The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  “Great town,” said Valdette.

  “How do you like P.C.?” I asked.

  “It’s nice,” Christine said.

  “Well, you’re lucky you ran into Sue,” I said. “She’s the reason I ended up here. It’s all her fault!”

  “Yeah, she’s really nice,” Christine said.

  “It must be difficult being a woman of color in P.C.,” Valdette said.

  “I haven’t found that,” said Christine.

  “Really!” said Valdette. “How can that be? We’re so white bread. A sea of Wonder bread. Pillsbury Doughboys.”

  Valdette was making swimminglike movements with her arms as she spoke, the sleeves of her dashiki becoming entangled with her wooden bangles. She lit a cigarette.

  “Last Christmas I said to Joel, ‘You’re Jewish, I’m a lapsed Lutheran. Why don’t we just call it even and celebrate Kwanza?’” Valdette said. “But he said, ‘Screw that. I want a tree!’ I said, ‘You can get a tree as long as I ain’t the one putting it up and taking it down.’ That’s why I like menorahs. Much easier to assemble.”

  “I hear ya,” Sue said. “Lucinda, you might be interested in talking to Christine about some of the women in the clinic and their struggles with methamphetamine. She’s an absolutely brilliant caseworker.”

  “Oh really?” I said. “Have you been getting a lot of meth cases?”

  “Usually they’re multiple substance abusers,” she said.

  “Do you find there’s more meth here than in other places?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Because I lived for ten years in New York,” I said. “And no one did meth.”

  Over the last year, I had upgraded myself from an eight-year resident of New York to a ten-year resident, having decided to factor in my summer internships during college.

  Christine said nothing.

  “Yeah, it’s weird,” I continued. “Just wild how common it is here.”

  “It’s pretty common every where.”

  “Crazy,” I said. “Wild.”

  I waited for Christine to say something, but again she just sat there, smiling affably with her mouth closed, cherry-red gloss covering her lips, the kd lang music filling the silence of the immediate area. She was extremely attractive, but in an overly well-kept, almost droidlike way. She exuded an aura that hovered somewhere between Vanessa Williams and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The white cashmere and the lip gloss gave her a Love’s Baby Soft quality. I found it hard to believe she was a drug counselor. Most drug counselors were worn-down social work types, ex-addicts with savior complexes, people with need-to-be-needed syndrome. Christine didn’t appear to need anything, except, from what I could see, a personality. Surely this job was a stepping-stone to a political office or cabinet position, which, if she hung out with this crowd long enough, she’d obtain within six months.

  Joel appeared with a plate of crab cakes.

  “For you, madam,” he said to Christine.

  “Thanks,” Christine said.

  “Can I get you another drink?” he asked. My glass was nearly empty, though he didn’t look in my direction.

  “I’m fine for now,” she said.

  Her Coach purse was lying next to her on the couch. She appeared not to have moved since the party started. Though the women were actually waiting in line to talk to her, the men were standing in huddles and sneaking glances from across the room. It was a pity this wasn’t a pool party.

  In the dining room, Teri was holding court with a group of concerned-looking women, gesticulating wildly, and saying something about soy products. Leonard stood on the periphery of the circle smoking a cigarette. Guests at Sue’s house were supposed to go outside to smoke but Leonard obviously had family privileges. He tapped the ashes into an empty beer bottle and stood there serenely while Teri nattered on.

  “How much more evidence do we need?” I heard her say. “Milk is snake venom. Bovine growth hormone. Recombinant somatotropin. These girls hit puberty at age nine. Then we have unwanted pregnancies up the wazoo. We have incest. We have gang rapes. And Monsanto’s got the feds in its back pocket.”

  “So how’s life on the farm?” Leonard finally said to me.

  “Great!”

  “It’s supposed to be a bad winter,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve got the Sunbird,” I said. “Built Chevy tough, you know.”

  “Isn’t it a Pontiac?”

  “That’s what I mean, then,” I said. “How are the kids?”

  “They’re in the car,” he said.

  “Good move.”

  “I’m not kidding,” he said. “Josephine’s out of town so I have them this weekend. And I told Danielle that if I couldn’t trust her to watch her brother without sneaking out they’d both have to come with me.”

  “And they’re in the car!”

  “They’re doing their homework. It’s an SUV. There’s room.”

  “Does Sue know that?” I asked. “I’m sure they could have come in and done their homework upstairs.”

  “Danielle would have just stolen the booze,” he said.

  “Well, it sounds like you’re on top of the situation.”

  The kd lang had been turned off. West Side Story was on. The Peter Fonda county commissioner was singing “Maria.” Christine was still sitting on the couch, squeezed between Sue and Valdette. It would take me forty-five minutes to get home, not that I was that eager. Mason had all the kids that night. They were planning to watch Terminator 2 after Erin went to bed.

  I said good-bye to Sue, who seemed disappointed that I was leaving so early.

  “Is every thing okay?” she asked.

  “Everything’s great,” I said. “I just have a long drive.”

  “You can spend the night here, you know,” she said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “How’s every thing going on the farm?” she asked. “Why didn’t you bring Mason tonight?”

  “Because I thought it was a girls’ party,” I said. “I mean, a women’s party.”

  Why was it that I could never bring myself to call Sue’s bluff in these kinds of situations? It was obvious that the reason she had told me the party was women-only was that she didn’t want me to bring Mason. So why didn’t I have the spine to confront her with it? If the situation had been reversed—though, barring my hosting of an “all meat-eaters party,” I couldn’t fathom a situation where I could discreetly exclude Teri—Sue would have been the first to take me aside and discuss the issue in a way that was straightforward and self-respectful without being petty. She would have said, Lucinda, I’m sensing a little awkwardness here and I’d like to clear it up. But then again she was the bionic woman, not a mere Lifestyle correspondent.

  “I’m sorry about the confusion,” Sue said. “I should have called you and told you that men were invited.”

  “Mason has the kids tonight anyway,” I said.

  “Good for him,” Sue said. There was no trace of sarcasm in her tone and this somehow annoyed me, which in turn made me feel guilty for being annoyed.

  Outside, where the SUVs lined the gravel driveway like cars in a cemetery, the air felt cooler than it had for weeks. I could hear the singing through the window screens, the frequent spasms of laughter, the buzz of the outdoor floodlight. As I walked to the Sunbird I passed an unfamiliar pickup truck at the end of the row of cars. There were sounds coming from it, a radio playing an old Dire Straits song, a creaking of seats. I turned toward it and saw Danielle, in nothing but a pink bra, engaged in heavy petting with an older-looking guy in the front seat. I could see his baseball cap and beaded choker, his hand sliding under the strap on her shoulder. Danielle’s hair covered most of her face and as I passed by she saw me, lurched up, and caught my eye for a split second before I pretended not to see them. Her eyes were ringed with mascara. The boy looked like he could have been in college, though more likely he was a fifth- or sixth-year senior at Prairie City High. In the floodlight, Danie
lle’s profile looked like those silhouette portraits they take of children at Sears, small nose, long eyelashes, lips red even after the lipstick had smeared off. Her breasts, tawny and sweaty and pinched by under-wire, swelled out of proportion over her rib cage. The bra probably cost more than her shirt and shorts combined. Was she twelve now? Thirteen? How long had it been since I’d seen her that evening in Leonard’s kitchen?

  I looked for Leonard’s SUV, virtually indistinguishable among the others. When I found it, the silver Grand Cherokee with a worn bumper sticker saying MY KID IS A SOCCER STAR AT MILTON ELEMENTARY I looked through the open window at Kyle, who was reading a comic book with a penlight.

  “Whatcha reading?” I said.

  “Batman,” he said.

  “I heard you were doing your homework.”

  “I finished it.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “You’re not missing much in there.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Well, good night,” I said. “Hope your battery holds up. Your dad says hi.”

  IN THE INTERESTS OF PUBLIC RELATIONS, I told everyone, especially the staff of Up Early, that the farm was paradise. This was partly because my one-year series on the quality of life was almost halfway up and I felt I needed an extension and partly because, in a way, the farm was paradise. I’d yanked the blankets off the windows immediately and peeled off the hideous kitchen wallpaper and painted the walls Lake Champlain, a dazzling shade of aqua blue. I’d put the cotton window panels in the windows and had a phone jack installed in my office. Susannah came by to drop off Sebastian and brought tomato plants she’d started in her garden.

  “Don’t let Mason tell you he can’t cook,” she said. “He’s actually a great cook. He makes good meat loaf.”

  Susannah, somewhat unlike Jill and completely unlike Julie, who I didn’t think knew my name, was unwaveringly friendly. She’d given me a Christmas present even before I’d moved in with Mason, a painted ceramic coffee mug she’d made herself. She frequently passed along books by regional writers that she thought would help me with my “Quality of Life” reports, although Faye, when I’d mentioned them, told me she “didn’t need to hear any more ‘hawk, you are my sister’ crap.” Susannah also told me to make sure Mason didn’t let the farm get out of hand.

  “He’ll load the place up with animals and soon you’ll have a petting zoo,” she said. “Ever tried running a classified ad for five goats? I thought selling my 76 Buick was hard.”

  But suddenly, Mason was energized. It was as if a lightning bolt had hit the barn and pierced his psyche. He reshingled the roof and painted the outside of the house and the barn. He started a flower garden of daylilies and petunias. He’d made flyers advertising the horse-boarding operation and plastered them on bulletin boards in the farm co-op and the horse supply outlet, as well as The Grinder and Hinky Dinky. He believed the enterprise should have a name and wanted to call it Crazyhorse Stables or Harvest Moon. When I talked him out of both of those he said he thought Mason and Lucinda Stables sounded nice. I said that sounded like a designer shoe boutique on Columbus Avenue.

  “Huh?” he said.

  We were drinking margaritas in the stock tank. It was a hundred-gallon aluminum horse trough, rusted on the outside and just big enough for the two of us to sit in if we didn’t move around much. Mason had found it among the discarded farm implements in the pasture, hauled it into the yard, and filled it with water. “We have a pool!” he’d said. We could only get in if we slid in at the same time and entwined our bodies around each other’s waists like twins in a cold womb.

  “Everything should have a name,” Mason said. “Boats have names. Ranches have names.”

  “You’re saying we should name the farm?” I asked. I looked at the buckling foundation under the mudroom. I looked at the chimney on the roof and saw that the bricks were coming loose.

  “We should call it South Fork,” he said. “But I guess we’d have to put in some chandeliers.”

  “We need an insurance policy if we’re going to board horses,” I said.

  “Aw, don’t worry about that right now.”

  “If one of them gets loose and damages something, we’re up shit’s creek,” I said. “I didn’t move here to get sued.”

  “Bootsy,” Mason said, “this isn’t New York. Don’t make such a big deal out of every thing.”

  “Then we’ll just call it Shit’s Creek Stables,” I said.

  He reached over the side of the tank to pick his drink up off the ground, sloshing water onto the grass.

  “Shit’s Creek Stables sounds kind of nice, actually,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Uh oh, Antiques Roadshow’s on in five minutes.”

  Cupid, the lone, old horse already in the pasture, watched us as we climbed, naked, from the stock tank and darted into the house. Cars rarely drove down the road and Mason saw fit to walk around naked much of the time, even to feed Cupid or fi ll his tank, though he often wore a cowboy hat for such tasks. From the kitchen window I’d watch his bare buttocks as he walked—always in his flip-flops—from the barn to the pasture and back again. He’d feed Cupid an apple and talk to him as though he were a person.

  “Do animals know when you’re naked?” I asked, knowing it was an idiotic question.

  “They know when you’re high,” Mason said. “But not when you’re naked.”

  * * *

  UP EARLY HAD LIKED THE IDEA of my living on the farm—“it’s like Under the Tuscan Sun without the language barrier,” Samantha had said—but they wanted me to give the impression that I actually lived there alone. Promoting unmarried cohabitation would result in letters from right-winger zealots. Besides, the idea of me alone on the prairie, “pumping your own water” as Faye had written in an e-mail (although she had typed “pimping”) and “maybe milking a cow,” was more enticing to the average Up Early viewer, who, according to market research, was a single woman between twenty-two and forty-five with a bachelor’s degree and a nine-to-five office job. The average viewer watched the show between the hours of 7:00 and 8:00 A.M. and listed marriage, career advancement, and weight loss as her top three goals. Living with a man would alienate this viewer, the show executives said. Faye had even suggested I go on a blind date in Prairie City to show what the dating pool was like in the Midwest.

  “Because we all know you can’t really date bad boys,” she’d said. “And that guy bathing in the river was, you know, extreme.”

  “Faye, I’m living with Mason,” I said. “I can’t go on dates.”

  “Don’t be unprofessional,” she said. I heard a toilet flush. She was calling from her apartment and had taken the phone into the bathroom.

  “Did you just go to the bathroom while talking to me?”

  “It’s called multitasking,” Faye said. “Am I hearing cartoons in the background?”

  “Mason’s daughter is here,” I said.

  “God, how awful. Hold on, I have another call,” she said. Then she hung up.

  ERIN, IN A POKÉMON HAZE, watched videos in Mason’s and my bedroom on the three nights a week that she stayed with us. She was a cute kid in the typical sense, though not a terribly interesting one (at least compared to my notions of children, which came mostly from novels where precocious toddlers said things like “Mommy, does the moon have dreams?”). For all of Julie’s apparent intellectual indifference to her daughter, she didn’t skimp on the toys. Dolls and plastic toy telephones and tiny acrylic Barbie dresses seemed to dribble from the girl’s hands onto the floor like mud sloughing off boots. It wasn’t so much the mess I couldn’t stand—Mason ordered her to throw every thing in a bucket before going to bed—but the way the toys seemed physically connected to her body. Like her favorite plaything of all time, a repugnant, troll-like doll called Diva Starz Nikki, Erin was in perpetual need of some accessory—a handbag, a hairbrush, an AA battery. At any given moment, a piece of something seemed to have just broken off in her hand, fallen between the sofa cushions, permanentl
y snapped out of joint. Such calamities always sent her running to Mason and since he was usually in the barn or the field or someplace she couldn’t access without putting on her shoes (a task she couldn’t yet perform solo) Erin would then proceed directly to my office.

  The poor girl. Had she been just a few years older she might have caught on to the fact that when it came to fixing a toy there was probably no worse place to seek help than my office, particularly when that toy was the Diva Starz Nikki doll. Even in my limited knowledge of children’s playthings, I couldn’t imagine that any object had ever come closer to inducing psychosis than Diva Starz Nikki. Frightening enough when naked, the snap-on dresses activated a computerized voice that said, in a kind of valley speak, things like Silly willy I look like a noodlehead and Today’s word is “glamoricious” (other days the word was “bodalicious,” a term I was powerless to explain to Erin). On Nikki’s shoes were buttons saying “yes” and “no” designed to let children converse with her. Erin pounded the buttons relentlessly, often so hard that the dress would get knocked slightly askew and then stuck and she would be forced to seek assistance.

  “Lucindaaaa!” she’d cry, sliding off the bed and running toward my office. “Diva Starz Nikki stopped talking again.”

  I’d offered to let her type words on the computer in my office. I’d offered to buy her certain children’s books I remembered from my own youth—Where the Wild Things Are, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. She wanted none of it. Only Diva Starz Nikki and Barbie and the Little Mermaid and their attendant books, videos, and clothing accessories.

  “You can’t pound the buttons so hard,” I’d always say. And then, because even after nearly a year in Prairie City I was still not the kind of woman Lyle Lovett would have written a song about, I’d take the doll, pretend to examine it, and while Erin wasn’t looking, put the positive ends of the batteries together so the thing didn’t work.

  “The batteries are dead,” I’d say. “We’ll get new ones tomorrow.”

  IN THE MEANTIME, I needed to do another meditative sort of segment that would introduce the farm. One Saturday afternoon, while Erin was watching The Little Mermaid downstairs and I was slightly hung over from the previous night’s margaritas, I began to type.