How to Catch a Frog

by Heather Ross

  Margaret Johnson woke up my sister and me on the second Sunday morning of our stay and told us that we were going to church. Appropriate clothing—more secondhand pieces, carefully selected and no doubt invoiced—was laid out on the foot of the bed for us. The car ride was long and dull, and the fact that my mother was not present was the main topic of conversation. “Sometimes,” Margaret said to me, suspiciously sweetly, “the child must choose a different path than his parent, and hope that they will follow their love toward him.” I had no idea what little boy Margaret was referring to. Beth led us into a Sunday-school class, which is where I tuned out completely. When it was finally over and we filed out into the hallway and were standing among a hundred adult legs, all in trousers and skirts and brown shoes, my sister grabbed my arm. “Look!” she said, “It’s Hannah and Anna!” pointing up at the pair, who were just a few feet away, with husbands and children—one of whom had been sitting next to me in Sunday school. We looked at each other with the same wide-eyed expression, realizing suddenly that we had fallen for their tricks; they had never mentioned any children or church or knowing the Johnsons. We had been led here, and here was where we most certainly did not belong. My sister took Margaret’s arm in her small hand and stared at her coldly. “I want to see my mother,” she said. It was not the voice of a frightened or hurt child, and it wasn’t meant as a suggestion.

  Our mother was waiting for us when we got back to the Johnsons’ house. We took off our church clothes and laid them back down onto the bed and gathered together what little we had brought with us. I placed the hairbrush that Beth had given me on the bed with the clothing but kept the barrettes. We never said thank you or good-bye; we just climbed into our little car, and before the vents were even blowing hot air, we were on our way into town and then up our hill. The trip seemed so effortless, with no one to stop us or warn us or even notice us. Plum was so happy to see us that she kept falling over from purring too hard. We pulled the mattress off our mother’s bed and dragged it to a place on the floor that seemed dry and protected and flipped it over to reveal the side that had not been damaged by smoke and water. We pulled the Mexican wool blankets out of the tall wicker baskets that they had been stuffed into during the fire. They smelled like soot and smoke but now also like home and like Plum. It was still very cold but not quite the middle of winter anymore. We could almost imagine spring happening now, and we could hear a small but steady dripping of melting snow off the roof and on the tarps that kept the snow from falling into our house, at least until the sun went down. Then we piled the blankets high on the mattress and curled up together, my sister and I on either side of my mother, and lay on our backs looking up through the wavy glass of our tall windows at our sky. We were home.

  HOW TO

  swim a horse

  MY UNCLE MIKE WAS MARRIED when I was twelve. His wife, Mary, was beautiful, a dark-haired, blue-blooded woman who was still a student at Bennington College when they met and only twenty-four when they married. When she moved onto the mountain, she brought some horses with her. My grandparents, who believed in nonteam sports like riding, skiing, tennis, and ballet, were convinced, without much effort, that my cousins, sister, and I should learn to ride from her. My grandfather once told me that women who took ballet had the finest posture, and he felt certain that girls who played field hockey did not make good wives and that women who were not fearful of horses were not fearful of anything. And so Mary raked out a rough schooling ring on the one piece of level ground that dropped away into steep pasture and then into the valley a mile below us, and assigned us each a day of the week, which was when we would come for an hour-long lesson, rain or shine, for which my grandmother paid.

  There were trails on the mountain, too, including one that climbed all the way up to and then snaked along the ridgeline, spitting you out on the other side of the steep creek that carved the valley between our mountain and the one to its south, but at a point so high in the watershed that you crossed thousands of tiny streams instead of one rushing one, which is when I learned how a river is made. There was a dark forest trail that crossed a steep gulch via something called a slide, which is when a hillside is so steep and the soil is so loose that the only way down is to give the horse his head—basically give him control—lean back as far as you can, and let him make his own way, sometimes stepping with cautious and jarring steps, and sometimes not moving his legs at all but just sliding on all four feet, with his hind legs bent and his nose straight down. The trails, though, were only open to us for the longer rides that were a reward for surviving the grueling hours in the ring for weeks at a time.

  Mary’s father had been a cavalry something or other, and she believed, as he had, that until you could post (which means lifting yourself a few inches off the horse ’s back repeatedly at a certain point during a trot, to avoid the heaviest impact of each stride) bareback, using only the strength of your knees and practiced timing, you didn’t deserve a saddle or stirrups. Mary would put a dollar bill between my knee and the horse and lunge me in circles around the ring for what seemed like full days, and if the dollar was still there when she finally let the horse slow to a walk, it was mine to keep. Mary’s sharp commands and short temper kept me focused, and after two summers, when she proclaimed me her star student (not much of an achievement, really, since by then my cousins and sister had abandoned their weekly lessons, and it was just me who still showed up), I was hooked.

  Mike and Mary’s horses seemed a mismatched lot, a mix of breeds and temperaments, but each with its own character and purpose. Butternut was the Morgan, the beauty: Tall, sturdy, quiet, and blond, she was Mike’s favorite. She had come from a very fancy barn called Taproot in Shelburne, Vermont, where Morgans were bred to perfection. Morgans are meant to possess the most athletic qualities of a horse sized for riding, with the temper, sturdiness, and work ethic of a draft horse. Butternut was a magnificent athlete, but she did not like to take orders. For this reason, she had been pulled from the breeding stock at Taproot and found her way to Mike, for whom she was a perfect match. He would let her run her heart out on the last mile home, and when you saw them from Mike’s porch coming up the mountain on the dirt road just after the sun had set, from a half-mile away—her in a wild gallop and him with both hands thrown forward, almost touching her neck, his tall, lean form balanced in the saddle, almost motionless—you held your breath.

  Bucky was the old schooling horse. He and I had what you might call a May-December love affair. I loved him in that way that a girl can love a horse or a dog or a kitten, in that painfully smothering way that had been practiced on stuffed animals and does not consider what unrequited love could possibly feel like. I would stare into Bucky’s eyes for solid minutes, hoping to make some sort of mental or magical communicative connection, certain that I was getting somewhere. “You’re making him nervous,” Mike would say. “He’s nearly blind, you know, you’re just a big nosey blur to him.”

  I stood on my toes and whispered into Bucky’s ear as I gave it a scratch. “It’s OK, Bucky, I’ll be your eyes.”

  “He’s deaf too, Tupy,” Mike said, clearly annoyed and watching me carefully now. “Deaf as cheese.” I would climb onto his back with just my jeans and rubber boots on and lie on his neck, with my arms wrapped around him, my bare chest on his bristly neck where I had torn bits of mane out by the fistful during our lessons. I especially loved to do this when it was raining, which it did on many afternoons, closing my eyes and feeling the steam coming off him and searching for that cosmic connection through his coat. He would wait until I was almost asleep and then reach down suddenly as though he wanted to eat some grass and then quickly take a step back, and I would slide forward and off and land in a pile at his feet, with a thin coat of wet horse hair, some of it gray, on my chest and face.

  Bucky didn’t take me very seriously in the ring, either, and had to be constantly reminded to stay in a trot or to ignore the favored ferns that grew on the edges of the ring but had be
en picked clean in his pasture. He liked to step on my foot while I was putting his saddle on his back and then pretend he was asleep as I tried to push him off. Other times he would hold his breath and make his chest big while I tightened his girth, and then when we were in the ring, he would let all of the air out of his lungs so that on the next turn my saddle would slide off his back and onto the side of his belly, and I would end up hanging by one foot, trying to right myself long enough to pull my feet out of the stirrups and jump off safely before he made a break for the barn doors with me dragging behind in the dirt. But if he had been younger and I had been older, I like to think that we would have had the sort of girl-horse love that books are written about, that telepathic, transcendent love. I would have been covered in blue ribbons, he would have saved my life at least once, from a bear or a near-drowning or a pack of wolves, and I would have won a scholarship to one of those horsey colleges, where we would have gone together so we would never have to be apart. But time stood between us, and at the end of our fourth summer, Mary sent him and me out on a ride by ourselves and told me to say my good-byes, as Bucky was retiring to a pasture in town. I cried and proclaimed my devotion as he farted loudly enough to scare the birds off the branches all along the half-mile stretch of dirt road back to the barn.

  Cosmos was the young draft horse. He was massive, with a shiny, wet-black coat and muscles that looked like the ones you see in a comic book. He had short legs, which made his center of gravity low and good for pulling things like logs and stone, and the big gentle eyes of a fawn, with thick black lashes. He was not the most cunning of animals; Mike needed only to put a fence across the path to keep him from going down to the creek. Cosmos would walk toward it, sigh, and turn around to plod back up the hill without it occurring to him that he could simply step off the path and walk around it. Cosmos never startled, never bit or nipped, and never seemed to get impatient or angry with any of us or the other horses. He was at the very bottom of the pecking order, or horse hierarchy, because he was the youngest and the least aggressive, which seemed to suit him just fine. After he was ridden or worked, he liked to roll in the dust with his short little legs in the air and scratch his back like a giant puppy, and he would sometimes seem to stare into the sky and ponder a cloud, or even close his eyes and let out big, snorty sighs.

  Cosmos was the one that I took swimming in Paradise Pond, which was just over two miles away. Horses are natural swimmers, even the big ones. Vermont is muggy in the summertime, for which swimming is the best cure, especially if you are a child or an eighteen-hundred-pound horse with a black coat. And especially if you don’t have cousins or a modest sister or a mother around to tell you not to take off your shirt. “This,” said my uncle Mike, “is absolutely the last summer that you are going to be able to do that, Tupy.” He had said the same thing the previous year and hadn’t really been able to enforce it, though I had to admit that things were starting to look a little different up top and he was probably right. “I’m serious, people are going to start thinking I’m the funny uncle.” I thought he meant funny ha-ha, which didn’t seem to relate to the awkward development of my breasts, so I assumed he was doing us both the favor of changing the subject.

  On these muggiest of days, you could jump in and feel the sweat and the damp, hot air, and the dirt, or most of it, leaving you in the water. You could even open your eyes underwater and see it, pulling away from you in a cloud. When you ride your horse into the water, the cloud around you is at first opaque and mixed in with the mud or sand from the bottom, and when the water around you is clear, you know that your horse’s feet aren’t touching the bottom anymore and that you are swimming. When you are riding a swimming horse, it’s important to keep your whole body flat and near the surface, and to keep your feet up on his back because his legs are moving much more quickly than when they are on the ground, and if you were to get swept up in those legs, you could get kicked very hard and more than once. Cosmos’s back was broad enough that you could stand on it and pretend that you were in the circus, and if you were light enough, dive from it into the water, and then swim back to him and pull yourself back on, over and over again. And after, when I rode him home, I would tie up his reins in the longer pieces of his mane so that they wouldn’t slip over his head and trip him up, and I would stretch out on his back with my head on his rump and look up at the sky.

  Peggy was the bitch. I always suspected that it was because she knew that Mike loved Butternut the most, but it could have just been the way she was. I avoided her most of the time, but I always felt like she was watching me, waiting for me to acknowledge her and her impressive status among the other horses. One summer, on Mike’s birthday, my cousins and I brushed out her mane and tail and braided them. Into each of the braids’ creases we stuck wildflowers that wilted almost immediately. Peggy seemed to like the attention at first, but soon enough she grew impatient. My cousins and sister backed away after her first bitchy little stomp, but I persisted. This had become an art project, and I was not about to let my work wander off. When she was completely covered, I paraded her into the ring and made her stand so that the group on the porch could admire her. “She looks like Carmen Fucking Miranda!” shouted Mike, lifting his beer bottle toward us. Peggy shifted her weight. Someone pitied us and gave us gentle applause, which she recognized as her cue to pull me back to the barn. She walked quickly and then broke into a trot, yanking me with her, a few of the daisies flying off her mane, and I heard some of the adults laugh, in a kind way.

  Back in the barn I stood in front of her and unfastened her bridle. “You look pretty, Peggy, whether you know it or not,” I said to her, smiling, with my eyes wide and my brows up, to show her that I was her friend. Her eyes narrowed and met mine, and she moved her nose slowly forward toward my chest. Assuming that she was going in for a nuzzle, I put my forehead against the bridge of her nose, which was when I felt her teeth close around my right nipple through my thin T-shirt. I opened my eyes and put my hand against her mouth and tried to pull away, but she had locked on now, with all four front teeth, top and bottom, and was looking straight at me. Her ears were falling back, in a sign of aggression, and she was beginning to turn her head slightly, pulling my chest up with her. My mouth opened but no sound came out. I dropped her bridle and her reins and pulled on her ears as hard as I could until she finally let go, just when I was about to give up, certain that the edges of her top teeth had met the ones on the bottom and that I had lost an important body part forever. Then I grabbed her tack, and I ran away from her and toward the house, my hand over my throbbing chest.

  I didn’t tell anyone what had happened because I wanted to keep riding, and by now every mother but mine had decided that Mike and Mary’s horses were not safe to learn to ride on. It was weeks later, after my cousins had gone back to their cities, that I lifted up my T-shirt for my mother while she was in the tub, smoking, and showed her the bite. It was very swollen now, and surely infected. I hadn’t been able to sleep on my stomach or even on that side; the skin had broken and then healed and then broken again, and now when I pushed against it, clear fluid came out. The bruise around it was as big as an apple, black and yellow and, in one spot, a sickly green. My mother sat up and put her cigarette down in the tin ashtray next to the tub. She saw it and pulled me, by the forearm, closer to her and, looking right at my nipple, said, “What happened to you?”

  “Peggy bit me!” I cried out, tears coming out fast now. “Really hard.”

  She sat up straight, backing away slightly, and gave me a hard stare as she lifted her cigarette out of its tray and took a long, slow drag on it. “WHO,” she said, adding a pause as though she were trying to stay calm, “the FUCK is Peggy?”

  “The horse,” I said.

  “Mike’s horse? The little red one?” she asked, looking a little relieved.

  “Yes,” I answered, “the little red one!”

  She leaned back now, looking at my chest again, and sank back into the tub, holding
her cigarette high. Her voice lowered and she shook her head as she said, “What a little bitch.” I gave her a nod in agreement. Then she took another drag of her cigarette and looked at me again, and quietly told me to put alcohol on it every day and that if that didn’t make the swelling go down, I was going to have to go to the doctor. She occasionally said that, but it never happened, which was fine with me.

  A week later, my grandmother dropped off some clothes for me, and among the pile was a little bra. It was an almost useless thing, meant really just to flatten things out until I had something that needed supporting, but once I started wearing it, I also started wearing a shirt, because now when I wasn’t, I looked like I was in my underwear. I had to admit that it was comfortable, especially when I was riding. Mike was right. That was the last summer.

  HOW TO

  make cream of broccoli soup

  BROCCOLI GROWS BEAUTIFULLY in Vermont. My mother grew huge amounts of it when I was small, and of cauliflower and cabbage. These plants grow like giant round roses, with their leaves stacked over one another in a circular pattern, their edible parts in the center, the outer leaves becoming tough and inedible as they grow outward and separate from the round core. My mother would tie up each cabbage to protect it from the sun and rain and bugs and to compress it and force it into a round shape, and when you untied it, you would find a hard, pale globe of thickly pressed leaves that you could not pull apart without splitting. Her broccoli and cauliflower, though, were left exposed to the elements, and because she did not take drastic measures against them, worms and other bugs fed on them.