Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  All I could really see from that distance was a chestnut-colored Morgan with a wavy red mane pulling an open two-wheeled cart driven by a large man holding a buggy whip. But the word pulling didn’t do justice to what the horse was doing to that cart. Maybe it was the excitement of the wind, lifting and twirling her mane like towels on a clothesline, or maybe it was the sight of the barn, signaling the last stretch toward a bucket of grain, a warm stall, and some sweet hay. She seemed out of control.

  She’d look great for fifteen seconds or so, with an extended, high-stepping trot, pretty as any carriage horse in a period film. Then suddenly she’d toss her head and buck, kick the cart behind her, break into a run, jerk the cart from one side of the road to the other, and just as suddenly resume the pretty trot. It was a miracle she didn’t run into the fence or overturn the cart. The other miracle was that her driver never once used his whip or raised his voice. I could hear him talking to her, but he didn’t yell, even at her most out-of-control moments. By the time they reached me, I wanted to take them both home.

  The driver’s name was Bob and he was a professional horse trainer. The red horse was a three-year-old named Georgia, who had just completed her first lesson in harness.

  “What a brat,” I said, holding the reins near her perfect head as Bob stepped down from the cart. I had to stand right in front of her in order to see her whole face around the blinders. She had enormous almond-shaped eyes and a small white star in the middle of her forehead. Her Arabian ancestry was visible in the pronounced cheekbones and narrow, slightly scooped nose. Her chest and withers were covered in foamy white sweat, and she smelled like wet leather.

  Bob looked like a farmer from Lake Woebegon, a character right out of the Garrison Keillor radio show. He had to be six and a half feet tall, and there was no other way to put it: he was fat. He wore baggy jean coveralls that didn’t quite make it to his ankles and a plaid flannel shirt with the cuffs rolled back, exposing long underwear with a lot of holes. He had smooth white skin with a pinkish tint and long, thick fingers.

  “She’s got a way to go,” he smiled, laying a pink hand on Georgia’s rump and leaving it there.

  I liked the way he touched her, the way he left his hand on her back quietly like that. No slapping, even affectionately, nothing that would startle her. She chewed her bit and shifted her weight from foot to foot, pushing me away with her nose. She kept turning her head to look for Bob, for anything, trying to see around her blinders. She was a busy horse, and if we’d just get out of the way, she’d be down the road and halfway to Lake Wobegon by breakfast.

  At some point Sarah showed up. She was skinny, in her midfifties, chain-smoking Chesterfields. Her limp brown hair was held in a ponytail with the kind of elastic they put around the broccoli at the grocery store. It looked like she’d been pulling all-nighters her whole life; there was enough skin under her eyes to make a burrito. The teeth she had were OK; it was the ones that were missing you noticed, mainly on the sides, which explained the supermodel cheeks. She had on jeans, old blue sneakers, and a gray sweatshirt that zipped up the front with a hood. Underneath that sweatshirt was another sweatshirt without a hood. She wasn’t much of a talker.

  “This one’s not for sale,” she said, flicking the ash of her cigarette toward Georgia. She started walking off, I supposed in the direction of the horses who were for sale.

  I didn’t budge. When she realized I wasn’t behind her, she stopped and turned around.

  “If she was for sale, what would she cost?” I asked. I wasn’t leaving until I had a piece of paper in my hand saying I owned this horse. I’d looked at so many Morgans—some prettier, some bigger, all of them better behaved—but only this one had leapt into my heart.

  “She’s a mess, that one,” Sarah said, shaking her head. But she wasn’t shaking her head as in no, you can’t have her ever, ever, ever. It was more like, why would you want to?

  “Yeah, I saw,” I said. I was pretty sure I could fix that mess. Anyway, I didn’t want to drive her, I wanted to ride her.

  Sarah lit a fresh cigarette off the stub of the one recently clamped between her lips and thought for a second. Bob had slipped the wooden shafts out of the harness and was backing the carriage toward the side of the barn. I was still standing near Georgia’s head, holding the reins, wishing she’d show a little more interest in me and a little less in the dead weeds she couldn’t reach because I wouldn’t let her. She was still wet from the driving lesson and needed to be walked until she was dry. Most big farms had an electric horse walker, a contraption that looked like a large circular clothesline to which you could hook four horses, to be walked in a slow circle until they were dry. If Sarah had one, it was nowhere in sight.

  “She’s green broke English and western,” Sarah told me. “We had her down at the Garden last spring in Western Pleasure, just to give her some practice. I got a nice proof you could have made up.”

  The Garden meant a show at Madison Square Garden, and in a Western Pleasure event the rider uses a western saddle and puts the horse through a series of walks, trots, and canters, as though riding for pleasure. A proof was a photograph. But what she was really saying was that she’d be willing to sell this horse.

  “I ride English,” I said. In my head I was jumping up and down shouting, She’s mine! She’s mine!

  “Could be a good endurance horse,” Sarah said. “She has plenty of heart, good strong legs and feet, and loves to eat.”

  “I do a lot of trail riding,” I told her. Our conversation was getting positively chummy: two moms discussing the future of a kid we both knew wasn’t going to Harvard.

  “Of course, she’ll do better as she matures, when she’s five or six,” Sarah said. “If you want, Bob could work with her some more before you take her.”

  She was mine, just like that. But for how much? Sarah still hadn’t said. I had budgeted ten thousand dollars to spend on a horse. Not a lot by horse standards, but I wasn’t buying a horse for showing, I was buying a horse for pleasure riding. Even with her breeding, sired by the number-one-standing Morgan stallion, I didn’t think Georgia would cost anywhere near ten thousand.

  “Can I walk her out?” I asked, suddenly anxious about keeping a wet horse standing still on a cold day. My wet horse. It would also give me a chance to be alone with her to see how she moved and behaved off the bit, to see if she’d listen to me.

  Sarah threw her cigarette in the dirt and walked toward the barn. “I’ll get a halter and lead.”

  Georgia and I followed her into the barn, and I helped Bob take off her harness. Then Bob towel-dried her and brushed her down. It only took a few minutes and when she was ready, I clipped a lead line to the chin ring of her leather halter and led her out to the long dirt drive.

  It was about five o’clock, and the sun had disappeared behind a forest of evergreens on the horizon. The light was fading, and the air smelled of wood-burning stoves and horses. The hum of cars on the thruway was steady in the distance, punctuated by the muted roar of trucks and tractor trailers. The wind had died down, but it was still breezy enough for Georgia’s mane to flicker across my face as we walked down the drive past fields of Morgans.

  I walked, Georgia trotted. We passed dozens of grazing horses on either side of the dirt drive, and Georgia was very much aware of them. Her head swiveled from one side of the road to the other with wide nostrils, keeping up a low, throaty nicker.

  Her high-stepping trot was due in part to the shoes she was wearing. They were called trailers, a heavy shoe, designed to make a horse throw the foot high, creating that prancing effect often seen in carriage horses and saddlebreds. As lovely as it looked, to me it seemed contrived and unnatural. I’d get Georgia’s removed and replaced with plain shoes as soon as I could.

  She was three years old, and I was thirty. With any luck, we’d be together until I was in my sixties. That was a commitment, a word I hated. I thought it meant the opposite of freedom. I thought it meant you were trapped, stuc
k, buried. Life was over and now you had this obligation, this ever-present other who said things like “And where were you?” and “How much did it cost?” and “Why didn’t you call?”—all the none-of-your-business questions that were suddenly OK because you had a commitment. Some people called it love. I called it a burden.

  I was thinking this because I wanted Georgia to pay attention to me and she wasn’t. I wanted her to be as enthralled with me as I was with her, to feel that same chest-tugging connection. Instead, she was thinking about ditching the stranger tugging at her pretty head so she could run off and frisk with the other three-year-olds. She wasn’t interested in a doting new mommy, she was interested in grazing.

  I wish I could say all that insight saved my marriage, that I ran home to Jerry and the new Sub-Zero filled with organic mesclun and free-range eggs to say how sorry I was for being unforgiving and unavailable; for being a lush and a cheap lush, too—Gallo, $4.95 a gallon. Maybe Jerry was no prize but neither was I.

  I think it was the idea of being with Georgia for the next thirty years that made me think about my life and where it was going, like deciding to have a child and realizing it meant having to change some things first. I didn’t want to bring anyone into the lie that was my life, not even a horse.

  At the very least, it meant taking the steps to end my marriage. Forget about saving face or saving Jerry, it was time to save myself.

  We walked until Georgia was dry and it was getting too dark to see where we were going. She never settled down, dancing and bucking at the end of the lead, but it didn’t change how I felt about her or how eager I was to get those awful shoes off her.

  I took her back and put her in one of the big box stalls in the dairy barn that had only partially been converted for horses. Then Sarah and I hung over the stall door for a while and watched her eat grain. She had a blue-ribbon face with a low tail set and a beautifully arched but short neck. These flaws would eliminate her from being shown in a halter class or being considered good breeding stock. Still, she was classic Morgan with the deep chest, the rounded neck, and the chiseled Arab face. Her coloring wasn’t a flaw, but red (called chestnut) was not popular with Morgan enthusiasts. In show circles it was well known that judges were prejudiced against chestnut Morgans. I had always wanted a chestnut, though, and, looking at her, it was impossible to imagine why everyone didn’t feel the same.

  We were quiet a long time, and then Sarah spoke. “Three thousand and you pay for shipping,” she said.

  Three thousand seemed too low. Surely it would be shortchanging Sarah. “Who’d do the shipping?” I asked.

  “Me,” she said.

  “When?”

  “Whenever you want.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Just gimme the directions.”

  Oh my. Thirty years.

  [ 7 ]

  I WENT HOME, and the next day Georgia arrived, and then it was time to tell my husband I was leaving, but I didn’t. I was waiting for the right moment. Whatever that moment would look like, I didn’t know, but I waited for it anyway.

  While I waited I schooled Georgia on a lunge line, which is a long rope with a person at one end and a horse on the other. The horse moves in circles around the person, practicing walk, trot, and canter by voice command. When we both had had enough of that, I saddled her up and rode her over miles of logging roads through fragrant white pines. At night I drank Gallo.

  I did some terrible things when I was drunk. I drove a hundred and ten miles an hour in my new Saab and never gave a second thought to the cars I flew past, or if I did, it was only to feel superior. Once I drove to Boston to catch a plane for Aspen. I left the house late because I was too hungover to get up, and an hour before my flight was due to take off, I still had a hundred miles to go. I got a ticket for driving a hundred miles per hour: driving to endanger. I remember the officer’s eyes as I waved my airline ticket at him in a fury, blaming him because I would miss my flight. His eyes were big and unblinking, and I saw in them a mix of shock and pity as he listened to the screaming bitch on the side of the highway.

  I’d owned Georgia for six months, and she was turning into a dream horse. I rode her all winter, through deep snow on which she seemed to float and even at night, if there was enough moon to light the way. On bitter cold days I rode her bareback to keep me warm. I rode her to get through hangovers and to get away from the ongoing arguments with my husband. I rode her because it was the only thing left in my life I wasn’t doing wrong.

  One night in March, my husband started drinking again, and I knew it was the right moment to leave. The truth was, the right moment to leave had come and gone a long time before the night the bottle of Scotch reappeared, so it was too late to pack or plan or do anything but grab a coat and run for the Saab.

  I drove all the way to Boston, four hours straight, right to the house of my friend Barbara, a teacher from the group that used to go to Happy Hour together. Barbara drank extra-dry martinis and had great legs. Not that she was ugly, but it was her legs people remembered. She used to say it took a lot of gin to fill up those legs.

  Even though I arrived unexpectedly in the middle of the night, we sat at her kitchen counter—Barbara drinking martinis, me drinking white wine—and talked about what a drunken lout my husband was, and no wonder I’d left him. Someone as wonderful as I was deserved better. Then we talked about all the teachers we knew at school and why their lives were sad and dull, what with husbands and babies and dirty diapers, compared to ours, which were full of interesting moments like, for instance, this talk we were having in the middle of the night in her kitchen.

  “We wanago blazes, nodsid aroun withabunge of kirty dids.”

  “Thazo true.”

  We woke up late the next day and faced each other, pale and shaky, across the kitchen counter again. This time she said, “What do you say we don’t drink today?”

  I said all right, never for a moment believing she meant it. I certainly didn’t, but that’s what you say when someone casually mentions not drinking. Then she suggested we get the Sunday paper.

  She parked in front of a drugstore and went in to get the paper while I sat in the passenger seat with the sun visor pulled down, shading my eyes behind sunglasses even though it was overcast and almost dark enough to be dusk. I looked at my watch. It was dusk. It was six o’clock. We’d slept all day.

  When she came back, she sat in the driver’s seat, riffling through the paper, throwing most of it into the backseat and studying a single page in her lap before she finally looked up and said, “Want to go to church?”

  “Church?” Maybe I had heard her wrong.

  “Not exactly church,” she said. “There’s an AA meeting in the basement of a church right around the corner.”

  My face hurt everywhere my sunglasses touched, and if I moved too fast, the whole world spun so I was careful not to overreact and whip my head around to stare at Barbara. But I was dumbfounded. She might as well have said, Want to go knock over a mini-mart? AA? It was too awful, too humiliating.

  Barbara started to cry. “I’m tired of feeling like this,” she said, sniffling into a Kleenex. “Do what you want, but I’m going.”

  I felt like a terrible friend because she had asked me to do something, and I hadn’t said yes, and now she was crying. Last night she’d thrown the front door open and hugged me even though it was midnight and she didn’t know I was coming, and now all she wanted was for me to go someplace with her for an hour. It was the least I could do. Besides, maybe if she went to an AA meeting, she’d realize she should stop drinking gin and switch to drinking wine like me. Then we could just forget about this little episode.

  “Think any interesting men will be there?” I said.

  Later I wouldn’t remember the meeting or whether there had been interesting men. I also didn’t remember calling my husband to tell him I wasn’t coming back, but the real surprise was that I stopped drinking. Not just because of AA, but because after one night of
not drinking, I wanted to see if I could stop for two nights, then three, and so on. It was a game, like learning to hold your breath underwater, something uncomfortable but rewarding. Suddenly you’re swimming the whole length of the pool without coming up for air, and you think it’s amazing until you break your own record and swim two lengths. Then you’re hooked. All you want to know after that is, How far can I go with this?

  However, it only felt like a game for the first few weeks. After that, it felt like coming out of a coma and realizing all the ways I’d been left behind during the ten years I’d been in a vegetative state. The void in my life created by not drinking was larger than anything I’d ever experienced. If I didn’t drink, what was the point? What did I do?

  I missed drinking but I didn’t miss the hangovers. For the first time in my adult life I had mornings, a whole chunk of day I’d never known about before. I’d perceived them hazily, when I could perceive them at all, as something to survive, something to get through. Now I really had them. I could get up and eat breakfast. I could ride Georgia first thing, before the bugs got bad. I could canter around in the woods near the new house I had bought after I left Jerry.

  It was a miracle, having mornings. I couldn’t get over how beautiful they were. It was like being at summer camp again with a feeling of excitement each dawn because the day ahead was going to be full of horses and sweet-smelling air. And no one was going to hit me because I finally lived alone. It was the first house that was all mine, where no one could tell me to get out or make me feel unwelcome. I had bought it a month after I stopped drinking. So mornings were good. They were really, really good.

  Nights, on the other hand, were awful. Dinner parties were something to survive, especially if liquor was served. Blind dates (or any situation that smacked of a fix-up by well-meaning new friends) were out of the question. Without liquor I couldn’t function socially. I couldn’t make small talk or flirt or laugh. I felt like a child trapped at the grown-ups’ table. Conversation around me sparkled with talk about terrific jobs, fabulous children, trips abroad. I was the retired Gallo expert who stared in amazement at the wineglasses people left half empty when they got up to leave the table. Hey, I wanted to say, how can you leave that? I got quieter and quieter and eventually I stopped going to parties at all. I spent my days and nights alone.