Weather Woman by Cai Emmons

Author:Cai Emmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

28

The porch door slammed shut in anger, and Bronwyn has vanished, leaving Diane sucker-punched in a day that is improbably hot, improbably still. No questions at all have been laid to rest, and the anxiety of the past week has been replaced by a gumbo of worse emotion.

Indignation. Bronwyn has apparently been moving in this strange direction—whatever it is—without feeling any need at all to include or alert Diane, even after all Diane has done for her, even after Diane has beseeched her to return to grad school and rejoin the ranks of working research scientists and would do anything to make that happen. Of course it’s possible, or even quite likely, that this “strain of thinking” that has beset Bronwyn played a role in her leaving the graduate program in the first place.

Fear. Generalized and nonspecific. Bronwyn did not appear to be “cracking up” in any of the usual ways Diane has seen people go—social withdrawal, bad hygiene, dissociation—but who knows how she’s been behaving when Diane isn’t around? And surely psychosis can emerge in any number of ways. She hates to think of Bronwyn presenting herself in public as she did today, subjecting herself to more and more ridicule, scarring her reputation as a researcher and making a return to academic science unlikely.

Shame. Though she has championed Bronwyn and helped her out, she has not prevented this from happening, or seen it coming. It calls her judgment into question at the most fundamental level. She hates to think of all the times she has defended Bronwyn in the presence of people who have found her a bit odd. Have those other people seen Bronwyn more clearly than Diane herself has?

Sadness. Terrible sadness, cohabiting with her in this chair, taking up too much space. Bronwyn. Her Bronwyn. Her project for so many years. Her protégé. Almost her daughter. She has loved Bronwyn as much as she has loved her husbands.

She is scheduled to have dinner with some dear old friends, two couples, not a scientist among them. A museum curator and a sculptor; an attorney and a librarian. She doesn’t mind being the only uncoupled person at the table, she likes that she and Joe are independent enough and confident enough with one another that they do not find such arrangements threatening—she could never be married again to anyone who felt otherwise—but being the fifth person with two couples often means the conversational focus turns to her, fine on most occasions, but not tonight. How could she discuss with them what has happened today? She wouldn’t know how to position the narrative. Would she describe Bronwyn from a safe distance, thereby ridiculing her? Or would she try to take Bronwyn’s perspective, standing by her, and thereby subjecting herself to ridicule? Not that her old friends would ridicule her openly—they’d only get to that later, shaking their heads ruefully in the privacy of their bedrooms—but they would be embarrassed for her. She can picture them looking away, dabbing their mouths, excusing themselves to the restroom.

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