by Carol Anshaw
They have each blown off what they are supposed to be doing with this back half of the day—Fern is skipping her Peasants seminar and James has knocked off early from his messenger job. They have been making love, off and on, for a couple of hours. Sex with James is very different from sex with Cooper, which she used to think of as Big Sex (although her experience was, is still, pretty limited). With Cooper, she would go around the day after, sore in the obvious places, but also at her elbows, in the muscles at the back of her neck. When he disappeared, the sex bore the weight of everything he hadn’t said, held the meaning she needed to counter her constant disorientation.
With James, what happens in bed is more easygoing, sometimes even comic. In a purely physical sense, their height, turned horizontal, becomes a matching of lengths; they are two long creatures of their species tangling in a graceless way, looking for a shortcut, as though if they learn each other physically, they can skip everything else that’s going to be necessary. Necessary for what, Fern can’t say.
He pulls her flat on top of him.
“Let’s pretend we’re missionaries,” he says.
“The part where we go out and convert natives,” she says, “oppressing them with our cultural assumptions?”
“Actually, I was thinking about the part where we have sex in the missionary position.”
“Then I think you’d have to be on top.”
“Sssh,” he says, shifting beneath her. “Just let me in. I’ll tell you later about our religion.”
***
Lucky is growing restless. He has been napping on the window seat of the dormer in the front of the apartment, but is now pacing in and out of the bedroom.
“He needs to go out,” Fern says.
When they get themselves dressed and outside, dusk is settling in; the sun has taken along with it any warmth that had been adhering to the afternoon. Fern clutches her jacket at the front and waits while Lucky pees luxuriously on a bush and James finds his car keys. He has an ancient Datsun, older than either of them. They open the hatchback for Lucky. He gets as far as standing with his front paws on the bumper; James hoists him the rest of the way in.
There is an affinity between Lucky and James. They both have expressive eyes that give them an air of being in on some terrific joke. They are both happiest when they are in motion—Lucky ambling along on a walk; James on his skateboard, on his bike.
Fern has begun to see dotted lines between certain people and animals, between certain events—indications that the universe is ordered, but in a way that has yet to reveal itself. This universe holds particularly significant friends. Lucky is one, and now James. Others are still out there, waiting in places as snug as tree forts, stockpiled with the laughter of running jokes. The trick will be to find them. They are part of Fern’s suddenly expanding view of the space her life will occupy.
“Watch out for the floor,” James reminds Fern as she gets into the car, referring to the fact that there isn’t any on the passenger side. She props her feet on the dash for the short ride up to Welles Park, Lucky’s old stomping grounds, from the days when he was a pup and Fern lived with her mother and father close by there.
The park is brilliant in the midst of the falling night, its playing fields and basketball court, the horseshoe-pitching pits, all bathed in a false day created by the gang-busting floodlights. Lucky totters over to the fence by the baseball diamond, his favorite pooping place. Fern heads over to pick up after him.
“He knows this park like the back of his paw,” Fern tells James a little later, as Lucky herds them from behind, some working-dog hard-wiring. There’s another dog out, a hobo with no apparent owner, no collar, fur of many colors and directions—the sort of dog for which Lucky has always had a mysterious affection, maybe from his early days on the rocky road of life, before they got him. What begins with a burst of hilarity—the two dogs throwing themselves against each other’s shoulders and chasing each other back and forth—winds up with Lucky losing sight of his buddy, and then, before Fern can do anything to stop him, he is blearily heading out of the park, straight into four lanes of traffic gunning up and down Western.
Even in the mildest hours of morning, Western is a route of serious, lightly menacing drivers in beat-up vans and highwheeled trucks. At night, these vehicles are driven by the same guys, now with a few beers under their belts. And so when Fern loses track of Lucky as he slips into the surly stream of fenders and headlights, she panics. All she can do is stand bolted to the curb screaming, “No!”
James jumps onto the hood, then the roof of a parked SUV.
“I see him!” he shouts down and leaves Fern on the curb as he scrambles down and leaps into the traffic. Cars honk and begin slowing down, then stopping altogether. Humanity swells up around Lucky; nobody wants to hit a dog. Fern sees, when she unfreezes and heads into the street herself, that, amazingly, a few people have gotten out and cordoned Lucky off. When she finally gets there, Lucky is on the ground. He has been hit.
“No,” she says. He cannot be dead. He just can’t.
“Hey, man, I’m really sorry,” a huge guy with a mullet haircut and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off in a ragged way is telling James, who tells Fern, “It’s not that bad. See. He’s only been bumped.”
And it seems to be true. Lucky’s name has carried him through. He only has a cut over one eye, a little blood. He’s disoriented, Fern can tell when she crouches down to hold him. He comes up with a brave look. This is the part that kills her and she starts crying.
They drive down to the emergency vet where it’s expensive just walking in the door, but after hours it’s the only game in town. They wait for a few minutes on turquoise plastic chairs. Lucky rests on Fern’s lap, her arms bracketing him, one hand tapping a beat of comfort on his haunch.
“You are a fabulous dog,” she tells him, and then tells him the story of the day they got him at Anti-Cruelty so many years ago. He loves hearing this story, which she embellishes a little every time she tells it. She also tries to stick his name in every couple of sentences, so he knows the story is about him. “You were showing off in your cage, wagging your tail and smiling. You needed to do some big-time public relations. You’d been brought back twice, Lucky. Yes, you had such a long rap sheet tagged to your cage. Eats furniture. Barks. Chases cars. My dad thought you were homely and a pack of trouble and wanted us to take this little dog that looked like a fuzzy football, but of all the dogs there, Lucky was the one I wanted. Only you weren’t even called Lucky then. The name on your cage was Kool. Anyway, I cried and pitched a fit and finally my dad said we could take you, ‘on probation.’ On the way home, he said you were one lucky dog and that’s how we came up with your name. Lucky.”
By the end of the story, Lucky’s tail is thwapping a slow beat on the seat of the chair next to them.
The only other people in the vet’s waiting room, aside from the receptionist, are a mother and a boy about seven, who is holding something motionless in his lap, something wrapped in a dishtowel. Fern looks away, presses her forehead to James’s shoulder, and says in a low voice, “Oh, man. What do you think—parakeet?”
“Hamster,” James says, and turns to kiss her temple.
They have to wait; the mother and kid are next, but they emerge in no time at all, without the dishtowel or its contents.
The vet on duty is incredibly nice.
“Hey, big guy,” he says to Lucky, squatting in front of him, kissing him absently by the ear as he checks out the damage. Then James lifts the dog onto the table and the vet stitches up the cut, which gives Lucky a jaunty, devil-may-care look.
“He’s going to be fine,” the vet tells them, “but his eyes have pretty heavy-duty cataracts. He probably only sees shapes now. His hearing might be going, too. What I’m saying is he’s not navigating with as much info as he once did. You might need to keep a closer watch on him.”
When he leaves to write up the visit and James goes to find a cash machine so they c
an pay the bill, Fern crouches in front of Lucky.
“The doctor says you’re doing great,” she tells him.
They bring the dog home. Fern figures this is as good an opportunity as any to filter James into the house in a nonchalant way. She wants him and her mother to meet, even though she can imagine every moment of this meeting. How Nora will be gracious and seem welcoming and interested in James, and totally cool about his life at the moment being lived in the middle of nowhere. No college or real job. Nora will draw him out about his artwork and seem so fascinated he won’t have a clue that he’s being dismissed, dispatched way down in her pecking order. For Fern, the visit is over in her mind before it has even begun. But keeping James a secret, which is what Fern has done for nearly a month now, seems like giving her mother way too much power.
Before they go in, she briefs him on Nora’s situation with Jeanne. She should have told him before, but there hasn’t really been a right moment. When she tells someone, she likes to just slip it in, by the by. As opposed to dropping her mother’s sexual orientation as if it’s a bombshell, which she doesn’t think it is, really. Now, though, she has to make it a bombshell. Otherwise, she risks bringing James in and finding her mother and Jeanne necking on the couch, which, amazingly, they still do sometimes. And so she just tells him. He doesn’t act like it’s a deal, only asks if it’s a deal for her.
“No, of course not. Not now anyway. When she first told me, though, I was maybe twelve. She had a talk all prepared. I’d sort of figured it out by then anyway. But even then I wasn’t so much weirded out about her. I was mostly just mad that she’d left my father, and this new thing was a part of that. But it did make me have to think about why I liked boys in that way, and not other girls. What it was about them that I liked. What it was about me that was different from her.”
“Piece of luck for me, you being straight,” he says, turning off the ignition, then, “Hmmm. Your lesbian mother.” He goes around the car, opens the hatchback, and lifts out Lucky, who is totally into being injured and helpless. “Let’s go meet her, then.”
They come in the front way and are immediately hit with a wall of noise. Jeanne is watching Payback, one of her favorite junk movies. Mel Gibson is clinging to the bottom of a careening car, shooting through the floor to kill the Asian gangsters inside.
“Do not mess with Mel,” she says to Fern when they come into the living room, but then she looks over her shoulder and sees that Fern is not alone. She politely grabs the remote and stuns the screen to a silent solid blue. First, there is a great flutter of concern and explanation over Lucky. Then, when the dog is sitting like a potentate on the futon sofa, which is usually forbidden to him, Fern introduces James, then asks where her mother is.
“She had an appointment with the dentist after work.”
In the same way she couldn’t call up a picture of her mother’s after-school meeting that other time, Fern now can’t see Nora in the dentist’s chair. There is no appointment; the dentist is gone, the office is closed, dark and silent and smelling of mint and metal.
“You two would like Cocas?” Jeanne says. You can’t tell her they’re Cokes, Fern has tried. In France they are Cocas, and come in tall glasses and with a slice of lemon. Everything is just a little better in France, a little classier. This running line of Jeanne’s conversation can get a little tiresome, but tonight it stops here. She is only charming.
While Jeanne is slicing the lemon, pouring the pop, Fern has a little time to wonder where her mother really is.
And then, in the very next moment, Nora bursts breathless through the back door. She almost immediately grows a little flustered—seeing Lucky with his shaved, stitched forehead, and then tuning in to James. The scene would be a tough one to piece together with no information; anyone might be a little bewildered. But Fern caught her mother a beat earlier, caught her expression at the instant of arrival, before she had to start focusing on what she was coming into, and yet even then she was flustered, by something left behind, beyond these walls. And she drags a little bit of it in with her, the way kids drag in the snow or cut grass in which they’ve been playing, along with a spillover of mood from whatever they’ve been up to, and now have to come down from. Fern picks up on this mood spill, and knows she has her mother dead to rights.
Fern holds off explaining Lucky on the sofa, James in the kitchen, and tackles her mother before she has a moment to get her guard up. “So, are you numb?”
Nora’s eyes flicker, as though she’s been blindsided.
“From the Novocain.” Fern amplifies, prompting Nora to put an actor’s hand to her cheek.
“Oh, you know it.” Nora flicks a finger against her cheek to illustrate the deadness. “Go ahead.” She laughs, and says to everyone, “Sock me.”
Job Site
NORA IS SUPPOSED TO BE at the dentist, the latest appointment in a phantom after-hours schedule. She writes these ghost events into her datebook, in case Jeanne should ever flip through its pages.
The time she is claiming to be at Dr. Gerber’s will actually be spent in a small house in Ravenswood. A small house, but a big job for Pam—a kitchen and bath renovation plus a sun porch to replace a rotting deck. The new owners won’t be moving in until all the work is done. When Nora arrives a little after six, the house, with its uncurtained windows and harsh work lights within, is a jack-o’-lantern, brilliant against the backdrop of nightfall. She stands out front for a moment, breathing in the graveyard smell—leaves expiring into the bottomless cold and damp, the vast hollow that is the winter to come. Once inside, she flushes as though with sudden fever, but it’s only that the heat is so cranked; radiator thimbles hiss and sigh all around her.
She finds Pam in the kitchen, conferring in fast (theirs) / bad (hers) Spanish as she writes a check and gives it to the head guy among the drywall mudders, a circus act of small Mexican men on stilts, shadow-dancing between the fresh white walls and the high light of their work lamps. Nora has seen this ballet before, at another job site, also at night, when the crew was folding up their tents as these guys are now, leaving Nora and Pam to their own devices in these vacant, darkened places. This is the housekeeping they do.
“Upstairs,” Pam says. Outside, the drywallers’ van is pulling away from the curb.
Always there is an aura of ambush at the start, Pam shutting a door behind them, locking it if possible, even if they are alone in the house, as they are now. Her moves are fluid, assured, as though she possesses a past lively with the practice of secrets—girlish diaries with locks, clubhouses with branch-covered entrances, and into adulthood, into other rooms with other women before Nora, situations in which locking the door would be the first bit of foreplay.
This bedroom door has no lock and Pam gently presses Nora against it. In the few weeks of their affair, they’ve had little opportunity for anything languorous, or even properly between sheets. They have to take whatever opportunities present themselves; neither can offer a bed free and clear. Nora lives with Jeanne. Pam lives with Melanie, who, according to Pam, is a “hothead.” Melanie is an emergency room nurse, her everyday is filled with saving lives, which Pam finds impressive and fascinating. Not quite so fascinating to Nora, who hopes never to meet Melanie. Nora listens for another sort of detail. Such as that, in an unfortunate combination with her hotheadedness, Melanie is apparently also the jealous type. Pam is nervous about cheating on her. Nora infers that something cautionary has happened before along this avenue.
If Nora wants to scare herself, she only has to calculate how little she really knows Pam. In the narrow patches of time when they’re not grappling around naked on a paint tarp, or coming out of their clothes across the bench seat of Pam’s pickup or (twice) in the middle of the afternoon on a king-size mattress at the Heart O’ Chicago motel, they talk, but not in any reasonable or efficient way, not with the purpose of exchanging the hard information they ought to be. Most of their talk happens over the phone. These calls come into the office fro
m Pam on the phone in her car.
Nora feels overexposed taking these calls at her desk; they seem much more like calls she should take under her desk. (She can hear Mrs. Rathko puttering in a phony way in the outer office, surely eavesdropping.) These calls have a breathless quality to them; there is never enough time available to explore their small repertoire of inexhaustible subjects:
how they really shouldn’t be doing this
how they are managing to get through daily life in a constant
state of distraction and exhaustion
where they ache
what they would do if they had a whole day or a whole night—
the dinner Pam would fix for Nora, the movie they’d go to.
Even as she is held in thrall by these chats, Nora also understands that they are common currency in the realm of the illicit—small, easily spendable change dropped into the palm, enclosed in a fist. Their conversations are probably no different from those of the salesmen and secretaries who occupy the other rooms at the Heart O’ Chicago.
As for Pam and who she is and where she comes from, Nora knows only this and that. She is blue-collar by redefinition; her parents are both high school history teachers. Her small rebellion was to drop out of college and into the building trades.
She is fond of extreme sports—deep-water scuba diving, freefall parachuting. This is how she met Melanie; they took their first jump together. She has a three-tooth bridge on one side of her mouth and a scar up the side of her left calf, both from the same bad landing. The ceramics class fits into another cache of interest—artistic pursuits. She has also taken courses in collage and watercolor painting. The ring she wears she made herself in a metalsmithing course. She is thirty-five, but seems younger for all these lively interests, still bursting with all her potential. There is something enormously appealing about how Pam sees life as a blank to be filled in any way she wants with no constraints, is so dashing and adventurous, and now Nora is part of the adventure.