The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  “You’ll get it after a while,” said Theresa. “I mean, we’ve been riding for years.”

  “Yeah,” said Jenny. “You’ll get the falling trick. And as soon as you do, you’ll go intermediate. Personally, I wish someone had taught that to me way back when I was just a beginner.”

  “You’ll get it,” the other girls said.

  “I know,” I said. But I didn’t. I didn’t know much. I didn’t know why I’d dreamt about an angel with buzzing wings, or why air, which you needed to live, fanned fires that killed you to a crisp, or why I kept seeing that single black boot in the space where she should have been but wasn’t. I didn’t know why I was affected one way, everyone else another. I didn’t know then that some people are just that much more likely to see in a shared story darkness, where others see stars. I didn’t know that, nature or nurture, some bodies, some brains, are prone to feeling unsteady about their unsteadiness, a kind of tinnitus of the soul. For a long time, much later on, in my therapy-believing stage, I blamed my mother for all my fears, and then I blamed my brain, and now I don’t have time to blame anyone or anything, because my mandate is just to manage. But it’s taken me a long, long time to land here, where I am right now, typing these words, in the house where I live with my own daughter who is close to the age I was when I first fell for horses but couldn’t fall off them and went through all that a person does, all that tumbling otherwise referred to as growing up, and looking around, and if you are lucky finding in the world a single soft spot where you can rest your head, no joke, no punches pulled, a place you maybe first see from the sky, or on some speeding being, and gradually get to, despite the constant fog, touching down on the ground—no joke.

  “I don’t know,” I said again, and I really didn’t. I had no way of knowing it would be years before I’d learn touchdown my way, my style, in the house I have here, with my husband and my soulmate son and my so-special-to-me daughter who loves horses with me.

  Outside, in Westminster, right now, next to the country house where we spend our weekends, and where we will soon move to full time, is a field we will seed with alfalfa and timothy. The moon tosses some meager light on the moss-padded stones that are centuries old and, piled high, define the borders of what we own. The dogs are in for the night because there are coyotes in the woods. “Are there bears?” Clara asks me, and I tell her what I know. “I don’t know,” I say. And touch her head.

  The fields, the meager light of the moon, the timothy and alfalfa, how I lost my mother and left my childhood home—left the Golden Ghetto when I was still a child, and for forever—how I landed here—all that is a whole other story, a part of this story perhaps, but not now. Not here. Next.

  Here. 1974. The summer after the snow storms that covered the whole East Coast, knocked out people and power. “Do it Slater, do it,” Rose kept saying, but I didn’t. Rose knew my fear, smelled my stubbornness, and her nose twitched. Sleep got difficult, each drop down interrupted—snapped in half—I sitting up, holding tight to my sheet in the night. I didn’t do it Tuesday; I didn’t do it Wednesday. August came in a blast of black flies. The fields turned tawny in the August heat, and the vernal pools shriveled. The nights were dense, intense. Fireflies and falling stars. I kept clutching—a reasonable response, in my opinion.

  She came up close to me then. This was near the end, the last part of summer when the heat’s still high but begins to blend with autumn, borrowing bits of it here and there in a cool current that comes and goes so fast you can barely feel the freshness.

  And it was during this ending of one time, the beginning of another—fall fall fall—when the trees would turn to torches, beautiful one day—apple and rose—ugly the next, infection red—it was during this time when she came up to me in the ring, in the afternoon, during our group lesson. Because I’d refused to fall fall fall, every day Rose assigned me ponies, each one smaller than the next, until at last came that day when I was riding the smallest there was, a smelly shaggy Shetland with cracked hooves. Her assignments seemed part out of pity, more out of mockery, but what did I care? In my mind, down is down. Pride is pride. It got all mixed up for me, and for Rose too, I think. “Slater,” she said on this particular day, the afternoon lesson half over, I on the shaggy Shetland; she came up to me, leaned in close to me, and then closer still, so we were nearer to each other than we’d ever been before, nearly nose to nose. And what I saw—I have to say it shocked me. Her lashes—they looked different so close, each lash separate and tarred, coiffed in a way it was impossible to notice from even a few feet back. And this close up I could suddenly see that the skin on her face had some sort of film on it, some kind of dun-colored cream, visible in only the slightest streaks not blended. Or was I misperceiving? I had the sort of urge you sometimes get, senseless and difficult to resist, just to reach out a finger and swipe her face, to see if she smeared or came out clean. As for Rose, well, she saw me see and narrowed her eyes at me. Without meaning to, an unconscious response, I narrowed my eyes back.

  Rose took one solid step away from me then, put her hands on her hips. I sat as still as I could on my miniature mount, in the middle of that lesson, with the other girls looking on. No one moved. For just a second Rose seemed flustered, somehow caught. She stroked a finger beneath her eye, checked the pad, blew briefly.

  “Are you wearing makeup?” I asked. I wasn’t meaning to be rude. She just hadn’t seemed at all the type. In fact, hadn’t she told us more than once that women who wore makeup were fools? Every day she dressed in jeans, her braid slung over one freckled shoulder, her t-shirts a simple washed white. I blinked, and suddenly I could see Rose differently and definitively, her foundation cream, the tiniest but definite marks of black dotting her lower lids, giving her eyes a deepness they did not deserve. “Are you?” I asked again. I leaned out of my saddle a ways, peered at her, and, without meaning to, she instinctively, revealingly, took a second fast step back.

  No one could hear us. The other girls on their horses were at the far end of the ring. Rose and I were in a separate sphere. I saw her fast-step back, how it was hiding, what she didn’t want us to know. She saw me see.

  “You,” she said, her voice low and wrong. It was so simple. Campers didn’t disobey, didn’t question, certainly didn’t cut to the quick. That was her job and her job only. We were in this sense like her horses, and sure enough, Rose raised her crop. I did not think she would hit me. I was so sure that under no circumstances would she hit me. She would never go that far because she was only so crazy, right? But what I thought she would do is pull a Splash, send that crop slashing sideways so it would whizz, and I would jerk back, as terrified as I was bold. Bold? Yes. Paradoxes aplenty.

  But Rose didn’t slash her crop sideways, toying with me as she had so many weeks ago toyed with Splash. Instead, she raised her crop, her face going fiery, her bunched mouth mean—on the barest edge of control Rose was—and just as I was getting ready to jump down and run from her rivulet of rage, Rose did this weird thing. She jerked her arm and her crop away from me, trying to make it look like this had been her plan all along, to just casually place the crop on the highest part of fence post, which she did, laying it up there with a forced, false gentleness, plan B. Obvious to me.

  “Plan B,” I said.

  And then, Rose came in really close to me again. Closer even than before. So close that even if you’d been standing one foot from us you could not have heard her speak. I leaned down to listen.

  “Slater,” she said, “you think I’d hit you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You think a forty-year-old woman needs to really bother with a rich kid like you?”

  I stared straight at her, in shock, but not for the reason she thought.

  “You’re … forty?” I said.

  A puzzled look crossed Rose’s face. “How old did you think I was?” she asked.

  We were whispering this. The girls were still looking on from far across the rink. I shrugged
.

  “How old?” Rose demanded again.

  “I thought you were … much younger,” I said quickly. “But that’s just because you, your, um, your braid, and you live at home, I mean usually old people don’t live …” I was confused, making mistakes I could hear, Rose smiling a wicked, slow smile.

  “So,” she said. “You think I’m too old to live at home?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You most certainly did,” Rose said. Suddenly, she whipped around. “Girls,” she shouted, somewhat maniacally. “Girls, Slater here thinks I’m too old to live at home.”

  The girls on their horses at the other end of the rink didn’t say a word.

  “How old is too old to live at home?” Rose asked, walking into the center of the ring, equidistant now from us all. She pointed at Jenny. “How old,” Rose repeated, speaking loud so we all could hear, “how old is too old to live at home?”

  Jenny shrugged. “I dunno,” she said. “Thirty-two?”

  “Wouldn’t you agree,” Rose said, striding back to the fence post, picking up her whip, pointing it at Aggy as she resumed her spot in the ring’s sandy center and then repeating: “Wouldn’t you agree, Aggy, that a thirty-two, or even a thirty-six year old living at home was a loser?” Rose paused. “Of some sort,” she added quickly.

  “I guess I’d think that it was weird,” said Aggy.

  “How old do you think you’ll be,” asked Rose to Theresa, now pointing the whip towards her. “How old do you think you’ll be when you leave home?”

  “I want to go to college,” said Theresa. “Far away. California,”

  “I bet you’ll go to Stanford,” Rose said, her voice dripping with resentment. “And I’ll bet when you’re thirty-two you’ll have four babies, right?”

  “Two?” said Theresa in a small voice.

  “Twins,” said Rose, her mouth a strained smile, her face collapsed. She scanned all of us. “You girls have all got it made,” she said. “You’ll all grow up,” she said and paused. “You’ll all grow up and meet some man and have babies of your own. You’ll have your houses and your husbands, maybe not in that order, but you’ll have them all right. And then you know what?” she said. “Then you’ll spend the rest of your life telling yourself that all that crap was what you really wanted.” She turned and looked directly at me.

  “You too, Slater,” she said. “In the end,” she said, “no matter how eccentric you think you are, you with your notebook and neuroses, you’re no Emily Dickinson. You’ll do nothing different. But I,” said Rose, laughing a little, “well, I’ve done something different all right. I’ve ….” and here her voice trailed off. She stood and stared. Stared and stood. “I’ve never …”

  I could, we all could, hear her struggling to find her words. “I plotted my losses,” Rose said, at last. “I leapt off, and made it look like something else. I said no to Alice,” Rose said, and now it seemed she was speaking to herself, or maybe to Alice, who was there, invisible in the air.

  And then Rose turned to me again. “So I’m an oddity, eh?” she said. “That’s too true. And in the end, Slater,” Rose said, “no matter how unique you think you are, in the end, Slater,” Rose said, “you’re not an oddity. You’ll never say no. You’ll be just like the rest.”

  “And you,” I said, overcome, again, by a boldness that simply makes no sense in a life full of fears. “And what will you be like, in the end?”

  “Just as I am now,” Rose said softly. Her answer seemed to surprise her. “As I was and am and forever will be.”

  And then, just like that, Rose turned, left us on our horses in the ring; she just walked off, whistling. We watched her cross the field, her form diminishing with distance, then gone.

  Overhead, a plane went by, high, high in the sky. It was so tiny, so impossible, a minnow stuffed with people.

  “What the fuck?” said Aggy.

  “She’s forty,” I said, still on my little Shetland, speaking to all the girls. “She just told me she was forty years old!”

  We all twelve looked at each other then. No one moved from where they were. Even the horses stayed silent, stayed still. I kept seeing Rose in my mind as I’d first seen her the day my parents dropped me off here, leaning languidly on the fence, her plump blond braid tied off with a cherry-red ribbon, purple flip-flops and frayed jeans. “Forty,” I heard someone say, the word just dangling there. And then, without further discussion, we all solemnly dismounted. The giddiness was gone. So much for learning to fall. What good did that do if you didn’t know the ditches?

  It was mid-August then. In two more weeks, we were out of here. It started to rain.

  It rained and rained. It rained and rained and rained and rained. It rained. The fields filled with puddles, the driveway streamed, the sand in the riding rink gullied and washed off, leaving only what was beneath it behind, bare patches of clay and pavement. It rained on the roof and on our heads and in our eyes when we went out, each drop distinct, the tap of a foreign finger, cool and commanding, appointing, anointing, again and again. It rained on the barn roof, which was white metal in the summer sun but turned slick and sterling in the storm, deepening the red of the barn beneath it, that big building floating on swales of water and hay. It rained.

  We stayed in the cabin. Nothing much to do. We played Crazy Eights and Spoons. Our sheets dampened, nearly dripped, our blankets gained weight, the wood walls swelled and split, and when we read, or tried to, the pages of our books stuck together, two or three or four or even five pages of paper clumped, tearing softly, almost luxuriously when you tried to pry the paper apart. And the paper left behind, on our finger tips, the stains of words, of stories we’d never make sense of now.

  It rained. It rained and rained and rained and rained. It rained. It rained all over the old, listing farmhouse, and the downspouts couldn’t carry all the weight of that water, got choked up, backed up, gurgled, and spit, Hank sprinting out of the house with a folded newspaper over his head and tugging from the downspouts’ metal mouths a clot of leaves, a clot of clots. Wiping his hands on his pants while inside the yelling kept coming. It rained. It rained water and voices. Hank hurried outside, pried clots from the downspouts, wiped his hands on his pants, tossed the newspaper down, and stood still in their flooded yard, looking directly, challengingly, but hopelessly up, his face rent open, water coming into his clefts. His eyes.

  It rained water and voices. Weather outside and in. The forecast said rain for the foreseeable future, and in their house they kept it coming, too close, perhaps, too tired, too many leaks, too many years; who knew? The pages of books were stuck together, tore softly when we tried to pry them apart, the ink all smudged, so pieces of the story were and would always be wet. Senseless.

  The rain came pounding down, but it had the odd effect of amplifying their voices, each distinct drop carrying within it a tiny subwoofer, a speaker, broadcasting their forecast, their weather, their tears, too. I heard crying. I thought maybe Rose was crying, but who could say for sure? Someone cried, perhaps a bird, perhaps a person. Mostly they yelled, as was their custom, their religion, but during those days of rain, the rain following the fall which preceded the discovery of Rose’s age. She had assumed we knew, and yet she had also made her mask of makeup, but this wasn’t what really hurt her. What really hurt her were just the figures, plain and simple, two digits impossible to fly over or fall from; horses and humans—both tethered. The yelling changed in the house, and the house tilted just a tiny bit more, strained its anchor, so for maybe the first time, the house could consider its options, sense the open sea.

  In my mind, when I watched that house, I pictured what it would look like snapping from the anchor that kept it in place and then sailing off, all three stories, what that would feel like from the inside, the sound of it, crisper than anything they’d maybe heard in a long, long time, the feel of it, a sudden little lilt, a lifting, so surprising it would stop them dead, or alive, in their single circlin
g track, and they’d eye each other as they felt their home rising on a small swell, leaning into the wind, not against it but finally with it, all the rooms coming along for the ride, and there they went, whisking. Hi-ho, the Derry-o! I pictured their faces at the windows once they realized the cord was cut, the feared freedom now theirs, by hook or by crook, no choice. Change. Their faces would appear at the windows, one face per window, one circle in one square, each circle smiling, the white hand waving, at once mechanically and ecstatically. Good-bye. Good-bye!

  Sometimes I wanted to cry, for no obvious reason. Crazy Eights. How long can that go on?

  A long, long time, as I learned that summer of 1974, the summer after the snowstorms that came and killed people with not a single, solitary weapon. Nature’s way. Quite cunning.

  One thing Alice and Hank and Rose were not was cunning. They were all blunt blades that kept on cutting uselessly. As it rained, they yelled. As it poured, they screamed, all cooped up and crazy. Alice screamed at Rose, the words, the phrases, over and over again: Underappreciated; not in my home; can’t you care? you had your chance; what a slob; you mope and mope; return the ring; my only hope; I didn’t try; I tried.

  And, in return, Rose screamed at Alice, the words, the phrases, over and over again: Mr. K; outta my hair; it was never my life; I feel so bad for Dad; you think it’s my fucking fault? I was always first place; you push.

  And the words went singsong in my head, Feel so bad for Dad return the ring my only hope you mope and mope my only hope, over and over again, until it seemed I was indeed falling in precisely the way I really feared, the ground completely gone. And then, on the fourth night, the rain came down with a weird, wrong ferocity, a sheer, pounding sheet washing things away, while in that house on that hill they ranted and raved, screamed and shouted, swore and swore at an intensity I had previously believed not possible for them, and that plus the strange rain scared us until it stopped.

  In a second it all stopped. It was like God had a big brake, the pedal of which he suddenly pushed down, hard—enough!!—God said, and crushed his big brake to the floor of his gazillion-dollar chrome Corvette up there in the sky; he screeched everything to a stop. Red light. It’s over. Mars—see it shine? Mars is so small and so big at the same time that the confusion could make you cry. And in a second, in a single, simple swoosh, God’s housekeeper cleared out the clouds so we could see the sky beneath, and all the stars appeared as though they’d been there the whole time, just waiting, which of course they had been, only tonight they looked unusually bright. They looked festive, as if extrascrubbed for some special show, opening night at The Universe, the whole cast of characters glowing and perfect and pulsing with energy, some shooting, some still, that sky filled and filled with stars streaming back into their rightful place in space. Oh my god your god no god—was it ever something to see.