by Meghan Daum
“Well,” she said, “given the small attendance at our meeting today, I thought we’d take a break from serious discussion and watch a movie.”
“Great idea!” said Sue.
“What’s the movie?” I asked.
“Well,” said Valdette, “since we are a women’s group and, you know, committed to the advancement of women, I thought we’d watch one of my all-time favorites, When Harry Met Sally.”
“I love that movie!” Sue shouted.
They made popcorn. I drank several glasses of water—it would be a long drive on icy roads back to the farm. Halfway through the movie, just before the part where Meg Ryan imitates the orgasm, I could no longer take their murmurs of “That’s so true” and “Another cute outfit she has!” I said I had to leave.
“So soon?” said Sue.
“I need to get back,” I said. “I need to stop at the supermarket.”
“Is every thing okay?” asked Sue.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I just need to . . . get some things.”
“Okay then,” she said. “See you at the next meeting, if not before. We need to get together more often.”
“Yes, totally.”
Valdette handed me the minutes from the last meeting and hugged me good-bye. As I walked to the Sunbird, which was parked across the street, a gust of wind knocked the paper out of my hand and blew it down the street.
It was just before 10:00 P.M. and looking like it could snow at any minute. Mason had all the kids that night; the boys would be sleeping in the living room by the time I got home. I needed to stop at Hinky Dinky, mostly because we were out of wine. When I entered the store Clara was at the first register, her belly distended and her face even more blemished than before.
Hinky Dinky, already a freak show during daytime hours, was transformed into a veritable house of deformities after dark. Every possible mutation was represented. A guy whose arm looked like it had been recently reattached—he held it in a sling and giant pins stuck out from both sides of his elbow, which had turned blue from bruising—stood zombified in the canned vegetable aisle. A blind woman tapped her cane down the length of a meat freezer, a man less than four feet tall held the hand of an obese woman in a Pizza Hut uniform. After I got the wine I went to the produce section to get a head of lettuce and noticed a small, redhaired woman fussing over tomatoes. She’d pick one up, inspect it, and then put it back. In her cart she had soy milk, bean sprouts, and a box of Cheerios.
“Jill?” I said.
She looked up, appeared startled for a moment, and then smiled. She had blue eyes like Mason’s and Peter’s but hers were brighter somehow; even through her glasses they were the first thing you noticed. She wore snow boots and a long heavy coat over jeans and a ski sweater.
“Lucinda!” she said. “Oh God, I know I look like a bag lady.”
“No you don’t,” I said.
Though I saw her from time to time when I went with Mason to pick up Peter, most of my dealings with Jill took place over the phone. Unlike Susannah, whom Mason and I often had coffee with when we retrieved Sebastian, or Julie, who communicated mostly via notes left in Erin’s Pocahontas knapsack, Jill made at least a once-a-week ritual of calling Mason to discuss Peter’s school work, eating habits, mood shifts, and overall well-being. Because Mason spent so much time in the barn it was usually me who took those calls and while I didn’t converse with Jill in the sense that she tried to discuss Peter’s well-being with me, we had developed a tacit and almost bemused bond over the fact that Mason was so rarely in the house, even on the coldest days, and, once in the house, often neglected to call her back.
“It just seems that the only time I have to shop is late at night,” Jill said.
“I know the feeling,” I said, even though I had no day job and didn’t know the feeling at all.
Jill shuffled her feet for a moment. She looked in her cart as if pretending to take stock of her items, though there were just three, and then turned to me with a rather pained expression.
“So how’s every thing going out there, Lucinda?” she asked me.
“Oh, I was out tonight,” I said. “I’m sure Mason’s watching a movie with the kids.
“I don’t mean tonight, I mean in general.”
“Everything’s great.”
“Because I was down at Effie’s a few weeks ago and I ran into Julie,” Jill said. “And Julie isn’t exactly my favorite person in the world but we got to talking and she mentioned a few things.”
“Like?”
“Well, like Mason sending Erin off to school with two different shoes on. And being late to pick her up from school a lot. I guess one time he never showed up at all and the school had to call Julie. No doubt he was at the bar . . . but, you know, stuff like that.”
“Really?” I said. “When was that?”
“It sounded like a few weeks ago,” she said. “I mean, is he drinking a lot?”
Jill looked down at the three bottles of Fetzer in my cart.
“He’s actually drinking less,” I said.
“Oh.”
“I’m sure it was just an honest mistake that he forgot to pick Erin up,” I said. “He gets confused sometimes with all the kids’ schedules.”
“Well, it’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?”
“As for the shoes,” I said. “You know Mason’s sartorial powers can be a bit . . . lacking.”
The conversation was making me extremely nervous; my heart was pounding. Nonetheless I took a certain delight in using the word “sartorial.” Though Jill didn’t appear to know what it meant, I thought my large vocabulary might suggest that there was no possible way anything could be amiss in our house.
“Well, I thought maybe I’d stop by sometime,” Jill said.
“Yeah, you haven’t seen the place since we redid the downstairs,” I said, smirking like a witty cocktail party guest.
“You redid the downstairs?”
“We winterized the place,” I said. I continued to smirk and arch my eyebrows and make little nodding motions with my head. I felt very clever. Jill looked vaguely bewildered. She told me she had to get going but that she would come by sometime, not necessarily right away, since there was so much snow and she didn’t have four-wheel drive, but when it warmed up a little, which she didn’t think would be too long from now.
“Make sure to wear a skirt when you come,” I shouted as she walked away with her shopping cart. “Because Mason prefers that we pee outside!”
A few shoppers turned their heads, but this sort of statement was nothing out of the ordinary at Hinky Dinky. Jill, taking her place in line at Clara’s register, looked back at me and issued a bland titter. I was still in the produce section, still smirking, still a bit foggy from the tipsiness of a few hours earlier and, though it would be months before I realized it, very close to being deranged.
To: Lucinda Trout
From: Faye Figaro
Re: Book Club
Are you geering up for the book club shoot? I hope so because its been along time and Upstairs is having questions about your out-put. You will here from a stylist about what the book clubbers should wear.
Also, New York Mgazine is doinf a story on Up Early so you might get a call form the repirter. Don’t say anythng stupif!
The book club segment was postponed from February to March because, according to Sue, too many coalition members were still out of town and they wouldn’t be having a February meeting. The month had slipped right by me, anyway. A week before the shoot, I was clearing Barbies and various unidentifiable pieces of broken pink plastic off my desk in preparation to write the script when the phone rang.
“Is this Lucinda?” a female voice said.
“Speaking,” I said, hoping, as I did everytime the phone rang, that it was Sarah Vanderhorn from Chamomile Press.
“This is Julie.”
She had never called before. Was it possible that Jill, despite Julie “not being her favorite person,” had
said something about our encounter at Hinky Dinky?
“Mason’s not here right now,” I said.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” she said.
“Something you want to talk to Mason about?” I asked. “He’s at work. Do you have the number?”
“No, there’s something I want to talk to you about.” Her voice was edged with anger, the manufactured umbrage of a none too bright woman. It was not unlike the tone Dawn had taken with the cameraman during that first “Quality of Life” segment. I opened the desk drawer and pulled out a cigarette.
“Sure,” I said.
“Why did you tell Erin that God was a pig?”
“What?”
“You know what, Lucinda?” Julie said. “You don’t have kids, so maybe you don’t understand how they think. What you told Erin really upset her. You told her that God was a filthy, disgusting animal. You offended not only my faith but the lessons that I am trying to teach her.”
She was clearly reading from notes.
“Furthermore,” she continued, “from what I hear your house is more fit for a pig than for people, especially little children. She says she’s sleeping on the couch. Did you know that I can make one phone call and take away your custody? Did you know that it’s a negligible act making a child sleep on a couch? She could fall off and break her head open. Not that you’d care.”
I sat there tapping the cigarette on the desk. I had no ashtray, nor matches, so there was no way to buffer the conversation with nicotine. I was perplexed that she said “your custody,” as if I were the child’s parent. As for the house, Mason kept it spotless. It was just overrun with furniture, a condition Erin might have interpreted as messy.
“She sleeps on a fold-out couch,” I said. “There’s no way she can fall off. And in the spring she’ll move back upstairs. To her own room.”
“The spring is a ways away,” said Julie. “And frankly I’m more concerned about these ideas you put in her head. No one gave you the right, no one gave you the right, to talk to her about God.”
“Maybe you should talk about this with Mason.”
“Mason,” she said, “is useless.”
That was it. I was furious. Not at her—though I was disgusted with her, more for her tone than for her moronic dogma—but at Mason, not just for getting drunk and screwing Julie in her cat costume, but for trying to do the right thing when he so obviously couldn’t, for establishing himself from the get-go (Lamaze coach? what had he been thinking? he’d probably been high) as a first-class chump, as someone who could be manipulated into a lifetime of babysitting and Christmas presents he couldn’t afford and child support payments that, though they nearly broke him, amounted to so little in the grand scheme of things that his primary value was that of a nanny, a nanny who provided siblings and a farm, a nanny with a girlfriend who gave a damn, a nanny who loved the child far, far more than it sometimes appeared, and, were it not for that child, might have actually maintained a level of sanity that precluded the taking of illegal drugs and allowed him to heat the upstairs of his house. Though that was a cheap shot. Even with no kids, Mason wouldn’t have heated the upstairs of his house. As it was, he still hadn’t arranged to get more propane so we could keep heating the downstairs. If he had his druthers, he’d have lived his whole life outside. It was only women who forced him indoors. And I was number four.
“Maybe we should talk about this in person,” I said to Julie.
“Look, I’m really, really busy,” she said. “I work two jobs. I don’t have time to talk about this in person.”
“You’re working two jobs?”
“Yes, Lucinda, I have a daughter to support.”
“Well, I just want you to know that Erin is very well cared for here,” I said. “And you’re welcome to come out to the place anytime you like.”
“I doubt I’ll have time but it’s kind of you to offer.”
“Anytime.”
“And Lucinda,” Julie continued, “I think you should know that people are talking about you. This isn’t a big town.”
“What are they saying?”
“Things. Just things. A lot of people think you have an attitude.”
“An attitude?”
“And it’s not that attractive,” she said. “Maybe that’s how people are in Boston, but here it’s really not cool to tell little children that God is a pig.”
“I’m from New York.”
“Congratulations,” she said. “And if I hear that you’ve been talking to Erin that way again you’re gonna hear from my lawyer.”
Then Julie hung up. She was so much like a bullying high school girl that I found it hard to believe Mason could have sustained enough dialogue with her, even drunk, to make it back to her condo and into her bed on that fateful Halloween night. I didn’t know whether to tell Mason about the phone call. Surely he should know about the “custody” threat (although given Julie’s regular patronage of Effie’s, where Mason suspected she went every night we had Erin at our place, it was unlikely she’d give up her free babysitter) but I also had the sinking sense that my offer for Julie to come by the farm was one I shouldn’t have made. I could imagine him reacting as though I’d given her the keys to the house. Still, she seemed too uninterested to actually follow through; she didn’t even know where the house was.
“The only people who talk about their lawyers are the ones who don’t have a lawyer,” Mason said when I told him about Julie’s phone call but not that I had invited her to come by the house.
“Well, you might, you know, want to talk to Erin about things like guys who live in the clouds,” I said. “Unless you want her to become a Seventh-day Adventist.”
We were eating tuna helper out of the Pier One swirl-style ceramic bowl. Erin, having finished her TV dinner, was watching cartoons in our bedroom. The rooms seemed suddenly very cold, even the food was getting cold on our plates. I got up from the table to get a sweater.
“Did you have the door open earlier or something?” Mason asked. “Were you smoking again?”
“No,” I said.
“The goddamn heat isn’t on,” Mason said. He got up and put his hand in front of the vent. “There’s nothing coming out of here.”
The thermostat read 50 degrees. I turned it up to 80 and the blower kicked on. The air coming through the vents was ice cold.
“It’s fucking broken!” Mason yelled, wincing when he realized he’d cursed in earshot of his daughter.
“Did you check the propane?” I asked. “Maybe we ran out.”
“We didn’t run out,” he said. “There’s plenty in there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Why don’t you check?”
“It’s not the propane, it’s the damn furnace. We’ll have to call the landlord.”
“Why don’t you check the propane tank first?”
“All right, Jesus.”
Mason jerked on his coat and hat and boots and tromped through the yard to the propane tank. Rubbing a spot through the frost in the window, I saw him look at the gauge, kick the side of the tank, and walk into the barn and then the tack room. Five minutes later he came back inside.
“We’re out of propane,” he mumbled.
I just stood there and nodded. There was nothing to say that wasn’t completely obvious and unoriginal. I’d told him at least seven times to check the propane level.
“I’m sorry, bootsy,” Mason said. “I screwed up.”
I called the propane co-op and got a recording saying that if you needed an emergency refill after hours or on weekends there would be a $100 house call fee, a $75 penalty charge for letting the pilot light go out, and a minimum refill order of two hundred gallons. Considering the price of heating oil and that it was Friday, that put the cost at somewhere around $500. I had roughly $275 in my checking account.
“What?” Mason yelled.
“That’s what they said.”
“
We’ll have to figure out something else,” he said.
“Some other way to get propane?” I asked. “You happen to have some lying around?”
“Well, I don’t have five hundred dollars.”
“So we’re not going to call?” I asked. “We’re going to stay here all night and freeze to death because you forgot to check the tank?”
“Just stop!” Mason yelled. “I said I’m sorry.”
Erin came into the kitchen, scooting along the floor in her socks, and announced that she was cold. Mason told her to get into her pajamas.
“And then put a sweater on top of your pajamas,” he added.
Half an hour later, we could already see our breath. Mason made another trip to the barn and back.
“I guess we’ll have to all sleep in the same bed,” I said when he returned. “Like the pioneers.”
And then, though I did not even remotely expect it—as sarcasm constituted such a large portion of Mason’s and my dealings—Mason picked up the Pier One Italian swirl-style ceramic bowl, which had been left on the counter for washing, and in a single, lightning fast motion threw it on the kitchen floor.
Being ceramic, it broke into four or five pieces rather than shattering. The incident knocked some of the wind out of me, but I managed to turn around and leave him standing in the kitchen, where he immediately got the broom and began sweeping up the pieces and, while he was at it, the rest of the floor.
I went into the bedroom where Erin was watching World’s Funniest Car Chases. I was afraid I’d cry if I spoke, but the house in its one-story incarnation afforded no hiding places. There were no doors between the downstairs rooms, just the eggplant-colored sheer panel between the living room and what was now the bedroom. The den was separated from the living room only by a wide archway.
“What broke?” she asked.
“Just the bowl.”
“You broke it?”
“It fell off the counter.”
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But we have other bowls.”
The back door slammed and then I heard Mason’s truck start up. The light from his high beams slid across the walls as he plowed down the driveway.
