Lucky in the Corner Read online

  Complaint

  “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 anyth
ing; 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.”

  “Oh, but I think it is helping. You have more calmness. You could go another night instead? Thursday perhaps.” Jeanne’s mechanisms of control come cloaked in good-natured politeness.

  “No. Thursday I have an orientation reception for the fall semester. I hate Continuing Ed.” This attitude comes over her frequently since she quit smoking. “Why can’t people just get educated once and for all and give it a rest? Instead of coming in here at night with their big life changes and ridiculous identity crises. They’ve been accountants for thirty years and now all of a sudden they think they might have a knack for Web site design, or day trading.”

  “Or belly dancing,” Jeanne says, unnecessarily.

  “You know Leila conned me on that one. Her course title was Desert Rhythms. As soon as I got wind of what was going on, it got dropped from the schedule.” Nora hates the little catch of defensiveness she can hear in her voice, but she’s up on her high horse and can’t get off. “Look, I know Access is not a totally serious enterprise. But it’s still this huge machine to operate. It still pumps out a giant toxic cloud of meetings and memos and complaints.” She stops, remembering that Jeanne is not the enemy, or the unconverted. “Where are you, anyway?” She hears traffic in the background.

  “Down the street from Willie’s.” Jeanne has been living in America for twenty years, but at heart, she is still French, culturally averse to exercise. Wilhelmina is her masseuse. Jeanne goes once a week, lies on a padded table, is rubbed and stretched and pounded, and given something called “electric stim.” She refers to these sessions as “conditioning.”

  “I’ll probably get home before you. Let’s do something nice. I’ll make cappuccino. I never see you anymore. Are you still short?”

  “You are crazy busy,” Jeanne says.

  “I know. I feel like Lucy. Lucy and Ethel when they were working on the assembly line at the chocolate factory and the chocolates were coming so fast they started ramming them into their mouths.” She waits a minute, then realizes Jeanne doesn’t have Lucy in her cultural data bank, that she was still in France when Lucy was working in the candy factory, and being pushed out of the kitchen by her over-yeasted bread, and riding the suds from her over-soaped laundry load. “It’s nice about Fern’s dinner, though. I wonder what inspired her to such a grand gesture?”

  “We can play with Tracy’s baby,” Jeanne says. Childless herself, she adores babies, the way non-Catholics adore nuns.

  “Man, I hope Fern doesn’t get pregnant anytime soon,” Nora says.

  “Oh, but I cannot even imagine her having sex. I think she is too alienated from the human race, too nihiliste to make herself naked with someone else.”

  “I think she was doing something. With somebody. You know. That time.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “All those late nights out and sleepovers at Tracy’s. It was fishy as hell.” She can’t win on this. She doesn’t want Fern to be twenty-one and have had no sexual experience. On the other hand, she doesn’t want to think of her going through this evolution furtively, without guidance.

  She flushes with a terrible memory of Fern at twelve and way out of synch with the Lolitas who attended her school. Next to them, Fern seemed stuck, swaddled in orthodontia and shyness, miles taller than everyone in her class except for a set of beanpole twin brothers. Her manner back then was composed of explosions of goofy humor alternating with gloomy silences. Nora tried to help; she ordered a boxed set of pamphlets and videos, “Gal Gab: Mothers and Daughters Talk about Sex.” On the box was a photo of a mother and daughter, snuggled side by side on an overstuffed couch, the daughter fascinated as the mother smiled and pointed to a diagram of ovaries and fallopian tubes. This was Nora’s hope for her and Fern, exactly what was pictured on the corny box.

  They never got to the couch. Fern looked at the box, and said, “Please,” in a tone that was panicky, not sarcastic (which would have been marginally better), “don’t make me do this.”

  Fern slipped into adolescence silently, as though it were quicksand. Even, all these years later, now that she has surfaced into early adulthood, Fern is still unfindable behind her superficial presence. She is always available to talk, to be positively chatty while revealing nothing of her true self, whoever that might be. She is someone, apparently, who thought it was a good idea to get a tattoo on the side of her neck. Nora will never mention the tattoo to Fern. The tattoo is a nonsubject.

  “When I think of Fern and our future together,” she says to Jeanne, although she can tell Jeanne is only being patient until she can get off the line, “we’re not together. She’s moved to Seattle. Or Sweden. She tells her friends there she had to get away. She lives with some guy who collects exotic goldfish, spends nights in the basement synthesizing sounds on his computer. They have a kid. Fern’s an advocate for soy baby formula or home schooling...”

  While Nora is on this roll, time-traveling through the near future, the call with Jeanne gets cut off with several beeps and the sound of coins being swallowed by the pay phone. Nora hangs up and waits for her to find some change and call back, but the phone sits silent on her desk. Perhaps Jeanne felt the conversation was effectively over, even though they hadn’t said goodbye.

  Canasta

  FERN LETS HERSELF IN with a key her unde has made for her. She understands that in giving her this, Harold was also giving up a piece of his privacy. He was deferring to Fern’s need of a slipknot, a release from the house she lives in with her mother and Jeanne. Where things have become purely claustrophobic.

  Last weekend, Saturday morning, she woke with a terrifying sensation of suffocation, then realized it was the subconscious drift from the thick fragrances of domestic ritual seeping under her bedroom door—the buttery aroma of Jeanne’s croissants baking, the charred air kicked up by her mother’s vacuuming, the suspended pollen of lemon Pledge.

  Jeanne is not the problem; she’s only guilty by association with Nora. Nora is the problem. Anyone else’s mother would be easier. Tracy’s, for instance—huge phony, bad nose job, thinks she can win you over by reading your tarot cards. But it is precisely these limitations that make her bearable. Tracy’s mother always occupies the same, predictable amount of space. As opposed to Nora, who spills over all her edges, then over Fern’s.

  The problem starts with the way she looks. Those compellingly irregular features, the haunted eyes—what Tracy once labeled “your mother’s fuck-you looks.” Tracy has a whole riff on this, like why hasn’t Nora given in to fate—moved to New York and signed some huge modeling contract and started sleeping with rock stars and getting herself a tricky little addiction, maybe an eating disorder?

  But Nora is not interested in anything involving cameras or stages. She’s in a lifelong flight from her family’s fascination with show business and doesn’t really want this sort of attention and blah-blah-blah, and Fern more or less believes her, but not really. Something about the way she blows off
looking so dramatic and movie-starrish—all the baseball caps and sunglasses—only sets her more apart, pressurizes and intensifies her little magnetic field. Which she then, of course, uses to her advantage.

  Meanwhile Fern, with her gawky height and bland features, will always suffer by comparison. This is the result of Fern’s mother having married Fern’s father, who, although he is in advertising and dresses in a moderately hip way, nonetheless looks totally like a dentist, and has left his stamp on Fern. So in their family configuration, Nora will always remain the gorgeous one, while Fern will have to make the best of an appearance that is not so much unattractive or attractive, but rather that of someone you’d feel comfortable coming to with a toothache.

  She has been working against this blandness, what she thinks of as her dentality. She worries that this was, in some part, what Cooper slipped away from. And so she has been trying to carve out some angles with the tattoo, the diet she doesn’t mention to anyone, a major hair change. Early in the summer she went down the street to Big Hair, which specializes in chaotic cuts, and now she has hair that’s short all over, disorganized on top and three colors—her own dishwater blond, a Coca-Cola brown, and a synthetic red. For a week of mornings after, she surprised herself in the mirror.

  Her mother has said nothing about the tattoo, has yet to notice the diet, and looked at the haircut as if she was about to come forward with an opinion, then thought better of it. It’s never that Nora doesn’t have an opinion—the best you can hope for is that she will restrain herself from expressing it. This is the most incredibly annoying thing about her, her relentless certainty. She is so smug about her career choice (college administration!) and sexual orientation and her relationship with Jeanne and having left Fern’s father in the dust, but now they’re good friends so no real harm’s been done (in Nora’s view at any rate). How, Fern wonders, can anyone be so certain of what’s right and wrong, the proper axis of the planet, the order of the universe, her position in it?