Lucky in the Corner (13 page)

Nora often felt older than her parents, well beyond the corny, childish way they saw life as being either onstage, or backstage, waiting to go onstage again. Also, they didn’t seem to see that their notions of entertainment had been superseded. That no one wanted to hear Lynette sing “Mambo with Mama.” That the mambo was ancient history. Rock and roll had happened, and the war, and windowpane acid. People could see and hear a mambo just by closing their eyes. Her family was on a path to nowhere, a highway made obsolete by a new turnpike.

In the slightly wider world outside her home, Nora fared better. She was a junior in high school and was popular, mostly, she knew, by virtue of her looks. She had a small group of friends, smart girls in her class—“sharp” was how they thought of themselves. Also, she kept an eye on two seniors—Tory Latham and Raeanne Maggio. Tough girls. Nora didn’t speak to them, their paths never crossed. She suspected they were probably morons, or high all the time; they had this trancy air about them in the halls. But she had almost nothing to go on in her efforts to decipher them—a little gossip, no hard information. Her total relationship to them was seeing them during change of classes, and imagining situations in which they would come to her rescue.

Like: She’s mugged on her way home and they see her and rush over, chase the guy off, and Nora’s bleeding, but only a little. They take her to their apartment. In the fantasy, everyone’s a little older. Tory and Raeanne have an apartment of their own, in New York, down in the Village. They clean Nora up, put her in a bubble bath. Wipe her face with a washcloth. One of them leaves, and Nora is alone with the other.

Things got vague from there.

Once she saw them shopping at Macy’s. They weren’t giggly or goofing off. They were, in fact, barely speaking to each other. They had reached a point beyond talking, some higher plane. They would pluck at various items hanging in the Teen Style department, and then nod at each other, or lift an eyebrow, making small judgments on what was cool and what wasn’t. Macy’s was at their service, offering up a selection for their approval or disapproval. For them, shopping was serious work. They carried the burden of their importance in their small kingdom of style. Also, they were definitely aware of how they would appear to anyone who might run into them.

And that afternoon, they did see Nora flipping through a circular rack of turtlenecks. They didn’t say hi; that would have been way over the line. But Raeanne did nod slightly in Nora’s direction, which was huge, given that they were seniors and she was beneath the level of them having to notice or recognize her at all.

Nora took this nod home with her, ran the scene through the loop a few more times, spun it into a few more vague fantasies about Raeanne and Tory befriending her, taking her on trips, opening before her their vaults of secrets.

None of this seemed to have anything to do with sex. It was more about a romantic version of friendship she couldn’t imagine happening in real life, but which had evolved into a definite set of aspects and emotions inside her. Rescue was a large component. These girls would save her from something.

Sex was another matter entirely; it occupied her in a blunt, urgent way that she didn’t hear in the conversation of her friends. They either liked making out (or making out and more) or didn’t, but it was more tied up with particular guys in a getting them/keeping them/losing them way. Nora wasn’t interested in any of the boys they knew, not in any of these ways.

For Nora, sex seemed to occupy a side room beyond the walls of her regular life. There was the kissing that had happened with the girl in the motel on the way to Florida that time. Then, when she was thirteen, a girl named Cathy, whom she knew from having done a science fair project together (“The Labyrinth of the Human Ear”), took her to the Vogue Theater.

“It’s a different kind of show,” she told Nora and left it at that.

The Vogue was in a working-class suburb a couple of towns out from White Plains. They took a bus there. The theater was so decrepit outside that at first Nora thought it was abandoned. Inside, the seats were sprung, the fabric worn down and slick, the whole place overheated and smelling of butter and a flowery deodorizer. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the deal was that you would leave an empty seat beside you. Once the lights had gone down, a guy you didn’t know would slide into it. One of the hoody guys who hung out there, skinny guys with long hair and cheap, black parkas. For the length of the movie, you could make out with him, and when the show was over you left with your friend as though nothing had happened. Everyone inside the Vogue seemed to play by these rules. To Nora, it was a perfect place. She went there other Saturdays, even after Cathy tired of it. She went by herself, which was better, in a way. Then Teddy Frey moved into the neighborhood and Nora didn’t have to go to the Vogue anymore.

She visited Teddy after school while his mother was still at work at the hospital. They had plenty of time. His mother worked until eleven. There was no rush.

Teddy was a boring kind of regular—short and stocky. He wore wheat-colored Levis and John Lennon glasses with blue lenses. He had dirty hair. He looked like a fifth Beatle, on his way to see the Maharishi. Teddy was not particularly interested in the social life at school. He liked to read books on Eastern religions and smoke dope, neither of which was a very social activity. At school, he was a nonentity, lost in the shuffle. He wouldn’t bother telling anyone that Nora came over to his house after school. There wouldn’t be any point; nobody would believe him.

They would go down to the family room in his basement and smoke a little dope and watch TV, mostly sports—baseball, golf, whatever was on. Once it was a fishing show. They would turn off the lights and let the TV run, and, without saying anything, Teddy would stretch out on the sofa on his back and Nora would stretch out on top of him. They kept their clothes on. What they did with each other was suppressed and constrained, like sex in a monastery, or in some ancient Chinese dynasty. She pressed her face into the sofa arm, which smelled like dog. They made almost no sound, even breathed in a controlled way that produced slight shudders. Eventually, while she bit the arm of the sofa and he had his head turned to the side (she imagined his eyes open, staring at the golf match), they would bring each other off. They never discussed, or even referred to what they did in the basement. They were just watching TV.

NORA LISTENS
to Mrs. Rathko pack up and go. Although from inside her office she can only hear what’s going on, she can visualize each step. She knows each component of Mrs. Rathko’s leave-taking by heart. The sighing as she drops weary and underappreciated into her secretary’s chair, then pulls up a foot to change from businesslike pumps into running shoes for her brisk hike to the El. The gathering up of soiled Tupperware and her thermos, one of the last plaid wide-mouths in America. The nestling into her tote bag of one of the paperbacks she plods through serially—thick, hair-raising stories of bacterial plagues or nocturnal takeovers by secret cabals of now ancient Nazis. Rainy days like today, Mrs. Rathko’s ritual substitutes the running shoes with the snapping on of galoshes (which she, of course, insists on calling “rubbers”), the fluttering open of a pleated rain hat. She prepares for her nightly trip home as though it will be a great journey across borders, travel that will require supplies and stamina, papers of transit.

It’s nearly six by the time she has pulled the door shut behind her and Nora is left alone to scheme. It started small. At first all she did was look up Pam’s application form, get her address, and drive by one night. It was a brick bungalow in Ravenswood Manor. There were no lights on, no clues to the life lived inside. Also from the application, she got Pam’s birth date and started checking Omarr’s horoscope for Pisces every day. In Omarr’s opinion, something big was about to happen to Pam; Nora took this to mean herself. She was waiting for Pam to make the next move, to follow up on all that steamy flirtation at the steamy orientation.

Then it began to seem as if she wasn’t going to make any move at all. Early on, she came by the office for the parking permit, but Mrs. Rathko was there to take care of it. Nora came out of her office at the sound of Pam’s voice, offered a little chitchat, and Pam was friendly enough, but there was nothing freighted about her conversation this time, no more of that delicious eye contact. Still, Nora was left riled up. As though she had been surreptitiously tickled and, once Pam had left, needed to smooth down her skirt, open a window to let in some fresh air, go to the cooler for a paper cupful of water.

Since then—nothing. If there’s a next move, Nora is going to have to make it. She sits inert at her desk, but within, she’s a Greek drama in an ancient amphitheater—foible and folly paving the way for tragic consequences. She sat here last Tuesday night, watching this same play of bad judgment and horrible consequence, and ended up slinking home, grateful to Jeanne for her unwitting protection.

Tonight, though, she can’t summon up this gratitude, and her restraint last week now seems like good behavior that should count toward a small dispensation. She gets up and grabs her jacket and a clipboard she finds on top of Mrs. Rathko’s file cabinets. A clipboard—could she get any sleazier? How different is she from Claude Frolich down in his lab? He probably uses a clipboard to camouflage his overtures. She can picture it only too clearly. And, morals aside, is she risking being called on the same carpet as Claude? (She recently heard he hired a lawyer after his meeting with the ombudsman.) If Pam is not interested, if Nora is horribly mistaken, won’t she be guilty of harassing a student? This prudent line of thought does not so much as break her stride on her way out the door as she heads over to the Fine Arts Annex.

She tracks down the ceramics workshop and finds a long table lined on both sides with hunched-over, aspiring ceramicists. Pam is one of them. While most of the students are painting spots on the backs of clay bullfrogs, or stripes on the haunches of unicorns, Pam’s piece is a small pot with a narrow opening at the top. A vase, maybe, for small, short-stemmed flowers. Pam appears, however, to be transforming it into an antivase in which flowers might not feel entirely welcome. The background is black and, at the moment, she appears to be totally absorbed in painting over this a floating nonpattern of amorphous, ghostly shapes in colors from a cranked-up primary palette. Postmodern yellow. Insane-asylum green.

Clipboard crooked in her arm, Nora asks the instructor (Evelyn Fitzpatrick, who has been teaching basic art courses at the night school since forever, since before there was clay or canvas, when there were only paintings on the walls of caves) if she could please have a moment with one of her students. As though she is taking Pam by the ear down to the principal’s office for detention.

When they are a ways down the corridor and Nora has been made a little goofy by all the noticeable aspects of Pam in black polo shirt and tight, faded, paint-smeared jeans and Pam is looking back at Nora with an expression that usually precedes laughter, only Pam doesn’t laugh, just holds onto the look, Nora says, “I was wondering if maybe, maybe you could get out of here? When you’re done?”

This suggestion gets Pam a little more serious. “I’m done enough. I’m at a drying part.”

Nora waits in the hall, leaning hard against the wall as though she might buckle without its support, while Pam cleans her brushes and puts her antivase away on the shelves. Nora clutches her clipboard, which she only now realizes has no papers attached to it, and she thinks,
Okay. Here we go.

This is the first cool night of the early fall. Nora rolls down the sleeves of her jacket and buttons the cuffs as they walk to the parking lot. Pam drives. She has a pickup (as opposed to a car), black (as opposed to nothing; whatever she drove, it would have to be black). The vanity license plate reads
BLDR GRL.
It turns out Pam is an independent contractor. She adds family rooms onto homes with growing families. She puts dormers in attics, updates kitchens and baths. She has also built two greenhouses and an artist’s studio. She handles the carpentry and wall-busting on her own, wields—if she says so herself—a mean Sawzall. She farms out the beam work and electric and plumbing to subs, gets them to show up and stick to schedule even if it means hauling them out of bed or bar. She loves her work. The ceramics class is a sort of artistic outcropping of these same inclinations. She thinks in colors and shapes. She loves working with her hands.

Nora has nothing this good to trade.

“What you’ve got,” says Nora, “it’s what everybody wants. I’m one of the everybodies, I suppose. I don’t have a career so much as a job that’s about ten jobs down a straight line from a dumb job I took in a temporary way when I got out of college. I mean, it’s not like I had a doll when I was little, and dressed it up as a little college administrator.”

“I never played with dolls,” Pam says.

“Me either.”

“Do you think that’s a dyke thing?”

There is something stunningly invasive about this question, with its tacit assumption that they are both dykes. Of course this is the whole basis for their presence in the suddenly close quarters of this truck cab. Still, as long as it wasn’t mentioned, their quarters could feel roomy, their purpose on this ride vaguely social. By saying “dykes,” Pam has ripped off her underpants and handed them over to Nora.

From the passenger seat, bumping along on the truck’s springy shocks, Nora watches Pam’s huge hands, fascinated by the way they dance a little over the top of the steering wheel, the way they are not quite cleaned up from class, are still painted green along the sides. There is also, peripherally, the way Pam’s jeans tug around the muscles in her thighs every time she depresses the clutch, then the accelerator. Also, the place at which her forearms emerge from the rolled-up sleeves of her old gabardine bowling jacket. In these ways, Pam’s immediate presence blots up most of Nora’s thought processes, pushes out any memory of whatever clever conversation she was going to come up with on this ride.