500 Acres and No Place to Hide

by Susan McCorkindale

  And then, when I’ve been at my desk about an hour and given myself at least one good giggle (I subscribe to the Mel Brooks school of comedic writing, which says, “If you laugh, they’re gonna laugh”), I reward myself with my own private Jazzercise class. Led by me. For me. Just to kick my own ass. And to celebrate the fact that I don’t suck.

  Yet.

  Tomorrow? Anything’s possible. It could be a whole different story. But at least I know how it’ll start. And when. And what my Facebook status might say. I’m thinking, “Done working out with the roosters. Tomorrow it’s back to real weights.”

  Feel free to post your reply.

  Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,

  A Pair of Stilettos at My Feet.

  If I Should Die Before I Wake,

  Bury Me in Them,

  For Goodness’ Sake!

  TO: Friends and family

  FR: Suzy@stuckinthesticks.com

  Date: Saturday, 4:36 p.m.

  Subject: No goody bags at this girl’s funeral

  Life on the farm is lovely, calming, a veritable feast for the senses. It’s low-stress, peaceful, like living in a postcard. At least, that’s the party line.

  Fact is, some days, when there’re no goats to chase off the porch, fence boards to bitch about fixing, or houses to show to prospective renters,76 it’s downright brain-deadening.

  So what do I do to stay occupied, off the street, and out of trouble?

  Sometimes I write letters to the local chamber of commerce asking, again, why there’s still no Starbucks in town. Other times I flip through a Pantone color book left over from my marketing director days and choose new color combinations for the twenty-eight buildings on the farm. Currently I’m campaigning for periwinkle with lime green trim, because I really think there’s a whole Key West Goes Country thing coming and I want to be out in front of it. And still other times I dream up elaborate plans for a Takeout Taxi–style service I call Suzy’s Pickups by Pickup. It’s sort of a rip-off of the TOT but with one important difference: not only will Suzy’s Pickups by Pickup stop at your favorite Italian restaurant, we’ll also hit the wine store. Because what good is penne marinara without a nice pinot noir?

  But even daydreaming doesn’t last all day. So what do I do for shits and giggles and barnfuls of fun? What do I do to pass—dare I say kill—the time?

  Frankly? I plan my funeral.

  And at this point, I’ve left directions down to the minutest detail for a party you won’t want to miss.

  I want music. Loud, fun, feel-good music like Linda Ronstadt’s “Heat Wave” and Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.” And throw in some Black Eyed Peas, too, please. I want a martini bar and a margarita bar, and more chardonnay than you can shake a corkscrew at. The good stuff, please. Stick the Turning Leaf in a tree.Toss the Monkey Bay back in the water. And tell the Smoking Loon to put that shit out. Only J. Lohr and La Crema, capisce?

  And, of course, there has to be food. Get Forlano’s Market in The Plains to cater hanger steak,77 frites, and a succulent green salad. Then top the whole thing off with Hershey’s. Hershey’s bars. Hershey’s kisses. Some with almonds. Some without. But please, skip the white chocolate. It’s beyond blasphemous to us purists.

  Whether I die today, forty-something years old, two kids, two cats, three dogs, two goats, three hundred head of cattle, a couple of chickens, and twenty-plus years of marriage to my best friend and the only man I’d ever try to love farming for, or thirty years from now, the rules are the same:

  No crying.

  And no goody bags.

  You heard about that, right? Some poor unsuspecting woman went to a funeral where the guests were given a lovely satin satchel that contained a dollop of the remains of the dearly departed. I guess the host felt it would be nice if the bereaved could bring a little of that very special someone home with them.

  And I guess I feel . . . ick.

  Is it just me, or does this smack of a kid’s birthday party gone berserk? Maybe I could understand if the deceased’s favorite expression was, “You want a piece of me?” but I have a nagging sense that this was not the case.

  And I’m absolutely, positively not trying to speak ill of the dead. On the contrary: I’m trying to defend them against the alarmingly poor judgment of a few of the living.

  Like I said, I happen to think celebrating someone’s life is a wonderful way to go, if you’ll pardon the play on words. But let’s not go too far.

  I want you to drink my favorite drinks. Dance to my favorite songs.Tell stories about my farm foibles, and laugh about my shallow passions for shoes and the Jersey shore. I want you to tell my favorite jokes and joke about how I loved my sons to the point of incapacitating them.78 I even want you to say, “Suz, you Glamour ‘don’t.’ You had to wait on that highlight. Now you’re going to spend the rest of eternity with roots.”79

  But please don’t parcel me out like a premium. Unless I died in battle, there’s no reason to resort to body bags. Even pretty, shiny ones.

  If anything, you might just want to buy doggy bags. There’s bound to be too much food at my funeral, not to mention alcohol. So please, divvy up the steak and the frites, the martinis and the margaritas. Send me off with a bag of Hershey’s kisses, a bottle of chardonnay, a corkscrew, and, of course, a glass. Oh, and somebody please make sure my favorite stilettos are on my feet.

  Because, Lis, if they’re missing? I am so coming back for your Calvin.

  Love,

  Susan

  Chapter Eleven

  JEREMIAH WAS A PEEPING TOM

  It’s funny, but one of the things I like most about farm living is also one of the things I like least. I’m talking about the lack of people. I much prefer having people, particularly my girlfriends, close by.

  Especially at cocktail hour.

  And when I have writer’s block.

  And when I just feel like claiming I have writer’s block so I can feel less guilty about goofing off.

  And breaking out my blender.

  But I also love bare windows. No drapes, shades, or shutters. Just spare, sparkling, sunshine-streaming-in, Windexedto-within-an-inch-of-their-lives windows. Not exactly an option when you live so close to your neighbor that you can see the tag on their T-shirt and only one of you has to have a television. If I could choose people or stark-naked windows, I’d choose people. But as that’s not an option on our five-hundred-acre slice of near solitary confinement80 and I’m one of those folks who pride themselves on making lemonade when life gives them lemons, I decided from the start to view Nate’s Place as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to live curtain-free forever.

  Or at least until somebody complained about having to wear sunglasses inside.

  Of course, they could have worn one of the two dozen New York Giants, John Deere, and Tractor Supply baseball caps I keep handy, or popped open a beach umbrella. But no. They had to bitch. And I had to buy blinds.

  In fact, within six months of living here I was forced to forgo my curtain-free fantasy and valance, sheer, and drape the entire downstairs.

  “Now we can see the TV!” cried Case the day the blackout panels went up in the den.

  “Now I can see my computer screen!” cried Cuy the day dark blue denim curtains went up in his room.

  “Now the cattle can’t see me in my birthday suit!” cried Hem81 the day he realized the whole first floor was dark enough to harbor fugitives and treat them to a matinee. Nothing new, of course, and no online ticketing; I draw the line at putting the farm on Fandango.

  Before long, the McMen coerced me into covering the windows upstairs, too. And this I really couldn’t compre-hend. Sure, we’ve all heard talk of clouds calling 911 on behalf of some poor woman who’s way overdue for a bikini wax, but the fact is? They do that only to purists who won’t even put up a shower curtain.

  Now please don’t get the impression I’m an exhibitionist or some kind of closet nudist. On the contrary. I love clothes and unfortunately have (and hav
e always had) the credit card bills to prove it.82 I also love decorating and accessorizing, picking paint colors and fabric patterns, and yes, back in suburbia I was all about window treatments.

  But in suburbia I had neighbors, for Pete’s sake, and if they were watching me like I was watching them, it was only a matter of time before somebody hollered, “Suz, give the bleach a break!” and Hem’s T-shirts would look like shit.

  And I’d be back to hiding my roots with a yellow highlighter.

  In any case, I very quickly caved and created the veritable man cave my men desired. I put curtains on every window in the house, with one exception: the upstairs bathroom. The sun floods it all day long, and the only plant I haven’t killed yet owes its life to living on the sill.83 But more important, we hardly use it. Sure, it’s our middle-of-the-night “go-to” loo, but when it comes to showering? That we do in the downstairs bathroom, where the water comes in from the well and not the Exxon Valdez, which, I’m relatively certain, supplies our second-floor facility.84

  My point is, we’re never in there naked.

  So even if the cattle sprout wings, what can they see? Toothbrushing? Deodorant application? A barely awake blond woman fussing with a plant?

  Bingo. It just wasn’t flying cattle that caught me.

  One morning I got up as I always do, in the before-dawn dark, and tiptoed, as I always do, into the bathroom. Yes, the uncurtained one. It’s four a.m., it’s pitch-black outside, and, since I don’t turn on any lights, it’s damn dark inside, too. It doesn’t bother me. I’m a mom. I can wash my face, remove the mascara I should’ve removed the night before, brush my teeth, put in my contacts, and, of course, pee by moonlight. And so I do.

  To my left are the naked window and the sill where my benignly neglected, and therefore flourishing, jade plant usually sits. I say usually because a few days earlier I did a little light cleaning,85 and I put it on the ledge of the tub. There’s more room for it there, but it does better on the sill, and I want to kick myself for forgetting to put it back.

  Since I’m butt-to-bowl at the moment, kicking myself will have to wait. But the tub’s not two feet in front of me; I could just pop up, grab my happy, healthy jade, and return it to its favorite spot. It would take a split second, tops. And unless I cause some kind of unprecedented lunar eclipse, nobody’s ever going to know I moved a plant and chucked a moon at the same time.

  Quickly, I lean forward into what can only be described as a piss-poor (pardon the pun) squat and lift the one and only shred of proof that I’m capable of caring for a living thing that doesn’t subsist on snack foods and video games. “Mommy’s so sorry for not moving you sooner,” I coo. Suddenly my sleep shorts slip down around my ankles and an image of Porky Pig in all his belly-shirted, pantsfree fabulousness flashes across my mind. “You’re all class, Suz,” I whisper to myself and my plant, and the bulging-eyed bullfrog staring back at me through the glass.

  Holyshitholyshitholyshit! I hiss, pressing my sun-deprived succulent into service as a fig leaf and shuffling backward as fast as anyone lassoed by a pair of pajama shorts possibly can. Which, of course, isn’t fast in the least, but what I lack in the ability to flee I more than make up for in my ability to snag my foot, fall backward, ram into the towel rack on the door, and slide down to the floor.

  Note to self: 1. Replace cold, tough-on-bare-tush tile with carpet.

  2. Replace metal towel rack with something less likely to cause spinal injuries. Like a pool noodle.

  The bad news is that the bruise on my back was definitely going to look like a tramp stamp done by a drunk.86 The good news is that I didn’t wake anyone up or spill a drop of potting soil. And the round of applause from the frog was nice, too.

  At least, I thought he was applauding. Turns out the poor thing was banging his head against the glass because he was stuck between the screen and the sash. My guess is that one of the rednecks I’m raising was playing sharpshooter, and someone, quite possibly the other redneck I’m raising, shot back, and in ducking for cover redneck number one had just enough time to close the sash before he was hit by a hail of BBs. As the windows in our house have been known to close without any human assistance whatsoever, my other guess is that sometime after the skirmish Mr. Frog hopped in, the screen slammed down behind him, and he was trapped.

  Until he spied me, pantsless and whispering sweet nothings to a plant.

  Clearly Jeremiah wasn’t just a bullfrog. He was a peeping Tom.

  As I saw it, I had three options. One, I could try to free J.T.87 myself, but, as this required opening the screen, which could be achieved only by first opening the window, which would most likely result in J.T.’s hopping into the bathroom and quite possibly touching me with his sucker-footed feet, which would almost definitely result in my fainting, hitting my head on the toilet, and adding a concussion to my spinal cord–cum–tramp-stamp injury, I said, Nah.

  Two, I could rouse my rednecks and make them dispose of poor, dear J.T. But as this would result in fighting and finger-pointing, and the fact that, ultimately, while they wrestled to the death on somebody’s bedroom rug, the frog would get loose and we wouldn’t find it until later in the day—when Tug threw it up—I said, Nah.

  Or three, I could pull up my shorts, grab my plant, and go wake Hem.

  Dammit, I thought. He’s going to make me swear I’ve seen the error of my naked window ways. And worse, he’s going to make me promise to put up a shade.

  I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t just sit on the floor, stuck between a toad and a window treatment.

  It was time to get my farm game on.

  I took a deep breath, got up, and tiptoed toward the window. “It’s okay, little guy,” I whispered, “I’ve got ya.” Then I closed my eyes, lifted the sash, and stepped back as J.T. sprang onto the toilet seat.

  “Cool! A frog!”

  Holyshitholyshitholyshit! I whirled around. “Case! Where’d you come from?”

  “My bed.” He laughed sweetly.

  “You scared the daylights out of me, dude,” I replied. “I didn’t even hear you.” He looked so cute standing there, half-asleep in his green camo p.j. pants and brown Hendrix tee, which, frankly, could just as easily have been a Backstreet Boys tee. My eldest loves music. You name it, he listens to it. The Rolling Stones, *NSYNC, Pink Floyd, Slipknot, Maroon 5, the sound tracks to Footloose, High School Musical, even Star Wars.

  “I heard you,” he teased, looking from J.T. to me.

  My God, I’m losing my mom powers. “Sorry, sweetheart.” I fumbled with the screen. It went up, but it wouldn’t stay up.

  “You’re hoping he’ll hop out?”

  I turned to reply and came eye-to-eye with the teeny, tiny, but big-enough-to-freak-me-out frog, cupped lovingly in my gentle giant’s long, thin fingers. “What the—How’d you—”

  He shrugged. “Animals like me, Mom.”

  And I love you, Case.

  Ten minutes later, J.T. was safely outside, my hero was back in bed, and I was on the Country Curtains Web site. A week later, our pretty blue paisley button-up curtain came. It lets in a little more light than my men wanted, but we do have the plant to consider.

  And a bullfrog to keep an eye out for.

  Chapter Twelve

  SUPERMODEL SUZY

  “Model for me!”

  It was my friend Tara, the lovely and talented woman who owns my absolute favorite boutiques in all the world: Lou Lou, and Lou Lou Too. Sunday service had just ended and I was making my way up to the piano to practice with the kids’ choir. Unfortunately for these darling boys and girls, I’m their accompanist. They sing. I stumble. Somehow the pastor, the choir director, and the Big Guy—you know, God—are all good with it. It’s the kids who probably want to clunk me with their clipboards.

  But back to my plucked-from-obscurity Ford Modeling Moment.

  “Susan,” Tara said, touching my shoulder and stopping me in my “oh, please be speaking to me” tracks, “we’re doing a fashio
n show as a fund-raiser for a local charity and I’d love it if you’d model for us.”

  Should I act like I didn’t hear her? It would be kind of tough. I’d have to feign sudden, catastrophic deafness or some sort of seizure. And I really wasn’t certain about collapsing in the sacristy. Playing the piano poorly is one thing. Playing the congregation for fools is another.

  “Tara, did you miss your medication?” I cracked. Oh, God. Why didn’t I just say yes? I so want to say, Yes. Thank you. I’d be thrilled. Oh, goody. Me and Kate Moss. Maybe after the show we can smoke and skip meals together! What are we waiting for? Let’s swing by the store and pick out my outfits! But no. Needy wiseass that I am, I make her ask again. I am totally going to hell for my bottomless insecurity and bouts of massive ego.

  “Susan, you are so funny,” she said sweetly. “You’ll do it, right?”

  “Um, sure, if you really want me to,” I finally reply like an adult. And then promptly permit my gumball-machine mouth88 to get away from me. Again. “I mean, I can see the folks at animal crackers asking me to model, because frankly I’ve always thought I had it all over their regular bear, but if you want me to hit the runway for Lou Lou, I’d love to.”

  Nice save, O unsound one.