Large Animals in Everyday Life (8 page)

The child! The dream that woke her crashes, almost audibly, back into her brain. The child was there, tied to her wrist with some kind of yellow string, but the knots were poorly tied and the child came loose, suddenly floating upward and away from her against a clear white sky. She had no time, no chance to stop it, the child was already too far up, looking back down at her with a puzzled expression.
Grandmother
? the child called uncertainly. She was not yet panicked, only confused. The grandmother tried to yell but no sound came, and when she tried to leap after the child, the weight of what must have been the whole earth held her down. Her heart beat like a bird against a window.
Grandmother
? the child called, but her thin voice was moving steadily away, getting harder and harder to hear, her body growing impossibly small against the giant sky.
Can you hear me? Grandmother
?

She lies in bed, her hand on her heart. The child is fine, the child is safe, she is not in the sky, she's at home. She is in her bedroom, tidying up, the grandmother can see her now.

She understands now what has changed. And it is odd, incidentally, very odd, for she has always assumed, like most people, that it is the dead who float off toward the sky, the living who remain below. For this is what has changed: Her secret has arrived. It will be a secret no longer.

The idea that she should be frightened registers like a speck of dust on a distant backdrop, then vanishes. She shuts her eyes and focuses on the child, whom she can see as clearly as if it were full daylight. The child is in her room, on the floor, kneeling over something on the yellow carpet and concentrating hard, her hair making a shiny curtain that covers her eyes on both sides, like blinders. Around her the room is tidy, the pine toy-chest closed, the polka-dotted comforter covering the bed, the mismatched stuffed animals set up in a neat half-circle on a
shelf. The child has learned from her grandmothers the importance of taking care of one's belongings, the necessity of surrounding one's self with beautiful things. The child crouches now, engrossed in some scrap of paper or bit of cloth, oblivious. But around her, everything is in place, everything is exactly as it will need to be.

Claire from upstairs had a brother who from the time he was little would go outside and come back in with snakes, snakes nobody even saw until he casually picked them out of the grass and offered them for your view. This was something Claire told me, and after she told me I could not seem to hear or see enough of him. He and Claire were tall, handsome interns at a stable, both of them chattering about bots and mash and foundering hooves, sharing blue jeans so that sometimes when I saw a pair of strong faded legs striding by my basement window my stomach would clench up and then it would turn out to be silly Claire, leaving me embarrassed. I tried to get them in for coffee, and spent time sitting in each of my chairs, gauging Claire's brother's view of my narrow rooms, my parents' hand-me-down bridge tables and cheap ethnic hangings. But only Claire ever came, squinting and dusty after work, carrying her velvet-wrapped huntcap, which she kept on her lap the whole time. She
told me about her day indiscriminately and I had to wait, blank-faced, for the topic of her brother to come up, feeling real pain somewhere behind my ribs. He wore two button-down flannel shirts on cold mornings, one under the other, his blond chest under them, and seeing this from my window, or imagining it later while I pretended to listen to Claire, gave me angry waves and chills, hard frustration.

Claire was all right, though, in that she never caught on, or pretended not to catch on, and spoke in great swells of overstatement, sometimes making me pay attention to her in spite of myself. “I fixed that trunk lock a hundred and fifty thousand times yesterday,” she'd say, or “That sick horse has more worms than veins.” Then she would laugh, surprised at herself, and I'd laugh, and she'd say, “Why don't you come down there with us, Caroline, and we'll take you out on the trail? It's free, with us, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “It's not the money.” I always left it at that, wanting to go, but not wanting to be seen as a novice; surely I would get up on the wrong side of the horse, or call the horse the wrong thing, or steer the horse into a wall, or make other equestrian mistakes that I was too inexperienced to even imagine.

Claire tried; she told me riding was all predilection and magic, that she and Dale only did it because when they were teenagers they'd gotten stuck with an ugly pony their grandfather left them in his will. They'd tried raffling the pony off to the neighborhood kids, but the ticket Dale drew had their own names on it, mysteriously, and that was that, here they were making a career of it. “Besides, you can't just sit in here a million hours a day,” she said. “Don't you just want to shoot out the ceiling?”

“I think I have the ideal situation,” I said. In the corner were twelve cartons of the makings of brochures, which I sorted and assembled and once a week drove to a warehouse downtown, where I was given more cartons, as many as I could fit in my car. I was one of the people who made direct-mail advertising work for
me
, said the caption under my picture in the newspaper ad
that ran continuously. I was a success story, and my smiling face seduced dozens of lazy others into signing up. But I'd been doing it the longest.

“Never drive on a slant street,” my mother always said, meaning: Don't do what you don't know how to do. I followed this and thought it was better to
imagine
Dale taking my sweater from my shoulders, imagine him learning that my bra unhooked in front, than it was to go ahead and accept Claire's invitation and make a fool of myself at the stables.

Once when I went up to their apartment I saw something small and curved glinting on a dresser in their back room and thought it must be Dale's—part of a knife or razor—but it turned out to be Claire's barrette, and this made me wonder: was petty danger all I wanted? I noticed messy tins of polish and liniment on their kitchen counter, and week-old mail lying unopened on their bathroom floor, whereas at my place I knew which drawer my birth certificate was in, original and copy, and where I had a screwdriver small enough to repair the hinge on a pair of glasses, though I did not wear glasses. Tucked away in my bathroom closet were fresh tubes of toothpaste and sealed bottles of sinus tablets, of which, it was beginning to occur to me, I should be ashamed. So I went upstairs and sat on the fold-out sofa—where he slept—and got what I could from Claire, but it was never enough.

In February, when they'd been living upstairs for six months and the early morning swampiness in the air was almost unbearably sweet, I finally broke down about the stables, and then only because it was an emergency. Dale was at my door, suddenly, in a bright absurd slam of unexpectedness, telling me his truck had a bad clutch and would I mind? I put on my hard-soled shoes, the picture of straight-faced concern, and noted my comb and blusher on the dresser, unused and useless, and he bent idly to look at my one nice print. It was a Hondecoeter poster from an art museum, a somber group of birds exploding around a fallen crow, an allegory. “I've seen this,” Dale said, improbable in his cowboy boots. “A Dutch guy?”

“Right,” I said. “He was the one who knew how to paint birds.”

“Oh, good, good, Caroline's finally going to ride,” Claire said from the open doorway. We swept out, Dale leaving, I hoped, a shed hair or fingerprint or dried mud crumbling from his boot—in this way I might as well have been fifteen. I had once saved two curled hairs from the chest of a man I loved, storing them like contact lenses in an envelope, as if I could save enough to build another, more controllable him. It wasn't that I was superstitious, though, having had enough people love me or stop loving me for the wrong reason or for no reason—I was just starved for small encroachments on my small successful life.

• • •

The stable was set back from the highway by a yard of mud and gravel, overhung with Spanish moss that a few tied, waiting horses were chewing. Their stretched necks were clean and reflected my Chevy's headlights, but they didn't pause or look, though with their eyes in the sides of their heads I thought they might be taking us in. I had been on a horse once at camp or a carnival, and remembered only the stupid, clumsy way its neck looked from above, not storybook graceful or powerful in the least but more like a dead branch on a tree. “Don't even look at those duds,” Claire said. “We ride the privately owned ones, who haven't been ridden by eight hundred brats a day until they can't even feel their own tongues in their mouths.”

Dale, in my rearview mirror, had his head bent, and was fixing or playing with a button on his flannel shirt cuff. “That's right,” he said. I saw his deliberate fingers on his cuff, on my sweater. I cut the engine, thinking:
snakes
.

The smell of the place was perfect, Dale a hundred times over: sawdust, leather, sweat, mildew, coffee, cedar. Three women even prettier and happier-looking than Claire stood in skin-tight breeches in the stable's office, drinking machine coffee out of
paper cups and teasing a runny-eyed cat with their whips. “Connie, Rachel, Lynn,” Dale said, nodding and leading us through.
He can't love all of them
, I thought.

“Look out,” Claire said behind me, and we stepped around another cat who had a mouse or vole opened up on the concrete. Another memory came to me: a drunken man approaching me on my parents' front lawn and offering ten dollars and the end of a fifth of tequila if I gave him our Dalmatian. I wanted the money and the dog was boring, but I was afraid of being found out and of the tequila and so said no. This seemed an embarrassing corollary to Claire's raffle story, saying something about people who knew when to take a hint from their lives versus those who wouldn't, and I kept it to myself. Dale took us down aisles of cramped lead-in stalls, past dozens of horses' calm rumps, under ceilings of ropy cobwebs. In the back the stable opened up into airy box stalls for the boarder horses of higher quality.

“How about if she takes Cocktail Hour?” Claire said, and Dale nodded and unbolted the sliding door on one of the boxes, making the hefty chestnut inside sidestep and toss its head.

“It's nice that you get to ride these horses,” I said, balking.

“We don't
get
to,” Dale said, all the time working the heavy door, buckling a halter, chaining the big horse up for me. “That's what the boarders pay for—boarding, training, and exercise. We're training and exercise. Now we're going to make this easy for you, give you the
western
saddle, and just a snaffle …”

“Go on in,” Claire said. “He won't breathe
fire
on you.”

I stepped in and my feet sank a little, sawdust after concrete. Between Dale and me was the high red wall of the horse, not yet saddled. “This is the curry,” Dale said, handing me something over the horse's shoulders. I knew something was about to happen as I reached for it, seeing the horse's muscles seem to contract under its skin. The sawdust shifted and I saw the chestnut's big head cocked like a kitten's, its white eye rolled back at me. I felt the wall of the horse's ribs against my ribs, my back hitting
hard wood, and I thought:
Dale's ribs, I'm wearing the black bra
, and then I fainted.

• • •

“What will you do, what will you do?” I thought I heard someone saying, but when I really came to, Claire was saying, “Dad's gone genealogy insane,” and Dale was holding a cold can of beer against my throat, and the way I was propped between them made me feel like some kind of king. “She's fine,” Dale said, his fingers on my ribs.

“Caroline,” Claire said, “did you know our great-great-grandfather was master of the hunt in England—I was just telling Dale that some people don't have horses in their blood like we do,
you
probably have sea blood or mine blood or wheat-field blood …”

“Shut up,” Dale said.

I reached for the beer can at my neck, but he took it away, drank it off, crumpled it, and tossed it a few yards, all the time keeping his eyes on my face, his hand under my sweater. “Say something,” he said, beginning to smile.

Something twitched under his hand, under my skin. “Oh,” I said.

• • •

In college I once went tubing with my friends, a group of hopeful, sloppy-hearted girls like Claire. We went to the local cold springs the day before we all were to graduate, and for once I was relaxed enough not to talk or even paddle; we'd gotten through college, after all, so I lay back and shut my eyes against the Southern sun, altogether thrilled with such a batch of luck: friends, weather, success. What got me then was nothing as drastic as a cloudburst, but when I opened my eyes my friends had drifted a good thirty yards ahead, keeping hands on each other's tubes, and one
of them was getting up on her knees, cheered by the others—I was at that moment invisible, and not just to them. Almost as an experiment after that I let things and people drift as far as they wanted, and found it didn't take anything away from my success. But now I was finding out the experiment's inverse: when someone drifted my way it was a windfall, it was winning the lottery. In all my wanting Dale, I had never thought so far as to
expect
him. In my small bedroom, finally, where he stayed when he came down to check on me the evening of my faint, he was as large and unlikely as a grand piano, a gift from another, richer world.

Claire came down inscrutably the next morning, carrying sweet rolls, and I couldn't tell if she was spying, consoling, or just visiting. Her knock gave me a small fit of remembering: Dale flexing his wrists like a weight lifter just before he took my face in his hands to kiss me; the lazy, satisfied way he stepped from my shower stall, male pride itself. “Don't give me any more coffee,” Claire said. “My heart's about to explode. I just stopped in to ask a favor for Dale.”