The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  “Just showing her the old hacienda!” Leonard shouted.

  The kitchen sink was piled with dirty dishes and an overflowing laundry basket sat on the floor.

  “My ex-wife has the kids on weekends,” Leonard said. “Which means I have two whole days to clean up after them. Wanna see the upstairs?”

  “Sure,” I said, although I had no idea what the point was. We padded up the carpeted steps, where Leonard opened a door marked with a NO TRESPASSING sign. It was the kind of sign I’d seen only in television shows featuring thirteen-year-old boys.

  “This is Kyle’s room,” Leonard said.

  “Maybe he wouldn’t want me going in here,” I said.

  “Ah, screw him,” Leonard said. “I told him to dismantle the meth lab.”

  The room, relatively large and covered with dingy beige wall-to-wall carpet, was plastered with rock posters, including one for a musician named Papa Roach who apparently had an album called Infest. There was a desk with some textbooks and a globe. There was a terrarium with a toad in it. There were piles of clothes everywhere. The bed was unmade and I saw that it was covered with Smurf sheets. I thought of Daphne and her platonic friend Ira. Leonard looked suddenly embarrassed. “Tomorrow’s laundry day,” he said.

  He showed me Danielle’s room, a feminized, preteen version of the same teeny-bopper consumer syndrome. There was an *NSYNC poster on the wall and several bottles of blue and purple nail polish on the bureau. I couldn’t remember how old he’d said she was. Eleven? Leonard showed me his bedroom, a tribute to the minimalist aesthetic of the divorced male. An overturned cardboard box served as a bedside table. I recognized the pseudo Indian-style bedspread from Target. A John Grisham book and a copy of Newsweek lay on the cardboard box.

  Leonard now seemed to realize that it was silly to give me a tour of his house. He walked me out the front door and onto the street, where my Sunbird was squeezed between two Jeep Grand Cherokees.

  “So this is the Sunbird,” he said.

  “That’d be her.”

  “You were smart not to get the Saab,” he said. “Replacing a simple Saab part costs twice as much as on a normal car. So would you want to go out sometime?”

  “Oh!”

  “Like to a movie or something?”

  “Oh . . . Yeah, that’d be great.”

  “Maybe sometime next week,” he said. “I figure you probably don’t have much to do yet, don’t know that many people.”

  “Well, when I get started on my reporting series I’m going to be really, really busy,” I said. “But I’m not so busy now.”

  “Great.”

  “Great.”

  He gave a little wave, the same kind he gave in the garbage truck, and I got in the Sunbird.

  It was nice of Leonard to invite me to a movie, I thought, struggling with the ignition key, which had a way of locking. It really was. Because he was clearly aware that he was far too old for me and therefore didn’t mean it as a date. And he was secure enough and with-it enough to be able to ask me to a movie without worrying that I would interpret it as anything more than that.

  The car finally started. A Peter Frampton song erupted from the classic rock station and I turned down the volume and lowered the window. From Joel’s deck, where the trunks of nearby elm trees reflected the flickering citronella candles and the smell of grilled chicken kabobs hung in the humid air, came the sound of an adult chorus singing “Nathan Detroit.”

  MY FIRST “Quality of Life Report” was going to be a sort of introductory piece to the whole series, a summing-up of the reasons I—and many New Yorkers—might choose to abandon the rat race for greener pastures. As I’d left his party, Joel had told me he was going to find me a cameraman who could capture some sweeping prairie footage, some peaceful shots of Prairie City’s many parks and recreational areas, and then shoot me sitting on my front porch. Most of the segment would be a voice-over. One day before the script needed to be e-mailed to Faye, I still hadn’t started it. I sat in my office and admired the sheer eggplant-colored panels that covered the French doors. I flipped through the Prairie City Daily Dispatch and read a column called “Family Matters,” in which a woman named Loni Heibel-Budicek humorously pondered the challenges of going to the supermarket with four kids under ten, all of whom still wanted to ride in the shopping cart. I tried to write a first line.

  Sometimes choices are right in front of you. Sometimes you have to search for them.

  I decided to call Daphne. She wasn’t home. I called Elena at her office. She worked at a publicity firm that specialized in promoting gym equipment. The person who answered the phone said she was working from home that day. I called her at home and she was about to leave for a yoga class.

  “All I can say is that I’ve set a stopwatch to see how long it takes you to pack up and come home,” Elena said.

  I went back to my script.

  The sun rises over the prairie like a silent alarm clock, much like the alarm that woke me to new possibilities, new frontiers, new ways of thinking about myself.

  The word “prairie” fascinated me. It was a childlike word, something that had a legitimate meaning but was hard to say out loud without sounding like you were talking baby talk. “Tundra” and “muff” were similar words. But I lived on the prairie now, or so I intimated to the Up Early staff, who pictured me living in a shanty amid acres of cow pastures and wheat fields, an illusion I made no effort to dispel since the chances of getting Faye to approve segments about the spiritual benefits of living on a street with refrigerators on front porches were slim.

  Incidentally, the apartment, despite being a showplace, was infested with fleas. Having remained dormant in the time that elapsed between my arrival and the departure of the previous tenant, who I later learned kept a ferret—and this explained the pungent uriney smell of the house—the insects found new life in my flesh. It had taken me an egregiously long time to figure out what was happening. For weeks, the itching kept me awake at night and in the mornings I’d find my sheets bloody from scratching in my sleep. Even after setting off a flea bomb, they still hadn’t all gone away. I planned to do another one that night. My legs looked like they had shrapnel wounds. I could only imagine what Faye would say if she saw me.

  The phone rang. Daphne?

  It was Samantha Frank. “How’s it going out there, Little Miss Anne of Green Acres?” she said. “Did you see the show this morning?”

  “Samantha, Up Early doesn’t air here,” I said.

  “Oh, right. Hello!” she said. “Anyway, there’s a particular, like, line of inquiry I’d like to just chat about with you. It’s certainly not foreign territory to you. But everyone’s wondering about it. Have you met a man yet?”

  “I’ve met many men,” I said.

  “Are any of them cowboys?”

  “No,” I said. “But, uh, I suppose I could run into one.”

  “Try to,” she said. “Because we want to do a spot on this new book called The Good Girl’s Guide to Bad Boys and were thinking we could do a tie-in with your, uh, you know, thing you’re doing.”

  “You want me to find a bad boy? Are cowboys bad?”

  “Well, you know what I mean,” said Samantha. “They’re not, like, investment analysts. They probably smoke, what’s that stuff? Chew? Can you smoke chew? Chewing tobacco? Or maybe you just chew it. Like baseball players. You know, whatever. All I’m saying is maybe you could brainstorm on that. Oh, I gotta take this call. But how are you otherwise?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “That’s awesome. Well, bye.”

  All the women I knew in New York were dying for me to find a boyfriend, preferably in less than a month, because it would confirm the very syndrome that we spent nearly every moment discussing: that there were no men in New York and if any one of us stepped as far outside Manhattan as, say, Stamford, Connecticut, we’d have more propositions from high school guidance counselors and auto mechanics in ten minutes than we’d had from actors and Wall
Street brokers in ten years. Not that most of my friends were willing to date guidance counselors or auto mechanics, which is why they kept fighting over the same handful of architects and Men’s Journal editors. But the hypothesis among my friends was that within three weeks of being in the Midwest, Lucinda Trout, who hadn’t had a boyfriend in two years, would find herself a veterinarian who looked like Sam Shepard, a younger Sam Shepard, Sam Shepard circa 1983. It was as if I were on a space walk and all the women of New York were gathered around a snowy television screen waiting for me to tell them whether or not there was life on other planets. I wasn’t particularly in the market for a man, but it seemed there was more at stake in that area than just my need to adjust at my own pace and have a time of solitude before embarking on a relationship, or even a date, with some unsuspecting Prairie City male.

  The ratio of men to women in the twenty-five to forty-five age group in Prairie City was, according to the census data I’d looked up on the Internet, approximately 51 percent to 49 percent. Considering the number of men I saw at the Hinky Dinky supermarket, the post office, and the YMCA, these statistics appeared fairly accurate. It was just that a lot of these men, if they were not wearing Joe Camel baseball caps with wraparound sunglasses perched on the brims, were wearing short-sleeved dress shirts, Dockers, and wedding bands. From what I’d seen so far, there seemed no middle ground between the kind of guys I saw buying filterless Winstons at the Gas ’N Stop and the kind of guys who kept framed portraits of their families on the walls of their cubicles at the bank and said things like “Lucinda, we at P.C. Union and Times are committed to making your banking experience a positive one.”

  Not that a Sam Shepard veterinarian wouldn’t have been nice. Back in those last weeks in New York, during that terrifying time when I’d sit in my apartment and nearly shake with fear about what I was about to do, I’d allowed myself to dabble in hyperbolic fantasy. It was both a distraction and a defense mechanism. I’d inflated it to the point of caricature so as not to get my hopes up by actually believing it. In the fantasy, Sam Shepard would live next door. My house would be on the outskirts of Prairie City, conveniently located near both a Starbucks and a cornfield so vast that when I strolled through it in a 1940s-style floral print dress, my hair blowing in the prairie wind, my mind calm and contemplative, my soul clean and pure and good, my hands calloused from some sort of manual labor (clothes hanging? corn husking?), you’d swear I was an extra in a Sam Shepard movie. Make that the star of a Sam Shepard movie. Make that the costar, playing opposite Sam, who was really my neighbor and not literally Sam Shepard but a rancher or an organic farmer or, yes, a veterinarian, a large animal veterinarian. He’d start coming over for coffee in the mornings and we’d discover each other’s inner goodness and things would just take off from there. Everyone I’d meet in Prairie City would be both interesting and kind, every conversation meaningful, every gesture sincere, every woman nonanorectic, every man tall and able to fix cars. I would not be an anxiety-prone, epicurally challenged bad driver but a woman of heart and mind who possessed the kind of sexual appeal that comes not merely from regular exercise or a good bikini wax but from some innate quality that, were she to have any religious background whatsoever, might be characterized as God-fearing. I would be a home slice of a woman, the kind of woman Lyle Lovett might write a song about, the kind of woman Willa Cather might have lusted after. I would officially qualify as decent folk, a good person living among good people.

  It was already past noon. I had less than twenty-eight hours to finish my script. That didn’t count the four hours I was going to need to be out of the house to set off another flea bomb, which I’d planned to do that evening while I went to a movie by myself and then perhaps sat in The Grinder and attempted to finish my script.

  The sun that rises over the prairie is the same sun that rises over the city, but somehow the light is different. In the city, dawn marks the end of the evening. On the prairie, it means a new day.

  The phone rang. Daphne?

  “Lucinda!” a male voice said. “Joel Lipinksy. How’s it going?”

  “Just great.”

  “Hey, I know this is really last minute,” Joel said, “but I was wondering if you had plans tonight.”

  “I’m setting off a flea bomb,” I said, which turned out to be one of the stupider things I said during my first month in Prairie City.

  “Valdette has her class at the synagogue tonight,” Joel said. “And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Heidi Vidlak Memorial Film Theater here in P.C. but they show art films, like, you know, foreign flicks and stuff other than the commercial crap that plays in the regular theaters. And tonight’s the last night of a film called Julian Donkey-Boy. I’d really like to catch it.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I thought you might need a dose of culture by now,” he said. “Because I know what that’s like. I mean, man, it can get bleak around here.”

  Because I had essentially announced that I had no specific plans and had to be out of the house for at least four hours, I had no choice. Besides, I needed to foster a good working relationship with him.

  Joel picked me up and helped me set off the flea bombs. He made a big show of running out of the house as if we were ducking out of a sudden rainstorm, though he also seemed concerned about getting chemicals on his suit, which was an army green version of the black one he’d worn the night before. When he started up his SUV, the soundtrack to The Buena Vista Social Club blared from the speakers.

  “The Buena Vista Social Club!” I chirped.

  “Oh yeah,” Joel said. “I really dig this. I have Ibrahim Ferrer’s solo album, too. Really great stuff.”

  During my last year in New York, my aspirations to be a more serious journalist had led me to work as a film critic. It was an unpaid position at a free newspaper that pretended to be neighborhood based and therefore had different names according to where it was distributed, though the content was the same in each edition. It was called The Upper West Side Eye, The Chelsea Ear, The Flatiron Focus, Greenwich Village Accent, and, most perplexingly, The Upper East Side Top Hat, which seemed a misguided effort to evoke an Edith Wharton–flavored aura of old Manhattan society. Every week I delivered lengthy essays on the films that the senior critic, a second-tier socialite who was married to a real estate mogul, couldn’t be bothered to cover. I would review a documentary about highway rest stops or the latest movie from Iceland. Often the film had ended its brief run by the time the review was published. As it happened, I had reviewed The Buena Vista Social Club. It was a Wim Wenders documentary about a group of legendary Cuban son musicians who, thanks to the American slide guitarist Ry Cooder, were reunited after decades of cultural repression under Castro. Though the film was earnest and stylish—so much so that, in a weak moment, I’d bought the soundtrack in the hopes of impressing the Prairie Cityites—I’d also thought it smacked of cultural imperialism, especially the finale, which showed the band playing a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall and saying they owed it all to Ry Cooder, whose atmospheric steel pedal guitar chords were about as organic to the music as a John Bonham drum solo at the Ice Capades. I said as much to Joel.

  “Really?” he said, pulling into a parking garage near the theater. “I didn’t think so. I found it really interesting.”

  Julian Donkey-Boy, I quickly discerned, was the latest atrocity from independent cinema’s enfant terrible Harmonie Korine, who was best known for writing the (in this critic’s opinion) facile and exploitive docudrama Kids and then went on to make the horrifying Gummo, wherein a prepubescent, trailer trash punk systematically kills neighborhood cats and a retarded girl is gang-raped. In Julian Donkey-Boy, a schizophrenic nudist with a fascistic German father impregnates his adolescent sister, who then has a miscarriage at a skating rink. The film appeared to have been shot by a seventh grader with a handheld camera and most of the dialogue was unintelligible. The audience at the Heidi Vidlak Memorial Film Theater was comprised of a combinati
on of college professors, students, and middle-aged women wearing batik sundresses. When the screen faded to black after no particular dramatic conclusion, the crowd let out a collective mmm. As we left the theater, people were saying things like “It really makes you think.”

  Joel wanted to get a drink. Since I had almost two hours left before I could enter my house, I agreed. We went to a place called Cosmo Club, which he said was much “classier and hipper” than the usual dive bars downtown.

  “That was really interesting,” he said as we sat down in the bar. It was dark and had couches with low tables and candles. It was sort of like Bar Barella, except the clientele appeared to be exclusively Prairie City State College students. A ponytailed guy in an army jacket was scribbling in a notebook while drinking Scotch and smoking a cigarette.

  I made the mistake of telling Joel that after three years minoring in cinema studies in college and two years of reviewing the debuts of every film school grad who ever had a rich uncle, my patience for high art had waned.

  “That’s one of the reasons I moved here,” I added, suddenly feeling the oddness of my presence in a midwestern cocktail lounge with a fifty-year-old married man. “I wanted to see what it was like to be normal. It’s really, you know, just an experiment. I know I probably seem very strange to everyone. And everyone’s been so nice. But, you know, I’m still doing my job. Up Early is very behind this project. It was practically their idea.”

  “Well, I for one am just totally psyched that you’ve chosen to live here and do this documentary project,” Joel said. “Partly because we’re all looking forward to getting to know you more as a person and partly for selfish reasons. I mean, it’s great to have someone who can talk about culture, who knows what’s going on in the world, who can think outside the box.”

  “You mean like telling you I thought that movie was gratuitous, pretentious shit?” I said. Suddenly I felt like I’d crossed the line. He had, after all, paid for my ticket. So I added, “Other than Chloe Sevigny’s performance, which was quite good despite the material.”