Harvesting the Heart (47 page)

“No.” My mother walked forward and brushed the cool cheek of one of the dolls. “One of the reasons I decided to lease this stable was because of this room. I kept thinking how much you would have liked it here.”

I looked around the room at the sugar-candy decoration, the suffocating wallpaper. I
wouldn't
have liked it as a child. I thought about my bedroom at home in Cambridge, which I didn't like, either, with its milk-colored carpet, the near-white walls. “I was eighteen when you got this place,” I pointed out. “A little old for dolls.”

My mother shrugged easily. “You were kind of stuck in my mind at five years old,” she said. “I kept thinking I'd go back and get you, but I couldn't do that to your father, and besides, if I went back I knew it would be to stay. Before I knew it, you were all grown up.”

“You came to my graduation,” I said, sitting down on the bed. It was a hard mattress, unforgiving.

“You saw me?”

I shook my head. “Private eye,” I said. “Very thorough.”

My mother sat down beside me. “I spent ten hours in Raleigh-Durham, trying to make up my mind about getting on that plane. I could, then I couldn't. I even sat down on one flight and ran off before they closed the door.”

“But you came,” I said, “so why didn't you try to talk to me?”

My mother stood up and smoothed away the wrinkles on the bedspread so that it looked as though she'd never sat down. “I didn't go there for you,” she said. “I went there for
me,”

My mother checked her watch. “Brittany's coming at two-thirty,” she said. “Cutest little kid you've ever seen, but she's never going to make it as a rider. Feel free to come down and watch, if you like.” She looked around as if something were missing. “You have a bag?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing that even if I wanted to I could not make myself stay at a motel. “It's in my car.”

My mother nodded and started to walk out, leaving me on the bed. “There's food in the fridge if you're hungry, and be careful because the toilet lever sticks a little, and if you need me in a hurry there's a sticker on the phone with a number that goes straight to Pegasus's barn, and they can get me.”

It was so easy to talk to her. It came effortlessly; I could have been doing it forever. I supposed I had, but she hadn't been answering. Still, I wondered how she could be this matter-of-fact, as if I were the kind of visitor she got every day. Just thinking about her made a headache come behind my eyes. Maybe she knew better and was doing this to skip all the gutted history in between. When you don't keep looking back, it's that much easier not to trip and fall.

My mother stopped at the threshold of the door and held her hand against the wooden frame. “Paige,” she said, “are you married?”

A sharp pain ran straight down my spine, a sick ache that came from her being able to talk about phone lines and lunch but not knowing the things a mother is supposed to know. “I got married in 1985,” I told her. “His name is Nicholas Prescott. He's a cardiac surgeon.”

My mother raised her eyebrows at this and smiled. She started to walk out of the room. “And,” I called after her, “I have a baby. A son, Max. He's three months old.”

My mother stopped, but she did not turn around. I might even have imagined the quiet tremble of her shoulders. “A baby,” she murmured. I knew what was going through her mind:
A baby, and you left him behind, and once upon a time I left you.
I lifted my chin, waiting for her to turn around and admit to the cycle, but she didn't. She shifted her weight until she was moving down the stairs, humbled and silent, with the parallel lines of our past running cluttered through her mind.

She was standing in the center of the oval—the ring—and a girl on a pony danced around her. “Transitions, Brittany,” she called. “First you're going to take him to a trot. Squeeze him into it; don't lean forward. Sit up, sit up, push those heels down.” The girl was leggy and small. Her hair hung in a thick blond tail from beneath the black riding helmet. I leaned against the rail where I'd stood earlier, watching the squat brown horse jaunt its way around in a circle.

My mother walked to the edge of the ring and adjusted one of the redwood rails so that it was lower to the ground. “Feel when he's going too fast and too slow,” she yelled. “You need to ride every step. Now I want you to cross the diagonal.... Keep stretching down in your heels.”

The girl steered the horse—at least I thought she did—coming out of the corner and making an X across the ring. “Okay, sitting trot,” my mother called. The girl stopped bouncing up and down and sat heavy in the saddle, wiggling a little from side to side with every step of the horse. “Half seat!” my mother called, and the girl bounced up once, freezing in the position that held her out of the saddle, hanging on to the horse's mane for dear life. My mother saw me and waved. “Let's cross the diagonal again, and you're going to go right over this cavalletti,” she said. “Ride him right into the woods.” She crouched down, her voice tense and her body coiled, as if she could will the horse to do it correctly. “Eyes up, eyes up ... leg, leg, leg!” The horse did a neat hop over the low rail and slowed down to a quiet walk. The little girl stretched her legs out in front of her, feet still in the stirrups. “Good girl,” my mother called, and Brittany smiled. “We can end with that.”

A woman had come up beside me. She pulled out her checkbook. “Are you taking lessons with Lily?” she asked, smiling.

I did not know how to answer. “I'm thinking about it,” I said.

The woman scrawled a signature and ripped off the check. “She's the best there is around here.”

Brittany had dismounted, neatly sliding off the saddle. She walked up to the fence, leading the horse by the reins. My mother glanced at me, looking from my head to my shoulders to my walking shorts and sneakers. “Don't worry about tacking Tony down,” she said. “I think I need him for another lesson.” She held out her hands for the reins and watched as Brittany and her mother disappeared up the hill toward the barn.

“My three-thirty has the flu,” she said, “so how'd you like a lesson for free?”

I thought of the horse that morning taking the jumps with the power of a locomotive, and then I looked at this little horse. It had long dark eyelashes and a white patch on its forehead in the shape of Mickey Mouse. “I don't think so,” I said. “I'm not the type.”

“I never was, either,” my mother said. “Just try it. If you don't feel comfortable, you can get off.” She led me toward the little redwood rail and paused, holding the horse's reins. “If you really want to know about me, you should try riding. And if you really want me to know about you, I can learn a hell of a lot just by watching you in the saddle.”

I held the horse's reins while my mother adjusted the stirrup lengths and pointed out the names of things: blanket, pad, and English saddle; bit, bridle, martingale, girth, reins. “Step on the cavalletti,” my mother said, and I looked at her blankly. “The
red
thing,” she said, kicking the rail with her foot. I stepped onto it with my right foot and then tucked my left foot into the stirrup. “Hang on to the mane and swing yourself over. I'm holding Tony; he isn't going anywhere ”

I knew as soon as I was sitting that I looked ridiculous. A little girl might have looked cute on a pony, but I was a fully grown woman. I was certain my legs almost touched the ground. I might as well have been riding a burro. “You're not going to kick him,” my mother said. “Just urge him into walking.”

I touched my foot gently to the horse's flanks, but nothing happened. So I did it again, and the horse shot off, bouncing me from left to right until I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around its neck. “Sit up!” my mother yelled. “Sit up and pull back.” I summoned all my strength and did what she said, sighing when the horse slowed to a quiet walk that barely jogged me at all.
“Never
lean forward,” my mother said, smiling, “unless you're planning to gallop.”

I listened to my mother's calm directions, letting all the words run together and feeling the simple meter of the horse's movements and the scratch of its hide against my bare calves. I was amazed at the power I had. If I pushed my right leg against Tony's side, he moved to the left. If I pushed my left leg against him, he moved right. He was completely under my control.

When my mother urged the horse to a trot by clucking at him, I did what she said. I kept my shoulders, my hips, and my heels in a straight line. I posted up and down, letting the horse's rhythm lift me out of the saddle and holding the beat until the next hoof fell. I kept my back erect and my hands quiet on Tony's withers. I was completely out of breath when she told me to sit back and let the horse walk, and I turned to her immediately. It wasn't until then that I saw how much I wanted her approval.

“That's enough for today,” she said. “Your legs are going to kill you tonight.”

She held the reins while I slid out of the saddle, patting Tony on the side of his neck. “So what do you know about me now that you didn't know before?” I asked.

My mother turned, her hands on her hips. “I know that at least twice during that half hour you pictured yourself galloping across a field. And that if you had fallen the first time Tony pulled away a little fast, you would have got right back on. I know you're wondering what it's like to jump, and I know that you're more of a natural at this than you think.” She tugged on the reins so that the horse separated us. “All in all,” she said, “I can see that you are very much like me.”

It was my job to make the salad. My mother was simmering spaghetti sauce, her hands on her hips in front of the old stove. I glanced around the neat kitchen, wondering where I would find a salad bowl, tomatoes, vinegar.

“The lettuce is on the bottom shelf,” my mother said, her back to me.

I stuck my head into the refrigerator, pushing past nectarines and Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers to find the head of iceberg lettuce. My father believed you could tell a lot about people from their kitchens. I wondered what he'd have to say about this one.

I started to peel the leaves off the lettuce and rinse them in the sink, and looked up to find my mother watching me. “Don't you core it?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You know,” my mother said. “Take the core out.” She rammed the heel of the lettuce against the counter and neatly twisted it out. The lettuce fell open in a series of petals. “Your father never taught you that?” she said lightly.

My spine straightened at the criticism.
No,
I wanted to tell her.
He was too busy doing other things. Like guaranteeing my moral conscience, and showing me how to trust other people, and letting me in on the unfair ways of the world
“As a matter of fact,” I said quietly, “he did not.”

My mother shrugged and turned back to the stove. I began tearing the lettuce into a bowl, ripping it furiously into tiny pieces. I peeled a carrot and diced a tomato. Then I stopped. “Is there anything you don't take?” I asked. My mother looked up. “In your salad, I mean.”

“Onion,” she said. She hesitated. “What about you?”

“I eat everything,” I told her. I chopped cucumber, thinking how ridiculous it was that I did not know what vegetables my own mother would eat in a tossed salad. I couldn't prepare her coffee, either, or conjure her shoe size, or tell a stranger which side of the bed she slept on. “You know,” I said, “if our lives had been a little different, I wouldn't be asking these things.”

My mother did not turn around, but her hand stopped stirring the sauce for the span of a breath. “Our lives weren't a little bit different, though, were they?” she said.