Where We Are Now

by Carolyn Osborn

  I didn’t know…. I’ll never know what that horse saw … something, a piece of paper fluttering, a bird suddenly flying in front of him, a dried leaf lifted by a slight breeze. It could have been anything. He shied to the right. Cindy was flung out of the saddle to her left. She hit a rock, one almost buried yet still stubbornly protruding from the roadbed. I could see that much as I climbed out of my saddle. At first I reacted almost automatically. I’d seen plenty of people fall off horses. Pokey, who’d run a few yards away, returned to stand by her. Fright rippled his hide. My heart began jumping as I ran over to Cindy. Bending down I saw she was breathing. Her eyes remained closed, her head against the rock as if it were a pillow. Like the foolish horse, I waited beside her. How long did we all wait there like that—horse, two women, horse—in the middle of the road? Still kneeling beside her I called her name; tears stung my eyes. Move her? Let her be still? This indecision must have taken a few minutes though it seemed longer. Then her head moved, shifted slightly. Her eyelids fluttered.

  I cradled her head in one arm.

  “Shoulder.” Her voice was a painful whisper. “I don’t think it’s—”

  “Are you all right?” I kept asking.

  She insisted on getting back on the horse even though I disagreed with her. “It’s not far. I’ll ride back, get one of the grooms, get the car—”

  “I have to ride. If I don’t—You know if I don’t do it right away I might never—”

  Pokey, calm now, had gone to graze at the opposite side of the road with my horse. I caught up their reins, helped Cindy mount, and we walked slowly back to the corral. She agreed to X-rays after two aspirin, a long hot shower, and a stiff drink failed to help her.

  When Fergus and Marshall got back, I had a lot of explaining to do. Cindy was in the hospital with a fractured shoulder. She was scheduled for surgery the next morning.

  “She doesn’t want to call her daughters, not till the operation is over. Is there anyone else we should call?” I asked Fergus after he came home from the hospital. Cindy’s mother was in a nursing home in Nashville; her father was dead. I kept wondering—I’d been wondering ever since they arrived—how she was going to keep this from her husband. How had she managed to come out here with Fergus at all? She must have lied, invented a friend in dire need or a relative in Santa Fe she had to see. Now she’d have to give that invented friend or relative some horses.

  Fergus just shook his head when I talked to him. We were both tired. Marshall had already gone to bed. The next day Fergus came out to stay with us, then he had to get back to Nashville. Singers and bands had been scheduled to use the studio.

  When I saw her at the hospital Cindy, her arm in a cast covering her shoulder, argued that she could go to a bed and breakfast place or rent a condo. Her doctor wanted her to stay until he put her in a lighter cast. The bluish stains under her eyes were gone. Obviously she felt better.

  “I wouldn’t want to live with strangers or be totally alone while recovering,” I said. “Our house is much easier.” It was hard to talk her into staying. Her stubbornness went beyond polite protest. Perhaps she was afraid of forfeiting her independence in some way. Perhaps she feared we might become too close, too intimate.

  “We have this big house. Both girls are gone, you know. You can keep the whole wing to yourself. We’re not expecting company for months. Our friends like to come in the summer.” All this had to be repeated in an attempt to let her know she was truly wanted. More than anything else, she seemed to resist imposing on anyone.

  “I don’t want you to feel you have to have me because of Fergus.”

  “I can’t help having a cousin. So yes, because of Fergus and because of you. Let me do this for you. After all, I’m the one who took you riding.”

  Still she hesitated.

  I waited looking out the window facing the mountains. “It would be easier for me, really, if you stayed at the house. I wouldn’t have to drive into town to check on you.”

  “Marianne, I would be taking advantage of you in a strange way. I haven’t told you that Wallace, my husband, has died … it’s been nearly seven months now. He died in the middle of September last year. Fergus and I … Fergus wants me to marry him.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, “I’ve decided not to.”

  I turned away from the window and, for a moment stood and stared at her. She looked straight back at me; the white pillowcases piled behind her dark hair, the white gown she was wearing, made her look a bit pale and slightly diminished.

  “I’m sorry about your husband.” A little chill crept over my shoulders. I shrugged it away.

  “You think I’m … you must think I’m awful.” Her voice faltered. “I couldn’t seem to tell you somehow.”

  “I … well, I’m sure there are … reasons.”

  She moved her legs restlessly under the sheets. “Not what anybody else would call a good one…maybe not the right one exactly but mine. You know, don’t you? You know Fergus loves what he can’t have.”

  “Are you sure? I thought he’d grown out of that.”

  “Some never do. She plucked at the sheet with one hand then smoothed it. “My husband knew about Fergus. He’d known about him for years. I couldn’t leave Wallace, not when he was dying. He advised me to marry Fergus after he—I know it must seem bizarre, but when people are ill for a long time, they plan. They plan everything … or they try to.”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it, for Fergus to learn to love what he has?”

  “I don’t know. Every time I see you and Marshall together I think there’s a happy marriage. I want one too.”

  Wanting to protest that we were not extraordinarily happy, that we quarreled, that we held grudges, that I had not always been faithful, nor did I believe Marshall had either, I kept silent. I couldn’t plead Fergus’s cause for him no matter how much I wanted to.

  “I can’t do it, Marianne. I won’t let my life be ruled by Wallace’s plans and Fergus’s habits.”

  Her face flushed. She sounded like a stubborn child, but how could I know? How could I know anything about her marriage? I had yearned so for a solution, for a happy ending, for simplicity, I wanted to moan aloud, to raise my head and wail like one of Fergus’s singers. Sorrow, frustration, and anger were all too tangled for me to say anything. With one hand, I made a see you later gesture and left the room. Walking fast I stretched my arms out wide in the hospital’s hall as if I could have, by physical effort, pushed aside all the barriers to what might have been.

  THE ZANIES

  We’d come to a standstill, but what else was there to do when my daughter Sally wanted to marry someone like Max with his earrings, his country rock band, his good looks. Blonde as Sally with a face that would look great on record jackets, fierce blue eyes, a straight nose, a strong chin, he even had good teeth.

  “Mother, what do you think?” Sally, framed by the kitchen’s doorway, waited in a pair of shorts, an old tee shirt, and my bridal veil falling over her face.

  At the same moment I could see myself wearing it, could remember putting it on for the first time and being transformed to a young woman whose future was a hopeful glow in the near distance falling over my husband, the children we might have, and all the rest of our lives. Bordering that glow were the shadows unseen until later—the baby boy we lost, the deaths of friends and kinspeople, the clashes neither of us wanted to remember, unnumbered, unnamed griefs.

  “We wore them back. Everything thrown back.” I lifted the veil off my daughter’s head and rearranged the tulle, a fabric as gauzy as the future.

  “Okay. Al-l-l right.” Sally turned toward the mirror in the next room. “Max will love it.”

  “Al-l-l right.” I took up Sally’s drawl.

  My husband Marshall, whose nature was more accepting than mine, had been as worried as I was. Marsh had fewer prescribed patterns than I did; little or nothing had been mapped out for him. He’d lost his parents earlier than I had, and the aunt and uncle who raised him guided
him with looser reins. From age sixteen he came and went as he pleased. He thought his interest in the Civil War could be answered best by going to college in the South, so he left Texas for Tennessee and met me. We moved to this farm near Santa Fe after our son died and have lived here for twenty years. Our daughters, following their father’s example, went East to school. Sally the youngest returned to Texas. Her older sister Kate, now a newspaper reporter in San Diego, would come back to New Mexico just for the wedding.

  “We’re scattering,” I told Marsh.

  “Marianne, both girls have been gone for years.”

  “Now Sally will always live somewhere else.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?” he reasoned.

  I nodded. We both disapproved of parents who wouldn’t let go; still I had that little ache I got in my throat when Marsh and I couldn’t agree.

  Carrying my coffee back to the desk I wished someone else in the family had decent handwriting. Instead I was stuck in the middle of a paradox, aiding while disapproving. The next invitation would be sent to my Great Aunt Annette. I hadn’t seen her since Grandmother’s funeral. Gaylord, Grandmother’s youngest brother, found Annette when he was working as a circus roustabout somewhere in Oklahoma sometime in the thirties and waited until she was old enough to marry.

  “Everyday and twice on Saturdays,” Grandmother said, “Annette was shot out of a cannon. Gaylord would take up with someone bizarre! I trust you will not, Marianne.”

  I can still hear her voice—telling, directing, demanding. I must have laughed inwardly, at least, at her obvious disapproval, for she disapproved of so much so easily. I asked her why Uncle Gaylord was in Oklahoma. I knew they were from Virginia. I also knew Grandmother habitually altered memories to suit the occasion. When lecturing Fergus, her only grandson, about his future, she’d referred to her brother as a vagabond and a rogue—and around the time he bought his liquor store—a man of questionable morality. Other times she’d say our uncle was merely down on his luck.

  “I don’t know why he couldn’t lead a regular life, but he couldn’t. Gaylord barely finished high school. He and Papa quarreled, and he ran away when he was only sixteen. We didn’t hear from him for two years. Papa nearly gave him up for dead.”

  His was a long adventure, a more daring life than her own. I should have asked him how he survived; somehow I didn’t think to then. As a child brought up on old people’s stories, I tended to absorb then half-forget them. Later I puzzled over the parts left out.

  “When he came back to visit he didn’t want to talk about those first years, Marianne. He liked to tell about the circus, about how fast they could get the tent up, and how they used the elephants and all that.” She waved a dismissive hand as if to say that Uncle Gaylord wasn’t entirely reliable, that he only told about the glorious days and left out the hard ones.

  “And the Zanies?” For some reason I wanted to remind her of them, perhaps because they were so exotic, so removed from her dominion.

  “And the Zanies,” she said, repeating her private name for Annette’s family. They were the Zanninis, Italian circus aristocrats, trapeze artists who’d had top billing for many generations. Early that summer before I began college, they had been in Nashville performing. Grandmother, for Gaylord’s sake, invited them to do their morning workouts at the farm.

  I watched them from a second story window at daybreak, heard the twang of trampoline springs, the quiet command, “Hup!” and the counts, “Uno, due, tre!” Their bodies rose, twirled, turned. The leaves on the magnolias behind them, rattling in a rising breeze, seemed to be applauding.

  Aunt Annette always landed on her feet. She must have been in her thirties, and there she was still exercising with all her eternally tanned family who kept concentrating, kept an even rhythmic pace.

  They had toured nearly everywhere—North Africa, Italy, France, the whole U.S. Now, because Uncle Gaylord had married Annette, they were practicing on the back lawn.

  Their trapezes were hung in the largest barn. Later I would sit with Uncle Gaylord on the ladder leading to the loft while they swung in disciplined freedom, their arms outstretched, catching, clasping, letting go, falling freely to the safety net below. Even as they fell, there was a practiced certainty about their movements. The women, wearing lightweight leotards, and the men in tight tee shirts and skimpy, brightly-colored briefs, drilled, sleek as seals, brown, firmly muscled, their every move perfectly balanced.

  I loved Uncle Gaylord and the Zanies though I barely knew them. I loved their trained nonchalance, their apparent indifference to their own beauty, and to the risks they took. They lived, I thought, in their own perfectly contained world with costumes, trumpet fanfares, and glitter—surface glamour they didn’t appear to notice. In the sweet dustladen air of the hay barn, the light slowly filling the open door, they performed quietly without announcement—one or another would count, in Italian always—without their spangled costumes, music, or spotlights, without Annette’s cannon even. Designed by her grandfather, a pneumatic device within the barrel propelled her into the air in slightly varying curves. Years of practice on the trapeze trained her to land on the safety net correctly, though she sometimes had to change her arc in flight. Usually she landed perfectly; only once, Uncle Gaylord told me, she broke her arm.

  Whenever a throw was completed on the trapezes, a man standing on the ground with both arms outstretched proclaimed, “Hoop-la!” celebrating the action completed. It was Annette’s father maybe. There were a bunch of them, two parents, five children, their five husbands and wives, three grandchildren, none of them my age. They all lived together, traveled together. Determined to leave my own family, I wondered at their closeness. Some of them must have lost their tempers sometimes, yet how could grudges be held by people who made their living flinging themselves into mid-air?

  I saw them so seldom I couldn’t keep them straight although I remember Grandmother remarking on their politeness. They stayed once, for a farm dinner served at noon. We sat at a long table on the side porch while Grandmother and Minnie carried out bowl after bowl of food—heaps of fresh vegetables and platters of fried chicken. It was June. It must have been because of the corn. Does anybody eat like that any more? A parade of food. The Zanies ate with great pleasure bestowing compliments until praises seemed heaped as high as the platters. Grandmother said it was just everyday cooking.

  “So well mannered,” she commented afterward. She hated cooking, yet was vain about hers.

  What had she expected, that they would chew with their mouths open and throw food? Impossible. The Zanies were so foreign Grandmother had almost no expectations of them. I was the one with expectations. Didn’t most mothers hope their daughters would marry happily? Sally said I had a checklist in my mind: She and Whoever were to have matching backgrounds, educations, religions, skins, and politics, if possible.

  She told me. “ Max has only got a high school degree, but he did some work at the community college in Austin. He likes history like Daddy does. That’s good, isn’t it? I mean I never did. There’s a balance.”

  “Why must he wear three earrings?”

  “Better than a tattoo. Musicians…. He just likes earrings. They don’t mean anything. He likes girls too.” She grinned.

  They had been living together for a year then, and this was the second time she’d brought him home. We had these supposedly exploratory conversations when they visited. Max always followed Marsh off to the barn and the corrals. I worked at a counter chopping an onion, peeling carrots, silently cursing, “Oh hell, hell, hell!” while thin vegetable skins piled up on the wooden block. Sally sat at the kitchen table watching me. Like my grandmother, she disdained cooking.

  Max’s parents lived in a little town in West Texas. His father owned a hardware store. He was a Democrat. “He’s not terribly liberal. I mean he’s the type who thinks everyone ought to have a job except his wife. Singing is Max’s business.”

  She was as cheerful as she could be; under
neath that happy veneer, I sensed defiance.

  After their first few visits, Marshall and I counseled each other every time they returned to keep quiet, to say nothing about the boy; she would only like him more if we said a word against him. Whenever we were tempted, we’d change the subject. Marsh talked a lot about the news or reported on a horse he was training. I relied on gossip from friends in Santa Fe, or even the weather when necessary. We skirted any mention of music or marriage. We had strong memories of nay-saying elders. Grandmother had not wanted me to marry him. The aunt who raised Marsh, the same one that gave him his liberty, had her own set of opinions. She’d said the Moores sounded like southern decadents before she’d met one of us. Marsh declared he found decadence terribly appealing. Remembering our own defenses, we kept silent when Max first appeared. It would wear out, we thought. At least it would wear thin. He’d be touring, and Sally would be lonely. But no. His band hadn’t reached touring level then. They had made two tapes, and neither one had taken off. All he needed was one song, one little song, and he didn’t have it yet. He had Sally.

  By the time he found two or three successful songs and was touring, Sally took a job as a receptionist in a hotel in Austin where her French and Spanish were useful only to visiting foreigners. She was fluent in both after four years in college, a semester in Paris and a summer in Madrid. Sometimes I wish I’d done the same, but my grandmother and uncle held me close while I fought against their old-fashioned ideas of my safety and their responsibility. Both of my parents died in foreign countries; leaving home was dangerous. I didn’t know how Max’s parents felt about his impending marriage. He went on singing, lighting in Austin whenever he could.