The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  And then from behind the bedouin tent came a piercing cry, a continuous whinny that kept reaching its crescendo only to shatter the ceiling of sound and go higher still; some rage this horse had; I heard before I saw. And when the bedouin finally approached, he was not leading the horse so much as dragging him, the animal sitting back hard on all four heels. His equine legs were ramrod straight, his nostrils flaring. The horse was drenched in sweat, so wet the beast looked oiled, unreal, and when he came up close he let out a second kind of sound, a high pitched plea it seemed, a long, up-spiraling whinny of a cry, and from all four corners of the desert the answers bounded back.

  And then, only moments later, the Sahara settled into silence again. “Ma neesh nah?” the bedouin asked, tapping on the monstrous saddle, but I’d changed my mind; no thanks. This was a horse who’d woken up on the wrong side of the stable, clearly, his eye rolling loose in his huge head. “Ma neesh nah?” the bedouin said again. “Lo,” I replied, Hebrew for “no.” But then the washing woman—she’d been watching the whole time I think—now she stopped her smacking and came over to me, her hands dripping, and in my memory my parents and siblings just go away, and that woman, well, she lifts me like a baby, her dripping hands under my arms, lifting me as though I am light and easy, she swinging me onto the saddle as someone whistles and we are off. I am hanging on hard to the greasy mane and, though it couldn’t have been more than a slow trot, what I feel is the world break up in a bounce, the immutable, rock-solid stuckness of things become otherwise, the landscape chunked and piecemeal from the clunky gait, and my mind, for once my worried nattering what will happen mind, resolved into a particular point of concern, or concentration. All that mattered was to do what I would later learn the phrase for: keep your seat. That was it, sum total. All that mattered to that girl back then—and to maybe my girl now and, if I extend myself still further, maybe to so many of the girls groomed to groom, loving horses—all that mattered was to root myself to the animal, graft my rhythm to his, or vice versa. The concern is not over who gives, who takes, who leaves, who stays; the point is simply staying with, staying here; here. And suddenly there was a here, and the future fell away, what could or would or may, and truly time stood still.

  “Did you have fun?” my father later asked. Did I have fun? Fun? No, I did not have fun. I was sore and chafed. I was gripped and gripping. I wanted one thing only and that was to try this thing again, this perched-on-a-precipice-hang-on-hard sport. This getting off the ground, and the subsequent return, refueled, full of thanks, enough so you could, of your own free will, become bendable, kneel down, and put your mouth to the mud in a kiss that no one called for.

  But my mother—she was not happy. She had brought her brood to Israel for certain reasons. She had wanted us to improve our Hebrew and experience the feverish pace of a country determined to irrigate the desert. My father, although a paler creature than she, also had these hopes. My brother brought back from Israel an embroidered yarmulke, my eldest sister a prayer shawl, my youngest sister a miniature menorah. I brought back ladybugs no one knew about and an Arabian saddle blanket made by bedouins, who, of course, are not Jewish, never mind the Semitic similarities. My mother tried to toss that blanket. I insisted on sleeping beneath it.

  Jews play tennis or golf, my mother always said. For this reason she forbade me riding lessons at first, hoping I’d come out East Coast-Jewish-country-club style. Perhaps the fact that I am ambidextrous is why that never happened.

  I was a terrible tennis player. My siblings all got good at the sport, but, being ambidextrous by nature, I couldn’t decide which hand to hold the racket in, and thus I didn’t get past step one. While the other students at the country club progressed, I was simply stuck between two equally possible grips. When the coach quit on me, my mother must have seen her options dwindle.

  The coach quit in March, and in April overnight camp material arrived in the mail. My sister chose a sleep-away called Ben Davide, the promo material picturing girls singing at the edge of a beach, their eyes all fastened on a colossal menorah adrift in a row boat on a large lake.

  There were no menorahs anywhere in the pamphlets for the Red Fox Riding Academy or the Salisbury Hunt Club, both describing eight weeks filled with black boots and blue ribbons from the riding competitions that were at the heart of the camps’ missions. My mother shuffled through these materials, shaking her head. I shuffled through, also shaking my head. Then Flat Rock Farm appeared in the pile. No fancy binders or calligraphed letterhead. Flat Rock Farm was typed on plain white paper spiral-bound into a simple notebook. I turned the page. Four or so cabins scattered on a grassy knoll. A red barn overlooking a field bordered by birches. A girl leading a pony by a raveled rope. Three girls bareback on a horse high-stepping through a rock-strewn stream, each girl hugging, the one in front hugging the horse hard, her ear pressed to a floss-soft mane, mink black. Slick stones. Sun slant.

  There.

  3: Flat Rock Farm

  Here, the summer of 1974. The summer after the series of blizzards that buried the East Coast under so much snow. When the melt finally arrived, we found the pavement buckled and, come summer, cosmos bloomed in those cracks. In Maine, where Flat Rock Farm was, the fields were saturated all through July.

  Flat Rock Farm. The entire camp consisted of twelve girls in a single cabin below the main farmhouse where Alice lived with her husband, Hank, and their daughter, Rose, the riding instructor and stable manager.

  We went there in the Cadillac Seville. I recall a long, rutted road, tree-lined and shadowy, an arrow nailed to a post—left here—and then, quite suddenly, space. Verdant pastures as far as the eye could see. Mounded hills and horses high on them, the air so clear I could see across the acreage the blond plume of a palomino’s tail, a Welsh star, a pair of stark white socks on lean legs.

  We parked in a clearing and each of us emerged from the car’s interior. My older sister, fifteen, her hair in a high ponytail, had come along for the ride. I saw her peer around, squinty eyed. Her tennis sneakers seemed a shining white against this verdant backdrop otherwise known as where we stood. A space of hills and horses and grass all headed to hay.

  And everywhere, running about this space, swerving here and there, dashing around my sister and parents and me as though we were mere obstacles in an agility course—my sister and mother flinching when the contact came too close—were horse girls gone giddy from the thought of eight weeks immersed in saddles and straw, girls with scabbed knees and sloppy, unlaced sneakers laughing, calling, pulling from their parents’ well-kept cars stuffed duffle bags and knapsacks. The girls stomped across the soil in their muddy shoes, jodhpurs, and fancy show jackets slung over their arms. I heard new words: Friesian; dressage; snaffle. These words felt good in my mouth when I whispered them.

  My mother, however, did not look good. My father seemed lost, just peering about, staying still in his spot. All around us were flies feasting on clods of fresh manure. Alice, wife of Hank and mother of Rose, was serving punch from a bowl on the lawn. My first view of Rose, I recall, was unremarkable. She was leaning languidly against a fence post, her hemp-colored hair in a long braid over one shoulder. Rose looked young and lovely, the way you’d want your teacher to be. Meanwhile Alice ladled four drinks into Dixie cups for the clot of family we were, standing so tightly together we must have seemed sealed.

  “I take it you’re Lauren,” Alice said, and before I could answer she’d pressed a nametag to my chest.

  I felt her hand against me. I saw her face, roughed up from wind and weather, somehow the skin still soft.

  My mother set her the Dixie cup on the table. My sister peered inside hers. “There’s a fly in here,” my sister said. I looked. Yes, there were. Two flies, alive and struggling. Alice laughed.

  “They won’t harm you” Alice said. She looked at my sister. She looked at me. “Nothing here will harm you,” Alice repeated.

  Turns out, she was half right.

  We had le
ssons twice a day, three hours in the early morning, two hours in the late afternoon, when the coolings came. The fact that I often recall less about those lessons than the events surrounding them speaks to the strangeness of the situation I would soon discover I was in. Our sheets were dewy each evening when we climbed into bed. The tarnished bell in the paint-peeled cupola tongued out the time when Hank tugged the old rope. The old rope, the old desk in the old office in the old barn with its closet beneath the hayloft, the door as dark as the wall, so it was almost invisible. Opening that closet door to get at its innards; the glycerin block for washing the tack; the fresh girths, the deep tin scoops with which to dole out grain for the feed buckets affixed to the stalls, their doors brass plated and inscribed with the twenty names of the twenty horses, many of whom I still recall: One Precious Dot, Splash, Mister K (Rose’s favorite), and, yes, even Pegasus himself, all white except his withers, which where splattered with astral debris—splotches, spots, moons; on his haunches he carried an impression of the world’s biggest bang—a horse with history on his hide.

  Both Pegasus and Mr. K had dental issues and thus in that closet was also stored a separate equine toothbrush for each animal, the toothbrushes the size of pot scrubbers, plus an enormous tube of toothpaste flavored like sunflower seeds, a fact that we confirmed empirically. Twice a day Rose required that we brush K’s and P’s teeth, or get some other horse a new girth, or do this or that, so we were always hustling to and from that closet. This is why it did not take us long to find, hanging in the closet’s back, an old show jacket lined with silk, silk slippery and cool no matter how high the heat. Who would not want to touch such fabric or not want to open the accompanying, and by contrast plain, plastic bag crammed with first-place ribbons in every hue of blue. Later, when I learned more, I imagined Rose shoving in the ribbons, punching them in in a fit of rage. Each ribbon we fished free stayed spastic, the kinks resisting the smoothing press of our palms. On their backs—Rose’s name, a date scribbled on decades ago, but we never put our twos and twos together. Rose’s blues in 1952. And then Rose now, in 1974, so lyrically lovely, especially in the evenings when she wore tank tops that showed her freckled shoulders.

  Who could forget Rose? We guessed she was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, but beyond that the guessing got hard. A boyfriend? College? She was princess pretty, with her long Rapunzel braid she’d at times let loose so we could comb the rippling river of her hair. “Girls,” she’d sometimes say, apropos of nothing, “girls, I don’t want to see you ever in makeup. You should let your natural self shine through.”

  As for Rose, she wore jeans ripped just right, and when she wasn’t in boots she went barefoot, her nails nacreous against her trim tan feet. She could be in great good moods, laugh uproariously, tell us ghost stories, lend us her head and her hair, and at night we whispered about her boyfriends, who they were, and if they ever came around once we were asleep. We tried to picture Rose in cars with their soft tops down, above her the sky spattered with stars, or at college in a library by stacks of books, but no matter how hard you thought about Rose, there were always curves you couldn’t get around. Almost every day, before breakfast, she would ride her favorite horse, Mr. K, through the fields, the sun a spotlight following them as they galloped, serpentining the spools of hay. One of the first stories Rose told us that summer, and then kept retelling us, was how she’d raised Mr. K from infancy. “I almost saw him born,” Rose would say. “Eight years ago. I had a monitor by my bed, and I kept running to the barn every time the mare moved in this way. And each time, false alarm. I finally brought my blanket out there and slept in the straw so I wouldn’t miss the birth. But I’d been up so many nights,” Rose would tell us, “that, you know what, girls?” she’d ask, for the fifth, the sixth time. “You know what?” Rose would say and we’d all lean forward—what?—even though we knew.

  “Mr. K was well on his way before I woke up. I was sleeping right there in the straw and I didn’t hear a thing. And when I opened my eyes, there he was, more than halfway here.”

  We loved hearing Rose talk about Mr. K; how he whinnied before his hips were even freed, how the mare’s milk bag was full but she kicked him away every time he tried to nurse, how he persevered and how, relieved of the pressure from her swollen teats, the mare relented, and love came, all mixed up with milk. But more than these specific stories, we loved that Rose loved to tell them, standing by the stall, Mr. K’s heavy head resting in the crook of her arm, how she stroked his nose in time to the words, how he sometimes snoozed there. We loved to see this. And we loved to see Rose ride Mr. K, because it seemed incredible, how he changed from a sweet sleepy mammal to all elegance in his bridled attire, ears forked forward, tail held high as he raced the fields. Rose could take Mr. K from a squared stop to a full gallop with one simple word: Now. She had trained him to trot sideways, to pounce and pivot—human predator and equine prey flung from their fixed roles and deciding to dance together; for me it was proof that if—rule number one—the universe could be impossibly bad, then—rule number two—it could also be impossibly good.

  And then there was rule number three: rules were unruly if you peeled back the bark and kept going. Nothing stayed still.

  At night we often listened to their fights. “This is insanity, and that f’ing garlic, my god, Mother.” Silence. Silence. Sile—“AND WOULD YOU STOP WITH YOUR HIGHER POWER?” In the listing farmhouse where Rose lived with her parents, we could often hear her voice, the snippets senseless and all the more riveting because they were so. Garlic? Higher power? We could hear Rose’s father, Hank, like a plodding donkey: “Let’s respect each other now—” and Alice: “How could you? Why would you? That’s IT.”

  Our bunk, located just below their kitchen windows, meant for us front-row seats to a B-grade movie we had, at that point, no ability to really rate. As the summer progressed, so too did that family’s misery. Twelve girls, we’d put our chins on the sills and listen.

  As times passed, we learned the tempos. Sometimes the battles screeched to a stop, a brief beat of silence, and then hearty laughter, odd in its abruptness. Other times the opposite; on and on the fighting went, deep into the night, the pauses between outbursts growing longer, and then longer still, as though Alice, Hank, and Rose all had mechanical packs in their backs, the batteries running down until at last the charge was lost. Then an ominous silence settled over the house, and in the cabin, we’d eye each other with worry. I’d picture the family slumped in their separate chairs, resting like rag dolls.

  We tried to guess why, the guesses growing wilder and wilder still. Now, thirty-some years later, I can’t recall our tall tales; what’s stayed with me are the details: Hank’s slippers next to his reclining chair, Alice’s crocheted pads arranged almost desperately on every armrest. Their staircase curved up into a shadowed second floor we were not invited to explore, and once a week the family’s clothes dried on the line, Alice’s incredibly large underpants, Hank’s jeans, Rose’s red bras and teensy panties flirting with the wind until Alice plucked them down, her mouth a tight line as she hurried inside, balancing the laundry basket on her hip. What’s stayed with me is Rose’s face the many mornings after a battle gone really bad, her skin the color of some sidewalk. She was in such a state the first time I saw her kick the paint pony, camp only one week old, and then also the next time, when she whipped the Welsh mare so hard a red seam opened in her hide. The high cry of pain. The pony, trapped on the lead line, rearing back, front legs dangling down: Stop. Rose stopped.

  Except she didn’t. Some horses were so scarred from her whip work that they had sunken spots in their hides where you could fit your finger in. We began to understand: these beatings happened, like wind or weather. We started to scan the sky.

  We were twelve girls with twelve tongues, girls thick with gossip and giggles, but about the beatings, we did not speak.

  I remember Splash, a large, baby-faced gelding who, smelling dinner on our very first trail ride, took
off towards the barn no matter how hard Jenny yelled, “Ho there, Horse!” Back at the stable, Rose undressed Splash. She unbuckled his girth, slid the bit from his maw, slipped his halter over his head, hitching that halter to a hook anchored deep in the barn’s main beam.

  “What a bad, bad horse you are,” Rose said.

  At these kinds of times, her voice took on a little lilt, and she tongued the dentures she’d showed us just days before, when, without warning and during a ghost story she’d popped them into her palm, enjoying our sudden shock.

  And now, with Splash, we could see her tongue her teeth; slip them from their sockets, the brief gap in her gum line, the sudden snap back in.

  We knew. The horse knew. Rose brought out a long crop and flicked it towards Splash’s face. His anus let go. “Stinker,” Rose said. And then she did what she did, but this time no touch, Rose coming closer, slashing sideways so the horse must have felt that buzzing breeze, the edge of expectation sharper than any actual instrument. Could is such a wide word, composed completely of corners. Rose kept the crop at him, but always a skin-shaving away, here and there, now here. As for Splash, he wept, but not from pain—from could. He wept sweat and droppings. And we just stood there, dangled dryly. On and on Rose went, toying with this … pure possibility.

  And all that night our sleep was slashed. I saw an angel in an orange grove. Her wings made a buzzing sound as she rose into the sky, mouth full of pulp; I snapped awake. The cabin was dusky with dawn just coming on; in the other beds were the bulky forms of girls on the move, girls deeply dreaming, troubled, tossing here and there.

  Splash, huge in stature but delicate in psyche, got sick after that. We were, by then, ten days into camp—at most. But already every one of us girls had grown frightened of Rose, while we were also equally enchanted, numbed by some spell, the feeling as if for forever. Splash circled in his stall. He stopped eating. Dr. Fascal came out in her van. She put her ear to Splash’s heft and listened. She pressed his sides and stomach. She used her stethoscope and let us hear his insides, the secret sounds of horses. “Maybe a torsion?” the vet said, clearly confused. Splash’s bedding was matted and stunk from slurpy shit.