Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  When I’m trying to sleep in my guesthouse bedroom and it’s two in the morning, the wind throws itself against the window like a pushy, shrieking banshee: “Let me in.”

  So I do. I crack open the window and the full storm of fresh Arctic air whirls in with the keeping-you-from-sleep sunlight. The wind fills up my eardrums with its reckless chatter. It wipes me clean. It puts me right again. It helps me breathe. It makes my life seem large and the world larger.

  The wind, the wind in those places.

  A week before I am about to leave for Iceland, my father gets an infection. They take him to the hospital and the infection spreads to his kidneys; his kidneys start to fail and then his gallbladder is inflamed. They can’t seem to subdue the infection. My mother says, “This may be it.”

  I cancel my trip to Iceland. I drive an hour every day to see him in intensive care and to eat lunch or dinner with my mother. This vigil goes on for two weeks—we are waiting for my father to die. When one of my brothers comes to visit, he says, “Nonsense, he’s not going to die.” And he yells at my father to wake up, “What are you doing, Dad, open your eyes!” And my father drowsily nods his head in mute confirmation. “See, he’s fine,” my brother says.

  I marvel at the emotional gender gaps in my family. My mother and I are ready and willing (too eager perhaps) to weep at my father’s side; I’m writing the funeral notes in my head and tearing up at the imagined recital of my public words for my father. My brother’s response is to raise his voice and to shake my father awake. “Stop your crying, he’s not going anywhere,” he says with utter assurance.

  And it turns out he’s right. On what would be the third day of my Iceland trip, he pulls through. His fever and infection are gone.

  When my father is cleared and back in the nursing home, my mother says that we should go to Scotland. “I’ll pay,” she says, knowing I would probably never spend my money traveling with my mother. I take her up on it because I don’t know how much longer she’ll be around, or how close she is to winding up in a nursing home, but mostly I want to go to see my daughter—she will be with a dance troupe at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My daughter feels no anxiety about traveling at age twelve without us. She likes to talk; unlike my son who has developed the art of dropping consonants and collapsing them into a vowel sound mashup, she enunciates clearly. She instinctively knows how to navigate and make herself at home anywhere.

  But the trip to Scotland with my mother it not what I hoped for. At eighty-five, she has a hard time walking. She is easily winded, her hips ache, and we always need to find someplace for her to rest—and no one gives up their seat for the elderly any more, not even in Edinburgh.

  Spending day after day with her for a week, I notice she is easily addled, confusing elevators for doors, chicken for fish—she picks up a salt shaker and looks at it as if it were a Rubik’s cube. She is focused primarily on meals. We must stop and eat between meals, too. And she is losing her keen observations about people and places. She has little to say, except, when her granddaughter is on stage, “Is it just me, or is she not commanding all of the attention?” But then I notice she has her eye on the wrong dancer. I am not sure what she is getting out of this trip. My big regret is that I waited too long to travel with her—five, ten, twenty years too late. And it makes me reaffirm my commitment to travel every year to Iceland with Sylvie and Eve. Though I am still in my forties, there will be a day, even though it seems so many years away, when it will be too late, we will be too old.

  BOOK II

  THE TÖLT

  A natural, lateral gait, unique to the Icelandic breed. It is similar to a running walk, a very smooth, four-beat gait, which can be quite fast. Done well, it allows the rider an almost bounce-free ride at up to 20 mph.

  2007

  A Reykjavík Night

  It’s one A.M. on June 17. I’m in the Hotel Klopp in a double room on the second floor. I’m waiting for my roommate, a friend of Eve’s who lives in the Berkshires.

  I’m sleepless, restless, full of unrepentant independence. I try reading but get up frequently to look out on the street.

  Reykjavík is overcast, so the diffused nighttime sunlight pushes an opaque twilight through the clouds. It is Iceland’s National Day of Independence, their July 4th, and people are coming out of bars, drunk and singing. Two men walk down the street, unsteady on their feet, passing a bottle between them. They carry fishing poles and head toward the piers. Three women wobble toward the hotel, wearing disarrayed versions of the national costume: a long navy skirt, plaid apron, double-buttoned vest, puffy sleeved shirt, and the signature hat—a gold-banded black tail-cap.

  My roommate shows up at two A.M. Trying not to wake me, she tiptoes in and then drags her heavy suitcase after her and it bangs into the wall. “It’s okay, you can make noise, I’m not sleeping.”

  “Hi, roomie, I’m Lisa.”

  I turn on the light, not that it’s dark in the room. Lisa is a middle-aged woman in a tight windbreaker, big in the way a lot of middle-aged women are, only around the middle. I have noticed that a lot of us—me, Eve, Sylvie, Viv, and now Lisa, are of the same body type. We all have skinny legs, we are heavier on the top than on the bottom, and we are thick around the middle. It makes me wonder if our ancestors all met in Neolithic times and scouted out cold weather and horses together on the Eurasian steppes before heading to Northern Europe.

  After we introduce ourselves, Lisa is on a roll, nonstop talking about her flight, how she knows Eve. No awkward silences with Lisa. She tells me she and her husband met in their early twenties as skydivers, and that the two of them run the Skydiving club of New England.

  “Wow,” is the only response I can offer up, as someone who is afraid of heights and has recurrent nightmares about falling from second-story windows.

  She tells me that she recently gave up skydiving because of her health. But she won’t give up riding—she has a Thoroughbred cross—and she loves steeplechasing.

  “Wow,” is all I can say again, as someone who stopped jumping horses after one try with Charlie. He was lazy and arthritic on one side and I wasn’t putting much effort into it, when he stumbled and knocked down the rail. The riding instructor came over and began to smack Charlie in the face with her crop to wake him up. She apologized later in the stables when I was putting salve on his neck and tried to explain: “I didn’t want you to get hurt,” she said, “because he was being lazy.” I left the stable after that and felt awful for leaving Charlie behind. I can never forgive myself for not stopping her. And I cannot get over him, my old-man horse, how he tarried, how I wept for him.

  Lisa goes out to have a cigarette, but first tells me she is going to give up smoking before her grandchild is born. “I’ve got five months to go.” She stands outside on the sidewalk directly below my open window and the smoke wafts up. I don’t mind the smell of smoke. In fact, I’m a non-smoker who likes the smell of cigarettes. My son is a smoker, and I hate that—that he has been tarring his lungs since fifteen. I brought him up on organic baby food, cage-free eggs, non-nitrate hot dogs. I had the pregnant Madonna complex and drank nothing stronger than weak green tea when he was in utero, so he wouldn’t lose a point or two off his IQ. Somehow this all paved the way for his current habits of sucking in pollutants and intoxicants like candy.

  So it’s a forgivable offense, if late at night, when the smell of cigarette smoke from the patio curls into my bedroom window, I find it a comforting trigger. It means he’s home and he’s safe. I can go to sleep. Funny how kids wind up training you.

  Lisa announces she’s back by opening the door and coughing. She has a smoker’s cough, a smoker’s voice, a smoker’s raspy laugh. She says a phrase in Italian, and when I give her a blank stare, she translates something she says is from an opera. She tells me that she went to an Italian boarding school in the southern Alps and became fluent in Italian. She ran away from the boarding school at seventeen with a boyfriend. She joined a hippie-type caravan and tr
aveled around India on the roof of a train. The craziest thing she ever did was spend all night sleeping on a park bench in Tehran, before the revolution. She has two kids, but only one that she talks about—her pregnant daughter, who is brilliant and getting a PhD in computational linguistics.

  Then she gives me the rundown on her medical history. She’s had five abdominal surgeries in the past twenty months. It’s not the surgeries that bother her, it’s the fact that they are all the result of the first surgery and the surgical sponge the doctor left behind. “One botched surgery and four more to correct the botched one.” She brings up a lawsuit she’s thinking of pursuing, but then she goes on about how much she hates lawyers. But she hates surgeons more. A conundrum.

  She’s tough, opinionated, a risk-taker—a modern Beryl Markham, and I find myself liking her, though she’s making me feel like my life is too staid, that I’m not wild enough. I’m not.

  Comfortable now that we’ve spent a full ten minutes together, she lifts up her shirt and shows me the scars from the abdominal surgeries. And then other scars from other surgeries. Scars from her caesareans. Context is everything, and I feel inferior and wimpy that I have nothing comparable to show her: just a small horizontal line on my neck where my over-exuberant doctor, feeling a small lump, removed half of my perfectly fine thyroid. Other than that, a couple of playground scars. She’s tough Robert Shaw and I’m weaselly Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws.

  She is a one-woman show and I’m the only one in the audience. Except for my minor scars, I have revealed nothing about myself. And she has asked nothing. Not even the basics like, do I own a horse? Or is this my first time in Iceland? Or how do I know Eve? She doesn’t even ask the secondary basics: do I have a husband or an ex lurking in the background? Do I have any children? Where am I from? I wait for these questions, but they are not forthcoming. And I am not in a rush to reveal anything about myself. I would rather listen to other peoples’ stories anyway; I find relief from the fatigue of the narration constantly playing in my head. Some travelers are tell-all types; all I need to do is nod and agree and they spill their entire, scarred selves.

  At four in the morning, as Lisa comes in from her last smoke of the night, I’m ready to take my sleeping pill. Lisa looks in her makeup bag, “I’m taking a diazepam.”

  “Oh God, me, too.”

  She loves the idea we are synchronizing the popping of our sleeping pills. “Down the hatch, roomie.” Her smoker’s laugh is the last thing I hear that night.

  Mothers and Daughters

  The skyline of Reykjavík—those two nouns I would never have put together a few years ago—is filling up with scaffolding and dangling construction beams. And we’ve taken notice:

  “That bank building wasn’t there last year.”

  “Nor were all these high-rises.”

  “Who’s going to fill all these buildings?

  “It’s hardly like Iceland is a hot spot.”

  “I know. It’s a teeny tiny country. We all love it, but I can’t imagine that many others see what we see here. It’s not like it’s gonna have a huge population boom.”

  “It looks like they’re building for big doings, though.”

  “But what for?”

  “Reykjavík’s a town, a town the size of New Haven, it’s hardly a city.”

  There are six of us stuffed again into one van: Viv, now seventeen-year-old Britt, Sylvie, Eve, Lisa, and me. Suitcases at our feet, bags in our laps. The snacking has begun, with Viv taking out tea biscuits the minute we pulled away from Hotel Klopp. Lisa unwraps a package of assorted licorice, having fallen sway to Iceland’s curious licorice fetish. Licorice is a national craze, and it’s made in all different flavors like chocolate, white chocolate, marzipan, and pepper. I’m not a fan.

  Per usual, Sylvie does most of the talking. She tells us that she has sold her house in Otis, bought property in Monterey, and is building a new house right down the road from Eve’s farm.

  Eve loves the idea of being closer to Sylvie. “I can’t wait till you move in. You can just walk over every day.”

  “You know what though . . . my husband wants to move in with me once we get the new house built. So I’m hoping it takes a few years to build my new one. Ha! I’m a terrible wife. But I’m used to living alone now and I like it. And he wants to come around again. I don’t know if I’m happy about that.”

  Eve and Jack took a yoga cruise to Mexico, but she didn’t like it that much. “It was fine, it was fine, but the vibe was all wrong.”

  Sylvie clears her throat and remains quiet. But I know Sylvie, she has more to say about this.

  In Borgarnes, we stop at a bakery. I sit at the table with Sylvie, while Eve, Viv, and the others are still in line. The bakery has long windows and though it’s overcast and rainy, it feels bright with subdued light. The tide is low, so the mudflats stretch far out. People are digging for mussels, and if I have my directions right, we are directly across the fjord from where we asked for directions in 2004, from the family digging for mussels.

  “Lisa has such interesting stories,” I tell Sylvie.

  “Yes, she does have interesting stories. She’s done a lot of things. But she now lives in the shadow of her mother, who is eighty and retired but was a famous academic in ancient texts and world mythologies. Kind of a female Joseph Campbell type, you know the ‘follow your bliss’ guy. She leads these monthly salons at her house. She has quite a following. Eve goes to them.”

  “She didn’t mention her mother last night.”

  “That’s good. Eve invited her so she could break away from her mother, who’s brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but Lisa could stand to get out from underneath all that brilliance. So, that’s good, you listen to her stories. You’re good for her, you haven’t heard them.”

  “She’s tougher than we all are.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  It’s clear now that this is another “save the daughter from the mother” intervention on Eve’s part. Overbearing mothers is a theme that Eve is sensitive to. I wonder about her relationship with her own mother. She has told me that Jack’s children (and now grandchildren) from his first marriage are all the children she needs, and I suspect she didn’t have children by choice.

  My daughter is fourteen and I want her to come with me to Iceland. I don’t want to wait until it’s too late, like I did with the trip to Scotland with my mother. I want to be able to ride with her before I get too old. I want to gallop to the Greenland Sea with her. I want to impart my motherly wisdom and let her experience the wild freedom that only horses can give. But it’s a fantasy of mine she doesn’t share.

  Before I left, I made her listen to Rickie Lee Jones, which always leaves me bubbling up with maternal mawkishness:

  “That’s the way it’s gonna be little darling, we’ll be riding on the horses, yeah,

  Way up in the sky, little darling, and if you fall I’ll pick you up, I’ll pick you up.”

  I put it on her iPod and watched her listen with earbuds, looking closely at her face for any little reactive movement. “Don’t you like it? Don’t you love it?”

  “Aww, it’s sweet, Mom.”

  “Doesn’t it make you want to ride with me? Some year won’t you come with me?”

  “Er, Iceland? Horses? Yeah, no thanks, Mom. Paris, yes. Take me to Paris.”

  Not all girls love horses, even ones who share my DNA. My daughter only likes them at a distance, preferable in digital pixels, or if in real life, from afar, out in the fields through a car window. She’s a consummate urbanite. Even Connecticut is too empty for her liking. She’s not a fan of big animals, or animals in general. She likes our dog, but she often pushes her away because of her rank stinkiness. My daughter instinctively focuses on human relationships, reading social and emotional cues in a way I never could at her age.

  I took her up to Eve’s this past year. She went into the stables with me and hesitantly petted the horses’ velvety muzzles. But when they snorted out
the barn dust she jumped back, like they were going to run over her. Obliging me, she got on Snild, a gentle mare for beginners. Sylvie and Eve led Snild around on a lead rope and gave my daughter lots of encouragement. But she was interested in only two things: chatting with them and looking longingly at the gate, hoping to go back to the barn. When they gave her the reins to take over on her own, she took one loop around the arena and was done. “That’s enough.” She dismounted in a hurry, eager to get to have lunch and conversation with me and my horsey friends.

  I’m not really sure what draws people, females in particular, to horses. Horse ownership is estimated to be 80 percent female in the United States. My daughter is unlike me in many ways. She has no desire to throw herself on the back of a horse and gallop to lands end. She has always been a garrulous girl, emotionally stalwart, an extrovert who manages people well, traits she gets from her father. They say it is the daughter’s relationship with her father that sets her confidence level. I buy that. But more than that, I think horse love is for the lonely girls at heart. That’s the club we once all belonged to, whatever our adult life may appear to be built upon. Whatever I or Eve or Sylvie or Viv have become, we started out quietly unsociable, spending too much time alone in our imaginative horse world. The only risk we wanted to take was with horses. The horse took us both away from and into the world.

  All the Queen’s Men

  This year we have men (men!) riding with us. It’s all very exciting, as one of the men, Olafur (Oli) is also our resident chef. He is a friend of Helga’s and a zoologist by day, but he’s off during the summer, and his hobby is cooking. I’m not sure what the arrangement is, but Helga has delegated to him the cooking for our group. Within an hour or two of getting back from our rides, he comes over from Helga’s kitchen with Icelandic pancakes, which are thin, rolled-up crepes filled with strawberry jam and whipped cream. Or he brings in an enormous platter of soft, dark, velvety red wood–smoked salmon piled inches deep that melts as soon as it hits my gluttonous little tongue. It’s served with rúgbrauð, a dense, sweet and steamed rye bread, and crème fraîche. For dinner, he makes baked sea trout with onion sauce, pilaf and salad. Or roast leg of lamb with potatoes galette. Or a mushroom barley soup with fresh baked potato bread and salad with Danish blue cheese. For dessert, he brings us skyr cake, like cheese cake but made from fresh cream and skyr and topped with blueberries, or Happy Marriage Cake, which is like a fruit buckle. Did I mention I love him? We all want to marry him. He is very big and very bald, very smart and kind, but alas, he is married.