Right After the Weather

by Carol Anshaw

  “Let me text Maureen. Tell her you’ve already tried this stuff.”

  Right away a reply buzzes in.

  bludout worthless. do you have any magnesium chalk around there?

  Instead of replying sure, cases of it, Cate texts back: thanks!, clicks her phone off, and slips it in her back pocket, then turns to Neale.

  “Let me help you up.” Using her hands like blades, she awkwardly hoists Neale by her armpits. This proves to be a difficult negotiation. “Getting down on the floor might have been a bad move for you so soon.”

  “Fuck,” Neale says when she’s up, rearranging herself over her feet, shaking one foot out of sleep. She’s missing a tooth, far enough toward the front to be noticeable. Cate hadn’t registered this before. “Little Billy Bob thing you’ve got going here.” Cate taps a finger against Neale’s cheek.

  “Cold.” Referring to Cate’s fingertips. Meanwhile, Cate is adding up the damage Neale has sustained.

  “Oh man. So much happened before I arrived. If only I hadn’t been running late—”

  “Oh, please don’t get into if only thinking. There’s no end to that. You’d have to go back to if Ricky was using her diaphragm that night, she wouldn’t have had you and you wouldn’t have been there to help me. Things might’ve gone worse if you’d been on time. They might’ve been facing a different direction. The way it went down, you had the jump on them. The element of surprise.”

  “I was just so furious I didn’t think to be afraid. I was Liam Neeson in those movies where he’s always rescuing his daughter from international sex-trafficking operations.”

  “There was more than one of those? How could his daughter keep winding up in that same situation? She’d have to be pretty unlucky.”

  “I think his wife gets taken in the next one. I think it’s a business that’s hard to get out of. Oh, I have to tell you. Ricky’s embarrassed by the whole thing. She would’ve preferred a gun, maybe a dagger. Something dramatic and avenging, but also neat and clean. Maybe a fencing sword. She referred to my weapon as a Crock-Pot, to make the whole business sound a little goofy. Maybe rural.”

  “You can always count on Ricky. She always comes through.”

  Cate sees belatedly that she’s going to have to open Neale’s can of pop for her. “Sit down. In this chair. Not back down on the floor. Do you have any straws? I think you’re going to need one to drink this.” She rummages through a few drawers and comes up with one still in its McDonald’s wrapper.

  “I have to keep the studio open. I can get somebody to sub for my three classes, but to make up for that extra salary, I’ll have to be over there most of the time, manning the desk, and that’s going to be it for a few weeks, maybe longer. They say the wrist is going to take its time. I hate that he did this to me. Put me out of business.”

  A queasiness floats up. Cate identifies it. “I don’t like that knowing him is something we share.”

  “But we don’t really share any of what happened. First it was my experience, then I was out cold while it was being your experience. I knew him when he was alive. You knew him while he was dying.”

  “Okay” is what Cate says, although this is not the response she was hoping for. The assault is the worst thing they have ever shared, but also the most significant. As circumstances arranged themselves, she rescued Neale, but if their positions had been switched, she knows Neale would’ve done the same for her. For Cate, saving Neale has eliminated whatever thin space was between them. Neale has had a different response. She has the look of someone at the end of her own private dock, looking seaward toward a fogged horizon. When she pulls back into herself, she is looking around what used to just be her kitchen. Cate tries to help. “You don’t have to stay here. You could move to a blander neighborhood. Or even just a frumpy one. West of Ashland. No one will think you’re a wimp if you get out of Dodge.”

  “You know what I hate most? I hate that from here on this will be the centerpiece of our friendship. That we used to have a regular friendship and now we have this thing with weights all over, dangling from it.”

  This is so not how Cate sees things. In the first place, she has never thought of their friendship as regular. She thinks of it as way big enough to accommodate what happened. Nothing in this conversation, though, is reinforcing these assumptions.

  Neale is fixed on the matter of the house. “I don’t think I have what it would take to rehab someplace else, and I won’t get enough for this place to buy anything but another fixer-upper. I’d have to look at all those listings that say, ‘tons of potential.’ I wish that house all the best, but right now I don’t have whatever it would take to help it realize its destiny.”

  Cate gets stuck in a long pause, then pulls her random, sorrowful thoughts into some sort of action. “What do you say we go get the magnesium whatever for the floor and pick up some Vietnamese sandwiches on the way back. You and Joe and I can eat spicy sandwiches here and start reclaiming your kitchen, the way trees take back abandoned parking lots.”

  Neale disappears for a few minutes, then comes back with two bathroom rugs, drops them over the offending patch of floor. “All right. Rock and roll.” When they get to the door, she shouts up the stairs to Joe, “Don’t open the door for anyone!”

  breathing room

  The Tuesday Molly insisted Cate come to New York turns out to be Christmas Eve, and the important meeting turns out to be drinks with her and Lauren at a bar in the Village. Nothing gets discussed that couldn’t have been handled over the phone or through email, but it’s not until Cate is back in her hotel room that she realizes the meeting was really just a command performance. A reminder that Cate is in their service.

  In an unexpected way this summons turns out to be a blessing. Instead of heading back to Chicago right away, she lies to Maureen that she needs to stay through the holiday to do some complicated measuring while the theater is dark. What she actually does with her Christmas is sleep through the morning, then scour Yelp for a restaurant that’s open and has a turkey-dinner special. From there she walks south through the short afternoon, and through a lower Manhattan that’s on pause. This allows her to be a rare sort of alone. She’s purchased a bit of freedom from everything that’s just happened and whatever complications might be rolling in.

  auld acquaintance

  A middle-aged guy dressed as a New Year’s baby is walking up Halsted in a sash and a diaper under an open down coat. It’s not even 5 p.m.

  “No problem,” Cate says.

  Paint cans and pans rattle in the back as they drive. They pass an antiabortion billboard on Ashland that says AT 9 WEEKS BABIES HAVE FINGERPRINTS.

  “Doesn’t that seem a little early to worry about that?” Neale says. “I mean, considering they can’t really get out to commit crimes.”

  She and Neale and Sailor are planning to use the long, last night of the year to obliterate the current version of Neale’s kitchen. They are painting it red and yellow and blue. These are the colors of Frida Kahlo’s kitchen in Mexico City. Neale saw a feature in a decorating magazine and kept the pages.

  They’ll have the house to themselves for the project. Joe is on a three-day family Caribbean cruise with Kiera and her parents. This is their present to him, distracting scenery and all. Neale resisted at first; it seemed too lavish a gift, but when they told her how cheap the cruise was, she caved.

  “Apparently it’s almost cheaper to be on a cruise now than to live your regular life at home,” she tells Cate. “The boat putters around the Caribbean for four days from one formatted fun place to another, beaches set up for snorkeling and parasailing. At night, the disco has teen dances. Although Joe pretended he was too cool for that sort of thing, I could tell he was really pretty psyched.”

  * * *

  Maureen is dressing up and taking herself to a big LGBT charity dinner dance. She wanted to take Cate, but Cate is still a long way off from dancing, even from dinnering. Maureen did not take this view, not at all. Apparently in
her world New Year’s Eve is a big deal. She wouldn’t speak to Cate for three days. Finally she blinked. She’s coming by after the ball, or whatever. Her giving in, weirdly, disappointed Cate.

  “I thought she’d be tougher,” Cate tells Neale, then, “I can see I’m starting to think of her as I don’t know, like a hobby. Which is so wrong. Because it’s clearly a bigger deal to her than that. I thought it was going to be a bigger deal to me, but that hasn’t happened. And now she wants to take care of me like I’m a wounded bird. She wants to feed me with a little eyedropper, nurse me back to who I used to be. But I’m not sure I can go back there.”

  “This is about Dana, isn’t it? She’s back and wants to take care of you, too, doesn’t she? What’s the difference?”

  “She doesn’t think I need recuperating. She thinks I did something important and that I’m a new, slightly better version of myself for having done it. She says—”

  “What? She says what?”

  “That she has to find a more important way to fuck me.”

  “Ah,” Neale says.

  * * *

  Coming into the painting project, Neale is handicapped by her wrist. It’s still in a splint. She’s been told to do as little as possible with it.

  Cate tells her, “You can still paint all the lower cabinets with your good paw. Just sit here on the floor. Start here. I can pour you more paint when you need it. Weird reversal, me being the one to lend a hand.”

  “Ah, I don’t think you’re supposed to stand on the top part; that’s not even a step really,” Neale says. Cate is on the ladder to tape off a wall from the ceiling.

  “Balance is my strong suit,” Cate says, then after a few minutes, “Does anything seem normal to you yet? I’m just checking in. Do we even seem normal to you—you and I? Doesn’t it seem like we’re in a play about our life? We have lines but they’re anodyne. It’s a quiet play. Like we’re in act two: ‘Painting the Kitchen.’ I say something. You say something back, but it’s too quiet around us. Right outside the theater, though, bombs are going off. Do you think we need to talk more about what happened—to dilute it, or wear it out, maybe?”

  “I just want it all to go away. Talking about it gives it a little chair where it can sit right next to us. And you might want to rehash it because you have a heroic role. But I’m the flaky broad who leaves her back door open in a sketchy neighborhood. Then forgets all those practical moves we learned in that self-defense class years ago. He was so big, and he got me from behind, and I know there was probably a tricky move to get out of that hold—something that KGB wife would use in that TV show you like.”

  “The Americans.”

  “Right. Like she’d grind her heel down hard on his little toe. Reach around to pinch some little thing in his neck. Instead I was confused and powerless. And now I’m a victim, a survivor. I hate that. I mean, of course I’m grateful you came along, but why couldn’t I have done him in myself?”

  “Well, yes. That would’ve saved me quite a bit of trouble. But that’s not how it went down. You got sandbagged. I had to step in. That’s it. I don’t want you jumbling all the credit and debit around anymore. Everything has already happened. Forward is the only direction. I don’t know if it’s helpful to look back. When I do, it’s a giant ball of horror in my head. How crazy they were, the terrible smell, just the wrongness of them being in this room. It’s not like I had a tactical plan. I didn’t have any time to sort things out. All I could do was improvise. And there’s a hundred details I still can’t remember. Like after I sprayed the woman, where did she go screaming? When the cops arrived, I told them they should look around the house—upstairs maybe. Or in the basement. I thought she was still around somewhere. But she’d gotten away. Even bashing him. I can only remember it in a very general way. I was just a crazed basher. I made a huge mess.”

  “I forgive you for sullying my kitchen in order to save my life.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You hate being the victim? Well, it’s not all peaches on my side. The culture has co-opted being a hero. I’m in a cheesy category. That stupid TV show they got me to go on. And this week I got an invitation to join a Facebook page called Women Who’ve Killed.”

  “New friends!”

  * * *

  The only way midnight—in this case the shift from one year into the next—is signified in the kitchen is the inconspicuous guitar chord notification tone indicating a text coming in from Dana. Cate ignores this. They go on painting.

  They are nearly done with the walls when Maureen comes by around one in the morning. She’s way too bright and shiny. The glitter of social life clings to her. She’s wearing a dress that’s about seven leagues more fashionable than anything Cate has worn, or ever will wear.

  “Wow,” she says, appreciating it. Maureen is not drunk, just tipsy enough that her general volume is way too high for the room. She doesn’t see this, of course.

  “I know. It’s ridiculously expensive. Who would actually pay this much for a dress?”

  Cate understands this to mean Maureen has “borrowed” the dress, probably from Saks, her favorite lending library, one aspect of her lightly comprised system of ethics. She rushes to cover this statement, although Neale has probably taken its meaning. “What’s that you’ve got? A goodie bag?”

  “Excellent goodies.” She pulls from a tote covered in fake jewels an extra, extra-large Ziploc (brought from home) filled with crab Rangoons and bacon-wrapped breadsticks and tiny quiches. Chicken wings. She arranges these, crushed and bruised and stuck to each other, as decoratively as she can on a plate she grabs out of a cabinet. “Come on. Time for a break. Smashed appetizers from my mother’s purse when she came home from parties were some of the highlight treats of my Hollywood childhood.”

  She sets the plate on the kitchen table next to a roller pan filled with tomato-red paint, then ushers Cate down from the ladder, says, “Pretend it’s midnight,” and gives her a way-too-lingering kiss. She hauls out and pops the cork on a bottle of sparkling something, then goes looking for glasses.

  It occurs to Cate, not for the first time, that the planet Maureen lives on might be too many solar systems away. But while it’s okay for Cate to think this, it’s not okay for Neale to look in a slightly withering way at Maureen for trying, however ineptly, to blast a little cheer into this muted scene.

  “Yes!” Cate pops a crab Rangoon into her mouth and holds up a juice glass of champagne. Sometimes, in a small way in a particular instant, you just have to take a side. And even Neale—ordinarily kind, currently wounded—can be a jerk.

  moonachie

  This simple trip is made long and annoying by a tight budget. Her flight was the lowest fare she could find among the inconvenient-hour departures. Six thirty-five a.m. out of Midway, with a stop in Tampa, as though Tampa is on the way to New Jersey. The rental car she picked up in a strip mall ten minutes down the road from the airport has fuzzy cloth upholstery steeped in cigarette smoke from an ancient civilization. Ninety-five thousand miles on the odometer. Engine rattle when she tries to push it past sixty-five. Although this play is a huge career opportunity, it is nonetheless even lower paying than some of the productions she’s worked on in Chicago or Milwaukee. The off-Broadway pay scale is absurd; she’s heard this before and is now experiencing it. But off-Broadway is, of course, adjacent to Broadway.

  So she rattles onward, from the Newark airport to Moonachie, a remote New Jersey location where the sets for Blanks will be constructed. She’s here today to start things off with the fabricators. The shop is in a retired candy factory. A caramel aroma drifts vaguely out of the corners. Everything is in forward gear. Cate loves the energized scent of wood and metal and sweat and, of course, caramel.

  It turns out to be an all-woman shop. No-nonsense women. Five of them. One has an injury much worse than Cate’s—her right foot has been replaced with a high-tech prosthesis. This is, she tells Cate (part of a universal private conversation among those with missing parts), from a previou
s career in chicken processing at a plant unbothered by concerns for worker safety.

  Most of the afternoon gets used up working out details from drawings and images Cate throws from her laptop onto a pull-down projector screen in what was once the candy baron’s office lofted above the factory floor.

  The carpenters want to know does the stage at Ropes and Pulleys have tracks for platforms?

  Cate says no, but they’ve okayed installing them.

  The painters are doubtful the walls of the basement scene can be done to Cate’s specification with just paint.

  Cate says, “The writing room Virginia has there needs to be already old in the 1920s. Old cellar is, I think, a special color, a particular mix of gray and decay. I’ve brought along Pantone chips for this mottling.” She doesn’t say she got the specific colors from her father. “I’ve also brought an old British fuse box I ordered off eBay. That basement wall needs something for Vita and Virginia to bump against. A romantic nuisance.”

  Someone wants to know how much greenery will be needed to create Vita’s garden.

  “Bushels and then some. Vita’s writing tower will perch twenty feet above the stage and needs to be covered in vines. The garden backdrop is going to require its own floral tonnage, also climbing roses over the pergola. Basically we’ll need fill for everything that isn’t walkway and French-door entrance.”