Nellcott is My Darling by Golda Fried

May 28, 2005
--by Lisa Fitterman

For many people, freshman year at university is a rite of passage. It marks the first time they've left home, managed their own chequing account and eaten Chef Boyardee ravioli straight out of the can.

Even more important, they can actually stay out all night without having to answer to anxious parents and, maybe, just maybe, they can finally lose their virginity - that is, if they haven't already.

This last pursuit is the obsession of Alice Charles in Nellcott Is My Darling, Golda Fried's first novel. It is 1991, and Alice has left her comfortable home in Toronto for a dorm room at McGill University in Montreal. Skinny, with frizzy, unruly hair, glasses and way of shrinking into herself, she has never before had a boyfriend and wonders if she ever will. She asks herself, who would want to go out with her?

Even Bethany, her obsessively neat best friend from high school, who keeps a collection of cutesy stuffed animals on her bed, lost her virginity with her prom date. "And when we finished having sex, you know, I was happy it was over. Honestly, I had one less thing to worry about," she tells Alice.

"I think I'll feel that way, too," Alice whispers back.

At one point, when a friend counsels her to wear sexy underwear in order to picture herself having sex with a boy in her children's literature class, she cuts the bows off of 10 pairs of underwear that her mother bought in bulk. As if in so doing, she can snip the ties that bind.

Fried writes lucidly of that limbo between childhood and becoming an adult, of the aches and awkwardness Alice suffers as she tries to come into her own. She joins the student film society and, sometimes, it seems her life is like a movie, too, complete with the requisite cast of oddball characters.

There is arch and exotic Allegra, a coffee-addicted, dish-throwing artist who sleeps around; Cricket, a rugby-playing bully who has tantrums over Cosmopolitan magazine counseling women to tape their breasts together to fake a deeper cleavage; and hip, raven-haired Rally, who never smiles and works in the dorm's cafeteria to help pay her way through school.

Then, there is Nellcott, a 23-year-old man who works in a record store, wears black eyeliner and will change Alice's life forever. (Well, don't they always?)

They meet at a party in an apartment on the Plateau and their first conversation is an argument over which song is best on Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks album - Tangled Up in Blue or A Simple Twist of Fate. To impressionable Alice, it's all very symbolic.

Nellcott fascinates and scares Alice. He is insistent, inscrutable and overwhelming, the archetypical "bad boy," and honest to God, there is nothing she'd love more than to be swept away and ravished. She is also extremely conflicted over the idea and can't stand to have anything in any of her orifices, not even earplugs to mute the sound of partying students on her dorm floor.

He calls her "darling," and takes her to diners, where she orders coffee and eats off of his plate. She hangs out in his freezing apartment, sleeps outside one entire night with him, meets his father and cobbles together something that resembles a relationship.

Before she knows it, Nellcott has become her darling, too.

Like Alice, Fried grew up in Toronto and went to McGill. Now teaching English composition in Greensboro, N.C., she has crafted a story that will speak to anyone who has lived through the drama of a first boy or girlfriend, or tentatively tried to make a new life in a new city.

Yes, this is yet another coming of age story but it's the telling of it that makes it worth reading. And what stories aren't told over and over again? Fried's strength is in making this one sound both fresh and poignant.

Lisa Fitterman writes a weekly column for The Gazette's Arts & Life section.