
she
can look out the window and spot little hand-painted antique shop signs. It would be nice if she would spot them before I am past the turn, but she never does.

Mother thought the nicest thing in my life was my sixteenth birthday and the acquisition of a license. Everybody else’s parents were postponing the evil day, moaning about Freedom, the Misuse of; or Gas, the High Cost of; or Cars, the Privilege and Responsibility of. But my mother had me at the Motor Vehicle Bureau at dawn on my birthday, fee in hand. By noon of the day I got my temporary license, we had already parallel-parked in front of three antique shops with Mother joyously and—as it turned out—permanently ensconced in the passenger seat.

“Nancy, guess what?”

“Mother, wait till I’m out of this traffic circle, okay?”

“Nancy, just listen to this.”

“Mother, that furniture van is going to eat our bumper. Wait a minute.” I sometimes think that having children will come as no shock to me. I have always driven a car with an immature person babbling at me.

“Nancy, the woman who donated the recipe for cough syrup is named Nearing. Miss Elizabeth Priory Nearing.”

I avoided the furniture van, extricated myself from the traffic circle, honked at a dachshund deliberating whether to cross the street, and accelerated quickly to avoid a crash with a guy in an old Triumph who was jumping the light. “How
about
that?” I said.

But Mother went on, “I wonder … I wonder if we’re related.”

I hadn’t even paid attention to the name of that particular recipe donor.
Our
last name is Nearing. Father died years ago. Mother had never met any of his family and we’d never come across anybody else named Nearing. I said, “If she donated a recipe to a cookbook that was published in 1915, I very much doubt she is still with us.”

“She may have had descendants.”

“In 1915, Mother, people named Miss did not have descendants.”

“She could have been young in 1915. She could have gotten married later and had children.”

I’ve always envied people with families. You just know that at Thanksgiving they’re gathered around the dining room table, kissing their fourth cousins, embracing their aunts, and generally reveling in all those roots. If you had a big family there’d always be somebody to babysit for or to do your babysitting. There’d always be little kids’ stockings to make neat little presents for and somebody who could teach you to knit or take you to New York or organize a family soccer team or tell you the name of a good automobile mechanic they trust.

Mother and I have each other.

Fortunately I like Mother. It’s always good to like the person with whom you share a four-room apartment that is hung, strewn, and jammed with little antiques. I have a bolt on the inside of my bedroom door so the antiques can’t slither in during the night. Grow them on your side of the apartment, I tell Mother.

Mother tells me I should have a hobby myself. Everyone needs a hobby, she insists; hobbies make a person well-rounded.

My hobby, I tell her, is daydreaming about boys. Someday I plan to expand this hobby to include a real live boy. But this seems to require the consent of the boy, and so far this hasn’t happened.

My favorite study hall activity is thinking of interesting names for a boy to have. Then I see how Nancy Nearing would look linked with it. Oh Nancy, says my mother sadly, when she finds my little lists. Take up classical music or transmission repair. Something you can really benefit from.

I tell her I would truly benefit from having a boyfriend.

I drove the last several miles home from Richmond daydreaming that Miss Elizabeth Priory Nearing had married late in life and had a son. He came down with a terrible lung disease, but she saved him with her famous cough remedy. He grew up and also had a son and we would meet and the family would be complete once more. I almost went through a red light trying to work out how many generations I was going to need for this fantasy to work right.

“We’re home, Mother.” I slid the little car between the custom van with triangle windows that belongs to the two young men in the apartment above us and the gas-guzzling chrome-studded ship that belongs to the retired couple in the apartment below us.

“Nancy, you
must
read this cookbook,” said my mother, as if cookbook reading were on a par with good citizenship and voting.

“Sure,” I said. I locked the car. We ran up the stairs, something Mother often does fifteen times in a row. Exercise, she explains when people begin to regard her nervously. Keeps the old heart pumping. Or stops it, she gets told. Anyway, we ran up.

“Really, Nan,” she said again, “I want you to read this cookbook.”

“Mother, I have a term paper due on Lord Byron.” Cookbook reading is very very low on my list of things to read even when I’m not doing a paper on Lord Byron. Besides, cooking is too detestable even to think about. One of my life goals is to be rich enough to eat all my meals out.

“But, Nannie,” Mother said (and I knew she really wanted it, the way she was going through all my nicknames), “Nannie, this book is about you, you’ll love it.”

It was difficult to imagine how a cookbook compiled in 1915 could be about me. I shooed Mother out of my room and began concentrating on Lord Byron. I don’t know why English teachers think Byron is so interesting. Every single poem of his I’ve ever read is a complete dud. I wondered what the teacher would say if I handed him a paper that began, “For reasons not made clear in research texts, this conceited fellow—possibly through the aid of a good press agent—got his poems published.”

I probably would not get an A.

After I had written the word
dud
in fat curving letters and added little birds and flowers and leaves, like a medieval manuscript, I decided that maybe a cookbook about me would be more interesting than Lord Byron. I opened my bedroom door. “Mother,” I said (you never have to yell in an apartment as small as ours), “what makes you say that cookbook is about me?”

She was right there, putting the cookbook in my hand.

My desk chair is on casters. I love to propel myself around the bedroom. I set the cookbook on my lap and scooted back to my desk and shoved Lord Byron to the rear, where he belonged.

I began with the introduction. I don’t normally read introductions—they’re sure to be stuffy—but the word
Nearing,
my own last name, kept popping out at me.

It seemed that Nearing River was a town in North Carolina. The name had nothing to do with proximity to a body of water, although there was a river there. The town was founded by the Nearing family. Half the members of the Daughters of the Confederacy Chapter that compiled the cookbook seemed to be married to Nearings or sprung from Nearings or both. There was actually a biscuit recipe written by Anne Nearing Nearing.

I suddenly began thinking of the distant cousins and grandmothers with white hair and aprons and old cookie recipes that I’d daydreamed about during the drive home. (Though, in fact, all my friends’ grandmothers are young with dark hair and buy their cookies at the grocery.)