The Exit Coach

by Megan Staffel

  “‘Him’? It’s a him?” People had told us male goats were mean and smelly, and we had decided we only wanted does.

  “Nah.” He spit phlegm into the gutter. “Not him. He been robbed of his treasure. He’s a choirboy, which in goats it’s called a wether. See now…”

  Chipper leaned in over the seat and, despite the cold, gave me a lesson on the psychology of the neutered male goat. “They got the male impulse, but they don’t got the equipment. So wethers is orn’ry. Never did like ’em. Same hormones but no way to express themselves. So you and the boss, you got to watch it with this guy.” He stepped away, slamming the door. He lifted a palm in thanks, and then he leaned towards me again, opening the door a crack, and said, “Tell you one thing: any longer and the wife would have shot me and the goat together. That’s a new railing. The little bustard kicked out the spindles.”

  Sometimes I just felt lucky. Here I was, living in this beautiful, uncrowded place. I did farmwork. I could fling a fifty-pound hay bale onto the top of a high load easily as any man. I had a pickup to haul a goat. He sat quietly, though when we passed a house and he heard barking dogs, he baaed a little goat baa, which is like a sheep’s but more insistent. “Been running with the deer?” I said. “Then you should know about dogs.”

  I put fresh bedding down and filled a water bucket. Then I led him back to the barn and closed him into the stall with some hay. I planned to keep him locked up for a few days till he knew his home.

  In the afternoon, I shoveled snow out of the truck and drove to the feed store, where they loaded me up with more bales of hay, a hayrack to hang on the wall of the stall, a rubber drinking bucket, and feeding dishes. By the time I got back, the sun was sinking, and my portion of the sky was flushed an encouraging pink.

  But I will admit, as the kettle was heating for tea, the thought crossed my mind: I should have discussed it with Shep. No, he was meeting with the school board, and I had seen to everything. All Shep would have to do was hang the feeders and hayrack. I was no good with carpentry, and Shep was quick and efficient.

  So I decided instead to tell our children. Two e-mails went out while the leaves steeped: one to Arianna, who was in college, and one to Lincoln, who worked as a contractor. “Got Goat.” Nothing more. A tease to get them to call.

  I toasted some bread, peeled a couple of hard-boiled eggs, and poured a large cup of tea. The first pause in the day. It’s this, I’ve always thought, that marks the difference between us and the animals. Up in his stall, the goat was not reviewing the events of his last ten hours. He was eating, drinking, looking, listening, all at the same time, but I doubted that he was thinking about what had happened.

  Or it could be a glass of wine or a cigarette, but it was all the same, an excuse for the chance to sit down. Had I done the right thing? Was it foolish to take on so much, so quickly, just because a villager had called me by my name? I started to see the situation from Shephard’s point of view, remembering how difficult these last few weeks had been for him, first meeting with the state officials over the low test scores and now the school board over the budget.

  Tomorrow he had to drive five hours for another meeting in Albany. And I knew he hadn’t been sleeping well. A rogue goat was the last thing he needed. A rogue goat foisted on him by me. At exactly the wrong time. An escape artist. A male creature with no equipment. All my accomplishments were in the wrong direction. I had only made more complicated our already complicated lives.

  I’d heard about Shephard Brightner long before I ever met him. In the small coastal town in Maine, twenty years ago, there was a group of women who passed his name around like a favorite recipe. Most were divorced, but a few, like me, had never been married. Didn’t matter. Everyone was thrown together, and two very different populations congregated in the food coop: the wealthy who had been enticed there by lots of things, the ocean being just one of them, and the others who depended upon the wealthy for their jobs. I was going to massage school; Shep was working as a contractor while he finished his degree. The both of us rented tiny places in the center of town, mine in an attic of someone’s summer mansion, Shep a garage apartment, and commuted the hour to the city. To us it made sense; we like small-town life.

  The first time I saw him, Shephard was on the stage at the high school. The town was having a referendum. Should the local school be closed and the kids bussed to the larger school in the next town, or should the local school be funded at greater taxpayer expense? Most people were for closing the school and bussing the kids. It seemed like a done deal. Then Shephard walked to the podium. People got quiet even before he said anything. The auditorium was packed, but I swear he looked at each person. The man had presence. He was just a contractor, a student at the university, but it was evident that he had the authority everyone else had lacked. His was a natural authority, an ability to know how to speak to a very particular group of people: lobster fishermen who were tough and independent, executives who were tired and simply wanted to eat the lobster and play golf, and then all of the in-betweens, the people like me with no money or steady job but loads of ideals. He began with a joke. I don’t remember now what it was, but after we all had a laugh, he got serious.

  First he showed us one way to look at the issue, and then he showed us another, and then he stated the conclusion he came to, and he made it seem so clear and obvious, we had no choice but to agree with him. It would be cheaper, he told us, and the kids would have more curriculum choices, but they would lose their identity as a place, as a neighborhood of people who had gone to school together their whole lives and had known each other and their families for a long time. The hour-long bus ride at each end of the day, combined with losing the idea of who they were as a community, bid him as a future parent, a future educator, to vote no.

  Someone in the first row stood up and started to clap. A wave of feelings swept over the room, and soon we were all on our feet, clapping and whistling and stomping. He had expressed the reservation that we all had but were afraid wasn’t legitimate: that the pocketbook shouldn’t be the only thing we considered. Community was foremost. Who we were, where we lived. That we were friends and neighbors sharing a common place that we all loved, and that this common place was the healthy, solid uppermost fact of our lives and was for our children a source of identity and support. Let’s not rob them of it.

  I’m not a speaker. I’m not a very political person, even, but after he was finished, I felt fired up. I was ready to volunteer to do whatever I could to make sure that the small central school in the middle of our town stayed open.

  So I joined the campaign, and over the next weeks, I went to all the communities in the district. And then, one day, returning from a nearby peninsula where we had distributed leaflets, I was with him in his beat-up old van, buckets of drywall mud rattling in the back. He pulled into a gas station, and I watched as he filled up.

  Shep is a tall man with long legs, wide shoulders. He likes to wear corduroy jackets, even back then he did, and the pockets of the jackets are always bulging with pens and pencils and scraps of paper with things written on them. He’s one of the few people who never watches the ground when he walks. He looks straight ahead, and on his face there is a wide-open expression. Shep is a happy person most of the time, and I could see it in that forward-looking expression. He has big feet and big hands, and they give him an awkwardness, like a perpetual teenager, even now that he has graying hair. He slid in and started the motor, but I said, “Hey, wait a minute,” and pointed to the other end of the lot. “Pull over there, will you?”

  He thought something was the matter. Tires needed air; woman needed bathroom. It never occurred to him that it could be anything else. That’s when I understood that as smart and charismatic as this guy was, he was also incredibly stupid. Or else, blind. Because, back then, I was a good-looking woman. At least some of the time, which is all even the best of us can hope to achieve. Before kids, before the wear and tear of life’s situations, I was thin a
nd elegant, and I had really strong hands. Now I’m a bit of a used article. My skin is weathered, and inside, I feel an intensity that wasn’t there before. I think it’s the loss of biological focus.

  So I leaned towards him, and when he turned my way, I kissed him on the lips. Only once, lightly, sweetly. But he was surprised. He hadn’t been expecting it or even thinking about it. That made me wonder. Did he have a girlfriend? If so, she was surely keeping herself scarce. Was he not attracted to me, to women? But he was. A few times, I’d caught him watching. So why hadn’t he ever made the first move?

  I’ve had cups of tea over that question. And I wonder about it still. A man with a clear trajectory, ready to move up the ladder in the field of education, an articulate man, a man who has strong hands too. Why would he hesitate?

  Outside, the snow squeaked under a set of tires. A car door slammed. The outer door to our mudroom sticks when it’s very cold, and now I heard it shudder open. I heard him set his briefcase on the floor, pull off his boots, and then he opened the door into the kitchen.

  “‘Got Goat’? What’s that, a Muslim billboard?”

  I realized, suddenly, how stupid I had been. In the age of e-mail, information moves quickly. Then I remembered that he’d been planning to talk to Lincoln that day.

  “Got goat,” I confirmed, walking towards him. We touched lips.

  He took a beer from the fridge (this was how he created a pause in his day) and sat down at the table heavily. He sighed. Then he said, “Is someone going to tell me what this is all about?”

  I should claim that as the moment when everything changed. Not the phone call. The phone call was simply the outside event that started things moving. It was the man in the beautiful brown wool suit we had bought at a thrift store in that town in Maine all those years ago, sitting at the table with his legs crossed, feet in the woolen socks I had given him on his last birthday, who announced the change with that question: Is someone going to tell me what this is all about?

  He was clearly annoyed, but then he had never been anything but direct. In fact, I loved him for his directness. But no, it wasn’t that. It was the word someone spoken in a house where there was only me.

  When men reach their middle years, their cheeks get the rougher, more weathered patina of old cars. A woman’s body collapses like a worn sofa, and if there’s been loss, her face shows it. Shep’s face had a look of forbearance.

  “Everything’s taken care of,” I said. “There’s nothing you’ll have to do until the weekend.”

  “I’m going away this weekend.”

  “Isn’t Albany tomorrow?”

  “It is.”

  “So you’ll be home Thursday night.”

  “No, I’m also going away this weekend.”

  When a husband makes a pronouncement like this to a wife he normally confides in, it startles. But there was nothing in the set of his mouth or the focus of his eyes that betrayed anything. I didn’t say, What do you mean? I didn’t say, Where to? I simply said, “Why?” And that’s a curious thing. In a long marriage, in a small town that isolates us because of the political nature of Shep’s job, we had been thrown together and, for many years, had been not only lovers but each other’s only best friends. What I meant was: Why would you go somewhere without me?

  He took a sip of beer. And then he didn’t say anything. That hurt. Usually we’re talkers. It came from all the different places we’ d lived, from having to figure those places out quickly so both of us could function. School administration is a job about doing the right thing, but also making the opposition think it had been their idea. To be effective, you have to get the feel of a place quickly. And where to have a massage practice—that was the other delicate issue. It couldn’t be in the town where Shep worked, but it couldn’t be in a town where the people were going to think it was some kind of sex thing. Location is all-important. So when we first got to a new place, we ran the roads and went into bars, supermarkets, repair shops, gift emporiums—noticing, talking, introducing ourselves. Then we met and compared notes and made our conclusions together.

  “I wanted to think things through on my own. For once, I wanted to act independently. That doesn’t mean I want to be independent. I very much hope that you’ll decide to join me later on.”

  Had I missed a connecting link?

  “What are you talking about?” I sat down across from him. “Hey, will you please remember who I am?”

  “Sorry. I was asked, very recently, to apply for a job as headmaster at a very prestigious private school in New Hampshire. It starts next fall, and apparently I’m their first choice, and they want me to come out this weekend to take a look. There’s a slight cut in salary, but there’s a huge cut in stress, and I’d be an independent educator.” With a very straight face, he said, “In New Hampshire there’s no Albany.”

  “You know it takes me a year to build up clients. Moving is a very big deal.”

  “They’re more liberal in New Hampshire, more accepting of massage.”

  “But you’re talking as though you’ve already accepted this.”

  “I haven’t. I said I needed to come out and meet the trustees and see the place.”

  “But what about me? Where am I in all of this? Your partner. Hey, your partner!”

  It seems to me that people are born with a certain level of ambition. None of us choose to struggle, but on the other hand, I don’t think many of us choose to become president. Most of us simply want to be comfortable with an interesting job and a minimum degree of stress. But for me, were I to be truthful, I’d have to admit that my ambition is only to live in a small town and be known. Goats, chickens, a vegetable garden, and enough clients to keep me busy three days a week doing massage. That’s it. So maybe Shephard’s ambition balances my lack of it.

  As we talked, I learned that it wasn’t just a private school. It was the most distinguished private school in New England, if not in the entire United States, and though it looked like a slight pay cut on paper, in actuality it was a substantial raise, because housing, a beautiful and well-appointed Victorian mansion he showed me online, was part of the deal. No utility bills, no property tax, no federal standards, no state testing, no school board, no fundamentalists screening the classroom texts. This was the school that turned out the people who entered the highest levels of industry and government. Corporation presidents, senators. These were their alumni. And then there was me: Ramona the peasant.

  That night, sitting in our kitchen, we were an island of light in the darkness. There are no shades or curtains on any of our windows. No reason for them. The nocturnal creatures—the deer, the fox, the opossum—are not Peeping Toms. I wanted him to meet the goat. But now, “Got Goat” seemed so wrong-headed I was ashamed to suggest it.

  II.

  I create lists. In grade school, I soothed myself with the sounds of things. There were the three ships Columbus brought to America: the Niña, the Pinta, the Santa Maria. I loved the perfect rhythm of those names and would say them over and over. I learned the three stars that make up Orion’s Belt: Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka. They weren’t as musical as the Spanish, but the Arabic was exotic.

  As time went on, the list became a way to entertain my mind when I was at work. Nude, naked, unclothed: my hands kneaded those words into troubled skin. It is the perfect state of being, but occasionally, I’ll get a woman who insists on wearing panties and bra. I guarantee, if she becomes a regular, she’ll take those articles off. Not because I’ve said something, but because after a session she accepts herself. I never see my bodies in entirety; I see only parts. But I can deduce, and what I say to the foot and the shoulder is meant for the rest of it.

  There are the three places Shep and I have lived—Blue Hill, Burlington, and now Andover—and the three states—Maine, Vermont, New York—that we’ve paid taxes to. We’ve chosen these places carefully, going only where there were opportunities for both of us. It is a fact, if you look at data, that superintendents move aro
und. Ten years at one school, seven years at the next. The job is too political to last at any one place for very long. Of course, I choose to think Shep is different. I choose to be an idealist, to believe that despite the unrealistic, unfunded requirements of No Child Left Behind, despite school report cards and budget pressures, Shep will remain true to what he believes: that children learn in different ways and that an effective school is one that uses a variety of teaching methods. But variety is more expensive, and when there are monetary pressures and a lot of hotheadedness, it’s difficult to implement. These days he wakes up at 4:00 in the morning, and I hear him downstairs, pedaling his stationary bike, the chain making a clicking sound as he rides through the nighttime dramas that are a spillover of contentious days. It’s good; it helps him survive. Because I want to stay here. I want to make this our home.

  The turds are black; they drop out of the velvety anus like balls from a gum machine. They have no odor, because a goat’s vegetarian intake is thoroughly digested by the time it exits, having been swallowed, processed in the rumen, then brought back up to be chewed some more as cud, swallowed again, and passed through the other stomachs, all of which are housed in the barrel suspended between the shoulders and the sharp, bony hips. Rumen, reticulum, omasum, abomasum: I say them to myself as I squat down in the stall. His breath is goaty, and he picks at my jacket with his soft, black lips and looks at me through flat, horizontal pupils. Clearly he’s been with people, because he’s comfortable with me, blows air against my neck, butts his head into my waist. I am learning the contours of his body, its little nicks and scrapes, as I pet him. I am sorry there aren’t other animals in this barn, but at least he can hear the chickens in the neighboring shed, and when he goes out, they will keep him company. His long ears are soft, and though the rest of him is brown, they’re light grey, almost white. His lashes are very long, also white, and the little teeth on his bottom jaw are small and straight. They nibble at my jacket sleeve, pull my glove out of my pocket. But his hoofs need trimming; he needs minerals. I need to buy these things. I also need to go to New Hampshire.