Growing Girls (21 page)

We had only one ewe that didn’t live up to the task. Ironically, it was Sweet Pea, the only ewe with a name, our pet. She had herself been an orphaned lamb; years earlier she had been brought to us by our neighbor George, who thought, perhaps, our nursing goat would adopt her, which she did. I had always held on to that adoption story, a perfect metaphor for Anna and Sasha to think about whenever they got sick of me and wished they had gotten a better mother. “You think you got problems,” Sweet Pea could say, “my mother is a goat….”

So naturally I was eager to see what sort of mom Sweet Pea would be. She was the only one of the ewes to give birth to twins, which was in itself heroic, but she rejected one of them. This was not subtle. She threw that baby with one great nudge, flinging it clear across the pen. “Meeee,” the lamb said. Sweet Pea offered no reply. She obviously did not consider herself
mother to this lamb. Instead she stood and intently licked her second-born, allowing it to drink.

“Meeee,” the first lamb said. Again and again, waiting for an answer that never came.

I expected a lot more of Sweet Pea, and felt personally wounded.
After all we did for you?
But I made sure the girls didn’t hold her responsible and explained what I learned in one of our sheep books: Birthing can be wildly traumatic for a ewe, especially the first time around. And a ewe with twins has a prolonged labor; sometimes, by the time she finally gets the second lamb out, she forgets all about the first. The pain that triggers the instinct to clean and call and nurture is attached to the thing that came out that stopped the pain. The last lamb. That first one hanging around, waiting for her mother to finish, waiting to get cleaned up and to be fed, might as well be a stray cat or an orangutan. And so the mother nudges it away.

There is always a reason. There is always a logical explanation.

We bottle-fed the lamb and named her Emily.

“Meee!” she would cry.

“Emily!” we would answer.

Sasha, who had just turned four, became the best at this, and made it her job to do those feedings four times a day. I would make up the bottle and warm it for thirty seconds in the microwave and hand it to Sasha, who would walk out back and yell, “Emily!” Those were three pretty distinct syllables for a child with a language disorder to manage, and so at first it came out “Em-we,” which frankly we all thought was pretty good.
Changing from “m” to “w” like that in the middle of a word would not have been something Sasha could have accomplished before. But already she had moved far with her ability to speak, defying the odds of the speech therapists who had labeled her apraxic.

Within a few weeks, and with considerable coaching, she was able to say “Em-il-y” as clear as day and we all applauded. She took to running while Emily followed, back and forth along the fence line, Emily leaping for joy at the attention of her mother, and Sasha, like any youngest child, clearly thrilled to have her very own kid to boss around.

All the rest of the sheep stayed with their more traditional mother-daughter sheep pairings and language, “Meee!” and “Meeeeh!”

And so the music filled our fields that spring, the lullabies that inevitably follow the trauma of new life, if everything goes as planned.

Ellen, our babysitter, finally said something about the giant ripe tomato on the back of the one ewe that I refused to acknowledge. “Did you see?” she said. “There’s like a big red ball coming out.”

“Yeah, I saw,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I suspected I knew what it was. I just didn’t want to talk about it. “Did you tell Alex?” I asked.

“I told him yesterday,” she said. “He didn’t say anything to you?”

No, he did not. He never mentioned it to me and I never mentioned it to him. If you don’t talk about things, they don’t exist.

The next day, I went out to look and the tomato was gone. Gone! It seemed to have gone back in. Obviously, this wasn’t prolapse. Because it went back in.

“It went back in,” I said to Alex. He knew exactly what I was talking about. That was all we said. We were leaving for vacation in a few days. Our first in two years. We were going to Cape May for a week.

Then, the next day, the tomato was back. “The red thing is back,” Ellen said. “Did you see it? There’s like a million flies
on it
.”

Oh, God.

“It came back out,” I said to Alex.

“I know,” he said. “I called Dr. Hurley. He said maybe he could stitch it.”

When Dr. Hurley came over he said this wasn’t vaginal prolapse, but rectal. He said this as if it were a good thing. Congratulations, the vagina wasn’t coming out, the rectum was! He said it would likely repair itself.

“We’re lucky,” I said to Alex. “Don’t you sometimes walk around thinking how lucky we are?” Prolapse, the kind Gretta told me about, happens to other people’s sheep. We were special. We were not like those other people.

None of the other sheep seemed to take note of the grotesque nature of the tomato, and neither did her lamb, nursing as usual.

Then, the day before we were to leave for vacation, everything fell out. Something broke, perhaps the membrane between the rectum and the vagina, and all the insides of the ewe were spilling out. She was lying on her side, panting, with her
baby curled up by her head. The mass of red on the ground was the size of two or three basketballs.

Alex called Dr. Hurley, who said, yes, that must be the membrane. Bad news. He said there was nothing we could do. He said all of her insides, all of the guts, the spleen, the stomach, the intestines, the vagina, the ovaries, all of the things that make a sheep a sheep were falling out. Alex looked at me, shaking his head to say, “Nothing.”

“Okay, thanks,” Alex was saying and he was about to hang up.

“How are we supposed to do it?” I shouted. “Ask him how!”

“What do you recommend?” Alex said into the phone. “Just, like, a gun?”

Alex listened, looked at me, nodded his head yes.

Ellen came with me outside and helped me pull the baby lamb away from the dying mother. “Meee! Meee!” the lamb screamed. “Meeh,” the mom answered. She still had plenty of strength to answer. We took the baby down to the barn and put it into a pen, where she didn’t have to watch.

“Meee!” cried the baby.

“Meeeh!” cried the mom.

That was the hardest part. In those cries naturally I heard Anna, and naturally I heard Sasha. I saw someone stealing them from me and them crying for me and me crying for them. But that was ridiculous. That was a silly fantasy. A cartoon. Nothing like that was happening.
Don’t be so melodramatic
.

“Meee!” cried the baby.

“Meeeh!” cried the mom.

In those cries I heard Anna and Sasha and the ghost-mothers of China, the loss, the loss, the loss. A torturous image. No sense going there. Nothing you can do about that one.
Now, stop it!

“Meee!” cried the baby.

“Meeeh!” cried the mom.

In those cries I didn’t have to hear or see anything but what was right there in front of me to feel the heartbreak of centuries. A baby losing a mother.

Alex got the pistol. He had fired that thing only once, over on the field on the other side of the road where he had set up a little target practice. I remember because the boom was so loud it sent the dogs running under the bed.

Ellen put on a SpongeBob tape for the girls, hid inside with them.

I told Alex I would go with him, fully expecting that he wouldn’t take me up on the offer. He didn’t say yes but he didn’t say no. He just kept walking and so I followed. The ewe had dragged herself and all of her exposed guts into the large doghouse we had supplied for the lambs, in case of rain. We were surprised she was able to pick all of herself up and move there.

“You think you can just … shoot in?” I asked.

“I can’t get a clean shot,” he said. “I don’t know where the bullet would end up.”

He grabbed a leg and pulled the sheep out. I didn’t offer to help. I should have offered to help. This was all so far out of my league. Wasn’t this out of his league? One of us had to step up and I loved him for being the one.

I wanted to say, “Look, if you need me here for this, I’ll stay.” But I was afraid he might answer in the affirmative. I wanted him to save me. I wanted him to say, “You go on inside.”

But he didn’t. He wasn’t thinking. He was doing. He got the sheep out. She was on her feet, half her insides spilling there. He pointed the gun. I could hear the lamb still screaming. I was so far out of my league. Did he need me to stay? Should I stay? And we didn’t say goodbye to the sheep. We didn’t thank her and we didn’t apologize. Wait!

He wasn’t thinking. He was doing. He had the sheep in position, holding her steady by the chest, grabbing her close between his legs. She had no energy to fight. He pointed the gun at the back of her head. Did he need me for this? Should I stay?

I could tell he was going to do it. I could tell there was no turning back. My face was hot and I ran in fear, just took off as fast as I could as I held my hands to my ears as hard as I could and I ran, a chicken, a stupid chickenhearted excuse for a wife. I ran.

The pow
was more vibration than sound. I felt it through my feet. It was only one shot. I came running inside and I didn’t want Ellen to see me cry so I ran to the bed and covered my head with pillows.

“Meee! Meee!” The lamb was out there screaming for her mom, with no reply. None of the aunts filled the void with an answer. None of the goats, nobody. The lamb just kept screaming into the blankness. Say what you will about nature, but nature is cruel and maybe this fact alone helps us forgive our own darkest sins.

It took an hour before Alex came in. He had cleaned everything
up. He had taken the body up on the hill, put it in a large pile of brush, and burned it. It was all so very far out of my league.

He looked like hell.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

“I’m sorry!” he said. “I saw you running, I saw you covering your ears.” He was close to tears. “You know I never did anything like that before. I never killed anything before. I know you think I’m evil now.”

I held him. I told him we were so far out of our league. Gretta would have just gone ahead and made sausage. We had no idea what we were doing, or maybe the problem was we did.

The lamb was still screaming. I told Alex what I heard in that cry, Anna and Sasha and the ghost-mothers. He said he heard himself, still crying for the mom he had lost decades ago. It happens all the time, a child loses a mother. It happens all the time.

We went down to try to calm the lamb down, but nothing we could think of doing worked.

Powerless, we told ourselves we would just have to get used to this. Powerless.

love, kindergarten style

Report from the playground:

The news came from other mothers, from nannies, even from other kids, but not from Anna, who seemed, as is her way, oblivious.

It was big news. Michael had a girlfriend. Anna had a boyfriend. Here it was: Michael and Anna, the first kindergarten couple.

I should have seen the signs. In her backpack each day I would find drawings of green and orange and blue superheroes, some with supersonic goo shooting from their eyeballs. “To Anna from Michael,” the pictures would say. Then one day Anna got her first-ever time-out from a teacher. The offense: “Bopping Michael on the head.”

Love was in the air. I got the full story from Michael’s mother.

“I can’t sit next to you anymore,” Michael had said to Elaine, the nanny who had devoted her previous five years to his care. “I can only sit next to Anna.” It was a major topic of dinnertime conversation in Michael’s house. After weeks of hearing about Anna’s every move in school, his mother finally said: “What is it about Anna? Is she really nice to you?”

“Oh, she’s nice to me,” he said. “But she’s
so
beautiful.”

He announced that Anna was his girlfriend, and that was that. “They’re really good together,” said one of their classmates to me one morning by the lockers. Other kids reported on Michael’s acts of heroism. When Stevie accidentally knocked Anna over on the playground, Michael ran to her. She was hurt. She was crying. Michael soothed her. “I just petted her and petted her until she felt better,” Michael proudly told his mother.

I asked Anna about the incident, and she confirmed the details, adding, “He’s a great man.”

As the weeks went on, I found myself pushing for news, hoping for bits of intrigue like you do when you read
People
magazine. “So, did anything happen with Michael today?” I would say on the ride home from school.

“No, but Zoe had a hole in her tights,” she said once. Much of her news has been of this ilk, and so I’ve come to depend on Michael’s mother and others to keep me apprised.

Inevitably, the crisis occurred: Tritan. He had been Michael’s best friend for two entire years. And now Michael was too busy for him. Too busy with a
girl
, of all things. For a
while Tritan merely stepped aside, occasionally looking glum. Then he made his move. Michael was handing out invitations to his Halloween party. When he turned to give one to Victoria, Tritan dashed forth. “You can’t do that!” he said.
“Because she’s mine!”
Victoria was reportedly surprised by the news, but not disappointed. And so Michael found in himself a streak of valor. He did not give the invitation to Victoria but rather handed it to Tritan to give to her. “I
had
to,” he later explained. “Because he is
my friend.”