Horsekeeping

by Roxanne Bok

  Back inside, I briefed my weary parents and realized the time. I had completely forgotten about Bandi’s arrival. Though my heart was not in it, I was glad for the diversion. Mom, Dad and I pulled up to the barns at Riga Meadow just as Bobbi drove in with Bandi trailered behind her pick-up. She was excited because he travelled with no trouble—always a relief with such unpredictable and unwieldy cargo. Bobbi had shared many examples of the mishaps her horses managed while standing in a metal box behind her truck, many miles from help and home.

  Though Bandi should have been the man of the moment, I first inquired after Bobbi’s husband who I last glimpsed re-equipping to get back to the fire fight.

  “How’s Chip?”

  “Oh, he hasn’t come home yet.”

  It was 11:00 a.m. I tried to fill Bobbi in on the fire as I reached in to pat Bandi, but she was preoccupied with my new horse. Fumbling the trailer door latch, she carried on, unconcerned about the event her husband and I had shared, habituated, I figured, to sleeping through his midnight emergencies.

  “Here’s your boy,” she said cheerily. “He did just fine on the ride.”

  Indeed. Serene as a yogi he stood munching away at some hay in a string bag tied at mouth level. She backed him out and down the ramp slowly and he shone reddish brown in the sunlight. Despite my sleep-deprived funk, I remembered the camera, and Mom snapped a few photos. I had a new male, or half-male, in my life, my first eunuch I suppose, and joy eclipsed my exhaustion. A beautiful horse, my very own: our future partnership of show ribbons and glorious trail rides streamed out before us. Over the next hour we settled him into his new quarters, and in the physicality of the tasks I forgot about Ursula and the fire, indulging the moment.

  Late in the afternoon I felt smoked over from the fire and lack of sleep. With plenty of the day still to go I retrieved my kids from camp. Elliot had a Little League game at 6:00 p.m. across the state line in Miller-ton, New York. Excited that his Pop (my dad) would see him play, we settled in for a hot, slow-paced time. Baseball played by ten-year-olds is like watching paint dry. These kids pitch overhand, hard, but with dicey accuracy. Satisfying hits are rare, and stealing home on wild pitches is common. Singles regularly score as home runs based on overthrows that roll to the back fences. Elliot’s good eye ensures that he walks a lot—even though all the parents yell “swing away” just to get some action going.

  Halfway through the game, small-talking to some of the parents in the bleachers, I relaxed while a bored Jane balanced and banged along the metal bleachers. I let my mother bear the burden of watchful care and took advantage of the respite, figuring the roar of the crowd would alert me to any developments on the field. The crack of a bat alerted me to see Elliot drop the ball thrown to him at third base for an out. He scrambled after it and made a decent throw to home plate to get the same runner, but it was too late: a run scored.

  “Roxanne, Elliot’s hurt.”

  I looked back to third. Elliot was down on his knees, flapping his hands furiously in front of his face. I raced over, hearing “bloody nose” spoken by parents as I passed. Thank God, I thought to myself, only a bloody nose. By the time I got there, he was crying, almost hysterically, and covered in blood. I knelt and took over the coach’s hold on the bridge of Elliot’s nose with one hand as I held a rapidly soaking tissue to his nostrils with the other.

  “Put your face forward Ellie, so you don’t swallow the blood,” I counseled, falsely calm. The old custom of tilting the head back thankfully has been debunked—I still remember that disgusting feeling of blood pouring down my own kid throat.

  “Elliot, don’t worry, honey. I’ve had plenty of bloody noses and they look a lot worse than they are,” I soothed.

  I waited several seconds and lifted the wad of tissue a centimeter away from his nose, talking all the while. The blood gushed forth. I replaced my hand. Helpfully, people were gathering up tissue and towel reinforcements.

  “If you calm down, it will stop sooner,” I told him, fighting to maintain my own composure.

  Though I have run many alarming nosebleeds that eventually ceased on their own, one did send me to the hospital where I endured an unpleasant gauze packing and eventual cauterization. Although rarely life threatening, so much blood from the head invariably begs the question “will it stop?” And this was my beloved child, scared stiff and hemorrhaging. I felt panic circling rationality in my brain.

  “But it’s not stopping!”

  “It will soon, I promise. Look it’s slowing up.”

  I inched the towel away, but it still geysered. I lied and told Elliot it ebbed some. I glimpsed the head coach looking worried as he worked away on Elliot’s redder than orange glove with some wet wipes. He needed an occupation, and his busyness distracted Elliot. My son’s shirt streaked red down the front. He held his dripping hands out a la Frankenstein while blood pooled on the grass. My stomach lurched and a buzzing sounded behind my eyes. No, don’t wilt now. I lowered my head to steady my blood pressure and pass the nausea. It was eight o’clock at night, and I had been up since one, working on an hour and a half of sleep. I bolstered myself, breathed deep, and re-adjusted my squeeze lower down on his nostrils. My faintness faded as the coaches and parents recounted how the ball flew off the tip of Elliot’s glove, clonking his nose before rolling away.

  “How about that, El? You made the play after you were hurt.”

  “But I didn’t make the out.”

  “But it was a good throw.”

  Another three minutes passed, with intermittent checking. Just as I suggested a trip to the emergency room, the red tide receded. The game had resumed earlier, but the coaches suggested we sit on the bench for a while to be sure he was okay and then take him home.

  Elliot perked up once the blood stopped and watched another of his friends get clocked in the back by a pitch.

  “I have to go see if Jason’s alright,” he shouted, and took off toward home plate.

  Soon, he had trotted back to me begging permission to hit. I questioned the coaches, who shrugged their shoulders and nodded, and though every bone in my aching body urged retreat, I waved him on: “Go.” I aligned my decision with the folk wisdom of falling off a horse—if you don’t get right back on you may never ride again. Elliot is a thinker like me, so I worried he would over-ruminate given time and inaction. He loved baseball. Playing rather than fretting was probably best, as long as his nose didn’t unclot. I watched him approach the plate. He bent to it without any trepidation and whacked a double, hitting in a run that turned out to be the winner. Alright, Elliot, I exclaimed under my breath. Later in the game, he climbed the mound. He had never pitched before, except with Scott in the backyard. He performed more than credibly, and I beamed proud rays toward my warrior son. What a day.

  At the following week’s game, Elliot did end up at the emergency room. He took a solid hit in the kidney with a forty mile an hour late throw as he righted himself from a successful slide into home plate. Though he tried to shake it off, the pain escalated rendering him doubled over and howling. He is not particularly sensitive to pain, and doesn’t dramatize, so after conferring with a doc parent, we sped off to Sharon Hospital for an x-ray. By the time we arrived, poor Elliot’s writhing and begging for help prompted some pretty quick action in the ER. A morphine drip worked wonders. All tests proved negative, and he woke up right as rain the next morning. We figured a muscle spasm was to blame, since anything else would have left him sore at the very least.

  It was torture witnessing Elliot in severe pain begging for relief I was unable to supply. I morphed into a panicked animal, screaming at people who couldn’t possibly move quickly enough. This time, thankfully, I had Scott with me and more sleep. But between Elliot’s two injuries, I had earned some grey hairs and was reminded how draining parenting can be. Do I have the energy to squeeze in new projects like horses and a farm and the danger they entailed? The hazards of baseball, let alone his winter sport of ice hockey, seemed enough excitement.


  As for Ursula’s house, it was a complete loss, with the exception of George’s more recently added, unfinished apartment above the garage, though even that was smoked and wet. The fire department camped out two more days to keep watch. The source possibly sparked from the forty-year-old attic fan that Ursula swore was turned off. We put George up at The White Hart for a few weeks since his remaining section lacked electricity and water. I took the kids to the site to show them what fire can do, and the charred remains surrounding the hole that was the basement made us cringe for Ursula. Very little could be salvaged, and in the humid summer heat, mold soon crept lava-thick across it all. George informed us of the nightly rat troops, and our own sightings around our house prompted a call to our vermin buster, Jim, who put down poison, and to the county sanitarian to speed up the inevitable demolition. But bureaucracy moves at a glacial pace. Even though she had more than adequate insurance and a helpful agent, Ursula inched through the necessary decisions.

  In late September the rubble finally was cleared away. George reverted to living in his car for months, unwilling to give up on his damaged home, and felt compelled to stand guard against varmints and voyeurs. He posted too many KEEP OUT/NO TRESSPASSING signs, inviting attention. Because of a fall that broke her neck, Ursula spent time in hospital and then in a nursing home, the very fate she had feared. But she adamantly refused to move to Illinois with Ross, and, still in possession of her Yankee iron will, planned to rebuild. I hoped she would live long enough to see it through.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Colt and a Filly

  IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE HYPERBOLIC PHRASE, I would “kill for” my children, Elliot and Jane, as they are my own flesh and blood. I fully believe I could lift a vehicle off my kid as described in those emergency tales of superhuman strength. When Jane asks how much I love her, I honestly submit a superlunary answer.

  “I love you and Elliot more than anyone or anything in the entire universe.”

  “Even more than Daddy and Velvet?” she asked.

  “Yes, even more than the two of them put together.”

  “Hey,” Scott said, “I’m sitting right here.”

  “Someone I created takes precedence over someone I married.” I rolled my eyes at him like “duh.”

  “Where do I rank against the pets?”

  “Velvet or Bandi?” I frowned, thinking it over.

  And I am not even especially maternal, not naturally the giving type. One by one our friends began spawning with gusto claiming that “your life isn’t complete without kids; it’s what makes a family.” Ambivalently, after fourteen years of marriage, we took the plunge, had one, barely made it through the baby stage and then, according to rules of genetic conspiracy, five years later we forgot the mastitis and sleepless months and had another, and persuaded everyone we knew to do the same to convince ourselves we had done the right thing. There is no u-turn, nor any upside in admitting that life as we had known it—long Sunday mornings with the New York Times, sex without the door barricaded, some hours of the week with nothing to do, a leisurely, narcissistic self-indulgence—ceases to exist, and the needy, adorable little people, whom you love more than anyone you have ever known including—and this is big—yourself, are yours for life. And though other parents do not like to admit it, and with rare exceptions, we really only deeply love our own: everyone else’s just don’t compare. It’s primal.

  While Scott and I will do absolutely anything for them, it doesn’t mean that self-sacrifice is returned. By nature, children experiment, and we are the laboratories. Just when we think we’ve got their fastball sorted out, they throw us a curve: Elliot yells “Damn it” in the middle of a crowded store when they are out of cupcakes; both kids get ornery and bored while sitting among enough toys and books to stock a day care center; Jane throws her first and only tantrum during an all-important elementary school interview (the bright-eyed admissions director turned sullen at my protestations of “that’s a first, we’ve never seen that before,” and replied “Of course,” while scribbling Xs and !!!s across our file); one regresses and wets the bed again just when I had disposed of the waterproof mattress pad, and, well, you get the picture.

  Scott and I are decent parents, maybe even better than average. But we have our weak spots. For Scott, it’s the car. When both kids jabber at once to a tired Pa who just finished a hard week’s work, trying to get his attention—that is, each trying to get all the attention, pitching the decibels louder and louder, and Scott is trying to maneuver a Suburban around the craters on the Willis Avenue bridge at rush hour, and 1010 WINS is blaring a twenty-minute backup on the Bruckner Boulevard onto which we have just turned, well, think pressure cooker and Linda Blair. I smile smugly when Scott loses it because it is so rare. Volatility is more my trademark with mealtimes, particularly family dinners, my Achilles heel. An example:

  “Jane, please tell Elliot dinner is ready.”

  Scott is already doing his best to tilt this dinner toward success. Flattering Jane with a job gives her some ownership and a vested interest in cooperation.

  “OK, Daddy,” she chirps, and runs in tight, excited steps to the playroom.

  “Aayot [her mutilation of Elliot], come eat dinner.”

  Immediately she races back.

  “He’s not coming.”

  “Yes I am, Jane, give me a minute. Sheesh,” Elliot yells, slamming his laptop shut.

  He bounds in and slumps into his chair. We assemble around the table, and the kids assess their plates. Neither child is happy with the appetizing marinated chicken and broccoli that Scott has given up time with his Sunday newspapers to lovingly prepare. Tonight, like all nights, they would have preferred pasta with “Farmer John cheese” as Jane persists in calling parmesan. But, to his credit, Elliot rallies.

  “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub.”

  Scott and I cautiously exchange glances. Our hopes rise. Maybe tonight will be that rare experience of cute word-play and meaningful conversation, where we manage to keep some control and perhaps impart a tiny bit of wisdom, so that even if we cannot quite label the meal pleasurable, we can tag it a “learning experience.”

  “Mommy, when will I get booties?” Jane says, suddenly looking very concerned.

  Elliot chokes, spits some chewed greens onto the lazy Susan and howls because he knows that Jane means “boobies,” her twice-mangled euphemism for breasts. She has been asking this question a lot lately, and Elliot, embarrassed about all things sexual, finds it hysterical every time. I’m just grateful when the “booties” question comes out at home rather than in an elevator, or in church. Maintaining an even keel, I reply:

  “Elliot, don’t be a barbarian. Please eat over your plate and use your fork. I’ve told you Janie, you’ll grow breasts when you’re a teenager, but only if you eat your dinner.”

  “What’s a teen-angle again?

  “A teenager is someone thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen years old—all the numbers that end in ‘teen.’ Please take a bite of chicken. Daddy made it special for you and it’s really yummy.”

  “What’s for dessert?” Jane wants to know.

  Elliot snorts again, sending milk out of his nose.

  “EE WWW , GROSS,” Jane declares.

  Dessert is a loaded topic. Because Scott and I have fallen into the trap of bribing Jane with dessert to prompt her to eat her dinner, a practice that the childcare gurus declare the ultimate no-no, it raises our hackles. Every day we say we have to call a halt to the practice, but there is usually some mitigating circumstance that saps our will. It doesn’t help that Elliot eats well: rather, it makes us feel like we’ve run out of steam with child number two. Elliot takes great pride in his attention to vegetables and his restraint regarding dessert, if only as a way to distinguish himself from his little sister, who, as he has announced on numerous occasions, was “the worst thing that ever happened to me when I was five.” Internally, Scott and I are beating our selve
s up about our inadequate parenting in regard to food and projecting ahead to inevitable eating disorders, and then my thoughts shift to Cain and Abel, but little Freudian Jane has already moved on:

  “Will I get a penis when I’m a teen-angel?”

  Elliot bursts out: “Of course not, Jane—you’re a girl. You have a vagina. Sheesh!”

  “Sheesh!” Jane shouts louder, and rolls her eyes at her brother.

  A volley of “sheeshes” ensues.

  I consider myself lucky that body parts are only discussed. My good friend’s daughter once showed her vagina to her grandfather at the dinner table.

  Scott comes to the rescue with the double-whammy of a conversation stopper:

  “HEY! Elliot. Tell me one good thing that happened in school today. Jane, eat a carrot.”

  Dead silence, with the exception of scraping forks sculpting food pyramids.

  That’s inventive, I think to my own unimaginative, sulking self.

  “Well?” Scott persists.

  “Lunch and recess,” Elliot sullenly replies.

  “That’s two. Did you finish reading Skinnybones? Jane: pick up a carrot, put it in your mouth, chew it and swallow it or Daddy will be very angry with you.” He looks back at Elliot, who, feeling the pressure, replies,

  “Of course I finished Skinnybones. It was so dumb.”

  Elliot re-slumps and probes a piece of chicken only to smear it around in a dollop of ketchup. Simultaneously, he rolls his eyes at no one and Scott rolls his eyes at me. Looking for support, he forces a smile, and I icily return a grimace. Mouth full of carrot, Jane pipes in:

  “Daddy, you have a big butt.”

  Elliot snorts out some more food, and Scott knows instinctively that this will push me over the edge into my “I hate eating with the kids mode,” about which we both know I will later suffer guilt because, as the same aforementioned child-rearing experts have said, it is crucial to their pint-sized psyches to share quality mealtimes. Right now, I would rather be having a root canal with some good nitrous. This thought sours me more, but I feel I should defend my maligned husband.