Lucky in the Corner

by Carol Anshaw

  She has never met anyone who operates with such confidence, with so little regard for the hurdles that stop most people. Which makes her admirable in the abstract, dangerous in their particular situation. If Pam decided that Nora was a next step in the big adventure that is her life, she would probably be able to work up the nerve to dispatch the incendiary Melanie, as well as tromp straight into what Nora has with Jeanne. She can too easily imagine Pam getting to a point where everything in her way would be just so much fragile china on a glass shelf.

  Nora can’t help but observe that Pam is so very different from Jeanne, whom she envisions sitting up in her study, buttoned into her cardigan, in a muddle of three-by-five cards, or sulking after a call with one of her bitchy sisters. Nora tries to apply checks on this sort of thinking, tries to recognize that if the situation were reversed, if she’d been with Pam for years, she might well find all her swashbuckling grandiose and tiresome by now, might find Jeanne’s quiet, cultured charms refreshing. She tries to keep in mind that a great part of Pam’s appeal is simply her newness, that she is as yet ungotten. Ungotten but possibly gettable.

  And she can come up with a few such sensible thoughts on the matter when she is alone, or at the office, but these then completely evaporate the moment she is with Pam, like now—naked on a crumpled canvas paint tarp, wrists pinned to the floor next to a rusted radiator, sweat rolling off her everywhere as Pam lies hard on top of her, mouth at Nora’s ear.

  Later, Pam sits naked except for her flannel shirt hanging open. Her body is a sketch composed of planes and darkness, propped against a wall that was a Floridian pink when they came in and the overhead was still on. In the dim, referred light of the streetlamp outside, it’s a rosy gray.

  She asks Nora, “What’s it like, to look the way you do? Do you go into the john late at night, turn on the light, and hang out in front of the mirror and say, ‘Man, it’s great that I’m so good-looking’?”

  “I don’t think about it that much.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s not as big a deal as you think. I guess it smoothes things out a little, situations. I walk in and I can feel the smoothing.” “But that is big,” Pam says. “Huge, actually.”

  “Maybe. But huge in a subtle way. And with limits. Like, maybe it’s part of how I got you to here. But it would probably take something else to get you any further.”

  Pam doesn’t say anything. Then she says, “Further would be trickier.”

  “I’m not pushing for further,” Nora says.

  “Right.”

  Of course, in her worst moments Nora does want further, without understanding exactly the shape it would take. When she begins thinking about further, her imagination, mercifully, shuts down.

  “Right now is the best part. For me,” Pam says, bringing Nora back to their present. She takes a deep drag off a filterless cigarette, some additive-free brand made by Native Americans, and stretches forward to pass it to Nora, who is still supposedly a nonsmoker, but has been taking hits off Pam’s, and now keeps a pack of Camels in her glove compartment for moments when she is wired, of which there have been a few lately. “You’d think the best part would be the fucking, but it’s not. The best part is the having fucked. It’s now, when I get to sit here and—even though out there we don’t exist, out there you and I are nothing—in here, in this little space where you’re so grateful to me, I own you.”

  When she says this stuff—so bullying and appropriating—Nora is appalled and thrilled. The fine hairs on her forearms stand up. Sometimes it seems Pam is someone she has made up, the woman in the roadside restroom, the woman in the motel by the tracks.

  Nora doesn’t need to look at her watch, which lies on the crumpled edge of the painter’s tarp. She knows it’s getting late. She can feel the pressure of misspent time bearing down on her, creating too long an absence, which she is going to have to account for with a tire she found flat when she got out of the dentist. A flat and a bumpy drive to a gas station, where they took forever to patch it. She concocts its details the whole way home. Hearing these lies when Nora gets there, Jeanne will sit blinking in a way that will make Nora worry that all her malarkey has only made her sound more suspicious.

  This isn’t what happens, though. Instead, while she has been out of the loop, something has happened inside it. The kitchen is startlingly full when she comes in. Jeanne is there, and Fern, who asks Nora about the dentist, a lie she has already half forgotten. There’s also a boy in the kitchen. Lucky has been hit by a car, but he’s all right. He sits on the sofa like a welcomed-home war hero with his wound stitched up. Fern has brought him from the vet, along with the boy, who is tall and sleepy-looking. He and Fern stand close, tilting in a little toward each other, totally unaware they are doing so. They are in love.

  It was the boy who rescued Lucky. James. Who is beautiful in his youth and in the easy way he moves and the slightly sorrowful cast to his expression. His other immediately distinctive feature is hair so thick it seems at first that it must be a wig. Nora tries to make a determination without appearing to stare.

  Cokes, wouldn’t they like something to drink? And then Nora sees they are already holding glasses. Then what about a pizza? They could order one. Should she call Pete’s? She rummages through the junk drawer, then waves a carryout menu in the air, trying to generate a mood that’s fun but casual. What’s important, crucial even, is that she makes Fern understand that she can bring this lovely, hairy boy here, that this house is open to him, to them.

  Unfortunately, she doesn’t have enough time to get this strategy rolling in the couple of minutes before Fern politely declines the pizza offer, and ushers the boyfriend outside to say goodbye. Then comes back, picks up Lucky, and takes the patient to her room. On her way, she shoots Nora a look with a thin edge, like a blade. Not dangerous, only incisive. To show she knows Nora was not at the dentist.

  Nora usually casts the geometry of their relationship as one in which the distance all belongs to Fern, but this isn’t really true. Tonight, for instance, Fern brought her boyfriend home, stood him squarely in the middle of her life, while Nora left a lover behind in an uninhabited house. She thinks back to all the women she used to meet in darkened spaces, or brought home late and ushered out early, before Fern was up—a ghostly third shift of characters who populated Fern’s childhood even though she never saw them. Over the long haul, Nora has, in a spirit of protecting Fern, tried to keep her from knowing the whole of who her mother is. And yet she somehow knows anyway.

  Nora makes herself something to eat to fill in for the dinner she missed. They need to go shopping. The cupboard is pretty bare. She has to settle for a sardine and ketchup sandwich. She is hungry and not hungry. What she really wants is to be alone and in a tub soaking Pam out of her pores, but also thinking about her. Jeanne comes up behind her, pushes Nora’s hair out of the way, and puts her mouth on the back of Nora’s neck. “You smell smoky,” she says absently.

  “Oh, I’m so weak. I got upset with Mrs. Rathko and went down to Geri’s office and bummed a weed off her.” She is flooded with huge relief in being able to confess anything at all, even something she has made up.

  At first, Nora doesn’t tell anyone about Pam—how can she? The whole thing is so purely wrong. Telling would be like mentioning that you had someone chained in your basement “for observation.” That you liked to set out tacks on bus seats.

  But of course she can’t stand not telling anyone, and so decides to tell her friend Stevie, whom she has always been able to tell anything. She is setting up the easiest possible test. Stevie will have to be understanding; she can’t throw any first stone. When they were in college together and everyone was smoking a little marijuana and considering themselves “into drugs,” Stevie was shooting heroin. She dropped out to become a housekeeper for a professor and his wife and was soon sleeping with both of them and wound up destroying their marriage. Then she left Manhattan behind and became a Buddhist nun and lived several years
in a convent in Boulder, but got excommunicated in some dramatic casting-out ritual that meant she was barred from the convent and the order and the whole Buddhist religion, and she has never been able to tell even Nora the reason and so it must have been pretty bad. Currently she is in a relationship with a woman twenty years younger whom she met in her therapy group. If there is anyone Nora can tell, it’s Stevie.

  They go for coffee and Nora finds them a table in the back and scans the café. She doesn’t want to run into anyone she knows. She feels guilty even so much as talking about Pam. But she finally manages to pour out the whole story, placing herself in the most sympathetic light possible—helpless, felled by unexpected passion—in hopes that Stevie will be able to counsel her in a nonjudgmental way. And so it is disconcerting that her response is how can Nora possibly be doing something so morally bankrupt.

  “I mean,” Stevie says, “how!?”

  Nora looks into her coffee and becomes lost. She tries, but can find no answer at hand, nothing important or crucial, nothing weighed and considered, nothing of substance and merit that she can hold up with conviction and say, “Because of this.”

  Fever

  VAUGHN WAILS. He’s internally amplified, an impressive screamer, a sorrowful, miniature James Brown. Please, please, please, he’s trying to say.

  He has an ear infection. Tracy took him to the pediatrician, started him on an antibiotic; now they’re waiting for the fever to break. Fern has come over to help, even if helping means only waiting along with her. Tracy looks beyond exhaustion. She has greenish circles under her eyes, from lost, longed-for sleep. The eyes themselves have a bad gleam, a madness-in-the-jungle cast, as though she’s hearing the beating of drums from over the mountain. She has dyed her hair a strange mauve. She has been in the house too long.

  “At first I thought it was his colic coming back, then maybe that it was only another cold, but then he started getting red and hot so I took him in. Man, this kid comes down with everything.”

  Fern cups Vaughn’s forehead with her palm: definitely warm, but not fiery.

  Tracy’s mother comes into the bedroom, looking persecuted. She stands just inside the doorway. She doesn’t want to be drawn into the situation, only to critique it. Vaughn has been in this house half a year without having as yet received any real welcome from Brad and Tina. What is their problem? It has to be more than disappointment in Tracy. Fern suspects it’s an image thing. They are clinging to their flower childhood, which now'requires the assistance of cosmetic surgery (Tina’s nose and eye jobs, Brad’s jowl rehabilitation) and spa vacations, and of course part of the reason they want you to first-name them is they don’t want to be Mr. and Mrs. Meyers. Or Mom and Dad. For sure, not Gram and Grampa.

  “You could quiet him down if you wanted to,” Tina says. “With the kids at the commune, we used to dip a rag in tequila and let them suck on it.”

  “You also ate my placenta,” Tracy says. “Life has moved forward from the seventies. The seventies are a period piece.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  But Tracy is not interested in shutting up. “Your commune is a roadside historic attraction.”

  “What part of ‘shut up’ didn’t you understand?” Tina says. She talks like this a lot, in bumper stickers. She’s still standing in the doorway to Tracy’s room, her hands on her hips like Wilma Flintstone, mad at Fred. Since her nose job, when Tina gets pissed off her nostrils flare in a horsey way, as though she’s about to snort. The nostril-flaring always lends a comic air to her fit-pitching, and it’s hard to take her seriously.

  Still, Fern doesn’t particularly want to be in the middle of a blowout between Tracy and her mother. And the fight won’t even be about anything other than the further thinning of their already worn good humor going into this millionth hour of Vaughn’s wailing.

  Fern gets a washcloth in the bathroom, turns on the tap, and waits for the cold. In the meantime she picks lazily through the contents of the medicine cabinet, an idle pursuit she picked up from her mother and Harold. Tina is apparently on Zoloft, and there’s a little stack of Viagra samples on the top shelf. From a pharmaceutical standpoint, things around here should be sailing along on smooth seas. Everything else on the shelves is extraor maximum-strength. Fern helps herself, popping a couple of Excedrin Migraine and a Valium, little hedges against the stress levels in the air.

  She gets the washcloth as cold as she can, wrings it out. She knows a little about babies, from sitting jobs in high school. The thing now is to help Vaughn over the hump.

  Tina has disappeared to some more tranquil quarter of the household. Vaughn is still wailing, like a siren, ebbing a little, then getting louder again, pausing only to inhale. His hands and feet are fists. Tracy is looking down at him in a way that troubles Fern.

  “Basically, this is getting a little old,” she says.

  “Let me take over for a while.” Fern lifts Vaughn off the bed, wipes his face with the washcloth, then presses it to his forehead. “Go take a walk or something. Chill.”

  “Yeah. Right. So I can come back and listen to this for a few more hours.”

  “I can stay the night if you want. You can crash at my place. Just tell my mom what’s going on. Take Lucky out for a walk. Then get some sleep.”

  “I can’t leave him.”

  “Of course you can. He’s got a fever is all; it’ll break pretty soon. I’ll be here the whole time. Take the cordless into my room; I’ll call you if anything happens. I’ll call the doctor if anything gets worse, or doesn’t get better. I’m totally on top of this. And you’re too nuts to be much good to him anyway. So get out of here.”

  Tracy nods, as though she is in third grade and being sent home with a small scrape and a Band-Aid on her knee. Trying to look as though she’s only taking orders, but is secretly euphoric at being sentenced to freedom.

  Once Tracy is gone, Fern focuses all her energies on calming Vaughn down. He is red—maybe from the fever, maybe just from all his crying. He has small round patches on his cheeks of a deeper red, like the stain of beet juice. She brings him into the bathroom, lays him down on his back, on his cotton blanket, in the empty bathtub while she fills the huge old washbowl with cool water. She takes a couple of cotton balls from a jar on the back of the toilet and stuffs one in each of her ears, the way she does before concerts. Vaughn’s cries move a slight ways off. When the bowl is full, she picks him up and sets him gently into the water. For a moment, he is startled into silence, then begins crying again, but he is at least looking outside himself. His eyes open and he stares in a panicky way at Fern. She tries to get all his unsubmerged parts—his head and shoulders and chubby chest—with the washcloth. It’s then that she notices the small marks on his upper arms. Bluish. On the back and front of his left arm, a fainter set on the other. Fern clicks into cognitive dissonance. She tries to come up with a benign scenario. Vaughn wiggling his arms a little too enthusiastically between the rails of his crib. Falling onto, running into, something, what?

  But of course he can’t be running into things or falling down onto them since he doesn’t yet run or even walk, isn’t really up for there to be someplace to fall down to. The only picture that would explain these marks is the one Fern is trying to keep at bay. Someone holding him by these arms, just below his shoulders, a bit too firmly, perhaps shaking him a little, maybe to stop him from crying.

  She wants to think the bruises are Tina’s work, but can’t imagine her getting participatory enough to hold Vaughn. They have to be Tracy’s doing, a byproduct of carrying too much fatigue, moving into yet another dark hour of last night. But probably also fatigue in a larger sense, a dark brooding rolling in along with the realization that even when this crisis is over, this fever broken, she is not going to be released. She will only be stuck with a well and happier Vaughn. There is no place she can see to where she won’t be with him. After zooming through her teenage years with agile moves, Tracy is now carrying the weight of another human through a s
eemingly endless series of uninteresting but arduous tasks, an absurd picnic game—one leg strapped to someone else’s while holding an orange between chin and shoulder, balancing in front of her as she goes an egg jiggling in a tablespoon. And no finish line in sight.

  As Fern gets Vaughn out of the bath, into a dry diaper and terry cloth shirt, his infected ear begins seeping out a thick discharge, yellow and viscous, like the snot she has been wiping from his nose. And instantly, with no tapering down, he stops crying. He opens his eyes and tells Fern, “Ba-ba-ba,” then falls softly to sleep with several fingers of his left hand in his mouth.

  His vulnerability is excruciating.

  Crouton

  SITTING IN HER CAR, in the school parking lot, Nora noticed she was in the space marked RESERVED FOR VICE PRINCIPAL. She kept the motor running, for the heater, also because she was not sure she was going to get out of the car. She was still trying to make herself, but had so far been unable to go inside.

  Nine years of shielding Fern from tap lessons, flute lessons, choral group, and yet somehow this school pageant—Food Friends—got by her. By the time it popped up on her radar, Fern had already been cast as a crouton in the salad number, was already gluing burlap onto a box she found in the basement, already practicing her terrible song, which rhymed “lettuce” with “get us.”

  Someone, a portly guy in a car too small for him, who had been idling behind her for a while, now pulled into the space next to her and gave her an indignant glare before getting out of the car and locking it, then coming back and checking to make sure it was locked. Probably the vice principal. Fuck him.