by Meghan Daum
“But if you try sometimes,” Mason said, “you just might find you get what you need.”
Had he actually said that? Mason was slumped back in the rocking chair, which, due to the cramped quarters, could not be rocked without hitting the dining table. He was drinking a Mountain Dew even though it had started to snow. We were getting a white Christmas, perfect fodder for my Inspirations from the Heartland proposal. That morning, I’d thought of a new passage.
In the heartland, the heat is hotter and the cold is colder, but the white Christmases are even whiter—and that makes up for every thing.
“I wanted a new Diva Starz!”
“Go to your room!” Mason shouted.
Erin stomped into the den and slammed the door. I prayed she wouldn’t touch the computer. Ever since I’d taught her how to type “Diva Starz” and “Pocahontas” she couldn’t leave the thing alone.
Sebastian and Peter, like youngsters from another era, had received a baseball mitt and a wooden toboggan, respectively. They said polite thank yous. I went to the den to check on Erin, even though I felt like yanking her tangled hair out of her skull.
“Let’s go outside and see the pig,” I said. She was punching keys on my fax machine.
“It’s too cold out,” she said.
“I know it’s cold but don’t you want to wish the animals a merry Christmas?” I said. “We have to give Sam Shepard his present.”
“What’s his present?”
“Well,” I said, “I figured since you didn’t want Where the Wild Things Are I would just give it to him. He’d love it.”
“What?”
I picked up the book. “This looks like a nice thing for him to chew on.”
“No!” Erin wailed.
“You want it then?”
She started sobbing. Her little body, clad in tiny blue jeans and a red and green sweater that said ho ho ho, began to shake. Her face was turning red. A tantrum. I immediately feared for my computer.
And then I feared for the child. As if caught in the admonishing glance of a supermarket shopper, I suddenly saw the scope of my cruelty. This little girl who couldn’t control her bowels, who had no room of her own, who made do with a father whose responsibilities had accumulated around him like blinding snowdrifts, was wanting of nothing more than a Diva Starz Alexa doll. And I had given her a book she didn’t want. Not so much because I believed the book had greater cultural merit but because—and it was the first time I’d allowed myself to think this out loud—I didn’t want one goddamned more pink plastic toy in my house. Because it would mess up the decor more than it was already messed up. Because after all the time spent in Prairie City, after all the ways that I’d felt I had overcome my shallowness and arrogance and bitterness over people like Haley Bopp owning prime downtown real estate, the truth was that not only was I still shallow and arrogant, I was also shallow and arrogant in a way that hurt people. I had proved nothing to myself other than that I could acquire a fake tan.
“You know what?” I said to Erin. “I have another present for you.”
“You do?” She was trembling, trying to stave off the breakdown.
“We haven’t named the pig yet,” I said. “And I think you could give her a good name.”
“She doesn’t have a name?”
“Not yet. And getting a name from you will be her Christmas present.”
We bundled up. Sweatpants on top of jeans, snow pants on top of sweatpants. Mittens that invariably fell off the coat pegs and landed in the mountain of boots by the door. Outside, the boys were on the toboggan. Mason was pushing them and Sam Shepard was chasing them. The snow was falling in soft chunks. A Currier and Ives print. Other than the Sunbird and Mason’s truck, which were quickly becoming covered in white, there was no indication that it was the twentieth century.
Erin and I went to the pig’s stall. She’d made herself a nest with the straw and was sleeping, snores emanating from her like an asthmatic tractor trailer.
“So what do you think?” I asked. “What’s her name?”
“Diva Starz.”
ALLOWING A PIG to be named Diva Starz was, in my opinion, a charitable act. So was preparing an eight-pound ham, mashed potatoes, ambrosia, and a pumpkin pie while Mason was in the barn blasting Neil Young and staring into space. Holidays depressed him, he said. On Christmas Eve, Mason returned the kids to their mothers, a treacherous and snowy journey made worse by the traffic backed up for a mile in front of the Kmart plaza, then he retreated, with a six-pack of beer, into the tack room “to read.” After taking a call from my parents, who wanted to know when I was going to bring my “friend” down to Florida for “some R&R and a serious tennis match with Dad” and another call from Faye, who wanted me to come up with ten ideas for Up Early’s “Brand-New You” package for January’s Resolution Month—“What’s the cosmetic surgery scene like in Prairie City?” she’d asked—I began making hot apple cider. I thought the scent might improve the atmosphere if and when Mason decided to come inside.
By 4:00, with the ham in the oven and the potatoes almost mashed, Mason came in the house and stood in the mudroom. He didn’t remove his coat.
“I’m gonna take off,” he said.
“What?”
“I just need to get away.”
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just don’t like holidays.”
There was no way to fight this without its turning into the kind of scene that you remember for years and years, thinking, with each recollection, “Why didn’t I just let him leave? Why didn’t I just show some dignity?” There was no way to get him to stay without acting like a teenager just dumped by her boyfriend, clutching his coat and asking “Can we still go to the prom together?”
“Do whatever you need to do,” I said.
It was, in fact, the very kind of thing I said even when I was a teenager, dumped or not. I’d been a low-maintenance girlfriend all my life and now, at age thirty, I was whipping potatoes with an electric mixer while my boyfriend abandoned me on Christmas Eve. I bit the inside of my cheek as he closed the door behind him and got in his truck. As he plowed down the driveway, I realized I didn’t even feel like crying. I opened up a bottle of Fetzer. I finished the potatoes and started the pie. I got out the videotape of Country starring Jessica Lange and the human Sam Shepard that I’d purchased before moving to Prairie City and watched the whole thing over more wine. At the end of the movie, when Jessica Lange rallies the other farmers into boycotting the foreclosure auction, I cried.
Dark had come. The ham was done. I took it out of the oven and began cutting it into pieces. I found an aluminum pan and filled it with meat, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, even ambrosia. I put on my coat and hat and mittens and carried the pan outside, where Sam Shepard leaped up at the smell of the food and followed me to the barn. The wind burned on my cheeks, the snow crunched under my boots like gravel. Inside the barn, I turned on the light and the room jerked awake. The horse grunted at my presence. The pig, sentient now to the dinner bell, trundled to the front of her stall. I undid the latch and walked in slowly. Forgetting the origin of the meat, I held out a piece of ham and Diva Starz chomped it noisily and pointed her snout upward for more.
Sam Shepard had followed me into the stall and I fed him one piece at a time, sometimes holding up a slice and then taking a bite myself, a game that made him tremble with anticipation. Pretty soon, the cat (the one we’d kept after she’d proven herself unpregnant) jumped down from the rafters and there we all were, like some sentimental cartoon, eating Christmas dinner out of an aluminum pan. No longer fearing the pig, I sat down in the straw. Sam Shepard tried to crawl into my lap, though he was too big now, and the wind knocked against the side of the barn like a crazy man at the door. When I’d eaten enough ham and scooped mashed potatoes out of the pan with my fingers, I placed it on the ground where the animals rushed it, tearing the meat up like carrion, wolfing down the potatoes and ambrosia until
even their ears were dabbed with food. And though I was cold, though I knew I had to break the ice in the horse tanks, I sat against the stall and closed my eyes, the effects of the wine descending from my head like a slow leak. At the end of the barn, Lucky stomped his mammoth hooves. The barn swallows, small as stones and far too delicate, it seemed, to survive the winter, rustled in their nests in the eaves. The shrieking wind drowned out even the coyotes. Every evening, darkness brought a cacophony to that farm. There was no such thing as a silent night on the prairie.
I had bought Mason a sixty-dollar rag wool fisherman’s sweater from Banana Republic. He opened it on Christmas morning, where we sat by the tree like nothing had happened the night before. Though he was angry at me for giving all the food to the animals, he’d stopped himself just as he’d started to lecture me. He’d come home sometime after midnight. He said he’d gone out to the river and tried to get on the abandoned railroad trestle. He’d taken a few steps but the ties were icy, so he’d sat in his truck for a long time looking at the moon.
“Thanks, boots,” he said, holding out the sweater.
“I know it’s no pig.”
“Not sure I have any formal occasions to wear this on,” he said.
“It’s a wool sweater,” I said. “It’s not formal.”
“If you say so,” he said.
“I’m going to New York next week,” I told him.
I hadn’t booked a ticket yet, but in the calamity of the previous night, I knew I had to get away. Other than a few short trips before we moved to the farm, where I’d stopped in at the Up Early offices and was treated like a former employee dropping by for a visit, I had barely spent any time in New York since coming to Prairie City. I had not, as it turned out, saved so much money that I could fly out to have drinks with Daphne every month at Bar Barella.
“When did you decide to do this?” Mason asked.
“You know I have to make regular trips,” I said. “For work.”
His eyes shifted sideways as though he were figuring out a math problem. He said nothing, just rocked slightly in the rocking chair, rubbing the dining-table leg as he did so. Then he sprang up and began collecting the ribbon and bits of torn wrapping paper. He went outside to check on the dog and, passing through the mudroom on his way back, picked up the dust mop as if it were a piece of candy in a bowl and he couldn’t help himself. He sprayed Pledge on the wood and, though there was barely any empty floor space—nearly every thing from upstairs had now been moved downstairs, making the house look like a low-end antiques store—began to mop the floor.
THE FLIGHT TO LAGUARDIA took two and a half hours. The cab ride from the airport into Manhattan took two hours and forty-five minutes. Traffic sat motionless on the Triborough Bridge and accelerated to only five-mile-per-hour lurches on the FDR Drive. I almost threw up in the cab (this would not have been a first, only a first while sober). It was nearly 5:00 by the time I reached midtown, where Daphne, on whose couch I’d be sleeping, was illegally subletting a high-rise apartment from someone who was subletting it from someone else. She’d left keys with the doorman and when I entered the apartment there was a note by the door saying her temp agency had called her for an overnight word-processing shift.
Make yourself at home. Sheets and towels are on sofa. See you tomorrow. We’ll go out for drinks and eats can’t wait—xoxoxo, D. P.S. Can you believe this place?
The apartment bore no resemblance to any space ever inhabited, even for a month, even for a day, by Daphne. It was an alcove studio; a Japanese screen separated the living area from a small recess just big enough for a full-size bed. Kitchen counters and a stove and refrigerator spanned the length of the wall closest to the door; a freestanding counter with three stools demarcated the eating area from the living area, which had parquet floors and an imitation Persian rug I recognized from Pottery Barn. This was clearly an apartment that had never been occupied, at least for very long, by any one person. The furnishings, while expensive, were almost aggressively bland. Were it not for the Eames chair and a single bookshelf of hardcover books—the most obvious kind, the best sellers of the last year and a half plus a couple of art books from the MOMA gift shop—it could have been a hotel suite; there were outdated copies of Time and Newsweek on the coffee table and even the remote control for the television, which was hidden in a varnished entertainment center (though Daphne had left the cabinet doors open), listed the names of the networks and their corresponding channels. The only sign of Daphne was a heap of boxes filled with paints and sketch pads and Alpaca sweaters and leather-bound journals that had fallen open to reveal dabs of watercolor and verses of poetry written in a sprawling, curling handwriting. She had lived in the apartment for only a few weeks. Her previous place, also a sublet of a sublet, had been suddenly reoccupied by some original owner. This place, if I’d understood her correctly, functioned more or less as a crash pad for a colleague of her father’s, a businessman living in Europe who slept there only a few nights a year.
The main attraction, of course, was the view. The apartment was on the twenty-first floor and outside the windows, which ran from nearly floor to ceiling of one wall, the city tumbled forth like children’s toys dumped out of a bucket. The Chrysler Building, with its gleaming Art Deco spire, stood several blocks down. Across the street, directly in my line of vision, was an office building with computers glowing from every window. Women in black pants and turtleneck sweaters sat at desks and glided from office to office—I could make out the occasional potted tree or a corner of a framed art poster; it was probably a publishing company of some kind. Stacks of papers were piled in front of windows as if the view had been sacrificed for filing space. A woman sipped coffee from a paper cup at her computer; I watched her swivel her chair and gaze absently at the street below, then she abruptly swung back and picked up the telephone. Even through the sealed windows, I could hear the car horns and the belching buses.
I was suddenly exhausted. I thought about calling Elena, who was busy at a trade show all weekend but had penciled me in for a postyoga coffee, but instead I called Mason. He was sullen and taciturn. I asked him how his day had been and he said it was like every other day. I could hear the sound of Erin’s cartoons in the background. I knew he’d go to bed as soon as she did. Like the pioneers, we usually had no reason to stay up long past dark. And because I couldn’t remember the last time since I’d stayed up even in time to watch the 10:00 news, because that morning I had risen at 5:30—not to catch my flight but because that’s when we always got up—I felt my body retreat into itself. Though I was hungry, the task of taking the elevator back down to the street in search of food (which would naturally present too many options to ever allow for the proper decision) seemed insurmountable. I spread the sheets out on the sofa, brushed my teeth, and changed into my long underwear. Lying on the sofa, I reached for the remote control and then realized the moment before pressing the power button that I didn’t want to watch TV. It wasn’t even 6:00. It would be an hour or more before those women in the office across the street left for the evening (and given their commutes and gym workouts and after-work drink dates, more than two hours before they’d probably eat dinner) but I wanted only to sleep. In the morning I would go to the offices of Up Early, where I would tell Faye my ideas for upcoming “Quality of Life” segments. I lay there looking at the smoke alarm on the ceiling as the apartment slowly dimmed with the twilight.
I woke, unsurprisingly, before dawn. Perhaps it was the sound of Daphne’s keys in the door. More likely I was just no longer capable of waking up at a usual adult time. Even on weekends, Mason and I were usually roused by Erin, who, by 6:30 or 7:00, would roll out of her fold-out love seat in the den that was now her bedroom and trot into the dining room that was now our bedroom. Because she’d want to watch cartoons—and because the television was by our bed—I’d have to drink coffee and read the newspaper in the kitchen while Mason went out to feed the animals. Now, in the gray apartment, I feigned sleep while
Daphne tiptoed from the bathroom to the bed behind the Japanese screen. I gave her half an hour to fall asleep and then slinked off the sofa. I took a shower, pulled on some clothes in the steamy bathroom so as not to disturb her, and grabbed my coat and bag, which I assembled in the elevator. I had forgotten my scarf—the one hint of color in an otherwise all-black outerwear ensemble—but didn’t want to go back for it. On the street, where the sun was rising over the East River, I found a coffee shop and ordered a four-dollar espresso. Already the place was packed with people on their way to work. There was only one empty seat, an overstuffed chair by the window, and I made a beeline for it, cutting off the path of a guy talking on a cell phone, who glared at me as I threw down my bag.
Up Early aired from 7:00 to 8:00 A.M. Faye, who claimed to watch the show at home, though I knew she didn’t even get up until 10:00, wouldn’t be in the office until after 11:00. I sat in the coffee shop for two hours. Since the Up Early office was downtown—a forty-five-minute walk at a good clip—I figured I would make the journey at a leisurely stroll. This turned out to be necessary for more reasons than just the killing of time; I’d drunk so much coffee that I needed to stop every few blocks to find a bathroom. This meant ducking into either a Starbucks or a Barnes and Noble and it was in the third Barnes and Noble—this one just a few blocks from Up Early’s converted warehouse office—that I noticed, on the “our staff recommends” table by the revolving glass doors a gleaming, oversize hardcover book by the formerly esoteric diarist Haley Bopp.
Though the Internet journal, long since relinquished to Time Warner, had been called “This Broad’s Sheets,” the book was entitled A Broad and Her Sheets. Pictured on the cover was Haley, nude. Her long black hair covered her breasts, which, for good measure, were also covered by her knees, which she clutched before her as though to suggest a dreamy girl sitting on her bed writing in her diary—except that this girl was naked and the bed in the photograph was a stark futon stripped of any covers other than a single white sheet and red velvet pillow. The text, printed in large courier font with occasional words crossed out and replaced with handwritten words, was formatted to look like a journal. Instead of dates, entries were marked with headings like “Monday, raining, feeling blue” and “April, midnight, a little dewy down there.” Pen-and-ink sketches of a girl vaguely resembling Haley appeared every ten pages or so. In one, she walked alone in the park in a vintage zebra-print coat. In another, she sipped a martini in a bar, her Marlboro-smoking date shown only from the back. In still another, Haley was naked beneath her sheets, the shadow of her lover creeping over her shoulder as she stared into space. I read one of the entries.
