Pages 1-13. Through June 17.

. To: katie@dundee.net
From: sarah@sarahspage.com
Date: 6-15
Subject: Hurricanes, Parental Stress & Other Summer Activities

Dear Katie,

I know. I’m SORRY. I, like, dropped off the planet. At home every time I tried to e-mail you, Mom’d get this really CONCERNED look on her face — like little electrons were leaping off the screen and searing through my eyeballs into my brain. There’s so much to tell you. Things have been REALLY whacked-out, what with leaving New York and getting shipped out HERE and all. At least I have my laptop and Mom isn’t around to be an e-Nazi any more.

HERE is, of course, the state of MICHIGAN, vacationland to the stars (NOT). The fact that Michigan has phone lines and Internet access is about the only thing it has going for it. :-) You would not BELIEVE the room I am sitting in. The carpet is the color of Barney the Dinosaur. I can’t believe the rental units did this to me. Especially since I have to live with my sister, Amy, and Jeff, and you know how my mom freaked out about THAT whole relationship. She swears Amy eloped just to cheat her out of a big wedding. And Mom doesn’t even KNOW about the horrendous decorating. It was going to be SUCH a fun summer at the beach — until everything happened.

Before I even get too deep into explaining anything, I want to tell you that I’ve created my own Web site. I think after you read the rest of this e-mail, you’ll realize why. It’s more or less to preserve things and keep a running journal. Somehow, just writing things down the way I used to doesn’t seem like enough. Not when my whole world’s been turned into hummus. I think you’ll really like it. Check it out at Sarahspage.com.

So I guess by now I should stop avoiding the topic and bring you up to date. I’ll entitle this story "How My Mother Sent Her Precious Baby Daughter to Live with Her Sister on the Prairie." Catchy? Think? The short answer is my mother couldn’t deal with me anymore. The long answer may take several e-mails, but I’ll do my best to get the hurricane part out of the way in this e-mail.

I guess what happened was that freaked-out spring hurricane was supposed to miss Long Island. But then it took this wild left turn in the middle of the night. This is the part where I get sad because you never saw our beach house. :-( This was supposed to be the summer you came to visit. Like, think you’re FINALLY old enough to stop going to camp? Obviously my plans experienced a meltdown.

On sarahspage, I’ve uploaded pictures of the house. Actually it’s kind of weird designing the site because it is, after all, the WORLD WIDE Web. You can’t be sure that people who visit the site are from New York, like us, or even know where Southampton is. They could be from OREGON for all I know. Not that a lot of kids from Oregon are going to be logging onto my stupid little site, but you get what I mean. Anyway, it was kind of cool describing my life for someone who doesn’t know anything about me. I’ve got maps and pictures and all kinds of stuff. I included a sample at the end of this e-mail because it’ll give you a feeling of what I’m doing on the site, and who knows, maybe you have a cousin from Oregon. All about Southampton

Now for the blood and gore:

The hurricane wasn’t SUPPOSED to hit us, according to Channel 2’s weatherman Storm Field with his shiny patent-leather hair. But when did a hurricane — especially one with a politically correct name like Arethra — ever listen to Storm Field? About 2 a.m., Arethra took a hard left and slammed right into the South Shore. I know you’ve read all the newspaper stories. Like 10 people on our street lost their houses. :-/

I woke up hearing the roar. I had my laptop all packed. I always do if there is the least little chance of a hurricane. I can’t bear the thought of leaving my data behind as my hysterical mother drags me out the door to flee to higher ground. So I grabbed the machine and ran downstairs.

The bay window was blown out. The briny water lapped at the Persian rug under my feet. My mother was standing in the middle of the living room in her bright pink-and-green Lanz nightgown and bathrobe, shouting over the surf — something about a Q’ing Dynasty vase. Dad was already in full gear. Uncle Jim was there, too. He had heard the 11 o’clock news about Arethra’s hard left and called my dad from the car phone. He and my two cousins raced out to Southampton. They got to the house and everyone started hauling furniture to the old stable building in the caretaker’s beat-up old truck.

The first thing I did was put my laptop under the driver’s seat of my dad’s Mercedes. I knew THAT car would make it out of the hurricane if my dad had to strap life preservers to it and SWIM it back to Manhattan. Back inside, Dad had one end of the Louis XVI sofa and my cousin Drew had the other. Uncle Jim was driving them like a cattle rancher. My mother was now shouting something about the Waterford crystal, which was trembling in the cabinet. Dad and Uncle Jim were focusing on BIG valuables. "Emily!" Uncle Jim yelled. "Cut that out and grab the Gosh DARN couch."

You’d think it would only take seconds for a house to go into the ocean — like those building demolition shots you see on a slow news night. You’d think that, and you’d be WRONG. It really took several hours.

As dawn was breaking, we stood on the beach. Nearly half the house was gone. It was like looking into a dollhouse with the door open. Only, the dollhouse frame was the mangled interior walls of what used to be our house. Twisted pipes and wires and chunks of concrete spilled out and away from the house. It was, as the insurance guy put it, "a total loss."

It’s strange and somehow awesome to watch a whole world disintegrate. We were frozen into stone with disbelief. And yet, the weirdest part is that everyone KNEW, one day, it was coming. For YEARS we’ve been watching the hurricanes come in. Remember that one year the National Guard made us evacuate, but the most we got was a strong breeze? All these houses are worth a ba-jillion dollars and they’re RIGHT on the dunes. And NO ONE thinks anything of it.

Do you know that, like 50 years ago, they started to predict that the south shore of Long Island was going to be totally toast by the year 2000? All these meteorologists and other geeks took a look at some data and said, "Yup. That puppy’s going out with the tide. So if you rich people want to build your houses RIGHT on the water, knock yourselves out." Well, we DID knock ourselves out. My grandfather even used his political influence (he was tight with President Nixon or something) to get the Army Corps of Engineers to build these piers and tide-blocks to keep the beach from washing away. Yeah, like THAT worked. The hurricanes STILL tore down the beach, carving a whole new landscape. The day afterward you wouldn’t recognize things anymore. There’d be all kinds of STUFF washed ashore. And this hill you remembered wouldn’t be there anymore. Where the beach used to be wide, it was narrow. And in other places, there’d be these enormous ridges of sand that you could walk along and make forts in. So I always thought hurricanes were pretty cool. And, like my grandfather, I really kind of thought that money WOULD keep back the ocean.

But I guess I never saw a hurricane like THIS one. Who knew that our friend, humble little H2O, is like the most destructive force in the galaxy? I’ve watched storms and hurricanes before and I’ve always been like, "MAN! That CAN’T be the same water I swam in yesterday!" But let me tell you, I’ve never seen ANYTHING that would compare to the ocean that night. The waves that had been warmly and gently sloshing ashore earlier in the day turned into these HUGE bear paws that heaved up, reached out onto the beach and swiped at everything in sight. And I was like, "WAIT. You’re supposed to stay on the BEACH!" But instead these bear-paw waves were coming into our yard, and onto our porch and through our windows.

Station Break — I did a bunch of research on hurricanes. It’s on the Web site. Check it out. All about hurricanes

Back to our show:

Our house took the most damage on the street, though I hear the Mulholland house down the beach was a total loss as well. But everywhere you looked there was destruction. Arethra got hers from Southampton, man — in a Bonfire of the Vanities kind of way, if you know what I mean. You could see garages gone, cars floating over the surf. A roof, a shutter. Debris everywhere.

Speaking of floating, you would not believe all the flotsam and jetsam that came ashore in that first week after the hurricane. We were all kind of paralyzed — not knowing where to go. So we moved into a suite at the Meadow Club until my mom and dad could figure out what to do. All of the kids just kinda ended up walking the beach a lot. We’d yell back and forth to each other as we found things, "Hey, Ashley, isn’t this one of your mom’s sconces?"

"No, I think that’s Mrs. Bostwick’s."

"Eric, your dad’s chess piece?"

"Some gold fixtures. Must be from the Carmichael’s bathroom."

"Sarah! Like, most of this stuff is from YOUR house."

Thing is, that was true. We lost the most. I put together a box that week of scraps from my house. Things like wallpaper, a rag of silk (My mom had just had the dining room curtains done. Each window cost $1200), a pretty painted tile from the backsplash in the kitchen, broken china, a Tiffany lamp, a brass doorknocker.

I guess you can see why the Web site is so important to me. I really feel like I need it right now or I’m going to lose everything. Now, don’t freak out on me. I’m not ready for Prozac — yet. It’s just that memory is such a wild thing. I want to remember all there was about that house and our life because it’s, like, OVER now. And I can already feel it slipping away. Especially since I’m stuck out here on the prairie. But anyway, I just want more than words. I want pictures, songs — all that kind of stuff. And maybe the summer’ll be interesting enough here so that I’ll want to record some of that stuff, too. The page is under heavy construction, but you might want to check it out. At least it gives me something to do.

Once again, we return you to our regularly scheduled program:

After about a week, my parents just decided ‘Screw it, the summer’s ruined.’ There are worse things than Manhattan in June. (What, I don’t know. But then, I suppose I’ve never been to Bombay.) What weirded me out about the whole parental unit thing was how SERIOUS they both were. I really expected something different, to be honest. Like my mom would become hysterical and remain hysterical for a good three weeks. Then Dad would be totally consumed with how hysterical she was, and take like a week off from the Publisher (like anyone is there in the summer anyhow) and be around to comfort her. Then, after about three weeks, my mom would realize that there was INSURANCE money coming for a new house and a lot of NEW decorating. And then she would suddenly get chipper. Dad would immediately flee back to Manhattan — he hates decorating binges — and all would be well with the family’s world.

I thought too soon. None of this EVER happened. My mom and dad just got really serious and did a lot of meeting with insurance agents, bankers, lawyers, and Uncle Jim (which was REALLY strange). No hysterics from Mom. No calls to the real estate agent or the decorator. Nothin’. Too weird.

Being a smart aleck is my defense mechanism and can be kind of annoying. (Or so you tell me. Frankly, I think it’s endearing.) Needless to say, my suggestions about buying a HOUSEBOAT didn’t go over too well. Even Dad wasn’t in the mood to take a joke. And then they both kept looking at me in this really CONCERNED way. Now I’ve been upset about this whole catastrophe. I’ve cried, but not IN FRONT of people. Yeah. I’m bummed. But we’ll come out of it. It’s not like anyone DIED or anything. It’s not like we’re ruined and the insurance company won’t pay or something. Life will be screwed up for a while, and then it’ll go back to being the way it was. But it’s like my mom and dad didn’t see it that way. I don’t know. Maybe they were more attached to the house than I thought. The house HAS been in my dad’s family for a ba-jillion years.

So, now we’re into the whole riding accident thing and my mother not being able to deal with me anymore, but my carpal tunnel is acting up so I’m going to sign off. Check out sarahspage. I think it’s kinda cool ;-)

Bye,
sarah@sarahspage.com


. To: katie@dundee.net
From: sarah@sarahspage.com
Date: 6-16
Subject: Mitten-Shaped States & Major Head Injuries

Hi Katie,

I’ll continue with the story, but first I have to tell you once again how LAME I think this whole weird state is. I’ve put some facts on the Web site. Did you know that Michigan is shaped like a mitten and that there are more smokers per capita than any state in the nation, save Louisiana? Fascinating. I’m riveted.

Michigan the Mitten

NOTHING is the way it should be. You’d think that living in an old farmhouse would be romantic. But this is MICHIGAN, and you’d be WRONG! Living in an old farmhouse is romantic if you do it in suburban Connecticut — when the house has been gutted and redone by an architect, and the best decorator in Greenwich has ordered vintage quilts for every room. In rural Michigan, living in an old farmhouse means drafty walls, bad plumbing, rodents, and an electrical system so ancient you can’t turn on the toaster and the hair dryer at the same time. "Remodeling" means putting in dropped tile ceilings, paneling like the Brady Bunch house, and wall-to-wall carpeting. :-o YUK. Of course Amy says she wants to redo everything. Sure. Like THAT will ever get done. She couldn’t even pull together a REAL wedding like any NORMAL person. I mean, like, how do you even KNOW people are married unless they have a REAL wedding? Anyway, I’ve pretty much decided that this pioneer thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Check out the page yet? There’s a cool picture of my BIG ACCIDENT. It’s amazing the horse show photographer actually GOT that shot. What I don’t get is how he EVER approached my dad. Like, what did he say, "Here’s a picture of your daughter’s last moments on earth. Five-by-seven or eight-by-ten?"

The really scary thing is that my dad DID buy the picture.

But I’m going out of order. Here’s what happened: We went back to Manhattan, and BOY was the apartment depressing. I just had to get out of there, so I decided to hang out at the riding stable in Oyster Bay. I mostly ride on weekends, so they were pretty surprised to see me. But what else was there to do?

The only hitch in my plan was that I’ve never really liked that hoofed TERRORIST people insist on calling a horse. He’s sneaky and runs out at fences and rubs me off under trees and stuff like that. But I’m pretty gutsy, so I figure the one horse show can’t kill me, right?

Darn near killed my mother, though. I don’t remember anything after I entered the ring. But Mom could write a MOVIE SCRIPT about it. It wasn’t pretty. He tried to stop at every fence. It was: Dodge to the right. Dodge to the left. JUMP! Dodge to the left. Dodge to the right. JUMP!

The third fence was my Waterloo. He was barreling along, and then, without any warning, came to this screaming dead halt. I was SOOO mad. I cracked him real hard with the whip. He reared back, heaved himself over, caught his feet in the rails and plunged, snout first, into the turf.

Unfortunately, my snout was only a short distance behind.

I woke up in the apartment. The first thing I remember hearing was the distant sound of traffic. And my mother calling "Sarah, baby, can you hear me? It’s Mom."

She cried for like an hour when I opened my eyes. Then the doctor started to ask me questions. Like, "What’s your name?" (nailed that one), "How old are you?" (no brainer); but then he hit the real toughies like "What month is it? Where do you go to school?" I swear to God, Katie, I had NO idea. Quick thinking on the doctor’s part, too, because when he saw my eyes start to glaze over, he asked my mother if she could get some hot towels — like I was giving birth or something. He never used the towels.

Losing your memory is like the weirdest thing that ever happened to you. Alzheimer’s patients must feel this way. It’s like the here and now is crystal clear. (Except for the Freddy-from-Friday-the-13th-drove- an-icepick-through-my-head headache.) But everything else was really far away. School, the hurricane, the horse — they were just like wiped clean. The only thing left was today and tomorrow. Yesterday just didn’t seem to matter. It was totally washed away.

Gradually — after about 4 days — things started to trickle back. Which, to be honest, was mildly depressing. When I couldn’t remember, I was free from the stress of losing the house and then how weird Mom and Dad were. I hate change. I like my life to stay the same. It nearly killed me to have to make the switch from the Middle School to the Upper School. And I don’t know WHAT I’m going to do about this whole college thing in a couple of years. Guess I have a lot of repressing to do. So, anyway, once I was conscious again, I tuned into the fact that the units were downloading this major VIBE.

I HATE being a kid. You feel like you want to know what’s going on, but you probably don’t REALLY want to know what’s going on. And then you have no real control over the whole operation, so it’s like, who cares?

While I was groggy everything else felt really far away. I almost DIDN’T care. That must be how people feel when a piece of their life ends — like if you move or someone dies or you get divorced or whatever. There’s a part of your life that just fades into the background, even if you loved it a lot. And soon, you can’t even remember it really well anymore. That’s kinda how it felt having my memory gone. But I didn’t let it worry me too bad because, of course, my life hadn’t changed THAT much. BTW — on sarahspage I have a list of all the things I could remember and all of the things I couldn’t remember. Check it out and let me know what you think.

My memory

So, anyway, like I was saying, I started to feel okay again, but my mom was OVER THE EDGE. I know she’s not like the most easygoing mom around (Okay. Okay. But it’s not like yours is EITHER.) Mom really took my little spill HARD. I heard her telling my father that we needed to sell the horse "sooner than we thought." I really don’t get the "sooner than we thought" part. But maybe they found the horse’s terrorist union card.

THEN Mom started talking about sending me to live for the summer with my SISTER in MICHIGAN! Yikes! I mean, Amy WANTS to live in Michigan and I’m sure SOME of the other people who live in Michigan want to live there. But I DON’T. I want to live in New York where all my New York friends are, and go to Southampton in the summer where most of my New York friends go, and take the train to the North Shore on weekends to ride my horse. (Hopefully, my next one will be slightly retarded and docile.)

YES! I admit it! I’m a yuppie-in-training. A rich kid! An elitist! A snob! Call me anything you like but don’t cut my umbilical cord to Manhattan Island. I agree that New York is the most provincial place on earth. I mean, for crying out loud, NORMAL kids are all waiting to get their drivers’ licenses. Not us New York kids. We don’t need drivers’ licenses. We live in Manhattan. I mean how old was that guy your sister married — like 30 — and he had NEVER had a drivers’ license?! I don’t think my grandmother ever went outside the 10 square Upper-East-Side blocks surrounding her apartment. (And if she did, she used a map.)

Anycase. We are provincial. Like the ancient Romans. (Wasn’t that class cool?) We think we are WAY better than all those weird Visigoths out there. We establish imperial outposts (Greenwich, Locust Valley, Oyster Bay, Summit, Hamptons), we plant a flag, we build our aqueducts and we demand that everyone we colonize accept our culture or we feed them to the lions. (Actually, we New Yorkers just act really snotty and superior, but you get the idea.) Yes. That’s me. HAIL MAYOR GIULIANI!

Now my sister Amy, as you know, was way too earthy crunchy for New York. Don’t know how my mother (Madam Bergdorf Goodman herself) ever gave birth to such a tree-hugger. But let’s just say it’s lucky she didn’t stop with Amy. Not like they MEANT to have me — there’s 10 years between Amy and me. By the way, there’s like 7 years between you and Claudia. So, like waddaya think? Ever ask your Mom and Dad about THAT one?

So, all the time I was an adorable, toddling yuppie-to-be in my little applique outfits from Le Petit Bateau, Amy was begging to go to summer camp on a ranch in Colorado. I think the only reason she went to Yale instead of someplace like University of Arizona is that, once she got in, she thought my parents would both end up in therapy if she didn’t enroll. Dad especially. Turns out my grandfather wouldn’t let Dad go to Yale because he said it was a Red school. Gramps was stuck in the McCarthy era. Dad would just have DIED if Amy didn’t go, and when he told her that story, Amy caved. Dad figured it was because she really DIDN’T want the family to go another generation without tickets to The Game. Actually, Amy liked the idea of Yale as a Commie enclave. THAT’S why she went.

Jeff was at Yale Med at the time — and had just inherited his family’s farm. Turns out his mom and his grandparents like all died the same year (major funeral-parlor summer), and left him the family farm. And Amy thinks — "Wow, romantic. I’ll go to live in Michigan on a farm with a country doctor." And Dad thinks, "Well, at least he went to Yale." And Mom thinks, "Well, at least he’s a doctor." And Sarah thinks, "Well, at least I get to stay in New York."

And Sarah was WRONG. Getting back to the part where I’m lying in my sickbed listening to my parents — Mom says they’re going to sell the horse and send me to live with Amy in Michigan. Why? Turns out my mother thought my accident was — get this — A VEILED SUICIDE ATTEMPT. Boy, can I plan ’em, or can I plan ‘em? No messy razor blades or pills for me. No splat on the sidewalk from 20 stories up. Nope, I’d rather get all dressed up and take a dive into a brush box. Now THAT’s the way to go! Elegant. VERY Christopher Reeve.

So there is no WAY I can persuade her I haven’t tried the old equine hasta la vista. And — I hear her talking with my dad — "If Sarah’s THIS upset over the house going in the ocean, imagine how she’ll feel LATER." Well, I know that house-hunting and decorating sprees with my mother can be tough, but not enough to kill yourself over. Normally, I would expect my dad to come to my defense. But like I already explained, this summer they have NOT been acting predictably. So Dad AGREES with her. And before I know it, I have a plane ticket to Michigan and a reservation at Chez Manure Pile in the Barney Suite!

So, that brings you pretty much up to date with how I GOT here. But I have sooooo much to fill you in on since. It’s kind of hard. Jeff is nice, but Amy and I are having just this TEENSY WEENSY bit of trouble finding common ground. She thinks we should do the horse thing together. So check out the page. I was able to do this cool animation of the house going into the ocean. More tomorrow. Going to sleep ‘,- )

Animation of house going into ocean

Type at you later,
S


. To: katie@dundee.net
From: sarah@sarahspage.com
Date: 6-17
Subject: The Local Scene, Misguided Adventures in Animal Preservation

Hi K-woman,

You know, I have to admit mornings here are kinda cool. Michigan is this really WET state. Supposedly they have like 5 gazillion lakes. All around are these boggy marshy places with cattails and ducks and stuff. In the morning, if the air is just a little bit cool, all this fog blankets the place and floats down and settles in the low areas.

Amy and Jeff’s house is high up on a hill. The early farmers didn’t have any flies landing on them, boy. They said to themselves — "Lotta water round here. Gotta be up high." So all the old farmhouses are on the highest ground. Lemme tell ya, it also helps with the mosquitoes who are big enough to MUG you. From my window, I can see the whole surrounding area. And in the morning, the mist pools down in this one area of their property that’s marsh, and drapes right along the stream that runs through. And the spiders build webs overnight and the mist drops collect on them so they look like these white pieces of paper scattered all over the fields. Norman Rockwell, eat your heart out.

So, I do get this small twinge of "this is nice." But then I say to myself, "SNAP OUT OF IT." There isn’t a THING to look at for miles other than farm fields and the occasional house. And Amy and Jeff live on a DIRT ROAD. Yes, you heard me. DIRT. You bump and rattle all the way to their house. And then there’s all this overgrown grass along either side. So I asked Amy, "Why doesn’t the town or the village keep the roads better?"

And Amy says, "Sarah, this isn’t Greenwich, Connecticut."

Okay, DUH. What was your first clue? The John Deere cruising down Main Street, or the gas station selling LIVE BAIT?

Amy and Jeff have this BIG old barn. MAN those old German farmers made things to LAST. The foundation is made of these HUGE fieldstones that they dragged out of the fields. Or so Amy says. Personally, I think the same aliens that moved those huge statues on Easter Island had a hand in this construction feat. But I’m keeping my opinions to myself.

Since Amy’s a teacher, she’s off for the summer. What else do you do with a $100,000 Yale education but go to work in a backwoods school for $26,000 a year? Somebody put this woman in charge of a mutual fund!

Jeff is an okay guy. He’s outta here every morning at 7 a.m., dressed in his scrubs. His best feature is the way he cuts through the Donnelly family hysteria. You’d think as hip as Amy is she’d be really laid-back. Nope. We both got it from Mom — just in different ways. I’m like this really high-energy prepster and she’s this whirling dervish druid. So Mom must have given Amy the idea that I was totally on the edge because the day I arrived she was all HOVERING over me in a hide-the-knives kind of way. Finally Jeff chimes in with, "Amy, would you knock it off. Your sister’s fine. If she OD’s, I’m a doctor. Remember?" It cut through the stress, and we all laughed and felt better.

They have adopted this dalmatian dog. Ever since that movie came out, all these people have been buying dalmatians for their kids. Well, if people want something spotted, they should just buy a hyena, because it’d be less wild than a dalmatian. A lot of these spotted maniacs end up in shelters. Amy can’t just adopt a greyhound like any respectable bleeding heart. She hears about the dalmatian glut and has to have one of THOSE.

Remember that hockey game we used to play — the one where the puck is carried on those little streams of air. And it just whizzes all over — BOINK, BAM, CRASH. Okay, that’s Ellie. She just RUNS all over the place. If she can’t stop, she slams into the wall. I guess she’s about 3 years old. She chews everything. Last night I walked in, and she was under my desk chewing on my computer cables. Okay, so THAT stopped in a hurry. But then, she looked at me real mad, jumps up on my bed and pees on my pillow WHILE SHE’S LOOKING AT ME. It was a real, take THAT moment. I think the people that owned her were tired of having their stuff destroyed.

Two pairs of docksiders and one Dooney & Bourke purse later (ouch that hurt), I guess she decided I had felt enough of her pain. Two nights ago around midnight, she trotted up the stairs and got into bed with me. And I don’t mean she just LAY down at the bottom of the bed. She jumped up, stepped on my head and used her nose to pry open my arms, which I had clenched tight on the covers under my chin (It’s kinda chilly here at night in June.). Then she dove under the covers, turned once and lay with her back to me and her head ON THE PILLOW. Gotta respect a woman that knows what she wants. I know you’re thinking, "YUK!" But I’m telling you, your standards for YUK change out here. Besides, she’s really warm.

So I get up at 7 a.m. Yes ME, up at 7. Believe me, it’s not of my own free will. FIRST of all, out here in the sticks, the whole WORLD shuts down at 10 p.m. I’m SERIOUS. Get this through your head, THERE ARE NO GREEK DELIS. You can’t just hook up with your friends at 9 o’clock and walk half a block to the deli and stay up till midnight sucking down egg creams, talking about who’s dating who. Or decide to go to a movie and walk three blocks to the theater. I don’t know WHERE the kids are or WHAT they do. It’s impossible to do ANYTHING if you don’t drive. Though, I hear that most kids around here drive tractors when they’re like 6 years old. Still, all I know is when you look out from my sister’s dining room (and I use the term loosely), you can see the lights of like 3 houses. Then at 10, it’s dark. It’s depressing.

So I stay up another hour or so writing e-mail to you and working on the page. But then Ellie jumps on the bed and barks at me, and I’m usually kinda sleepy anyway.

Why? Because she gets me up at 7! Licks my face until I wake up. Like I said, your standards for YUK change around here. But yesterday, even if I wasn’t awakened by the saliva reveille, I would have heard the old fart farmer. Amy and Jeff’s nearest neighbor is this 86-year-old farmer. And he was out fertilizing the corn field. Now, I don’t know how YOU feel about an 86-year-old man riding on a huge John Deere tractor, but frankly I’m glad I was still in bed. Turns out he also tries to help Amy out by cutting the edges of her yard so she doesn’t have to mow. Problem is, he can’t see really well. So he took out like 7 of her rose bushes. His name is Door. As in "Close the ____." People have these weird names out here. What ever happened to "Chaz" and "Mitsy"?

By 7:30 the day is in full swing and I’m drinking coffee. Not cappuccino. Not latte or mocha. Regular old coffee. Then I go for a walk. First, the dog needs it. Second, I do. To be honest, I’m finding it hard having so much time to THINK about things. It’s not that I mind the thinking so much. It’s that I mind the stillness. If I’m going to have to ponder my life, I want my feet moving while I’m doing it. Anyway, the field is pretty neat because all the hay is growing tall. It smells like — well, sweet hay. And as I wade through the tall grass, all these eeny weeny grasshoppers ping away from me in every direction. Like HEY WHAT THE ___! You’re walking through my HOUSE!

This morning when I got back, Amy and Jeff were deep in discussion. Jeff was pretty frustrated. He was saying, "Look, Amy, you just can’t bring your urban-vegetarian opinions to the country. Those animals don’t belong around humans."

"What animals?" I said.

"Jeff says we’ve got wild cats in the barn."

"Cool," I said.

"Not so cool," Amy said. "He thinks they’ve got rabies or something."

"Well. Why don’t you just get rid of them?" I asked.

It was one of those moments when you know you’ve taken the side of one married person, and that one looks really smug and the other looks like you’ve just sold them out. Well, Amy looked like I’d just sold her out.

"You see. Your sister loves animals and even she agrees."

"Wait. What did I agree to?"

"Oh, nothing," says Amy, real calm and cool, just like Mom. "Jeff is going to shoot them."

Okay, so like in a nanosecond Amy and I were standing shoulder to shoulder for the first time in our LIVES. I guess I didn’t realize that you couldn’t just call up a SERVICE to get rid of wild cats in your barn. Like you do with roaches. You call the service, you leave for the summer and when you come back, they’re gone. Obviously they KILL the roaches. But I guess I thought the Cat Removal Service would just RELOCATE them. But, like I discovered, there IS no Cat Removal Service.

"Well," says Jeff, "What do you ladies plan to do?"

Amy looks at me and I look at her. "Relocate them," I said.

"Oh," says Jeff in a real know-it-all tone. "That’ll work."

You would not BELIEVE what the day was like, but we did it. I think I have the worst case of poison ivy I have ever had in my life and like a hundred mosquito bites.

First, we went out and got some cat food. We got like 20 cans because we had no idea how it was going to work. It was kinda cool doing this with Amy. It gave us something to talk about.

So we got this big cardboard box. We put an open can of food in the middle of the barn, and hid behind some hay bales. So then, one of the cats comes over and WHAM! I take a flying leap and catch him under the box.

Well, that’s how it was SUPPOSED to work. Actually, the first few times the cat zapped away when he saw me coming. After about 5 cans of cat food, I got one. Boy, lemme tell ya. These cats were WILD. That thing started hurling itself against the sides of the box. I sat on it until Amy raced over. Then we slid this other piece of cardboard underneath the box and both held on tight until we could turn it over. I got a couple of scratches, cuz this cat paw kept reaching out of any opening and swiping in the air — like a scene from an alien movie.

So, in a brief 2 hours we had our first cat. Pooh on Jeff, we both thought. We held the box between us, and got it into the back of Amy’s truck. (Yes Amy drives a pickup truck. I won’t even TELL you about the country music she listens to.) We taped the box shut and motored on over to the local animal rescue place. THAT’s when our plans started to fall apart.

We stood there, braced against each other, holding on to the Mexican-jumping-bean box. The woman behind the desk just LOOKS at us. So we tell her about the cats. She tells us that if they took in every wild animal in everybody’s backyard, they’d go out of business.

So this was TOTALLY NOT what we’d expected to hear. We both just stood there, stumped.

"Do you have any suggestions about what we should DO with these cats?" Amy finally asked.

The woman shrugged and looked down at her paperwork, "Why don’t you just shoot ’em?"

So we’re like, "WHAT is it WITH you people!?"

On our way back to Amy’s we decided we’d just have to take the cats out to the woods behind Amy’s house. They could live there with the other wild animals. (Actually, once they saw this feline spawn coming, the woodland fauna would probably vacate the neighborhood. But still.)

We drove through the fields, lugged the box a few hundred yards into the woods, set it down, quickly ripped the top off and ran. So did the cat. Disappeared into the woods. I have to admit, the cat did look kinda gross — like it was sick. But we’re like, "Okay. THIS is a PLAN."

All told, we relocated 12 cats. We ran out of cat food and had to go to the kitchen for tuna fish. But I think it cost less than $50. Not bad.

About 10 p.m. we were sitting up, congratulating ourselves on what a good job we’d done, when Jeff comes in and says, "Well girls, I’d like you to listen to something."

So we all go to the back porch and listen. It was like this chorus, coming from the barn. This "Reow. Reeeoww. REEEEOW!"

"Obviously, they liked the menu," said Jeff. "Good work. Now they know if they stay, you’ll feed them."

I went to bed listening to the cat chorus with Ellie growling softly. You know what she was thinking too. "Damn cats. Lemme at ‘em." I didn’t sleep well, and I was up before Amy and went out to take a walk.

Ellie and I were out for about an hour. I had almost forgotten about the cats, until I reached the edge of the yard. There they were. Hiding in the tall grass. All the wild cats. An alien tribe, with a leader who said, "This, men, is the place of the sacred can-opener. It will be our new homeland. Tonight, when the humans are asleep, we take the house."

It’s weird: You have this idea about cats as cuddly, domestic animals. It messes with your mind to see them wild like this. It’s as if your favorite teddy bear suddenly grew fangs or something. And I’m like, MAN, is THIS what happens to you out here?

Ellie went after one and it hissed and scratched her nose.

I stepped up onto the porch.

There was something soft under my foot.

Naturally I leaped back like 20 feet. God only knows WHAT they have out here. In New York if you step in something soft, you KNOW what it is. Well this wasn’t THAT. It was a cat. A DEAD cat, I might add. Remember I said some of these cats looked sick? Well this sick one had obviously crawled up to the porch. It knew we had food. Maybe it thought we had a complimentary health plan as well.

Well, it was too late for a feline HMO. So I went inside and got a garbage bag. I toed the body into the bag. YUK standards — out the window.

Jeff opened the back door and looked at me. "Sorry, kid. Not like New York, huh?"

We all had kind of a quiet breakfast. "Well," says Amy, "What do you think we should do about the cats?"

Kate, I don’t know what came over me. I just hated these things. I hated them for invading my life, and for being so wild and alien. And for not being New York roaches you can just exterminate. And for not STAYING relocated when they had BEEN relocated. In order to continue living with myself, I’ll just chalk the whole thing up to the major head injury:

"Shoot ’em," I said.

I knew Amy just couldn’t handle it. So Jeff and I went out at dusk. The cats hunt at night and their eyes gleam in the dark. Jeff had the gun. I held the flashlight. The only thing we need to complete the scene was a ring of covered wagons and the distant sound of howling.

It’s hard to talk about, Kate. It’s TRUE. I WANTED to kill them. Funny thing. If it had been a REAL wild animal, a wolf or something, I would have felt totally different. I would have been like, "Hey! You can’t kill that gray wolf! They’re ENDANGERED, for crying out loud!" But there was something about these cats. They were this weird mixture of two worlds, domestic little house kitties and totally wild animals. THAT was what made me want to kill them.

I don’t know, Kate. I don’t know if any of this is right, wrong, or like if it doesn’t matter. But we killed them. All 12. Tell ya what. Tonight, I really want to be back in my apartment. If I were, know what I’d do? I’d call you up and we’d go to the deli and I’d get about 2 hours of Kate therapy to recover. Then we’d schedule a facial at Georgette Klinger and about 5 hours of shopping. Sound good?

Gotta go. Ellie’s barking bedtime.

Your friend, the felinocidal assassin.

S

© 1998 Sleeping Bear Press. Used with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.