The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  Bonnie, now on the Victorian sofa, clutched her coffee mug and shook her head. “Thanks for that sobering report, Lucinda,” she said.

  “Scary stuff,” said Samantha.

  “Although I gotta say, I wouldn’t mind weighing 104,” Bonnie said.

  “Wouldn’t we all,” said Samantha.

  Sue’s jaw dropped. “Jesus Christ!” she said.

  On the videotape, Samantha’s face registered chagrin as the director glowered at her. “Not that that’s the way to go, of course,” she added.

  “No, of course not,” Bonnie said.

  “Of course not,” Samantha said. She turned to the camera. “Well, stay tuned because up next we have fitness trainer Jaycee Chung here to show us the latest moves in our favorite new workout, tai-bo! Stay with us!”

  I stopped the tape. Teri wouldn’t look directly at me. Sue slung back the rest of her wine.

  “Well, that’s show biz,” Sue said.

  “That’s really a lot of the reason I moved here,” I said. “To get away from that kind of reporting. Believe me, I plan to handle things much more in depth from now on.”

  “I hear ya,” Sue said.

  “Boy, we gotta go,” said Teri. “It’s late.”

  It was 9:30, the Prairie City equivalent of 12:30 in New York. A terrible feeling was coming over me, a feeling not unlike the one I’d experienced while accidentally kissing Joel in his SUV. It suddenly seemed idiotic to have invited Sue and Teri to dinner, mostly because it seemed idiotic to be in Prairie City in the first place. I was a one-woman army of cultural imperialism—that was a pretty good line, I thought, momentarily distracted from this new wave of misery. It was kind of clever, especially for having consumed so much wine.

  “I know I seem like a one-woman army of cultural imperialism,” I said as I got their coats.

  “What?” said Teri.

  “Oh hush,” said Sue. “We all survived when they built that giant shopping mall on the south edge of town. We can survive you.”

  “Oh yeah.” I laughed, though it was more like panting. “Thanks. And thanks for every thing you’ve done for me, with, you know, the car. And letting me stay with you. And inviting me to all your parties.”

  “You don’t have to thank us,” Sue said. “That’s just what people do.”

  “Right,” I said.

  They bundled up. Sue handed Teri the car keys and they both hugged me good night.

  “You’re okay,” Sue said to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “And you’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s all going to be okay here.”

  Sue said this in a way that managed to sound neither condescending nor new agey, which to me seemed like an impossible feat. She was like the bionic woman in that sense.

  They opened the door, letting in an arc of cold air. The temperature must have dropped 20 degrees since they’d arrived.

  “Oh, not too bad out yet,” Teri said.

  Without bothering to zip up their coats they walked down the porch steps to the Isuzu Trooper on the street. I closed the door behind them and picked the half-eaten baguette off the coffee table. I couldn’t believe I’d said that thing about cultural imperialism. It smacked of such self-importance and was the kind of line that only worked on Faye because she wouldn’t really be listening.

  Through the air vent, I could hear Dawn screaming downstairs. Her boyfriend, who she said had lived with her in the basement apartment for seven years, was now serving a three-year prison sentence for dealing crack. I’d seen Dawn only twice after meeting her during the Up Early porch shoot, once when she’d locked herself out of her apartment and another time when she gave me her keys in case she locked herself out again. She’d been matter-of-fact about her boyfriend, explaining the crack dealing like someone might explain an illegal right turn. I’d told her how sorry I was, which I actually was. She seemed nice enough. She called me “hon.” She thought Toby was “weird” and that the landlord was “a shit” and the house was “a pit,” mostly because the paint was almost entirely flaked off and the ferret urine smell emanated throughout all three apartments. I kept telling her to come up for coffee or a glass of wine whenever she felt like it. She’d never come. Her key ring sat on my kitchen windowsill. It had a plastic decoy that said I’M NOT A BITCH, I’M THE BITCH.

  “I fucking do every thing for you,” Dawn’s voice rose through the vent. It seemed she was on the phone. “I sit here. I wait here. I visit your fucking mother!”

  Then Toby stomped up the staircase outside, causing the dishes in the drying rack to rattle. I heard him unlock his door and slam it shut. A wine cork rolled off the kitchen table to the floor. Metallica started playing upstairs.

  “What am I to you?” Dawn continued. “Just another one of your bitches? A fucking ho? We were supposed to get married!”

  I picked up the phone and dialed Mason’s cell phone number. He was at the cabin with Erin. He answered on the first ring, whispering so as not to wake her.

  “So how was your evening?” he asked. There was so much static I could barely hear him.

  “I wish you were here,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I wish you were here,” I repeated. Then the signal was lost. I called back three times and finally got through, though the static was even worse.

  “I wish I was there, too,” Mason said.

  He started to say something else but the phone disconnected again and I hung up. I went to bed and listened to the end of Dawn’s conversation. She screamed and cursed some more. She said something about Christmas. Then she slammed down the phone and wept.

  MASON HAD AGREED TO BE FILMED for the Bad Boy story as long as I promised to get some footage of his artwork. I hadn’t exactly told him the subject was “bad boys,” just that it was a companion piece to an interview with an author who had written about “transcending your type.”

  In preparation for the bad boy shoot, Mason smoked a joint. It was a raw day in early November. Jeb met us at the cabin, where the river was gray and choppy; 10 degrees cooler and there would have been a glaze of ice on the banks.

  “I’m really sorry that you have to get in the river,” I said.

  “That makes two of us,” Mason said. It occurred to me he’d been at my house nearly every night since we’d met. He hadn’t showered at the truck stop.

  “But it’s gonna be great for the story,” I said. “Remember, you’re doing this for the sake of your art!”

  “Let’s do that part last,” Jeb said, hoisting his camera over his shoulder. “For now, why don’t we get you chopping wood or something.”

  We filmed Mason chopping wood. We filmed him stoking a fire in the woodstove. I had him pretend to mend his hoof shoes, sweep the cabin floor, and pour himself a cup of coffee and sit contemplatively on the deck. To show Mason’s and my togetherness, Jeb filmed us holding hands while hiking around in the woods. To touch on the bad boy aspect, I had Jeb get close-ups of the animal skulls mounted on the walls. The cabin reeked of pot smoke.

  “You wanna move that crib out of the way?” Jeb said.

  I scooted Erin’s portable crib across the floor. Mason finished his third beer and Jeb followed him out of the cabin and filmed him tossing the bottle into a recycling bin overflowing with Leinenkugel bottles.

  “You got some shots of the paintings, right?” Mason said.

  “Oh sure,” said Jeb. He looked at his watch. “Interesting work.”

  A wind was blowing in from the north. If I didn’t get some shots of Mason’s bathing in the river Faye would kill the whole segment.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind doing this?” I asked Mason. “You won’t have to be in there for very long.”

  “Whatever,” he said. I got several towels and a scrub brush out of the car and found Mason’s bottle of Pert Plus in the cabin.

  “Just get in the river, suds up your hair, and use this scrubber on your back,” I said.

  “I don’t use a scrub brush,
” he said.

  “I know, but it looks better on TV,” I said. “I’m sorry. Just . . . it’ll be better that way.”

  Jeb, who had put on a pair of gloves, looked like he felt genuinely sorry for Mason, who was pulling his clothes off and dropping them on the ground. His shirt started to blow away in the wind.

  “I told you you could wear a swimsuit,” I said.

  “I don’t bathe in a swimsuit,” Mason said.

  He was completely naked except for his flip-flops. Still tan except for his white buttocks, he faced Jeb and the camera, holding the shampoo bottle in one hand and the scrub brush in the other.

  “You can turn around,” Jeb said.

  Mason ambled to the riverbank, kicked off his flip-flops, and jumped in. When he resurfaced he let out a loud holler, “Woo-ee!” Sort of like a cowboy, I thought, which was good. Except that he was already turning purple. I pantomimed for him to start shampooing himself. He sudsed himself up and began scrubbing his armpits.

  “Shit,” Jeb said. “I’m out of tape.”

  “What?” I said. “Can you reload really fast? So he doesn’t notice.”

  “He’s gonna notice,” Jeb said. “Unless he’s blind, which he may be by now.”

  Jeb sifted through his camera bag for another tape. Mason was jumping up and down in the water and singing.

  “Don’t rinse your hair out yet!” I yelled.

  “What?”

  “Keep doing what you’re doing. It looks fabulous!”

  Mason was hooting and hollering and shaking his arms around. Even from thirty feet away I swore I could see goose bumps forming on his back like welts. I imagined how perfect it would be if a bald eagle came and landed on a nearby branch as he was washing himself. For that, I would receive an Emmy.

  “Getting a little chilly out here, bootsy!” he yelled.

  “I know,” I yelled. “Hang in there!”

  Jeb was finally reloaded and I continued to mime my directions. Wash hair. Scrub back. Lather up the beard. Rinse.

  “Can we do one more take?” I yelled. “I’m really sorry.”

  After fifteen minutes we let Mason get out. I told him I would treat him to dinner anywhere he wanted and he said he wanted to go to the all-you-can-eat buffet at USA Steaks. He had four helpings of prime rib. I told him I loved him. He said he’d loved me from the moment I’d walked in the door of Effie’s Tavern on our first date.

  “I couldn’t believe you actually showed up,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll leave me one day for a long-distance trucker with a very large tool box. But I’ll have my way with you as long as I can.”

  WHAT WAS IT ABOUT that sparse, windy place that made big steps seem so small? Was it the great distance between things, the way all that land and sky could make a human trajectory seem so tiny, so irrelevant, so much like a blade of grass that could break from its stem, blow in any direction, and then land in another pasture where it lay until the next gust, indistinguishable from the rest of the field, untraceable by even the keenest animal nose, and no worse for the wear? Why was I able to get in deeper with Mason, someone at once so scattered and so inert, than I ever had with anyone else? Even years later, after Mason and I had damaged each other beyond what we thought was possible, I would still see that land as a place I had only just come to, as a space too wide to truly inhabit. Time passed on the plains the way clouds often do; you couldn’t sense the motion but in the time it took to turn your head the formations would be different, something would have blown in and then blown out, something else would have edged in sideways, slipped just above the horizon line and left so many streaks in the sky that it was like one hundred planes had passed over in the time it took to eat your dinner. Change was not so much a tangible entity as it was something you realized had already taken place.

  Winter never really happened that year in Prairie City. Snow fell in January and March, melting, on both occasions, within a week of the first flake. The pastures turned green earlier than expected. The bald eagles flew past Mason’s cabin on their way back to Alaska. I turned thirty. Dawn married her boyfriend in prison. She showed me her ring one day in the basement laundry room. She had purchased it herself at Wal-Mart. He’d be out in a year, she said. Now all this waiting for him actually meant something.

  Something else happened that spring. This is how it didn’t happen.

  One Sunday morning, as Mason and I drank coffee in bed, snuggling and listening to the drip of melting snow outside my window, he turned to me and looked deeply into my eyes.

  “I think we should get a place in the country,” he said. “I’d like nothing better than for us to evenly split the rent of a charming yet modernly outfitted farmstead. I have the financial stability to take on such a responsibility and I hope that we can talk through the various issues of this obviously serious decision and make a smart and well-considered choice.”

  “I agree,” I said, nuzzling my honey around the ear and taking another sip of coffee. “The runaway success of my series for Up Early has given me lots of financial stability as well. And though I’ve never lived with anyone before, I feel confident that we can coexist peacefully under one roof and solve domestic conflicts in a mature and thoughtful way. But let’s give ourselves a few more months to continue talking about it until we’re absolutely sure we’re making the right decision.”

  “I completely agree,” Mason said. Then we made passionate love.

  This was the way it happened.

  One Tuesday afternoon, as Toby’s stereo was blasting upstairs and I was sitting at my desk panicking over the fact that in the course of seven months Up Early had used only three of my “Quality of Life Report” segments, thereby forcing me to live off my rapidly dwindling savings, Mason called me from the grain elevator.

  “Did you see the Dispatch classifieds today?” he asked. “Look on the second page of the rental listings under ‘acreages.’”

  The acreage listings were typically the second thing Mason and I turned to in the Prairie City Daily Dispatch, right after the horoscopes. We had never actually discussed the ramifications of living together, just of living on a farm, presumably together. Over time this talk expanded into the actual act of looking through the classifieds and then, once or twice, going out to an acreage (and this meant any domicile situated on more than one acre of land) and actually looking at it. Most of these turned out to be trailers or houses that appeared to have been designed to look like trailers. But every once in a while there was a real house with a real barn for rent. Since these properties got snatched up as quickly as Manhattan apartments, we were always too late and had never been faced with an actual decision.

  “You see the one I mean?” Mason said.

  The listing read like this: 4 BR on 12 acres, barn w/stable, new water heater, $800/mo.

  Mason called the landlord, came back to my house, and we drove the Sunbird out to the place immediately. The road, which had the uninspired name of County Road F, was gravel but the driveway, marked by a rusty mailbox, was just dirt with tire ruts. It sloped up a gentle incline for about a quarter mile until it reached the house, a large turn-of-the-century farmhouse not so much of the Hallmark Hall of Fame variety but the PBS-documentary-about-struggling-farmers variety. It was three stories, if you counted the attic, and had the small, south-facing windows typical of farmhouses in the region. Large windows, Mason had told me, let in too much cold air, plus they could break during storms. The foundation appeared to have shifted at some point over the years, leaving the porch lopsided. The paint had flaked almost entirely off the clapboard siding and the shingles were sliding off the roof; a few had entangled themselves in an elm tree, one of just a handful of trees on the entire twelve acres.

  The back door opened into a mud room with painted floor-boards and a wall of windows that bore cracks from the strain of the wind. The kitchen walls were covered with dark, old-fashioned wallpaper and glass cupboards that were similarly cracked in places. The living room and dining room w
ere empty other than a ratty sofa and an elaborate TV and stereo system. In the den, which must have been built later as an addition, a king-sized waterbed took up most of the room. Throughout the house, blankets covered the windows. Cumbersome security lights were mounted to the pillars of the porch. Inside the front door, a motion detection system sounded an alarm whenever anyone pulled into the driveway.

  “We had a little trouble with these people,” the landlord said. He looked like an old farmer. He was missing part of a finger. “Real nice couple. But somehow the husband got into some trouble and he’s doing some prison time and the wife couldn’t make the rent payments. We let her slide for six months or so but, you know, sometimes you have to say enough is enough. A shame.”

  Dozens of cars were coming up the driveway to see the house, each one setting off the alarm. It was the only nontrailer or trailer look-alike rental that had been in the paper in weeks. People were milling around in the yard and the barn. I had brought tax returns, bank statements, landlord references from New York, and, just in case, a videotape of my first “Quality of Life Report” segment. The label said Quality of Life Part 1: Choices and Chances: How I Went to the Heartland in Search of My Soul. I heard the back door open as another prospective tenant came inside. I offered to write the landlord a check right then and there. We hadn’t even looked upstairs.

  We got the acreage. Actually, I got the acreage. Mason, who sacrificed half of his paycheck to child support, had no money, no tax returns, no references. My name was on the lease. But Mason was ecstatic about the whole thing because, as he whispered to me while the landlord went to his truck to get a copy of the lease, “I can board horses here and make so much money I can quit the elevator!” The barn, nearly as big as the house, had seven horse stalls, cathedrallike rafters, and a tack room. According to the landlord, there was already a horse in the pasture, named Cupid, whose owner had paid the previous tenants $75 a month, technically bringing the rent down to $725. The landlord also said he’d reshingle the roof and pay for paint if we painted the house ourselves. I pulled back the blanket on the window and peered out onto an endless stretch of gently rolling hills. The sun was beginning to set and the sky was turning violet. A hawk circling the pasture landed on a cottonwood tree far in the distance.