Lucky in the Corner by Carol Anshaw

Author:Carol Anshaw [Anshaw, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780618340705
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

On the phone, Louise tried to expand this visit to include dinner, and Nora haggled it back down to a cup of coffee. She doesn’t know why Louise is being so atypically social, given her opinion that Nora is a lesbo-weirdo freak and Fern is spoiled and should be doing more to support herself.

Nora had hoped Louise was not going to be a player in tonight’s discussion. She can still remember when Russell told her he’d met someone, and she had cast this development in an optimistic light. She started imagining they could be friends, put their failed marriage behind them and in some hip, contemporary way be cordial, occasionally go out to dinner together as a reconfigured foursome—Russell and his new partner, Nora and Jeanne. Maybe even little group vacations that would include Fern, too.

Then Russell’s new partner turned out to be Louise, who added fresh contempt for Nora to Russell’s long-simmering anger. He is too civilized, or perhaps too passive-aggressive, to hate Nora in a straightforward way. Instead he comes up with a certain level of congeniality so she has nothing to complain about—to Fern, to whomever—while beneath the surface, she’s pretty sure he’s as filled with anger as those stalking ex-husbands in TV miniseries. There should probably be creepy, nervous-making music, a soundtrack underlying all her encounters with Russell. Of course, Louise might be the real-life equivalent of creepy background music.

He is totally justified in hating her, even Nora sees this. She betrayed him, then left him in such torturously small stages that he didn’t actually get it until she was out the door.

At first, when they were married, he liked that she was different from the other wives in their social sphere—more independent and freethinking. “Scrappy” was the term he used to describe her to their friends. Then, gradually, she was a little too different. He didn’t like the women’s reading group she joined, was sarcastic about their selections being limited to books written by women. If they were shipwrecked, he pointed out, forced to choose one of the two books that had washed ashore with them, by these rules they would have to read Jackie Collins over James Joyce.

After the group met at their house and he saw the actual women in the group, he had more ammunition. First it was about Sara, who was huge. Russell, a quick study, began referring to her as a “woman of size.” Then Betty was a “woman of red hair color.” There was a lot of this sort of funny but not really funny commentary.

Then one afternoon at work, he broke a finger at an agency lunch-hour softball game and was taken to the emergency room. Which brought him home with a tiny cast on his pinky at one-thirty in the afternoon, left-handedly fumbling his key in the lock. This was the first signal of his unscheduled arrival, the door opening too quickly for Nora to disengage from Chimera, one of the women from the reading group, but not the only self-named one.

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