Lucky in the Corner

by Carol Anshaw

  “Well, that was a different time and place,” Nora says. “Louise, I don’t think you can expect thrift to be a compelling notion to a twenty-one-year-old. You can try talking to her. I mean, you’re welcome to that conversation.” She reaches over and ruffles Fern’s hair, as though she does this all the time, as though they are always teasin’ and joshin’. Fern goes along with this charade, smiling shyly. She is a good actress when necessary; it’s all that show biz in her gene pool.

  Louise isn’t interested in persuading Fern, though. She is a dollars-and-cents girl; she oversees budgets for all the ad agency’s campaigns; that’s how Russell met her. She has gone over their finances with the same ruthlessness and has a dollar figure at the ready, the extent to which she and Russell are willing to help. This amount has clearly been arrived at before Nora got here; they have just been making her dance.

  Nora tries to pull out of this sinkhole into some Zen place of larger vision. Instead she winds up fiendishly craving a cigarette. Russell interprets her brief silence as concession, and hands her a check—for a little better than half of what Nora had been hoping for. He says, “Now, Louise has something she wants to talk with you about. And while we leave you girls to your little chat, I want to show Fern my new laptop. Humongously powerful. I have to strap myself into the chair before I launch onto the Web.”

  Fern sits tight and looks at Nora as if she knows her mother needs to be rescued (and that she owes her something for tonight), but Russell takes her hand and pulls her off the couch and down the hall and all she can do is look back over her shoulder at Nora, which Nora interprets as a silent wish for good luck.

  When they are alone and the room is silent, Louise leans forward across the coffee table.

  “What’s this about?” Nora says, not giving Louise a chance to lead up to whatever is coming. She tries to suspect the worst, but can’t really see what that is going to be.

  Louise clasps her hands together and fixes Nora with a look of synthetic sincerity. “I wanted to apologize.”

  Nora knows enough not to ask “for what?,” but lack of a prompt is not going to stop Louise.

  “My faith teaches us to hate the sin but love the sinner. But sometimes, well, sometimes I’d get the two mixed up. The truth is I had a hard time dealing with your perversion, and, of course, at first I had to cope with my personal concerns. That I was, perhaps, being regarded in a, well, an unsavory way by you, the way a man might look at me.”

  Nora doesn’t know where to begin. Sarcasm, usually a tool close at hand, eludes her. Which leaves Louise free to continue cataloging her fears.

  “And of course, Russell and I worried about Fern’s development, that you couldn’t provide a role model that was, well, healthy.”

  Nora sinks deeper into the sofa. She can’t imagine Russell actually shares any of these crackpot notions, but she supposes it’s possible he lets Louise think he does, which is almost worse. She knows that in a few days she will come up with knifelike replies to Louise’s remarks, but in the moment she seems to have fallen into a chasm of silence she can’t climb out of. All she can come up with is “Are you nuts?”

  “Well, you can insult me, Nora, but I’m only voicing concerns you must realize are shared by most people, righteous concerns.”

  “Basically,” Nora says, “I have trouble dealing with any line of chat that includes the word ‘righteous.’”

  “Well, then I’m sorry for you.” Louise is on a roll. “Righteousness comes from having God and Scripture on my side. Leviticus tells us—”

  “Oh please, Louise. Don’t even start thumping that Bible with me. Doesn’t that homo thing come in some passage that also forbids putting two fish in the same oven and riding an ox to market?”

  Louise puts up a hand, like a Supreme singing “Stop in the Name of Love.” “Please. You’re taking this the wrong way. Let’s start over. I’m only trying to bring you good news. My church has a new ministry that’s very exciting—”

  “I am not interested in being accepted by your religion. I think being shunned by your religion is the best possible relationship I can have with it.” Nora has to get out of here. The air in the room is beginning to thicken and become cloying, as though those little air freshener things are plugged into every wall socket.

  “I think you’re only defensive because you haven’t felt welcome before. But now we have an outreach specifically directed toward your needs.” Louise’s eyes begin moistening. Nora’s discomfort is nothing to her; she’s a Mack truck with a mission, bearing down, ready to run Nora over if that’s what it takes to get her message out. “It’s called Healing Waters. You see, it’s a beautiful program that uses the power of prayer for change. And we’ve been so successful. It’s been wonderful to see all these happy people who used to be sad and sorry, trapped in perversion and a godless lifestyle, and now they’re freed from all that through prayer, free to live a normal life again, to find serenity and be in God’s grace. Think about where it could take you. You could even remarry, provide a healthy atmosphere for Fern. Now we even have scientific studies to back us up. It’s been proven that if you try hard enough, you can make it work for you.”

  “Or maybe,” Nora says, belatedly finding her full voice, “we could take care of your concern from the other direction. Maybe they could come up with a program for you. You know, if you tried hard enough—with God’s help, of course—you might be able to turn queer. Think about it. You could be in the Pride Parade. I could get you a rainbow bumper sticker.”

  Louise closes her eyes for a long moment, clearly praying for strength. When she opens them, she has nothing more to say, only sits with her hands clasped in front of her, prayerfully poised fingernails pointing at Nora, aiming enlightenment at her over the banana bread.

  As Nora gets up from the sofa (more awkwardly than she would like, as the deep cushions don’t relinquish their occupants easily), she senses the heat in her face and hopes it doesn’t show. “Louise,” she says as she goes to find Fern, “don’t ever talk to me like this again.”

  In the car, she turns up the radio, then lets Fern change it to a station she likes, which has a playlist of songs that seem to be mostly amp backlash and guitars about to be slammed against the wall. If she lets Fern have her station, she won’t have to talk. The tactic doesn’t work, though.

  “Something really bad happened, didn’t it?” Fern says, turning off the radio.

  “Really. Bad.”

  “I think I know. I saw some pamphlets lying around. When I was at the cottage. I figured she was going to unload on you sooner or later.”

  “Then why didn’t you warn me? So I wouldn’t get ambushed.”

  “What difference does it make what she says? It’s just another stupid thing she believes in. I mean, she’s against Halloween because it has witches and goblins and they don’t believe in that. She also thinks there was Adam and Eve and then us, no monkeys. She’s a moron. I couldn’t even talk to her tonight. It’s like I just locked up.”

  “I know. I was there.”

  “Don’t blame me. Please. I mean, how was I going to defend myself in the face of that noble little picture she was painting. Thrifty little Louise standing with her piggy bank—”

  “I saw it as a cookie jar full of quarters.”

  “In line at the bank—”

  “The East Bumfuck Bank,” Nora fills in.

  “Yes, the First National Bank of East Bumfuck,” Fern says, and rolls the radio back up, but switches it to XRT for Nora. Sometimes, rarely, and only in little spots like this one, in blips on the verge of dissolving even as they are formed, but still, the two of them align and ally and sit in soft grass on the same side of the fence.

  At home, upstairs, Jeanne is curled up on the sofa in her study. She is the picture of domestic contentment, of constancy and faithfulness. Nora has been out the entire evening, and all Jeanne has done with this time alone is keep the home fires burning. She has not been sitting out by the lake in a
pickup truck with a stranger. She is right here with a glass of wine and a short stack of travel magazines.

  Jeanne enjoys these not so much to plan vacations, or even to travel via armchair into the luscious photo spreads, but rather for the columns that relate readers’ horror stories. Travelers stranded in airports for days with all their luggage lost or passports stolen, subjected to cavity searches for drugs. Tourists who wind up in Greek prisons for going over their Visa limit in a gift shop. Bus group stragglers lost for days in the maze of some ancient medina.

  “Anything gruesome?” Nora asks, slumping into the easy chair opposite the sofa, envying Jeanne her uneventful evening.

  “Nothing. This month, they are all whiners, babies.” Then she adds, very casually, not looking up, “I was surfing the Web for a while before. I found a fantastic fare to Paris.” She really means Tours, where she is from, but can’t say the word; it’s too incendiary. In lieu of real vacations these past few years, Nora has visited many chateaux, and suffered through three visits with Jeanne’s provincial, judgmental family—two sisters and a mother. They never fight, but gang up on Jeanne in chillier ways. They are particularly adept at pointed silences and ill-natured teasing. Nora drives from chateau to chateau while Jeanne cooks for her mother, shops with her sisters, and by the late afternoon when Nora returns, Jeanne is up in the guest room crying, but pleads with Nora that her family mustn’t know they have driven her to tears, and so dinner is always tense and hideous and cloying with reduced wine sauces. Nora thought she and Jeanne had already agreed that she wouldn’t have to go over again until somebody died. And so Nora doesn’t feel she has to ask how cheap the fare is, even just to be polite. Plus she knows Jeanne will tell her anyway.

  “Two hundred sixty dollars aller et retour.”

  “How could it possibly be that cheap?”

  “Well, it’s not a nonstop. That is where you find the very deep savings.”

  “Where’s the stop?”

  “Phoenix...first.” Nora doesn’t ask if this plane is going to Paris the long way around the planet, or doubling back from Phoenix and stopping in Greenland. She’s too downcast to work up even the mildest sigh of exasperation, and her silence on this normally touchy subject prompts Jeanne to put down her magazine and really look at her.

  “Oh! Tell me please what has happened,” she says, sitting up, reaching to pull Nora down beside her.

  Nora relates the worst of the conversation with Louise. “If only Fern had tipped me off, I could have had my dazzling retorts prepared, or headed Louise off at the pass. Instead I cowered, then got in a few licks, but really, she won. She made me feel as bad as she could have hoped to. As it was going on, I realized that I’ve almost never had to deal with head-on contempt.” Nora starts crying. She almost never cries. Jeanne knows enough not to offer any sort of facile consolation. Instead, she sits with the information for a while, then says, “We’re too insulated. We live in a small place where everyone is understanding and tolerant of differences, where everyone is different, our little neighborhood of oddness and peculiarity.”

  “I should laugh it off,” Nora says gloomily. “Why can’t I take Fern’s position, say Louise is a moron and forget the whole thing?”

  “It is difficult being challenged, even by fools.”

  “At least I refused to defend myself against her stupid accusations. Like that I’m a vampire, that I want to suck the blood of schoolchildren and seduce housewives.”

  “Well...” Jeanne says.

  “Well, not all housewives anyway,” Nora amends. “They don’t know we’re very fussy about our housewives.” From there she takes the folded Kleenex Jeanne has pulled from the pocket of her sweater, wipes her nose, takes Jeanne’s arm, pulls it over her shoulder as she leans into her sofa-warmed body, and allows her sadness to be blotted up.

  This is what the long run is about, she thinks, the deep comfort furrowed out by time and endurance. This huge and important thing is what she is putting in jeopardy. She fills with good sense and firm resolve. She will put an end to the nonsense with Pam. Now she sees it is simply a test to pass.

  Salad

  FERN WAS HOT AND ITCHY inside her crouton costume, which consisted of a black leotard, dancing slippers, and a box with no bottom and a head hole cut in the top. The outside of the box was covered with roughed-up burlap, tan and scratchy.

  She was standing in the wings, waiting for her part in “Dancing Salad,” the grand finale of the “Food Friends” show at her school. The point of the program was that it’s important to eat good things, not just candy and junk food.

  She had only a little while longer to wait. The lettuce wedges, tomatoes, and cucumber slices were onstage now. Next would come onions, carrots, then herself and the three other croutons, then the bottles marked VINEGAR and OIL with their squirt guns.

  She found a gap in the stage curtain and looked out into the audience. Her father was away in Ohio, making a presentation to a tire company for a campaign. “Tires that grip the road.” The tire in the picture turned into a glove grabbing a snow-covered stretch of highway. The glove was his part of the idea.

  Anyway, she was not looking for him because she knew he wouldn’t be there. She was looking for her mother, who was against children being forced to perform onstage, even though Fern had sworn she hadn’t been forced, that she loved being a crouton.

  The lights were off in the school auditorium, but there was enough light spreading out from the stage to see into the audience. There were a few fathers, but it was mostly mothers and brothers and sisters, a few of the kids from the show who were in the proteins dance, now sitting down in their costumes—which made them look like primary-colored worms—to watch the end of the show. She dragged her gaze slowly over each person, to put off the moment of surprise when she would spot her mother.

  She was still looking when Miss Elmquist put a hand on the top of her box, by her shoulder, gathering her together with the other croutons, telling them all to remember that they are tossing themselves into the salad, not walking into it. Fern had heard this before, had her tossing movements inside her, stored up, waiting to burst out from behind the curtain into the jumble of somersaulting, cartwheeling vegetables.

  She took a last look into the shadows of the back rows, beyond where the light reached. She picked a shape that might be her mother, probably was, was for sure. She could, with only the slightest pressure of imagination on reality, see her mother there among all the others, hands together, holding back her applause until she saw Fern burst onto the stage, toasty and scratchy, tossing herself—perfectly—into the mix.

  Bump

  WHEN SHE PRESSES HER FACE into the slight depression at the center of James’s chest, the smell is dry and slightly salty, like a potato chip. The taste of the place behind his ear is tart. There is a lot about him naked. The woolly hair on his chest. The deep, freckled tan, especially on his shoulders. The scars, mementos of various mishaps—a pencil-thin line under his chin (diving board), a squashed star shape on his elbow (skateboard), a raised curve above his right knee (bike). His fingers spatulate, his toes so peculiarly long.

  “You’re quite an oddball, really,” Fern tells him, leaning on an elbow as she makes her diagnosis.

  “Well, let’s see who’s talking,” he says, turning onto his side to make his own examination.

  A few days after the day in the park, while she was still working up elaborate plots for running into him again, he asked Tracy for her number and called. The conversation didn’t go totally smoothly. He meandered so aimlessly, for so long, that she began to wonder if he’d lost track of whom he was calling, what he was calling about. But then eventually he said maybe she’d like to get together sometime, it didn’t have to be soon, and she said it could be soon as far as she was concerned, it could be that night for instance, and it turned out this was fine with him.

  He is someone who needs to be steered a little in the right direction. She has to do most of the calling an
d planning, but he is always happy to hear from her, as though he was expecting her call, is already nudging the rest of his life over to make a space for her.

  He worries a lot, about a lot of things—the future, the environment, greenhouse gases, the meaning of things and the possibility that they don’t mean enough. He riffles through her anthropology texts and seizes on the grimmest examples of existence. Nomads in arid parts of Africa who spend each of their days searching out a cup of water, a few bits of grain, a little shade. He fears that, stripped of music videos and new ways to distress denim, human enterprise would quickly be reduced to nothing more than scavenging for water and shade.

  Fern, by nature an optimist, thinks she provides a counter to James’s pessimism. She thinks it’s a good thing he ran into her.

  The only hurdle she had was right at the beginning. She tried to tell him that she was “sort of” involved with someone. He asked what that meant. She had to admit she hadn’t seen this person much in the past few months. Not at all, actually. And that maybe it was more like a year.

  “Then,” he told her, “I think it’s okay to see me.”

  They are on the mattress on the floor of his apartment, which is above a large garage behind a house on Barry. The apartment is made up of dormers and ceilings that slope with the roof above them. You have to stoop a lot walking through the place. James, who tops even Fern by several inches, uses a lurching gait as he ambles from room to room, like someone with a peculiar limp. The gravedigger in an old monster movie.

  The place has a red kitchen and a lot of dusty sunlight and is given over to the boxes he makes (something like Joseph Cornell’s, but really very different) and to his collections. His skateboards rest in a set of slotted shelves. Globes litter the floor, a drifting galaxy. The few vertical walls are hung with the opened boards of games from before their own childhoods. Rich Uncle. Chutes and Ladders. Pillow Fight. James is three years older than Fern, but he seems to occupy a different geography, a place less edgy and future-oriented than hers, more relaxed and suspended in childhood.