Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  One of the reasons Dr. Grice was so well liked was that she always left you with hope. Not insincere, pie-in-the-sky hope, but real hope. She did it now.

  “The eye cavity is big. It could be a long time before she can’t shut her eye. Until then, she should feel OK.”

  “What do we do when she can’t shut her eye?” A horse had to be able to blink to keep its eyes moist.

  “Let’s see what Dr. Rebhun at Cornell says. This is his area of expertise.” Dr. Grice was sitting sideways in the cab of her truck, her knees facing out with the writing desk on her lap that Donna had passed to her so Dr. Grice could finish writing up the bill. As she talked, she was sketching a horse head and an eye. Then she drew a circle to show where the tumor was.

  In a few minutes she’d pull out of my driveway, leaving me behind with the terrible question that would confront me every morning. What would the eye look like today? How it looked would determine everything else. It would tell us if she was in pain, how fast we were falling, if we’d hit bottom. I felt like tugging at Dr. Grice’s pant leg and saying, “Wait a minute, let me find a grown-up, somebody to be in charge.”

  It was the way I had felt as a new social worker the first time a patient told me he wanted to commit suicide. I wanted to run out of the room and get help, find the person who would know what to do, tell Mommy.

  Facing my frightened, helpless self was the hardest part about a crisis, especially a medical one. Before I did anything else, I had to grapple with overwhelming feelings of self-doubt and denial. Maybe everyone has to deal with those feelings, I don’t know. I just know that I did not feel well equipped for what I was facing now. My first instinct when Dr. Grice started talking had been to put my hands over my ears and yell, Stop! Then when she mentioned the word tumor, a voice in my brain immediately said, Maybe she’s never done a sonogram, maybe she’s reading it upside down. Then when I finally absorbed what she had told me, when I was no longer questioning or blaming the messenger, I was clobbered with anxiety.

  I doubted Dr. Grice saw any of this. And why should she? My model for behavior was the Dalai Lama, because he smiled no matter what. When I was little, my model had been the Queen of England because she exhibited no feelings whatsoever except a love of horses. Most of the time I achieved a blend. Call it cheerful reserve or quiet strength. Boy, I wanted people to think, there goes a calm woman.

  There was that little incident of weeping on Dr. Grice’s bumper over a dinner date with a man, but I didn’t do that very often, and I was sure Dr. Grice had been surprised, just as she would have been surprised to know how alone and afraid I felt now, how incompetent.

  I stood by the truck, squinting into the impossibly beautiful afternoon, trying to fit the word tumor into the kaleidoscope of spring surrounding me. It was a bad word to float across verdant pastures bordered by flowering orchards. How had it found its way down this country lane on to my small farm tucked behind its sturdy fence? It was like the word death finding its way into Christmas, the last day I’d seen my mother alive. Where, in the cluster of gifts underneath the Christmas tree, did you put a dead mother?

  Dr. Grice had finished writing my bill, and the corner of the paper fluttered in the breeze as she held it out to me. “She’s a lucky horse,” she said, “because you’ll take such good care of her.”

  I smiled and nodded even though I knew she was wrong. I knew somehow I’d run away.

  [ 11 ]

  LAY ME DOWN’S illness filled me with a sense of urgency. It changed time from something abstract to something almost visible, something to be watched and measured, something as precious as Lay Me Down herself. Time was achingly finite and unfair, too. Lay Me Down deserved better. So had my mother. And what about me?

  I started to dread going to the barn in the morning. I used to wake up with a feeling of pleasant anticipation at the thought of morning chores, at starting the day with horses. Watching Lay Me Down’s eye changed that. Within a few weeks, the eye had protruded enough for me to see how different it was from the healthy eye. Now when I woke up, I crept to the window, half expecting to see Lay Me Down weaving her head in pain or lying dead next to a grieving Hotshot.

  For several weeks after the diagnosis, I considered euthanizing her immediately. Why put her through another ordeal? Why put me through it? Then I’d go to the barn and feed her, brush her, spend time with her, and the truth is, she was content. I’d even say she was happy.

  She did something all horses do but when she did it, it seemed different to me, as though she got a special enjoyment out of it. Early in the morning, when the sun was just up and the bugs weren’t out yet, she’d find the spot where the sun first hit the pasture and sunbathe. All my horses loved the morning sun but Lay Me Down was always there first and sunbathed the longest. Maybe she loved the sun because she was more sensitive to cold or maybe because once she had been kept inside and didn’t see the sun for a year. When it became too hot for the other three, and they’d gone back to the barn, Lay Me Down would stand in the sun another thirty or forty minutes, then have a good roll before going inside. And in the end, that’s why I decided not to euthanize her: because she loved the sun.

  Once I decided to see Lay Me Down through her illness, something in me changed. The dread I felt about morning chores went away, and I felt less apprehensive, less scared. I spent more time with her. I talked to the homeopathic vet in Florida and he sent me a super vitamin concoction to help boost her immune system. He also sent me a liquid remedy that might slow the growth of the tumor or even shrink it. I put a few drops of it in her grain every day, along with her vitamins, carrots, and—thanks to Allie—a candy peppermint. My grandmother had instilled in me a strict no-sugar rule for horses that had lasted thirty years, until the day Allie heard about it. “That’s ridiculous,” she’d said and brought my horses their first bag of peppermints. Lay Me Down always carefully picked the peppermint out of her grain bucket and ate it first.

  I was particularly diligent about fly proofing her. I didn’t want a single fly near her face, especially near her bad eye. I used Avon’s Skin So Soft straight from the bottle, dabbing it around her eye with a cotton ball. I coated the inside of her ears with Bag Balm, originally made for cows but a good antiseptic salve for all animals. I sprayed the rest of her with a strong commercial horse spray. I didn’t like using conventional horse sprays because they contained such toxic chemicals, but they worked better at keeping flies away, and with Lay Me Down, it was crucial to keep her bad eye free from infection. If the eye continued to push out, she’d wear a full-head fly hood made of nylon mesh.

  To further reduce flies, I kept her stall extra clean and bought cedar chips instead of pine shavings for her bedding. Cedar was twice as expensive but made the whole barn smell nice and probably helped reduce the flies in everyone’s stall. When they got really bad in the middle of the summer, I shut Lay Me Down in her stall while I was at work and put a box fan in her window set on low so she’d always have a breeze. Keeping her in her stall was to ensure that she would never be trapped outside the barn by Georgia. The arrangement seemed to make everyone happy, including Lay Me Down, who headed right for her stall when she saw me walking across the pasture in the morning. I left hay for Georgia and Tempo in their stalls and put Hotshot’s right outside Lay Me Down’s door, because as far as I could tell, that’s where he spent the day.

  There was a young woman I occasionally hired to take care of my horses when I was away. Hannah had grown up around horses and still had one of her own, though she had less time to ride since beginning a business program at the nearby community college earlier that fall. Because I didn’t know what symptoms Lay Me Down might develop, I was nervous about leaving her alone all day. I decided to call Hannah to see if she could check on Lay Me Down while I was at work.

  “She seems OK right now,” I told her, “but soon she might need meds or some kind of dressing.” But that wasn’t my worst fear. “She could have a seizure,” I added, cringing at
the image of Lay Me Down thrashing around helplessly on the floor of her stall. I held my breath, expecting Hannah to politely decline. Who in their right mind would want to take on the responsibility of an animal this sick?

  “Sure,” she said without hesitating. “I can stop by almost anytime. Most of my classes are at night.”

  “Thank you,” I breathed, more relieved than I could express. We agreed I would pay her ten dollars an hour, more if and when Lay Me Down needed some kind of treatment. For now, Hannah would clean her stall, change her water, and give her fresh hay and a treat.

  As the summer wore on, I was less fearful, but I was sadder, too, and softer somehow. The mornings I spent in the barn before work seemed precious and too short. One morning I found my Siamese cat sitting on the sunny windowsill of Georgia’s stall, Georgia below with her neck stretched toward him, taking a cautious sniff. She knew about cat claws, and the sight brought tears to my eyes. Because it was funny? Sweet? Ironic that a fourteen-pound cat commanded this kind of respect from Georgia when no one else did?

  It was as if in accepting Lay Me Down’s illness I’d accepted something else, something bigger. I had thought I would prepare for her death by pulling back, withholding my feelings, or even euthanizing her before any symptoms developed. Instead, I spent more time with her.

  She was the only horse I resumed grooming daily, and she loved the attention. I’d wait until she’d finished her grain and then bring the grooming kit in and set it on the floor, where she’d sigh over it as if greeting a long-lost foal. I’d pull out the curry comb with the dull rubber teeth and, starting high on her neck, brush in short, vigorous circles, loosening dead skin and dirt from one end of her to the other. The harder I brushed, the better she liked it, bobbing her head and leaning into the brush whenever I came to a particularly itchy spot. When I was done currying and her whole body was covered in the dirty little circles a curry comb leaves, I’d get out the red brush with the long nylon bristles and brush away all the loosened dirt, leaving her coat soft and shiny. I’d brush out her short dark mane, which never seemed to grow, and get the worst tangles out of her tail with my hands, leaving the real tail brushing for the weekends when I had more time. When I was done, I’d fly proof her, give her a second peppermint, turn on her fan, and leave her fresh hay and water for the day. In the evening when I got home from work, I’d repeat the routine, only then I’d open her stall door and let her out to graze with the other three horses in the cooler air of the relatively insect-free night.

  The more time I spent with her, the sadder I sometimes felt, but I didn’t pull back. I just felt sad. Animals live in the moment, and that’s what I tried to do that summer, getting up half an hour earlier in order to spend more time with all four of my horses but especially with Lay Me Down. In a way I felt more alive, filled with the smells of summer: the sweet new hay in the hayloft, the woodsy smell of cedar chips, the heady perfume of the wild roses growing along the stone wall near the barn, and Lay Me Down’s peppermint breath.

  In the middle of July, Hank called. His message took up the whole answering-machine tape with an apology for not calling sooner and a monologue about ugly divorce details that I fast-forwarded through to the end, where he asked if I’d like to have dinner. Afterward I sat by the phone, staring at the answering machine, drawing starbursts on the message pad, a wide smile stretched across my face.

  Before I called him back, before I even knew if I’d see him again, I headed straight to Victoria’s Secret in the Hudson Valley Mall. It was a knee-jerk reaction, a sense that it was time to change something. At the store I chose seven pairs of black lace, French-cut bikini panties.

  “No pretty bra to match?” asked the child behind the counter, smiling. This was something I hadn’t even considered. “Can I leave these here?” I asked, dropping the underwear on the counter as I headed for the bras.

  “I’m Trudy, if you need help,” she chirped.

  Did Trudy think I needed help getting into a bra? I looked around. There were no women in their forties in sight. I told myself I was lucky I had a figure that still looked OK in this sort of thing. I assumed it looked OK. I hadn’t actually tried anything on yet. But if I planned ahead, if I bought enough of the right thing in the right size, I’d never have to come back again as long as I lived. I’d never again have to be the only woman in Victoria’s Secret who was old enough to be Trudy’s grandmother.

  Suddenly I felt really old, old and crazy. Maybe that’s how Trudy saw me. When I left, she and the other size-two clerk would laugh about the crone who’d just bought all those giant-sized black bikinis. “Think she still does it?” they’d ask.

  That’s what I wanted to know when I was that age, who still did it. I would have assumed women of my age didn’t because who’d want them? They were old. I remembered being twenty-four at a friend’s twenty-fifth birthday party and feeling like a big wall had just dropped between us. She was old and I wasn’t. The difference between our ages was only a few months but it might as well have been decades. It was all over for her. People twenty-five and up just sat around waiting to die. That was what I’d thought.

  So while I was waiting to die, I looked at bras. The last thing on my mind was comfort. It seemed to be the last thing on Victoria’s Secret’s mind, too. It was the land of the underwire, a place where breasts were something to be worn just under the chin. At the moment I was willing to go along with that. I wouldn’t have been in there if I hadn’t been.

  I wasn’t sure of my size. Smallish. The kind of shape that in the past had made men say, “I prefer flat women.” I bet they did, the way I preferred men with no teeth. Still, the As had less to fear from gravity. They also had less to choose from, which wasn’t so bad considering there were four big walls covered with bras on little plastic hangers. It was the kind of thing that flooded me with anxiety. There were too many choices. It was why I didn’t like to shop in department stores like Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. To find one skirt you had to look through a thousand? Why? It was a maze and a house of horrors all in one. No matter where you turned, as far as the eye could see, you bumped into skirts.

  For me, shopping boiled down to getting it over with quickly, so I selected a few black bras, a few white ones, and headed for the dressing room. From four walls of bras to four walls of mirrors, it was a toss-up which was worse. The good news was that I was working with the half of my body where lying to myself about cellulite wouldn’t be necessary. There was the Cellulite is beautiful lie, the Babies have cellulite, too, and they’re cute lie, and the whopper of them all, only possible in certain kinds of lighting, It’s gone!

  I tried not to look in the mirror until I had to, which wasn’t easy in a tiny room lined with mirrors. By mistake I glimpsed myself in my own bra, the one I had worn from home. It reminded me of the Timex watch ad where they strap a Timex to the bottom of someone’s ice skate and then run over it with a bulldozer and then dig it out of the sand a year later, smashed and filthy, but still ticking. That was my bra, a grayish film stuck to my skin that looked like something I should exfoliate. If Trudy saw me now, she’d run for a Ziploc bag and tweezers.

  I shoved the old bra into the front pocket of my jeans, horrified I’d let myself come to this. It was as though, surrounded by all these mirrors, I couldn’t escape seeing the part of my life I’d buried. So often I felt a kind of smug satisfaction in my independence, the poster girl for living alone and loving it. I wasn’t single, I was autonomous. I was free. I was that fish without a bicycle. I was complete.

  So why did I feel like weeping into the pretty lace bras? Why did all this freedom suddenly seem so awful? Poor Hank. Poor any man who made a date with such an ambivalent woman. But right now it wasn’t ambivalence I was feeling; it was gaping, shrieking loneliness.

  It wasn’t what I’d expected would happen to me at Victoria’s Secret. I had come for underwear, not insight, but I’d gotten both. The underwire principle of life: make the most of what you’ve got. It di
d wonders for my body; why not for the rest of me?

  I was ready to pay for my new life, which was heaped on the counter in a small pile of black and white lace. Trudy sorted through it, scanning in the prices, murmuring little sounds of approval as though she suspected I was doing something out of character and wanted to encourage it. When she was done ringing everything up, she didn’t hit Total. Instead, she looked at me and frowned. “Having the wrong nightie could spell disaster.” Her expression was dead serious, as though a problematic nightie was on a par with other global threats: war, famine, the hole in the ozone.

  “A nightie?” I felt exposed. I’d been caught with a half-baked plan to end loneliness. I couldn’t escape yet.

  “Follow me,” she said and headed across the store to a rack of nighties. She turned around to consider me from head to foot and then turned back to study the rack. She pulled out a diaphanous forest green garment that might have been a slip and held it up to me. “I like real silk, don’t you?”

  I took the nightie from her and held it up to myself, turning to face a mirror. “Now I do,” I said.

  My second dinner with Hank was nothing like the first. This time there was a sexual tension between us that gave the whole night a pleasant incoherence. Nothing much about him bothered me—not the crumbs on his lapel, the strip malls desecrating America, or his having forsaken books. Not even his allergy to horses bothered me or that he still wasn’t divorced. What seemed important was that I was wearing pretty new underwear. The underwire of the bra dug into my ribs every time I took a breath, and I found myself wanting to say, What exactly is bondage?

  Our conversation was peppered with presumptions. We both said things like the next time I see you and when we get together again. But at the same time, little red flags went up, highlighting critical areas of incompatibility. Besides observing that we had no interests in common, I found myself assessing him as I would the more empathetic creatures in my domain, as if he were a horse. He was a stallion, of course, and as such, self-centered and domineering. As unappealing as this was, he was the first man to seek me out in years.