Chosen by a Horse (15 page)

There was a young woman I occasionally hired to take care of my horses when I was away. Hannah had grown up around horses and still had one of her own, though she had less time to ride since beginning a business program at the nearby community college earlier that fall. Because I didn’t know what symptoms Lay Me Down might develop, I was nervous about leaving her alone all day. I decided to call Hannah to see if she could check on Lay Me Down while I was at work.

“She seems OK right now,” I told her, “but soon she might need meds or some kind of dressing.” But that wasn’t my worst fear. “She could have a seizure,” I added, cringing at the image of Lay Me Down thrashing around helplessly on the floor of her stall. I held my breath, expecting Hannah to politely decline. Who in their right mind would want to take on the responsibility of an animal this sick?

“Sure,” she said without hesitating. “I can stop by almost anytime. Most of my classes are at night.”

“
Thank you
,” I breathed, more relieved than I could express. We agreed I would pay her ten dollars an hour, more if and when Lay Me Down needed some kind of treatment. For now, Hannah would clean her stall, change her water, and give her fresh hay and a treat.

As the summer wore on, I was less fearful, but I was sadder, too, and softer somehow. The mornings I spent in the barn before work seemed precious and too short. One morning I found my Siamese cat sitting on the sunny windowsill of Georgia’s stall, Georgia below with her neck stretched toward him, taking a cautious sniff. She knew about cat claws, and the sight brought tears to my eyes. Because it was funny? Sweet? Ironic that a fourteen-pound cat commanded this kind of respect from Georgia when no one else did?

It was as if in accepting Lay Me Down’s illness I’d accepted something else, something bigger. I had thought I would prepare for her death by pulling back, withholding my feelings, or even euthanizing her before any symptoms developed. Instead, I spent more time with her.

She was the only horse I resumed grooming daily, and she loved the attention. I’d wait until she’d finished her grain and then bring the grooming kit in and set it on the floor, where she’d sigh over it as if greeting a long-lost foal. I’d pull out the curry comb with the dull rubber teeth and, starting high on her neck, brush in short, vigorous circles, loosening dead skin and dirt from one end of her to the other. The harder I brushed, the better she liked it, bobbing her head and leaning into the brush whenever I came to a particularly itchy spot. When I was done currying and her whole body was covered in the dirty little circles a curry comb leaves, I’d get out the red brush with the long nylon bristles and brush away all the loosened dirt, leaving
her coat soft and shiny. I’d brush out her short dark mane, which never seemed to grow, and get the worst tangles out of her tail with my hands, leaving the real tail brushing for the weekends when I had more time. When I was done, I’d fly proof her, give her a second peppermint, turn on her fan, and leave her fresh hay and water for the day. In the evening when I got home from work, I’d repeat the routine, only then I’d open her stall door and let her out to graze with the other three horses in the cooler air of the relatively insect-free night.

The more time I spent with her, the sadder I sometimes felt, but I didn’t pull back. I just felt sad. Animals live in the moment, and that’s what I tried to do that summer, getting up half an hour earlier in order to spend more time with all four of my horses but especially with Lay Me Down. In a way I felt more alive, filled with the smells of summer: the sweet new hay in the hayloft, the woodsy smell of cedar chips, the heady perfume of the wild roses growing along the stone wall near the barn, and Lay Me Down’s peppermint breath.

In the middle of July, Hank called. His message took up the whole answering-machine tape with an apology for not calling sooner and a monologue about ugly divorce details that I fast-forwarded through to the end, where he asked if I’d like to have dinner. Afterward I sat by the phone, staring at the answering machine, drawing starbursts on the message pad, a wide smile stretched across my face.

Before I called him back, before I even knew if I’d see
him again, I headed straight to Victoria’s Secret in the Hudson Valley Mall. It was a knee-jerk reaction, a sense that it was time to change something. At the store I chose seven pairs of black lace, French-cut bikini panties.

“No pretty bra to match?” asked the child behind the counter, smiling. This was something I hadn’t even considered. “Can I leave these here?” I asked, dropping the underwear on the counter as I headed for the bras.

“I’m Trudy, if you need help,” she chirped.

Did Trudy think I needed help getting into a bra? I looked around. There were no women in their forties in sight. I told myself I was lucky I had a figure that still looked OK in this sort of thing. I
assumed
it looked OK. I hadn’t actually tried anything on yet. But if I planned ahead, if I bought enough of the right thing in the right size, I’d never have to come back again as long as I lived. I’d never again have to be the only woman in Victoria’s Secret who was old enough to be Trudy’s grandmother.

Suddenly I felt really old, old and crazy. Maybe that’s how Trudy saw me. When I left, she and the other size-two clerk would laugh about the crone who’d just bought all those giant-sized black bikinis. “Think she still does it?” they’d ask.

That’s what I wanted to know when I was that age, who still did it. I would have assumed women of my age didn’t because who’d want them? They were old. I remembered being twenty-four at a friend’s twenty-fifth birthday party and feeling like a big wall had just dropped between us. She was old and I wasn’t. The difference between our ages was
only a few months but it might as well have been decades. It was all over for her. People twenty-five and up just sat around waiting to die. That was what I’d thought.

So while I was waiting to die, I looked at bras. The last thing on my mind was comfort. It seemed to be the last thing on Victoria’s Secret’s mind, too. It was the land of the underwire, a place where breasts were something to be worn just under the chin. At the moment I was willing to go along with that. I wouldn’t have been in there if I hadn’t been.

I wasn’t sure of my size. Smallish. The kind of shape that in the past had made men say, “I
prefer
flat women.” I bet they did, the way I preferred men with no teeth. Still, the As had less to fear from gravity. They also had less to choose from, which wasn’t so bad considering there were four big walls covered with bras on little plastic hangers. It was the kind of thing that flooded me with anxiety. There were too many choices. It was why I didn’t like to shop in department stores like Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. To find one skirt you had to look through a thousand?
Why?
It was a maze and a house of horrors all in one. No matter where you turned, as far as the eye could see, you bumped into skirts.

For me, shopping boiled down to getting it over with quickly, so I selected a few black bras, a few white ones, and headed for the dressing room. From four walls of bras to four walls of mirrors, it was a toss-up which was worse. The good news was that I was working with the half of my
body where lying to myself about cellulite wouldn’t be necessary. There was the
Cellulite is beautiful
lie, the
Babies have cellulite, too, and they’re cute
lie, and the whopper of them all, only possible in certain kinds of lighting,
It’s gone!

I tried not to look in the mirror until I had to, which wasn’t easy in a tiny room lined with mirrors. By mistake I glimpsed myself in my own bra, the one I had worn from home. It reminded me of the Timex watch ad where they strap a Timex to the bottom of someone’s ice skate and then run over it with a bulldozer and then dig it out of the sand a year later, smashed and filthy, but still ticking. That was my bra, a grayish film stuck to my skin that looked like something I should exfoliate. If Trudy saw me now, she’d run for a Ziploc bag and tweezers.

I shoved the old bra into the front pocket of my jeans, horrified I’d let myself come to this. It was as though, surrounded by all these mirrors, I couldn’t escape seeing the part of my life I’d buried. So often I felt a kind of smug satisfaction in my independence, the poster girl for living alone and loving it. I wasn’t single, I was autonomous. I was free. I was that fish without a bicycle. I was complete.

So why did I feel like weeping into the pretty lace bras? Why did all this freedom suddenly seem so awful? Poor Hank. Poor any man who made a date with such an ambivalent woman. But right now it wasn’t ambivalence I was feeling; it was gaping, shrieking loneliness.

It wasn’t what I’d expected would happen to me at Victoria’s Secret. I had come for underwear, not insight, but
I’d gotten both. The underwire principle of life: make the most of what you’ve got. It did wonders for my body; why not for the rest of me?

I was ready to pay for my new life, which was heaped on the counter in a small pile of black and white lace. Trudy sorted through it, scanning in the prices, murmuring little sounds of approval as though she suspected I was doing something out of character and wanted to encourage it. When she was done ringing everything up, she didn’t hit
Total
. Instead, she looked at me and frowned. “Having the wrong nightie could spell disaster.” Her expression was dead serious, as though a problematic nightie was on a par with other global threats: war, famine, the hole in the ozone.

“A nightie?” I felt exposed. I’d been caught with a half-baked plan to end loneliness. I couldn’t escape yet.

“Follow me,” she said and headed across the store to a rack of nighties. She turned around to consider me from head to foot and then turned back to study the rack. She pulled out a diaphanous forest green garment that might have been a slip and held it up to me. “I like real silk, don’t you?”

I took the nightie from her and held it up to myself, turning to face a mirror. “Now I do,” I said.

My second dinner with Hank was nothing like the first. This time there was a sexual tension between us that gave the
whole night a pleasant incoherence. Nothing much about him bothered me—not the crumbs on his lapel, the strip malls desecrating America, or his having forsaken books. Not even his allergy to horses bothered me or that he still wasn’t divorced. What seemed important was that I was wearing pretty new underwear. The underwire of the bra dug into my ribs every time I took a breath, and I found myself wanting to say,
What exactly
is
bondage?

Our conversation was peppered with presumptions. We both said things like
the next time I see you
and
when we get together again
. But at the same time, little red flags went up, highlighting critical areas of incompatibility. Besides observing that we had no interests in common, I found myself assessing him as I would the more empathetic creatures in my domain, as if he were a horse. He was a stallion, of course, and as such, self-centered and domineering. As unappealing as this was, he was the first man to seek me out in years.

Even though I knew we had no future, it was hard not to like someone who said he had wanted to call me for six years. Ten years ago, the men I knew said all kinds of nice things to me. After enough Scotch and sodas, they said they were looking at the prettiest girl in America, and after enough Gallo, I thought they were, too. There were whole evenings filled with boozy platitudes, a whole decade.

And then a decade of neither. No men and no Gallo. A decade of sorting myself out alone, of growing up. Emotionally I had gone through my twenties in my thirties, and
now, in my forties, I was beginning to date. It seemed both too soon and too late. But I’d forgotten how nice attention from a man could feel. Maybe my friends were right. I had to give Hank a chance.

Our third date was a picnic dinner at a park overlooking the Hudson River. As we lay on the itchy wool blanket, eating Greek olives, Hank turned to me and said, “I want to marry you.”

It felt like a Gallo flashback. As though we were two strangers spinning on bar stools, picking out potential baby names from the wine list. I doubted we’d spent six hours together. He was allergic to everything I loved. He was still married to someone else. I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. I didn’t know if it was because his question was horrible or wonderful.

Hank started to laugh, too. We rolled onto our backs and laughed up at the sky, big, body-shaking laughs. I laughed so hard tears rolled down my cheeks and into my ears. We laughed and laughed. When we were finished with the big laughter, when it had subsided to an occasional chuckle, Hank rolled back onto his stomach, and I could feel him looking at me.

“I’m serious,” he said.

I was still on my back, hooting into the sky. “Just what’s
in
those olives?” I stammered.

But I knew that being wanted was the most wonderful feeling in the world.

L
AY
M
E
D
OWN’S
eye worsened steadily all fall. By December, it protruded so much that a large pink mass the size of a golf ball had appeared along the bottom of the eye. It wasn’t the tumor, it was the third eyelid being pushed out by the tumor. Because it was December, flies weren’t a problem, and Lay Me Down still showed no signs of discomfort. However, it meant the tumor was growing, and even if Lay Me Down seemed otherwise healthy, come spring, flies would be a serious problem.

It was hard for me to look at her bad eye and yet, twice a day, I checked it carefully to make sure she could still blink, to make sure it remained moist. For as long as I could remember I’d been squeamish about medical problems. I assumed it was a result of watching my mother get sick and die. My brother was the same way. Neither one of us went
to the doctor for yearly checkups because it made us too nervous. Merely hearing the word
cancer
could give either one of us an anxiety attack. We didn’t want to hear about illness and we certainly didn’t want to be around it. It was probably a blessing I’d never had children.