No One Could Have Guessed the Weather

by Anne-Marie Casey

  “Lucy Lovett is sarcastic.”

  “She’s English. Haven’t you ever watched The Office on BBC America?”

  “I heard her say to Robyn Skinner that if parents can’t spell, how can they expect their children to?”

  “Who’s Robyn Skinner?”

  “Robyn Skinner’s that woman who’s always late for pickup, so someone always has to wait with her kids, and then she’s always cross. Like it’s any of our faults she’s so disorganized. Honestly, it happened last week and she looked at me really strangely. Like she hated me.”

  “Lots of women hate you. Don’t you ever look in a mirror?”

  “No.” (This was true. Christy avoided looking at herself, as she had acute body dysmorphia, a legacy of her modeling days, and often referred to her “wobbly bits,” oblivious to the stab of loathing this induced in every other woman around her. )

  “I’m telling you she hates us all.”

  “Ridiculous. Anyway, back to Mrs. Lovett and her crusade against the incorrect use of the apostrophe, which, by the way, I agree with.”

  “People see her graffitiing on the PTA notices.”

  “Give her a chance. Maybe in the end you’ll love Lucy?”

  Julia winked, but Christy was in no mood to be humored.

  “You, me, lunatic Lianne, and sarcastic—oh, sorry, English—Lucy Lovett. Okay, that’s four. Apparently the minimum on the course is five, but I can’t take the stress, so I’ll just pay for the extra place. Vaughn mustn’t know, though. Don’t mention it to him.”

  “Why?”

  “You know Vaughn can’t bear waste. It’s because of his childhood. He eats yogurts after their sell-by date.”

  Julia shifted a little, unwilling to join Christy in a domestic lie.

  “It’s only a few hundred bucks,” Christy pleaded.

  Now Julia looked at her strangely.

  “Hey, Marie Antoinette. Don’t say that in front of anyone else except me.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m being awful. It’s Lianne and this stupid weekend. At least it can’t get any worse!”

  Christy’s nostrils flared, and she flicked her mane.

  • • •

  LUCY, JULIA, AND CHRISTY sat side by side on wonky plastic chairs at the back of the school hall as the raffle was being drawn. Julia was hunched up in the middle, as, although usually she insisted on the end of a row so she could stick her legs out the side, she understood that Christy, who had Irish roots, was having some strange postcolonial reaction to Lucy and was scared of her.

  Dolores Madden, head of the PTA, a woman who could have run a small country as a dictator but instead had four children and managed the local CVS, was holding aloft a large scented candle wrapped in orange plastic.

  “Number seventy-nine. Seventy-nine.”

  “That’s you!” said Christy, nudging Julia, and before Julia could pretend to have lost her ticket the two women behind them started clapping. Julia hurried up to Dolores, made a futile attempt to give the candle back, but Dolores just hissed, “Nobody wants this. Just take it.” Julia returned to her seat, blew the dust off the wrapping, and wondered who she might regift it to.

  “The next prize is . . . unusual,” said Dolores, making no effort to raise her expression above pained. “A place on a weekend course in E . . . A . . . L . . .” She picked up an envelope and read, her tone tightening with every word. “That’s Equine-Assisted Learning, which incorporates horses experientially for emotional growth in participants. Kindly donated by Mr. and Mrs. Vaughn Armitage II.”

  She looked accusingly at Christy. Last year Vaughn had paid for five new computers, obviating the need for spring semester fund-raising.

  “What?” said Christy, turning to Julia, bemused.

  Lucy explained.

  “I got Vaughn on the phone last week when I was ringing round for donations. He said he’d just had an e-mail from the horse people. There was a place you hadn’t filled. . . .”

  She stopped. Lucy sensed she was tightrope-walking above a treacherous marital crevasse, and anyway, she was confused herself.

  “I thought it was a riding weekend.”

  “Did you?” said Julia innocently.

  “Number three hundred and two. Three hundred and two.”

  “That’s me!” came a voice from the front of the hall. Lucy, Christy, and Julia all leaned forward to look.

  “It’s Robyn Skinner,” said Christy.

  “Who?” said Julia.

  Christy looked at her meaningfully.

  “Is that good or bad?” wondered Lucy, until she saw the expression on Robyn’s face as Christy detailed the prize.

  “So the three of you are going . . .” Robyn was looking up at them, her hands fiddling with the waistband of her baggy skirt. Her hair, scraped back into an unforgiving ponytail, was ash blond. Her face, open and freckled, was unlined, apart from a triangular furrow between her eyebrows. The three sides of the triangle were anxiety, hostility, and bemusement.

  “And my stepdaughter, Lianne. It was her idea,” said Christy.

  “How old is she?”

  “Forty.”

  Lucy filled the ensuing silence. “Have you ridden before, Robyn?”

  “No,” said Robyn bitterly, “I didn’t grow up in that sort of home.”

  Ouch, thought Lucy. She wanted to say “Neither did I,” but she didn’t.

  “Neither did I,” said Julia.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you can ride or not,” said Christy firmly. “The course is psychological. Lianne says you spend time with the horses and you learn life lessons. Then, when you find yourself in a crisis situation, you think, What would a horse do?”

  “How does that help a crisis situation?” said Robyn. “It’s a horse.”

  None of the others could think of a response to that.

  “Is it in a hotel, Christy?” What Robyn meant was might there be room service and an opportunity for two nights of uninterrupted sleep?

  “No. It’s an equestrian center. We sleep in yurts.”

  “What are they?” Robyn was clutching at straws now.

  “A yurt is a timber-and-sheep’s-wool structure first built by Turkic nomads on the steppes of South Asia,” said Lucy helpfully.

  Robyn was disappointed, that was obvious, but in her life she had been disappointed by many things far more important than the PTA raffle. As a teenager, Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” was her favorite song. (Lucy’s was “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush; Julia’s was Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”: Christy’s, rather appropriately, was “A Horse with No Name” by America.)

  Robyn’s voice softened, and she lifted her chin and smiled. “I’ve never won anything before. I need a break. Maybe it’ll be fun?”

  Lucy and Julia smiled back, but Christy, who was now engrossed in her own private drama, her anger at Vaughn and his inability to be profligate except when it suited him, missed the moment.

  “Look, Robyn,” said Christy, “you don’t have to do it. I don’t know how this happened or why Vaughn put it in the raffle.” (This was directed at Lucy.) “But it doesn’t matter. It’s only a few hundred bucks.”

  Ouch again. Julia looked away. Lucy looked down at Robyn’s shoes and saw the black line of the rubber resole around the toe.

  “Or maybe you could swap with someone? Is there another prize you’d prefer?”

  Christy turned and saw Lizzy Clearmountain, a Reiki practitioner whom she liked, carrying a crate of Spanish wine out the door.

  “Look at Lizzy. She got the Rioja and she’s practically teetotal.”

  A sudden blush in the shape of a hand spread red and furious over Robyn’s collarbone and clutched her neck.

  “I won this. Fair and square. It doesn’t matter whether I like it or you like it. I’m comi
ng.”

  And she headed off toward the lockers, her rubber soles squeaking with indignation.

  “I should have offered her the candle,” said Julia.

  “She hates us,” said Christy.

  Neither Julia nor Lucy disagreed.

  • • •

  LIANNE HAD DONE extensive preparations for the horse weekend. She had read The Horse Whisperer and watched the film twice and spent the first half hour of the journey discussing with Julia why screenwriters felt they could change books so much.

  “I mean, there’s no sex in the film. It’s stupid. What’s the point of Robert Redford being your horse whisperer if you don’t get to . . .”

  At this point Christy turned up the radio, ostensibly to get the traffic update for the turnpike.

  “Well,” replied Julia thoughtfully, “with an adaptation you’re thinking, How do I reflect the spirit of the book in a different art form? It’s not necessarily about slavish adherence to the plot. So in the film of The Horse Whisperer, the two main characters still have an intense spiritual connection fueled by the kid and the horse stuff; it’s just beyond the physical. Right?”

  Lianne did not appear to have listened. Like most people raised by servants, she demanded attention and agreement and was disconcerted by any deviation from that.

  “I think it looks like he’s in love with the horse and that’s why there’s no sex.”

  “Interesting. Maybe you should ask our facilitator that?” suggested Julia. “After all, we’re learning about human-equine relations. Right, Lucy?”

  Lucy nodded and tried to look enthusiastic. She had loved horses as a child, obsessively reading about them, entering the WHSmith win-a-pony competition every year, and on walks she would canter on her own legs through woodland, making whinnying noises at passersby to her brother George’s embarrassment. In a childhood remarkable mainly for its juxtaposition of high drama and excruciating boredom, it was something that stood out, something that she remembered with happiness. Throughout her twenties and thirties she had often asked herself why she had stopped riding.

  Richard knew this. She had been reminded once again how well he did know her. He had never forgotten their honeymoon in Turkey during which he had watched her cantering alone on a white horse along a mountain path, an expression of pure bliss on her face, and so he had insisted she go away with “the girls,” as he put it, in some flashback to the vocabulary of his own parents in the seventies. Lucy had resisted. She felt that she had wasted weeks, probably months, of her life in London trapped with “the girls” in one never-ending tedious conversation on the theme of “kids do the funniest things,” as they all vied to demonstrate their exemplary motherliness. But as Julia and Christy never mentioned their children unless they absolutely had to (usually in answer to the question “How are your children?”), she felt safe among the like-minded. Now, though, her heart was pounding underneath her seat belt, and she could not mention it. It was only the second time she had been away from her sons since they’d come to New York, and she was overwhelmed with the separation anxiety that had begun the moment she had said yes to Julia. It wasn’t healthy, she knew that, and she also knew that many believe codependency to be the death of any relationship.

  “We have to be open, Lucy,” said Lianne. “This is about taking us out of our comfort zones.”

  Lucy looked out the window. “I’m already out of my comfort zone. I’m in New Jersey.”

  Julia roared with laughter and caught Christy’s eye in the rearview mirror. Christy knew her well enough to know what she was thinking, which was, See, she’s funny and clever, I insist you like her. Christy made a noncommittal grunt, gripped the steering wheel, and pressed her foot down on the accelerator. Lucy was glad the car was automatic, as Christy was grumpy and would have taken it out on the gearbox. The journey was beginning to remind Lucy of a school trip she had once been on to Stonehenge. Then, as now, the vehicle positively hummed with the undercurrents and strange calibrations of female moods and alliances. Lucy always sensed such things. She did not enjoy that aspect of her personality.

  Lianne handed her a sheet of paper, ordering her to read it, and Julia put on her glasses, a pair of jet-black little-old-lady frames that should have made her look like Demi Moore, but in fact made her look like someone had scribbled circles on a photo of her face with a black marker pen. One side of the sheet was background information about horses and the herd mentality and how they always live in the moment, as they have fight-or-flight responses. The other side was quotations, “Aha!” moments, from successful participants in the EAL course. These were in italics, with many exclamation marks. Mike from Millbrook had found it “Profound!!!!” Susan from Westport said it “Changed my life forever!!!!”

  Lucy turned her head to see Julia chewing her lower lip and rocking ever so slightly backward and forward.

  “What is it?” mouthed Lucy, concerned.

  “I’m having withdrawal symptoms,” whispered Julia.

  “Didn’t the doctor give you anything?” said Lianne, who had the hearing of a bat.”When I went off cocaine the doctor injected me with some vitamin/antidepressant thing.”

  Christy was keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead.

  “It’s not literally withdrawal,” said Julia. “I promised Christy I wouldn’t bring my writer’s notebook.”

  “That’s good.” Lianne had her solemn voice on. “You know what they say about the sessions here? What is said in the circle stays in the circle.”

  A song came on the radio. An unmistakable melancholy guitar intro.

  Lucy and Julia sat up. “Gordon!” they exclaimed in unison.

  “Who?” said Lianne.

  “Ssssh. Turn it up.”

  Christy obeyed Julia, and they listened in silence to Gordon Lightfoot singing “If You Could Read My Mind.” Julia and Lucy started singing along, and then, harmonizing the bridge.

  Lianne could take it no longer.

  “I’m sorry. ‘He’s trying to understand the feelings that she lacks.’ What does that mean?”

  “I know what it means,” said Christy sadly, but Lianne just stared at her.

  Christy sighed and glanced in the mirror. To her amazement, she thought she could see a tear in Lucy’s left eye.

  “I love Gordon Lightfoot,” Lucy was saying, “I love Jim Croce, too.”

  “So do I,” replied Julia, and they gripped each other’s hands.

  Christy had another of her out-of-body experiences. She saw herself trapped in a deep dark pit with Lianne and coils of hissing snakes while Julia and Lucy frolicked together in a sunlit garden above. For a moment she wished she was drinking plastic coffee with Robyn Skinner on the train, an extremely unexpected development, but then a positive thought struck her.

  She had an emotional dilemma she could bring to the horse.

  • • •

  THEY HAD BEEN LEANING on the wooden fence around the outdoor arena for more than an hour, observing horse behavior. Or, rather, Christy, Julia, and Lucy were observing the horses and Lianne was observing their facilitator, Darren, who, though no Robert Redford, was a rather manly six foot three, with big hands and no wedding ring, and had demonstrated earlier how to bring a pony to submission using acupressure points and nose massage.

  Robyn, who knew all about submission with no nose massage, had left immediately afterward to “check out the yurt,” and, when Lucy went to look for her, was flat on her back on a camp bed, last month’s Vanity Fair unopened on her stomach, snoring the extreme sleep of the chronically sleep deprived. Lucy put a glass of water beside her and closed the sheep’s-wool-and-timber door firmly.

  Four horses had been released without halters into the sandy ring. They trotted around, then, one after the other, collapsed onto their knees and rolled over luxuriously on the ground before rising to their hooves and shaking off the d
ust. There were three geldings, Mitch, Neo, and Captain, and a small white mare, Sahara. They nosed around the ring, munching at the bushes surrounding the fence. The three males relentlessly nipped, niggled, and messed with one another. So that’s what horseplay means, thought Lucy to herself, in the first of her three revelations of the day. Sahara kept herself to herself and rewarded any male incursions into her space with either a nuzzle and a gentle rebuff or a great big kick. Lucy’s second revelation was that this reminded her of most evenings in her apartment.

  Julia was wholly absorbed. She found the experience fascinating and oddly relaxing. Christy, to whom detachment came as first nature, was silent and still. And Lucy, caught up in the rush of her revelations and feelings and childhood memories, felt again a sense of intrinsic Lucyness returning to her, the thrilling and painful process that had started from the moment she arrived in New York. More prosaically, all three of them shared the same momentary insight. When did I last sit still for sixty minutes? Lianne did not. She was pretty much a daily visitor to the Nails and Tails Beauty Spa in Chelsea.

  Suddenly, Darren cleared his throat and asked what observations they had about the horses’ behavior. Lianne’s hand shot up.

  “We can see that horses all have their places within the herd and they are led by a dominant mare.”

  “Well done,” said Darren. Lianne beamed.

  “Really?” said Julia.

  Lucy nodded. “I know that from My Friend Flicka.”

  Darren then asked them to consider if they had responded to any of the horses in the arena on an emotional level. Julia pointed immediately to the white and bay, Mitch. A handsome brute with wide eyes, Mitch dominated the others at seventeen hands.