Talking About the Weather

“SO WHAT’S GOING ON IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD?” she asks. Her blonde hair is darker than usual. Unwashed, it’s gathered itself into limp strings, spaghetti-thick. She flicks a hand towards the window. The sky low and heavy.

“It’s not as cold as it looks outside.”

“Not the weather. Dear Lord, not the weather. Everyone who comes here wants to tell me about the weather. ‘It looks like it might rain later’ or ‘Sure is windy.’ That’s all I get.”

I nod but don’t say anything. The weather is the only thing that seems safe.

She wants to know if I have any good jokes. She’s flipping through a magazine, its pages rippled by moisture, but I can tell she’s not even looking at any of the pictures. It’s just a thing she’s doing, like biting her nails.

I am not one of those people who collects jokes and carries them around in my head. I’ve always been envious of those people. There have been many times I’ve needed a joke. For instance, the last time I was getting my hair cut. I have exactly one joke and it’s a terrible, racist one. It’s the one about how to fit a large number of people into a small car. It’s not that I ever tell this racist joke, so I don’t know how it got there or how I’ve managed to hold on to it all these years. I just don’t have the memory for these types of things. At the restaurant I have to write down everyone’s order. Even if it’s just two Pepsis. Otherwise, I’ll be at the fountain debating between Seven-Up and Orange Crush. I must be Dollarama’s biggest consumer of coiled notebooks, the miniature type that can fit into the square pockets of my server’s apron. Same way with movies. I can watch a movie ten times and be surprised every viewing. I’ve had boyfriends who do nothing but quote movies at me and then whiz their hand over my head when I stare back, dull-eyed like a trout.

I hate telling her I don’t have any jokes, I want to be able to give her something. Something other than the blue teddy bear I brought that’s still sitting in my purse. As soon as I saw her I knew it was a mistake. What would she do with a blue teddy bear? It’s not even a great teddy bear, as far as teddy bears go. It could be softer, bigger, maybe even comically large. It could be wearing a bow tie. Maybe I should’ve sprung for one of those personalized ones you build yourself at that store in the mall, the one full of children celebrating their birthdays. I tend to avoid places where children outnumber adults: zoos, fast food restaurants, toy stores. If I handed her the bear, she’d take one look at it, know I picked it up at the pharmacy on the way over here, that there weren’t many options, that it was either this or a stuffed owl in a graduation cap holding a felt diploma. I should have brought flowers, I think. Or a hand-knitted blanket.

She basically lives here now, at the hospital, waiting. Sometimes when I’m at work I think of her, waiting. What does she do all day? There are only so many cups of vending-machine coffee a person can drink. When I’m at the restaurant and I happen to think about what she must be doing at that exact minute, I can only picture her staring straight ahead, unblinking. I don’t even picture what she is staring at, I can only picture her staring, waiting.

I’d say I don’t like hospitals, but it’s not even worth saying.

I finally admit I don’t have any jokes.

“You must have read something good in the paper or on the Internet lately,” she says. “I can’t read anything right now, my brain can’t process it. I need people to read things for me and give me the highlights. Or the lowlights, whatever.”

I don’t get the paper and the last thing I googled was “baby in ICU.” From there I read an article about a baby born in Pakistan with a disease called Harlequin-type ichthyoids which causes the skin to look like diamond-shaped scales, red and white and horrifying. In the accompanying photo the Pakistani baby also had bloodshot eyes and a bright red gash of a mouth. The caption read “Tiger-Striped Baby.” The thing about the Internet is you just keep clicking: next it was a forty-four pound baby, then the world’s oldest mother of twins.

“Okay,” I say, “I read this one story about a man and his dog.”

“Oh God, is it sad?”

“Yes. No. I guess it’s happy-sad.”

“All right, give it to me.” She gathers her knees to her chest as if in preparation.

“Okay, so this man in Michigan, or maybe it’s Wisconsin or Illinois— somewhere bordering the Great Lakes—he has this dog with—”

“If the dog dies, I’m getting you banned from visiting hours.”

“No, no, it doesn’t die, it just has really bad arthritis and it can’t get to sleep at night because of the pain. So this guy carries his dog—and it’s a big dog, maybe a German shepherd—out into the lake every night.

And so he holds his dog in the lake and the water apparently soothes the dog to sleep. He does this every single night so his dog can get to sleep without pain. But here’s the other part of the story: this guy says it was the dog who saved his life. When his marriage ended, he started having suicidal thoughts, but then—Okay, yeah, I guess it is pretty sad.”

She nods and I think about things I haven’t thought about until now. What does this man do in the winter when the lake water is too cold or frozen even? Do the Great Lakes freeze over? Will the dog be dead by winter? I left out the dog’s age: nineteen; if you times that by seven the dog is already dead.

“Do you have any stories about dumb criminals?” she asks, and I wish I did. I try to think up one on the spot but I only get as far as a guy trying to steal his own car and then wonder how that could possibly be a crime.

I didn’t think we’d be sitting in a waiting room like this. The Internet led me to believe I’d be trying to pick her baby out of a lineup of other bluish babies, that the babies would be lying on metal carts that make them look like they’d been ordered from room service. Though I wasn’t sure I wanted to, I was at least sure I’d have the option to put my hands into those big gloves and reach into the incubator and stroke the baby’s cheek. But instead we’re sitting opposite each other on scratchy maroon couches like we’re waiting to see the dentist. I want to ask when we’re going to see him, but maybe that’s not how these things work, family only, or maybe she knows better than to let me near her baby. Maybe she knows I spent the afternoon googling babies in ICU and comparing the incubators to the plastic hamster cage I owned when I was twelve.

When her mom called, all she could get out was, “He’s here.”

“He’s here, he’s here,” she said, voice breaking, and I stupidly demanded, “Who? Who? Who’s here?” The baby shower over a month away.

I hope she got the messages I left on her cell: that I might be coming down with the flu and should probably stay away from the hospital until I was sure, that I would definitely come on the weekend, then that I had to work a double shift but would definitely come the day after tomorrow. If she’s wondering why it took me over a week to get here, she doesn’t say so.

I want to ask her what she does here all day. If she’s made any friends. You always hear about that: friendships made in hospital waiting rooms, people bonding over their desperation. You can skip the weather and the other small talk and go right to the important stuff: the tests that are always inconclusive, the nurses, the doctors who seem to know absolutely nothing or are keeping it a secret. Do people who meet in hospital waiting rooms stay friends on the other side? Or do they go their separate ways, later ducking into the next aisle at the grocery store to avoid having to talk about the weather with the person they knew from another lifetime

when they badmouthed pediatric surgeons to pass the time? The thing is we don’t have that much in common. I often wonder if we’d be friends if we met each other now. Would we even like each other? She was the first girl in our grade to get a perm and a second piercing in each ear. I was the girl whose mom picked out her outfits with coordinating floppy hats. She was outgoing, fearless. One time I threw up under my desk because I was too shy to raise my hand and ask permission to go to the bathroom. We became friends in our school’s rosary club of all places: I was trying to avoid the playground at recess, she was fervently offering up her Hail Marys to children in Haiti. She still goes to church every Sunday, I came out to my parents as an atheist after high school. All she wanted was to get married, buy a house, have a bunch of babies, and I’ve got my head in the sand. A bad joke of mine: the restaurant I work at is called the Sandbar. I discovered I could cure my shyness in three drinks and she got married. She and her husband have one of those “lived across the street from each other when we were children” type of love stories. And then fifteen years later they were married in an old Catholic church. She asked me to take communion with the rest of the wedding party when it was time. All the bridesmaids and groomsmen friends from high school, all Catholic, at least on paper.

“Everyone will be watching. And you’re still Catholic, technically.” “Am I?”

“Did you call up Rome and ask them to cross your name off the list?” If I didn’t believe in anything, what would it matter? But when I put the wafer on my tongue I was certain I was going to hell. I made a clumsy sign of the cross and waited for my smiting. I wondered if they would carry on with the service, everyone stepping around the dark hole where I had been standing when the lightning bolt struck me down and incinerated me into nothingness. Now all their mutual friends are other married couples. They have dinner parties and go on ski trips. I was invited once, for Scattergories and Taboo. “Bring Chris,” she said, but it was Craig and we had already broken up.

Mostly she meets me away from her house: at my apartment or a restaurant, like we’re secret lovers. She always asks the same question: “How’s your love life?” But she doesn’t mean love, not in the Catholic sense, anyway. She means sex, and she wants details: the positions they want it in, the sizes and shapes of their penises, the things they call out when they have about three pumps left. I make almost all of it up. I know she doesn’t want to hear about sharing chicken fajitas for two with a computer programmer I met online. I hardly ever go on second dates anymore, never mind to bed.

“Get this,” I told her, “Zack wanted to do it in his car in front of his parents’ house when he knew they’d be home watching American Idol. So he parks right in front of their bay window and it’s barely even dark outside and I’m praying they’re not the type of people who get up during commercials.” She doesn’t judge me for using the word “praying” in the colloquial sense.

“Get this, Paul wanted me to watch a sex tape he made with his exgirlfriend.”

“Get this, Frank’s frank was so long and floppy I could’ve made balloon animals out of it.”

“What does that even mean?” she shrieks, and then we’re both laughing so hard we’re wheezing like asthmatics.

It’s a thing I can do for her, make her feel better about having sex with only one man.

I wonder if I should try it now, make up a story about some guy nicknaming his penis “the Skipper” and ordering it around my vagina like it’s a sailboat, but when I think about her baby in a glass tube behind some door somewhere, my vagina seems irrelevant. But then so do dogs with arthritis and dumb criminals.

The thing about being an atheist is you can’t offer prayers. I can’t tell her I’ve been praying hard this past week, and if the worst were to happen, I can’t say he’s in a better place now. I can’t tell her he’s an angel, I can’t tell her she’ll hold her baby again when the time’s right. No one wants to hear the things an atheist has to offer when the worst happens.

“What do you say we get out of here?” I ask. We could go to the mall, get her hair washed by a professional. I check my watch and suggest happy hour.

“I can’t,” she says, without even considering it.

All of her features are large. Sometimes I don’t know how they all fit on her face. But her eyes take up the most room, cartoon eyes, round like a child’s drawing. When they start to well up, you know it right away. There’s no hiding tears in eyes that big.

“I’m sorry,” I say, but for some reason I keep going. “I just mean for an hour and then come right back here. I just thought you could use a break. Or we could wait till Brad’s done work and then he could stay and we could go just for a little bit.”

“You go,” she says, “Go get some fresh air. Come back later if you want to. Or tomorrow. I’ll be here whenever you want to stop by.”

“I don’t want to leave you here,” I say, which is more true than “I want to stay here with you.” I offer to grab us some real coffee, promise to be right back. “Skim latte?”

“With whipped cream and chocolate shavings. And maybe some ice cream. And a slice of pizza.” She wipes her eyes.

In the parking lot I devour the air like I’ve been underwater too long. When I start the car, a song by Bon Jovi that I don’t like is playing, but I don’t change the station. I catch myself singing at a red light: We’ve got each other and that’s a lot. For love, we’ll give it a shot. Woa-ohhhh.

I will go back to the hospital. I will present her with a chocolate frappuccino, one-third whipped cream. A slice of greasy pizza, the kind that

if you hold it by just the crust, all the toppings are pulled by gravity towards the floor. A box of twenty Timbits—“anything but plain.” An Oreo McFlurry because an ice cream cone wouldn’t have fared well on the drive. I will drive around the city for an hour, collecting calories. “You forgot to get something for yourself,” she’ll say, laughing.

The pizza will be nearly cold, the McFlurry gone soupy.

When Brad shows up, I’ll leave. I’ll go back to my apartment. I’ll forget to think about the baby in the glass tube—if that’s even where he is—for vast stretches of time. I’ll check my Internet dating profile to see if anyone 27-33 wants to take me out to an expensive restaurant where I’ll drink an entire bottle of Prosecco because he prefers beer but was too polite to say so when I suggested it. And if he suggests dancing afterward, I won’t say no. My head full of bubbles, pulsing, my body electric and wanting to be close to another body, any other body, swaying to music that is fast and loud and has no words.