Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” Dr. Grice said, “but we won’t know for sure until we X-ray it.”

  We put what looked like a black rubber doormat under Lay Me Down’s foot to help keep it level. Dr. Grice guided the injured leg down and placed it flat on the mat, but as soon as she moved away, Lay Me Down either picked up her foot or rested it, tilted, on the tip of her hoof. This went on for a while, and Dr. Grice finally said she’d take a picture with the hoof tilted and hope for the best.

  She took several films from different angles, and when she was done, I put the cold compress back on Lay Me Down and led her into her stall. Dr. Grice gave Lay Me Down a shot of Banamine for pain and told me to continue giving her bute and applying the ice. She’d call with the results of the X-rays first thing in the morning.

  I followed her out to her truck and found the other three horses standing around it, licking the hood. Big wet marks streaked the windshield and the side windows. At the back of the truck, where the flatbed would normally be, was a vet hospital on wheels, including running hot water. Doors swung open and bottles of medication, leg wraps, syringes, and stainless steel surgical tools slid out on long clean trays. It was a wonder of engineering and organization.

  “Things should calm down now,” Dr. Grice said, giving Georgia’s mane an affectionate tug. She raised her eyebrows and looked right at Georgia.

  Georgia gave her a sleepy blink as though it had just been another dull morning here at Ho-Hum Farm.

  “Mares,” Dr. Grice said, shaking her head and patting the shiny red flank as she walked to the back of her truck to wash her hands.

  I was so relieved she didn’t hate Georgia, didn’t single her out as being anything worse than “a mare.” It was OK if I was angry, if I thought Georgia was a monster. She was my monster, my beloved Morgan monster. But I didn’t want anyone else to think of her that way.

  I followed Dr. Grice to the little water spigot at the back bumper and wondered why I felt so sensitive, as though if she said anything too nice or too mean, either way, I’d burst into tears, I who never cried. Maybe I was more upset about the two mares fighting than I realized. Maybe it was guilt for not closing the barn doors. I was so close to tears I knew that if she said anything but “Here’s your bill,” I’d cry.

  She leaned over the spigot and soaped her hands and arms, all the way to her elbows. “So,” she said as she scrubbed, “how’s everything going?”

  I made it to the bumper near the spigot before the tears came. “Well,” I squeaked in a tiny, clenched voice, “I have this date.”

  [ 9 ]

  ALL WEEK BEFORE my date I had trouble concentrating. During a counseling session at work I caught myself worrying about what to wear.

  “You seem different,” said my newly crack-free client. In the past he wouldn’t have noticed if my chair was on fire.

  “Different?”

  “You didn’t say anything about what’s missing.”

  I yanked my attention away from myself and looked at the man on the other side of my desk. I felt exposed, found out. In his angry glare I saw that I was just another woman in a long line of women who didn’t listen, who didn’t care, who had failed him: his mother, his wife, his boss at work, who threatened to fire him if he didn’t get treatment for his drug problem.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I was distracted.” I quickly looked him over to see what was missing. Hair? Teeth? Nose? They all seemed to be there. Limbs, digits, eyes. Everything was there. “Missing?”

  He sighed and patted the empty left breast pocket of his shirt as though I’d missed the ax handle protruding from his chest.

  No cigarettes. “You quit!”

  He rolled his eyes.

  But he was right, I was different. After years of mothballing any need for a personal life, I found my upcoming date with Hank had unleashed twin monsters of fear and loneliness.

  When Saturday arrived, I got up early to do barn chores. Lay Me Down’s pastern had not been broken but it was still swollen and she was still lame. She was taking bute for pain and swelling. While she ate her grain, I soaked her foot in ice water.

  She looked huge to me once again. I wasn’t used to seeing her in a stall. She filled the twelve by fourteen-foot space like a big doll in a small dollhouse. Her stall was diagonally across the aisle from Georgia’s, in full sight. This was good because they needed to get used to looking at each other but bad because I felt disloyal whenever I was nice to Lay Me Down in front of Georgia. I knew Georgia watched me, and I knew she’d let me know how she felt sooner or later: a nip, a shove, a step to my foot plus a little grinding. She didn’t forget.

  I’d wait until Georgia was out of her stall and grazing before I’d sneak Lay Me Down a hug. I felt like I was two-timing Georgia, an old and familiar feeling that had ended along with the Gallo wine. It wasn’t who I was anymore: lying, making up stories about where I’d been, whom I’d been with, and what I’d been doing. It was hard to believe I’d ever been like that.

  When Lay Me Down finished her grain, I lifted her foot out of the bucket and dried it before wrapping it in Vetrap, a wide elastic bandage that sticks to itself and is used to support the injured area of a horse’s leg. I had chosen bright pink but it comes in every color imaginable. I guess people just like to add a splash of color to their horses to “accessorize” them.

  Lay Me Down was fed, soaked, wrapped, drugged, and hugged, and then she was ready to join the herd. Hotshot waited patiently for her outside her stall door, ready to escort her to the pasture and to protect her against further attacks from Georgia. Fortunately, Georgia seemed to have gotten the worst of her rage out of her system. It was possible she felt she had made her point, established her alpha status. As long as Lay Me Down didn’t get too close, Georgia left her alone. If she did get close, Georgia’s ears flattened, and she rushed at Lay Me Down in warning.

  Standing still, Lay Me Down was a work of art with long, graceful lines and muscle mass that exuded power. As soon as she moved, especially when she moved fast to get away from Georgia, she lost all her grace as she hobbled and lurched. She was truly and badly crippled. Bute helped but it can be hard on the stomach. A horse shouldn’t stay on it indefinitely. I’d started adding arnica to her feed, a homeopathic treatment for pain that she could stay on for the rest of her life without any harmful side effects. But it was impossible to tell if the arnica was helping.

  Early that same evening, after the second feed and before heading to the house to get ready for my date, I lingered at the fence a moment to watch the horses. Since Lay Me Down’s arrival, they had remained in pairs. Hotshot and Lay Me Down grazed together, and Georgia and Tempo grazed at a distance from them. I’d yet to see Tempo and Lay Me Down together. Hotshot didn’t permit it. I wondered if it would always be this way, this immutable division. I wondered what made a pair, what drew Hotshot to Lay Me Down so strongly, what drew anyone to anyone.

  Something about the horses pairing off made me sad. Before Lay Me Down they’d been a group, a herd. Now they shut each other out. Sometimes a couple grazed so close together their noses touched, and it looked like they were telling secrets, whispering nasty things about the other couple, the way it felt sometimes when I was around couples at a dinner or a party—shut out of an exclusive club of two. I didn’t have many friends who weren’t married or living with someone, so I experienced this more often than I liked.

  Now it was in my pasture. I stood at the fence and watched the horse couples. It seemed to be the story of my life. It had been so long since I was part of a couple myself, it was as though I never had been, and in some ways I hadn’t, not really. I don’t think someone who drank the way I did was capable of being part of anything except in the most superficial way. I suspected real intimacy required more than intoxicated rambling no one remembered in the morning. I suspected it required something I couldn’t even name but didn’t think I possessed.

  Oh, I liked being alone: having things my way, answe
ring to no one, having the freedom to come and go. Yet when I talked to clients about their relationship or marital problems, I felt insincere. In my office at work I had a picture of Georgia and my deceased Newfoundland on my desk and had recently added a photograph of Lay Me Down. I knew for a fact I was the only person who worked at the agency who didn’t have at least one photograph of a human being in her office. Clients noticed, too.

  “No kids?” A young woman bent forward in her chair and squinted at the photographs of my animals.

  “Well, actually, those are my children.”

  My response felt evasive, not because I thought women should have children or even because I thought I should, but because for me, it felt like unfinished business. It would have been more honest if I had said, “Ever since my mother died and my father left, I’ve been unable to get close to anyone.”

  I don’t think men do this, reevaluate their lives, starting from birth, before going out to dinner with a woman.

  Perhaps most women do not do this either but most women in their forties aren’t dating.

  Later, I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, considering black jeans and a white T-shirt or black jeans and a black T-shirt. What was the right outfit for a date with a writer? Certainly not a skirt. I glanced at the pile on the bed. No, no, no. Why had I even pulled out the skirts?

  Shoes? Clogs or the new Arche wedges I had cheered myself up with when I had (uncharacteristically) agreed to drive a friend to chemotherapy at Sloan-Kettering a few weeks ago? Clogs. Arches seemed pretentious. Best not to betray any sign of shallow, name-brand tendencies. This man probably liked women who didn’t care about fashion, just books.

  Earrings? The pearl dangles. I wore them every day, even with sweats. They gave just the right message: tasteful without being ostentatious, feminine without being girly, timeless without being fuddy-duddy.

  Back to the T-shirt. I looked washed-out in white but black seemed a little hostile, like when I wasn’t reading I was throwing down shots of tequila, lip-synching to Courtney Love. Better to stick with white even though it was slightly bridal.

  Other jewelry? I liked real jewelry: oversized, chunky, and lots of it. Forget about quiet, tasteful, understated. Below the earlobes, the rules changed. It was my grandmother’s fault. She liked a wrist shackled in precious metal and rocks, fingers that bulged with stones. Anything less than eighteen-karat gold was junk, and if you couldn’t see the rocks, say, from across the dining room at the Colony Club, then they weren’t worth wearing.

  I tried dainty for a while: a slender gold bangle, a pinky ring with a ruby chip. It was what I could afford. But one day my grandmother gave me a few of her bracelets and a few of her necklaces. None of them were very valuable, but all of them were very big. After that I had to hold back.

  I decided on a men’s Swiss Army watch I could read without glasses and a wide gold cuff bracelet I’d worn almost every day for the past twenty years. Big but quiet; a compromise. No rings in case we shook hands.

  Fifty minutes later, I was in the car on my way to meet Hank. I was accompanied by an Etta James CD, her big, soulful voice filling my car with the intensity I needed. When she sang “Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield,” something wild in me wanted to wear a thin dress and roll in the dirt with a man, wanted to set fire to whatever was holding me back. When the song was over, I hit Replay, and, after listening a few more times, I was ready for the next song, “Gonna Have Some Fun Tonight.”

  When I pulled into the parking lot at the restaurant, there was a bald man leaning against the trunk of his car. I knew he must be Hank, but I wouldn’t have recognized him if I’d run into him on the street. He had changed, aged, which meant I had, too. It had been six years, of course we’d aged. Still, it was a shock.

  He smiled and waved as I pulled my car next to his and parked. He wasn’t quite bald. A neatly trimmed band of pale red circled the back of his head from ear to ear. The man I remembered was thin; this one was barrel-chested and plump.

  He stood near my car door with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to get out. I fumbled with the keys, my purse, the door handle. The dark, wild me had fled; it was the anxious, uptight me who got out of the car and extended a damp hand for him to shake. He ignored the hand, and I was pulled into the round belly and hugged hard. I must have been taller than he because I could feel his ear against my jaw.

  He kept his hand on the small of my back as he guided me toward the restaurant. I tried to decide whether I liked being touched that way. His hand was light but it was there, as though it had a right to be. I thought, if I were Lay Me Down, I’d be flicking my tail about now. I’d be asking Hotshot to back off.

  Inside there were white linen tablecloths, candles, and the sound of chamber music. The dining area was one large room divided into smaller sections by waist-high wooden partitions filled with plants. The rug was dark green with little maroon fleurs-de-lis. French windows were draped with matching velvet curtains, left open to views of fields and woods. We followed a maître d’ in a black tuxedo through the buzz of muffled voices to our table in a quiet corner.

  I took my first really good look at him when we were seated across the small table from one another. He had that pale, freckly skin redheads have. He plucked a bread stick from the bread basket and took a bite. Crumbs fell all over the table, but he didn’t notice or didn’t care, and he took another bite. More crumbs fell. He was wearing a gray T-shirt and a blue blazer that now had crumbs on the lapels. He brushed at his front halfheartedly but most of the crumbs remained. He seemed utterly relaxed.

  I was just this side of whispering the Twenty-third Psalm. It seemed easier to die than date. It was too hard, too much effort, requiring too many things I didn’t have: youth, small talk, great underwear.

  “Do you like wine?” he asked, picking up the wine list.

  Another reason I shouldn’t have come. How did I explain this? “I don’t drink,” I said.

  He poked his head out from behind the wine list. “Nothing?” Pale red eyebrows shot into the middle of his forehead.

  “Nothing.”

  He put the wine list down near the edge of the table. “Then neither will I.”

  It was the first thing about him I liked. He didn’t ask questions, didn’t probe, and then abstained to keep me company. At least I thought it was to keep me company. As it turned out, it was the last thing I liked about him as well. The rest of the evening was pretty much downhill, beginning with the news that he was only separated from his wife, not divorced.

  We ordered and the food came. He ate with gusto, I picked. I was too nervous to eat. He wasn’t handsome but he was intelligent, with a sense of humor. When I took my jacket off, he looked me over. I looked him over, too, all through dinner. I was trying to decide if he was someone I could sleep with. Not tonight, but sometime. I thought maybe I could. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything.

  “I haven’t had a date in ages,” I said.

  He didn’t even look up from his steak. “Is that what this is, a date?”

  I felt like I’d just sneezed on his food, made a faux pas, calling this a date. But, yes, I thought it was.

  When he finally looked up, he noticed the unfinished piece of salmon on my plate. “Are you going to eat that?”

  “Help yourself,” I said and pushed my plate toward him. Watching him eat my dinner was like feeling his hand on my back all over again. It made me want to pull away, tell him he didn’t know me well enough for that. He’d been married for twenty years, I reminded myself. He knew as little about dating as I did.

  “I’d like something sweet,” I said after he’d finished eating my salmon.

  Hank held his hand up to signal the waiter. “I’m not a sugar eater myself.”

  When the dessert menu came, I ordered something called Death by Chocolate. It felt like a prophecy.

  “My daughter doesn’t eat sugar either,” Hank said and ordered herbal tea.

  “Are
you working on a book?” I asked.

  “A book?” He frowned. “I haven’t written a book in five years.”

  His grievances included the extinction of good editors, good publishers, and good money.

  “I don’t even read,” he added.

  He didn’t read? This surprised me more than his not writing. Who didn’t read? I got an image of a glowing television set, hot as molten steel, turned to the Sports Channel for five years straight.

  But what really bothered me was his tone of voice. It was dismissive, mocking, the way some people talked about the religion of others, as though there was something desperate and childish about believing in a God or an afterlife. His tone said writing and reading books were OK for the little people, but the enlightened were investing in strip malls, like Hank and his small group of partners.

  “We fly over rural and suburban areas and look for potential sites—a field, an abandoned drive-in. When we see something, we buy it, develop it, and lease it. Whole thing takes less than a year, from spotting the site to cutting the ribbon on opening day. We have about seventy malls, all the way from Texas to the Canadian border.”

  I was with a man who was cementing over America, bringing Blockbuster into the lives of book haters everywhere. It was like expecting to meet Charles Frazier for dinner and having someone wearing a Century 21 blazer with a pocketful of real estate brochures show up.

  I didn’t know what to say. As a group, I put writers on the same level as horses: a species almost beyond reproach. Whatever their imperfections, they were still writers. They got me through my childhood, through the last ten years without a date. Whatever sanity I had was thanks to writers, to books that either helped me forget my troubles or helped me understand them. I was one of those people who thought the answer to everything was in a book. To me, the phone book was a book. I could hardly believe we got it free.