by Meghan Daum
Of course, there was already as much meth in New York as there were opportunities to do good in New York. It’s just that no one I knew had anything to do with either. That was another reason the story appealed to me so much: it was guaranteed to lead me in the opposite direction of my actual life. There was little chance of encountering a publicist, plus I noticed that people in recovery had a way of telling you every thing, including things they really shouldn’t tell you (like that they’re high this very moment), which produced, in addition to the previously established feelings of superiority and righteousness, a tertiary sensation of omniscience. Thanks to the interviewees’ own stupidity (and my disarming interview technique—what a pro!) dozens of disadvantaged waifs with no concept of the term “on the record” were putting themselves at the mercy of my compassion. And I would not let them down. They were safe. I would not quote the things they said about smuggling. I was Mother Teresa, a credit to my despicable profession and the snide, backstabbing metropolis I called home. Suddenly, I loved my job.
I also loved Sue Lugenbeel. She was the executive director of the Prairie City Recovery Center for Women and she wore batik harem pants and dangling silver earrings and had spiky, bleached blond hair that she claimed to have cut herself. She said she lived on a farm outside of town. I suspected she was around fifty. I also suspected she was a lesbian, which, given the farm, I found fascinating in terms of, as Faye would have said, her “cultural context.” In addition to setting me up with seventeen recovering addicts, Sue also assumed the role of ambassador for Prairie City. The first night after Ray returned to New York, Sue met me at the Ramada and drove me in her Saab to a Japanese restaurant in a strip mall, where we met two of her colleagues and discussed women’s issues. Generally I wasn’t up for discussions of women’s issues, having filled my quota in college, but there was something thrilling about the juxtaposition of the vaguely 1970s-sounding rhetoric—the word “empowerment” kept coming up—and the decor of the restaurant, which had a huge freestanding fish tank and was carpeted a deep red to connote “an Asian flair.” I liked the warm, self-deprecating nature of the other two women. I liked the way the piped-in Kenny G music weaved in and out of their conversation. They segued flawlessly from sanctimony to cattiness, from the subject of rampant meth use among women in their community to gossip about who had slept with whom in the county health department. After dinner, we retreated to a modular sofa in the bar area, where Sue smoked a cigarette, a gesture I found admirably rebellious in light of her work as a health advocate.
After my third day of further research—there had been a redheaded truck stop waitress whose teeth had rotted from drugs, a nineteen-year-old mother who’d lost both her children to the state, a dental hygienist who, having tired of prescription drugs stolen from her office, had resorted to smoking meth in the basement every night while her husband watched Jeopardy!—Sue invited me for cocktails out at her farm.
I GOT LOST ON THE WAY TO SUE’S PLACE. Off the highway, there was one gravel road after another, roads with names like Little Mud Creek Road and Northwest 317th Street. Finally I found a farmhouse with a Saab in the driveway. It was old and rambling like something out of a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie except it had an aboveground swimming pool with rainbow wind socks on the deck and a rainbow beach umbrella on the patio table. Acres of tilled cornfields spread out in every direction. Tractors hummed in the distance. kd lang played on the stereo inside the house. Sue ran out to greet me, followed by three large dogs with rainbow collars.
“Welcome, Lucinda!” she cried, hugging me even though she’d seen me two hours earlier. “This is the old homestead.”
There was an END HATRED sticker on the front door. The dogs were jumping all over me, covering my J. Crew capri pants with drool.
“Stop that, Willa! Stop that, Chloe!” Sue yelled at the dogs. The third one, an ancient-looking black Lab, cowered behind her legs. “This one’s Isaiah. He’s a little shy. He was abused by his old owner.”
Another woman emerged from the house. She was wearing Birkenstocks with the same harem pants I’d seen on Sue. She had long, slightly frizzy, dirty blond hair that she’d tied up on her head and pierced with chopsticks.
“This is my partner, Teri,” Sue said. “She has to take off, unfortunately. She’s taking a Chinese medicine class at the college.”
Teri gave a quick wave and climbed in the Saab and drove off, kicking up a trail of dust on the road.
“Wine?” Sue asked. “I just went to Shop ’N Save. I have some Triscuits, too.”
Sue and I drank approximately two and a half bottles of wine that night. Because I was in interview mode, I asked her a lot of questions. And because what little inhibitions she had were erased by the wine and at least half a pack of Merit filters, she told me what seemed like every thing about herself. Her life story read like an entry in Our Bodies, Ourselves. She had turned fifty-two that year. She was in the process of planning a menopause shower for herself and a number of other women—“it’s like a baby shower except you get calcium supplements instead of teething rings!” Sue had grown up in Prairie City, taught health at Prairie City High School for several years, and, upon realizing she was a lesbian, attempted to open a gay cocktail lounge, which had ultimately failed because of competition from the more established queer hangout, the Thirteenth Street TGI Friday’s. Given her interest in women’s issues, she began working at the Prairie City Recovery Center for Women and was eventually promoted to executive director. She’d met Teri at TGI Friday’s and, a few years later, they’d bought the farm, where they’d recently installed track lighting and a subzero refrigerator. Sue had twice received the League of Women Voters’ Antonia H. Kubicek Award for excellence in community service in the interests of women. She was on intimate terms with all of the city’s left-leaning elite. The liberal county commissioner and his wife, a former all-state women’s softball champion, were her best friends. She was also very close with her brother, Leonard, who drove a garbage truck for the Prairie City Department of Sanitation. He was Native American by blood but had been adopted into Sue’s family as a toddler.
“He took back his Indian name,” Sue said. “So now he’s Leonard Running Feather. You can imagine how my mom felt about that. It made my being a lesbian seem about as big a deal as getting a D in math! But they got over it.”
“Do you ever get, like, harassed?” I asked, now a probing journalist in the Katie Couric vein, unafraid of raising the tough questions. “I mean, being openly gay and living out in the country and every thing.”
Sue looked bewildered. “No.”
She said this as if I had asked whether coyotes ever came near the house, opened the door, and sprawled out on the couch to watch Friends.
In the adjacent field, a farmer drove by on a John Deere tractor, a bright headlight guiding him through the dark. He extended his arm in a giant wave.
“Hi, Joe!” Sue called out.
SO WHY WAS IT that everytime Sue went inside the house for more wine or Triscuits I could do nothing but look out at all that farmland and, with the mixture of fear and exhilaration that accompanies a dare, wonder if the solution to my problems, the problems that began with my apartment lease and ended somewhere around my growing feelings of shallowness and moral worthlessness, was to move to Prairie City? Why was I so stirred by the selection of magazines in Sue’s bathroom: Country Living, Travel & Leisure, Mother Jones? Was it merely amazement that someone living on a farm in the Midwest would subscribe to Mother Jones? Or was there truth to my mounting suspicion that I had discovered a secret pocket of American society, a place farmers waved at semibutch lesbians, a place where women threw menopause showers and the sky—I’d noticed this even from my hotel room—seemed to eclipse the Earth itself. It could have been another planet. It was certainly a cheaper planet. As I scanned the classified section of the local newspaper I picked up at the airport on my way home, I noticed that houses rented for as little as four hundred dollars per month. Prai
rie City was, if not an obvious paradise, a bizarre and intriguing idea.
MY ONE-ROOM, one-window apartment in New York had mice and hardly any kitchen. Though I’d never even attempted to entertain more than two guests at a time, I was considered an obstreperous tenant, mostly by my downstairs neighbor, Bob, the longtime lover of my upstairs neighbor, Yuri. They’d lived there at least twenty years and both of their apartments were rent controlled. Neither paid more than three hundred dollars a month, so instead of getting a place together they moved between the first and third floors as if they had one apartment, padding up and down the stairwell in their robes and slippers like college lovers in a dormitory. It was as if my existence on the second floor was that of a guest who would not leave a dinner party. My apartment itself seemed an infringement on their rights as private citizens. Bob was forever shoving notes under my door. “You walk so heavily on the floor. Could you please remove your shoes upon entering your apartment?” “Would it be possible to lower the ringer on your phone?” “Your overnight company is, shall we say, a bit vocal. Have you any idea what I can hear?”
This last was so mortifying I vowed never to run into Bob or Yuri again. I scampered down to the lobby to fetch The New York Times and the mail, terrified of the sound of Bob’s unlocking door at the foot of the stairs. I lingered on the sidewalk if either of them happened to be walking ahead of me into the building, Yuri holding the door for Bob like a patient grandfather, his jet black toupee sweeping across his deeply creased forehead, his imitation silk ascot tucked in his shirt like a Russian lounge singer, which he may well have been at one time. I would watch them from the entrance of the Korean grocery a few doors down, counting the seconds until I could walk toward my building without their seeing me, clutching my plastic container of deli salad and wondering exactly how a person gets to be twenty-nine and still finds herself hiding from her neighbors before going to her apartment and eating tricolored pasta salad in front of a TV with barely any reception. I experienced this sequence of thoughts almost weekly.
ON THE EVENING I FLEW BACK from Prairie City, I dropped my luggage off in my apartment (a glance in the darkened kitchen area revealed two dead mice in overturned traps) and took the subway downtown to meet my friend Daphne at our favorite cocktail lounge, Bar Barella. Daphne was usually my favorite friend, though not necessarily my best friend (my best friend was Elena Fein, with whom I was usually angry or vice versa). Part of Daphne’s appeal, part of the reason I was willing to come home from a long trip and meet her in a bar that was forty-five minutes from my apartment and one block away from hers was that she was notoriously unavailable. She would disappear for months at a time. She would retreat to Maine, staying in some cottage owned by her relatives, and not call anyone. She would go to Africa for six months as a relief worker, then slink back to New York, sublet an apartment, and wait weeks before letting anyone know she was around. Her dominant characteristic was her lightness, her lack of rules, her ability to perceive individual stupidity as a natural response to global stupidity. During a time several years earlier, when I was briefly dating a guy who netted hundreds of thousands of dollars a year running a high-end escort service that catered to Wall Street brokers, Daphne was the only person I told. Years later, when Daphne dated a guy who netted hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling high-grade marijuana to rock stars, I was one of many people she told. That was the difference between us. She could do stupid things and actually come off looking cooler for it. For this I worshiped her.
When I arrived at Bar Barella, Daphne was sitting on a Victorian sofa in a dark corner. A flickering candle on the table reflected in her Armani glasses, for which she’d paid four hundred dollars despite difficulty making her rent. I wanted to tell her about Prairie City, about Sue and the farm, and my thought of moving there, which, by the time I picked my bags off the carousel at LaGuardia, had evolved from a thought to a full-fl edged, terrifying plan. But she needed to talk first.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“What?”
“My fucking life.”
It seemed that in the week I’d been gone, Daphne had managed to sleep with two different men. This was after a year and a half without sex.
“Rock on,” I said, which isn’t the kind of thing I usually say. But it seemed a less offensive cliché than “You go, girl.” Given the census data, the seven hundred thousand surplus of single women, two men in one week was less an act of sluttishness than of stockpiling. We hardly ever got laid. My “vocal” overnight guest had been an anomaly. As for Daphne, two men in one week, especially two men taller than she, merited a glass of Champagne.
But no. One of them was an ex-boyfriend, a struggling actor who’d dumped her long ago for an actress with a trust fund and a SoHo loft. The other was her ostensibly platonic friend Ira, who had been in love with her for years and to whom she wasn’t attracted. Somehow she’d gotten drunk and spent the night in his apartment because she didn’t feel like taking the scary D train all the way home from Brooklyn. Neither had called her since.
“Fuckheads,” she said. “I have to move.”
“Move to the Midwest,” I said.
“Really?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “We’re not done with you. Keep going.”
“No, I’m finished,” Daphne said, sucking down her last bit of Pinot. Her eyes darted around for the waitress. “And even more disgustingly,” she continued, “Ira has a single bed. He’s too cheap to get a grownup bed. And I can’t believe I’m even admitting this but he has Smurf sheets, like a child’s sheets. Like it’s ironic or something. Like we’re still in college. I mean, he’s fucking thirty-three.”
“I met these lesbians in the Midwest,” I said.
“There are lesbians in the Midwest?”
“They live on a farm and drink wine and read Mother Jones,” I told Daphne. “You can rent a house for four hundred dollars. I don’t know. Something’s happened inside my mind.”
“I thought Mother Jones went out of business.”
“And,” I said, “the town is called Prairie City. How cute is that?”
“No fucking way!”
“Way,” I said. “I think I might have to move there. I think the train has left the station. I have the idea. I can’t not do it.”
“Uh oh,” she said. “Alternative Lifestyle Alert.”
When my friends and I were not discussing the lack of available men, we were usually discussing moving out of New York. Again, the subjects were related, though not entirely. Someone was always coming up with an escape plan, a way to lower the cost of living, a way to increase the odds of meeting a guy who actually knew how to hammer a nail into a piece of plywood. The plans varied according to the books we’d recently read, the movies we’d recently seen, the city most recently featured on The Real World. We’d say Austin, Seattle, Paris, New Delhi. When somebody came home from an unusual location—a wedding in Nova Scotia or a snorkeling trip in Australia—and spent two weeks obsessing about moving into a yurt on the Bay of Fundy we called it an Alternative Lifestyle Alert. The guiding principle of the Alternative Lifestyle Alert was that it was never acted upon.
Until now. No, I thought as I rode the subway back to my verminous apartment, this time it would be different. I, Lucinda Trout, would break the pattern of Alternative Lifestyle Alert inertia and actually alter my lifestyle. That night, as I unpacked my clothes, which still smelled like the country air and cigarette smoke of Sue’s farm, I entered a kind of trance. It was an intensified version of the kind of trance I’d occasionally enter on nights when I’d catch some kind of heartland movie on TV, Country, for example, which starred Jessica Lange and an especially scrumptious Sam Shepard, and, despite the fact that it was produced by Disney, had always been a secret favorite of mine. Out of this trance would always arise the same question, a question that asked what would be left of me if I uprooted myself completely. What would happen if I removed myself from the crowds and the money and the constant talk
of who had been featured in articles in New York Magazine with titles like “Under 35 and Over the Moon: Gen-X Internet Moguls Cash in and Take the Real Estate Market by Storm”?
I bring this up because in the stack of mail by my door was that very magazine with that very article. And one of the under-thirty-fives was a woman I’d known in college who had taken what basically amounted to a personal Web page chronicling her sexual exploits and sold it to Time Warner. Then she’d purchased a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar loft in TriBeCa. A full-page color photo showed her reclining on a leopard-print Victorian sofa. The caption read “Haley Bopp (née Alice Sterngold), creator of the cyberdiary This Broad’s Sheets, might have given up creative control of her Web site, but she now seeks artistic expression in her 1500-square-foot loft, which she’s decorated with the help of the red hot design firm Home Planet, known for its innovative approach to feng shui.”
My trance was briefly interrupted by an outburst of envy and disgust. I considered calling Elena, who was an early riser and might have taken a 3:00 A.M. phone call as an opportunity to get a head start on her workout. But then, like a light breeze, the trance returned, bringing with it the realization that no amount of leopard-print Victorian sofas or feng shui consultation from Home Planet could justify fifteen hundred square feet going for more than ten times the amount of Haley’s and my tuition at Smith College, a place where we had been required to take courses with names like “Gender, Power, and Commerce,” courses from which I, who was still paying off my student loans, had obviously garnered fewer benefits than she. It occurred to me that Sue and Teri’s farmhouse, purchased in 1991 for sixty thousand dollars, would probably sell for close to a million were it located within a seventy-five-mile radius of New York City. It then occurred to me that the 2 BR, 1.5 BA, c/a, fenced yd, w/d hookups, gar, gorg. woodwork, $475/mo listing I’d spotted in the Prairie City Daily Dispatch would not only reveal what would be left of me if I uprooted myself but would leave me with enough extra funds to fly home and have drinks with Daphne at Bar Barella every month if I felt like it.
