No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (7 page)

Julia's mother was more circumspect and less partisan. She had given birth very young and devoted twenty-four years of her life to wiping asses and countertops, ironing sheets, and arguing about homework. She did all this for no charge. But it turned out no charge is what you pay for the ultimate guilt insurance. For the day Julia's younger brother left for college, her mother walked away from that stage of her life without a backward glance. Aged forty-five, she qualified as a swimming coach (she had been nicknamed “the dolphin” as a child) and had taken the local junior synchronized swimming team to the National Championships at least ten times.

Julia described how, these days, she had to make appointments to speak to Coach Kirkland, which irritated her and meant their conversations were often chilly and combative, especially if anything about Romy and Lee's physical milestones were discussed. But then she realized that what really irritated her was, first, the knowledge that she had much preferred her mother when they were younger and the more comfortable relationship of servant and master had existed between them and, second, the fear that her own children might hate her, because she could not be their slave. Julia, who was quick of mind and fearless of temperament, reluctantly acknowledged that therapy boot camp might suit her.

The tension between Julia and her mother had come to a head one Saturday morning when Julia's mother was on the sidelines at a swimming gala. Julia rang her, by arrangement, about Thanksgiving. Kristian had taken the kids out for pancakes, and Julia was lying in bed with coffee and toast and peanut butter, and felt decadent and relaxed and deluded. She had made a joke, her mother laughed, and then Julia said that Kristian wanted to have another baby. Julia's mother kept laughing, but not in an amused way. When Julia fell silent, her mother marched out of the pool area, where the water made the sound echo around her, and asked Julia outright if she was pregnant. When Julia said “no,” her mother said “good” far too quickly; Julia could tell she was gripping the phone so tightly her knuckles were red, and there was a heartbreakingly serious note in her mother's voice when she finally spoke again.

“Don't do it, Julia.
Please.
I love you, but I beg you, don't have another baby.”

“Mom. I don't think that's any of your business.” So much for the coffee and the toast and the peanut butter. Julia's mother knew before she did that Julia wasn't coping.

“You've got to learn you can't be the best at everything—”

Julia slammed down the phone.

Then why was there never a prize in our house for “good enough”?
she thought.

•   •   •

K
RISTIAN HAD DROPPED
in one morning to discuss the arrangements for the following weekend, when, after finally taking his admiring gaze from Julia (even under that day's multicolored knitted hat with earflaps, which on anyone else would make them look like they were goat herding in Peru, Julia looked amazing), he looked down at the dog and failed to conceal his disquiet. Julia took offense immediately. She was getting fond of Marjorie and had taken charge of her grooming, nail clipping, and even teeth cleaning, as she worried Courtney was not attentive enough to the possibility of canine plaque. Sometimes, though Julia didn't say this to Kristian, Marjorie stayed for a sleepover.

“You didn't tell me it was a dealer's dog. It's a gangland bitch. They're used to attack people.”

“Ridiculous. How do you know that? You teach yoga.”

Kristian was having none of her attitude.
“
Look,”
he said
,
“she's got a
tattoo
.”

And indeed behind Marjorie's ear there was a tattoo, a small star symbol, a sign of something rather thrilling and nefarious. Julia knew better than to tell him about her experience with the Tough Inked Man; the separation had done nothing to lessen Kristian's protective streak, and he often lectured her, ending with “I care about you; you are the Mother of my Children.” At such times, Romy and Lee, the children of whom she was the mother, always reminded him of reckless things Julia had done in the past, always in the course of research for the TV crime show that had dominated their lives for ten seasons. It was fun for the four of them to banter like that. Only a year before, Julia's main interaction with her children was to holler at them and then beg their forgiveness.

Kristian was concerned about whether the dog was safe around the kids, and so Julia agreed not to let her near them. She was the very model of reasonableness these days, she had learned the art of compromise at the Wellness Center, and it seemed that, now that they were liberated from the stress of pretending that equality in marriage ever means fifty-fifty, Julia and Kristian were both different people. The rules and the roles were clear, and Julia often thought,
Oh, if only he had been a woman, thus conditioned for career kamikaze, if only he could have chosen to be the wind beneath my wings
, and sometimes felt that if they had only managed to work that out before what happened happened, what happened might never have happened.

When Julia met Kristian he was twenty-nine and had something of a following in an overdesigned men's magazine for his witty columns about a patrician, handsome All-American boy whose father had gambled away the family fortune on real estate speculation in Eastern Europe. To his credit, Kristian never pretended this was anything but autobiographical. He lived rent-free in his aunt's apartment in the Dakota, wore his father's suits from the 1960s, and drove down Broadway on a scooter. His very existence could have been dreamed up by an art director to advertise handmade Italian shoes, and Julia was incredibly attracted to his sidecar, his gray sharkskin, and his disdain for the grubby business of real life.

Once they had the children, however, in an attempt to impress her or himself with his newfound determination to provide, Kristian lurched into freelance website design, finally starting a business downtown that involved his being in the office sixteen hours a day. To fit in, he wore T-shirts that showed his abs. That was the upside. On the downside he took a loan against their apartment and defaulted on it. Of course, he was suffering from depression (he was an adored youngest son, brainwashed by the cult of New York, living with a woman who was the embodiment of “making it there”); and of course Julia should never have allowed herself to be doing everything. Literally. But Julia would never have succeeded without denial. She read numerous self-help books about work/life balance for women and ignored everything they had to say.

She pondered all this the following week as she and Marjorie strolled along the streets, the locations of many of the scenes from her marriage. She saw the two of them, herself and Kristian, not herself and the dog, of course, staggering hollow-eyed down the apartment steps carrying babies and buggies and bottles and heading into the café opposite so they could pay someone to feed them. But they were still laughing, still madly in love; they made jokes,
“If
you have two kids in two years, it's not just the city that never sleeps,”
and there were many nights the four of them collapsed on the super-king-size bed together, and if you saw that in a film you'd think,
That's a happy family, that's a family that will make it
. It's called
show, don't tell.

But then the crime drama got a new executive producer. His reputation preceded him. He was called the Asshole. By his friends. Within a month the Asshole called Julia into his corner office and, with a customized poster declaring
ALWAYS BLAME, NEVER APOLOGIZE
hanging above his head, announced that he had fired two of Julia's colleagues (one for having a vacation, the other for having cancer) and was promoting her.

“You'll never sleep again,” he said happily, but she figured that this wouldn't make any difference, because she and Kristian had not slept for three years anyway. She worked her brain, fingers, and ass off, drinking Red Bull and vodka out of a My Little Pony beaker, writing through the nights in a delusional state, and the show's ratings soared, although Julia still never seemed to earn quite as much as her male counterparts. Her agent told her this was because she had other life “priorities,” but that made no sense.

She had never told the Asshole she had a family.

•   •   •

E
VERY MORNING
Julia saw a Ghost of Julia Past among the taut, teeth-grinding women standing outside the day-care center at seven fifty-five.

One day she passed a woman begging her child to stop crying, the woman's own eyes filling with tears, her voice rising to an operatic pitch, until they actually harmonized in a duet of misery as people scurried past, studiously avoiding them, not wanting to allow themselves those feelings.

Julia went into a café, bought the child a cookie and the woman a coffee. The child, clearly fed muesli and never allowed sweets, a regime Julia had imposed on her own two, which she liked to think of as the “I'm never there, but I feel less guilty if you don't eat sugar” diet, stopped crying, gobbled down the chocolate eagerly, and the woman sipped some coffee and waited for the inevitable judgmental homily. Julia, who had been on the receiving end of those many times from women she encountered in situations involving children, said nothing except “It'll be okay,” even though personal experience had taught her that it might well not be. And she was sure the woman would have hugged her, had it not been for Marjorie, who suddenly took an enormous, foul-smelling, yellow shit on the sidewalk, and she had to borrow a baggie to scoop it up.

Julia's children had been picked up every evening by a succession of resentful, undocumented nannies who watched television with them until she staggered home between seven and eight in the evening, put in a load of washing, defrosted dinner, and bribed them into bed. Her beautiful babies had turned into slow-to-read, anxious, unhappy children, disruptive when they started school and always whining and desperate for attention. Kristian found excuses to stay out later and later every evening, and many nights Julia found herself alone in the kitchen with his uneaten plate of pasta at ten p.m. before steeling herself for three more hours of writing. The alarm would go off at six-thirty the next morning, and the whole ghastly business would start again. It was like
Groundhog Day
, except it wasn't funny and occasionally something unusually unpleasant or downright dangerous would occur; Kristian left little Lee, age five, playing with the cutlery drawer alone in the apartment for a morning, simply forgetting about him in a haze of exhaustion. Another day, Julia nearly broke her arm on a cab door pulling Romy inside so she wouldn't be late for school. They were stuck in traffic, anyway, as a film crew had blocked the road. Julia, curious, wound down the window and asked what the movie was.

“
I Don't Know How She Does It
,” boomed the boom operator.

•   •   •

T
HERE WAS ONE PLACE
in her neighborhood that Julia avoided, a playground on East Thirteenth between Avenues B and C, a relatively pleasant, clean spot, with a metal climbing frame, a few actual trees, and two pergolas on each side that were covered in jasmine in May. She took the ugly dog on circuitous routes around it, for it was somewhere she had no desire to see again. It was a key location, the scene of the “inciting incident,” the snapping point, the straw that broke the camel's back (and Julia was the camel).

It happened on a Wednesday and, that evening, Julia waited until Kristian came home after another futile day
drumming up business
, which seemed mainly to be playing backgammon on his laptop and drinking too many beers, and walked out of the loft on Rivington Street. She took a cab to the small apartment on East Tenth (the unpleasant and litigious life coaches had terrorized her most recent tenant out of the building), pulled the sofa bed out, and crashed for eighteen hours. She did not come back.

Julia and Kristian lived separately, Kristian in the loft with the kids, Julia in the small apartment with her laptop. They took turns taking Romy and Lee to school. Kristian stopped working “outside the home” (Christy told Julia he kept saying this). Julia paid all the bills. Apart from the month Julia spent at the Wellness Center, they swapped over most weekends. Julia became reacquainted with sleep and, although the dull ache of separation never left her (the umbilical cords had been physically cut, but Julia felt them dangling from her heart, invisible to all but her, like amputated limbs), she discovered she could hang out with her children, and enjoy them and even get them to do what she asked, something which had seemed almost impossible before. When she rang her mother to tell her this, there was no weird laughter or heartbreaking begging. Julia's mother was matter-of-fact.

“It may work better for you all,” she said. “I was talking to some parents last week, and the mother said that the only good thing about their separation was that they both got time off from their kids.”

This reminded Julia of a college friend of hers who had rediscovered religion in order to escape her three sons for two hours every Sunday.

One Saturday the second month, one of Kristian's former partners suggested they go to a yoga course together (they had both discovered yoga as a displacement activity from the website design business), and Kristian found his calling. He decided to train as an instructor, traveling upstate most Friday nights. He didn't ask for much money for himself (he was far cheaper than an undocumented, resentful nanny), and, although it was expensive to run the two apartments, Julia could never have guessed the dramatic effect the new arrangement would have on her career.

She won an Emmy. She got a new agent. The new agent, Clarice, shouted,
“There's a new sheriff in town!”
at the Asshole and got Julia off the Crime Show. She then negotiated a deal with a studio and instructed Julia to write romantic comedy. Clarice told Julia that Julia had been brutalized by her work environment, and it was time for her to get back in touch with her woman-y side. Although Julia thought that was rich coming from someone who had turned an anger-management problem into a negotiation technique, she appreciated Clarice's point. While
ALWAYS BLAME, NEVER APOLOGIZE
might be the way to terrorize the Writers Room, it is not the basis for successful interpersonal relationships.