Man Camp (13 page)

There’s just enough light for the men to make out the edges of things: the main barn, which Cooper calls the Cow Palace, various sheds and shacks, a rickety fence outlining the perimeter, a silo, cows huddled together in clusters, bales of hay. But Cooper, who is as familiar with the farm as he is with his own body, sees something the men miss: a foreclosure notice freshly tacked to the fence that runs along the drive. Though the bank had sent many letters, he was sure he had at least another month or so before they took any action. Plenty of time, he thought, to get things back on track. His heart races and he hopes his mother didn’t notice the sign, which he’ll remove after his guests are asleep.

When they arrive at the farmhouse, two golden retrievers run out to greet the truck. Cooper introduces them to the campers as Tor and Tap, explaining that there have always been two golden retrievers named Tor and Tap on the Tuckington property, a tradition Cooper’s father and grandfather set into motion and one that Cooper has followed without questioning. “Not much as guard dogs,” Cooper tells the men as they grab their bags, “but good company and loyal as bark is to trees.”

Lucy and Martha and Beatrice pour out onto the porch looking like three haloed angels, backlit from the glow of lights in the kitchen. The delicious smells of roasted potatoes and chicken waft out behind them.

Beatrice steps forward and shakes hands with each of the campers as they file past her. “I’m awful glad to meet you,” she says, exaggerating her Southern accent. When Cooper reaches her, she mock-scolds him for their benefit: “Cooper Tuckington, exactly what kind of a welcome is that for our guests?” She beams at him, patting his chest through the leather jacket. “Don’t you think these handsome men have anything better to do with their time than help you change a tire?”

CHAPTER 9

“It’s not the men in my life that counts—it’s the life in my men.”

Mae West

LITTLE COULD SEEM further from the men’s daily New York routine than life on Tuckington Farm. In the city, their lives take place roughly between 8 A.M. and midnight, and their schedules are all variations on a theme: They hit the snooze button a few times before waking to their favorite talk-radio program and enjoy morning rituals of showers, lattes, and newspapers; if they’re motivated, they go to the gym; if not, they go directly to work, where they spend the next ten to twelve hours on e-mail and headsets; they pass most evenings in nice restaurants with friends, colleagues, or the occasional date, though sometimes they stay at home, order Chinese, and watch reality television.

Not so at Tuckington Farm. Here, with the help of a leghorn rooster named Pavarotti, Cooper wakes the men at 5 A.M., gives them a mug of Folgers, loads them onto the flatbed of one of his pickup trucks, and drives them to the milking parlor, a half mile from his house. There, disoriented and unshowered, the men stand on industrial rubber mats stretched along a sunken walkway between two raised platforms where, for the next ninety minutes, a steady stream of fourteen-hundred-pound cows are ushered through in batches of twenty-four, twelve per side.

The six campers, spaced evenly along the central corridor, are responsible for milking four cows at a time, two per side. Cooper makes a point of telling them how lucky they are to be in a state-of-the-art facility where the cow udders are at waist level and minimal stooping is required. They look at him bleary-eyed and annoyed, no doubt wondering how they got talked into coming to Tuckington Farm in the first place. “The job is usually handled by two farmhands,” he tells them. “So it should be a piece of cake for you guys.”

In a show of solidarity with the men, Lucy and Martha wake up at the same ungodly hour to observe the dairy operation from the front section of the building, where Cooper has set out two ancient milking stools. From this vantage point, they watch the cows march in wild-eyed, their bags so unnervingly full of milk that the large varicose veins running along the sides look as if they might explode.

The cows, already agitated by their physical state, are especially skittish in the presence of the unfamiliar men, and Cooper does his best to calm them. In a low, soft voice, he lectures the campers on how to handle livestock and equipment, occasionally interrupting himself to cluck encouragement to a startled cow and get her moving into her station.

“It’s very important that we don’t dip below our production goal of seventy-five hundred pounds of milk per day,” he tells the campers. “That means hooking up the equipment properly and keeping everything as serene as possible in here. And remember, the cardinal rule in the dairy parlor is no hand-to-cow contact.”

“Why’s that?” Adam asks.

“Because it’s unsanitary and the Department of Agriculture is particular about contaminants in the milk supply,” Cooper replies sternly. Then he sees Lucy and Martha out of the corner of his eye and forces a smile. “They send inspectors—greasy little men with thick glasses and no chins, who we regularly kill and eat.”

The men laugh at Cooper’s joke and then watch him demonstrate how to milk a cow. He submerges each teat in a bottle of cleanser, wipes off the excess with a special cloth, and connects the teat to a device called “the claw” (the bovine equivalent of a breast pump), which has four suction attachments that pump the milk into individual six-gallon recording jars with red marks on the sides like those on measuring cups.

“How I wish I hadn’t just seen him do that,” Martha whispers to Lucy, crossing her arms over her breasts.

Not surprisingly, Kurt hooks his cows up the fastest and then makes the rounds, drill-sergeant-style, to rally the troops. He stops beside Bryce, who handles the claw with as little physical contact as possible. “It’s not a bomb,” Kurt tells him. “You’re slowing us up here, buddy. Remember, there’s no
I
in
team
!”

“There’s a
Me,
” counters Bryce, who seems content just to be the best-dressed dairy farmer of the bunch, wearing brand-new Carhartt overalls and L.L. Bean boots.

Nervous at being watched, Jesse gets his index finger stuck in one of the suction tubes of the claw, which provokes all sorts of snickers from Walter until Cooper turns off the machine to extricate Jesse’s digit.

Simon is unusually quiet, which makes Martha wonder if he’s picked up on his unpopularity or if he (like her) just isn’t a morning person. And Adam works at a steady clip, deftly hooking up his cows, whistling softly to keep them calm and happy.

Lucy, meanwhile, marvels at the contrast between the earthiness of the cows with their four gurgling stomachs, and the dairy’s high-tech systems designed to measure, transport, and cool. Then she thinks of the lovely end result of all this activity: milk—white, pasteurized, and government approved for mass consumption by children.

Martha wonders aloud if the herd wouldn’t be more at home listening to country music rather than the classical stuff that is being piped in from Cooper’s office.

“It’s all about relaxation,” Cooper tells her, pulling up a third stool. “The more soothing the sounds are, the better the milk flows. Believe it or not, a dairy farm is a pretty cushy life for a cow.”

Martha gives him a skeptical look.
Forced reproduction and breast
pumping. Cushy?
She doesn’t buy it. She knows from the back of the GOJAPAN takeout menu that Kobe cattle are given beer with their meals and massaged daily, which sounds more like the level of pampering she’d opt for if she were a cow.

When the last claw releases its grip on the last cow, the deflated four-legged ladies are led out of the far end of the parlor looking much more comfortable than when they arrived. Almost immediately a new bunch files in, brown eyes rolling wildly, bags about to burst.

Lucy studies the various levels of milk in the recording jars and asks, “Why is it that some cows produce so much more milk than others?”

“If I had the answer to that question, I’d be a wealthy man,” Cooper says, explaining that there are lots of variables to milk production, including the age of the animal, her health, and her lactation stage.

“I just love that this”—Lucy gestures to her surroundings— “is called a dairy
parlor.
”

“It makes it sound like the kind of place where a proper young cow can sit down with a cold root beer and wait for gentlebull callers.” Martha surveys the new lot of cows that have entered, noticing their snotty noses, muddy legs, and manure-smeared rumps. “Ladies,” she calls out. “How about a little more attention to appearance and hygiene? You never know when a handsome bull might come a-callin’!”

Enchanted by Martha’s silliness, Cooper laughs. “I’m afraid
I’m
the closest thing to a bull that any of these ladies get to see,” he tells her.

“What about Pinckney?” Lucy asks. They’d driven by his pen on the way to the parlor. “I thought he was the bull for all the Tuckington cows.”

“Actually, it’s proven more cost-effective and reliable for me to inseminate the cows,” Cooper says. “So these days, ole Pinckney only services the heifers.”

Lucy and Martha exchange a look.
Services?

“What exactly is the difference between a heifer and a cow, anyway?” Martha asks.

Cooper’s eyes twinkle. “A heifer can’t give milk. She’s not a cow until she’s freshened.”

“ ‘Freshened’?”

“Until she’s had a calf,” he explains.

“I’m guessing a man came up with that euphemism,” Lucy says. It takes a moment for her to realize that in the bovine world, she and Martha are still just a couple of heifers.

As if reading her mind, Martha says, “Always a heifer, never a cow.”

EACH MORNING, the group returns to Cooper’s house by 8 A.M. to the smell of freshly baked bread, the sound of bacon sizzling, and the sweet sight of Beatrice (clad in a black-and-white cow-patterned apron) scurrying around the kitchen scrambling and flipping and frying their breakfast. Large squares of softened butter, edges rounded by the heat of the kitchen, lie on the table and next to the stove.

On the first day, Bryce recoils when Beatrice hands him a plate piled high with scrambled eggs, home-cut slabs of bacon, fried potatoes, and buttered toast. “No offense, Beatrice,” he says, looking at the portion, “but this meal has more calories than I usually consume in a week. Don’t you have any Kashi or low-fat cottage cheese?”

Amen to that!
Martha thinks, greatly relieved that someone else mentioned it before she had to. Why hadn’t she thought to bring some nonfat yogurt?

Despite the girls’ warnings in the car, Beatrice looks shocked: What kind of man turns down a proper breakfast? It only takes her a second, however, to decide what tack to take. She’s a Southern woman after all, and flirtation is her currency. She turns up the volume on her accent and says, “I hope you’re not suggesting that you’re going to turn down a home-cooked meal, one that I made for you with my own two hands?” She tilts her head and gives him a look that is both tragic and seductive at once. “Besides, you must know that women love men with a little heft.”

Walter perks up at this declaration and pats his spongy belly as if he’d created it with the pleasure of women in mind.

She said heft, not flab,
thinks Lucy, reminded of a graffito scribbled on a stall door in the ladies’ room at La Luna:
Women will
never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head
and beer gut and still think they’re beautiful.

“The bigger you are, the safer we feel in your arms,” Beatrice continues.

Martha looks to see if Lucy is as shocked by Beatrice’s flirting as she is, but Lucy hasn’t even noticed. She’s stuck on Beatrice’s comment about hefty men, remembering the first time she got undressed with Adam, horrified that her thighs were bigger than his. At the time, she wondered if she could ever feel secure dating a man who weighed only ten pounds more than she. Now, eyeing Adam’s slender fingers, Lucy hands him the plate with the most bacon on it. “Eat up, sweetie,” she tells him.

“I give you my word,” Beatrice promises, tousling Bryce’s hair, “my son will burn this breakfast off of you before lunchtime.”

“If you say so,” Bryce says, brushing his hair back into place.

If you’re that gullible,
thinks Martha, assessing the calorie, fat, and carbohydrate content of his plate,
I should have just sold you a
pill that’d turn you into the perfect man.

“How do
you
stay so svelte eating like this all the time?” Bryce asks.

Beatrice touches her waist, appreciative that a young man has noticed her figure. “When you live in the country, you work for your food and that’s pretty much all it takes. People aren’t meant to sit at desks all day,” she says, moving pans from the stove to the sink. “I tend to my vegetable garden and the chickens, and go dancing whenever I can.”

Martha’s eyes narrow. She knows there’s a more plausible explanation for Beatrice’s petiteness and does a quick plate count to discover that they’re one shy. “Are you not having breakfast with us?” she asks innocently.
Don’t make me find your Slim-Fast
supply.

Beatrice smiles. “Aren’t you wicked for drawing attention to my bad manners,” she says, and looks apologetically at the men. “I’m embarrassed to admit that I got so hungry making your breakfast, I couldn’t wait.”

“You never have to wait for us,” Kurt says.

“Certainly not,” Simon agrees. “You’re a wonderful hostess.”

“The best,” Jesse says, perplexed by his sister’s rudeness.

She’s good,
Martha thinks, marveling at the alacrity with which the men rush to her defense.

Beatrice shoots Martha a haughty look and resumes her conversation with Bryce. “Call me old-fashioned, but I think it’s important to know where your food comes from,” she says, with a touch of self-righteousness. “Look at your plate: The eggs are from my chickens, the pork from a farm down the road, the bread made fresh daily by our neighbors in exchange for butter we churn right here. Now, can you tell me where Kashi is from?”

Can you tell me where Tropicana orange juice comes from?
thinks Martha, holding the carton up behind Beatrice.

Lucy frowns at her:
Put that down.

SPRING IS A BUSY SEASON on the farm and dozens of jobs, big and small, need doing every day just to keep things on track: Cows have to be milked, bred, and calved; land must be plowed, fertilized, and planted; fences require mending and equipment needs repair. Consequently, the campers’ daily schedule at Tuckington Farm is rigorous and follows a predictable routine. The morning milking starts at sunrise and is followed by breakfast and whatever daily training session is scheduled (carpentry, machinery, and agriculture are all part of Man Camp’s core curriculum). Then there’s lunch, a much needed siesta, and the afternoon milking, which marks the end of the official workday and the beginning of whatever extracurricular activity Cooper has in store. Martha and Lucy take over the training operation at suppertime with informal lessons on manners, conversation, and chivalry. And, on nights when the campers are able to keep their eyes open, they show movies featuring strong male romantic leads.