Lucky in the Corner (7 page)

“Actually, I am,” she says. “Greek. I was born in Athens.” She adds, “In the shadow of the Acropolis,” her mind racing through high school geography, hoping the Acropolis wasn’t in Sparta, hoping his next question isn’t about her pantyhose.

“I’m calling Sears!” Nora says as she comes in through the back door.

“I already tried,” Fern says from the bed, where she is being very still, waiting for her next call. “They’re out of everything except one that’s mainly for factory use. A million BTUs or something. We’d have to get special wiring.”

“Man, it’s weird out there. Lights off everywhere. Hydrants popped all the way up Damen. At least we haven’t lost
our
electricity. Oh.” Nora stops as she sticks her head in Fern’s room. “Are you ...
working
?” She puts a tiny spin on the word.

“I can’t go to Harold’s. His power has been down for hours. He’s in a foul mood. His canapés are melting. So I need to do this here, if that’s going to be okay.”

“Why ask me?” Nora says, but just because she has to be a little bitchy about Fern’s job. Something—the heat probably—has knocked the usual fight out of her. She seems dreamy and preoccupied. She disappears for the next couple of calls, but then, while Fern is in the midst of consoling a client who has been dumped—dumped terribly, from the details—Nora drifts past the doorway, miming “boo-hoo-hoo,” fingertips tracing imaginary tears down her cheeks. She’s having her little bit of fun. Fern calls the Star Scanners number and logs out early.

“I didn’t mean for you to stop,” Nora says.

“I can’t do this in an environment of sarcasm. You totally don’t take my work seriously.”

“Well, there
is
a serious side to it. My sympathies do genuinely go out to your customers in their real moment of sorrow, when they open their Visa statements and see how much they’ve blown on these calls.”

“You have a point,” Fern says. This is one of the stock phrases she uses to sidestep arguments with her mother. The best thing to do with her mother, she has found from hard experience, is not hand her anything she might later use as a club. And that could be anything—an interest in something new, a person Fern might find attractive, a book or movie she might have enjoyed. So the trick is not to give up anything of herself to her mother, ever.

This is especially easy today; she can hardly come up with conversation, let alone confrontation. The heat makes even the gathering of thoughts difficult. It is all she can do just to lie in a torpor, the chenille of the bedspread blotting up her sweat.

Then the house, which has been silent except for Lucky panting in a mildly alarming way on the floor next to her, is suddenly alive with action. Nora is dragging an old metal box fan across the floor of Fern’s room, into the tiny bathroom at its far end. She then turns the shower on full-blast, puts the fan up on a wooden chair she drags in from the kitchen, then stands looking with pride at her handiwork, which she presents to Fern as the “Turbo Cooler.”

Fern can see that her mother is trying to make amends for clipping her about her job. Instead of apologizing, though, or not clipping Fern in the first place, she’s trying to make it up with charm. In moments like this, Fern can see her mother as Harold’s sister, products of the same improvisational childhood that makes them subtly different from everybody else. And this is the very stuff she loves best about Harold. If
he’d
rigged up this contraption, she would have sworn it worked even if it hadn’t. In fact, though, the Turbo Cooler works fabulously. The sea breeze she imagined on her Greek island is suddenly, deliciously wafting over her.

“So...?” Nora says.

“Whatever,” Fern says. She knows this is her mother’s most hated response.

“Then we shouldn’t waste the water; I’ll just turn it off.”

“No,” Fern says. “Leave it on. It’s better than nothing.” Then she wonders if she might have come across as too enthusiastic.

THE HEAT WAVE BREAKS
in the night between Thursday and Friday, with a terrific storm that whips against the house and down the street. Nora leaps up to close windows, then decides against it.

“It just feels so great,” she says to Jeanne as she presses her palms to the screen. “So things get a little wet. So what?”

Fern’s dinner on Friday feels like a celebration, a thanksgiving to the gods of rain and coolness. Nora brings home a kitchen gadget, a present for the cook. She doesn’t want the already touchy relationship she has with Fern to degenerate into snappish little scenes like the one they had last night. She’s hoping she can change the tone.

“Somebody’s going to make a million bucks on this gizmo—the Miracle Garlic Peeler.” Nora demonstrates. It’s a soft rubber tube. “Put in a clove,” she says, lifting her voice into a pumped, infomercial tone. “Roll it back and forth on the counter, and it’s done!” She shakes out the clove, neatly shed of its skin.

“Cool,” Fern says, as though she means it. Nora watches her daughter looming over the kitchen island, her height giving her a cheflike majesty. She has a style all her own, although Nora suspects she isn’t very aware of it. She pulls from the grab bag of visual rhetoric available to girls her age and makes it look completely like her own idea. Her confetti hair, the ironic way she wears lipstick only with the most non-lipstick-compatible outfits, like today—a dark red that’s comic in combination with a T-shirt, a pair of plaid Bermudas, and a multipocketed fishing vest.

This nose-thumbing approach to fashion is part of a complex joke Fern seems to be assembling about the universe she inhabits. She sees the humor in what everyone else finds merely annoying. She has a repertoire of urban imitations, like a pitch-perfect rendition of the six-sound car alarms that drive all of them nuts in the middle of the night. She also thinks Vahle’s Bird Store on Damen ought to have a striped ticking cover pulled over it at night. She inhabits a hilarious city in which she is always scouting out new landmarks like the Decent Convenient Store and the Little Bit Cleaner, both catering to customers with low expectations; or the Stationary Store on Leland, which customers can rest assured will still be there when they pick up their business cards. Fern links this to the Toujours Spa on Clark, whose promise seems to be that it will resolutely remain a spa, as opposed to changing willy-nilly into a tapas bar or optometrist’s office. Nora suspects that, as with the way she dresses, Fern is not entirely aware of how delightful she is, which only makes her more delightful.

At the moment, though, Fern is not being very delightful at all. She takes the garlic peeler, looks at it as though it has historical significance, like the cotton gin. Then she puts it aside on the countertop and gets a knife from the drawer and peels a few cloves in the old, labor-intensive way, whacking them first with the side of the blade.

From a shelf full of books on the difficult adolescent, Nora understands that Fern needs to blow off the garlic peeler, do things her own way, form her own style of peeling, form her own personal relationship to garlic. Nora understands this, and still, in these moments, her hope and goodwill evaporate and all she can see is the two of them on the floor, flat on their stomachs, positioned to arm wrestle, and—it being
her
fantasy—Fern has a weak grip and it’s an easy piece of work to force her hand to the ground.

Harold is sitting across the kitchen table from her, crunching Lucky’s ears, bending to lift a velvety flap and whisper a sweet nothing. Nora tries halfheartedly to catch his eye, then gives up. Why bother? She will never make him see how skillfully Fern operates. He can never ascribe any malice to Fern; he has her in a little grotto, surrounded by small vases of cut flowers, flickering votive candles. Then, of course, she feels awful for wanting to tint his opinion. Why does she need an ally against her own child?

Until he appeared half an hour ago at the kitchen door, Nora wasn’t aware that her brother was going to be part of this dinner. He arrived bearing a bowl wrapped like a mummy in foil, giving off frosty steam in the mild air of the early evening.

“I found an old ice cream freezer at one of my junk shops on Belmont. I made Pistachio Rocky Road, from scratch. The thirty-second flavor.”

It’s Friday night. Nora wonders why he’s not working.

In spite of never having had a discernible career, Harold nonetheless appears to be on a gently downward slide in terms of employment. At first, the waitering jobs were a way to subsidize his acting. And for a while after he followed Nora to Chicago, he was a lively presence in local theater—in roles requiring a dash of the sophisticate, an edge of the sinister.

He also, for a few years in the earlier portion of his thirties, worked for an escort service, and swears that in his case, it never went any further than escorting. He took single businesswomen to social functions, widows to weddings, none of them to bed. Topics were the problem—the constant search for conversation openers and continuers, the avoidance of awkward silences.

Over time, he has gotten less and less stage work. Nora suspects that, along his way, he acquired a reputation for being difficult, a superstar-type perfectionist but without star clout, without, actually, any clout at all. There has been a parallel slippage in his waitering. He started out working in high-style places with zinc bars and pale wood tables, in the early era of chic food. Serving entrées flecked with sun-dried tomatoes, salads dressed with raspberry vinaigrette. But three or six months into a job, there were always troubles, peculiar disagreements and subterranean feuds with this cook, that hostess, brooding skirmishes difficult for him to articulate when Nora probed. For the past three years, though, he has been working way up on Lincoln, at Der Schnitzel Haus, which has a beer hall in the back famous in tourist guidebooks as the “Home of the Singing Bartenders.” Nothing about the place is trendy. He wears a cummerbund, serves huge platters of roast duck, sauerkraut, spaetzle, giant wedges of Black Forest torte. And he has, it seems, no troubles. The hostess and co-owner is Gretel. She runs a tight ship. No feuds or flaring tempers under her command.

“She doesn’t wear braids wrapped around her head, but you feel like she does,” he has told Nora. “When I’m away from the restaurant, I could swear she has braids.”

He has a crush on Gretel, Nora can tell. She can imagine the two of them pretty graphically, scenes in which one or maybe both of them is wearing a girdle.

Harold’s life is a detailed demonstration of getting by. He operates out of a cheese-paring frugality. He rents an apartment in a pocket of nowhere up on Ashland, dirt-cheap but with the understanding that the landlord does next to nothing in the way of repairs. He roots around in secondhand shops for clothes. He gets his books and videos from the library, goes to free concerts, takes wood shop through the Park District. He has an unkillable car, a fifteen-year-old Chevy he loads up at a giant club store in Skokie or Morton Grove. Everywhere you look in his apartment, every hiding place—under the bed or on the high back shelves of the closet, or behind the sofa in the living room—is stuffed with a hundred cans or rolls or boxes of something.

Within a disposable Western culture, Harold inhabits a miniaturized Third World. He discards almost nothing. His kitchen drawers are filled with wiped, then neatly folded sheets of aluminum foil; a trove of rubber bands; restaurant matchbooks; dust rags cut from worn-out underwear. He gets his broken appliances fixed, or fixes them himself. He has his shoes resoled, knows a tailor who still practices “invisible reweaving.”

He wears a lot of black and is devoted to dyeing, which, to avoid detection, he does nocturnally in the back row of the laundromat. The T-shirt he’s wearing today, she can tell, is a product of midnight craft—stretched at the collar, but crisp in color. Because of the worn thinness of its material, the outline of a brassiere beneath is visible.

Nora doesn’t think this fascination with drag signals anything troublesome. What is it, after all, but a hobby, a set of model trains in his basement? One time she and Jeanne had a little party for people they worked with—from the college, from Berlitz. Harold turned up in a sport jacket, but also wearing eye liner and mascara. This unsettled Nora for about two minutes, and then she let it go. It was subtly applied and if anybody noticed, so fucking what?

“My mother sent along ... you know ... some stuff,” Tracy says. She is awkwardly negotiating the back door with Vaughn, cozy against her breasts in his baby sling. She has her hands full with offerings—a loaf of bread and a Tupperware container—its translucence almost certainly camouflaging a clot of her mother’s turgid homemade cheese. “Plus I have a couple of discontinued candles.” She takes them out to read a label. “Bayberry maple.”

Vaughn gets a big round of welcomes and, as soon as Tracy has him out of his sling, he receives the fanfare with fists balled up in glee. He seems to already grasp the principle of visiting.

“He just had his nap,” Tracy says. “I hope someone’s up to entertaining him for a while. He’s discovered he has hands. Just to warn you.”

Harold tugs at Vaughn’s toes, telling him, “Ooky, pooky, dooky. How’s my little snooky?” One of the best things about Harold is that he has absolutely no fear of appearing foolish.

Lucky shambles over and licks the baby’s dangling foot. It takes the dog some time to get across a room now.

Nora takes the baby from Tracy, over to the old sofa against the far wall of this big room made out of the house’s original kitchen and dining room. She settles in, making a lap for him to sit on. His smell—the sweet and sour of baby powder and spit-up milk—and his body so jam-packed with babyness combine to tumble her back into her own early days of motherhood, when holding Fern could so overwhelm her with love that she worried she might be deranged.

She makes monkey faces for Vaughn, who has a rather funny face himself—a long nose for a baby, and eyes that droop a little at the edges, brows that sweep upward, giving him an aspect of curiosity. Then there is his thick, stand-up hair, like a fright wig. She shoots him into midair, tickling him as he goes, holding him high and dangling, but secure in her clutches. He bunches up his odd features, then smiles hugely while shouting “yayaya,” the prototype of a laugh.