Lucky in the Corner by Carol Anshaw Page A

“They’re so much meatier.”
    “I ran into her yesterday. Christine. At the Dominick’s. She was buying artichokes with her girlfriend.” Nora knows it’s idiotic, her jealousy of Jeanne’s therapist, her worry that this person she has never met probably knows more about Jeanne than Nora does, or at least more of the interesting stuff. She also hates that Jeanne refers to her therapist by her first name. Instead of calling her Dr. Jungundfreud or whatever. But of course, she
isn’t
a doctor; she’s a lesbian therapist—though not the worst of the lot. She doesn’t barter her services for French lessons. She doesn’t work out of her house, or have her dogs prowling through her sessions with clients. She hasn’t tried to date Jeanne. The worst indictment Nora has been able to come up with for all her probing is that her office is filled with deadly, cliché therapist art (gallery posters from the Southwest). That, and Nora doesn’t like her voice when she’s on the machine changing an appointment. She sounds way too
understanding.
There’s also this big mystique around her, some veiled tragedy in her recent past. All in all, she’s a little too romantic a figure to suit Nora. What happened to all the pudgy bald guys everyone used to go to?
    “What was she like, the girlfriend?”
    “Tall, dark. Handsome in a Katharine Hepburn way. It was like in school, when you couldn’t imagine the teacher had a life outside the classroom. I am afraid I appeared very silly. I know I was falling over my words. Rouging.”
    “Blushing.”
    “Yes.”
    It’s Saturday and soon they will have to get up. Jeanne will bake croissants (usually just frozen ones, but occasionally she tackles the project from scratch) and then they’ll set about cleaning their house, one of Nora’s favorite parts of the week, a few hours to bustle and putter, flounce sheets like energetic chambermaids in something from
Masterpiece Theatre.
Today Nora’s plan is to attack the furry tile grout around the bathtub; she has set aside an old toothbrush especially for the job.
    Jeanne turns from her back onto her side, to face Nora. She is such a small person, so light in her movements. This rearrangement under the sheet makes Nora think of a small flock of birds fluttering inside a soft sack.
    “What about your reception at school the other night? I didn’t get to hear. It was a success?”
    “Oh, I think so,” Nora says. “Not so many students as I’d hoped. There never are. But some of them seemed to connect with each other. Mrs. Rathko was terrible to me, what else is new?”
    This nattering is successful. By the end of it, Jeanne is brushing Nora’s hair back, kissing her forehead, popping out of bed in search of coffee, on her way into the day. The moment has passed when Nora could have, by the by, brought up the woman at the reception, so she and Jeanne could have shared her, allied themselves lightly against an innocuous moment of flirtation. This happens more and more often—Nora sees exactly how some small next piece of her life should be happening and, instead, like the bus driver weary of his route, alone on the night shift, veers off a little, down some unscheduled side street.

Park
    WHEN HE GOT HOME FROM WORK , Fern’s father would take her and their new dog, Lucky, to the park. Even in February, lots of dogs came out with their owners around this time and mostly they got along and had fun without too many scraps because the park was no one’s territory, there was no protecting or guarding to be done. These were some of Fern’s happiest times, out there not only with Lucky, but with all the dogs—Ben and Kiko, Maggie, Bridget Olive, and the wild blond dog, she didn’t know his name. Sometimes there were as many as a dozen or even twenty dogs out at once and she would stand with her hands out so she could peel off her mittens and pet them as they milled around her in the gathering darkness, exhaling clouds of frosty breath,