Lucky in the Corner (17 page)

“Nothing. This month, they are all whiners, babies.” Then she adds, very casually, not looking up, “I was surfing the Web for a while before. I found a fantastic fare to Paris.” She really means Tours, where she is from, but can’t say the word; it’s too incendiary. In lieu of real vacations these past few years, Nora has visited many chateaux, and suffered through three visits with Jeanne’s provincial, judgmental family—two sisters and a mother. They never fight, but gang up on Jeanne in chillier ways. They are particularly adept at pointed silences and ill-natured teasing. Nora drives from chateau to chateau while Jeanne cooks for her mother, shops with her sisters, and by the late afternoon when Nora returns, Jeanne is up in the guest room crying, but pleads with Nora that her family mustn’t know they have driven her to tears, and so dinner is always tense and hideous and cloying with reduced wine sauces. Nora thought she and Jeanne had already agreed that she wouldn’t have to go over again until somebody died. And so Nora doesn’t feel she has to ask how cheap the fare is, even just to be polite. Plus she knows Jeanne will tell her anyway.

“Two hundred sixty dollars
aller et retour.”

“How could it possibly be that cheap?”

“Well, it’s not a nonstop. That is where you find the very deep savings.”

“Where’s the stop?”

“Phoenix...first.” Nora doesn’t ask if this plane is going to Paris the long way around the planet, or doubling back from Phoenix and stopping in Greenland. She’s too downcast to work up even the mildest sigh of exasperation, and her silence on this normally touchy subject prompts Jeanne to put down her magazine and really look at her.

“Oh! Tell me please what has happened,” she says, sitting up, reaching to pull Nora down beside her.

Nora relates the worst of the conversation with Louise. “If only Fern had tipped me off, I could have had my dazzling retorts prepared, or headed Louise off at the pass. Instead I cowered, then got in a few licks, but really, she won. She made me feel as bad as she could have hoped to. As it was going on, I realized that I’ve almost never had to deal with head-on contempt.” Nora starts crying. She almost never cries. Jeanne knows enough not to offer any sort of facile consolation. Instead, she sits with the information for a while, then says, “We’re too insulated. We live in a small place where everyone is understanding and tolerant of differences, where everyone
is
different, our little neighborhood of oddness and peculiarity.”

“I should laugh it off,” Nora says gloomily. “Why can’t I take Fern’s position, say Louise is a moron and forget the whole thing?”

“It is difficult being challenged, even by fools.”

“At least I refused to defend myself against her stupid accusations. Like that I’m a vampire, that I want to suck the blood of schoolchildren and seduce housewives.”

“Well...” Jeanne says.

“Well, not
all
housewives anyway,” Nora amends. “They don’t know we’re very fussy about our housewives.” From there she takes the folded Kleenex Jeanne has pulled from the pocket of her sweater, wipes her nose, takes Jeanne’s arm, pulls it over her shoulder as she leans into her sofa-warmed body, and allows her sadness to be blotted up.

This is what the long run is about, she thinks, the deep comfort furrowed out by time and endurance. This huge and important thing is what she is putting in jeopardy. She fills with good sense and firm resolve. She will put an end to the nonsense with Pam. Now she sees it is simply a test to pass.

FERN WAS HOT AND ITCHY
inside her crouton costume, which consisted of a black leotard, dancing slippers, and a box with no bottom and a head hole cut in the top. The outside of the box was covered with roughed-up burlap, tan and scratchy.

She was standing in the wings, waiting for her part in “Dancing Salad,” the
grand finale
of the “Food Friends” show at her school. The point of the program was that it’s important to eat good things, not just candy and junk food.

She had only a little while longer to wait. The lettuce wedges, tomatoes, and cucumber slices were onstage now. Next would come onions, carrots, then herself and the three other croutons, then the bottles marked
VINEGAR
and
OIL
with their squirt guns.

She found a gap in the stage curtain and looked out into the audience. Her father was away in Ohio, making a presentation to a tire company for a campaign. “Tires that grip the road.” The tire in the picture turned into a glove grabbing a snow-covered stretch of highway. The glove was his part of the idea.

Anyway, she was not looking for him because she knew he wouldn’t be there. She was looking for her mother, who was against children being forced to perform onstage, even though Fern had sworn she hadn’t been forced, that she loved being a crouton.

The lights were off in the school auditorium, but there was enough light spreading out from the stage to see into the audience. There were a few fathers, but it was mostly mothers and brothers and sisters, a few of the kids from the show who were in the proteins dance, now sitting down in their costumes—which made them look like primary-colored worms—to watch the end of the show. She dragged her gaze slowly over each person, to put off the moment of surprise when she would spot her mother.

She was still looking when Miss Elmquist put a hand on the top of her box, by her shoulder, gathering her together with the other croutons, telling them all to remember that they are tossing themselves into the salad, not walking into it. Fern had heard this before, had her tossing movements inside her, stored up, waiting to burst out from behind the curtain into the jumble of somersaulting, cartwheeling vegetables.

She took a last look into the shadows of the back rows, beyond where the light reached. She picked a shape that might be her mother, probably was, was for sure. She could, with only the slightest pressure of imagination on reality, see her mother there among all the others, hands together, holding back her applause until she saw Fern burst onto the stage, toasty and scratchy, tossing herself—perfectly—into the mix.

WHEN SHE PRESSES HER FACE
into the slight depression at the center of James’s chest, the smell is dry and slightly salty, like a potato chip. The taste of the place behind his ear is tart. There is a lot about him naked. The woolly hair on his chest. The deep, freckled tan, especially on his shoulders. The scars, mementos of various mishaps—a pencil-thin line under his chin (diving board), a squashed star shape on his elbow (skateboard), a raised curve above his right knee (bike). His fingers spatulate, his toes so peculiarly long.

“You’re quite an oddball, really,” Fern tells him, leaning on an elbow as she makes her diagnosis.

“Well, let’s see who’s talking,” he says, turning onto his side to make his own examination.

A few days after the day in the park, while she was still working up elaborate plots for running into him again, he asked Tracy for her number and called. The conversation didn’t go totally smoothly. He meandered so aimlessly, for so long, that she began to wonder if he’d lost track of whom he was calling, what he was calling about. But then eventually he said maybe she’d like to get together sometime, it didn’t have to be soon, and she said it could be soon as far as she was concerned, it could be that night for instance, and it turned out this was fine with him.

He is someone who needs to be steered a little in the right direction. She has to do most of the calling and planning, but he is always happy to hear from her, as though he was expecting her call, is already nudging the rest of his life over to make a space for her.

He worries a lot, about a lot of things—the future, the environment, greenhouse gases, the meaning of things and the possibility that they don’t mean enough. He riffles through her anthropology texts and seizes on the grimmest examples of existence. Nomads in arid parts of Africa who spend each of their days searching out a cup of water, a few bits of grain, a little shade. He fears that, stripped of music videos and new ways to distress denim, human enterprise would quickly be reduced to nothing more than scavenging for water and shade.

Fern, by nature an optimist, thinks she provides a counter to James’s pessimism. She thinks it’s a good thing he ran into her.

The only hurdle she had was right at the beginning. She tried to tell him that she was “sort of” involved with someone. He asked what that meant. She had to admit she hadn’t seen this person much in the past few months. Not at all, actually. And that maybe it was more like a year.

“Then,” he told her, “I think it’s okay to see me.”

They are on the mattress on the floor of his apartment, which is above a large garage behind a house on Barry. The apartment is made up of dormers and ceilings that slope with the roof above them. You have to stoop a lot walking through the place. James, who tops even Fern by several inches, uses a lurching gait as he ambles from room to room, like someone with a peculiar limp. The gravedigger in an old monster movie.

The place has a red kitchen and a lot of dusty sunlight and is given over to the boxes he makes (something like Joseph Cornell’s, but really very different) and to his collections. His skateboards rest in a set of slotted shelves. Globes litter the floor, a drifting galaxy. The few vertical walls are hung with the opened boards of games from before their own childhoods. Rich Uncle. Chutes and Ladders. Pillow Fight. James is three years older than Fern, but he seems to occupy a different geography, a place less edgy and future-oriented than hers, more relaxed and suspended in childhood.

They have each blown off what they are supposed to be doing with this back half of the day—Fern is skipping her Peasants seminar and James has knocked off early from his messenger job. They have been making love, off and on, for a couple of hours. Sex with James is very different from sex with Cooper, which she used to think of as Big Sex (although her experience was, is still, pretty limited). With Cooper, she would go around the day after, sore in the obvious places, but also at her elbows, in the muscles at the back of her neck. When he disappeared, the sex bore the weight of everything he hadn’t said, held the meaning she needed to counter her constant disorientation.

With James, what happens in bed is more easygoing, sometimes even comic. In a purely physical sense, their height, turned horizontal, becomes a matching of lengths; they are two long creatures of their species tangling in a graceless way, looking for a shortcut, as though if they learn each other physically, they can skip everything else that’s going to be necessary. Necessary for what, Fern can’t say.

He pulls her flat on top of him.

“Let’s pretend we’re missionaries,” he says.

“The part where we go out and convert natives,” she says, “oppressing them with our cultural assumptions?”

“Actually, I was thinking about the part where we have sex in the missionary position.”

“Then I think you’d have to be on top.”

“Sssh,” he says, shifting beneath her. “Just let me in. I’ll tell you later about our religion.”

***

Lucky is growing restless. He has been napping on the window seat of the dormer in the front of the apartment, but is now pacing in and out of the bedroom.

“He needs to go out,” Fern says.

When they get themselves dressed and outside, dusk is settling in; the sun has taken along with it any warmth that had been adhering to the afternoon. Fern clutches her jacket at the front and waits while Lucky pees luxuriously on a bush and James finds his car keys. He has an ancient Datsun, older than either of them. They open the hatchback for Lucky. He gets as far as standing with his front paws on the bumper; James hoists him the rest of the way in.

There is an affinity between Lucky and James. They both have expressive eyes that give them an air of being in on some terrific joke. They are both happiest when they are in motion—Lucky ambling along on a walk; James on his skateboard, on his bike.

Fern has begun to see dotted lines between certain people and animals, between certain events—indications that the universe is ordered, but in a way that has yet to reveal itself. This universe holds particularly significant friends. Lucky is one, and now James. Others are still out there, waiting in places as snug as tree forts, stockpiled with the laughter of running jokes. The trick will be to find them. They are part of Fern’s suddenly expanding view of the space her life will occupy.

“Watch out for the floor,” James reminds Fern as she gets into the car, referring to the fact that there isn’t any on the passenger side. She props her feet on the dash for the short ride up to Welles Park, Lucky’s old stomping grounds, from the days when he was a pup and Fern lived with her mother and father close by there.

The park is brilliant in the midst of the falling night, its playing fields and basketball court, the horseshoe-pitching pits, all bathed in a false day created by the gang-busting floodlights. Lucky totters over to the fence by the baseball diamond, his favorite pooping place. Fern heads over to pick up after him.

“He knows this park like the back of his paw,” Fern tells James a little later, as Lucky herds them from behind, some working-dog hard-wiring. There’s another dog out, a hobo with no apparent owner, no collar, fur of many colors and directions—the sort of dog for which Lucky has always had a mysterious affection, maybe from his early days on the rocky road of life, before they got him. What begins with a burst of hilarity—the two dogs throwing themselves against each other’s shoulders and chasing each other back and forth—winds up with Lucky losing sight of his buddy, and then, before Fern can do anything to stop him, he is blearily heading out of the park, straight into four lanes of traffic gunning up and down Western.

Even in the mildest hours of morning, Western is a route of serious, lightly menacing drivers in beat-up vans and highwheeled trucks. At night, these vehicles are driven by the same guys, now with a few beers under their belts. And so when Fern loses track of Lucky as he slips into the surly stream of fenders and headlights, she panics. All she can do is stand bolted to the curb screaming, “No!”