No One Could Have Guessed the Weather

by Anne-Marie Casey

  “That’ll never happen.”

  “You’re right.” She glanced at her watch. “Gotta go. The new tenant wants me to change the blinds to match the sofas. He’s German,” she added, as if this were an explanation.

  Lucy was dragged back to the moment by the appalling noise of chalk and nail scratching on a blackboard and saw Ryan, central-casting creative writing teacher in glasses and a brown corduroy jacket, his body language indicating his enjoyment of this intoxicating combination of pedagogy and tight jeans, scrawling words with a flamboyant flick of his right wrist. Stop it! she thought, as she caught herself doing this, holding herself back and observing as, despite Julia’s words ringing in her ears, she had resolved to stop the distant thing. Surreptitiously she slid her plastic magic magnifier out of her wallet and peered through it at the blackboard, on which was now written ONE THOUSAND WORDS A DAY. She glanced around to see her fellow participants dutifully copying this into their notebooks. Lemminglike, she followed suit.

  Ryan spun round, ran his chalky hand through his boyish crop of hair, and grinned. “That’s all you need to know,” he said.

  Lucy reevaluated. When Ryan was with Robyn she had never thought him the remotest bit attractive.

  “One thousand words a day,” he continued. “That’s the thing about writing. You sit down and you do it. I hope this course will give you some tools, but if you can’t commit to the thousand-words-a-day rule”—he paused, catching the eye of the most obviously attractive female in the room, a twenty-five-year-old social studies student called Dianne—“stand up, take your stuff, and leave!”

  Lucy wondered if anyone had ever actually gone at this moment and what would happen if she did, but Ryan was now circling the room, soliciting introductions and expressions of intent. There was the lovely Dianne, who wanted to express herself. Roger and Stu, who wanted to do that, too (Stu on the instruction of his therapist). Marian, a stick-thin eighteen-year-old, who planned a career in songwriting, and her mother, serious-looking Jennifer, who wanted to do “something for herself.” Betty, an unfriendly, wizened septuagenarian who really did have the face she deserved, tut-tutted at this (although Lucy knew exactly what Jennifer meant) before ranting on about why all contemporary fiction sucked for about five minutes, “It’s psychotherapy masquerading as plot,” and finally announcing that she had been working on her memoir for the last ten years.

  Finally, Ryan turned to Lucy and actually saw her. By the way he double-took, she knew he was trying to remember how he knew her, failing, and then worrying about the increasing number of senior moments he had experienced recently, so she put him out of his misery by declaring that their kids used to go to the same school. She told the room that she had studied literature, worked in publishing (when Ryan flinched, she assured him she had been a lowly editorial assistant in nonfiction), taken time out to be with her children and support her husband’s career (when Betty flinched she wanted to say that Richard’s career was brilliant no longer and they were all the better for it, but it felt too convoluted and disloyal), but somehow a few years’ break had turned into ten as if by magic. Then she told them that she had turned forty this year and, although everyone said to her it shouldn’t be a crossroads, it sure as hell felt like one, so she had decided to get off her ass and try something she had always felt she could do. For, after all, what was the point of reading a book and thinking “I could do that” when the only valid response would be, “Maybe, but you didn’t, did you?”

  Jennifer smiled and clapped her hands together, reflecting the waft of approval emanating from round the room; even Betty could not think of a sneering riposte, and Ryan nodded in a sincere manner. Lucy stared down at her empty pad with the date neatly written across it, considering how pathetic it was that she could experience an intoxicating sense of achievement simply by speaking in front of strangers.

  To begin, Ryan asked them to think of a headline in a newspaper or on the Internet that they felt could inspire a story. Who were the characters? What were the events? How would they tell it? Lucy immediately thought of an article she had seen in the New York Post and laughed out loud, startling herself as much as everyone else. Ryan looked at her curiously, so she had to explain. The article was about a pensioner who had poisoned forty-seven police officers with dodgy tuna melts over a two-year period.

  “Great,” said Ryan, hoisting himself onto Dianne’s desk, his manly thighs spreading slightly so she had to pull her pencil case away. “Let’s run with that. Betty, who is this woman?”

  Betty was not amused. “Why would you ask me? And why do you assume it’s a woman?”

  “Fair point,” said Ryan, thinking What big ears you have, Granny, and asked Roger for his thoughts. Roger tactfully suggested it was a man called Stu, because he couldn’t think of another name on the spot, who harbored a secret resentment toward the police because—

  “His wife left him for a station sergeant,” piped up Marian. And Jennifer added, “With a big nose,” and they both laughed ruefully in tones redolent of private meaning.

  “Yes,” said Stu in the deep, husky tones of a presenter of late-night jazz, which startled everyone, as he had not spoken up to this point, “and my, I mean Stu’s, restaurant was closed down after I fled to Paris to train as a pastry chef because of malicious claims by my ex and her husband.”

  “This should be set somewhere else,” said Dianne. “How about Corleone. It’s in Sicily.”

  “Do they have tuna melts in Italy?” remarked Betty sourly.

  “If it were an American restaurant they would,” said Ryan, both chivalrous and grammatically correct.

  And Lucy, though silent, was happy. And while she hoped fervently that Ryan would not end the class with any profound statements along the lines of the longest journey beginning with the first step, or some such version relating to a large book and a single letter, as she looked around her she knew it was true.

  Anyway, he didn’t. Ryan was much less annoying as a teacher at night school than as an unhappily married parent you had to make small talk about the school nits epidemic with at the Halloween barbecue.

  • • •

  LUCY TRIED TO GET into a groove. After the boys went to school she would spend half an hour cleaning and tidying the apartment, take the puppy to relieve itself in Tompkins Square Park, walk along First Avenue to Abraço to buy the best cup of coffee in the neighborhood, and then return ready to sit down in front of the laptop. Ceremonially, she placed the coffee on her right, a pad for notes on her left, the puppy by her feet, and then she removed a Post-it from under the desk, the days when they were used to give orders to the staff long gone, and stuck it on the wall in front of her.

  One thousand words a day was written on it.

  That was the easy part.

  She enjoyed the challenge of the writing exercises Ryan set them. She described a memorable incident from her schooldays (this was pure fiction, as she did not want to share the truly memorable ones), she dramatized a historical event from her own perspective (the morning of August 31, 1997, when she had awoken to Camilla shrieking down the hall of their flat in Bayswater that Diana, Princess of Wales, had died), and she wrote a surprising monologue for a fictional character (she imagined that Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind hated Scarlett O’Hara, which was how Lucy herself felt). But once her homework was done, the lure of displacement overwhelmed her. She would stand up, gather the latest of the never-ending piles of washing, and walk to the launderette thinking about the evening’s dinner. Often she took a short detour to see if Hello! had come into the International Newsagents on Fifth Street. One day she rang Julia in desperation, looking for inspiration, but Julia was lost in Beverly Hills, late for a breakfast meeting with someone so famous she couldn’t say who it was, and had just spilled a double macchiato down her James Perse lounging T-shirt while doing a U-turn, so a garbled “Write something you’d like to read yourself”
was the best she could do. It did not help. Lucy struggled to type a single word a day.

  Her fellow classmates did not seem to have such difficulty. She had had a long chat with Roger the previous week about how he had written not one but three unpublished books. He would come home after a day working in the archives of the New York Public Library, cook himself dinner, and then write for a couple of hours. This in itself seemed to give him great pleasure, and he described how seeing letters form his words on the screen in front of him made him feel alive. Lucy found this inspirational. She found the sight of Marian, Dianne, and Jennifer reading their paragraphs out loud to one another before class moving. She came to admire Betty’s dogged refusal to accept that her own life was less valuable or interesting than anyone else’s. Even withdrawn Stu opened up, telling her he loved books because he was fascinated by typefaces and the effect they might or might not have on the reader. Because she had worked in publishing she was able to discuss with him the different meanings of regal Times New Roman or perky Arial or reassuring Rockwell.

  There was no doubt about it, Lucy loved books and words and using phrases like a concatenation of circumstances, but, although comfortable with the life, as she had always relished a certain amount of aloneness, she quickly came to feel that she was not cut out to be a writer. Take adjectives, for example. How could you ever describe something in a new way, a way that wasn’t a cliché? When Lucy thought about the snow at Julia’s over Christmas, the only adjective that came to mind was “white.” It was frustrating and she was useless, and Julia had been quite wrong to give her false hope. She would have to train to be a teacher, the only other profession she could think of to do, despite the fact she disliked all children except her own. She lamented her hubris at length to the puppy inside and outside the apartment, and because the little dog woofed adoringly whenever Lucy paused for breath, passersby thought she was training her and not crazy.

  She was full of fear and self-loathing as, halfway through the course, she trudged into the classroom fifteen minutes late, the sound of the boys’ hysterical refusal to eat their spaghetti ringing in her ears. Ryan introduced her to his partner, Catalina, who had arrived in leather leggings, bearing cupcakes for the break, and at whom Dianne was staring viciously. Perhaps because of the presence of the leather leggings, Ryan was in top form this particular evening, announcing that the session tonight was inspired by William Carlos Williams, doctor and poet, and his philosophy that poetry could be about the everyday circumstances of life. Ryan scribbled NO IDEAS, BUT IN THINGS on the blackboard and allotted the group fifteen minutes to write a free-form poem about a specific incident in their life with no embellishment or allusion other than what actually happened, before disappearing out the door with Catalina.

  Oh, God, thought Lucy. Now it’s like an exam I haven’t prepared for, which was a nightmare she still occasionally endured, sitting bolt upright in the early hours of the morning, trying to remember how to use a slide rule to calculate average speed using distance traveled/time taken. But then she reminded herself that she had always been very good at exams and the trick with an exam was to answer the questions. So she focused on thinking about something that had actually happened that afternoon and, to her amazement, she started to write.

  She had just dotted the full stop at the end when Ryan reappeared, ever so slightly disheveled with what looked like photocopier ink on his neck, and told them to read their poems. Lucy was anxious to get her turn over with so she could concentrate on the others, so she hurried through her effort, which she called “Homework with My Nine-Year-Old.” Dianne point-blank refused. (Lucy guessed she had written about a romantic incident designed to inflame Ryan’s jealousy, then thought better of it.) Marian, in monotone, described hiding in a wardrobe the day her father walked out to live with the woman with the big nose, which left Jennifer in tears as she read her poem about growing a beautiful sunflower from a seed. Roger told of the day he touched a first edition of Leaves of Grass, Betty of her hip replacement, and Stu recalled being on vacation in Jamaica and his taxi driver being shot in front of him, brains spattering all over the windscreen (No wonder he needs a therapist, they all thought).

  Ryan did not congratulate or criticize, he listened and made constructive comments, and all felt proud and energized and excited, apart from Dianne. But now that she had witnessed the reality of Catalina, and was liberated from the burden of flirting with Ryan, she, too, started to concentrate.

  Meanwhile, Lucy’s block had disappeared, risen like a portcullis, allowing invading ideas to storm in, and, as she looked round the room, sentences were forming, images appearing, no ideas, but in things. And wasn’t that what Julia had been trying to say to her all along? Begin with what you see and go from there.

  That evening she came through the door and found Richard half asleep on the sofa, the Times crossword half finished across his chest.

  She leant over and kissed his forehead. His eyes flickered open, and he looked at her and told her she looked beautiful, and he asked her what she had done at her class. She replied that she had written a poem in fifteen minutes and he asked to read it, which she then did. He told her it was good and he was proud of her and she should really give writing a go and, if she did, she’d have to give it at least a year or two to see.

  She lay on top of him, her head pressed into his neck, and whispered, “Thank you” and said she would and what she wanted to thank him for was not only his generosity and support, financial and emotional, but also the gift of taking her seriously, despite all the years and all the reasons not to.

  All she had to do now was take herself seriously.

  HOMEWORK WITH MY NINE-YEAR-OLD

  by LUCY LOVETT

  (with apologies to William Carlos Williams)

  You should walk away

  I tell my son at the kitchen table.

  He looks at me

  Blue-eyed, curious, pencil in hand.

  When the feeling starts,

  I say, the red mist.

  Like Taz the Looney Tune, he says,

  Yes, but Taz never walks away

  so it isn’t the best example.

  When Patrick laughed at me

  it felt like wasps were buzzing

  in my brain. Let them out

  I reply. Now, long division. (A long groan.)

  And, look! You have four bonus words

  for spelling. Paragraph,

  Business, Communication, Literary.

  Oh, sweet Jesus, he mutters,

  glancing up to see if anything explodes.

  But it’s only the sweet corn boiling

  for I have walked away.

  Lucy was touched when Johanna Riordan, great with child, at the end of a wonderful, gossipy lunch in the penthouse, handed her a beautiful leather-bound notebook and a packet of pens. She needed it. She no longer measured out her life with school plays or sports days or soccer tournaments. Ideas and stories were flooding her, images like the woman with a live snake around her neck, the horizontal rain that coursed through the avenues, Robbie peeing in the snow upstate. As she walked through the lobby and saw the handsome doorman playing with a couple of toddlers who lived in the building, Lucy reflected on Johanna’s life, immured in luxury, and what would happen if she fell in love with someone else. She jotted down this idea, which she called “The Doorman,” felt a little guilty, as Johanna had given her the notebook, then remembered what her friend Rosanna had said about changing names. She thought about Rosanna, the first proper writer she had ever been close to, and her heroic struggle to be true to herself as well as those who depended on her. Rosanna had once told her that she loved the movie Julia. Lucy decided that was what she would call her.

  The epic historical novel, the sci-fi spectacular, or the big thriller would have to wait. Lucy had no clue how to write one of those. But if she wrote some stories about events in her life or
the lives of women like and unlike her, it might turn into something. A book that she would buy at an airport, or waiting for a train, or read exhausted in bed, in the twenty minutes her body gave her before she sank into comatose sleep. And if she would read it, maybe someone else would too? But soon she stopped thinking about that. And then she understood what Ryan meant by If you want to write, you just have to write. One thousand words a day. Whatever the ending of your writing, if you have the willpower to do it and it keeps you sane, why not?

  She noted down words to describe her feelings about New York, and soon the city became a character, as real to her as any other. She cut out pictures from magazines and took photographs and stuck them in her notebook. She thought about her life back in London and her life now. What she had wanted to be and what she had become. She thought about sentences and how they might work together, and she wrote incredibly long ones (which sometimes she broke up by using brackets) just for the fun of it. Some days, many days, she wrote nothing; she clawed at a couple of ideas, she stared at the keyboard, she composed a humiliating critique of her ideas by one such as a Miranda Bassett that made her cry.

  Then came the horse course, the Hamptons, the opera with Carmen, and Ryan (Evan), and the Mother from the School she would call Robyn who ran off with the fantastically handled Schuyler Robinson, whose name she would have to keep, at least until copy editing. And finally, she realized that she’d have to be a character herself, or rather a version of herself with some of the tedious and unpleasant bits edited out. Or maybe left in. Maybe that was the point.

  After three months, she gathered all her notes into one document, but before she could start she needed a title. She looked out the window at the last sleet of spring and typed the first thing that came into her head.

  no one

  could have

  guessed the weather