Lucky in the Corner (15 page)

He considers the question for a while; you can’t rush him into an opinion.

“I guess I don’t see you becoming anything you aren’t already. Which is to say wonderful, unique. You’ll bring that to whatever comes along.”

“Actually, I was thinking of T. E. Lawrence.”

“Of Arabia?”

“We read a biography of him in a history class I took last year, and by the time he was eight or nine, he knew his mission in life was to save a captive people.”

“Oh,” Harold says, then whistles softly. “Do you think you might be setting the bar a little high?”

Finally, before she goes, she gets around to why she came over in the first place.

“I have something.” Meaning something to tell. Not about the skateboard guy, lames. He called, but it’s too soon to talk about him. And when she does tell Harold, she’ll filter the news through Dolores. What she wants to run by Harold today is something else entirely. She needs to try out her suspicion. “Something’s going on with Mom.”

“Something like...?”

“Something stupid is my guess. I mean, I don’t have anything concrete, like that I saw her stumbling bleary-eyed out of one of those terrible motels up on Lincoln.”

“I woke up in one of those once,” he says, then looks for a second overcome by his past, then leans in, positioning himself for gossip. Fern starts in.

“Just in general she’s been very distracted lately, with nothing to account for it, but when I’m talking to her it’s as though she’s kind of hearing what I’m saying, but at the same time listening to something much more important on a hidden earphone, like a newscaster. And then I ran into her last night. I got home late and she was walking Lucky for me. I asked her if she’d just gotten home. She said yes, she’d been kept by a ‘meeting.’ So I tried to call up a picture of this meeting, the way I do when my clients describe a scene or a person. I tried to gather up the details—a conference room, everyone tired, someone blathering on—blah, blah, blah. But it didn’t jell and then I knew the meeting was bogus. It hadn’t happened, the conference room had been vacant and darkened, or being vacuumed by a guy from maintenance. My mother was somewhere else.

“Harold, this psychic job is changing me. I’m developing something. It’s not so much that I can look into the future. It’s more a different way of seeing the now—like I can spy around corners, into private places. I see surprises all around me.”

Today is the first time she’s told anyone about these developments. She takes a swig of her ginger ale. The machine here gets the pop so cold it’s like liquid ice. She holds it in her mouth, feeling the pinpricks, waiting, afraid of what Harold might say. But it’s okay.

“Maybe you’re developing your sixth sense. When you think about it, why should we be limited to five?”

Fern grabs his head from behind and plants a kiss on the side of his face. She is so relieved to have someone believe in this cockeyed (but exciting) notion along with her.

Harold thinks things over. “Your mother, on the cheatin’ side of town. Hmmm. She hasn’t said anything to me.”

“But she probably wouldn’t. She knows you adore Jeanne.”

“Oh yes. I do. But still, she’d tell me.” (Harold hates being out of the loop, will never admit when he is.) “Of course, it’s something your mother’s good at—getting girls. She had quite a run of it for a while. She’s all settled in now, but she must have moments when she’d like to see if those old powers are still working.”

“I don’t even know why I care,” Fern says. “It’s not my business. I’m almost out of there. I am out of there in my head.”

“It’s an old sore spot for you, her tipping things over in her hurry out. But stuff doesn’t usually happen the same way twice.”

“But why
now,
when she’s all tucked in?”

“If you read enough biographies, you begin to see a pattern. There’s often a great affair, a grand passion a ways along in life when nobody’s expecting it—Dietrich was in her early fifties when she fell for Yul—or in the middle of some dull period of domesticity. People like to screw up a good thing. Happiness is hard to bear. Everyone’s always worried about it running out, always nervous. And as long as there’s bound to be trouble anyway, you might as well make it yourself.”

Neither of them says anything for a while. Harold gets up and pulls a huge tangled wad of socks and jockey shorts from the machines and wheels the pile in a small wire cart over to a waiting dryer. Once he has them tumbling around, he sits back down. “Man, though, what
about
poor Jeanne?”

“I know.” Fern nods. “She’s a sitting duck.”

NORA AND FERN
are taking the long way around to Russell’s with Fern at the wheel. They drive all the way up to Evanston, then back down to Lincoln Park, drifting, building up steam for the evening ahead, which they are both dreading.

They are mostly silent, then Fern says, “You okay?”

“About tonight?”

“About anything.”

Nora is positive Fern suspects she is up to something.

“Yeah. I’m fine. No problem,” she says. In most of the ways Nora would like to be close, she and Fern are miles apart, and then there are these primal, subterranean connections that give her the willies. She can’t really tell her anything, though. Fern would be deftly judgmental. Nora would lose what little respect she gets from her without gaining any sympathy in the bargain.

They stop at an old Dairy Queen on the way back into the city. They sit in the car and eat greasy burgers, then decide to have raspberry sundaes.

“The good news is that this is probably the last time we’ll have to do this with Dad and Louise,” Fern says. “Next year I’ll be out of school.”

“Well, you might fall in love and want a huge wedding with an ice swan and you coming down through a cloud of dry ice on a swing and nets of doves let loose all around you. But...”

“Probably not,” they say, almost together.

When they’ve finished dining in style and Fern has stuffed their garbage in the can and they’ve dusted the crumbs off their jackets and brushed their hair in the rearview mirror, there is nothing else they can do but head on down through the wall of fire.

“There,” Nora says, pointing up ahead, at an open space on the right.

“Nope,” Fern says, not even bothering to slow down. “Hydrant.” She picks up her father for dinner once a week. She knows this block by heart.

Parking is impossible here in Russell and Louise’s neighborhood. There is never a free space, ever. Since she got the boot last year, Nora has been trying very hard not to park illegally. To get unclamped, she had to pay sixty dollars plus all her back tickets, including some she was in the middle of disputing, but there was no arguing at that point, what with her car languishing, undrivable, and twenty-four hours shy of being dragged, for another hundred dollars, to some remote lot off the edge of the earth. So Nora has stuck a Post-it, an advisory against illegal parking, to her windshield visor. It says:

DON’T EVEN
THINK ABOUT IT
.

But after they have circled the block twice and found nothing, they tacitly admit defeat and Fern slides the Jetta into an illegal spot at the end of the block. If they get a ticket, it will just add insult to the injury of having to visit Russell and Louise.

“Don’t you do any bowing or scraping,” Nora says. “Particularly not the scraping. I’ll do it all.”

“I hate that you have to do this for me,” Fern says. “It’s Louise, you know.”

“Some of it’s Louise.” Nora leaves it at that. Fern’s hatred for Louise takes the heat off Russell. And it’s true, Russell does honor his financial obligation to Fern. And of course, he wants her to finish college, and he can afford to help. Since he has stayed in advertising all these years, he brings down a nice, chunky salary. But recently the Louise factor entered the equation on one end, and on the other, Fern seems to have entered an academic area that will almost surely require graduate school. Plus, next summer she wants to do a month of field study up in the Arctic, with some tribe on the tundra. At least she is making her own decisions now, mapping out some future for herself. The only solace Nora had until just recently was that Fern wasn’t making any conspicuously bad choices. She wasn’t doing major drugs or gambling on casino boats or heading toward a peculiar line of work, like embalming.

Now, though, she is interested in anthropology, and although Nora worries this will lead to a job teaching for a pittance, parttime, at some obscure college, waitressing nights at Hooters, still it’s a path (actually, very nearly the academic path Nora herself was on before Fern’s arrival prompted a change in course). So Fern has her path, plus good teeth and a wry sense of humor. She is well worth the small trouble of this evening.

“Sometimes I wish,” Fern says.

“What?” Nora asks.

“Nothing.” Her jaw is doing the little grinding-popping thing it does when she is upset.

“Come on.”

“Just that it wasn’t like this, that things could be like they used to. Like they were before.”

Nora has to think a moment to get that what Fern means by “before” is when she and Russell were still married and the three of them were a family.

“Oh, honey, that’s ancient history.”

“To you. To me it’s like a giant scrapbook. Everything’s still inside for me to look at. You’d be surprised what I remember. Like, Dad used to wear those cool vintage bowling shirts to work. He’d cook us Szechuan food, making that huge mess in the kitchen. He set up that little room in the attic. So you could write your poems.”

“Oh, those poems. I put them all in the Weber one night and torched them. My contribution to the survival of literature.”

Neither of them says anything for a while, but they don’t get out of the car either. Finally Nora says, “How can I find an apology big enough to cover everything?”

Fern looks straight ahead, but not at anything; her jaw is still making the little twitches.

“There wasn’t going to be a happy family if I stayed,” Nora says. “There was only going to be the ironic shirts and the Chinese food and me smoking up in that attic, thinking how I was going to get through another week.”

“And that was the key thing, after all. Getting you through.”

Nora takes this slam and sits with it. What Fern is saying is true. In the crunch, Nora saved herself. She never wants to try to defend that to Fern. She could, of course. She could point out that her unhappiness and restlessness were going to bring the whole thing down one way or another. And while all of this is accurate in a large-picture way, it could also be said that Nora fled her marriage, grabbing Fern on her way out, in order to—and in that particular moment this was really all there was—in order to sleep with a security guard named Sugar.

She is both not guilty, and guilty as charged. Defending herself further will only turn this conversation into a fight. And so she tries to sidestep.

“Even though your father and I aren’t together, you still have both of us.”

Another statement that is both true and not true. By busting up her marriage, Nora jeopardized Fern’s relationship with Russell. She left Fern slightly displaced, and vulnerable to further change. When Louise came into the picture a couple of years ago, Fern became Russell’s ex-kid, opening up a more central space to be filled with the baby Louise and Russell are (according to gossip from Fern) busy trying to have. Russell’s attention to Fern has ebbed. Sometimes he calls off their weekly dinner on short notice with a flimsy excuse. He forgot her birthday last year, a horrible day. Nora knows she bears some of the responsibility for all this. But there is nothing she can do about it now, nothing she could do about it then. She failed her child and can’t find her way either backward or forward to a place of succeeding for her.

What is love? she thinks. Fern guilt-trips her, and Nora allows it. Is this a variant of love, some blank space in the Hallmark rack? Whatever, it’s what she has. (Sometimes, in these hard moments, Nora escapes by imagining an alter-Fern who is devoted to her. They paint each other’s toenails on a raft on a lake.)

“Come on,” she says, getting out of the car, taking on the small task at hand. “Let’s go see if we can get you some moola.”

On the phone, Louise tried to expand this visit to include dinner, and Nora haggled it back down to a cup of coffee. She doesn’t know why Louise is being so atypically social, given her opinion that Nora is a lesbo-weirdo freak and Fern is spoiled and should be doing more to support herself.

Nora had hoped Louise was not going to be a player in tonight’s discussion. She can still remember when Russell told her he’d met someone, and she had cast this development in an optimistic light. She started imagining they could be friends, put their failed marriage behind them and in some hip, contemporary way be cordial, occasionally go out to dinner together as a reconfigured foursome—Russell and his new partner, Nora and Jeanne. Maybe even little group vacations that would include Fern, too.

Then Russell’s new partner turned out to be Louise, who added fresh contempt for Nora to Russell’s long-simmering anger. He is too civilized, or perhaps too passive-aggressive, to hate Nora in a straightforward way. Instead he comes up with a certain level of congeniality so she has nothing to complain about—to Fern, to whomever—while beneath the surface, she’s pretty sure he’s as filled with anger as those stalking ex-husbands in TV miniseries. There should probably be creepy, nervous-making music, a soundtrack underlying all her encounters with Russell. Of course, Louise might be the real-life equivalent of creepy background music.

He is totally justified in hating her, even Nora sees this. She betrayed him, then left him in such torturously small stages that he didn’t actually get it until she was out the door.

At first, when they were married, he liked that she was different from the other wives in their social sphere—more independent and freethinking. “Scrappy” was the term he used to describe her to their friends. Then, gradually, she was a little too different. He didn’t like the women’s reading group she joined, was sarcastic about their selections being limited to books written by women. If they were shipwrecked, he pointed out, forced to choose one of the two books that had washed ashore with them, by these rules they would have to read Jackie Collins over James Joyce.