Where We Are Now (19 page)

We rode out from the corral into a broad valley. Cindy sat straight in the saddle, the balls of her feet securely in the stirrups just as we'd all been taught. No one ever wanted to look scared riding horseback; knowing the drill helped. In front of us foothills rimmed the valley. Behind us rose the peaks of the Jemez. It was early March, before the snowmelt began usually but not this year. Already we could hear creeks
running. We let the horses amble across an unplowed field, one that had been fallow a while, so the rows had almost been smoothed away. Then we came to the unfenced edge and a dirt road I often took.

“Let's trot,” Cindy said once we hit the road.

“Are you sure?” I called. The road was empty.

“Sure.”

No matter how good a seat someone had, no matter how secure a person was in the saddle, riding a quarter horse at a trot could jolt the most seasoned rider. Our half-Arabs had a longer stride so Cindy was well in front of me. Again I saw her lessons had been well learned, she posted keeping her back straight, pressing the balls of her feet down in the stirrups. Since posting helped soften the gait, I did the same even though I was riding a quarter horse. It was a perfect day, the sun shining in a deep, clear blue sky, a color we so often have here that I sometimes forgot to notice it.

I didn't know…. I'll never know what that horse saw … something, a piece of paper fluttering, a bird suddenly flying in front of him, a dried leaf lifted by a slight breeze. It could have been anything. He shied to the right. Cindy was flung out of the saddle to her left. She hit a rock, one almost buried yet still stubbornly protruding from the roadbed. I could see that much as I climbed out of my saddle. At first I reacted almost automatically. I'd seen plenty of people fall off horses. Pokey, who'd run a few yards away, returned to stand by her. Fright rippled his hide. My heart began jumping as I ran over to Cindy. Bending down I saw she was breathing. Her eyes remained closed, her head against the rock as if it were a pillow. Like the foolish horse, I waited beside her. How long did we all wait there like that—horse, two women, horse—in the middle of the road? Still kneeling beside her I called her
name; tears stung my eyes. Move her? Let her be still? This indecision must have taken a few minutes though it seemed longer. Then her head moved, shifted slightly. Her eyelids fluttered.

I cradled her head in one arm.

“Shoulder.” Her voice was a painful whisper. “I don't think it's—”

“Are you all right?” I kept asking.

She insisted on getting back on the horse even though I disagreed with her. “It's not far. I'll ride back, get one of the grooms, get the car—”

“I have to ride. If I don't—You know if I don't do it right away I might never—”

Pokey, calm now, had gone to graze at the opposite side of the road with my horse. I caught up their reins, helped Cindy mount, and we walked slowly back to the corral. She agreed to X-rays after two aspirin, a long hot shower, and a stiff drink failed to help her.

When Fergus and Marshall got back, I had a lot of explaining to do. Cindy was in the hospital with a fractured shoulder. She was scheduled for surgery the next morning.

“She doesn't want to call her daughters, not till the operation is over. Is there anyone else we should call?” I asked Fergus after he came home from the hospital. Cindy's mother was in a nursing home in Nashville; her father was dead. I kept wondering—I'd been wondering ever since they arrived—how she was going to keep this from her husband. How had she managed to come out here with Fergus at all? She must have lied, invented a friend in dire need or a relative in Santa Fe she had to see. Now she'd have to give that invented friend or relative some horses.

Fergus just shook his head when I talked to him. We were both tired. Marshall had already gone to bed. The next day Fergus came out to stay with us, then he had to get back
to Nashville. Singers and bands had been scheduled to use the studio.

When I saw her at the hospital Cindy, her arm in a cast covering her shoulder, argued that she could go to a bed and breakfast place or rent a condo. Her doctor wanted her to stay until he put her in a lighter cast. The bluish stains under her eyes were gone. Obviously she felt better.

“I wouldn't want to live with strangers or be totally alone while recovering,” I said. “Our house is much easier.” It was hard to talk her into staying. Her stubbornness went beyond polite protest. Perhaps she was afraid of forfeiting her independence in some way. Perhaps she feared we might become too close, too intimate.

“We have this big house. Both girls are gone, you know. You can keep the whole wing to yourself. We're not expecting company for months. Our friends like to come in the summer.” All this had to be repeated in an attempt to let her know she was truly wanted. More than anything else, she seemed to resist imposing on anyone.

“I don't want you to feel you have to have me because of Fergus.”

“I can't help having a cousin. So yes, because of Fergus and because of you. Let me do this for you. After all, I'm the one who took you riding.”

Still she hesitated.

I waited looking out the window facing the mountains. “It would be easier for me, really, if you stayed at the house. I wouldn't have to drive into town to check on you.”

“Marianne, I would be taking advantage of you in a strange way. I haven't told you that Wallace, my husband, has died … it's been nearly seven months now. He died in the middle of September last year. Fergus and I … Fergus wants me to marry him.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, “I've decided not to.”

I turned away from the window and, for a moment stood and stared at her. She looked straight back at me; the white pillowcases piled behind her dark hair, the white gown she was wearing, made her look a bit pale and slightly diminished.

“I'm sorry about your husband.” A little chill crept over my shoulders. I shrugged it away.

“You think I'm … you must think I'm awful.” Her voice faltered. “I couldn't seem to tell you somehow.”

“I … well, I'm sure there are … reasons.”

She moved her legs restlessly under the sheets. “Not what anybody else would call a good one…maybe not the right one exactly but mine. You know, don't you? You know Fergus loves what he can't have.”

“Are you sure? I thought he'd grown out of that.”

“Some never do. She plucked at the sheet with one hand then smoothed it. “My husband knew about Fergus. He'd known about him for years. I couldn't leave Wallace, not when he was dying. He advised me to marry Fergus after he—I know it must seem bizarre, but when people are ill for a long time, they plan. They plan everything … or they try to.”

“It's possible, isn't it, for Fergus to learn to love what he has?”

“I don't know. Every time I see you and Marshall together I think there's a happy marriage. I want one too.”

Wanting to protest that we were not extraordinarily happy, that we quarreled, that we held grudges, that I had not always been faithful, nor did I believe Marshall had either, I kept silent. I couldn't plead Fergus's cause for him no matter how much I wanted to.

“I can't do it, Marianne. I won't let my life be ruled by Wallace's plans and Fergus's habits.”

Her face flushed. She sounded like a stubborn child, but how could I know? How could I know anything about
her marriage? I had yearned so for a solution, for a happy ending, for simplicity, I wanted to moan aloud, to raise my head and wail like one of Fergus's singers. Sorrow, frustration, and anger were all too tangled for me to say anything. With one hand, I made a see you later gesture and left the room. Walking fast I stretched my arms out wide in the hospital's hall as if I could have, by physical effort, pushed aside all the barriers to what might have been.

W
e'd come to a standstill,
but what else was there to do when my daughter Sally wanted to marry someone like Max with his earrings, his country rock band, his good looks. Blonde as Sally with a face that would look great on record jackets, fierce blue eyes, a straight nose, a strong chin, he even had good teeth.

“Mother, what do you think?” Sally, framed by the kitchen's doorway, waited in a pair of shorts, an old tee shirt, and my bridal veil falling over her face.

At the same moment I could see myself wearing it, could remember putting it on for the first time and being transformed to a young woman whose future was a hopeful glow in the near distance falling over my husband, the children we might have, and all the rest of our lives. Bordering that glow were the shadows unseen until later—the baby boy we lost, the deaths of friends and kinspeople, the clashes neither of us wanted to remember, unnumbered, unnamed griefs.

“We wore them back. Everything thrown back.” I lifted the veil off my daughter's head and rearranged the tulle, a fabric as gauzy as the future.

“Okay. Al-l-l right.” Sally turned toward the mirror in the next room. “Max will love it.”

“Al-l-l right.” I took up Sally's drawl.

My husband Marshall, whose nature was more accepting than mine, had been as worried as I was. Marsh had fewer prescribed patterns than I did; little or nothing had been mapped out for him. He'd lost his parents earlier than I had, and the aunt and uncle who raised him guided him with looser reins. From age sixteen he came and went as he pleased. He thought his interest in the Civil War could
be answered best by going to college in the South, so he left Texas for Tennessee and met me. We moved to this farm near Santa Fe after our son died and have lived here for twenty years. Our daughters, following their father's example, went East to school. Sally the youngest returned to Texas. Her older sister Kate, now a newspaper reporter in San Diego, would come back to New Mexico just for the wedding.

“We're scattering,” I told Marsh.

“Marianne, both girls have been gone for years.”

“Now Sally will always live somewhere else.”

“Why shouldn't she?” he reasoned.

I nodded. We both disapproved of parents who wouldn't let go; still I had that little ache I got in my throat when Marsh and I couldn't agree.

Carrying my coffee back to the desk I wished someone else in the family had decent handwriting. Instead I was stuck in the middle of a paradox, aiding while disapproving. The next invitation would be sent to my Great Aunt Annette. I hadn't seen her since Grandmother's funeral. Gaylord, Grandmother's youngest brother, found Annette when he was working as a circus roustabout somewhere in Oklahoma sometime in the thirties and waited until she was old enough to marry.

“Everyday and twice on Saturdays,” Grandmother said, “Annette was shot out of a cannon. Gaylord would take up with someone bizarre! I trust you will not, Marianne.”

I can still hear her voice—telling, directing, demanding. I must have laughed inwardly, at least, at her obvious disapproval, for she disapproved of so much so easily. I asked her why Uncle Gaylord was in Oklahoma. I knew they were from Virginia. I also knew Grandmother habitually altered memories to suit the occasion. When lecturing Fergus, her only grandson, about his future, she'd referred to her brother as a vagabond and a rogue—and around the time he bought
his liquor store—a man of questionable morality. Other times she'd say our uncle was merely down on his luck.

“I don't know why he couldn't lead a regular life, but he couldn't. Gaylord barely finished high school. He and Papa quarreled, and he ran away when he was only sixteen. We didn't hear from him for two years. Papa nearly gave him up for dead.”

His was a long adventure, a more daring life than her own. I should have asked him how he survived; somehow I didn't think to then. As a child brought up on old people's stories, I tended to absorb then half-forget them. Later I puzzled over the parts left out.

“When he came back to visit he didn't want to talk about those first years, Marianne. He liked to tell about the circus, about how fast they could get the tent up, and how they used the elephants and all that.” She waved a dismissive hand as if to say that Uncle Gaylord wasn't entirely reliable, that he only told about the glorious days and left out the hard ones.

“And the Zanies?” For some reason I wanted to remind her of them, perhaps because they were so exotic, so removed from her dominion.

“And the Zanies,” she said, repeating her private name for Annette's family. They were the Zanninis, Italian circus aristocrats, trapeze artists who'd had top billing for many generations. Early that summer before I began college, they had been in Nashville performing. Grandmother, for Gaylord's sake, invited them to do their morning workouts at the farm.

I watched them from a second story window at daybreak, heard the twang of trampoline springs, the quiet command, “Hup!” and the counts, “Uno, due, tre!” Their bodies rose, twirled, turned. The leaves on the magnolias behind them, rattling in a rising breeze, seemed to be applauding.

Aunt Annette always landed on her feet. She must have been in her thirties, and there she was still exercising with all her eternally tanned family who kept concentrating, kept an even rhythmic pace.

They had toured nearly everywhere—North Africa, Italy, France, the whole U.S. Now, because Uncle Gaylord had married Annette, they were practicing on the back lawn.

Their trapezes were hung in the largest barn. Later I would sit with Uncle Gaylord on the ladder leading to the loft while they swung in disciplined freedom, their arms outstretched, catching, clasping, letting go, falling freely to the safety net below. Even as they fell, there was a practiced certainty about their movements. The women, wearing lightweight leotards, and the men in tight tee shirts and skimpy, brightly-colored briefs, drilled, sleek as seals, brown, firmly muscled, their every move perfectly balanced.