No One Could Have Guessed the Weather

by Anne-Marie Casey

  Schuyler was a little taken aback, she could tell, he was obviously working his way through the lonely ladies on the lunch nutrition committee, but Robyn was determined not to be a notch on his Shaker-style bedpost. In fact, her only hope was to keep as far away from him as possible, for, if she allowed herself to spend one minute in that Duxiana with him, she would simply have to marry him and that would mean redecorating the farmhouse. And she hadn’t a clue about colors.

  She buttoned her coat firmly, which had the effect of making him stare at her chest, and picked up her bag.

  “I’ll send you the notes if you like?” Schuyler called after her. “What’s your e-mail?” She shook her head. “No thank you.” But at that moment Principal Lorraine appeared in a puff of something and handed them all a leaflet with the names and contact details of all attendees, who she announced could share information and ideas inspired by the workshop.

  “I’ll send you roses, then,” he grinned; in fact, Robyn was pretty sure he winked, and, as she was walking out the front door of the school, she received what could only be described as an inappropriate text from him about his desire to harrass her. Schuyler had spelled “harass” incorrectly, and Robyn was charmed. Ryan crafted everything from texts to e-mails as if they would one day be bequeathed to the New York Public Library.

  It was a bad sign that she was becoming irritated with Ryan again. She did not put her wedding ring back on.

  January

  Quinn’s tenth birthday party was to be held at Chelsea Piers. Robyn found the invitation in the trash can by accident—her reading glasses had fallen off as she poured the end of her mug of herb tea into it, and the soggy red paper had stuck to her right lens.

  She retrieved the card, smoothing it out by the side of the sink. Ryan had junked it, but that was okay. They had agreed that all party invitations on the West Side were to be destroyed before the children found them. It was just too expensive to go, a hundred dollars by the time you’d got there and back and bought the sort of present, educational and fun, that would be expected, and you could always get stuck with paying for drinks and popcorn as you waited for the wall-climbing class to start, or the pottery to warm up, or the clown to dress. But she told Ryan that Madison had found it and demanded to go (her lying had become so much more practiced as a result of the few months of the double life of Robyn; she had learned never to embellish and had eliminated any verbal tics that might give her away), and he agreed, adding that Schuyler seemed a good guy. Not the brightest spark in the fuse box but an unusually tolerable member of the lucky sperm club, ha, ha, ha (this was how Ryan always referred to the scions of independently wealthy families). Schuyler had made a point of telling Ryan how much he enjoyed “Fathergate,” and Ryan was never averse to hanging out with people of excellent taste.

  “He has a town house on Charles Street,” Ryan added for no apparent reason, and suggested that they all take Madison to the party. This was not what Robyn wanted at all. And she really wished Ryan had not told her about the town house.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s just that Michael wants you to take him to the movies and I thought we’d split up for the afternoon.”

  She and Madison were late to the party. Robyn had not known what to wear, and then they had to scan the several events going on, the hellish shrieking reverberating high up into the domed ceiling. The place was full of different children, but characterized by the same adult behavior, as parents, or mainly mothers, futilely offered celery sticks and raisins to children who were stuffing handfuls of chips down their throats, and hid empty cola bottles in their bags before other parents arrived to collect their by now hysterical offspring. Finally, Robyn saw Schuyler’s leather jacket in the distance hovering by a balance beam, as Quinn crouched in tearstained refusal before it. Madison ran off to join two girls dressed like or by the Olsen twins, and Robyn made her way over to Schuyler, just as his ex, the climate change denier with the gray pixie cut, appeared.

  “Quinn, it’s a gymnastics party,” she said, trying to disguise her exasperation. “It’s what you said you wanted.”

  “I wanted to tumble!” the boy shouted. “It’s not my fault there’s no tumbling! This is a bullshit party.”

  “Don’t speak to me like that.” She turned to Schuyler, her own eyes reddening. “You shouldn’t let him speak to me like that.”

  “Quinn. Your mother’s right—”

  Even Robyn, predisposed to view Schuyler through town house–tinted glasses, thought this was pathetic. She had endured many similar scenes in her own home, scenes that never ended well. Fortunately, at that moment Big Dave, who was in charge of activities, appeared and, realizing that his sizable tip was diminishing as Quinn’s behavior disintegrated, stepped into the breach.

  “Quinn would like to tumble,” sniffed the ex.

  Robyn could tell that whatever Quinn wanted, Quinn got, so she was not surprised when Big Dave immediately crouched down and started doing forward rolls across the blue exercise mats. Quinn followed until he twisted his right arm beneath him and started crying loudly for his mother, who dutifully sprang toward him despite the fact that Schuyler tried to stop her by hanging on to her sleeve. Schuyler shook his head, and Robyn looked away to avoid the pain-filled, silent exchange between them that she thought told the whole story of their years of reproductive torture.

  When Robyn looked back, Schuyler was watching the other children, Madison in the excitable center, queuing up to swing on the monkey bars. They then both turned and caught sight of Quinn half punching his mother in the chest as she hugged him. Robyn saw in Schuyler’s face his dislike of his own child. Something would have to be done about that, she thought. She asked him if he wanted a coffee. He looked at her, nodded, and held out his hand. And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she took it and led him toward the machine.

  He told her that the reason he and his wife had not been able to have more children was not her highly strung, stale-egg infertility but his own less-than-zero sperm count. The doctors had tried to make him feel better by mixing sperm from two donors with the couple of sperm they had surgically retrieved from his bladder before the in vitro, but when he looked at Quinn he knew there was no part of his DNA anywhere near him, the conclusive proof of this being that Quinn loved anchovies. Schuyler had gone to great lengths to source anchovy-flavored chips, and he knew no other children would eat the pizza because it was covered in them.

  “Anchovies make me barf,” said Schuyler, and they both smiled.

  “I’m sorry I came on so strong to you,” he continued. “I’ve been taking my therapist’s advice to have some fun. It’d been a long time and, boy, it’s amazing how much fun you can have with the ladies if you’re . . . up-front.”

  Robyn tried to convey a mixture of understanding and suitably ladylike shock, although she knew as well as he did it’s amazing how much fun you can have with the gentlemen if you’re up-front.

  “I liked all the flowers,” she said primly. “My office looks like a funeral parlor.”

  “That doesn’t sound very good,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean it how it came out,” she replied, not meeting his eyes, though in fact it was exactly what she meant. It was just that something, not someone, had died.

  “Well, anyway, I’m sorry. For all of it.”

  This was a reference to the increasingly suggestive texts he had sent, often late at night, and his one attempt to leave a phone-sex message on her mobile. It had made her laugh so loudly that Ryan had become convinced they were so happy these days they should renew their vows.

  “But now I want to get serious.” He meant it. Robyn adopted an intense listening pose.

  “I want another child, Robyn. I don’t care how. I deserve a second chance.”

  He crushed his plastic cup in his hand and threw it so it landed in a bin twenty feet away. He had excellent ball skills and, unl
ike Quinn, Robyn suspected he was extremely gymnastic. Then he smiled, looked at his watch, and announced he had to go find the only cake shaped like a fish in the fridge. It had silver icing shaped into gills and everything, and some pastry chef in the Meatpacking District had slaved over it after his/her shift the previous night.

  Robyn knew she was losing him. She recognized from the look on his face that he wasn’t looking for an affair anymore; he wanted a second marriage and a new baby. If that was what she wanted, she reckoned she had about eight weeks to snare him before some gorgeous twenty-eight-year-old, tired of dating and making excuses for the lack of commitment from her male contemporaries (“I feel sorry for him, actually”), would listen to her mother and see Schuyler Robinson not as a tired middle-aged man but a good catch.

  Robyn had some serious thinking to do, so she wandered outside and stared over the river. Ryan would be fine, she knew that. He had the ultimate relationship survival skill, self-absorption. It was Madison and Michael who had to be considered. She was not an evil person, after all, but wasn’t the fashion of subservience to your children out of vogue?

  Weren’t things going back to the fifties and Betty Draper–style parenting (a cigarette and a slap) these days?

  A bird, a big ugly gull, squawked overhead. She looked up, idly wondering if this might be a sign. The bird released an enormous shit that landed on the side of a yacht called The Anemone. The sign was that in New York City, everyone dumps on everyone else eventually.

  That night, she had a long bath in Jo Malone nutmeg-and-ginger oil and allowed Ryan to glimpse her moving seductively along the tiny corridor to their tiny bedroom. He followed her, meaningfully throwing his notes onto the floor and removing his T-shirt flirtatiously, a long-standing sign between them that he was available and ready to go. She laughed but escaped from his embraces to run back into the bathroom. “Just a minute,” she giggled, and closed and locked the door.

  Then she lay down on the yellowing bath mat, gathered herself, opened her legs, and, taking a deep breath, stuck two fingers inside herself, feeling for the wire threads of her Mirena coil. She found the first easily, then wiggled for the other. Eureka! She closed her eyes and pulled, hard, until the coil came out in her hand, clear, sticky fecund mucus stretching round it like chewed chewing gum. She wrapped the plastic in toilet tissue and threw it into the bin.

  May

  Christy noticed Robyn immediately on Sixth Avenue, although Julia had said that the effects of Robyn’s new life on Charles Street had transformed her to the point of unrecognizability. It was not just the obvious physical changes, her clothes, her skin, her haircut, it was that she smiled.

  “Maybe it’s love?” Julia had suggested, then begun laughing so hard the muscle she had pulled during Soul Cycle went into spasm.

  “You shouldn’t be so cynical,” said Christy. “Just because Schuyler’s rich doesn’t mean she didn’t fall for him.”

  Julia recognized that this was a sore spot for Christy and regained her composure. Christy decided there was solidarity between her and Robyn, and determined to be very nice to her if she ever saw her again. She had resolved to ask her to join her book group, until she remembered Schuyler’s ex was in it, so instead she asked her if she wanted to go for lunch in Bar Pitti. Robyn was delighted, telling Christy she had all the time in the world these days as she had stopped working “outside the home,” they both said quickly, as soon as she had moved in with Schuyler. She had also become a born-again virgin, so there was no embarrassment for her in inquiring solicitously after Vaughn’s health.

  It was only when they sat down at their table, and Robyn removed her fun-fur gilet, that Christy noticed she was definitely carrying more weight up front. She said nothing. Robyn had always been a little heavy, but Christy wondered if Julia was right and the weight gain was a sign of repenting at leisure. (Christy, with her anorexic worldview, could never accept that a woman could be fat and happy.) But Robyn caught her glance and announced proudly that she had not been hitting the dessert trolley but that she was pregnant.

  “How?” said Christy, too sharply. When they had read The Handmaid’s Tale, Schuyler’s ex had told everyone about his lack of sperm motility.

  Robyn, sagely accepting that in the circles in which she now mixed there was no such thing as too much information, answered calmly that the baby was in fact Ryan’s, the result of a moment of passion inspired by the realization that their life together had ended (Christy blinked a little at this) but that Schuyler had been overjoyed at a second chance at fatherhood.

  She shrugged happily and ordered a primi pasta and the kidneys in a cream sauce.

  “Everything’s great. Ryan’s living with his colleague from the gallery on West Eleventh, so the kids see us both all the time. Nothing’s really changed for them. Except they’ve got two happy parents.”

  Christy was disoriented by the matter-of-factness of it all. She ordered two primi salads, one beet, one artichoke, and wanted to ask how life could be so straightforward, but felt she could not without revealing her own private torments, so instead she said, “So you met Schuyler and you knew he was the one and you just went for it?”

  “I’d been unhappy for a long time. And there was just one moment when I was standing by the water, and I saw a beautiful white bird and it skimmed up into the clouds, flying free, and I knew what I felt and I thought, Robyn, you need to fly free, too.”

  Christy had no idea Robyn was such a poet.

  “I bumped into Lucy Lovett the other day and told her, and she said it was another wonderful/terrible New York story. So Lucy.”

  Robyn paused as she was overtaken by heartburn. “Then she said something else. She said I had taken on the city and I’d won. I didn’t have a clue what she meant.” Robyn’s heartburn eased, but her confusion did not. “What do you think?”

  Christy rolled her eyes dismissively.

  “Robyn, I don’t know what Lucy’s going on about half the time,” she said. “Julia says it’s like Mornington Crescent, whatever that means, and it’s a cultural thing, but she seems to understand her.”

  But Christy did understand. Lucy had meant that Robyn had exactly the right combination of bravery and ruthlessness required for success in New York, and when the opportunity for a new life had presented itself, she had taken it. Christy knew this because when her opportunity had come, she had not.

  “Julia adores her,” said Robyn meaningfully.

  Christy smiled weakly and stabbed an artichoke.

  “I think I really love Schuyler,” Robyn continued, “but I’m not going to lie. I really love my new life, too. It’s a better fit for me. I’ve been on a long, tough journey, and this is the right ending. I don’t feel guilty about anything. I’m riding into the sunset. Ooh. The baby’s moving.”

  She said this blithely, her unabashed reincarnation as a Real Housewife complete, and then stood up to go to the bathroom, explaining that the baby had kicked her in the bladder. Christy felt like someone had kicked her in the heart.

  When Robyn returned, Christy was examining the dessert menu. To Robyn’s surprise, Christy said she would share the chocolate mousse, and they started talking about private schools.

  cabin fever

  Julia’s trick was to cook the turkey upside down. This guaranteed moist juicy breast meat and not the white sawdust-tasting astronaut-chew food people were used to. She had learned this from a cookery demonstration she went to the year she had lived in London, during which she had embraced the full Victorian ideal of Christmas, the holly wreaths, traditional English carols, even brussels sprouts, with the zeal of a convert. Ever since, she strove annually to have at least fifteen family members sitting round her dining table pretending they liked one another, for, as she always said, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any alcohol-fueled arguments.”

  Last year her teenage nephew had obliged by setting fire to his
hair gel with the end of a joint and, although Kristian had saved the day and possibly the youth’s chances of future successful sexual congress by hurling a jug of pomegranate bellini over him, when Julia’s unmarried brother Andy, in whose bag the illegal substance had been found, explained that he was taking it for medical reasons only (he lived in Vermont), he and Julia had had a violent dispute, ending in a headlock straight out of WrestleMania, about how Andy had ruined everyone’s life with his burgeoning addictive behaviors the year before Julia had left for Barnard.

  So Julia had promised Kristian that they would experience the magic of the next holiday season alone, just the four of them, in the cottage upstate, and her parents clearly felt the same way, as they booked themselves onto a three-week cruise in the Caribbean in order to avoid the four days toward the end of December when all hell broke loose. But as November drew to a close, Julia started feeling like a failure, and, under the pretext that it was good for the children to experience the communal table, she invited Lucy and Christy and their families, and for different reasons they both said yes.

  Kristian was sanguine about it. He wanted Julia to be happy, because over Thanksgiving, which Julia considered merely a warm-up in the turkey stakes, they had made a Big Life Decision, one he was sure was the right thing for their family. But he worried Julia had not fully reconciled herself to it. He knew this because she had not told Christy, and this was hanging over her like the scent of the eucalyptus candles she began lighting as soon as she woke up on Christmas Eve.

  Outside, the elements had bent to her will. It was picture-perfect. A fresh dusting of snow had glazed the garden, the bare trees stuck into the white like twiglets in icing, and Romy’s snowwoman, accessorized with yellow straw hair, a conical bra made out of plastic cups, and false matchstick eyelashes, stood proud in the middle of it, like a snow Madonna on the Blond Ambition Tour.

  It gladdened Julia’s heart to see Romy and Lee running outside in their fleeces, hurling themselves onto the ground and making snow angels. Kristian was happily hauling logs on the sled. All she needed was Judy Garland singing, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. . . .” on the sound track, and that was easily remedied by pressing the remote play on her iPod, as a selection of holiday classics was already ready to go. She peeled squash and sang along, thinking of Judy and her heartbreaking voice that could bring tears to your eyes with the tiny sob at the end of a line. “From now on our troubles will be out of sight.” Julia fervently hoped so. She had color-coordinated her two Christmas trees in the hope that she would find the perfect moment with Christy, the two of them alone in front of the glowing fire, or outside, ruddy-cheeked in the snowscape, where she would make her announcement and they would hug and be happy. That was how she planned it, anyway, and no one knew better than Julia the power of setting up a scene correctly.