by Cai Emmons
WEATHER WOMAN
WEATHER WOMAN
a novel
Cai Emmons
Weather Woman
Copyright © 2018 by Cai Emmons
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book Design by Hannah Moye and Mark E. Cull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Emmons, Cai, author.
Title: Weather woman : a novel / Cai Emmons.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021770 (print) | LCCN 2018023133 (ebook) | ISBN
9781597096300 (ebook) | ISBN 159709630X (ebook) | ISBN 9781597096003
(paperback) | ISBN 1597096008 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Identity (Philosophical concept)—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3605.M57 (ebook) | LCC PS3605.M57 W43 2018 (print) |
DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021770
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, and the Amazon Literary Partnership partially support Red Hen Press.
First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5
Contents
Part One Discovery
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Part Two Now What?
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
Part Three The Arctic
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
Acknowledgments
Weather Woman
Biographical Note
PART ONE
Discovery
1
Since she was a child she had understood the earth’s oblique murmurings. Her pores, like the braille-reading fingertips of the blind, easily interpreted messages brought from the air. She had thought nothing of it, it was simply the way she was made. But then, a month after she turned thirty, just before the summer solstice, all her senses sharpened, and she and the earth, now co-equals, began to duel and dance. At the time, this appeared to happen without warning, certainly without conscious instruction. But thinking back she believes she may have hastened the change a year earlier, by deciding to move to New Hampshire.
2
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
Late May
Bronwyn sits in a warbling column of late-spring sunlight and tries to laugh along with her longtime mentor, Diane Fenwick. There is every reason to celebrate. Summer is barreling in and soon its milder rhythms will be firmly in place. The term is over. Grades are in. The team’s various research projects are trundling along as expected. And today, Diane has declared her regular meeting with the graduate students to be a social occasion and has brought in homemade ginger cake and her signature maple-walnut scones along with a carafe of strong, dark French roast. She is talking about her husband Joe’s love of kayaking, how meticulous he is with care of their boats and paddles, how much time he spends cleaning the boats before launching them, which seems to her like a waste of time when they’re bound to collect sand and seaweed. She reports all this with fond amusement, her plump bosom and gray-flecked black hair trembling with each burst of laughter. There is nothing more joyous than laughing with Diane Fenwick. Her humor is an exuberant salve, her laughter buoyant to the point of giddiness; joining in Bronwyn feels like she’s bouncing on a trampoline and recovering the freedom of childhood.
But today Bronwyn can’t let go enough to laugh authentically. She knows she’s a terrible heel. She has taken a job in New Hampshire as a TV meteorologist, which is far more suited to her talents than being a doctoral student in atmospheric sciences at MIT where, for the past two years, she has been researching the intricacies of cloud formation alongside Diane. She should have broken this news to Diane a month ago when she got the job, but the thought was too terrifying. They have known each other for almost a decade, since they were both at a wom en’s college nearby, Bronwyn a know-nothing undergrad, Diane one of the most admired faculty on campus. It still mystifies Bronwyn that Diane singled her out in that large introductory science class. She was smart, yes, but so painfully shy she never raised her hand, and during rare face-to-face meetings with Diane (Dr. Fenwick to her at that time), she could not control her blushing and was always at an embarrassing loss for words. But Diane was aggressive about telling Bronwyn she was suited for science, and over the next couple of years Bronwyn took three more of her classes. She began to loosen up and Diane began to invite her for dinner at her home, initially an excruciating experience but one Bronwyn came to love—the elegant old house on Brattle Street, the gourmet meals, her easy-to-talk-to husband Joe, a novelist. It was at those dinners that Bronwyn became comfortable calling Diane by her first name. When Diane left for a job at MIT and Bronwyn graduated, it was obvious they would stay in touch, and during the five years after Bronwyn’s graduation, when she was waitressing and caring for her dying mother in New Jersey, Diane was true to her word and communicated regularly. She visited Bronwyn after her mother died and helped her clean out the small house, all the while urging her to capitalize on her talent and come to graduate school. Bronwyn isn’t sure what kind of strings Diane pulled to get her into MIT, but she is sure some strings must have been pulled.
So how, after all of that belief and encouragement and concrete help, do you simply say: I’m leaving.
What Diane doesn’t seem to see is that Bronwyn never belonged in graduate school in the first place. She has no business being a scientist, certainly not a research scientist, working at an esteemed institution like MIT, among people as brainy and observant as Diane, people who daily see patterns and aberrations from patterns and make quick connections that lead to hypotheses. Bronwyn knows more about clouds and weather than your run-of-the-mill citizen, but nowhere near enough to be in this sharp-edged, Nobel-aspiring, what-do-you-have-to-say-for-yourself atmosphere. For the last two years she
has felt as if she’s been standing on the vertiginous edge of a precipice, bare toes clenched, liable to lose her footing at any moment and plunge to the swift, heartless river below.
It is true that Bronwyn has always been a weather lover. As a very young child she was entranced by clouds. She made her first barometer in second grade, had a sizable weather station by the time she was ten. How could you not love weather, extreme weather in particular, coming as it does and changing the rules, eliminating the ho-hum routines of life-as-usual, the strictures of school and parental tyranny? When she was a child and extreme weather came in, all bets were off, life became about surviving, and she could escape from her mother’s hyper-vigilance for a while and do as she liked. What she liked was watching and feeling the way the wind and rain tiptoed over her skin, altered her heart rate, even changed her brain. She can’t think of a single memory from her childhood that is not framed by weather. Certainly the best times she ever had with her mother were when big storms hit. During hurricanes they would go up to the attic of their small New Jersey home and watch the trees whipping back and forth like dervishes, waterfalls of rain smearing the windows so they could hardly see out. Even her mother, Maggie, always fearful, seemed excited at those times, perhaps because she knew the weather wasn’t her fault.
Once, when Bronwyn was a teenager, she and her best friend Lanny drove to Atlantic City to witness the hurricane drama, defying Maggie and ignoring public warnings telling people to stay home. The waves had lost their metric regularity and they pummeled the boardwalk like club-wielding Mafiosi. Some even crossed the street and threatened to enter the casinos.
In eighth grade there was a blizzard that took down power lines and shuttered everything for a week. She and Maggie camped out in the living room with blankets and sleeping bags, candles flickering like friendly ghosts on all the surfaces around them. The stove was out so they roasted hotdogs on skewers in the fireplace and ate them, bunless, with ketchup-slathered hands. Maggie was relaxed for a change, unconcerned about the mess. In a crisis, mess was irrelevant. They were human beings making do, dependent on fire for heat and light.
It wasn’t just the local emergencies that excited Bronwyn, she followed weather all over the world, checking the daily temperatures in the world’s major cities, trying to imagine how arctic temperatures would feel on a face, wondering if she could endure the boiling heat of Riyadh. She thought she would be one of the bold and resilient ones, venturing outside, cracking an instantaneous sweat that would cool her and enable her to forge on as she waved at the people glassed off in air-conditioned high rises.
The twisters excited her too. No one could see them coming or explain why they followed the paths they did. They were anticipated in the Plains States at certain times of year, but once she read that a tornado had hit Wisconsin, uprooting a cheese factory and an elementary school. That was the thing about weather—it had a mind of its own, you couldn’t control it, or predict it accurately, how could you help but be fascinated?
“You make me feel like a glutton, Bronwyn,” Diane says. “Have some more, please. If you people don’t eat, I’ll have to take it home, and since Joe isn’t around, I’ll eat it myself and the consequences of that will not be happy.” She squints at Bronwyn. “Are you alright? You’re quieter than usual. Quiet is fine, but there’s contented quiet and discontented quiet.”
Bronwyn sees Jim and Bruce exchanging a glance. The two of them, both graduate students who also work with Diane, have played no small role in making Bronwyn feel out of place. They are younger than Bronwyn, but they’ve been in the doctoral program longer than she and they love to hold that over her. Conniving and ambitious, they have the tiny brutal eyes of mantis shrimp. A fission of acknowledgment passes between them now, the quick pulsing of electrons, a communication taking an infinitesimal amount of time, barely detectable. They compress away budding smiles. Diane has not seen. She has no idea what happens when she is out of the room, how many ways Bruce and Jim find to torture Bronwyn, concealing their torture in packages that might be read by a stranger as mere playfulness, as wit, as legitimate scientific debate or platonic dialogue. One of their games is coming up with words they can use as nicknames for red-headed Bronwyn. Hey, Cinnabar. Hey, Stammel. Hey, Rufulous. As if, in addition to being gifted in science, they are also great linguists. Both Harvard-educated, both scions of affluent families—Jim’s from California, Bruce’s from New York—they never hesitate to wave their pedigrees as indisputable evidence of their brilliance. They cannot stand the fact that Diane likes Bronwyn, respects and favors her. Bronwyn could have complained about them to Diane, but she could see how that would go. Diane would chide them, and they would retaliate more covertly and fiercely. Bruce and Jim have always felt to Bronwyn like a crucible life has set for her. If she can’t endure whatever mockery they serve up, how can she possibly survive what lies ahead?
Bronwyn and Diane stroll along the Charles River, both glimpsing the sky as they always do, by instinct and training. Today sun predominates delectably, only a few small cumulus clouds, high and sprocketed. Across the river the Boston skyline rules like Batman’s Gotham. The day is expansive, jubilant, a gateway to the great arc of summer ahead. It is one of those days when you want to open your mouth to the sun and drink it like liquid. It’s a Friday, but no one seems to be working. Sculls dart by, fleet as dragonflies, scarcely seeming to touch the water; small sailboats drift here and there in search of more wind. Runners are out in droves, the fit and the wannabe fit; starlings poke around the rafters of the boathouse.
Bronwyn has broken her news, and Diane’s terrible look of dismay upon hearing it keeps flashing across her mind. Diane looked as if she’d been slapped. Though she recovered quickly, Bronwyn can still see the sense of betrayal lingering in her quickly blinking eyes.
“I think you’re making a big mistake,” Diane says. “What you feel is a difference in style, not brain power. Your approach may not be the same as many others around here, but that’s exactly why we need you. We need people seeing things from a variety of angles.”
Bronwyn shrugs. She has always allowed herself to be persuaded by Diane, and Diane has usually been right. But now is different—now she feels compelled to follow her own instincts.
If only she could describe to Diane the way Bruce and Jim laugh at her. It isn’t just that they laugh, it is the way they laugh, a thousand harmonics of derision dressed up to be funny. It is the sound of past gym teachers and assistant principals and the sound of her own mother sometimes. That’s not realistic, Bronwyn. Face the facts. What has fed their egos so they feel they have the right to laugh at her so openly, to pretend her ideas are trivial, her thinking lame? Is it that she came to the program from a women’s college whereas they came from Harvard? Have they failed to note that Diane herself came to MIT after teaching at that same women’s college? Can it be that she is a scholarship student, daughter of a single mother?
No doubt they have mothers who are too doting, too servile, too impressed with the brilliance of men, mothers who are too ready to proclaim their sons geniuses, smart women themselves, but women who readily fade to the background and resign themselves to second-class status. Can’t such mothers see what a disservice they do to the plight of womanhood? To the plight of the entire nation?
The thought makes Bronwyn livid. She wishes she knew how Diane has prevailed in the company of so many men like Bruce and Jim, young and old men who look past her when they speak, who interrupt her, who are surprised by the quality of her work when they happen to notice it in the first place. Diane has clearly found a way to ignore these denigrating people, and do what she needs and wants to do. But Diane is an extrovert and has social skills Bronwyn lacks; she knows how to ignore the people who must be ignored, and she knows how to throw her weight around when necessary.
“Well, maybe you need a year off to think. I can respect that. I forget sometimes how hard it can be when you’re starting out, especially for women. But I want you
to promise me that we’ll revisit this in a year. I hate to lose you, a good researcher and a woman to boot. I hope you don’t have any of that gender-wiring drivel stuck in your brain. You must remember—scientists aren’t born, they’re made.”
They stroll in silence, Diane’s red sneakers clopping along the pavement, her billowy purple tunic and wide-legged trousers flapping. Bronwyn envies Diane for knowing herself so well, for being heedless of what others think of her, for being on the other side of so many hurdles. Diane does what she wants, says what she wants—Bronwyn has never met anyone so fearless. If only Bronwyn could talk to her mentor about how her brain really works, about how much time she really spends “in the clouds,” evaporating entirely. But if she were to say these things surely Diane would lose respect for her. Diane wants her to think differently, but not that differently.
“Sure,” Bronwyn says. “I’ll keep in touch.”
“What does your honey think of this plan? Reed.”
Bronwyn is amazed that Diane would be thinking of Reed now. The two have only met a few times. Reed has been busy in law school, and Bronwyn has always tried to keep her worlds separate. But Diane is perceptive and she forgets little, and about Bronwyn she records and remembers things as a mother might.
“He’s okay with it. He’ll stay here for a year to finish law school, maybe find a job in New Hampshire when he’s done.”
“That won’t be necessary though, will it, because you’ll be moving back here by then.” Diane laughs and it appears to be genuine. “I’m terribly bossy, aren’t I?”
She draws Bronwyn into her capacious bosom, and Bronwyn rests there for a moment. No bridges burned. Not yet.
3
SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE
June—13 Months Later
On the day of Reed’s scheduled visit, just before the summer solstice, Bronwyn wakes far too early. It’s still dark, but for the first faint tinctures of dawn tonguing the river. She bolts out of bed and hurries from her tiny bedroom to the porch of the cabin, where she stands with her face pressed to the screen, listening and watching. The air is dead still, just as it has been for the last three or more days. Through the semi-darkness she senses the presence and weight of the stratus clouds that have been settled too long on the horizon, firmly fixed as struts. There is no rain, not even a sign it rained overnight, but those clouds are unusually tenacious.
