by Meghan Daum
As I sit on my porch swing, drinking lemonade and watching the cows moseying in the pasture across the road, I realize that my petty concerns are upstaged by the subtly dramatic scenery of the high plains. With miles of rolling hills to the north, the seven acres of horse pasture to the east, the five acres of natural grassland to the west, and the—
I was only that far when Erin abruptly aborted her Little Mermaid watching and raced upstairs to the bathroom. “Dad!” she shouted. “Dad! Dad!”
indescribably huge, frequently biblical-looking sky that looms above it, the house is a vessel of tranquillity . . .
“Dad!”
“He’s outside, Erin!” I shouted, almost like a mother. Except a mother might have risen from her chair. Though not necessarily Erin’s mother.
“I think the children’s Ex-Lax is working,” she called from the bathroom. There was no hint of joke or irony in her voice. In fact, she brought to the statement the same intonation she might bring to I have eighteen different Beanie Babies.
Unlike her alter ego, Diva Starz Nikki, Erin had a problem with constipation. Tucked inside her Pocahontas knapsack were always squares of chocolate-flavored children’s Ex-Lax wrapped in foil along with notes from Julie saying things like “Take one in late afternoon” and “Make sure she poops before you bring her home.” Surely this malady was the result of being shuffled between two houses, plus the fact that Mason fed her Little Debbie’s and microwavable dinners with fried chicken cutlets shaped like circus animals. Mason felt it was his prerogative as a father to feed his kids junk food, as if Oreos and root beer would endear him to them, as if his very presence connoted a holiday.
“I said, ‘I think it’s working!’” she called again.
I was also working. I was doing very important work. But because Mason was far out in the pasture mending a fence (did all the folks back in New York hear that? I thought, mending a fence!) I got up from my desk and went into the bathroom, the floor of which was covered in shit, as were Erin’s buttocks and the backs of her legs.
I expected her to be crying—I would have been—but she was matter-of-fact about the situation.
“Do you want me to get your dad?” I asked.
“No. I want you to clean me up,” she said. She had brought Diva Starz Nikki in with her. Today’s word is “glamoricious,” the doll said.
“Get my clean clothes from my knapsack,” Erin directed.
I got her underwear, which was decorated with tiny strawberries, and a pair of pants. When I went back in the bathroom I accidentally dropped the clean clothes on the soiled floor.
“Don’t put them where the poo is!” Erin screamed.
I was gagging. I was also still thinking about my script. I felt so terrible for Erin that I could not look her in the eye. When I was four an incident like this would have humiliated me. I would have wanted to go home to my mother immediately. But Julie had gone to Kansas City for the weekend to attend a Madonna concert.
I accomplished the task. I cleaned Erin up. Later, when Mason came in from mending the fence, I told him what had transpired.
“Way to go, bootsy,” he said.
I’d expected a gush of praise. I’d expected effusive, guilt-ridden declarations of his love for me, a teary recognition of the undeserved good fortune he had to meet a woman such as me, a young chippy who didn’t want kids herself but was willing to interrupt her very important work to wipe shit off someone else’s kid. I expected him to take a trip out to the Hinky Dinky and buy me a bunch of carnations for $5.99.
But he didn’t. Instead he sat down on the love seat in my office and said, “I’ve decided to sell the cabin.”
“What?” I said.
“I need the money,” Mason said.
“Isn’t that a little rash?”
“You don’t like it out there anyway,” he said.
“That’s not true!” I said. It was true. I had enjoyed the cabin for maybe the first two times. Then the bugs began bothering me. And other than the Sweet Baby James tape he had no music out there other than Neil Young.
“I don’t like it as much as I used to,” Mason said. “I can sell it for ten thousand dollars.”
“That’s it?” I asked, even though I was actually surprised it was worth that much.
Presumably, he needed the money to pay his share of the rent, which he was not currently paying. Despite the flyers we’d plastered all over town, no one had called about boarding a horse. Mason was getting calls from creditors. Jill was demanding money for a private tutor for Peter; Julie wanted ice skating lessons for Erin. For the two months that we’d been on the farm, I had bought all the groceries, paid all the utility bills, and lent Mason the Sunbird whenever his truck broke down, which was about every other week.
I’d also encouraged Mason to invite Frank Fussell over for dinner, partly to ingratiate ourselves to him so that he might consider giving Mason a raise. Mason said he had done so, though it wasn’t until that moment, when I looked out the window and saw Frank’s pickup coming up the driveway, that he told me when to expect him.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“What?”
“Someone’s here.”
“Oh shit,” Mason said.
Though he worked in a dusty grain mill, Frank washed his truck at least every other day. Other than the debris it had collected en route to the farm, it was gleaming and spotless. Some kind of new age atmospheric music was blasting from the stereo. I watched as Frank actually put on his turn signal to pull around to the side of the house.
“Is today Saturday?” Mason asked.
“Is he here for dinner?”
“Is it Saturday?” he asked again.
“Well, you’re not at work and you worked yesterday, so I would assume so,” I said.
“Man,” he said, running down the stairs. “Guess I lost track of time.”
Frank, in yoga pants and a Little Feat T-shirt, was standing in the driveway doing a sun salute. When we came outside he hugged us. He smelled like patchouli oil.
“I come bearing carrots,” he said, presenting a bunch of leafy carrots he must have grown in his garden. He handed them to me along with a bottle in a paper bag.
“Prune juice,” he added. “The stuff is awesome.”
“You kind of caught us off guard,” Mason said.
“No you didn’t!” I interrupted. “We’re just running a little behind. We can get you a drink.”
“We’ve got a specimen cup if you’d like some of your own urine,” Mason said.
“I’m only drinking prune juice these days,” Frank said. “I’d like to rinse off my truck if you don’t mind. These gravel roads are a killer.”
Mason showed Frank where the hose was and came into the kitchen as Frank sprayed his truck several times and then, astonishingly, dried it off with a rag. I opened all the cupboards and couldn’t see anything that could be turned into a meal for a guest. I opened a bottle of wine and poured myself a glass.
“We don’t have anything to eat!” I said. “How could you have forgotten to tell me?”
“Relax, boots,” Mason said.
“I’m gonna have to go get a pizza or something.”
Mason surveyed the cupboards, pulled a package of frozen hamburger out of the freezer and put it in the microwave to defrost.
“We don’t have any hamburger buns,” I said.
“I can make meat loaf,” he said.
I hated meat loaf. This was the reason we had never had it, though Mason claimed to love it and be an expert in its preparation. I got out the Italian swirl-style ceramic bowl and dumped a bag of chips in it. I got the place mats and napkins out of a drawer, saw that they were filthy, and threw them in the washing machine.
“This is not the way I like to entertain,” I said.
“This is not New York,” Mason said. “Besides, it’s Frank. We could serve him dirt and tell him it’s organic and he’d be happy.”
Erin padded downstairs, clutching D
iva Starz Nikki, and announced that her movie was over.
“Go outside with Lucinda and talk to Frank,” Mason told her. He was almost manic. He’d laid out every spice container in the cupboards and was mulling them over as if they were watercolors.
“Do we have any bread crumbs?” Mason asked.
“We have stale bread,” I said.
Outside, Frank was picking rocks out of the yard, holding innocuous little stones in front of his face, and inspecting them as though he were a jeweler. He’d made a pile of rocks next to his truck and when Erin scuffed through them with her pink sandals he gasped.
“I had a project going there!” he said.
“It’s just dumb rocks,” Erin said.
“That is a very limited viewpoint,” said Frank. “Every rock is a bone fragment of the earth. Within them lies the marrow of life’s essence.”
“We have Doritos inside,” I said.
“I can’t support corporate globalization,” he said.
“Is this a bone?” Erin asked, handing Frank a rock.
“It is a sacred shard from the femur of Gaia,” Frank told the four-year-old.
Erin leaned against Frank’s truck, causing Frank to grab the dust rag out of the bed and wipe the spot she had touched. Then he spit on his hand and wiped the dust left by the rag.
“Do you need any help in the kitchen?” Frank asked.
“I think Mason wants to be a solo act,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Because I’m going to take this opportunity to practice some tai chi. I’m getting a very intense vibe from this place.”
I took Erin back in the house. Mason had actually broken apart the stale bread into crumbs and was drying it out in the oven. Somehow, in the wasteland of the refrigerator and cupboards, he had managed to find Parmesan cheese, eggs, an onion, and even some frozen bacon. He was mincing Frank’s carrots like a veritable television chef. I noticed that he’d picked some daylilies from the side of the house and had put them in a vase on the table.
“I put the place mats in the dryer,” he said. “I’m making soup and a sandwich for Erin.”
“Can I have some of this juice?” Erin asked, eyeing Frank’s prune juice.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
* * *
MASON’S MEAT LOAF WAS TREMENDOUS. In about ten minutes, he’d managed to whip up something so edible, so not only edible but actually tasty, that I found myself hoping we could have meat loaf at least once a week. This was the charm in Mason, his ability to occasionally make his chronic lack of effort look like a magical effortlessness. He had a way of bringing a complete unselfconsciousness to tasks that I would have fretted over for days. If I had known Frank was coming over for dinner, I would have begun preparing for it a week earlier. As it was, Mason had taken less than an hour to make a meal, a flower arrangement, and fold the napkins into what he claimed was the shape of sandhill cranes. He popped open another bottle of wine and filled my glass.
“It may look like chardonnay, but it’s actually Frank’s piss,” Mason said. “And a fine vintage at that.”
“Have you been out to the cabin lately?” Frank asked.
“Not much use for it these days,” Mason said. “I reckon I’m gonna sell it.”
It amazed me how I now barely noticed Mason’s hickish locutions. The “reckon” s and the sentences ending in “at.” He stopped short at constructions like “don’t got any” and had even corrected Erin when she’d said “I don’t got any more ketchup for my fries.” But still, his Texan-like drawl belied his midwestern upbringing. Frank, for his part, sounded like some new age life coach on cable television. Or maybe local access cable television.
“It sounds like you’re in the midst of a life passage,” said Frank. “You must respect your instincts.”
“Actually I just need the cash,” Mason said.
“How much would you want for it?” Frank asked.
“I reckon whatever I can get.”
“I’ll buy it,” Frank said. “I’ve been thinking I need a country retreat.”
I caught myself snorting. A country retreat. For Ted Kaczynski maybe.
“I’ve been thinking I’d like to hold some meditation workshops out by the river,” Frank said. “You know George Andersen, that farmer who brings his soybeans to the elevator? His wife has expressed a real interest in studying transcendental meditation with me. These rural women get so isolated.”
And there’s nothing like a dilapidated cabin miles from any telephone lines to foster a sense of empowerment in a farm wife, I thought. Mason was gazing out the window and nodding his head. Frank was cutting his meat loaf into small pieces, arranging them in a circle on his plate, and eating them counterclockwise. He examined each forkful the way he’d examined the rocks outside.
“How does ten grand sound?” Mason asked.
FRANK BOUGHT MASON’S CABIN. This gesture was, I supposed, in lieu of giving him a raise. Mason loaded his truck up with the giant paintings and the skulls and the photographs and drove it to the farm and put it all in the tack room. Except for the absence of the woodstove and the loft bed, the tack room looked just like the inside of the cabin had. He told me he’d stood in front of his cabin and cried before he drove away for the last time.
He gave me five hundred dollars. He made a few trips to the grocery store. He paid for a couple of dinners at Rib Ranch. He said he was going to pay off all his credit cards as well as get a vasectomy, which was not covered by his insurance. As the summer ebbed away we drank more margaritas in the stock tank. Erin, who had finally been won over by a children’s book about a divaish little pig, began demanding bedtime stories from me every night she stayed over.
I had, during this time, a sense that when it came to living the kind of life that most people lived, I was as close as I was ever going to get. After all, the basic trappings were there—house, car, child, regular dinners eaten at home while seated. It was as if my previous life were a rare, poorly understood disease that had gone into remission. I felt I needed to make the most of things, explore every corner of this odd normalcy before I was yanked, like a weed in a manicured lawn, back into the mess from which I’d come. Of course, I now know my sense of things was already misguided. Though I was still running through the pastures yapping on my cell phone to Elena about how spiritually cleansed I was, the truth was that I was spreading a disease far worse than the one I’d whined about in my old life. It would be months before I would bring myself to admit (because admitting it would constitute not only personal failure but also professional failure, which despite all the bedtime stories and Stovetop stuffing preparation was still my primary concern) what was happening was that my problems weren’t going away so much as they were changing. They were becoming more serious. My previous problems, which had mostly been problems of style (rumpled clothes, Chinese baby hypotheses) were rapidly converting to problems of substance. Actual Problems. And I was about as equipped to deal with actual problems as Faye would have been equipped to compete in a spelling bee.
Still, I’d received permission to extend the “Quality of Life Report” series through another year. Though Faye had canceled the meditative introduction-to-the-farm idea—“That’s a snore, we’ve had enough with the coffee,” she’d said—we were now proceeding with what was sure to be the most exciting segment yet: How to Throw a Barn Dance for Under $300.
To: Lucinda Trout
From: Faye Figaro
Re: Barn Dance
As part of Party Week series for early September we wood like you to throw a bran dance on your farm to show how this can be an ecomonical and fun way to entertane outdoors. Sense the other segments will featur a rootftop party on the Upper East side, a reception in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modurn Art and a loft part in the Tribeca Home of twenty-something internment diarist Haley Bopp, we thought it would make nice contrast to show a folksy event on your farm. Maybe you could corporate square dancing and roast a pig or somethng.
/> A stylist will be callling you to discuss what the guests should wear. Also please no fat people!
“How fun!” Valdette Svoboda-Lipinsky said. When Joel had told her about the barn dance shoot she immediately called to find out how she could help.
“We’re all going to be famous!” she said.
“Only in New York,” I said. I could hear her smoking on the other end of the phone. I imagined her telephone earrings dangling against the receiver. “And I’m embarrassed to say this, but there’s kind of a dress code.”
“Oh!”
“You’re going to need to wear, like, certain kinds of clothes,” I said.
“Like costumes?” Valdette said. “I’ve got a Cat Woman outfit.”
“Like, uh, overalls,” I said. “Or, uh, leather vests. Cowboy boots.”
The stylist had sent me a fax listing the clothing options for the barn dance guests. It said:
1. a few people in overalls (but not too many), preferably with white shirts underneath but not plaid shirts underneath
2. plaid flannel shirts (again not too many), no mixing of plaid and overalls
3. boot-cut jeans
4. cowboy boots on men (maybe on one woman but not more than that)
5. suede—for example: long suede bias cut skirt ($248 at Banana Republic), suede vests ($190 at J. Crew) and suede jodhpurs ($390 from J. Peterman) or just about anything leather (soft leather though, brown not black)
6. no visible tattoos, piercings on men, strange hair colors
7. no black (too New York), no green, no polka dots, stripes, or animal prints
8. no smoking on camera
“I have the perfect thing to wear,” Valdette said. “It’s adorable. It’s like a poodle skirt from the fifties except instead of a poodle it has a cow. And the cow’s tail actually wraps around like a belt and it has a little bell on it. It would be so in keeping with your theme.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Do you have anything suede?”
“I don’t do suede,” she said, exhaling abruptly on her cigarette. “You know I’m an animal person.”
