Nellcott is My Darling by Golda Fried

Saturday, April 30, 2005 (Page D8)
--by Wendy Banks

When shy, virginal Alice tells her friend Walker about the crush she has on a guy in her children's lit class, he advises her to get some sexy underwear. So Alice sits down in her tiny dorm room and cuts the bows off the 10 pairs of cotton panties that her mom bought her in bulk. It's funny because it's true. For anyone who was ever a raw, vulnerable, clueless teenager, it's even hilarious. Golda Fried has a knack for capturing the awkwardness of youth, and Nellcott is My Darling is full of painfully accurate scenes like this.

Set in the same early nineties, student-swarmed Montreal as Fried's 1998 short-story collection, Darkness then a Blown Kiss, Nellcott chronicles Alice's freshman year at McGill. She's overwhelmed by her own inexperience; everything she does -- laundry, smoking, watching grown-up movies, shopping for herself -- is brand new. "She felt like she was wearing diapers," Fried writes. "She felt like a baby bird cracking through the egg." She's talking about Alice's first rock concert in high school, but it could apply to any scene in the book.

Everyone is more sophisticated than Alice. She rooms next door to Allegra, a fascinating artist who wears Raspberry Bruise lipstick and takes Alice shopping at Value Village. Rally, the events co-ordinator at the film club Alice joins, is sexually experienced and knows how to make her own macaroni salad, "like it was nothing."

Only Bethany, Alice's friend from home, is more naive, but she's almost too uncool to count: "Bethany and her friends were these girls who taped TV shows and had giggly conversations, hands over their mouths." They contemplate spring-break vacations in Cancun; so much for them. Alice's parents are no help at all, grilling her on boyfriends and urging her to study; while Alice frets about upsetting them, they replace her with a dog.

So Alice is left to figure things out on her own. Her unbearable innocence and desire for an identity are bound up in an angsty mass with her burdensome virginity. When she meets Nellcott, an eyeliner-wearing Goth boy with a sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll reputation, her confusion only increases.

They fall into a complicated relationship that pivots on her sexual naiveté. He's smitten, dramatic, willing to wait; she's got reservations that have partly to do with timidity, and partly to do with Nellcott. Fried has a penchant for flashy similes: Sometimes ("she felt like a little teacup full of fear") they slip dangerously close to preciousness, but in the charged scenes with Nellcott, they're a natural vehicle for Alice's sense of drama. She stays over at his place: "When his eyes were shut, his black eyelashes looked like stitches shutting his eyes forever."

The story speeds airily along in a series of sketches of dorm rooms, diners, film nights and parties in Plateau apartments. Fried binds us to Alice's point of view; we only see what Alice notices, and, with her drive to feed her fledgling identity, her wide-eyed attention is permanently fixed on the surfaces of things. She studiously notes fashion, mannerisms, décor, all accompanied by quick evaluations: Should Alice adopt them, or does she disapprove?

Obsessed with movies, she sees the city around her as a kind of set; in Chinatown, she notices a battered phone booth and imagines making a distressing phone call to her parents from it, then wishes that Chinese take-out came in white cardboard boxes with wire handles, as it does in Manhattan.

Alice's movie-set view of the world extends to her friends. Allegra's room is "really a wonderland, complete with fairy dust in pill bottles and feathers and notes in jars." Her friend Cricket is "extremely loud . . . [and] wore skirts that rustled when she sped down the hall or rugby outfits with Christmas colours and stripes." Their inner lives are as much a mystery to us as they are to Alice, and for the most part, that's fine. It's her story; and if Alice doesn't care, why should we?

Occasionally, though, it's perplexing; you get so accustomed to the wide-eyed influx of sensory details that when an emotion crops up -- when, for instance, Alice bursts into tears in a restaurant with her parents -- it's slightly jarring.

But the upside of Alice's minute focus on her own developing opinions and preferences is that it makes for a sensitive, sensual, funny and accurate map of the rocky and mystifying territory between childhood and maturity.

Formerly an awkward teenager, Wendy Banks is now a writer living in Toronto.