by Carol Anshaw
Fern nods. “I know. And we’ll have an unhairy sofa.” Neither of them says anything for a little while, then Fern says, “The best thing about him, for me, was his there-ness. No matter who else has come and gone, he’s always been there, filling in the blank, completing the scene.” She stops for a second to gather up her emotions. “There were times, you know, when you needed things to change. But I was a kid; I needed them more to stay the same. That was Lucky—always the same. He liked his walks and his dinner at the same time every day and he’d turn exactly three times on his bed before he’d drop down and go to sleep. And he wasn’t going anywhere on me. He was always going to be there, lying on his blue bed in the corner.”
They are only a foot apart, which, in ordinary circumstances, would be the same as a mile. But right now, it’s an easy fall into each other’s arms, where they cry for much longer than Fern could have expected. After a while, it begins to seem to her that they are crying for more than Lucky, that they have both caught a glimpse of some broader palette of sorrow and have incorporated into this moment the sadness they have already encountered and that which still lies ahead. Even when it seems they should be done, they’re not and just keep crying. Only when they finally break apart and start hunting down Kleenexes in coat pockets does Fern think what a long time it has been since she has been held by her mother.
And when they get into the car, Nora says “Come home with me. So you don’t have to be alone tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Jeanne and I were just going to do something low-key anyway,” Nora says. “We can make it even lower-key. I’ll make cheesy eggs. We can have a non-Christmas Eve.”
“Oh, Mom,” Fern says, meaning too many things to go into.
At dinner, Vaughn is calm and happy, making a big mess on his highchair tray, breaking down his portion of eggs into lumps, then determining which lumps are eating lumps, which are throw-on-the-floor lumps. He is the only happy human at the table.
Nora and Jeanne try to help Fern by paying tribute to Lucky, to his great addlepated sensibility, his cockeyed journey through life. Fern can’t quite chime in, isn’t up to packaging Lucky in anecdote yet, but she is appreciative, for their stories, and for their company tonight, for the comfort of other living beings in the room with her.
Through a wash of pain, Fern sort of notices that her mother is doting on Jeanne in a peculiar way, slightly formal, as though Jeanne is a rare visitor from afar rather than the person Nora lives with. Fern is sorry for all of them. For herself, for losing Lucky. For Jeanne, who will soon, one way or the other, find out she is being betrayed. For her mother, who has been made vulnerable to disaster by one small shoddy aspect of her character, which is ridiculous, almost hilarious if you look at it from a certain angle. Fern can’t quite get to that perspective tonight, though. Tonight, her mother just looks stupid and tragic, sitting on a kitchen chair, possibly about to blow up something good and essential for something that is almost surely beside the point.
After they’ve eaten, Nora insists on cleaning up. Jeanne puts Vaughn to bed in his crib in Fern’s room. The cold weather makes him a sleepy baby, early to bed.
James calls looking for Fern, but she doesn’t yet feel up to reassuring him that it was okay he wasn’t here today.
“Tell him I’m already asleep,” she says to her mother, then crawls into her bed, next to Vaughn’s crib, then gets up and goes through her closet and drags out her old cowgirl blanket from the deepest recesses of her childhood and puts it on top of the pile of everything else she usually sleeps under.
Outside, where there had been a lot of snow blowing around, everything has now turned still and bitter. Fern can see the moon high and pale yellow, a coin going into a slot of black sky. She thinks of Lucky, out there somewhere in the universe, heading into the unseeable. And then she slides into a dreamless sleep, which lasts a few hours, until the night blows wide open with a crash. Fern, still half-asleep, runs through the darkened rooms and wipes frost off a front window to see what has happened.
Antarctica
THE RENTAL CAR they’ve given Nora is an SUV. It’s all they had left on the lot. It’s a huge sucker, a total embarrassment. She roams around looking for parking spaces big enough, sinks low in the seat and hopes no one sees her. Her replacement car is due next week. They towed in her old one to see if there was a chance of putting it to rights, but it was totaled. The frame, the guy at the collision shop told her, was basically a parallelogram now, as opposed to a rectangle. He drew two diagrams with a pencil, to help her grasp the concept.
Neither the cops nor the insurance people inquired about any possible connection between her and whoever did this.
“Holiday drunks,” one of the cops said, shaking his head as he filled out a report. Standing there with his paunch and his snap-holstered gun and a screeching walkie-talkie clipped to his shirt, he had such an air of authority on the matter that Nora almost started believing him along with everyone else.
After that, there was the hour or so of bad acting she had to do for Jeanne’s benefit. Fern, astonishingly, just picked up the script and improvised on it.
“Oh, Mom, you loved that car. I can’t believe people that drunk let themselves get behind the wheel. Of course, they probably don’t even know they’re driving.”
And when Jeanne brought up the curious fact of Nora’s being the only car hit, Fern reminded everyone of the damage (minuscule, but Fern didn’t mention this) done to the bumper of the car in front of Nora’s. She was trying to show Nora she had an ally. This alliance was completely unexpected. Nora didn’t know what to make of it. She wanted to grab Fern and kiss her all over her face, was so grateful for something good in the midst of all the bad that was coming down.
Vaughn, in spite of having awakened all of them on numerous occasions, did not appreciate his own sleep being interrupted. He squalled for another half-hour before they could all get back into bed and Nora could feign exhaustion, turn away from Jeanne, and pretend to sleep.
She was still awake two hours later, in the long winter lag time before dawn, when the phone rang. Unfortunately, the phone was not on Nora’s side of the bed. Rather, it rested on a stack of books of French feminist critical theory on Jeanne’s side, an easy reach for her, even half-asleep. And so Jeanne was the one to receive the call, the one to make the acquaintance of Melanie, Pam’s other lover.
Nora parks by Harold’s apartment building. She has been sleeping on his sofa for the past week. He has been generous to her in so many ways that she has wound up crying at some point in nearly every day. She hopes he is home now because she needs to talk again. Basically, she needs to talk about every ten minutes. She needs sympathetic ears, shoulders to cry on, and has found a small population of these. Stevie, who is always there for her, even when she doesn’t understand what Nora is doing. Geri in Admissions, although Nora suspects she would talk sympathetically with anyone who will stand outside the Administration Building and smoke with her. And Harold. He’s her mainstay.
When she comes in, he’s fresh out of bed, although it is early afternoon. This is his regular schedule, what with his work life being entirely on the swing shift. Nora finds him in the kitchen, fixing eggs over easy with roast duck. Duck is a staple in his diet. Apparently they always have leftovers at the restaurant.
He is wearing a short, navy terry cloth robe, his Arnold Palmer shave coat. This is part of a new, ironic drag that Harold finds amusing—fatuous manly accessories from the recent past. Soap on a rope, deodorants with virile brand names. In this apartment, he can be anyone he pleases. Himself, Dolores (Nora has finally met her), or the guy who uses all this stuff, whom she believes is Chad.
“Did you blow off work today?” he says. “Would you like some breakfast?”
“Thanks, no. I just had lunch. There’s nothing happening at work. Mrs. Rathko is about the only person down there. She says she’s using the holiday lull to redo her files on some color-coded system she read about
. She subscribes to magazines like Modern Administration. I think she’s really lurking around to see how bad I look when I come in. I’m sure this is so delicious to her, my life collapsing around me.”
“Oh, I think it’s already collapsed. Now’s the part where you start to build it back up ”
“Do you think so? How come it seems to me like I’m just paralyzed and sleeping on your sofa and reading all your Hollywood bios?”
“Cautionary tales for you. Required reading, really. Before you make any next moves.”
“I wake up in the night,” she tells him. “A little free fall. I start thinking, What if this is only the beginning of Melanie’s mayhem? One night I’ll be going to my car at school. Late, after a meeting. I’ll feel her behind me, then the gun at the small of my back or the piano wire around my throat. Or I’ll be at home, reading in bed, and hear the crackle of starter flames on the front porch.”
“Stop.”
“What I’m saying is maybe I should be calling the police.”
Harold sits down at the table across from her with his plate. “What could you pin on her? She probably ditched the car she used. She wouldn’t have used her own. Plus it would mean dragging the whole lesbo love triangle mess to the cops, who would probably like it a little too much. Besides, I think she has probably made her big statement. And you’re staying away from her girlfriend, which is all she wants.”
Nora doesn’t say anything. Harold looks up suddenly from his eggs.
“You are staying away?”
“Oh yes. Not that I’m proud of it. She’s been leaving messages.”
The messages, she tells Harold, are of various stripes. “She’s so, so sorry, she takes all the blame for what happened, she never thought Melanie would go this far. She wants to pay any damages. Then a few days ago, she left a new number. She’s staying with a friend, up in Rogers Park I’m not supposed to give the number to Melanie if she calls. Then yesterday, there was this kind of wail from the middle of the desert: Why have I abandoned her?”
“Do you know?” Harold says.
“Oh, there would just be so many steps, and I can’t even imagine the first few. Calling her, okay. I can imagine that. Maybe meeting her at the apartment of her friend. Apparently she has eleven cats. That’s about as far as I can get. What comes after that? I sleep with her on the sofa bed with the cats crawling around our heads. What then?”
“You could just call. Or answer the next time she calls. You could just step up to the plate.”
Nora shakes her head. “I’m having some terrible failure of nerve. It’s not really worrying about her nutball girlfriend, about her coming after me with a hacksaw. Sawing me to death and putting the pieces in her refrigerator. It’s me I’m really afraid of. All those years ago, Jeanne saved me from this thing inside me, this tropism toward moronic passion or whatever. Say I run off with Pam, what happens a few more years down the line when the next Pam comes along? So, of course, I’m tempted to call. Of course, I’m not over her. But I think the best thing I can do is try to take the high road, be on my way, and not look back. I just wish I didn’t feel so shaky about everything, so unsure which impulses to trust. I know I seem like a basket case. Fern and James, when I come over, they fix me tea. Herbal tea. As if real tea would be too stimulating. Like I’m on the big lawn at the institution and they have to speak in soft voices around me. It’s not exactly what I want from Fern, but in a weird way it’s the nicest she’s been to me in years.”
“I think maybe this has cut you down to size for her, made you more approachable.”
“You know the worst part? Maybe I will have a little duck.” She goes to get a fork and plate. “The worst part is that this thing I do, this thing I thought I was through doing but apparently wasn’t. It’s like a little relativity equation. I take the matter that’s me and find someone I can use to blow myself into pure energy, into this place where all I am is desire. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that I really don’t know if what I find when I get way out there is my worst self, or my most authentic.”
A little later, Harold has to get ready to go to the restaurant. It’s New Year’s Eve, and there’s a special eight-course dinner. Plus a live brass oompah band to back up the singing bartenders.
“A long night of Bavarian merriment,” he says. “Can you see these grease spots on my cummerbund?”
“Do you want the truth?”
“I guess I don’t have time for the truth. The jacket will cover the worst of it. So, what are you going to do?”
“If I could be anywhere now, I’d be back home. I’d be making Jeanne that ghastly instant cappuccino stuff. You’d think she’d look down her snooty European nose at it, but instead she loves it. So that would be it—drinking a bad instant coffeelike beverage. Sitting in the kitchen, talking about tomorrow, which would just be another regular day.”
Harold doesn’t say anything.
“But you can imagine how far away and hard to get to that seems. Antarctica.”
“You could use the New Year’s thing. As an entrance ramp.”
“No, no. She’d never fall for it.”
But at eleven, Nora is driving up from Sam’s, where she bought a bottle of Pomerol. She also has flowers. Nothing was open, and so she has pulled six limp 7-Eleven roses from their plastic tubes and rubber-banded them into something like a bouquet. She will look like a fool to Jeanne, standing on her doorstep (formerly known as their doorstep) loaded down with corny romantic clichés. Like Elvis coming to court Priscilla on the army base. Frank Sinatra trying to make time with Ava Gardner in Hollywood. if Jeanne is even home, which she probably won’t be.
But when she comes up the front steps, Nora hears a barrage of gunfire inside and knows Jeanne is watching a video. Nora rings the bell and the noise stops abruptly and Jeanne opens the door.
Nora expects her to look haggard, like Madame X in the cheap hotel in Mexico City, like she’s been through something. But she doesn’t. She looks calm, unruffled.
She says, “Come in,” but Nora can’t find any inflection that would give a clue to her mood, nothing in her expression to tip Nora off.
The house, inside, also looks unruffled. All traces of the long, terrible Christmas they spent together here, after Fern and the baby cleared out, have disappeared. The pillows are fluffed up and back in place on the futon couch. The kitchen wall where the milk carton hit has been cleaned up. Even the air has a calm to it, enhanced by some chunky candles Jeanne has going on the coffee table.
The wine goes unopened. The flowers got dropped on the front porch next to the door. Nora didn’t have the nerve to bring them in.
The two of them sit in the living room.
“I know being sorry isn’t enough,” Nora says. “It’s too meager.”
“Yes, it is too little,” Jeanne agrees. “I am too angry. My anger would be too much bigger than your apology. And even if I weren’t so furious at you, there is so much I need. I need you to be sorry and not love anyone but me. And I know you can’t do that right now. And I want you to be the sort of person who wouldn’t have let this happen. That’s the worst of it, that you aren’t that person. I want to exact promises from you, but what value would they have?”
“All I can ask is that you let me show you.”
“But how much showing would it take? How long before you could hold me without me sniffing to see if I could smell someone else on you? If I stay with you, I’ll know you have the capacity for betrayal. No matter how much time went by, I would fear your treachery had only moved into the shadows. What is love but trust, and how can I have that now?”
Nora nods.
“I am not trying to put you through the hoops,” Jeanne adds.
“No, I know. Everything you say is true. I’ve left us with only less-than-great options. We could end it over this. I’ll understand if you want to do that. Or we could go on, but you’re right that it will never be like before. Not so easygoing. Blithe—blithe wouldn
’t be available to us anymore. I know I’ve made that impossible.”
Jeanne sits staring at the flames of the candles, picking bits of warm wax off the sides. She has made several little cubes of wax, now set next to one another on the coffee table, dice without numbers.
“On the other hand,” Nora says. “You’d have me over a barrel. You could push me around for a long time. Make me go to Korean restaurants and eat all those little pickled things. You could play those spacey mood tapes that make me insane. You could make me visit your family.”
“Oh, my family would never see you now.”
Emotion is such a tricky element. Nora is completely surprised at how stung she is at this rejection by a small group of women she loathes. And on moral grounds. She is now someone who can be rejected on moral grounds.
“The water heater burst,” Jeanne says. “Tuesday. There was water everywhere.”
“I think it was pretty old,” Nora says. “I think it was already here and old when we bought the place.”
“Bernice came over. She brought her Shop-Vac. Then we got a guy to replace it yesterday.”
Jeanne has been on this side of the Atlantic so many years and yet every time Nora hears her overarticulate something utterly American, like “Shop-Vac,” she falls a little in love all over again.
Jeanne is not simultaneously falling a little in love all over again with Nora. Her expression doesn’t change, but she has brought their daily life together into this conversation, which is huge. Nora exhales silently, sensing they have moved past the place where Jeanne would have asked her to leave.
Later, toward morning, they are back in their bed, but their truce is tentative. Nora is crying; she has been crying off and on, for some time. “I’m just so grateful.”
“Yes,” Jeanne says. “I know. You are grateful and you are here, and we will go on together, for a while at least. To see if we can. But there is a crack in the vase now.”