by Meghan Daum
The next morning, as planned, I got up before 5:00 A.M., stuffed my sleeping bag into one of the duffel bags, brushed my teeth, got dressed, walked out of the apartment, and took the bus to LaGuardia. Up Early had not even sprung for car service. Dawn broke as the bus ambled through Harlem and over the Triborough Bridge. Looking back toward Manhattan, the sun glinted off the redbrick housing projects that bordered the East Side. Behind the projects, the skyscrapers where earlier in my career I’d worked more temp jobs than I could remember jutted out into the sky just like they do in the opening credits of movies about people who come to the city and suffer a million knocks before something happens to them that is so spectacular, so redeeming, and so much a testament to their unrelenting passion and hard work that it’s like the knocks never happened, it’s like they sailed in and the city greeted them as though it were heaven and they had died trying to rescue someone who’d fallen onto the subway tracks.
Though it wasn’t yet 7:00 A.M., planes were climbing and landing from every direction. The terminal was packed. I waited in line for half an hour and checked my bags. I got coffee at the Starbucks stand. To calm my nerves, I pretended I was going on a business trip. I pretended that Up Early had sent me off on a story, a story concerning, perhaps, women who had been fondled by their gynecologists. I got on the plane, we took off, and the island of Manhattan shrank away behind the clouds. Four hours and one airport connection later, we descended into a patchy prairie. From the plane I could see tiny boxlike farmhouses, sectioned-off fields of crops, the occasional factory flanked by a huge parking lot, which was flanked by acres of cornfields, then acres of prairie grass, then a highway with barely any cars on it.
What was I doing in this place? Then I slapped my wrist with the plastic coffee stirrer. I wasn’t allowed to ask. That had been the pact, no getting upset for six months, no breaking down, no admission of error. Besides, it was beautiful down there. Land and sky and nothing in between. This place seemed less a place than a huge amount of space, enough space to see what you’d do with yourself when given so much room, enough space, I later realized, after it was much, much too late, to get yourself in a whole lot of trouble.
A Serious, More Humanitarian Direction
The truly remarkable thing about a person like Sue was that you could call her up on a summer evening, having met her only briefly a month earlier, and announce that you were taking a drastic pay cut to move to her town and she would respond as if a) she’d known you for ten years, b) you were making the best decision of your life, and c) moving from New York to Prairie City was not only understandable but obvious, a crucial step everyone reached eventually, as integral to the maturity process as moving out of your parents’ house. When I’d called Sue from New York to tell her about my plans, under the guise of fact checking my methamphetamine story, I’d feared she’d think I was some kind of stalker or, at the very least, a total loser. Was this not, after all, the equivalent of someone from Paris visiting my nondescript suburban hometown in Pennsylvania and deciding, upon returning to her seventeenth-century flat in the 21st arrondissement, that all those sunny afternoons picnicking on fresh bread and jam in the place des Vosges were wearing her down and she felt she’d be better off shopping for super-sized Velveeta at the Union Avenue Safeway? Sue didn’t see it that way. Instead, she let out a little shriek, which I was 99 percent convinced connoted delight rather than horror, and immediately began to list all the different landlords she knew who could rent me a 2 BR, 1.5 BA, c/a, fenced yd, w/d hookups, gar, gorg. woodwork $475/mo.
“But you can stay on the farm as long as you want,” she’d said. “And you can buy our old Saab. I’m buying an Isuzu Trooper. Or just use the Saab as long as you want until you find a car.”
And so I was met at Prairie City Municipal Airport by Sue, who drove me to her farm, showed me to the luxuriously appointed guest room, handed me the keys to her 1989 mint green Saab 900, and then had no fewer than twenty friends over for a welcoming party.
“Too bad you missed the menopause shower,” Sue told me. “I haven’t been that stoned since my early forties. But this party will be fun, too.”
The party was fun. I was greeted the way I imagined Olympians were welcomed home when they returned triumphantly, or even less than triumphantly, from the games. People handed me drinks and fistfuls of Triscuits. They came up to me and threw their arms around me. “Lucinda! I have to actually touch you to believe you,” said a fiftyish woman named Brenda Schwan, who had newscaster hair and perfectly white teeth despite her cigarette voice. “No one ever moves here.”
Sue’s brother, Leonard Running Feather, spent much of the afternoon playing water polo in the aboveground pool with Teri and the county commissioner, whose name was Phil and who looked more like Peter Fonda than any man I’d ever seen, including, in a strange way, Peter Fonda himself. Lacking an appropriate ball, they used a beach ball for their polo match. When a sudden wind gust blew it into the adjacent cornfield, they attempted to play with a giant inflatable chair.
Maybe it was because my own parents were so old that I didn’t think of Sue and her friends as being that much older than me. They laughed and poked each other and rolled out of their lawn chairs like college students—not students at my college, I thought regretfully, but the students at the kinds of colleges where people have tailgate parties and play pranks on the president by putting his office furniture on the roof. Over the ensuing months I would see that there was an enviable ease to every thing Sue and her friends did, an effect of the overall uncomplicatedness of life in Prairie City and the fact that, like a huge family, they seemed utterly without personal boundaries. They walked inside one another’s houses without knocking. They all knew where everyone kept her silverware. If someone needed to make a run for beer or cigarettes, he or she simply hopped in whoever’s SUV was at the end of the driveway. Everyone left his keys in the cars or, if not, everyone knew which pockets or purses from which to retrieve them. Unlike my friends in my world, I couldn’t imagine them ever sitting in restaurants dividing up checks. They didn’t go through the social kissing routine. For this I admired them. For this, I wanted to be them. At least in some ways. Nearly all of them wore Birkenstocks and, every once in a while, someone’s cultural or political reference would serve as a jolting reminder that most of them were at least twenty years older than me. Sue had graduated from high school two years before I was born. The Peter Fonda county commissioner had barely avoided the Vietnam War draft. Leonard was a huge Three Dog Night fan. It was hard to believe that they were actually Faye’s age, especially given her insistence that she was thirty-seven.
THE DAY AFTER MY WELCOME PARTY, I drove all over Prairie City in Sue’s Saab looking for an apartment. Memo to New Yorkers: this is what I found: a twelve-hundred-square-foot, five-room apartment that took up the entire ground floor of a Craftsman-style house. It had oak floors, gorgeous oak woodwork, built-in glass china cabinets carved in the style of the Sullivan school, French doors, a perfectly restored 1930s-era Hotpoint stove, a claw-foot bathtub, and central air conditioning that was paid entirely by the landlord. In Manhattan the place would have gone for five thousand dollars a month. The rent in Prairie City: five hundred dollars.
I called Daphne and Elena and told them.
“That much?” they both said.
Sue’s friends, to my astonishment, also thought the place was overpriced. They also thought the neighborhood was “marginal.” I disagreed. With the exception of one house whose porch was sinking into the ground, probably because of the sofas and large kitchen appliances that had been placed on it, the neighborhood exuded an aura of neither deprivation nor pretension, merely solid citizenship and, judging from the bumper stickers on most of the cars, some serious pro-union leanings. Though there were tenants in both the basement and on the second floor of my house, I entered through the front door and was sole proprietor of a large porch that was just crying out for a swing. My furniture arrived and filled up maybe a fifth of th
e place. I got a Pier One charge card and bought a camel-colored sofa and two olive green velvet pillows. I ordered an INNKEEPERS ARE NOT STUPID hotel shower curtain from the Restoration Hardware catalog and purchased some sheer eggplant-colored fabric from Target and made panels for the French doors. I set up my office in the larger of the two bedrooms. I unpacked my CDs, put on the soundtrack from The Buena Vista Social Club, which, though I wasn’t in fact crazy about it, was something I figured would be unavailable in Prairie City and best purchased in advance. I danced around the house, admiring my flawless design sense. Even if tomorrow I become miserable, I thought, even if I get into an accident with the Saab and the whole venture turned out to be a disaster, my house was a goddamned showplace.
My upstairs neighbor was a thirtyish heavy metal fan named Toby Vodacek. He worked the night shift at the Firestone tire plant and spent his days tinkering with several vehicles he kept in the driveway and on the street. At all times, Metallica or Judas Priest blared from the stereo of one of the cars. Given his apparent auto mechanic credentials, I let him convince me not to buy Sue’s Saab. Replacing a part that on most cars would cost two hundred dollars would run upward of eight hundred on a Saab, he said. He told me not to be a slave to fashion and to buy a solid American car. So after thinking that I couldn’t possibly drive anything other than a Honda or a Toyota I gave in and bought a 1990 Pontiac Sunbird from one of Toby’s co-workers. It was white and looked like a rental car and I was soothed by its air of impermanence, as if I could return it at any moment and be on the next plane back home.
But I had no real urge to go home. I was, quite possibly, a new woman. With my car, my apartment, my new membership to the YMCA, which cost just thirty-nine dollars a month and had an Olympic-size pool, I felt like the most privileged person in the world. Compared to New York, every thing in Prairie City seemed like it was free. As the weeks went by and I absorbed the various symbols of the town’s commitment to safe and easy living—the three-bedroom colonials with list prices of eighty thousand dollars, the ribbons of public bike paths on which parents rode with helmeted babies strapped in behind them, the endless telephone directory pages devoted to free services for every possible variation of the less fortunate (ESL classes for new immigrants, safe houses for battered women, food pantries and clothing dropoff sites, and, to my count, more support groups than there were people with the last name Schmidt)—I found it increasingly hard to understand why anyone lived in places like New York or Boston or San Francisco at all.
“The Quality of Life Report” was to be produced using the facilities of KPCR, Prairie City’s public television station. It seemed the station manager was an ex–New Yorker named Joel Lipinsky. He was the cousin of the brother of someone who married the ex-wife of some friend of Faye’s in the Hamptons. When I called him to arrange a meeting to discuss the series, he invited me to a barbecue at his house the following weekend.
“Come on over,” he said. “Meet my wife, meet my friends. There will be a lot of interesting people there.”
JOEL’S HOUSE was a split level ranch with solar panels over the den, a Brady Bunch sort of house, which was why I was surprised to find that Joel was a short man with a goatee, a diamond stud in his ear, and shoulder-length silver hair that was tied back in a tiny ponytail. Even though it was at least 85 degrees on his back deck, where people who looked exactly like Sue’s friends were grilling burgers and eating potato salad out of giant containers, Joel was wearing Doc Martens, black pants, a black jacket, a black shirt buttoned all the way up to the top, and a string tie. When I introduced myself, he hugged me.
“The famous Lucinda Trout,” he said.
“I’m really eager to talk to you about this series,” I said.
“Whoa there,” he said. “Relax, this is a party.”
He dragged out a couple of lawn chairs and made me sit down. I noticed that Brenda Schwan, the woman who’d had “to actually touch you to believe you” at Sue’s, was at the other end of the deck.
“I’ve really been eager to meet you,” Joel continued. “Especially because, you know, I totally relate to what you’re going through. When I came out here I was like this guy from Brooklyn. I had no clue about the Midwest. I was like, man, where can I get a decent bagel? I’m telling you, I asked for lox at the supermarket and they sent me to the hardware section. I kid you not!”
“When did you come out here?” I asked.
“73.”
“1973?”
“Yeah, but man I tell you, sometimes I still forget the news comes on at ten.”
Joel was interrupted by his wife, who introduced herself as Valdette Svoboda-Lipinksy. She leaned over the lawn chair and hugged me, spilling drops of margarita on my lap.
“Get up so I can talk to her,” Valdette said to Joel, nudging him out of the lawn chair. “I think your foie gras is ready.”
“You’re serving foie gras?” I asked.
“No, it’s just nachos,” Valdette said. “It’s a little joke we have. We call every thing foie gras. Joel has attended cooking seminars in France. He’s quite a Renaissance man.”
Valdette had long silver hair—she seemed to match her husband; they had his and hers hair—and wore a zebra-print blouse and black leggings. She wore earrings shaped like frogs and a Star of David around her neck. Though she eschewed the Fritos for apple crisps, which she told me could be purchased in bulk at the health-food store, she chain smoked Virginia Slims and knocked back two margaritas in under twenty minutes. Her speech had a curling, almost Southern drawl to it. She was a rape crisis counselor for the Prairie City Domestic Violence Commission. She was also a member of the Prairie City Coalition of Women, through which she knew Sue.
Brenda Schwan noticed me from across the deck and blew me a little kiss. Then I noticed another familiar figure walking across the yard. It was Sue’s brother, Leonard Running Feather.
“You know Leonard?” I asked Valdette.
“He’s our neighbor,” she said. She raised her arm, a mess of silver bangles sliding down her wrist as she called to him. “Hi neighbor!”
In the few weeks I’d been in Prairie City, I’d seen Leonard a number of times, not only at Sue’s farm, where he went nearly every weekend to swim, but also driving the garbage truck around town, where he would sometimes pull up next to me at an intersection and give a little wave. According to Sue, he’d gotten divorced a few years earlier, after his wife ran off with a car salesman she’d met on the Internet. Though she’d returned two weeks later, begging Leonard’s forgiveness, Leonard had found himself rather enjoying his time off from the streaming criticism of Josephine Hornbach Running Feather and decided his authentic self was that of a bachelor. Given his wife’s indiscretions, he was awarded primary custody of their two children, which mitigated his child support obligations and generally left his weekends free. Given the kids’ Native American blood, federal grants would surely pay for their college educations, if things ever got to that point. Life was sweet for Leonard.
Valdette leaned close to me and whispered in my ear.
“You know he’s really Sue’s adopted brother, right?” she said.
Leonard was exactly Sue’s age. He wore tinted aviator glasses and kept his receding hair pulled into a ponytail. Other than his name and his hairless face, there was nothing palpably Native American about him. A cigarette hung from his mouth as he stepped over the bedding plants in the yard. He’d brought his own beer, one he’d already opened and another tucked under his arm.
“You’re already on the party circuit,” he said to me. “It’s all downhill from here.”
I couldn’t tell whether or not he was being sarcastic. Joel, though his wardrobe distinguished him from the other members of the crowd, who wore T-shirts and shorts and the ubiquitous Birkenstocks, had begun to sing show tunes with a small group at the grill. Brenda Schwan wanted to sing “Maria,” but Joel was saying that was “too obvious.”
“Don’t you guys know any of the songs from Ren
t?” I heard him ask.
Dripping with sweat, slapping at the mosquitoes that were landing on my face and neck, I explained to everyone I met how “The Quality of Life Report” series was designed to tap into New Yorkers’ fantasies about the good life. Most reacted with shock. A few hugged me and said they were sure I’d meet plenty of interesting people, especially if I hung out at The Grinder, Prairie City’s most popular coffee shop.
“So if you know any farmers who are champion ballroom dancers I’d love to hear about it,” I said. “Or any other kind of quirky local thing.”
“You should do a story about my book club!” said Brenda Schwan. “We’re a really interesting group.”
“That would be interesting,” I said, even though it sounded so uninteresting the very thought of it made me want to go back to thong underwear reporting. Book clubs, Faye once said, were “so middle brow they’re unibrow.” She held the same opinion about bachelorette parties and women’s investment clubs, though we’d done stories about both.
I needed to stop drinking, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to drive home. And since I didn’t think I could stay at the party without consuming more alcohol, I got up to leave. The air-conditioning inside the house caused the last vestiges of sweat to break through my pores. In the living room, as I approached the front door, Leonard appeared out of nowhere.
“You’re leaving already?” he asked.
“I can’t keep drinking.”
“Just stay off the main roads,” he said. “The cops hardly ever stop anyone on side streets. Hey, want a tour of the house?”
“This house?”
“No, my house,” he said. “I need to grab some more beers anyway.”
Leonard led me across Joel’s yard to his house, which looked almost exactly like Joel’s minus the solar panels. He took us to his back door, requiring a trip through the side yard so everyone on Joel’s deck could see me going inside.