Right After the Weather

by Carol Anshaw

  “You’re the most handsome dog in the world. And you don’t even know it. Which only makes you more handsome.” She kisses and kisses the soft fur just above his eye. “And I got you. Imagine that.” She’s trying to let him know she’s still there for him, even though she’s a slightly different her. He has sniffed out the change.

  And then he’s off again.

  One of the changes is that she’s lost five pounds in the past month, without trying—part of the morphing, as though the person she’s turning into needs to make a lower weight, maintain a more agile vigilance. She suspects this isn’t temporary, that she’s made a permanent move to this interior neighborhood, some unincorporated area of aftermath.

  She can’t really talk with Neale about this stuff, about how different she feels. Neale is on a mission to forget. And everyone else Cate knows still lives in the old neighborhood: they’re stumbling through the middle years of their lives in a familiar place, which they find tricky and difficult enough, filled with small, ultimately solvable problems. Their innocence fatigues her. She looks back with nostalgia at a sepia-tinted time when she thought Maureen’s affair with her sister was a big problem. Or Graham’s inability to resist the siren call of Eleanor. (He’s been spending the odd night over at her place lately, but in a tapering way.) These look like play problems now.

  She knows anyone would advise her to see a shrink, but she hasn’t been able to bring herself to that yet. She thinks anyone worth seeing would cut through the counseling platitudes and start poking around in soft spots and sensitive areas, and Cate isn’t yet up to opening herself—particularly her new self, with whom she’s just making first acquaintance—to the judgment of a professional stranger.

  She had long thought her bad thing already happened, down in her father’s workshop. This relieved her of a lot of luxury fears. She didn’t bother worrying about exploding stoves or falling safes. She allowed herself to take on small bits of daring. She still sometimes throws her feet forward and takes the last three steps onto whatever landing, a real-life version of her staircase dreams. A childhood trick she probably should have given up this far into adulthood. Now, though, a further bad thing has happened to her, adding randomness to bad. The treaty she thought was in effect has been violated. She has been tossed back into the general risk pool. Also, she has the extra worry of a new encounter with the woman whose darting eyes she sprayed with fire retardant. If there is an encounter, Cate wants to be in charge of it.

  On The Americans, Elizabeth, the undercover KGB killer, does most of her disguising with glasses and wigs. So Cate got some cat’s-eye frames at a thrift shop on Belmont, then found a long, blond ’90s wig at Elim Wig and Hair on Broadway. She wore these with old jeans and a drab peacoat from the wayback of her closet. Assembled in all this, she looked in the mirror and hardly recognized herself. It was a little amazing.

  The Aldi itself is also a little amazing. She has been there twice now. She puts on her disguise in her car, then wanders the aisles with a cheesy straw tote. Most of the store’s stock is of brands that remind you of regular brands. Savoritz crackers. Chef’s Cupboard soup labels with a definite Campbell’s graphic to them. Other brands seem part of a fictional shopping neighborhood—Millville (cereal bars) where you’ll find Friendly Farms (milk) down by Crystal Creek (chardonnay). But there are also weird outliers, brands that seem to have been born out of a fundamental unfamiliarity with language or concept. Like the scary cans of Gridlock energy drink.

  She’s not sure she will recognize the woman’s face, but the jittery way she moved, she’s pretty sure she would be able to spot that. So far, though, she hasn’t seen anyone like her. She doesn’t know how long she’s going to keep coming back, or what she will do if she does see her. Tail her home, then call the cops, but what will they be able to do? Cate’s flying blind, but does not like the idea of the woman being out there, on the loose. On the loose and possibly keeping an eye out for Cate. Or going back to Neale’s.

  * * *

  She feels warm, beefy breath, then a slip of a tongue on her lowered forehead. She sits up and looks around to see Sailor has lost his small cohort. The two of them currently make up the entire population of the beach.

  “Okay,” she says, “you’ve definitely got a point.” They walk together toward the car.

  hypothermia

  “Now?”

  Cate is pressed against a cold metal wall between stacks of boxes of eggs, coffee, cartons of half-and-half.

  “Not yet.”

  She and Dana are in the cooler at Toaster. Dana has one of Cate’s wrists pinned next to her head, part of an erotic strategy.

  “Can you hold off a little longer?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m too close.”

  Dana pulls her hand out but only a little. “You can stop if you really try.”

  Both of them go completely still. Then all it takes is the slightest flicker of Dana’s fingertips and Cate is there.

  “Oh.”

  “There you are.” Dana presses her forehead against Cate’s collarbone. “Now you have to leave. Any second now, Felipé is going to come busting in here looking for coffee beans. He wouldn’t care but he’s a terrible gossip. And by terrible, I mean he tells everybody everything.”

  When they’ve gotten themselves together, just before Dana pushes the red ESCAPE button on the closed door, she looks unblinking at Cate. “I understand it might be hard for you to see. You have to come at it from a slight angle, but what I’m trying to do with you is honor this as something important. And I know I’m not doing a great job. But I can do better.”

  This is how Dana makes her crazy.

  * * *

  In spite of the back-and-forth to New York, Cate is trying to maintain the pieces of her life at home. Maureen is a piece. Sailor. Neale, even if she no longer wants to be an important piece. That Dana is even a piece at all is absurd, but there you have it.

  Cate and Sailor spent last night at Maureen’s. They cooked from a service that FedExes a box of gourmet, premeasured items along with instructions for making a dinner for two. This is like eating in a good restaurant, only you do all the work. Maureen thinks it’s a fun thing for the two of them to do together, and it is undeniably a touching bit of domesticity. After dinner, they cleaned up the kitchen, then watched a movie with Sailor draped across both their laps. He’s so long he’s a laps dog. When Cate was on the sofa, under Sailor, snug against Maureen, both of them in plush “TV Sweaters” Maureen ordered off a commercial (as a joke, but still, they’re wearing them), watching Ben-Hur (so Maureen could ridicule the costumes), everything seemed in its place. But then this morning, Cate pretended she had a 7 a.m. flight back to New York. She dropped off Sailor at her apartment, picked up her travel bag, then told the Lyft guy to go down to Toaster, where Dana was at the change of shift and the two of them had maybe half an hour together before Cate ordered another Lyft, this time actually heading out to O’Hare in time to make her flight, which is actually at eight-thirty.

  Here she is, finally pulling her life together:

  She’s a hero in a crisis.

  She’s working on what might be the biggest play of her career.

  A fabulous dog has come to her out of thin air.

  She has a real chance of making a relationship with an adult, also with a future.

  Everything lately has been narrowing the space between who she is and who she would like to be. Yet with all this, she is nonetheless currently huddled in the musty back seat of a Lyft that smells as though a large animal has recently defecated, the event then masked with a spring bouquet spray. And her teeth are chattering hypothermically from twenty minutes inside a cooler with a woman who will never leave her girlfriend. Jody has Dana in every real-life way, while Cate and Dana are confined to small vignettes they’ve become adept at creating and decorating. What bewilders Cate is the potent distillate of emotion generated by these small pieces of time. She has little direct observation of Dana in the wo
rld. She has to study her small remarks and references. In the cooler, for instance, she asked if Cate was going to the Women’s March.

  Yes, she told her. The one here. With Neale and her mother and Joe. Did Dana think it was going to be big?

  She thought so, and she was hoping it would make every person feel part of the bigness. The way unions work.

  “I don’t want to wear the pussy hat,” Cate told her.

  “Hat not mandatory,” Dana said, and pressed a wrapped sandwich into Cate’s hands. It now rests inside her backpack, on her lap, inside the Lyft. Cate knows it will be egg salad made with duck eggs, aioli, capers Dana pickled herself. Bread baked in an oven in back that looks like the entrance to hell. The sandwich has to stand for so much, there is such a burden on it.

  flat white

  Rooting around in an antiques shop in the Village, Cate has found a gnarly gilded picture frame. Perfect for Vita’s living room. She can fill it with a portrait of some ancestor. Ancestors were something Vita wasn’t short on. Cate really shouldn’t be bringing this in herself. She has a prop master; this is technically his bailiwick. But sometimes she goes a little off-road, lured in by a thrift shop window. Cumulatively, over the years she has been extremely unthrifty in thrift shops.

  Due to a small schedule snag, they have the theater for a luxurious two whole weeks before the play opens—now down to a week and a half. And after today, they will see how the sets hold the actors without confining them. That’s always Cate’s first priority.

  Lauren spots the frame as Cate brings it in. She thinks it’s possibly too ornate.

  “We like your idea of the living room being overstuffed. But we want to stay shy of distraction.”

  Molly comes over. Cate assumes she’s going to weigh in personally on the frame. Instead, she looks briefly at Cate and blinks a question to the surface. “Could you run and get me a coffee? A flat white?” It’s a wonder no one has killed them by now.

  Still, they are inarguably talented. Molly will give her opinion of the frame, just not right now. Their attention to detail is impressive; this is something Cate really likes about them, and might be a reason they picked her. She enjoys watching them roll the pieces around. Tiny, wobbly balls of mercury that attach to each other as they go, obtaining critical mass. This is the way they assemble plays that will be remembered, and win awards and get produced again and again. In this effort, they appear to have abandoned small courtesies that might siphon off their focus. They let everyone else recede to a pulsing blur, a blur emitting a soft gray noise. It’s kind of hilarious how everyone is a gofer to them, fetching whatever while the two hold their vision aloft. Well, except for Gladys Banner, who, being a huge movie star, could have taken the play or left it. The play’s success is not reliant on her, but her name on the marquee will pump up advance ticket sales. Gladys is not asked to run errands.

  When Cate brings the coffee back from Hssss, an espresso shop around the corner, ferrying it with the enormous amount of balance necessary to not disrupt the skin of micro-froth on the top, she sets it on the binder resting semi-precariously on the arm of a fourth-row seat next to the one Molly occupies. (A few hours later, when Cate leaves the theater, she’ll notice the coffee still in place where she set it down, the foam intact.)

  They’ve loaded in the sets today. Two—Vita’s living room and her garden—are already up on the gliding platforms. The less elaborate ones—the train station platform, the basement, Persia (two taxidermied camels; a large, shallow sandbox; a stationary sunrise at a horizon) await transfer. This afternoon Cate will time the stagehands switching the sets to see how the scene transitions might be speeded up. One of the pitfalls of multiple set changes is the collective blinking of cell phones lighting up the darkness so audience members can check the time. When that happens, you’ve broken whatever spell you’ve managed to create.

  Cate is looking at the camels, which are a little more threadbare than she was hoping for. She’ll have to find a rug to cover the bald spot on the worse one. Persia would not have given a diplomat’s wife a mangy ride.

  Cate is not going to have the luxury of being a creative diva on this production. She runs even the smallest adjustment past Lauren and Molly. They are her masters. If they want changes, even drastic ones, she nods and gets to work. Nonetheless, by the tiniest increments, they seem to trust Cate more, now leave small and middle-size choices to her. She can bring in a frame or a fuse box now, relatively unchallenged.

  * * *

  She sits down on a seven-step staircase, stairs to nowhere. Eating a bag of chips. Waiting for the arrival of one of these revisions, a change she herself suggested. Cate thinks Vita needs to be reading on a long sofa rather than on the love seat originally planned. A sofa is sexier, even if it’s not being used for sex. A lot of the aura of this play is sex and its treacherous power, power derived from its societal suppression.

  The metal grate of the elevator door screeches as it’s pulled open, revealing a heavy, blood-red velvet sofa with slightly ragged fringe at the bottom. This will provide Vita a place where she can both sit and recline. She’s going to be sitting and reclining with a number of girlfriends throughout the play. (One actress, Alex Shields, will play each of these women in turn. Her specific talent is taking on a character, vanishing into it. Here, she can disappear deftly into these characters with only wigs, hats, dresses, and voices.) Cate gets up and goes over to inspect the sofa. She asks Gladys to try it out. She’s a little thrilled to be ordering around a megastar. Who takes the order, bounces onto the sofa, stretches out full length, then sits up with her legs crossed.

  Ruby runs the same test, then turns to Cate, who left her bag of chips and a Mexican Coke on the steps behind them. “Might I have a crisp?” she asks, pointing. Ruby is in full costume as Virginia Woolf—long, nubby sweater, narrow tweed skirt, sturdy shoes, her hair “bobbed.” She speaks in a high, reedy voice she says she has found in a rare recording of Woolf. She has dressed and spoken this way through every day of rehearsal. Like she’s Daniel Day-Lewis on the set of Lincoln. Another piece of this verisimilitude is that she inhabits 1927. If you try to talk with her about something in the here and now, she looks at you with fake bewilderment. This makes her impossible to talk to or be normal with in any way. Cate doesn’t even try. In this particular instance, she understands that Ruby is asking for a potato chip.

  “Thanks awfully,” Ruby says to the offered package, then pauses as she eats two chips. The pause is long enough that Cate is afraid she might be about to start a conversation, but then, mercifully, she walks off, twiddling her fingers next to her head. “See you on the morrow.”

  * * *

  Cate moves through the shadows at the back of the stage, then climbs up into the lighting grid to get a bird’s-eye view of the sofa, see how it works in the scene about to be rehearsed—a conversation between Vita and her husband, Harold. Their marriage is, at this point, purely companionate.

  Judd Shoemaker, playing Harold, is a good physical match—a slight man, given heft by brogue shoes, a thick mustache, and a pipe. Before this, Cate has only seen him in movies. Onstage he has to project. He’s skillful, though, and by now, toward the end of rehearsals, he has blended into this role. He smells of cherry pipe tobacco and tweed.

  Harold has just come into their library; Vita is at a small writing table, intent on a note she’s writing, scratching away with one of the fountain pens Cate found at the used-desk store.

  HAROLD

  Who’s the favored recipient of that letter? Mrs. Campbell?

  [Mary Campbell is a new interest of Vita’s.]

  VITA

  No. The recipient is Mrs. Woolf.

  [Vita is arranging the assignation with Virginia when Vita goes up to London. She will arrive half an hour early to meet Virginia in the basement. The scene lays out the terms of Vita and Harold’s philandering. Harold takes his pipe, knocks the ashes out of it into a standing ashtray, and leaves it there. He sits on the arm of the
sofa.]

  HAROLD

  Perhaps, between kisses, you might tell her I’ve a notion to do a book on George Curzon, his postwar policies. I’m thinking Hogarth might be interested.

  When Vita says nothing, just keeps scratching away with her pen, he falls gracefully backward, onto the couch. Molly, in the front row with Lauren, holds up a gnarly hand to stop the clock, then hoists herself out of her seat and totters up the steps to the stage.

  “Judd, I’d like you to do something a little faggy here. Just to underline. Vita doesn’t really have to do anything but look butch and commanding. I think it would be good counterpoint if you did something small that a straight man mightn’t.”

  He gets up, goes back to the doorway, repeats his lines, falls backward onto the sofa, this time crossing his legs at the ankles, as he props them on the sofa arm.

  “Perfect,” Molly says. The scene moves on.

  HAROLD

  [Stares at the ceiling.]

  Your silence, is it cloaking something we ought to talk about? Is it, in fact, speaking volumes?

  VITA

  Well, perhaps one. A slender volume. You’re going to scold me now, aren’t you?

  HAROLD

  I’m just saying you have to keep in mind that you don’t have la main heureuse when it comes to other peoples’ marriages. And you might want to be particularly careful with Virginia. She’s really too mentally delicate for your hijinks. You wouldn’t want to tip her over her edge. You might not see her advancing toward that, given there is so little in the way of edges for you.

  VITA