Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  Riding is largely a singular sport. Although there are shows and red ribbons, first places and sixth places, it can still be done, nevertheless, with no attention to that. You cannot really play lacrosse or soccer unless you are playing against someone, and this against-ness requires that you see yourself as separate, with all that that implies. But horseback riding you may do alone in the woods, or in a dusty riding rink, or even in your mind, which can canter too. Riding is not about separation. It is not about dominance. The only person you might hurt is you. You are, at long last, without guilt.

  Riding. It is about becoming one with the animal that bears you along. It is about learning to give and take, give the horse his head, take the reins and bring him up. It is about tack, the glorious leather saddles, and the foam-stained bits, which fascinated me, how Lisa would roll them in sugar and slide them into the animal’s mouth, its thick tongue clamped. It is, more than anything else, about relationship and balance, and as Lisa taught me how to do these things—walk, trot, canter—a sort of peace settled in me, a working-through my mother and me, a way of excelling at no one’s cost.

  And so the summer progressed. The only thing I could not do well was jump. Each time we approached the fence, the horse seemed to sense my primordial fear, fear of the fence and fear of everything it contained, and it would bunch to a scuttering halt or, more humiliating, the horse would stop and then, with me uselessly kicking and kicking, it would simply walk over the bar. I watched Lisa jump. She was amazing, fluid, holding onto the horse’s mane as she entered the air, her face a mixture of terror and exhilaration, the balanced combination that means only one thing: mastery.

  One month into the camp season was visiting day. My parents arrived, carrying leathery fruit rolls and a new canteen for me. They seemed as separate as ever, not even looking at each other.

  My mother was appalled at the condition of my wardrobe. My clothes stank of sweat and fur. The soles of my boots were crusted with flaking manure. That was the summer, also, when I started to smell. “What’s this?” she said, flicking through my steamer trunk. “Do you ever do your laundry?” She pulled out a white shirt with black spatters of mud on it and stains beneath the armpits, slight stains, their rims barely visible. “Lauren,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. She held the shirt out, as though to study it. And once again, I saw that look of longing cross her face, but this time it was mixed with something else. I saw the briefest flicker of disgust.

  A few minutes later, she went into our cabin bathroom, which we called The Greenie. She closed the door. I stalked up to it, pressed my ear against its wood. What did I do with my body? What did she do with hers? I heard the gush of water from the tap, the scrunch of something papery. The bathroom had a lock, on my side only. Quietly, and for a reason I still cannot quite explain, I turned the lever and the bolt slid quietly into its lock.

  A few minutes later, when she tried to get out, she could not. She rattled the knob. We were alone in the cabin. I stood back and watched. “Lauren?” she said. “Lauren?” Her voice hurt me. It was curved into a question, and when I didn’t answer, the question took on a kind of keening. “Lauren, are you there? Open the door.” I stood absolutely still. I was mesmerized, horrified, by the vulnerability in her voice, how small she suddenly seemed and how I was growing in size, seemingly by the minute. For some reason I suddenly pictured her trapped in a tiny glass bottle. I held the bottle in my hands. I could let her out, or leave her.

  I let her out.

  “What are you doing?” she said. She stared at me.

  I stared back at her. I could see her sweat now; it ran in a trickle down the side of her brow. I wanted to wipe it away.

  They left in the evening, when colored clouds were streaming across the sky. I stood in the parking lot and watched their station wagon rattle over the dirt road, raising clouds of dust. The next few days, I backslid. My fears returned. There was the problem with my breathing, but accompanying this obsession was now the need to walk backwards while counting. I saw for sure that I was growing while she shrank. I saw for sure that I was growing because she shrank. I also saw something pointed in me, some real desire to win. Hearing that bolt sink into its socket, there had been glee and power.

  I stopped riding then. I stopped going to the stables. I stayed in my bunk. I wrote letters and letters to my mother, the act somehow soothing my conscience. Love, Lauren XXX. Kisses and hugs. I love you.

  At last, after four days had passed, Lisa, the riding instructor, came to my cabin to get me. “You disappeared,” she said.

  “I’m sick,” I said.

  “You know,” she said, “I never much liked my mother.”

  I stared at her. How had she known?

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Are you going to sit on a cot for the rest of your life?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Just sit there and cry?” she said, and there was, suddenly, a slight sneer to her voice.

  I looked away.

  “I once knew a girl,” she said, “who spent her whole life going from hospital to hospital because she loved being sick. She was too scared to face the world. Is that you?”

  I have thought of her words often: a premonition, an augur, a warning, a simple perception.

  I followed Lisa back to the barn. It was noontime. The sun was high and hot. She brought Rain into the middle of the ring, tightened up his saddle strap, and tapped on the deep seat. “All aboard,” she said.

  Sitting high on the horse, I could smell the leaves. I could smell my own sweat and all it contained, so many contradictions.

  “We’re going to jump today,” she said and set the fence at four feet high. “Now, cross your stirrups and knot your reins. A rider has to depend on her inner balance only.”

  I cantered towards the jump, hands on my hips, legs grasping. But each time, at the crucial moment of departure, Rain would screech to a halt, and I’d topple into his mane.

  “He senses your fear,” Lisa said.

  At last, after the third or fourth try, she went into the barn and came back out with a long black crop. Standing in the center of the ring, right next to the jump, she swizzled the crop into the air, making a snapping sound. The horse’s ears flashed forward. “You have to get over it,” she said. I centered myself in the saddle. I cantered twice around the rink and then turned in tight towards the bar. Lisa cracked the whip, a crack I still hear today whenever I feel my fears and I do, I often do, but I rose up, arms akimbo, in this leap merged with the mammal, its heart my heart, its hooves my feet, we sailed into the excellent air. I did it. I had found a way to move forward.

  2

  Going Solo

  I bought my first house all on my own, without a man or a friend or even much money to speak of. I bought it on a salary of $25,000 a year, in 1993, in a rundown section of Boston, where there were murderers and car thieves and kids smoking pot on porch stoops in the smog-filled summers. Everyone told me not to do it. The house was wrapped in vinyl siding with a gorgeous old slate roof and radon in the basement, and had peeling lead paint and windows so drafty the weather came through. My first winter in my brand-new house, I would wake up and find my counters and computer covered in small snow drifts, and my breath was visible, sterling silver Os in the air, if I pursed my lips just right, each O rising up towards the buckled ceiling like a little exclamation of pleasure or surprise. I wrapped myself in an afghan, bought a crock-pot, and made myself some stew.

  I have always, always wanted to own my own home. This may have something to do with the fact that I had left my family for a foster home, and what I got in place of my own abode was a foster family I knew would never really be mine. I became aware, at a very young age, of DNA’s sweeping spirals and how those spirals were like ropes binding you to your people, whom you could never replace. My foster family was good and kind,
but in the nights I dreamt of houses, of finding a house in a cove or on a dark, dead-end street and going inside and there seeing butter-yellow walls and stacks of colorful quilts and white rabbits on tiled tables and rooms. The dreams always featured me, lone and lost, entering what looked like a normal or even suspicious-looking house to find that it unfolded endlessly, room upon room, garden upon garden, terraces unseen from the street, a horse with his head hanging in the kitchen window, a bowl of bright cherries in every cupboard.

  I eventually left my foster family and went to college and lived in a dorm my first year, which I despised, with its cinderblock walls and stained couches and cold, iron beds. Then I rented a house off-campus with three friends, which I liked somewhat better, but the house wasn’t mine. I wanted, more than a man, a best friend, a child, or talent, I wanted to own my own home because I knew that as soon as it became mine, it would become magical, the “mine” and “magical” conflated here, ownership as fairytale.

  I was thirty and working as a literacy instructor when I decided it was time to buy. I’d just gotten my first book deal and it had left me with some extra cash. I wanted a huge house with at least seven rooms so I could paint each in one of the seven spectrum colors and thus have a rainbow on my hands. I found a two-thousand-square-foot dump, my neighbor on one side an old lady with orange hair, and on the other side a convicted murderer with a bracelet on his ankle. In the nights, police-car lights swished by on my walls. The crime rate was high. My father, whom I’d reconnected with, told me not to do it, a waste of money, and what did I, a single woman, need with so much space? My boyfriend of the time was miffed. I knew I wouldn’t marry him, and even if he were “the one,” why should I wait, and who, really, could accompany me in the pursuit of this deeply private dream? I didn’t buy a house in which to start a marriage or a family; I bought a house to right old wrongs, to fix my past—not to form my future; I bought a house so I could, once and for all, prove to myself that the roof over my head was of my own making, and if wind or weather or sheer bad luck tore it away, I’d find it again. I could afford it, in every sense of that word.

  I moved into my new house in early summer. Within ten minutes of getting the keys, I had torn off the drop ceilings to find the old pressed tin beneath. Within three days I had the floors painted. I didn’t want wood; I wanted white, and turquoise, sea and sand, and blue, so it would be like walking on a hard enamel sky. In the attic closet I found three old, curved canes with the word Noam carved into the wood: Noam, like gnome.

  My enthusiasm for rehabilitation that summer knew no bounds. I started work on the exterior of the house by tearing off the tilted, rotting porch and ripping up the floorboards and replacing them with fir. I was a one hundred percent u-do-it gal, working on my own with little plan or skill. Call it confidence, or ecstasy, or beginner’s luck: all my projects went well. Nails sunk swiftly into wood. Paint painted itself onto freshly spackled walls. Then something happened.

  I was working on the porch in the hot summer sun. I was digging four-foot holes in which I planned to place new posts to hold up the new floor. I swung my pick and from deep in the earth I heard the sound of something moan and clang. I stopped. The moan was like a person, buried alive, while the clang had the mournful echo of a hollow pipe. I swung again. Again this echoing moan, and then a geyser of water sprang up from the ground, a fountain with all the force of someone’s rage; I had hit a waterline. Water spread across the ground, under the powdery foundation of my home, and, when I ran inside, I saw it seep up between the kitchen floorboards. It just kept coming. I was in it up to my ankles, this wellspring, this never-ending source of what I was not sure. And in an instant all my ecstasy and confidence was replaced with total bone-freezing fear: I couldn’t do it, I was fundamentally alone, I would drown, or get electrocuted, or simply float forever in some unclaimed and unnamed space. By the time the plumbers came I was crying. By the time the leak, to put it mildly, was fixed, the ground outside my home had eroded and my first floor smelled like wet dog.

  Soon after that, men came with what they called a French drain and suctioned the water out of my house, but it took days and days to dry, and the wood warped. I calmed down. What was wrong with a little warp and wobble here and there? I had dreamt of houses, old suspicious-looking houses with many wonders in them; this could be one. A long time ago, I recalled, when I left my first home, never to return, I had taken with me a tiny floor tile, pried it loose, held it close in my palm as the car drove me away forever. I had the floor tile with me then, and I still do now. Two nights after the furious fountain burst, I found the tile in a box left unpacked. It was blue-and-white striped. I held it up to the light and it gleamed like an old eye. I redid the ruined floor with tile this time. I found beautiful green-floral tiles in a steep sale, and I laid square by square. I laid it all down. With the flat of my putty knife, I creamed in the white grout. In the center of my brand-new floor I placed the small blue piece from my past, where for years it had stared at me, it now affirmed me, saying (and still saying), “You last.”

  3

  Paired

  When I first met my husband, I thought his beard was sexy. It was a shadow of stubble, the color of iron filings, giving him a look that was at once tattered and tough. The fact that my husband is neither of these things—he is a chemist and a self-proclaimed Druid—only added to the appeal. I loved my husband’s beard, the way it hovered halfway, how it felt against my skin, both soft and sharp. I came to know his face by the presence and particularities of this beard. I was attracted to him in part because of this beard. It would not be entirely wrong to say I married my husband based on his beard; based on other things too, of course—his humor, his intelligence, his kindness, his quirkiness—but the beard was a factor.

  Before we married—while we were courting, that is—my husband took care of his beard. When it started to get fluffy, he trimmed it with a tiny pair of sewing scissors and a black electric razor. But after we married—I don’t know exactly when, a year, maybe two—once we were settled down into domesticity, once our relationship had lost the anxious edge that comes without commitment, he started to let his beard go. He started to let it grow. It came in curls and frizz, and it seemed to spread sideways more than down, making his face look fat. Once during this time he took a business trip, and when I came to pick him up at the airport I was shocked to see him with the clarity that comes from absence. He looked like an old-fashioned lumberjack, or Moses, his lips barely visible, fully fringed with hair. He also appeared crazed. He got into the car, tossing his suitcase in the back.

  “How are you?” he said, and he leaned over to kiss me. The beard had a strange smell, a smell familiar but impossible to place, the inside of an old trunk maybe, cedar chips and dust. I flinched and drew away. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said, and I hated myself then, hated myself for the lie and also for my superficiality.

  We were mostly quiet on the way home. The highway hummed under our wheels, the long ribbon of road unfurling before us, green signs flashing in the headlights and then yanked back into blackness. As we pulled into our driveway, I said, “You know, I think you should cut your beard.”

  He pulled on it and smiled. “I kinda like it this way,” he said.

  “I don’t think I do. You remind me . . . I mean, you don’t look like my husband. You look . . . avuncular. I really think you should trim it at least.”

  “It’s my beard,” he said.

  “But I’m the one who kisses it,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a bat flew out of that mess.”

  “Cool,” he said. “A bat in my beard. I like it.”

  My husband then swung open the car door, bounded up our front steps. The dogs were ecstatic when they saw him. They leapt up, barked, and he funneled his face down close to theirs, tongues slurping, wet noses, and when he looked up, his beard had some slobber on it.

  I was grumpy then. Days passed and the grumpiness would no
t leave. And then, one week later, my husband came home and his beard was gone. Presto. Poof. I had never, ever seen the lower half of his face in plain light before. There it was, stark, white, white, stark, pale, plucked; he looked young, very young, the shaved skin red as a diaper rash. I hate to say it but I yelped. It was as though he had snuck up on me wearing a Halloween mask, only the mask was his actual face, and his actual face was as unfamiliar as a stranger’s.

  “You like?” he said.

  “Why’d you do that?” I said.

  “You asked me to,” he said.

  “I said trim your beard, not strip it.”

  “I want to try out a beardless identity. I want to pass as a Republican.”

  “What,” I said, irritated, “you think a beard is radical? I’m sure the Christian Right has a large bearded base.”

  “You know,” he said, “you look a little scared.”

  “You should have warned me,” I said. “You don’t look anything like yourself.”

  “It’s me,” he said, and of course he was right. It was him, and that was precisely the problem.

  Everyone likes to think that looks are secondary in love. We pick our partners for their talents, their brilliance, their ambition, their stature. Sure, we like a handsome man, but we don’t walk the aisle based on a face; we are holistic; we understand beauty is emitted in many ways, and comes in many shapes and sizes. This is what we like to tell ourselves. But in fact, recent studies have shown that human beings tend to favor (i.e., love) the people in their lives who are most attractive. In a 2005 study, researchers at the University of Alberta gathered some disturbing results after hanging out in supermarkets and watching mothers interact with their children. They found that mothers gave more praise and positive reinforcement to their more beautiful children. Other studies have shown that people with conventionally pretty faces are more likely to be picked for job offerings and are more likely to advance up the corporate ladder. In his study on mate selection, psychologist David Buss showed a series of faces to people from Katmandu to Kentucky, and whatever the culture, everyone seemed to agree on which faces were the most attractive. As human beings, we know beauty, and we love beauty. I did not find my beardless husband beautiful. He had no chin.