Nothing But the Weather

By Susan Pepper Robbins

Wake up in a storm. Row down a flooded alley of people looking for their way home." Nothing but the Weather" wades through the water, both clean and dirty, digging up life without cleaning it off first.

The collection introduces you to a grandmother who reads magazines at the grief counselor's office because her son wants her to adjust to life again. You will rub shoulders with a bipolar Lynn who has half-started just about every career. Mingle with an array of family units that hold secrets, lies, but love one another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Release date: Mar 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370050536

Book preview

Nothing But The Weather

A Collection of Stories

Susan Pepper Robbins

Published by Unsolicited Press

Some of the stories in this collection were originally published in the following journals and anthologies: A Turn Key Job in The Laurel Review, 1983;Nothing but the Weather in Thema, 1990; "Red Invitations" in Sacred Ground, Milkweed Editions,1996; Sweet Jesus in Ripples, 1986; Came and Went in Cache Review, 1985; Aloft, Back Flips and True Facts, Your Needs—My Qualifications, Assisted Living, Tonopah Review, (on line) 2010; Middle Solutions in When Last on the Mountain, Holy Cow!Press, 2010.

Nothing but the Weather

I am a grandmother, a modern one with an unmarried son, a doctor, who is raising his daughter with his girlfriend—hardly the word for someone like Rebecca, an oncologist in Reeboks—who is not the mother of the baby. Six months ago, my husband died. He had lost his job two years before he became ill, and six weeks into his illness before it got terrible, I lost my job as a personnel trainer at the bank. Keith preferred going through the humiliation of looking for a new job at fifty-six, being interviewed by people younger than our son Paul, going on unemployment, receiving his notice of exhaustion of funds—anything, even preferred death which never seemed inevitable until three days before he died because of all the treatments and tests, to the low places we were brought to by his illness. But I am not sure about my preference. The rhythms of joblessness are intense throbbing nightingales compared to the no rhythms, no throbs, nothingness-nadas of death.

More and more older people tell me that death is not a problem. They know that for a fact; proximity lending authority, they speak with wisdom about dying, all riddles solved. Death is, they say, like nothing else but the weather. Invisible, important, inevitable, and therefore, not to be worried about; in fact, they laugh, knowing they are not saying anything new, and they will repeat the old joke, not as bad as the alternative. But they are wrong, I think, in spite of all their experience. Death is, excuse the cliché, terrible, especially when it is not your own. In three months, cancer of the spine killed Keith. It began like sunspots on his bones. That’s how he described the warming pains, flashing up and down his back. Old age, we joked, not meaning a word of it. We were both fifty-six, three months apart, me older. Another way to look at it, and one doctor did, shrugging an of course, when I told him the story in three sentences, was the stress of losing his job. Fifteen years as coordinator of development, never the director, though there were five of them in those years, then reorganization after two consultants came, chosen for their distance and objectivity, from Chicago. A brief meeting with the young director who himself had letters out to three larger firms and wanted Keith to write recommendations for him saying how expertly he managed, planned and directed the capital campaigns. Keith wrote the letters for Mark after he had told Keith that his position was being, regretfully, eliminated following the cost-cutting, efficiency studies from both of the consultants. If only one had recommended the action, then, Mark said, he would not be forced to have the difficult, to say the least, conversation with Keith, but because both of the consultants had pointed to the same locus of the problem, he felt he must implement the program of revitalization. Keith, to his credit in some book which I hope is kept somewhere, answered Mark by asking when he would need the letters from him.

I read women’s magazines when I am at the grief counselor’s office—at my son’s insistence. I am looking for quicker help for widows in the pile of magazines in the outer office than I think Dr. Asra can give me. I get some good tips: go square dancing, join a new church, go camping, volunteer for a literacy program.

Paul, a neuro-pediatrician at thirty-one, thinks doctors have most of the answers, but I think more and more that the simplest answers about grief come from elderly people, like the comparison of death to the weather. I try to read the weather as a grief handbook written as allegories: blizzards mean stay inside, hurricanes tell us to throw out sandbags, rains with different volumes on the roof mean different, but all very simple, things: clean the gutters, wash the windows, remember a fishing trip when we used gold-colored hooks, look at an album.

I like reading about older citizens, widows and widowers, remodeling houses, leaving for refugee camps to work with children, preserving old wooden carousel horses, teaching criminals to read. I like the before and after accounts. In their dark hours before their new responses to grief, or to the weather as I am calling it, occurred to them, they report that they considered suicide. Everyone, to a man, to a woman. Then, light broke through, flooding down on a path, Damascene, in front of them. Soon they are recognized and celebrated for stepping away from the storms of grief into the patches of sunshine on the grass, so to speak, by Sixty Minutes and Sunday feature editors.

I long for a light on the path to show me what to do. So far, darkness. First person accounts of older people who are starting new businesses at home in spite of arteriosclerosis, angina, rheumatoid arthritis, even blindness have not helped me; they paralyze me. Older citizens are remarrying or graduating from colleges as they have always dreamed of doing.

I would like to be a person like I.F. Stone and learn Greek at eighty-seven. I want to go to Arkansas and raise bees like Sue Hubbard. Or write my twenty-second book at age eighty-three as Muriel Spark did, or go into space again as John Glenn did, but the facts remain: I am an aging, jobless, widowed woman trapped in her house with a blizzard howling unintelligible words to her outside. In such a storm, how can I be a new person like the ones in the magazines? How can I step away from the storm into the sunlight?

Mark came to visit once three days after Keith’s service. He brought his family, his and her children, and Melinda, his wife in a workout suit.

Paul calls me every week. He loves me, hates to see me unhappy, and would like for me to adjust to my life as a widow. Dad is away, he seems to feel, as I have read children feel about death—away and therefore, might return. Paul has no idea what he is asking me to do. He and Rebecca have eighteen-month-old Anna, but no plans to marry. Rebecca was a great comfort, in a kind of chemical/computerized way, at the end with Keith. She knew what was going to happen and told us both. Her voice must be why Paul loves her. It is as plain and strong as ironstone. You will have terrible pain, now, Keith. He did, but it helped to have her know it was coming. Rebecca runs five miles a day, works fourteen hours. Anna is happy in her daycare. Rebecca expects to get a grant for studying cancer victims in China, the environmental/nutritional factors are easier to isolate there, she says. Anna may go with her or she may stay with Paul. Rebecca made higher grades in med school than Paul and she jokes about Nobel prizes for both of them in twenty years. It is clear that she expects to be friends, at the least, with Paul then. I will be seventy-eight.

I can hardly tell we are both women. Rebecca seems to have something in common with a satellite dish, her wide-angle eyes tilted up to catch some message from the sky. Sky to Earth and Out she reads the sky for messages, hears something about her life, her adopted daughter’s life and her daughter’s father’s life, his father’s life. She is working out some destiny written across the sky in jet plumes. When Paul dies, or Anna, God forbid, maybe their deaths will be like the weather to Rebecca—terrible and true, but acceptable.

When I go for my six-month grief-counseling check-up with the psychiatrist, as if my widowhood were my teeth, the doctor (M.D., Ph.D. from New Delhi) swirls toward me in her sari where I have been waiting like a plant. Paul and Rebecca sent me her name, made the first appointment, and Paul is paying for the visits. My insurance won’t cover mental health. Dr. Asra never catches the gauzy hem of her sari on chairs. Her white jacket Americanizes the exotic impression she makes. She is a widow too and looks bored with my accounts of overfeeding the cat or forgetting to feed him.

Her prescription for me is also simple. Like a Sinatra song. I must accentuate the positive, entirely. I give Paul’s check to her administrative assistant, a young woman who looks like a clerical version of Rebecca, cursing myself for agreeing to come for this advice.

Dr. Asra wants me to join a group with similar grief issues, but I want to try for the positive on my own first. She hints that I may be asked to be the group leader. I am not her youngest widow, she says, kindly, puncturing any little balloon of self-importance I may be pursing my lips for.

Yes, camping is good, she says when I repeat what I just read in her magazine. Very positive. See, it’s right here on the list of grief therapy activities. Dr. Asra hands me a Xeroxed sheet. She tells me I can report to my first group session when I come back from my camping trip.

I’ve never been camping. Keith always did nature, we said, meaning the yard—the grill, the red-tipped Photina hedge, the Purple Martins’ house, the car. We never went camping but I have read about the warm swell of hypothermia. It’s February. I know that the Hardware River can kill and I am hoping it will. Simple thoughts. Cold weather, lonely widow, running water, inadequate tent and sleeping bag, inexperience, a rabid bear.

Paul teaches Wilderness Therapy on his vacations, and I know his philosophy of the wilderness’s drawing the best out of people, hanging it in front of them, and building their confidence to lead lives back home. That’s great for kids from the streets who kill each other for shoes or drugs or cars, I say to my new tent, rolled up in the middle of the floor. Fine.

The next week, afraid to think about what I am doing, I give my cat to my neighbor, hoping deeper than my counseled grief that I won’t come home from the camping trip, hoping I won’t be leading a group session on how camping is a positive response to grief, hoping I can stay away.

The sky behind the trees is lavender. I am surprised at the color. The Hardware River dashes up a gray, icy froth on the rocks, the leafless trees are stainless steel prongs. My blaze orange vest is not becoming to me, I can’t help but notice. The cold is pink and lavender. I should not have come out here, 127 miles, by myself, in this foolish effort to get back to the basics. A cold river and tent under a lavender sky, will free me up to dream wide-awake?

I am afraid to go to sleep and I want to give myself a chance to be drawn out by the cold, the rushing river, the frozen sky, in the ways that Paul has experienced. Sitting up, wrapped in thermal blankets, I dream about the old kind of happiness—Keith, working with me in the kitchen for a big dinner for Paul’s friends, going to see Cats, closing in the back porch. My damp socks do not feel damp. I can’t feel my feet.

We buried Keith in the brown leather slippers he’d gotten at Christmas. No socks. There’s nothing unusual in that. I know some people who’ve buried their loved ones barefooted and some who’ve shod their dead in their best. Paul and Rebecca and I chose slippers, a happy in-between. It paid off in the short run, for the night of the funeral, in my dreams, Keith got up from his walnut coffin and leaned conversationally against it smoking a Chesterfield regular as if to say, Free At Last, from Paul and Rebecca’s knowing, monitoring eyes, but with no rancor about its being Chesterfields or even Mark that had helped put him in slippers and walnut. Death was not without its good points as Keith would point out before he had to go to bed fulltime and still had, he admitted, a fair amount of hope. I used to agree with him.

In my campsite lopsidedly set up by me, I am all thumbs. The lavender sky turns cloudy and the river froth changes from its natural color to a pale chartreuse. I am afraid that I may forget my own freezing toes in this place, under this sky, by this river. I try to turn my thoughts away from Keith to my old life in personnel at Crestar.

Faye Newton. I assign myself to think about Faye Newton. She was in my first training class, and now has gone higher and further than I dreamed she would with a diversified fuel oil company. She keeps in touch with me, calling from Dallas, once or twice a month. If I get back home, she will laugh at me with my big soft quick-frozen toes. I will be able to make her laugh. Thinking about her laughing over long distance at me out here camping like an idiot makes me lie down on the rock and look up at the green sky.

During Keith’s illness, Faye would call and launch into new episodes from her office to distract me. A rescued cat from the dumpster or a husband who accepted Jesus as his personal savior on television as he gave up his girlfriend who was there in the studio, but did not know what was about to happen, in fact, thought according to Faye’s imitation of the low-voiced announcer, that she was being proposed to in front of millions. She keeps me posted on her new friend who sleeps in her office on a futon disguised as an easy chair. This friend, Vanessa, does not have a home. She let her lease run out, had a sale and moved into her office. She showers at the Y across the street and says she is the New Homeless, upscale, smart, a survivor. Vanessa may run for public office. She tells me stories of lost and abandoned children: Willy left in the bus station, Denise on the golf course. Still, these stories which usually shock me out of myself are not as powerful a therapy as the sky, the cold, the river. I am still looking up at the sky stretched out on a rock by the river.

Sometimes, in those last three days of Keith’s life, Faye gave me direct advice that was premature according to Rebecca and Paul when I told them what she had said. Start my own mail order business at home was one piece of advice. Write pamphlets on how to make damson preserves, how to make oak furniture look like walnut, and how to take notes from old courthouse records—some of the things Keith and I had done. She told another story to make her point, and although I listened so hard my ear was bruised from pressing the receiver against it, I was not sure if I could carry out the plans, so beautifully simple over the phone.

She and Vanessa had gone on a cruise to Barbados. A good deal, five days and nights on board The Oslo, shopping tours arranged. The works. The last night around the swimming pool on the ship, there was a festival where a lamb and pig were roasted. Someone had to be the guest of honor. An old custom of the Norwegian Cruise Line. Faye said naturally she volunteered. What was the honor? She got to eat the lamb’s eyes.

She did, and went down in The Oslo’s history when she chewed and chewed and chewed, then announced in the