Right After the Weather

by Carol Anshaw

  * * *

  Someone has already started painting the wall of books that is the backdrop for Vita’s living room. The books, she sees, are life-size. Cate hates to start off a project by correcting the mistakes of others, so she frames a correction as a collaboration.

  “I’ve had to do this before,” she tells the painter, “I think the books look more substantial from a distance if I go to one-and-a-half size. Can I borrow your tape measure?” She pencils in a line three inches above and just under two inches wider than the first book, then does this for the next few books What do you think? Let’s paint them in this size then back off and see how they’ll look to the audience.” Part of what she’s become adept at is asking the opinions of people who will not really be concurring so much as following her orders.

  By six, the crew is ready to order materials and begin construction, and Cate heads out. She gets a breakfasty dinner at a steel-sided diner. (Holding her cell under her newspaper, she takes a surreptitious picture of the grill, which appears to be from the beginning of the twentieth century. She shoots this to Dana. But, of course, why is she shooting anything to Dana?) She finds a cheap motel for the night before heading into New York tomorrow. Cheap hotel rooms in Manhattan are way too scary. What she finds on the outskirts of Moonachie is the Loch Lomond. Hers is the only car in the parking lot; all the other guests have trucks. Her room is both depressing and agitating—a pageant of plaid. Bedspread, drapes, and small, tragically decorative pillows on top of the real ones. All the plaids are different tartans. The walls are hung with prints of fox-and-hound events, and of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who does not appear to have really been all that bonnie. The carpet is clean, there’s that. No bugs scatter when she turns on the lights. In the corner across from the bed, there’s a full-size refrigerator. She’s not sure whether to count this as feature or flaw. A flat-screen TV is mounted high on the wall across from the bed. She opens all the windows to get a breeze going, to dilute the air in the room, which is thick with loneliness. There’s a ten-dollar deposit for the remote, which Cate declines; she has a copy of a good play with her, something she saw years ago, early in her career. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. She remembers the set allowing a lot of agility on the part of the actors. Reading scripts, imagining (or remembering) them up and running, is one of her great free-time pleasures, a busman’s holiday.

  She showers and gets into yoga pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt, crawls into bed.

  * * *

  This is their second design meeting, and so the initial butt-sniffing is over, and they are now going forward with a tacit agreement that they can work together. Dan Tennent, the lighting guy, like a lot of lighting directors, thinks the set is a corpse his lights can bring to life. He may be a problem, but Cate decides not to worry about that yet.

  Saya Arai is doing costumes. She’s really good. Cate knows how good by the fact that the couple of times her name has come up, Maureen has had something negative to say about her. Saya is ethereal in her presence, thin in a way that implies an internal focus, a diet of lichen. She is extremely quiet. She didn’t talk much at the first meeting, only took furious notes in a slender gray notebook. Cate isn’t crazy about having notes taken on everybody else by someone who’s not putting out her own ideas.

  Jenny McAdam is the stage manager, an old pro, a security blanket for Cate. She comes with an air of capability and crisis management. She and Cate were friends back at RISD, so she’s a known among unknowns. Cate could even stay on her sofa to save the hotel bill, but she did that once and found out Jenny keeps ferrets as pets. They live in the hall closet amid a circus of hammocks and exercise wheels, but slither in and out through the night under its door.

  Oliver Palmieri, the company’s dramaturge, is the last to arrive, and takes several minutes to negotiate getting out of his coat and sitting down on one of the folding chairs around the table. He weighs probably 350, and is a short man to start with. His butt cheeks overflow the seat of his chair, and the closest his stomach will allow him to get to the table is about a foot away. Cate used to enjoy watching extremely fat people—imagining what they eat when they’re alone, how they manage sex. But now that small, crummy curiosity has been corrupted. Now corpulence tugs a grimy cord inside her.

  Ty Boyd gets up to stretch. He’s singular looking. Dramatic, with a white shock of Beckett hair, heavy glasses with thick lenses behind which his weak eyes swim. According to Graham, he’s asexual, which gives him a subtle aspect of outlier. Along with this, there’s a (Cate suspects deliberately) random aspect to the way he dresses. Today it’s a varsity swimmer’s jacket and dark green work pants. Hiking boots.

  He was here before everyone else. He catches Cate’s eye and points to his wrist, although he has no watch, to say Lauren and Molly have yet to arrive. They always show up a little late for everything, to let a small flutter of apprehension gather up among those who await them. At the twenty-minute mark, Ty goes to the single window in the rehearsal space, opens it, sticks his head out and looks down the street. He pulls himself back in and shuts the window. “I guess we should just begin.” He’s clearly not convinced this is the right decision. Confirmation of that comes another fifteen minutes in, when Molly and Lauren swirl in, see the meeting in progress and don’t say anything, either of them.

  They arrive just as Saya is suggesting—her first entry into the general conversation—that Vita be in skinny jeans for at least the garden scene. “The way Sofia Coppola put those Converse high-tops in Marie Antoinette’s closet. A little anachronism. You just know Vita would have worn Levi’s if she were around today.”

  “We’ll think about that,” Molly tells Saya. This is her version of no.

  Throughout the rest of the meeting, maybe forty-five minutes, Molly and Lauren are chilly.

  No one will start a meeting before they arrive again.

  * * *

  Cate booked herself on the last flight tonight to Chicago. She wants to take a couple of hours to be a tourist. On these recent trips, she’s inside the play more than she’s in Manhattan. She heads up to MOMA, which is open until eight.

  Down in the subway, a train must have just come and gone. The platform on her side is empty. The air is sweet and sour with urine. She’s cold, but it’s also nerves that make her shuffle a little from foot to foot, flicking glances toward the passage she’s just come through. She needs to know who will come out next, into this echoing tunnel with no visible police presence, only videocams to record whatever happens down here, the footage valuable only afterward. She hates that she thinks like this now. It’s not fear. Neale bought all the fear available from what happened. Cate’s fallout is a constant readiness. She hates that she’s so ready. Being always ready is quite fatiguing.

  December has pushed into January, the light staying longer, the sharpness of winter growing dull. The air—because it’s New York and not Chicago, also because of the changing climate—has a balminess to it. She gets out a couple of stops early, stops in a shop called Black Hole that sells jeans so heavily dyed you have to wash them by themselves not just the first time, but forever. She buys a pair, decides to wear them to MOMA, stuffs the old pair she’s wearing into her backpack. Might as well be modern herself.

  Inside the museum, instead of being absorbed by the art, she stands alone and outside everything around her. This is a new bad feeling. Not a panic attack exactly. More a heightened awareness, hearing sounds from a higher register, picking up something drifting in on a chilled wind.

  She catches a cab to the airport. Inside, she presses Dana’s number on her contacts list, which she has obscured as T. Oaster. She’s in luck. Dana answers. It’s too early for her to be at work, so she’s probably at home.

  “Just tell me I must have the wrong number. I’ll call you later at work. I’m just having a bad moment. I want to hear your voice is all.”

  “Sorry. I think you have the wrong number.”

  tiles

  Cate is i
n such a tumble of departing and arriving these days that she worries Sailor is confused about her. So this morning, before she has to go downtown to teach the first class of the spring semester, she takes him to the beach, where he wears himself out with a pack of younger dogs.

  Which makes her slightly late for class. She has fifteen undergrads. She sees that what’s trending this semester in terms of hair is two chroma colors in addition to regular hair color. These kids are colorful, but silent as little monks. She breaks the ice with an old-fashioned parlor game. Each of them has to write on a three-by-five card three facts about her/himself—two true, one false. And the class asks questions to try to trip them up on their false fact, which, since it is false, they don’t know enough about. By the time they’ve gone around the table with this, the atmosphere has warmed enough to begin class.

  Their first project is to design a set for Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. She has found this to be a successful assignment. First, they’ve never read the play, and so this forces them to do that. Second, it requires period furniture, so they have to go rummaging around in the past. One class she goes with them on the el up to Belmont junk shops to measure and photograph pieces they might use. Every once in a while, one of them sets a play on another planet, or after whatever apocalypse, which is nice, a little off-roading, but it’s still good for them to have a basic grounding in the way things looked historically.

  Only one of the students recognizes her from local newspaper stories. It was a bit of luck that Cate’s newsworthy fifteen minutes took place during winter break and most students were home, out of range of Chicago news. This student, though—a girl wearing a cocktail dress and Doc Martens—comes up after class to say, “So. Are you okay?”

  This seems way too intimate but for the fact that when your personal life makes the news, it’s no longer off-limits for strangers to mention.

  “I am,” Cate says, reflexively, then wonders what okay would be now.

  * * *

  After class, she drives up to see Neale, who’s recuperating after surgery on her busted cheek. She finds Rose and Arthur in the living room. With a little conversation she also finds they are not just here in a post-op way, but in an open-ended residence. Well, of course, they would be staying here. Activists take action. They’re wired for it.

  “Cate, sweetheart,” Rose says, briefly holding her phone away from her, “we’re adding home security to the cable package here.”

  Arthur reads aloud from the Comcast site on his laptop. “ ‘Check your home even while you’re away. Use your mobile app to monitor your property inside and out.’ ”

  “Sounds a little Orwellian,” Cate says.

  “Except in this case, you’re Big Brother.” Occasionally Arthur will speak to Cate as if he needs to give her a boost up the learning curve. Everything about him is aimed at the greater good, but in matters of personal kindness, he often comes up short. This gives Cate permission to look a little too long at his abundance of protruding ear hair. Both he and Rose, who are a few years younger than Cate’s parents, look a decade older. Probably because they have been working for the good of others since their youth, thereby pretty much skipping their youth. Their brows have permanent furrows, their gaits are arthritic from years of marching and shuffling at demos and on picket lines. They’ve never had a citrus peel or microdermabrasion, or, like Cate’s father, an eye lift.

  Cate has brought three excellent bagels from a deli on Seventh Avenue. For her and Neale and Joe. Three is definitely the wrong number of bagels for five people. She leaves them in her messenger bag.

  “Joe-Hill is at his friend Kiera’s house.” This is the name Neale, in a weak moment, promised her parents she would name her baby, but in practice, only Rose and Arthur use it. Joe himself shrugged it off years ago. “Nealy’s upstairs resting,” Rose tells Cate. She hasn’t heard Neale’s mother refer to her daughter as Nealy since junior high. While she’s thinking she’ll have to ask Neale about this new level of parental attentiveness, she senses over her shoulder that Rose is following her upstairs. What’s this about?

  “Hey,” Neale says from her bed. She’s not in any sort of invalid mode. She’s in jeans and a sweater, reading a new novel by Elizabeth Strout. She loves Elizabeth Strout.

  She looks better than Cate expected, or at least no worse.

  “Little titanium plates,” she says, tapping her bandaged cheek. “My first step toward becoming bionic.”

  “Now you can go to Bionic Hair.”

  “I need to go somewhere. I’m stir-crazy.”

  Rose says, “I think you’re supposed to get bed rest just now.”

  Cate knows that Neale will not respond well to this directive cloaked as a suggestion, and indeed she is grabbing her jacket off the bedroom doorknob before her mother has a chance to try again. Instead, Rose turns to Cate and clears her throat, which means she is about to deliver a preformed message. “We’re so lucky you were here to help that day.”

  This is not the first time Cate has seen Neale’s parents since the assault, and she is getting tired of being thanked by them. Hero is a single-dimension entity. She’d like to go back to being Neale’s friend with a million aspects and reference points and a long history with their family. She knows Rose and Arthur are traumatized by what happened to Neale, and she could probably help by giving them a version with a pastel filter. They would probably see through it but maybe be comforted nonetheless. But she can’t come up with any version of those events, not even the true one, because of the redaction of her memory. She suddenly needs to be out of this house as much as Neale does. She asks her, “You still want to go look at tiles for Frida’s kitchen?”

  This is the last step in the renovation/obliteration of Neale’s kitchen, finding the right floor tiles.

  * * *

  When they’re in the car, on their way to Home Depot, Neale says, “What about Tile City? Wouldn’t they have a bigger selection? I mean, doesn’t their name suggest a stronger mission?”

  “They might. But what they don’t have is a woman who’s in charge of the floor-covering department. She’s helped me before.” Neale smiles. It’s the first time Cate has seen her smile in a long time.

  “You’re so cute. Your little lesbo map of the city.” Then, a few beats later, “Look. I’m not telling my parents about this.” She pulls a small automatic out of her backpack.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. That people like us don’t have guns. But now I’m part of a new population. People like us who’ve been attacked in their homes, where their kid also lives.”

  “Do you even know how to use it?”

  “I took a lesson at the gun shop. I have four more to go.”

  “I know I need to talk with you about this, but not just yet. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so far from your thinking.”

  Neale slides the gun back into her bag, then tacks away from the gun and starts talking tile. “I think we want a pattern.”

  “How much do you think about it, about what happened?” Cate says.

  “An easier question would be how much do I not think about it.”

  “I keep trying to put it in a small box. I have to close the box and sit on the lid, but it keeps thumping underneath me. There’s our whole lives before, then ten minutes in your kitchen, now the rest of our lives. Those minutes were totally anomalous to everything else. Unless we go through a third world war or an antibiotic-resistant plague, nothing like that is going to happen again in our lives. So it wasn’t a learning experience. All I’m hoping now is that it doesn’t color us, and I’m beginning—what you just showed me—I’m beginning to feel that’s what’s happening.”

  “Well really, though,” Neale says. “How can it not?”

  “Who do you think they were? Sometimes I try to imagine them in their life. Maybe it was so hard it bent them. Maybe they were terribly abused as kids.”

  “No, no. You need to get off that train of though
t. That’s the train that takes you to second thoughts. Rue. You don’t need to muddy up things with rue. You don’t need to think maybe you could have just knocked him out so he could have come to and gotten into prison counseling and back on the straight and narrow. Because what if he came back to consciousness? He was quite huge, as you might recall. You were only able to kill him because you caught him from behind. And by surprise. I just don’t let my thoughts branch out. Marlene says I need to keep my thoughts on it circumscribed by those minutes, that room, that for now it’s best to confine it.”

  “Does Marlene know about the gun?”

  Marlene is the therapist Neale has started seeing. An old friend of Neale’s mother. She ran Rose’s consciousness-raising group in the ’70s. Cate knows she should want Neale to get professional help, but in fact she resents the fact that Neale is talking to someone about what happened, but not talking about it to her.

  * * *

  In Home Depot, Neale points to a small square of tile on a thick page filled with samples. “What about this?”

  “There’s multicolored, then there’s dog vomit.”

  “Yes, this one here is called Trip to the Vet.” This is the salesperson, Darlyn. She’s amused by the idea of a dog-vomit palette. The three of them are in a tight huddle over the sample books, and Cate can feel a dry heat coming off Darlyn, just wafting around in the confined air. She finds this comforting because it’s something she’d notice in regular life, her life before. Darlyn pulls a big sample book out of a slot and opens it. “Here are some confetti patterns in circus colors. And here’s one with yellow-red-blue.”

  * * *