We Are Unprepared (2 page)

Years before, Pia and I had made a pact to live a different sort of life one day. We had only the vaguest plan to escape the city and remake ourselves, but we were sure the details of this plan would present themselves when it was time. So when we found the farmhouse, we recognized it as the natural extension of the dream we had created together. I sold my piece of the firm and stayed on as a long-distance consultant. Two months later, we were unpacking in Vermont. It was such a fast and easy process that we didn't have time to iron out all the wrinkles of our new life. Pia didn't have a new job lined up yet and we hadn't met a soul there.

It sounds reckless in the retelling, but that was an important part of its appeal. Pia was great at embracing the new and unpredictable, but I was far more cautious, so this leap to a new state also felt like a leap toward my wife. We were going to forge a new path together, armed only with years of shared daydreams about a country life.

The hammock rocked gently as the breeze picked up, and I could smell the goldenrod that was being mowed at the farm upwind. Pia was still listing things that would need to be addressed before The Storms came: gutters, faulty wiring in the basement, a stuck bedroom window. I knew she was probably right; if this storm was for real, then we did need to start preparing. But I stroked her hair and suggested that we spend the rest of the now-enjoyable Friday relaxing. We could get to disaster preparations tomorrow.

“Hey, dudes. What are you doing?” said a squeaky voice.

Approaching us was our seven-year-old neighbor, August, whose dilapidated little house sat on the other side of a thick wall of trees and shrubs to the east. His place was invisible from our porch but connected by a short, neat path that I had helped August clear to facilitate easy movement back and forth. I had met August on the first day of our arrival, when he walked through our open front door and began peppering us with questions. He seemed desperate for friends and bubbling with curiosity. Since then, I'd seen him almost every day. He'd come over to kick a soccer ball back and forth or invite me to check out the new fort he'd built in the woods behind our homes. Pia thought August was sweet, but it was I who spent so much time with him. I wondered sometimes about the adults in his life who had left him so hungry for attention, but I didn't ask many questions, mainly because I didn't know what exactly to ask, but also because I enjoyed our time together and wanted to just be with him. And August was helpful. He'd spent his entire short life in those woods and he knew more about self-reliance and country living than Pia and me combined.

“What's up, buddy?” I said, reaching a hand out for a sticky high five.

As usual, August was barefoot, filthy and smiling. The burdock lodged in his curly auburn hair appeared to have taken hold days before.

August wanted to play Frisbee, so we hoisted our bodies out of the hammock and met him on the lawn. The mood had shifted and we were happy to play. That was the way things changed with Pia: she could be crying and sad, but the minute it was over, it was really over. Most of the time, this was a relief, though there were times when I knew we probably should have actually worked things through instead of just riding them out. But it was so much easier to just wait for storms to pass, and the highs were so high that we didn't want to look back at the lows once we had escaped them. We just drove forward, secure in the knowledge that we were in love and nothing was worth dwelling on. This unspoken arrangement required a willingness on my part to indulge every emotional whim that Pia wanted to follow. In return, she kept things uncomplicated and asked very few questions. Abiding by the rules of this dynamic felt intimate. It worked for us.

Pia dived theatrically as the Frisbee left August's hands, which made him double over in laughter every time. I laughed along with them but let my eyes wander to the group of flycatchers above. They were migrating south, no doubt, but they were several weeks late. They should have been in Central America by then. These were the details of nature that I never got wrong. I was as passionate about nature as Pia was about art, and I knew bird migratory patterns like the moles on my left arm. I assumed they were just as immovable. But the birds were confused and their travels had changed.

Our backyard was magnificent that day. The enormous sugar maples along the lawn's perimeter swayed cheerfully as the low sun illuminated their drying leaves. It would have been a perfect July day, were it not for the fact that it was late September and there was no shaking the feeling that everything was off. The leaves seemed to be skipping past their most brilliant orange-yellow-red phase and going straight to the browning at the end. We were playing Frisbee in shorts, for Christ's sake.

Weather was the primary topic of discussion in the Northeast Kingdom that summer—even more so than usual—because it was all so wrong. Everyone was nervous: the farmers, the maple sugarers, the people who relied on ski tourism, the ice fishermen and the hockey fans. Pia talked a lot about a global-warming government cover-up, but I was the one in our household who truly mourned the changing Vermont climate. I had grown up there (technically, I grew up in Rutland, a sturdier, postindustrial town in central Vermont). Every milestone of my life was tied in some way to New England weather; and every romantic vision I had for our new life relied on the weather being right. Some part of me understood this to be unrealistic, but I wasn't ready to accept that.

When the sun finally disappeared and our toes started to chill in our flip-flops, we sent August home and Pia and I went inside to make dinner. I loved making dinner together. It was an activity that could lay the groundwork for hours of sexually charged companionship. It wasn't just sex—though that almost always came later—but also wine and storytelling and laughter and touching. Those nights always felt to me like scenes from a movie. I envisioned someone watching us through a window, not hearing exactly what we were saying, but being impressed by the ease and tenderness of our home life. It was the shade of domesticity that I liked marriage in.

Pia browned fat chunks of bacon in a pan that would soon be joined by split brussels sprouts and a drizzle of maple syrup, an addicting recipe she had acquired from the little girl who ran the farm stand down the road. These were the details we relished but worked hard to seem cool about when we breathlessly relayed them to our friends back in Brooklyn.
We buy our sprouts from a farm girl down the road! That's where we get our eggs, too—you have never eaten eggs until you've had just-laid eggs. I can't believe we ever bought our meat vacuum-sealed at the grocery store. Just-butchered and free-range is the way to go. It's just the way life is here...
The narrative we'd created about our life in Vermont was almost as important as the experience itself.

I massaged salt and pepper into a local sirloin and carried it out the back screen door to place over high flames on the grill. Pia joined me minutes later, slipping a hand around my waist and lifting her pinot noir to my lips. I took a sip before leaning down to kiss her hard. I loved that I was almost a full head taller than her. Being tall and broad was my best physical feature. Without expending much effort on appearance, I projected the illusion of general fitness, even as my stomach softened slightly and my dark, groomed beard sprouted grays. I drew most of my confidence with women from my size, which worked fine for Pia, who liked to be enveloped by someone larger than herself. On cue, she melted into my chest and then pushed me away, darting back inside to tend to her sauté pans.

* * *

“I want to change the world,” I once said to Pia during a marathon late-night session of drinking, fooling around and philosophizing early in our courtship. We were on our second bottle of wine and both feeling drunk.

“No, you don't.” She laughed.

“I do!”

“No, people who want to change the world go on disaster relief missions in Haiti and deliver vaccines to babies in Africa. You just want to be outside and feel like less of a yuppie dick.”

I considered this correction as I studied the pattern of the blanket beneath us. We were sitting on the floor in our tiny Brooklyn living room having a sort of indoor picnic.

“It's okay,” Pia went on. “I'm the same. I'm too selfish to do something truly good, but I think choosing to live a life that doesn't make the world worse is okay, too.”

“Shit, you're right,” I conceded. “So how do we not make the world worse?”

“Smaller ecological footprint, conscientious consumerism, freedom from prejudices, that sort of thing. It sounds trite, but I don't think it is. You live a more thoughtful life than your parents did, and you teach your kids those values, and voilà: the human race evolves. That's meaningful.”

“I'd rather actually be a good person, but I guess you're right. Maybe that is meaningful,” I agreed. “So let's make a pact to live that way. Somehow.”

Pia stretched a hand toward me to formalize the agreement. “I love that. It's a deal.”

We shook on it.

“I feel like a good person already,” I said.

“Not good, just a not-bad person,” she corrected.

We set our wineglasses aside and I dived toward her. She enveloped me with her legs and fell back.

Pia was a marvel to me in those early days—as witty and esoteric as she was sexy. It was just nice being together and we never wanted to stop.

* * *

Dinner was served on the dirty porch furniture, which looked perfect in the glow of a dozen tea lights that Pia had carefully arranged. We sat across from each other, drinking wine and discussing the superior origins and experiences of the dead animals before us. There would be no mention of her ovulation cycle or my quiet resistance to the project. This was a good night. After some discussion of the strange and beautiful sky, we eventually turned to the most obvious topic.

“So, what are we going to do, love?” Pia asked, more excited than scared. “These storms are just terrifying! We need a plan.”

I nodded. “We do need a plan. I can't imagine that our little landlocked state is in all that much danger, but I guess we should err on the side of caution and get this leaky old house sealed up. I assume that we'd stay here, even if a really big storm came, right?”

“Of course—we have to stay!” Pia said, gulping her wine. “This house is our baby. And where would we go anyhow? Certainly not to your parents' place. And certainly not to mine!”

I was surprised that she hadn't considered the possibility, but it was true that there wasn't really any reason to go to either of our parents' homes in the case of an emergency. We were adults and we were no less equipped to handle disaster than they were, though I felt as though they'd attained a level of adulthood we hadn't yet graduated to.

Pia's parents, both academics, lived in a tony Connecticut suburb outside of New York City, which was where they had raised their one beautiful child. They were aloof and opinionated, but they had always been kind enough to me. Pia spoke of them as if they were monsters. And maybe they were. I once assumed that she liked believing that hers had been a cruel childhood because it made her more interesting and tortured. But I was wrong about all that. Something had been missing from her childhood; there was a chaos inside of her that I couldn't account for.

I didn't like Pia's parents, but not for the reasons she provided. They offended a Yankee sensibility in me that valued industriousness and discipline. I couldn't understand what justified their haughtiness when, as far as I could tell, they hadn't left much of a mark on the world. It wasn't that their pretensions were unfamiliar to me—there was no shortage of artsy liberal affect in the corner of New England I grew up in. I just hated playing along with it. Pia's parents attended the symphony and followed culinary trends and read theater reviews, but they didn't create anything themselves and this bothered me. They seemed to believe that, by virtue of association with greatness, they, too, were great. They told us stories about so-and-so who just produced a one-act play or wrote a book about his trek across Nepal as we nodded with appropriate awe. Visits with them required pretending that we weren't having cocktails with appreciators of great art, but with the artists themselves. All of this was made even more maddening by their undiluted disappointment at the lack of
formal
culture in our lives. That was their term for distinguishing the kind of culture that we enjoyed from the established arts of the aristocracy they believed themselves to be part of.

My family was less complicated in every way, a point that Pia liked to make when she was annoyed with me. My father was a lawyer at a local firm in Rutland, where I grew up with two sisters and a brother. I came second, which secured my rank as neither the most successful nor the most screwed-up of my siblings. My mom stayed at home and I believe Pia disapproved of this, but she never said so aloud. My parents volunteered at our schools and picked up trash on green-up days and supported local theater. Since moving to New York, I hadn't met anyone who cared about their community in the way my parents cared for their struggling town. I like my parents and, although my younger sister's kids and my brother's drug habits had commanded most of their attention in recent years, we were all okay. (My older sister lives in London with her wife. We had always gotten along well, though we've fallen out of touch in recent years.) This is what family looks like to me. It's not always joyful, but it's big and messy and kind of fun some of the time. I expected to have something similar one day, when I was ready.

“Yeah, we have to stay here no matter what,” I agreed, pulling the collar on my sweater a little higher. It was cool outside now and so dark that I could barely see Pia's face floating above the candles.

She moved our bare plates aside and took a small notebook with a matching pen from the pocket of her bulky sweater. It was list time. Pia loved the idea of being a writer, someone who writes, so she was forever collecting pretty little notebooks to have on hand in case inspiration struck. But inspiration never stayed with her for more than a few minutes, so her notebooks were mostly used for frantic list making, which struck much more frequently. She listed books she planned to read, organic foods she wanted to grow, yoga postures that would heal whatever was ailing her. Her lists were aspirational instructions for a life she wanted to live. They rarely materialized into much but served a constructive role nonetheless, as if the mere act of putting her plans in writing set her on a path to self-improvement. I didn't object to the positivity of it all.