The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  “So what did the guy go to prison for?” Mason asked.

  “Meth dealing,” said the landlord, shaking his head. “His poor wife. She had no idea. One day they just showed up and dragged him out.”

  This guy knew how to pick them.

  How to Throw a Barn Dance for Under $300

  To: Faye Figaro

  From: Lucinda Trout

  Re: Exciting News!

  Guess what? I am moving to a farm! Now “The Quality of Life Report” will really be able to take on more of a structure. I’ll bring viewers along as I stroll through the fields in the early evening light as well as struggle with the harsh realities of farm life (brutal winters, possible animal invasions—grasshopper infestations). Think of it as A Year in Provence meets Lake Wobegon Days.

  To: Lucinda Trout

  From: Faye Figaro

  I’m thikning of it as Girl Interuptted meets Deliverance.

  There were cats all over the farm. At least seven. The meth addict previous tenants had fed them and now they were mangy and unvaccinated and apparently extremely pregnant by a lone tom cat that lurked in the rafters of the barn. Mason and I had asked the landlord to take the cats away but on the morning we showed up with the first load of furniture they were still there. By the time we returned with the second load, they’d all given birth. And they were the worst mothers I’d ever seen.

  Kittens were strewn every where—in the yard, in the barn, underneath the porch. Most of them still had their eyes closed, their multicolored fur obscured by wetness and grass. The farm seemed to wheeze with their cries. The mother cats skulked around in complete indifference. Mason stared at them, cursing and breathing heavily.

  “Why aren’t the mothers taking care of them?” I asked.

  “Because they’re too young!” he yelled. “The mothers are probably six months old. That tom cat is probably their father, too. What the hell was the matter with those people? Everyone knows you don’t feed stray cats.”

  “Maybe they’ll get the hang of it,” I said. I picked up one of the mother cats and set her down by two kittens. She sniffed them and walked away. I realized then that a sound I’d first thought to be the squawking of a bird was actually coming from a place closer to the ground. I followed the noise to the horse pasture and saw a white kitten, no bigger than a mouse, howling under a long stalk of prairie grass. Afterbirth was attached to its side.

  “Oh God, come over here,” I said.

  Mason looked at the kitten. His breath grew even heavier.

  “Go someplace else,” he said.

  “Maybe the mother just needs to find it,” I said. “Come here, kitty! Come over here!”

  “Walk away!” Mason yelled. “Go inside the house. Don’t look out the window.”

  “Why?”

  “Just let me handle it. You don’t need to see this.”

  I went inside the house and up the stairs, which creaked so loudly you wondered if they’d cave in. The room that would be my office was the second largest of the four bedrooms. Sebastian and Peter would share the largest room when they visited on weekends and Erin, who would sleep over three times a week, would have the small maid’s room, which had slanted ceilings and a tiny window seat and, were I four years old, would have been the coolest place imaginable given its similarity to the sleeping loft on Little House on the Prairie. Mason’s and my bedroom had windows facing the west, where a plain of natural grasses that the Department of Land Management paid the landlord not to farm stretched for more than a mile. I stood in my office and pictured where my desk would go. I scanned the walls for a phone jack. There was none.

  Through the window I watched Mason take a pair of gloves out of his truck. He looked up and saw me.

  “Go to the other side of the house!” he yelled. “Go in the bathroom or something. Get away from the window!”

  I went into the bathroom. There was only one in the house. It was on the second floor at the end of the hallway and there were happy face stickers all over the walls. The light switch cover was decorated with a picture of a sunrise and the words “and god said ‘LET THERE BE LIGHT.’” After about five minutes Mason called to me from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Why don’t you go back into town?”

  “Why?”

  “Just let me deal with this,” he said.

  “What did you do?”

  “Never mind that,” he said. “Why don’t you go to the Y and go swimming or something?”

  “My car has all my shit in it,” I said. I’d stuffed the INNKEEPERS ARE NOT STUPID shower curtain and the eggplant-colored window panels and all the sheets and towels and clothes I could fit into the Sunbird.

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t drive it,” Mason said.

  “But my stuff will get stolen.”

  “This isn’t fucking New York!” he shouted. I noticed he had tears in his eyes.

  I got in the car and drove into town. This was terrible. Was I wrong to let Mason do what I suspected he was doing? No one I knew from home would have allowed it. They’d take all the kittens in, feed them with eyedroppers, and then submit essays to the back page of The New York Times Magazine about how saving the lives of forty-two newborn kittens made them reconsider their position on abortion. Except that even I knew you couldn’t save an hours-old kitten with an eyedropper. I knew from watching The Discovery Channel that there were certain nutrients they needed, certain things that couldn’t be provided by humans. And The New York Times Magazine didn’t accept unsolicited material anyway. I knew because I’d once tried to submit something about the deluge of Chinese baby girls on the Upper West Side and received a form reject letter.

  I didn’t know where I’d packed my swimsuit, so instead of going to the YMCA I went to The Grinder and sat in the outdoor section so I could keep an eye on the car. Mason had told me to come back in no less than two hours. This seemed an interminable amount of time. I flipped through a copy of the Prairie City Daily Dispatch. The lead story was about the latest statistics regarding playground safety. Then I did something I’d been dreading but absolutely had to do. I took out my cell phone and called my parents in Florida to tell them I was moving in with Mason. When I got the machine I left a message saying that I was moving to a farm “for job-related reasons” and could be reached at a new number. I decided to omit the part about Mason.

  During my fourth cup of coffee, I saw Sue standing at the counter. She was talking on her cell phone and looking very businesslike in a blazer, tailored slacks, and Birkenstocks. She saw me and waved.

  “Lucinda!” Sue cried, walking toward me as she attempted to balance her grande cappuccino with her cell phone and canvas EMBRACE, EMPATHIZE, EMPOWER tote bag. “It’s been forever. Whatcha been up to?”

  “Oh, this and that,” I said.

  “How’s the TV stuff going?”

  “Great!”

  My heart began racing. I hadn’t told Sue—or anyone in Prairie City—about moving to the farm with Mason. It seemed obvious that I had to tell her now, though, as if on reflex, my mind flipped through a list of alternate subjects toward which to veer the conversation.

  “How’s work?” I asked.

  “Fine,” she said, “which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to call you. I want you to meet a new friend of mine. She just started working at the recovery center and she’s around your age. She’s an African American woman named Christine and she’s just terrific. A really interesting woman. I think you two would hit it off.”

  There were, from what I’d seen, perhaps 75 African Americans in Prairie City. Nine of them worked for the Prairie City Coalition for Diversity. The remaining 66 appeared to be members of the university’s perennial powerhouse football team. My impression was black women who grew up in Prairie City fled town at the first opportunity. Just as, according to my prophecy, by the year 2015 regular Jewish girls on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would be unable to vie for men with the Chinese Jewish girls who had been adopted in the late 1990s, it seem
ed that no woman of color in Prairie City could be bothered to compete with the Caucasians their male counterparts seemed to prefer. Dawn’s imprisoned husband, it turned out, was African American. In this regard, there was quite a bit of interracial coupling in Prairie City, surely a testament to the efforts of the Coalition for Diversity.

  “We’re having a little get-together this Saturday,” Sue continued. “Sort of a women-only thing. I hope you can make it.”

  “Great!” I said.

  “I’m not sure what time Teri will be home from work,” Sue said. “So I’ll call you and let you know when people are coming.”

  Sue was now looking at her watch and pulling her car keys out of her pocket. I couldn’t believe I’d waited so long to break the news to her. It was clear I’d have to tell her now and that it would be totally weird and she’d look at me all concerned and want to have a longer conversation wherein we discussed my motives, Mason’s and my level of commitment, and my ability to remain independent and empowered in the context of heterosexual cohabitation.

  “Actually,” I stammered, “I have a new phone number.”

  “Really?” said Sue.

  “Actually, I’m moving to a farm.”

  “Really! Whereabouts?”

  “About twenty miles west of town, on County Road F,” I said.

  “Wow, that’s far,” said Sue. “Are you going to be able to manage out there?”

  “Actually,” I said, “Mason is moving there, too.”

  I couldn’t look directly at Sue, so I fixed my eyes on a couple of college students who were going from table to table with some kind of petition about the Green Party. I prayed they’d come over and interrupt us.

  “I didn’t realize you guys were that serious,” she said.

  “I know it seems weird,” I said. “But I’ve really thought about it a lot and I’m prepared to take it on.”

  I waited for her to issue some warning about Mason or at least tell me that I could always stay with her and Teri if things didn’t work out. Instead, she pulled her Palm Pilot out of her tote bag and asked for the new phone number.

  “Well, how fun!” she said. “You’ll have to have a house warming.”

  “Oh definitely,” I said.

  “And I bet it’ll give you a lot more material for your TV series.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “And if it doesn’t work out,” Sue said, walking away, “you can always move back into town. Nothing’s irreversible.”

  How true, I thought. Nothing was irreversible here. I made a mental note to explain to Daphne and Elena that moving onto a farm with a guy in Prairie City was equivalent to, say, giving a guy the extra keys to your apartment in New York. It was a convenience rather than monumental occasion. It was, simply, a passage. It had both an entrance and, if need be, an exit. In Prairie City, finding a new place to live was as easy as taking back your extra set of keys. This was what we meant by quality of life. So there you had it. No further explanation was required. Suddenly I felt lighter and, if not carefree, less burdened by the implications of the farm. What fun times surely lay ahead!

  The Green Party petitioners, with their clipboards and righteous, steely eyes, were coming toward me. Bolting out of my chair, I ran toward the sidewalk, inadvertently throwing the newspaper in the trash can rather than the recycling bin.

  RETURNING TO THE FARM exactly two hours after I’d left it, I found Mason sitting on the porch drinking beer with his boss, Frank Fussell. Actually, only Mason was drinking a beer. Frank was drinking a bottle of iced chai. I’d met Frank only once before, when Mason had given me a tour of the elevator, and he was wearing the exact same thing he’d worn that day: a surgical scrub shirt, acid-washed jeans cut off just below the knees, and Jesus-style sandals that wrapped around his ankles.

  As I walked up the porch steps, Frank came up to me and put both hands on my shoulders. Like Leonard, he wore aviator-style glasses that darkened in the sun. A ring of thick, graying hair encircled his bald head and hung past his earlobes. The kittens were gone, though a few mother cats were still ambling about.

  “Lucinda,” he said, “sometimes kindness must take the form of cruelty.”

  “That’s pretty deep, Frank,” Mason said. There were empty beer cans all over the porch.

  “You know,” Frank continued, “we tend to think of nature as a self-sufficient entity, as a force that ebbs and flows peacefully without human interference or a lot of, you know, input from mortals such as ourselves. But I hope you’ve learned today that that’s not always the case. And it can be a karmic bummer.”

  They had killed the kittens. Mason never told me how, but considering there was no water around to drown them and it didn’t make much sense to shoot them I can only imagine Mason and Frank had hit them with blunt objects. Actually it was Mason who had done the killing; Frank mostly stood around and coached him. Mason had needed to drink to do it, and even through the salve of alcohol he seemed shaken up, discombobulated, and still pissed off at the people who’d lived there before. He said he’d thought about killing the mother cats, too, because chances were the humane society would put them to sleep anyway, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  I resisted making a smart-ass remark. I resisted saying “that was big of you” or “you deserve a humanitarian award.” Mason seemed so upset and the situation seemed so much bigger than anything I was in a position to judge—especially with what he would surely call my “urban mentality”—that I didn’t say anything. I went up to my empty office and watched through the window as Frank drove off in his truck. When I went downstairs, Mason was in the kitchen opening another beer.

  “Can’t we keep the ones that are left?” I asked. “We can get them spayed.”

  “You have seven hundred dollars?” he asked. He already owed me upward of a thousand dollars for his share of the security deposit, the first month’s rent, the interior paint, new phone service, the electric bill, and the establishment of a propane account, which he insisted wouldn’t be necessary if he could put in a wood-burning stove.

  “Maybe we can find homes for them,” I said.

  “We won’t,” he said. “They’re wild cats. They’ll get pregnant again immediately.”

  “We should take them to the humane society,” I said.

  “Like I’m sure we can get them in the car,” he said.

  “We can try.”

  I took the boxes of dishes and clothes out of the trunk of the Sunbird. A plate fell out and shattered on the steps on the way through the back door and Mason cursed again. When the trunk was empty we both put on gloves and caught the cats, Mason two at a time, and threw them in. Mason got scratched on the face. I screamed and dropped one and it fled into the pasture. We drove back into town listening to the screams of the cats in the trunk. They were louder than the engine. Mason turned the radio on. He flipped past Garrison Keillor and settled on a classic rock station. His cheek was bleeding. I started crying. Partly out of sorrow and disgust, partly because I wouldn’t be able to tell any of my friends about it.

  “I know you think I’m awful,” he said.

  “I don’t think that,” I said.

  The sun was beginning to go down over the passing farmland. The sky was streaked with pink and a jetliner was arcing around for a landing at Prairie City Municipal. Grand Funk Railroad’s “American Band” played on the radio.

  “Let’s not mention this to the kids,” Mason said. I had forgotten his kids existed.

  When we reached the humane society I opened the trunk of the car, and the cats leaped out and tore across the parking lot. We stood there and watched them as they headed toward the highway. It was the last we saw of them.

  “Well, that was a fine use of time,” Mason said. “Now they can all get run over by cars. Does that make you feel better?”

  From there, we went to Effie’s Tavern and drank more beer. Then we went back to the house and, since the bed wasn’t put together, slept on the matt
ress. We had, at that point, officially lived on the farm for eleven hours.

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, when I arrived at the women’s party at Sue and Teri’s, the first person I saw was Joel. He was in the kitchen making crab cakes. A towel was thrown over his shoulder and he wore an apron that said I’M COOKIN’ WITH THE FRUGAL GOURMET ON PRAIRIE CITY PUBLIC TELEVISION.

  “I thought this was a girls’ party,” I said.

  “Why would you think that?” he asked.

  Sue barreled into the kitchen, a margarita in one hand and a finger sandwich from the prepared-food section of Hinky Dinky in the other. She wore a beaded African necklace.

  “Lucinda!” she said. “You made it.”

  “I thought this was an all-girl thing,” I said. “An all-women thing.”

  Sue looked startled for a moment.

  “Oh that was the original plan but these guys wanted to come,” she said. “What can you do? Come in here, I want you to meet Christine.”

  Someone in the corner wore an Angela Davis-style dashiki and huge earrings. It was Valdette, sitting mesmerized on the couch next to a woman who looked like Vanessa Williams. Presumably, this was Christine. She wore a sleeveless, white cashmere sweater that showed off slim, hairless arms. Her long, straightened hair was pulled back in a headband and she wore tiny pearl earrings.

  “Christine!” Sue said, dragging me over by the elbow. “This is Lucinda Trout. She moved here last year from New York.”

  Valdette appeared slightly peeved at the interruption. Christine extended a perfectly manicured hand.

  “I hear you’re new in town,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Where did you move here from?” I asked.

  “Des Moines,” she said.