Weather forthcoming in ROOM

by Karyn Smith

After his wife, his God, his children and his family, my stepfather Leo loves New England Patriots and Notre Dame football, Red Sox baseball, and The Weather Channel . I've seen Leo spend entire afternoons in front of The Weather Channel , waiting for the next big storm.

Leo isn't particular about where the storms occur. Those poor buggers in the Midwest are getting pounded with tornadoes, he'll tell us. During hurricane season, there are always places he's glad he's not: Bermuda, St. Croix, Florida, the Gulf Coast. And then, when winter comes and he tracks storms that roll towards New England from the Rockies, he wishes he could be in Bermuda, St. Croix, Florida, or on the Gulf Coast.

Leo is particularly fascinated by extremes; I think he likes to know what's possible. One particularly cold winter in Minneapolis, he sat captivated as weathermen hammered nails into roofs with bananas, as boiling coffee tossed from a Styrofoam cup froze mid-air. Put on The Weather Channel for a minute, Matt, he'd tell my brother. We'd be watching The Brady Bunch (my choice), or Transformers (Matt's choice). We were eleven and nine that year. You kids gotta see this. It's incredible. And then a weatherman, or a house, or a boat, would blow across a street, or a yard, or a dock, and we would be awed. We would briefly forget our afternoon re-runs. We'd want to know what happened to those people. We'd want to know if it could happen here.

“Hell, I haven't seen that kind of weather in years. But when I was a kid—snow up to your freakin' ears. And the Hurricanes—oh, my God. Bloody unbelievable.” Here Leo shook his head slowly and paused in a kind of reverence. He squared his shoulders with his work-boots, scratched the back of his head just beneath the rim of his baseball cap. “Hell, I ain't even seen nothin'. Now, the Hurricane of '38, that was somethin'. My father tells stories about people getting blown off the bloody Brightman Street Bridge. ‘Course, they didn't know what the hell was going on, back then. They didn't have the forecasting that we do now-a-days.”

As Leo spoke, I imagined vivid, terrifying scenes. I saw the bridge, freshly painted, and not yet much of a highway. I imagined the wind picking up, people clinging to the rails, peering down into the water, until they were swept up, much like Mary Poppins, only they would come immediately back down, still holding their hats and their umbrellas, plunging straight into the depths of the Taunton River. Person after person after person.

I'd always been fascinated by the folklore of the Great New England Storms: about how surprising they were, how dangerous. About how much they destroyed, how many lives they claimed. And about the ways in which cities and towns recovered and rebuilt afterwards. Every weather story, it seemed, ended with that kind of hope. Every story seemed like an adventure.

Occasionally I would watch The Weather Channel with Leo, waiting with him for the forecasters to announce the next big storm. But the days in most places were sunny and fair, and only Leo could sit through that tediousness.

Sometimes I think he kept watching because it gave him a purpose. He would reply to “Goodnight” with, “It's gonna be a scorcher tomorrow,” or “Better bundle up in the mornin', kids, it's supposed to rain like hell.” Each morning we dressed according to his forecast from the night before. Sometimes his predictions were correct, sometimes they were not, but none of us ever kept score. Leo was devoted to the forecasters, and we were devoted to Leo. We hung our hopes on his forecasts, and the bigger the possibility of a storm, the more we hoped.

I relished the days when Leo said, “Gary Ley over on Channel 6 says it could be a corker this weekend.” Leo often used “corker” to refer to the weather. It was a special term, a term that he reserved for the possibility of significant force and damage. “Corker” carried great anticipation: would we need to evacuate? Hunker down?

I lived for the corkers.

“Leo's at it again. It's his damn kids.” My mother's foot pressed down on the gas. The car accelerated and decelerated in rhythm with her sentences. The summer was cooling off. In a few short weeks I would start high school. We were on our way home from the mall.

“Chris called this morning, he's fighting with his mother again. And of course Leo gets so concerned. I keep telling him, this is our life, this is our house, and he can't let them disrupt our happiness. But he doesn't listen, he just sits there in his chair and tells me to fuck off.” She ashed her cigarette.

As the years passed, the adult conversation that was my mother and Leo's marriage often became public knowledge in our house: they would discuss their problems at the dinner table, or in the next room, or in front of the television, their voices rarely hushed. They fought about money, they fought about Leo's ex-wife, they fought about their kids. They cursed at one another, they yelled. They slammed doors and they drove too fast, but they never laid a hand on one another. The lack of physical violence was a selling point for all of us: no one had a black eye, so how bad could things be, really?

While my mother spoke, I imagined Leo back at home, sitting in the armchair between the living room fireplace and the bay window, staring off into the distance of a neighbor's yard. It was almost noon, it was raining outside. The neighborhood would fall into gray. I imagined Leo bringing his can of Budweiser to his lips and taking a swallow. I imagined his quiet.

Even now, that is the only term I can apply to that mood: quiet. It was Leo's own particular mix of depression and anxiety, coupled with some recent event: his damn kids this time. Other times he might be worried about money, or his job, or my mother. In these moods, there were no stories, no jokes, no buzzing of weather reports on the television. Leo would withdraw entirely.

Understanding my mother and Leo's marriage is like trying to solve an algebraic equation: I can't do it. I can pick out moments that seem important. I can remember stories Leo told about the weather, about the crazy things he did when he was young: he once wore a fur coat on a cruise to Bermuda, another time he drove to New York City just for a cup of coffee. I can recall how my mother laughed at all of his stories. I can tell you that my mother looks beautiful when she laughs: she throws her head back, her eyes sparkle, her face glows pink. I can tell you that even now, no one can make her laugh like Leo can.

I also know that I blamed my mother for most of what happened. I blamed her in part because she and I didn't have a very good relationship: we fought as viciously as any adolescent mother and daughter. I blamed my mother for my wide hips, for my bad haircut, for my ill-fitting sweaters. Because of my mother, I told my teenage self, I was unpopular and depressed. It was easy to assume she had this effect on everyone else in the house.

I blamed Leo, too, but I blamed him less. Leo was funnier, and he never yelled at me, and so he was harder to fault.

Blaming either of them as a child was easy. Blaming them as an adult troubles me. Twenty years later, they're both retired and still married. None of us live with them anymore, and so we don't know how often they fight. We know they fight during the holidays, when my mother needs to clean the house and get ready to put on a big meal and they need to find money to buy everyone presents. We know they sometimes fight about my grandparents, who are eighty and often ill. We know they fight about how much money to spend on each of their children—there are four of us all together, and we've been getting married and buying houses and studying abroad. We know these are all normal things to fight about. We know that when they're not fighting, they go to dances and go bowling and take cruises and spend as many days as they can on the beach. Every time I visit home, they show me pictures of the latest places they've been. They are always smiling in the pictures. In person, they pick at each other.

I am married now, too, and there are days when my husband and I pick at each other in the same way. He always leaves his socks on the floor, I never clean out the cat's litter box. These small resentments seep into our everyday lives, and then they'll disappear and we'll wonder aloud how we could ever do anything other than love one another. This seems to be the rhythm of marriage.

But how often we disrupt that rhythm: my husband comes home late, and I've been waiting for dinner, which I would have started making, had I known. And I am in a bad mood, and he points out that if we had cell phones, I'd know he was running late—but I don't want cell phones, he reminds me, because I've held onto some foolish notion about cell phones and brain cancer. At which point I remind him about how much cell phones cost, and then we're fighting about whose responsibility it is to remember to pay the electric bill. And then one of us hears that tone in the other's voice, and suddenly the fight is about who implied that who is stupid. We begin yelling, and I think: I am my mother . And then, after I slam the door on my way into the bedroom, I am certain that I have become my stepfather. I sit on the bed and cry—no, sob—and I think We are both of them . And I am scared.

This is how Mom and Leo's story begins: In April of 1986 Leo rang the doorbell at our house on Lafayette Street. His Patriots T-shirt was tucked neatly into the waistband of his jeans. He carried a bouquet of bright pink carnations.

“Lorraine! How ya doin?” This is how Leo greets everyone: his mother, his coworkers, his boss, the guy he sees every morning at Dunkin Donuts. If he doesn't remember the person's name, he calls them buddy. Hey buddy! How ya doin'? Leo remembers everyone's face. He knows some guys from Durfee High, some guys from Narragansett Electric, some guys from St. Michael's. And he knows all of those guys' wives. He can always tell you how he knows a person, even if he can't tell you their name.

That day in 1986, my mother would have looked past Leo, checking to see where he parked his car. She would have made sure the car wasn't parked too far into the street, or too much on our lawn. She didn't want dead grass or cranky neighbors. More importantly, she would have looked to see if he'd brought anyone else along with him—ideally, someone she more immediately recognized, someone who could help her figure out who this guy on her front porch was.

“I'm telling ya, Mom, it was so weird,” my mother told my grandmother over the phone that night. “I mean, this guy just shows up out of nowhere. He says to me ‘Oh, we used to see each other all the time at St. Michael's. I held the door open for you.' Said he remembered Matt's little blue coat, you know, the one we bought him last Christmas? Anyhow, I barely remember him. Nice guy, though. Just left his wife. He remembered that I was divorced, wanted to know about the process, he said. Two kids, I think. Brought me some flowers, so I thought, what the hell? I gave him a beer. He said he might stop by next week. We'll see if he does.”

I don't remember much about life before Leo. I know this story well because we've all told it so many times. He just showed up , my mother likes to say, grinning.

I was nine that April, and my brother was seven. Our parents had been divorced for four years. We lived with our mother in a white house with black shutters and a green lawn on a long street full of other two-colored houses and green lawns. We saw our father on the weekends. In the spring, we planted pink and purple pansies in neat rows under the front window. My mother learned how to mow the lawn. She wallpapered all of the bedrooms. We transferred from Mt. St. Joseph Catholic School to Chase Street Elementary. My mother kept teaching English at the same high school.

When I was nine, I loved going to church and I loved Disney movies. I loved magic: water turning into wine, enough fish to feed a hillside of people, rags that became ball gowns, strange women that would float down from the clouds and snap their fingers to clean up a room. When I was nine, I imagined a day when magic would be real.

I don't know where I was when Leo arrived. I might have been on the recliner chair, my legs draped over the side. My mother, getting up from the kitchen table where she'd been playing solitaire or reading the paper, would have said Sit up straight and It's too nice to be inside as she walked by. I would have heard an edge in her voice, a teacher's hiss.

We might have all been in the kitchen, after lunch. I might have been washing the dishes, my brother might have been drying them. I hated chores, and I would have been scowling. My mother would have told me to cut it out.

This is how I remember my mother's short temper: in innocuous moments. I know that she also got angry over important things: I can remember ruining my brother's wooden toy barn, I can remember throwing a fit when I wasn't allowed to stay up as late as I wanted to. When I remember these moments, though, I remember them in a kind of pantomime: my mother a red-faced giant, her mouth open and her eyes narrowed, me a crying midget. I had no way to measure my mother's anger, except that I was nine and she made me cry and that flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about justice.

What I knew at age nine was based entirely on a steady diet of The Cosby Show , Family Ties , and Growing Pains : families fought, but most families could resolve whatever issues arose. Most families were close and loving. It didn't occur to me that most families had trouble resolving issues without the assistance of screenwriters. I tuned in to every special episode, and to every not-so-special episode, hoping to find the clue that would set us on the path to happy, smiling times. I hoped my mom was watching too.

What I can understand now is how much my mother missed adult companionship, how much having two small children to raise by herself must have worn on her, despite any of her best intentions. The hobbies she occasionally tried—Jazzercize classes, church performance groups, cheerleading coach—all eventually fell away: she didn't have time, she didn't have the money, she had scheduling conflicts. Despite the company my brother and I tried to help our mother keep—and we did try, in our own well-intentioned but ultimately ineffectual and child-like manner: sneaking downstairs late at night to watch movies in her lap, building her sandcastles at the beach, jumping with her into scratchy piles of autumn leaves—no matter our efforts, she was lonely.

And she wanted to be appreciated. She saved up money every year to take us on a week-long summer vacation: we went to New Hampshire, to Pennsylvania, and once to Florida. She bought us trendy toys each Christmas. She didn't want us to notice that anything was missing.

When Leo did reappear the second week as promised, he arrived with more flowers and a dinner invitation. In the year of their dating and engagement, Leo rarely walked through the door without flowers or candy. He took my mother out dancing and bowling, and together they joined a theatre group, taking up bit roles in South Pacific and The Miracle Worker . They went away, smiling and excited, for weekend trips to bed-and-breakfasts on Cape Cod, in Maine and New Hampshire—weekend trips when my brother and I were left in the care of our grandparents, who would spoil us with sugary breakfast cereals before our father picked us up for his weekly Sunday afternoon visits.

For my brother and I, Leo brought toys, ice cream, and, every other weekend, two children of his own, close enough in age for us to play with. He told us stories and jokes. We thought he was pure fun.

On television, families ate dinner together. By the time I was a teenager, I knew our family dinners were much different. I can remember friends who ate dinner alone, or in front of the television. I envied them.

“Matt, bring me the plates.” My mother always insisted that we eat as a family.

My brother would stack up the plates from the kitchen table, and hand them to my mother, who would fill them with re-heated veal patties or a hulking portion of scalloped sour cream potatoes made from a box. I would sit down and fiddle with the forks and knives I'd just set, lining them up parallel to the flowers on the yellow placemats. Leo would turn off the television and set his can of Budweiser down by his milk glass.

Sometimes, the food itself could start a fight.

“No potatoes for me tonight, Lorraine,” Leo might say. “My stomach's been acting up all day.”

“Did you take some Pepto Bismol?”

“That shit doesn't work for me.”

“You have to take something.”

“Don't worry, Lorraine. I'm not worried about it.”

“I know. You never worry about anything. Mr. Carefree, sometimes.” The serving spoon clinked against the white Corelle dinner plate with tiny green flowers.

“What, Lorraine? What do you want me to do?” And then, under his breath: “For Christ's sake all ready.”

“That's nice. Start cussing.” Another helping of potatoes on another plate.

“You know what, I'm not hungry. I'm going out.” Leo grabbed his keys from the hook by the phone.

“That's right. Just run off. Why don't you just go to your ex-wife and kids. That's who you really want.”

“Fuck you Lorraine.” The door slammed shut, the garage door opened and Leo's car started up. My mother continued to mutter under her breath, and at the last minute she dropped the plate onto the counter, the spoon into the pan, and stormed out to the garage. Matt and I ate silently. In the garage Leo and my mother hurled insults over the sound of the car engine. I focused my attention on my green beans, on eating them one by one.

After a few minutes, Mom and Leo came back into the kitchen, my mother trailing after Leo. Leo walked quickly to the bedroom. I heard dresser drawers opening and closing. My brother moved his potatoes from one side of his plate to the other. There was more yelling. Leo walked back down the hall and into the kitchen. He opened the door to the garage and paused for a moment.

“Hey—I'm sorry, you kids.” He sounded tired and sincere, almost regretful.

“It's OK.” I mumbled, and I almost meant it. I would have left too, had I the means. The garage door closed, Leo was gone, and my mother cursed him from the living room as she watched the car back out of the driveway. Matt and I finished eating in silence.

Every time Leo left, my mother, my brother and I would live for a time in the haze of my mother's reassurances: “We've done this before, the three of us. We'll survive,” she'd promise.

Sometimes a few days later, sometimes after more than a month, and following a series of negotiations and reconciliations, Leo would return. The Weather Channel came on again, they booked a vacation, Leo's T-shirts and jeans reappeared in the laundry, my mother smiled at him across the kitchen table and said “I love you, honey.”

And for so long I wanted to believe that every reconciliation was new—and permanent. Every time Leo left, I thought the fight preceding his packing had been more intense. Every time Leo left I thought: now we can really start over.

That fight might have been about potatoes and Pepto Bismol. It might have been about money problems, it might have been about job stress. It might have been about their marriage or about something outside of their marriage. As the years went by, all of the fighting blurred: I remember my childhood as one long string of yelling followed by short intervals of rest. We yelled, and then we went to Disney World. We yelled, and then it was the summer and we spent a few nice days at the beach. We yelled, and then it was Christmas and we quieted down, ate some good food, and sang carols for a few days. And then, sometime in the new year, we yelled again.

What hurt the most, though, wasn't the yelling. Which isn't to say that I understood what I heard. I couldn't make sense of what they were fighting about or why, and I grew tired of trying to. What hurt the most was my belief that someone could—or that someone would—come in and fix things.

I wanted, all those years, a real tragedy. I wanted something that was broken, so that when it was repaired I'd know that things had improved. I wanted something verifiable—a cut that healed into a scar, a thin line marking where a vase had been glued back together, a new patch of paint on a door—something that I could point to and explain: once that was a problem, but now it's been fixed.

One night, after she'd fought with Leo, I found my mother out on the back deck, under an afghan, smoking a cigarette, its orange tip making small explosions with every inhalation. In the glow from the house lights and the stars I could see my mother's face: blank and dark.

“Nicole just called. Can I go to the movies?” I was sixteen. I understood, then, that she was sad, but I didn't know quite what I should do.

“I'm sorry, Karyn, and Leo's sorry too,” her voice popped with sadness, she tried not to cry, “You know, we have our problems. But we'll get through this. You know we love each other. It's just hard sometimes. But I promise we'll get through this, OK, honey?” She said all of this to the stars, to some fixed point up above the house.

“OK, Mom.” I reached for the screen door handle, tugged at it for a moment, but it was locked. “I'm sorry Mom.” I paused, considered unlocking the door. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to curl up beside her as if I were five again, as if we were on the couch watching a Disney movie on a rainy afternoon, as if life and affections were relatively uncomplicated. I wanted to make all of this stop, like Moses, to part the seas and walk through to the other side.

“So, can I go to the movies?” I didn't fumble with the lock. I didn't walk outside, and I didn't offer any sympathetic words. My hand dropped to my side. I began to turn away, knowing that she'd let me go.

“Sure. Just be home by ten.” My mother's voice was weak and tired. And I was gone.

I was home with the flu in the winter of 1995 when it began to snow outside, delicate flakes dissipating against our picture window all afternoon.

“This ain't gonna turn out to be nothin', sweetie,” Leo called over to me on the couch, where I pulled an afghan up to my chin and turned back to my paperback. “Weathermen on the news last night said it was just gonna be a couple of inches. Might even turn to rain.”

In a few months I would graduate from high school. Two months after that I would move three hundred miles south, to Delaware, to begin college. I remember holding that sharp feeling of nervous anticipation close: I was certain that my whole life was about to change in some lovely way.

I could not imagine, that afternoon, any version of myself slamming a door after a terrible fight with my husband, could not imagine that I might say things in anger just as terrible as what I'd heard, could not imagine shutting people out in moments of sadness. I could not imagine the numerous ways in which I would repeat, over and over, the only patterns that I had ever known. That I would be able to identify those patterns but that I'd struggle with stopping them. That there would be times when I would know that stopping would be as simple as saying I'm sorry, I'm wrong , and that still, I would not be able to do that. I didn't imagine that I would ever be capable to creating that kind of damage. I imagined only that once I left home, good things would happen to me.

Leo walked into the living room, holding a can of soda. He stood on the edge of the throw rug.

“Hey, did I ever show you those pictures from '78? That was a bloody blizzard. I was in the Guard back then. Had to help drive the nurses back and forth to the hospital.” He headed down the hall to look for the old news clippings. “You kids don't know how good you got it. People died in that storm. It was somethin' else. I don't need to see another storm like that, no-sir-ee-boy...” His voice trailed off down the hall.

I had seen those clippings before: pictures of busses all but obscured by the fast falling snow, pictures of the long lines of cars buried along the highways a week later, of the snow piled up over the doors of businesses. The pictures were all grainy and gray, with occasional black figures fumbling around through a white, white world. Over and over their captions told of acts of heroism, of all the people rescued from what might have been a certain fate: from being swept out to sea along the coasts, from freezing alone in houses without heat, from perishing in one of the almost five thousand cars stranded throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In sidebars, reporters tallied the storm's effects in inches, miles, dollars, and numbers of lives lost. And over and over in the articles, the eyewitnesses asked why. How had this storm happened? How did we not know it was coming?

Leo walked back into the room, handed me the clippings, and turned to gaze out the window. The snow had been layering itself over the roads: I heard the cars passing by our house moving slower, the cautious wet swoosh of their tires on slick pavement.

“I'll tell ya one thing,” Leo said, turning back to me. “I'm sure as hell glad I don't have anywhere to go this afternoon. I'd hate to be one of those poor buggers outside in weather like this.”

Around us the house fell quiet and warm in the late afternoon light, the snow whirled and thickened across the landscape, and we waited.