A Friend of the Earth (20 page)

Mac
. She met him two days ago – through me, because of me – and already it's Mac this and Mac that and could I get you another soda, Mac, or peel you some grapes, and what do
you
think, Mac?

He's smiling – I can tell because the corners of the gauze mask lift just under the plastic rims of the sunglasses, where the muscles of his fleshless cheeks would be. He's looking at me – or at least his head is turned my way. ‘Come on, Ty, don't be such a crank – come on, I'll show you,' and there's movement now, Maclovio Pulchris, the ex—pop star who hasn't had a hit in sixteen years sliding across the room on spring–loaded joints to take hold of my aching and angry arm, the two Als stirring and exchanging nervous glances over the dangerous proximity of their employer to another human being, Andrea closing fast and even April starting up from her congealed eggs. ‘Down in the basement, Ty – the east basement, locked off from those sweet tawny lions, and you know I love them, man, so don't give me that look. Shit, I've got a whole meat locker full of stuff – steaks, rump roasts, strings of pork sausage, lamb chops, corn dogs, filet mignon, you name it. We could feed fifty lions!'

I've never believed in vegetarianism myself, except as an ecological principle – obviously, you can feed a whole lot more people on rice or grain than you can on a feed–intensive animal like a steer, and, further, as everyone alive today knows, it was McDonald's and Burger King and their ilk that denuded the rain forests to provide range for yet more cows, but, still, I don't make a religion of it. Meat isn't the problem, people are. In prison, they gave us spaghetti with meat sauce, chili con carne, sloppy joes, that sort of thing, and I forked it up gladly and didn't think twice about it. It's a Darwinian world – kill or be killed, eat or be eaten – and I see no problem with certain highly evolved apes cramming a little singed flesh between their jaws every now and again (if only there weren't so
many
of us, but that's another story). Besides, I didn't really come to the environmental movement till Andrea got hold of me, and I'd gone through thirty–eight years as a carnivore to that point. Top of the food chain, oh, yes, indeed.

My daughter saw things differently.

It started when she was eleven. She came back from an outing in New York with Jane's sister, Phyll, which I'd assumed would be a Radio City Music Hall/Museum of Natural History sort of thing, and announced to me that meat was murder. They hadn't gone to the Hall of Mammals after all. No, Phyll had taken her to the Earth Day rally in Washington Square, where she'd been converted by a dreadlocked ascetic and a slide show depicting doe–eyed veal calves succumbing to the hammer and headless chickens having their guts mechanically extracted on a disassembly
line. I'd had a catastrophic day at the office, my biggest tenant – a national drugstore chain, the anchor for the whole shopping center – threatening to relocate in the mall down the street, and I was sipping scotch to anaesthetize my nerves and defrosting a fat, dripping pair of porterhouse steaks for dinner. Sierra stood there in the kitchen, five feet nothing and eighty–eight pounds, lecturing me about the evils of meat, the potatoes dutifully baking, the frozen string beans in the pot and the steaks oozing blood on the drainboard. ‘That's disgusting, Dad – it is. Look at that meat, all slimy and bloody. Some innocent cow had to die just so we could eat like pigs, don't you realize that?'

I wasn't humorless – or not entirely. But I'd had a rough day, I was a single parent and a cook of very limited resources. Meat was what we had, and meat was what we were going to eat. ‘What about last week?' I said. ‘What about the Chicken McNuggets I get you every Saturday for lunch? What about Happy Meals?'

The kitchen we were standing in was a fifties kitchen, designed and built by my father after he'd finished the first seventy–five houses in the development. Things were breaking for him, and he spared no expense on the place, situating it on three acres at the very end of the road, with a big sloping lawn out front and an in–ground pool in back, then buffering the property with another hundred acres or so of swamps and briars and second–growth forest – the haunt of deer and opossum, toads, frogs, blacksnakes and the amateur biologist and budding woodsman who was his son. The kitchen, with its built–in oven and electric range, Formica counters and knotty–pine cabinets my mother insisted on painting white, had been the scene of any number of food rebellions in the past (macaroni and cheese particularly got to me, and wax beans – I couldn't even chew, let alone digest them), but this was unique. This wasn't simply a matter of taste – it was a philosophical challenge, and it struck at the heart of the regimen I'd been raised on.

Her gaze was unwavering. She was wearing shorts, high–tops and an oversized T–shirt Phyll had bought her (
Lamb to the Slaughter?
it asked, over the forlorn mug of a sheep). ‘I'll never go to McDonald's again,' she said. ‘And I'm not eating school lunch either.'

I took a pull at my drink, the scotch swirling like smoke in a liquid sky. ‘What am I supposed to give you, then – lettuce sandwiches? mustard greens? celery sticks? bamboo shoots? You don't even like vegetables. How can you be a vegetarian if you don't like vegetables?'

She had nothing to say to this.

‘What about candy? You can eat candy, can't you? I mean, candy's a vegetable, isn't it? Maybe we could base your whole diet around candy, you know, like eggs with fried Butterfingers for breakfast, peanut brickie and baked Mars Bars on rye for lunch with melted chocolate syrup and whipped cream on top? Or ice cream – what about ice cream?'

‘You're making fun of me. I don't like it when you make fun of me. I'm serious, Dad, you know, really serious. I'll never eat one bite of meat again.' She pointed a condemnatory finger at the steaks. ‘And I'm not eating that either.'

I could have handled it differently, could have humored her, could have applied the wisdom I'd gained from all the little alimentary confrontations I'd had with my mother when I was Sierra's age, not to mention my father and his special brand of militant obtuseness. But I was in no mood. ‘You'll eat it,' I said, looming over her with my scotch and the beginnings of a headache, ‘or you'll sit at that table over there till you die. Because I don't care.'

The steaks were in the pan, inch–thick slabs of flesh, and I looked at them there and for the first time in my life thought about where they'd come from and what the process was that had made them available to me and my daughter and anybody else who had the $6.99 a pound to lay down at the A&P Meat Department. Cattle suffered, cattle died. And I ate burgers and steaks and roasts and never had to contemplate the face of the creature who gave it all up for me. That was the way of the world, that was progress. I shrugged, and shoved the pan under the broiler.

Sierra had retreated to her room at the end of the hall, the room that had been mine when I was a boy, and she wasn't listening to her tapes or doodling in her notebook or whispering dire secrets into the phone – she was just lying there facedown on the bed, and her shoulders were quivering because she was crying softly into the pillow. I'd seen those quivering shoulders before, and I was powerless before them. But not this night. I had my own problems, and I didn't take her in my arms and tell her it was all right, she could eat anything she wanted, Fruit Loops in the morning, cupcakes for lunch and Boston cream pie for dinner – no, I took her by the arm and marched her into the kitchen, where a baked potato sat slit open on the plate beside a snarl of green beans in melted butter and a slab of medium–rare steak the size of Connecticut.

I poured her a glass of milk, set my drink down and settled into my chair across the table from her. I plied knife and fork. I lifted one chunk of meat after another to my mouth, patted my lips with my napkin,
vigorously tapped the inverted pepper shaker over my plate, chewed green beans, slathered my potato with sour cream and butter. There was no conversation. Nothing. I might have said, ‘Good meat,' or something along those lines, some little dig at her, but that was about it. She never moved. She just bowed her head and stared down at her plate, the potato and beans no doubt contaminated by the juices from the steak, and the milk, which she'd never much liked but only tolerated in any case, entirely ignored. Even when I got up from the table to rinse my plate and dump the rest of my drink down the drain, she never so much as glanced up. And later, when the phone rang and rang again, her friends on the other end of the line anxious to communicate their own dire secrets, she never flinched. She sat there rigid at the table as the daylight faded from the windows, and when I found her sitting there in the dark an hour later, I flicked on the counter lights.

I couldn't look at her face or focus too long on the back of her bowed head and the sliver of white that was the perfect parting of her hair, because I was determined not to waver. Let her get away with this and she'll rule me, that's the way I felt, and then it'll be junk food and candy, then it'll be stunted growth and rotten teeth and ruined skin, delinquency, early pregnancy, bad debts, drugs, booze, the whole downward spiral. At eleven, I crept into the kitchen and saw that she was asleep, head cradled in the nest of her hands, the plate pushed to one side, untouched, preserved like a plate under glass in some museum of Americana:
Typical American meal, circa 1987
. I lifted her in my arms, no weight to her at all, as if the forfeit of one night's meal had wasted her, and laid her gendy into bed, covers to the chin, a kiss to the cheek, good night.

Pork chops the next night, breaded, with German potato salad, sauerkraut, hot apple sauce and reheated green beans. She wouldn't even look at it. What did I say? Nothing. She sat there at the table doing her homework till she fell asleep, and this time I left her there. On the third night it was pizza, with anchovies and mushrooms, her favorite, but she wouldn't touch that either. I gave vent to my feelings then. I roared and I threatened, slammed things, stretched her over the rack of guilt and stretched her again – did she think it was easy for me, with no wife, to come home from a numbing day of work and put on an apron, just for her? Huh? Did she?

On the morning of the fourth day of her hunger strike, I got a call from the school nurse: she'd fainted during gym class, halfway through the rope climb, and had fallen twelve feet to the gym floor. Nothing broken, but
they were taking her to the hospital for precautionary X–rays, and by the way, had she been eating right? The windows were beaded with rain. Sevry Peterson, owner of the failing stationery store in the shopping center, was sitting across the desk from me in the hopeless clutter of my office, explaining how she'd come to be six months behind in her rent. I waved her off, grabbed my jacket and made the Mustang scream all the way to the hospital.

Sierra was sitting in the waiting room when I got there, looking glum in her leggings, big socks and Reeboks and the oversized fluorescent pink T–shirt she insisted on wearing every third day. Mrs. Martini, the school nurse, was sitting on one side of her, a hugely fat man in sandals and a dirty white sweatshirt on the other. The fat man periodically dabbed his forehead with a bloody rag and moaned under his breath, and Mrs. Martini sat stiff as a cadaver over a copy of
People
magazine. Sierra's eyes leapt up when she saw me come through the door, but then they went cold with the recollection that meat was murder and that I, her father, was chief among the murderers. And then what?

Then we went home and she never touched another scrap of meat in her life.

Mac's house – his Versailles, his pleasure dome, his city under a roof – was built during the nineties, the last age of excess in a long line of them. It has three dining rooms, eighteen bedrooms, twenty–two baths, the aforementioned gift–wrapping room, a theater, spa, swimming pool, gymnasium and bowling alley, not to mention the twenty–car garage and a scattering of guesthouses set amongst the remains of what were once formal gardens. There's plenty of room for everybody – Andrea, April Wind, the ghost of Sierra, Dandelion, Amaryllis and Buttercup, refugees from the condos (though none have showed up yet and the winds are still raging), the two Als, Mac and his collection of gauze masks, even Chuy, who insists on sleeping beneath the vintage Dodge Viper in the garage. And, as I'm about to discover, there's food too. Mac pulled me out of the dining room by the arm, and now I'm following his sloping shoulders down a long corridor to an elevator with hammered brass doors. ‘It's down two,' he says, pulling a gauze mask from his pocket and holding it out for me.

What can I say? I take the mask and loop it over my head without a word. My role here is to play the angry old man, and I let my eyes, fully
stoked, do the talking for me. Down we go, and then the doors part on another hallway, magenta carpets, recessed lighting, some of the last mahogany paneling ever installed anywhere on this earth. In the confusion of yesterday we herded the warthogs and peccaries into the bowling alley, and that's down along here somewhere, I think, and though I can't hear them, I can smell the lions. No doubt they're asleep – even in nature, when there used to be nature, that is, adult lions would sleep something like twenty hours a day. I can picture them laid out like corpses amongst the rags and tatters of the dismantled furniture, only the slow rise and fall of their rib cages giving them away. (It's a crazy picture, I know it, this whole thing is crazy, but welcome to life in the twenty–first century. And who am I to complain – I'm surviving, aren't I? If that's what you want to call it.)

Mac's shoulders work, the fedora rides. We follow a corridor to the right, make a left up another corridor, then pass through the swinging doors of the lower kitchen. Mac fumbles for the light switch and a world of kitchen implements bursts into gleaming view: saucepans, colanders, whisks and graters depending from the ceiling above stainless–steel worktables, a big industrial–sized dishwasher, the polished doors of a walk–in freezer. ‘Check this out,' Mac says, his voice muffled by the gauze, and then he pulls back the door on the right and we're engulfed by a creeping cloud of super–refrigerated air. Another light switch illuminates the interior and we can see the carcasses arrayed on their hooks and casting their frozen shadows.