Right After the Weather

by Carol Anshaw

  * * *

  The book she has on hold is a collection of letters Vita wrote to Virginia Woolf. Cate has read the current draft of the play. Also two biographies. The corkboard in her workshop is tacked up with photos of

  Vita;

  her girlfriends (Cate has found thirteen so far plus a couple of random guys);

  her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson (also busily queer, conveniently closeted);

  her neglected (sometimes totally abandoned) sons in ill-fitting suits; and

  her garden (major).

  The space she has pulled into is right in front of the library entrance, marked LOADING ZONE.

  She punches the flashers, tells Neale, “If you see a ticket person—”

  Parking enforcement, once a lazy, city-run revenue effort, has been sold off to a ruthless corporation based somewhere in the Middle East that conducts a reign of terror. Meter readers in Day-Glo vests troll relentlessly, ubiquitously. Everyone now lives in fear of huge tickets.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll take the wheel.” Sometimes the smallest thing like this blooms into a nervous consideration of what would she do if Neale weren’t there. To shift into the driver’s seat and, of course, everything else. Cate travels with a sense of safety, that if a trapdoor opened beneath her, Neale would grab her before she went down.

  * * *

  Inside, she goes to the on-hold shelves, which means a journey that requires running a gauntlet between two long Wi-Fi access tables. Any time Cate has come here, every monitor has someone sitting in front of it. Some of these are regular people, but more fall into the irregular category. Irregular and often talking softly, as though they have a Bluetooth thing, but they don’t. Or irregular in their intense smell. Today’s smelly person is a huge guy with a tattooed neck. The tattoo, half-covered by his jacket collar, appears to be of Daffy Duck. She catches a nice whiff off him as she passes to, then again fro, on her way back to the checkout desk. Not a urine smell. More like a bad egg. The patrons near him seem oblivious. Oblivious or resigned.

  * * *

  While she’s standing in line to check out, Cate reads a few of the Vita letters. She is so happy to have a shot at this gig. Tons of possibilities for the sets. Long Barn, the Tudor country house where Vita lived during the 1920s, and Sissinghurst, a crumbling castle Vita and Harold restored in the 1930s, are going to be amalgamated into one interior. Serious surroundings for romantic treachery. Treachery because Vita had nothing beyond sex and flattery on offer for Woolf, or the others who came before, or the ones who followed. She didn’t jettison them, just gently set them to the side and kept writing them flattering notes while she moved on to someone new. The teacup of jealousy stirred and stirred again.

  * * *

  “After their first night together,” Cate says, getting into the driver’s seat and tossing the book into Neale’s lap, “Virginia went out and bought gloves. I think she felt her hands were now erotic elements and needed to be covered. Poor Virginia. All that genius, but she didn’t see that Vita only liked beginnings.”

  “I see you’re on a first-name basis with both of them now.”

  “Well, the whole thing is pretty compelling. Aristocracy and Bloomsbury and queerness. Historically, all that rustling in the back of the closet. All the codes and signals. The letters within letters, the pinky rings. Something delicious about all the secrecy. Now everything’s so in the open, we’re free from fear and oppression, but we’ve traded it for being commonplace. Queer’s as boring as straight now.”

  “Oh, I think you still have a little cachet. You still have a bit of shadow. There are still places where you could get beat up.”

  “I love thinking of Vita getting Virginia into bed. Seducing someone so physically vaporous. So graceful and elegant, so inexperienced. Then add in the fragility from her mental illness. She absolutely needed someone to touch her. I like thinking of her being helped out of her long skirt and dowdy underwear. It’s the first time in a while I’ve been so ramped up about work. Not since the last play I did for Adam. I’m thinking this will be sort of a fresh start for me.”

  shrimp platter

  When she has turned off the ignition, Cate spends a few minutes lingering in the driver’s seat, gathering herself up. During this short pause, the car cools and the shrimp platter, which has been bumping around on the passenger seat on the way up to Evanston, nice and close to the heat vent, now gives off a pale pink odor. A day in the refrigerator has brought a gray tinge to its initially vibrant pink. She sees that several shrimp have worked loose from their tight, military formation around the central cocktail sauce cup. She pries off the plastic dome, cracking it in the process, and tucks the deserters back into place. Which only makes them look tampered with. The whole display has now acquired a sullied aura. Also, it seems to have grown since she got it. Only now does she see on its label SERVES 8. She goes around and gently lifts it out of the car like it’s plutonium.

  * * *

  “Really?” This is Ricky’s response to the shrimp. “Did you win this somewhere? Like a shrimp festival?”

  “I found it in the alley,” Cate tells her.

  Her mother puts the platter on the counter, just above, Cate notices, the slide-out garbage drawer. Poised for whisking. The counter is new, made of blue-tinted, polished concrete, banded with a matte-finish metal. She hasn’t seen this before.

  “I left a message on your phone,” Ricky tells Cate. “I wanted to remind you to bring anchovies. I forgot to pick them up at the store.” An essential component of the Caesar salad Cate makes for any occasion.

  “I so didn’t get that.” She’s on shaky ground here, as she hardly ever listens to her voice mail, just looks at the call log and guesses what the messages probably say. Then she looks around and sees the entire kitchen has been totally remodeled since the last time she visited. “Hey, this looks great.” She wipes her hand across the cool surface of the counter; it’s like worn rock in an undersea grotto. She looks down. “Wow. This floor.”

  “Repurposed basketball court.” Ricky’s beaming now. “It’ll survive the nuclear winter.” This house is her mother’s masterpiece, constantly being revised and improved on. Her next-door neighbors hate her. Their children, they complain, have spent their whole childhood under a dust cloud, their hearing shredded by the din of power saws.

  Cate thinks she was last here maybe a month ago. Ricky moves fast and efficiently when she wants something done. This is part of what makes her successful in her job.

  “What’s up with dinner?” Cate says. “Where are the simmering pots, the homey aromas?” This is a joke. Cate has to go back at least a decade to come up with a holiday dinner actually prepared in this kitchen.

  “We got it from Stella Brown this year. Her menus are always interesting. Your Caesar, that can be our traditional element. I’m too beat from the Christmas ramp-up at the store. Nothing is going right, plus I think they’re trying to edge me out, or at least over. There’s a kid they’ve brought in from New York, from the flagship. Haydn. Right. So anyway, with the catering, I just have to warm up everything. It’ll be fine. And then we’ll be done and we will have gotten through another holiday.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds memorable. Moving, even.”

  “Why don’t you go in the den and let Jason know you’re here? He’s only reading. Some giant book on tree grafting. He’d probably welcome an interruption. So he can rest his wrists.”

  “I’ll wait until dinner.” She never knows what to say to Jason. Although he is only a couple of years older than Cate, they inhabit different galaxies. He is her mother’s third husband, a River North florist Ricky uses for special functions at the store. Although Cate is mildly creeped out by the two of them being together, she also understands that objectively, their pairing probably isn’t all that ridiculous. Her mother, in her mid-sixties, is still attractive in a slightly sharpened way. And still powerful in the world of retail design. If she wants a new man, she can still
pluck one from a moderately deep pond. Jason is the latest koi. Except for encyclopedic knowledge about flowers and plants, he is vapor. Even his vices are recessive. He’s vaguely alcoholic. Nothing showy or embarrassing, just that he always has a drink at hand and, as an evening wears on, recedes farther and farther into a quiet, comfortable niche. He is kind of hypnotic to watch. His eyes are heavily lidded. His hair is a pale color that’s neither gray nor blond, and it’s thick, cut short like a scrub brush. He has a calibrated amount of stubble. He’s small, maybe even a little smaller than Ricky.

  * * *

  They sit on high stools at the kitchen’s island. Jason pours the three of them such ample glasses of red wine that the bottle is nearly drained on the first pass. Fiestaware serving dishes filled with catered food slide back and forth across the concrete. They take trial-size dabs and slices. Macadamia-crusted sweet potatoes. Seared duck breast with Chinese plum sauce. Green beans with lemongrass. A berry cobbler topped with whipped cream. Ricky does her usual picking and prodding with the tines of her fork. Once she told Cate about the fashion models’ trick of eating tissue paper to stave off hunger. That plus hooking themselves up to vitamin drips so they could make it through shoots. She related this, of course, as though it was horrifying. But on a higher frequency, Cate caught a note of respect. Jason shows almost no interest in food; it’s just a colorful accessory to a drink—like a coaster or swizzle stick. Both of them do, however, take heaps of her Caesar, the recipe they praise fatuously as world-famous, but the joke did get started because the salad is quite good. Today she put in extra Worcestershire to make up for the missing anchovies.

  A second bottle of wine is opened. Jason uncorks like a sommelier. He offers the cork to Ricky. The two of them always drink excellent wine. Ricky knows the wine buyer for the store’s restaurants. She gets both the employee discount and good advice.

  Jason says, “We meant to get down to see your play.”

  “It closed so fast.” As she says this, Ricky scrapes, with the side of her fork, the slight film of plum sauce off the edge of a piece of duck.

  “You dodged a bullet, trust me,” Cate says. She doesn’t mention the New York play. If the opportunity falls through, at least it won’t be placed in the long failure column in her mother’s thick ledger on Cate. Not that either of them acknowledges the existence of the ledger.

  “In the theater, though, even if you get a stinker,” her mother says, “I guess at least it’s something new, a new challenge. As opposed to Christmas in the world of retail. All that red.” She takes a deep drink of wine. “Not to mention the green.”

  Both of Cate’s parents have careers in the profitable levels of design. Cate sees she probably should have gone some other route entirely—flight school, cardiology—so as not to be so continuously and unfortunately compared to them.

  “You should have brought someone along,” her mother says, looking at all the uneaten food. “A chum. Someone with a holiday spirit. Graham even.” Ricky likes to bring Graham into the conversation. He’s male, also the most financially successful person Cate has been attached to. Really, the most financially successful person either of them knows.

  “Everyone was busy. Or not into holidays.”

  “What about the redhead?” Jason turned up in the lobby of the Evanston theaters a while back when she and Maureen were on an early date. He was alone. He likes to go to movies by himself.

  “Redhead?” This information has perked up her mother’s interest.

  “Someone new. I met her in a cage fight.”

  “You should’ve brought her,” Ricky says. Cate thinks Ricky and Maureen might even enjoy each other. They come at life with a similar ruthlessness, although Ricky’s is aboveboard. She’s trying to beat the world at its own game. Maureen is palming aces. But, of course, Ricky couldn’t like Maureen, on principle, her principle.

  “Right. You can’t even look at my girlfriends directly, just sideways. Like they’re solar eclipses or nuclear tests in the desert.”

  “Your sexual orientation isn’t a big problem, just peculiar and a little embarrassing. Like some odd hobby I have to explain away to friends. Bavarian folk dancing. Like you’re always lurching off to Munich for festivals.” Ricky goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of sparkling water. “Plus, of course, it’s sordid.”

  This last comment isn’t part of their little sparring routine. It lies on the other side of a barely discernable line. Jason sees this, and takes the awkward silence as an opportunity to head back to the den and his tree book.

  Ricky presses on. “Let’s just say you’re not what I was planning on. I wanted someone who would marry a lawyer and have a couple of interesting kids and then the husband would have an affair, but they’d get through it, and she’d get into local politics. She’d run for alderman—”

  “At least you didn’t have anything specific in mind.”

  Her mother moves along to the next station in this conversation. “I have some stuff for you. I was going through all the crap in the attic.”

  “Sounds promising. Crap from the attic.”

  Ricky goes upstairs, then comes back down with a small cardboard box. “In case you can use any of this in a play sometime. This is all from my grade school days.”

  Cate pulls out a turquoise transistor radio.

  “Oh wow,” she says, unfolding a felt skirt with a poodle appliqued on its front. “You could get good money for this on eBay.”

  “No, you take it.”

  Cate pulls a long piece of green gabardine from the bag. “I never saw this. You never showed it to me. What is it, a sash?”

  “I know it must be hard for you to see me as a Girl Scout, but as you can see, I picked up quite a few merit badges.”

  “I see. Yes. Here you go. Swimming. Campfire.”

  “That’s the symbol for camping. Making a fire was one requirement. But we also had to pitch a tent. The old kind, with stakes. String up food from a tree branch to keep it from animals. Dig a latrine hole.”

  “What’s this?” Cate rubs a thumb over another embroidered circle.

  “Pathfinder. You had a little map and had to find your way out of a place in the woods.”

  “That sounds a little risky. What if they lost a kid?”

  “I think it was a small patch of woods. I don’t remember any of the badges being that hard to get. But I was in, like, fourth grade. They were solid little accomplishments.”

  “Don’t you want to keep this?”

  “I’m all about getting rid of stuff now. I don’t want to hang on to anything I can imagine myself fondling when I’m ninety in assisted living, showing it to my home healthcare aide. Telling her I was a little pathfinder.”

  “Yeah,” Cate says, adding a little social awareness to the conversation, “while she probably arrived here in an overcrowded boat and worked her way up here through the Everglades, then hitching rides with truckers. Washing up in gas station restrooms. Sleeping—”

  “Yes. I think we’ve got the picture,” Ricky says. “The thing is, now that I have so much past, it’s like I’m dragging it behind me and I want to lighten the load. Looking back turns out to not be all that interesting.”

  * * *

  “Are you going to see your father for Christmas?”

  “Just before.”

  “I hate when you go down there. I always think you’re going to be disappeared. Your ear will come back to me in a FedEx envelope. And I’ll have to be one of those powerless, cynical women. Like in an old Joan Didion novel. Drinking at the airport bar. Bleakly scanning the crowd for you.”

  “I know. I think about that every time I go. But really, nothing bad is going to happen. Dad picks me up at the airport.”

  “Is he still with the amazon?”

  “Yes. They’re a pretty solid thing. And she’s not an amazon, just a powerful person.”

  That’s all Ricky wants to hear about Seneca. “Can you get me some Ambien while you’re there? I’m
almost out. And whatever else looks interesting. Do you remember that yellow cough medicine you got me once, the one where you had to already be in the bed before you took it?”

  Cate’s single most important goal in life is not turning into her mother. Still, she takes her money.

  When Cate is leaving, Ricky says, “I’m not going to have a day off between now and Boxing Day.” She almost forgets the money, the thin, folded pad of fifties she presses into Cate’s hand at the end of visits. Cate hates that she takes these, especially hates dawdling around, as she is doing now, until her mother remembers and goes to find her purse.

  * * *

  The heat in her car has rejuvenated a residual shrimpy aroma. She sees a couple of texts from Maureen, who actually did want to come along today.

  on my way

  Cate texts back, tosses her phone onto the passenger seat. She takes Ricky’s cash, hikes herself up in her seat to slide it into her back pocket, then starts the engine.