by Carol Anshaw
Tracy’s mother comes out the back door with a large pan and a roll of gauze that looks like bandaging for a wounded army.
“Cheese alert,” Fern says in a low voice. Every weekend for as long as Fern has known Tracy, Tracy’s mother makes cheese, the same cheese she brought to Fern’s dinner, to all of Fern’s dinners—pale curdy grout that hangs from a line in mesh sacks over the pan, draining through all the Saturday afternoons of their growing up. Tracy’s parents were hippies and still make the cheese to stay in touch with their good old days. There’s the cheese and the home-baked bread, plus they still wear Birkenstocks. When Tracy first figured out she was pregnant—peeing on the blotter stick from the home kit while Fern sat on the edge of the bathtub—Fern thought, well, at least Brad and Tina (they want you to call them by their first names) would be understanding. They themselves met in a drug- and sex-filled commune in the seventies and had Tracy before they were married. So it was surprising when they turned out to be upset, although Fern sees that their anger is not based on any moral system but on Tracy blithely tossing away her future, turning overnight into someone not terribly interested in leaving the house.
As far as Fern is concerned, it is Brad and Tina who are the big disappointments. They have turned out to be only superficially alternative; their attitude did a one-eighty when they started making big money, almost accidentally, in herbal supplements. The business started out as a basement operation but now has its own plant in some far-flung suburb.
Tracy has a sister, Wind. (Until she was twelve and took matters into her own hands, Tracy herself was Skye.) Wind is a trader. Even when she’s visiting at home, she sits in the breakfast nook with hundreds of small pink slips and a cell phone and makes and takes calls on only two stocks. She asks, “What’s it selling for?” Or “What’s it at now?” Tight little questions for whoever is on the other end of the line. She buys, she sells. All day. This seems to Fern the most soulless occupation imaginable, but because Wind drives an Infiniti and has a condo overlooking Lincoln Park, Brad and Tina consider her a big success Tracy should imitate.
“Hey, Tina,” Fern says. Tina’s response today is muted—a slight nod and the hanging of a few more sacks of cheese. She’s not the cheery talker she used to be, not with Tracy, of course, but also not with Fern, who has apparently fallen into the accomplice category.
“You were going to look into daycare places,” Fern says, turning back to Tracy.
“Daycare, I’m beginning to find out, is for women with careers, or at least real jobs. Or women with SUVs and manicure appointments. Basically I’m one step up from the women you see dragging their laundry to the ’mat in a wire cart, with all their kids trailing behind them. Okay, maybe I’m two steps up from there. I have Tina’s old car, and we have a washing machine in the basement. I don’t need a wire cart. Beyond the cart is as far as I’ve gotten.”
“But what about going back to school so you could be a person with a real job? Your parents would help, you know they would. They’d be pissy for a while, then they’d help.”
“Maybe,” Tracy says. “Probably. But I’m too tired right now to come up with a coherent plan. Right now, my little job is almost more than I can handle.”
“Then—” Fern gets only this far before Tracy puts a hand on her arm.
“Thanks, but I’m okay. We’re okay.” She rubs Vaughn’s furry head as though he’s a good luck charm. “I’ll figure something out. Just not now, okay?”
“I was only—”
“I know.”
The sky grows overcast as heavy yellow-gray clouds muscle in. Tracy brings Vaughn out of the pool and bundles him in a big towel, then gets him into a fresh diaper and a T-shirt that says BIG BABY.
“Let’s change out of our suits and go for a walk,” Fern says. “We can put Vaughn in his stroller thing, what do you say?” It’s an idle suggestion. Tracy isn’t much for getting out and about these days. And so Fern is surprised when she says, “Okay.”
Not far, over on Roscoe, then a ways down Damen, there’s a nice little park. They sit on a bench enjoying the big breeze that’s coming up with the clouds. They watch a trio of guys about their age—a little old for skateboarding, but very good at it. They look like old surfers, their hair bleached out at the tips, their tans oven-baked. They’re doing tricks on the sloping asphalt paths winding among the park’s trees. Taking long stretches easily on their back wheels. Hopping off their boards, turning in midair, reconnecting soles to fiberglass, flipping into an opposite direction. Showing off for one another and for anyone else who might care to watch.
“Oh man,” Tracy says, and it takes Fern a beat or two to see she’s not referring to their tricks, but rather that she recognizes one of them, who nods in their direction. “Fuck,” she says softly.
“A checker,” Fern guesses, meaning from Tracy’s checkered past.
Fern doesn’t recognize him, but that’s not surprising. For a long while, Tracy was a devotee of the one-night stand. She carried a baggie stuffed with condoms in her backpack, along with an address book of numbers and first names. Fern figures she probably doesn’t know about most of Tracy’s boyfriends. This one is tall and skinny in that flat way some guys have; when he turns to the side there’s hardly anything between the back of him and the front. He has ropey muscles in his arms and legs. He’s wearing long, baggy shorts and black, thick-soled shoes, a karate-style headband, wraparound shades.
Fern waits to see what will happen. More and more when the issue of guys comes up, Fern feels alienated from Tracy, or as though she has been left far behind. Tracy is already worn out, just from the amount of life she has lived so far—the time she put in being a creature of the night, out on Belmont or in Bucktown in black polyester pants and peculiar hats and thrift shop sweaters with politically incorrect fur collars and cuffs. Being politically incorrect is part of her tough act. Fern used to think that underneath all the toughness Tracy was really just a big softie, but lately what’s underneath also seems tough, fibrous, as though she has taken a look at what’s available out there and isn’t terribly impressed. Her facial features, small and pointed, have now also hardened up. What used to be a dry-ice glare, used selectively, has become her default look, and it’s hard to find her inside there. Too often lately, Fern gets embarrassed when her own enthusiasms run head-on into the abutment of Tracy. She has become guarded in revealing excitement, about certain things in particular, but also in her general sense that everything ahead is bursting with possibility. Possibility seems to be one of the things on which Tracy now casts a cold eye.
For a long while, Fern was Tracy’s sidekick on their search for whatever. When she met Cooper, at the rave, she thought Tracy would be happy for her, happy to be a part of the discovery team. And she was, for about a minute. Then Cooper quickly became one of the things Tracy was bored by. While Fern was finding him so original and fascinating, Tracy acted as though she’d already come across a thousand Coopers and he was just one thousand and one.
“He’s nothing,” she told Fern. “He’s vapor.”
Fern didn’t want to have to defend Cooper to Tracy. What she wanted was for Tracy to understand automatically why she was so totally vulnerable to him, why contact with him made her feel exfoliated, like she’d had about six layers of skin sanded off. Understanding this seemed like the kind of thing Tracy should be able to do, but she couldn’t. So she turned out to be right about him, that’s not the point. The point is that she couldn’t come out of her own darkness to be happy in a particular moment for Fern.
The guy who is a problem for Tracy wheels over. He is in a state of extreme sweat, but in an interesting way. His chest is furry, the hairs glistening; the band around his head and the T-shirt he has knotted around his hips are soaked through. He tips gracefully off his board, and, as part of the same fluid motion, crouches down in front of Lucky, who is sitting at attention. The guy is close enough that Fern can smell salt. She can tell that Lucky is making his standard initia
l assessment of this guy—friend or foe? The guy lifts his hand and with long fingers starts scratching Lucky’s chest. In reply, Lucky gives the guy’s shoulder a long lick, as though it is delicious.
Tracy emerges from somewhere deep within to say, “Hey, James.” She’s got her voice flattened out, but she’s nervous, Fern can tell. She doesn’t bother making introductions, just shifts her gaze down and starts pushing Vaughn back and forth a little in his stroller.
“Hey,” James says in reply—to Tracy at first, but then he widens his focus to take in Fern and the baby.
“Fern,” she says, introducing herself, lifting her hand in a wavelike gesture she immediately regrets. She suspects she looks as though she’s wiggling a puppet.
He kind of notices her, kind of doesn’t. She figures his distraction has something to do with him and Tracy, nothing to do with her, but she feels dismissed nonetheless. She is not very adept at being cool; she falls way short of negotiating the complex grid of attitude. So she retreats from the conversational volley; she leaves it to the two of them. They seem to be making a point of how little they have to say to each other.
How has Tracy been?
She’s been fine.
He’s been fine, too. He’s working as a bike messenger between law firms down in the Loop. It’s pretty good money, but he almost gets killed in traffic about five times a day. He has nightmares about getting “doored.”
She’s taking some time off from school.
Neither of them mentions Vaughn, although while he’s talking, the guy brushes his hand casually through the baby’s hatlike crop of hair, which prompts Tracy to start fussing, yanking Vaughn out of his stroller, onto her lap. James looks over at Fern with a kind of click in the back of his eyes. There’s something about the look that makes her edgy in return, but not until he has waved in response to his friends, who are leaving, their boards under their arms, and made a quick set of goodbyes so he can catch up with them, and she has watched the way he moves in his long shorts the whole way out of the park, does she begin to figure out that this edginess has something to do with attraction.
“Anything you want to tell me?” she says to Tracy.
“An old acquaintance. Mr. Nice Guy. Not my type. Too broody.”
It occurs to Fern all of a sudden that the awkwardness between him and Tracy might be that James is Vaughn’s father. She’s not sure where she has come up with this. Maybe their eyebrows; there’s something similar about the way they wave up a little at the ends. But it’s more than that. Before she became a psychic, she almost never had premonitions or suspicions or forebodings. Now she has them all the time. Occupational drift, but disconcerting nonetheless. She’s not sure she wants to know so much, opening doors onto people’s secrets.
Fern waits for Tracy to come forward with this piece of information about the guy, James, but she doesn’t say anything, just plays a silent game of patty-cake with Vaughn.
After a longish moment, Fern says, “I kind of liked him.” She feels like she’s throwing herself on a grenade.
But Tracy only looks at her and then back at the path down which James is disappearing, and says, “Yeah. You might.”
Almost There
NORA AND HAROLD go on a neighborhood garden walk. He found the tour advertised on a flyer tacked up somewhere, the same way he ferrets out church pancake breakfasts and VFW spaghetti dinners. For Harold, the city is a limitless universe of galaxies and he’s a tourist in all of them. This makes him both delightful to know and exhausting to be around.
Nora asked Jeanne along (too busy with her article) and Fern (something else to do, that sad smile of regret, she’s so adept at these, at making them look as false as possible). Later, Nora heard her on the phone with Tracy, discussing their lack of plans. Nora knew the garden walk wouldn’t attract Fern’s interest, but she thought maybe with Harold as a draw...
She gets this hazy idea from time to time, the three of them doing more together. But it seems that Fern and Harold already have their relationship in place. Very private, not based on social occasions, especially not on garden walks. She’s jealous, of course.
The walk is in Andersonville, which has some huge old Prairie mansions Nora wouldn’t mind snooping around. She can imagine herself gardening in some placid patch of her future. She watches Martha Stewart on TV—annihilating aphids, pruning rosebushes, training Boston ivy over pergolas—and can easily project herself into this cluster of patient pursuits even though, so far, in any given summer of her life, she has not found time to do more than stake a few tomato plants, or plug in a flat of impatiens alongside the garage. Even the basil was too much for her this year; she left it to Fern. Still, she’s up for taking a look at what rich people are doing in their backyards—why not?
Saturday arrives bearing a light, misty rain, and she assumes Harold will have changed his mind, but when she calls, he’s still up for it, and when she pulls up in front of his apartment, the rain has stopped and he’s standing on the sidewalk, ready for an expedition, an umbrella tucked under his arm.
He has always been beautiful, but moving through his thirties, the throttle is out. Sometimes Nora doesn’t see him for two or three weeks and in reappearing, he catches her off-guard. Much of his beauty, she thinks, is the incandescence of his goodness radiating from within. It’s interesting that he dresses as both man and woman. Sometimes he pushes in both directions at once. Like today. In pleated black linen shorts and a pale green camp shirt, with his hair wet-combed back off his face, his gender is unspecifiable. He is the perfect androgyne.
Here is another way in which he and Fern are connected. Nora knows about Dolores, but only secondhand, through Fern. She is bothered by Harold’s lack of trust in her, but at the same time knows she would do poorly if confronted face-to-face with Dolores. She could not, as she gathers Fern does, sit around having conversations, dishing the dirt or whatever it is you’re supposed to do with Dolores. She herself would be able to go only as far as having a conversation with her brother in costume, whereas Fern apparently welcomes Dolores as another person, or at least a legitimate alternate version of Harold. How can she? Nora wonders, while at the same time understanding that this very thought disqualifies her, clicks the velvet rope across the entrance to the complete Harold.
He thinks Fern is coming with them today.
“She blew me off,” Nora says, looking for sympathy. “She’s not, basically, interested in spending time with me.”
“I think she is an extremely private person,” he says. “Like Garbo. Except without the Swedish part, or the movie star part. But still, it’s like having Garbo around your house. I can see how that might be frustrating.”
Harold is a mediator. When issues arise between Nora and their parents, or between Nora and Fern, he moves into position with a calming tone and a sympathetic demeanor, a kind of tilt down and forward with one shoulder, the one you can feel free to cry on. Sometimes he is a comfort, but other times, she wants to put a bucket over his head and start banging on it.
“I think she finds you kind of overwhelming,” he offers.
“What? Is that what she tells you? I mean, how ridiculous is that?. I can’t even whelm her, much less overwhelm her. I can’t even get her to clean up the bathroom after herself. I don’t really think you can be overwhelming to someone if you also have to pull that person’s hair out of the drain catcher.”
“You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry. I forget you’re perfect. How could she have any complaint against you?”
Nora doesn’t bother to reply.
Harold gives it one more try. “Look. Fern is twenty-one. Do you remember twenty-one?”
“Sort of.”
“You don’t, really,” he says. “The good news for you is pretty soon Fern will be forty and you two can get along then.”
“Thanks so much for your insights.”
It turns out this walk encompasses only the lower-rent streets of Andersonville, blocks of sensible middle-cl
ass brick two-flats.
“Maybe we should forget it,” Nora says.
“Come on. It’ll still be fun. And the rain’s almost over,” he says, pointing to a sunny sky pausing beyond a bank of clouds.
“What I’m really looking for,” she says, “is a medicine-chest walk. A drawer-by-the-side-of-the-bed tour. I want to see the prescriptions and nipple clamps of strangers.”
“Oh, darling, I know.”
“Here’s Number Fifteen,” she says, half an hour later, pointing to a marker flag.
“This is a fucking corner” Harold says.
“Correcto mundo.” Nora reads from the stapled program they were given for their six-dollar entry fee: “Number Fifteen—neighborhood corner planting.” They look down at a skimpy bed of nasturtiums.
“I don’t think they can count this,” he says gloomily.
“Number Seventeen is a window box,” Nora says, pretending to read further. It’s hard to joke about a joke, though. Number 6 was somebody’s muddy backyard with nothing but a crayoned sign propped on a lawn chair:
SORRY!
AZALEAS BOMBED THIS YEAR.
They pass other garden walkers along their way, recognizable as fellow travelers by their air of determination to get somewhere, but without much enthusiasm, and by the pamphlets rolled up in their hands.
Harold gets a broody look as they pass a house with six wind chimes tinkling and clanking and bonging in the slight breeze. He is thrown into despondence by what he considers stupid, worthless noise—mainly car alarms with their hair-trigger detonation, their pips of setting and unsetting that fill the air of the city. And, of course, wind chimes.
“I don’t think wind needs enhancement,” he says. “I mean, why can’t it just be wind and we all leave it alone?”