“I’m sorry, what?” John said.
“Katahdin sheep. I have four. In FarmVille.”
“Ah. Thank you for clarifying.”
Seems as if John should have remembered what an accomplished and sensibly diversified fake farmer I was. But in his defense, my mental faculties can be a bit … unpredictable in intense weather. Heat in particular brings out a bedazzled aphasia in me. On a trip to Florida, on a day that topped out at 103, I announced that an elevator we were in had “European-style seating.” I caught my mistake. “Flooring. European-style flooring.” John raised his eyebrows. “You know what I mean,” I said. “The ground floor says G, not 1. The first floor is the first floor!”
The elevator door opened. “And now we are at our floor,” John said, “where we are going to get you into some air-conditioning before things get any worse.”
Later that day, we took a walk on the beach and I spotted a little kid fishing in the ocean. “Look at that boy shopping out there!” I told John. “So cute.”
“It is amazing that you grew up here and survived,” he said.
Jet lag could also set me off. “I can’t find the switches for the upper brightness,” I’d once lamented in an Italian hotel room. But that day at the fair I was simply stating facts. I did have four Katahdin sheep that each produced four milks and two fertilizers per feeding, making them highly valuable to my farm and especially its yogurt operation.
I had FarmVille’d my ass off in the two months I’d been sober. When the 9:00 p.m. jitters hit, I planted wheat. When I left a stressful meeting thinking, God, I can’t wait to have a glass of wine, and then remembered I didn’t drink anymore, I’d duck into my office and collect eggs. On my tenth day without a drink, when John and I had a dumb spat about how to cope with an incompetent mortgage refinance rep (I wanted to just get it done, while John felt we should bury his body under the plum tree and start over), it hit me that I was stuck in a perfect drinking situation and couldn’t drink. And my life would continue to be harder and conflict-ridden as a result, though perhaps less so after my inevitable divorce. Deep breathing did fuck-all to calm me down, but rearranging my fake plots to cluster the berries and flowers together made the night manageable, and one more manageable night was a win.
I didn’t talk much about my significant FarmVille accomplishments to anyone but John. “It’s not real,” a co-worker once said when I mentioned it.
“Sure it is,” I said. “It’s really moving pixels around a screen.”
“But don’t you feel like it’s just an escape from life?” he pressed.
“Yes, I do,” I said, and maybe I said it in a scary way, because he let it drop, which saved me from having to mention his fantasy football league. Look, I admire people who can spend all their time living smack in the middle of their problems and fears. But if I had that innate capability, I probably wouldn’t have become a drunk. And in early sobriety I saw nothing wrong with taking my reality in small doses.
And the sheep at the Washington State Fair were real. Their wool was dense and humid. They smelled like sheep murk, not pixels. I was absolutely thrilled to meet them, and the square-pupiled goats, and the rabbits that, let’s face it, don’t seem to bring a lot to the party other than fluff. “Look,” I said to John. “It’s those chickens with little feather Village People pants!” “Look, this cow is making intense eye contact with me!” “Look, this bunny has cow spots—it’s a Holstein rabbit!”
And this was before we’d even gotten to the hall with the gourds and prize vegetables. This was real farming—real life, full of nonalcoholic wonder—and I wanted to see everything, everything.
* * *
Normally, I would have spent June through August drinking wine al fresco. But I’d canceled Rosé Season for myself just as it was getting started, so I had to fall back on the lesser-known season, Summer.
Summer in Seattle is an experience of collective hypomania, three months when the entire city tries to cram in as much activity as possible before the light disappears again. Our daylight, which ends by 4:00 p.m. in December, stretches until after 10:00 in July. The mist dries up, and the temperature rises to our upper-tolerable limit of seventy-seven degrees. Like nineteenth-century Austrians, we take the air to cure ourselves of the damage seasonal affective disorder has done to our minds and hearts. Summer in Seattle brings outdoor Shakespeare, kayaking, paddleboard yoga. There is a festival where people sleep in tents just to hear Dave Matthews Band play their four-hour songs. “Dave Matthews!!!!!!!!” they post to Facebook.
Once I quit drinking and actually had energy to spend, I threw myself into square and wholesome things. On Saturdays I’d come home from the farmers’ market and spread all my loot out on the kitchen counter. “Isn’t it interesting that carrots can be vastly different colors, but taste the same?” I asked John. “Or do you think there are subtle taste variances that a carrot expert would pick up on right away?”
“Carrot expert?” he said.
“There’s not a thing in this world that doesn’t have its own expert,” I told him.
I made pesto out of kale and sorrel and everything else I could think of that wasn’t plain old basil (though I made plenty of basil pesto, too). I wandered the aisles of garden stores, smelling pineapple sage and chocolate mint. I filled the backseat of my car with dahlias, planted them in a raised bed, and made short, densely packed bouquets like the ones I’d seen in Martha Stewart Living. I dragged John to parks and petting farms. I thought I was just coming back to life, but one day, watching me bottle-feed a baby goat, John said, “You’re trying to become Useful again, aren’t you?” and I realized yes, I was doing that, too.
* * *
John and I had tried to become Useful together once, by moving to a farm. Well, to what used to be a farm. A daffodil farm. Okay, we were not the Joads. But we were in earnest. We lasted a year.
We were in our twenties, not yet married, and living the postgrad life in Ann Arbor. We had spent our school years studying literature and art history and philosophy and emerged not knowing what to do with any of it. We had for-now jobs that paid the bills and gave us places to go every morning, but that was just until we got a foothold in the world doing … something. We might have been privileged and naive, but we were serious about finding our purpose, and finding it in the Midwest, which felt exotically solid and American. Nothing like our South Florida childhoods, full of banana trees and wild parakeets and winter trips to the waterslide park, but no ice-skating or snowball fights or cozy nights in front of glowing hearths—no roaring fires at all except for the ones that periodically burned in the Everglades. We had no history; nearly everything was new in South Florida, including the people, who arrived for the winter from up north, or forever from Cuba, coming by the tens of thousands in the Mariel boatlift. I was nineteen before I ever went north of the Mason-Dixon Line and thought the thirty-five-degree Christmases at my grandparents’ house in Alabama were almost unfathomably cold.
To my young eyes, it also seemed as if no one in South Florida really did anything. Not anything tangible, anyway. Or Useful. At least not in my affluent white town, where all the men worked in offices and their wives stayed home. Retirees made up much of the population, and their main activities were shuffleboard and hostile driving. Even the county fair was more about rides and the chance to win Jethro Tull coke mirrors than a wholesome celebration of hands-on utility. In high school I fell in love with the Richard Hugo poem “What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American.” Hugo was a poet of small-town, working-class America, a burly man with the face of a hard drinker who’d been sucker punched more than once and might have deserved it. He came from the land of real jobs, the kinds of jobs no one around me seemed to have. Reading him by our in-ground pool, I started to form the idea that if a professor’s kid who’d never worked anywhere earthier than the mall could be more like Richard Hugo, she might begin to belong—to the world of people who did things, who made the country work. Useful people.
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By the time I left Florida for graduate school in Ann Arbor, I was primed to fall quickly and deeply into Midwestern Derangement Syndrome. Every bog-standard thing thrilled me: houses made of wood, bulb flowers, more than three kinds of trees! John moved to town six months later and was hit just as hard. For two years we staggered around like tourists, going apple picking and saying “Look, icicles!” to each other. John bought an ancient mint-green Ford pickup with a rusted-out floor. I began wearing enormous hand-knit sweaters over long skirts like my girl crush, Natalie Merchant. Staying on after I graduated was a no-brainer. The only problem was that even Ann Arbor, granola-crunchy as it was, was still a university town where people had inexplicable jobs like “administrator” or “dean.” If my hometown was a one out of ten on the Usefulness scale, Ann Arbor was maybe a six. The notion of pushing to, say, an eight gradually took hold, and we contemplated moving out to the country where we could farm, or at least live farmishly. Exactly what that meant wasn’t clear, beyond the mental image of large, boisterous dinner parties where guests ate and raved about my homemade bread. That was enough for me, and John was satisfied with the prospect of a barn to paint and sculpt in. We started driving out to the country on weekends to scout locations.
A few months into our farm hunt, an acquaintance of John’s mentioned that he had a cottage for rent on his property in Rives Junction, forty-five miles west of Ann Arbor. We visited that weekend and almost collapsed from the thrill of rusticity. Keith, the owner, also lived on the grounds and ran his business out of the renovated barn. He kept llamas, goats, and “show chickens.” The hundred-acre property had once been a commercial daffodil and tulip farm, and thousands of flowers still bloomed in columns right behind the cottage, which was bigger than our apartment in town and 30 percent cheaper.
After visiting the farm, we stopped for lunch in Chelsea, the nearest town with a decent restaurant, and agreed that Keith’s cottage would be the ideal way to test out country living before taking the plunge into full farm ownership. “It’s rustic, but still kind of arty,” John said.
“Plus, it has a washer and dryer,” I said, raising a forkful of microgreens to my mouth.
We moved to the farm in late spring, that glorious Michigan time between frozen mud and scarring heat, and promptly became euphoric. The daily commute from work in Ann Arbor felt like driving to a vacation home. In the evenings we sat on the back porch and watched bats fly out of the apple trees. My desk looked out onto the flower fields and the woods beyond them. On weekends we visited the llama paddock where Bo, the biggest male, would amble over and let me pet his neck. Bo didn’t offer a lot in terms of personality, but he seemed happy enough to hang out with me. A goat named Gretel shared the paddock, and her main shtick was to wiggle out under the split-rail fence, then immediately turn around and stand with her face an inch from the slats, staring fixedly as though wondering how to get back in. I didn’t know if that was standard goat behavior, or if Gretel was … off. I’m still not quite ready to make the call.
So we were happy in our quarter-life version of New Zoo Revue, though there were signs we might not be natural country folk. For instance, we couldn’t get cable in Rives Junction, so we spent a considerable amount of time experimenting with where to position our rabbit-eared TV and our bodies to get the best reception. With the TV on the coffee table, John in the very middle of the sofa, and me completing the triangle on the floor, we could sometimes tell Mulder from Scully, Simone from Sipowicz. There was also no pizza delivery where we lived, so one of us had to drive seven miles to the outer edge of the delivery zone and exchange money for pizza in a church parking lot. It was a twenty-mile round-trip to buy the Sunday New York Times, thirty miles to see a movie. But it never occurred to us to give any of those things up. So we spent a lot of time in the car.
Rives Junction had also not proved to be as village-like as I’d expected from my extensive reading of British mystery novels. Soon after we moved to the farm, we stopped in at the local pub, ready to banter with the locals or at least watch crabby old men play chess. But the men at the bar sat staring straight ahead, not talking. Dropping off menus, the waitress asked in a friendly enough tone if we were the new people out on Zion Road. We said yes, all smiles.
“Heard you’re not married,” she said.
“Engaged,” I said, reflexively offering my ring hand. But she just smiled tightly and walked away. John and I stared at each other.
“That was weird,” I said.
“That was some Straw Dogs shit,” he replied.
Most of the residents weren’t outright rude to our sinful selves, but even the more benign interactions were hard to interpret. One Sunday afternoon at the outset of hunting season, a man in fatigues knocked on the front door to ask if I’d seen anyone take his deer. “I left her right across the road,” he said, gesturing to the ditch where I’d picked wild asparagus (or “foraged for food,” as I thought of it) in spring. “And when I got back with the truck she was gone.” I told him I hadn’t seen or heard anything. “Are you sure?” he asked, looking over my shoulder into the living room in a way that made me realize he thought maybe I had taken his deer, dragged her in to bleed out on the sofa.
“Positive,” I said apologetically.
His eyes swept the room behind me one more time. “Well, all right,” he said with a sigh. “You have a good day, ma’am.”
Later, John told me the same man had driven up on an ATV the previous week and tried to give him a kid. “Bet you’ve been missing this little guy!” the man had said of the toddler. “Found him out back playing with my ducks.”
“Hi there,” John said to the little boy. “I think you might have the wrong house,” he said to the man.
“Are you sure?” the man had said to him.
“Well, yeah.”
The man shook his head. “Well, that’s the strangest thing. All right. You have a good day now, sir.”
I thought maybe it was all part of an elaborate farmhouse-casing scheme, but when I mentioned it to Keith, he shook his head. “Nah, that’s just Bill. He lives down the road. He’s all right. Just drinks too much.” Granted, Keith himself was an odd one. He wore the same clothes every day, frequented tanning parlors, and made cryptic references to things he had seen in Beirut in the 1980s. But I figured he was a better judge of rural weirdness than I was, so if he thought our ATV neighbor was all right, I would, too.
John and I were married that September at an inn an hour west of Rives Junction, christened by the torrential rain that blew in ten minutes before the ceremony and stayed throughout the reception. Winter came soon after, snow making the flower fields as smooth and unbroken as the fondant on our wedding cake. The salt truck came down our road most mornings before dawn, and I drove my little hatchback to work in the slushy ruts it left behind. The drive to town took twice as long in winter. Everything did. Back in Ann Arbor, my method for clearing ice off the car was to get in, turn it on, and sit there listening to PJ Harvey until the windows warmed up enough for the wipers to push everything off. In the country, I was lucky if Keith had been out early and cleared my car along with his own. Other mornings I had to scrape, and hack, and occasionally pour boiling water on the driver-side door to unstick it.
John left for a month at an artists’ residency in Vermont. In his letters only a few scant sentences were about his painting; the rest was about the seamlessness of Vermont snow removal. “It’s the skiers,” he said on the phone. “They can’t have ski tourists dying all over the place.” Meanwhile, our cottage felt more and more like a snug space pod floating in a sea of whiteness. On my way home from work, I’d stop at the video store fifteen miles outside town, to rent a movie to watch that night, but also to give my hands a break from their iron grip on the steering wheel. For exercise, I bought a mini-trampoline and jogged on it in front of the television. That’s how I watched Schindler’s List for the first time: bouncing.
Spring finally arrived in its usual two-steps-forw
ard-one-step-back way, bringing peonies and mud. I helped Keith’s wife, Dorothy, deliver a baby llama, which mostly entailed playing it cool while being utterly certain that mother, baby, and all other animals and humans on the premises were going to die. Then two tawny kittens showed up, all saucer eyes and needle teeth—a gift from Keith to Dorothy, who hadn’t been getting along. Before she’d married Keith, Dorothy had been a marketing executive in Detroit, working on auto ads for the Big Three. Now she was bored. She wanted to get back in the game, but Keith said the commute would be too long. I didn’t see why that mattered—he wasn’t the one who’d be commuting, after all—but it had become a big enough point of contention between them that she was thinking of leaving the marriage altogether. “He’s a good man,” she’d said. “But a good man isn’t enough to make a life on.”
The kittens were a peace offering, meant to make life on the farm less lonely for Dorothy. And they were fun to have around, aside from the ringworm they gave us all. But then, less than a month after they arrived, they died. Keith found one in the woods behind the flower fields, dead without a mark on him. I helped Dorothy bury him in a shoe box, holding his brother over my shoulder—ringworm be damned—so he wouldn’t see. A week later, the brother went missing, too. John found him in a stand of peonies, his neck broken.
I gave myself some circle-of-life pep talks, but dead baby animals were just not what I’d bargained for. For the rest of that spring I spent less time at the farm and more in Ann Arbor, which by then, with its one art-house theater and smattering of vegetarian restaurants, felt like the East Village. When I was at home, the farm was so quiet and still that I thought maybe Dorothy had left after all, but she was just spending a lot of time inside.
It was early summer when John called from Ann Arbor to say he’d stumbled on a great house for rent, an A-frame with a sleeping loft and woodstove, two blocks from downtown and pizza and coffee and movies. I protested halfheartedly that we’d barely given rural life a chance, but we both knew I didn’t mean it. And winter was coming, at some point. A few weeks later we packed up a U-Haul with Keith’s help, unloaded our stuff in the new house, and celebrated with champagne and Caribbean takeout.
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