Meg Little Reilly - We Are Unprepared

As I approached the door of the Blue Frog, I saw a large group of people five years younger than me laughing around a rustic wood table, and I became suddenly aware of my aloneness. Normally, I wouldn’t mind having a beer on my own, but I wasn’t up for it at that moment, so I kept walking. When I got to Polly’s, the darker, sadder townie bar several doors down, I opened the door.

Polly’s smelled like old cigarettes and my feet felt sticky on the worn carpet as I stepped to the bar. There was one other patron in the room—a large, red-faced man at the far end of the bar who was busy circling things in the classified newspaper pages before him.

“What can I getcha?” a petite, female bartender asked me as I took a stool. “We have draft Bud. Everything else is cans and bottles.”

She wore a tiny cropped shirt that appeared to be constructed of macramé over a denim miniskirt. It was distracting how much of her body I could see and I was grateful for the curtain of dark hair that hung behind her. How old could she have possibly been—twenty-two, maybe? I couldn’t tell.

“Budweiser is fine, thanks,” I said. “Are you guys always this quiet on Tuesdays?” I couldn’t think of anything more interesting to say than that.

“Yep, until the preppers let out. Then we get another wave.”

I tried to look casual in my curiosity. “Oh right, the preppers. So what’s the deal with them anyway?”

She handed me my beer and started drying glass mugs, one hip gently leaning against the sink in front of her.

“They’re freaks,” she said matter-of-factly. “I get some weirdos in here, you know? But these guys are, like, totally paranoid. And they never shut up about it. They come in here all fired up after their meetings and lecture me about how I need some kind of bunker for when the end of the world comes. I tell them, if the apocalypse comes, I’m not sticking around this shitty world anyhow.”

“Yeah, they sound really weird.” I nodded into my beer.

She stopped drying mugs for a moment and looked up at me. “So what’s your deal? You’re not our usual type. You hiding from a girlfriend or something?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“That’s what I figured. Not like it’s such a genius guess—most guys are doing that. But you’re more of a Frog type,” she said, referring to my original destination. “I bet you guys live up the hill in an old house, and you’ve got a little organic garden and some nice wine in your basement. What’s wrong with your life that you gotta hide? Sounds nice to me. Did you cheat?”

It was embarrassing and somehow emasculating to be summed up so neatly by this tough little girl.

“No, I didn’t cheat. And we hardly have any nice wine at all!”

I smiled and she tossed her head back to laugh. This was the first time I had spoken with anyone other than Pia in days and the conversation was refreshing.

“I just needed some air, I guess,” I said, sipping my beer.

“That’s what everyone says when things are going bad.”

“Oh, no, things aren’t bad. I wouldn’t say that. Just not good tonight.”

“Sounds like the same thing to me, but what the hell do I know?” she said. “I’ve been living in this town my whole life.”

“I love it here.”

“Sure, because you don’t have to be here,” the bartender said as she dried one mug after another with great efficiency. “I wouldn’t even care if I was in another shitty town, you know? It just wouldn’t be the one I grew up in. That’s the difference.”

I was sure that I didn’t know what she meant, but I nodded my head like our problems were all about the same.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “I got a friend who runs a fancy bar on Martha’s Vineyard, and as soon as I have enough savings, I’m going to meet her there. I figure it will be like a working vacation.”

She walked away to check on the other guy and I puzzled over the idea that someone could be stuck, financially marooned in our town. This was a side of Isole I hadn’t experienced much of since moving there: the real locals. There are pockets of immense wealth and worldliness in northern Vermont, but the state wasn’t built on those people; they’re just interlopers in its history. At its core, Vermont is defined by tough, industrious people who live modestly and know the land intimately, even if they no longer make their living from it. They prize independence and privacy over any allegiance to a nation or political identity, and they resent the ceaseless push by outsiders to transform the state to a socialist utopia. (I knew such generalizations made me seem like a patronizing asshole, but the locals had their own generalizations for me, too; it was how we made sense of our cohabitation.) Pia’s prepper meeting was a funny mix of the old and new Vermont, I realized, though it wasn’t a flattering light for either camp.

The clock above the bar struck eight, so I paid and thanked the bartender for her wisdom, which sounded stupid as soon as I said it out loud. I just wanted to get out of there before the prepper meeting ended, and Pia and her new friends made their way to Polly’s. It seemed important that this nameless bartender never find out that I had been at that meeting. Plus I was concerned about how angry Pia might be.

I walked back in the cool air and waited in the car as people streamed out of the Elks Club and said their goodbyes. Some were laughing as they emerged, but there was a seriousness to the whole enterprise. That was perhaps the part that bothered me the most. On its own, preparing for disaster was inarguably a wise thing to do. And if Pia hadn’t dragged me to that meeting, I would probably have regarded those people as nonthreatening curiosities. But Pia was always searching for religion. When she was a vegan, she emptied our fridge of all my favorite foods; and when she was a performance artist, she announced that she needed to be surrounded exclusively by creative people; and when she was a political activist, she accused her parents of being fascists.

Then there was the time that she actually did find religion, when she decided that we should be Buddhists. It involved a lot of Tibetan prayer flags in our apartment and mercifully little else. Her zeal was always genuine, but she lacked the conviction to see any of it through. And, inevitably, her avocations failed to deliver on whatever promise she thought they held. I regarded all of these phases as the hobbies of a passionate artist seeking purpose. They gave her focus, briefly, and a frenzied sort of pleasure. It wasn’t a placid existence, but it was interesting.

This particular hobby, though, seemed more morbid. Her new friends weren’t the ethereal waifs she used to bring home from tantric yoga class. (Weirdos are always harder to spot when they’re bendy and beautiful.) No, this was darker and stranger. And maybe I knew it appealed to something frightened inside her, a part of her that I never fully understood. I wanted to believe this was out of character, but somewhere in my brain I knew that wasn’t true.

The passenger door opened violently.

“We can go now. Are you happy?” Pia said, dropping into her seat like a child.

I looked at her in disbelief. “No, I’m not happy at all, Pia. I’m annoyed and a little freaked-out about the meeting you just tricked me into. What was that about?”

She shook her head in disbelief. “It was about seeing the truth, Ash.”

And with that, our fight was under way. I didn’t bother trying to reason or even argue; I just drove and let her fume. She pinned her hair up and took it down again, making the faintest huffing sounds to herself. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of an argument. My plan was to just get home, open a bottle of wine and, after she’d consumed most of it alone on the couch, feel her groggily fall into bed beside me. That was how it was supposed to go.