by Pam Houston
78. Tucson, Arizona
The idea is that you catch, tie, and groom the horses, and the horses reflect back to you your fears, shortcomings, and insecurities, in a loving, nonjudgmental equine way. Which is fine, I think, if you are a wealthy urbanite with an abject fear of any creature larger than a chinchilla.
Grooming is supposed to take two hours, but Cinder and I get the big gray Percheron looking like a Mercedes-Benz inside of forty minutes, mane and tail all ShowSheened up, hooves painted pretty as a pedicure with Hooflex.
Afterwards, in the group therapy portion of the retreat, after Rachel from Chicago gets teary because it took her so long to figure out the halter and Janice from Westchester flat out bawls as she relives the terror of combing out her Arabian’s forelock, eventually Dr. Wyatt Webb turns his attention to Cinder and me and says,
“Looks like you two had a pretty sweet time with Apollo.”
We nod in our smug-outdoorsy-Western-women way.
Wyatt says, “Tell me, Pam, what would you have done if you hadn’t been able to get Apollo to pick up his feet?”
I think, But I did get him to pick up his feet. I say, “I would have walked a few steps away and come in with greater intention, and asked him again,” and Wyatt says, “And what if that didn’t work,” and I say, “I would have untied him, walked him in a circle, come in with better focus, and asked him again,” and Wyatt says, “And what if that didn’t work?” and I say, “I would have gotten a lunge line, and trotted him first in one direction and then the other, and then I would have tied him up and refocused and asked him again.”
We go on like this for several more rounds until finally Wyatt looks around the room and says, “Can anyone tell me what Pam is forgetting?” and Lori from Park Slope raises her hand.
“Asking for help?” she says, and I have to admit it. He could have asked me fifty more times and that would never have been my answer.
If a lesbian has a collection of over four hundred dildos, does that mean she is no longer from West Texas?
On his first day in office the new president said, We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.
At the Madison handoff last Friday, we were supposed to collect her at her mother’s house, but Sofree, Tom, and Madison had been at a kids’ fair down on Pearl Street, and decided at the last minute they wanted to drop her off instead. According to the mediation agreement, Rick is supposed to have his cell phone on thirty minutes before pickup, but his battery was dead so at 4:50 when we were racing out the door to get to Sofree’s on time, and they were racing over to Rick’s house so we wouldn’t miss them, we all but collided cars at the bottom of Rick’s driveway.
Sofree flew out of the car shouting about the cell phone and flinging her arms around, and Rick kept backing away from her growling, “Don’t touch me, don’t you dare touch me!” and eventually backed all the way into the house, Sofree hot on his tail. Madison got out of the car and climbed the apricot tree, and Tom and I exchanged one quick glance through the windshield that might have said, You and I should really get a beer sometime, and then Sofree swept back around the corner smiling ferociously, plucked Madison out of the tree, hugged her tight, and said, “Don’t worry, darling, this is exactly the kind of thing that happens when feelings run deep,” set her down onto the dirt driveway, whirled into the passenger seat, and was gone.
79. Oakland, California
“Come here and talk to me for a minute,” Amanda says, after Watsu, bobbing backwards to the part of the pool that is shaded by a fine mesh overhead. “Something happened during our session, and it was pretty unusual, and I think I should tell you about it.”
“Yes,” I say, “please.”
“Well,” she says, “we got into the quiet place, you know?”
I nod. So that was where we had been.
“And I was trying to work that spike out of your hip.”
I nod again.
“Anyway,” she says, “I got that spike out.”
I flex my hip under the water, and sure enough, the pain that has been with me since they took the cast off my four-year old femur is at least temporarily gone.
“And then this big . . .” she pauses a moment, “let’s call it,” she pauses again, “well, let’s not call it anything right now.” But with her hands she makes the distinct outline of a cage. “It came down with us inside it, and I thought, Wow, what is this? And then all of sudden there was this whoosh! And this thing pulled every single spike out of your body.”
“Like a magnet,” I say.
“Exactly,” she says. “And they told me to tell you, it’s up to you, you know? You can do whatever you want, but as of right now, you are spike-free. You’ve got a clean slate. It’s entirely your call how many of those spikes you want to put back in there.”
“None of them!” I say, so I don’t have to ask who the they is.
“Pretty cool, huh?” she says, and lies back in the water, blowing bubbles like a fish.
80. Portland, Oregon
Rick says, “Pam, if everyone deserved a down pillow, there wouldn’t be any more birds.”
81. Cheyenne, Wyoming
We have only been in Cheyenne for twenty-four hours, and so far Brad and I have run into a convention of Republican women at the Holiday Inn, the swearing-in of a brigadier general at the community college, and forty Mormon missionaries commandeering the Baskin Robbins.
It has been almost twenty years since Brad and I have seen each other, long enough for me to get married a couple of times, and for Brad to become a dad and then watch his wife go crazy.
All those years ago at Bread Loaf we had walked around together for ten days singing Van Morrison, snapping our fingers to the intro to “Jackie Wilson Says,” but we didn’t fool around because even then he was so completely in love with Rosemarie.
“This house where we are going has two swimming pools, I hear,” says Gloria, who is sitting in the front seat with her stunningly nondescript husband and has tied sparkly ribbons into her hair. Gloria is in charge of driving Brad and me around, even though we both have rented cars because in Cheyenne, Wyoming, you don’t want to find yourself stuck somewhere.
What the house turns out to have two of, is not swimming pools, but elaborately landscaped waterfalls. One cascades from the circular driveway around the side of the house to a backyard pond, and the other is entirely inside the dog run. The dog is a black-and-white shih tzu. Of course there is no actual creek.
“Rosemarie’s not interested in the kinds of things married people do anymore,” Brad says, as we admire the dog run, and I am pretty sure he means sex and not the Home Depot.
Earlier today Trish emailed to say that she saw on Oprah that sperm-bank only children feel even more isolated than those with siblings, so she’s decided to do the whole thing again, pull another one of her eight fertilized eggs from whatever kind of freezer they are kept in, and shoot it up, so to speak, hoping it will stick.
Brad and I are seated at a table with three sisters from Lamar, Colorado, a small town out east, which is, they tell us, the home of the Savages.
“Still?” Brad asks.
“Russell Means even came to our high school in the seventies to tell us why we ought to change the name,” the smartest sister says, “and we had an assembly and listened to him talk for two hours. But then whoever was in charge of these things decided to leave it alone.”
After dinner we go to the Holiday Inn bar to watch the Rockies, and it is pretty obvious that Brad is trolling but he won’t stoop to the lady Republicans.
The Rockies are beating the Dodgers in the bottom of the eighth inning but Bettancourt, the setup guy, is struggling.
“I can’t just leave her, Pam,” Brad says, as if I’ve asked him. “I’ve loved her all my life.”
On the long, silent camel ride with Sasan and Rick out of the desert in the early morning frost, the camels were tied together, and I saw Don Quixote cross too close behind Ali Baba and I
knew the rope would get caught under Ali Baba’s tail, and then it did, and the two camels started circling and circling each other, and then Ali Baba reached down and took Don Quixote’s leg into his mouth and I did a flying dismount, pretty efficiently, I thought, and Sasan said, in French, barely concealing his amusement, “Were you scared?”
I said, “You mean when the camel I was riding twisted around backwards and put the other camel’s leg into his mouth?”
Sasan said, in English this time, “It is the marriage of the camels these three months,” except he called it mar-ee-age, like découpage—“and Ali Baba tells Don Quixote that he is the man and Don Quixote is the woman, and Don Quixote tells Ali Baba that he is the man and Ali Baba is the woman, and neither of them want to believe.”
82. Poncha Springs, Colorado
Exactly halfway home on the five-hour drive between the Denver airport and the ranch I get a phone call from Colt, who says, “What time are you getting in?” and when I tell him he says, “I’ll meet you there. I just want to see the look on your face.”
Even so, I’m not prepared for what I walk into, every piece of furniture, every piece of art, even kitchen condiments, everything that was not too heavy to move has been. Only the piano, the fridge, and the bookshelves remain in the same spot they were only seventy-two hours before.
My first reaction is classic children-of-alcoholics. “It’s not so bad,” I tell Colt, “I can live with it.” Then I see the gouges in the pine floor, and I notice that she has taken down every single picture of me and my friends to hang up fifteen tchotchkes of almost no value, a wooden fork I bought at a market in Zimbabwe, an Ecuadoran ukulele made from an armadillo—and to hang them she has used four-inch framing nails.
“Who does this?” Colt says.
“Apparently, Harmony,” I say. “She’s Rick’s friend, from Estes Park. I barely met her once for five minutes. He said she needed a weekend away.”
Colt shakes his head and goes home to Tassie’s. I don’t start crying until I pull the first nail out of the wall. I go down to the basement and waste an hour looking for spackling. Finding none, I use toothpaste, which, unfortunately, is no longer white. Then I call Rick, who says he’ll call Harmony. I say, “Do you know one single woman who didn’t make up her name?”
I can tell by the way Mary Ellen’s leg is quivering these days that the cancer is probably back, so I stop moving furniture and sit down and pet her head for an hour. Twenty-five percent of Irish wolfhounds die too young of bone cancer and another 25 percent of heart failure or stomach torsion, which makes most people give up on them after the first or second heartbreak, but for me Mary Ellen, Fenton the dog, and Liam represent wolfhounds number seven, eight, and nine.
In therapy, Patrick always tells me my devotion to the breed is significant, but he has yet to tell me precisely what it signifies.
It takes the better part of a week to get my belongings back where I had them. Several things I like better in their new spots, so I leave them alone. Eventually I get an email from Harmony that says I’m sorry you didn’t appreciate my gift in the way I imaged you would.
Cliff Parker is paying me to read his novel, which is pretty darn good, although I am having a hard time understanding the character of Julia, who all of the central male characters fall for, including three brothers and two cousins. The love of Julia leads all the boys to lie and cheat and take stupid risks in snowmobiles and kayaks, and two of them even sign up to go to Iraq. The only male character who is not in love with Julia is her brother, who still likes her enough to commit murder in her honor, because she made up a story about being raped.
What can all of these men possibly see in her? I write in big red letters in the margin, knowing as I do that the book is pretty ingenious in its creation of a contemporary woman who can still launch a thousand ships, and what I am really screaming about is Sofree.
Some years ago, when I was agonizing over my second abortion, which anyone will tell you is a whole different category of agonization than the brand which accompanies the first, Nora said, “No, Pam, don’t you see? When you look into your baby’s eyes, what you see there will become your very own Tibet.”
I did not see. I couldn’t. Still can’t.
83. Davis, California
“You have something on your right side,” Janine says. “You are all caved in . . . you are even putting your hair over there to try to fill the hole.”
“Is it a blockage,” I say, “or a ghost?”
“It’s an entity,” she says. “But don’t get all caught up in that. Just say, Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming, but I don’t need you right now.”
Getting dressed for bed last night, Madison said, “Daddy, why do I have such a cute little hourglass figure already?”
This morning I had a mass email from Sofree with the subject line How to Be a Gracious Bitch, and above the forwarded message Sofree had written, I love this! with one of those little yellow winking smiley faces underneath.
The story below the smiley face was about Jennifer, who was determined not to let anything dampen the excitement of her wedding day, including her parents’ nasty divorce. It seemed her mother had found the perfect dress to wear, something that would really stick it—visually at least—to her philandering father. Turned out Jennifer’s father’s hottie young girlfriend bought the same dress, and even though Jennifer asked the girlfriend nicely to return it, the girlfriend said, “Absolutely not. I look like a million bucks in that dress and I’m wearing it!”
“Who are these people?” I asked Rick, and he said, “These are the characters that populate mass emails, sweetie, don’t think too much about it.”
So Jennifer was left with little choice but to tell her mother about the dress, and her mother said, “Never mind, dear. I’ll get another dress. After all, it’s your special day.” The two of them went shopping, and indeed found another great dress, but when Jennifer asked her mother if she wanted to return the first dress she said, brightly, “Oh, I don’t need to return it, darling, I’m wearing it to the rehearsal dinner!”
Underneath the story, all in caps, someone, possibly Sofree, had written: NOW I ASK YOU—IS THERE A WOMAN OUT THERE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, WHO WOULDN’T ENJOY THIS STORY?
“Anywhere in the world?” I said to Rick. “Bangladesh?”
I forward a copy of the message to Cinder and she sends me a text that says, I guess you didn’t appreciate the gracious bitch story in the way that Sofree imaged you would.
On YouTube, you can watch a ten-minute video, set to sad, jangly music, of people committing suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge. Some of them jump down to the cord first, the big orange cable, thicker than an oil drum and pulled tight underneath the motorway. Some climb up on the railing and do a modified swan dive. Others just haul themselves over, unself-consciously, like a kid from a farm vaults over a fence. One guy in the video has at least three feet of straight black hair and at first I think it’s a woman, but when he stands on the railing, the wind lifts it to reveal a receding hairline, just before he bends in half and gives in to gravity. It’s hard, watching this video, not to wonder about the filmmaker, how he felt setting up the camera, what he told himself as he stood behind it, about the relative value of art.
Janine says, “Are you paying attention to your friends these days?”
I say, “You mean my actual walking-around ones?”
“Yeah,” she says, “girlfriends. Mackenzie, Cinder, Practical Karen, whoever.”
Later, driving down 19th Street, feeling oddly, solidly inside myself.
In Synesthesia, a color can be a taste or a feeling can be a sound.
Once in Portland, an old man called me singular. Then he said, “That must make life very difficult for you.”
It was like the time Rick’s parents walked into the coffee shop just as I was explaining to Madison why it was important that the president was having a beer with the Harvard professor and the policeman who arrested him for
breaking into his own house.
“Well, the first problem,” Rick said, “is that you said beer.”
84. Marshall, California
Walking up the hill with Bob Hass at the Marconi Center, the pleasing way he startles first at the rabbits, then at the hummingbird, then at the explosive obelisk of sparrows, then at the doe and her fawn.
From the top of the hill, looking down and seeing the bay through the trunks of the giant ponderosa, the dissolution of figure and ground, distance shrinking, surface gleam and pattern, all of it in motion, like looking under a microscope at a paper-thin slice of God’s brain.
I think of being at the ranch, lying in the tall grass with Mary Ellen, seeing what she saw, blue sky, white clouds, tasseled stalks of seed-heavy prairie grass, framing a magic-eye painting of everything that is not known, dog’s cornea bent to see God, but if I got close enough, maybe she could see it for me.
The Rimadyl wasn’t working that well anymore and I asked Doc if it was okay to give her the Tramadol at the same time and after a long pause Doc said, “You know, Pam, Sandy’s mother lived with us for quite a while before she died. And Sandy’s mother really liked ice cream. So Sandy gave her a little bit of ice cream with every meal, you know, along with the meat and green beans or whatever. And Sandy used to always say, ‘Now come on, Mom, you need to eat all those green beans before you can have your ice cream . . .’ And one day I took Sandy aside in the kitchen and said, ‘Sandy, the woman is ninety-two years old, why does she have to eat the goddamned green beans?’ ”