Lucky in the Corner (8 page)

Fern glances up and across the room from stirring the pot of boiling spaghetti, and tells Nora, “He doesn’t enjoy that sort of thing.”

“Yes, he’s miserable,” Nora says. “You can see.”

“Yeah, well, he laughs, but then he throws up,” Fern says, nibbling a broken-off piece of Parmesan.

Nora retreats into silence. She flips back to the beginnings of her long, unwinnable war with Fern.

When she came out to herself, Nora went from fierce nerves and brooding to pure exhilaration. Up until then, everything had seemed so in its place, with Russell still a copywriter at the agency and she still working in the ombudsman’s office at the college. Of course, they didn’t know the “still” part, didn’t think of this as being merely the first part of their adulthood. The future appeared deceptively plain in front of them, looking much like their present only maybe painted a slightly different color, maybe with a room added on. Fern was just starting school, coming home with peculiar drawings, odd stories about aliens from outer space visiting her class, or coming home with nothing at all to say about an entire day. And all of this was so fiercely interesting, so preoccupying, so ongoing, each day opening directly into another. And yet, in the middle of this, for Nora to be right, to be who she really was, who she had already become, all of this would have to be overturned.

And it was in this overturning, Nora fears, that Fern—already a mysterious child, tricky to find in the best of moments—became profoundly lost to her. A vacuum was set up between them and has persisted through the years, Fern signaling her indifference in the face of all that Nora offers, keeps offering nonetheless, in hope and in penance.

“My turn,” Harold says, and takes Vaughn from Nora. He lies down on the wood floor of the kitchen, sets the baby onto his stomach, and gives him big thumbs to hold.

Tracy joins Fern in fixing the dinner; the two of them politely help each other at the chopping block. They are no longer the giggling, silly friends they used to be. Nora suspects this is not a loss of innocence, rather simply that they are no longer smoking dope out in Tracy’s car as a prelude to encounters with adults, gliding into the house like deer emerging from the dark forest, their pupils huge. Now they are practicing at being adults. Now Tracy has a baby and Fern is studying anthropology. Nora supposes they are repositioning themselves
vis-à-vis
each other, accommodating the fact that their circumstances have set them on divergent paths. Nora still has trouble adjusting to the notion of Tracy as a mother; she has grown so used to thinking of her as the ur-bad girl with her terrible boyfriends and school suspensions. Motherhood makes her seem vulnerable for the first time, a tentative young woman with a circus-animal plastic diaper bag and a blood-dripping dagger tattooed on her ankle, doing something quite difficult in an eerily solitary way.

“This kid has so much personality,” Harold says in a voice squeezed from having his nose clenched in Vaughn’s fierce grasp.

Fern overlaps this, shouting “Almost done!” to all concerned, tossing the spaghetti with the garlic and olive oil, the red pepper flakes and flat-leaf parsley. Nora goes upstairs to fetch her girlfriend from her study.

Although the evening is mild, Jeanne is wearing a light cardigan. This over a retro rayon dress. She will be more dressed up for this dinner than anyone else. Even if she wore jeans, they would be jeans into which she had ironed a crease. Part of this formality is because she is French, part because she is Jeanne.

“I have a small chill, it seems,” she says.

Nora puts one hand to her lover’s forehead, the other to her own for comparison. “You
are
a little warm.”

“
Un peu enrhumée,
perhaps. I always get a cold in the summer, when everyone else is well, then never in the winter when my classroom is full of sneezes.”

She looks tired, an older version of her usual self. Jeanne’s small maladies—colds, tickly throats, occasionally a stomachache she ascribes to her liver—Nora has come to understand, are tugs on her awareness. Jeanne is not hypochondriacal, but she doesn’t like to ask for things directly, and Nora has noticed that these minor ailments tend to come on when their time together has been pinched by the rest of life. They are, she thinks, Jeanne’s unconscious way of asking for a slight increase in Nora’s attention. Sometimes this seems sweet; other times Nora wishes Jeanne could just spit it out. Grab Nora by the hair and yell at her, or drag her into bed, or whatever all this politeness is a cloak for.

“It has been a long week,” Jeanne says. “Too many students. And they grow stubborn or discouraged, and my job becomes even so much harder.”

“How’s it going? Your article.” Nora nods toward the screen of Jeanne’s computer, the flush of three-by-five cards across the surface of her worktable. Jeanne is far past her deadline with this piece, for a feminist journal. The article is to be a reappraisal. She hopes to show that while Colette undeniably slept with women, she wasn’t really a lesbian. That there is a distinct difference between doing something and defining oneself by it. Jeanne’s argument is that it is wrong-headed to attempt to plug historical figures into a contemporary set of assumptions, that although loving someone of one’s own sex has always existed, gay identity is a modern construction. Colette is the centerpiece of the article, but along the way, Jeanne has tacked on Emily Dickinson and Eleanor Roosevelt. When she started talking about including Melissa Etheridge, Nora understood that the piece was slipping out of control.

Jeanne holds up a copy of a letter from Colette to her lover, Missy. “All of this is a problem of translation, but not of language. Here, it is that the French—specifically in the time of Colette’s youth,
la belle époque
—experienced life in such a different way than we do now, here. And also, Colette was something of a foreigner in her own place, an anachronism in her own time, which adds to my difficulties.”

Jeanne doesn’t want to be teaching grammar and syntax; she wants to be teaching French literature or cultural studies. But her Ph.D. dissertation languishes in a box somewhere while she fritters her time away on articles like this one. There is no talking to her about any of this. Nora has tried. Discussion only brings out her defenses, and does nothing to get her off the dime. They have been together eight years, long enough that many of their topics and issues have gone into reruns; some have been taken off the air altogether. The two of them are long past the dazzling, opening stretch of relationship where each of them thought they were going to be a huge agent of change for the other.

“Is it time for Fern’s dinner?” Jeanne asks.

“Yes. She’s being very awful,” Nora says. “Come down and protect me.” In the hallway, she adds, “I don’t deserve this. All the literature says you replicate your own parents’ limitations. But I haven’t. My mother was so all over me all the time. I was determined to give Fern room to grow, some private space to hold her secrets. Which I continue to do. I’ve never, for instance, if you’ve noticed, so much as alluded, not once, to the fucking tattoo.”

On the stairs, Jeanne tugs at the back of Nora’s tank top, makes her stop and turn around, kisses the side of her mouth.

“I think Fern is in a place now that is a little dark. You know, patting her hand around on the wall to find the switch to turn on the light. And I think soon she will find it, but also that she needs to be alone in her darkness until she does. I think this is what she is saying to you, what you perceive as anger or indifference.”

“I know, but—” Nora starts, but Jeanne pats her butt to get her going down the steps, and says:

“Patience.”

They move out to the backyard for the dinner; they eat at two long folding tables pushed together to make a square. These tables are layered with an assortment of Nora’s vintage tablecloths —pink and blue, a green and yellow map of the States, a holly-patterned Christmas cloth—set with brightly colored Mexican plates. The rains have revived the garden, loosened the deepest fragrances from the flowers, the earth itself, the basil and the tomatoes—especially the tomatoes. Fern’s boom box sits on the sill of her bedroom, facing out. Otis Redding’s greatest hits slip through the window screen.

The big bowl of pasta rests in the center of the table, next to it a platter of Caprese salad with fat slices of tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and a confetti of chopped basil leaves. Tracy’s mother’s many-grain bread sits, sliced, on a board. The homemade cheese, which they all know too well from long acquaintance, remains in the kitchen, on the counter next to the sink, safely confined to its plastic tub. The bayberry maple candles have made it onto the table, but no one has made a move to light them.

It’s a mystery where Fern comes by her talent for cooking; she was raised on spaghetti sauce from jars, rôtisserie chickens from the supermarket. And then, when she was early into her teens, she started bringing home cookbooks. Like a child from some backwoods shack without so much as a radio, coming upon a grand piano and teaching herself to play.

“We are so lucky to have you,” Jeanne tells her, as plates are being passed around, and Fern smiles and lowers her head and closes her eyes, made both happy and shy by the compliment.

Nora wonders why she herself couldn’t have come up with this little bit of praise and elicited this particularly sweet smile from Fern. But of course, if Nora had been offering the compliment, it wouldn’t have been received in this easy way. Fern would have been searching for some hidden jab, or pretending to take it as though it had been delivered sarcastically, bravely trying not to appear wounded.

“I’m going to have to switch to working lunch at the Haus,” Harold tells them all once they’ve begun eating. “I have a part. A new theater company, up on Clark. They’re doing some
very
interesting things.”

“Is it big?” Fern says. “The part?”

“Well, it’s ridiculous in a way. You could say it’s a large part because I am onstage through the entire play. But I don’t have any lines because the fact is, I am deceased. The whole thing is set at a wake and I’m laid out in the casket. I was a very complicated person when I was alive and all the other characters have to sort out their feelings about me.”

At first, no one finds anything to say to Harold’s remarks, except Harold.

“No matter how fascinating you were when you were alive,” he says, “once you’re embalmed, you’re pretty much reduced to one aspect. Which is to say, dead.”

“Man, though,” Fern says. “I mean, no blinking.”

“What if you sneeze?” Tracy says, lifting her shirt to nurse Vaughn, who has begun to fuss on her lap.

“Yes,” Harold says, “well, you can see that even though it’s hugely boring, it is nonetheless going to require all this control.” He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, holding the position while they all watch. There is not the slightest flutter of lashes.

“Could be very powerful,” Fern says, and Nora forgives her everything.

When they’ve finished dinner and had coffee and Harold’s ice cream (a big success) and everyone has requested that Fern play the Otis Redding disk again, she does, then comes back out and claims Vaughn as her dance partner, swooping him around dramatically to “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” The baby adores Fern, goes into a sort of rapture, Nora has noticed, whenever she picks him up, as though he knows he is totally loved by this particular human. Which he is. Nora sees Fern’s love for Vaughn as something other than maternal or auntlike or whatever she might understandably be feeling for him coming out of her closeness to Tracy. Rather it seems to Nora that what Fern and Vaughn have is some profound version of friendship, an affinity.

It’s almost ten by the time the kitchen gets cleaned up with a little effort from everyone but Fern, who gets a cook’s dispensation. Soon after this, Tracy leaves with Vaughn, who has long since nodded off. Harold says his goodbyes after looking at his watch and muttering something about having to meet someone. He chests his social life like a good hand of cards. Whatever he has on tap for tonight must be very good to risk the wrath of Gretel for blowing off work.

Nora and Jeanne, tired and sleepy with wine, offer a final round of praise for Fern’s dinner, then pull themselves upstairs. Nora picks a copy of
The Death of the Heart
off the pillow along with her glasses, and sets them on the dresser. She was hoping to get a little reading in tonight, but it’s too late now. She and Jeanne fall into bed, crash-landing without taking off underpants or watches, only brushing each other’s lips by way of good night.

They sleep like synchronized swimmers, freestyling parallel through the night, flipping over to catch, then release, each other into the universe of the subconscious. Nora has come to know Jeanne in sleep as much as through daylight observation. Let loose in a room of a hundred women, she could find Jeanne by the shape of her shoulder, the scent under her arm, the taste of the inside of her ear. In the morning, they often lie limb over limb, shuffling through their dreams.

Nora’s are tricky skirmishes in an ongoing war with dark forces. Hitchhikers unsheathing knives in the back seat as she drives along desert highways, the sound of metal brushing against leather before the blade is pressed sharp to her throat. Other, more hulking figures, springing from beneath the steps in the shadowy stairwell. Or large, writhing rats racing over her in some dimly lit, too small space, their tight fur bristling across her palms as she tries to push them away. If sex enters the frame, it is something sordid with someone inappropriate—Harold, or her mother. Once with Mrs. Rathko, in a train berth.

Jeanne, meanwhile, reports dreams of flying low over their neighborhood, using her arms to take off and land gently. Even what she considers nightmares seem merely whimsical or slightly odd. She has little hands for ears. She gives birth to a chipmunk. Last night, Queen Elizabeth startled her by opening her handbag to show off her trained mice in little outfits—polka dot dresses, checkered suits.