by Meghan Daum
“Where’s Dad going?” Erin asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Out for a while, I guess.”
On the television, a police car slammed into a giant Ronald McDonald statue in a fast-food parking lot.
“This show is stupid,” said Erin. The little girl’s breath was as visible as smoke.
“Yes, it is.”
The phone rang in the den. I feared, momentarily, that it was Julie. I walked to my desk and debated whether or not to answer. On the sixth ring, I picked up.
It was Daphne.
“Just wanted to see how you were doing,” she said. “Is this a bad time?”
“No,” I said, though hearing the sound of her voice, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying.
“So how are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Really fine?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “What do you mean?”
I couldn’t believe I was getting mad at Daphne. Everything about her ran so counter to inciting anger. It was like being mad at a deer.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve just been sensing something in your voice lately.”
“You haven’t heard my voice lately.”
“Well, then I’ve been sensing something in your lack of voice.”
“Is that supposed to be a metaphor?”
“You sound angry,” Daphne said. “I’m asking one more time: is every thing okay?”
“No,” I said. My jaw grew heavy with tears. I whispered to hide the crying. “He’s doing it again.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“What an asshole,” she said.
“It’s not that bad, really,” I said.
“It’s very bad.”
“No,” I said, “it’s hard to explain.”
“Lucinda—” Daphne began, but she was cut off by Erin, who had suddenly appeared by the desk, Diva Starz Nikki in tow, and was tapping my arm.
“It’s too cold in here,” said the child.
“I know,” I said. “We’re gonna warm up.”
“The other thing I have to tell you,” said Daphne over the phone, “is that I’m back with the Park Slope woman.”
Today’s word is “glamoricious,” said Erin’s doll.
“I think maybe I was being too hard on her,” Daphne continued. “I mean, compared to all the asshole guys I’ve put up with . . . and she has a really nice apartment.”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“I mean, maybe you should consider getting involved with a woman,” she said. “For real this time. Maybe all this bullshit you put up with with Mason is just masking your true impulses.”
“What?” I asked.
Silly willy I look like a noodlehead, said the doll.
“What was that sound?” asked Daphne.
“I gotta go,” I said to Daphne. “I’m fine. I’ll take all that into consideration.”
Daphne started to say something else but I hung up. Erin, as though she sensed the presence of some crisis that required sudden maturity, was trying to unfold the love seat in preparation for her bedtime. But it was far too cold for either of us to sleep without the space heater.
“You know what?” I said. “How about we both sleep in the big bed tonight?”
“In your bed?”
“Yes?”
“With Dad, too?”
“When he comes home, yes.”
“Can we watch more TV?”
“Sure,” I said. “For a while.”
I had her put another sweater on top of the sweater that was already over her Little Mermaid pajamas. I moved the space heater closer to the bed and, in a sudden burst of pioneer spirit (and, in retrospect, an unconscious concern that Julie would catch wind that I had shared a bed with Erin and we’d all end up on 60 Minutes), opened the back door and let the dog in.
Mason didn’t like having dogs in the house, but I often let Sam Shepard in during the day. He lay on the love seat in the den and, after a few painful lessons, was now housebroken, though Mason didn’t know it and regularly referred to Sam as “strictly an outdoor dog.” Now, partly to spite Mason and partly because, frankly, we needed the extra heat, I patted the bed and invited him up. Erin, having no grasp of the origins of the dog’s name, called him Samsha Perd.
“Is Samsha Perd going to sleep with us?” she asked. He was so big it was as if I’d let a pony in the house.
“I think he will,” I said. “Just for a special treat.”
“But what if he poops?”
“He won’t.”
Erin, however, did poop. Though Mason had forgotten to check the propane level, he had not, for once, neglected to give Erin the children’s Ex-Lax that Julie had packed in the Pocahontas knapsack. Hours later, after we had all fallen asleep, Erin in her pajamas and sweaters, me in my neoprene jersey and running tights, the dog dutifully at the foot of the bed, Erin’s bowels released themselves. Even in sleep, which had only come after three glasses of wine and a round of tears that had me biting the blanket so as not to wake the child, I smelled the stench. The dog, of course, had been way ahead of me on that.
It was 4:30 A.M. Mason hadn’t come home. In half sleep, I reasoned that it was better not to move her, so I got up and led the dog into the kitchen, where I turned on the oven and sat by it, with the door open, for an hour until the sky cracked into pink streaks outside the frosted windows. I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table reading The New Yorker. It was only after the second cup of coffee that I realized how much the scene in my house resembled notes in a caseworker file.
I gagged when I pulled the blankets off Erin and she began crying when she awakened, a jag that mounted into hysterics when I took her upstairs and began running a bath. It had only occurred to me after the third cup of coffee that the water heater was electric and we would therefore have hot water. And while a real mother would have thought to begin running the bath before waking the child I led her to a bathroom that was like a meat locker. She stood there, barefoot and bawling, on the freezing tile. The backs of her legs were soiled and I wiped them off with toilet paper and wrapped her in my robe. Her face had turned red from sobbing, though it could also have been from the cold. With the hot water running, the collision of steam and cold air was so pronounced I wondered if we might actually produce thunder.
“Why why why why?” Erin bawled. She was crazed and nonsensical. My socks were soaked from the melting ice on the towels underneath the bathtub.
“Just get in the tub,” I said. “It’ll be okay.”
“No!” she shrieked.
“Get in the tub, Erin.”
“It’s too hot!”
“It’s not too hot!” I snapped.
I lifted her up, still in the bathrobe, and placed her in the few inches of water that had amassed in the tub. For the most fleeting of moments, a span of time with room for only the vaguest of perceptions, I congratulated myself for taking the initiative and putting her in the bath. It was an adult thing to do, a good-person thing to do. It was a thing I never would have thought to do in my previous life. But of course the water was too hot. She screamed again—a piercing, terrifying shriek—and I lifted her back out. Her ankles and feet were red.
“I’m sorry!” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t even know how to give a bath!” Erin screamed. “You don’t know how to do anything!”
I heard the back door slam downstairs, then a muffled curse as the door opened and shut again and Mason let the dog out. His footsteps creaked up the stairs. As he opened the bathroom door, steam spilled into the freezing hallway.
“What the hell is going on?” he said.
Erin, shivering in the wet robe and still sobbing, ran to him and clutched his legs.
“Daddy!”
There was nothing he could say. At first, Mason assumed the dog had soiled the bed, but as soon as he removed the sheets he stopped and sat down on the mattress, rubbing his t
emples and looking like he might cry, though judging from his eyes he already appeared to have cried a great deal.
“Lucinda,” he said, and then said nothing else. It was the first time I could remember him actually calling me by name.
Erin, who now splashed contentedly in a bath of more moderate temperature that Mason had drawn for her, was singing the Pokémon theme music. The redness in her feet and ankles had quickly receded, taking with it my fears that Child Protective Services would be arriving by noon. The Diva Starz Nikki doll lay on the bedroom floor and when I accidentally kicked her she announced Silly willy I look like a noodlehead.
“Why couldn’t you have broken this doll?” I said to Mason.
He continued to sit on the bed with his head in his hands. Then he carried the sheets into the mudroom and put them in a garbage bag. We had only one other set of sheets. He poured a cup of coffee and sat at the table near the open oven.
“I just can’t stand living with someone who hates me,” Mason said.
“Who hates you?”
“Everytime I walk in the door you look at me like I’m a criminal,” he said. “If you’re so miserable why don’t you just leave? Are you waiting for the snow to melt?”
“Where did you go last night?”
“I slept at the elevator.”
“Why couldn’t we all have slept at the elevator?”
This was an unfair question. The grain elevator, which was packed seven stories high with corn and wheat, was infested with rodents. The one time Mason had given me a tour, two rats had scurried across the floor of the basement storage room and I’d screamed so loudly that Frank Fussell came down because he thought someone was injured. I would have slept in the barn before sleeping in the elevator, although it, too, had mice.
“I just needed to get away,” Mason said. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.”
“What is it about your life that makes it so unbearable?” I asked.
“What is it about your life that makes you have to pretend it’s some stupid movie?” Mason asked. “Why do you have to turn every thing into a damn Christmas card? Why do you have to throw a barn dance and pretend I don’t even live here?”
“I wasn’t pretending that to the people here. It was just for the segment. I told you, it needs to seem like I live here alone.”
“You could never live here alone!”
“I know,” I said.
“Which is why you stay with me,” he said. “Otherwise I’d be gone already. You could have your stupid women’s meetings here and all your pals could come from New York and be impressed at how independent you are. And Sam Shepard himself could come and live here with you and maybe you could have him jump into the freezing river for your TV show, although he’s so old he’d probably have a heart attack.”
“Are you mad about that?” I asked. “The bathing in the river thing?”
“Do you know what idiots you people from New York are?”
“It’s not like that . . .”
“Do you know what an idiot I look like, what a total ass people think I am living out here with some girl from New York who dresses me up in costumes and films me bathing in the river? With a fucking scrub brush that I’d never use!”
“I’m sorry . . .”
“You think Jill’s a nag?” Mason said. He took the filter from the coffeepot and dropped it in the garbage can. “You think Julie screwed me backward and forward? They got nothing on you, sister.”
“You’re a drug addict!” I hissed. “You are a fuckup. All your life, you get close to having it good, and then you just screw up and screw up and screw up!”
“At least I know I’m a fuckup,” he whispered. Upstairs, Erin had stopped singing. “At least I know what I am. What are you? An artist? Some kind of TV star?”
“I’m just trying to live my life.”
“Bullshit! You’re trying to make your life into some kind of project. You’re trying to sell your life. I’m trying to live my life.”
“What kind of life is that?”
“I work in a grain elevator. I have kids. I hike around. I do a little more drugs than I should probably do. That’s it.”
“That’s pathetic.”
“Fuck you!” he said. “And the horse you rode in on.”
“Daaaad!” Erin called from the bathtub. Mason got up and headed for the stairs. It was not yet 8:00 A.M.
“That’s a real life,” he said as he climbed the stairs. “I know it’s not really your style. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been a better subject . . . and the propane guy is on his way.”
Embrace, Empathize, Empower
To: Lucinda Trout
From: Up Early Clothing and Accessories Department
Re: wardrobe suggestions for book club shoot
Lucinda, in keeping with the warm, sisterly nature of book clubs we’d like to stick with as many earth tones as possible with a few accents of color thrown in (red but not green and a deeper red rather than a brighter red). We would ask that the participants keep their hairstyles as simple as possible and that the more heavyset members try to position themselves in either oversized chairs or at the end of a sofa so as to minimize figure flaws. Below are some further suggestions:
• Turtleneck sweaters are good; please encourage two or three women to wear turtleneck sweaters, preferably in teal, burnt sienna, or charcoal (but no two people in the same color, obviously)
• No plaids or animal prints, subtle prints are fine so long as not green
• Earrings and accessories should be small and tasteful, no dangling earrings or large bangles, jewelry should be platinum or silver (no gold!)
• No smoking on camera
Also Faye says to please send the exact street address of the location of the book club as she needs it on file for legal purposes. Have a blast!
I was chastened by what Mason had said. Perhaps it had been wrong to ask him to bathe in the freezing river, though more than a year had passed since then and I thought he’d more or less forgotten about it. The barn dance segment, it was true, had omitted the fact that he lived on the farm at all—that he meticulously maintained the barn, that the animals that inhabited it could not have survived without his care—but considering that the event had coincided with the peak of his first bout of drug addiction, I had questioned neither my ethics nor my manners.
In the end, we had been without heat for only about sixteen hours. Mason had called the propane co-op from the grain elevator and by the time Erin got out of the bathtub, a guy had come with a gas truck and relit the pilot light and put in two hundred gallons of heating oil. Mason paid him five hundred dollars cash. When I asked where he got the money he just said, “I got it, okay?” and then he looked at me and said, “I’m finished with the meth. That was the end of it” and because I was too tired to do anything else, I’d gone out and bought him two bags of Hershey’s kisses, most of which Erin and I ate.
Meanwhile, Faye called to say that the Up Early executives were putting pressure on her to improve the “Quality of Life” series and that unless the book club segment went really well—“Like someone having a sudden flashback to being molested as a child,” she said—my job would be in serious jeopardy.
“That’s not the kind of thing I can guarantee,” I told Faye.
“Can’t you maybe ask one of them to say something like that?” she asked.
“You’re disgusting.”
“Lucinda, Upstairs is threatening to make me come out there and direct the segment myself,” Faye said. “And God knows that’s the last fucking place on earth I want to go.”
“You’re gonna come out here?”
“No, but they’re making me call that guy, Joel Lipschitz or whatever his name is, and make sure he knows how crucial it is that this turns out right.”
“I have no reason to think it won’t go smoothly,” I said. “These women are very passionate about Idabelle Sugar.”
“Well, Upstairs is very passionate about n
ot getting beat in the ratings by A.M. Style, which is on goddamned cable,” Faye said. “And we’ve got a reporter following us around all week for the New York Magazine story and since that tart Bonnie already pronounced Bosnia like ‘bonsai’ live on the air yesterday we can’t afford another fuckup.”
“Bonnie didn’t know what Bosnia was?”
“That girl couldn’t find Africa if she was screwing Queasy Mfume on a relief map,” said Faye.
“Kweisi Mfume,” I said. “And I wasn’t aware he had much to do with Bosnia.”
“Don’t be fresh!” Faye yelled into the phone. “Just remember, I want some serious repressed memory syndrome at that book club or we’re both going to be updating our résumés. If you have to, tell them you were fondled by your gynecologist.”
THREE DAYS LATER, I reported for duty at Brenda Schwan’s house.
“Nothing’s better than good friends, good food, and good conversation,” I said in front of the camera. “And more and more, people are throwing something new into the mix—good books! Today we’re visiting a book club in the midwestern town of Prairie City, where women of all different ages and backgrounds have come together as they do once a month to talk not only about the world they share but also about how a special book can bond them together in ways they never imagined. This month’s selection: Clip My Wings and I’ll Grow a New Pair, by renowned poet and novelist Idabelle Sugar.”
Jeb, crouching behind his tripod in Brenda Schwan’s snow white, sunken living room, motioned for me to stop. Sue and Valdette had burst through Brenda’s door as I was finishing my intro, thereby ruining the take. I put down my microphone and waited as they wiped their shoes on the mat. They each carried grocery bags filled with wine.
“It’s the big night!” Valdette cooed. “I’m so nervous!”
Sue looked at me uneasily. “Are you going to be filming the whole time?” she asked. “Because we kind of have an issue we want to discuss after the book part.”
No doubt the issue was the softball match against the Prairie City chapter of NOW.
“Jeb will be here for only an hour or so,” I said. “We won’t even get through two bottles of wine before he’s done.”
