by Meghan Daum
“Oh sorry!” Sue said.
Sue and Teri were interrupted by the director of the Office of Native American Affairs and Valdette said she had to go check the wiener inventory. This left us alone with Joel.
“Why the AIDS ribbon on this occasion?” I asked.
“I think it’s important to show support for the cause when you make a public appearance,” Joel said. “There’s so much hatred these days.”
Without saying anything, Mason walked away and went to the end of the bar, where he sat with his back turned to everyone.
“What did you say your friend’s name was again?” Joel asked.
The entertainment at the benefit was a lesbian folksinging duo called Estrogen Therapy. Their names, as far as I could make out, were M.J. and Dee Dee. The one who played the guitar and sang lead on most of the songs wore a purple tent dress and huge silver earrings with silver fringe hanging from them like wind chimes. The other one played the tambourine and gazed adoringly at the other one, who prefaced all of her songs with lengthy ruminations about the inspiration behind the songs, most of which dealt with silent flirtations in places like the bank and the library and, to my astonishment, the Hinky Dinky supermarket.
“You know how sometimes you can feel like you know everything about a person, even though you’ve never talked to them,” M.J. (or maybe Dee Dee) said, strumming and checking her tunings as she spoke. “’Cause it’s funny, for years I’ve been buying my groceries at the Hinky Dinky and, well, you folks know about the Hinky Dinky—”
The audience laughed knowingly yet respectfully, unsure whether or not it was okay to titter about dwarves and people with speech impediments. Mason, whom I’d persuaded to sit with me at a table that included Joel and Valdette and a cluster of rough-hewn, chain-smoking women who had graduated from the recovery center, let out a loud “hah.”
“But there’s one woman there,” the singer continued, “who, I don’t know, seems like she’s going someplace. There’s a spark in her eye. You can feel her spirit. And so this song is about not only her but all of us whose spirits come through even when we’re doing things like, you know, weighing a head of lettuce. It’s called ‘Jane at the Register.’”
I thought I knew who she was talking about. There was a clerk at the Hinky Dinky who, other than the Band-Aid on her eyebrow, appeared to have no physical or mental defect and looked like she might one day advance beyond the sideshow ranks of the other employees. Her name was not Jane but Clara. Her name tag said CLARA: AN EMPLOYEE/OWNER FOR 2 YEARS. The “2” was written in with a red Magic Marker. Some of the other employees, like the woman with the forked tongue, had name tags that said AN EMPLOYEE/OWNER FOR 12 YEARS. Clara looked like she was in high school and she looked like she could have been on the field hockey or speech team if she didn’t have to earn extra money working what appeared to be twenty or more hours a week at Hinky Dinky. Though she did sport a Band-Aid on her eyebrow, she was trim and pretty and well groomed and laid off the makeup. Her regulation blue oxford shirt was always tucked into her regulation khaki pants and I had often found myself imagining that she was a good student who, given the proper channels, could probably get a scholarship to a place like Smith, which would be likely to favor someone from Prairie City and give her all sorts of financial assistance. I was so impressed with Clara that I sometimes avoided getting in her line if I was embarrassed about what I was buying. Since I still clung to the Manhattan habit of never buying more than one bag of supermarket items per trip, I’d often go to the Hinky Dinky three days in a row and buy prepackaged deviled eggs every time. I didn’t want Clara to take note of something like that. She was alert. She seemed capable of making an observation and then a judgment. If only she knew that Estrogen Therapy had written a song about her. She could go anywhere from there.
Jane, you’re a flower, don’t let them call you a weed.
Jane, it’s your hour, don’t be afrai-aid to need.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Mason said under his breath, although I think Valdette, who was seated to his right, heard him. Her eyes shifted toward him and then to Joel, whom I caught looking across the table at the cleavage of several of the recovery center graduates. Valdette lit a cigarette. Mason was fidgeting. He whispered to me that he was getting up and going to the bar.
“But we’re closed in,” I said. “If you get up, everyone else will have to get up. You can’t squeeze through.”
“I can’t sit here anymore,” he said.
“You can’t get past all those women,” I said. “You’ll make a scene.”
“Which women?” he asked.
“The detox graduates,” I said.
“You mean the ones that are rode hard and put away wet?” he asked.
“What?”
It’s your special time, now you’ve got to shine.
The planets are aligned, now make them your shri-hi-hine.
“Rode hard and put away wet,” Mason said. “Horse terminology.”
“You can’t get up now.”
“They look like they’ve spent thirty years smoking filterless cigarettes in a tanning bed somewhere in the Arctic,” Mason said. “It won’t kill them to stand up for a second.”
Mason stood up. The whole table looked at him. Then he gestured for everyone on our side of the table to get up and let him out. Since the tables were packed so tightly everyone at the adjacent table had to get up, too. He ducked through the tables and walked out of the room. The singer watched him leave the room and then shook her head and smiled as if to say “there goes one more man who just doesn’t get it.”
After the last tune, which was called “Lady and Her Loom,” the audience broke into thunderous applause and rose from their seats. In an effort to make up for Mason’s conspicuous departure, I clapped my hands madly.
“That was very moving,” I said to Valdette.
“They have a CD, you know,” Valdette told me. “You can buy it at The Grinder.”
“I’ll get it tomorrow,” I said.
We filed back out to the bar. Mason was sitting by himself smoking a cigar.
“We can go now,” I said.
“We don’t have to,” Mason said. “If you want to stay, that’s fine.”
“But you don’t seem to be having a very good time.”
“I’m having a fine time,” he said.
I went to say good-bye to Sue and Teri but Joel caught me by the arm and pulled me aside. My heart began pounding.
“Lucinda,” he said. “I’m sensing a little awkwardness between us tonight.”
There were two ways to go here. I could be straightforward (i.e., empowered) and tell him his behavior in his SUV had been inappropriate and that it was in both of our interests to maintain a strictly professional relationship or I could do the thing I’d always done in this kind of situation and pretend like nothing happened. The choice was clear.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I sense you’re avoiding me,” he said. “You haven’t made eye contact with me all night. And so I just want to say something. Let’s just get this out on the table. I like you as a person. I think you’re really fun and interesting. And as flattered as I am that you seem to have feelings for me, I’m a married man and just don’t want to pursue something like that.”
“What?” I gasped. There was a very real possibility that I would throw up.
“Don’t get defensive,” Joel said. “I know no one likes to hear these things.”
“Uh,” I said. “I don’t think . . . I think you’ve misinterpreted . . . I think you know . . . uh . . .”
“Don’t feel like you have to say anything,” Joel said, suddenly casual. “Hey, I’ve been there.”
By now, the crowd at the Lasagna Factory looked like an aquarium of shoulder-padded blazer-wearing goldfish smoking Virginia Slims 100s. I pushed through them in my stiletto heels, hating at that moment the town of Prairie City more than I’d hated anything in my life, except perhaps Bonnie Crawley whe
n she remarked, after meeting Dave Davenport at the Up Early Christmas party, that I was lucky to find a man who appreciated a more disheveled woman.
When I finally found Mason he was on the other side of the restaurant looking out the window. It was beginning to sleet, so I had to grab his arm as we stepped outside. The blast of cold air alleviated my nausea, except now I felt like I was going to cry.
“Fun time,” Mason said.
“You obviously didn’t have a good time,” I said.
“I had a fine time.”
“Then how come you didn’t talk to anyone?”
“I didn’t feel like it,” he said.
“Well, it doesn’t work like that,” I said. “You have to talk to people!”
“Why would I want to talk to any of those people?”
“Because you’re at a fucking party!”
“Settle down, bootsy,” he said. This was his pet name for me, established only over the past few weeks. I didn’t dislike it.
“You don’t have to keep trying so hard to get them to like you,” Mason continued. “They already seem to like you enough.”
“But you can’t just sit there with your back to everyone,” I said. I was choking back tears. “It’s creepy to people.”
“Sorry, babe,” he said. “It’s that Nam syndrome. I wasn’t there but I have it anyway.”
And I think, right then, I fell in love with him. Or at least felt a wave of affection wash up over my anger as I clung to his arm on the slick sidewalk. The din of the party noise faded into silence as we walked to the car. I’d never tried to get Mason to like me, and yet he liked me more than anyone else in Prairie City did—and ever would.
A FEW DAYS AFTER the recovery center benefit, I had Sue and Teri to my house for dinner. This was to thank them for every thing they had done for me—the lending of the Saab, the automatic entry into Prairie City’s power crowd—as well as show them the tape of the Up Early segment on women and methamphetamine. I was a little worried about what they’d think of the segment, although by Up Early standards it was pretty hard hitting. The evening had been planned for months but Sue and Teri’s schedules were so tight with parties and fund-raisers and their lesbian poker club that by the time they came over there was a dusting of snow on the ground. To accommodate Teri’s vegetarian diet, I had prepared penne with pesto sauce and oven-dried tomatoes, a dish I’d practiced a few weeks earlier but that Mason had insisted upon eating with a hot dog because he couldn’t have a dinner that didn’t include meat. I had purchased the ceramic Italian swirl-style salad bowl from Pier One along with heavy pewter salad servers, white embroidered placemats, and eggplant-colored napkins that matched the sheer eggplant-colored panels that hung over the French doors. I put on Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon and waited for Sue and Teri to arrive. Sue had seen the house once, but that was before it was fixed up—well before the dried roses and sheer eggplant-colored panels. They would be blown away.
They showed up, I took their coats. I poured them each a glass of $11.99 chardonnay.
“Lucinda,” Sue said, “that guy you brought to the benefit looked like the Unabomber. You can’t date him!”
“He was creepy,” Teri said.
I didn’t know Teri all that well. I wanted to like her, although, looking back on things, Mason had been right: I was so interested in making sure people in Prairie City liked me that I barely got a chance to decide whether or not I liked them. But now Teri had said this to me, not really said anything to me but echoed what Sue had said. I did not like it one bit. I supposed Sue had a few more rights in this area. I knew her better. She’d told me she was taking hormone replacement. I’d told her about my lesbian affair in college, which had lasted approximately five days. But telling someone you had had a lesbian affair at Smith is like telling them that you took an introductory English course. It did not give one license to criticize someone’s boyfriend. They obviously didn’t understand the mating patterns of Lucinda Trout. I was furious. But as the seconds ticked by, as I set down a baguette and a tray of olives and goat cheese and grasped for an answer—do I explain my theory of extreme men? Do I tell them that Mason’s IQ was tested at 130 (granted this was in eighth grade and predated years of drug use)? Do I tell them I dumped him?—I realized I was furious at Mason. Because, of course, Sue and Teri were right about him. And had they known about the three kids by three different women they would have been even more right. I shouldn’t have been dating him. Except that I was and except for the incident at the Estrogen Therapy concert and one other time when we’d been at his cabin and I looked at those paintings of anguished, screaming human heads and thought that perhaps I had entered a zone that was fraught with more demons than I could take on, I was happy with Mason. I loved him. Probably, anyway.
“It’s not serious with him,” I said.
“Just a boy toy?” Sue said.
“Fun for now,” I said. “You know. He takes me to see eagles. He brings me flowers. He polished my floors once while I was at the gym.”
“You let him in your house alone?” Teri asked, although she was interrupted by Sue, who said “You go, girl” and Teri stopped talking.
We moved on to other topics—a political scandal involving the city health commissioner, the growing influence of the Prairie City Coalition for Diversity, the nutritional benefits of free-range chicken—and ate the pasta, which they didn’t say much about, nor did they remark on the salad bowl. For decaf and dessert, we went back to the living room to view the Up Early tape.
“Now remember, it’s not as in depth as I would have liked,” I said. “Such are the limits of television.”
“Oh I can’t wait,” said Sue, who was pouring Kahlúa into her coffee. “Because I’d really like to show this to the city council when it comes time to ask for more money.”
I put the tape in. Bonnie Crawley, with her giant head and tiny body, sat in a director’s chair on the Up Early sound stage. The set was designed to look like a loft apartment, with a kitchen area for cooking demonstrations, an overstuffed Victorian sofa for interviews and Bonnie and Samantha’s “rap sessions,” and a “work station” with a desk and a laptop computer that was supposed to look like it was constantly posting wire stories that the hosts would announce throughout the broadcast. In fact, it permanently displayed a screensaver picture of a kitten peering into a fish bowl. Bonnie took a sip from her Up Early coffee mug, opened her enormous mouth, and delivered the introduction I had written.
“Turning to women’s health this morning, Up Early has discovered a shocking trend involving a dangerous new drug affecting thousands of women in, of all places, our nation’s heartland. And it may be coming east. Lifestyle correspondent Lucinda Trout traveled to the land of cornfields and found that there’s a lot more to country living than Sunday picnics and apple pie.”
“The women you interviewed don’t live in the country,” Teri said. She was leaning toward the TV with her elbows on her knees like a baseball manager in a dugout.
“I know,” I said. “It’s really reductive. I don’t have much control over the intros.”
A wide shot of a cornfield appeared on the screen, followed by a dilapidated farmhouse, and then the shadowy figure of one of the women from Sue’s clinic.
“I lost my kids,” the woman said. “I lost my house, my marriage, my car. This drug destroyed me.”
My voice came on.
“The gently rolling plains of America’s heartland may look peaceful, the kind of quiet place where women still get together to sew quilts and compare potato salad recipes, but, more and more, a terrifying plague is gripping these once-innocent people. It’s called methamphetamine.”
Another woman appeared in shadow. She was sitting on the front porch of the Victorian house that functioned as the clinic’s “therapeutic neighborhood.” A title appeared beneath her that read “Jenny, age 20.”
“I have three kids,” Jenny said. “And I got to where I didn’t care nothing about them
. All I cared about was chasing my next fix. My weight went down to 104 pounds. People told me I looked good. I had so much energy. I stayed up all night and cleaned the house. I tweaked so hard I scraped the pattern off the kitchen counter. But I was spending five hundred dollars a week on meth.”
“‘Tweaking’ refers to the compulsive, sometimes frenetic behavior that results from excessive methamphetamine use,” continued my voice as footage of police-confiscated meth appeared on screen, vials of white powder and the small rocks from which the stuff was broken off and snorted like coke. “Some women say they started using meth because it allowed them to do more housework. Others were in it for the weight loss. And still others, like Karen, who didn’t want her real name used, found it helped in not only tearing up the kitchen but tearing up the sheets.”
“We got into the craziest sexual positions,” said Karen, who wasn’t from Sue’s clinic but a friend of the bartender at the Ramada Inn whom I’d tracked down thanks to my intrepid investigative journalism skills. Though she wanted her name changed, she wasn’t in shadow. Gaunt and smoking, we’d filmed her in her trailer home.
“I’d be hanging from the ceiling, tied to the bedpost,” Karen continued. “I’d dress up in a maid’s uniform and scrub the bathroom floor while he, you know . . . Sometimes I’d get distracted and want to keep scrubbing. And I was so thin that it really added to the experience.”
“Oh my God!” Teri said. Sue poured herself another glass of wine.
The segment continued for another minute and forty-five seconds. I interviewed a police officer, a doctor, and another woman, who rolled up her sleeve and showed her track marks from injecting the stuff. There were a few more cornfields, then a shot of me standing in front of a barn holding a microphone.
“Experts say that if the trend continues, meth will claim more and more victims in the Midwest and then make its way east. And although New York might not have the abandoned farmhouses that are the labs of choice in these parts, anyone with access to the simple household products that make up the ingredients of this deadly drug can find the recipe on the Internet and make a small fortune off innocent victims. A scary thought, because, as these women have told us, meth can make you lose a lot more than a few extra pounds. You can lose your life. Back to you in the studio.”