Chosen by a Horse (9 page)

She parked in front of a drugstore and went in to get the paper while I sat in the passenger seat with the sun visor pulled down, shading my eyes behind sunglasses even though it was overcast and almost dark enough to be dusk. I looked at my watch.
It was dusk
. It was six o’clock. We’d slept all day.

When she came back, she sat in the driver’s seat, riffling through the paper, throwing most of it into the backseat and studying a single page in her lap before she finally looked up and said, “Want to go to church?”

“Church?” Maybe I had heard her wrong.

“Not exactly church,” she said. “There’s an AA meeting in the basement of a church right around the corner.”

My face hurt everywhere my sunglasses touched, and if I moved too fast, the whole world spun so I was careful not to overreact and whip my head around to stare at Barbara. But I was dumbfounded. She might as well have said,
Want to go knock over a mini-mart?
AA? It was too awful, too humiliating.

Barbara started to cry. “I’m tired of feeling like this,” she said, sniffling into a Kleenex. “Do what you want, but I’m going.”

I felt like a terrible friend because she had asked me to do something, and I hadn’t said yes, and now she was crying. Last night she’d thrown the front door open and hugged me even though it was midnight and she didn’t know I was coming, and now all she wanted was for me to go someplace with her for an hour. It was the least I could do. Besides, maybe if she went to an AA meeting, she’d realize she should stop drinking gin and switch to drinking wine like me. Then we could just forget about this little episode.

“Think any interesting men will be there?” I said.

Later I wouldn’t remember the meeting or whether there had been interesting men. I also didn’t remember
calling my husband to tell him I wasn’t coming back, but the real surprise was that I stopped drinking. Not just because of AA, but because after one night of not drinking, I wanted to see if I could stop for two nights, then three, and so on. It was a game, like learning to hold your breath underwater, something uncomfortable but rewarding. Suddenly you’re swimming the whole length of the pool without coming up for air, and you think it’s amazing until you break your own record and swim two lengths. Then you’re hooked. All you want to know after that is,
How far can I go with this?

However, it only felt like a game for the first few weeks. After that, it felt like coming out of a coma and realizing all the ways I’d been left behind during the ten years I’d been in a vegetative state. The void in my life created by not drinking was larger than anything I’d ever experienced. If I didn’t drink, what was the point? What did I
do?

I missed drinking but I didn’t miss the hangovers. For the first time in my adult life I had mornings, a whole chunk of day I’d never known about before. I’d perceived them hazily, when I could perceive them at all, as something to survive, something to get through. Now I really had them. I could get up and eat breakfast. I could ride Georgia first thing, before the bugs got bad. I could canter around in the woods near the new house I had bought after I left Jerry.

It was a miracle, having mornings. I couldn’t get over how beautiful they were. It was like being at summer camp again with a feeling of excitement each dawn because the
day ahead was going to be full of horses and sweet-smelling air. And no one was going to hit me because I finally lived alone. It was the first house that was all mine, where no one could tell me to get out or make me feel unwelcome. I had bought it a month after I stopped drinking. So mornings were good. They were really, really good.

Nights, on the other hand, were awful. Dinner parties were something to survive, especially if liquor was served. Blind dates (or any situation that smacked of a fix-up by well-meaning new friends) were out of the question. Without liquor I couldn’t function socially. I couldn’t make small talk or flirt or laugh. I felt like a child trapped at the grown-ups’ table. Conversation around me sparkled with talk about terrific jobs, fabulous children, trips abroad. I was the retired Gallo expert who stared in amazement at the wineglasses people left half empty when they got up to leave the table.
Hey
, I wanted to say,
how can you leave that?
I got quieter and quieter and eventually I stopped going to parties at all. I spent my days and nights alone.

With all that peace and quiet I had plenty of time to think, and what I thought about was beginning that novel I’d been wanting to write ever since I was seven. It was the other thing I loved besides horses: books. I loved reading them, and I couldn’t imagine anything better than growing up and writing one. When I became a teacher, it was always in the back of my mind to use summers and school vacations as a time to write. I wrote poetry, kept a journal, and briefly freelanced as a feature writer for a small Boston
paper, but in spite of all this, I’d never gotten serious about writing.

I needed to support myself, and the chances of making a living as a novelist were slim. After burning through my inheritance on expensive appliances (no longer mine), a house, and a horse, I needed a job. I had liked teaching but I always found myself wondering why smart students failed or why some students hated school or smoked at twelve or rebelled in other ways. I wondered about the other teachers, too: why they said what they said and did what they did. I wondered about people all the time, mostly about the unhappy ones. There seemed to be so many, including me. Mornings were lucid, and my days were peaceful and calm, but I couldn’t say I ever felt happy. I felt grateful sometimes, not happy. There was a difference. I was relieved but not energized.

Therefore, while working in the office of a local alcohol treatment center, I returned to night school for a master’s degree in social work. By my midthirties, I was counseling in a residential drug-treatment program during the day and teaching social work classes at the local community college at night.

I felt as turned around as Eliza Dolittle. There seemed to be no connection between my former life and my new life, except for horses. Horses were the thread that had been there from the beginning, through the pain of childhood and the drinking and the marriage, the thread that seemed to keep me stitched together. Georgia was, in a
sense, my therapist. For years she listened to my rantings as we tore around the woods. I couldn’t help it. I needed an ear and there they were, two big ones, right in front of me. Georgia needed someone, too, so less than a week after she was returned to me in the divorce settlement, I acquired Hotshot to keep her company and, a few weeks later, Tempo. And eleven months later, there was the surprise arrival of Georgia’s foal, Sweet Revenge.

Despite the business of the new career, the new house, the new life, the urge to write a book did not subside with the passage of time. I’d been saying I wanted to write for twenty years. I’d said it so often and for so long that people who knew me didn’t even hear it anymore. It was just one of those things I repeated, like “I should re-gravel the driveway.”

“I want to write a book,” I said to Allie.

“Did I tell you about that eagle?”

“I just can’t think of anything to write.” I’d throw up my hands.

“I was in my kayak and this eagle was standing there, not twenty feet away, playing with a snorkeling mask somebody must have left on the beach last summer.”

“
Other
people write books, why can’t I?”

“A bald eagle!”

“Wow,” I said, “a bald eagle.”

Even though I said it all the time and no one listened anymore when I did, the secret was, I meant it. I’d always meant it. Actually, the real secret was stranger than wanting
to write a book. The real secret was that I already thought of myself as a writer. I’d hardly written a word and I couldn’t think of a single idea for a book, but in my mind, I was a writer. I’d been a writer since I was seven.

Thirty-five years is a long time to carry around an idea about yourself that has no foundation in reality; it was as if I secretly thought I was the Grand Duchess Anastasia. The evidence was so slim that a pessimist might say it was nonexistent. But I was pregnant with book. I could feel it kicking to get out. I was one of those women designed by nature to write books: wide in the hips, perfect for long hours sitting at the computer. I could birth a lot of books with those hips, if I could just get started.

Yet I didn’t get started. For the next two months my days were full. Mornings before work I rode Georgia. All day I counseled clients, taught at the college, and once home again, I nursed Lay Me Down back to health. I worried about my bad back and the gray hairs appearing on my head faster than I could pluck them out. I had always promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those women who clung to youth when youth was gone. No collagen, no surgery, no expensive creams that promised to reduce or eliminate wrinkles. When the time came, I’d throw out the short skirts, the clingy tops, anything with Lycra, and just look and dress my age. But accepting age was harder than I’d expected. More than the physical changes and the chucking of the accoutrements of youth, the hardest part of middle age was realizing that time was finite. The more gray
hair I saw in the mirror, the worse I felt about not writing. I was like a woman facing forty who was desperate for a baby.

A few weeks after her foal left, it was time to blend Lay Me Down into the herd. She’d gained a hundred pounds since I’d gotten her (you weighed horses with a measuring tape that gave pounds instead of feet and inches), her lungs were clear, and she was lonely. She grazed near the gate of her pasture even though there was better grass farther away. If she stayed near the gate she could see the other three horses, and my sense was that just seeing them helped her feel like part of the herd.

I didn’t introduce her to both geldings at once, as planned. My instinct now told me to bring Hotshot to Lay Me Down’s pasture and leave them alone to get acquainted. Hotshot was old and sweet, Lay Me Down was crippled from racing and lonely, and there wasn’t a mean bone in either of their bodies. What could happen?

Georgia and Tempo made a big fuss as I led Hotshot out of the pasture and shut the gate, leaving them behind. They both kept up a frantic whinnying, rushing back and forth along the fence as though terrified.

Not Hotshot. He was definitely the gentleman caller on his way to sit on the front porch with someone special. He’d been looking at Lay Me Down for a month, and it was like this was the dating game, and he’d won. He was ready. He’d lost most of his winter coat, and he looked sleek and shiny. He was almost a perfect match in color to Georgia’s red.
People who saw them for the first time had a hard time telling them apart.

In the order of dominance—there is always a clear and rigid pecking order with horses—Hotshot was at the bottom. In some herds, establishing the pecking order could be a rough business involving loud, physical confrontations. That had never happened with my three. Within minutes of being together for the first time, they had worked out that Tempo was the wise and gentle ruler, Georgia was the bitchin’ babe who got away with obnoxious behavior just because, and Hotshot was the good-natured nanny who doted on the other two, even when he was Georgia’s punching bag. This had been worked out nonverbally and nonviolently as they stood in a tight circle, all three noses together in the middle. Every once in a while a head had jerked up, but in a few seconds the noses were together again. This went on for five or so minutes, and then they started grazing, and that was that.

Hotshot was all arched neck and big eyes as we headed over to Lay Me Down’s pasture. His eagerness to meet her was touching given his experience with females. He’d taken so much abuse from Georgia in the past ten years. Who was to say this one wouldn’t be the same? But that didn’t seem to be what he was thinking as he tugged at the lead, hurrying me along toward Lay Me Down’s pasture.

Lay Me Down had seen us coming and stood with her chest pressed against the gate, waiting. Her head was high, her ears up and forward as she blew out a little whinny.
Hotshot whinnied back. They were talking. I was dying to know what they were saying.
Hello? You can come over but don’t pull any funny stuff? After all these weeks I can’t believe we’re finally meeting? This place has great grass, don’t you agree?

We arrived at the gate and right away they touched noses for a good long sniff. This was one of the prettiest yet most tension-fraught moments of introducing two horses. The outcome of a face-to-face meeting was impossible to predict and might or might not involve some form of physical aggression. With Georgia, a meeting with any new horse, particularly another mare, almost certainly involved violence. When a horse in the wild wants to attack something, it uses its front legs to do so. The kick can be devastating, even lethal.

I was relieved but not surprised when neither Hotshot nor Lay Me Down exhibited any kind of aggression whatsoever. They sniffed and whinnied softly at each other, and after a few minutes I pushed gently at Lay Me Down’s chest to move her away from the gate so I could open it. She backed up just enough for Hotshot to squeeze through, I unclipped the lead line, and he trotted right in.

I stood at the gate and watched two sweet old horses go a-courting. Their mutual attraction was instant and strong, and to a human eye—say that of a lonely middle-aged person with a tendency toward anthropomorphizing—it looked romantic. Hotshot’s nose spent a lot of time moving from one end of Lay Me Down’s long neck to the other, and when he felt braver, he let it wander past her shoulder right
to the middle of her back. She grazed. He sniffed. She grazed some more, he sniffed. She moved, he moved and sniffed. She wandered over to the watering trough for a drink, he wandered over and sniffed. He couldn’t believe she was for real. She was nothing like Georgia. She was nice.

She liked him, too. She seemed to understand that the sniffing wasn’t going anywhere heavy, so she’d put up with it until the infatuation ran its course and they could move on to being a herd—a herd of two, but a herd. She knew this first. Deep down he knew, too, but sometimes he forgot he was gelded. Georgia had no trouble reminding him he was useless for that sort of thing with a quick incisor to the neck, but Lay Me Down let him dream for a while. She looked at me and sighed.
Can he stay?
she seemed to ask.