Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  With all that peace and quiet I had plenty of time to think, and what I thought about was beginning that novel I’d been wanting to write ever since I was seven. It was the other thing I loved besides horses: books. I loved reading them, and I couldn’t imagine anything better than growing up and writing one. When I became a teacher, it was always in the back of my mind to use summers and school vacations as a time to write. I wrote poetry, kept a journal, and briefly freelanced as a feature writer for a small Boston paper, but in spite of all this, I’d never gotten serious about writing.

  I needed to support myself, and the chances of making a living as a novelist were slim. After burning through my inheritance on expensive appliances (no longer mine), a house, and a horse, I needed a job. I had liked teaching but I always found myself wondering why smart students failed or why some students hated school or smoked at twelve or rebelled in other ways. I wondered about the other teachers, too: why they said what they said and did what they did. I wondered about people all the time, mostly about the unhappy ones. There seemed to be so many, including me. Mornings were lucid, and my days were peaceful and calm, but I couldn’t say I ever felt happy. I felt grateful sometimes, not happy. There was a difference. I was relieved but not energized.

  Therefore, while working in the office of a local alcohol treatment center, I returned to night school for a master’s degree in social work. By my midthirties, I was counseling in a residential drug-treatment program during the day and teaching social work classes at the local community college at night.

  I felt as turned around as Eliza Dolittle. There seemed to be no connection between my former life and my new life, except for horses. Horses were the thread that had been there from the beginning, through the pain of childhood and the drinking and the marriage, the thread that seemed to keep me stitched together. Georgia was, in a sense, my therapist. For years she listened to my rantings as we tore around the woods. I couldn’t help it. I needed an ear and there they were, two big ones, right in front of me. Georgia needed someone, too, so less than a week after she was returned to me in the divorce settlement, I acquired Hotshot to keep her company and, a few weeks later, Tempo. And eleven months later, there was the surprise arrival of Georgia’s foal, Sweet Revenge.

  Despite the business of the new career, the new house, the new life, the urge to write a book did not subside with the passage of time. I’d been saying I wanted to write for twenty years. I’d said it so often and for so long that people who knew me didn’t even hear it anymore. It was just one of those things I repeated, like “I should re-gravel the driveway.”

  “I want to write a book,” I said to Allie.

  “Did I tell you about that eagle?”

  “I just can’t think of anything to write.” I’d throw up my hands.

  “I was in my kayak and this eagle was standing there, not twenty feet away, playing with a snorkeling mask somebody must have left on the beach last summer.”

  “Other people write books, why can’t I?”

  “A bald eagle!”

  “Wow,” I said, “a bald eagle.”

  Even though I said it all the time and no one listened anymore when I did, the secret was, I meant it. I’d always meant it. Actually, the real secret was stranger than wanting to write a book. The real secret was that I already thought of myself as a writer. I’d hardly written a word and I couldn’t think of a single idea for a book, but in my mind, I was a writer. I’d been a writer since I was seven.

  Thirty-five years is a long time to carry around an idea about yourself that has no foundation in reality; it was as if I secretly thought I was the Grand Duchess Anastasia. The evidence was so slim that a pessimist might say it was nonexistent. But I was pregnant with book. I could feel it kicking to get out. I was one of those women designed by nature to write books: wide in the hips, perfect for long hours sitting at the computer. I could birth a lot of books with those hips, if I could just get started.

  Yet I didn’t get started. For the next two months my days were full. Mornings before work I rode Georgia. All day I counseled clients, taught at the college, and once home again, I nursed Lay Me Down back to health. I worried about my bad back and the gray hairs appearing on my head faster than I could pluck them out. I had always promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those women who clung to youth when youth was gone. No collagen, no surgery, no expensive creams that promised to reduce or eliminate wrinkles. When the time came, I’d throw out the short skirts, the clingy tops, anything with Lycra, and just look and dress my age. But accepting age was harder than I’d expected. More than the physical changes and the chucking of the accoutrements of youth, the hardest part of middle age was realizing that time was finite. The more gray hair I saw in the mirror, the worse I felt about not writing. I was like a woman facing forty who was desperate for a baby.

  A few weeks after her foal left, it was time to blend Lay Me Down into the herd. She’d gained a hundred pounds since I’d gotten her (you weighed horses with a measuring tape that gave pounds instead of feet and inches), her lungs were clear, and she was lonely. She grazed near the gate of her pasture even though there was better grass farther away. If she stayed near the gate she could see the other three horses, and my sense was that just seeing them helped her feel like part of the herd.

  I didn’t introduce her to both geldings at once, as planned. My instinct now told me to bring Hotshot to Lay Me Down’s pasture and leave them alone to get acquainted. Hotshot was old and sweet, Lay Me Down was crippled from racing and lonely, and there wasn’t a mean bone in either of their bodies. What could happen?

  Georgia and Tempo made a big fuss as I led Hotshot out of the pasture and shut the gate, leaving them behind. They both kept up a frantic whinnying, rushing back and forth along the fence as though terrified.

  Not Hotshot. He was definitely the gentleman caller on his way to sit on the front porch with someone special. He’d been looking at Lay Me Down for a month, and it was like this was the dating game, and he’d won. He was ready. He’d lost most of his winter coat, and he looked sleek and shiny. He was almost a perfect match in color to Georgia’s red. People who saw them for the first time had a hard time telling them apart.

  In the order of dominance—there is always a clear and rigid pecking order with horses—Hotshot was at the bottom. In some herds, establishing the pecking order could be a rough business involving loud, physical confrontations. That had never happened with my three. Within minutes of being together for the first time, they had worked out that Tempo was the wise and gentle ruler, Georgia was the bitchin’ babe who got away with obnoxious behavior just because, and Hotshot was the good-natured nanny who doted on the other two, even when he was Georgia’s punching bag. This had been worked out nonverbally and nonviolently as they stood in a tight circle, all three noses together in the middle. Every once in a while a head had jerked up, but in a few seconds the noses were together again. This went on for five or so minutes, and then they started grazing, and that was that.

  Hotshot was all arched neck and big eyes as we headed over to Lay Me Down’s pasture. His eagerness to meet her was touching given his experience with females. He’d taken so much abuse from Georgia in the past ten years. Who was to say this one wouldn’t be the same? But that didn’t seem to be what he was thinking as he tugged at the lead, hurrying me along toward Lay Me Down’s pasture.

  Lay Me Down had seen us coming and stood with her chest pressed against the gate, waiting. Her head was high, her ears up and forward as she blew out a little whinny. Hotshot whinnied back. They were talking. I was dying to know what they were saying. Hello? You can come over but don’t pull any funny stuff? After all these weeks I can’t believe we’re finally meeting? This place has great grass, don’t you agree?

  We arrived at the gate and right away they touched noses for a good long sniff. This was one of the prettiest yet most tension-fraught moments of introducing two horses. The outcome of a face-to-face meeting was impossible to pre
dict and might or might not involve some form of physical aggression. With Georgia, a meeting with any new horse, particularly another mare, almost certainly involved violence. When a horse in the wild wants to attack something, it uses its front legs to do so. The kick can be devastating, even lethal.

  I was relieved but not surprised when neither Hotshot nor Lay Me Down exhibited any kind of aggression whatsoever. They sniffed and whinnied softly at each other, and after a few minutes I pushed gently at Lay Me Down’s chest to move her away from the gate so I could open it. She backed up just enough for Hotshot to squeeze through, I unclipped the lead line, and he trotted right in.

  I stood at the gate and watched two sweet old horses go a-courting. Their mutual attraction was instant and strong, and to a human eye—say that of a lonely middle-aged person with a tendency toward anthropomorphizing—it looked romantic. Hotshot’s nose spent a lot of time moving from one end of Lay Me Down’s long neck to the other, and when he felt braver, he let it wander past her shoulder right to the middle of her back. She grazed. He sniffed. She grazed some more, he sniffed. She moved, he moved and sniffed. She wandered over to the watering trough for a drink, he wandered over and sniffed. He couldn’t believe she was for real. She was nothing like Georgia. She was nice.

  She liked him, too. She seemed to understand that the sniffing wasn’t going anywhere heavy, so she’d put up with it until the infatuation ran its course and they could move on to being a herd—a herd of two, but a herd. She knew this first. Deep down he knew, too, but sometimes he forgot he was gelded. Georgia had no trouble reminding him he was useless for that sort of thing with a quick incisor to the neck, but Lay Me Down let him dream for a while. She looked at me and sighed. Can he stay? she seemed to ask.

  Hours later I looked out the window, and Lay Me Down was grazing with Hotshot standing at a right angle to her shoulder, no longer sniffing but still not composed enough to think about grass. She was much taller than he was; he had to lift his head to look over her back. Her legs were long and slender compared to his shorter, stockier ones. Her neck, too, was long and slender; his was shorter and thicker. She was every inch a racing machine; he was every inch a dude-ranch dude. Together, they were a duet of contentment. I was happy for both, for Hotshot to have a break from Georgia’s relentless bossing and for Lay Me Down to have a companion.

  Tempo and Georgia had moved away from the fence and returned to grazing, all signs of distress about Hotshot’s departure gone. Occasionally, one or the other looked up, saw Hotshot in the distance, and, satisfied that he was within sight, returned to grazing.

  I decided to leave them this way indefinitely, in contented couples. I was pretty sure if I added Tempo to the pasture with Lay Me Down and Hotshot, things would go as smoothly as they had with Hotshot, but that would have meant leaving Georgia alone, and I didn’t think she’d tolerate that, not for long. Besides, it would have been unfair to leave her alone while her two boys were in plain sight with another horse.

  The next step was bringing the mares together, and I dreaded it. I knew Georgia too well to have any illusions about how she’d behave. Sometimes I wondered what had possessed me to get another horse, or if I had to, why it couldn’t have been a gelding. I blamed myself for creating a monster, a monster named Georgia. All these years of spoiling her, of never allowing anyone else to ride her, of letting her boss me around the same way she bossed around Hotshot and Tempo and the vet. I wondered why I had knowingly, willingly, eagerly paid money for a discipline problem. From the moment I saw her, I had known she was trouble, yet I couldn’t wait to get her home to my barn.

  Sometimes I wondered if I would ever love a human being as much as I loved Georgia. This troubled me. And the older I got, the more it troubled me. I didn’t want to be one of those people whose obituary mentioned only surviving loved ones with hooves.

  What I really wondered was, could I love a man? I loved my women friends. I loved my brother, his wife, and his three children, I loved my neighbors, and I loved Allie. I even loved people I’d never met, like Jane Austen for writing her books, Wolf Kahn for his pastels, and Franz Marc for his paintings of horses.

  Yet I didn’t love a man. Not that way. I wondered if something was wrong with me, if I was one of those people incapable of intimacy. It would have made sense if I was, but I didn’t want to be.

  “Why don’t men like me?” I asked a social worker friend whose honesty, insight, and frankness I particularly valued.

  She paused for two seconds, possibly less. “Because of what they see,” she said.

  I swallowed hard. She thought I was ugly. “What do they see?” But I didn’t really want to hear her answer. It was obvious she was pathologically abrasive and couldn’t be trusted.

  “They see a big wall,” she said, “with a sign that reads KEEP OUT.”

  I was so relieved she didn’t say, Sorry, but men just find you repulsive that the notion that I was walling myself off seemed acceptable. “Good fences make good neighbors,” I said.

  “Yeah, but your wall is covered with ice and giant thorn bushes and along the top is razor wire, and the whole thing is electrified, and there are these armed guards with nuclear weapons and …”

  “I get the picture. But if I don’t know I’m doing that, how do I stop?”

  “Thaw and disarm.”

  I practiced thawing in the grocery store. When I ran into a male shopper, I didn’t dive behind my grocery list. I looked into his eyes and smiled, or if I couldn’t manage that, I looked at his shoes instead of down at mine. One day I was in the farmer’s market near where I lived, picking out a pie.

  “Which do you think is the best pie?” asked a deep voice right next to me.

  His presence caught me so off guard that I had to jerk my head away from the pies I’d been contemplating, and before any entrenched behavior had a chance, I was looking into his smiling brown eyes and smiling right back. He was handsome, too, and tall, dressed country casual, the way I loved a man to dress, as though he wasn’t going to let a staggering stock portfolio get in the way of the fact that he just felt more comfortable in stained khakis and Birkenstocks.

  “Blueberry,” I said, tossing my newly highlighted locks off my forehead. I felt bold and wild, as if underneath my sweats I was wearing a garter belt.

  “Blueberry?” he said meaningfully.

  “Honey!” a female voice called from the entrance. “The kids are getting spastic in the backseat.”

  I followed his eyes to Audrey Hepburn, who stood in the doorway in tiny cutoffs and a wedding ring. It was too painful to look at her for more than a long glance. She made me feel like throwing myself on the steps at Lourdes and wailing, Why these legs?

  “Be right there, hon,” his full lips answered, and he swept up a blueberry pie with one fuzzy hand. “Thanks for the tip.” He smiled and tore himself away with depressingly little effort.

  I told myself this was just the warm-up. Something to remind me to stop wearing pajamas to the store. Let’s face it, if you sleep in sweats, technically that makes them pajamas. Men don’t like women in pajamas, not even in bed. It all came back to me, how it was to be with a man, how none of them had ever said, “If you’re going to wear those sweats, you better be packing birth control.”

  Sweats were the razor wire of my wardrobe, and they worked. There hadn’t been a break-in for ten years. To be honest, I wasn’t sure anyone had been interested in trying, unless you counted the men I counseled at work, who woke up off drugs for the first time in twenty years so desperately needy that they were like baby ducks, imprinting on the first thing they saw.

  Besides clients, I hardly ever met men. Social work was a woman’s world. I knew male social workers existed, but they were as rare as red beach glass. Besides, a man with good communication skills just wasn’t my type. No man I’d been with had ever said, “Sweetie, let’s just sit down and work this out.”

  Maybe that was the problem. My type was modeled on my father, and men like
my father turned out to be, well, men like my father: bright, funny, rejecting. Or, as his fourth wife put it, “Terrific, until you got to know him.” I spent years waiting for my father to notice me. And that was after years spent waiting for him to just show up. I was never more than minimally interesting to my father, and even then, it was mostly as a target for his humor or his wrath. My father was a lot like my first pony, Bunty. Both returned my love with a mean bite.

  However, I knew my social worker friend was right. I didn’t have to be the impaired rat who kept going back for the shock. I could be the smart rat, the rat who chose pleasure instead of pain, the Christopher Columbus rat, willing to fall off the edge of the earth rather than go the same old route. I was so ready, ready to be that daring, adventurous rat who discovers a whole new world.

  If Lay Me Down could risk loving, so could I.

  [ 8 ]

  I SAT ON an upended cinder block, reading the newspaper in the sunny doorway of the barn. It was one of my favorite places to sit, especially in May when the swallows swooped in and out, busy with nesting. That day, however, I sat listening to Georgia pace around her stall, whinnying in fury because Lay Me Down was out in the pasture. It was Lay Me Down’s turn to be outside with the boys, while Georgia remained in her stall. I’d been rotating them, one in, one out, for three days. Georgia was behaving as I’d imagined she would. When I let the mares sniff noses over the stall door, Georgia squealed and struck the door. Lay Me Down looked alarmed and backed away.