But Enough About Me (12 page)

What most people find festive—a weekend at a beach shack with friends, a boat trip down a river, a crackling bonfire on a summer night—I see as a bleak nightmare to be grimly endured. I would sooner put lit cigarettes in my eyes than share a vacation house with a crowd. Inevitably there is one bathroom for ten people, so there is a constant line, and when it's time to do your business, someone outside of the rickety door decides at that moment to take the CD out of the player as you furiously pull up your pants in the silence. Later, you are thwarted again as you realize that if you can clearly hear your friend's newspaper rustling as he reads the
Times
out loud for everyone's amusement, then they can all hear you. The days crawl by as you swell like a tick. No, thank you.

I do not want to stand in the kitchen with the car keys, seething, while one person makes a grocery list and another hunts for cash and a third announces to the housemates playing touch football that all fourteen of us are going to the grocery store in one car for a shopping expedition that should take ten minutes but will stretch for three hours, do you want to come along?

Every eternal day revolves around the meal. If you're at the beach, there's always someone who feels that it's their duty to boil lobsters, a joyless process
of liberating the creatures from their muddy prison at the fish market, praying for the water to boil so they'll stop struggling, mustering your appetite as you wrestle the meat out of the shell, and then cleaning up the carcasses, the stench of which hangs over the kitchen for the remainder of the week.

If you're in the woods, you try to devise a menu from the macaroni and cheese mix and Vienna sausages offered by the bait and tackle shop that also sells toiletries and food, or, with noisy fanfare, you open the spider-corpse-encrusted grill out back to barbecue some dubious meat, which will be cold and raw in the middle and burned on the outside. On another night, you will make spaghetti, which the cook keeps tasting with the same spoon and putting back in the sauce, and you can count on someone throwing the cooked pasta against a cabinet door to see if it sticks, done to much hooting and clapping. When it comes to meals, everyone pitches in, so that your food is lovingly touched by fourteen sets of grimy hands, and since everyone is usually drunk by cleanup time, there will always be at least one chunk of beige food stuck in your fork tines when you eat something the next day.

The mantra of the gathering is always “Do your own thing,” but of course you can never really do your own thing without acute self-consciousness. If you bring up a book that you're dying to finish, someone will plop down next to you and ask about what you're reading, or a group will gather around you and talk loudly so that you read the same paragraph three times. Somebody always brings a dog, usually a black Lab, and no matter how carefully you edit the guest list, there's inevitably one really annoying person in attendance, either some girl who gets too drunk and cries, or a meathead who likes to repeatedly remind her about it the next day when he's not checking all the various sports scores on TV as the birds chirp merrily outside. You buy flowers at a roadside stand to decorate the house, and in the tumult, nobody puts them in a vase. Days later they've turned to mulch on the counter where you left them, buried under a mound of moldy kitchen rags.

Silence is not going to happen, because silence doesn't mean Good
Times, so there's constant chitchat, and one guy who takes it upon himself to play deejay. After lunch, time halts completely and gets stuck at four thirty for what seems like days, so the whole cabal bumbles around until someone cracks a beer and everyone else, relieved, follows suit. Then it's time to go to the grocery store.

After dinner, you can't go to bed early because everyone feels compelled to do the late-night
Big Chill
thing, and besides, there's an uncomfortable undercurrent because one couple claimed the “good” bedroom, despite having just joined the group this year. Then it's activity time. No, thanks, I don't play cards at home, so I sure as hell don't want to do it here. Or Boggle. Or charades. But you finally give in, and you drink more than you want to, and Boggle starts to seem sort of fun, and you think,
Hey, this isn't so bad.

But then the next morning, after a restless, sweaty sleep on yellowed sheets and a musty dog-hair-covered afghan that the original house owner's aunt knitted during the Eisenhower administration, you jolt awake at dawn to the sound of the stereo blasting courtesy of the one early-riser guy who's annoyed that no one else is up after he has already run five miles on the beach. Fuzzy headed, you make your way downstairs, where there is always a person eating cereal and making chipper small talk before you've had your coffee in a seventies earth-toned mug that's cracked and glued back together and has an ancient lipstick mark that has never been washed away. You grab the carton of warm orange juice that a housemate has left out on the counter overnight and pour it into a glass that foams up from the dish soap that somebody forgot to rinse during the drunken group cleanup.

Then, all you want to do is bike into town to that quaint little scone shop that you spotted during the drive in, the one that looks like an English cottage with morning glories covering the sun-dappled front patio, and buy yourself a scone, a cappuccino, and a newspaper and quietly read, but that is not what this weekend is about. Because even though the unofficial motto is “Do your own thing,” if you actually do break away, there are raised eyebrows and hurt feelings, or, worse, as you make your escape and pedal desperately to the scone
shop, you discover that you're playing Follow the Leader to fourteen bikes. Then your boisterous, hungover mob noisily overwhelms the tiny scone shop. All the gentle regulars flee as the girl who drunkenly cried the night before complains that the store doesn't offer soy milk and the whole posse rearranges all the tables with loud scraping noises, so that everyone can sit together. God forbid you have two newspapers.

When you can't put off taking a shower any longer, you wonder why you didn't bring your flip-flops as you behold a rainbow assortment of pubes on the floor of the mildew-scented stall. After you're done lathering up in a trickle of cold, rusty water with Prell—always Prell shampoo, bought from the local tackle shop that sells toiletries and food—you reach for your one towel that you had carefully placed on the third hook, only to find it in a wet, fetid pile next to the john after it has clearly been used to swab your friends' nooks and crannies.

Your mind races. Who used the shower before you? Was it one of the clean ones? Was it one of the guys in the nice gay couple or was it the husky one who came out of the bathroom after breakfast cheerfully announcing that he needed a plunger? Who is having actual fun here except the meathead guy, and the couple who don't have a good relationship and are just relieved to be around others? As you prepare to go on a communal trip to the ancient movie-rental place that has
Jaws
in the New Releases section, and the long debate commences as you all try to find the one movie that hasn't been seen by all fourteen of you, you vow to yourself,
Never again. Never, ever, ever.

So why I thought a hayride would be any different, I don't know.

A new friend from
Rolling Stone
had invited me for an upstate idyll, and in my eagerness to be included, I had ignored the red flags. Every year the family held a hootenanny at a farmhouse estate. I loved farms. Maybe it would be lambing season! What could be the problem?

As it happened, it was the roster of events, which would seem like great fun to anyone else but was, to me, the lowest depths of misery: a tennis tournament, a square dance, communal sleeping quarters, and a hayride. And so I found myself sitting on a scratchy bale of hay, bouncing over pristine farmland
in a truck driven by a stalwart farmer type. The celebrants around me, most of whom I didn't know that well, were throwing hay at one another, tossing back drinks, and occasionally bursting into song, a living, squirming, shouting Ralph Lauren photo spread. I, meanwhile, was calculating how long this trip could reasonably last. Two hours? An hour? The tractor had to run out of gas, eventually. Why wasn't anyone looking at their watches?

I surveyed the ring of faces. All were merry, pink-cheeked, chatting animatedly.

Except one. She had wedged herself into a corner, and her ghastly isn't-this-fun smile matched my own. She had the same careless blond good looks of the privileged people around her, but somehow I sensed that she was approachable. I made my way over to where she sat, fighting to keep my balance as the truck heaved over another rock.

I assumed a pleasant expression. “I haven't been on a hayride in years,” I said. I tried to be upbeat, but that was the best I could do.

“I never have,” she said. “Jews don't do hayrides.”

I scrambled to sit closer to her. “This may be the most awful day of my life,” I said in a low voice.

“I was once in a car that caught fire,” she said. “This is worse.”

Julie was a high school friend of the host. She had been visiting her folks nearby and decided to stop in. “No matter how much I drink,” she said, “I'll never attain the level of drunkenness to appreciate this.” She told me that she lived on the Upper West Side and had gone to NYU film school. She was single, dating here and there, and she wrote scripts for the
National Geographic
Channel.

“I'm a reporter for
Rolling Stone,
” I said. This was not strictly true. I had only recently become an assistant editor.

“I know a guy who works there, named Peter Sloane,” she said. “I took riding lessons with him.” Ugh. Smarmy Peter Sloane, Mr. Ski Tan. Mr. “Can I get you ladies a drink?”

“Oh,” I said carefully. “I know him.” Then I cracked. There was something about her that made me want to drop the facade. “He's…he's…
what's the word?”

She laughed. “How about ‘horrible'? There are three people I hate in the world. Frank Stevens, Providence Insana, and Peter Sloane.” I didn't have time to ask about Frank or Providence as the conversation bounded along.

She leaned forward. “Listen, I don't work at
National Geographic.
I just sent them in a test script. I don't have an assignment yet. Lately, to pay the bills, I've been working as a clerk at an insurance company.”

“Well, I'm not a reporter at
Rolling Stone.
I compile the charts page.” Around us, the group decided to chant the farmer's name in what they probably thought was a friendly, inclusive way, but he did not turn around.

Julie and I talked for an hour in our own bubble until the hay wagon rattled its way back to the farm. As everyone jumped down and dashed off to the next activity, Julie walked over to thank the driver, who was picking beer bottles out of the piles of hay, and I knew that my instincts about her were correct. Julie was missing the hard edge that afflicted so many of my city sisters and brethren. Julie, I would soon find out, was the type of person who wouldn't feel the need to comment on the lopsided wig that a diner waitress wore, who refrained from ordering in food during bad weather because she didn't want the delivery man to have to ride his bike in the rain. Tourists constantly asked her for directions, old ladies flapped over to her in the grocery line to compare purchases.

She told me that she once attended her superintendent's Tupperware party because she saw that he was inviting other people in her building and thought that nobody would come. “I was right,” she said as we walked toward the farm. “Four people showed up, and one was his sister. There was a deli platter and about twelve bottles of wine for the five of us. And the super is a recovering alcoholic, so he doesn't drink.” She sighed. “I ended up buying a hundred and twenty dollars' worth of Tupperware.” As we continued to walk, talking intently, I learned that she had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of baseball, gritty films of the seventies, and Halloween collectibles.

She shielded her eyes from the sun, gazing in the direction of the barn, where the family matriarch was sweeping the floor in preparation for the
square dance.

“I have to find my parents,” she said. “They'll want to be getting back soon.”

My heart sank. “You're not going to the square dance?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I guess you're staying here?”

I nodded. “I'm in that big cabin,” I said, pointing to a ramshackle building near the farmhouse.

She looked appalled. “The one with the burst pipe? I heard all about it on the hayride. How many people are in there?”

“Fourteen,” I said. “Let me show you my horror.” No one was in the cabin. Julie gingerly stepped in. Her foot made a squishing sound because the carpet was flooded with sewage from the burst pipe. Empty beer cans littered the living room. A rustic plaque of a Pa Kettle type hung on the wall, inscribed with the words, “I'd have to git better just to die.”

“This is where I'm sleeping tonight,” I said, pointing to a lumpy plaid sofa that smelled of long-ago ass. I bit back the impulse to ask her if I could stay with her at her parents' house.

She surveyed the room with her hands on her hips. “I am aghast at these conditions,” she said. “I'm not a backpack-through-Europe type of person, let's put it that way. My idea of camping is a hot dog at Riverside Park. But this…” She held up her hands. “This is an outrage.” She checked her watch. “I'm sorry to do this to you, but I really have to find my parents.”

“I'll help you,” I said quickly. Outside, she made her way to a couple who looked as uncomfortable as we did.

“Ready to go?” her mom said.

Julie gave me a note. “Here's my number,” she said. “Call me anytime.” She put both hands on my shoulders. “You can get through this,” she said quietly.