Growing Girls (10 page)

I take a deep breath. I help her get the tutu on. The coat is thick and robs her of any semblance of a waist, so the tutu is about as wide up top as it is at the bottom. “Glasses?” she says. “Anna’s glasses?” She finds her sunglasses, a purple plastic pair given to her by her otherwise wise and loving father.

Well, then. She looks up at
me. Are you ready?

At the mall, I don’t bother looking at the people staring. I don’t want to talk about it. Yeah, this is my fabulous child. Yeah, I’m the mother of the girl in the getup. I try to get Wendy’s voice out of my head, and Claire’s. I am a mother who encourages self-expression. Surely there is something good about this.

The display in the front of the Payless shoe store calls Anna as if put there by her own private angel. “Tap shoes!” she cries. “Tap shoes!” An entire rack of shiny patent leather shoes with bright silver cleats.

“Mommy, look!
Tap shoes!”

Would another parent refuse? Would another parent steer her child away? We find a size 6.1 tie the silky laces. They fit just fine. “Anna’s tap shoes!” she says, standing up. They’re only 111.99. Would another parent refuse?

The shoes do not disappoint. The shoes offer her a completeness that will take years to understand and name. She clicks and clacks and swishes and twirls, then, through the mall, her head bent so she can watch her magic feet. “Anna’s tap shoes!” she exclaims on the downbeat, and on the upbeat, too. It is a sight to behold. It is joy in motion, all happiness and delight
spinning by Hickory Farms and Spencer’s Gifts and right on through the food court, too. The surly teenager cracking gum, the cranky old man arguing with a clerk about change, the sad old lady drooping her shoulders low and lower still—everyone looks up, everyone looks to see where that
clickity clack
sound is coming from. They look and see her, a round girl in leopard and tulle and purple shades. A one-girl parade. They look and they are transported to some small better place, smile after smile, like a wave.

a stupid feud

We decided the heck with George. We decided to get our own damn sheep. This was after many hours of consideration.

Our back hill is about twenty acres wide and in some places the drop is as sudden as a cliff. When we first moved here, Alex mowed that hill with his big blue farm tractor, and we both nearly had heart attacks, him from aiming straight down like that, strapped to the tractor seat with a nylon belt, and me from just watching and wondering how it would be if he and the tractor ended up tumbling into the kitchen.

“So
you’re
the guy who mowed that hill,” neighbor farmers would say to Alex in the hardware store. Apparently, news that someone had actually taken a tractor to that cliff had hit the old-time farmer circuit as a piece of lore no one was sure was true or not.

“Yup,” Alex would reply, all proud and trying to sound farmer-like. But in time he came to understand why everyone was so impressed.
(“That dude is nuts….”)

George was the one who offered to help. He pulled Alex aside. He said, “Listen, buddy.” He said, “You’re going to kill yourself” Then one day he came up the road with about a hundred of his sheep following behind, and he opened our gate and shooed the sheep in.

The sheep ate the grass, and they fertilized it, and they required nothing of us, not even a thank-you. Summer after summer, with George lending us those sheep for a few months, we had a back hill that came to resemble a smooth golf course, albeit crazily steep.

George accepted no money for this service and we came to understand that it was rude to even offer. This was just a neighbor-to-neighbor thing.

Then the silent feud started and no sheep came. We sat and wondered why George had stopped talking to us and if we were supposed to do something about it and if so, what that might be.

Meantime the grass grew, as Alex watched and got worried and woeful, thinking about what he was going to have to do. I said let’s not mow the hill. I said let’s just regard that growing vegetation as a very young forest to admire and accept. He said no, he would have to mow it. It was the right thing to do; it was a matter of stewardship and honor, a farmer keeping his fields clean and healthy. He started eating a lot of ice cream in anticipation of taking the tractor up there. The sugar from the ice
cream kept him up at night. He’d finally fall asleep and wake up with a headache.

I said maybe he should just go over and make up with George, so we could get the sheep back. He said how can you make up with someone when you don’t even know what you’re fighting over? He said he wanted none of it. He said if whatever we did was really that bad then why didn’t George just come over and confront us with it?

“True,” I said.

We decided the heck with George. We decided to get our own damn sheep to eat the grass on our terrible hill.

Now, I have no reason to believe that children’s author Laura Numeroff meant ill will when she wrote the popular book
If You Give a Pig a Pancake
. My girls love this book. Sadly, I have had to ban it from the house.

In this book, the pig on the receiving end of the pancake is not satisfied with just that. Like most of us, that pig wants syrup. Syrup leads to another request, inevitably and quite logically to another, and another; in fact, pages and pages of others that would seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with breakfast foods at all. The pig is not, I don’t think, particularly greedy or even needy. No, the pig quite blithely and reasonably moves forth with her requests for tap shoes, wallpaper glue, all manner of nonsense—until finally, in the end, we are brought unavoidably and maddeningly back to her appeal for another stinkin’ pancake.

Reading this story, thinking about this story, my head goes into a spastic twitch and soon enough I’ll drool.

Too close to the bone. Too many of my nightmares right there in pig form. The tumbling effect of one stupid thing leading to another, the complications upon complications, the way you just want to kick that pig out of your house and start some particular sequence of your life over.

But it’s too late for that. By the time you notice what’s going on, it’s too late.

The sheep would be Alex’s project. He would become fluent in the language of ewes and rams and worming medications and ear tags and antifungal sheep foot dip.

He called Gretta, by now our official agent of animal acquisitions, and she taught him about Dorpers, a breed of sheep just now being introduced to the U.S. from South Africa. “They’re
hair
sheep!” Alex reported back to me, having moved remarkably swiftly along the learning curve after just one phone call. Hair sheep, he explained, were different from the far more common wool sheep. You have to shear wool sheep, since the wool keeps growing and growing until pretty soon the poor animal is wearing the equivalent of twenty-five sweaters. The hair on hair sheep falls out in time, like human hair. So you don’t have to shear them. Beginners in love with the romance of knitting scarves made from the wool of their own sheep may find the prospect of owning a hair sheep disappointing and pointless. But any sheep farmer worth his mutton knows that the labor involved in shearing a flock is the single most costly
aspect of the business. There is no market in the U.S. for wool; sheep farmers are all about meat, mostly lamb. Shearing costs more than you’d ever get back selling wool.

So, hair sheep. That’s the future. That’s what Gretta told Alex. She was about to introduce Dorpers into her own flock and said she could get some for us, too. It was, she assured him, a good investment. Get in early, that’s how it works with these designer animals. That’s how it worked with llamas and that’s how it worked with alpacas and that’s how it worked with miniature donkeys. Those animals could fetch five thousand dollars or more when those markets hit their peak.

One Dorper ewe was at the time going for about a thousand dollars. But Gretta said we wouldn’t have to spend that much. We could “breed up,” get a ewe that was 75 percent Dorper and mate it with a 100 percent Dorper ram and eventually our sheep would have enough Dorper in them to be put on the official purebred registry.

Alex took in all this sheep knowledge and he took notes and he started a file folder and you could tell already he felt a sense of purpose.

So one day Gretta showed up and in the back of her pickup she had six “three-quarter Dorper” yearling ewes we bought for six hundred dollars apiece.

It made a surprising amount of good sense, although no one stopped to remark upon the fact that six ewes weren’t going to eat even half our hill, which was the whole original point.

We had, that is, already given the pig her pancake.

The thing about farming is a lot of the original points get lost. You find yourself headed in a direction for one reason or
another, and then another, and then a few left turns and then a right, and then one day there you are trying to coax six yearling hair sheep to go ahead and climb out of the bed of your friend’s pickup truck.

Come on! Come on, little girls, come on!

They were gentle animals, white as the blossoms on the nearby petunias, and their faces carried the expressions you might imagine on very alert, and very worried, angels. They moved as one unit, each seemingly completely attuned to the nervous systems of the others. They weren’t animals you would pet or even get to know. They were scared of us and preferred each other. In that way, they were our first official farm animals. We had goats and horses and a pony and a mule and chickens and a sheep raised by goats who thought herself a goat—all these were pets, animals with names that we talked to and imagined as family. But the Dorpers were livestock, an investment.

Come on! Get down, yee-hawwww!

Humans seem to instinctively make guttural noises when moving livestock. The ewes came off the truck and then we yee-hawed them into the paddock. We stood down at the barn with our hips jutted out, making noises like this, standing like farmers stand.

Soon enough, in the evolution of any new sheep farmer with six expensive ewes, there comes the realization: “Hey, we need to get ourselves a ram.”

Gretta told us about a good lead she had on two “pure” Dorper rams, and she said she was going to buy one and she asked if we wanted to buy the other. We really couldn’t think of a reason to say no.

When the ram came he was square with a barrel chest and he was packed tight as a linebacker and he had enormous testicles hanging down. I felt rude looking at them but couldn’t seem to help myself. They looked like birthday balloons the day after. They looked like wobbly, sagging breasts. They looked painful to own. The ram wasn’t shy about jumping off the back of Gretta’s pickup truck. He took one whiff of the apparently ripe air and tore up the hill after our ewes. It was … impressive. We never actually saw the ram in the act of mating with those ewes, and for that I was and remain grateful.

Gretta said when all the ewes were pregnant they’d let the ram know. She said at that point we’d probably need to put the ram in a very strong pen or else he would run off down the road in search of more ewes.

Alex and I walked around trying to figure out where to build a very strong pen. We found a place that was perfect. Except there was no water source. We talked about just using a garden hose. Which would freeze in the winter. We talked about digging a ditch and installing a pipe.

You always think it’s just one more thing. Just one more thing to do to complete this sheep/lawn-mowing project and then you can move on with your life.

If you want to be a sheep farmer and you have six expensive ewes and one expensive ram, after you figure out where to put a strong pen and how to get water to it, certainly the most important thing to talk about is what you’re going to do about the coyotes. It’s a significant problem in our area, especially in spring, during lambing season. Up at the hardware store, starting in March, all the conversation is always about how many
lambs any particular farmer had lost to the teeth of coyotes. To protect their flocks, some of the farmers had taken to sleeping outside with shotguns.

Gretta said there was a better way.

We stood down at the barn with our hips jutted out, standing like farmers stand. We listened to Gretta and we decided okay, we’d get a livestock guardian dog to protect our investment. We really couldn’t think of a reason to say no.

Alex was surprisingly gung-ho about the dog acquisition. In fact, the entire sheep enterprise seemed to delight and fascinate him. He had none of the pig-and-pancake reaction I was having; or if he did he never said anything. That was another reason I banned that book from our house, so as to protect my husband from seeing his life as a never-ending, continuously unfolding sequence of stupid events.

Now, the thing about the dog was, we were not allowed to bond with it. I worked on not bonding with it long before it arrived, as per the instructions from the breeder, who made it plain that we were
not
buying a
pet
. The breed, Maremma, originates in Italy, where for centuries these dogs have been protecting sheep and goats from predators. Like other livestock guardian dogs, Maremmas make their own decisions in the absence of a master. Engaging one in a more submissive pet role would only be to handicap it. So none of this poochie, poochie, smoochie stuff. You’re supposed to just introduce yourself, your family, and then allow the dog to grow up with the livestock it will instinctively protect.