Lucky in the Corner (3 page)

“Oh, but I think it
is
helping. You have more calmness. You could go another night instead? Thursday perhaps.” Jeanne’s mechanisms of control come cloaked in good-natured politeness.

“No. Thursday I have an orientation reception for the fall semester. I hate Continuing Ed.” This attitude comes over her frequently since she quit smoking. “Why can’t people just get educated once and for all and give it a rest? Instead of coming in here at night with their big life changes and ridiculous identity crises. They’ve been accountants for thirty years and now all of a sudden they think they might have a knack for Web site design, or day trading.”

“Or belly dancing,” Jeanne says, unnecessarily.

“You know Leila conned me on that one. Her course title was Desert Rhythms. As soon as I got wind of what was going on, it got dropped from the schedule.” Nora hates the little catch of defensiveness she can hear in her voice, but she’s up on her high horse and can’t get off. “Look, I know Access is not a totally serious enterprise. But it’s still this huge machine to operate. It still pumps out a giant toxic cloud of meetings and memos and complaints.” She stops, remembering that Jeanne is not the enemy, or the unconverted. “Where are you, anyway?” She hears traffic in the background.

“Down the street from Willie’s.” Jeanne has been living in America for twenty years, but at heart, she is still French, culturally averse to exercise. Wilhelmina is her masseuse. Jeanne goes once a week, lies on a padded table, is rubbed and stretched and pounded, and given something called “electric stim.” She refers to these sessions as “conditioning.”

“I’ll probably get home before you. Let’s do something nice. I’ll make cappuccino. I never see you anymore. Are you still short?”

“You are crazy busy,” Jeanne says.

“I know. I feel like Lucy. Lucy
and
Ethel when they were working on the assembly line at the chocolate factory and the chocolates were coming so fast they started ramming them into their mouths.” She waits a minute, then realizes Jeanne doesn’t have Lucy in her cultural data bank, that she was still in France when Lucy was working in the candy factory, and being pushed out of the kitchen by her over-yeasted bread, and riding the suds from her over-soaped laundry load. “It’s nice about Fern’s dinner, though. I wonder what inspired her to such a grand gesture?”

“We can play with Tracy’s baby,” Jeanne says. Childless herself, she adores babies, the way non-Catholics adore nuns.

“Man, I hope Fern doesn’t get pregnant anytime soon,” Nora says.

“Oh, but I cannot even imagine her having sex. I think she is too alienated from the human race, too
nihiliste
to make herself naked with someone else.”

“I think she was doing something. With somebody. You know. That time.”

“Perhaps.”

“All those late nights out and sleepovers at Tracy’s. It was fishy as hell.” She can’t win on this. She doesn’t want Fern to be twenty-one and have had no sexual experience. On the other hand, she doesn’t want to think of her going through this evolution furtively, without guidance.

She flushes with a terrible memory of Fern at twelve and way out of synch with the Lolitas who attended her school. Next to them, Fern seemed stuck, swaddled in orthodontia and shyness, miles taller than everyone in her class except for a set of beanpole twin brothers. Her manner back then was composed of explosions of goofy humor alternating with gloomy silences. Nora tried to help; she ordered a boxed set of pamphlets and videos, “Gal Gab: Mothers and Daughters Talk about Sex.” On the box was a photo of a mother and daughter, snuggled side by side on an overstuffed couch, the daughter fascinated as the mother smiled and pointed to a diagram of ovaries and fallopian tubes. This was Nora’s hope for her and Fern, exactly what was pictured on the corny box.

They never got to the couch. Fern looked at the box, and said, “Please,” in a tone that was panicky, not sarcastic (which would have been marginally better), “don’t make me do this.”

Fern slipped into adolescence silently, as though it were quicksand. Even, all these years later, now that she has surfaced into early adulthood, Fern is still unfindable behind her superficial presence. She is always available to talk, to be positively chatty while revealing nothing of her true self, whoever that might be. She is someone, apparently, who thought it was a good idea to get a tattoo on the side of her neck. Nora will never mention the tattoo to Fern. The tattoo is a nonsubject.

“When I think of Fern and our future together,” she says to Jeanne, although she can tell Jeanne is only being patient until she can get off the line, “we’re not together. She’s moved to Seattle. Or Sweden. She tells her friends there she
had
to get away. She lives with some guy who collects exotic goldfish, spends nights in the basement synthesizing sounds on his computer. They have a kid. Fern’s an advocate for soy baby formula or home schooling...”

While Nora is on this roll, time-traveling through the near future, the call with Jeanne gets cut off with several beeps and the sound of coins being swallowed by the pay phone. Nora hangs up and waits for her to find some change and call back, but the phone sits silent on her desk. Perhaps Jeanne felt the conversation was effectively over, even though they hadn’t said goodbye.

FERN LETS HERSELF IN
with a key her unde has made for her. She understands that in giving her this, Harold was also giving up a piece of his privacy. He was deferring to Fern’s need of a slipknot, a release from the house she lives in with her mother and Jeanne. Where things have become purely claustrophobic.

Last weekend, Saturday morning, she woke with a terrifying sensation of suffocation, then realized it was the subconscious drift from the thick fragrances of domestic ritual seeping under her bedroom door—the buttery aroma of Jeanne’s croissants baking, the charred air kicked up by her mother’s vacuuming, the suspended pollen of lemon Pledge.

Jeanne is not the problem; she’s only guilty by association with Nora. Nora is the problem. Anyone else’s mother would be easier. Tracy’s, for instance—huge phony, bad nose job, thinks she can win you over by reading your tarot cards. But it is precisely these limitations that make her bearable. Tracy’s mother always occupies the same, predictable amount of space. As opposed to Nora, who spills over all her edges, then over Fern’s.

The problem starts with the way she looks. Those compellingly irregular features, the haunted eyes—what Tracy once labeled “your mother’s fuck-you looks.” Tracy has a whole riff on this, like why hasn’t Nora given in to fate—moved to New York and signed some huge modeling contract and started sleeping with rock stars and getting herself a tricky little addiction, maybe an eating disorder?

But Nora is not interested in anything involving cameras or stages. She’s in a lifelong flight from her family’s fascination with show business and doesn’t really want this sort of attention and blah-blah-blah, and Fern more or less believes her, but not really. Something about the way she blows off looking so dramatic and movie-starrish—all the baseball caps and sunglasses—only sets her more apart, pressurizes and intensifies her little magnetic field. Which she then, of course, uses to her advantage.

Meanwhile Fern, with her gawky height and bland features, will always suffer by comparison. This is the result of Fern’s mother having married Fern’s father, who, although he is in advertising and dresses in a moderately hip way, nonetheless looks totally like a dentist, and has left his stamp on Fern. So in their family configuration, Nora will always remain the gorgeous one, while Fern will have to make the best of an appearance that is not so much unattractive or attractive, but rather that of someone you’d feel comfortable coming to with a toothache.

She has been working against this blandness, what she thinks of as her dentality. She worries that this was, in some part, what Cooper slipped away from. And so she has been trying to carve out some angles with the tattoo, the diet she doesn’t mention to anyone, a major hair change. Early in the summer she went down the street to Big Hair, which specializes in chaotic cuts, and now she has hair that’s short all over, disorganized on top and three colors—her own dishwater blond, a Coca-Cola brown, and a synthetic red. For a week of mornings after, she surprised herself in the mirror.

Her mother has said nothing about the tattoo, has yet to notice the diet, and looked at the haircut as if she was about to come forward with an opinion, then thought better of it. It’s never that Nora doesn’t
have
an opinion—the best you can hope for is that she will restrain herself from expressing it. This is the most incredibly annoying thing about her, her relentless certainty. She is so smug about her career choice (college administration!) and sexual orientation and her relationship with Jeanne and having left Fern’s father in the dust, but now they’re good friends so no real harm’s been done (in Nora’s view at any rate). How, Fern wonders, can anyone be so certain of what’s right and wrong, the proper axis of the planet, the order of the universe, her position in it?

A worse part of this confidence is that it includes an exact idea of who Fern should be. Nora just
knows.
Of course, she won’t reveal in any direct way what this idea is. Instead she lets Fern know that she is constantly falling short, or to the side of this ideal, and is by now miles off the mark. Nora is a mistress of disappointment, and of meaningful silence, her gaze tactfully shifting to the floor. Fern hates The Shifting Gaze. She can feel it coming even before her mother’s eyes have begun to move.

She can’t go and live with her dad, can’t even spend weekends with him as she did through the years after her parents split up, because now there’s Louise, and now Fern meets her father once a week for dinner, without Louise. Mercifully, the only substantial time she and Louise spend together is the week Fern spends every summer at her father’s summer cottage in Michigan, around the lake. This is a long-standing tradition he insists on keeping up. He thinks Fern is short on traditions.

An apartment of her own is what Fern needs, a place for just her and Lucky. Instead, she is still sleeping in the back sun porch off the kitchen. She claimed this room as hers when they moved here. They have lived in this house for eight years, and Fern has repainted her room five times. Wedgwood blue, sunshine yellow, Day-Glo orange, purple. This last time, she came up with a color she initially thought of as neutral, and only later realized was a maximum-security gray.

She was all ready to get out last year. She and Tracy were going to rent a place together in Bucktown. They had a plan and a budget, a sofa bed from a friend. And then Tracy got pregnant with Vaughn and that was that. Fern can’t swing it alone, which means she is probably going to stay put for another year, until she finishes college. Because she goes to the same college where her mother works, they get a tuition break. At first, she thought they’d be running into each other all the time, and it would be weird, but this hasn’t happened. She sees Nora surprisingly little on campus.

Home is another story. Her strategy for living there is to stay away as much as possible, lie low when she is there, and try not to feel like someone arrested in her development, lost amid her stuffed animal collection. She has cultivated what she thinks of as a breezy air when everyone’s around, as though she doesn’t exactly live there, but rather has stopped by to be amusing for the length of this conversation, that pancake breakfast. Her spaghetti dinner next week. She sees her interactions with her mother as scenes in a little play in which nothing anybody says holds any real meaning. The audience would have to consult a key, as with
Ulysses,
something with psychological and historical footnotes, to decipher what’s actually going on.

Here at her uncle’s apartment, the atmosphere is much less tricky. It is Thursday afternoon; Harold will be hostessing his canasta club. Fern opens the door of the apartment and hears the soft flipping action of the giant, vintage card shuffler, backed by Della Reese on the stereo, over-enunciating some heartbroken delusion—“Someday,” Della belts, “you’ll want me to want you.”

As Fern comes through the short hallway into the living room, she nods to the group—Vera, Gwen, Iris, and her uncle, who on Thursday afternoons crosses over into Dolores. The four of them are vamps from another era. They shave close, pad their brassieres, powder their noses, and cross their legs provocatively in dresses with back-slit skirts. Slouchy hats on top of lustrous pageboy wigs, silk gardenias tucked behind their ears. Their nylons have seams. Kid gloves lie like fallen birds at the corners of the card table among the ashtrays and cocktail glasses, fluttering lightly in the breeze of an ancient electric fan set on the windowsill.

Their drag has a cut-rate quality. Although vampiness hangs in the air like musk, it’s not as though they’re impersonating Lauren Bacall or Barbara Stanwyck, but rather some second rung of actresses in the movies Harold loves (and loves Fern to watch with him)—the bad girls who get shot in the last reel, or dumped by the detective hero, or casually turned over to the cops. Audrey Totter. Lizabeth Scott. On Thursday afternoons, the room is filled with their ghosts. Everywhere, hair falls in heavy waves over eyes, lips are darkened to reddish black. Dolores and her friends look like women who are playing canasta, but would also like someone to help them murder their husbands.

Playing cards, here in this apartment, is their only group activity. Their drag is not quite ready for the wider world. Gwen’s stubble pokes through her face powder. Vera’s wig is a bad fit. Iris and Gwen are large men with muscular calves; both are telephone linemen when they’re not at the card table.

They seem content to cut themselves a lot of slack. It’s as though they learned through some correspondence school instead of from observing actual women. Of course, how could they, really? Women like them haven’t existed for fifty years.

They are all straight apparently, all married except Harold. Fern saw Vera once in the Loop, selling luggage at Field’s. It was shocking to encounter him as a man. As though
that
were the impersonation.