Lucky in the Corner (2 page)

“Well, it’s true, and as it turned out, it’s cool. It got you Jeanne, who is way cooler than your father.”

“Yeah. Right,” Fern says. Tracy flat-out likes Jeanne and she’s probably right. Still, Fern likes to appear to be keeping her suspicions up, on principle, the principle being not to let her mother push all the pieces around on her and totally get away with it.

Actually, when it’s just the two of them together, Fern likes Jeanne fine. It’s only when she has to witness Jeanne’s devotion to Nora that Fern’s sentiments start wavering between contempt for Jeanne for being such a fool and pity for Jeanne for being such a fool. Sooner or later, Fern knows Nora will betray Jeanne, the way she betrayed Fern and her father. She will become distracted and walk away toward whatever is distracting her, forgetting even to look back over her shoulder. Sometimes when she is with her mother and Jeanne, Fern gets a mild chill, as though a draft is passing through the room. Jeanne can’t feel this cold air, is incapable of imagining Nora’s treachery. That’s all right. Fern imagines for her.

“And Louise,” Tracy is on a roll. “Even Louise might not be all that bad. I mean, she gave you that check for your birthday.”

“It
wasn’t
a check. It was a dorky savings bond. I have to wait until I’m retired or something to cash it in. When I’m ninety, I can stand all stooped over in line at the post office and get fifty dollars for it.” She stops herself. “Oh man, do I sound like a total whiner, or what?”

Vaughn lets go of his mother’s breast, appears totally satisfied for a split second, then bunches up his face in distress.

“Burp alert.” Tracy hoists him over her shoulder and starts patting his back in time to the music.

What’s actually bugging Fern is her own dead standstill in this great flutter of rearrangement. It seems she should be able to come up with some large, surprising event of her own. Instead, in place of actually being able to create a dramatic future for herself, she has become adept at making up one to suit the occasion or questioner. On the spot she can spin out to whomever—her mother or father or the head of the Anthro Department at school, or Turner, the therapist her parents had her seeing for a while—some detailed plan for the next few crucial years. She likes school but has no idea what she will do with all this education. She bluffs by putting together a full-color package featuring grants and fellowships and grad school programs and field study semesters on this island or in that remote mountain village.

Her line lately is that she wants to study the Nenets, an Arctic tribe in Siberia, some of whom are reindeer herders adhering to a lifestyle so primitive they wear clothes made of reindeer skins and live in reindeer skin teepees, make nearly everything they need, and spurn all modern conveniences except ceramic teacups. They have the narrowest worldview imaginable. A Nenets proverb, for instance, is: “If you don’t eat warm blood and fresh meat, you are doomed to die on the tundra.” The Nenets play into Fern’s fantasies of being in a much simpler situation, a place of limited expectations.

She stretches off the mattress onto the floor to uncover the clock from beneath a pile of Tracy’s clothes, then gives Lucky a little massage on his chest. “Can you keep Lucky for the rest of the afternoon? I have to go to work. I’m on from four to eight tonight. Rush hour. Right after they run the infomercial.”

Vaughn curls up as though squeezing the sleep out of his body, pulling his legs and arms in, then pushing them out again. He smiles and explodes with something that sounds like
“pow!”
and becomes once again center of all the attention in the room. Even Lucky rallies. He gets up on his feet to stand quietly watching the baby for his next surprise.

It occurs to Fern that Vaughn’s needs will be rapidly changing and expanding. Soon he’ll be tottering around, rummaging through danger-packed cabinets. Then he’ll have to be placed in preschool and go to summer oboe camp and get expensive braces on his teeth, and then in spite of all the attention and concern of the adults around him, he’ll do something brainless like inhale air freshener on a dare, or steal a car. Or flunk out of a decent college and have to finish up at someplace nobody ever heard of in Ohio. But then he’ll get it all together and find some niche in the universe. His own pattern of connect-the-dots. It’s hard to imagine; all of this seems remote as another galaxy on this still summer day that smells like lawn and tomatoes and seems as though it could hold itself in place forever.

“What do you think he’s smiling about?” Tracy says, giving up her index finger to Vaughn’s grip. “What can a baby’s dreams be? What can he know yet?”

“He knows he’s a miracle,” Fern says, putting her face close to his head, which smells like powder and sweat and is covered in thick dark brown hair like a cheap toupee. Everyone says he’ll lose this, but so far he hasn’t. “He’s thinking, So far, so good. He’s resting on his laurels.”

“
DID HE TOUCH YOU
?” Nora asks. She has to shout a little to make herself heard over the huge, shuddering air conditioner stuck in the window behind her. “Any of these times in the lab?”

“Sometimes, sort of,” the student, Ellen Schroeder, says. She dabs her nose with a Kleenex that has nearly gone back to pulp. Her nostrils are brilliantly red.

Nora will write up this complaint and put it into the channels the college provides, but she needs to hear it all herself first. Mercifully, she doesn’t get many of these in her program, which has been snappily renamed Access College, but is really just the old Continuing Ed extension of the real college. (And Continuing Ed was only a euphemism for the original night school.) She has to acknowledge that some of the courses the program offers—cooking classes, language intensives for travelers, current events discussion groups—are lightweight and have a social component, and so attractions do occur, but these are consensual and between adults, matters of the heart that are none of her business. In Mediterranean Cuisines last spring, a romance that had formed in the class led to some nuzzling around the chopping block, and she had to call the offenders into her office for an embarrassing chat about toning it down, but that sort of thing has been the worst of it. She doesn’t think there’s a need for her to be the morals police in classes that involve tabooli preparation or tango lessons.

Ellen Schroeder’s complaint, though, is of another order, dead serious. She is taking two psychology classes, both for credit, in an attempt to boost her grade point enough to be admitted to the regular bachelor’s program in the fall. Her complaint concerns Claude Frolich, a tenured full professor in the Psych Department and Ellen’s instructor in Behaivioral Research. Nora flips him up in her mental Rolodex: pear-shaped, sententious, mid-fifties. She vaguely remembers something about him in the mid-distant past. The Psych Department calling him on the carpet. She’ll have to phone someone over there.

All she can do now is listen to what has been happening down in the psych lab. Claude Frolich cozying up to Ellen around the cages of the mice they inject with whatever, or deprive of whatever else. She sees Claude insinuating his meaty thigh against Ellen’s bony one while telling her he thinks she has the makings of a first-rate research psychologist. Sliding into an offer of mentorship, accompanied by an arm around her shoulders.

“It was kind of subtle,” Ellen says. Nora flashes up a little picture of Claude at the college’s Christmas party with his wife (Irene?), a tiny woman with enormous glasses, the two of them looking as though they’d been married a thousand years.

Nora hates these complaints, hates that they exist at all. She thinks everyone should be able to keep his hands to himself and his penis in his pants while in the workplace. Girls shouldn’t have to come in here, nervous and weepy and worried for their grade, but more nervous that if they don’t come here the rubbing or double entendres will go on. All Ellen wants is to get into the degree program without having anything to do with Claude Frolich’s thigh or having to act as though she finds him attractive even though he’s an old guy with pasted-down hair and pipe breath.

She catches herself. Although she likes Ellen Schroeder and believes her, she can’t condemn Claude just yet. There is the remote possibility that Ellen Schroeder is a crank, that her complaint is vindictive, payback for a lousy grade or something. These aberrations occur, and make her grateful for the school’s mechanisms of judicious mediation. She won’t have to draw and quarter Claude Frolich herself, tar and feather him, run him out on a rail. Then wonder if she’s done the right thing.

“Don’t worry about this” is all she has to say, all she
can
say to Ellen at the moment. “I’ll start things in motion, send a report over to the ombudsman’s office.” She pulls a bag of Pecan Sandies out of a desk drawer. When she opens it, a gust of cookie scent escapes into the air over her desk. She extends the bag toward Ellen. To show her, without having to say as much, that she is on her side.

After Ellen, she has an appointment with a guy named Edward Carlson, who called a couple of weeks back wanting to teach a course titled “Tapping Your Inner Potential.” The Access pooh-bahs are big on inner potential, on tapping it.

As it turns out, Edward Carlson arrives lugging a briefcase bulging with legal pads, the pages of which, she can see, are filled from top to bottom, no margins, with a quivery handwriting. He would like to help students release their internal energy fields with the help of magnets. She talks to him as though he is absolutely sane, at the same time keeping an eye on the wall clock over his shoulder. She and her secretary, Mrs. Rathko, have an agreement that if a visitor to Nora’s office appears to be a nut, Mrs. Rathko will pop in at the twenty-minute mark to inform Nora that it is time for her “meeting with the vice president.” This time, though, she doesn’t poke her head in until almost half an hour has gone by. A small nasty trick from the bag Mrs. Rathko keeps at the ready.

The afternoon rumbles on in this way: waves of too much to do peppered with sharp longings for a smoke. It has been five weeks since Nora quit with the help of a hypnotherapist recommended by her friend Stevie. Nora was skeptical, but she has managed to stay off for thirty-seven days. She’s also wearing a nicotine patch and going to yoga classes, which she hates—slow, silent torture, all that finding her way into a pretzel position, teetering forever on one foot, staring down an arbitrary point on the wall, pretending she is part of some deep, philosophical Eastern belief system. Someone in a loincloth on a mountain, instead of in a loft on Lincoln above a tattoo parlor and a German delicatessen that specializes in disturbing lunch meats.

She casts about for a good enough reason—a minor crisis, a fit of nerves—that would permit her to go down the hall and bum a weed off Geri in Admissions, but she can’t come up with anything. By design, her life is resistant to casual crises, like those Incan walls that absorb subterranean tremors by rippling, then settling gently back into place.

“This memo you wrote on add/drop procedures. I suppose if people read between the lines, they’ll eventually see what you’re getting at,” Mrs. Rathko says, standing in the doorway, imperious even in a dress patterned with tiny polka dots, holding the offending document between two fingers, as though it is dripping with its own incompetence.

Mrs. Rathko has had Nora on the run for years. She has figured out precisely the right sequence of buttons to push to shift Nora onto the defensive. Nora feels like a Russian chess champion pitted against a supercomputer. Her own moves will be absurdly inadequate to the task of outmaneuvering Mrs. Rathko. The charms with which Nora is able to woo most people just bead up and roll off Mrs. Rathko, who has never given any indication that she finds Nora amusing or intelligent or interesting in any way. Her unspoken stance is that Nora is a nitwit who has, by some inexplicable twist of circumstance, been placed in a position over her. There is a parallel assumption that Nora also understands the absurdity of their situation. Nora does her best to brush all this nonsense away, but is still left with the gloomy fear that those who hold a good opinion of her are simply less discerning than her secretary.

“I’ll look it over,” Nora says in the monotone that is one of her pathetic tactics against Mrs. Rathko.

“How’s the smoking?”

“Fine,” Nora says. These interactions have made her a master of the nonresponse.

Jeanne calls. It’s Thursday; she teaches a night class at Berlitz until nine-thirty. (She used to teach here at the college, in Modern Languages, but the pay was too crummy.) She is calling not because she has anything to say, but so this won’t be a day when the two of them don’t speak between getting up and going to bed. She is a compendium of these sorts of small kindnesses and considerations. If Nora had to account for why she loves Jeanne, she would have to parse her explanation into a thousand slivers as tiny as this.

Jeanne wants to talk about her lunch with her friend Bernice, another teacher at Berlitz. “She had calamari.”

Nora doesn’t say anything; there doesn’t seem to be a response, really.

“It is like rubber bands. Why would anyone want to eat rubber?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nora says. “I kind of like it myself. Sometimes, nights when you’re not home, I fry up an old bathing cap.” This is an old kind of joke she makes up especially for Jeanne, who enjoys pure silliness and has too little of it in her teaching days, during which she wears a businessy suit and assumes a strict, pedagogic posture, rapping her ruler on the classroom desks where corporate executives sit, failing to rumble out their r’s properly.

“Fern left a note in the kitchen,” Jeanne tells her. “She wants to fix us dinner next week. Friday. Tracy and the baby are coming.”

“Great.” She flips to the next page in her datebook. “It’ll mean skipping yoga, but I’m always happy for an excuse. I don’t think it’s working anyway. Last time, when we did that resting part at the end? Where it’s dark and we’re lying on the mats, freeing ourselves of worldly concerns? I thought, what a nice time it would be to have a little smoke.”