Lucky in the Corner (11 page)

Here is another way in which he and Fern are connected. Nora knows about Dolores, but only secondhand, through Fern. She is bothered by Harold’s lack of trust in her, but at the same time knows she would do poorly if confronted face-to-face with Dolores. She could not, as she gathers Fern does, sit around having conversations, dishing the dirt or whatever it is you’re supposed to do with Dolores. She herself would be able to go only as far as having a conversation with her brother in costume, whereas Fern apparently welcomes Dolores as another person, or at least a legitimate alternate version of Harold. How can she? Nora wonders, while at the same time understanding that this very thought disqualifies her, clicks the velvet rope across the entrance to the complete Harold.

He thinks Fern is coming with them today.

“She blew me off,” Nora says, looking for sympathy. “She’s not, basically, interested in spending time with me.”

“I think she is an extremely private person,” he says. “Like Garbo. Except without the Swedish part, or the movie star part. But still, it’s like having Garbo around your house. I can see how that might be frustrating.”

Harold is a mediator. When issues arise between Nora and their parents, or between Nora and Fern, he moves into position with a calming tone and a sympathetic demeanor, a kind of tilt down and forward with one shoulder, the one you can feel free to cry on. Sometimes he is a comfort, but other times, she wants to put a bucket over his head and start banging on it.

“I think she finds you kind of overwhelming,” he offers.

“What? Is that what she tells you? I mean, how ridiculous is
that?.
I can’t even whelm her, much less overwhelm her. I can’t even get her to clean up the bathroom after herself. I don’t really think you can be overwhelming to someone if you also have to pull that person’s hair out of the drain catcher.”

“You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry. I forget you’re perfect. How could she have any complaint against you?”

Nora doesn’t bother to reply.

Harold gives it one more try. “Look. Fern is twenty-one. Do you remember twenty-one?”

“Sort of.”

“You don’t, really,” he says. “The good news for you is pretty soon Fern will be forty and you two can get along then.”

“Thanks so much for your insights.”

It turns out this walk encompasses only the lower-rent streets of Andersonville, blocks of sensible middle-class brick two-flats.

“Maybe we should forget it,” Nora says.

“Come on. It’ll still be fun. And the rain’s almost over,” he says, pointing to a sunny sky pausing beyond a bank of clouds.

“What I’m really looking for,” she says, “is a medicine-chest walk. A drawer-by-the-side-of-the-bed tour. I want to see the prescriptions and nipple clamps of strangers.”

“Oh, darling, I
know.
”

“Here’s Number Fifteen,” she says, half an hour later, pointing to a marker flag.

“This is a fucking
corner”
Harold says.

“Correcto mundo.” Nora reads from the stapled program they were given for their six-dollar entry fee: “Number Fifteen—neighborhood corner planting.” They look down at a skimpy bed of nasturtiums.

“I don’t think they can count this,” he says gloomily.

“Number Seventeen is a window box,” Nora says, pretending to read further. It’s hard to joke about a joke, though. Number 6 was somebody’s muddy backyard with nothing but a crayoned sign propped on a lawn chair:

SORRY!
AZALEAS BOMBED THIS YEAR.

They pass other garden walkers along their way, recognizable as fellow travelers by their air of determination to get somewhere, but without much enthusiasm, and by the pamphlets rolled up in their hands.

Harold gets a broody look as they pass a house with six wind chimes tinkling and clanking and bonging in the slight breeze. He is thrown into despondence by what he considers stupid, worthless noise—mainly car alarms with their hair-trigger detonation, their pips of setting and unsetting that fill the air of the city. And, of course, wind chimes.

“I don’t think wind needs enhancement,” he says. “I mean, why can’t it just be wind and we all leave it alone?”

“I think people get them as gifts,” Nora tells him. She has told him this before. “They put them up, then forget they’re even there.”

“But I
don’t
forget, that’s the thing. I mean if it was the sound of some orphan’s dialysis machine, you’d say, well, it’s irritating, but you’d have to live with it. But this is only more worthless, knickknacky noise added to all the rest of the noise that’s already there. Do you think they’ll pass? That they’re just a fad?”

Nora says in what she hopes sounds like a convincing, definite voice, “Oh, I think they’re already on their way out.” This is a total lie. She saw a huge display of them a couple of weeks ago in the snooty Smith & Hawken store down on Clybourn. If anything, they are only on their way in. From the look he gives her, though, she can see he believes her. Sometimes it’s as though they are still twelve and seven.

Number 19 is mostly clumpy bushes and the odd begonia, but there’s a flagstone patio with half a dozen extremely old people sitting attentively, or at least politely, while a sullen teenage girl in a pale blue sundress plays something lugubrious on a cello.

As they come back down the gangway, Harold whines in impersonation of the cellist, “I don’t want to do it. It’s about to rain again anyway and Brittany and Jessica are going to the mall.”

Nora answers with a parental baritone. “Now, honey. Grandma and Grandpa are counting on you. Who knows how much longer they’re going to be with us.” There’s a certain kind of fun Nora has only with her brother. It’s about having a few million stupid jokes behind them.

Numbers 21 and 22 are nice gardens, both behind two-flats belonging to gay guys. At 21, there’s a small black and white dog Harold takes a shine to. At 22, they’re offered mimosas. Nora declines. Harold takes one and drains it in short order, like a cowpoke in a saloon.

“We’ve seen enough, don’t you think?” he says, picking up on her weariness. On his own, she suspects he’d slog through to the bitter end, get his full six dollars’ worth. “I’ll take you to lunch, okay?” he says. “I need to go down to Chinatown anyway, to get some cookies.”

They take the Drive along the lakefront, which, in spite of some threatening clouds in the distance, is so alive with people today it looks as though there’s a Festival of All Humanity and everyone got an invitation.

“I was down at Filene’s this week,” she says, reaching around while she drives, pulling a package of T-shirts off the back seat and handing it over to him. “Couldn’t resist these at the price.” She tries to subsidize Harold’s meager lifestyle when she can find small casual gestures that won’t embarrass him.

She’ll pick up the lunch check, too, even though, as it’s Harold’s choice, she knows the restaurant will be impossibly cheap. It turns out to be on a side street off Wentworth, tucked in among a row of jammed-together frame houses. There is no sign out front and inside there are only five Formica-topped tables and a wall menu in Chinese. Everyone besides the two of them is Chinese. No one is eating anything readily recognizable. Root vegetables, maybe. Marine life, both flora and fauna. Nora can only guess.

The owner is delighted to see Harold, who tells him, “The usual.” What arrives is tofu and little bits of meat in black bean sauce and some thready noodles in a curry. Also greens on a separate plate, leaves mixed with oil and garlic and something that tastes like mushrooms but probably isn’t.

“Good,” Nora says, picking at this and that with her chopsticks.

“Nobody comes down to Chinatown anymore,” Harold says. “Cantonese is totally unhip now. Or wasn’t hip ever. But it’s still great.”

“Dad’s not looking so good,” he says a little later. He has just been down to Florida for a short visit with their parents. They pay his plane fare. He stays a couple of days, sleeps in their guest room. He helps Lynette with the big household jobs that are starting to overwhelm her. He cleans out the refrigerator, rents a carpet shampooer and does the whole apartment, wall to wall. He helps with the husbandly details in which Art has never had much interest. He takes their car in for maintenance and makes sure Art doesn’t get ripped off. He soaks, then clips, their father’s tusklike toenails. He is an excellent son.

“Gray,” he says. “His color is gray with a little top coat of tan.” Nora nods, as though she is the specialist being brought in on Art’s case, as though she knows anything about what’s going on in her father’s arteries, his liver.

“He must be seeing a doctor?” she says.

“The thing is, I don’t remember him being this way before—maybe it’s from hanging around with other old guys—but he’s got this new bad-ass attitude. That it’s going to the doctor that brings on the trouble, that you step into the office and that’s where your troubles really begin.”

“I’ll get Mom on him.”

“He has this serious paunch now. He sits on the sofa and has to lean back to get comfortable. He doesn’t have a lap anymore. It’s more of a slope, an embankment. And when he gets up, it’s like he’s made this huge effort. There’s sweat on his forehead.”

“Well, he better not go to the doctor, then. I have a feeling that doctor would only tell him he’s not in great shape and that’s where his troubles would really begin.”

“I know,” Harold says. A plate of tiny snails has arrived with little picker implements to pluck out the meat. He holds out the dish toward her.

“Not for me,” she says, raising a hand. “I have trouble with them cringing in their shells.”

“This is going to take me a while, then, all by myself.” He starts in with his little pick. There look to be maybe a hundred snails on the plate.

Nora sits back and pours more Coke into her glass of ice. The cubes crack and sputter, rearrange themselves. “I’ll call Mom. Get her to take him in to see someone. He won’t fight Mom.”

When Harold is done eating, he blots his lips with a flutter of thin paper napkins from the table dispenser. He exhales deeply and fills a small cup with tea that has steeped to nearly the color of coffee.

Nora looks to her brother for clues. He gives off an air of life fully lived, deeply enjoyed—all without seeming to have any of the sort of larger point to which one is supposed to aspire. He has an aura of success and accomplishment hovering around him, although he doesn’t seem to have accomplished or succeeded at much of anything. Nora wants to understand this contentment. She would like a piece of it for herself.

She considers talking to him about the woman at the orientation reception. She would have nothing to fear; he is the most discreet person on the planet, and probably the second or third least judgmental. She could put a silly spin on the little episode. Make fun of her own vanity being tapped by the encounter. Then shake her head with relief that she hung up her jersey years ago and retired from this ridiculous sport.

She moves so close to this confession that she experiences the slight sensation in the jaw that precedes revelation. But then, instead, she says nothing, picks up the pale green slip that is the restaurant check, settles up, and moves quickly past the opportunity.

Around the corner from the restaurant, they find what he’s looking for. A wholesale shop, profoundly dark and musty inside, its wares lurking in huge drooping banks of cloth sacks pushed against the walls, and in a freezer case where roiling frost obscures whatever lies inside. There doesn’t seem to be a lively flow of buying and selling in the shop. Nora imagines a hole in the middle of the back room, leading directly to China, mysterious goods hefted out, then set to wait for some vague, nocturnal commerce.

“These will see me through a couple of months.” Harold pats the giant bag of fortune cookies he has bought. He tears it open at the top, shakes it like a lottery maestro, and tips the bag toward her. “Go ahead.”

She cracks open her cookie and reads:

YOU ARE ALMOST THERE
.

“A great fortune,” she says. She hands it to Harold.

“Yes,” he says. “Excellent.”

While he was buying the cookies, Nora found, on a shelf next to some bottles of hair tonic, a dusty, paper-wrapped bar of jasmine soap.

“For Jeanne,” she tells him, setting it on the counter, feeling the guilt flow through her fingertips into this gift, tainting it. Even though she has nothing to be guilty about. Yet. The guilt comes from knowing there is a “yet” attached to the thought.

On their way home, he opens the bag and sniffs the soap, which sets him off on the subject of Jeanne. “You are so lucky,” he says.

“Yes.” She wants to head off the hymn of praise for Jeanne that is forthcoming. She won’t be able to hear it right now, cannot have the conversation that is pressing its way forward. Instead she brings up his play.

“Previews start next weekend,” he says brightly, meaning, Will she come?

“Saturday. On Friday, Fern and I have to go have a talk with Russell. She’s supposed to be contributing to her own upkeep. She already gets half her tuition because of me working there. Russell makes up the shortfall on that, but there’s still everything else, and most of what she makes from the psychic thing goes—well, she has her Body Shop habit, those Starbucks drinks. So anyway, we have to put on our rough-hewn garments, go into mendicant mode.”

“He’ll do it. Russell always comes through.”

“Yes, but he’ll make me suffer first. That’s why we have to go over to have this humiliating talk. It’s my penance. He can’t just mail a check. And I have to bring Fern for moral support because I can’t ever bring Jeanne. Louise says she can’t accept our ‘lifestyle.’ She doesn’t want to be confronted with it. What she actually said was she didn’t want her nose rubbed in it.”

“Someone should put a sock in her mouth. A smelly sock.” Everyone hates Louise; Harold jumped right on that bandwagon, bless his heart.

“Oh, I think Russell is hiding behind her skirts. He can put everything off on Louise and her religion. She has a bumper sticker:
GOD LISTENS.
God must just be so bummed, don’t you think, having to sit up there, listening to Louise?”