The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  MASON HAD RESERVATIONS about the event, mostly because he couldn’t quite think of anyone to invite. He invited some of the people from Effie’s Tavern, though I was concerned about the tattoo element. Frank would come and maybe Susannah and her husband and Sebastian but other than that we were reliant on the Sue contingent.

  “I don’t see why we have to do this,” Mason said to me one evening as I was making dinner—chicken breasts marinated in ginger and lime juice, served over angel hair pasta in the painted ceramic bowl from Pier One—and drinking our requisite bottle of $5.99 Fetzer.

  “Because it will pay a month’s rent,” I said. “And the electric bill. Consider your participation a way of paying your share.”

  Even after selling the cabin, Mason still hadn’t paid me anything more than the initial five hundred dollars. Though he said he was paying his credit card bills, the collection calls were still coming. He’d made an appointment with a urologist about the vasectomy but said he’d had to cancel it at the last minute because Jill demanded his presence at a science fair at Peter’s school.

  In the middle of dinner, however, we got good news. We had a new horse boarder. “A stud!” Mason announced when he got off the phone with the owner, who, for some reason, had to bring over the horse right that very minute.

  “A stallion,” Mason said again. He was almost salivating. “He’ll have to be kept separate from the other one. That means we can charge more.”

  “How much?” I asked. Possibly the amount of Mason’s entire portion of the rent?

  “We didn’t go into that,” he said.

  “You didn’t go into it!”

  “I didn’t want to scare him off,” Mason said. He went to the refrigerator for another beer. “We need to generate business.”

  The horse was white and caked with mud and had a knotty, matted mane and odd pink circles around his eyes. His hooves were so badly in need of trimming that they had the effect of platform shoes, raising him at least an additional four inches off the ground. Slabs of muscle bulged from his legs. His neck rose from his body like a construction crane. He stood in the driveway, rearing and making that sound horses make—a whinny, I supposed, though that seemed an inadequate description for something that sounded like an eighteen-wheel truck skidding across a road.

  I turned my head for what couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds and when I looked at the horse again he had a new appendage, a beastly trunklike organ, pink with large black spots. It swung out from under him in a pendulumlike motion.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “I think he likes you,” Mason said.

  The horse’s name, evidently, was Lucky.

  “Hope this doesn’t change your feelings about me, bootsy,” Mason said, winking.

  Lucky tried to charge Cupid, who was running in circles in the pasture and crashing into the barbed-wire fence. He tried to charge the cottonwood tree, then the Sunbird. It took both Mason and the owner to get him in the barn. The horse would have a stall and a small corral, barely enough room to take five steps.

  “He’s paying us a hundred dollars a month,” Mason said after the owner had left.

  “That’s it?”

  “Hey, be glad,” he said. “It’ll add to your barn dance story to have a horse actually in the barn.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But is he mean?”

  “Mean? He’s not mean; he’s aggressive,” Mason said. He got out the broom and began sweeping the kitchen floor. “Hell, I’m gonna ride him if that guy brings out a saddle. Or even if he doesn’t bring one.”

  When he finished sweeping the floor, Mason pulled the toaster and the coffeemaker and the blender away from the wall and began scrubbing the counter.

  “I already did that, you know,” I said.

  “You gotta stay on top of it,” Mason said. “Especially given how you are about mice.” We’d had one mouse. It scampered across my feet one afternoon in the summer as we were arguing about whether or not Mason would be able to make conversation if we went to a pool party at Sue’s. I’d screamed and run outside. I’d nearly hyperventilated. The mouse never came back but Mason blamed its appearance on my shoddy housekeeping. We’d ended up going to Sue’s and Mason spent the whole time floating in the pool without speaking to anyone. A few days later I received a note in the mail from Sue. On a piece of clinic stationery, with the slogan EMBRACE, EMPATHIZE, EMPOWER running across the top, she had written

  Dear Lucinda,

  I hope things are going well on the farm. Please know that you always have friends.

  Peace, Sue.

  “Not so long ago I thought you couldn’t possibly throw a party—much less a dance—without spending a fortune on cocktails and caterers, not to mention renting a party space. But here I am on my farm in the Midwest putting the final touches on what promises to be the event of the fall season. I’m hosting a barn dance. And believe it or not, I’ve done it for under three hundred dollars!”

  The evening of the barn dance, I stood before the camera and delivered my intro in a long suede skirt, a suede jacket, and a pair of too-large cowboy boots I’d borrowed from Susannah, who couldn’t come because she’d had to give a lecture on “Greenhouse Effect Prophecies in the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” The skirt, which was not from Banana Republic but from some exclusive designer the stylist had chided me for not knowing about, had been FedExed by an Up Early stylist with explicit orders not to get it dirty or wet. But Faye had instructed me to give at least part of the report standing next to the horse and, ten seconds into the shoot, the nine-hundred-dollar skirt was splattered with mud. Standing next to Lucky had required getting into the corral, where he’d stomped his feet and licked the camera lens and, with the tape rolling, presented all eighteen inches of his male organ and swung it in and out of the frame. Jeb, who had experience filming livestock but couldn’t tolerate the lens licking, moved us to the barn. It was looking almost cathedrallike. I’d decorated the rafters with old-fashioned outdoor Christmas lights I’d ordered from the Restoration Hardware catalog for seventy-five dollars. I’d spent another hundred dollars on a keg of beer. Valdette, in her commitment to accurate media portrayals of the Midwest and her role as wife of the KPCR station manager (who received a tiny end credit on Up Early every time a “Quality of Life Report” segment aired), had generously offered to provide the food. The back of her Volvo station wagon was packed tight with Tupperware trays. She’d also brought two bottles of vodka and several lawn chairs.

  “So here’s the menu,” Valdette said. She’d worn the cow skirt, though the tail had come loose from the belt and was dragging behind her. “Bratwurst, because that’s traditional to the area. Regular hot dogs for people who don’t like bratwurst. Cold cuts and sandwiches. Deviled eggs. Jell-O and Rice Krispies treats for dessert. And just to show that the Midwest isn’t all white bread Christians, matzoh balls!”

  “Oh my goodness,” I said.

  “Joel makes fun of me but I love them,” Valdette said conspiratorially. She took a loaf of white bread out of a Hinky Dinky grocery bag. “I’d love those people in New York to see us on TV square dancing and eating matzoh balls.”

  Frank Fussell’s truck pulled into the driveway. He was blasting sitar music from the tape deck and when he climbed out I saw that he was wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt that said MY KARMA RAN OVER YOUR DOGMA. Clichés had a way of coming late to Prairie City. It was possible that “Where’s the beef?” had not taken hold until the mid-1990s; “Don’t go there,” for its part, had recently become a favorite mantra of Sue’s and she used it on every possible occasion, including when her dogs wandered into the road. Frank stood in front of his truck and stretched his arms to make sure everyone could read his shirt. Then he walked over to Lucky and began whispering in the horse’s ear.

  Respectful of the call time—we needed to start shooting before sundown—everyone showed up at once. Sue and Teri arrived wearing western-style shirts. The Peter Fonda county commissione
r and his wife wore Birkenstocks and Prairie City State College Women’s SOFTBALL sweatshirts. Leonard showed up in a T-shirt that said I DIG BACKYARD FARMER ON PRAIRIE CITY PUBLIC TELEVISION.

  In a caravan of SUVs and the occasional Volvo or Subaru station wagon, it seemed all of Prairie City was coming up the driveway at once, parking on the grass, and gawking at one another as though they recognized the person from some earlier incarnation—such as seventh grade—and couldn’t believe how fat or mangy or just generally old the other had become. Mason had handed out party invitations at Effie’s Tavern and a good portion of the Friday afternoon regulars were now milling around the farm, at least a third in violation of the “no visible tattoos” directive. Though he’d been drinking Leinenkugels at Effie’s Friday afternoon happy hour for almost half his life, Mason was vague on many of their names and he greeted them with generic slaps on the back and, in the case of one biker-looking guy with a long, gray beard and bags under his eyes, a sort of mock stomach punch. Mason had gone to school with this guy, he explained to me.

  By “school,” Mason meant the semester he’d spent smoking pot in the makeshift art studios of Prairie City State College. Since then, more then twenty years had passed. And as the crowd separated into clusters—Frank Fussell and a few would-be disciples by the horse corral, the Effie’s people in the tack room, Sue’s gang in the house, where the women laid Triscuits out on plates and Joel managed to find my Buena Vista Social Club CD and was now adjusting the volume on “Chan Chan”—I had the startling realization that late adolescence, like the smell of wood smoke in Mason’s clothes, would never leave them. This was an intentional condition. And it came not from a lack of maturity or ambition but a lack of need. Though their bodies might have pulled ahead into middle age—and it shocked me that anyone with a gray beard could have gone to school with Mason—they had had the same friends for thirty years. Since the 1960s, their guest lists had remained the same, their in-jokes never changing, their speed dials so permanently fixed they knew no one’s phone number. Even as their configurations shifted over the years, even as couples divorced and remarried and new partners were brought, under the scrutiny that accompanies a sorority rush, into the clique, there was always a sense in these people that the reason they were there was because they’d always been there. When they said “We go way back” they meant it. They meant it in a way that I would probably never be able to mean anything in my life. And that was because in Prairie City “way back” meant way back and every month of every year in between. It meant they never missed a New Year’s Eve, a Fat Tuesday jambalaya party, or, for that matter, the Peter Fonda county commissioner’s annual margarita mix-off in honor of Settler’s Day, a day in early June for which Prairie City Avenue was closed and barbecued ribs and beer were sold on the street and anyone who wore an OPEN ARMS, OPEN MINDS T-shirt got a free corn dog. It meant that even when someone told a wholly unoriginal joke and they threw their heads back and said things like “This gang, they’re too much,” you had to forgive them because this was their gang. This was their town, these were their in-jokes, their backyards and lawn furniture and ice chests and they were the ones who had picked each other out of the various abysses over the years, taking the phone calls late at night when the marriages were dissolving or the kids were sick and driving one another to the airport and the hospital and passing around their favorite books with certain passages highlighted to show how much they cared, how much they understood, how much they believed in what Sue would call “what matters.” And because of all that they had shared, because, unlike me, what mattered was to them a tangible and attainable state of being as opposed to an alien, mockable concept, they had earned the right to say things like “You go, girl.” They could have stood on that fertile soil and recited the recipe for beef stew if they’d wanted to, they could have elected not to say anything relevant or interesting or even entertaining ever again and it would have been fully within their prerogatives. It was a privilege that came from having honored the legacy of their homesteading ancestors, of having stuck it out through miserable weather and late-night talk-show jokes at their expense and the low-grade yet unyielding indignity of the fact that 65 percent of educated American adults were unable to locate their state on a map. They could leave themselves wide open for those jokes, fashion themselves into walking chestnuts, and no one, least of all someone like me, could, with any degree of fair play, fault them. As I checked my makeup in the bathroom mirror, listening to their explosions of laughter downstairs, I understood for the first time that I was a guest on their land. Even now, as they stuffed beers in my fridge and carefully wiped their shoes before coming inside, I was the guest and they were the hosts. And I hadn’t once bothered to wipe my shoes.

  Back in front of the barn, microphone in hand, I resumed my narration.

  “As my friends and neighbors arrive, I imagine what it would have been like more than one hundred years ago during the Homestead Act. This very farm might have been the setting for barn dances held by the pioneers to commemorate the end of harvest, a final celebration before hunkering down for the long winter. In the 1800s, someone would surely have brought out a fiddle. But since it’s the twenty-first century, we have the benefit of a stereo system.”

  Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul” erupted from the tack room. A few feet away, by the horse, Frank Fussell was practicing tai chi moves.

  “If they’re gonna square dance they’d better do it soon,” said Jeb from behind the camera. “We’re losing the light.”

  When I went into the tack room to tell Mason to change the music he had already lit up a joint and was passing it among a circle of Effie’s people.

  “Listen,” I said, “I just need to put on square dancing music for maybe half an hour.”

  Mason was leaned back in the reclining chair that had been left by the previous tenants. His eyes were glazed over. He looked like the proprietor of an opium den.

  “Do what you need to do,” he said.

  I went to the cassette deck and put in the “barn dance” mixed tape that I’d made from some traditional folk music records I’d checked out of the Prairie City Public Library. Jeb had set up extra lights in the barn and when he turned them on it was as if the guests were jolted out of their conversations and reminded, with a certain dread, why they were there. The pressure to perform had suddenly eclipsed the novelty of appearing on television and several people slunk away toward the house. Sue and her gang, however, stood ready. The spirit of volunteerism was alive and well. Valdette took a compact out of her purse and touched up her makeup.

  “Okay, you guys,” I said, already hating the sound of my group-address voice and the seeming unavoidability of the high schoolish “you guys” (because I could not have brought myself to say “folks”). “I really appreciate your willingness to come out here and participate in this segment of New York Up Early. I will let you know when it airs and make sure anyone who wants a videotape gets one.”

  “And what about those of us who want all copies destroyed?” said the Peter Fonda county commissioner. “Folks, we now know that I’ll never be reelected.”

  They laughed. They clapped their hands. They shouted things like “Just don’t let Linda Tripp get ahold of the tape.” Mason was still in the tack room.

  “Now, Lucinda,” the Peter Fonda county commissioner continued, “I heard you mention before that you didn’t exactly know how to square dance. And despite you and your employer’s insistence on portraying us as backward, inbred hicks without indoor plumbing—which is true of only half of us—I feel it’s my duty to tell you that we don’t know how to square dance, either.”

  “Only dirty dance!” someone shouted.

  “Which is why,” the Peter Fonda county commissioner continued, taking another swig of beer, “we’re going to do the funky chicken.”

  I began to say something witty, something that was only partly conceived when I opened my mouth, something I trusted (since they were so generous with their jo
ke appreciation) would pass muster as it left my mouth, but they all broke out in applause and began whistling and cheering and, when I went to the tack room to turn up the music, avoiding looking at Mason as I did so, they stampeded into the barn and began to perform the most dazzling and corny array of dances I’d ever seen. Like auditioners for a local production of Oklahoma!, they stamped their feet and slapped their thighs. With beers in one hand, they twirled one another and bumped butts, drinks spilling onto the dirt floor, faces turning red with exertion. They did the funky chicken and the twist. They broke into small groups and did haphazard macarenas, hokey-pokeys with huge gaps in the circles, old cheerleading routines from their days at Prairie City High. They imitated Irish clog dancers. They grabbed hands and attempted a Rockettes-style kick line, though most of them couldn’t get their legs beyond much more than a 90-degree angle. Joel, who had taken tango lessons at L’Elegance Dance Studio above the P.C. Union and Times Bank on Prairie City Avenue, grabbed me and attempted to propel me down the length of the barn.

  “I thought all New Yorkers knew how to tango,” he whispered in my ear as we glided (though it was more like galloping) past the empty horse stalls to where Lucky, excited by the goings-on and apparently just having relieved himself of several pounds of fecal matter, was craning his massive neck over the gate of his stall.

  “Where’d you get that idea?” I asked. His goateed cheek was pressed hard against mine. His groin dangerously close to the folds of my leather skirt.

  “’Cause you’re all gluttons for punishment,” he said, and then he dipped me. He dipped me so low I could hear my back crack. I could feel the back of my head brush the dirt floor. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a mouse scurry into a stack of alfalfa horse feed.

  And then I was back up. Joel could dance. I had to give him that. And Jeb had gotten the whole thing. From behind the camera he gave me a thumbs-up. Joel stretched my arm out, knelt before me, and kissed my hand.