Growing Girls (25 page)

But this, yes, this is bigger than Lucy and Ethel. In this darkness and in this fog, I am officially cowered.

Up front next to Alex is Cindy, our new friend who used to be our dog groomer but then evolved into our horse trainer/instructor. Next to Cindy is her boyfriend, Bob, who used to work as a trash collector but last year he fell off the back of the trash truck going at an illegally high speed, so he quit trash collecting and started college instead.

So, we’re driving. Alex has remarked more than once that he can’t see five feet in front of him. He is wisely going just thirty-five miles an hour on this highway. His point is that if we have to stop suddenly, the tonnage of horse meat behind us is sure to create some drag. Fortunately, no one else is on the road. We’ve passed a lot of rigs parked over in rest areas, apparently preferring the aforementioned option of snoozing. Every time he sees one of those idle rigs, Alex points it out. I can tell it’s because he thinks he’s heroic, pushing on while even the pros have surrendered, and that he wants acknowledgment.

“You’re amazing,” I say, because this is what a spouse should
say. And because I have to admit I’m impressed. I would never drive in this stuff, with or without the baggage. I could not do this alone. That’s what’s impressing me. The common conclusion is always that I’m the one responsible for creating this family, that it’s all my inner Lucy and Ethel fueling us to get a farm, adopt kids, go chicken and duck and sheep and goat and horse shopping. But look, folks, look who’s driving. If it were up to just me, none of this family would have happened at all. I wish I knew how to give him more credit, and if he wants it.

We’ve got about ninety miles to go. Besides giving Alex credit, all I can think about is how big those horses are. It’s the bigness that is getting to me.

“You know what?” Alex says. “I’m starting to think I’ll be able to see better in this fog if I just turn these headlights off.”

“Oh, honey, I don’t think so …”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, dear …”

“What happened?”

No, we most definitely can’t see better without light. Now we are towing our bigness down this highway in the pitch and total dark. We are a misguided missile falling off a plane; we are an asteroid dropping through space; this is the beginning of something new or this is the end of everything. This is it. We’ll crash here. In the morning they’ll be talking about the traffic delays on 1-79. They’ll be talking about the tragedy, six people, two of them children, and two horses splashed all over the highway, such a shame. Traffic on 1-79 northbound will be backed up for miles while they clean up the mess, so please, folks, find an alternative route.

“Okay, that’s better,” Alex is saying, finding the switch and turning the lights back on.

Here, as our summer has begun to slip toward fall, here we are with a whole new horse life. It seems to have come out of nowhere, but if I look back I can see the pieces falling together over the years, little pixels arranging themselves haphazardly, and then suddenly the picture begins to emerge.

Did we even want a horse life? Was this ever even an objective? In the spring we signed the girls up for horseback-riding lessons at a local stable with the idea that if they’re going to grow up on a farm they should know how to behave around horses. It was a safety issue, on the one hand, and an experiment more or less on behalf of our three beloved equines on the other. Alex and I had long since stopped paying attention to Skippy, my mule, and Maggie, his mare with the sore feet, and even Blitz, the pony I naively got for the girls when they were still way too young.

Yes, I suppose we did want a horse life, that much is obvious, and I can see that over the years we flirted with the idea as we tried to manage the difference between fantasy and reality. Fantasy is you and your husband blissfully romping over the hillsides atop your big, strong stallions, and wearing your cute little riding hat and those slick tight pants and boots, don’t forget the boots! And who’s that emerging from the bushes? Oh, hi, sweeties! It’s your little girls on their fine ponies, one wearing braids and the other with her rosy cheeks,
clip clop, clip clop
, come on, family, let’s gallop together toward the top of the hill where our
tea party awaits!

Most dreams start out as cartoons. If you knew about all the work, all the financial as well as emotional outlay involved with the dream, you’d never talk yourself into bothering with it.

Skippy and Maggie came into our lives long before the girls. That’s when the fantasy was still in the Mr. and Mrs. stage, no kids in the picture. I fell in love with Skippy and I encouraged Alex to fall in love with Maggie and we tried to figure out which end of our new saddles pointed forward and what, exactly, a bridle was. We didn’t know how to tie a cinch knot, let alone how to ride. We took some lessons. Alex even built a round pen on the other side of the road where we would go and practice, much to the amusement of Skippy and Maggie, both of whom had our numbers.
(“These people are idiots.”)

When you are new at riding, the first thing that hits you is that the very large animal beneath you doesn’t want to do what you want it to. No, that large animal would really prefer to go back to the barn and eat. This may be fine for bossy types determined to conquer beasts, but for regular old animal-lovers who come from a basic dog-lover culture, it presents challenges. Dogs want to please you. Dogs will do anything for a scratch behind the ears. Dogs are smaller than you and depend on you.

Horses are … big. Horses outweigh you by about half a ton and so they really don’t have to pay any attention to you if they choose not to. And why would they choose to? That’s what I could never get. Who was I to boss Skippy around? Skippy had been trained by a famous mule trainer, had won ribbons in rodeos, so I knew he wasn’t the problem. It was me. I was not worthy. I was puny and unentitled. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I would say to him when he wouldn’t obey my most tentative commands.
“Aw, sweetie, you don’t want to go around the ring today? I’m sorry. Poor baby. Mama’s gonna take you home and give you some treats….”

As I tried to learn to ride Skippy, mostly what I did was turn him into a spoiled brat. It got so that mule would do nothing that I asked of him. Why would he?

Alex was better at handling Maggie, who was, however, clearly too small a horse for him. Her thin back was no match for his manly thighs and every time he’d mount her you could see her eyes pop out in pain.

Alex fell off Maggie and broke a rib during this period, and Maggie’s feet developed problems so then she really couldn’t handle his weight, and then Anna came, and then Sasha. One thing I learned is you can’t do motherhood and horseback riding at the same time. At least not early motherhood. These two lives have virtually zero intersection. One could conceivably strap one’s child papoose-style on one’s back and ride one’s mule, but one such as me would probably and rightfully be hauled off to the Department of Children and Family Services.

So Skippy and Maggie went on about their lives in the field, occasionally getting called in for carrots. We loved watching them graze up on the hill with the backdrop of the setting sun. We got insulted when Mike, our farrier, would come to trim their feet and call them “expensive lawn ornaments.”

Hey, we took good care of them. What was wrong with having equines as pets? We got Blitz when Anna was four and Sasha was two because a friend was selling him and I knew he was a bomb-proof pony, and I was watching
Mary Poppins
a lot, feeling inspired by that scene when Julie Andrews and Dick
Van Dyke go sailing with the kids on those carousel horses that magically prance about the colorful English countryside.

The farrier was the one who told us about Storybrook Stables and the group lessons for kids. He said it might be good to teach our girls to ride on horses that have been kid-tested, and then maybe, someday when the girls were older, we could rescue our equines from their lazy days of munching toward equine obesity.

At first, the main reason Anna wanted to take horseback-riding lessons was because Michael, her boyfriend, had agreed to take them with her. She was six now and she and Michael had been an item since they were both five, when they met in gymnastics class. That’s where the sparks first flew. So much of Anna’s little life changed in that gymnastics class. It was supposed to be Sasha’s thing. I thought Sasha’s tiny little body would be a natural at tumbling, and some of her speech therapists had said that the lessons in movement and coordination and muscle-sequencing would ultimately help her speech.

I figured Anna would drop out of gymnastics after a few weeks, preferring something more cerebral. Delayed physically in so many ways when we adopted her—at eleven months she couldn’t even sit up or roll over on her own—I never figured on her being much of an athlete. She was always “the artsy one.” And Sasha was “the spitfire,” “the flirt,” the girl who would try anything once.

Labeling children one way or another is something all parents say they’ll never do and lo and behold all parents do.

But Anna blossomed in gymnastics. Soon she could do a perfect cartwheel and in no time a round-off. She was becoming known for her athleticism. Her
athleticism?
It took a while for this to sink in. And the athleticism had brought her
out of her shell, out of the AnnaLand she had so blissfully lived in before; now, so comfortable in her body, in the physical world, she was ready to come out and play.

But it was in the horse life that Anna found a real home. Soon, at riding lessons, the instructors came out to watch the six-year-old who possessed the posture and poise and confidence of an experienced rider. She was a natural, they all said. It seemed as if when she was on that horse she was once again in AnnaLand, fully focused in the moment, in the intersection of muscle and mind, and somehow she found a way of allowing the horse to be right there in AnnaLand with her.

She would come home and draw pictures of all the ponies at Storybrook Stables, and tape them to the wall. She had me look up the difference between an Arabian and a Quarterhorse and a Palomino and other breeds, information she memorized until she could recite it on command. Horses were becoming her everything.

She was on the porch drawing horse pictures the day Cindy came over to groom Marley. Cindy was standing there freeing Marley’s poodle curls of burrs, and I was going on and on like a proud mother does, bragging about Anna and Sasha and their natural skills at riding at Storybrook Stables. Sasha was too small to have quite the strength and prowess of Anna, but her daredevil spirit allowed her to keep up with Anna if only in that she did not mind falling off anything. A bloody nose here and there, a scraped elbow. No big deal. She would climb right back on.

Cindy asked the obvious question: We had horses. We had fifty acres of fields and woods upon which the horses could ride. Why weren’t our daughters riding our horses?

“Our
horses?” I said. “Oh, we would never trust them on our horses.”

“What’s wrong with your horses?” she asked.

“They’re sweet,” I said. “But they’re wild.”

Cindy looked at me, curled her lip. She told me she had eight horses of her own.

“Eight?”
I said.

“I know horses,” she said. “I know wild. Your horses are golf carts.”

I protested. I tried to explain about Skippy. Cindy offered to come over one day and “freshen” our horses up. She made the point that our horses would probably prefer the riding life to the lazy days out there in the field with all the flies.

She showed up on a Thursday night with Bob and a bareback pad. She didn’t believe in real saddles. Too much nonsense. She came from a cowgirl culture that said if you could ride bareback you could ride anything. She put a bridle on Blitz, threw the pad on his back, grabbed a hunk of mane, and hoisted herself up.

“Golf cart,” Cindy said, steering him around. Yeah, well, I sort of knew Blitz was capable. She repeated the process with Maggie. “Golf cart,” she said. “What is wrong with you people?”

“Mommy, I want to ride Maggie,” Anna said.

“Can I wide Bitz?” Sasha said.

Soon enough we were all across the road, over at the round pen we hadn’t even visited since those days when Alex broke his rib, and I was busily apologizing to Skippy for interrupting his days of grazing. Some of the boards had fallen loose but the basic structure was intact.

Anna had brought along a pad of paper and a marker, because this is what she does. When she is excited about something she has to either draw it or spell it. “How do we spell ‘Maggie’?”

“Honey, you can ride her, but only if Cindy leads you around,” I said.

“Oh, come on, Mom,” Cindy said.

“She doesn’t know how to ride bareback,” I said.

Yes, apparently, she did. And so did Sasha. By the end of the evening, Cindy had both girls riding around our ring, nothing to it. Anna exuded the confidence of a queen, sitting straight and tall. Sasha approached Blitz much as she did swimming lessons. Just dive in there and go. Blitz is a fat pony, and Sasha is a short kid, the net result being she rode with her legs out as if doing a split. “Kick!” Cindy commanded. And Sasha’s little ankles would barely pop up, but she’d manage to communicate her desire to go forward and Blitz would oblige. Soon Sasha was trotting around the pen to catch up with Anna, who was regally moving as if heading off to bestow gifts upon the king.

“I just can’t believe this …” I said, repeatedly. My girls were
horse people
. And my horses were
people horses
. Here were all these pieces of the dream scattered about our big backyard, and here they were falling into a most glorious formation.

Skippy and I were standing together, watching Anna on Maggie and Sasha on Blitz, standing there together like two ex-lovers longing to dance. I was scratching his ear, which he loves.

“Aw, Skip,” I said.

“Aw, sweetie,” he said, but not in the way anyone else could hear.

Skippy has always had a thing for me, and I’ve always had a thing for him. Skippy is the mule version of my dog Betty, who is but the dog version of my first cat, Bob, and my second cat, Steve. All the pets I have bonded with, deeply and fully connected with, are the same beings, the same little souls. We are the type of friends who can pick up instantly with each other after years of separation.