Right After the Weather

by Carol Anshaw

  When they’re back in the car, Cate asks how it’s going with Rose and Arthur in residence. She’s sure Neale has some anecdotes about their oppressive presence, but all she gets is,

  “They’re being great. Well, a little overbearing, but—”

  Then Neale is quiet in a sinking way. Then she is saying, “The thing is, I think I saw her.”

  “What? When?”

  “Last week. At the Aldi. On Broadway.”

  “Aldi?” Aldi is a budget supermarket on Broadway in Uptown. Cate has only gone there once. They didn’t have bags at the checkout; many customers were taking their groceries home in suitcases.

  “This happened last week and you’re only telling me now? Did she see you? And why were you at Aldi in the first place?”

  “I don’t know. It’s so close. Their yogurt is really good. I’m not absolutely sure it was her. She was buying candy. I didn’t do very well with the situation. Basically, I just left. I was afraid if I called you, you’d make me call the cops.”

  “Well, yeah?! Didn’t you think you ought to do that?”

  “I don’t know. The thing is, I’m not really sure it was her. I don’t think I could pick her out of a lineup of scraggly old women along that stretch of Broadway. And I guess I don’t want to bring it all up again. Maybe she has friends—you know, bad company. Maybe the guy was her husband or her brother. Someone she loved. Someone whose death she might want to avenge. I don’t want to draw her attention.”

  “But she already knows where you live. She can find you any time she wants. But you could have followed her home and found out where she lives, told the cops her address.”

  Neale doesn’t say anything for another long time, while Cate starts thinking she might make a shopping trip to the Aldi.

  When Neale says the next thing she’s going to say, it’s, “Anyway, pretty soon our defenses are going to be even more bolstered. Claude’s coming back.”

  “Claude? He’s coming back from India? He’s going to help you?”

  Claude is the most self-absorbed human Cate has ever known. He’s literally a navel gazer. She has seen pictures of him in Pondicherry, in the ashram, in a loincloth. She can’t imagine him helping anyone. He’d step over an old lady collapsed in the middle of the street. He wouldn’t take her cane, he’s not wicked. He just can’t be bothered with the inconvenience of other people. Cate thinks the only reason Neale married him is that beautiful women like her are in an elite class that attracts handsome men who in turn blind everyone to their underlying character. Claude looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. Also, Neale wanted someone to give her the baby who turned out to be Joe.

  “Joe told him about it on Skype. So Claude’s Mighty Mouse, coming to save the day. I don’t know. I think it’s the right thing to do. Put a little more male presence in the house. Just for now. Get my parents out of my hair.”

  Pain slams Cate hard in the chest, as though she’s been whacked with an oar. Nothing big happens, she’s beginning to see, without knocking around the adjacent pieces.

  girls kissing

  At the rehearsal space above a Korean restaurant, the actors are bouncing their characters off one another. The room has heavy fragrance—body odor and sizzling beef.

  Today, the actors playing Vita and Virginia have come in to work out logistics for the basement scene. Gladys Banner is the exact right type for Vita; it’s easy to see why Molly and Lauren went against the advice of their casting director, who doesn’t think Gladys is up to the job. But she’s British and casually wields both a Received Pronunciation accent and an imperious manner. Most important, she is famous for starring in a movie and two sequels about an icy detective seeking justice in a ruthless world of the future. Molly and Lauren are hoping Gladys’s presence will sell a lot of tickets even before the reviews come out.

  Virginia is being played by Ruby Pepper, who, though she has a stripper name, also has a long list of stage credits for having played one or another sensitive artistic type. Her part in Blanks is smaller. Vita’s affair with Virginia occupies only the first act. Act two moves Vita through the destruction of Geoffrey Scott and her subsequent philandering through a short list of lesbians working at the BBC, where she and Harold give their talk on “the happy marriage.”

  Today Molly lays out the challenge of the scene in which Vita has come to the basement of Virginia’s London house, to the small writing studio. She’s ostensibly on an afternoon social visit, which will include tea, small sandwiches, and London gossip. Virginia’s husband, Leonard, may be around. So they make an arrangement, a letter inside a letter (“You’ll be nice to me, won’t you? And I’ll be nice to you.”) to meet half an hour early so they can make out a little in the basement. This is the scene for which Cate bought the old fuse box.

  Molly delineates the action for the two of them. “This is a subtle sex scene. Virginia is often portrayed as fragile, but in this relationship she is also slightly the aggressor. She’s forty. She’s had very little romance in her life. Vita’s offering her that opportunity and Virginia’s interest is piqued.” Molly pushes and pulls Gladys and Ruby into an embrace in one corner of the room. She steps back to see how they look, then comes in for a little rearranging. “Okay, so Virginia’s brilliant as a writer, but she faces a steep learning curve in flirtation and seduction. You know what? I think I need you to reverse your positions. Vita should be against the wall of the corner stage left; she’s the catcher. Ruby, I want you to stand with your right foot between Gladys’s feet. Gentle but pointedly invasive.” She turns to Cate. “I need you to make sure these walls, onstage, are firmly buttressed, sturdy enough to have some passion pressed against them.”

  Both actors are straight. Ruby is professional, Gladys is tiresome. She needs to put her heterosexual watermark on the scene, giggling into and out of the first practice kisses. Asking Molly, “Is this right?” As if kisses between women operate on a different mechanism, like a language with a glottal stop.

  “Perfect.” Molly brushes the stupidity aside.

  Cate goes off to take measurements on a chaise Gladys says is too short for her to stretch out on seductively. She wants to be out of earshot when Gladys says, “Oh this feels so weird!” Or whatever.

  While this run-up has the usual urgency of every play ever mounted, its machinery is more oiled than Cate is accustomed to. The Babes, as Cate thinks of Molly and Lauren, are totally in control of the production. Also, because one of them wrote the play, it’s a living organism, adapted as it goes. Underlines and italics can be added and removed, weak lines cut, new ones added.

  * * *

  It’s only been three weeks since the assault. It feels both like ten minutes and a year. At first Cate thought, no way she could do this play. She’d have to give it up. It was Neale who pushed her, but the sporadic separation has not been good for their friendship. Cate missed Neale’s surgery, her gun buy, her parents’ move-in, and Claude’s imminent rescue. But for Cate, the job and its thousand details help keep at bay the replay loops in her head. During the days anyway. Nights in Manhattan, she’s on her own.

  long-term dating

  found a place west on montrose.

  not cuban. some other island, near equator.

  in the back of a little grocery store.

  This is Maureen arranging an activity for the two of them. She still does this. Cate is to a place where she doesn’t need an activity to justify the two of them getting together. But Maureen still likes to create a little honeypot, as though she needs to lure Cate into seeing her.

  She mines every area of common interest they’ve turned up. Along their short way, they’ve found a mutual love of restaurants located in one or another obscure corner of ethnicity. This one is cozy. It smells of plantains and salty fat and coffee. The tables are covered with frantically patterned oilcloth. The menu is not in English, not in Spanish either. They order by hunch and the color photos on the menu.

  The food arrives. Cate surveys her plate
. “Mmmm. This thing—it’s a root?” Whatever it is, it’s puddled in an orange oil. “And these spongy greens. It’s like a little hillside, a knoll maybe. What you’re having looks better.”

  A small patch of silence as they poke and taste. Cate pushes the oily root (now it seems more likely to be something from the ocean floor) to a distant region of the plate. The fronds are aromatic in a medicinal way. “I think I may have moved into a land beyond edible. At least without a period of cultural assimilation.”

  Maureen’s dish is probably chicken, but could be rabbit. (Cate tries not to think “bunny.”) She gives Cate a piece along with the slice of Wonder bread and a butter pat that sit next to it. When Cate doesn’t eat either, Maureen says, “You’re right. Your selection was a step too far. Let’s drive down to Oak Street. We can stop at the fancy Norwegian frozen yogurt place. You’ve earned some vanilla.”

  Next to the yogurt place there’s a rarefied clothing store.

  Cate says, “These shops. How do they make money? They only have six pieces of clothing in here. I always think if I even walk in, I’ve made a commitment. I’m going to have to justify my presence by buying a two-hundred-dollar T-shirt in size two. Their version of large.”

  Minutes later, sitting across from each other at a smaller, this time steel, table, eating small dishes of cloudberry frozen yogurt, Maureen voices a complaint.

  “Sometimes I feel I’m losing you to this terrible thing that happened. That you’re never going to get past it.”

  “No. Really. I’m not only traumatized. I was also surprised by what I was capable of doing. I’m kind of exhilarated at my competence.”

  “Yeah, well, that might be another problem.” This crankiness is turning up fairly often. Of course, she has a perfect right to it. Maureen is stuck in an annoying set of circumstances. Instead of a blossoming romance, she’s getting Cate in random pieces scattered between her travel to New York, her trauma, and her taking care of Neale. If she could hold off being cranky at least until Cate is full-time back in Chicago and can sort out a few things. But she can’t.

  Even if she doesn’t know all the specifics of Cate’s distraction, Maureen perceives the general inattentiveness. She’s also unhappy about the social engagements Cate slides out of, particularly getting together with Maureen’s friends, of which she has quite a retinue. Keeping these friendships lively entails dinners and reciprocal dinners, brunches (a meal Cate sees as a sucking time hole with eggs), a subscription to Hubbard Street Dance with Ingrid and Patty (an ex of Maureen’s). The list winds on. Maureen takes defection from any of these as Cate rejecting her social world. Cate, for her part, feels beleaguered trying to stay in step with Maureen. It’s like dancing on broken pavement.

  apocalypse beach

  Maureen is still asleep when Cate wakes up. She looks deep in there, definitely a couple of hours shy of getting out of bed. Then she will awaken refreshed, having missed out on the pageant of her own sputter-snoring, her twitching legs, her strangled nightmare screams. She’s like a road hog—passing on the right, tailgating, tossing hamburger wrappers out the window as she goes. Of course, she doesn’t believe any of it. “I sleep like a baby,” she says.

  This is by now an inside joke. They are starting to have inside jokes. Every step forward with Maureen feels like it’s toward the edge of a cliff. She knows she should sit down and take a closer look at this feeling.

  * * *

  Every morning Cate has to put on her shoes with the obstacle of a dog’s cement-block head in her lap. Sailor’s excitement is never tamped down by the predictability of his walk. Sunny or inclement outside, he drags in one of her shoes every morning at 8 a.m., even this deep into winter, when 8 a.m. means not long after daybreak. He’s never off by more than a few minutes. This morning the shoe is being pressed against her forehead and pops her out of a dream about hurling herself down stairs, taking them a flight at a time by swinging around on the newel post and throwing herself feetfirst in a springy way down onto the next landing. This is the way she takes stairs in her dreams. Her dreams are filled with stairs.

  “Okay, buddy,” she whispers and looks down at Maureen, lying like a fallen fighter, her fan tattoo soft across her shoulder blade. The scent coming off her warm body when Cate lifts the cover is dry and autumnal, like a burning pile of leaves (or a couple of cigarettes). Even though Cate moves as delicately as possible, shh-shh-shhing Sailor backward so she has room to get out of bed, Maureen stirs.

  “It’s early,” Cate tells her. “Go back to sleep.”

  “No, I have to get going. I’ve got a breakfast meeting. Barry Shriner.” She is presenting a portfolio of costume sketches for a musical version of Dr. Zhivago. Maureen is dying to get this job. The play has both ballroom dresses and the rough clothing of the revolutionaries. By her own estimation, she is a master of peasant fashion. She can tatter and sully a shirt like nobody else. Pencil shavings are her trade secret; she rubs them into the fabric. They add the most believable dusting of historic urban dirt. There are a lot of tricks like this to her trade, and of course to her entire life. The way she borrows clothes from Saks and Neiman Marcus, and a small rotation of Near North shops. Tomorrow night she’s going to a Jeff Awards benefit. Which means today she will find the perfect dress, then wear it to the cocktail party very carefully (drinking only white wine or vodka). At home afterward, she will steam the dress, refold it inside the store tissue, refasten the price tag, if she’s been able to get it off. Later this week, she’ll return it with a limp excuse. It didn’t match the shoes she had in mind. Or maybe when she sat down, it felt a little too snug at the hips. When she explained this little routine to Cate, it wasn’t with any shame. She was showing off. Maureen sees herself as crafty and savvy. Her justifications are collapsible and expandable. The implication in this matter is that women who actually buy fancy clothes for this or that occasion are spendthrifts supporting shops that she can then use to her own small advantage. When Cate misses the beat where she’s supposed to nod and laugh or come up with a similar anecdote of her own, Maureen sidesteps. “You know, the store usually gets a dress back in better condition than when they sold it to me.”

  Maureen enjoys detailing her guerilla agility. And passing it along to others. Cate overheard her on the phone telling a friend whose car had been T-boned on Ashland to get the car out of the shop and over to CarMax fast, to beat the accident report, in case there was anything gravely wrong with it. Even though she has lived an entire life within the roped-off area of upper-middle-class privilege, she maneuvers like a new immigrant, as though she needs to climb her way up through an unwelcoming culture. It’s a game she plays, maybe to add a little burr of friction to her smooth life of ease and plenty. Cate hasn’t confronted her on this sort of stuff; she hasn’t yet been able to find a way into that conversation. She’s never had this dilemma before. Questioning someone’s ethics isn’t something easily brought into any conversation. Any talk along these lines would be big and damaging. For now, she’s waiting for other shoes to drop.

  But really, what if they do? She’s going to point out to Maureen that she’s ethically challenged? And who is Cate to judge? She doesn’t have gray areas herself? Although when she tries, she can’t really come up with any of these sorts of tactics in her own behavior. Or, for that matter, in the behavior of anyone she knows besides Maureen. But are these sorts of shabby edges reason enough to break up? It’s kind of the same as Maureen’s affair with her sister. Although initially shocking, if she looks at these pieces from a few angles, gives them time to wear down, they begin to seem more like quirks. And addressing any of this would imply the existence of a totting-up. No budding relationship could survive that.

  * * *

  It’s way too cold for humans at the dog beach. Not too cold at all, though, for the two other dogs whose humans were able to rouse themselves and dress in layers and layers plus two hats, plus boots with heat packs stuffed in the toes.

  Cate sits on one of the
broken benches scattered around the beach, facing the brutal, steel-colored waves. And in an instant she has left her current circumstances behind, sucked back and down.

  she’s statue-still on the mudroom steps, frozen, the big guy kneeling over neale, who is unconscious. his butt emerges as he shrugs down his sweatpants. two pillows of flesh fall away from the center furrow. she does not look at the furrow. the exposed flesh is gray, patterned here and there with small patches of angry red rash. this mass jiggles as he shifts around flat on neale to position her, set her in place.

  the fire extinguisher. one step up from the one on which she’s standing. she picks it up slowly, to avoid the grating of metal against cement. there’s some sort of wire ring, a safety latch that needs to be removed. when she pulls this loose she uses her bad hand, which unfortunately doesn’t have enough fingers to keep the ring from falling onto the concrete with a small but definite ping.

  the woman hears it and turns. her stare is fierce with calculation. no time to think. cate just rushes her with the white fog billowing out of the extinguisher, which sets her screaming like a frozen wire and zigzagging around the kitchen. cate loses track of her. she has to stay on the move. the big guy is turning around and trying to get up. she can’t have that. she starts spraying him, but too little is left. it’s then she starts swinging the can by its trigger, smashing his head wherever the metal lands. she doesn’t have a strategy.

  She comes back to find herself hunkered over her knees, positioned against the slicing wind. Sailor is blissed-out, the air rippling through his fur like an invisible brush. He tries to get a rumble going, first with a terrier, then with a malamute. Since no other dogs are available, the three of them—in spite of their large discrepancies in size—gamely try to box and roll each other over, then set up a race. In between rounds, Sailor comes up and sinks his head into Cate’s lap.