Lucky in the Corner

by Carol Anshaw

  Most nights Vaughn stays with Fern at James’s apartment, but Nora and Jeanne have been surprisingly eager to pitch in. They take Vaughn a lot on weekends so Fern and James can have some time alone together. They are being generous, but they are also goofy over Vaughn. One time Fern came to pick him up, and Jeanne and her mother had gelled his hair into a mini-Elvis, while the real Elvis was on the stereo singing “I’m a hunka hunka burning love.” All this good nature has forced Fern to revise her opinion of her mother upward a couple of notches. Her good-naturedness, plus the fact that Nora is having this stupid affair, which makes her look tormented so much of the time. How can Jeanne not see this? Or is it only Fern, with her newly heightened perceptions, who can see through to her mother’s strained conscience?

  Brad and Tina are not part of the Vaughn picture. At first it looked as though they were going to be terrible villains. Tina called Fern with some talk about alerting child welfare that Vaughn’s mother had abandoned him and he needed to be adopted by someone more responsible. Basically, Tina would like to close the file on Vaughn. Since this original outburst, though, they haven’t made a peep. Fern heard through Tracy that their orgasm herb has been causing irregular heartbeats, and they’ve stopped production. They’re staring down the barrel of a few nasty lawsuits, much too preoccupied to bother with Vaughn.

  That night, Vaughn is fussing, so Fern takes him for a walk in the papoose sling, a trick that usually works to settle him down. But as soon as they are back inside and she has taken him out of the sling and his quilted jumpsuit, he starts crying.

  “He’s driving me crazy. He wants to go out again,” Fern tells her mother, who has come in from the living room, a paperback dangling from her fingers. Nora does not like to be disturbed when she’s reading. Tonight, though, she doesn’t seem to mind. Actually, what she seems is already disturbed, already distracted.

  “Maybe you can pretend you’re taking him out. Babies are pretty easy to fool.”

  So Fern puts the baby back into his quilty suit, then into the sling, puts her own jacket back on and starts walking him back and forth from the bedroom into the kitchen and back again, with Lucky following as though they are all on a real walk through the neighborhood. And Vaughn is quiet within a minute. He looks around at everyone, pleased with the situation and with himself.

  Nora drops into the old, sprung, overstuffed chair by Fern’s bed.

  “Did you use cheap tricks like this on me?” Fern says, still walking, just in case.

  “Yes, this one, and cheating to beat you at checkers.”

  Her mother is such a different person lately, an extremely modified version of her usual self, subdued and agitated at the same time. Instead of going around looking smug and confident and cocky, as she usually does, as if she has swallowed the canary, she now looks more like the canary that understands it is about to be swallowed. She has the desperate, exhausted-but-overstim-ulated look of something hunted. Her eyes film with starter tears; underneath there are pale violet shadows. Of course, where all this ravage would make anyone else look worse, it only makes Nora a little more beautiful.

  When Fern was a kid, after they all moved out of the house when her parents split up, but before Jeanne came along, during the stretch when Nora had a stream of women coming through, Fern thought of her mother’s attraction to women as an aspect of her power. Only with this recent thing has Fern seen that under Nora’s seamless confidence, she is actually weakened by her desire, disadvantaged in wanting someone so badly. And, in a larger way, Fern suspects there will always be these women for her mother; that she will never be able to get out of their way. In this position, Nora seems so fragile and ordinary.

  “Where’s Jeanne?” Fern asks.

  “Upstairs. Working on the ‘a.’” They don’t call it the “article” anymore.

  “I’m going to stay here tonight. James is having a little memorial thing for Kevin at his place. He needs room to wail with his buddies. I’ve got to hit the books anyway.”

  “Are you getting enough time for your school stuff?”

  Fern tries to find the barb couched in this question, but there isn’t one. One of the disconcerting new aspects of her mother is that she carries no concealed weapons. It seems completely safe to answer, “Yeah. Mostly.”

  “I worry a little. You seemed to be on a real path. It was the same with me. And then you came along. Which was a different kind of good. But, well, you have to be aware that a baby changes a lot in the way of plans.”

  “The path thing might be giving me too much credit. I’ve really just been fumbling my way through. And Vaughn, well, what can I do? He’s my friend. If he was in college and I was in a stroller, he’d take a little time out for me. He’s that kind of guy, you just know it.” What she doesn’t add, because it is both too personal and too unformed as yet, is that taking care of Vaughn is what the person she would like to be, the person she hopes she is becoming, would do.

  Doorbell

  THE DOORBELL RINGS. It’s Sunday afternoon. Nora has spent the past couple of hours in the backyard in a bone-chilling drizzle, pulling up the garden, filling recycling bags with tangles of spent tomato plants, stalky sumacs, limp clusters of impatiens, their summer colors now an indeterminate pinky gray.

  Her reward is this nice soak in a hot, hot bath, a cup of tea with milk and sugar on the edge of the tub. She has plucked off the shelf an old favorite novel, Housekeeping, set in the Pacific Northwest. She needs a mournful landscape to match the day outside, a narrative enveloped in dank mists. She becomes absorbed immediately, and so the ringing of the doorbell occurs in a distant outpost of her awareness. She is expecting no one. Jeanne is downstairs, in the kitchen, cleaning up after a baking experiment, trying to replicate her mother’s famous baguettes. She’ll answer the bell.

  She does, and the small conversation being held at the front door drifts up the stairs, into the bathroom, then runs the length of Nora’s immersed body like an electric current. The other voice is Pam’s. Nora can’t hear the words. The tone is flat, questions asked and answered; the rhythms of information being exchanged. After a few minutes, Nora hears the front door shut and, a second later, the storm door sigh with its own closing.

  Jeanne doesn’t come up afterward. Nora waits until there’s no more hot water when she turns the tap with her toes, until the bath is inarguably over. She dries off, pulls on sweatpants and an old jersey, conies down to the kitchen, where Jeanne is not packing her bags or setting fire to the furniture, merely rubbing olive oil into the butcher block cutting board. Two misshapen but wonderful smelling loaves sit cooling on a rack on the counter.

  “These smell great,” Nora says. Then she adds, by the by, “Did the bell ring?” She has to ask. She pokes through the cabinets for nothing in particular, making her expression unavailable to Jeanne.

  “Oh, it was nothing. Nobody. A builder, a carpenter. A lady carpenter. She came to give us an estimate on some remodeling. She had our address, but another name entirely. Somewhere she was mixed up.”

  Nora waits for more.

  “I asked for a card. Maybe when we fix the bathroom, we can give her a call.”

  “Right,” Nora says. “Good idea.”

  She still hasn’t called Pam, has not seen her in three weeks, although she has wanted to see her during nearly every one of the several thousand minutes in these weeks. She has one of Pam’s work T-shirts, which was sweated through when Nora stole it from the boot of the pickup. She keeps it in the bottom of her gym bag. Whenever she pulls the shirt out to press her face into it, she knows she is taking the measure of her derangement.

  Her symptoms go beyond the mental—her joints ache and her mouth dries out, her eyes water. When she thinks about Pam touching her, Nora is moved in some symphonic way, as though she’s in France, hearing Bach played in a cathedral. Huge, corny emotion. Pam saps her wit, makes Nora dull, reduces her to a scattering of aspects—lightly bruised, needy, grateful. All of it horrible, and she wants
more.

  Still, she has—in a feeble attempt to be a decent human being—not contacted her, not returned any of Pam’s increasingly agitated voicemail messages. And this restraint made Nora feel that she was taking charge of the situation, holding the line, that her “no” was the deciding vote. That she and Pam were playing by some tacit set of rules, some code of emotional etiquette. Today, though, she has been brought up sharply to understand that either there are no rules, or that they won’t be hers, or that Pam has toddled off the game board entirely.

  She stands at the counter, facing the cabinet, even though she should probably be moving along, saying something else to Jeanne, something about the dinner they are making tonight for a couple of Jeanne’s friends from Berlitz. But she can’t. Instead, a new and terrible version of herself surfaces and asks Jeanne, simply for the pleasure of picking up the topic again, fondling it lightly, getting a second opinion:

  “What did she look like? The lady carpenter?”

  Famous

  “THIS IS A GREAT ARTICLE,” James says, tapping the Reader profile on Harold that is taped to the refrigerator door. Harold has become famous in a small way. In one of the early performances of his play, he drifted off and began snoring in the casket. He was afraid he was going to be fired, but the audience liked it so well that the director kept it in as a regular thing. Now when he starts snoring, the audience shouts, “Hey! Wake up the dead guy!”

  The whole play, in a similar, campy, cultish way—so bad it’s good—has turned out to be popular. Extra midnight performances run on weekends. The kids who come have been before, some several times. They dress up like the characters onstage, also talk back to them. Fern has been four times. The last time, a couple of weeks ago, she brought James along.

  “You were terrific,” he tells Harold. “Very dead. Muy deadado” And Harold turns from the stove, smiling, catching the praise as though it were sunshine. Fern loves the easy way he takes a compliment.

  Harold is fixing dinner for Fern and James. He wanted to let Dolores do the honors, claiming she was the better cook, but Fern put her foot down. “Later. He can meet Dolores on another visit, a future visit.”

  And when he opened the door to them, he was his most manly self in jeans and a white T-shirt (no bra), and only the slightest bit of lipstick. You couldn’t even tell unless you were looking for it. Harold has a sinewy build from working out in the gym he has rigged up in his back bedroom. He has a collection of exercise equipment bought for a song at garage and yard sales, from people whose best intentions have drifted off, leaving them happily pushing back in their recliners. In addition to recognizable items you’d expect, like a Bowflex and an exercise bike, he has gear and appliances from the distant past of self-improvement. A Jack LaLanne Glamour Stretcher. A machine with a belt that slings around your butt and jiggles the flab off when you flip the switch. A steam cabinet you sit in with your head poking out the top. Fern has hung out and watched Harold use all this stuff, which is weird and hilarious at the same time, but as he says, it all worked for somebody sometime, and it’s true that he is totally buff.

  When they sit down, Fern recognizes the meal as Harold’s “Always Affordable Dinner,” a scheme he has worked out to be able to do a bit of home entertaining beyond the canasta club. The menu is:

  home-made linguine marinara (one box linguine, two cans

  tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, oregano, Parmesan cheese)

  Caesar salad (romaine lettuce, more Parmesan, one egg, one

  lemon, one can anchovies, Worcestershire sauce, croutons)

  French bread (Pillsbury dough loaf)

  hot fudge sundaes (ice cream made in antique hand-crank

  freezer, fudge sauce by Hershey).

  Wine, if you want to bring it, would be delightful. If you don’t, there is always the default bottle of red from some emerging wine nation, someplace that has recently moved from the potato to the grape.

  Tonight, there is the extra cost of one banana, mashed, for Vaughn, who sits on James’s lap and opens his mouth for the spoon, then takes a very long time working banana around with a look of deep concentration.

  Meanwhile James and Harold are looking for a conversational intersection. James tries to explain why he loves to skateboard, but, as usual, he is inarticulate on this subject and defaults into doodling a complicated move called an Ollie on the back of an envelope.

  “It’s about leaving earth behind” is as close as he’s able to get to anything anyone else could understand, then adds, “You also have to not mind falling.”

  Gamely trying from his end, Harold gets up and puts an LP on the turntable. Teresa Brewer’s Greatest Hits.“I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter,” Teresa warbles in her excited ingénue voice, followed by other optimistic numbers, as though leading some pep rally of romance. “Button up your overcoat,” she cheerily advises her beloved.

  Fern feels an ache in her jaw as she is reminded of some slides she once saw in class. Early British explorers in Africa, standing awkwardly in a jungle clearing, meeting a group of tribal elders, each side bearing enormous goodwill, trying with little hope of success, to find so much as a square inch of common ground.

  So when Harold wants to talk about Tracy, even though she is a touchy, difficult subject, Fern is just grateful to have any subject at all. Except her mother. She talked with Harold (actually, with Dolores) about her mother’s affair, after she’d confirmed it with Tracy’s sighting of Nora and the Other Woman. But she doesn’t want this topic to come up tonight. She hasn’t told James about it. She wants to present her mother to him as a model, the Good Lesbian. Monogamous and stable, having offered Fern a nurturing alternative family unit with her life partner. As opposed to someone slouching through the night, trolling for a little action. So Tracy is a better subject of conversation for tonight.

  “She was back in town last week,” Fern says. “For a little visit, I guess. But not to us, not to Vaughn.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” James says.

  “I just found out. I ran into Deena, and she told me she’d talked with Tracy and Dale at the Radiohead concert. Tracy told her they’d come down to pick up supplies. Which I guess translates as scoring recreational drugs.” Fern thinks for a minute. “This is one of the worst things she’s ever done to me. I can sort of see the twisted path of emotional logic she’s gone down. She couldn’t handle Vaughn, and James and I picked up the slack, and we’re managing to do what she couldn’t. So, instead of being grateful, she’s pissed off at me and alienated from Vaughn. Which explains why she’s behaving badly, but it doesn’t make me happy with her. I mean, she can’t even stop by for a guest appearance in her kid’s life?”

  “On the other hand,” Harold says, always ready to smudge any black-and-white situation into a gray area, “there’s this new guy in the picture. Worse than Tracy disappearing would be Tracy showing up with him and taking Vaughn into those deep Wisconsin woods and raising him to be a drunken fisherman. You know, it’s probably time to stop thinking of your situation with Vaughn as a holding pattern, and start considering whether you’re up to a permanent commitment.”

  Vaughn, who doesn’t know temporary from permanent, stays pretty squarely in the moment. In this one, he sucks on a plastic teething ring that Fern has pulled from Harold’s freezer (wall-to-wall, Fern noticed, with packages of lima beans).

  “I’m not saying you have to take Vaughn on,” Harold says. “I’m not even sure you should. Just that if you’re not, maybe we’d better think about finding someplace he can settle into for his upcoming childhood.”

  Fern takes a little while with this thought. The truth is, she hasn’t made any long-range plan around Vaughn. A plan hasn’t seemed called for. She has taken this sequence of days each as it has come. And so James takes her a little by surprise.

  “I think Fern and I are the plan,” he says. “We’ve made a groove in our lives that fits around him. He’s happy. We love him. We’ll work the rest out a
s we go along.”

  Fern looks around for a few words but can’t find them.

  For the ride home, she has Vaughn bundled up inside two jackets. James’s car is freezing on account of a busted heater, but much easier to ride around in since he cut a piece of plywood to make a floor on the passenger side. Fern took the floor as a gesture of love.

  “When you and Tracy were ... you know ... together...” Fern says.

  “That would have been for a short part of one night.”

  “But still. It could have ... you could be...”

  “Well, yes. I could be Vaughn’s father. I suspect a few other guys could say the same. But, really, what does it matter? Those guys aren’t here. I am. I mean, clearly it’s not mattering much who his mother is, so it doesn’t matter if I’m his ‘real’ father or not. What’s ‘real’ anyway?”

  “This?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I think it is.”

  A little further along, he says, “I like your uncle.”

  “It would have been okay if you didn’t, but, well, I love him so much...”

  “Does he have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t think so. I think he has a crush on Gretel, his boss at the restaurant, but I don’t think that’s really going anywhere.” Fern finally met Gretel backstage, the first time she went to see Harold’s play. She had been expecting flaxen locks and an operatic build, tall with a huge bosom. Instead, she was beyond hip with Cleopatra hair and red leather jeans, glasses with turquoise frames. She was scary in a way Fern hadn’t anticipated, witheringly serious. She wanted to discuss the play in terms of its semiotics. Meeting her, Fern thought she was going to have to go home and reconsider Harold’s romantic inclinations.