Lucky in the Corner

by Carol Anshaw

  “I think people get them as gifts,” Nora tells him. She has told him this before. “They put them up, then forget they’re even there.”

  “But I don’t forget, that’s the thing. I mean if it was the sound of some orphan’s dialysis machine, you’d say, well, it’s irritating, but you’d have to live with it. But this is only more worthless, knickknacky noise added to all the rest of the noise that’s already there. Do you think they’ll pass? That they’re just a fad?”

  Nora says in what she hopes sounds like a convincing, definite voice, “Oh, I think they’re already on their way out.” This is a total lie. She saw a huge display of them a couple of weeks ago in the snooty Smith & Hawken store down on Clybourn. If anything, they are only on their way in. From the look he gives her, though, she can see he believes her. Sometimes it’s as though they are still twelve and seven.

  Number 19 is mostly clumpy bushes and the odd begonia, but there’s a flagstone patio with half a dozen extremely old people sitting attentively, or at least politely, while a sullen teenage girl in a pale blue sundress plays something lugubrious on a cello.

  As they come back down the gangway, Harold whines in impersonation of the cellist, “I don’t want to do it. It’s about to rain again anyway and Brittany and Jessica are going to the mall.”

  Nora answers with a parental baritone. “Now, honey. Grandma and Grandpa are counting on you. Who knows how much longer they’re going to be with us.” There’s a certain kind of fun Nora has only with her brother. It’s about having a few million stupid jokes behind them.

  Numbers 21 and 22 are nice gardens, both behind two-flats belonging to gay guys. At 21, there’s a small black and white dog Harold takes a shine to. At 22, they’re offered mimosas. Nora declines. Harold takes one and drains it in short order, like a cowpoke in a saloon.

  “We’ve seen enough, don’t you think?” he says, picking up on her weariness. On his own, she suspects he’d slog through to the bitter end, get his full six dollars’ worth. “I’ll take you to lunch, okay?” he says. “I need to go down to Chinatown anyway, to get some cookies.”

  They take the Drive along the lakefront, which, in spite of some threatening clouds in the distance, is so alive with people today it looks as though there’s a Festival of All Humanity and everyone got an invitation.

  “I was down at Filene’s this week,” she says, reaching around while she drives, pulling a package of T-shirts off the back seat and handing it over to him. “Couldn’t resist these at the price.” She tries to subsidize Harold’s meager lifestyle when she can find small casual gestures that won’t embarrass him.

  She’ll pick up the lunch check, too, even though, as it’s Harold’s choice, she knows the restaurant will be impossibly cheap. It turns out to be on a side street off Wentworth, tucked in among a row of jammed-together frame houses. There is no sign out front and inside there are only five Formica-topped tables and a wall menu in Chinese. Everyone besides the two of them is Chinese. No one is eating anything readily recognizable. Root vegetables, maybe. Marine life, both flora and fauna. Nora can only guess.

  The owner is delighted to see Harold, who tells him, “The usual.” What arrives is tofu and little bits of meat in black bean sauce and some thready noodles in a curry. Also greens on a separate plate, leaves mixed with oil and garlic and something that tastes like mushrooms but probably isn’t.

  “Good,” Nora says, picking at this and that with her chopsticks.

  “Nobody comes down to Chinatown anymore,” Harold says. “Cantonese is totally unhip now. Or wasn’t hip ever. But it’s still great.”

  “Dad’s not looking so good,” he says a little later. He has just been down to Florida for a short visit with their parents. They pay his plane fare. He stays a couple of days, sleeps in their guest room. He helps Lynette with the big household jobs that are starting to overwhelm her. He cleans out the refrigerator, rents a carpet shampooer and does the whole apartment, wall to wall. He helps with the husbandly details in which Art has never had much interest. He takes their car in for maintenance and makes sure Art doesn’t get ripped off. He soaks, then clips, their father’s tusklike toenails. He is an excellent son.

  “Gray,” he says. “His color is gray with a little top coat of tan.” Nora nods, as though she is the specialist being brought in on Art’s case, as though she knows anything about what’s going on in her father’s arteries, his liver.

  “He must be seeing a doctor?” she says.

  “The thing is, I don’t remember him being this way before—maybe it’s from hanging around with other old guys—but he’s got this new bad-ass attitude. That it’s going to the doctor that brings on the trouble, that you step into the office and that’s where your troubles really begin.”

  “I’ll get Mom on him.”

  “He has this serious paunch now. He sits on the sofa and has to lean back to get comfortable. He doesn’t have a lap anymore. It’s more of a slope, an embankment. And when he gets up, it’s like he’s made this huge effort. There’s sweat on his forehead.”

  “Well, he better not go to the doctor, then. I have a feeling that doctor would only tell him he’s not in great shape and that’s where his troubles would really begin.”

  “I know,” Harold says. A plate of tiny snails has arrived with little picker implements to pluck out the meat. He holds out the dish toward her.

  “Not for me,” she says, raising a hand. “I have trouble with them cringing in their shells.”

  “This is going to take me a while, then, all by myself.” He starts in with his little pick. There look to be maybe a hundred snails on the plate.

  Nora sits back and pours more Coke into her glass of ice. The cubes crack and sputter, rearrange themselves. “I’ll call Mom. Get her to take him in to see someone. He won’t fight Mom.”

  When Harold is done eating, he blots his lips with a flutter of thin paper napkins from the table dispenser. He exhales deeply and fills a small cup with tea that has steeped to nearly the color of coffee.

  Nora looks to her brother for clues. He gives off an air of life fully lived, deeply enjoyed—all without seeming to have any of the sort of larger point to which one is supposed to aspire. He has an aura of success and accomplishment hovering around him, although he doesn’t seem to have accomplished or succeeded at much of anything. Nora wants to understand this contentment. She would like a piece of it for herself.

  She considers talking to him about the woman at the orientation reception. She would have nothing to fear; he is the most discreet person on the planet, and probably the second or third least judgmental. She could put a silly spin on the little episode. Make fun of her own vanity being tapped by the encounter. Then shake her head with relief that she hung up her jersey years ago and retired from this ridiculous sport.

  She moves so close to this confession that she experiences the slight sensation in the jaw that precedes revelation. But then, instead, she says nothing, picks up the pale green slip that is the restaurant check, settles up, and moves quickly past the opportunity.

  Around the corner from the restaurant, they find what he’s looking for. A wholesale shop, profoundly dark and musty inside, its wares lurking in huge drooping banks of cloth sacks pushed against the walls, and in a freezer case where roiling frost obscures whatever lies inside. There doesn’t seem to be a lively flow of buying and selling in the shop. Nora imagines a hole in the middle of the back room, leading directly to China, mysterious goods hefted out, then set to wait for some vague, nocturnal commerce.

  “These will see me through a couple of months.” Harold pats the giant bag of fortune cookies he has bought. He tears it open at the top, shakes it like a lottery maestro, and tips the bag toward her. “Go ahead.”

  She cracks open her cookie and reads:

  YOU ARE ALMOST THERE.

  “A great fortune,” she says. She hands it to Harold.

  “Yes,” he says. “Excellent.”

  While he was buyin
g the cookies, Nora found, on a shelf next to some bottles of hair tonic, a dusty, paper-wrapped bar of jasmine soap.

  “For Jeanne,” she tells him, setting it on the counter, feeling the guilt flow through her fingertips into this gift, tainting it. Even though she has nothing to be guilty about. Yet. The guilt comes from knowing there is a “yet” attached to the thought.

  On their way home, he opens the bag and sniffs the soap, which sets him off on the subject of Jeanne. “You are so lucky,” he says.

  “Yes.” She wants to head off the hymn of praise for Jeanne that is forthcoming. She won’t be able to hear it right now, cannot have the conversation that is pressing its way forward. Instead she brings up his play.

  “Previews start next weekend,” he says brightly, meaning, Will she come?

  “Saturday. On Friday, Fern and I have to go have a talk with Russell. She’s supposed to be contributing to her own upkeep. She already gets half her tuition because of me working there. Russell makes up the shortfall on that, but there’s still everything else, and most of what she makes from the psychic thing goes—well, she has her Body Shop habit, those Starbucks drinks. So anyway, we have to put on our rough-hewn garments, go into mendicant mode.”

  “He’ll do it. Russell always comes through.”

  “Yes, but he’ll make me suffer first. That’s why we have to go over to have this humiliating talk. It’s my penance. He can’t just mail a check. And I have to bring Fern for moral support because I can’t ever bring Jeanne. Louise says she can’t accept our ‘lifestyle.’ She doesn’t want to be confronted with it. What she actually said was she didn’t want her nose rubbed in it.”

  “Someone should put a sock in her mouth. A smelly sock.” Everyone hates Louise; Harold jumped right on that bandwagon, bless his heart.

  “Oh, I think Russell is hiding behind her skirts. He can put everything off on Louise and her religion. She has a bumper sticker: GOD LISTENS. God must just be so bummed, don’t you think, having to sit up there, listening to Louise?”

  “That’s Friday,” Harold says.

  “Yes, and so Saturday we’ll come to your play. We’re all looking forward to it.”

  They both taste the lie for a moment, then Harold says, “I’ll drop off some comps.”

  “And I’ll call Mom,” she tells him as he gets out of the car in front of his place. “Get her on Dad’s case.”

  “You won’t be disappointed,” he says, meaning the play. Unspoken between them is all the ghastly theater Nora has had to sit through over the years because Harold was a wife-poisoner in this, a spy in that. Once, he was Being in a theatrical interpretation of Being and Nothingness. They can never talk about that one.

  Meteorology

  DON’T KNOW WHYYY...drifts out from Harold’s living room as Fern lets herself and Lucky in the front door.

  Dolores is home, propped against the cushions at the end of the sofa, in her version of leisurewear—a long kimono-style robe printed with fans. Her hair drapes her shoulders. She is soaking the fingertips of her left hand, to release the two-inch, vermilion press-on nails Harold won’t be able to wear out this afternoon.

  “Lena Horne doesn’t have enough tragic range for ‘Stormy Weather,’” she tells Fern. “I have the Judy Garland cover. With Judy, that sun’s not merely hiding behind a couple of gray old clouds. The apocalypse has already happened. That sun has abandoned the sky, for good.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you...” Fern starts in, then gets cold feet, then warms them up enough for another try, which is, “I mean, have you ever noticed that your interests are sort of like the interests of, well ... of a gay guy?”

  “Oh,” Dolores says, pulling her hand out of the soaking solution, plucking the nails off one by one, “wouldn’t that just simplify everything?”

  From the stereo, Lena acknowledges that she can’t go on, that everything she has is gone, but her sorrows get muted by the bedroom door as Fern pulls it shut behind her. Lucky finds a corner, and, after several turnarounds, drops to the carpet for a nap. Fern is ready for work.

  By conducting her business within earshot of Harold’s stereo, its ancient turntable always stacked with sputtering seventy-eights from the forties and fifties, Fern is acquiring a slouchy outlook on love. Everything that has happened to her, or will happen, has clearly already happened to someone else. It was a cold hand on her heart, the realization that the people who first found meaning in these songs of wry despair are now her grandmother’s age. In much the same way, all the vaporous futures predicted by all the fortunetellers before her are long since played out. But for her clients, who have their own contemporary anthems of sorrow, their troubles are still terribly alive, their futures lying around sharp corners, over steep rises ahead.

  She positions herself diagonally on the bed; she has found she gets the best reception from this angle, that more information seems to come her way. This sort of thinking, which she would have found totally flaky a year ago, has become part of the new way she sees the universe.

  It started with trying to be good at the job. At first she was punting with every call. Wildly scanning for clues—inflections in the client’s voice, pauses that might be pregnant with meaning. Guessing general, using the formats Mindy provided, then going to specifics when the clients’ interest seemed to perk up. Beating the bushes to flush out their pasts—hard childhoods, missed opportunities, estrangements.

  Their present—a period of upheaval or searching.

  Their future—growth and change ahead! Perhaps a new and significant person entering their life! Maybe money! (She tried to fill the future with capital letters and exclamation points.)

  This is still her default method, but, more and more lately, she hears her callers’ questions, then waits along with them for her own response. She is sometimes not sure what she’s going to say until she says it. This is where the process gets interesting.

  Star Scanners is happy with the increasing length of her calls, her rate of return callers. They want her to be plugged in from four to eight, three nights a week and Sunday afternoons, so her regulars will know when they can find her. In exchange for this firmer schedule, they have bumped her hourly rate up a couple of notches. Once she’s back at school next week, she’ll have to work the calls around her studies. Today, though, she can just stretch out and wait, passing the time thinking about all the potential in life as it lies ahead of her.

  It’s almost five; she’s about to clock out when the phone rings.

  “I know I’m late, but I just got in and I had to talk with you today.”

  This is Marsha, a nurse—nurses and beauticians are her most frequent callers. Marsha is a regular about whom Fern has not yet received so much as the vaguest psychic insight. All she can give her is common sense laced with a mystical flavor. Marsha has been involved for a couple of years with a married guy and has recently found out that he has also been seeing yet another woman—a girl really, a college friend of his daughter. Marsha is trying to bend the facts enough to keep thinking the guy—Phil—is an okay, simply confused person.

  Fern wishes Marsha would stop calling. She is done with this client, has nothing more to offer her. Nada. She has told Marsha flat-out that she doesn’t see this liaison occupying any good place in her future, that she sees her going on to someone who is neither married nor dating someone else (instead of both), that she sees the aura of distant travel, an adventure deep into a foreign culture. Not even this exotic note did much to pry Marsha off her Phil obsession. Although she pretends to take Fern’s—which is to say Adriana’s—advice to heart, and hangs up at the end of each of their sessions utterly resolved to get free of Phil, she has not yet made it a whole week before she’s back on the phone to report a new glimmer of possibility.

  “We had a very important talk today,” Marsha says.

  “Yes, I see it. I see you sitting very close to each other. Your expressions are very serious.” She knows they were close since the only places Phil,
nervous about discovery, will take Marsha is to a budget motel or out in his car where they park like teenagers.

  “He’s not serious about her,” Marsha says.

  “The new girlfriend?”

  “No. His wife. Their parents were friends. It was practically an arranged marriage.”

  “But they’ve been married for years, right?”

  “Eighteen, but it’s been dead in the water for a long time.”

  “But what about the college girl?”

  “If I can get him to dump the wife, the girl will be a piece of cake.”

  Fern doesn’t like Marsha’s attitude. More and more she is sounding like someone who will deserve Phil if she gets him. “I see you with someone else.” Fern hangs tough.

  “Look harder,” Marsha says, with a bossy edge in her voice which Fern doesn’t like, doesn’t like at all.

  By the time she has hustled Marsha off the phone, then logged out, Dolores is just a kimono left on the sofa and Harold is off to a rehearsal of his play. Fern heads home and on her way ties Lucky’s leash to a parking meter and ducks into the Blockbuster to pick up a movie for herself and Jeanne. She is making a gesture of thanks. When Fern went out to the cottage in Michigan with her dad and Louise in July, she couldn’t bring Lucky (Louise is allergic to everything but humans and fish). Her mother loves Lucky and can be counted on to feed him and take him on the slow, sniffing-opportunity walks he enjoys; she would never let him languish. Jeanne, though, throws herself into dog care with enthusiasm. She takes Lucky to the park, and on what she calls “happy rides,” which are to the drive-thru at McDonald’s. This time she took him so often that he was a little portly by the time Fern came back. She had also—a minor miracle given Lucky’s age and lifelong resistance to doing anything cute—taught him to shake hands.