by Meghan Daum
“Dad!” Erin yelled. She got up and threw her arms around him. She was wearing a Little Mermaid T-shirt and had a plastic tiara on her head. In the girliness of the room, Mason looked like Sasquatch. He picked her up and kissed her head. Then he removed the tiara and tossed it on the floor. He did it so gently she seemed not to notice.
“This is my friend Lucinda,” Mason said. “She’s coming with us.”
She hid her face. Then she got down and ran to Julie, who put the telephone receiver on the counter and said, “Bye-bye, sugar plum princess, be good” and then looked at Mason and said, “Try not to bring her back looking like she’s had a mud bath this time.” She looked at me, mumbled a faint hello, and resumed her phone conversation.
“She attended charm school at a feed lot,” Mason whispered as we walked to the car. “Fortunately Erin takes after me.”
We piled into the Sunbird and went to Hinky Dinky. Mason bought frozen pizzas, marshmallows, Doritos, and two giant bottles of Pepsi.
“Can I have Oreos?” Erin asked.
“No,” said Mason.
“Can I have candy corn?”
“No.”
“Can I have Fruit Roll-Ups?”
“No.”
The little girl’s chin started to quiver, then her whole body followed as if a wave of grief had come over her.
“We have Doritos,” Mason said.
“I don’t want Doritos!” Erin screamed.
“Don’t start this,” he said. Sebastian and Peter ambled on ahead in the snack aisle. Erin started sobbing and then wailing. I pretended to ignore her. People were staring. Did they think I was her mother, pretending to read the ingredients list on a package of Fritos while a four-year-old in a Little Mermaid shirt hyperventilated and threw herself down on the floor? I slinked off to the liquor department and bought a bottle of Fetzer.
After stopping in the video section, where they rented Pokémon II, The Haunted, and The Naked Gun, we made our way through the checkout, where a teenager with not only a Band-Aid on her eyebrow but Band-Aids on her chin, cheek, and nostrils rang us up.
“That’s $37.24,” she said. Her tongue was pierced with a giant silver stud. Apparently the Band-Aid rule did not extend into the mouth. “Oh shit,” Mason said, digging through his wallet. He turned to me. “Do you have five bucks?”
In the car, Erin tore open a package of Fruit Roll-Ups. Sebastian and Peter sat quietly. I asked them about school, what grades they were in, whether or not they played sports. They answered in monosyllables. Erin fidgeted and whined about having sticky fingers. When we got about ten miles outside of town, lightning tore across an open field to the side of the highway, followed by the loudest clap of thunder I’d ever heard. It was like a truck had tipped over in front of us. Then the rain started falling so hard we couldn’t see in front of us.
“Oh, this is just great,” Mason said.
“It’s raining, Dad,” Erin whined.
“Duh,” said one of the boys.
“Dad, it’s raining!” she said again.
“I can see that, Erin,” Mason said.
“Will it pass?” I asked Mason.
“Do I look like a weatherman?” he said. The kids were fighting in the back over what appeared to be the last Fruit Roll-Up in the box. The rain was pelting the windshield so hard we couldn’t see the road. Mason pulled over to the shoulder.
“Dad, why are we stopping?” Erin asked.
“Just be quiet for a minute,” Mason said. Tractor trailers were rushing by us, kicking up water and spraying the little Sunbird with mud from the side of the road.
“We won’t be able to drive through that road near the cabin in this car,” Mason said. “It’ll be too muddy. If I had the truck we could do it.”
“You want to go back?” I asked, thinking of what I might do alone at home that weekend. I could write some story proposals for Up Early. I could call Daphne or Elena.
“I suppose we could hang out at your place,” Mason said.
“Oh!” I said.
“They could watch movies,” he said. “I mean, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, no, that’s fine,” I said. “And then you’d go back out in the truck later?”
“We can’t all really fit in the truck,” he said. “Besides, it’ll be too late. And it’ll be so muddy out there.”
“Oh.”
“They have their sleeping bags. They can sleep on the floor.”
“Oh.”
“Unless you don’t want to do that,” Mason said. He reached over and put his hand on my cheek. I flinched; the kids could see us. His eyes were tired-looking and lovely with those little lines around them. It occurred to me that if I was a trouper about this, then he might be a trouper about the bad boy story for Up Early.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “As long as they don’t mind.”
“It’ll be an adventure for them,” he said. “And for you.”
He turned the car around and drove back to town. When we entered my house, the urine smell seemed worse than usual. I could see the boys wrinkle their noses slightly, but they were too polite to say anything. Erin, hyper from the Fruit Roll-Ups, began tearing around the house. She ran into the dining-room table and knocked off the flower vase. Mason grabbed her by the collar of her Little Mermaid shirt and put her in a time-out in my bedroom. The telephone rang once and it took several seconds before I realized that Erin had grabbed the extension by my bed and attempted to carry on a conversation with the person on the other end, a person who turned out to be my mother. Even from the next room I could hear her piercing interrogation through the receiver.
“Who is this?” she demanded.
“Hello! Hello!” Erin chirped.
“Where is Lucinda?”
“Who’s Lucinda?”
I yanked the phone out of the child’s hands. My mother was now engaged in a conversation with my father about whether or not she’d dialed the wrong number.
“I’m here, Mom,” I said.
“Who was that?”
“The neighbor’s little girl,” I said. “She lives next door. They just stopped by.”
It amazed me how easy it was to lie to my mother when I could not so much as tell Joel that I was spending an evening doing something other than flea-bombing my apartment.
“We don’t live next door,” Erin said loudly.
“Lucinda,” my mother said, “I want to tell you this. A very nice couple whom we know down here have a son who lives in Texas. He sells wireless service and he’s very nice and he doesn’t have a girlfriend. I thought that since you lived nearby maybe you’d let him take you out.”
“I don’t live near Texas!”
“Honey, you can’t just limit yourself to people within walking distance. It’s not New York.”
“But Texas is hundreds of miles away!”
“There’s such a thing as airplanes,” she said. “They have some very good fares right now.”
“Lucinda,” my father said, taking the phone from my mother, “your mom’s afraid you’re not aggressive enough in finding a boyfriend. The best guys are in graduate school.”
“Actually, I am seeing someone,” I said. Erin was now jumping on the bed and singing the Little Mermaid song.
“Really? What does he do?”
“He’s an artist.”
“An artist! Watch out, he’ll get famous and become a heroin addict. We just rented Basquiat.”
Erin jumped up and landed on the bed so hard that she knocked the phone cord out of the wall. My father’s voice was replaced by silence. Or so it seemed until I realized Erin had hit her head and was now bawling hysterically.
Rode Hard and Put Away Wet
To: Faye Figaro, Samantha Frank
From: Lucinda Trout
Re: Bad Boy story
My friend Mason has agreed to be filmed for the bad boy story. However, I think it would be best if we presented it more like an “unconventional boy” story. For reasons of pers
onal privacy, I’d rather not go into the specifics of my relationship with him, but we can collect footage of him hiking around his cabin, working on his paintings, and walking along an abandoned railroad trestle. Unfortunately, it’s too cold now to show him bathing in the river. But I think the segment can focus on the “alternative lifestyle” nature of his existence and show that there are lots of different ways to be satisfied in life.
To: Lucinda Trout
From: Samantha Frank
Cc: Faye Figaro
Re: Re: Bad Boy story
I understand your need to protect your friend but, as I said, the story is about Bad Boys and needs to at least touch on the ways that his alternative lifestyle affects your relationship. Also, I really like the bathing in the river idea. Is there any way you could just get him in there quickly, just to get a few shots? Courtney Rosenzweig’s book has a chapter called “The Baddest Boys Are Softies Inside.” Perhaps your segment could touch on that issue. To help you organize your thoughts further I am adding a few more suggestions.
1. Is he much gentler in bed than you would have thought?
2. In spite of his overall rough and tumble demeanor, does he have a secret soft spot that really turns you on (he’s super nice to his mother, he drinks herbal tea)?
3. Does he talk about having kids someday? Does he ever look in your eyes and say, “Honey, I know I seem a little rough around the edges, but nothing would make me happier than settling down and having a family with you”?
Later the next week, Valdette Svoboda-Lipinsky called to make sure I had a ticket to the annual fund-raiser for the Prairie City Recovery Center for Women, of which she was a newly elected board member.
“And if you’ve met anyone whom you’d like to bring,” Valdette said, “you sure can do that.”
“I have met someone,” I said, hoping she’d immediately pass it on to Joel. “I’ll have him check his schedule.”
“We’d love to meet him,” she said. “Is he a special guy?”
Let me digress for a moment and explain something about the mating patterns of Lucinda Trout. They had always been driven by a number of neuroses and proclivities, the saddest and least flattering of which was my chronic embarrassment about the social presentation (i.e., cocktail party banter and ability to discuss independent films) of whomever I happened to be dating. This was due partly to narcissism and insecurity—the combination of an inflated sense of my own social adroitness and a nagging fear that I had some terrible personal trait, like body odor or a tendency to interrupt, that everyone talked about behind my back—and partly a function of my ever-intensifying desire, possibly even need, to date men so unlike myself or anyone I knew that introducing boyfriends to my friends ended up seeming more like show-and-tell than a normal social interaction. Such had been the case with my Last Serious Relationship, of which most of my friends, particularly Elena, had roundly disapproved.
His name was Dave Davenport. He was an airline pilot. No joke. I’d met him on an Up Early assignment about the caloric content of airline food (he’d been featured briefly in the segment as an example of a crew member who packed his own lunches) and upon our falling madly in love he had spent a year flying up from his home base in Atlanta to visit me in New York. He would ride the subway in his uniform and wonder why people were staring at him. When he got disoriented while walking along Broadway he’d say “I need to find my coordinates.” When I’d bring him to parties people would ask him what he did for a living and, when he’d answer, they’d say “No, come on, what do you really do?” A pilot, like a fireman or lighthouse keeper, was so removed from their orbit as to almost be fake. A pilot was like the word “prairie.” It was extreme, foreign, and utterly its own thing. To date Dave was to not just date a guy but to gain access into a world that had absolutely no relevance to my own. It was to find things to talk about other than independent films and whether or not A Perfect Day for Bananafish conveyed more nihilism than Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut. It was to move past the fact that once, during dinner with some friends of mine who were discussing a mutual acquaintance who had gotten tenure, Dave started shaking his head and clucking his tongue because he apparently didn’t know what “tenure” meant and inferred from the word “got” that it was a sexually transmitted disease.
But I actually found tons of knowledge about one thing and virtually none about anything else to be a huge turn-on. I loved Dave because he knew every circuit and fuse of the electrical system of a Boeing 727 and had never heard of Martin Scorsese. I loved Dave because every thing about him was pilotish—his military-style haircut, his pastel golf shirts, even his name: this is Captain Davenport speaking. And because of the time I spent with Dave, I knew quite a lot about flaps and spoilers and light chop and yaw, which is the term for the back-and-forth rocking motion that is caused by opposing aerodynamic forces on the rudder. These were things I’d never know if I’d spent a year with someone who knew about Martin Scorsese and A Perfect Day for Bananafish. I already knew about those things. There seemed little point in going over all of it again.
A similar principle applied with Mason. Despite knowing the meaning of “plethora,” he did not, for instance, know the meaning of “conducive.” He tended to say “orientated” instead of “oriented” and favored sentences with dangling prepositions, such as “where’s my hammer at,” which I was able to overlook out of the sheer novelty of being with a man who actually used a hammer. Mason did not eat sushi or much fish in general because “it was like eating bait.” Mason was extreme.
All of this is to say that “is he a special guy?” was among my least favorite questions in the English language. And because I had not yet figured out a way to finesse a response that neither insulted the guy in question nor expressed the kind of commitment that would elicit a lecture—and they always came—about my “judgment” or my “choices” I said to Valdette the thing I always said to everyone. I said, “It’s fun for now.” Then I changed the subject.
“I should be getting a tape soon of the Up Early segment I did on methamphetamine,” I continued.
“Wonderful,” Valdette said.
“I hope Sue will be pleased with it,” I said. “You just have to remember that I have very little control over how they edit it.”
“So what does your friend do?” she asked.
“He’s . . . an artist.”
“Really? Does he have a gallery?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“Wonderful!”
MASON OWNED ONLY ONE pair of shoes other than his flip-flops and they happened to be shoes that he’d made himself. They were moccasins that he’d sewn out of deer hide and thick thread. They were at least ten years old and curling out at the sides and so worn down that they did not so much look like shoes as hooves. It was these hooves that he wore to the benefit for the Prairie City Recovery Center for Women, which was held in the special events room at the Lasagna Factory restaurant.
All of Prairie City’s left-leaning elite (that’s to say, all of Sue’s friends) were in attendance. The Peter Fonda county commissioner and his wife stood behind a long table serving cocktail wieners and baked ziti from aluminum trays being heated by small propane burners. Since the proceeds from this twenty-dollar-per-ticket event were on behalf of substance abuse treatment, alcohol was not included in the package, which meant that almost everyone was gathered around the Lasagna Factory bar buying their own drinks and smoking cigarettes and, as Mason and I approached, staring at us and looking aghast. I had taken the opportunity to wear my little black cocktail dress and my Cynthia Rowley stiletto heels, which had pointed toes that all but eliminated my ability to walk, therefore requiring me to cling to Mason’s arm and, I realized after it was too late, making me appear dependent upon him and therefore unfeminist, which was as good as a slap in the face of the recovery center, whose motto was EMBRACE, EMPATHIZE, EMPOWER. Sue looked radiant in a floor-length batik dress and a red blazer that she appeared to have thrown on in order to connote
her position as executive director. Teri wore a tuxedo suit. Joel was there, too, wearing his standard all-black ensemble with a red string tie and, oddly, a red AIDS awareness ribbon on the lapel. Valdette wore purple velour leggings, a black velvet jacket with a fur collar, and earrings in the shape of turn-of-the-century telephones. Mason wore jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Everyone was staring at his hoof shoes.
“Those are some earrings, Valdette,” I said.
“Ring ring,” Valdette cooed, holding the tiny dangling receiver to her ear. “I got them on eBay. Couldn’t resist. Introduce us to your friend, Lucinda.”
“This is Mason Clay,” I said, avoiding eye contact with Joel. I noticed Leonard wasn’t there.
“Jason?” Joel said.
“Mason,” Mason mumbled. He extended a hand to Valdette and Joel and then Sue and Teri. He looked directly at none of them.
“Nice to meet you, Jason,” Sue said.
“It’s Mason,” I said.