Lucky in the Corner by Carol Anshaw

remarks, except Harold.
    “No matter how fascinating you were when you were alive,” he says, “once you’re embalmed, you’re pretty much reduced to one aspect. Which is to say, dead.”
    “Man, though,” Fern says. “I mean, no blinking.”
    “What if you sneeze?” Tracy says, lifting her shirt to nurse Vaughn, who has begun to fuss on her lap.
    “Yes,” Harold says, “well, you can see that even though it’s hugely boring, it is nonetheless going to require all this control.” He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, holding the position while they all watch. There is not the slightest flutter of lashes.
    “Could be very powerful,” Fern says, and Nora forgives her everything.
     
    When they’ve finished dinner and had coffee and Harold’s ice cream (a big success) and everyone has requested that Fern play the Otis Redding disk again, she does, then comes back out and claims Vaughn as her dance partner, swooping him around dramatically to “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” The baby adores Fern, goes into a sort of rapture, Nora has noticed, whenever she picks him up, as though he knows he is totally loved by this particular human. Which he is. Nora sees Fern’s love for Vaughn as something other than maternal or auntlike or whatever she might understandably be feeling for him coming out of her closeness to Tracy. Rather it seems to Nora that what Fern and Vaughn have is some profound version of friendship, an affinity.
     
    It’s almost ten by the time the kitchen gets cleaned up with a little effort from everyone but Fern, who gets a cook’s dispensation. Soon after this, Tracy leaves with Vaughn, who has long since nodded off. Harold says his goodbyes after looking at his watch and muttering something about having to meet someone. He chests his social life like a good hand of cards. Whatever he has on tap for tonight must be very good to risk the wrath of Gretel for blowing off work.
    Nora and Jeanne, tired and sleepy with wine, offer a final round of praise for Fern’s dinner, then pull themselves upstairs. Nora picks a copy of
The Death of the Heart
off the pillow along with her glasses, and sets them on the dresser. She was hoping to get a little reading in tonight, but it’s too late now. She and Jeanne fall into bed, crash-landing without taking off underpants or watches, only brushing each other’s lips by way of good night.
    They sleep like synchronized swimmers, freestyling parallel through the night, flipping over to catch, then release, each other into the universe of the subconscious. Nora has come to know Jeanne in sleep as much as through daylight observation. Let loose in a room of a hundred women, she could find Jeanne by the shape of her shoulder, the scent under her arm, the taste of the inside of her ear. In the morning, they often lie limb over limb, shuffling through their dreams.
    Nora’s are tricky skirmishes in an ongoing war with dark forces. Hitchhikers unsheathing knives in the back seat as she drives along desert highways, the sound of metal brushing against leather before the blade is pressed sharp to her throat. Other, more hulking figures, springing from beneath the steps in the shadowy stairwell. Or large, writhing rats racing over her in some dimly lit, too small space, their tight fur bristling across her palms as she tries to push them away. If sex enters the frame, it is something sordid with someone inappropriate—Harold, or her mother. Once with Mrs. Rathko, in a train berth.
    Jeanne, meanwhile, reports dreams of flying low over their neighborhood, using her arms to take off and land gently. Even what she considers nightmares seem merely whimsical or slightly odd. She has little hands for ears. She gives birth to a chipmunk. Last night, Queen Elizabeth startled her by opening her handbag to show off her trained mice in little outfits—polka dot dresses, checkered suits.
    “I think you should bring
my
dreams in to your therapist,” Nora says.