by Sonia Taitz
After he was done, and only then, Davey would drink his glass of water. He drank it all the way down, down to the last drops. He’d tip the glass for these, then say, “Ahhhh.” That was how he ended each meal. In the cafeteria, Jude suddenly realized, Davey probably finished each meal way after all the others were done. Had Delaney really stayed on to watch him finish? And if she had, wasn’t she the real “weirdo”?
“OK look,” Jude says, her eyes damp and flashing. “I don’t want to hear anymore about you, your daughter, or my son. Davey’s the best—the best boy in the world, and one day you’ll all see what a mensch—what a good and genuine human being he is. How would you like it if someone really judged you when you were a vulnerable teenager—if your whole life was judged by what you did or didn’t do when you were—”
Without even consciously thinking about it, Jude knows she made mistakes when she was about her son’s age, perhaps even unforgivable, irrevocable ones that had nearly ruined her life (and someone else’s).
Jude lets her last thought hang unfinished in the air. She marches into the house and slams her teacup down on the kitchen counter. Heidi, right behind her, picks it up and calmly puts it in the sink. The cup leaves a little Zen circle on the granite, so Heidi wipes it with a moistened, waffle-weave, unbleached organic cloth.
“Later!” Jude barks over her shoulder, racing to her van as though she meant never to see Heidi again. Maybe she really wouldn’t. Her anger gave her enough courage to contemplate cooking her own food from now on. Simple things: omelets, spaghetti. Meat loaf with normal beef and bread crumbs from a tin. Soup from a can, the old-fashioned kind, with sodium and heaps of MSG. All of it, she thought rebelliously. Iceberg lettuce in a glass bowl, with Russian dressing, not on the side. Glopped on top.
“Don’t you want the brochure? Just in case?”
Heidi had taken a shortcut to the driveway and was ahead of Jude.
“Oh, fine!” Jude growls, swiping the horse-farm glossy from Heidi’s outstretched hand. If it’ll shut you up! That last part—she doesn’t really say it out loud.
Disorders
Over the past year or so, Davey did seem to be developing an anxiety disorder, along with his obsessive style of eating. He hardly spoke to anyone but his own family anymore. Teachers had reported this, but Jude had not listened. She thought the way he ate was just a peculiar habit, charming even, and that Davey might one day become a great scientist or scholar. “The absent-minded professor,” her parents had called people like Davey. There was no shame in that. Einstein had been peculiar as a child, and there was no one in the world her parents loved more than that genius with the wild, white hair. It was more than likely that Einstein had eaten his peas in an idiosyncratic way (perhaps likening them to planets).
But it was not the best way for a teenager to be.
While Joey, his twin, was easygoing and popular, Davey tended to spend time alone, listening to music. He didn’t even like the Internet. If he had gone on Facebook, he would have no friends. Most teenagers had hundreds. Joey had nearly a thousand. Even his mother had one (not that Davey knew that).
He had had an enormous growth spurt over the past months, and his limbs seemed lanky, out of his full control. Davey had always been clumsy, though, and had never gone in for team sports. In Little League, other players had been unfailingly sore at him; they had shouted at him to try harder, to quit dropping the ball or missing the ball, or whatever poor boys were supposed to do with that damnable ball, day in and day out, for all their growing years.
Now his lack of athletic prowess was even more regrettable. Davey could have made friends on teams, hearty mates to whom he would not have to open up, but simply pass a ball. The exercise might have helped his brooding. Staying inside all the time had also given him a pallor. His face was whiter than it had ever been, thought Jude, and the acne was returning.
Davey sat in his room wearing large headphones that blotted out all ambient sound. He liked torchy love songs, such as those sung by Barbra Streisand or Celine Dion. These he played over and over, sometimes hundreds of times. They made his heart swell with a sense of potential. His yearnings were not for adventures on the high seas; they were for the kind of soaring love that went all the way and withstood all obstacles. David Ewington was quiet and he was shy, but Jude knew he had something pure and true inside of him. The music spoke to that side, gave it hope and kept it alive.
It was suppertime, and mother and son were alone in the house together. Jude wanted to eat dinner with him tonight, just the two of them. Joey had gone out on a group date to the movies. The film would be a summer blockbuster, full of buildings toppling, cars crashing, and impossible heroics. Ten people were going, a pack of popularity, among them Joey’s new summer girlfriend, whom he’d met at the mall the other day while his mother and brother were shopping together for shirts.
Popular, girlfriend, mall. Jude knew that none of these words would ever apply to the smaller, more awkward, power-ballad-loving twin, even with the new T-shirts she had bought him from a pseudo-cool store. But she was not sure she minded. Davey, she told herself again, would one day be someone extraordinary—if not Einstein, then a surgeon, perhaps, or a hostage negotiator.
She knocks on his door, but he does not answer, so she opens it and goes in. Davey doesn’t notice her. He is singing along to the lyrics, which are about how no matter what, no matter how, the singer will keep on driving until she finds You. His voice, floating around in a tuneless but loud a capella, seems a bit like the wail of a deaf-mute:
“Come get you . . . ahhhhhh . . . can we take the roooooad . . . no matter hoooowwww . . .!”
His mother taps Davey on the shoulder.
He looks up, and she motions: “Take the headphones off.”
“What’s up?” he says, sliding down the headphones only slightly, gripping them as though he cannot wait to put them back on and shut out the world.
“Are you hungry?”
“Hungry? What time is it?”
“It’s almost seven, Davey.”
“Wow. I’ve been sitting here for almost four hours.”
“Come down and have dinner. I’ve made spaghetti from Daddy’s special noodles. I’ve got parmesan. And grape soda.”
“Wow! Grape soda!” says Davey, without a trace of sarcasm. Like most teenagers, he loves sugary and salty foods, the junkier the better.
“Yeah, Heidi concocted it out of real Burgundian grapes and a certain low-gas formula she’s been working on. I’ve got a couple bottles left. Let’s go finish them up.”
“Heidi, huh. I’ll drink it anyway.” Davey and his mother have an inside joke about his disliking Heidi’s ambitious foods. Jude loves the way he prefers her own more humble fare, and how she can call pasta “noodles” with him.
They sit at the table, perpendicular to each other, like a couple in a corner nook. After making sure that each spaghetti strand is exactly the same length and bears the same load of sauce and parmesan, Davey eats heartily and asks for seconds. Jude feels the pride of feeding her fast-growing boy. For dessert, she has baked him an apple.
“Mom, I love it when Joey and Dad aren’t here. They’re so loud and so pushy, you know?”
“Well—yeah . . .”
“You know?”
“Well, yes. I do know. But I didn’t know you felt that way about Joey.”
“Well, I love him and he’s my brother and everything, but come on! He’s kind of a player. He’s like Dad. Dad is always a success at everything he does, and that is admirable—but does he ever think about anything he does? And Joey, Joey is a born leader, as they say—but where is he leading everyone? Where are they all going? Does he even know?”
“You’re very interesting and thoughtful,” says his mother.
“Thanks. You are, too,” he adds generously. “I wish it could always be like this. Nice and warm and cozy. Why is the world so full of angles and noise? And mean people elbowing, you know?”
“I
do. Well, they’re not always mean. They’re just elbowish. They want to be first. Even in the pettiest ways.”
“It’s not a race, is it, Mom?”
“It shouldn’t be. Unless you’re talking about Darwin, and I hope we don’t treat human life as ‘survival of the fittest.’”
“It shouldn’t be like that, but it is. Anyway, what am I ‘fittest’ for?”
“You have the rarest gift, a deep and intricate soul,” she answers. “And you’ll enjoy that one day,” she adds, although part of her doubts the truth of that statement. Yes, her Davey will be a success in the worldly sense, she is sure. But people with deep and intricate souls often suffer more than the elbowers. Though, of course, all of them suffer eventually.
Jude stands up to clear the dishes. From the kitchen, she calls out, “How’s the baked apple?”
“Perfect. It’s a perfect, perfect apple.”
From her other son, this sentence might have stung of sarcasm, but not from Davey. The apple is indeed perfect: red, round, and sweet, the inedible core removed, and the hole filled with nuts and honey. She knows that Davey will eat the nuts first, then thoughtfully and thoroughly lick up the honey, and finally go for the apple. But that is all right.
“You know, sweetie?” says his mother, returning to the table with a small, folded brochure. “I’ve been thinking about something.”
“No,” says Davey. “No thinking. No plans. No agendas, please.”
If there’s one thing I’d change about you, thinks his mother, it’s that you say “no” first. It wears me down, and it’s not good for you, either.
“It’s not an ‘agenda’,” she continues. “It’s just an idea. I think about you because you spend so much time alone, indoors. And here we are, in the lovely countryside.”
“Suburbs, really.”
“Fine. Suburbs. We’re not in the city. We have fresh air, land, a pool in the backyard. And did you even know how close we live to Angel-Fire Farm?”
“What’s that—another wee farm in Putnam County? What do they raise, alpacas or organic aubergines?”
Davey is so clever. There is, indeed, a proliferation of “cute” rustic businesses in the area. Many of them sell dried-flower wreaths, enamel jewelry (usually depicting cats or ladybugs), and stone geese with tartan ribbons around their necks.
“No, it’s a new horse farm, actually. You remember how you always liked to ride when you were little?”
“I actually remember not wanting to ride. It seemed like a good way to fall down and really break something.”
“Oh you’re right,” she continues, chuckling affectionately, “you were afraid at those birthday parties with ponies. But not if the man held the rope, right? Then, after you got down, you’d give the pony a carrot, and slowly relax. Once, you asked if we could get you a pony like that, a nice tame one that you could get to know.”
“What was I, seven years old? What are you getting at here?”
“Well, this place, Angel-Fire, is actually not so much about the riding and jumping part of things. It’s more about getting to know and trust the horses, grooming them, communicating—”
“Mom, you sound a little flakey. Like you want me to use crystals or something. Do you think I’m really that strange?”
They stare at each other, and then Davey looks away. It is hard for him to maintain eye contact, but why should she force that? Why, indeed, is she picking on Davey? Jude hears her own words: “communicating,” “horses.” She thinks of Mister Ed, one of the television fixtures of her childhood. Why do all her efforts seem ridiculous lately?
But she is not talking about that kind of communication—the kind achieved with a trained horse that was given peanut butter, making his mouth move in patterns vaguely resembling human speech, which would then be dubbed. She is talking about the real thing—one being making clear expression to another—which animals do so well.
“No, of course I don’t think you’re strange at all!” she answers, with full conviction. But some people (like Heidi) do, or might start to, thinks Jude, and that is not good for Davey. She can see a bit of wear and tear in her young son already.
“Your shyness really bothers you sometimes, right?” she continues.
“It depends if I’m alone or not.”
“Is that a joke? You’re not meant to be alone!”
“Really? Who said? Everyone seems alone, if you ask me. You and Dad. Joey with that constant stream of girls he can’t tell apart. And then there’s this girl, Delaney—”
“Heidi’s daughter Delaney?”
“Yeah, that one. She was in my Spanish class. She ate with the weirdos at school and watched me all the time.”
“Is she really a weirdo?” Jude asks eagerly, remembering that Heidi had quoted her daughter using that very word about her son. She excitedly imagines Delaney’s crowd—chipped black polish, pierced tongues, pentagram tattoos. With wild maternal schadenfreude, she wishes a group like this on perfect Heidi’s daughter. How long can her rebellious streak be hidden?
“You know? We shouldn’t use those categories,” Davey says, beginning to carefully remove the peel from the baked apple. “I mean, sometimes, the weirdos are the most interesting kids in the school. At least they think for themselves, and that is the beginning of wisdom, right?”
Davey is such a good and interesting person. It is poignant to have a unique child with whom you long to openly agree, someone you want to have a glass of wine with, to trade wise maxims with—but not be able to. Because he is your child, and you are his mother, and you have to raise him into someone who can have a go at the cold, cruel world the way you and everyone else had had to do.
“Here,” says Jude, her voice strong and positive. “Look at the brochure; you’ll see it’s something that might really help you.”
Obligingly, Davey picks up the brochure and reads it aloud. It says:
Nature. Man and beast. How often do we live with connection?
Is your child shy, awkward, socially withdrawn?
“Your ‘child’? I’m fourteen years old! Very nearly fifteen!”
“It’s a figure of speech. Read it—they take kids up to eighteen.”
Does he or she have trouble sitting still, making friends, controlling his or her impulses? Do you find them sitting in their rooms and brooding?
Are you worried about your child’s future as an active, positive participant in the joy of life?
ANGEL-FIRE FARMS is the solution.
“Are they serious?”
“I hope so.”
On our 15-acre facility, horses and their people develop a trusting bond, one that brings them closer to the source of confidence!
Social scientists and developmental experts agree:
Therapeutic Riding is the best and most lasting solution to many problems of adapting to the demands of school and society.
Your child, ages 7–18, will become confident! Hardy! Flexible and strong!
Call for a complimentary lesson: 845-555-6987.
“Mom,” says David, laughing as he puts the brochure down on the table. “No offense? This sounds like a total waste of time . . .”
“Will you at least think about it?”
At the Angel-Fire House Farm
Even though he is a teenager, Davey half wishes his mother had accompanied him during his first Angel-Fire Farms visit. Perhaps this wish is part of his paradoxical problem—he likes to be alone, but not when meeting new people (or horses). Then he needs the comfort of friends and familiars.
It is Sunday, and Jude has promised Joey that she will drive him to a paintball party an hour away. Davey has not been invited, and in any case, would not have gone. So Jude drops one son off at the gate of the therapeutic farm, and keeps on going with the other, toward the imaginary world where guns mark enemies with brightly colored stains that stand in for blood. There is no therapy needed for that bloodlust; indeed, Joey is meeting friends there—alpha boys who, like Joey (whom they called
“Joe”), are in the “popular” group at school. Boys she resents for not liking her gentler son, or speaking to him, even when they visit. Of course, Davey would hide and not even try to get to know them.
“I’ll come back later,” she promises him. “I’ll peek in and see how you’re getting along.”
“No, God, don’t,” he says, opening the door of the van and nearly slipping on the gravel path. “You’ll only embarrass me. Just come at the end and pick me up at the gate.”
“I’ll see you at the end, then.” Jude drives slowly away, her wheels crushing pebbles and then tarmac. She watches him in her mirror, getting smaller. He watches her, too.
When his mother is gone, Davey walks pensively along the long path, alongside a line of cars. The path winds upward, flanked by large grassy meadows where horses graze. When he gets to the top of the road, he sees clusters of parents hovering around their children, a large riding ring, and several stables.
Despite the presence of so many new people, there is something about the place that comforts him.
“Come,” says Gretchen, the young farmhand, stepping up to Davey and taking him by the arm. “We’ve been expecting you. The younger kids are going to curry the ponies. I thought I’d show you the main riding ring, and then we’ll see if we can find you a helmet that fits.”
“I—I haven’t ridden much before,” says Davey, appalled that his voice cracks on the word “ridden.”
“We don’t expect any of you to know anything. We’ll just get you comfortable with the horses, and see how it goes from there.”
“Are you—are you one of the teachers here?” Davey hopes so. He likes her kind, round face, fringed by straight yellow hair.
“Oh, we all do a little of everything. Administration’s actually where I spend most of my time. But everyone here is really, really nice. Horses especially,” she says, smiling.
A broad-chested man walks into the ring, leading a large chestnut mare with a white star on her forehead and glossy black tail.
