Read Online Lucky in the Corner by Carol Anshaw - Free Book Online Page B

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.