The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  “Yes, Tiny,” my father said then, his voice brisker and louder than usual, and he leaned forward and plucked the collar from her. “That was all a while ago,” he said, and we nodded, and she looked at us, her four children, and then nodded too. “You,” she said to me, “need a haircut. And your room cleaned up. Now.”

  I cleaned up my room, now, and two days later she took me for a haircut, instructing the stylist to chop off the curls that came whenever my hair grew out, the floor beneath my feet littered with large locks and maple swirls, the scissors clipping and clipping and my mother saying “more” until, in the end, the floor was a sea of hirsute waves and I looked nearly bald, the hair cut so close to my skull it appeared to be clinging to it, like a cap that might blow away in a brisk wind. While my mother paid I sat in the seat and watched a woman sweep me up, my whole head, it seemed, tossed into the trash and my neck now bare to the breezes outside, so I shivered. Lying in bed that night I could feel the bareness of my neck, feel the palpable shadows flickering and stroking, and it wasn’t until I hunkered down deep in the sheets, a blanket bunched up to my chin, that I could finally fall safely asleep.

  We had a snowless winter that year, the ground hard and brown while my nine-going-on-ten body seemed to think it was spring, ripening, the curls she’s tried to cut out of me appearing, as if by magic, in other parts of my body, my waistline changing, my legs growing longer and covered with curly fuzz. Just as the smoothness of the egg had seemed to mock me, my dancing, springy body seemed to mock her, although I never meant it that way. When, I wonder now, had she ceased seeing me as a good egg and started seeing my shape as wrong, as an intended attack? Although the forest was far away there was always an animal between my mother and me; she said she could smell me and insisted I wear deodorant. Her hands strapping me into a bra were invasive, intense, her snout sniffing me out, no matter where I went. The whole thing was hard, over the top, perpetually painful, and yet we seemed to need it, this primitive battle we fought in a moist mythical forest of towering trees and pure white owls and tufts of vivid moss growing in dark delicious hollows; we needed it.

  At forty-eight years of age I am five feet tall with hands and feet so petite I can wear my twelve-year-old daughter’s sandals. It always surprises me, to see my feet slip into these narrow flats or to pull child-sized mittens easily over my hands. It shocks me, really, that I’m so small, because in the mythical forest where I’ve lived with my mother for most of my life, I tower and stink, my huge hands ripping trees out by their roots or crushing stumps and eggs, egged on by a barbed need to know. I can’t calculate my ratio of gentleness to cruelty, can’t claim for sure that my teeth aren’t fanged in my mouth. I don’t know where the beast in me begins and the human ends, or what sort of centaur I am. On my good days I feel the animal in me is a sign of strength and speed, a gift to give the daughter who is right now around the age I was then, when this all happened. On my bad days the animal in me becomes a beast and then the beast a burden I’m not sure how to hold, as I go about my business.

  For my tenth birthday that March I got a flute, with its lean, long body, my mother insisting I learn to play. She hired a private instructor named Mrs. Rodoway, a tall lady who came to our house twice a week and stood over me turning the pages of the music book on the stand of walnut wood. I’d pick up this gorgeous, complexly keyed instrument with the oval hole for blowing, and I’d blow, trying to curve the air just so, trying to coax melody from this slender shining shape. My first sounds were all squawks and screeches and so loud my face flushed and I’d put the flute down on the ground. “No, no,” Mrs. Rodoway would say, “you can’t give it up like that,” but of course she didn’t understand it wasn’t the flute I wanted to give up; it was me—the self that made the sounds and smashed the silver egg.

  I practiced, under my mother’s strict gaze, for thirty minutes every day, and despite the fact that I learned how to keep a whole new kind of time—2/4, 4/4—and despite the fact that I learned to play some Bach and simple songs like “Gay Tarantella,” I couldn’t come to a different image of myself. When June arrived and school let out for the summer, I put the flute away in its velvet-lined case, breaking its body down into three separate segments and laying each piece in the space it was supposed to go, and then closing the case and putting the instrument under my bed, Mrs. Rodoway gone until school started again. Unlike the summer before, when I’d been free to ride as I wished, this summer my mother signed us all up for swimming camp and we got Speedo suits. I hated to swim, hated the cold concrete pool with its narrow lap lines and chemical smell. I had one week off between swimming and school and, with my flute packed away and my Speedo suit folded in my drawer, I took my Schwinn from the hook it hung on in the garage, ratcheted the seat up a notch, and rode off, out of the Golden Ghetto, over the highways where, beneath me, cars streamed by, fast and free; I kept riding and riding until the streets narrowed and the red barns blazed and the cows meandered in the churned-up pastures rich with rotting loam. I didn’t stop for the cows or for a pink drink; I didn’t stop until I reached the Private Way, at which point I leaned my bike up against a tree and, for the first time in almost a year, entered, once more, my forest.

  Birds screamed. Creatures flapped past, so close it seemed their feathers brushed my face. The pond, so clear last year, looked brackish and dark now, surrounded on all sides by enormous bump-backed toads. I looked left, then right, stepped here, then there, trying to affirm that, yes, this was the forest I’d so loved and it was, it was, the same forest, only this year it scared me whereas last year it had enchanted me.

  I could have run, but instead I stayed on the path, vines hanging down, bright berries bleeding on the ground. My feet looked huge to me, my hands hanging from the rims of my wrists downright dangerous. They’d never caught the killer of the girl named Emma Gin—the one taken by a stranger and then found part by part. I’d seen it on TV, here a hand, there a leg, wrapped in a cloth and put into a car. Would my mother, I wondered, love me if I were brought to her like that, in pieces, something she could assemble just as she saw fit? Sometimes, now, a fatigue came over me, so encompassing I couldn’t move. And right then and there the fatigue came down like a cloth covering me, and I sat on the forest ground, my back against a tree. The tree’s roots broke the crust of the earth and tiny white flowers thrived at its base. I picked one of those flowers and, with my fingers, flicked off its head. The sun crossed the treetops and began to descend on the other end of the day. It was 2, then 3, then 4 p.m., the forest edging into night so slowly, just slipping in as one might slowly slip into a cool pool. I, then, entered into stillness again, and as I did I heard the songs of the starlings. Deep in the distance I could make out the moving blur of deer and then, closer by, I saw those holes in the ground, and now I heard the chirps and gurgles of foxes just waking from their naps. I didn’t have any treats and would they even remember me? It appeared they did. First came what I guessed was the large male, climbing out of his hole, and then some slightly smaller ones and then behind them some could-be cubs. Now the male circled the tree, coming closer, the others following him, and then—in a dream I had—came more foxes from more holes, so I was soon surrounded by dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of foxes, all flickering in the late light as they circled me and circled me, and I recalled, then, how once I was a child in an airplane that circled the city for hours while I looked on, my face pressed up against the bubble window, and beneath me the whole world made more beautiful by my distance from it, the cars as tiny as toys, my longing to land growing only larger the more time we were aloft. And so it was with the foxes, inching closer by nearly invisible increments, and I held out my hands so they could see who I was, what I was, and they approved, or so it seemed, because even with no nuts for them they still circled and circled for who knows how many minutes or days or years—this in a dream I had—and then I click clicked with my mouth, and all those foxes stopped, turned towards me, sniffing and snuffling, tak
ing in my jumbled scents, for so long, they couldn’t stop, sniffing my palms, my knees, the curves of my calves, sniffing and sniffing and coming back, each time, to my upturned hands, my scrawled lifelines and finding—was it possible?—something sweet.

  Sugaring the Bit

  1: Girls, on Horses

  My daughter, fallen for a horse. My girl, at eight years of age, asking why we can’t take Pegasus home with us, our urban backyard big enough, she claims, for a pasture. This is what horse craze does to a child, stretches the perimeter of the possible.

  My daughter, Clara, loves her lessons and all the accoutrements that go with it: bridles and bits, hoof picks and crops and currying combs, jodhpurs with suede patches and long black boots with over one hundred eye hooks, total. My daughter has taken the time to count them and lingers when she laces, her cider-colored hair falling all around her as she leans over, lost in a world I know so well, having been there myself, my own black boots long gone now, by the time I was through the leather so soft it slumped.

  My daughter, like me, loves the smell of the stable: dirt floors, wood shavings, wildflowers growing in the cracked corners. My teacher’s name was Rose, and I’ll get to her, but first there’s Amy, Clara’s new instructor, no more than twenty years of age, a ponytail pulled high off her fresh face, her body lean, molded muscles visible when she moves. Each of Clara’s lessons start the same way. With the halter slung over her shoulder, Amy leads my daughter and me to the wire that fences the forty acres of field the horses graze on. If it’s morning there’s mist floating just above the grass in scraps of white; if it’s evening the land looks blue, its hollows filled with shadows.

  We three stand by the fence and Amy calls for the horses. She calls for the whole herd, even though Clara will only ride one, and each time I’m tempted to say, “Could I, might I, possibly try riding today, too?” I thought I’d long lost my love, but here it is, as intact as ever, returned to me though my daughter, who now becomes my tether to the past as well as my funnel into the future.

  When we three arrive at the fence, the visible parts of the pasture are always empty, the horses down and around. The sky sprawls above us, everything quiet, as though waiting for some show to start, and it does; it always does. Amy takes each pinkie and pulls back the corners of her mouth so a keen whistle sluices through the air and makes its way over the land, a whistle so strong you can almost see it, dipping down and around the curves, sliding over the modest mounds, racing between rocks, and eventually reaching the horses, whose sensitive ears fork forward as they rise up from grazing, turn their majestic necks towards the call, their bodies, all at once, breaking into a trot, and then a canter, the whole herd of them, thirty, no forty, galloping towards the sound so we always hear the horses first before we see them, or rather we feel them first, through our feet, the ground vibrating, the thunder building, building to its breaking point just as they round the bend and burst into view, silvers and bays, chestnuts and golds, their bodies surging as though they are one mass moving, as though they will not, cannot, stop; they pound towards us with no sign of ceasing, and each time Clara and I start to step back—an instinct, a preservationist impulse—and each time Amy says no. “Stay still,” she commands and so we do, putting our faith in her and the herd, who are now no more than thirty, then twenty, then ten feet away, their necks extended as their hooves lift and hit the ground, closer and closer, our hearts in our throats as the whole hustling lot of them screech to a bunched, sudden stop right at that electric line, their huge chests heaving, their long faces hanging over the wire. Laughing, we open our hands and offer them carrots and apples, loving the ways their dry, rippled lips search our skin for more. We love the huge pools of their eyes. We love the veins visible in their faces. We love their wild gallop just as we love how the chosen one demurely, politely, lowers his head for the halter Amy slips on him, Clara now holding the rope as the horse walks behind her. I stand back and watch. All three—Amy, Clara, and horse—enter the darkness of the barn, the horse flecked with dirt and streaming sweat from his run. Five minutes later the three reappear on the concrete path, the horse totally transformed in his tack, gone domestic, it seems, in a matter of moments. A clip and a clop and my daughter’s chosen mount now stands obediently in the center of the ring as Amy tightens the girth, pulling up the saddle straps so they cinch the horse hard; he doesn’t protest, never protests, and then the stirrup proffered, Clara’s booted foot slipped in, and, with a boost from her teacher she’s up and over, sitting straight—remade, my daughter is—taking on height that isn’t hers.

  And as I watch the lesson progress I wonder what sense we might make of this sport and the undeniable draw it has for millions of girls growing into adolescence. Does it have something to do with the paradox at the heart of being female in our time and place, girls told to stay strong and yet to be soft, this contradictory message reflected in the body of a horse, with his mixture of power and delicacy, size and fragility, animals who inspire fear even as—pure prey—they are full of it themselves? How powerful your daughter must feel up there, some feminist might proffer, an unfulfilling explanation, too easy, too pat, the flip side of the horse-as-phallus theory that, from what I can see, most people buy into without much reflection.

  Like Clara, my own love of horses was paired with a desire to ride, and when there were no horses available, I spent my time locked away in my room with equine novels and plastic ponies, my fascination eclipsing every other childhood interest: the Schwinn bike I’d so loved and on which I’d pedaled my way out of the Golden Ghetto, now hung on a hook in our garage, its sparkling seat furred with dust. I don’t know what became of that bike, or the box I used to warm the egg I found in the forest. I have not carried those things with me into my adulthood, hanging on hard to my ribbons only, in pinks and reds and glory blues.

  By the time I was old enough to understand the prevailing theory about females and equines, I was already sliding off the saddle and on to other adventures. For my daughter, though, I suspect riding will be a lifelong love, if only because we have bought a house in the country and will be moving there soon, the antique barn equipped with stalls, all ready for the pony we plan to purchase. My parents never encouraged my riding, believing it to be a fundamentally dirty sport, but for Clara, well, the case is very different, and it won’t be long before she’s old enough to understand, and worse internalize, the psychoanalytic viewpoint that I believe brings shame to the prismatic and fundamentally irreducible love a girl has for her horse.

  I want alternative theories for my daughter. I believe the current understanding—the horse as phallus, the horse as practice for later heterosexual love—is not only wrong but—more problematically—damaging, transmogrifying a relationship packed with profundity of a highly unusual sort. And yet I’ve no choice but to admit that when I try to express what this profundity is, I come up tongue tied, stuttering, my head swirling with disparate images from my past; Rose riding Mr. K in the pasture stacked with cubes of hay; the glitter of the trees we raced towards; the flash of a stirrup, the resounding crack of her crop, rain on the roof of the barn, a deep-green show jacket lined with luminous yellow silk—thousands of images but nothing of substance to offer my daughter or any horse-loving girl. See her there, riding round and round the ring? See her, going in circles?

  As for me, how odd to rediscover this love in my middle age, when I was so sure it had disappeared. Sometimes, during my daughter’s lesson, I sneak off to the barn and whisper to the piebald pony, combing his blond mane with my weathered fingers. And then sometimes I simply walk the aisles, reading the nameplates affixed to each stall door. I have always delighted in the way we name our equines: Smokey Raindrops. Pride’s Starlight Tanya. A. M. White Night. Praise Be. World Peace. Lay Me Down. Amen. And my favorite: Sweet Revenge. What do these names tell us? There are fourteen domesticated large land mammals—alpaca, cow, cat, goat, pig—to name a few, and I have never heard any of them referred to in such a, a �
�� magisterial manner. Can you imagine a sheep called “Praise Be” or a dog called “World Peace”? The horse is the only domesticated mammal that can carry his ceremonial title; on any other it sounds absurd; it breaks the back. Were the bond primarily sexual would not a girl pick a designation that reflected lust rather than reverence? But what is this reverence made of, and why do boys in the presence of horses seem not to feel it, or to feel it less? I need to ride my mind back, and back, trying to find, in the scraps of my own particular past, alternative explanations for the bond between girls and horses.

  So here I am, a girl of ten, then eleven, then twelve, a girl who saw in the hugeness of a horse terror and beauty both, a girl who felt, sitting up in that saddle, and only on my best days, that she had some kind of connection with an absolute other, and the elation that went with that, my body a bridge over which it seemed all the animals could come. And they did come, Clara, in some dream sense they did, and then later, back down on the ground, the ride now over, I’d open my hand clutching carrot peels, apple halves, or even a dark chunk of chocolate, the horse’s limber lips taking it in, all gone, but that small smear on my skin somehow proving it had happened, proving I’d been freed, if only for a moment, from the prison that a person is, my human halter off, my whole self dilated, trees and teeth, fur and wind and every kind of weather pouring through me.