We Are Unprepared

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.

Pia had begun a shopping list of home supplies we would need for The Storms. She wrote, “canned goods, multivitamins, water filtration system, solar blankets.” It read more like a survival list for the apocalypse than a storm-preparation plan.

“Babe, I was thinking we would just, like, board up the windows and try to seal up the root cellar a bit,” I said. “Do you really think we need all that?”

“It can’t hurt to be prepared.” Pia shrugged, still writing in the dark. “And if nothing comes of these storm predictions, then we’ll have some extra supplies the next time we need them. No harm done.”

Her reasoning was sound, but there was an edge to her voice that surprised me. The coming storms excited her.

Pia came around to my side of the table and wrapped a wool blanket around both of our shoulders. It smelled like campfire from a previous summer outing. She put her arms around my chest for a quick squeeze and then turned back to her notebook. I listened to the leaves swaying with the wind and the din of summer insects that were somehow still abundant. Her hair fell all around us. I could smell the natural almond shampoo she had started using since adopting a more country approach to hygiene, which made her hair wilder than it used to be. Pia was getting charged with each new idea she recorded. I loved her like that: present and energized. I knew what my role was at those moments. I would be adoring and attentive, which I really was.

Pia pulled a knee up to her chest and I noticed a new drawing in ballpoint pen on her upper thigh. It was a tree with the face of an old man in its trunk. She must have done it that evening, mindlessly doodling in a moment of boredom. Our lives were filled with these small reminders of Pia’s artistic gifts, washable and impermanent, but impressive. She had won awards in college for her oil paintings, and a prominent gallery in Manhattan had offered to show her photography years before. But Pia lacked the discipline to carry out long-term projects and she changed mediums too often to be truly great in any of them. With focus, she could have earned a living doing the kind of art she loved.

“You’re going to be great at this,” Pia said.

“At what?”

“You know, bracing for these big weather events, finding industrious solutions to things, living without some of our old comforts. You like things a little difficult.”

She was complimenting me, but teasing, too. Since we’d started making real money, modern life was feeling a bit squishy for me, all morning espressos and personal trainers. I secretly feared that I was growing too attached to it all. A tiny alarm in the primal recesses of my brain had been going off, warning me to stay sharp and focused in case of future uncertainty. I never told Pia about this growing discomfort, but I should have guessed that she could sense it.

“Fingers crossed for frozen pipes.” I smiled.

We stayed outside until nearly eleven, building our plan for The Storms and laughing—flirting even—as we huddled together in solidarity. When I finally convinced Pia that it was time to go to bed, she took my hand and led me upstairs to our bedroom, where she instructed me to sit in a small antique chair to watch her slowly peel off each layer of her clothing.

It would have been comical on a less beautiful woman as she unbuttoned her oversize flannel shirt and pulled off fading green cotton underwear, but it wasn’t. My physical response to Pia’s naked body hadn’t flagged in the years we’d been together. If anything, it had grown more intense as sex tapered off a little. When she was done undressing, she turned and walked her naked body to the bed to wait for me. Her ears and nose were still cold from the evening chill, but the rest of her body was warm, hot even. I attempted restraint at first, but that didn’t last, and what followed was the wild, forceful passion that we’d founded our relationship on years ago. Better even. We fucked like two people desperate to occupy one another. It was feral, afraid. Pia was alive, the weather was our common enemy and I was relieved.

As she fell asleep beside me, my mind drifted back to our unconceived baby and the news of The Storms. I wasn’t ready for a baby, not then, but I loved Pia’s desire for one because it was the embodiment of my favorite things about her: a hunger for new beginnings, adventure and, above all, optimism. Whether there was a place for optimism in the stormy new world we inhabited, I didn’t know. And I wondered—for the first time in my life—whether this was still a world that babies wanted to be born into. And how could the answer to that question be anything other than an emphatic yes if we are to go on living wholeheartedly? Is there a moment at which the human race should decide not to perpetuate itself, or will we keep going until the universe decides that for us and just wipes us out? The latter seemed more likely. So I wondered how the universe might kill off our species, whether it would be instantaneous and painless or cruelly slow. Perhaps it was already happening at a pace just slow enough to go undetected. Were we at a beginning or an end?

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.