by Susan Juby
All at once I remembered the little dictionary and began to panic when I couldn’t find it. Then I realized that I was hanging on to it.
I didn’t write another word of fiction again until I was twenty-seven. That little dictionary still sits on my desk today.
6
The Last Ride
BEFORE I WAS EVER ADDICTED to alcohol I was addicted to horses. The minute I first laid eyes on a horse, I was lost. There was no creature so magnificent, noble, or beautiful as a horse. Giraffes and moose were close, but they weren’t as shiny and wouldn’t let you ride them. I drew horses on every flat surface and even created a cartoon horse character named Foster Grain. He was a fat little creature who always wore sunglasses. His plot lines were dull, but he had spots on his ass, which more than made up for it.
I learned to make horse noises with my mouth, including the sound of a horse galloping, and I spent an inordinate amount of time going around on hands and knees pretending I was a horse. None of this is unusual. Children have been doing these things probably since the first cave youth saw a Dinohippus. The only thing that was unusual about it is that I continued wearing out the knees in my pants until well past the age when such behaviour could be considered normal.
Finally, when I was around ten and was pretty sure I’d die if I didn’t get my own horse, my mother and stepfather said I could take my savings and use the money to buy a horse. I had ridden only a few times and, other than the many books I’d read, had no real knowledge of horses. A family down the road heard that there was a sucker on the lookout and they offered to sell me their horse for eight hundred dollars. The horse in question was an elderly gelding called Echo’s Little Wonder. He was supposed to be an Appaloosa, but I think his registration papers may have been fake. He was white with fleabite-looking speckles, stood nearly seventeen hands high and looked like a cross between a fridge and a rhino. With his massive Roman nose, all that was missing was the horn and the freezer compartment. He had a habit of lowering his head and fixing me with a baleful look. I loved Echo and was terrified of him in equal measures.
I kept him at a small farm a few miles away from our place. Each day I would walk an hour there and an hour back to see him. Each day he did his best to scare me to death. Horses are big and Echo was huge. As I spent more time with him, I gained an appreciation for the hundreds of ways one can get hurt around horses, including getting kicked, bitten, squished, and smashed or bucked off. Echo did all of the above to me. Once in a while, for variety, he’d place a plate-sized hoof on my foot and grind it into the earth.
I had only a bridle, and when I first got on him I felt momentarily on top of the world or at least on top of a mountain. I was riding! I was riding!
Then Echo lowered his head and gave a combination shiver/ shrug that landed me on the ground.
I wasn’t riding.
I finally figured out how to stay onboard for upwards of ten minutes or longer at a time and we began to venture out of his field and around the neighbourhood. Echo dumped me in mud puddles, creeks, and ditches and onto nearly any other surface you can think of. But he was a gentleman and usually waited for me to get up and brush myself off (or staunch the bleeding) and get back on. This was in the days before many people wore helmets, and there were several occasions when I hit my head hard enough that I couldn’t remember my name for several minutes. I blame my inability to do even basic math on some of the brain damage I got from those early concussions. A better name for him would have been Echo’s Little Concussion.
As time went on, Echo and I would head out in the morning and come back when the sun fell. We crossed rivers and swam into lakes. We explored every trail and every road. Owning a horse was like having a best friend, confessor, and car all wrapped into one slightly unpredictable package.
After trail riding for a year or two, I got a saddle and started taking riding lessons. My mother had been supportive of my riding before this. She had horses when she was growing up, and she was in favour of anything that kept me busy and out of trouble. She paid for all my riding expenses, including the lessons and shows that I started later. Echo’s Little Wonder was not a show horse. He was old. He was huge. He had a rotten attitude and we won nothing.
Echo was finally retired, and my mother bought me a fancier horse, a little mare called Honey. I switched from western to English and then discovered dressage and got more and more into showing. I rode (or at least I was supposed to ride) every day in the summer, and my mother and I drove all over the northern interior going to horse shows.
My focus changed. I started to think about riding in terms of winning and money. Who had the most expensive horse? Who won the most competitions? My mother made serious sacrifices in time and money to pay for my riding. When I was competing, I don’t remember her ever buying herself new clothes even though she worked full time. In return, I was expected to be disciplined and take my riding seriously. The problem, of course, was that I had developed other interests. I liked boys and parties. Riding was getting in the way of all that. It was also interfering with my drinking. I still loved horses and I enjoyed doing well at shows, but I liked getting wasted even more.
Near the end of my high school years, a high-level dressage teacher came to Smithers to give a clinic. Somehow, Honey and I caught her eye, and when the clinic was over she asked if I wanted to come and train with her at her barn when I was finished high school. She lived in another country, and the offer forced me to make a decision. Was riding and working with horses what I wanted to do with my life?
After giving it some thought, I decided I wasn’t ready to make the commitment. That was the beginning of the end of my riding career. Riding slipped down the list of my priorities until my mother had to nag incessantly to get me to spend any time with my horse at all.
The last show I went to was held at the Smithers Fair Grounds. I had, as usual, entered every possible class. After a successful first day, I made a plan to meet my non-riding friends, Brenda, Charmagne, and Nan, at the midway so we could go on the rides that evening. My mother warned me that I had to be home early in order to be ready to compete the next day. As soon as I had a few drinks with my friends, I forgot all about going home and all about my horse.
It was well past my curfew when my mother arrived at the fair to take me home. I refused to go with her. She lost her cool. She began dragging me through the fairgrounds amid all the strobing lights and jangling music and the sickly scents of dust and vomit and cotton candy. Drunk as I was, I still remember people watching us pass, her leading me by the neck and the arm like a reluctant steer and me resisting all the way.
When we got home, my mother, nearly crying with rage and frustration, informed me that if I couldn’t abide by the rules of the house, I was free to leave. Gathering up my wasted dignity and my new down-filled duvet, I walked out of the house and made my way up to the highway, where I stood, wrapped in my quilt, waiting to meet my non-living-at-home/non-horseback-riding destiny.
It was only when the old motorhome screeched to a halt in front of me that I remembered serial killers and their fondness for young, female hitchhikers. They probably especially liked girls wearing quilts in which their bodies could be conveniently wrapped later. I got in anyway. The RV was being driven by two French guys in their late twenties. They were from a small town in Quebec. The first thing they showed me was their prize yogurt container full of pot. We smoked up, which did nothing for my already tenuous emotional well-being. As luck would have it, they were headed for the fair. When they unloaded me and my duvet, I wandered around to discover that my friends had left. I’d run away from home with only a down-filled quilt for nothing.
I ended up at a house party some time later and spent the rest of the night in a blackout. I woke up in a strange room, beside a strange guy, and was instantly filled with the sickening realization that I was homeless. Worse, I’d missed my first class at the horse show. Who was looking after my horse?
I got someone to drive me h
ome and when I walked into the house I was met by my grim-faced family. My mom had gone and picked up Honey from the show grounds. After a horrible conversation during which I promised to behave, I was allowed to come home. But that was the end of my riding career. Not long after, Honey was sold. The horse and the sport that had made life worth living for so long were gone. In truth, I barely noticed.
7
Playing Well with Others
AGAINST ALL ODDS, or maybe because the teachers in middle school wanted nothing more than to get rid of their foul-mouthed charge, I was moved to the high school with the rest of my class. This was when my life started to get very bad. From the outside, I probably looked like just another hormonally challenged and socially confused kid. On the inside, I felt like an ice climber who’d forgotten her crampons. If I had to guess, I’d say the cause of the chaos was eighty percent substance abuse and twenty percent adolescence, though everyone around me continued to attribute all my problems to my age and the fact that I was a ninth grader.
As far as I was concerned, the problem was my personal relationships. Like Henry in Barfly, I didn’t hate people, but I seemed to feel better when they weren’t around. I’d let go of my gentle and accepting best friend Giselle in order to hang out with people who partied, but my new friendships weren’t solid, as I found out when I made the mistake of briefly dating, then breaking up with, a boy.
He was one of the wild ones. As I got to know him better, I would more likely have described him as one of the dumb ones. Hank was decent looking, even attractive, with olive skin and a wide toothy grin. The problem was that he insisted on talking. He was under the impression that just because he thought something, he should say it out loud. His particular specialty was stating the obvious. Later it was plotting the least romantic ways conceivable to relieve me of my virginity.
I agreed to “go out” with Hank one night when a few of us were drinking in a baseball dugout near town. I was splitting my time between my popular friends and the wild ones. That particular night, the two groups mingled. I was very drunk, and the powerful ringing in my ears made it impossible to understand anything Hank said to me. I didn’t even realize what I’d done until I got a call from Darcy the next morning.
“So, you and Hank, eh?” she said.
I had recently finished dry-retching as quietly as possible so my family wouldn’t hear and was attempting to keep a sip of flat ginger ale down. As usual, I was afflicted with soul-destroying remorse. I’d been in a blackout for most of the night before, so I wasn’t exactly sure what I was sorry for. All I knew was that I was very, very sorry.
“Hank?” I said.
“Don’t you remember? You guys got together? You were sitting on his knee the whole night. It was so cute.”
“Hank?” I said. I was having trouble remembering his face. I’d been in grade nine for only a couple of weeks, and everyone and everything was a still blur. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d recently started smoking extra pot in an attempt to become more easygoing. As noted previously, pot had the exact opposite effect on me that it seemed to have on everyone else. It made me paranoid and, when mixed with alcohol, violent. In other words, I was more of an aspirational pothead.
“Ha. Ha. Very funny. I wish I was going out with an older guy,” said Darcy.
“How old is he again?”
“Grade eleven. He’s so hot.”
All at once the memories began to crash in. Hank, curly haired, possessed of tremendous, if, in my opinion, misguided, personal confidence. That guy was my new boyfriend? How could that have happened? I fell back into bed like I’d been punched by a god-sized fist.
The next call came a few minutes later.
“Is this Susan?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How’s it going?”
“Uh, fine?” I said. It seemed rude to ask who was speaking.
“Right on. Hey, you want to meet up later?”
Vomit lurched into my throat as I realized who was probably on the other end of the line.
“I can’t. I’ve got to … I mean, I’m grounded. Because of last night.”
“That sucks,” said the caller who was probably Hank.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Can you sneak out?” asked Almost Certainly Hank.
“No. My mom is, she’s like, tough,” I said, improvising.
“Well, that fucking sucks,” said Definitely Hank.
“Well, I have to go now. I’m not supposed to use the phone.”
“What if your house goes on fire?”
“There are exceptions,” I said.
“See you at school Monday,” he said and hung up. His words felt like a threat.
Sure enough, he was waiting for me outside in the smoking area Monday morning. He didn’t smoke, but he spent a lot of time out there anyway. It was where all the people who liked to party hung out. As soon as he saw me, he strode over and slung an arm around my neck, like I was an old army buddy he’d once saved from enemy fire. Very possessive, that arm.
“Hey,” he said.
The hangover from Friday night when I’d apparently enlisted with Hank’s unit had been epic, but it was nothing compared to the swamp of excess stomach acids and random poisons now being churned out by my knotted digestive system.
All the smoking area people eyed us approvingly and I tried not to shrink away from Hank. Instead, I offered him a weak smile.
“Hey.”
That should have been it. No one said much in the smoking area, other than “Got a smoke?” and “Fuck off” or “She’s such a bitch.” But Hank, as a non-smoker, wasn’t busy smoking so he was free to hold forth on a variety of subjects, such as how many pull-ups he could do and how fast he could run.
His arm prevented me from smoking comfortably. His conversation prevented me from breathing properly. I could nearly feel the situation turning into an uncontrolled asthma attack.
“You want to skip next period?” he whispered intimately, his hint of moustache tickling my ear.
I cranked my head to the side to avoid it.
“No!” I blurted. Then tried to soften it. “I’ve got class.”
“Fuck class. I want to spend time with you.”
For some reason, the severity of my reaction to him was all out of proportion to anything he’d said or done. Sure, he was dumb. But so was I. So was almost everyone I knew. We were in a dumb phase of life. The problem was that Hank, like many of the other guys I ever hooked up with when I was drinking, revolted me when I was sober. I had no respect for anyone whose self-esteem was so crappy that they could be interested in me.
In the harsh light of the smoking area, I couldn’t bear to look at Hank. If he didn’t get his arm off me soon, I was going to chew off my own arm at the shoulder.
“I’ve got a test,” I told him. It could have been true. A lot of people had them. Or so I’d heard.
“Sucks ass.”
“Okay, bye!” I slipped out from under the encircling arm and threw my cigarette on the concrete.
“Hey!” he said. It was his second favourite word, after “sucks.”
I looked at him, trying to control my breathing.
“Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?” he asked, loud enough so everyone could hear.
I stared at him, appalled at the idea. That’s when he kissed me. His mouth was so wet that it felt like he had licked me.
Everyone cheered. Quite the romantic moment in the smoking area.
It took me until lunch to get the taste out of my mouth.
“I swear I will never drink again,” I muttered to myself during the four visits I made to the girls’ washroom to make disgusted faces at myself in the mirror and wipe off and reapply my lipstick. “I swear, God, I will never drink again if you will just make Hank go away.”
God wasn’t listening and Hank didn’t go away. He spent the hours we were apart planning elaborate strategies to “get me alone,” according to reports from my delighted frie
nds. He was eager for us to “do it.”
I had no idea why people were so overjoyed at the prospect. Probably because some of the wild girls had nasty boyfriends who expected them to do it and they wanted everyone to take part in the misery.
At lunch I hid, but when I saw the wild ones between third and fourth periods, they gave me updates on Hank’s plans.
“He’s going to ask you to go to Steve’s house.”
“Actually Steve’s garage,” corrected another.
“So you guys can be alone.”
“To do it.”
My stomach heaved at the thought of being alone with the wet-mouthed, monosyllabic boy.
I fled home before last period, telling my teacher I was sick. When the phone rang that afternoon and then again approximately every twenty minutes, I didn’t answer it. When my mother got home (she was the only other person who answered the phone in our house), I told her too that I was too sick to speak to anyone.
Huddled in my bed, my mind spun with ways to get rid of Hank. I composed numerous letters.
“Dear Hank, I have decided I am too young to date.”
or
“Dear Hank, I’m not ready for a relationship. Also, you should know that I was in a blackout when I agreed to go out with you.”
or
“Dear Hank, my mother says I can’t see you any more because there’s a chance you might be bad news. Sorry.”
or
“Dear Hank, we probably shouldn’t go out because I’m bad news.”
or
“Dear Hank, you make me want to throw up so I don’t think we should see each other any more.”
And so on, ad infinitum.
With the greatest reluctance in the world, I dragged myself off to school the next morning. Unlike my usual outfit of skin-tight painter pants and T-shirt, I cloaked myself in oversized sweatpants and one of my mother’s less attractive gardening sweaters. I hoped the vast clothing would make me less irresistible. Unfortunately, Hank apparently would have found a stuffed footstool erotic.