Lucky in the Corner

by Carol Anshaw

  One of Nora’s reasons was her daughter. She wanted to link up with someone who would help her create a new home for Fern, and from the start, without hesitation, Jeanne understood that a life with Nora would also include Fern. And somehow, with her charm and good nature, she moved into a position that wasn’t presumptuously parental or even stepparental, but rather provided Nora and Fern with a buffering presence between them. Nora knows Fern’s adolescence would have been even rougher-going if Jeanne hadn’t been there to simmer things down, smooth them out. For this alone, Nora is hugely indebted to her. No one else could ever occupy Jeanne’s place, which has been achieved through so much shared history.

  Not that their relationship is a monolith; it still, even after all this time, sorts out into its good and bad days. There is still a lot of push and pull—a subtle handing over and taking back of power, control, confession, intimacy that sometimes seems so terribly interesting. In other moments, this seems a more fatiguing way of doing things than might be necessary.

  The fundamental tone of their partnership, though, set by Jeanne in the very beginning, is one of kindness. This simple measure has made Nora a more considerate person. She used to be thoughtless in small ways—late without calling, forgetful about plans made. Now when there’s something important to be done for Jeanne, Nora writes it on her palm, then checks her hand at the end of the day. She has a sign taped to her desk that says, CHECK HAND.

  Sometimes they arrive at larger differences, but weather these with a tacit understanding that there are borders on disagreement, that no argument will explode into something truly threatening. At the center of the love Nora holds for Jeanne is a sense of safety—from terrible craziness rising between them, and from the rough side of life. Also from women like this one here at the reception, from her attraction to these women. Which has already come into play—warm liquid flooding her joints, an intransitive sense of urgency. (Something must be done, but about what?) Nora sees that this collection of old, familiar symptoms is probably what has inspired her interior pause to mark the merits of her relationship with Jeanne.

  She has to be on guard against herself because even after all the years away from women like this, Nora can still hear their soft, deliberate footfalls as they pace the perimeter of her desire. She can still, given about two seconds, come up with a fairly detailed scenario—something fast and wordless in a gas station rest room along some deserted highway. Or something in a motel room backing onto railroad tracks. Sheets still wafting up sex recently transacted as well as the promise of more to come soon. The scene also includes drinking Cokes from small, icicle-cold bottles from a red 1950s cooler outside the door. Drinking Cokes and smoking Camels.

  She gathers herself up, readies her handshake, and tries to get down to the business of greeting students. Her radar is still on, though, and so there is no surprise at all, not so much as an instant of wondering whose fingers have dropped lightly on her forearm.

  She turns around.

  “Someone...” the woman, Pam, says, “I hate to bug you, but someone told me you were the person to talk to about getting a parking permit for the semester.”

  “Oh. Right.” Nora loses her sure footing for a moment. Pam waits patiently while Nora pulls a couple of sentences together. “Come by my office before your first class. My assistant handles the passes.” She immediately regrets having used the words “handles” and “passes.”

  Pam nods, shyly. This shyness throws Nora off-balance; she was expecting swashbuckling. Shy is trickier.

  “Actually,” Nora says, “come by if you have any questions or problems at all. That’s what we’re there for.” She feels good about having come up with this bureaucratic plural. As though her office is hopping with peppy, uniformed staffers, ready to give efficient, impersonal service.

  “Oh, I’m not expecting a problem,” Pam says. “I’m only taking pottery.” She looks down at the floor again.

  Nora feels an old power flood through her like a narcotic. She has had so much training in this part, is so adept at its extremely small moves. Simply continuing to stand here looking at this woman who can’t look back, not letting her gaze fall or drift is, in itself, a move. The trick is to keep whatever is said or done hovering over the blurry line between something and nothing. These are skills she learned during the women before Jeanne. Surprisingly, they don’t feel at all creaky or withered from lack of use. Rather, they seem greased up and at the ready, as though she has been working out in some secret gym, at night.

  “With all your responsibilities,” Pam is saying, “I suppose you need to introduce yourself to some of the others, the other...” “Students,” Nora says. “Yes, I suppose I should.”

  While Pam heads off toward the refreshment table, Nora searches for a familiar face, any colleague will do. Instead she finds herself being nodded at by Mrs. Rathko, who was apparently on her way over anyway to say “Disappointing turnout. If only you’d gotten those flyers to me a little earlier.” She goes on in this rueful vein for a while (what a pity they’ve been sabotaged by the weather, and she’s already gotten so many withdrawals for the semester ahead). When Nora finally manages to disengage and is free to scan the thinning crowd, Pam is gone.

  She herself stays until the ice melts around the cans of pop, and the buffet runs out of everything but a scattering of carrot sticks, and the students have diminished to a self-sustaining group of perhaps a dozen, chatting in small clumps. Still, even though three-quarters of an hour has elapsed, she is not really surprised when she comes out the front door of the Student Union, to find Pam sitting on the ledge to the side of the stairs. Her shirt is soaked through in places, stuck to her skin at the collarbone, deeply stained at her armpits.

  “First,” she says, “let’s not say anything about the heat.”

  “Okay,” Nora says, idling in neutral. “What’s second?”

  “Oh man, I didn’t have a second thing.” Pam runs a hand over her damp, bristly hair.

  Nora feels a drop land on her cheek. She loses track of what Pam is saying. It’s not important. The hair is what’s important, its dampness. Nora pushes an internal PAUSE button, freezing the little scene that pops up when she puts a picture of Pam together with the concept “damp”: they’re in the bathroom of the railroad motel and Nora is pulling a shower curtain aside, handing Pam a towel, then playfully reneging.

  In the real world, on the steps of the Union, hoping she has missed only half a beat of real time, Nora tries to find a conversational analogue of throat-clearing, tie-straightening, cuff-tugging. “Well, then. I hope you enjoy your class. Have some fun.”

  “I’ll make you an ashtray,” Pam says, not joining in the straightening up. She’s still in the motel room, lazy between the sheets.

  “I quit smoking,” Nora says.

  “You might start again, though.”

  Night is falling. Nora pulls her car out of the lot behind the Administration Building. She hears on the radio that large patches of the North Side have had their power knocked out—payback for having sucked up all the available electricity with a few million air conditioners running on high. Everything looks normal and regular for a few blocks, then lapses into darkness. It’s a little scary, also fascinating, to sail along a daily route made eerily unfamiliar by minor catastrophe. Nothing is quite itself. Block after unlit block, here and there a candle or flashlight visible in a window, on the street a sweep of headlights. Amateur anarchists splash in the water gushing from uncapped fire hydrants. Ancient beaters ghost by, heading toward the lake with their windows rolled down and mattresses strapped to their roofs. On the radio, she hears that the parks and beaches are filling up with a temporarily transient population looking for a cool spot to spend the night.

  Sailing through all this, it occurs to Nora that if anything were to happen between her and this woman, they would already have this little piece of history in place, something to refer back to, a meteorological marker of their beginning.

  Tu
rbo Cooler

  FERN LIES ACROSS HER BED waiting for her next call. The heat wave has forced her to work from home. Harold’s power is still out. She called and found him in a rare downcast mood. He had to cancel the canasta club and had two trays of Crab Rangoon appetizers spoiling in a dead refrigerator.

  ‘I’ll just hang over here, then,” Fern told him. With any luck, her mother and Jeanne will be late getting home. Even though she has all the windows on the sun porch open, and has stripped down to gym shorts and a tank top, the heat presses on her with dead weight. For Lucky, she has been running a tea towel under cold water, wringing it out, then draping it over his back. He moves very carefully, to keep his tea towel in place; he understands that the towel is crucial.

  They don’t have air-conditioning. All three of them hate its artificial feel and the sealed-in quality, and, really, on all but a few days of summer, they’re perfectly fine with the ceiling fans. When an unbearable stretch comes along, they usually cave in and call Sears, only to find they’re sold out. And then the heat breaks and they completely forget about air-conditioning for another year.

  And so now, Fern tries to lie absolutely still waiting for the phone. When it rings, she husbands her limited psychic energies, cuts to the chase by almost immediately telling the caller she sees a reunion with a loved one. “Someone who has gone away. There’s a long journey involved. By sea.”

  “Where do you see me?” the caller asks. “What sea?”

  Fern thinks he might be an exception to the rule, a straight guy, older. He has an affected accent. She imagines him wearing an ascot, his hair in a comb-over.

  “I can’t tell exactly,” she says, treading until she sees what direction this call will take. “Someplace you’ve always wanted to go.”

  “Greece?”

  “Yes.” Without even trying, she can feel the Greek sun beating down on ancient temples. No, too hot. She moves toward the cool water. “I see small islands with white houses. Silvery fish pulled from the sea in heavy nets.” Fern tries to fill in the blanks with whatever she can remember from Jeanne’s travel magazines and the few times she has eaten down in Greek Town. She decides against bringing flaming cheese into the picture.

  “And this is going to be soon?”

  “Within the year, yes,” Fern says, her voice vibrant with confidence. It is this tone, she is sure, that makes her so successful, brings so many repeat callers to ask the Star Scanners operator for Adriana.

  “Are you Greek yourself?” the caller asks. She’s not crazy about dealing with a straight guy. Women and gay men are truly interested in the future. With straight guys, sometimes their interest slides off the future, onto Adriana. Fern listens carefully to his breathing, tries to determine if this one is whacking off. Sometimes there’s confusion along these lines. They think “900 number” and “woman” and put them together in a faulty way. She suspects this caller falls between the rows, neither interested in his Greek odyssey nor in something sexual with her. He is probably just lonely.

  “Actually, I am,” she says. “Greek. I was born in Athens.” She adds, “In the shadow of the Acropolis,” her mind racing through high school geography, hoping the Acropolis wasn’t in Sparta, hoping his next question isn’t about her pantyhose.

  “I’m calling Sears!” Nora says as she comes in through the back door.

  “I already tried,” Fern says from the bed, where she is being very still, waiting for her next call. “They’re out of everything except one that’s mainly for factory use. A million BTUs or something. We’d have to get special wiring.”

  “Man, it’s weird out there. Lights off everywhere. Hydrants popped all the way up Damen. At least we haven’t lost our electricity. Oh.” Nora stops as she sticks her head in Fern’s room. “Are you ... working?” She puts a tiny spin on the word.

  “I can’t go to Harold’s. His power has been down for hours. He’s in a foul mood. His canapés are melting. So I need to do this here, if that’s going to be okay.”

  “Why ask me?” Nora says, but just because she has to be a little bitchy about Fern’s job. Something—the heat probably—has knocked the usual fight out of her. She seems dreamy and preoccupied. She disappears for the next couple of calls, but then, while Fern is in the midst of consoling a client who has been dumped—dumped terribly, from the details—Nora drifts past the doorway, miming “boo-hoo-hoo,” fingertips tracing imaginary tears down her cheeks. She’s having her little bit of fun. Fern calls the Star Scanners number and logs out early.

  “I didn’t mean for you to stop,” Nora says.

  “I can’t do this in an environment of sarcasm. You totally don’t take my work seriously.”

  “Well, there is a serious side to it. My sympathies do genuinely go out to your customers in their real moment of sorrow, when they open their Visa statements and see how much they’ve blown on these calls.”

  “You have a point,” Fern says. This is one of the stock phrases she uses to sidestep arguments with her mother. The best thing to do with her mother, she has found from hard experience, is not hand her anything she might later use as a club. And that could be anything—an interest in something new, a person Fern might find attractive, a book or movie she might have enjoyed. So the trick is not to give up anything of herself to her mother, ever.

  This is especially easy today; she can hardly come up with conversation, let alone confrontation. The heat makes even the gathering of thoughts difficult. It is all she can do just to lie in a torpor, the chenille of the bedspread blotting up her sweat.

  Then the house, which has been silent except for Lucky panting in a mildly alarming way on the floor next to her, is suddenly alive with action. Nora is dragging an old metal box fan across the floor of Fern’s room, into the tiny bathroom at its far end. She then turns the shower on full-blast, puts the fan up on a wooden chair she drags in from the kitchen, then stands looking with pride at her handiwork, which she presents to Fern as the “Turbo Cooler.”

  Fern can see that her mother is trying to make amends for clipping her about her job. Instead of apologizing, though, or not clipping Fern in the first place, she’s trying to make it up with charm. In moments like this, Fern can see her mother as Harold’s sister, products of the same improvisational childhood that makes them subtly different from everybody else. And this is the very stuff she loves best about Harold. If he’d rigged up this contraption, she would have sworn it worked even if it hadn’t. In fact, though, the Turbo Cooler works fabulously. The sea breeze she imagined on her Greek island is suddenly, deliciously wafting over her.

  “So...?” Nora says.

  “Whatever,” Fern says. She knows this is her mother’s most hated response.

  “Then we shouldn’t waste the water; I’ll just turn it off.”

  “No,” Fern says. “Leave it on. It’s better than nothing.” Then she wonders if she might have come across as too enthusiastic.

  Gadget

  THE HEAT WAVE BREAKS in the night between Thursday and Friday, with a terrific storm that whips against the house and down the street. Nora leaps up to close windows, then decides against it.

  “It just feels so great,” she says to Jeanne as she presses her palms to the screen. “So things get a little wet. So what?”

  Fern’s dinner on Friday feels like a celebration, a thanksgiving to the gods of rain and coolness. Nora brings home a kitchen gadget, a present for the cook. She doesn’t want the already touchy relationship she has with Fern to degenerate into snappish little scenes like the one they had last night. She’s hoping she can change the tone.

  “Somebody’s going to make a million bucks on this gizmo—the Miracle Garlic Peeler.” Nora demonstrates. It’s a soft rubber tube. “Put in a clove,” she says, lifting her voice into a pumped, infomercial tone. “Roll it back and forth on the counter, and it’s done!” She shakes out the clove, neatly shed of its skin.

  “Cool,” Fern says, as though she means it. Nora watches her daughter looming
over the kitchen island, her height giving her a cheflike majesty. She has a style all her own, although Nora suspects she isn’t very aware of it. She pulls from the grab bag of visual rhetoric available to girls her age and makes it look completely like her own idea. Her confetti hair, the ironic way she wears lipstick only with the most non-lipstick-compatible outfits, like today—a dark red that’s comic in combination with a T-shirt, a pair of plaid Bermudas, and a multipocketed fishing vest.

  This nose-thumbing approach to fashion is part of a complex joke Fern seems to be assembling about the universe she inhabits. She sees the humor in what everyone else finds merely annoying. She has a repertoire of urban imitations, like a pitch-perfect rendition of the six-sound car alarms that drive all of them nuts in the middle of the night. She also thinks Vahle’s Bird Store on Damen ought to have a striped ticking cover pulled over it at night. She inhabits a hilarious city in which she is always scouting out new landmarks like the Decent Convenient Store and the Little Bit Cleaner, both catering to customers with low expectations; or the Stationary Store on Leland, which customers can rest assured will still be there when they pick up their business cards. Fern links this to the Toujours Spa on Clark, whose promise seems to be that it will resolutely remain a spa, as opposed to changing willy-nilly into a tapas bar or optometrist’s office. Nora suspects that, as with the way she dresses, Fern is not entirely aware of how delightful she is, which only makes her more delightful.

  At the moment, though, Fern is not being very delightful at all. She takes the garlic peeler, looks at it as though it has historical significance, like the cotton gin. Then she puts it aside on the countertop and gets a knife from the drawer and peels a few cloves in the old, labor-intensive way, whacking them first with the side of the blade.