Lucky in the Corner (21 page)

Then there was the time he tried to take Lynette and Nora and Harold on what he thought would be a regular American family vacation at a rented cottage in the Adirondacks, then spent half of every day driving to and from the pay phone at the gas station at the crossroads, booking an entire tour for the Harmonicuties.

“Your father was born for the cell phone,” Lynette says, gesturing with a toothpicked olive. “He just showed up a little too early, technology-wise.”

Nora doesn’t say anything. She knows she should be offering some charming anecdote from her own stack of memories, but she is too busy trying to push away an image that has crept back, this time in more detail—her brother, pubescent and pumped with hormones, on top of Vicki Ashford in some ludicrous bed, something with a round mattress and a satin headboard. She can smell the Chanel vaporizing into the hotel room air above them, can see the seams of borrowed fishnet stockings running up the back of Harold’s long calves as he services the Purring Kitten.

They wait for their ranks to fill in. When everyone is here, Lynette will take them all to the Moonlight Carousel, her favorite romantic restaurant. It occupies the top of an old hotel and overlooks the ocean near the harbor at Port Everglades and serves sole amandine and beef Wellington and cherries jubilee with lots of tableside theatrics—decantings and debonings, tossings and flamings. The restaurant itself revolves slowly with hydraulic creaking, providing diners with a panoramic view of the marina at Bahia Mar, the ocean, the high-rise condominiums out of which most of the patrons have come to have dinner. Nora will pop a Dramamine before they leave the house.

Jeanne and Fern are flying down together after their respective classes. Fern’s arrival will prompt a feast of adoration. She is adored competitively by Lynette, because she is her granddaughter, and by Fern Lawler, because she is her namesake, and by both of them because Fern is who she is.

Jeanne is not adored, but is genuinely liked by the old gals, although with Lynette, it was rough-going at first. In principle, she curls a lip at the notion of lesbians. The only ones she has known personally were a couple of Rockettes. Tough characters, but also tragic—so off in the wrong direction, suffering terrible heartaches without the ultimate payoff of husbands.

Although Nora knows her mother loves her, and even likes her in the sense of enjoying her company, she also understands that she is a disappointment for having squandered her legacy by not even trying for some rung of stardom, and also for being sexually peculiar, an oddity Lynette cannot present in an uncomplicated way to her friends.

At least, as Lynette told Nora in the past, Jeanne is “normal-looking.”

“Whatever
that
means” had been Nora’s response, but of course she knew. Jeanne wears dresses and make-up and a stylish (but not too severely stylish) haircut and earrings (but only two, as opposed to sixteen in one ear). Lynette can, with some measure of comfort, refer to Jeanne as Nora’s “friend,” can cast the two of them in a domestic situation together without ever having to picture them naked.

A thought flickers across Nora’s consciousness: as opposed to Pam, who is precisely the sort of woman Lynette could
only
imagine in bed with her daughter.

Pam hasn’t called. Nora left a message on her cell phone yesterday about her father dying, and has checked her own several times last night and today, but there is nothing in the mailbox. (The cell phone is a recent purchase. At home, she hides it beneath the seat of her car. Pam is the only person to whom she has given the number. She buys minutes on a card so there won’t be a bill.) This isn’t the first time Pam has ducked out of reach; it has happened a couple of times before. She will be suddenly, startlingly incommunicado. Meaning she doesn’t call Nora, doesn’t respond to Nora’s calls. For a few days, Nora will go crazy inside while trying to act normal at work, or at home, or here in her mother’s living room. And then Pam will return as casually as she departed, and it will turn out that Pam and Melanie went to Starved Rock for a few days of hiking, or Melanie’s parents came to visit. And Nora will sink with these reminders that Melanie has the whole of Pam except for the little compartment in which Nora waits. Like her unanswered messages in the mailbox of the cell phone in Pam’s glove compartment.

Nora tries to climb out of herself and offer something to the moment she is supposed to be inhabiting. She asks her mother, “Are you going to be all right, down here by yourself?”

“Oh, I have my friends, too many really. My bridge group, the aquarobic gals, my Thespians.” Lynette is involved in a theater project out at the city senior center. They cast their productions from the pool of themselves and so wind up with Stanley Kowalskis and Sally Bowleses in their seventies and eighties, which gives the plays a whole new spin.

“Money’s not a problem,” she adds. “Your father and I have gone through all the papers and accounts together, a few times. Like little fire drills. I just wasn’t expecting widowhood so soon.”

“I know,” Fern Lawler says, weighing in with a second opinion. “I thought he had real golden-years potential.”

“Exactly. I know he was a little overweight, a little sedentary, but still. He was only seventy; I’m only sixty-eight. I thought we’d have a longer run of it is all.”

Harold suddenly starts weeping, his head in his hand, his shoulders shuddering. Nora’s emotional state is dry, but dark. She thinks, a little angrily, about how soon into her childhood she had to get used to her father leaving, how he was a receding character for the whole of her life. When she was little, he was always going on the road with Vicki or some other client. Art’s idea of being a good father was being a good provider, which meant working most of the time. When he retired, Nora was already long gone from home, raising her own daughter. She had fleetingly thought that perhaps, with some of his new free time, he and Fern might form the friendship Nora had missed out on.

Instead, with no deals to close or calls to make, Art settled back into the quiet, remote person he must have been by nature. He took up deep-sea fishing, spending long days—even those of Nora and Fern’s visits—on rank-smelling boats with other quiet old guys in squashed hats and clip-on shades. Other guys who felt they had talked enough for a lifetime, now they’d fish.

His having left so early and often should make his death easier to bear, but Nora instead finds herself in a place where facts can’t touch feeling. She sits freezing in her mother’s living room, shrugging deeper into her father’s beach jacket, falling while no one notices, into a small moment of self-pity for having lost a father she’d still been vaguely hoping to gain. She thinks how death shuts even the unopened door.

Across the living room, Lynette has gone over to hold Harold as he weeps. While she’s doing this, she apparently is also softly nudging him out of the spotlight.

“I’m a widow,” she says, holding her son and shaking her head in disbelief. She sounds as though she has read the line on a script, then the gesture in parentheses beneath it.

Nora can see that her mother is beginning to transform Art’s death into the latest in her lifetime string of dramatic moments. She speaks, not so much in direct reply to anyone in the room, but as though she is being interviewed by an invisible television personality who has asked some terribly sympathetic question about where Lynette will go from here—courageously, of course—and what she will do to fill the emptiness.

“I think I’ll get a cat or two,” she says. “Your father was allergic, but now, what the hell.”

WHEN THE COMPRESSOR
on the refrigerator shuts down with a sigh, it’s as though this exhalation is the last sound in the world, now sucked into the powerful and complete silence of the kitchen.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Tracy says finally. “You’re only around in little bursts. Happy, fun bursts. You’re not here for the hour-after-hour part, the day-after-day part. He was a colicky baby, and now he’s a fussy baby. He needs his mommy all the time. He’s Mr. Personality, but sometimes at four
A.M.,
I could do with a little less personality since I already got an hour’s worth of it at two-thirty.”

“I know,” Fern says. “I’m not making a big judgment. I love you and I love Vaughn and I’m trying to figure out how to get things to a better place.”

“It’s not going to happen again, if that’s what you’re worried about. I must’ve just lost it when he was crying for so long. I wanted him to stop is all. I yanked him out of his crib. A little too hard. It wasn’t great, what I did. I’m not saying it was great.”

As though he knows this conversation is about him, Vaughn is watching them intently from his swing, which is set on the table amid their cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts Fern brought with her. The microwave pings. Vaughn’s bottle is ready. Today is the first Fern has seen of him with a bottle.

“The breastfeeding thing,” Tracy says. “It’s over.”

“Where are your lovely parents?” Fern says. She has noticed that they don’t seem to be rattling around anywhere.

“Out at the factory. They’re never here anymore. They’ve got a new herb. Tree bark from some Himalayan valley, it’s supposed to give you earth-moving orgasms. They can’t ship the stuff out fast enough.”

“They’re part of the problem.” Fern wants to spread the blame a little, so Tracy won’t feel like Fern is beating up on her. “Where are they when you need them? You don’t have enough support. Like, if you lived in a small Sicilian village you’d have generations of extended family handy. Or even in Idaho. You’d have an old farmhouse and a reliable husband and a kindly aunt who’d take the baby while you went into town in the pickup on Saturday night for the hoedown. You don’t have any kind of bigger situation that can absorb a baby. All you’ve got is you.”

“All you ever have, really, is you.”

Fern doesn’t want to listen to Tracy go existential.

“Hey. Let me give you a break. I can take Vaughn days I don’t have class, maybe bring him to Harold’s when I work over there, see how that goes. I could keep him over some nights.”

“Oh, man, your mother would love that.”

“She’ll be cool.” Fern has no idea how Nora will be; she’ll worry about that later.

“I saw her last week, by the way. Before you all went to Florida. She was coming out of Selmarie.” She punctuates this piece of information by lowering her head and raising her eyebrows, so Fern will get her drift.

“Not alone,” Fern says. “I knew. I knew something was going on. I
know
her. I am not fooled by her disguises. She fluffs up those throw pillows, all comfy on the sofa, reading a book with Jeanne’s feet on her lap. Jeanne’s feet with those fuzzy sock slippers on them. The picture of domestic bliss. But I saw through it!”

“I was out with my friend here.” Tracy has him out of the bouncer. He is latched onto the bottle. “We were hanging out in the little square. They were coming out, heading to cross the street.”

“Where were they going, do you think?”

“The apothecary shop. I waited to see. But that’s not the crucial part. They had to cross the street, and your mother was going to lunge out without looking, but the girlfriend stopped her, and this is the thing—the way she did it was putting a hand down in a restraining way on your mother’s thigh.”

“So?” Fern says.

“Well, try thinking how many times I’ve put my hand on your thigh.”

“What’d she look like?”

“Mmm. Scary. Crewcut. Skinny. Black jeans. Long black coat. One of those things the Marlboro Man wears when he’s getting the herd in from the snowstorm.”

“Oh boy. Just her type.”

“But Jeanne’s not like that.”

“Jeanne makes a nice presentation. Jeanne is who my mother
wants
to want. But who she really wants? You should have seen the babes before Jeanne. And the ones I saw were probably the more presentable babes. There were others I think she brought in at night, after I was asleep. But even the ones I met were sullen things. That’s what I think she really wants—sullen and impossible. Someone who’ll push her around a little. Maybe a little on the dumb side. Someone she can’t really bring into her life. I can’t believe they were out in broad daylight. She must be totally lost. Oh, my poor mama. I could almost feel sorry for her.”

There’s a long pause during which Fern assumes they are on the same page, thinking about her mother’s ridiculous affair. But then Tracy says, “You haven’t told her, anyone, anything, have you? About me, about this Mommy Dearest thing?” Tracy gives Vaughn a kiss on his furry head, a protective gesture, although she is the one they are trying to protect him from.

“Of course not.” The truth is she hasn’t told anyone except James, whom she told right away. But she can’t let Tracy know that. Tracy has been tentative about accepting James’s arrival in Fern’s life. If James is Vaughn’s father, that would account for it. Tracy hasn’t come forward with that piece of information, and Fern hasn’t pressed. It could just be that Tracy sees James as someone on her pile of discards and isn’t comfortable with him turning up again in her life. Whatever the snag between them, Fern is hoping it will eventually smooth itself out. In the meantime, she tries to downplay the intimacy she has with James.

When she told him about Vaughn, about what she’d discovered and what she thought she—which means they, really—was going to have to do, he listened and rubbed Lucky’s ears with his thumbs for such a long time that Fern thought he was going to say this was more than he’d bargained for. (They are so far “together” in only the loosest way.) But then he said they should definitely help, but that first she needed to talk with Tracy, to get her cooperation, make her part of the new plan. Fern had intended to follow up immediately, but then she had to go down to Florida, a delay that made her nervous, but also gave her time to fine-tune the conversation—supportive and nonthreatening—that she’s having now.

Tracy has a good poker face. You have to look hard to get what’s going on beneath the blankness. Today, though, there’s a new element. Fern pays attention, tries to figure it out. It’s not only that Tracy has lost her bad-girl look, her attitude, her weird signature make-up with all that sixties eyeliner. Or that her home dye job is that unfortunate housewife mousy mauve, now with roots. What’s new about how she looks is something more fundamental, the tracks of hard times.