Right After the Weather

by Carol Anshaw

  Cate sits down on the floor, next to Sailor, who pushes his long nose into her armpit.

  “I understand your concerns, I really do. But I’m not sure anyone’s going to be able to stem the information flow. It’s worrisome, but so are the depletion of the oceans and the melting ice caps. The lunatic weather and how it’s being ignored for short-term profits. The perpetual wars. And in the middle of everything scary and tricky, I’m trying to live my one life. This is the place and time in the world where I came in, and sometimes there’s too much to deal with. And now that too much includes my post-traumatic flippage. I’m not in here with you that much, and I worry that you’re in here all the time, sinking under the weight of your massive knowledge. Come out with me. Get some fresh air. We can take Sailor, open the windows. Go down the drive, then swing back up. We can hit the drive-thru at McDonald’s and get him a cheeseburger. Half an hour, max. Does that sound manageable?”

  “Okay,” he says. Then, “Not today, though.”

  Maureen has given Cate the name of a therapist for Graham—expensive she says, but good. Cate raises this possibility. “It would just be someone for you to talk with. Just small air holes punched into the top of the box.”

  “I talk to you every day. And Lucille Rae, and Ed.”

  Cate doesn’t ask who Ed is. Why, really? He doesn’t mention Eleanor. She doesn’t know if this is good or bad.

  “Two years ago you would have thought someone living your life was terribly depressed.”

  Sailor has been sitting up between them, his head turning from one of them to the other, as though he’s watching a tennis match. But now he goes under the table. He doesn’t like it when talk gets a certain kind of serious, sharp at the edges. They think his previous home contained a lot of arguments. Also a lot of salads. If any salad is left on the table, he eats all of it, then licks the carton or bowl. They’ve tried to extrapolate his previous life from clues he gives them. From the salads and the arguments, they think his former humans might have been corporation lawyers. Shitty corporation lawyers who left him off in the exercise yard by the shelter, closed the gate, and that was that. What did he think, watching them drive away? Until then, he thought they were his best friends. Cate can’t hold on to this image for too long. All the time people send her videos of rescued dogs and how happy they are now. Like a dog so frightened by his past that he stands facing a yellow wall, his nose an inch away. He just stands there. Then he’s shown in his new happy home playing with another dog. Isn’t this heartwarming? the sender will say. But all Cate can see is the dog staring at the yellow wall.

  * * *

  “Let’s talk in upbeat tones,” she says.

  “Okay. Here’s the thing!” Graham says, in the voice of a balloon-making children’s entertainer. “I’m just not all that interested in what’s going on outside. Taking Sailor for walks fills my need for the out-of-doors. AND SAILOR IS SUCH A GREAT DOG! I can see that you still find things to go out for, but I’m not there anymore. I’m someplace way elsewhere.”

  “That kind of thinking is agoraphobia.”

  “I’ve already been to the agora. It’s always the same stuff on sale. The same people walking around. It’s repetitious. Maybe if the agora was in Morocco. But I don’t want to waste my time being outside just for the sake of appearing normal. I have too much to do in here.” He gestures. “Just to keep up. I’m falling behind.”

  She stops and imagines how much fear-inspiring material must exist stacked in the corners of a billion spare rooms and basement offices, files within files within files on laptops, also in shaded corners of the web itself. It would be so easy to get lost in there. The other day she was doing a little research for the play, looking up the destruction from bombing around the countryside of Kent during World War II. Which led her to the small vials of prussic acid Vita and Harold kept in case the Germans prevailed. The hope being they would never have to catch that final whiff of almonds. Then from there to the cyanide capsules given as the war was ending to German citizens who didn’t want to face the rough justice the Russian soldiers were going to mete out. Women who didn’t want to be raped a hundred times. Then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump over to “Hitler: The Missing Years, 1945–1965.” Time to close the box. She can do this, but for Graham the box is always open, beckoning.

  She hopes that a year from now he won’t still be in here, with four instead of three desktop monitors. That he’ll be on to a better phase of his life, not underbathed and buzz-cut and still sitting in her spare bedroom.

  pussy hat

  Cate is not going to wear the hat. She is extremely unhappy with the new president and fired up to be marching in protest of his election, and thrilled with the size of the crowd they join coming up out of the el at Jackson, but she’s not going to wear the hat. She thinks it brings the symbolic discourse down to his level. She doesn’t want this to be a problem between her and the person who knitted the hat for her, but it has started them off on the wrong marching foot. And then there is also this person’s—Maureen’s—sign to contend with. It features the president groping the Statue of Liberty. While its message is sound, its graphic is a little, well, graphic. Cate walks a short way off, to distance herself from the sign.

  two-flat

  The two-flat is in Bucktown. It belongs to Dana’s aunt. She owns the building, lives on the top floor, and spends the winters in Tampa. Dana checks the apartment to water the African violets and goes down to the basement to make sure no pipes have burst or pilots gone out. This is the first time she has brought Cate along. She has shut down Toaster for the night, but hasn’t told Jody. This is unprecedented and carries a certain amount of risk, which Cate takes note of.

  They have until morning. Cate has ducked out on Maureen, who was planning to fix cacio e pepe and put Mad Max: Fury Road on her giant flat-screen. Cate loves cacio e pepe, really loves Charlize Theron, and of course especially loves her with a phantom arm. She has replayed quite a number of times on YouTube the part where Charlize undoes the leather straps of her prosthesis and lets it drop onto the postapocalyptic sand. She basically thinks Fury Road is a masterpiece, so this was an extremely generous offer considering Maureen does not like violent movies and thinks Charlize Theron is too hot (whatever that means). So Cate feels bad about saying no, but opens up a big box of lies anyway. She’d love to come over but can’t. Her mother is throwing a work party up at her house, to launch the spring season. Although the spring season in retail does start in January, the party is imaginary.

  * * *

  Cate and Dana are both shy coming into the small foyer.

  “Wow,” Cate says, craning her neck, taking in as much of the hall and living room as she can. A recliner facing the TV. A medium-size Arc de Triomphe, also a Leaning Tower lamp so large it could only have been bought in Pisa and dragged back here. There’s more. A poster with LOVE spelled out in blocks. A kitten dangling from a clothesline with HANG IN THERE typed across the bottom. “Your aunt, it looks like she’s cornered the global market on cheesy souvenirs and bad Pop art from the sixties and seventies.”

  “Oh no you don’t. No professional snobbery here. This is borrowed decor. We’re not here to give it a rating.”

  * * *

  The evidence suggests Aunt Vicky is a woman deep into creature comforts. She has a giant bed facing a second giant flat-screen TV. She has also managed to fit a whirlpool into the house’s small bathroom. The tub has a terry-covered plastic pillow suctioned to one side. Several slinky Polynesian-print robes hang from hooks on the inside of the door. On a shelf above the toilet sits a complex machine that plays ambient sounds while it heats herbal oils.

  In the whirlpool, Dana grabs hold of one of Cate’s toes and says, “How’s it going with you, mental-wise? I worry maybe you’re getting exhausted just trying to hold it together.”

  “It comes and goes. I’m fine, fine and then instead of fine, I’m freaking out. And then I’m not freaking out but I’m very sad that peopl
e like them exist in the same world as Neale. That their sort of wicked foolishness can take down a really good person.”

  “Oh, I think you won the round. And I think Neale’s going to be okay only because you won it.”

  “But really, nobody was a winner coming out of that kitchen. I’m made of something different now and it’s not just stronger, it’s way bleaker. And Neale, I can see her folding in on herself, and I hate that. And I can’t help. I know she loves me and appreciates my taking time out of my busy day to save her, but also I’m the only witness to her humiliation. If I weren’t around, she could put it all away more easily.”

  “I think your friendship is so much bigger than what happened. I think you just have to give it time to recuperate.”

  And then Dana is quiet. This is one of the things Cate likes best about her, that she doesn’t have to fill pauses. She can sit inside them.

  After a while of letting the water roil around them and the aroma machine pump out little blasts of vetiver, letting Dana’s cell phone stream Nina Simone’s cover of “Here Comes the Sun,” Cate says, “Let me take you to bed. A giant bed.”

  * * *

  They have plenty of time for everything. Sex and foreplay and afterglow. Now they are searching for small scars and the stories behind them. Dana inspects Cate’s finger stumps in detail, then comes up with a way Cate can put them to use. They make love naked. Naked is rare, given their usual opportunities where even horizontal is a bonus. With her clothes off Dana is impressive. Thick in a way that’s about muscle gravity, like a gleaner in the Millet painting. Cate closes her eyes and trails her fingers over hard calves, little trapezius bumps at the top of Dana’s shoulders. But it’s not so much about parts as about the whole, the way Dana occupies herself.

  Dana says, “You miss the traction of those potato sacks under you.”

  But Cate has lost the ability to see their connection as lighthearted and storeroom-specific. “I feel too much in this. I’m emotionally ridiculous. What we have is totally concocted. Stolen moments. Midnight meetings. Sex that has to carry all the freight because we don’t have any regular everyday connection. We’re not building a history together. Affairs don’t have a history. They’re on the calendar in invisible ink.”

  Dana considers this. “I don’t think we’re an affair. If we brought this out into real life, had the time to go grocery shopping together and plug into each other’s families, go through old photos, if we had all that, it would just be surround to a center we’ve already created together—that we’ve made ourselves known to each other. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always held back something. This is new to me. So of course I’d like to see more of you. And I’d like to not be worried that this takes something away from Jody. But I’m mostly just so happy that someone gets me, that I’ve been able to show myself and you’ve shown yourself to me. I think we already have that foundation.”

  * * *

  Later, when they get to thinking about food, Dana goes into her aunt’s kitchen and makes them burrata salads with heirloom tomatoes. She brought a stocked Igloo cooler.

  “Oh yes,” Cate says. “Cream stuffed into cheese. Like the upscale version of the deep-fried butter at the Kane County Fair.”

  “This kitchen is tragic,” Dana says as she goes through her aunt’s cabinets. “Her spices are seasoned salt and garlic powder. Look in her freezer—she’s got a bargain bucket of strawberry ice cream. Frosty Fun. And a summer camp–size package of hamburger. She didn’t even break it into smaller packets she might be able to use. It’s just a meat raft in there. I need to come over here more when she’s around.”

  They are wearing just their shirts, butts sticking to the vinyl dinette chairs around the small, yellow Formica-topped table. Ciabatta crumbs drift down on Dana’s breasts as she tries to explain her life with Jody.

  “I don’t know how it all happened so fast. We moved in together. We got two cats.”

  “Salty and Pepper,” Cate says.

  “I hate that I ever told you that. The thing is, you’d like her if you two met.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether I’d like her. I’m never going to have that opportunity. I don’t even want to drag you out of your relationship with her. I feel bad enough seeing you behind her back. What I want is for you to have been free and clear when we met.”

  “You can only see this from your side. From your perspective, things aren’t moving fast enough, but toward what? What makes you think if we had each other free and clear it would be better than what we have now? What if what I give you is the best I’ve ever given anyone? Why would a conventional relationship necessarily be better? Maybe we put so much value on this because of its limitations.” Then she gets very quiet, then takes Cate’s hand and leads her back upstairs to bed.

  “Lie exactly on top of me. Press me down.” Then, “This. This is it.”

  They stay this way for a while, pancakes on a plate; then Cate pushes herself up, away from Dana, looks down on her. “I know this is important to you. I get that. And that nothing stays the same. But doing it this way makes me feel bad about myself. The higher I feel when I’m with you—stoned in paradise, you know, like the song—the lower I sink in my own esteem. I have to stop.”

  “Yes. I know,” Dana says as she reaches down around the backs of Cate’s knees and pulls them apart, slowly.

  Cate’s phone makes the coin-drop sound. Maureen.

  how’s the party going? send a pic.

  Cate rolls off Dana, then sits cross-legged on the bed, stumped.

  A pause, then the phone rings—Maureen deciding she needs to communicate more directly. Cate and Dana watch as the phone keeps ringing, which is to say, as it keeps playing “Danny Boy,” the special ringtone Maureen put on so Cate will know it’s her.

  “I can’t answer,” Cate says. “There’s supposed to be a party in the background. I hate this new personal-surveillance state. More and more, I’m starting to think like Graham.”

  “You have to go to the last line of defense. Say your phone ran out of juice. That’ll give us until tomorrow, then call her back.”

  “I know I have to do something about this. Maureen was part of my Plan C and I seem to have tossed that plan over the side. And I don’t think there’s a Plan D. I have to let her know all this. Just not while I’m sitting naked next to you in your aunt’s bed.”

  Then they watch silently as the phone winds its way through the ring’s last notes—and down the mountainside.

  symphony

  They—Cate and Neale and Joe—are at the symphony. It’s intermission. Neale has gotten tickets to the premiere of an avant-garde cello concerto featuring extraneous sounds piped in along with the music made by the orchestra. Maybe, Neale is hoping, these sounds will qualify as noise.

  They are in the top balcony, but the front row of it. So, pretty good cheap seats. Joe sits between Neale and Cate. As soon as the intermission began, he pulled out his phone to watch an obscure French movie. Since what happened to his mother, he cloaks himself in silence; it’s a hoodie cloak, with earbuds. He’s not available for comment. His people will talk to your people. Later.

  Something new has moved into the space between him and Cate, and she suspects it’s her attachment to his mother’s assault. It doesn’t matter that Cate’s part was stopping it. She was there. She saw it. It’s stuck to her. She’s dirty by association. She hopes this is a phase they will pass through, that there will come a time when her presence doesn’t carry the smell of the kitchen that day when he walked in, after everything was over, onto a stage littered with props from the previous scene. The spilled groceries, eggs drooling out of their shells, milk carton busted. A plastic bag of fun-size Snickers torn open with the candy bars scattered along with some empty wrappers. Meaning they ate candy while the whole thing was going on. They fucking ate candy.

  “Going to the john,” he says as he climbs over their knees.

  * * *

  Cate puts a hand on Neale
’s. “I’ve been going by the Aldi.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You should stop. If she was going to come back at me, she would’ve done it by now. It’s over. Don’t keep it alive. We need to move along. On our merry way.”

  isle of mull

  She and Maureen have perfected the rituals of dating but haven’t really moved beyond them. And lately Maureen has dropped mentioning hypothetical moves forward in even the middle-distant future. Maybe she has grown wary. The only event they’ve pinned to their horizon is the trip in May to Scotland. They sit on the floor this night in February looking over travel magazines and guidebooks opened and scattered across Maureen’s coffee table.

  “Look at this castle on Mull!” Cate tries to pin an exclamation point on this sentence, hoping to convey excitement, but doesn’t quite pull it off. Their tickets have been bought; they’ve booked a small cabin on a small ship run by a company specializing in educational tourism. Maureen’s news tonight is that she has upgraded them to a bigger cabin on the ship; the theme park costumes she’s designing have turned out to be a bonanza for her.