Lucky in the Corner

by Carol Anshaw

  Through all this, her romance with Russell glided along on cruise control, staying on the same slick surface of old movies and Chinese food and earnest chat sprinkled with references to a future that implicitly included each other. Nora acquired the skills necessary to seal what was important away from the rest of life—the practical, daylight part. In September, as planned, she drove out with Russell to visit his family, and got through the long weekend, his smokehouse mother, even the rough and tumble badminton. She ascribed her nausea on the trip to too many hours in the car followed by four days of country cooking—breakfast biscuits with cream gravy, dinner ham with cream gravy, fritters, shortcake with whipped cream. When she continued to throw up after their return to New York, she went to the doctor, who took blood and urine. Nora’s fears were clenched around a murky diagnosis of something malignant. And so she was totally baffled by an unequivocal diagnosis of pregnancy. In the first seconds after receiving this information, she inhabited a small flurry of confusion, linking the baby with the high-voltage connection to Celeste. Actual thought had to be brought to bear on the matter before she saw that, of course, this development was about Russell, with whom the sexual connection had the approximate wattage of a toaster. Still, somehow, that sequence of quick, industrious gropings had been enough to break a rubber and reset her direction. Nora saw in a telescopic way that she would tell Russell and they would get married and have the baby together and everything else that had happened this summer would be consigned to a private, unopened album.

  Hostage

  NORA HAS BEEN TAKEN HOSTAGE by the new terrible version of herself. Today, instead of going home after work, she fabricated a chiropractor appointment for a fabricated pulled shoulder (from yanking out renegade sumacs in the back of the yard the other day) and drove down to Hyde Park. With some winding around, she found the address, a brooding, ivy-strangled six-flat, then the apartment where Pam is putting in a new kitchen. The owners have taken off to avoid the dust and disruption, so once again she and Pam are alone in someone else’s home, like bad babysitters.

  Nora finally caved in to Pam’s voicemails and agreed to meet her. She gave herself a dispensation for this meeting by telling herself it would be their last. On the drive down, she prepared her side of the conversation: They simply have to stop. She has thought things over. The time-out has helped clear her thoughts, given her room to see that where she really belongs is with Jeanne.

  And this speech is exactly what the better, more reasoned, and responsible version of herself truly believes, and so it should have been possible to say these prepared lines straight off. And so she has only the hostage theory to account for not having said any of it, even though she has been here more than an hour. Instead, she is naked on the primitive-print sheets of strangers. She is lying on her back with an arm draped over Pam’s shoulder while Pam, with an ear to Nora’s breast, listens to her heart beat.

  They are both quiet. They are keeping the communication physical. Talking has become more complicated. If Nora were saying anything, it would have to be her carefully worded extrication, which, given the circumstances, would sound a little ridiculous.

  She shouldn’t be fucking Pam. She should be furious with her. That little visit to the house the other day to rattle Nora’s cage. The explicit message yesterday, and not on the cell phone, but on Nora’s work voicemail, to which Mrs. Rathko has the password, which means she probably played it for herself before Nora got to the office. Pam understands she is supposed to be totally circumspect in what she says in any messages she leaves at work, encoding everything as much as possible. Any message with the word “pussy” in it is not encoded.

  But, instead of feeling angry, Nora, in a weird way, admires Pam for taking this affair with long, bold strides, while she herself crouches in a corner, afraid of everything about it, even (especially) the happiness it has brought her.

  The two of them sit up. Pam goes to get a couple of beers from the refrigerator, while Nora pulls a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table—her smokes. Pam has quit; she’s wearing the patch. Now Nora is the only one smoking. On the table, she notices a small bedside clock. She sees with a slight sinking sensation, but with no real surprise, that she should have left here at least half an hour ago. Behind the clock is a framed photo of a couple on a hiking vacation, leaning in toward each other on a boulder, backed by a photogenic vista.

  “Oh boy,” she says as Pam comes back into the bedroom. Nora props herself on an elbow, reaching over to pick up the picture. “I know this guy. Jeff Fanning. He teaches at Berlitz with Jeanne. Eastern languages, Himalayan dialects.”

  “They’re in Tibet,” Pam says.

  Nora falls back against the pillows, takes a better look around the room. “I left my coat on this bed. We came for dinner. Maybe five years ago. They made something incredibly ethnic. A little grill on the table. Something on skewers. We drank out of wooden cups.”

  “She wants a clay oven put in the kitchen,” Pam says, as though she’s trying to help Nora reconnect with these old acquaintances.

  “We’re in their bed. I’m here with you sweating up the sheets of Jeanne’s colleague. Someone I’ll have to chat with at the school cookout next summer.”

  Pam doesn’t see the problem. “They’re not going to pop in on us. It would take them about five days to get here if they left right now. They’d have to start out on a yak.”

  “It’s not being discovered I’m worried about. It’s not them knowing I was here. It’s me knowing. I don’t want to have these sorts of secrets.”

  “Me either. I want to drive around with you. Go to a restaurant. A movie. Be happy when we run into friends. Have friends.”

  Nora tries to imagine who their friends might be. Pam’s friends? The two or three friends of Nora’s who won’t have abandoned her after her breakup with Jeanne? Stevie and Lauren? They would stick with her no matter what. Probably.

  Pam goes on. “I want to take you for dinner at my parents’. Make love in our bed.”

  “We don’t have a bed.”

  “We could. Beds are obtainable.”

  Nora doesn’t respond. She feels as though large items—marble sculptures and grand pianos—are moving around inside her. In the room that is her, there isn’t space for everything and so the individual pieces keep shoving, jockeying for position.

  With Pam she was only prepared for something that didn’t take up any space at all. She didn’t go in looking for a whole new life to replace the one she was already living. Her life was already in place, already satisfactory, requiring at most a few small improvements. New windows in the spring. Jeanne finishing her article. And nothing about that life has changed. The only problem is that, at some critical point when she wasn’t looking, she fell in love with this woman she had thought she was merely sleeping with. The elements of initial attraction have expanded in directions she hadn’t anticipated. She loves the large way Pam inhabits her life, the agility with which she moves through it. And now, the way she wants to be with Nora free and clear (while Nora is still looking for places to hide).

  Another thing is that having Pam, even though she has her for only an hour or two at a time, has become such a huge part of her internal life. Without her, she would have a sequence of days, a schedule of activity, that was sufficient before Pam’s appearance, but would now be terribly diminished by her absence.

  “I have a Christmas present for you,” Pam says. “Wait a minute.” She stretches off the bed to tug something out of a pocket of her jacket on the floor.

  Nora closes her eyes and thinks, Please don’t give me a present. Even though she has brought something for Pam, a pair of socks she has knitted herself, the first knitting she has done since the earliest, domestically ambitious days of her marriage when she knitted socks and scarves for birthdays, cross-stitched pillowcases for wedding presents. These socks are irrefutable evidence of premeditation. She has had to work on them over several weeks’ worth of stolen moments. Nights wh
en Jeanne was teaching and Fern was over at James’s. When time grew short, she would sometimes knit and purl in her car at the far edge of the parking lot at school, the heater running, the engine idling, the dash light on so she could read the instructions.

  Pam’s gift is also premeditated. It’s an old silver ID bracelet, scratched and nicked by its previous owner, polished by Pam, nameless on the front, but on its underside, in small, lowercase letters, Pam has had engraved “trouble.”

  “Oh man,” Nora says, and folds her hand around the back of Pam’s neck and kisses her.

  Still, the socks remain across the room in her shoulder bag, wrapped in red tissue, pushed beneath her wallet and cell phone. Giving them would be a response—to Pam’s present, which at the moment hangs heavy as an anchor on her wrist. The bracelet is not just about sex or mischief; it is recognition of a level of emotional content that has begun to assert its presence. And so Nora can’t give her the socks, which would be a reply she is shy of making. Shy and cowardly.

  “What about Melanie?” Nora says. Might as well bring her into the dialogue.

  “She knows,” Pam says. “About us.”

  Something icy shoots through Nora.

  “You told her?”

  “I told her there was someone else. I didn’t say it was you.”

  Nora wonders how much time she has, closes her eyes and sees the sparks running merrily along the fuse.

  Elves

  WHEN LUCKY STARTED PACING through the night, Fern would get dressed and take him for three-thirty or five A.M. (or whenever) walks. When he started hiding in closets, the vet, Dr. Sanders, told Fern that pacing and hiding are animal attempts to get away from pain. Lucky’s joints are cemented with arthritis. The vet prescribed something that worked for a few months, but now the dog is bad again, this time lying in the same spot most of the day. Fern and James have to carry him up the stairs, not only to James’s apartment, but even just up the front steps of Fern’s house. He has been on cortisone for four days—a last-ditch shot at buying him some more time—but Fern can see the stuff is not kicking in. Lucky is practically immobile, and now one side of his face is swollen from an abscess in his mouth.

  “He’s crashing,” Fern tells her mother on the phone. “I’ve been hanging out with him. Just to be around. He looks at me and I know he needs help, but there’s nothing I can do to make him suffer less. Except one thing.”

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” Nora says.

  “They’re open until four. I called.”

  “Where’s James?”

  Fern sighs.

  “That came out wrong,” Nora says. “Of course I want to help.”

  “He’s out at his parents’. They’ve got a tree-trimming thing they do every year. It’s not like he deserted me. We didn’t know Lucky was going to go downhill so fast.” This is a lie. The truth is that James couldn’t handle the situation. Hanging out for the past couple of days with Fern and Lucky, he had eventually gone completely silent, buried beneath the weight of his grief, forcing Fern to feel bad for him as well as for Lucky. James’s sadness used up all the available space for emotion in the room where Lucky was dying. Still, when Fern said maybe he should just go out for a while, leave the rest to her, she expected him to rally and say of course not, that he’d see this through with her. Instead, he nodded and said she was probably right, threw a change of clothes in his backpack and took the train up to his parents’ so she could have the car. Fern watched him hold Lucky’s paw for a moment, then kiss the dog’s head, then head out the door, and it was as if she was seeing not only this particular departure but ahead to all the other clutches in which James wouldn’t be able to be with her.

  “I’ll take him to the vet’s myself,” she tells her mother now, trying to let Nora off the hook, too. “It’s okay. I only need for you to keep Vaughn while I’m gone.”

  “No. Let me come with you. I can get out of here anytime. Everybody’s leaving. Most people didn’t even come in today.” Nora’s voice goes to a muffled murmur; Fern can tell she’s wrapping her hand around the receiver and her mouth. “Except Mrs. Rathko. She informed me this morning that ‘half holidays are not whole holidays.’ She gave me a Christmas present for you, by the way.”

  “I’m really looking forward to that,” Fern says. Last year Mrs. Rathko sent along a self-help book of tips on improving posture.

  “I’ll call Jeanne and get her to come by and stay with Vaughn,” Nora says. You and I can go over to the vet’s together. You don’t want to do this alone. Plus, he’s our dog, really. All this time.”

  “Do you remember when we got him? How the card on his cage at Anti-Cruelty said he’d been brought back twice for bad behavior, but Dad and I told you it only said ‘Likes to look out windows.’”

  “I remember he ate the sofa the first time we left him alone. He was a lunatic when we got him,” Nora says. “Tons of personality, but a lunatic. I’ll be right there. And I’ll send Jeanne to stay with the baby.”

  “Can you pick up a Hershey bar on your way?” Lucky has a long history of trying to get at any chocolate in the house. And chocolate, they’ve been told, is toxic for dogs. Fern tells Nora, “What I’m saying now is, well, toxic-schmoxic.”

  When her mother doesn’t say anything on the other end, Fern knows she’s crying.

  At the vet’s, there’s a Christmas tree decorated with dog biscuits and all the helper girls at the front counter—only irritating and incompetent on regular days—are this afternoon also dressed as Santa’s elves with red velvet caps and jingle-bell belts. One of them, jingling all the way, brings Fern and her mother and Lucky (who walks unsteadily, but on his own, about two inches an hour) into an examination room.

  Dr. Sanders comes in through the door on the other side of the room.

  “Sorry about the festivities,” she says.

  They’ve gone to Dr. Sanders since she was just out of vet school and worked out at the Bone Animal Hospital with a portrait in the lobby of its improbably named founder, Dr. Bone. Now she has two kids and is onto her second marriage. She has been Lucky’s vet practically his whole life. She stitched him up after the terrible fight with the two Dobermans, pulled his broken tooth, gave him all his boosters.

  “Here’s the part they don’t tell you at the puppy shop or the animal shelter,” she tells Fern and Nora. “They don’t warn you that taking on a pet is a contract with sorrow.” (Dr. Sanders herself has made several of these contracts. She has four dogs—all rescued from dumpsters or fires or grim situations. Dogs with suspicious natures or half their fur missing.)

  Fern sits cross-legged on the floor and settles Lucky across her lap.

  “If I can just give him this first,” she says, tearing the wrapper off the Hershey bar. She breaks it into a few pieces and holds one under his nose to get him going. Piece by piece, while they all wait, Lucky eats the whole bar, then licks Fern’s hand and looks around at everyone as if to say, “Okay, what’s next?”

  Dr. Sanders squats and, with a syringe, gives him a pinprick in his haunch.

  “This is just a sedative. To relax him. He should be pretty out of it soon.”

  And within moments, he gives Fern a goofy look, then his tongue slips out of his mouth and his eyes get sleepy. The elf spreads a towel on the steel examining table and they lay Lucky down on his side on top of it. Dr. Sanders shaves the hair off a patch of his hind leg, near his paw, and gets the IV in, then starts the euthanasia solution.

  “Stay close to him so he can smell you,” she tells Fern. “Talk to him if you like. It’s hard to know how much he’s perceiving through the sedative, but I think it comforts the animal to have his human close by.”

  Fern pets Lucky and rubs his ears and tells him how she used to take him shopping with her and leave him in the car. And when she came back, someone was almost always there laughing at him sitting in the driver’s seat, pressing on the horn with his paw, honking for her.

  “What happens now?” Nora says.


  “We wait a little while. Then I listen to his heart,” Dr. Sanders says. She puts her stethoscope to his chest, and says, “Very faint now.” Then, a moment later, she listens for a longer time, and they all stay very still until she looks up at them.

  “It’s stopped.”

  Fern bends down and kisses him.

  “Lucky was a great dog,” Dr. Sanders says. If she says the same thing about every dog she puts down, Fern doesn’t want to know.

  “You can stay with him awhile, if you want. When you’re ready, you can use the back door to the parking lot. So you won’t have to go through the party.” She nods her head sideways, in the direction of the lobby, where Brenda Lee is singing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

  Nora rubs Lucky’s head, then puts a hand on Fern’s shoulder and tells her, “I’ll wait outside.”

  Left alone with her dog, Fern remembers how big and rambunctious Lucky seemed to her when she was a child, how insubstantial he appears now. A million pictures of him flip through her inner field of vision. She unfastens the collar with his nametag on it and puts it in the pocket of her pea coat. She puts her hand into the thick fur on his neck. He’s warm. Warm, but so terribly still. This, then, is the essential element of death. The theft of animation.

  She bends over and kisses his ear, then puts her mouth against it.

  “You wait for me,” she tells him.

  In the parking lot, Fern and Nora stand facing each other and a future minus Lucky.

  “I’ve been standing out here thinking about the dumbest stuff,” Nora says. “Like no more surprise bones under our pillows.”