No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (18 page)

“My children are city kids.” He intoned, “They are going to grow up stimulated and excited, not dying of boredom like I did. The best fun I had every summer was hitting a tree with a stick.”

“Okay,” said Robyn, accepting immediately that she had blundered into the relationship area called bad timing. “Now we have to get out of the rain.”

At this moment, three of the young pierced punks who lived on benches in the park scuttled as fast as their bondage trousers would let them and joined them under the flimsy awning. Their Mohawks were wilting, and Michael and Madison stared. Robyn knew the kids were wondering if the spiderweb tattoos on their faces would wilt, too, and wanted to get them away before Michael said something that might result in him being spat at, but Ryan was not done. Robyn knew he secretly enjoyed his biannual explosions, always a response to an inconvenient emotional outburst of her own. He had not fled to New York to skulk away one weekend with a U-Haul back to Anaheim, he thundered. Robyn grabbed each child by a hand and started walking away. So Ryan decided he would lose his temper. The last words she heard as she turned the corner were: “I'm an urban writer. What about my inspiration?
What about my book?
”

She had given him a way out, a way she thought they could stay together, away from a city that took more from them than it ever gave back, and he had blocked it. She would never forgive him. So she raided the account that his parents had set up for Christmas presents for the kids and joined a gym near her office. Then she logged on to goop.com and followed her new friend Gwyneth Paltrow's suggestions on how to coordinate your outfits from Uniqlo.

She was not going to be invisible anymore. She was going to have an affair.

•   •   •

S
HE HAD ALREADY SLEPT
with Vaughn Armitage, so that didn't really count. He was very frisky with all the mothers, which Christy never seemed to mind, to the extent that Robyn wondered if she was relieved. One morning after Robyn politely said good-bye to him at the school gates, his arm tightened so hard around her waist she thought he might be feeling for her kidneys, so she brazenly suggested they have a coffee just to see what happened. Something did. Fifteen minutes of
afternoon delight
, as Vaughn called it, although it was nine o'clock in the morning.

The experience was not one Robyn wished to repeat, although she had a feeling she could. Christy might sleep in Egyptian cotton sheets with a 1,600 thread count, but she still had to feel Vaughn's gray nose hairs rubbing against her thigh. And the scar from his heart surgery ran down his stomach like a red arrow pointing to the fact that he might die on the job, which would be extremely embarrassing and would mean she couldn't do the book sale with Christy, which was the one day in the school calendar that she enjoyed. But Vaughn had been fantastically appreciative of her curves, and it occurred to Robyn that Christy's concave stomach might not be that reassuring to cuddle up next to, you could give yourself a nasty bruise on her hip bones, so after Robyn had come in late to work, blaming the subway like everyone else did, she looked up “fecund” in the dictionary again.

There it was:
“luxuriant, lush, fructuous
(whatever that meant),
FERTILE.”
She scanned down: “
fruitful in
offspring and vegetation.”
Ignoring the vegetation bit, she had an insight into something that might banish the cloak of invisibility to the back of the wardrobe of her life. She was younger, relatively, than most of the other mothers. She had not crossed the Rubicon of forty, after which the brutal regime of daily exercise and eating nothing but soup and a naughty little crouton stops making you “fabulous” and instead makes you “stringy,” with veins popping out of your arms and shoes that don't fit. Moreover, while other women might consider her fat, men didn't. No, Julia was right, they considered her
fertile
. Her hair, full of nutrients, was thick and long without extensions, and she had her own nails. Once she embraced this, and listened to Gwyneth's advice about updating her wardrobe with some key pieces, she was amazed at the attention she received from the Fathers at the School. She began to scan the locker rooms like an affair-seeking missile.

Within a week one of the chess teachers sidled over, muttering something about showing her his antique pawns, but with his huge bald head he looked like an enormous lollipop and, after the Vaughn experience, she wanted a man she found vaguely attractive. She fixed Richard Lovett in a doelike gaze from beneath her bangs, but he was so English he didn't even realize she was making a pass at him. He appeared to think she was asking for directions somewhere. So when she bumped into Kristian with a
K
in his Lycra yoga shorts and he suggested she try out his new hip opening workshop on a Saturday morning, as she had a lot of hip to open, she had a feeling she might have struck infidelity gold.

When he rubbed the massage oil into her temples longer than anyone else in shivasana, she knew she was onto something, and that if she took longer than anyone else to disinfect her sweaty mat after class there was a chance their eyes might meet across the incense burner. She did, and they did, and then they did it. “Vengeance is mine,” muttered Robyn to arouse herself, thinking of Julia, as her head bumped against the wooden blocks. In fact, it turned out to be rubbish revenge, because Julia never knew. Kristian with a
K
informed her seven sessions into their pathetic fling that Julia was in the middle of an “episode” and had left him, and all Robyn wanted to do was scream,
“Why didn't you tell me? It doesn't mean anything if you aren't cheating on her, if she doesn't get to find out YOU PREFER ME!”

She still did it with him three more times. She wanted to practice a sexual maneuver one of her younger colleagues from accounts had shown her, having recorded it the previous night on her iPhone. (It was the holiday party; there had been free eggnog, and the administrative staff were all huddled in the bathroom, gasping at the sheer athleticism of it.)

So she vented her fury with Kristian that their relationship was not in any way threatening his love for Julia by ordering him around on the mat and telling him to move his leg an inch or so to the right and hold his breath. When she finally got the hang of it she knew it was time to move on, although Kristian protested, saying that he had never met anyone as “free” as her and he would miss her “uncomplicated attitude.”

Robyn didn't feel free, but she did feel empowered, until Parents' Evening, when Michael's teacher, Miss Chang, told her that Michael couldn't read and brought back home to her the fact that nothing in her life had really changed.

Ryan went into the idiotically flirtatious manner that incensed Robyn. He assumed at first that Miss Chang was referring to reading
books
and giggled about how uninspiring kids' literature was these days and that he often felt that, if he wanted a break from his short stories, there was a fortune to be made writing for eight-year-olds. Ryan himself had read
Dracula
in third grade. Robyn became distracted thinking about
Dracula
and that among the ways of keeping vampires away, apart from the obvious garlic and crucifixes, was to draw a circle around yourself. She looked longingly at the stub of pink chalk on the desk, wanting to seize it and scribble round her chair, as, after all, marriage to Ryan was sucking the life out of her.

Miss Chang was unmoved. She repeated that Michael couldn't read.

“As in
bat, cat, pat
?”
said Robyn slowly.

“As in He. Can't. Read,” replied Miss Chang with the weary expression of someone used to ignoring stupid comments shouted out from the back of a classroom. She looked at them across the desk. “How much do you do at home?”

Robyn reached over and put her hand on Ryan's arm. Normally he hated that, but now he found it reassuring. He wanted her to take over, which she did, explaining that they were both incredibly busy and had not been as diligent with Michael's homework as they should have been, and asked what they could do.

Miss Chang sighed. “Practice will remedy it; it's just there are limits to what I can do in a class of thirty-two children, twelve of whom have learning and behavioral difficulties.”

“That's just not right,” countered Ryan. “How can Michael study with disruptive influences around him?”

Miss Chang looked at her watch. The gesture was as devastating as what came next.

“Michael's no angel.”

Ryan fell silent.

“Someone needs to do an hour's reading with him every day.”

Robyn looked at Ryan; she didn't get home until seven three nights a week, and Claudia the minder could hardly speak English. Ryan shrugged and folded his arms. Miss Chang looked at Robyn. Robyn knew the look was one of pity.

After this exchange Robyn sent Ryan in the direction of the coffee table, made an excuse, and headed for the disabled bathroom, bumping straight into Julia and Kristian, who had their arms wrapped around each other like young love's dream and were kissing in front of everyone. Robyn was so upset that she didn't even enjoy Kristian's expression of terror when she muttered “hello.” She desperately needed to cry and, like a small woodland animal ready to lie down and die, she needed a private burrow to do it in. The bathroom was too obvious, so she made her way to the janitor's storage cupboard, crawled into the corner, pulled a toilet roll from the shelves, and slumped onto the floor.

But she had been followed by a predator.

She looked up through sodden eyes to see Lucy Lovett peering in at her. Of course. Lucy often lurked in unexpected corridors with a faraway expression in her eyes. Sometimes she could be heard talking to herself. Not today. She said nothing, so Robyn felt she had to explain.

“Michael can't read, and I don't know what to do.”

“It's because this school is a dump.”

Robyn was startled.

“You think so? Miss Chang says it's because I don't read to him.”

Lucy, who had felt unsettled about Robyn since the debacle of the horse course, sat down beside her next to the foul-smelling floor disinfectant.

“Fuck off. When the fuck are you meant to do that?”

Robyn winced a little. Despite profanity being delivered in what she imagined was an upper-crust English accent, the good girl from Carolina in her never felt comfortable around it. Lucy and Julia swore all the time. It was very off-putting. But she needed to hear what Lucy was going to say next. This is what it was.

“It's all right for me. I have time. I bring them home and I teach them myself. I don't know how long it'll work, but for the moment it's fine. But you . . .”

Lucy looked at Robyn now, right into her eyes.

“You work harder than any other mother I've ever met. I see you every morning, hurrying, always hurrying. But you never lose your temper with your kids. I admire you. You ought to see me with half the pressure you're under, berating my two for ruining my life in front of Kmart. And passersby.”

Tears were spouting from Robyn's eyes now like a clown's rubber squirty flower. It was all too much.

“I can't do it anymore. I'm exhausted all the time. The only recreation I have is the gym.” (This was not strictly true, of course.
And sleeping with
the occasional husband
,
she should have added.) “I stagger through the day and I watch bad TV every night.
How can this be my life?
”

Lucy nodded. She reached for another toilet roll and handed it over.

“Michael can't read,” said Robyn again, marveling that this could possibly be true.

“No, he can't,” said Lucy.

Robyn remembered that Lucy volunteered in the classroom twice a week. She knew. Lucy took her hand.

“Thank you,” Robyn said, smiling thinly. Lucy smiled back. Broadly.

“You know, if you ever need me to pick them up or you get stuck one evening, let me know. I could drill them with mine.”

Robyn stared at her in disbelief, and then the dreamlike quality of the scene continued when Julia and Christy appeared in the doorway.

“What are you two doing? Sniffing the fucking cleaning fluids?” said Julia. “The principal's about to tell us the plans for the school summer clear-out. We have to choose a child to put on a bonfire. Or at least I think that's what she said. . . . Oh, hi, Robyn.”

Julia spotted that Robyn's face looked like a little rabbit's with myxomatosis and decided to ignore it.

“Stop it,” laughed Christy.

“I'm coming,” replied Lucy, crawling out. “Can I nominate one of my own?”

Then she stopped in the doorway.

“Robyn, I'm always in the park with the kids on Saturday morning, around ten. Why not come? We'll have coffee.”

Julia looked up. “I'll come, too.”

And they left.

Robyn started crying again. For so long she had wanted nothing more than to sit with the cool girls at the back of the school bus, but she realized now that she could have all along. It was not them stopping her. It was her. She had radiated a mixture of fear and disdain and had created a drama about her own rejection that they were oblivious to. She should never have listened to herself. She should have silenced the long monologues inside her head born out of her exhaustion and desperation.

She was suffused with guilt. Now they had finally looked at her, listened to her, and
seen
her, it was too late. She had fondled the penises of two out of three of their husbands.

Thank God Michael was educationally challenged. She had an excuse to take her kids out of the school.

November

Robyn picked up the message on her phone and felt sick. Sitting in Principal Lorraine's office, she felt sicker. She stared straight ahead at a poster listing the five requirements for the children in the school, focusing on number three:
Always tell the truth.
The letters seemed to dance around before her, like a visual disturbance preceding a migraine and, as the principal had made clear “it's about where you live,” Robyn felt an enormous headache coming on.