Free Lucky in the Corner by Carol Anshaw Page A

first time, a tentative young woman with a circus-animal plastic diaper bag and a blood-dripping dagger tattooed on her ankle, doing something quite difficult in an eerily solitary way.
    “This kid has so much personality,” Harold says in a voice squeezed from having his nose clenched in Vaughn’s fierce grasp.
    Fern overlaps this, shouting “Almost done!” to all concerned, tossing the spaghetti with the garlic and olive oil, the red pepper flakes and flat-leaf parsley. Nora goes upstairs to fetch her girlfriend from her study.
     
    Although the evening is mild, Jeanne is wearing a light cardigan. This over a retro rayon dress. She will be more dressed up for this dinner than anyone else. Even if she wore jeans, they would be jeans into which she had ironed a crease. Part of this formality is because she is French, part because she is Jeanne.
    “I have a small chill, it seems,” she says.
    Nora puts one hand to her lover’s forehead, the other to her own for comparison. “You
are
a little warm.”
    “
Un peu enrhumée,
perhaps. I always get a cold in the summer, when everyone else is well, then never in the winter when my classroom is full of sneezes.”
    She looks tired, an older version of her usual self. Jeanne’s small maladies—colds, tickly throats, occasionally a stomachache she ascribes to her liver—Nora has come to understand, are tugs on her awareness. Jeanne is not hypochondriacal, but she doesn’t like to ask for things directly, and Nora has noticed that these minor ailments tend to come on when their time together has been pinched by the rest of life. They are, she thinks, Jeanne’s unconscious way of asking for a slight increase in Nora’s attention. Sometimes this seems sweet; other times Nora wishes Jeanne could just spit it out. Grab Nora by the hair and yell at her, or drag her into bed, or whatever all this politeness is a cloak for.
    “It has been a long week,” Jeanne says. “Too many students. And they grow stubborn or discouraged, and my job becomes even so much harder.”
    “How’s it going? Your article.” Nora nods toward the screen of Jeanne’s computer, the flush of three-by-five cards across the surface of her worktable. Jeanne is far past her deadline with this piece, for a feminist journal. The article is to be a reappraisal. She hopes to show that while Colette undeniably slept with women, she wasn’t really a lesbian. That there is a distinct difference between doing something and defining oneself by it. Jeanne’s argument is that it is wrong-headed to attempt to plug historical figures into a contemporary set of assumptions, that although loving someone of one’s own sex has always existed, gay identity is a modern construction. Colette is the centerpiece of the article, but along the way, Jeanne has tacked on Emily Dickinson and Eleanor Roosevelt. When she started talking about including Melissa Etheridge, Nora understood that the piece was slipping out of control.
    Jeanne holds up a copy of a letter from Colette to her lover, Missy. “All of this is a problem of translation, but not of language. Here, it is that the French—specifically in the time of Colette’s youth,
la belle époque
—experienced life in such a different way than we do now, here. And also, Colette was something of a foreigner in her own place, an anachronism in her own time, which adds to my difficulties.”
    Jeanne doesn’t want to be teaching grammar and syntax; she wants to be teaching French literature or cultural studies. But her Ph.D. dissertation languishes in a box somewhere while she fritters her time away on articles like this one. There is no talking to her about any of this. Nora has tried. Discussion only brings out her defenses, and does nothing to get her off the dime. They have been together eight years, long enough that many of their topics and issues have gone into reruns; some have been taken off the air altogether. The two of them are long past the dazzling, opening