Chosen by a Horse (10 page)

Hours later I looked out the window, and Lay Me Down was grazing with Hotshot standing at a right angle to her shoulder, no longer sniffing but still not composed enough to think about grass. She was much taller than he was; he had to lift his head to look over her back. Her legs were long and slender compared to his shorter, stockier ones. Her neck, too, was long and slender; his was shorter and thicker. She was every inch a racing machine; he was every inch a dude-ranch dude. Together, they were a duet of contentment. I was happy for both, for Hotshot to have a break from Georgia’s relentless bossing and for Lay Me Down to have a companion.

Tempo and Georgia had moved away from the fence and returned to grazing, all signs of distress about Hotshot’s
departure gone. Occasionally, one or the other looked up, saw Hotshot in the distance, and, satisfied that he was within sight, returned to grazing.

I decided to leave them this way indefinitely, in contented couples. I was pretty sure if I added Tempo to the pasture with Lay Me Down and Hotshot, things would go as smoothly as they had with Hotshot, but that would have meant leaving Georgia alone, and I didn’t think she’d tolerate that, not for long. Besides, it would have been unfair to leave her alone while her two boys were in plain sight with another horse.

The next step was bringing the mares together, and I dreaded it. I knew Georgia too well to have any illusions about how she’d behave. Sometimes I wondered what had possessed me to get another horse, or if I had to, why it couldn’t have been a gelding. I blamed myself for creating a monster, a monster named Georgia. All these years of spoiling her, of never allowing anyone else to ride her, of letting her boss me around the same way she bossed around Hotshot and Tempo and the vet. I wondered why I had knowingly, willingly,
eagerly
paid money for a discipline problem. From the moment I saw her, I had known she was trouble, yet I couldn’t wait to get her home to my barn.

Sometimes I wondered if I would ever love a human being as much as I loved Georgia. This troubled me. And the older I got, the more it troubled me. I didn’t want to be one of those people whose obituary mentioned only surviving loved ones with hooves.

What I really wondered was, could I love a man? I loved my women friends. I loved my brother, his wife, and his three children, I loved my neighbors, and I loved Allie. I even loved people I’d never met, like Jane Austen for writing her books, Wolf Kahn for his pastels, and Franz Marc for his paintings of horses.

Yet I didn’t love a man. Not that way. I wondered if something was wrong with me, if I was one of those people incapable of intimacy. It would have made sense if I was, but I didn’t want to be.

“Why don’t men like me?” I asked a social worker friend whose honesty, insight, and frankness I particularly valued.

She paused for two seconds, possibly less. “Because of what they see,” she said.

I swallowed hard.
She thought I was ugly
. “What do they see?” But I didn’t really want to hear her answer. It was obvious she was pathologically abrasive and couldn’t be trusted.

“They see a big wall,” she said, “with a sign that reads
KEEP OUT.”

I was so relieved she didn’t say,
Sorry, but men just find you repulsive
that the notion that I was walling myself off seemed acceptable. “Good fences make good neighbors,” I said.

“Yeah, but your wall is covered with ice and giant thorn bushes and along the top is razor wire, and the whole thing is electrified, and there are these armed guards with nuclear weapons and …”

“I get the picture. But if I don’t know I’m doing that, how do I stop?”

“Thaw and disarm.”

I practiced thawing in the grocery store. When I ran into a male shopper, I didn’t dive behind my grocery list. I looked into his eyes and smiled, or if I couldn’t manage that, I looked at his shoes instead of down at mine. One day I was in the farmer’s market near where I lived, picking out a pie.

“Which do
you
think is the best pie?” asked a deep voice right next to me.

His presence caught me so off guard that I had to jerk my head away from the pies I’d been contemplating, and before any entrenched behavior had a chance, I was looking into his smiling brown eyes and smiling right back. He was handsome, too, and tall, dressed country casual, the way I loved a man to dress, as though he wasn’t going to let a staggering stock portfolio get in the way of the fact that he just felt more comfortable in stained khakis and Birkenstocks.

“Blueberry,” I said, tossing my newly highlighted locks off my forehead. I felt bold and wild, as if underneath my sweats I was wearing a garter belt.

“Blueberry?” he said meaningfully.

“Honey!” a female voice called from the entrance. “The kids are getting spastic in the backseat.”

I followed his eyes to Audrey Hepburn, who stood in the doorway in tiny cutoffs and a wedding ring. It was too painful to look at her for more than a long glance. She made me feel like throwing myself on the steps at Lourdes and wailing,
Why these legs?

“Be right there, hon,” his full lips answered, and he swept up a blueberry pie with one fuzzy hand. “Thanks for the tip.” He smiled and tore himself away with depressingly little effort.

I told myself this was just the warm-up. Something to remind me to stop wearing pajamas to the store. Let’s face it, if you sleep in sweats, technically that makes them pajamas. Men don’t like women in pajamas, not even in bed. It all came back to me, how it was to be with a man, how none of them had ever said, “If you’re going to wear those sweats, you better be packing birth control.”

Sweats were the razor wire of my wardrobe, and they worked. There hadn’t been a break-in for ten years. To be honest, I wasn’t sure anyone had been interested in trying, unless you counted the men I counseled at work, who woke up off drugs for the first time in twenty years so desperately needy that they were like baby ducks, imprinting on the first thing they saw.

Besides clients, I hardly ever met men. Social work was a woman’s world. I knew male social workers existed, but they were as rare as red beach glass. Besides, a man with good communication skills just wasn’t my type. No man I’d been with had ever said, “Sweetie, let’s just sit down and work this out.”

Maybe that was the problem. My type was modeled on my father, and men like my father turned out to be, well, men like my father: bright, funny, rejecting. Or, as his fourth wife put it, “Terrific, until you got to know him.” I
spent years waiting for my father to notice me. And that was after years spent waiting for him to just show up. I was never more than minimally interesting to my father, and even then, it was mostly as a target for his humor or his wrath. My father was a lot like my first pony, Bunty. Both returned my love with a mean bite.

However, I knew my social worker friend was right. I didn’t have to be the impaired rat who kept going back for the shock. I could be the smart rat, the rat who chose pleasure instead of pain, the Christopher Columbus rat, willing to fall off the edge of the earth rather than go the same old route. I was so ready, ready to be that daring, adventurous rat who discovers a whole new world.

If Lay Me Down could risk loving, so could I.

I
SAT ON
an upended cinder block, reading the newspaper in the sunny doorway of the barn. It was one of my favorite places to sit, especially in May when the swallows swooped in and out, busy with nesting. That day, however, I sat listening to Georgia pace around her stall, whinnying in fury because Lay Me Down was out in the pasture. It was Lay Me Down’s turn to be outside with the boys, while Georgia remained in her stall. I’d been rotating them, one in, one out, for three days. Georgia was behaving as I’d imagined she would. When I let the mares sniff noses over the stall door, Georgia squealed and struck the door. Lay Me Down looked alarmed and backed away.

The meeting between Lay Me Down and Tempo had gone smoothly. The only glitch had been Hotshot’s proprietary behavior toward Lay Me Down, which created minor
tension between the geldings for the first time in the thirteen years they’d been together. Hotshot was never farther than a few feet from Lay Me Down and always positioned between her and Tempo. If Tempo got too close, Hotshot flattened his ears and rushed at him, warning him away. Tempo accepted the warning and moved off without objection.

Lay Me Down seemed irritated by the intensity of Hotshot’s attachment. I know I would have been. He shadowed her everywhere and wouldn’t let her get close to Tempo even when she initiated it. He hovered by her stall door when it was her turn to be confined. Sometimes she flattened her ears and flicked her tail at him but that was as angry as she ever got. It was good to see she could assert herself even though it made no difference. Hotshot didn’t budge from her side.

I sat in the sunny doorway, within sight of Georgia so she wouldn’t be alone, hoping my presence would help soothe her agitation. It did a little. There were longer stretches of quiet between the pacing and whinnying, when I knew she was either eating hay or resting from the exhaustion of being angry for three days.

She’d been quiet so long I’d been able to read the whole paper, including the classifieds. I wasn’t selling or buying anything, I didn’t need a job, and even though I was a daring Christopher Columbus rat now, I’d rather have been single forever than answer an ad in the personals.

Then something stranger than answering a personal ad happened. I went in for lunch and the phone rang.

“Hello, Susan,” a male voice said, “this is Hank Dolby. We met six years ago at a party at the Gardners’ house.”

I was instantly confused. I remembered meeting him, but I couldn’t imagine why he was calling except for some horrible reason: mutual friends had been killed in a freak accident, my ex-husband had moved next door and was asking about me in a suspicious way, I had done something awful. My mind was spinning. Nobody just called out of the blue. He and his wife were writers and lived in a small town on the other side of the Hudson River. The wife was tall and opinionated with beautiful skin. Hank was shorter and quieter with thinning red hair and twinkly, observant eyes. Their pretty young daughter had been at the party, too, and when I met them at the Gardners’ that night, I remembered thinking they were a family who had it all: brains, beauty, and books.

“I remember you,” I said, straining to sound composed.

“How are you doing?” he asked. “Last time we talked you were on your way to England.”

Is that why he was calling, to find out how my trip to England had been? Six years later?

“It was sunny the whole time.” This felt crazy, telling him about six-year-old weather.

We talked like that for a few more minutes, stuck in the past.

Then suddenly he said, “Are you with anyone?”

I thought he was asking if anyone was in the room with me, as though he was going to tell me a secret, and he wanted to make sure I was alone. Then I understood.

“Not really.”

He told me he’d been divorced for a year and felt ready to “get out there again,” as he put it. Would I like to have dinner next Saturday?

“I’d love to,” I said, but what I really meant was, I’d love to be able to. I’d love to be able to throw on a little black dress and head out the door next Saturday night like thousands of women all over America. That he’d asked, that he’d remembered me six years later and called was enough excitement. The miracle had already happened. Getting to know him could ruin it. But I can’t tell him that. I said I’d love to. I could call and cancel later.

Being asked for a date was big news, big enough to make me want to tell someone, so I called my brother, Lloyd, a lawyer who lived in Vermont with his wife and three children. I could count on getting the sensitive male perspective from my brother.

“He’s probably going through his Rolodex and it took him a year to get to the Rs,” he said.

I could also count on getting the
insensitive
male perspective, the reality check. It was impossible to forget that I was the
God-you’re-so-dumb
little sister, still getting my nose flicked every time I fell for the
What’s this on the front of your shirt?
routine. That was my earliest memory of him. I trusted him, and he tripped me every chance he got.

After our mother died and our father left, for a few brief weeks we crawled into each other’s beds at night and whispered about what was to become of us. On one of those
nights he gave me a piece of Juicy Fruit gum, the first thing he had ever given me, and it was as though he had given me the Hope Diamond. Those few weeks huddled together at night, along with the gift of gum, created a connection to him that was so strong in me it survived the next twenty years we were to be separated.

By our forties, our pattern hadn’t changed much. Sometimes I got tripped, and sometimes I got Juicy Fruit gum, but our connection was deep and unbreakable. We liked to talk about the past.

When I’d visit him in Vermont we’d sit around the table after dinner and start talking about
What Had Happened
.

“What was it like before she died?” I’d ask. I had almost no memories of our mother, no memories of our family doing anything together. My brother was seven when she died, I had been five. He remembered a lot.

“In the summer we’d go to the beach,” he’d say. “Dad liked to cook out on the beach.”

“Did we have fun?” I’d ask. “Did Mom and Dad get along?”

“Sometimes,” he’d say. “She didn’t like his drinking.”

After a while, my brother’s wife and three teenage children would start to fidget, and one by one, they’d slip away from the table and leave us to our excavating.

“Did she know she was dying?”

He’d nod. “She told me to take care of you.”

And in a way he had. Not then, not when he was seven and sent away to a boarding school in South Carolina that
had created a third grade especially for him. And not during the years when I was sent from relative to relative and eventually to a boarding school in Massachusetts in eighth grade. It was after college, when we were both in graduate school in Boston, that we started to get together regularly. Two or three times a week I’d drive to his house in the suburbs, and we’d take a walk or have dinner and catch up on the past.