The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  “Dawn?” I said.

  “How do you know my name?” she asked.

  “I used to live upstairs from you.”

  “When?”

  “About a year ago.”

  She smoothed out her hair and studied me from across the cell. Her jaw dropped slightly.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Melinda, right?”

  “Lucinda.”

  “Lucinda!” she said. “Oh honey, I’m sorry I forgot your name.”

  “What are you in for?” I asked with a smirk, though she of course took me literally. She looked at the wall and shook her head.

  “My husband, of course, got loaded last night.”

  “He’s out of prison?”

  “Oh he got out awhile ago,” she said. “He was clean. He stayed clean for six months. And then, boom, he’s back at it. Fucking crack. It makes him crazy.”

  She had a bruise on her arm, a big green blotch under her wrist.

  “Did he hit you?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” she said. “He wouldn’t dare.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I told him last week that he if got loaded again I’d slash him from asshole to elbow, that’s what happened. And he went and got loaded. And of course he’s selling it to the whole goddamn town, which is what got him locked up before. So I did it. I took a kitchen knife and carved one in him. The shit. He didn’t feel a thing.”

  I stared at her. I didn’t know whether to admire her or fear her. I recalled suddenly the image of her key chain on my kitchen table: I’M NOT A BITCH, I’M THE BITCH.

  “The people upstairs called the cops,” she said. “The people in the apartment where you lived. There have been at least four different people moving in and out since you left. The rent’s so expensive.”

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Honey,” she said, “I don’t need a lawyer. That asshole was so fucked up they’re not going to do anything to me. Besides, a woman in this town wouldn’t be prosecuted on an abuse charge if she cut a guy’s balls off.”

  She was certainly familiar with the Prairie City legal system. I would have liked to hear her contributions to a Coalition of Women meeting.

  “Don’t let them give you coffee,” Dawn said. “It’ll only make you have to pee.”

  “Do you want to know why I’m here?” I asked.

  “You probably got a DWI,” she said. “Someone like you, that’s the only reason you’d wind up here.”

  “Guess again,” I said. And then, even though she didn’t ask, I told Dawn the whole story. I told her about Mason’s three kids by three different women. I told her about Julie’s yelling at me about the pig remark. I told her about the farm and the meth and Mason’s paintings and Lucky the horse and how I had neglected to properly secure the corral gate and how I had been so sure that Mason was clean that I’d invited the sheriff in to look at the paintings—“because they’re actually really good, because he’s actually quite talented, a member of the New York art community even said so.” I explained how the maniac Julie had broken into the tack room and left the meth on the table and how she had left a note that was not only unoriginal and overdramatic but also misspelled—“because that’s how stupid she is and she takes his money and buys the kid Barbies for Christ’s sake.” And when I got to the end, adding that I had just, that very day, found out I’d been fired from my job, though now it seemed like weeks ago, Dawn looked at me and rolled her eyes. I waited for her to tell me to get off the farm. I waited for her to say, like Daphne had said that night at Bar Barella, that I had to leave him. Period.

  “Man,” Dawn said. “That sucks that you got fired.”

  One Year Later

  To: Lucinda Trout

  From: Sarah Vanderhorn

  Re: Chamomile Press submission

  First of all, mea culpa for taking so long to respond to your delightful book proposal Inspirations from the Heartland: A Prairie Meditation. Between my travel schedule and a slew of manuscripts the months just got away from me. Eighteen months to be precise, ooh a million apologies! At any rate, I’m afraid I signed another writer to the heartland book before I had a chance to read your manuscript. However, there has been some interest in our office in a book on the topic of Almost Amish. It seems there’s a national trend toward “plain” living as exemplified through sobriety, celibacy (for singles), and lack of reliance on technology. As someone who has been living the simple life for a while now, perhaps this is a subject you’re familiar with. I envision this volume including high-resolution photos of sparsely furnished homes with Shaker furniture (I know the Shakers are different from the Amish, but you know what I mean). Let me know if you’d like to kick around some ideas. In the meantime, happy simplicity!

  To: Sarah Vanderhorn

  From: Lucinda Trout

  Re: Re: Chamomile Press submission

  Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

  True emancipation on the prairie is simply not possible without four-wheel drive. If it hadn’t been for Sue, who sold me her Isuzu Trooper when she decided to buy a Subaru Outback, I would have been forced to leave the farm. I know that sounds reductive, but sometimes you have to reduce things to their bare essentials—and in this case it was the winter conditions of County Road F—to fully understand what you need to survive. I needed better traction. Mason needed a spiritual guide.

  In the weeks following my arrest, Mason, who hadn’t been charged with drug possession given the odd circumstances of the break-in, took his few belongings out of the house and moved back to his cabin, which was really Frank Fussell’s cabin, and embarked on a meditational journey that commenced with a complete rereading of the works of Emerson and Thoreau and concluded, several months later, with the inclusion of two of his paintings in a group show for local artists at the gallery adjacent to the Heidi Vidlak Memorial Film Theater. In a write-up in the Prairie City Daily Dispatch, Loni Heibel-Budicek (who occasionally doubled as an art critic) called the work “weird and slightly disturbed but also fun, mostly due to its quirky devotion to the local landscape.” Mason cut out the review and nailed it to the door of the cabin. “This way people will know what they’re getting into,” he said.

  I spent most of my days alone, talking on the phone with Daphne and Elena and trying to convince them to move to Prairie City and start an artists’ colony (or even a publicity firm—I was open to anything) at the farm. I’d tried to be angry at Mason for what he had done, but in the end, I found it hard to be mad. At dusk, the light hit the tall grass in the west pasture with such a breathtaking yellow glow that I could only feel gratitude toward anyone who could have brought me to such a place. Though Mason had cried when he’d moved out, he’d also said he felt like he was leaving a movie set. “It’s just you and the pig and Sam Shepard now,” he’d told me. “But I’ll still mow your lawn.”

  I learned to mow the lawn myself, though. Teri gave me her tractor mower when she decided to hire a professional landscaper and, when it broke, Leonard came over to fix it. As much as I cringed at the knowledge that the Coalition of Women had, to a large extent, been right all along about Mason, I was so grateful for their help that when it came my turn to select the book club title I chose Idabelle Sugar’s Ain’t No Mountain Too Steep for Me and My Girl Posse and dedicated it to “the friendship and sisterhood shown to me by all of you” (though I did not read it). I hosted all-women dinner parties and served tofu steaks from the health-food store. I let Teri practice acupuncture on me after I twisted my ankle when climbing out of the Isuzu Trooper. In the end, none of that was really necessary. Everyone understood that everyone screwed up once in a while. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Sue said to me. “I once dated a woman who’d voted for Barry Goldwater. Talk about lowering your standards!”

  I took it upon myself to learn how to be alone on the farm. I cleaned out the pig’s stall and kept track of the propane level and
knocked the cobwebs out of the barn rafters. Though I sent the horses packing when I asked Mason to leave, a trough of frozen water no longer seemed beyond the realm of my coping ability. I also got a proper job. I taught journalism at Prairie City State College. I sent students out to cover church fairs and antique shows. I taught them how to interview people so that they forgot they were being interviewed. “Tell them your problems so they’ll tell you theirs,” I said. “Confess your worst sin. Make it up.” Even at nineteen, they had sins. They didn’t need to invent them. A few told me they wanted to go to New York. They wanted to live in the Village. They wanted to go to cafés and foreign movies and date artists. I told them to go immediately, to go before they made a mistake that would keep them here forever. Most never went. They stayed. Like the westbound homesteaders a hundred years earlier, the ease of staying was matched only by the difficulty of leaving. The wind blew too hard to take a step forward. A person couldn’t make it to age twenty without succumbing to prairie madness. I was afflicted now, too. The fever of complacency lulled me to sleep at night in that big, creaking house. The sheer size of the place still felt like a marvel. I was addicted to all the space. There would be no going back to my old life.

  The next spring, a colt was born, the result of Lucky’s afternoon excursion on that day I got hauled away. Mason paid the neighbor’s veterinary bills. Like a dutiful Lamaze coach, he visited the mare as she swelled like a wound. He wanted to adopt the colt when it got old enough and keep it at my farm. It had been so long since he’d had one, he said. He felt it was time for another, plus Erin wanted a horse and I, if I had any sense, would want one, too.

  I was hesitant about the colt idea, but all summer long, as the tornado warnings came in and out like the afternoons themselves, I would drive down the road on the way to town to see the little animal tearing around his pasture like a wild thing. He fell so many times you’d have thought he’d damage himself forever. But, always, he got up like nothing had happened. In all that space, under all that sky, there was no form of recklessness the homesteaders hadn’t already tried. There was no mess that the wind couldn’t blow away.

  Acknowledgments

  For their comments, moral support, inspiration, and professionalism, the author wishes to acknowledge the following: Lara Shapiro, Sara Eckel, Alison Manheim, Thomas Beller, Ron Orth, Karen Murphy, Svetlana Katz, and the Corporation of Yaddo. Special thanks to Tina Bennet for her incomparable dedication to this novel and to Carole DeSanti for her extraordinary editorial wisdom and her appreciation of old farmhouses.

  An Interview with Meghan Daum

  The parallel between your life and Lucinda’s is unmistakable. You once worked for a fashion magazine and then moved to Nebraska. At what stage in your move did the novel idea come into play? How much of your real-life experience influenced the book?

  I’d been in Nebraska for well over a year before I started the novel. I remember the day I actually began writing. There were several inches of snow on the ground and it was the coldest winter anyone had seen in years. I’d been thinking a lot about the phenomenon called prairie madness, which was a kind mental illness that afflicted many of the early settlers to the region, particularly those who came from the east during the Homestead Act of 1863. It was believed that the combination of isolation on the plains and moreover, the incessant shrieking wind literally drove people insane. It seemed to affect the women in particular, many of whom had come from the east, usually at the behest of their husbands, and were used to more refined conditions and larger communities. The deal with the Homestead Act was that families were given 160-acre plots of land, which they could own outright if they managed to farm it and live on it for five years. The act had been sold to easterners as a quality of life issue. There are propaganda posters from that time that show pictures of a barren patch of land magically transforming into a thriving farm with a well-appointed house and picket fence. Of course it wasn’t nearly that simple (this terrain proved more brutal than they ever could have imagined, and let’s not forget that the Native Americans didn’t exactly see this land as up for grabs) and many of the homesteaders just gave up and went home.

  Since I was living at the time in a very small house out in the country (literally a little house on the prairie) I started thinking about how prairie madness might affect a contemporary person. It seemed to me that the notion of “quality of life” continues to be tied up in the concept of the journey west. So I created Lucinda as a sort of vessel for these ideas. And while many of the specifics of her story are different from my own experience, her internal life (her theories and half-baked philosophies and struggles with finding a place for herself in the world) was quite similar to my own. As for the parallels between our New York lives, I’m glad to say that my experiences in magazine publishing in New York weren’t quite as dysfunctional as Lucinda’s television job experiences.

  Lucinda seems to posses a warm disdain for the canons typically covered in a women’s book club. If you could choose three novels to impose on your average middle-American reading group, what would they be?

  Lucinda’s disdain for book-club culture is more vehement than my own. I happeneded to belong to a book club in Lincoln. It was a real lifeline for me and it’s nothing like the one in The Quality of Life Report. But I’m not sure I’d be comfortable imposing specific titles on any group of readers. What I wish more book clubs would do is select titles that the individuals in the groups actually want to read, rather than those that, for sometimes mysterious reasons, become culturally sanctioned as “book-club material.” Reading is about as individual an experience as anything can get, which is why I’m wary of the one-size-fits-all approach that is reflected in the “One Book, One City” movement that has swept the nation in recent years. Suggesting that an entire town or city read a particular book seems counterintuitive to the whole purpose and pleasure of reading. I think most people should try to read Ulysses (preferably with a knowledgeable instructor or at least a breathing coach), but beyond that I suppose I’d like to see book clubs in which people just got together and talked about whatever book they happened to be reading on their own. It seems that might lead to more interesting discussions than people sitting around and apologizing that they’re only on page 400 of The Corrections, although that’s a novel I enjoyed immensely and for which I have a great deal of admiration.

  Would Lucinda have made the big decision to move to Prairie City without Sue as her initial tour guide?

  Probably not. In the beginning of the novel, Lucinda is a person who is utterly terrified of living in a world that does not offer some degree as what she perceives as “hipness.” In her naïveté and myopia, she takes Sue for some kind of cultural renegade, not least of all because she’s a gay woman living in rural America, a combination Lucinda never fathomed before. Much of the satire in the book revolves around the degree to which Lucinda and her cohorts in New York have things backward; for instance, they associate being gay with somehow being cool and, by extension, being cool with being urban. This is a gross from of stereotyping and its own kind of homophobia. So Lucinda’s comeuppance has in part to do with her realization that Sue is a person with pretty ordinary middle-class values. If she has been a married housewife, it’s unlikely that Lucinda would have initially found her so glamorous. That’s a harsh thing to say about a character you’ve created, particularly your narrator, but, in the beginning, Lucinda is a about as provincial as it gets. The twist is that it’s only by coming to “the provinces” that she achieves a truer sophistication, a sophistication of authenticity, which is something Sue had all along.

  How deliberate were your choices for the character names? Trout seems to refer to the fish-out-of-water theme and Mason Clay constructs an image of a man who works with his hands mixed with a figure that can be molded to taste. Or is sometimes a name just a name?

  I wanted my narrator to have a name that both was unique and commanded some degree of authority, a name with hard consonants in it.
Trout does refer to a fish out of water, but I was also thinking in terms of the idea of swimming upstream. Lucinda is very good at making things harder for herself than they necessarily need to be. Mason Clay just seemed like an appealing name. If I saw that name written down somewhere, I’d want to meet the person behind it. I’m actually obsessed with names. I have a secret hobby of reading the phone book and looking at all the names and imaging who they belong to. One of my favorite things about writing fiction is the ability to invent names. It seems to me that great heroines in literature almost always have memorable and even imposing names, like Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary and Cather’s Ántonia Shimerda, which has to be the best name of all time.

  What is the one thing that Lucinda misses the most about New York? What is the one thing you miss the most?

  Lucinda misses hers friends Daphne and Elena. When I lived in Nebraska, I missed the food in New York. Every time I ordered a salad and ended up with a chilled plate of iceberg lettuce and shaved carrots I wanted to get on the next plane to LaGuardia (not to eat at LaGuardia, of course, but at least they have Nathan’s franks).

  The novel in many ways works as a love triangle with a man and a place vying for Trout’s affection. What is it about the barn and Prairie City that Lucinda cannot live without? Do you think it’s possible for someone to feel the same kind of love for a tiny apartment on the upper West Side?

  Much of Lucinda’s love for the prairie comes out of the fact that she romanticized it for a long time before she actually got there. She had an image of it that was inevitably going to be, if not shattered, at least dramatically altered. So her love for the farm takes on a desperate quality in that she feels that if she stops loving it, she will be a failure. The interesting thing is that for much of the book, her love for the land is more contrived than it is completely genuine. It’s only when she becomes “of the land” that the love becomes more authentic (she starts making the mistakes that lead to her maturity, she develops prairie madness and survives). And you can absolutely have that kind of love for the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In fact, it’s probably more common. Lucinda doesn’t express that so much, but, as I talk about in my first book, My Misspent Youth, I romanticized New York City in a very profound and ultimately destructive way. I still have a very strong affection for both New York and the prairie, but now it’s tempered by the experience of having lived for a number of years in both places. In a way it’s a more mature, deeper kind of love.