by Carol Anshaw
From a shelf full of books on the difficult adolescent, Nora understands that Fern needs to blow off the garlic peeler, do things her own way, form her own style of peeling, form her own personal relationship to garlic. Nora understands this, and still, in these moments, her hope and goodwill evaporate and all she can see is the two of them on the floor, flat on their stomachs, positioned to arm wrestle, and—it being her fantasy—Fern has a weak grip and it’s an easy piece of work to force her hand to the ground.
Harold is sitting across the kitchen table from her, crunching Lucky’s ears, bending to lift a velvety flap and whisper a sweet nothing. Nora tries halfheartedly to catch his eye, then gives up. Why bother? She will never make him see how skillfully Fern operates. He can never ascribe any malice to Fern; he has her in a little grotto, surrounded by small vases of cut flowers, flickering votive candles. Then, of course, she feels awful for wanting to tint his opinion. Why does she need an ally against her own child?
Until he appeared half an hour ago at the kitchen door, Nora wasn’t aware that her brother was going to be part of this dinner. He arrived bearing a bowl wrapped like a mummy in foil, giving off frosty steam in the mild air of the early evening.
“I found an old ice cream freezer at one of my junk shops on Belmont. I made Pistachio Rocky Road, from scratch. The thirty-second flavor.”
It’s Friday night. Nora wonders why he’s not working.
In spite of never having had a discernible career, Harold nonetheless appears to be on a gently downward slide in terms of employment. At first, the waitering jobs were a way to subsidize his acting. And for a while after he followed Nora to Chicago, he was a lively presence in local theater—in roles requiring a dash of the sophisticate, an edge of the sinister.
He also, for a few years in the earlier portion of his thirties, worked for an escort service, and swears that in his case, it never went any further than escorting. He took single businesswomen to social functions, widows to weddings, none of them to bed. Topics were the problem—the constant search for conversation openers and continuers, the avoidance of awkward silences.
Over time, he has gotten less and less stage work. Nora suspects that, along his way, he acquired a reputation for being difficult, a superstar-type perfectionist but without star clout, without, actually, any clout at all. There has been a parallel slippage in his waitering. He started out working in high-style places with zinc bars and pale wood tables, in the early era of chic food. Serving entrées flecked with sun-dried tomatoes, salads dressed with raspberry vinaigrette. But three or six months into a job, there were always troubles, peculiar disagreements and subterranean feuds with this cook, that hostess, brooding skirmishes difficult for him to articulate when Nora probed. For the past three years, though, he has been working way up on Lincoln, at Der Schnitzel Haus, which has a beer hall in the back famous in tourist guidebooks as the “Home of the Singing Bartenders.” Nothing about the place is trendy. He wears a cummerbund, serves huge platters of roast duck, sauerkraut, spaetzle, giant wedges of Black Forest torte. And he has, it seems, no troubles. The hostess and co-owner is Gretel. She runs a tight ship. No feuds or flaring tempers under her command.
“She doesn’t wear braids wrapped around her head, but you feel like she does,” he has told Nora. “When I’m away from the restaurant, I could swear she has braids.”
He has a crush on Gretel, Nora can tell. She can imagine the two of them pretty graphically, scenes in which one or maybe both of them is wearing a girdle.
Harold’s life is a detailed demonstration of getting by. He operates out of a cheese-paring frugality. He rents an apartment in a pocket of nowhere up on Ashland, dirt-cheap but with the understanding that the landlord does next to nothing in the way of repairs. He roots around in secondhand shops for clothes. He gets his books and videos from the library, goes to free concerts, takes wood shop through the Park District. He has an unkillable car, a fifteen-year-old Chevy he loads up at a giant club store in Skokie or Morton Grove. Everywhere you look in his apartment, every hiding place—under the bed or on the high back shelves of the closet, or behind the sofa in the living room—is stuffed with a hundred cans or rolls or boxes of something.
Within a disposable Western culture, Harold inhabits a miniaturized Third World. He discards almost nothing. His kitchen drawers are filled with wiped, then neatly folded sheets of aluminum foil; a trove of rubber bands; restaurant matchbooks; dust rags cut from worn-out underwear. He gets his broken appliances fixed, or fixes them himself. He has his shoes resoled, knows a tailor who still practices “invisible reweaving.”
He wears a lot of black and is devoted to dyeing, which, to avoid detection, he does nocturnally in the back row of the laundromat. The T-shirt he’s wearing today, she can tell, is a product of midnight craft—stretched at the collar, but crisp in color. Because of the worn thinness of its material, the outline of a brassiere beneath is visible.
Nora doesn’t think this fascination with drag signals anything troublesome. What is it, after all, but a hobby, a set of model trains in his basement? One time she and Jeanne had a little party for people they worked with—from the college, from Berlitz. Harold turned up in a sport jacket, but also wearing eye liner and mascara. This unsettled Nora for about two minutes, and then she let it go. It was subtly applied and if anybody noticed, so fucking what?
“My mother sent along ... you know ... some stuff,” Tracy says. She is awkwardly negotiating the back door with Vaughn, cozy against her breasts in his baby sling. She has her hands full with offerings—a loaf of bread and a Tupperware container—its translucence almost certainly camouflaging a clot of her mother’s turgid homemade cheese. “Plus I have a couple of discontinued candles.” She takes them out to read a label. “Bayberry maple.”
Vaughn gets a big round of welcomes and, as soon as Tracy has him out of his sling, he receives the fanfare with fists balled up in glee. He seems to already grasp the principle of visiting.
“He just had his nap,” Tracy says. “I hope someone’s up to entertaining him for a while. He’s discovered he has hands. Just to warn you.”
Harold tugs at Vaughn’s toes, telling him, “Ooky, pooky, dooky. How’s my little snooky?” One of the best things about Harold is that he has absolutely no fear of appearing foolish.
Lucky shambles over and licks the baby’s dangling foot. It takes the dog some time to get across a room now.
Nora takes the baby from Tracy, over to the old sofa against the far wall of this big room made out of the house’s original kitchen and dining room. She settles in, making a lap for him to sit on. His smell—the sweet and sour of baby powder and spit-up milk—and his body so jam-packed with babyness combine to tumble her back into her own early days of motherhood, when holding Fern could so overwhelm her with love that she worried she might be deranged.
She makes monkey faces for Vaughn, who has a rather funny face himself—a long nose for a baby, and eyes that droop a little at the edges, brows that sweep upward, giving him an aspect of curiosity. Then there is his thick, stand-up hair, like a fright wig. She shoots him into midair, tickling him as he goes, holding him high and dangling, but secure in her clutches. He bunches up his odd features, then smiles hugely while shouting “yayaya,” the prototype of a laugh.
Fern glances up and across the room from stirring the pot of boiling spaghetti, and tells Nora, “He doesn’t enjoy that sort of thing.”
“Yes, he’s miserable,” Nora says. “You can see.”
“Yeah, well, he laughs, but then he throws up,” Fern says, nibbling a broken-off piece of Parmesan.
Nora retreats into silence. She flips back to the beginnings of her long, unwinnable war with Fern.
When she came out to herself, Nora went from fierce nerves and brooding to pure exhilaration. Up until then, everything had seemed so in its place, with Russell still a copywriter at the agency and she still working in the ombudsman’s office at the college. Of course, they didn’t know the
“still” part, didn’t think of this as being merely the first part of their adulthood. The future appeared deceptively plain in front of them, looking much like their present only maybe painted a slightly different color, maybe with a room added on. Fern was just starting school, coming home with peculiar drawings, odd stories about aliens from outer space visiting her class, or coming home with nothing at all to say about an entire day. And all of this was so fiercely interesting, so preoccupying, so ongoing, each day opening directly into another. And yet, in the middle of this, for Nora to be right, to be who she really was, who she had already become, all of this would have to be overturned.
And it was in this overturning, Nora fears, that Fern—already a mysterious child, tricky to find in the best of moments—became profoundly lost to her. A vacuum was set up between them and has persisted through the years, Fern signaling her indifference in the face of all that Nora offers, keeps offering nonetheless, in hope and in penance.
“My turn,” Harold says, and takes Vaughn from Nora. He lies down on the wood floor of the kitchen, sets the baby onto his stomach, and gives him big thumbs to hold.
Tracy joins Fern in fixing the dinner; the two of them politely help each other at the chopping block. They are no longer the giggling, silly friends they used to be. Nora suspects this is not a loss of innocence, rather simply that they are no longer smoking dope out in Tracy’s car as a prelude to encounters with adults, gliding into the house like deer emerging from the dark forest, their pupils huge. Now they are practicing at being adults. Now Tracy has a baby and Fern is studying anthropology. Nora supposes they are repositioning themselves vis-à-vis each other, accommodating the fact that their circumstances have set them on divergent paths. Nora still has trouble adjusting to the notion of Tracy as a mother; she has grown so used to thinking of her as the ur-bad girl with her terrible boyfriends and school suspensions. Motherhood makes her seem vulnerable for the first time, a tentative young woman with a circus-animal plastic diaper bag and a blood-dripping dagger tattooed on her ankle, doing something quite difficult in an eerily solitary way.
“This kid has so much personality,” Harold says in a voice squeezed from having his nose clenched in Vaughn’s fierce grasp.
Fern overlaps this, shouting “Almost done!” to all concerned, tossing the spaghetti with the garlic and olive oil, the red pepper flakes and flat-leaf parsley. Nora goes upstairs to fetch her girlfriend from her study.
Although the evening is mild, Jeanne is wearing a light cardigan. This over a retro rayon dress. She will be more dressed up for this dinner than anyone else. Even if she wore jeans, they would be jeans into which she had ironed a crease. Part of this formality is because she is French, part because she is Jeanne.
“I have a small chill, it seems,” she says.
Nora puts one hand to her lover’s forehead, the other to her own for comparison. “You are a little warm.”
“Un peu enrhumée, perhaps. I always get a cold in the summer, when everyone else is well, then never in the winter when my classroom is full of sneezes.”
She looks tired, an older version of her usual self. Jeanne’s small maladies—colds, tickly throats, occasionally a stomachache she ascribes to her liver—Nora has come to understand, are tugs on her awareness. Jeanne is not hypochondriacal, but she doesn’t like to ask for things directly, and Nora has noticed that these minor ailments tend to come on when their time together has been pinched by the rest of life. They are, she thinks, Jeanne’s unconscious way of asking for a slight increase in Nora’s attention. Sometimes this seems sweet; other times Nora wishes Jeanne could just spit it out. Grab Nora by the hair and yell at her, or drag her into bed, or whatever all this politeness is a cloak for.
“It has been a long week,” Jeanne says. “Too many students. And they grow stubborn or discouraged, and my job becomes even so much harder.”
“How’s it going? Your article.” Nora nods toward the screen of Jeanne’s computer, the flush of three-by-five cards across the surface of her worktable. Jeanne is far past her deadline with this piece, for a feminist journal. The article is to be a reappraisal. She hopes to show that while Colette undeniably slept with women, she wasn’t really a lesbian. That there is a distinct difference between doing something and defining oneself by it. Jeanne’s argument is that it is wrong-headed to attempt to plug historical figures into a contemporary set of assumptions, that although loving someone of one’s own sex has always existed, gay identity is a modern construction. Colette is the centerpiece of the article, but along the way, Jeanne has tacked on Emily Dickinson and Eleanor Roosevelt. When she started talking about including Melissa Etheridge, Nora understood that the piece was slipping out of control.
Jeanne holds up a copy of a letter from Colette to her lover, Missy. “All of this is a problem of translation, but not of language. Here, it is that the French—specifically in the time of Colette’s youth, la belle époque—experienced life in such a different way than we do now, here. And also, Colette was something of a foreigner in her own place, an anachronism in her own time, which adds to my difficulties.”
Jeanne doesn’t want to be teaching grammar and syntax; she wants to be teaching French literature or cultural studies. But her Ph.D. dissertation languishes in a box somewhere while she fritters her time away on articles like this one. There is no talking to her about any of this. Nora has tried. Discussion only brings out her defenses, and does nothing to get her off the dime. They have been together eight years, long enough that many of their topics and issues have gone into reruns; some have been taken off the air altogether. The two of them are long past the dazzling, opening stretch of relationship where each of them thought they were going to be a huge agent of change for the other.
“Is it time for Fern’s dinner?” Jeanne asks.
“Yes. She’s being very awful,” Nora says. “Come down and protect me.” In the hallway, she adds, “I don’t deserve this. All the literature says you replicate your own parents’ limitations. But I haven’t. My mother was so all over me all the time. I was determined to give Fern room to grow, some private space to hold her secrets. Which I continue to do. I’ve never, for instance, if you’ve noticed, so much as alluded, not once, to the fucking tattoo.”
On the stairs, Jeanne tugs at the back of Nora’s tank top, makes her stop and turn around, kisses the side of her mouth.
“I think Fern is in a place now that is a little dark. You know, patting her hand around on the wall to find the switch to turn on the light. And I think soon she will find it, but also that she needs to be alone in her darkness until she does. I think this is what she is saying to you, what you perceive as anger or indifference.”
“I know, but—” Nora starts, but Jeanne pats her butt to get her going down the steps, and says:
“Patience.”
They move out to the backyard for the dinner; they eat at two long folding tables pushed together to make a square. These tables are layered with an assortment of Nora’s vintage tablecloths —pink and blue, a green and yellow map of the States, a holly-patterned Christmas cloth—set with brightly colored Mexican plates. The rains have revived the garden, loosened the deepest fragrances from the flowers, the earth itself, the basil and the tomatoes—especially the tomatoes. Fern’s boom box sits on the sill of her bedroom, facing out. Otis Redding’s greatest hits slip through the window screen.
The big bowl of pasta rests in the center of the table, next to it a platter of Caprese salad with fat slices of tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and a confetti of chopped basil leaves. Tracy’s mother’s many-grain bread sits, sliced, on a board. The homemade cheese, which they all know too well from long acquaintance, remains in the kitchen, on the counter next to the sink, safely confined to its plastic tub. The bayberry maple candles have made it onto the table, but no one has made a move to light them.
It’s a mystery where Fern comes by her talent for cooking; she was raised on spaghetti sauce from jars, rôtisserie chickens from
the supermarket. And then, when she was early into her teens, she started bringing home cookbooks. Like a child from some backwoods shack without so much as a radio, coming upon a grand piano and teaching herself to play.
“We are so lucky to have you,” Jeanne tells her, as plates are being passed around, and Fern smiles and lowers her head and closes her eyes, made both happy and shy by the compliment.
Nora wonders why she herself couldn’t have come up with this little bit of praise and elicited this particularly sweet smile from Fern. But of course, if Nora had been offering the compliment, it wouldn’t have been received in this easy way. Fern would have been searching for some hidden jab, or pretending to take it as though it had been delivered sarcastically, bravely trying not to appear wounded.
“I’m going to have to switch to working lunch at the Haus,” Harold tells them all once they’ve begun eating. “I have a part. A new theater company, up on Clark. They’re doing some very interesting things.”
“Is it big?” Fern says. “The part?”
“Well, it’s ridiculous in a way. You could say it’s a large part because I am onstage through the entire play. But I don’t have any lines because the fact is, I am deceased. The whole thing is set at a wake and I’m laid out in the casket. I was a very complicated person when I was alive and all the other characters have to sort out their feelings about me.”
At first, no one finds anything to say to Harold’s remarks, except Harold.
“No matter how fascinating you were when you were alive,” he says, “once you’re embalmed, you’re pretty much reduced to one aspect. Which is to say, dead.”
“Man, though,” Fern says. “I mean, no blinking.”
“What if you sneeze?” Tracy says, lifting her shirt to nurse Vaughn, who has begun to fuss on her lap.