So Much Pretty (10 page)

No longer able to crowd-surf or stage-dive, she stood happily watching, glad these traditions still existed. Hurtling toward thirty, pregnant, sober, “professional,” standing in a gutted prewar tenement on the Lower East Side, half dreaming of fields and forests.

Gene

HAEDEN, NEW YORK, 1997

B
EYOND THE PATH
lined with lanterns and illuminated by pumpkins with grinning faces, dry cornstalks rustled gently in the field. Claire had hung white-handkerchief ghosts from the lower branches of the trees near the house, and Alice ran back and forth in the yard, waiting for Theo, the edges of her white gauzy costume floating behind her.

Claire, dressed as a fairy with wings made of crinoline, pants covered in faded daisies, and a blue pointy hat with a reproduction of Edward Munch’s
Scream
painted on the front, was inside roasting pumpkin seeds and making vegetable stew. When Gene came in from outside, he said, “I need you to help me with this, Fairy.” He handed Claire a large jack-o’-lantern with a hole in the bottom and then sat down in front of her at the table.

She stood between his legs for a moment and kissed him. “You’ve outdone yourself.” She put a tea towel over his head and then eased the pumpkin down over it until it rested on his shoulders. The face had triangular eyes and nose and a big grinning mouth; a long twisted stem grew out of its crown.

“Perfect.” She turned the pumpkin a little on his shoulders. “Can you see?”

He nodded and she kissed the pumpkin’s forehead. He rubbed his hands over her daisy pants, touching her for some time before they noticed Theo staring at them through the screen door, his hair tangled, his face painted green, bright yellow circles rimming his eyes.

They started and then laughed at the boy’s expression.

“Are your parents here?” Gene asked him.

“They dropped me off,” Theo said. He turned his head to the side, about to say something else, but then caught sight of Alice and jumped off the step, ran all the way to the path that she was haunting. They heard her squeal as she spied him.

“Can you imagine anyone just dropping off a six-year-old in the city?” Gene asked Claire, his voice echoing inside the pumpkin.

“I can,” she said. “But not the way you mean, no.”

“I’m just going to take them into town for half an hour,” Gene said. “They’ll be ruined for dinner by the time we get back.”

“That’s fine. Maybe they’ll have had so much sweet stuff by then they’ll be craving real food.”

Out in the yard, Gene watched Theo and Alice. They were holding hands and leaning back, spinning in a circle as fast as they could—periodically, they would let go and fall to the ground, laughing and yelling, then stand again and stagger like drunks. Alice tripped over the sheet and fell, and Theo lay on top of her while she struggled to get up.

The streets of the town were crowded with trick-or-treaters. Gene stood at the edge of the sidewalk as the ghost and the frog ran up to each door. They were squealing and talking nonsense, words and sentences that were half articulated, half hummed. They ran to catch up with groups of older ghouls, stalking along in packs with pillowcases filled with candy. Jason and Freddy Krueger, NASCAR drivers carrying their helmets, Ariel and Snow White, a hobo, a witch, Batman, G.I. Joe, and Cruella de Vil. A taller kid walked by in a Bill Clinton mask with five little Dallas Cowboys by his side. A black cat, the grim reaper, and a ballerina stood on the corner peering into their orange plastic buckets, and a pair of dice in matching black tights waved to them as they passed.

Just before they reached Town Line Road, Alice and Theo
fell silent in awe at the mist surrounding a house lit with green lights. It was the last house in the village, and terrifying screams came from somewhere deep inside. In the front yard, stripe-stockinged legs ending in pointy black shoes stuck out of the ground, alongside half a broomstick, as if a witch had crashed in the yard. A big plastic glow-in-the-dark skeleton sat crumpled in a chair on the porch. And an enormous nylon ghost, lit from inside and inflated by some kind of faintly ticking fan, billowed up from the front lawn.

“It’s haunted!” Alice yelled. She ran in a little circle around Theo, who grabbed the edge of her protoplasmic aura and wouldn’t let go until she was wound around him.

It’s haunted by the ghosts of Indonesian child laborers
, Gene thought.

“Come with us!” Alice shouted. “Come with us on the porch, Daddy, it’s haunted.”

Theo was still holding part of her costume as they walked nervously up onto the porch in front of Gene. They rang the doorbell and hunched their shoulders, waiting for someone to answer. When the door opened, they did not say “trick or treat.” They did not even move. Gene watched as they raised their heads in unison to look up at Frankenstein.

Frankenstein looked at Gene and winked. His makeup job was fantastic. The scars appeared real, and he had a flattop that made his head seem square, with bolts coming out of his neck. Plus, the guy was enormous. Gene thought this must be Danny White, the White Walls Drywall guy. It took a minute before any of them saw the princess, a girl who looked to be about nine years old, standing beneath the monster with a bowlful of SweeTarts. She was smiling at Alice and Theo and trying not to laugh.

“Mom!” the princess called back into the house. “C’mere, you’ve got to see this.”

A short round woman with feathered blond hair and freckled
forearms came from around the corner and looked out through the storm door. She grinned broadly at them. “Well, what do we have here?” she asked.

Theo and Alice were still transfixed. Wendy’s mother looked up at Gene. “They’re darling. How old?”

“Five and six,” Gene said.

“Oh my god,” the princess said. “Is that a real pumpkin on your head? Daddy, look!”

Frankenstein smiled. “Well, holy smokes, Wen—someone’s trying to outdo my costume this year!”

“Aha! That’s not a real monster!” Alice said. Theo let go of her ghost suit and held out his bag. The Whites laughed, and Gene smiled inside his pumpkin head, thought what a sweet family, what good people, standing together beneath their porch light.

“You don’t often see a ghost and a frog traveling together,” Wendy’s mother said.

“Actually,” said Alice, “it might not be that uncommon. In Hades, there are rivers! And if there are rivers, there are probably frogs, so if you are a ghost, then there are probably frogs who could be your friends. There are definitely frogs down there.”

“Ribbit,” Theo said, and held out his bag again.

The Whites looked at one another and laughed harder. “You got your hands full, don’t you?” Danny White said to Gene.

Wendy came out onto the porch and gave Alice a hug. “You are so cute!” she said. “Mom, she is
so
cute!”

Alice looked up at the big princess and smiled unseen beneath her ghost suit. “There can be princesses in the afterlife with us!” she said, eager to include Wendy in their game. “We know there can. We’ve actually seen them there!”

Flynn

T
HE FIRST YEAR
I lived in Haeden, I spent many evenings eating dinner at the bar in the Alibi, listening to people talk, and many nights at home on my computer, researching rural environmental problems. My intentions in moving to Haeden had not been rational. They were certainly not ideal for me personally. I left a place where I was happy; I had friends and boyfriends and colleagues and sources, I had broken stories, and people knew my byline and what I liked to drink.

In Haeden things were different. There were few friends to have. The eight or so people to whom I might have grown close were significantly older and had children or other preoccupations. Many of them were some kind of dropouts from rich families or good schools, sold on an idea of pioneering that was reinforced by an extreme lack of hardship in their formative years. I enjoyed talking politics with them at the Rooster, and I felt they were decent people. The Pipers were among this set, and Alice’s father, who had a part-time job with Soil and Water, and who saw himself as part of some David and Goliath story involving factory farms, provided me with a lot of information about the land itself. They were witty, intelligent people, good cooks and well read, but there was something slightly off about them—they’d experienced one too many bedtime readings of
Peter Pan
, maybe, had the earnest gaze of one who believes Tinker Bell can be brought back from the dead if we all clap our hands. They were looking for a place to love and believed it would be somewhere that didn’t yet exist. Somewhere they would create, a place that would materialize beneath their feet, no matter the real landscape of the region, a landscape that included nearly two thousand other people whose median income was less than $14,000 a year.

Haeden was also not the place to find a mate. Even a temporary one. I was asked out by a variety of different men—builders, a plumbing and heating technician, a pharmacy student interning at the Kinny drugs, a sixty-year-old professor, one of Dale Haytes’s rangy walleyed uncles, the Sysco salesman who stopped at the bar every week on his route through the region, a neurotic middle-school teacher, two Vietnam vets, a Gulf War I vet, several high school seniors, and an acupuncturist who lived in Elmville. All of them but the high schoolers went to work and then went home, and all of them were looking for someone else with whom to do that. Three trips back to Cleveland took care of the only thing for which they might have been useful. And long phone conversations took care of the things they couldn’t provide.

I lived those early years as best I could and felt many times that I was an embedded reporter, a correspondent from some postmodern ghost place, not even a town. I had never thought that anywhere in New York State, let alone the Northeast, could look like
Deliverance
country. And in some ways that made it all the more exotic, more surreal.

I have said over and over that I left Cleveland so I could work on a big investigative piece. That I left because the next critical wave of environmental reporting would be, as I told my friends at
City Paper
, rural, about food and water. And in many ways, this is true—close to the whole story.

If there hadn’t been a major change in environmental legislation, and if I had never learned about Seneca Falls, New York, I probably would have stayed in Cleveland. Seneca Falls is the site of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speeches, the place where the women’s suffrage movement began. It also was home to the largest waste site in the state—a fenced-in dome as big as a ski mountain over which bulldozers maneuvered tons of waste between the off-gassing pipes that went deep into the massive pile. My big-picture story would be about how all the garbage and detritus not fit for
cities ends up in rural areas, buried or piled up over expanses of unfarmable fields. Places where the brain drain has been so bad that only a handful of locals take offense to this shit, and the rest ignore it.

I knew that nothing like this could happen without people getting sick and other people benefiting from it. If I followed the money, I would find out. But somehow, in my anticipatory zeal about breaking open the story of this waste site, I got lost. I voluntarily left somewhere I loved because I had become an egomaniac. I honestly believed articles in the newspaper could change the way the world worked. And that meant
I
could change the way the world worked. And that’s not the healthiest thought for a human being to have.

The tipping point in my narcissism came when I won a George Polk for local investigative reporting, a few months before I quit Cleveland. It was a proud day for me and my editors, a recognition that seemed to independently confirm that it was worthwhile for me to be busting my ass the way I’d been. That my instincts for news were sound. The award was for a series on a neighborhood that had lost dozens to cancer, MS, and respiratory illnesses. These were the legacies of the steel and chemical industries. After the mills and manufacturers closed down, Cleveland lost a huge swath of the middle class, but we still had all the illness from things that were buried, burned, dumped into the Cuyahoga, or washed into the earth. This may not sound important to you, but the old adage “If it bleeds, it leads” finds more purchase in this kind of story than in a local murder. Leaves whole neighborhoods—sometimes a few generations in that neighborhood—fucked, bereaved. Racist redlining is not just a problem in housing. In Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, the redline of affordable real estate between one neighborhood and another marks mortality. Buy or rent a house past this point, this street, in the shadow of this building, and see if your baby gets leukemia, see if your husband gets to keep his nuts.

The Polk was meant to reveal good writing and get important stories more press. And it did. It was part of getting Superfund designation for the neighborhood and getting things cleaned up. What the Polk didn’t as handily reveal was the character of the recipient. In my case: obsessive, addicted to every story I was assigned, unable to cut details or column inches, unable to go home at the end of the day. Unable to talk about anything but my beat. In Cleveland I never left the newsroom; I just brought it to bed with me. I slept with other reporters or with people like reporters (lawyers, cops) because we loved to talk about the same things and were smart in the same ways, had the same sense of humor, but also because they didn’t notice how little space in my psyche they would occupy. And because they were too busy to saddle me with their attention. We were alone together, looking at the same things. And this was a very full life. It was as I had imagined it to be when I was a girl and first fell in love with newspapers and H. L. Mencken and I. F. Stone. And though I was now an adult and surrounded by a culture in which papers and magazines were disappearing daily, I felt my future as a 1940s-style muckraker was secure. All I needed was the sleeve garters and a drinking problem. The Rust Belt’s environmental problems were bad, but they were waning, “outsourced”; rural America’s problems were beginning to snowball. And I wanted to be there.