The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  “Are you happy with him?” she asked.

  “A lot of the time, yes,” I said. “I can’t tell you how much I love the farm. We have animals. If he could just get his act together I think I could be happy.”

  That last line, I knew for sure, had in the past been uttered verbatim by both Susannah and Jill.

  “Because I would say,” said Daphne, “that if he starts doing it again you have to leave him. Period.”

  “Oh I know,” I said, putting out my cigarette. “Totally.”

  THE NEXT DAY, from Daphne’s apartment, I called the office of Sarah Vanderhorn at Chamomile Press for the third time.

  “It’s just that I happen to be in town,” I told the assistant, “and I thought if she had a moment I might stop by.”

  “She is just now back from holiday,” said the assistant, “and she’s a bit knackered.”

  “I know that,” I said. “It’s just that I have a very hectic schedule. I am a journalist and she had written me, you see, about possibly writing a book. And I just happen to have written up some notes that she might want to, you know, take a look at.”

  In fact, I had written up more than just notes. I had compiled a twelve-page proposal, tentatively entitled Inspirations from the Heartland: A Prairie Meditation, wherein, in anticipation of accompanying Ansel Adams–style photographs, I had categorized the passages according to season. The first section, which I’d given the minimalist heading “Spring,” began with this:

  Sipping Coffee on a Suddenly Snowless Morning

  Open your eyes. It’s just the thing to do. It is now that the calves are born, now that the grass grows long and green, now that the snow, which, just yesterday, made this place look like the tundra, seeps into the ground for safekeeping.

  Open your eyes. What do you see? Space. Space to run and keep running.

  “Sarah does not accept unsolicited material,” the assistant said.

  “It’s not unsolicited.”

  “Well, why don’t you put in the post?” she said. “And I’ll tell her you rang. Again.”

  The Guy in the Clouds

  It was dark when I landed at Prairie City Municipal Airport. With so few lights from the town and the thick layer of snow that obscured even the rooftops and the few trees, it felt like we were descending into nothingness. The plane was late by more than three hours and yet the friends and families waiting by the gate registered no irritation. Children, allowed to stay up past their bedtime, ran to fathers who stopped in their tracks, dropped their bags, and scooped them high into the air. This slowed the deplaning process considerably. I brushed past the crowd in the terminal. My car was in the long-term parking lot. Mason, who had the kids that night, was not picking me up.

  It took nearly twenty minutes to knock the snow off the Sunbird and defrost the windows. The roads were glazed with ice and I nearly skidded out on the ramp to Highway 36, where I remained in the far right lane, going twenty miles an hour as the occasional four-wheel-drive truck or SUV passed me, kicking dirt and snow onto my windshield. The access road to County Road F was barely plowed and I inched forward as my rear tires slid to the left and right. There was a small incline at the corner where I needed to turn and it was only at the last second, as I gunned the engine to get a running start up the hill, that I saw a snowbank on the left side of the road. The Sunbird plowed into it head-on, sending the back of the car sliding down into the gulch next to the shoulder. I hit the brakes, the cardinal sin of skidding, and the whole car slid sideways off the road into yet another snowbank.

  Fuck, I said. I was shaking. The windows were fogging up. I rammed down the accelerator and spun the wheels until I could smell the rubber burning. Finally I put the car in neutral and climbed out. Other than the glare of my high beams, there was no light on the road; the moon was new and hidden by a layer of clouds. I walked around to the back of the car and attempted to kick the snow away, but I was wearing my lizard-skin mules—after the humiliating moment in Faye’s office, I’d sworn off the snow boots for the duration of my trip—and now my feet were wet and freezing and I could barely stand. I got back in the car and attempted once more to drive it out of the ditch. It was a hopeless case. I took out my cell phone and called Mason. The line was busy.

  It made no sense that the line was busy. It was 10:00 at night. There was no reason for him to be on the phone. He would, in fact, be in bed. I waited a few minutes and tried again. Perhaps there was something wrong with the telephone lines. The house was about five miles up the road. I considered getting my boots out of my suitcase and attempting to walk it. But the wind was blowing hard from the north. I would be fighting it all the way. I called information and asked for a tow truck company.

  “Where are you?” the tow truck dispatcher said.

  “Country Road F,” I said. “About ten miles north of Prairie City.”

  “That far out of town and this time of night,” the dispatcher said, “will run you about two hundred dollars. And cash only.”

  I had exactly seventeen dollars. I sat in the Sunbird, with the engine idling and Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do?” playing on the radio, for another ten minutes hoping that someone with a truck would drive by and pull me out. When no one came I decided to call Sue and Teri’s house. They lived in the country. Perhaps they knew how to handle this kind of thing.

  “That’s rural life for you, Little Ms. Pioneer!” Sue said. “Let me make some calls. We’ll get you out of this.”

  I sat in the car for another forty-five minutes while 96.9 “The Edge” played Grand Funk Railroad’s “American Band,” George Thoroughgood’s version of “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” Gary Wright’s “Love Is Alive,” Heart’s “Magic Man,” The Beatles’ “Revolution,” and, astonishingly, replayed Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do?” (though it’s possible I’d changed stations by then). When Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On” came on I was very close to tears. It was then that I saw a pair of headlights coming up from behind. An SUV pulled past me and then turned around so its backside was facing the ditch. In my headlights I saw the bumper sticker: MY KID IS A SOCCER STAR AT MILTON ELEMENTARY.

  Leonard Running Feather, bundled in a parka and a hat and thick gloves, jumped out and ran down the slope to my car. I rolled down the window.

  “I’ve got a winch,” he said. The wind had become worse. I could barely hear him. “I’m going to drive backward toward you a little bit so I can get close enough to put the chain on. It’s in four-wheel drive so I won’t slide. Don’t be scared.”

  He got back in the SUV and inched it down the slope. Then he got out and attached a chain to the front of the Sunbird.

  “Steer yourself out!” Leonard yelled. “Keep it in neutral and steer!”

  I thought for sure the whole hood of the Sunbird would break off. The sound was that of some medieval torture session, a body being split in two. After several minutes of awful crunching and creaking and the sound of the chain rattling against the bottom of the Sunbird, Leonard dislodged me from the snow and pulled me back onto the road. I was sure the car was ruined. He jumped out of the SUV again, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “I’ll drive ahead of you to your house,” he said. “Stay in my tracks.”

  We drove gingerly up County Road F. I kept my eyes glued on the bumper sticker so as not to stray from his tire tracks. When we turned into the long driveway to the farm I almost got stuck again and Leonard stopped and waited while I negotiated the ice. The house was dark. I got out of the car and, in my mules, hobbled across the driveway to the SUV. Leonard gestured for me to climb in the passenger’s side.

  “Oh my God, thank you,” I said.

  “You might want to consider getting four-wheel drive,” he said, stamping a cigarette out in the ashtray. “I mean, even Sue’s Saab would have been better than that thing.”

  “I know.”

  “Is Mason not home?” he asked.

  “There’s something wrong with the phone.
”

  Leonard looked down at my shoes. My ankles were turning blue.

  “You’re not exactly dressed for the weather,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. I felt like I was about to cry. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

  “No big deal,” he said. “I didn’t have the kids tonight anyway. Next time I’ll bring the garbage truck.”

  “I can’t believe you came all this way,” I said.

  “Oh hell, it’s nothing,” he said. “The Sopranos was just ending anyway.”

  Leonard had the SUV in neutral and he was staring at the snow-covered barn. He seemed in no hurry to leave and although I knew the kids were sleeping in the house I asked him if he wanted to come in for a cup of tea. Not inviting him in seemed unthinkably rude. Besides, he wouldn’t say yes.

  “I’d love some tea,” Leonard said.

  Inside the house, Erin was sleeping in the den and the boys were camped out in the living room. Next to Erin, the telephone receiver was not only off the hook but smeared with peanut butter. I hung it back up and tiptoed into the kitchen where Leonard was standing in the dark.

  “We have to whisper,” I said. “I’ll heat up the water in the microwave. The kettle would wake up the kids.”

  “Why aren’t they in their rooms?” he asked.

  “We can’t heat the upstairs.”

  Instead of turning on the ceiling light, I lit a candle that was sitting on the kitchen table. It was a slablike, peach-scented aromatherapy candle I’d purchased at Pier One. The effect was one Leonard might have construed as romantic. Instead he seemed alarmed.

  “You’re not using the second floor?” he whispered.

  “Not for a while.”

  “Doesn’t Mason work at the elevator on Highway 36?”

  “Yes, but propane is so expensive this year.”

  “Still,” Leonard said, “you’d think he’d be able to heat his house.”

  The microwave timer started to beep and I jumped up to turn it off. I stuck a tea bag in the mug and handed it to Leonard.

  “Do you want some milk in it?” I asked.

  “If you have any.”

  I opened the refrigerator, the light illuminated Leonard’s figure in the kitchen chair. He hadn’t taken his coat off. I realized I hadn’t, either. I opened the milk container and sniffed it. Even from his seat at the table, Leonard could smell that it was spoiled.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “that you seem to be having such a hard time.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Seems like you were doing a whole lot better when you first showed up around here,” Leonard said, a little too loudly.

  “We have to whisper,” I whispered.

  “Have you seen Sue lately?” he asked.

  “I see her from time to time,” I said. “Why?”

  “Just wondering,” he said. “I should probably get going. Doesn’t seem like now is the time for visitors.”

  “Take your tea with you,” I said. “You can keep that mug.”

  It was an Up Early mug, the kind that Bonnie and Samantha sipped from on the air.

  “A brush with stardom,” Leonard said, examining the mug.

  He put his hat and gloves back on and trundled out the door into the snow.

  “Thanks again for helping me,” I said. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “Take care of yourself, Lucinda,” I heard Leonard say through the wind. “I mean it.”

  When I slid into bed next to Mason he stirred for a moment and rolled over with his back facing me. I stared at the ceiling for an hour, reeling with shame over what Leonard had seen of my life. When I finally slept, I dreamed of a plane crashing in a noiseless, slow descent into the pastures surrounding Prairie City Municipal. Just before impact, I was awakened by the violent jerk of Mason’s leg.

  IT HAD COME BACK. Like a tumor. I’d suspected it for weeks, but couldn’t bring myself to ask. In the mornings, as the house tried to thaw out from the frozen night, I would hear the door to the tack room in the barn open and shut. Even inside with the windows closed I could hear that far-off rattle, like a child coughing in a distant room. He was like clockwork. It was a five-minute procedure; once first thing in the morning, then again before he took off. In the evenings, he’d steal into the barn four or five times. It was this relentlessness that I hung on to. Sitting at my desk, looking at the phone that now rang two, maybe three times a week, I concocted reasons to ignore the problem. I’d tell myself he couldn’t possibly be smoking the stuff every time, with every single trip, so therefore maybe he wasn’t doing it at all. In bed at night, he twitched. His leg would jerk spontaneously while I woke in and out of dreams about children left alone by the side of the road, puppies starving in the barn, planes plummeting through clouds to a ground that wasn’t there. I dreamed of Elena’s calling me to say she knew, of Faye Figaro’s telling me my series was canceled, that New Yorkers no longer cared about the “Quality of Life Report” or any other report from someone whom people used to know—by face if not always by name—but had now, through her own volition, through her own indolence and cop-outs, been entirely forgotten.

  Prairie City had been graced with mild winters for four years running, a welcome side effect of global warming that caused its citizens, whose well-cushioned bodies and closetfuls of down parkas inured them to the bracing elements, to don shorts everytime the temperature rose above 35. During my first winter in Prairie City, in that twelve-hundred-square-foot showplace whose utilities were paid by the landlord, only a few inches of snow fell on the sidewalk and, even then, a man came to shovel it at no expense. But the next year, the year on the farm, winter was like an alien force. Even the stoic Prairie Cityites complained about the cold and ice, the city’s negligent plowing system, the outrageous cost of heating oil. They ran into gas stations to keep warm and buy Powerball tickets as they filled their SUVs. They talked about not seeing a winter this bad since the 1970s, that uncooked time before the greenhouse effect, that time that was now so long ago, though the radio still kept all the hits in heavy rotation. In January, ten feet of snow fell on Prairie City over a three-week period. Every few days, the temperature would warm to just above freezing, generate an inch or two of slush, and freeze hard again, turning the entire prairie into an ice rink.

  The farm was barely visible. Frost covered every window; there was no seeing outside. Snowdrifts the size of buildings accumulated in the pasture. White lumps emerged in the yard where bushes had been. Cupid, barred from the barn by Lucky’s unwieldy machismo, grew ice balls on his hooves. The barn, white except for its slate gray roof, now looked like an optical illusion. Only with the doors open could you be sure a barn was there. Somehow the animals inside survived. The dog and cat bedded down together in the straw. The pig slept the days away. The swallows crammed five and six to a nest. The horse stood and waited it out.

  Only Mason came and went with any regularity. Even when the wind pushed in at fifty-five miles per hour, screaming through the night like a beast and straining the windowpanes so hard that I kept every inch of skin under the blankets in case glass shattered over the bed, Mason rose before dawn, put on long johns and a fur-lined parka Jill had given him years ago, and went outside. He took the long walk to retrieve the Prairie City Daily Dispatch at the foot of the driveway. He went to the barn and fed the animals. He broke the frozen water in Cupid’s trough and then, as I made coffee and toast and the pink morning light came in from the east, he went in the tack room and got high. He was meticulous about it; the time he took to do it was the time it took to make a piece of toast. By 6:15 he was warming up the truck and back in the house, climbing out of his boots, pouring himself a cup of coffee, and unfolding the newspaper.

  I clung to his normal moments, the relevant comments he made about the headlines, the times he elected to say “I love you” before lea
ving. And I avoided the tack room. Everytime I went to the barn to check the animals and break the trough water, I told myself to go inside. Just duck your head in the door and sniff, I told myself. Open a few drawers. Look behind the paintings stacked against the wall. But it was always too cold for that, too cold or too windy or I needed to get to the gym. There was always another day for that.

  Who knows what made me do it the day I finally did it. It seemed an act of self-sabotage, given that with the wind chill the air was 45 degrees below zero and the hammer, after I’d slammed it against the layer of ice in Lucky’s trough, shrank beneath a glaze of ice within seconds. Perhaps if I had picked a different day I would have made a different discovery. Perhaps if it had been any season other than winter, if Mason hadn’t had to tow the Sunbird out of a snowbank in the driveway three times in the past month, I would have done something about what I did indeed discover. But then again, it wasn’t a matter of discovering. It was a matter of confirming.

  I put Sam Shepard in his stall and opened the door of the tack room. What did it mean that Mason hadn’t bothered to lock it? Was it sheer cockiness or just confidence in my powers of denial? The room smelled only like cigar smoke and the regular mustiness of the barn. Mason’s demonic heads stared down from the canvases. The books were toppling off the shelves: Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, more Edward Abbey. A small wooden box where I’d seen him keep pot was sitting on the shelf. I took off my gloves and opened it. It was empty. I looked behind the books, behind cardboard boxes of bootlegged tapes of Grateful Dead concerts. There was nothing but cobwebs, hawk feathers, the occasional bird’s nest he’d found in pieces and reassembled with glue. On an end table against the wall sat a framed photograph of Mason and me. It had been taken haphazardly by Sebastian a few months earlier after he’d received a camera for his birthday. It wasn’t a particularly great picture but we looked happy in it—Mason had his hands around my waist and I was laughing about something. It was one of the few photos we had of both of us and Mason had bought a frame at the drugstore and slid the snapshot inside. When I picked it up to look at it more closely I noticed, sitting behind it, a plastic film canister. The canister rattled when I shook it. My fingers were going numb from the cold but I managed to pry the top off. Inside was a small rock, yellowish white. I poured it into my palm. It was instantly familiar. As a picture, a piece of granite in a palm, scrutinized like a mug shot, I’d seen it before. And now it was in the palm of my hand.