The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (8 page)

I ran. I ran away. I was at the edge of the parking lot when I heard the priest say to his congregation of children, articulating, again, each and every name as though their lives depended upon it: “Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph, go home. Go home now. It is late. Your mother must be worried.”

Late, late that night I awoke to the smell of char, the sound of sirens, striped lights swinging across my wall. I fell back into the fastness of sleep.

The next morning, in school, our teacher told us that a fire had taken the Callahans’ house and everyone in it as well. Only the mother, not home that night, had survived. Later, over days, the story seeped out. The children’s bodies had been found by the windows, which were not double hung, but crank operated, the aluminum handles too hot to touch, melted beyond shape or function.

All gone. Every single child, plus their father, gone. Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph. I was ten years old, in the third grade, my mind too small for these six singular facts, and yet not so small that I could slam shut some door, or window. Their names. Mary’s sneer. The pond-warm pee of a boy next to me. Gone now. And worse than gone, the going. How they must have clawed at the glass, flame-licked. The depth of human terror. Its persistent possibility.

For years after that I walked, once a month or so, by the site where their house had been, and, in my mind, a window all wrong, a man in black billows, a bird blowing by, my name not called, not called, not called. If every childhood has its defining event, this perhaps was mine, not the fire, not the enormity of the loss, although those figure in, believe me, they do. But the defining event, in the end, is not what happened, but rather what did not, and how close it came to being otherwise. My name not called. Myself, and yours, just a few little letters away from going Pegasus, who began as flesh but ended up astral. I was ten but also ten no longer.

I’m sure there are a thousand reasons for the fears that came to define me as definitively as my skin or my signature. I came of age in the 1970s and am old enough to recall the ending of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the nuclear era, missiles lining the banks of Europe, the threats, the button, a world emptied of people, a war where no one touches yet everyone dies.

Yes, a thousand reasons for the fears that waxed and waned but never left and instead, in their perpetual presence, became the beat by which I marched my way through life. For me, starting at the age of ten, life was about a
not
, a near miss, and thus I ricocheted between dodging dangers real and imagined while concomitantly clutching at whatever I believed could keep me safe. By the age of twelve I could list every elevator crash since 1923. I knew the date on which Charles Manson had become eligible for parole. I walked in fear and yet knew enough to mock myself, and thus my peers thought me quirky enough to be
almost
(but not quite) cool. In junior high’s homeroom, during attendance time, when we were all sitting in rows, I would not infrequently whip out a thermometer and take my temperature just to get the giggles, making comedy out of neuroses too severe to stuff down.

Two years after the Callahan fire, my father received his inheritance, and we moved from the Golden Ghetto to a much plusher place, 219 Chestnut Street. There, we had a butler and a burglar alarm that included what were called panic buttons positioned at calculated intervals along the corridors. The panic buttons glowed at night, mandarin bars of light we were told to never, ever push unless there was an emergency. The panic buttons presented me with a continuous unsolvable philosophical quandary that to this day I have not solved:
unless there is an emergency.
The panic button presumes that there is life on the one hand, crisis on the other. I had a more integrated approach. Panic did not exist apart from life. It
was
life, and to this day I swear I’m right. The sheer
number
of ways things can go wrong in a trillion-celled human body held together by gossamer threads of good luck confirm for me my stance. There are no freak accidents in life, and how could there be if the entirety of life is
itself
the most outrageous incredible freak event we will all never truly understand, even as we stumble through it, doing our best to dodge the dangers. And in my mind there is always a priest in billows of black leaning out over the sill of a window.
Go home. Your mother must be worried
.

Amen.

On the subject of god, as a child, I was skeptical, but my mother was not. Where I wavered, she stood strong. Where I wondered, she knew. If personalities can be described as punctuation points, I was a question mark, half erased. She was an exclamation point, typed in toner so dark it bled through and blackened the fingers.

As for god’s particulars, these my mother also knew. In fact, when she spoke of God it seemed she was so intimate with him that they’d just gone golfing or had a dinner out at the Capitol Grill. When there were wars—and the 1970s were
full
of wars or hijackings or kidnappings in the Holy Land or about the Holy Land—God, like Santa, always knew who was wrong and who was right, and he always told my mother, who always told us. Despite my doubts, I never went to bed unless I’d recited the Schmah at least twenty three times, in Hebrew, lights out.

This, I know, has nothing to do with horses, at least not on the surface. But beneath the surface, it was Judaism, or more specifically Zionism, that brought horses to me and also, ironically, prevented me from becoming the rider I so wanted to be, because, as my mother often repeated once the great affair had begun, “Lauren [all exasperation], Jewish people
do not
ride horses. They play tennis or golf.”

There’s probably some truth to this statement in the aggregate, but here’s the problem: I was not the aggregate but rather some speck spinning within it. And the particular speck called Lauren (and
not
Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph) one day, sometime around the age of twelve, two years after the fire, well, that speck began to burn in a whole new way.

We travelled to Israel, my brother, two sisters, parents, and me, sometime after the Yom Kippur War. I don’t remember much from this trip except a vague boredom and the tinted windows of tour buses. I do recall landing at the airport and how my mother, so stern, so
fisted
, how she bent down to kiss the ground and told us to do the same. I remember kissing Jewish ground, the smell of smog and soil combined. I remember seeing horses on the highways, so odd, the dusty, plodding equines side by side with peppy cars whizzing and tooting hysterically. This was Tel Aviv. The war was over, but still the streets were full of soldiers and Red Cross cars. My brother and I collected bullet casings on the Golan Heights, where the fighting had been fiercest. Inside one casing mysteriously speckled with black, I found a ladybug. I fed her from a secret stash of leaves. I brought her home within her home, snuck her through the airport search on one side, customs on the other. A few days later, back in the States, when I looked into the casing, there was not one ladybug but hundreds. How could this be? The bugs were tiny, each bright being the size of a pencil point, but growing day by day. I brought my cornucopia to the science teacher. She put her glasses on, peered inside and announced, “Babies,” as though this were the most common thing in the world. Babies in a bullet shell. Babies from another world. Babies that had survived against all odds, in a place devoid of resources. At recess I took the shell outside and, kneeling at the far end of the schoolyard field, where the woods began, I tipped the bullet-nest downward, tapped on its copper bottom, and, after several delicate thumps, the whole infant galaxy slid into the moss. I couldn’t find the mother though. I said an improvised prayer—
Good luck. Schmah y’Israel.
When I came back to check the next day, they weren’t there.

When I think of Israel now, from the graying, worried age of forty-eight, I think of ladybugs in a desert. I think of blooms in bullet shells and the Golan Heights. I think of the bedouins we met, people in a warp, untouched by time. They wore long white shirts that billowed in the desert winds; they seemed to sail on the Sahara sand. They had horses.

I first fell in love with horses near the end of that trip, right before I’d found the ladybugs, so the two are entwined in my mind—
miraculous
and
equine.

The bedouins’ horses were unlike those we have here in overfed, glossy America, where even our beasts gleam as though they’ve stepped from a Clairol commercial, their coats blow-dried and scented. The bedouin horses were predominantly tired, and when you touched their hides you felt matted fur. Flies sizzled in their eyes, covering the rims and lids. The bedouins offered tourists’ children the chance to ride, for a shekel or two. In fact, if I’m remembering correctly, something like two shekels got you a camel ride; one shekel, a plain old pony. I wanted the camel, and we had the money, but on that particular day, the camel was tied up, quite literally, to a post, and for some reason out of commission. Thus I got my first ever horseback ride by default.

We waited, my mother, siblings, father and I, we waited for my turn by the flapping bedouin tents. The wind was roaring. Army planes flew in formation overhead. They flew wing to wing, made mischief with the clouds, darting in and out. Somewhere someone was singing, the sound so slender it could barely be heard. To the side of the tent clusters, a bedouin woman was washing fabric in a bucket and then smacking the drenched garments on stone. Why was she smacking the stone? Why did the planes fly above? Why do the clouds stay up but the branches fall down? Nothing seemed sure except a certain singular fact—the balance beam we’re always on.

And there we waited for the bedouin to bring me the paid-for pony, my parents, my siblings, myself standing sun-struck in the desert, so still, we were, as though made mute by the intensity of the Sahara light, the heat, the white tents pinned to posts in the sand but nevertheless sagging and flapping in the wind while the woman fished bolt after bolt of bright cloth from a bucket, pulling from a seemingly endless source, like a magician coaxing handkerchiefs from his hat; the fabric kept coming. She kept wringing, as did my mother in our washroom at home, wringing the dirt from my soiled shirts, furious that it was there, wringing hanks of my hair, furious that they were there; wringing her two hands after one more fight with my father, furious that he was here, all of us kids gone mute, blinded by the bright light from the ice landscaping their marriage.

Where oh where was my horse? We waited by the white tents. I heard a tinny little tune but could not see its source. I felt a familiar leaden deadness smack in the center of myself. My breath rasped, in and out. Where oh where was my horse?

And then from behind the bedouin tent came a piercing cry, a continuous whinny that kept reaching its crescendo only to shatter the ceiling of sound and go higher still; some rage this horse had; I heard before I saw. And when the bedouin finally approached, he was not leading the horse so much as dragging him, the animal sitting back hard on all four heels. His equine legs were ramrod straight, his nostrils flaring. The horse was drenched in sweat, so wet the beast looked oiled, unreal, and when he came up close he let out a second kind of sound, a high pitched plea it seemed, a long, up-spiraling whinny of a cry, and from all four corners of the desert the answers bounded back.

And then, only moments later, the Sahara settled into silence again. “Ma neesh nah?” the bedouin asked, tapping on the monstrous saddle, but I’d changed my mind; no thanks. This was a horse who’d woken up on the wrong side of the stable, clearly, his eye rolling loose in his huge head. “Ma neesh nah?” the bedouin said again. “Lo,” I replied, Hebrew for “no.” But then the washing woman—she’d been watching the whole time I think—now she stopped her smacking and came over to me, her hands dripping, and in my memory my parents and siblings just go away, and that woman, well, she lifts me like a baby, her dripping hands under my arms, lifting me as though I am light and easy, she swinging me onto the saddle as someone whistles and we are off. I am hanging on hard to the greasy mane and, though it couldn’t have been more than a slow trot, what I feel is the world break up in a bounce, the immutable, rock-solid stuckness of things become otherwise, the landscape chunked and piecemeal from the clunky gait, and my mind, for once my worried nattering
what will happen
mind, resolved into a particular point of concern, or concentration. All that mattered was to do what I would later learn the phrase for:
keep your seat.
That was it, sum total. All that mattered to that girl back then—and to maybe my girl now and, if I extend myself still further, maybe to so many of the girls groomed to groom, loving horses—all that mattered was to root myself to the animal, graft my rhythm to his, or vice versa. The concern is not over who gives, who takes, who leaves, who stays; the point is simply
staying
with,
staying
here;
here
. And suddenly there was a here, and the future fell away, what could or would or may, and truly time stood still.