Knowing Nancy
How well do you think you know your friends?
Nancy invited me into her life, and for a year or so we were close. At first, I found her full of surprises―our backgrounds and personalities were so different―but by the time we parted, I thought I knew her well. When I play back the scenes that comprise my memory of Nancy, I see no clue to what was coming. In the end, she astonished me.
We met at work. It was the early 1980s, and Nancy had just been hired as the computer training manager for a large financial services firm. She was an unusual presence in the computer industry, which was dominated at that time by stolid marketing men and thin, intense engineers. Nancy was pretty, with a round face like a china doll and natural blonde hair in a sculptured page boy. Her eyes were luminous. Men called them her “big baby blues.” She wore pastel suits and her grandmother’s locket on a gold chain around her neck.
I was an outside consultant, hired to guide and support Nancy. My first sight of her was from the doorway of a back room crammed with boxes of equipment. She led me through the chaos and pushed aside a coil of Ethernet cables on her desk to make room for my briefcase. “Please excuse the mess,” she said. “They just moved me in here yesterday.”
Nancy seemed remarkably calm for someone who had been hired to transition 300 partners and staff onto a new computer system, a prospect which most of those people regarded with fear and loathing. She had no experience as a computer training manager, but then almost no one did. I had held the title, but hadn’t developed a training program on the scale― let alone in the disturbed hive of financial analysts―that faced Nancy now. I was nervous.
The training plan I had finished with some pride the night before looked absurdly elaborate and optimistic when I presented it to Nancy. She asked few questions during our walk-through. “This will be very helpful,” she said, putting my fifteen pages in a folder at the top of a stack of papers. She referred to it briefly in our next meeting, but we didn’t discuss it again.
Nancy was a doer. What she seemed to need most from me was approval of what she was doing. “I’m having those new overhead computer projectors installed in the classrooms,” I remember her saying over her shoulder as she erased a whiteboard. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”Yes, it was.
As far as I could tell, Nancy’s staff liked working for her. The computer rooms, atmospherically controlled to keep the machines from overheating, reminded me of a pleasant aquarium where fish nosed about busily and buoyantly. Nancy would pass through, often unnoticed, sometimes drawing a question or two in her wake. One day, I watched her with a new trainer. “Marlene told me you helped her finally understand macros,” she told the young woman. Then, turning to me, “Marlene is the managing partner’s secretary. She has been one of our biggest challenges.” The trainer beamed and darted off to get ready for her next class.
As her later promotion showed, Nancy’s employers were also pleased with her.
“How did you find this place?” I asked. It was our first dinner out together. Nancy had suggested the restaurant―a haven with its white linen tablecloths, oil candles and fresh flowers in tiny vases―where we were to become regulars. “Oh,” she grinned. “I had a date here with a very sweet man. But he’s much too young for me.”
I was startled.And flattered. We had been colleagues up to this point. Suddenly we were friends.
“Okay,” I said, “now you have to tell me how old you are.”
She was thirty-seven. I protested that she couldn’t possibly be that old. And besides, thirty-seven wasn’t old, not next to my forty-seven years. And besides that, if the younger man was taken with her… Why not?
“No really,” she said, “it can’t go on. He’s only a few years older than my son. But he’s just so sweet to me and looks so handsome in his uniform.”
I left the inviting topic of the uniformed younger man for later. “You’re a mother!” Nancy looked not just too young but too immaculate for maternity. Like a new engine purring before grit and rust get into the works. “I’ve got kids, too,” I said, “but it sounds like your son is older than my boys. How is that possible?”
It turned out that Nancy was divorced, like me. Working her way back from destitution, like me. “Here’s to the single working mother,” I said, raising my glass of white wine. We clinked.
But Nancy’s divorce story was not like mine. I grew up in the suburbs, got an excellent education, and ran away from it all with a macrobiotic who lived on a small boat and built door frames for a living. As the song went, I was the lady, he was the carpenter. It didn’t work.I ended up hitting him with a bunch of celery before I moved out.
Nancy grew up in a hick town, the daughter of working class parents. During her senior year of high school, she got pregnant, married her boyfriend, Tony, and dropped out to have the baby. They named the baby Frank, after Tony’s hero, Frank Sinatra. Tony joined the town’s police force. He kept his gun under his pillow. When Nancy went back to school at night, Tony became convinced she was cheating on him. He beat her, held his gun to her head. “It was scary. Awful. But it was a long time ago,” Nancy said.
What followed, when she went to Legal Aid and filed for divorce, was almost worse, though she no longer feared Tony’s rages. “I knew he couldn’t hurt me then because it would make him look bad on the force,” she explained. “But everyone in town was on his side.” Her own parents sided with Tony, first when he fought the divorce, and then in court, when he accused Nancy of adultery and laid claim to the child. Her parents ended up getting custody of Frank.
Nancy fled to the nearest city. She waitressed, took computer classes, got her first proper job doing computer work for an accounting office. When she discovered she loved teaching other people in the office how to use computers, she became a computer trainer.
Until Frank turned sixteen, Nancy only saw him on weekends at her parents’ house. At sixteen, he got to choose his home, and he lived with Nancy—until he got married.
“I’m a grandmother,” Nancy cooed.
“What?”
Rosemary Sedgwick, 2016
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