Lucky in the Corner (14 page)

Pam has decided, apparently, that they will go to the lake. There’s a parking lot near the beach at Foster where there seems to be some gay guy cruising going on, but mostly it’s just the usual nocturnal parkers—people waiting for drugs or brooding alone or finding a small patch of privacy with someone they’ve no business being with in private.

When Pam shifts in her seat and turns to Nora, the best Nora can come up with is, “I’m not sure why I’m doing this.”

Pam doesn’t bother responding to the lie. Instead she explains why she likes to keep the truck’s heater on, but with the windows open. “In summer I do the opposite, run the a.c. full blast with the windows open. It’s the blend that’s so great, cool on hot, hot on cool. Like a hot fudge sundae.”

Nora listens and stares at the floor mat beneath her feet and smells Pam from across the cab. She has a teenage guy odor, a mix of leaves and sweat cooled down after a scrimmage. Nora sits in the dark and enjoys the amount of sensation contained in this moment. Stars of fascination float around in the darkness of the cab. She could stay here all night with the engine idling, the heat eddying out the dashboard vents, the smoke from Pam’s cigarette dragged up and out the window into the flue of the night. All Nora has to do is wait as time collapses in on itself, past and future folding inward onto this tiny patch of present in which Pam reaches over and drags the calloused tip of a middle finger along the hard right angle of Nora’s jaw.

“1 think, maybe, a few girls have hurt themselves on this,” she says, then settles back into the driver’s seat, tosses the lit butt of her cigarette out onto the blacktop, looks at Nora, shifts the pickup into reverse, pulls out of the lot, and heads back to the college.

When they are in the parking lot at school, idling behind Nora’s car, Pam says, “Maybe I should call sometime?”

Nora nods. “But it would have to be...”

“At your office.”

“Yes.”

Pam finds a pencil and a scrap of paper in the glove compartment and Nora writes her direct number on the back and Pam folds it and slides it into a pocket over her breast while Nora watches, forming not so much thoughts as murky thought constellations. Pocket. Breast.

She parks a couple of blocks away from home. What she really needs is a decompression chamber in which she can adjust the pressure of the blood in her veins, bring herself down to ground level, room temperature. Maybe a short, secret session with a professional debriefer. All she has, though, is her car.

She’s not sure who will be home when she gets there. It’s a little after eight-thirty. Jeanne is doing an
intensify
Berlitz, tonight and tomorrow night, but Nora can’t remember how early it started, how late it’s supposed to run. And Fern, Fern’s schedule is absolutely impenetrable.

When Nora comes in, she is greeted only by Lucky. He is always happy to see her (or Fern, or Jeanne), but the overwhelming nature of his happiness tonight—not merely wagging and woofing, but an old college try at jumping up on her, his back paws slipping on the scattering of mail on the floor under the mail slot—tells Nora that he hasn’t been out for a while. Lucky is Fern’s responsibility and she’s usually very responsible. But when she screws up—with dog care or cleaning up the kitchen or bathroom after herself—Nora is no longer comfortable with calling her on it. Although she is still Nora’s child and still lives at home, Fern is also no longer a kid, and is only living at home because of circumstances beyond both of them. And so she has taken on something of the status of a roommate, a boarder. Someone whose housekeeping might disappoint, but not someone who can really be yelled at about it.

Nora opens the door to the backyard for the dog, then mixes some biscuits and canned food in his bowl and sets this out on the back steps. She picks up the mail and finds a postcard from her mother, who is apparently on a trip to the Bahamas with her bridge club:

Got my hair bead-braided in the old market. Back tomorrow. Mom.

She tries to remember if Lynette told her about this excursion. She tries to imagine her mother with bead-braided hair.

“Lucky!” she shouts out the door. At first she can’t see him, then spots his shadow lurking along the back fence by the alley. “Forget the possums. Let’s go for a
walk”
The magic word.

They are almost up to Cornelia—Lucky sniffing a particularly interesting weed along the parkway, Nora mentally replaying Pam’s fingertip running along her jaw—when a cyclist careens around the corner and skids to a stop in front of them. It’s Fern. Lucky is beside himself, his hind legs going out beneath him from the force of his wagging as Fern drops her backpack and rubs both sides of his head.

“Oh, Mom, thanks so much for taking him out. Did you feed him, too? I got stuck in the computer lab waiting for a printer. They have people in there who are printing out whole theses or phone books or whatever, and everyone has to wait. Somebody’s going to blow up in there one of these days.”

Fern is slightly flushed from her ride. At the college, Nora sees girls Fern’s age every day, and by contrast understands that her daughter is shaping herself in an iconoclastic way. She is not going to be ordinary, but the ways in which she will set herself apart are still in formation. Although Nora has offered several times to help her get a used car, Fern prefers to bike around town. She came up with her interest in anthropology on her own with no counseling from anyone, and in the face of most of her friends going into fields more associated with graphics or software design than with huts and tribes. She wears odd gatherings of clothes, assemblages that really can’t be thought of as “outfits.” Tonight she’s in parachute pants and a checked shirt under a plaid flannel overshirt. Her multicolored hair pokes out of a crocheted cap she got at an African crafts shop. She is breathtaking to Nora in the surfeit of potential she embodies, the directions in which she could take off. Nora sometimes looks at Fern, and at Tracy, and thinks, So, these are the new humans, the fresh replacements.

“I saw you at school,” Fern says once she has caught her breath. Nora’s heart drops with a small thud in its cavity. Before she can come up with a reply, Fern adds, “This afternoon. You must’ve been heading for lunch with Geri. I waved, but you guys didn’t see me.”

Geri from Admissions. Nora exhales. And when she is able to meet Fern’s eyes, she sees she has been caught. Fern picked up on her small spasm of fear. She knows something, she’s just not sure what.

For all the distance that has set up between the two of them, they are still linked by molecular structure. Lucky will drag Fern’s clothes into his basket bed to sleep with. He does the same with Nora’s stray laundry, but not with Jeanne’s. It took a while for Nora to figure out that he perceives Fern as his master, and associates her with Nora by scent. Along these same lines, you could put Nora and Fern on opposite sides of the planet, let a decade or two elapse, and the link would still be in place. And it is this, Nora thinks, which allowed Fern, in the moment immediately past, to see the brief click of fear behind her mother’s eyes.

“Did you just get home?” Fern says.

“I had a stupid meeting at school.”

Fern gets off her bike and nods, absorbing the lie, which they then carry home together.

FERN BIKES OVER
to the laundromat against currents of slanting rain and wind-whipped trash. She wants to talk with Harold. He has Wednesdays and Thursdays off from the restaurant, but Thursdays are devoted to canasta, which is really the whole day, what with canapé preparation, martini glass chilling, the whole business of transforming his apartment, warping it back in time, to the forties. (Fern loves this whole scene, but especially the canasta itself with its multiple decks, so many cards that a crank-operated shuffler has to be brought to bear. And the dealer with her mitts full, dispensing the cards into fat stacks around the table, which are then opened into wide fans of possibility, all those jokers and wild twos and black threes, all those melds ripe for the making. It’s such an optimist’s game.)

This schedule leaves Wednesdays for Harold’s business-of-life stuff. He is terrifically organized. He has thirty pairs each of underwear and socks. Ten pairs of jeans, ten of black Dockers for his waiter job. Ten T-shirts, ten polo shirts for work. A laundry bag for each category (plus one for Dolores’s “trousseau”), and he brings two here each Wednesday. While he waits, he reads Hollywood bios—the past few times Fern has seen him, he has been deeper and deeper into a huge, scathing book about Marlene Dietrich, written by her daughter.

There’s a sweet detergent tickle in the air as Fern enters, looks around, and finds Harold on one of the plastic seats against the wall. Laundry sloshes back and forth with a lulling rhythm, clothes take leapfrog tumbles—sock after shirt after towel—inside the dryers. It’s a warm, comforting place and a safe one for gossip since no one can eavesdrop over the mechanical din. She taps the top of his head to make her arrival known. He looks up, startled and edgy. Then Fern sees that the owner, a small man in the back, is keeping a sharp eye on Harold. He is suspicious that Harold is using his machines for dyeing rather than for washing. When Harold sees it’s not the tap of authority, that it is, rather, Fern, he lights up.

She peels off her slicker, gets a can of pop from the machine. While she’s settling in—shaking the rain out of her hair, rubbing her hands along the fronts of her thighs to get some blood back into them—he starts in about Dietrich.

“She had romances with everybody.
Everybody.
Flirtations, one-night stands, affairs. Maurice Chevalier. Erich Maria Remarque. Edward R. Murrow. Edith Piaf. Frank Sinatra. Kirk Douglas. JFK. The troops in and out of her tent during those World War Two USO tours. Doing her bit for the war effort. Yul Brynner. She was nuts about Yul. He had to call her, like, ten times a day or she’d go into despair. Basically, I assume everyone had a thing with her unless they tell me otherwise.” He fixes Fern with a probing stare.

“Not me,” Fern says. “Cross my heart.”

“Okay. She would have been too old for you anyway. By the time you were even born, she was heading into her decline. She stayed in bed the last dozen years of her life. So she could drink and not fall down.”

Yellow lights begin to flash on his machines.

“Fabric softener,” he says, then takes a giant sky blue plastic bottle over and pours a little, like a potion, into a slot in the top of each rusty, tilted machine. Fern looks at the photos in the bio.

“Until she gave up, though,” he says, dropping back into his seat, “she fought a long, hard battle for eternal youth. She had this specially made foundation garment, like a whole body sheath she sort of poured her sagging self into. She’d drop her tits into the tit holders, pop her nipples into the nipple slots and then stand up and someone would
zzzzzip
her up the back and she was twenty-five instead of fifty. She was also into instant facelifts—braiding the little hairs around her face into tiny twists, then basically bobby-pinning her face back.”

“Man,” Fern says.

“I know. It’s a great book.”

They talk awhile.

About his play. He practices being dead by lying on his sofa for an hour every morning.

About his job. There’s a small uproar. The waiters used to get their dress shirts from the restaurant, which would also launder them. Now all the staff—even the singing bartenders, who are threatening a walkout—are required to provide their own shirts, and get them washed and starched on their own dime. This was a top-down policy change, directly from Gretel. "She’s tough,” he says, but it’s a compliment.

About Tracy and Vaughn. He hadn’t seen them for a while before Fern’s dinner.

“What a dreamy little guy. Tracy as a mother, though. It’s quite a concept.”

“I think she has a little trouble herself,” Fern says. “I mean, of course she loves him, he’s her kid. But reality is settling in. You know. This can’t be a passing interest like everything else. She can’t say, ‘Well, now I’ve
done
motherhood.’ Like when she thought she was going to be a disk jockey and got Brad and Tina to buy her those turntables, and now they’re pushed into a corner of the basement. Plus I think she’s not all that crazy about being stuck with the mother image. When she brings Vaughn along, it cuts down on her old allure, and on her chances with guys. The diaper bag and all.”

“Didn’t she anticipate that her style might get a little cramped?”

“I think she wanted to do parenthood a whole new way, but now nothing that’s happening looks all that radical or dramatic or new. She has a baby and problems getting a whole night’s sleep and getting through Vaughn’s colic. And her breasts hurt. I mean she’s only my age. And I know where
I’m
at. Every day I’m, like, this total surprise to myself.”

She’s still flipping through the Dietrich pictures and puts her finger on one now. “Nice white tie and tails, Marlene. You know,” she looks up at Harold. “Dolores might look good in a tux.” Then she thinks this through for a moment.

“Tell me,” Harold says, taking the book out of her hand and closing it gently, “about being a surprise to yourself.”

“Well, like, in Observational Models last week, we videotaped each other interacting in groups and, of course it was sort of fake because you knew you were in front of the camera, but still. The thing is, I was
amazed
at how I came off.”

“You mean the accent?”

“Be serious.” She thinks for a moment how to put it. “I’m always worried I come off loud and goofy.”

“You’re never loud and goofy.”

“I think I must have extrapolated that from being tall.”

“You take the tall thing too seriously. You’re actually demure, reserved even. Which makes you look short, in a tall way.”

“That’s
exactly
what the tape showed. I seemed almost shy.”

“You
are
shy.”

“I’m not, really. But I think I might come across that way because I’m trying so hard to not come across loud and goofy. Harold. Do you have any idea who I’m turning into?”