The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (28 page)

My nieces and nephew spend hours in the hayloft, stacking and excavating hay bales to create the world’s largest and most intricate life-size maze. I know this because every time one of them comes inside to use the bathroom or get a glass of cider, they try to cajole the two of us into joining them. We promise that we will after dinner. When they grow tired of the maze, Farmer John revs up the tractor for rides through the fields. It’s shaping up to be exactly the sort of holiday that I’d hoped for them.

My mother joins us the kitchen, but curiously keeps out of our way, sitting on a bench, knitting and chatting as Brent and I flit back and forth. We’re cooking several things on the open hearth, as the Pilgrims must have, which requires an enormous amount of attention and patience.

By early afternoon, the windows in the kitchen have steamed over completely. I can barely make out the blurry bloblike outlines of the kids running along with the goats in the field. Brent is frustrated that the centerpiece he’d planned using wild grape vines and fallen birds’ nests wasn’t holding together the way he’d hoped. He asks me to help, but after fifteen minutes of holding two vines together waiting for the glue to dry I snap at him.

“I have to get back to the kitchen.”

“Just hold it a couple more minutes,” Brent says. “It’s almost dry.”

“Believe it or not,” I snarl, “we can have Thanksgiving dinner without the perfect Martha centerpiece. But we can’t have Thanksgiving dinner without dinner.”

“Shhhh…Your mom can hear us,” Brent hisses.

“So?”

“Just go back to what you were doing,” Brent says. “I can do it myself.”

Back in the kitchen my mother looks up from her knitting. She’s heard our little argument but has chosen to ignore it. It’s strange to see her so…not busy. My memories of family Thanksgiving feature her running around the kitchen all by herself. With a husband, two sons, and no daughters, she had almost no help in matters of cuisine. I thought for sure she’d be shadowing me all day, helping me to make some of the same dishes that she’d made for years.

“Oh shit,” I say, suddenly remembering.

“What, honey?”

“I forgot the fucking Waldorf salad.”

“Well, that’s not a big deal,” she says. “We have plenty of food. More than plenty.”

“No, there’s still time,” I say, looking at the clock. “The turkey won’t come out for another hour.”

Mom turns back to her knitting. Why isn’t she offering to help? My mother offers to help strangers put grocery bags in their trunks. She accepts every post on every church committee that no one else will take. When my father gave her the services of a cleaning woman one year, she not only insisted on cleaning right alongside the woman, but also wound up cleaning the cleaning woman’s house several times when the woman fell ill.

But today, the most familial culinary day on the calendar, she’s just sitting there.

“Do you think you could help me make the salad?” I finally ask. She looks a little startled.

“I guess,” she says. “What can I do, honey?”

“Can you chop this up while I go out to the chicken coop to get some eggs to make the mayonnaise?”

“Okay. Sure,” she says.

When I return from the coop, she’s back in her seat, knitting. The celery is untouched on the counter.

“The knives are in the holder over there,” I say, confused.

“I know,” she says. “I just wasn’t sure how you wanted it cut.”

My mother has made Waldorf salad probably more than a hundred times in her life. Its appearance on our dinner table signaled a “fancy dinner,” as we called them. She could make a Waldorf salad easier than the sous-chef at the Waldorf itself. It was a holiday staple at our house, which is mostly the reason I’d decided to make it today.

My mother gets up and walks over to the knife holder.

“Which one should I use?” she asks, fingering the handles.

She can’t just pick a knife?

“Just grab any one,” I say. She pulls one out. “No, not that one. Take the chef’s knife, there, on the right.”

She slides it out and places it on the cutting board while she rinses off the celery in the sink.

“Make sure the water’s cold,” I say.

When she’s finished she returns to the cutting board and holds up the knife. Right before chopping she stops.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“Well,” she says, contemplating. “Do you want me to cut it straight across, or on an angle?”

For a moment I’m annoyed with her constant questioning. How hard can this be? It’s celery, for God’s sake. I was the one who had to grow the damn thing from seed, starting each bunch in tiny little peat pots in the middle of March. I was the one who spent hours one afternoon tying each bunch up with string so that they’d grow tall and straight. I grew the most perfect bunches of celery on the eastern seaboard all by myself, and now I can’t even get a hand chopping it up?

I nearly snap at my mother as I had with Brent a few minutes ago. But then I remember Martha—Martha’s kitchen, to be exact. I think back to the Hamptons on the Fourth of July three years ago, when I was petrified about chopping the celery for the tuna wasabi burgers.

In the face of uncertainty, I’d tried to paint an iconic picture of the perfect family Thanksgiving. I’d become as exacting as Brent. And Martha.

My own mother is scared of me.

My family returns to Wisconsin Saturday evening. After they leave, Brent’s and my facade of togetherness fades away like the green of the Beekman fields before winter. We turn the heat down to forty-eight to save money as we clean up after my family in silence. By the time Brent and I are finishing folding four guest rooms’ worth of sheets, towels, and washcloths, it’s almost midnight.

“You know,” Brent says. Neither of us had spoken in so many hours that his voice nearly startles me. “I was thinking that maybe, given our money situation and all, maybe we should close up the Beekman after the holidays to save on heat.”

Over the last few weeks, as it became obvious that neither of us was going to replace our income anytime soon, I’d begun thinking the same thing. We’d save probably a thousand or so dollars a month on heat, train tickets, and gas for the truck. It would be hard to argue against that plan. I just hadn’t wanted to be the one to suggest it.

“Why wait till after the holidays?” I ask, resigned.

Brent reminds me that one of our neighbors had asked if we’d host a New Year’s Eve party and concert at the Beekman, to help one of her musician friends satisfy a grant requirement. She’d asked months ago, before Brent had lost his job and I lost mine, and then all of Wall Street lost theirs. Throwing parties seemed like a fun idea back then, so we agreed.

So we’d close down the Beekman on New Year’s Day. That meant that we would have to be together in our cramped eight-hundred-square-foot apartment in the city all winter…unemployed…together 24/7. I was fairly certain that would mean the end of Brent and me. Over the past year, his essential Martha-ness and my inner Oprah festered to the surface and erupted. There was no hiding our differences any longer. If it had grown impossible to stay together this past year when we were apart so much of the time, how could we possibly survive being trapped together in our tiny apartment?

I’m overwhelmed with grief. As crazy as my life may have seemed to people from the outside—the nightclub days, the drinking, buying a farm on a whim—I’d always known exactly what I was doing and where I was going. There wasn’t a single morning of my life, including the ones where I’d woken up in strangers’ apartments, that I didn’t feel completely in control of my fate. But now for the first time I don’t have a clue how I came to be wrestling with a fitted sheet in a 206-year-old farmhouse that we were probably going to have to sell off as my relationship fell to pieces smaller than the bone fragments in the crypt.

“Goddammit,” I say.

“What?” Brent says, still thinking I was referring to something as trivial as closing down the Beekman. “You want to waste all that money heating it during the week when we’re not around?”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it then?” Brent asks. He sounds sincerely interested.

“I dunno. Everything.” I sigh. “It seemed the only thing I had left to look forward to was Christmas.”

“We still have Christmas. We’re here through New Year’s.”

“That really makes for a wonderful holiday,” I said, sighing again. “Sitting around in the cold with no money to give each other presents and draining the pipes to close down the house.”

“Well, there certainly wasn’t anything that great about last Christmas,” Brent says, smoothing a still warm pillowcase against his chest. “We froze our asses off getting a Charlie Brown tree in the wilderness that we didn’t even use, we never finished getting all the garlands strung and hung, and we spent the entire vacation making batch after batch of soap for our friends.”

“That’s my point,” I say, ironing out a stubborn puckered wrinkle on a sheet.

“What’s your point?” Brent says.

“It wasn’t perfect.”

“Far from it.”

“And we weren’t even smart enough to enjoy it.”

Chapter Thirty

Brent and I are lying in bed watching the annual airing of
Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
using the rabbit ear antenna on the TV. Neither one of us has said one word about Christmas plans.

“At least you don’t have to come up with a present for Martha this year,” I say during a commercial break.

“What you mean to say is at least
you
don’t have to help me make one,” Brent replies.

“True.”

“Why don’t we just ignore Christmas this year,” Brent says, flipping the channel to a rerun of some horrible reality program. It’s actually not a bad idea, I think. Every mention of Christmas in the newspapers and on television this year is attached to plummeting retail sales and stories of families forced to spend Christmas Eve in their cars. Several people have already died at large retail chains as people stampede to take advantage of clearance sales. As a country it seems we’re not ready to give up the ghost of Christmas past. People collecting unemployment are still concerned about having the same number of presents under the tree for their children as they had last year. It doesn’t seem to even matter what the presents are—just that there are a lot.

This, I think, is what worries me most about the future—about Brent’s and my future. America has always been able to sentimentalize the holidays. Through every trial and tribulation of this country, we’ve been able to take a few weeks vacation from our stresses to create a homespun holiday memory. In 1897, America was still struggling to recover from our devastating civil war in the midst of the longest global depression in history. Then our hopes were buoyed by a
New York Sun
editorial assuring us that despite a worldwide outbreak of cynicism: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” World War I, the “War to End All Wars,” was marked by spontaneous Christmas truces on front lines around the world. Even the modern version of our jolly, fat, apple-cheeked Santa Claus was hatched in the middle of the Great Depression as a series of illustrations in Coca Cola advertisements.

But this year’s Christmas season seems to have no redeeming or restorative qualities. The stories aren’t about homemade presents and the joy of family. They’re about humans being literally squished to death by other humans at clearance sales, and about struggling to fill the space under the $450 artificial tree purchased during better times.

Maybe this downturn of Christmas spirit is what happens when half of the country’s advertising and media executives are laid off. When
Martha Stewart Living
’s December issue is slimmer than ever, how are people supposed to know how to celebrate? People may gripe about the commercialization of Christmas, but all evidence points to the fact that Christmas is quite possibly the most powerful brand in America and has been for a long time.

If Christmas itself isn’t selling, then perhaps we really are doomed.

“Yes,” I agree, as the credits roll on
Rudolf
. “Let’s ignore Christmas.”

I’m surprised at how easily I agree to this. Brent and I love Christmas. Even when things don’t go exactly as we planned—like last year’s cut-your-own-tree debacle—we still love everything about Christmas, and Christmas Eve, and the weeks leading up to it all. The first year we were together, Brent surprised me on my birthday (in August) with a shopping bag full of Christmas ornaments. He was a medical resident at the time with barely enough money to eat, and he’d gone to every expensive New York City department store on December 26 to buy their clearance ornaments. He’d done the same thing every year since. We had a huge collection—hundreds—each one with its own story.

This year they wouldn’t even make it out of the attic. I wondered if they ever would again.

Chapter Thirty-One

Heading into the office every day leading up to Christmas is like opening advent calendar doors in which each day isn’t a kind biblical verse but an ancient Gypsy curse.

We seem to be losing clients and revenue daily. We’re not alone. The economic meltdown is bringing the entire advertising industry to its knees. Of course the advertising industry is accustomed to spending a lot of time on its knees, but this is something quite different. Even the old-timers have never seen it so bad. I’ve had to let go several more employees, bringing the grand total of lives I’ve had to personally ruin this holiday season to eight. The agency has lost a total of twenty-eight employees. The odds of any of these people finding new places of employment right now are nonexistent—or, in other words, roughly equal to mine and Brent’s.

Any fleeting hopes of somehow turning the agency around by the end of the year has vanished.

Tonight is the agency holiday party, which we’ll be hosting in our own office this year rather than at a fancy venue. The decorations are handmade, the booze cheap, and the food scarce.

For the sake of the company party, I’ve forced myself to dress festively this morning, which I’m regretting now as I trudge through the gray sludgy mess on the sidewalks of Wall Street. The street is practically deserted. In the last few years, Wall Street at Christmastime literally felt like a candy store full of children. High-end retailers like Tiffany and Thomas Pink built some of the first retail shops on Wall Street simply to take advantage of the two or three days each year when bankers and brokers received their multimillion-dollar yearly bonuses. Their rationale, quite simply, was to put diamonds and luxury goods right outside the revolving doors of the banking and brokerage institutions in hopes of intercepting even a small fraction of employees walking out with pockets stuffed with bonuses far greater than the lifetime earnings of 99 percent of Americans.