The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  The word “fuck” issued forth under my breath. I felt like throwing up. What do you do with a pebble of meth? Do you flush it down the toilet? Like a suburban mom who finds pot in her son’s pants while doing the laundry? I thought of sticking it back in the can with a little note—“gotcha” or “pack your bags.” But the drama of that seemed trite. I put it back as it was and went outside. Even with all my layers of clothing, leggings under jeans under acetate warm-up pants, a turtleneck under a wool sweater under a polartech jacket under a now-torn cowhide jacket Mason had given me, the cold pierced every inch of my flesh. The wind seemed to pick up entire mounds of snow from the pasture and hurl them into the yard. The Sunbird was almost completely buried. If I wanted to leave the farm, even to get groceries, I’d need Mason to take me in his truck.

  Back in the house, I thought about who to call. Elena? Absolutely not. She’d send me a plane ticket to New York and refuse to speak to me until I used it. Daphne, of course, had issued her decree; if he started up again I was to walk. But she could not possibly understand the depth of the snow. There was no way to elucidate, to someone who floated from city to city with nothing more than a few boxes, the particular feeling of entrapment that comes from windows too ice covered to see through, furniture too copious to move without assistance, ice in the troughs that required, at least first thing in the morning, a grown man of notable strength to break. There would be no way to convince anyone that I couldn’t, at least for now, live here without Mason. Moreover, despite the degree to which my fantasy had collapsed around me, there was no way I could have convinced myself to leave the farm. Even if I hadn’t been almost completely out of money, even if I could have taken all the animals and moved into town, even, I daresay, if I’d suddenly inherited a rent-controlled apartment on Gramercy Park, nothing would have taken me off that farm. And though I wasn’t exactly sure why that was, I knew it had to do with more than just not being able to get out of the driveway.

  “A Subaru Outback,” said Elena on the phone later that afternoon. “That’s the solution to your problems. See, crisis resolved.”

  I had done with Elena what I always did when I didn’t want to tell the whole truth. I’d told half the truth. I’d told her things weren’t going so well with Mason and I felt ensnared by the weather and the farm. Although given the situation, “not going so well” was more like a quarter of the truth and as the conversation went on the white lies piled up until there was no truth left at all. She felt all-wheel drive was the answer.

  “It kicks into four-wheel drive automatically when you need it,” Elena continued. “It’s like an SUV except you’re not one of those horrible boomer assholes driving an SUV. You’re more like a public radio tote-bagger type driving a Subaru. So go to the dealership, put down a little cash, trade in that Firebird or whatever it is you’re driving, and get a finance deal for an Outback. Then you can get out of your driveway and live like a free and independent woman!”

  “I don’t have that kind of money,” I said. Mason would be home any minute. I hadn’t decided what to do and this conversation wasn’t helping.

  “Can’t you borrow money from your parents?” Elena said.

  I thought I heard Mason coming up the driveway, the sound of huge tires skidding through the drifts. Naturally he’d spend five minutes in the tack room before coming inside.

  “God, now I want an Outback,” Elena said. “And I don’t even drive!”

  I PULLED SOME CHICKEN BREASTS from the freezer and put them in the microwave to defrost. I took out a bottle of Fetzer and opened it with the corkscrew. Mason emerged through the back door and began peeling off his clothes in the mudroom.

  “Hey, bootsy,” he said.

  He was in a good mood. I hated to ruin it. I stood there holding my wineglass (it was 4:50 P.M.) and watched him strip down to his boxer shorts. His clothes were always so dirty from the grain elevator that he threw them in the laundry basket in the mudroom and spent the rest of the evening in his long underwear. He kissed the back of my head and went upstairs to take a shower, where the wet towels underneath the bathtub had turned icy from the lack of heat. I boiled water for rice and listened for the shower to turn off. I took out the chicken breasts and poured tomato sauce on them and shoved them in the oven. I refilled my wineglass.

  Mason came downstairs, flushed from his shower, took a bottle of water out of the refrigerator, and sat down at the kitchen table. He drank less beer now. He’d lost weight during the summer, during his first bout with the addiction. He’d attributed it to “cutting down on the brewskies.” And though he’d bulked up a little since the fall, his clavicle was protruding from his chest again.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “Yours?”

  “Fine.”

  “Those horses are going through hay like there’s no tomorrow,” Mason said. “I’ll have to get some more this weekend.”

  I took a sip of wine and stared at Mason. I had to say something. I’d rehearsed several versions and now I needed to choose one and proceed. I could sound like a soap opera and say Why are you destroying yourself like this? I could say, with a menacing, resolute calmness, I know. I could throw my wineglass across the room. But that would have wasted wine.

  Instead, I said—and this was what would seal my fate, this was what would lead, like rivers emptying into an ocean, to not only every thing that happened later but also to the numb resignation, the torpor, the even greater devotion to tanning that would characterize the ensuing months of my life—“Be sure to call about getting more propane.”

  “Oh right,” said Mason. “I keep meaning to.”

  From there, I said nothing else. I tore up some lettuce for a salad. Mason set the table and, when the chicken was done, I put it in the Pier One Italian swirl-style ceramic bowl. We ate in silence.

  “Not too talkative tonight, eh, boots?” Mason said finally.

  “Guess not,” I said, pouring more wine. “Maybe the cold makes me groggy.”

  The cold had taken the very life out of me. It had also (though who’s to say extreme heat wouldn’t have provided its own set of rationalizations?) left me so paralyzed in every aspect that all I could think about at dinner was the road conditions and how many days it would be until I could get the Sunbird out of the driveway and to the YMCA and the tanning and nail salons. After Mason cleared the table and I began washing the dishes in the sink, saving the leftover pieces of food for the animals, he put his coat on over his long johns, slipped into his boots without tying them, and went out to the barn. Though I wouldn’t have believed it at the time, though I would have insisted that a confrontation with Mason was only a matter of the right circumstances—a little less snow, a new set of nails—the truth was that by not choosing to throw my glass against the wall or say I know I had in fact made a very clear choice to do nothing. Despite my belief that I’d simply postponed my choice, even a fool—and, in retrospect, certainly Mason—could have seen I had already made the choice and was, even as I placed the dishes in the wooden drainer, carrying it out in full force. He was destroying himself and I was complicit.

  To: Lucinda Trout

  From: Carol and Richard Trout

  Subject: Cruise?

  Does your friend (Marlon?) enjoy the sea? We are thinking of booking a week-long Carnival Cruise for next year and wondered if you two wanted to join.

  Erin had taken to asking me questions, some of which I could answer (“Why is there ice underneath the bathtub?” “Why does the dog eat horse poop?”) and some of which I felt unqualified to answer (“Why do Sebastian and Peter and I have different mommies?” “Why won’t Dad let me come in the barn with him?”). One night, when I was reading her the bedtime story about the divaish little pig (she continued to love this book, both for the girlishness of the protagonist and for the coincidence of having a pig herself), she shushed me and said she wanted to ask me something.

  “Is there a guy who lives in the clouds?” Eri
n asked.

  “A guy who lives in the clouds?”

  “Yeah,” the girl said. “Like an old guy, in the sky.”

  A few months earlier, I would have suggested that she pose the question to her father. But Mason, though he made an exhaustive practice of educating his children in the ways of deer tracks, birds, and different kinds of wild-animal droppings, often responded to his children’s intellectual curiosity with an exasperated “Don’t worry about that right now.” With Sebastian and Peter, whose mothers seemed eager and well equipped to pursue such lines of inquiry, Mason’s disengagement was harmless enough. But Erin appeared to rely solely upon me to answer even the most prosaic of questions (such as “Why does poop get stuck?”). To my surprise, I had come to enjoy playing the role of all-knowing semistepmother. Though she still didn’t ask questions like “Does the moon have dreams?,” the “guy in the clouds” was a promising step.

  “Do you mean ‘a guy in the clouds’ like a guy some people would call ‘God’?” I asked.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “some people think there’s a guy in the clouds and some people don’t.”

  “Do you think there is?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, either.”

  “You know,” I said to the five-year-old who had slid her thumb out of the storybook and was staring at the ceiling as if the guy in the clouds might have taken up residence on the frostbit second floor, “we don’t know if it’s even a guy who lives in the clouds. There might be a little girl in the clouds. Or just a spirit in the clouds.”

  “Like a ghost?”

  “Like a friendly ghost,” I said. “But it’s up to you to decide whether or not you think there’s a God. Some people think that God is not just in the clouds, but around us all the time.”

  “Mom said he’s in the clouds.”

  “Then that’s what she must believe.”

  “There’s a little girl in the clouds, too?” Erin asked, slightly alarmed.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just imagining that. We can’t know for sure. There could be all sorts of spirits in the clouds.”

  “Are animals in the clouds?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe there’s even a pig in the clouds.”

  I reached for the book in an effort to return to the story, but the girl was so pleased by the notion of a pig in the clouds that she began to convulse with giggles.

  “There’s a pig in the clouds?” she asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Like Diva Starz?”

  “We can only hope.”

  “Is there a Barbie in the clouds?”

  “No,” I said. “There is not. There are only the spirits of living things in the clouds, and only if you decide that’s what you want to think.”

  “I think Dad is in the clouds,” said Erin.

  Astonishing. The girl had become precocious, even prophetic, all thanks to me and my ability to unleash creative energy in those around me. Perhaps I could somehow incorporate this into Inspirations from the Heartland. I finally coaxed her back to the story and tucked her into the blankets on the fold-out love seat.

  “Your dad will be in in a minute to say good night,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  Mason took more than a minute to return from the barn. He took half an hour. By then, the child had already fallen asleep, perhaps dreaming of things in the clouds that, if she was lucky, did not plunge to the ground like the fiery airplanes in my dreams.

  THERE WAS NO GUY in the clouds that winter. Nor did there appear, most days, to be a sun behind the clouds. Winter hung in the air like a flu in the chest. Snow came and stayed. School-closing announcements ran across the bottom of the television screen at night. Weather, like a manic-depressive, knew no moderation on that land. In the summer, we’d been warned daily of tornadoes, of funnels, and of rotator clouds whose paths could be tracked, like a wild animal loose in a town, down to the individual street. But winter did not come with alerts that expired. Instead it just sat there, a nonperishable item in the fridge, and collected its own debris. The porch steps eroded from salt. The mudroom towered with boots and wet socks. The streets of Prairie City, grimy from blackened snow, sat mute as citizens, too cold to stop and chat, scurried in and out of their cars. They often kept their motors running as they ran into supermarkets and banks; in Prairie City this was a safe enough practice, though it choked parking lots with carbon monoxide and turned the air the sallow color of the sky.

  Because of the weather, only three members of the Prairie City Coalition of Women were present at the January meeting. Prairie Cityites, mindful of the importance of being home for the holidays and equally determined to flee town during the winter, often took their vacations in January and February. Most went to places like Mexico; the slightly more upscale to the Caribbean, and, in the case of Joel Lipinsky, whose intellect required more stimulation than could be afforded by the average beach resort, a week-long guided tour (with meals and accommodations included) of the galleries of Florence, Italy. It was for this reason that Valdette Svoboda-Lipinsky held the Coalition of Women meeting at her house. Joel had gone to Florence without her, leaving her free to work extra hours at the rape crisis center and spend quality time with her girlfriends.

  Brenda Schwan, who usually hosted the meetings, had gone to Aruba with her daughter. The members of Estrogen Therapy, according to Valdette, had a gig in Kansas City and the other members of the group were similarly indisposed, leaving just me and Valdette and Sue. Wanting to keep things official, Valdette handed us the minutes from the last meeting.

  Minutes for Coalition of Women (COW), 11/15/00, place: Brenda’s house

  • We welcomed our newest members, Christine Robinson and Lucinda Trout

  • Brenda cited the latest domestic violence figures as reported in the Prairie City Daily Dispatch

  • COW members discussed how alarming the figures were and what we might do about it

  • Sue suggested we start our own town (hear hear!)

  • Pat mentioned that Barb Podicek left her husband

  • COW members discussed gender inequalities in the medical profession

  • Christine made an excellent point about the shortage of female gynecologists

  • Dee Dee reached out to Lucinda about various issues

  • COW members were reminded that the next book up for discussion is Clip My Wings and I’ll Grow a New Pair by Idabelle Sugar (we looooove her!)

  No meeting in December because of holidays: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Kwanza to all!!

  “M.J. and Dee,” said Valdette, lighting a cigarette with the flame igniter used for the fireplace, “are doing a benefit for a spousal abuse prevention center. Working for free.”

  “It seems like they always work for free,” I said.

  “God bless ’em,” Valdette said. “‘Give back,’ I say. ‘Give back.’”

  “Speaking of giving back,” I began, even though what I was about to say had nothing to do with giving back, “I have a proposition for you.”

  “Do we get to be on TV again?” asked Valdette.

  “Actually yes,” I said.

  I could see Sue start to roll her eyes. She was no dummy.

  “So they just want to get some footage of different book clubs throughout the country discussing different kinds of books,” I said (“throughout the country,” according to an e-mail from Samantha, was the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Short Hills, New Jersey, and Prairie City). “And since you’re all so intelligent and interesting, I thought it would make a lovely segment.”

  “Do we get to have Idabelle Sugar come as a guest?” Valdette asked.

  “Hey, that would be something!” said Sue.

  “No guests, I’m afraid,” I said. “Unless you count our trusty cameraman.”

  “He’s still recovering from that horse,” Sue snorte
d. “I’m still recovering from that horse!”

  “There won’t be any horses in this one,” I said.

  “We don’t allow penises at coalition meetings,” said Valdette. “Unless we hire them specifically!”

  She burst into cackles and lit Sue’s cigarette with the igniter.

  “Speaking of penises,” said Sue, “how are things with Mason?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. This seemed a bit crass for Sue. It was as if she’d decided to stop being polite about him. I reached for a cigarette. Since the evening with Daphne, I’d been indulging in the occasional smoke when Mason and I went to Effie’s Tavern or even sometimes in the bathroom, where the window hadn’t been sealed shut. Mason found this disgusting, which I found laughable.

  “I mean, how are you two doing?” Sue asked with obviously contrived nonchalance. “Are you getting along okay?”

  “Things are great,” I said.

  “He’s quite a man of mystery,” said Valdette.

  “I didn’t realize,” said Sue, “that his kids are from two different mothers.”

  “Three,” I corrected her. There seemed no point in lying. Everyone in Prairie City knew one another. She’d find out eventually.

  “Oh!” Sue and Valdette said simultaneously.

  “When did you start smoking?” Valdette asked, blowing two perfect columns of smoke through her nostrils.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I just felt like having one.”

  “Oh,” said Sue.

  “Normally I smoke crack,” I said. This would have made Elena or Daphne laugh. Sue and Valdette sat there and nodded. I was starting to feel drunk.

  Valdette finally leaped from her seat and scurried over to the enormous TV.