Lucky in the Corner

by Carol Anshaw

  “Yes,” Harold says, “well, you can see that even though it’s hugely boring, it is nonetheless going to require all this control.” He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, holding the position while they all watch. There is not the slightest flutter of lashes.

  “Could be very powerful,” Fern says, and Nora forgives her everything.

  When they’ve finished dinner and had coffee and Harold’s ice cream (a big success) and everyone has requested that Fern play the Otis Redding disk again, she does, then comes back out and claims Vaughn as her dance partner, swooping him around dramatically to “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” The baby adores Fern, goes into a sort of rapture, Nora has noticed, whenever she picks him up, as though he knows he is totally loved by this particular human. Which he is. Nora sees Fern’s love for Vaughn as something other than maternal or auntlike or whatever she might understandably be feeling for him coming out of her closeness to Tracy. Rather it seems to Nora that what Fern and Vaughn have is some profound version of friendship, an affinity.

  It’s almost ten by the time the kitchen gets cleaned up with a little effort from everyone but Fern, who gets a cook’s dispensation. Soon after this, Tracy leaves with Vaughn, who has long since nodded off. Harold says his goodbyes after looking at his watch and muttering something about having to meet someone. He chests his social life like a good hand of cards. Whatever he has on tap for tonight must be very good to risk the wrath of Gretel for blowing off work.

  Nora and Jeanne, tired and sleepy with wine, offer a final round of praise for Fern’s dinner, then pull themselves upstairs. Nora picks a copy of The Death of the Heart off the pillow along with her glasses, and sets them on the dresser. She was hoping to get a little reading in tonight, but it’s too late now. She and Jeanne fall into bed, crash-landing without taking off underpants or watches, only brushing each other’s lips by way of good night.

  They sleep like synchronized swimmers, freestyling parallel through the night, flipping over to catch, then release, each other into the universe of the subconscious. Nora has come to know Jeanne in sleep as much as through daylight observation. Let loose in a room of a hundred women, she could find Jeanne by the shape of her shoulder, the scent under her arm, the taste of the inside of her ear. In the morning, they often lie limb over limb, shuffling through their dreams.

  Nora’s are tricky skirmishes in an ongoing war with dark forces. Hitchhikers unsheathing knives in the back seat as she drives along desert highways, the sound of metal brushing against leather before the blade is pressed sharp to her throat. Other, more hulking figures, springing from beneath the steps in the shadowy stairwell. Or large, writhing rats racing over her in some dimly lit, too small space, their tight fur bristling across her palms as she tries to push them away. If sex enters the frame, it is something sordid with someone inappropriate—Harold, or her mother. Once with Mrs. Rathko, in a train berth.

  Jeanne, meanwhile, reports dreams of flying low over their neighborhood, using her arms to take off and land gently. Even what she considers nightmares seem merely whimsical or slightly odd. She has little hands for ears. She gives birth to a chipmunk. Last night, Queen Elizabeth startled her by opening her handbag to show off her trained mice in little outfits—polka dot dresses, checkered suits.

  “I think you should bring my dreams in to your therapist,” Nora says. “They’re so much meatier.”

  “I ran into her yesterday. Christine. At the Dominick’s. She was buying artichokes with her girlfriend.” Nora knows it’s idiotic, her jealousy of Jeanne’s therapist, her worry that this person she has never met probably knows more about Jeanne than Nora does, or at least more of the interesting stuff. She also hates that Jeanne refers to her therapist by her first name. Instead of calling her Dr. Jungundfreud or whatever. But of course, she isn’t a doctor; she’s a lesbian therapist—though not the worst of the lot. She doesn’t barter her services for French lessons. She doesn’t work out of her house, or have her dogs prowling through her sessions with clients. She hasn’t tried to date Jeanne. The worst indictment Nora has been able to come up with for all her probing is that her office is filled with deadly, cliché therapist art (gallery posters from the Southwest). That, and Nora doesn’t like her voice when she’s on the machine changing an appointment. She sounds way too understanding. There’s also this big mystique around her, some veiled tragedy in her recent past. All in all, she’s a little too romantic a figure to suit Nora. What happened to all the pudgy bald guys everyone used to go to?

  “What was she like, the girlfriend?”

  “Tall, dark. Handsome in a Katharine Hepburn way. It was like in school, when you couldn’t imagine the teacher had a life outside the classroom. I am afraid I appeared very silly. I know I was falling over my words. Rouging.”

  “Blushing.”

  “Yes.”

  It’s Saturday and soon they will have to get up. Jeanne will bake croissants (usually just frozen ones, but occasionally she tackles the project from scratch) and then they’ll set about cleaning their house, one of Nora’s favorite parts of the week, a few hours to bustle and putter, flounce sheets like energetic chambermaids in something from Masterpiece Theatre. Today Nora’s plan is to attack the furry tile grout around the bathtub; she has set aside an old toothbrush especially for the job.

  Jeanne turns from her back onto her side, to face Nora. She is such a small person, so light in her movements. This rearrangement under the sheet makes Nora think of a small flock of birds fluttering inside a soft sack.

  “What about your reception at school the other night? I didn’t get to hear. It was a success?”

  “Oh, I think so,” Nora says. “Not so many students as I’d hoped. There never are. But some of them seemed to connect with each other. Mrs. Rathko was terrible to me, what else is new?”

  This nattering is successful. By the end of it, Jeanne is brushing Nora’s hair back, kissing her forehead, popping out of bed in search of coffee, on her way into the day. The moment has passed when Nora could have, by the by, brought up the woman at the reception, so she and Jeanne could have shared her, allied themselves lightly against an innocuous moment of flirtation. This happens more and more often—Nora sees exactly how some small next piece of her life should be happening and, instead, like the bus driver weary of his route, alone on the night shift, veers off a little, down some unscheduled side street.

  Park

  WHEN HE GOT HOME FROM WORK, Fern’s father would take her and their new dog, Lucky, to the park. Even in February, lots of dogs came out with their owners around this time and mostly they got along and had fun without too many scraps because the park was no one’s territory, there was no protecting or guarding to be done. These were some of Fern’s happiest times, out there not only with Lucky, but with all the dogs—Ben and Kiko, Maggie, Bridget Olive, and the wild blond dog, she didn’t know his name. Sometimes there were as many as a dozen or even twenty dogs out at once and she would stand with her hands out so she could peel off her mittens and pet them as they milled around her in the gathering darkness, exhaling clouds of frosty breath, smelling one another and looking for balls to fetch and allowing themselves the casual love of humans.

  Lucky was a year old. They picked him out at Anti-Cruelty in the spring, a present for Fern’s seventh birthday. He had already had two previous owners, had been brought back twice for bad behavior. He was the fastest dog in the park. When the chasing and running around started up, he was always at the head of the pack—red fur flying behind him as he went, tongue dangling out the side of his mouth.

  “He’s a great dog,” Fern said.

  “If only he didn’t have a screw loose,” her father said, standing beside her. He meant Lucky’s problem with anyone, as he put it, of the “postal persuasion.” The first week they had him, he’d gotten out the front door and gone after their mailman, Raymond, who shouted from the sidewalk up to Fern and her mother, standing on the porch, “I’m going to have to mace him.”


  And Fern’s mother said, “Go ahead,” because if he didn’t, Lucky would tear into Raymond. So Lucky got sprayed and it was terrible to see him wobbling around the lawn blearily, pooping everywhere, but there was nothing else they could have done.

  The problem was bigger than simply their own mailman. If Lucky was in the car with them and spotted some stray mail person, he would begin growling in the back seat. Even if he saw just a mail cart by itself on the sidewalk. So they always had to keep an eye out for mail carriers, plus people wearing shirts or jackets with emblems on them. In these cases, Lucky had to decide if what they were wearing counted as a uniform, or not.

  These small trips to the park made Fern feel that everything was in its place, holding together. She had a dog and a father and they went to the park together. Like a page in a storybook.

  This was the best thing about her father—that he was always where she expected him to be. Not only here in the park, but also in the living room at home watching sports on TV, which he loved. Out in the backyard grilling, even in winter. During the day he was in his office at the ad agency; at night he was home. She never felt she had lost him or was about to lose him, the way she did with her mother.

  This happened once in the Jewel when Fern was six. She was in the cereal aisle, looking for Cocoa Puffs, couldn’t find them, then couldn’t find her mother. It turned out she was only around a couple of corners, picking up a package of chicken drumsticks, but in the short, heart-pounding burst of time it took before Fern found her, she imagined the whole rest of her life as a child alone in the world, walking down a highway with her backpack.

  What happened in the Jewel stayed with her a long time, and made her fear that every time her mother went out the door, she would never come back. But in fact, in this real-life way, she always came back. The leaving that frightened Fern was something else, odd moments when she could tell that her mother had retreated—not by walking away, or getting into the car and pulling out of the space in front of the house. The retreat was into herself, pulling back from Fern and her father and shutting a tight door, like on a refrigerator, a door with a seal. You didn’t know if, inside her, the light was on or off. It was from this place that Fern feared her mother would never return.

  Skateboard

  SATURDAY. They’re hanging out in Tracy’s backyard, by the side of a huge baby pool from Tracy’s own childhood, resurrected from the back of the garage for Vaughn, who sits near it, in the shade of the yard’s huge maple. He is content in his bouncer, alternately holding and throwing to the ground a multicolored rattle Fern brought him. Fern can mark off the summers of her adolescence—like rings in the wood of a tree—by memories of the conversations she and Tracy have had hanging out in this yard.

  Behind them, Lucky lies panting, even in the shade. She picks him up and sets him gently in the pool. Under his fur, he feels stiff in her arms, with his brittle bones and arthritic joints. Although he has never been much of a swimmer, he always becomes elated in water, standing up to his knees in it, then looking over his shoulder at Fern, as though he has accomplished something pretty significant. She plunks herself down in the pool next to him, scoops a little water over his neck to cool him down. When he leaves her to step carefully to the other side of the pool, then stands stock-still, waiting, she gets up, lifts him over the side, and sets him back on the grass. He shakes his fur free of water, then settles onto the lawn with an accordion sigh.

  Tracy pushes her shades down her nose and gives Fern a look over the top of the frames.

  “He’s doing great,” Fern says. She doesn’t want anyone saying he isn’t, or thinking it, or even just giving that look. He’s slowed down, sure, but he still enjoys life in most of his old ways. Going for walks. Flustering any birds who might be idling a little too complacently on the ground. Hating the mailman. The whole Lucky thing is too complicated. Fern can’t think about it. He has been her dog since forever; his presence beside her spans the whole distance from her childhood to this very minute. When he goes, there will be a terrible space next to her, a shadow with nothing casting it.

  After a lightly rainy morning, the afternoon is warm and sunny, but there are signs that summer is thinning out beneath them. The leaves on the neighborhood trees are still green, but dusty and beginning to dry. They scratch against one another, making a high, pale din, like sheets of waxed paper. In a couple of weeks, Fern’s fall semester will begin. She lies back and closes her eyes for a moment to enjoy the future. She has signed up for Observational Models, and got advance placement in a graduate seminar, Peasants. She’s taking a final semester of Spanish for her language requirement, and for an elective, Basic Zoology.

  She loves college, can get down into a kind of Zen calm sitting at her bedroom desk, or in the library at school, highlighter poised over an open textbook, assigning importance to certain sentences, determining the most crucial pieces of knowledge. She loves that learning is a thing in itself, a closed circuit. She particularly loves the shutter that anthropology opens on the possible ways of living a life. Nothing is a given; the most peculiar sort of behavior in Chicago would be absolutely normal in some remote mountain village, on some island somewhere. Celebrated even, with pageants or ceremonies.

  She has been reading about the dream travelers of Borneo. They go nowhere physically, feel no need to. They stay where they are, elongating their earlobes several inches with weights. They are tourists in their dreams, then return to report these dreams to one another. The dreams serve as both journey and as the raw material of story; in this way, they are always on the go, always engaged in both their real and their parallel lives. They would look at American girls obsessing over old boyfriends and longing for their own apartments as foolish creatures with pathetically small earlobes.

  Tracy flattens the Reader open on the grass in front of her and points to the ad she placed in the “Missed Connections” section, then reads it out loud: “Tower Records, Sunday night. You: interestingly wasted Rage Against the Machine lover. Me, blond, plugged into Beck. We crossed cords at the listening station. Was the eye contact all in my imagination? Tracy. Voicebox 698.”

  "How wasted?” Fern asks her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Tracy says. “He won’t call. What are the chances he’ll see this? The only people who read these are the fools who put them in. Too stupid to act when it might have possibly mattered. And say he even does call, what kind of social life can I possibly have with leaky tits and this little ball and chain?” She snaps Vaughn’s bouncer, springing him upward a little sharply. He looks disturbed, but only for a moment. Then his startled expression regroups into laughter as he decides this is a game.

  “You, though,” Tracy says. “Looking good. How much have you lost?”

  “Eleven pounds,” Fern says. Tracy is the first person to notice.

  This has been Fern’s summer self-improvement project. She would most like to be shorter, but, that option not being available, she is trying to get thinner. She started running in the mornings and going to Weight Watchers meetings where she has learned how to break food into a system of points.

  Tracy wants details.

  “Well, the main thing is to boost you up about the whole project. And tips, there are tons of tips. Sometimes someone brings in a deranged recipe, like skinless, boneless, fatless chicken breasts, grilled with a moli sauce you make from sugar-free cocoa mix, nonfat mayonnaise, and, I don’t know—garlic powder. Like that. Everything’s free or low or substitute or skinless. Or lettuce. I’m hoping I don’t run into anyone there who knows my mother. She can’t find out about this. I have to make this seem like something that just happened. She’d be so supportive. I don’t know which would be worse—being fat, or having to endure my mother being supportive about me getting thin.”

  “You weren’t fat before.”

  “No, right. Not fat. I was more like those sturdy peasant girls in old paintings, doing the haying. Wide in the loins, good for birthing. Kind of a birthing and
hay-heaving look. As opposed to a runway model look.”

  “As opposed to my loins, which were not built for birthing,” Tracy says, putting a hand on each hip. Fern was her birth partner. They went to classes together for a couple of months before Vaughn was born, Tracy doing breathing exercises, Fern learning how to comfort her through the process. And then, when push came to shove, Tracy lasted about ten minutes before calling the doctor a fuckhead and the nurses cunts and demanding an epidural immediately.

  “I’m supposed to be on a garden walk with my mother,” Fern says. “A bonding opportunity she cooked up.”

  “You waste too much energy hating her,” Tracy says.

  “I don’t hate her. Hating her would be so much easier. What I am is confused by her. She is a confusing person. Do you'remember in middle school? When we went to the exhibit of holograms?”

  “No, I had impetigo, don’t you remember? Everybody got to go but me. I had to stay home. I looked leprous.”

  “I remember. Your sister was charging her friends fifty cents to look at you.”

  “I forgot that part. The little jerk.”

  “Well, I don’t want you to be bitter after all this time, but the holograms were totally cool. Like a person. You could walk around them. One was Thomas Jefferson. There was Amelia Earhart. And they were three-dimensional, but also transparent. They were only made up of laser beams or something. That’s my mother. There, yes. But not really. Never really.”

  Nobody says anything for a little while, then Tracy lifts Vaughn out of his bouncer and brings him into the pool with her. He loves the water, has no fear at all.

  "I haven’t told him about drowning yet. That’s why he’s so cocky,” she says, holding him out in front of her as he slaps the water and throws his head back, cackling like a mad thing.