Fifty Acres and a Poodle

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  I wonder how many people in this Wal-Mart are here for the same reason I am here. I wonder if anybody is here to pick up a spider plant for a lonely ladybug.

  I navigate the aisles with my shopping cart and note one heck of a deal on dog food. One heck of a deal on paper towels and Diet Pepsi. The aisles are wide. The place is so well lit. The shelves are so neat. I am feeling so good about Wal-Mart.

  I find the plant section. I see some spider plants in hanging wicker baskets. I look through them, looking for one with aphids. No aphids. These are healthy plants, darn it. Whoever is in charge of Wal-Mart’s plant department is doing a good job. I put one of the largest ones in my shopping cart.

  I pull out my cell phone. I have to call Alex, I have to tell him that Wal-Mart is so much nicer than Kmart. There is no comparison.

  I am having a spiritual experience, all right.

  I am becoming a person who appreciates Wal-Mart.

  My cell phone battery is dead. Again? Something is wrong with this stupid battery. Well, that’s convenient. Because now I get to go shop in the cell phone section of the store. A nice young man who introduces himself as Cal offers to help me. No, he doesn’t have my kind of battery. But let’s see. And he gets out his battery book, looks mine up. He tells me no, I’m not likely to find my battery at Wal-Mart. Then he tells me about a cell phone store nearby. Pretty soon he is drawing me a map to the cell phone store.

  I want to say “I love you, Cal.” I want to say “I love you, Wal-Mart.” But instead I say thank you and make a dignified exit. I pay for the spider plant and put it in my car.

  At the cell phone store, which is so much more than a cell phone store, I see something. I see one of those new satellite dishes, eighteen inches in diameter, capable of beaming something like five hundred million thousand TV stations straight from outer space into your living room.

  Jim, the salesperson, sees me eyeing those babies. He says, “May I help you?”

  “Just looking,” I say.

  “Well, how many stations do you get with your cable TV?” he asks.

  “We don’t get cable where I live,” I say. “I live on a farm.” (I love saying this. Almost as much as I love saying “Alex is down in the barn.”) “I live on a farm.”

  “Then you are the perfect candidate for a satellite dish!”

  Which is true. I mean, we only get two channels on the farm TV, and even those are very snowy.

  “Are they expensive to install?” I ask.

  He says I could install a dish like this myself, no problem. “I put my mom’s up in, like, a half an hour.” He shows me how to hook the dish to the dual receivers and how the remote works off a special UHF antenna so you can change channels without even being in the same room as the TV. He shows me the on-screen channel guide, and he demonstrates the superb picture quality, thanks to 120 watts of digitally compressed signal.

  I nod, and nod some more, never mentioning the nagging voice in my head: Six hundred bucks for the privilege of watching a whole lot of stupid television? Is this really in line with my values? Do I really want to be a person who has access to five hundred million thousand TV channels?

  Well, yes.

  But it’s not something I would brag about.

  I think of the ladybug, the drain. That ladybug needs a spider plant. And I need a satellite dish.

  I hand Jim my Visa, and soon it is a done deal. I become a person with a satellite dish.

  I bring the satellite dish and the spider plant into the house. I hang the plant over the kitchen sink. The ladybug is down by the drain again. “All right, little guy,” I say. “The fun begins!” I pick it up and put it on a leaf. It crawls back and forth, and I can’t really tell if it’s happy or not.

  I call Alex and tell him about the satellite dish. I can’t really tell if he’s happy or not about it. But then again, he is not much of a TV watcher. But then again, he is working in the city every day and he sees actual humans, so he places less value on virtual ones.

  ON SATURDAY WE TACKLE THE SATELLITE DISH installation. To get the ladder up, we have to make our way through the briars that have grown up against the house. We climb onto the roof, one at a time, me with the installation kit, Alex with the instruction manual between his teeth, and a belt full of tools around his waist, and the satellite dish, a kind of giant gray dinner plate, under his arm.

  “I wonder what our neighbors will think when they see we have a satellite dish!” I say, excited.

  “Hee hon ha hay heehor,” he says.

  “Huh?”

  He spits out the instruction manual.

  “We don’t have any neighbors.”

  Good point. And I so love the way we are talking “we.” More and more we are talking “we.” It’s becoming positively normal to say “we.” Because we are blending our lives together, ever so quietly. We are blending our futures together, ever so gently. Maybe we needed the crashingly loud reality of this farm to help us work out the rest of things, as if in the background of a picture. The fuzzy part. The part you see but don’t really see.

  There have been no statements, no big talks, no big get-on-your-knee-and-ask-me-to-marry-you moments. And anyway, you would have to torture me with big flaming knives to get me to admit that this is what I want, this is what I wish, this is the dream come true that happens to other people, not me. But Alex, he’s already tried the M-thing. I know he has no interest in trying it again.

  But, Alex. I have Alex. I have a we. We have this farm. We have Betty and Marley, and even Bob is still alive. I have no reason in this world to complain. I love this life. I feel like I am alive, really alive, for the first time since I was ten. I think about that shed. What I found there, what I left there. I think about solitude, what it’s for. I think about finding a place in which you can sit and differentiate yourself from the rest of the world. And I think: Why? Why does it matter? Why do you need to know the edges of the self?

  Standing here on this roof with Alex, I have a notion. I think you need to know the edges of the self before you can begin to know how to knit them together with someone else’s edges. Before you can really know how to love.

  How strange to think that solitude and love have coexisted all along, like a coin has to have both heads and tails.

  “Okay, do you want me to do something?” I ask Alex.

  “Just stand there and look pretty,” he says.

  “Oh, please.”

  “But you do look pretty today,” he says.

  “But you’re starting to sound like the locals around here,” I say.

  “Yeah, what is up with that?” he says. “The womenfolk in these parts sort of drape themselves over the men and don’t talk.”

  “Womenfolk?” I say. “Womenfolk in these parts?”

  “I’m starting to talk weird, aren’t I?”

  “You are,” I say.

  “I think I’m discovering my inner hick,” he says. “This could get ugly.”

  “Get?” I say.

  He hoists the bracket up to the called-for seventy-five-degree angle, reaching toward the southwestern sky. He holds the dish up, trying to see how it will fit. I’m not sure I like the way it looks. I’m not sure a satellite dish really goes with our new country image. Fifty rolling acres, a bank barn built in 1887 by Amish dairy farmers, a lily pond with a visiting blue heron dining on a resident frog, a stream meandering beneath a towering chestnut grove—and a satellite dish?

  Even Eva Gabor on Green Acres didn’t sit around watching TV, at least not that I can remember. And I hate it when I’m driving through some rural area, drinking up the pastoral landscape, imagining all the country people in their houses churning butter or weaving rag rugs or canning peaches—and then there’s a giant satellite dish in the yard. It’s like a billboard announcing a homeowner’s priorities: “Hello, I am a person who watches a hell of a lot of TV.”

  It’s a good thing they make these things so small now. That’s what I’m thinking. Eighteen inches around
will not be so … obvious.

  “It’s taking us a lot longer to install this thing than it took Jim to install his mother’s,” I say to Alex, after we’ve been at this for several hours.

  He looks at me.

  “But it’s taking us, like, four hours longer than it took Jim to install his mother’s,” I say.

  “I don’t care about Jim’s damn mother,” he snaps.

  It occurs to me I better shut up.

  “Okay, let’s try again,” he says. “Go on in, and tell me what it says.”

  Alex is on the roof aiming the dish at the southern sky, while I clamber off the roof and head inside for the fiftieth time to watch a little red bar go up and down on the TV screen, indicating signal strength.

  “Hey, we got sixty percent!” I yell. “Whoa, now it’s forty…. Oh God, you’re losing it! YOU ARE LOSING IT!”

  “WHAT?!”

  “YOU HAD IT, BUT NOW YOU LOST IT! Hold on! Okay, you are at EIGHTY PERCENT! DON’T MOVE!”

  I run outside, climb the ladder. “Don’t move an inch!” We are finally aimed directly at the satellite, and now all we have to do is put in the final bolt, a specially designed cylinder that will hold the entire four-and-a-half-hour project together.

  Alex is balanced on his left knee, reaching for the bolt, which I am about to hand him but then … I drop it. It goes tinkle, tinkle, tinkle rolling down the roof. We watch it bounce off the lowest row of shingles, vault like that skier on the old Wide World of Sports intro, sail through the air as though in slow motion, and land, plop, in a pile of rotting leaves.

  “Sorry about that, chief,” I say, feeling myself in a total Maxwell Smart moment.

  It is dusk by the time we find the bolt and finish the job. The stars are coming out. The amazing stars. You don’t see stars like this in the city. Every night a display like fireworks. And the satellite dish is pointed at them. And somehow one of those stars is sending me TV, glorious TV.

  I’ve never really considered TV a cosmic experience before. I mean, what’s cable? A wire hooked to another wire hooked to a cable company. There is no mystery in cable. But now a satellite. More than 22,300 miles up, moving at the exact same speed as the Earth moves. And I have a path to it, through the sky, piercing the atmosphere, invisible.

  I have never, ever thought of the transcendent quality of television.

  I am, I think, desperate.

  Desperate for TV.

  Desperate for some kind of transcendent experience.

  I am beginning to believe transcendence can happen only when you’re not looking for it. It was the ladybug that led me to the spider plant. It was the spider plant that led me to the stars.

  “Okay, it’s working,” Alex says, while I grab a blanket and a bag of Doritos and prepare for some serious Saturday night viewing.

  “But we can’t watch TV,” he says.

  “What?”

  “We have tickets to the ballet,” he says.

  “We do?”

  “Yes,” he says. “It’s, well, a surprise. Happy Valentine’s Day!”

  “Oh,” I say, delighted and disappointed at the same time. I think about those five hundred million thousand TV stations. And Valentine’s Day isn’t, technically, until tomorrow.

  “Can you be ready in a half an hour?” he says. “The show starts at eight-thirty, so we really should hurry.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “If you don’t want to go,” he says, his shoulders starting to slump. “I mean, it’s, well, Romeo and Juliet.”

  I snap out of it, snap out of it like when you’re driving on the Turnpike and about to fall asleep. Suddenly it hits you, just hits you: It is not an option to sleep now.

  “I’d love to go,” I say. “What a wonderful surprise.” Here, after all, is the man I love making a most loving gesture. I think of how many Valentine’s Days I’ve spent home alone, with a bag of Doritos and a blanket and a TV.

  So we get all dressed up. Alex puts on his new gray suit and his new tie with the tiny geometric petunias on it. I put on the slinky black number I wore when I was recently a judge at the Miss Delaware pageant. That’s kind of a long story. I was there to write a magazine story about it. It was my first time judging a beauty pageant. And actually, I had something of an epiphany at that pageant. Many of the other judges were former Miss Delawares. On the elevator, headed to our first judges’ meeting, one of them turned to me and said, “You look great! What year are you?”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “What year?”

  Then the most fantastic truth hit me: She thinks I am a former Miss Delaware. It was beautiful. It was interplanetary. Because I never even knew I wanted to be a former Miss Delaware.

  Later that evening, I told Alex, who had joined me on the assignment. I said, “Hey! One of the other judges thinks I am a former Miss Delaware!”

  He looked at me. He said, “You?”

  And right then the sky dropped on my head. He saw me go limp. He saw my spine go all wobbly. And he knew he was sunk. He knew it right then and there.

  “It’s just that, well, you hardly ever even go to Delaware,” he said. It came out like a tweet.

  Oh, please.

  But well, whatever. I picked myself right the hell back up again. I ignored him. I sent him to the beach to think about his sin. And so then naturally, the whole rest of the weekend I hung around the lady who mistook me for a former Miss Delaware.

  For the record, I wanted Miss Dover to win. Her platform, “Milk: From Moo to You,” was quite informative. But she lost out to Miss Rehoboth with the flute act.

  Anyway. The black dress. The ballet. The city. Alex and I head into town on this horribly cold February night. The city is so alive. How strange it all seems. All the lights. My God! Blinding lights! And all these people around doing all these … people things. Everybody going about their lives, hailing buses, sleeping on steam vents. I am reminded of Mark, the one who believes in the fifty-fifty split. A few years ago, Mark moved to Alaska. Just fled in a pickup truck, late one December night. It took him days to get there. He came back for a visit about a year later—via airplane—and kept complaining about how overwhelmed he was by Pittsburgh. The noise. The traffic. The tension. I thought: Pittsburgh? Sweet little Pittsburgh? I didn’t actually believe him. I didn’t think you could lose all those filters you created for city living so quickly.

  But here in town, I believe him. I feel so unfiltered. We park in a big indoor lot. The elevator doesn’t work. It makes me cranky. I’m cold. I go clicking in my fancy Miss Delaware heels down a stairway that reeks of urine.

  In the concert hall, my mood is supposed to … shift. I mean, that’s what you have to do in the city. You have to forget that you just walked down a stinky stairway and passed all those people on steam vents, and you have to immediately start feeling good. Okay. And sure, yes, it’s beautiful in this concert hall. Opulent. Our seats are magnificent, ten rows back, center section. Perfumes swirl in the air. This is the first ballet I’ve been to in years. It feels wonderful to be here, next to Alex, holding his hand. The lights go out. The dancers emerge. And soon … Juliet.

  A most delicate Juliet.

  A butterfly.

  There is desperation in the arch of her back, fire in her legs. The music lulls me. I feel desperation in the arch of my back. Fire in my legs. For a time, I become Juliet, a twirling Juliet. By the time she wakes up, sees Romeo dead beside her, I am in tears.

  I’ve never cried at a ballet before. I never knew a ballet could capture me in this way. Maybe it’s the filterless life.

  Afterward we go for a late-night bite, and then Alex says let’s go back to the farm. Even though it’s an hour’s drive, even though we could so easily stay in the South Side house, even though this is exactly the sort of occasion I kept the South Side house for.

  “I need us to be at the farm,” he says. The farm has come to represent something to Alex that it hasn’t for me. For him, I think it really is an escape. A
kind of church. He’s so much calmer there, so much gentler in his view of himself. Sometimes when we’re at the farm, I’ll look at him and see an inner-city kid blossoming at camp.

  It’s midnight by the time we pull into the driveway. A moonless midnight, dark as ink. The clouds have moved in, moved in tight. It’s cold. It’s damp. We rush toward the door, and Alex grabs me.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he says.

  “What?” I say. “Honey. It’s February.”

  “Right.”

  “And I’m in heels.”

  “Right. But I want to go to the top of the hill with you,” he says.

  “There is no way I’m walking up that hill in this cold,” I say, sounding like my mother.

  “All right,” he says.

  When we get inside, I move toward the TV. There are five hundred million thousand TV stations beckoning, and I have yet to try one.

  “Don’t,” he says. “I have to ask you something.”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, wait here,” he says.

  I sit on the couch, fling my shoes off, look at the blank screen. That poor TV. That TV needs me. Bob jumps up, curls himself next to me. Bob wants to watch TV, too.

  Alex comes back into the room with flowers. Wow! A dozen pink roses. “Wow!” I say. He’s really doing this Valentine’s Day up. What did we do last year? Did we do anything? A fancy dinner maybe? Nothing like this.

  “Thank you!” I say, standing up to hug him tight. “They’re gorgeous.”

  “Oh, God. Look at this floor,” he says. “I should vacuum.”

  Huh? Is he okay? Alex cleans when he’s nervous, sort of like I itch when I’m scared. He gets out the vacuum, pulls the cord, turns it on. Bob scrams. The dogs leap. The dogs are wearing my same expression: What the hell?

  He vacuums the whole house, does a really good job, as I doze in and out of vacuum noise. He says we really should buy a Shop-Vac so we can vacuum the basement.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, half-expecting him to suggest that we now go to the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart to look at Shop-Vacs.