Still Life with Elephant

by Judy Reene Singer

  “I guess I’ll go by myself,” I had said to him.

  “The weather’s supposed to be crappy,” he had replied. “If I were you, I’d play it safe.” And, grateful that I had such a concerned husband, I stayed home. I stayed home and Holly got pregnant as a Christmas gift.

  “In fact,” Karl said, “I took Matt aside. Asked where you were. He said—actually—that you two were separated.”

  “Well, we weren’t together at the party.” I made a feeble joke. “So he wasn’t entirely lying.”

  “Right,” Karl said, but I don’t think he got it.

  I called Delaney’s owner, and she authorized the ophthalmologist. He came two days later.

  Dr. Reston was in his sixties, lanky and soft-spoken. He had a wonderful reputation as a specialist in animal eye diseases, and was a very busy man who didn’t usually make barn calls; most of his patients—equine, canine, and feline—were brought to his surgery. I was glad he could come, but I think that maybe Karl prevailed upon him a little. They arrived one right after the other, and Dr. Reston immediately gave Delaney a mild sedative, put atropine in his eyes, and then whipped out an elaborate ophthalmoscope.

  “Do you see it?” Karl asked him, leaning over his shoulder.

  Dr. Reston said nothing. He examined both eyes, taking his time, moving back and forth between them.

  “It looks like a congenital coloboma of the zonules,” Dr. Reston said.

  “Wow,” said Karl. “I’ve never seen that.”

  “Very rare,” said Dr. Reston. “I’ve only seen it maybe two or three times before myself.”

  “Could you repeat that?” I said, trying to suppress a giggle, “because I thought you said Colombian zombies.”

  Dr. Reston smiled and repeated himself. He really had said it was a coloboma of the zonules. And it was incurable. Delaney was going blind.

  “He’ll never be a reliable ride,” said Dr. Reston. “Too bad. He’s a nice-looking animal.”

  “What do you recommend?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing medicine can do for him.” He shrugged. “And I don’t like to tell clients what to do in terms of keeping the horse alive.” I watched him pack up his medical equipment and turn to leave. “You know, sometimes it’s not the medical problem,” he said, looking back thoughtfully at Delaney, “so much as their reaction to it. I’ve seen blind horses cope very well. If he was calmer, he could be turned out in a small, safe pasture somewhere for the rest of his life. But he panics. And that makes him very dangerous. He can’t even see you enough to not run into you.”

  “It won’t be my decision,” I said. “You know—whether to keep him”—I could barely say the word—“alive.”

  “Probably not,” he said, “unless you plan to adopt him.” He walked outside the barn.

  “I can’t afford to feed a blind, crazy horse,” I said, following him.

  “Most people can’t,” he agreed, climbing into his truck and pulling away with a wave. “I’m very sorry. Good luck with him.”

  Karl remained behind.

  “Hey,” I said, and gave a little laugh. “Who would have suspected Colombia even gets zombies?”

  “Listen.” Karl put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry—about Matt. We all knew something was up when he left his equine practice and decided to concentrate on small animals and buy all that fancy equipment. I heard near a million dollars’ worth. Whew!” He sucked his breath in with disbelief. My mind reeled at the amount.

  “We knew it was because Holly was pressuring him,” he continued. “We all knew there was something going on. He was a good equine vet.” He stopped, embarrassed that he might have said too much. I nodded, acting as though I wasn’t going to run into the house right after he left and use up another box of tissues. “I felt he had kind of lost his way, you know, when I saw him at the Christmas party,” he added, “when he told me about his big plans.”

  “Yep,” I lied, “that’s what did it for me, too.”

  Karl patted me on the shoulder again and then gave Delaney an identical pat. “Lucky this isn’t your horse,” he said, “because he’s basically finished.”

  “Lucky,” I agreed, and watched him pull out of the driveway.

  I stood in the barn for a while, with my arm draped across Delaney’s neck. One mystery was solved. Delaney just saw things coming at him out of nowhere, and it terrified him. I had a fairly good idea of what his fate was going to be. His owner was a good person and would give him a humane end. He was eating his hay now, unaware that his future had just taken a sharp left turn. It was good that animals didn’t have a sense of their own mortality, I thought, it saved them a lot of therapy bills. Or maybe they really do know when their end is near, and they just accept it with grace. Something we humans still need to learn.

  Delaney picked his head up and put it over the top of his stall door to sniff my hands for carrots. I ran my fingers absentmindedly through his forelock and rubbed his head and thought about Matt and a million dollars’ worth of vet equipment. I couldn’t imagine him making a business decision like that. Without ever discussing one word with me. He had a busy practice, but nowhere that busy. What could he have been thinking? One mystery solved, another beginning. Delaney gently licked my hand.

  “Poor Delaney,” I said. “I know what it’s like, when things come out of nowhere.”

  And I stayed in the barn with him for a long time.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “REESE SAYS you have a young man to bring to family dinner Friday night?” It was my mother, making plans to make me happy.

  “I don’t have a young man,” I said. Tom wasn’t young, and he wasn’t mine.

  “You don’t have to worry,” my mother said soothingly. “I know how hurt you are over Matt, but you have a right to be happy. If this young man makes you happy, then I’m happy. I just want you to be happy.”

  There it was again, the “happy” word. I really didn’t want to have dinner with the family, because I was only going to let everyone down on the happiness front.

  “I won’t be able to come to dinner,” I said. “I have horses to ride.”

  “You don’t ride horses in the dark,” my mother pointed out.

  “Okay,” I conceded. “I’ll come to dinner, but under two—make that three conditions.”

  “Conditions?” my mother repeated.

  “Conditions,” I said firmly. “Ready?”

  “I suppose,” my mother said. “I’ve never made dinner under conditions before.”

  “Well, one condition is, we are not going to talk about Matt, or my marriage to Matt,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “I guess I can agree to both of those.”

  “That was one condition,” I said.

  “I heard two,” my mother replied.

  “It was one.”

  “Oh, all right, and the second condition?”

  “I will be coming alone, and there will be no questions about whether I have a man in my life or not.”

  “Don’t mothers have any rights to advance information?”

  “No. And the third condition is, you will not keep heaping my plate with food and telling me how thin I look.”

  “Who’s going to criticize you if not your own mother?” she asked.

  “And, fourthly, can it just be us? You and me and Dad and maybe Reese? I just would like it less—public.”

  My mother sighed. “You have more conditions than the Weather Channel.”

  “Well?”

  “I’ve already invited Jerry and Kate,” my mother said, referring to my brother Jerome the Gnome and his wife, Kate the Relentlessly Happy Homemaker. “And Reese is bringing his girlfriend.”

  “Reese has a girlfriend?” I asked in surprise. “He never told me he was seeing anyone.”

  “He didn’t want to make you feel bad because he was happy while you were unhappy,” my mother replied.

  “So he thinks that I would be happier if I thought he was unhappy?”<
br />
  “Please,” my mother said, “let’s not get into it.”

  Jerry, my happy architect brother, and his wife, Kate, attended with their twins, two very happy, very bright, very precocious four-year-old girls. Jerome designs commercial buildings, and Kate used to model swimwear. They flashed me sadly compassionate smiles all throughout the meal and, well coached by my overachieving mother, refrained from asking any personal questions at all, even as to how I liked the weather. I was trying hard not to be such a stubbornly tragic figure, and made jokes and really tried to listen to the conversation. Reese introduced the new interest in his life, Maribelle. Or Tinker bell. Maybe Doorebelle. Okay, so I wasn’t paying that much attention, but I couldn’t help noticing they sat so close it looked like they were suffering from a bad case of static cling.

  My mother made a roast beef and new potatoes with dill, and made dinner rolls, as well as two other kinds of breads, honey-glazed carrots, noodle casserole, corn soufflé, and, in case she missed a food group, lots of salad, the last of which was all Kate ate, because she was never sure if her agent was going to put in an emergency call and beg her to climb back into a bikini again immediately, even though she’s forty-one, with two kids, and probably a tad past prime time for swimwear ads.

  Jerry and Kate waxed proudly about their children, practically holding a PowerPoint presentation of their nursery-school report cards from the past year, then had each twin do twenty examples of long division followed by several song-and-dance numbers fresh from their ballet and singing classes, a demonstration of Tai Chi from their martial-arts class, a quick exhibition of their finger paintings, and, the grand finale, a recitation of prime numbers that started with two and took us through dessert.

  We sat in the dining room. I watched my father being courteous, almost courtly, pulling out my mother’s chair before she sat down and patting her arm, and raving over her cooking. He acted like the devoted and doting husband that I always remembered. He gave his usual toast to everyone’s continuing good health and happiness. He refilled my mother’s wineglass twice and complimented both her looks and the lightness of her dinner rolls. I watched him, and I had a flash. Why hadn’t I been aware of it before? HE WAS SEEING SOMEONE. There was an undercurrent that I could almost feel, that undercurrent of tension that lives below the surface of hidden infidelity. I felt it as strongly as I did the subsonic rumblings of Margo when I came into the barn in the morning, and I couldn’t look at him.

  “Have some more food,” my mother urged me, then realized she had just violated condition number three. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks, but I couldn’t eat another bite,” I said, pushing my plate away.

  “Nonsense,” said my father, piling three large slices of meat onto my plate. “Meat is good for you. It builds character.”

  “Really,” I said, “I couldn’t—”

  My mother shook her head. “That’s because you fill up on donuts all day,” she said. I heard Kate gasp. My mother then foisted another huge helping onto Reese, who is always too goodhearted to say no.

  There were piles of leftovers after dinner that my mother wrapped and, at my father’s insistence, sent home with me.

  “I want to see some meat on those bones of yours,” my father said, pinching my arm like he was evaluating me for breeding stock.

  I thanked them as I took the ten-pound bag and put it near my coat. Leftovers. So much food.

  As soon as we finished our coffee, Clarabelle jumped up to help with the dishes in that overly ambitious girlfriend-trying-to-impress-the-family routine. Reese carried the piles of dishes to the kitchen, and she washed them carefully, because my mother likes her dishes sterile enough for surgery. I was stuck in the kitchen, loading all the newly washed dishes into the dishwasher for round two on their journey toward supreme sanitation.

  “You’d think we were going to manufacture microchips,” I grumbled as I stuffed the washed glassware into the dishwasher.

  Jerry and Kate took a pass on the domestic work, since they, of course, had to get their kids home to bed so they would have the energy for their photography, French, and calligraphy classes after nursery school the next day, all of which practically guaranteed that they would continue to grow up supremely—happy.

  “So—Reese tells me that you ride horses,” Whateverbelle said, taking a pile of dishes from my brother and plunging them into a suds-filled sink, after which she attempted to scrub off their yellow-rosebud pattern.

  “Um,” I replied, grabbing a washed stack from her and fitting them neatly around the dishwasher rack.

  “He said you ride English,” she said.

  “I don’t discuss horses when I’m off duty,” I joked, grabbing another stack and putting them in the way my mother likes, with all of them facing forward like kids in a classroom.

  “Reese tells me you used to compete, too,” she said. “So did I. I rode Western for years.” She paused. “Gymkhana. I love horses. I still have my old competition horse.”

  “Great,” I said, now checking to make sure the points of the knives were facing downward.

  “He said you stopped competing.”

  Why did she care? I wondered. Where does it say that you have to make small talk and pretend you care about someone just because you’re in the same kitchen with her and she wants to marry your brother?

  “Reese says that you gave it all up, even though you were really good.”

  “Long time ago,” I said, shrugging it off. “I don’t do it anymore.”

  But she was relentless, and then I knew where she was going with it. I eyed the knives I had placed so carefully and wondered, if I just turned one facing back up and pushed her…

  “I felt so bad,” she said, now handing me some already sparkling glassware. “I mean, when he told me about the accident.”

  I flashed Reese a how-could-you look while she kept talking. He tiptoed out of the kitchen. “I mean,” she said, “it sounded like a horrible thing to go through.”

  I didn’t answer her. Where was my music? I needed music. How was I going to stop her?

  She sighed and gave me a comforting squeeze of the shoulder with a wet hand. “You were so young. I can imagine how awful it must have been for you, to see your coach get killed like that. And by your own horse.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  THE TRUTH was, I really had never forgotten that Captain Chandelle-Meiers had been killed along with Homer. I just hadn’t cared at the time. He deserved to die, I had thought shamelessly. He deserved it. I didn’t care that he had most likely left a Madame Chandelle-Meiers back home in Switzerland, making wheels of cheese with the help of their Alpine-blond children. He had taken my horse from me, and I was filled with seventeen-year-old rage. My only concern had been my horse.

  I sat up in the kitchen long after I got home from my mother’s, with Beethoven playing loudly—I needed the strength and power of Beethoven—while I ignored the apologetic messages that Reese was leaving on the answering machine.

  The plastic shopping bag of leftovers was still on the floor next to my coat, and Grace was very interested in its contents. She was sniffing it carefully and whining, and I didn’t get up from the table until she started taking matters into her own hands, by pulling out the little silver-foil-wrapped torpedoes that my mother had packed.

  I picked up a package labeled “rst. bf.” and opened it to give her a few slivers, then shoved the rest of the bag into my refrigerator. An embarrassment of riches, I thought, considering that I had returned from a country, a mere several thousand miles away, where leftovers were an unheard-of problem.

  I lay awake in bed for the rest of the night, with Grace and Alley Cat tucked one under each armpit, and the covers pulled up to my chin, and Beethoven still da-da-da-dumming on the stereo. I thought about dinner and my father and Blabberbelle.

  Was it possible that I was wrong about my father? I really had no grounds for my suspicions, except that I was, well, suspicious, and that might have bee
n more of a result of Matt than reality. The phone rang again, and I got out of bed to listen, hoping that maybe this time it would be Tom.

  It was Reese. He was sorry again. He had only been telling Cutiebelle about the family, and didn’t think that she would latch on to the horse thing. Sorry. Sorry.

  I was sorry, too. I was sorry that I was such a pain in the ass to be around.

  “It’s not like I ever forgot,” I was telling Margo while she ate her breakfast the next morning. “I never really forgot.”

  I was outside her enclosure, sipping coffee and eating a jelly donut. I had asked Richie to let me feed her every morning so that she would learn to focus on me, but right now she was only focusing on her elephant chow. I talked to her anyway, as though she were listening. Abbie—the baby—was picking up little bouquets of hay and throwing them at me. I pushed the rest of their breakfast, a pail of fruits and vegetables, through the little trap door in the cage.

  “Margo,” I commanded, “look here.” She looked at the fruits instead, picking them over like an old grandmother, pinching and squeezing and selecting the best ones to eat first.

  “I remember everything about Homer,” I said to her, and sat down next to the bars. “You know, you never forget things like that.” Then I felt a stupid giggle rise up inside of me. How foolish it was to talk to an elephant about not forgetting.

  I leaned my head back and sifted through time. I remember my mother hurrying me away from the riding ring right after the accident, but not before I saw two figures lying there, like fallen statues in the pale sand. A dark-brown horse, the stirrups askew, with the very proper Captain Chandelle-Meiers, halfway out of the saddle, still holding the reins most correctly in his two fists, his head pressing into the sand at a terrible angle. Someone escorted my mother and me to a room on the second floor of the barn. We were ushered into a beautiful mahogany-paneled office that matched the nineteenth-century architecture of the barn below us. I sat in a leather chair with brass hobnails and ran my fingers up and down the bumpy nail heads and stared at the pictures on the wall. Olympic horses. They had all passed through this barn. This beautiful barn with its Belgian-block aisles and brass fittings on polished dark wood stalls, where the horses were literally bedded up to their knees in straw. Homer had been assigned a corner stall, huge, airy, a brass ball on each side of the stall door, like an entrance for royalty.