Fifty Acres and a Poodle

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Alex agrees to try the gun one time, pointing out once again that he is really not the gun type. Bob puts a brick in the grass about fifty yards away, says aim for that. Alex holds the rifle up, peers through the scope, and slowly squeezes the trigger. BOOM! Betty dives under a porch chair. Marley ducks into the barn. The brick vaporizes. The brick is no longer. It is one hell of a gun. I am imagining what it would do to a poor raccoon.

  Bob is saying, “Nice shot!” We are all staring off at the spot where the brick was.

  “My eye,” Alex says. “My eye.” We turn and see him doubled over, holding his right eye. The gun is on the ground. Blood is coming from between his fingers.

  I think for a moment that there is a hole in his head. I think that Alex has shot himself in the head.

  I think this farm idea may not have been such a good one after all.

  It turns out that Alex, who is not—did I mention?—the gun type, held his face too close to the scope. The rifle’s recoil slammed the scope back, slicing him in an arc around his eye socket.

  “Oh,” Bob is saying. “Oh, dear.”

  We decide not to buy the gun. We say thanks for the farm lessons. Good-bye. Good luck. We gotta go. I drive us back to the city so Alex can keep the ice bag on his face. We have two extremely stinky dogs in the backseat. We have dozens of owner’s manuals for dozens of pieces of farm equipment on the floor at Alex’s feet. We have a notebook full of information about filters, continuous filament polypropylene media with absolute rate downstream sections and continuously profiled pore size upstream sections. We have dead rat stories in our heads.

  We are opening our senses. We are in hot pursuit of our increasingly commingled dream. We are moving to the country.

  Green acres, here we come.

  FIVE

  IT’S A SNOWY NOVEMBER MONDAY, BRISK AND COLD. We just spent the long Thanksgiving weekend packing up my office, the contents of which are now rolling along behind us in a big white truck.

  Wilson Road is transformed by the cold. The cathedral of trees has lost its color and now forms the most intricate lace pattern overhead. A thin layer of snow softens the look of everything, like powder smoothing out an old lady’s cheek.

  The driveway, “our” driveway, is about an eighth of a mile long and unpaved. The surface is a bed of small rocks, like most country driveways. I wonder if the layer should be thicker than this, though. Is this why the surface is so slick? An inch of snow should not be this treacherous.

  “Whoa,” I say to Alex, as the Mazda skids. I unbuckle my seat belt, turn around, and make sure that Betty and Marley are safe in the backseat. “Okay,” I say. “I think we should make a pact with each other right now that we will not wear our seat belts when we drive past this pond.”

  He looks at me.

  “Because if the car slides in, we’ll have a better chance of not drowning if we aren’t strapped in,” I say.

  “Well …,” he says.

  All right. Stupid, I know. “I’m scared,” I say. I’ve been unnerved for weeks now, ever since we closed on the property. Everywhere I look, I see problems. And if I don’t see problems, I feel them. “I’m itchy,” I say. “I feel like I’ve got head lice. You know how when you get scared, you just itch?”

  “Not really,” he says.

  “Well, it’s fear,” I say. “I’m walking around scared all the time.”

  “Or else you have head lice,” he says.

  Thanks.

  The movers make it up the driveway and jump out of their truck. Alex and I get out of the car and open the back door for the dogs. Betty zooms over to sniff the movers, while Marley staggers, rights himself, then throws up. “Okay, no problem,” I say, trying to normalize this.

  The movers have long hair and thin faces. “Wow,” one says, looking around. “This reminds me of that Chevy Chase movie. You know, the one where he moved to the country?”

  No, I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. I’m in no mood for comedy. I’m a nervous wreck. I am having chaos anxiety. Well, I guess you’re supposed to have chaos anxiety when you move, but…

  BOOM!

  I jump into the stratosphere. What the hell was that? Everything that happens just reminds me that I have no idea what is going on.

  BOOM! BOOM!

  The booms sound like the ones created by Alex’s rifle experience, except farther away, more drawn out, more like CRACK! followed by FWOOOM!

  “I guess somebody else out there is trying to decide whether or not to buy a gun,” Alex says, rubbing his eye as if he can still feel the punch.

  Well, maybe. But jeezus. This is not my idea of the sound of welcome.

  Alex talks to the movers, explaining which doors to use. I am standing here looking at the truck. Inside that truck is the entire contents of 1701 Benedum Trees Building, 222 Fourth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15222. This is stage one of our move. Because this is how we’ve decided to do it. First, I bring my office here. Next, Alex will move down here. He accepted the bid on his house and will need to be out of there in about six weeks. Then, and gradually, I’ll move much of the contents of my South Side house to the farm. I’m still committed to keeping the South Side place, though. And I’m really in no hurry to set up house here at the farm. In fact, I’m needing to slow things down. I feel like a person who has done a very impressive dive off the diving board and is in the pool but now is doing a slow crawl over to the side, trying to catch her breath.

  I am having chaos anxiety. Or maybe it’s relationship anxiety. Commitment anxiety? Hmm. There’s no question that Alex and I are committed to each other. But will there be order, a structure to this commitment? Will we put the stamp of approval on it? Will we institutionalize it? Will we do the M-thing? Marry? Is that really what I want? I can’t even say the word out loud.

  It’s funny how chaos anxiety just creates order anxiety.

  Which only leads to endless loop anxiety.

  Because really anxiety is just anxiety, no matter what you call it. Making sense out of anxiety is just an intellectual exercise that does nothing, absolutely nothing for this itching.

  I’m here scratching my head, out by the barn, looking at the house that really makes no sense, a chalet stuck onto a trailer, but not really a trailer and not really a chalet. Just a long, funny house, cheap white aluminum siding and tiny windows on one end, dark cedar siding and huge, extravagant windows on the other. In between, lots of doors. An awful lot of doors. Why are there so many doors on this house? This house is like a story, a novel. One of those stories in which a different person is invited to add the next chapter, and the next. There is no central vision to this house, no one mood or one theme or one emotion.

  I scan the fields beyond the house, the vast hills reaching toward the sky. Okay, fifty acres, that’s what I’m thinking. Fifty acres. And let me get this straight. I mean, let’s review:

  I couldn’t keep up with my one-quarter-acre garden in the city. So I bought … fifty acres.

  Okay, fifty acres. Alex and I have been talking a lot about what to do with fifty acres. How, for instance, do you mow fifty acres? We learned that you mow fifty acres with the brush hog, which turns out to be the low flat thing that you attach to the back of the tractor. It’s the mower attachment. See, now, I never knew tractors even had attachments. I mean, I never really thought about it. To me, a farm tractor is a thing you see in the distance when you are on the Turnpike going somewhere, and it is out there on those fields doing very important farm things. That the farm tractor is made up of parts—attachments and levers and hydraulic-powered thises and thats—was not in my consciousness. Why should it have been in my consciousness?

  This is one example of a much larger principle I am dealing with, ever since we closed on the farm.

  Because, fifty acres. Fifty acres in a place called Scenery Hill. Fifty acres of gorgeous scenery. Scenery. We bought scenery. We bought a postcard. We bought green hills and a pond blooming with lilies à la Monet. We bought a creaky old ba
rn leaning in the wind à la Wyeth. We bought the most beautiful picture we could possibly find.

  We bought 2-D. Not 3-D. It did not enter my consciousness that the three-dimensional version of this thing was included with the package. Because how could it be in my consciousness? When would it have had the opportunity to get in? Chaos never announces itself, never advertises. Who would buy chaos?

  It’s getting in. It’s creeping in. Slowly, slowly, we are entering the picture, poking our fingers and our toes through some kind of protective film like you might see in a futuristic movie featuring awesome special effects.

  This is what it is to enter the future, a future you imagined as simple and perfect and new and … what? What’s all this green? Well, it’s grass, of course. But the grass is what? The grass isn’t just grass? The grass is hay? What, actually, is hay? And what do you mean you’re not supposed to mow it, you’re supposed to bale it? Use it? Consume it? A what? A hay baler? What does a hay baler look like? Another tractor attachment? How much does that tractor attachment cost? Exactly how many tractor attachments are there? A catalog of tractor attachments? Hundreds of tractor attachments? Hundreds of tractor attachments costing thousands of dollars each.

  I never knew. How would I ever have known? Why would I ever have known?

  Alex and I have been talking a lot about sheep and other animals that might eat fifty acres of green for us and do away with the need for all those tractor attachments. So far, we believe sheep are the answer. They’re easy, according to the sheep magazines. You fence the sheep in. They eat the grass. (Hay?) You provide them with a little hut for the winter and some water. In exchange, you get mowed fields, free wool, and stink-free fertilizer in convenient pellet form.

  But I am beginning to suspect that the idea of sheep is another two-dimensional picture. Idyllic sheep grazing on a field doing your yard work is really just another postcard. There are a lot of sheep details I can’t even conceive of, not until I crawl into that picture.

  Of course, I’m glad I’m crawling into this picture. The truth is, I’m glad I’m here. Because I know I will be able to breathe here. It feels like there is enough air here to fill all of outer space. I’m glad I’m here because there are trees, glorious trees here. Trees that tower over me and rock gently in the breeze, as if holding me on a swing. I’m glad I’m here because it is peaceful here. I think working here will be good for me, good for the writing life. I will have the solitude that all writers crave. I will have Betty here, curled up at my feet. I will have Bob here, at least for a time, drooling with pleasure as he watches me diligently meet my deadlines. I won’t have those investment brokerage people in the Benedum Trees Building looking at me on the elevator and making me feel like I should wear pantyhose.

  Solitude. Solitude is what I’m ultimately after. Or at least, this is what I am telling myself. I have a somewhat complicated relationship with solitude, having spent much of my life alternately loathing and longing for it. You don’t grow up a kid hiding in a shed in a neighbor’s farm and not know something about solitude. You don’t go inward, inward, inward and avoid splashing around in the murky water of solitude. When I was nineteen, I was a sucker for Emerson and Thoreau and the Transcendentalists who made solitude sound so romantic. As soon as I learned about Thoreau, I knew I wanted to be Thoreau, walking around that pond. I was clearly cut out for that job. I arrived at adulthood having embraced some of the tenets of the Transcendentalist philosophy quite on my own accord—as perhaps many children do. The Transcendentalists just gave it language, form, organization. I already believed in a monistic universe, one in which God was in nature, of nature; I learned that way back when God gave me that animal-soul-rescue job. I already believed, really believed, in a mystical world in which God is present in all things, and that thinking of the people/God connection as the only real connection, the only holy connection, is just plain silly—is merely a symptom of the basic truth about the human condition, which, as far as the rest of the universe is concerned, is narcissism.

  The Transcendentalists gave me a reason for being the way I was. I was part of a pantheistic world, one in which the objects of nature, cats and bugs and trees and people, are equally holy. A world in which you could experience God during a walk in the woods, or through contemplation of a salamander. I was part of a world in which all events could be both material and spiritual, just as Emerson described: “The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.”

  I loved that. In college I would take my watercolors into the woods and paint pictures that said that. At least to me. The Transcendentalists had given validation to the inward life I knew so well as a kid and had crawled out of, then back into, then out of, like a turtle sticking its neck in and out of a shell.

  I miss solitude.

  I sometimes fear that I’ve lost my capacity for it, lost it in the elevator of the Benedum Trees Building, lost it while standing there thinking I should be wearing pantyhose. Hell, I was a grownup now; I was supposed to be part of the outside world. A functioning member of society. Not some kid hiding in a shed on a neighbor’s farm.

  I miss that kid.

  I am longing for solitude again. Solitude is surely here, on these fifty acres, along with the gas well, the birds, the trees, and all this air.

  At the moment, however, I am forced to wonder if solitude itself is another two-dimensional picture. Just a postcard of a place I want to return to.

  There is, of course, a bigger problem emerging: How in the world can solitude coexist with love?

  AFTER MUCH DISCUSSION AND SEVERAL SWITCHings of drivers, each man trying his skill in maneuvering a van full of office furniture on an ice-covered lawn, the truck is successfully backed up to the door of the giant room. The room with the skylights, the room that overlooks the pond and barn, the room that will be my office. Talk about a writer’s retreat. I imagine a pinball machine in here. I imagine a Ping-Pong table. I imagine my paints and a potter’s wheel and all of my favorite things. I imagine writing stories galore, the best stories I’ve ever written. The movers put the ramp down, drink a lot of iced tea, get psyched up. They are having a good time.

  BOOM!

  They look at each other.

  CRACK—FWOOOM!

  “Uh, what’s with the fireworks?” one guy says. “Maybe it’s the Hatfields and the McCoys going at it,” another guy says. “Heh heh.”

  “Heh heh,” I say.

  They joke about the snow, about the truck sliding off the ice and into the pond. They joke about calling their boss and telling him the truck is at the bottom of the pond. They drink more iced tea and imagine, heh heh, losing their jobs. They look at the snow, now coming straight down with official force.

  BOOM!

  “We better hurry and get outa here,” the short guy says. And so with a great burst of energy, they start unloading the truck. I tell them to dump everything in the middle of the room, because I have no idea where anything will go. I like figuring that stuff out when I am alone. I have all week to get my new working life in order. Then next Monday it will be business as usual. This is so exciting.

  BOOM!

  Alex walks into the room, carrying a box of telephone stuff from his car.

  BOOM!

  He looks at me. He shrugs. “Well, I have no idea,” he says.

  “Well, you’re awfully calm,” I say.

  “Actually,” he says, “I’m hungry. I’m about to keel over.”

  “All right.” We decide to head out to find some take-out food. I take orders from the movers. They specifically request french fries. All right. But I don’t promise anything, because I have no idea if we are really going to find fast food out here in the middle of nowhere.

  I put the dogs in the basement, to keep them safe while we’re gone, and Alex and I hop in the car. And I don’t care what he says—I don’t put my seat belt on until we are safely on Wilson Road. We go ea
st on 40 for about fifteen minutes, finding nothing except a big stone monument on the side of the road, a lone statue of a woman.

  “Hey, pull over,” I say. I want to have a look. The woman is holding a baby, and there’s a child tugging at her dress. Underneath her it says “The Madonna of the Trail.” It says “To the pioneer mothers of the covered wagon days.” It’s a monument to the women who traveled the National Pike in search of a lot more than take-out food.

  “Aw, she’s pretty,” I say to Alex, as I lean out the window.

  “Ask her if there’s a place around here to get something to eat,” he says.

  I give a long, audible sigh. “Aw, she looks cold,” I say. “Don’t you think they should have given her a heavier coat?”

  “But then in the summer she would look hot,” he says.

  “True.”

  I get out of the car, take a quick walk around.

  “She’s so tall!” I say.

  “Well, ask her if there’s a Pizza Hut or anything around here,” he says.

  I roll my eyes. “Men!” I say to her.

  But she doesn’t reply. She just stands there looking … soft. I look at her face. How do they make such soft features out of stone? She is so young. God, when I was her age, I still smoked. She is so innocent. I stand next to her and look out, wondering what she stares at all day long. I think of all she has seen driving by on this road. I think of her seeing me, and instantly I feel embarrassed. She probably thinks this Eddie Bauer down vest looks stupid. She probably thinks I’ll never know the hardships she has endured in the name of adventure, of a new life, of survival. She probably thinks I have no right to be scared in my adventure. My God! My anxiety is the anxiety of privilege. This woman, now this woman really knows itching. Probably she had head lice for real.