“Does it bother you?” I asked Dorothy.
She shook her head. “You know those things don’t bother me.”
True. She’d seen worse. Dorothy was a hospice volunteer. She’d held her boyfriend, Charlie, in her arms when he had died of cancer nine months earlier. The end hadn’t been pretty but, in spite of that, Dorothy said being with him when he died was one of the most beautiful experiences she’d ever been through.
Lay Me Down pushed the hay around with her nose, sniffing for her favorite grasses. Maybe she was looking for clover. Horses loved clover. I’d never sat on the floor of her stall like this. My stall floors weren’t clean enough, and there was always too much to do when I was in the barn. I would have felt guilty just sitting. However, I didn’t feel guilty now, sitting on the spotless rubber floor with Dorothy, watching Lay Me Down eat hay. I felt relaxed and protective of this beautiful animal who blinked at us with drowsy affection.
I looked at my watch. Six o’clock. The snow sounded like sand blowing across the blackened skylights high above us, and shadows filled the corners of Lay Me Down’s stall where the overhead lights didn’t reach. I hadn’t realized it was night already. The outside seemed as remote as the moon, as uninhabitable. If it had been ten below this afternoon, what was the temperature now? At some point we were going to have to leave, make a run across that wind-whipped parking lot for the car. I couldn’t bear to think about it.
“Want to look around?” Lay Me Down seemed content and tired. She’d be OK if we left her alone for awhile.
“Sure,” said Dorothy, getting to her feet.
We gave Lay Me Down hugs before we let ourselves out of her stall. We visited the Percheron across the aisle, a sleepy black gelding who glanced at us from his hay but didn’t come over. I looked at his chart and saw that he was from Connecticut, and he, too, had an eye tumor. It must have been the eye ward and all the horses there, patients of Dr. Rebhun. There were two other horses in this section and sure enough, both had eye tumors, and both charts listed Dr. Rebhun as the vet. Lay Me Down had the only tumor where a mass was visible.
We wandered all over the huge complex, fascinated by the humanlike services offered, all on a scale for horses. There were operating rooms with two large padded tables, upended and close together like stanchions that the horse stood between to be anesthetized. Once anesthetized, this horse sandwich pivoted until the side of the horse requiring surgery was facing upward on the now horizontal table. This was all done by the push of a button mounted on a wall panel.
We walked through doors marked INTENSIVE CARE and saw a white pony standing in the middle of a stall, supported by a wide sling that passed under her belly and was attached to ropes coming from the ceiling. She was hooked to several IV drips, whose tubes descended from holes in the ceiling. There was no chart outside the stall to tell us what was wrong with her. She looked sound asleep so we kept quiet and tiptoed past.
We passed shower stalls, foaling stalls, stalls for X-rays and MRIs, and stalls with treadmills for stress tests. Everything was immaculate. There wasn’t a Q-tip or a roll of Vetrap in sight. There also wasn’t a human being, not even Eva, who must have gone home for the night. That we could wander around this expensive facility completely unmonitored amazed us.
We got lost trying to get back to Lay Me Down and wandered up and down the long corridors, passing horses with broken legs, horses with bandaged heads, and horses who looked fine but whose charts described pulmonary problems, blood disorders, and heart disease. We became more interested in finding out where they were from than in what was wrong with them. They were from all over the world: South Africa, Venezuela, Spain, Mexico. Some came from the most expensive breeding farms in America. Others, like Lay Me Down, were beloved backyard pets.
We finally began to understand the building’s configuration. It was laid out in the shape of an H, with the addition of two extra lines across the top and the bottom. Lay Me Down’s stall was in the bottom right-hand corner of the H. The front door was on the left edge of the middle of the H, the side door on the bottom left. After we’d walked around for an hour, that was our theory anyway.
When we finally found our way back, Lay Me Down had finished her hay and stood, almost asleep, one rear leg bent with her hoof cocked on its toe in typical horse posture of repose. She widened her eyes at us briefly, sighed, and returned to her semi-sleep. I noticed manure in her stall and went to the storage room for a shovel and wheelbarrow to clean it before we left for the night. There was a drain in the middle of the floor for urine and for rinsing down the stalls.
We picked up our coats, said good night to Lay Me Down again, and headed down the corridor for the long walk to the side door.
“Wait a minute,” Dorothy said, turning around. “I bet there’s a door someplace right near here.”
This was Dorothy’s little quirk, finding “illegal” doors in places like museums and restaurants, places like the Cornell Vet Hospital. She didn’t do it to rebel so much as to gratify her midwestern sense of logic. If there was a door, use it. A door marked NO EXIT was just plain silly to her. Clearly it was an exit, and, what’s more, it was also an entrance. We not only found an unmarked door that opened to the parking lot, but it didn’t lock behind us, so if we could find it again, it was the way we’d return the next morning.
We drove across a deserted campus and through a nearly deserted town. Both institutions, Ithaca College and Cornell University, were on semester break; most of the students were gone until mid-January. We checked into our motel, a nondescript, one-story strip of rooms about ten minutes from campus, and asked directions to the Moosewood Restaurant. Twenty minutes later, we walked into the cheerful buzz of a full dining room, eager to taste the food Mollie Katzen had made famous in the 1977 Moosewood Cookbook.
Whoever was left in town seemed to have congregated here across steaming bowls of vegetable soup, thick stews, and garlic mashed potatoes. Sitting in the far corner of the room was a young man with a guitar singing folk ballads. I bought both of us copies of their newest cookbook, Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites, from a stack by the front door, and while we waited for our pasta, we flipped through the recipes. It was after eight, and we were both tired from rising early and the long drive. It felt good to look at the cookbook, listen to the music, and not have to talk. Dorothy and I knew each other well enough to know what we didn’t have the energy to talk about that night. For Dorothy, it was facing her first Christmas without Charlie. For me, it was facing any Christmas, added to which was the anxiety of Lay Me Down’s prognosis. For two people on the edge of sadness, we had a pretty good time. The food was delicious, the music reminded us of our youth, and the car was parked right in front of the restaurant.
And that was about as good as that night could possibly get.
[ 15 ]
AT SEVEN THE next morning, Dorothy and I sat on her bed in the motel room and sipped instant coffee, staring out the window at desolation. It had been too dark the night before to see our surroundings, but this morning we opened the curtains to a view of the motel parking lot, a strip of snowy road and, on the other side of that, the empty parking lot of a CVS. It was a grim landscape in the gray winter light, filled with blowing snow, as though we’d destroyed the planet and all that was left was a howling polar wind and a chain store.
“I wonder what the suicide rate is here,” I said.
Dorothy laughed softly. “We just didn’t bring the right clothes.”
“Expedition gear?”
“Hats.”
How could we have forgotten hats? Well, we had, along with long underwear and anything to read. I never went anywhere without a book. Neither did Dorothy. Not that we’d had time to read. There was a television in the room, which was a real treat since neither of us had one at home that had any reception. Ours were used only for watching videos. We thought everything that appeared on the screen was fascinating, even the commercials. We had turned it on the night before as soon as we
walked in the room and sat zombie-eyed in front of it until one in the morning. I’d had to drag myself away from a Lean Cuisine commercial with terrific music to call Stan and Carol at midnight to see if they’d gotten home all right. They’d sounded stoned. Then I heard the Lean Cuisine commercial in the background at their house and understood that we were all on the same drug.
Some of the things we had liked about the motel room the night before seemed awful to us in the morning. Top on the list was the television, followed by the view. We decided to check out as soon as we’d packed and spend the rest of the morning at the hospital.
We picked up coffee and corn muffins on the way and got to Cornell around eight, letting ourselves in the same door we had exited from the night before. One glance at Lay Me Down from across the corridor, and I could tell she’d been drugged. She stood swaybacked and droopy from nose to tail. Her eyes were shut, and her head hung almost to her knees. She was utterly still. She opened her eyes briefly when I slid back her door, but she didn’t turn her head to look at me, and she shut them again before I was across the stall. There was clear gel smeared around her bad eye. They’d already run tests.
I checked her water and feed bucket and, for the first time since arriving at Cornell, felt angry. Her grain had been mixed with water and lay untouched in a mushy mess. It meant she hadn’t eaten anything that morning. It meant whoever had fed her hadn’t read the instructions in her chart. Lay Me Down didn’t like her grain wet. It was so simple.
I grabbed the bucket and headed for the garbage can in the storage room. I was so angry I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even produce the words to explain to Dorothy. I threw out the wet grain and dried her bucket with a towel. And then suddenly I was sitting on a bale of hay, crying. I couldn’t save this horse, not with dry grain or a good winter coat, or by sending her to the best hospital in the world. Not even by loving her.
I couldn’t save myself either, from feeling five years old again, helpless, and horrified. I knew that my rage and deep sorrow was thirty-eight years old, preserved perfectly intact, like a buried artifact suddenly exposed to the light. My past was more real than ever, more acutely alive in me than ever before. It had taken my love for this sick horse to make me willing to finally face death after all these years, to cry for the first time about the death of my mother and the loss of my family. It had taken me thirty-eight years to not drink or joke or lie about how awful the rest of my childhood had been. It was hard to accept that it was mine. All these years I had coped by distancing myself from it, as if it had happened to someone else, a child in a story.
I sat on the bale of hay and sobbed. A memory surfaced, a memory of a day soon after my mother’s death, when I had just gone to live with my grandmother. “Where’s my mother?” I’d asked her.
“You’re not to talk about her anymore,” she’d answered, a bejeweled finger shaking in my face. My mother was a forbidden subject; I’d been bad to bring it up. Years later, one night at the dinner table, just after I’d gone to live with my grandfather, I asked him to tell me about my mother, who was his daughter. Before he could answer, he started to cry.
“Now see what you’ve done,” his wife hissed at me and I was sent to my room.
Dorothy walked into the storage room and sat next to me on the bale of hay. I couldn’t look up, but I felt her hand making circles on my back.
“What is it?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to say, how to explain the depth of my grief. It seemed so private to me, something I could only talk about with my brother, the other person who had gone through it. I didn’t know how anyone else could understand the shame connected to what we had experienced. There was no rational basis for this shame but it was there, bigger than our sadness. It was the shame of being unwanted, unloved. So I had yearned for the day I would belong only to myself, free from anyone who could make me feel like a burden, who could leave me or die, as if that was possible.
“They screwed up her feed,” I said, looking around for a paper towel.
Dorothy pulled a clean tissue out of her pocket and handed it to me. I blew my nose and took a deep breath. “Is it awful without Charlie?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore, but I cried a lot at first.”
I hardly ever cried. That’s probably why I was crying now, because of all the things I had never cried about before. It was as though Lay Me Down and my childhood had merged into the same thing: losing what mattered, losing love. In a crazy way, it felt like Lay Me Down had been taking care of me ever since I got her, bringing to life parts of me that had died with my mother. By her gentle affection I felt restored to the status of someone who mattered, someone who was needed. She gave me that, a sense of family. We both had belonged to nobody, nobody who cared, and now so late in our lives, this miracle had occurred. We had come together on my farm, and for the first time, we had both been free from our fears.
Voices came from the corridor. It sounded like a crowd. I got up and splashed water on my face from the faucet at the utility sink. I left the empty bucket beside her grain. There was no point feeding her until the sedative had worn off. I took a leaf of hay to put in her stall so she’d have something sweet to smell as well as something to nibble when she started to come around.
Outside the storage room the corridor was filled with young women. We counted ten students and one older woman, the vet teaching the class. One of them told us they were in their final year of vet school. I asked where the men were. She said there were no men in this class, that more than seventy-five percent of the vet students were female. We stood back and listened while the teacher presented Lay Me Down’s case. Then they all trooped into her stall to examine the patient.
It was a funny scene, this group of young women gathered around my sleepy horse. It reminded me of an early riding class years ago: a cluster of seven-year-olds pressed close to a tall horse, faces tilted upward toward the graceful neck and the great round eyes, thrilled if the eyes looked their way, singled one of them out. Lay Me Down’s stall echoed with the sound of those little girls. They gathered around her, their voices full of tender concern, though now they were in their late or midtwenties and draped with stethoscopes instead of braids.
Dorothy and I watched from across the corridor, well out of the way of the class studying eye tumors. No one had asked who we were. I didn’t know if they realized I was the owner of the horse who stood quietly under their scrutiny. The class seemed informal, perhaps a follow-up to whatever test had been done earlier that morning. Some of them listened to her heart and lungs with their stethoscopes. Some just stroked her neck, murmuring encouragement at the sleepy face. I loved watching them discover her. “What a sweetie,” they said. “What a wonderful horse.”
They didn’t stay in her stall long, ten minutes at most, and then they filed out, disappearing down the corridor as they went on to the next case. Lay Me Down stood immobile in the middle of her stall, still heavily sedated. Her lower lip hung open, exposing her bottom teeth. Her eyes were slits of dark moisture under gooey lids. I brought in the leaf of hay and scattered it around right under her nose. I got a label from the storage room and wrote a reminder about not wetting down her feed and stuck it on the front of her chart.
I didn’t know what else I could do. It might be hours before the sedative wore off and she was in any shape for a visit. I had been warned that meeting Dr. Rebhun was unlikely. I had to work the next day and so did Dorothy. There was nothing to do but go home and wait for a phone call.
This time we left by the designated door, stopping to tell Eva about Lay Me Down’s grain. She apologized and said she’d tell the girl who fed Lay Me Down herself.
Dorothy and I were quiet as we drove through the snowy landscape of dairy farms and hay fields scattered across open hills, stretching all the way to the horizon. Huge silos rose into the gray sky, some bearing a farm name in large letters across the top: Tillson, Kingsley, Hardwick. The highway wound before us, a dark path through th
e broad white valley, almost empty except for the occasional car going in the other direction. I could feel the wind, like an invisible hand tugging at the steering wheel. Dorothy leaned against the headrest, looking straight ahead, Moosewood’s Low-Fat Favorites unopened in her lap.
It was three days before Christmas and I was thinking about death and dating. I was thinking I had no future with a man who was allergic to horses.
“Tell me again why it isn’t insane for me to be dating someone like Hank,” I said, glancing at Dorothy. As I turned my head, I felt a small shock in my lower back, like the snap of a rubber band. It was a feeling I knew well. “My back just went,” I said through clenched teeth. In another few seconds I could only hold myself upright with my arms, one hand pressed into my seat, the other gripping the top of the steering wheel. With every bump in the road, a sickening pain shot through my lower back and down my legs. Lifting my right foot from the accelerator to move it to the brake was excruciating as I eased the car onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped.
“Just tell me what to do,” Dorothy said. She was familiar with my back episodes and knew how debilitating they could be.
“I need to lie down,” I said, beginning to panic. I couldn’t imagine how I would get myself into the backseat, even with Dorothy’s help. A gust of wind rocked the car, triggering spasms of pain that made me nauseous. Sitting upright was unbearable. Dorothy got out of the car and began moving our luggage so she could lower the backseat. I had to wait until she was finished before I could recline the driver’s seat as far as it would go, which wasn’t flat, but provided some relief.
I needed ibuprofen. “Four,” I told Dorothy. “They’re in my purse.” I swallowed the pills without water and asked Dorothy to pack the plastic bag from yesterday’s sandwiches with snow from the side of the road. I’d ice my back and wait twenty minutes for the ibuprofen to kick in and then, maybe, with Dorothy’s help, I’d be able to make it into the backseat.
Chosen by a Horse Page 15
