by Carol Anshaw
“I know,” Nora says, “but just come here.” She pulls Jeanne on top of her. She needs to be weighted down, needs a counter to the helium of folly.
Sandbox
NORA WAS FLUSH with the sense that everything was just beginning. Tuesday and Thursday mornings, she went into work late so she could bring Fern to a group that gathered in an informal way at a play lot in the park.
Fern was thrilled by these outings. She seemed equally happy being bossy with the toddlers and being bossed around by a pair of twin sisters, who were older and basically ran the show around the swings and slide.
Nora was less well socialized, did less well with the mothers than Fern did with the kids. She could see that seeds of friendship were being sown among these women, but not with her. She suspected they found her a little standoffish, which she supposed she was (although she was also, in sequence, attracted to two of them). She hung around the periphery and listened as they revealed themselves in small bursts of conversation snatched from chasing down this wandering child, scooping up that fallen one. She saw how they expressed their self-satisfaction ironically, through small complaints about husbands or kids, which were really mechanisms for revealing the importance of men, around whom so many arrangements had to be made, the importance of children who required so many activities to satisfy their curiosity or creativity. Both the husbands and the children were positioned conversationally as accessories, a way in which these women defined who they were without having to reveal themselves directly.
Nora was shy about offering anything of her own along these lines. Her marriage seemed sturdy enough, but modest in scope; her husband steady but not important enough to brag about. Her child, by contrast, seemed so important that she couldn’t talk about her at all.
When she was pregnant, Nora had no idea who she was about to bring into the world, and so Fern astonished her from her first months, when she already seemed like such a fully developed human being. When she began to talk, she was already full of things to say, as though she’d been waiting quite a while. Most recently, she had been revealing a battery of firm, considered opinions on many subjects. Everything about her was fascinating to Nora, every day thrumming with the possibilities of who Fern would be tomorrow.
At the moment, Fern was showing a small boy, Aaron, how to make a basic castle by packing a plastic bucket with damp sand from the sandbox they were sitting on the edge of, then turning over the bucket, tamping it onto a flat patch, then lifting the bucket to reveal the formation beneath.
“Where are the turrets?” he asked.
“Turrets are the next lesson,” Fern told him, patient and professorial, and totally bluffing. “Turrets are next week.”
Among the hopes Nora was pinning on Fern was that she would be the first person in Nora’s life to whom she could give herself over completely, whom she wouldn’t need to resist in any way. And so things weren’t beginning just for Fern, but also for herself.
Astronaut
NORA IS IN THE PARKING LOT of the Whole Foods on Clybourn. Her assignment for Vaughn’s birthday party is appetizers. She stands bent over the open trunk of her car, the replacement for her old Jetta, this one green instead of navy. She is going through the bags to make sure she has everything. A shrink-wrapped package of smoked Scottish salmon dusted with dill. A wedge of Brie flecked with mushrooms. Crackers for the cheese, a loaf of pumpernickel for the salmon. Some hummus and pita bread. Vegetable pâté. Roasted red peppers. Little Italian olives, Fern loves these. She probably has too much. She should have made a list so she wouldn’t overbuy.
She tries to keep her life small and organized these days—lists ticked off, promises kept—a place of recuperation and containment. She is not unhappy in these reduced circumstances, but rather has found comfort in the tighter fit, the tucking in, her life pulled taut around her.
At first she doesn’t hear the engine at her back. When she picks up on the sound and identifies it, the vibration is hot breath on her neck. She doesn’t have to turn around to know who it is. She doesn’t have to turn around, period, but she does. The window on the passenger side of the truck descends with a low electronic whir. Pam leans across and unlatches and pushes open the door.
“Just a few minutes,” she says. Her hair is longer. The crewcut is gone. She is wearing a gabardine jacket Nora doesn’t recognize. Little clicks of time passing, having passed.
Nora can so easily imagine herself shaking her head, can see herself so clearly—saying no, she’s sorry, she can’t, and then getting into her own car, turning the key in the ignition, driving straight to Fern and James’s apartment without casting a glance in the rearview mirror.
Instead, she climbs into the cab of the truck, a sequence of movements that feels like rolling back a huge stone and entering an old cave. Sheryl Crow is singing quietly from the tape deck. A bitter Sheryl, telling someone: “If it makes you happy.”
Familiar smells cover the inert interior air like moss. Coffee and fries, Pam’s musky cologne and the other scent about her that’s sex. Pam doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at Nora, only drives. They don’t go far; Pam pulls into a deserted parking lot behind an abandoned warehouse off Elston.
“No one will hear my screams,” Nora says when Pam has put the engine in neutral and turned a little to face her, letting the weak joke evaporate.
“You totally iced me,” Pam says.
“I had to do something. I had to make a decision.”
“But it was a decision for both of us, and you made it alone.”
Nora wants to be able to say yes, but it was the right decision, she hasn’t had a moment’s doubt about it. She wants to say that the two of them talking would have only dragged out an inevitable end. A beautiful, coherent speech lies somewhere, for someone to make in a moment like this, a collection of words to balm exit wounds. But she can’t make the speech; she can’t find it anywhere inside herself. The plain fact is she ran back into her relationship with Jeanne and pulled the door shut. She thinks she’s done the right thing, but she still has days when some floodgate breaks and she is awash in longing for Pam, as though no time at all has elapsed. But the Pam she misses is by now partly a creation of loss and desire. As for the real Pam, the justifiably angry woman sitting inches away from her, she can’t tell her any of this; it’s both too much to let her know, and information that is worthless. What value is there in saying, I may still love you but I’m never coming back?
Also, saying even these worthless words would be a betrayal of Jeanne, whom she has promised never to betray again. So all she can do is sit and inhabit the silence formed by Pam waiting for a reply Nora can’t make.
Eventually Pam starts lightly drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. She is done waiting, and what she does next is unexpected and startling, not on any of the pages of the script of phantom connection Nora has written for the two of them, an aftermath of understanding and forgiveness. Pam has been writing her own script. She turns and clutches the front of Nora’s jacket and pulls slowly. And Nora’s response—also not what she would have expected—is to close her eyes, feeling first lips against her mouth, then teeth, then the sharp, swift pain of her lower lip being bitten, not playfully, but in dead earnest. She backs away, but refuses to put her fingertips to the blood she can feel welling up to the surface, running in a rivulet down her chin, dropping onto the collar of her jacket, then the dusty blue linen shirt she has put on for the party.
Pam reaches across to push open the door, inadvertently brushing the back of her hand across Nora’s nipples, which, absurdly, stiffen.
“Tell your girlfriend you got that at yoga,” she says as Nora steps out and, for an instant, feels like the astronaut on an ill-fated space walk, outside the craft, her line suddenly cut, drifting into the thin ether that lies just beyond the ordered universe.
One
FERN HAS the two cake layers baked and out of their pans, one set on top of the other. They list slightly to one side, but this
is not so noticeable now that she has the frosting (chocolate) on. She is scripting in “Vaughn” with a tube of white icing. The celebrant himself is sitting in his highchair, gnawing on a bagel, watching as though he knows the cake is about him. Fern has already put his party hat on him.
James comes into the kitchen and laughs as soon as he sees Vaughn. “Your hat, man!” he says, and opens Vaughn’s hand so they can high-five. Vaughn has almost got the high-five down pat. Then James spots the cake. “It’s a work of art,” he says.
“I’m glad I don’t have to do all my writing in frosting,” Fern says, squeezing out the tail of the “g.”
“No, it looks perfect,” James says. He has been out shopping for the forgotten condiment, sour cream, to go with the chili that’s bubbling on the stove. “I got these, too.” He sets a pot of foil-wrapped paper whites on the table. "To say, you know—spring is here.”
After a morning of cold rain and fog steaming up from the ground, the afternoon has offered some watery sunshine for Vaughn’s first birthday. Fern has the window open, and the cool air coming in above the radiator shimmers in waves and brings with it the fragrance of damp earth, last fall’s dead leaves, the shoots of tulips in progress.
“Lucky would have his nose on the windowsill today. It’s a real symphony of smells out there.” Fern still misses Lucky more than seems normal to other people. They don’t say “he was just a dog,” but she can tell that’s what they’re thinking. But it was Lucky’s dying that has made Fern see the line between life and death as not all that hard and fast. In the midst of missing him, she is often interrupted by the certainty that he is still with her, around the house, on the floor by her bed, wheezing a little in his sleep. And right now—she doesn’t even have to turn and look—with his nose on the sill.
Fern has told everyone to come about three, and soon after that they arrive in a short burst—the buzzer going off, muffled thumping up the old wooden steps, then stooping as they take off their jackets, put down their presents for Vaughn in the living room, and come under the eaves, into the kitchen with their offerings for the party.
Jeanne has brought a giant box of chocolate truffles and a bottle of white wine. She is wearing a dress with a pattern of tiny flowers, a pale green cardigan clasped at the neck with a bumblebee pin.
“You’re a vision of springtime,” Fern tells her, and lets Jeanne kiss her on both cheeks.
Harold shows up with a mix tape he has made. “Songs with ‘one’ in them,” he says, tapping the plastic case.
James goes for the boom box.
Russell has come with Louise’s cornbread but, mercifully, without Louise. He is not happy about Fern taking on Vaughn, or about James having shown no particular interest in any sort of career beyond messengering, or about Fern going part-time at school and taking on extra hours at the psychic hotline. He thinks she is abandoning all her good plans. She can see his point of view. Nothing about her situation is ideal. She has taken on the care of someone else’s kid, about a decade before she expected to be doing any parenting. Her partner in this enterprise is an underemployed depressive. Help from those around her has its limits. Her father’s purse strings are tied up by Louise. Nora lends a hand with caring for Vaughn, but she and Jeanne are not the buoyant babysitters they used to be. Now they have their own troubles. As a unit they seem fragile. They make you feel as if you should not make any sudden moves around them, or drop anything breakable. So Fern is more on her own than she would like, and not really in possession of a grand plan, or even a reliable map. She is making do with the small patch of ground she’s standing on, and the next step out from there.
Still, she has a sharpening picture of who she is in the world, how she wants to participate in the enterprise of being human, the ways in which she wants to be there for those around her. Somehow this goes along with being an observer and student of humanity. She will become an anthropologist; getting there may just take a little longer. Vaughn may have to be bundled up and put in the dog sled to visit the Nenets with her.
Tracy and Dale show up with beer, a twenty-four-pack, which seems excessive for an afternoon family party, but up in Wisconsin among Dale’s family, this might only be the starter pack. Dale is short and compact, missing the tips of two fingers. He is sullen, or maybe just made shy by all these people who know one another well and him hardly at all. Tracy is edgy. When she and Dale came back down from Wisconsin in the winter, they found an apartment and took the baby back. But it wasn’t even a couple of weeks before she called Fern at three in the morning from a club, sounding pharmaceutically enhanced, asking if Fern could pick up Vaughn because the babysitter might have gone home. When Fern and James got there, Vaughn was asleep in his crib, no babysitter in evidence. Fern suspected there had never been one.
After that, there had been a short sequence of bad conversations in which Tracy swung between indignant and defended, and remorseful and apologetic. What it came down to, when she was finally able to admit the truth, was that she didn’t want to lose Dale, and he apparently felt that if there was going to be a kid in his house, it should be his kid.
It was in the middle of one of these talks—one where she and Fern were going over some materials on adoption, looking into all that would have to be done at some point—that Fern suddenly understood that as her future was merging with Vaughn’s, she and Tracy were parting. Where once Tracy had seemed wiser and more experienced, now Fern feels so much the older one. She could even imagine a final scene—she and Tracy in their thirties, running into each other someplace boring and obvious, a Gap, a record store—and by then the calls and visits will have long since diminished, Tracy will have missed Vaughn’s last two birthdays. They will have reached the exact spot where everything between them will have been said and done.
But as of now this separation has only just begun. Tracy has relinquished her place as Vaughn’s mother, but is still looking around for a position she can occupy in relation to him, something other than failed parent. When she visits and it’s only her and Fern and Vaughn, it’s almost not awkward anymore. This gathering will be rougher, though. Fern can already see Tracy smelling judgment in the air.
Tough. She’ll have to deal with it. This group was not the easiest to assemble, but together, they add up to Vaughn’s family. They’re all he’s got.
By three-thirty, Fern is getting impatient with her only as-yet-unarrived guest.
“She was supposed to bring the appetizers,” she tells James. “I think if you’re the appetizer person, you should probably come a little early, but at the very least, you need to be on time.”
Jeanne overhears and says, “She was going to Whole Foods. She’s probably busy buying too many things.” But Fern hears a slight raggedness in Jeanne’s voice, an undertone of disappointment on the verge of exasperation.
“She’ll be here,” James says. “I’ll put out some crackers and peanut butter.”
Fern thinks he’s kidding, but he’s heading for the cabinets. Guys, she thinks.
By quarter to four, everyone is in a groove, sitting on the sofa and the living room floor, working through the crackers and peanut butter and the beer and the wine, even the chocolates have been opened, and Harold’s tape is up to “Book of Love,” which contains the line “Chapter One says to love her, you love her with all your heart,” and Fern is pissed. She has moved beyond caring about little boxes of sushi and little Italian olives or whatever her mother is bringing. She is beyond delayed appetizers, deep into replaying the whole historical pageant of her mother’s failure to show up. Then this anger snags on a suspicion. Nora is being held up by something more than spaciness or indecision at the deli counter. Some event has intervened.
In the same passage that Fern sees this, she also sees that whatever has happened won’t stop her mother, that something fundamental has shifted between them. Nora is not going to disappear on her. Returning holds more importance to her than going away. Other things may happen, but this one bad thing,
at least, is behind them.
From here, the noises of the party drop way into the background as Fern concentrates on helping her mother get here, willing her footfalls on the stairs. And it works. Fern hears the downstairs door open and shut, then Nora, not hurrying exactly, but taking the steps with deliberation. Then there is a momentary stop, a pause of preparation—a straightening of posture, a replacement of expression—as she gets ready to break through from wherever she has been to here, where she needs to arrive. Fern feels the precise pressure of her mother’s hand on the knob. And the door opens.
MY THANKS TO
Stacey D’Erasmo, Elizabeth Hailey, Mary Kay Kammer, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Laurie Muchnick, Barbara Mulvanny, Jean Naggar, Janet Silver, Bill Spees, Sharon Sheehe Stark, and to the Ragdale Foundation.
Books by Carol Anshaw
AQUAMARINE
“Anshaw writes with biting humor and a touching reverence for the power of loss.”—Boston Globe
At the 1968 Summer Olympics, seventeen-year-old Jesse Austin has just lost the 100-meter freestyle to an Australian swimmer. That moment, suspended forever in the Olympic pool’s aquamarine, will haunt Jesse for the rest of her life—or, more properly, her lives. With dazzling ingenuity, Anshaw presents Jesse in 1990, inhabiting three equally possible lives. Aquamarine plays exhilarating variations on the theme of lost love and examines the unlived lives running parallel to the one we have chosen.
ISBN 0-395-87755-5
LUCKY IN THE CORNER