An Unexpected Break in the Weather

By Deborah Schnitzer

After fifty years together, Gertrude and Mildred are facing some serious life changes. The bridal shop they own, A Rose on Corydon, has been a meeting place for their small community of friends and customers, with whom they have long shared joys and sorrows, worries, and triumphs. Unexpectedly, a series of events threatens the foundation of the life they have made together and tests their relationship in new ways. Mildreds 73-year-old hip is no match for an icy sidewalk, and long-time friend Wordie stares cancer in the face. Thirteen-year-old Arlie, aged beyond her tender years by the same illness, is a stalwart support, as is the thrice-married Perfume, on her way down a fourth aisle to eternal happiness, holding, perhaps, the key that makes the changes more bearable. This poetic and graceful novel explores the secrets and promises sustained by a love affair whose dimensions render speechless the most experienced of lovers. Educator, activist, editor, and writer Deborah Schnitzer is the author of the novel Gertrude Unmanageable and the long poem Loving Gertrude Stein, as well as scholarly works and critical anthologies equally devoted to the unexpected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turnstone Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9780888014849

Deborah Schnitzer

Educator, activist, editor, and writer, Deborah Schnitzer is the author of the novel, Gertrude Unmanageable, the long poem, Loving Gertrude Stein, as well as scholarly works and critical anthologies equally devoted to the unexpected. Her latest book, An Unexpected Break in the Weather, won the 2010 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. Schnitzer is a 3M Teaching Fellow in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg.

Book preview

METAL

everything ends on that Saturday, though each knows it differently. They’ve hit the very wall joked over for years. The wall pondered, by the week, the two of them snug in the kitchen alcove, bourbon at ten in the morning, Sunday. Always that day of the week chosen for reviewing accounts, recycling arguments. How many trips delayed, possibilities deferred. Worry sleeps between them as a small child might, a storm festering under the eaves, lightning scat in the sky. To counter: How many phatic rounds soothing young women in white, unnerved in the dressing room’s three-fold mirror, listening to bushels of bridesmaids tittering into taffeta and tulle, incandescent?

Regular resistance fighters, they find in small victories every excuse to go on. In the kitchen, though recipes scare her and she does not understand food in any useful way, Millie is artful, with pansies in the early summer to decorate, always scrounging in the deck garden thinking only pretty. Impressed easily, repeatedly, when Gertrude reminds her that what they really have on the go is an herb garden. Gertrude is always careful with the ‘h,’ which further pleases Millie very much. Millie proud of her Gert, liking the way the ‘h’ works with the rolling pin, the joyful cackle spread along the counterpanes in a kitchen hot with such plop and sizzle.

Even when she has her blues, Millie can rally. Blues about the way things were. The heavy hands her mother used to toss her out at sixteen, slamming the door. Her uncle, living with them, loving Millie, but inept, fluttering in the living room curtains, opposed to the harsh measure but with a runnel stained by drink. Always smaller than he needed to be. Mildred understood. Still does. Sometimes she thinks she sees him at the Shoppers on Henderson wearing the gabardine with the yellow scarf. Classy. She’d appreciated that pleat in him, even when he’d soiled things by caving in, dropping down the spiral staircase in the third rented house, giblets in hand for the damn dog, whose nostrils rank, drooled more than the speckled tongue everyone claimed distinguished the breed.

Blues about how she’d been treated.

About her own children gone.

Millie’s surgery happens thirty-six hours later. Stranded in the Emergency hallway, frittered energies, indignities, exposed without adequate pain medication, unfed, waiting.

The ER physician in charge will later tell Gertrude that he’s trained himself not to look into the eyes of those strewn on gurneys. He is more efficient if he does not make such contact. Stopping, answering a question, however feebly, would take time, divert him. He’s proud of his formula: Gertrude would assault if she could, if Mildred weren’t lying, dependent, useless, and the two of them worried sick because at ‘their age,’ this is to be expected: old people fall down; are no longer interesting. Even if they get up, they will most likely fall down again, requiring further care.

Who’s going to pay for that?

Hours.

Gertrude calls Renata. Reviews the list of alterations Renata’s committed to over the next several days. Sometimes shrill, always expert, Renata has been with them for at least twenty years and she understands completely. Consoles Gertrude. Tells her that Jeannette has been by, salted the ice, put up a sign, in red marker, on cardboard, taped to a two-by-four she finds between the buildings. DANGER.

Gertrude cringes.

And won’t that be a pretty sight?

When Millie sleeps, Gertrude attacks the hospital salad bar, ordering fries though she should not. Scowling at the Styrofoam. Such waste. Everywhere. She would argue with the manager if the girl on the till could find him. Arguing would make her feel better.

Everyone in the line can hear.

$7.95.

For this? You can’t be serious. Swatting at the plastic forks. Fucking cardboard.

In the waiting room, a doctor emerges, running through reassurances, devoid of warmth.

Quite a go. Pins. Shattered. But with time.

Gertrude bristles, understanding every unspoken word. She does not say thank you, though she knows she should. Rather, she accepts the operation as quite a success and Millie moaning. Paradoxes to be endured.

Mildred is smaller than she’s meant to be; Gertrude louder than she likes, attending in long stretches during the days that follow. She watches ripples along the inside of Millie’s cheek, delicate, teary waterways, quick tides shadowing the eyelids, closed, and Gertrude, the wind that would waken them both to the kinder pleasure of their own rooms, their single and united rise, a font cherished, able, withstanding the odds so often stacked against them, their enterprise.

With uncharacteristic ease, Jeannette has taken to making phone calls so that Millie’s Isadore knows, her Aunt Betsy and Manuela, whose dress is still on order. Customers wait, old friends, asking what they can do to help. Perfume drops in on the Monday, with Dorian, because she’s heard, wants to send flowers, perhaps a home-cooked meal. Though Perfie never cooks, Dorian has perfected a catastrophe casserole with chicken, rice, canned mushrooms, onion soup mix. Parsley.

Gert tells Renata she expects Isadore will fly in, perhaps stay for a bit to help. There’s not enough time to sort anything through hard days, brittle, Mildred hooked, intravenous, thigh splintered. At first this sounds better than broken hip. It is not. Weeks. Perhaps months. They will move her as they must from ward to rehab.

And Mildred won’t eat.

But she must eat something, mustn’t she, to build strength?

Gertrude pleads, bringing delicate tuna sandwiches from Prepared Pleasures which wilt on the bedside table, dark chocolate squares untouched bevelling the metal sill. The room is unbearably stuffy, mechanical, urine smoulders in the corners, and there is an old woman, sharing, who claws with one hand the air in front of her face, eyes wide open. She is a question, frantic, in a body unable to speak. In what becomes Mrs. Mildred Often’s room, she lingers as a form passed by. Once Marta Lucci, 83, kidney failure; Mrs. Betty McDougal, 77, heart failure; Sue Anne Benoit, 81, failure. Women who ‘go home’ while this old one clawing grows into the mattress.

The nurses write things down.

smile, it’s a lovely day.

Millie’s visitors read the signs on the table swung across the roommate’s bed and do so. Perfume and Dorian, with Wordie, Agnes unable to get away. They perceive: Millie turns as much as she can to the window, pulls her shoulder up against her ear, rubbing it, unwilling to speak, her hand brushing them away. In the hallway, Gertrude tells them she’s glad they’ve come, that Mildred’s not quite herself, as they can well imagine. They nod, adding they’ll come back on the morrow, with Agnes. Maybe over the dinner hour. Perfume takes both Gert’s hands in her own. Bends slightly and kisses them. She’s funny, Gertrude. If anybody can cheer things up, it will be Agnes.

Wordie thinks, How beautiful. Gertrude’s hands, Perfume’s lips upon them.

Mildred has words for Gertrude, but her mouth grappling with the urine and the soundless terror of the woman clawing, leaves phrases torn, unfinished. Such a thin membrane separates, shreds as the hours pass. The stillness. A dry bone in the next bed chafing the rough cotton sheet, unforgiving. Astute, canny, Gertrude takes in the potential for a stroke. Pins in the thigh gone wrong. Flesh souring. Before she has even the chance to settle into the beige recliner that one day Mildred herself may occupy—when she can, if she behaves—Millie will attack slurred, shot through with morphine, struggling,