Читать книгу We Are Unprepared - Meg Little Reilly - Страница 9

TWO

WE WOKE UP early the next morning, a clear Saturday that seemed incongruous with the austere task ahead: storm preparations. Pia walked around the bedroom naked for a few minutes, checking her phone, tying her hair up and then taking it down again in front of the mirror. The warm mood of the previous evening still lingered, though daylight had brought a new urgency to our self-assigned task of storm shopping.

I walked downstairs and turned the radio on even before making coffee, hoping for the latest from NPR on the new weather predictions. No one seemed to have any more information, but overnight, countless opinions had been hatched and opposing teams established. A conservative commentator suggested that this was part of a wider liberal scheme to divert public funds to global-warming-research and climate-change “slush funds.” Someone from a think tank feared that the president was withholding information and called for a congressional investigation into what the Department of the Environment and NOAA knew. Pia and I drank coffee with sweet local cream while we watched old men on network TV discuss how this might influence the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections. The Storms dominated everything, but they were still only an idea. It was just a Saturday project for us.

We took showers and climbed into the Volvo, bound for the closest family-owned hardware store, twenty-five minutes away. That morning felt like what I thought our Vermont experience would always feel like. We were close, she was smiling and the landscape unfolded before us like a picture painted by a child in crayon: all blue skies and red barns. The windows were down and we talked about how the smell of manure made us feel. Pia said she hated it but couldn’t resist taking a few deep breaths. I took a native’s pride in sharing that I loved that farm stink. It evoked for me a million childhood experiences, most real and some fabricated in the haze of nostalgia. She leaned across the front seat to kiss my neck and call me a hick as I pulled into Dewey’s Hardware.

* * *

“You’re so country.” That was what Pia had said to me when we met nine years earlier. We were at a raucous costume party in Williamsburg and I was fighting my way through a wall of bare male torsos, trying not to touch the smooth, sweaty shoulders standing between me and the keg. The host, a mutual friend, was a professional party thrower and an amateur drug dealer. His events were always predominantly gay and half-naked, but this one was exceptional even by his standards. My chances of talking to a pretty girl seemed better than average, given the demographics, so I took a risk and smiled at Pia, who was still unknown to me then. She immediately grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd until we found safety in an unoccupied corner of the room.

“You’re not from here, right?” she yelled in my ear.

Her costume was composed entirely of a vine that snaked around her curvy body, with plastic leaves covering all the critical areas. It was held in place with flimsy green tape.

“No one’s from here,” I said. “This isn’t real. It’s a costume party within the costume party of Brooklyn. This is a redundant party.”

Pia seemed impressed by the profundity of this drunken observation, so I kept going. I explained that I had been living there since I graduated from Amherst, that I was working in graphic design and that I had no intention of staying in Brooklyn forever. “I miss trees,” I said, which she liked a lot. When Pia, who had attended Middlebury, learned that I was from Vermont, she touched my arm and told me that she was “madly in love with the dirt there.” I told her about a harvest festival near my hometown that she would enjoy, which was when she smiled an amazing smile and decided that I was “very country.”

We slept together that night. There was no courtship or pretense. She just took me back to her messy apartment and, without a hint of modesty, pushed my head between her legs as if she was giving me a gift I had been waiting for. For the briefest moment, I considered fainting in the humid, earthy cave of her body, but I didn’t. I came alive. Pia didn’t exude the soapy perfume of the girls I’d been with before; she was all salt and musk. She was the most animate being I had ever encountered and a switch was flipped inside me. I wanted to consume her and she wanted to be wanted by me, so our frenzied union felt like a perfect fit. I knew from the start that with her passion came a moody and mercurial element, but that was fine with me. Life was so much more fun with her in it. So we built a relationship there, on a lumpy mattress, beneath glittery, draped tapestries, surrounded by stacks of books in unreal Brooklyn.

My confidence in those initial days with Pia can be largely attributed to the recent realization that my specific brand of geekiness was in high demand in that particular corner of the universe at that moment in American culture. I had always been a tall, slightly awkward dork who would rather be reading nature journals or distance running in the woods than mingling at a party. In Brooklyn, this was misinterpreted as sensitive, progressive and cool. Even my accidental wardrobe (workman pants, flannel shirts, hiking boots) seemed to impress. I would have resented the objectification if it didn’t work so well with hot hipster girls.

* * *

“I knew we should have left earlier,” Pia said from the passenger seat as we approached the hardware store.

The parking lot was surprisingly crowded for nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, but we found a spot in the farthest corner, next to a pickup truck with giant, muddy wheels. Two rows down, a woman hurried small children into the backseat of a car filled with shopping bags.

“Whoa” was all I could say when we entered the store. The normally orderly establishment was roaring with people pushing squeaky shopping carts, many holding lists of their own.

A young man wearing a navy Dewey’s Hardware polo shirt nodded at us from the entryway. “It’s the latest storm report,” he said. “Everyone’s getting prepared.”

I wanted to talk further with this teenager, who probably could have been helpful to us then, but Pia had already claimed a cart and joined the melee. We moved quickly up and down the aisles, most of which had been picked so bare that it was impossible to know which essential items were no longer available to us.

“Tarps have been sold out since seven this morning,” one man reported, “and don’t even bother trying to find sandbags.”

Neither was on our list, but they sounded important all of a sudden.

As whole sections of the store were emptied, shoppers veered to other areas looking for creative uses for seemingly useless items. One man bought all the remaining plastic sleds from the previous winter. I watched him jog to the register with his purchase, satisfied with whatever discovery he thought he’d just made.

It wasn’t the bare shelves or the full parking lot that unnerved me that morning; it was the behavior of the patrons. We were in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom with people who had lived through dozens of epic weather events. They had seen ice storms kill harvests, barn roofs collapse under wet snow and heavy winds bring trees down over livestock. They adapted to bad weather with whatever was in the shed or could be borrowed from a neighbor and they never, ever panicked. This wasn’t full-blown panic, but it was something close. (We would learn later what real panic looks like.)

Pia crumpled up the list in her hand and stuffed it in the pocket of her jean shorts. We wouldn’t find anything on that list. Taking a cue from the shoppers around us, she started just grabbing random items: gardening gloves, a box of large nails and a hammer, three bungee cords, shipping tape. I considered stopping her, but she looked committed, so I stood back. We went around the store like that for a while before finally making our way through the checkout line and out the door, arms full with plastic bags of odd items. As Pia had said the night before, there’s no harm in being prepared.

When we stepped outside, fat raindrops hit our faces and the temperature seemed to have dropped dramatically.

“Shoot, the windows,” I said, remembering our exposed car.

We broke into a clumsy run toward the Volvo, hoping to beat the rain, but the unexpected storm was much faster than us. The raindrops grew larger and somehow sharper as we ran. I felt one sting my ear and heard Pia shriek from up ahead. When we finally got to the car, we jammed our bags in the backseat, rolled up the windows and huddled in the front, stunned. I blinked the water out of my eyes and realized that it wasn’t rain anymore, but hail. Icy golf balls were pelting cars and frantic shoppers. The sky was dark directly above us, but bright and inviting just to the north. On the grassy border in front of the car’s bumper, I could see two birds—more flycatchers on their way south—lying dead, their faces frozen in shock or pain. I hoped Pia didn’t see them.

“Fucking biblical,” she said. Her hair was wet and she was shivering, so I reached into the backseat for a dirty sweatshirt that I’d left there weeks ago. She pulled it on and shook her head in disbelief at the weather change. There was a slight smile on her face.

“Ash, we should keep shopping...track down the stuff on our original list. This isn’t going to get less weird, you know?”

I did know. I felt it, too. The sun was already returning, but an uncertainty had stung us with that hail. We needed to start doing things. So I steered the car toward Burlington and the big-box stores that would have what we needed and the countless new items that popped into our heads as the distant notion of catastrophe inched closer.

Pia laughed out loud as we gained speed on the highway. “It’s kind of fun, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Waiting for disaster. It shouldn’t be, but it’s kind of fun.”

I knew what she was talking about. Candlelit blackouts and immobilizing snow days always thrilled me. To be briefly thrust into a more primitive lifestyle awakens something in us. But it must be brief and risk-free to be fun. It can’t be real. The storm predictions before us sounded more consequential than those fleeting adventures of the past.

“Remember that summer storm in our old place when we lost the power for three days?” she asked.

“It’s one of my favorite memories. My sister still talks about it.”

Years before, soon after I had proposed to Pia, a hurricane hit New York on its way off the coast, bringing torrential rains, followed by three hot, powerless days. My sister and her girlfriend were visiting from London at the time, and I was already uneasy about their first encounter with Pia. But I needn’t have been because Pia was at her best when life went off script.

* * *

We spent two boring days playing board games in the dark and finishing all the wine in the apartment. Without air-conditioning, we were grumpy and smelly, just waiting for life to return to normal. Pia was bouncing off the walls and I could tell that she was going to manifest action imminently. Finally, the rain stopped and Pia went outside. She ran to the corner store for a thirty-pack of Miller Lite, turned our speakers out the window toward the wet street and started knocking on neighbors’ doors. She had started a block party. People poured out of their apartments, many contributing to the beer tub, calling their friends to bring more. Makeshift barricades of chairs and garbage pails were set up on either side of the block to keep cars out, and someone filled a kiddie pool with fresh water. Within twenty minutes, there were close to a hundred people in the street, shaking off the sweaty cabin fever of the preceding days. It felt organic and spontaneous—the big bang of block parties—and no one remembered later how it began. But it wasn’t organic; Pia created it out of nothing. She saw the world for its potential and made interesting things happen. Life with someone like that is limitless.

“She’s rad,” my sister said later. “Fucking nuts, but rad.” That was Pia’s effect on people.

* * *

We drove along in silence, thinking about that party and the complicated pleasure of doom.

“I saw the birds,” Pia said quietly. The sun had reappeared. “The dead ones. It’s spooky—the hot weather and the sudden hail. Everything is a little wrong.”

I nodded and put a hand on her bare knee. There wasn’t much more to say, so I kept driving silently. It was eighty degrees when we woke up, and now the dashboard said sixty. The hail, the birds, the panicked shoppers. It was spooky, but I was grateful for the simple, shared task before us.

Forty-five minutes later, we were making our way up and down the aisles of Home Depot, joking about the impending apocalypse and thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.

“Of course, the dollar will crash after The Storms come, and we will have to turn to primitive forms of currency,” I said with a wide sweep of my arm as we passed the lawn mowers.

“Like spices and fermented cider and stuff?” Pia played along.

“No, much more primitive than that. Blow jobs primarily. Hand jobs also, though they aren’t worth nearly as much.”

She shrieked with laughter, turning several heads around us. Pia never cared who saw her laugh (or cry). I felt proud to be responsible for delighting this beautiful woman.

We bought a snow shovel and two pairs of work gloves, caulking and sheets of insulation. We didn’t know what we were doing, but it felt proactive. The hurried shoppers around us made small talk about which items were essential in which types of weather events and I studied them closely, eager to pass as an experienced local. We bought what they bought and hoped they were right.

Several hours and hundreds of dollars later, Pia and I were drinking wine on our back porch again, surrounded by bags of items that promised to keep us safe from whatever was coming. The back porch was the best part of that house, looking out on our unkempt backyard that dissolved into dark woods. It was home.

I don’t remember the indoors of my childhood. I grew up in a pretty Victorian house, bigger than most of my classmates’ homes and lovingly cared for, but I didn’t spend much time inside it. My parents were strong believers in the character-building properties of outdoor play, so they hurried us into the woods behind our house as soon as the sun was up each morning. We played until we were shivering, hungry or injured and then slept as if we were dead each night. My siblings eventually resisted this parenting technique, which would undoubtedly classify as some form of neglect today, but I embraced it until high school. The woods were freedom to me: undeveloped; unregulated by grown-ups and infinite in their potential for discovery. There was an order to the woods, but it wasn’t dictated by man. I wanted to understand that order, to have dual citizenship in both the natural and human worlds. Passing freely between them seemed the ultimate power. So I became a voracious consumer of science and nature writing. I wanted to know every species of wildlife and the subtle languages with which they spoke to one another. I wanted to be a part of that organism and welcomed by its inhabitants.

With puberty and the new concerns of young adulthood, my commitment to that mission waned and I eventually left the woods. I went inside. I didn’t think much about that departure at the time, but I’ve come to realize that it came at a cost. The sense of purpose and belonging I’d had in those woods hadn’t been replaced by anything in adulthood.

Pia had her head resting in my lap as we swung back and forth on the bench watching the sun set. It was warm again and there was no evidence of the surprise hailstorm that had barged through earlier that day.

“This isn’t what September is supposed to look like,” I said, shaking my head. I was comfortable with her there in my arms, but unable to relax entirely.

“But this is lovely,” Pia said with her eyes closed. Beauty, she believed, had inherent value. “Remind me what September in Vermont is supposed to look like.”

I swatted a mosquito from her forehead and thought for a moment.

“I don’t know... Colder, quieter... The wind should be louder than the bugs and animals. Do you know that some years on Halloween, we would have to trick-or-treat in the snow? That’s only a few weeks away.”

Pia opened her eyes and touched my face. “I don’t think that’s going to happen ever again, my love. It’s sad, really. Lots of things are going to be different for our kids.”

It was a surprisingly dour observation considering Pia’s recent obsession with having children. But I didn’t know then that her attention had already shifted away from those hopeful plans.