The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  “Whatever,” Mason said. “You’re the one who’s complaining about the cold. I could sleep outside in this weather.”

  That night, I could have sworn we were sleeping outside. The wind shrieked and flung itself on the windowpanes like a body thrown against a car hood. Though we lay under four blankets and I wore long underwear and two pairs of socks—Mason always slept naked, even, he said, when he camped in the winter—the chill kept me awake all night. In the morning, even after Mason had turned the space heater back on (he refused to run it at night for fear of starting a fire), I could see my breath. Mason got up to make coffee. When he came back, handing me a mug of coffee that was already lukewarm from the journey up the stairs and into the bedroom, he said we’d have to move downstairs.

  “I can’t have the kids sleeping up here,” he said. “They’ll get sick.”

  “There’s no room!” I whined. Though the truth was that the first floor of the house was more than double the square footage of my apartment in New York.

  “Look, it’s winter,” he said. “It’s what you have to do sometimes. The pioneers did it. They all slept in the same bed until spring. These houses weren’t designed to be used fully all winter.”

  They were designed, I thought, to be used by people who could afford an extra furnace. Like Susannah. Besides, we were renters. We couldn’t have installed a new furnace even if we’d happened to have one sitting around. I had come to understand why the rent was so low—eight hundred dollars a month for a house that would have gone for ten thousand dollars a month had it been situated in, say, Montclair, New Jersey. It was essentially not winterized. It was a summer cottage disguised as the set of a movie about struggling farmers. The shower also leaked through the bathroom floor and into the dining room, mostly because porcelain bathtubs were not designed for showers and therefore sent the water rolling over the curved sides of the tub. The towels I’d stuffed around the claw-foot legs, alternately soggy from the water and stiff from the soap, were rank and permanently discolored. A crack had formed in a wall of my office; every few days it seemed a fraction of an inch longer, a hair wider, as if our time in the house—or at least my residency in my office, where no fewer than twelve pieces of computer and stereo and video equipment were tangled into extension cords leading to a single electrical outlet—was as finite as the route of a plane.

  We moved the bed and the TV into the dining room, the dining-room table into the living room, and my desk, the stereo, and Erin’s toy boxes into the den. My office love seat, which folded out into a short, miserably lumpy bed, was squeezed between the wall and my desk. This was what Erin would sleep on. The boys would sleep on the living-room sofa and on the floor in a sleeping bag. This would be, according to Mason, “fun for them.” The proximity of my desk to the back door, said Mason, would give me “incentive to get outside more often.” He shut the upstairs doors and lined them with blankets and duct tape. He sealed off the door to the attic with a thick sheet of plastic. Of course we still had to go upstairs to use the bathroom, but Mason said I should really try to get more used to peeing outside, which he claimed was “invigorating and ultimately more satisfying” than using modern facilities.

  Dear Miss Trout,

  I am writing to tell you how much I have been enjoying your reports from Prairie City. It certainly sounds like you have found a new life for yourself! I especially enjoyed your report on how to throw a barn dance. My husband and I have a house with a barn in Bridgehampton and we plan to throw a similar event and incorporate some of your ideas. Anyway, kudos!

  Delores and Hal Steingarten

  New York, NY

  Dear Lucinda Trout,

  I used to watch you on Up Early and was always very tickled by your tongue-in-chic reports on things like the platform shoe craze and thong underwear. When they announced you were moving away to the Midwest I thought maybe it was just for a few months but it seems like you’ve been there for a while. I wonder how you like it.

  My fiancé and I are considering buying a house in Rhinebeck, New York. It is 90 minutes from the city and, needless to say, the idea of being that isolated really scares me. I wonder if you might write back to me and tell me how you deal with being so far away from restaurants, Broadway shows, and culture in general. Maybe you just read a lot of good books, who knows? Have you read Clip My Wings and I’ll Grow a New Pair? It’s great. I highly recommend it.

  Your friend and diehard Up Early fan,

  Jennifer Mengers

  Brooklyn, NY

  A week before Christmas, I received, like a crate of supplies dropped on a refugee camp, a package of letters from the Up Early administrative assistant. Some dated as far back as a year earlier. Why had they taken so long to forward them? Spreading them out among the scripts and VHS tapes and Barbies that cluttered my desk, I scanned the letters for praise, quickly turning over anything that imparted words like “condescending” and “hokey.” There were at least five unequivocally positive letters. I’d save them and make sure Faye saw them. A few were critical, one or two downright nasty, and one was from a stalker type who wanted to “grab a coffee and talk transcendentalism next time you are in New York.” All in all, not a bad ratio.

  Most of the letters had been opened and marked STANDARD REPLY SENT by the administrative assistant. But there was one more, at the bottom of the stack, still sealed in the envelope. The return address said Chamomile Press.

  Dear Ms. Trout,

  I have been watching with interest and more than a little inspiration your Quality of Life reports on Up Early. As a Connecticut native who sought her fortune in New York many moons (and dress sizes) ago, I can relate to the serenity of country life and the spiritual benefits of waking up to sounds of birds rather than sirens. As a senior editor at Chamomile Press, a publishing company that specializes in high-resolution glossy coffee-table books, many of which deal with spiritual subjects and their visual counterparts, I wonder if you might be interested in writing a book about your journey on America’s Great Plains.

  My vision for this project centers around the idea of “inspirations from the heartland.” Like most of our books, this would be a series of photographs accompanied by your text. I see it as part diary, part spiritual inquiry.

  If you are interested in pursuing this, please call me at the above number. In the meantime, I hope life in the Midwest is proving peaceful and purifying.

  All best,

  Sarah Vanderhorn

  Senior Editor

  Holy shit! A book deal! A book offer. A potential book deal or, at the very least, interest in a book. I’d always wanted to write a book, I’d just never been able to think of a topic aside from the ramifications of Chinese baby girls on the Upper West Side.

  The letter was dated May 24. Six months ago. Those assholes at Up Early!

  I dialed the number on the Chamomile Press letterhead.

  “Sarah Vanderhorn’s office,” a female voice said.

  “Yes, this is Lucinda Trout calling for Sarah Vanderhorn.”

  “May I ask what this is in reference to?”

  “I am a journalist,” I said. “I am a writer. I am calling in response to a letter she sent me about writing a book.”

  “I’m afraid she’s not in today.”

  “Well, could I leave a message?”

  “Yes, but she’s only in Tuesdays through Thursdays.”

  “So she can call me back on Tuesday?”

  “Except she’s on holiday right now,” said the assistant, who did not have a British accent but seemed to be trying to sound British. “She’s abroad. She won’t be back until after the new year.”

  Perhaps Sarah Vanderhorn was out of the country meeting with an author she had hired to write Inspirations from the Côte d’Azur. Perhaps she’d already contracted Inspirations from the Heartland with some writer living in a farmhouse with two furnaces—and an architect-husband. I left a message and agreed to call back in January.

  Perhaps it is better this w
ay, I told myself. I’ll have plenty of time to organize my Inspirations from the Heartland thoughts before talking with Sarah Vanderhorn. But I had a very good feeling about this. Chamomile Press would solve my problems. I could quit that sell-out, exploita-job at Up Early and become a legitimate author. Plus I’d be rich.

  Newly invigorated, I went to Hinky Dinky and bought a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries for Christmas dinner. It would be just Mason and me—Susannah was taking Sebastian and her husband to her sister’s house, Jill was taking Peter to her mother’s, and Julie, who had requested that we keep Erin for an entire week in January so she could go to Cancún with some women she knew from Effie’s Tavern, was doing whatever it was she usually did with Erin on Christmas. Mason had no real idea what holidays for Julie entailed and wasn’t even sure of her religious background. He’d met Julie’s family only once, at Erin’s christening, where they’d mistaken him for a maintenance man because he’d arrived early and was wandering around the church in shorts and flip-flops.

  At Hinky Dinky I bought an eight-pound ham, a can of pineapple slices, pumpkin pie filling, a bag of potatoes, and five bottles of Fetzer. I got in the checkout line and saw that my cashier was Clara, the one Dee Dee had written the song about, the one whom I fantasized about pulling aside and administering some counseling about college options. As I got closer in line, I noticed that Clara looked different. Her regulation blue shirt was untucked. Her Hinky Dinky apron puffed out in front of her and her face, once even toned and free of acne, was pocked with blemishes.

  “Would you like to use your Hinky Dinky preferred customer card?” she said.

  And then I saw she was pregnant. Her khaki pants, once pleated and pressed, were now at least three sizes bigger and she rested her hands on the backs of her hips while I fumbled through my purse. I gave her my card and when she handed it back to me I saw, on the bloated fourth finger of her left hand, a ring.

  Was she seventeen? Eighteen? Was it a testament to my elitism, my know-it-all sanctimony, my strident, arrogant psuedo-liberal take on the world that I got upset? Or was I simply a run-of-the-mill busybody, a person so bored with her own catastrophes that she sought drama in everyone else’s? I was not so much upset by Clara’s new incarnation but angry, not even angry at her circumstances (and who knows what they were; maybe she wasn’t so bright after all, maybe she’d never made the field hockey team) but angry at her. I watched her swipe the credit card through the machine, her manicured nails offset by the gaudiness of the ring. In my mind, a lecture poured forth, a supercilious, grotesque, utterly uncalled-for sermon. Clara, you stupid, self-sabotaging idiot! You terrorist of your own future, you sloth, you victim! Here you are, the classiest act in Hinky Dinky, the only one who bothers to tuck her shirt in, and you fuck it up! You let him go all the way in the car, you forgo the condom, you forget your birth control, whatever it was. And, then, what’s more, you fuck up on top of the fuckup. You irreverse the reversible. You marry the guy. It’s not so much that you got pregnant, not so much that you’re probably now going to have to get your GED when you could have gone to Prairie City State College not to mention Smith, not so much that you chose to keep the baby rather than put it up for adoption, but that you’re wearing the guy’s Wal-Mart ring. That you’re probably flipping through the bridal magazines during your breaks. That, priding yourself as you do on your strong work ethic, you’re going to work right up until your due date and then probably, Lord knows, not come back for another year and a half, not come back until he’s left you or been laid off from Firestone, not come back until you’re sitting in your basement apartment in the slums of Prairie City watching the House and Garden channel and thinking “well, at least at Hinky Dinky I was an employee/owner. Well, at least my mom can watch the kid for me.” Fuck you, Clara!

  “That comes to $101.63,” said Clara. “Will that be cash or credit?”

  “Credit.”

  That was the entirety of our exchange. A retarded guy carried my bags to the car. I got in, started the ignition, and heard Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do?” for the seventh time that week.

  Heartland inspirations:

  Christmas in the heartland comes wrapped like a present under a grandmother’s tree. It was shopped for before the holiday rush, purchased at leisure before the last-minute shoppers flocked the stores.

  As Gertrude Stein might have said, Christmas in the heartland is more Christmassy than Christmas on any isthmus.

  Three days before Christmas, as I put the finishing touches on my proposal for Inspirations from the Heartland (Sarah Vanderhorn, astonished at its thoroughness, would surely hand me a check before she even finished reading it), Mason returned early from work and said he had a present for me.

  “It’s in the barn,” he said. “It’s a present that has to stay in the barn. At least for now.”

  Sam Shepard was barking at something in one of the horse stalls. Mason made me close my eyes and led me through the yard.

  “Open your eyes,” he said.

  Mason had put it in one of the horse stalls. It stood on spindly legs that looked as if they could hardly bear its weight and its belly swung from side to side and nearly touched the ground. Its eyes were so deeply embedded in folds of fat that I could barely see them. The animal’s most prominent feature was its nostrils, which sat on its nose like a pair of undulating headlights. It was a pig. A giant black pig, no fewer than 150 pounds.

  “Oh my God!”

  “Merry Christmas, bootsy,” Mason said.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “At the humane society,” he said. “It was in the paper. I wanted to get you something special.”

  “The humane society?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Apparently she wandered onto a farm. Some farmer brought her in.”

  A stray pig! Imagine that. Mason didn’t know how old she was or even exactly what kind of pig she was. He figured she was a cross between a Vietnamese potbellied pig and a regular sow.

  “Irresponsible breeding,” Mason said. “But she’ll have a good home here.”

  “What does she eat?” I asked.

  “They were feeding her dog food at the pound,” he said. “But pigs will eat anything. We can give her our leftovers.”

  “She’ll need a lot of them.”

  “We’ll have to think of a name for her,” he said. “Too bad Sam Shepard’s taken.”

  Sam Shepard, in the meantime, was sitting outside the gate of the stall staring at the pig. Just four months old now, he was already seventy-five pounds. I hadn’t yet introduced him to the leash. Lucky, suddenly aware of a new animal presence, bucked in his stall at the end of the barn. I felt like a mother whose children had suddenly grown larger than she. Our menagerie was bulking up around us like sea monkeys sprouting in a jar. Surely we couldn’t just feed the pig leftovers. We hardly ever had leftovers.

  “You can pet her,” Mason said. “Go on inside the stall. You’ll need to spend time with her, get her used to you.”

  I opened the stall and took a step inside. I held my hand to the pig’s nose and her nostrils flared as if I were showing her a moldy sponge. Slowly, I stroked the bristly skin on her back, which was dimpled with folds of fat.

  She let out a sound so shocking, so loud, so deathly that I jerked my hand away and stepped backward so fast that I turned my ankle in the straw and fell to the ground. The pig recoiled in the corner, a move that required her giant, practically spherical body to travel three feet in what had to have been record time for any pig. In doing so, she stepped on my hand, creating a sensation not unlike slamming it in a car door. Worse, she continued making the sound from the corner of the stall, a gruesome moaning sound that was somewhere between a horse whinny and the whistle on the Staten Island Ferry.

  “Oh my God!” I screamed.

  “Calm down,” Mason said. He helped me out of the stall, which is to say he closed the stall door behind me when I got out.

  “She’s mean!”<
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  “No she’s not,” he said. “She just has to get used to you.”

  “She stepped on my hand,” I said.

  “Ah hell,” he said. “I once had a horse step on my face.”

  “Has she had all her shots?”

  “Pigs don’t need shots.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Listen, I know about animals,” he said. “She’s fine.”

  I looked at the pig, poor thing, crouching in the corner. It was hard to see her in the darkness of the stall, a glint of late-afternoon sun came through the small window and cast a square of light on her giant rear. I realized then that she was taking a dump. I had a sudden flashback to the episode with Erin in the bathroom. My whole life revolved around shit.

  “We’d better let her do her thing,” Mason said.

  “She’s been traumatized,” I said. I looked at Mason. His forehead was slightly wrinkled as if he were afraid I didn’t like my present. I noticed he’d swept out the stall and put down a layer of straw before putting her in. He’d obviously planned ahead. At least somewhat. He would have put her under the Christmas tree if he could have. Looking at her, I had no idea how he’d gotten her out of the truck.

  “She’s a great present,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “No biggie, boots.”

  THE KIDS CAME OVER on December twenty-third, tearing open their presents simultaneously and, in Erin’s case, disappointedly.

  “I said I didn’t want Where the Wild Things Are!” Erin whined.

  “Erin!” Mason snapped.

  “I wanted Diva Starz Alexa,” she said.

  Diva Starz Alexa was the latest release from whatever sadistic company manufactured the Diva Starz dolls. Every evening on the news there was a story about how the stores were sold out of them and parents were driving ten hours to Toys R Uses in other cities because they’d heard the thing was in stock.

  “Well, you can’t always get what you want,” Mason said.

  “Mom said I was getting Diva Starz Alexa.”