Weather Woman

by Cai Emmons

  “Jeez, what happened to you?”

  Bronwyn looks down at herself. Powdery car dust covers the bodice of her black dress; a grease spot highlights her sternum, centered like a fallen third eye. Panic flares—she can’t go on the air like this.

  “It’s been a very bad day,” she confesses.

  “What?” Nicole leans forward to sculpt a cave of secrecy around them, eyeliner stick wanding the air. Her eyes are not made more beautiful by the layers of black she paints on them, but Bronwyn wouldn’t dream of saying so. She likes Nicole, who is twenty-four, a high school graduate from a small town farther north, a good-times girl who has no aspirations beyond settling down with her boyfriend Mike. Their wedding is scheduled to take place in mid-July. Nicole’s situation could so easily have been Bronwyn’s, so Bronwyn usually feels for Nicole a unique blend of sympathy and pity, though right now Bronwyn wishes she were Nicole, sitting at a desk with nothing particularly pressing to do, preoccupied with dreamy thoughts of an upcoming wedding.

  Bronwyn brushes her dress ineffectually. The grease is not going to disappear without a stain remover. She should have thought to leave a change of clothing here at the station for such an eventuality.

  “Well—?” says Nicole, still waiting for an explanation.

  Bronwyn sighs, glances around her. “My boyfriend dumped me. I didn’t see it coming. Then, I was already late and I was stopped by a cop. Has Stuart noticed?”

  “I don’t think so. Why would he dump you? That sucks. I can’t imagine anyone dumping you.”

  Nicole looks genuinely heartbroken, and Bronwyn feels an unexpected surge of gratitude that almost brings tears. “Apparently he found someone better.”

  “He didn’t do anything to you, did he? Did he rough you up?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you look so . . . messy?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime. But I should clean up before Stuart sees me. I need to fix this stain. My jacket won’t cover it.” “You can borrow my sweater.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. It’s not exactly classy, but it’ll cover the stain. I only brought it in case the AC gets too cold.” Nicole forages in a bag under her desk and comes up with the sweater in question, a yellow nylon that crackles with static electricity.

  “Thanks,” Bronwyn says. “I owe you.” Stuart will not like this makeshift outfit. He will comment about the pale yellow clashing with her auburn hair.

  “No problem. I’m really sorry about your boyfriend. He’s a loser.” Nicole shakes her head. “Would this be the wrong time to remind you about July 14th? No rain, no clouds, no humidity. None of this shit we’ve been having. Just a warm, dry, sunny day?”

  Bronwyn freezes, grabbed and stilled by the memory, the spectacle made by the parting clouds, the extreme light of silver and gold.

  “You’ll arrange that for me, right?” Nicole says. “July 14th? A perfect day?”

  Bronwyn blinks, stuck in the vision. Overhead the fluorescent bulbs thrust out their ugly hissing light. Nicole is only asking what everyone asks. “Yeah,” Bronwyn says. “Sure. I’ll see what I can do.” She winks.

  “Any chance you and your boyfriend will get back together?”

  Bronwyn shakes her head.

  “I’ve got a really hot cousin who’s coming to the wedding. And he’s rich. He’s a real estate developer. Shopping centers and stuff. And last year he opened a new ski resort—Gold Mountain. He looks like Brad Pitt, I swear to god. I would have married him in a nanosecond if he weren’t my cousin.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’m not ready.”

  “Wait and see. You might like him.”

  Bronwyn nods, waves vaguely, and wobbles off down the hallway, stopping in the bathroom to fix her hair, rinse her face, and gather herself a little, though more fixing will be necessary before the broadcast. Marginally improved, she continues down the hallway past the control booth and the newsroom and editorial. She keeps her gaze down in don’t interrupt mode, afraid of being snagged for a conversation. Everyone loves to talk to her about weather, but here at the station it’s meaningless chatter. People want to tell her what they think of certain weather—too hot, too cold, too humid—what they want to do in it. No one seems to appreciate the pure marvel of it, how weather showcases the invisible, unpredictable, powerful forces at work on the Earth. Today she’d be just as happy not to talk to anyone about anything. She’s already looking forward to going home after the last broadcast, collapsing on the couch with a glass of wine, and hooting back to her Great Horned Owl.

  Her office is situated on the set itself, a row of computers behind the weather console. She works standing, or perched on a stool, always ready to respond to various members of the “team” coming and going, some with questions for her, others with messages, still others with business that doesn’t involve her at all. Today Brant, one of the two evening news anchors, is already on the set, pre-recording a news segment about a rash of robberies for a station farther north. Bronwyn tiptoes quietly to her post, saved from having to engage with Brant. He’s always cordial, but he’s vain and insufferably self-involved.

  Her first task when she arrives is to read—or reread—the feed from the National Weather Service. That becomes the core of her report and is the reason that people without a lick of weather knowledge can do her job adequately (and why it sometimes embarrasses her to be here, a mere cog, her background in atmospheric science non-essential). Usually she embellishes the Weather Service information a little with her own take on things, drawn from her instruments and her practiced talent of observation. Sometimes she has a “Fun Weather Fact” to share, but not today. Today, whatever the Weather Service says goes. Today, the more automatic the better. Today, the great challenge will be getting words out of her mouth in the first place.

  Unlike the news anchors, Gwen and Brant, she does not read from a teleprompter. She stands in front of the green screen on which the weather map is superimposed, and she ad libs. On both sides of her are monitors with graphics she has composed beforehand, and she can take her cues from them, but the words are invented on the spot. Sure, there’s a basic template that repeats from day to day—first a recap of the last twenty-four hours, then a run-down of current conditions, then the five-day forecast. She pins her words around that format, but they’re her words, generated spontaneously on the air, and she has to try not to repeat herself while gesturing elegantly in front of the empty green screen and looking into the camera where she sees, of all things, her own image. All this requires extreme concentration so that she says what she means to say and acts cheerful as she says it. If her concentration lapses, everything falls apart, and she forgets certain things, or says them incomprehensibly, or fails to smile, or gestures too wildly. And meanwhile she must be cognizant of fitting everything into a very precise time slot. It’s a sacrilege to go over time. Better to come in under, and amble over to the news desk, and chat insipidly for a few seconds with the anchors.

  She turns her back on Brant and feels a momentary relief at being in this windowless, artificially lit space where she has no direct information about outside conditions. She logs onto the National Weather Service’s digital forecast database to discover that things haven’t changed since she last checked. They’re calling for 60% chance of rain tonight, clearing by morning, a slight breeze at five mph, low humidity, temperatures in the high seventies, then a spate of sunny, not-too-hot, not-too-cold days to close out the month. She scrolls down, searching for some mention somewhere, perhaps from one of the trained local weather spotters, of what she witnessed on the beach before she came here. There’s no mention of it. Forget it, she tells herself.

  She immerses herself in the building of graphics—a weather segment won’t fly without graphics—but she’s short on time, short on attention, and she keeps expecting Stuart to arrive on the set and lecture her publicly. Now Brant is completing his segment.

  “Bronwyn!” he calls, a
s if summoning a dog. “What’s going on?”

  She can feel the tension rippling through her trapezius muscles. “I’m behind, Brant. I’ve got to keep working.”

  But Brant is already ambling to her area. Because he is featured on several local billboards and is occasionally recognized in local establishments, he thinks he’s famous, and believes everyone is delighted by his company. Old enough to be Bronwyn’s father, he fancies himself king of the station. He stands behind Bronwyn.

  “You got some good weather in store for us?” Schoolmarmish, he won’t go away.

  Bronwyn turns and makes her face a smooth, placating plate. “We’re in New England, Brant, you know what they say. Wait five minutes and the weather changes. Have you ever been to the top of Mount Washington? You can start out on a summer day and meet winter at the top. There are the highest ever-recorded surface wind speeds up there.”

  “I’m not talking about Mount Washington. I’m talking about good weather right here in Manchester and Portsmouth. My golf swing is going to hell.”

  Bronwyn smiles wanly. “Sorry. I really have work to do.”

  Behind Brant, the cameraman Archie, a laid-back, fifty-something, unreconstructed hippie, is making faces at Bronwyn. She raises an eyebrow in acknowledgement of Archie, and Brant gives up, sensing the mockery, and exits the set without a word.

  “What a piece of work,” Archie says, joining Bronwyn at her bank of computers where they’ve been left alone. Archie is close to Brant’s age, but they could not be more different. Archie wears baseball caps and sandals and Hawaiian shirts even in winter; he fastens his long gray hair in a ponytail, and his face is half masked by a coarse Brillo beard.

  “So, solstice tomorrow,” Archie says. “I’ve been wondering. I know solstice means a change in season, but does it have any effect on the weather? You know what I mean?”

  “Can I take a rain check on that? I’m really under the gun.”

  “Ten-four. You okay?”

  “Tired.”

  “Yeah, you look beat to shit.”

  Bronwyn nods. She appreciates Archie’s honesty. Archie spends a lot of time looking at her from behind his camera. He has often helped her tweak her appearance, adjusting her clothing or telling her she needs more blush. He’s never rude about it, just protective and paternal in a touching way. She has often felt rescued by him. But now his attention makes her feel like crying again. Not that she would cry.

  “I’ll fix myself up before air time.”

  Archie leaves, and she lowers her head to the console. She needs sleep. She can’t imagine pulling herself together for the five o’clock broadcast. She has only an hour to compose her graphics and plan out her patter.

  For the next forty-five minutes technicians and reporters wander in and out, some conducting business, others killing time. Some make their way to Bronwyn to schmooze, but she blows them off as well as she can. She chafes at the lack of personal space she has here. There’s no door to close, and everyone has as much of a right to be on the set as she does. On most days she’s fine with that, but today she’s too addled to work this way. The director has given her a longer segment than usual, three minutes and thirty seconds, and she doesn’t have nearly enough to say to fill that time. So often she wants to get into the finer points of the forecast, but today she’s just as happy to do the golfer’s version: Will it or won’t it rain? How warm will it be? Will there be wind? End of story. If that doesn’t fill her time, she’ll have to think of trivia for shooting the breeze with Gwen and Brant.

  Everyone gathers on the set ten to fifteen minutes before the broadcast: the two cameramen, Archie and Larry; a handful of reporters; Don, who does captioning; Jerry, the director. Gwen and Brant sit behind the news desk attaching their mics and fiddling with their ear buds through which the guys in the booth can direct them. Stuart has not yet made an appearance.

  Bronwyn still scrambles. She’s forgotten to get sunrise and sunset times, and though she could probably hazard a guess, a guess won’t do. It is her policy to make sure the data she reports are correct and verifiable. At the last minute she dashes out to the bathroom, swabs on some makeup, and buttons Nicole’s yellow sweater over her dress. It isn’t right, but it’s all she has.

  The floor manager calls for places. Bronwyn attaches her mic. Even as she situates herself in front of the blank green screen she’s uncertain about what will emerge from her mouth. Gwen eyes her with a maternal gaze. She has a twenty-year-old daughter she worries about, and she often consults Bronwyn for advice. What a joke, that Bronwyn would have advice for a twenty-year-old when her own life is so out of control.

  Archie’s gesturing demands her attention; he’s tugging his earlobe frantically. She remembers her earring. She only has one. She yanks it off, drops it on the floor. It clatters, spins, rolls off the platform. A look of alarm passes over the floor manager’s face until he sees what it is—the earring that has now settled. Archie smiles.

  “Three. Two. One.”

  Bronwyn activates her smile like a spigot. She’s gotten good at this in the last year. As low as she now feels, she can still find her smile. Her image comes back at her from the camera. She might as well be addressing her own bathroom mirror, and today she can’t help seeing that Archie is right. She looks beat up. Her big eyes are too big. She’s far too pale. Can others see in her face the disjuncture of mind and body?

  “We’re on the air folks.”

  At 5:03 p.m., she’s on camera two for the weather teaser. Her full report won’t come up for another twenty minutes or so.

  “And Bronwyn Artair is here,” Brant says in his booming, slick TV locution, “to tell us what to expect from the weather. Some sun in our future, Bronwyn?”

  “Yes, Brant, we finally have some good weather heading our way. Clearing all over southern New Hampshire. Throughout our viewing area, inland and on the coast, we can expect some beautiful early summer days for the foreseeable future.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Brant says. “Just what we’ve all been waiting for.”

  As soon as Bronwyn is off the air she wilts and crosses quietly to her weather console where she perches on the stool as Brant continues with a report on an infestation of blue-green algae on Lake Winnipe-saukee, followed by Gwen on Summer Safety for kids, stories Bronwyn only half hears. Talking is forbidden on the set when they’re live, which allows her to escape into the pleats of her brain, not sleeping, but not fully conscious either.

  Since she came to New Hampshire she has felt as though she has another life, a more authentic life, happening elsewhere, moving along in tandem with the life she has been living here. In that other life there is forward momentum. She would be marrying Reed and on her way to being employed at a more important, reputation-clinching job. That life has had an intense hold on her and thinking of it motivated and ennobled her. It was the life she was entitled to and knew would eventually be hers. But as of today, she understands that this life here is her only life, a life that is circumscribed and lonely, and she is the only one to propel it forward. She has no mother or boyfriend to weigh in and cheer her on. Having abandoned Diane, she can’t expect to consult with her, especially since they’ve scarcely spoken over the last year, sharing only a few shallow emails. There’s her old friend Lanny, but Lanny still lives in New Jersey and can’t be relied on daily. Her real life is turning out to be a solo journey, difficult and small, just like her mother’s.

  Archie pokes her. It’s time!

  Panicked, Bronwyn pops back to place in front of the green screen. The smile, find the smile. Thank god it’s Pavlovian. Smile in place, the words follow, not sophisticated words, but automatic, straightforward, fill-in-the-blank sentences. She grins, a big, fat, crowd-pleasing grin, not the grin of a failed scientist, or an abject lover, but the grin of a woman in love with the world.

  “So folks, as you well know we’ve had some gloomy weather here in southern New Hampshire for the last week or so, a stagnant front of low stratus cl
ouds, warm temperatures, high humidity, but things are changing as they are wont to do with the weather. We can expect some rain tonight, tapering off toward morning. The skies should be clearing by nine or ten a.m., and for the solstice and into the foreseeable future, we can expect to see some perfect summer days, as a high pressure system asserts itself and the humidity abates. So break out your bathing suits and golf clubs and fire up those barbeques. Get ready for summer.”

  Her arms swing over the Eastern seaboard in grandiose arcs, as if she is absolutely sure of what she’s saying, as if she is coaching major league baseball, or conducting the Boston Symphony, instead of detailing the temperatures in Portsmouth, Manchester, Nashua.

  “Let’s appreciate this weather while it lasts because, let’s not kid ourselves, we all know that as each year passes the weather is becoming more dire and less predictable and—”

  Archie is motioning for her to close. He appears desperate.

  The booth cuts to Gwen on camera one. “Thank you Bronwyn. You’ve made us all happy.” She continues, conciliatory as ever. “My husband and I are going fishing this weekend and it will be a lot better with sun.”

  Archie hooks Bronwyn’s arm as she steps off the set. “Sorry,” he whispers. “The booth was barking at me to cut.”

  She shrugs, nods. Bring it on. I don’t care. She knew the risk, even before she spoke of dire future weather, but for some reason she couldn’t stop herself. It’s 5:30 p.m. now. There are more broadcasts at six, then later in the evening at ten and eleven. She has to vary each one a little for the repeat viewers and as new weather information comes in. It’s hard to imagine finding all that energy three more times. She heads for the break room where she keeps a supply of Red Bull. Nicole intercepts her.

  “Stuart. He wants to see you now.”

  “Damn.” Did he see the broadcast? Or is her lateness the issue? “You did good, by the way,” Nicole says. “And the sweater looks awesome.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You were a little manic maybe, but I liked it. We could use a little more manic around here. Good luck with Stuart.”