Borrowed Horses (10 page)

Dave interjected here. “You were too young to know.”

Dawn sized him up with her gaze. “I don’t know about that. I knew I could hit it, or at least, I was pretty sure I could. And I knew I shouldna done it. It seems like I could have put two and two together before pulling the trigger.”

My teeth felt like they were beginning to float in my mouth. Our waitress came and wrote our food orders wordlessly, and I thought about my father. When he was nine, he’d found a nesting seagull in some rocks on an ocean cliff side. Practicing for the baseball team, he decided to test his aim by throwing rocks at the bird to make her fly. He’d thrown wide at first, but when she didn’t move, he threw closer. Then, a rock went a little off from where he’d meant to throw and hit her squarely in the head, which instantly dropped. He knew he’d killed her and her unborn chicks in their eggs. He watched and waited until the sun set, praying constantly that she wasn’t really dead, but prayers aren’t so very strong.

The waitress waddled off to the kitchen, and Dawn continued her story. “Dad tried to make me feel better about it when we got home. We even took the bird to show my mom. It was so light when I picked it up, but in the truck home, it seemed to get heavier and hotter. It itched in my hand. Dad took my picture with the Polaroid, me holding it up by its little foot, and he stuck the thing in the freezer so I could show my cousins at Sunday dinner.”

At the head of the table, Russ was unable to stay serious any longer and sputtered something incoherent about bird-sicles. Soon everyone, Dawn included, was laughing. Dave caught my smile and held it. For the hair of an instant, I wondered what would happen if I responded to his desire. “That damned Polaroid is still on their mantel,” Russ said as soon as he was able to get the words out.

Dave volunteered Jenny to go next, putting his hand on her shoulder as he did and letting it sit there. My jaw clenched and I tilted in a little margarita to loosen it. My foot could reach forward—I could touch his toe—instead, I reached again for my drink.

Jenny stunned no one with her totally lame regret: “I regret cursing my father.”

“Fuck me if that counts.” Dawn reeled back in her chair. “I spill my guts about shooting a poor little baby bird and the best you can come up with is cursing your daddy?”

I regretted taking Jenny, so inexperienced, trail-riding and getting her hurt. I regretted swiping Lemonheads from Rosauer’s and cheating on my U.S. history midterm in high school, though I never got caught at either. I regretted leaving my mother for New Jersey.

“No,” Jenny looked wounded, “come on. It counts. It was serious—you don’t know how close my dad and me were. We had a really close relationship, and I almost wrecked it.”

“Key word: ‘nearly,’” said Dawn, but she sat back and let Jenny continue.

“It was back when I was in high school. My dad and I had always been really close, like I said, because mamma died when I was just a kid.” Dawn’s hard stare softened. “It was always just the two of us. We’d do all sorts of stuff together that dads and daughters don’t normally do: go shopping, make cookies—he even helped me learn to put on make-up and choose a prom dress.” She looked at Dave and smiled here, and I had no doubt who her date had been. Numbness spread through my cheekbones, tequila’s anesthesia. “But Daddy was never quite sure about Dave.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Dave said. “Her old man hates me.”

Jenny laughed this away. “He never
hated
you. He just wasn’t sure. And think of things from his perspective: he didn’t want to give his baby to just anyone.”

I could see Dave fighting with himself a little here, wanting to say, I imagined, that he wasn’t “just anyone,” but he merely smiled at her, making Jenny’s eyes dance again.
I still regret you, Dave
, I thought.
I still do
.

“Anyway.” She turned back to the table at large. “Dave gave me a promise ring my senior year, and my dad hit the roof. He said there was no way he was going to let me marry Dave, and that Dave couldn’t offer me the emotional and financial stability I deserved. That’s exactly what he said: emotional and financial stability.” She gasped, as if astonished afresh by her father’s words, her eyes wide and blue. “We kept at it, saying things we shouldn’t, until I told him that I was eighteen and an adult and he should mind his own f-ing business.”

“Only you didn’t say f-ing?” Russ was grinning.

“Right. I didn’t say f-ing. My poor dad. I thought he’d explode or something, but instead he got real pale. I’d thought for a moment that I’d killed him, he was so pale—like he’d had a heart attack or something. Then, he just got up and walked out of the room and I swear to God I’ve never felt so alone in all my life. Dave was back at college, and my dad didn’t say a word to me for weeks. I started to think he’d never talk to me again. I begged him to forgive me and to give Dave another chance, but it was like he couldn’t even hear me.” Jenny stopped. No one said anything.

Three guys had ever seen me naked, and I was sitting across from one of them, and he was rubbing the shoulder of my friend, his wife. Every time Dave glanced over at me, I felt naked again. Naked and angry and wanting him nonetheless and not wanting him anywhere near me.

“Eventually he started saying little things,” Jenny said. “‘Pass the salt,’ or ‘are you taking the car tonight?’ That sort of thing. A little more every day until it was almost like normal, but sometimes I feel like that f word is still sticking between us, like, like,” she turned to Dave, “what’s that thing you wedge in a door frame when it isn’t right?”

“A shim.”

“Yeah, like a shim. Only instead of making us right or true or whatever, it took something that was true and pushed it out of place and I can’t make it right. Eventually, Dad seemed to settle himself to the way things were. I think he hoped that Dave would get so into college that he’d never come home, but we got married the next summer, and then Dave went to work for Dad, and now everyone’s happy. It all worked out in the end, but I still wish I hadn’t said that word to my dad. I wish I hadn’t hurt him like that.”

I regretted selling the Pod. I regretted my last fight with Mouse. I regretted not visiting my parents more often. I regretted not calling regularly when I was in Jersey. I regretted the last pair of shoes I bought. Tomorrow, I would regret drinking these glasses of Budweiser—but not the margaritas, never the margaritas.

I didn’t ask how Dave came to work for the man who so hated him—that story seemed to tell itself—and no one asked Dave if everyone was really as happy as Jenny claimed. I wondered if their marriage was an act of nineteen-year-old rebellion or a way for Dave to prove himself, to prove her daddy wrong at all costs. Or maybe Jenny was more powerful than I’d credited her, able to construct her own happiness.

When I was four, I had my own moment of animal cruelty. We had a cat, a stray my mother had fed. We named him Rumpelstiltskin, but we called him Rump because, as my father always said, he was a pain in the rump, pissing and scratching and spraying. I decided one day that he needed a collar, something to show he was owned and loved. We’d never kept cats, though, and the puppy collars in the drawer were too big. I found instead a thin blue rubber band, slid it over his head, and forgot about it. A week later, Rump’s neck started oozing, the stinking green and blood-streaked goo of a festering wound. The vet washed her way through the pus-matted fur to find the band. It wasn’t until I saw it that I realized it was my fault, that I had almost killed Rump. Even then I didn’t understand; it had slid on so easily, so slender and stretchy, so innocuous. My mother and the vet were outraged, blaming the rubber band on the cruelty of local teenagers hopped up on AC/DC and God knew what else. I sat silent, turning over this new reality in my head: I had very nearly killed.

It wasn’t regret exactly. Rump recovered and, over the years, fully paid me back for that rubber band with a series of dead birds on my pillow. I woke, over and over, to staring rubbery black eyes, stray feathers, and open yellow beaks. My arms were covered with parallel tracks of slender scabs written in claw, and at seven, I got cat scratch fever, making my armpits so sore I could not lift my arms. Infection for infection, quid pro quo.

Dawn turned to Russ. “Your turn.”

“Mine’s easy,” he said with the broad, class-clown grin so typical of him. “I regret not nailing Brittany Anderson back in high school.”

The table erupted with shocked laughter except for Dawn who scowled. Everyone was starting to feel further away, even Dave, whom I could look at now through the visor of margarita armor. Jenny said, “If my cursing my dad doesn’t count, than that one doesn’t either.”

“Clearly, you never saw the rack on Brittany Anderson.” Russ held his hands in front of his chest, pantomiming copious handfuls. “Back me up on this, Joan.”

Russ had also gone to Moscow High, but he was two years ahead. For me, Brittany was little more than a blurred memory of black hair, dark eyes, and pouting, frosted lips, but the memory of her impact on the guys at school remained, even through alcohol’s fog. “She was pretty hot,” I said.

“Pretty hot?” Russ rolled his eyes. “That girl was totally amazing.” He leaned across the table toward Dave and lowered his voice slightly, as if giving him a hot stock tip. “She was supposed to be totally easy, too.”

“Hot, yes,” I said, “but honestly, when did you ever have a shot?”

Now it was Dawn’s turn to laugh. “You better cough up a real regret.”

“O.K., O.K.” Russ shot a pseudo-glare my way, then paused and grew somber. “I don’t regret Brittany Anderson, but I do regret Melanie Richards.”

“Another hottie?” The word sounded funny coming from Jenny, but no one took notice.

“No,” Russ’s voice was lower now. “No, no one ever called Melanie Richards hot. They called her many things, but never hot. We teased her relentlessly. Actually, teased is too weak a word. We tormented her.” His eyes pierced the fog, “You remember Rhonda, don’t you, Joannie?”

I shrugged helplessly. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

Russ sighed. “I guess not a lot of folks would. Rhonda moved away before junior high, but back at Russell Elementary, she was the shit. Melanie moved here at the start of fourth grade. She was a nice enough girl, just small and quiet, but Rhonda must have seen her as some sort of threat. Or maybe she was just an easy victim. Good sport. Melanie wore these really ugly glasses, those big round kind with the thick frames? And she had thin, gawky, bird legs that were white even in summer. Otherwise, she was cute enough. For whatever reason, Rhonda hated her. She said she was a weird little freako and that her clothes all came from the poor box at their church, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it was true about the clothes. Rhonda said she smelled like brussels sprouts and started calling her Mel the Smell, but that wasn’t true. Melanie was always clean.”

“La Cucharacha” trumpeted through the speakers, with its rolling, celebratory brass.

“Pretty soon, everyone hated Melanie for no other reason than that Rhonda said we should. Even the girls who’d been Mel’s friends at first wouldn’t be caught dead with her, all so worried about what Rhonda would say.”

“There was a girl just like that at my school,” Jenny said quietly.

“Mine, too,” said Dawn, “I guess every school has a Mel and a Rhonda.”

Russ continued. “Rhonda made rules for the playground: only girls wearing this kind of jeans or that kind of tee shirt were allowed on the monkey bars this day or the swings that. She made charts for the girls she liked so they’d all know what to wear on certain days of the week: the cool kid uniform. Things could change hourly—only Rhonda ever knew the rules. Then, Rhonda started in on me, asking me to flirt with Melanie and stuff, just as a joke. She’d found out that Mel had a little crush on me or something. I hedged a bit and tried to get out of it, but Rhonda started hinting that I didn’t want to do it because I really did like Melanie and that maybe she’d tell the whole school that I was in love with Melanie Richards.

“I should have let her say what she wanted. Looking back, she wasn’t so tough. If she’d gone up against me, I don’t think my friends would’ve ditched me as quick as they’d split on Melanie. Shit, I could’ve been the breaking of Rhonda McMillan, but instead, I did what she said, writing these notes to Melanie with Rhonda at my back, telling me what to say, how much I loved her, dumb little poems, how hot she was in her glasses, how I dreamed of her during math. Finally she told me to write one asking Mel to meet me at the flagpole after school so we could kiss. She showed up, and all the kids just laughed and laughed.” He looked up, shaking off the memory. He swallowed and ran a hand through his flat top, all the laughter gone from his eyes. “That’s my regret.”

I knew the rest of the story, but I wasn’t going to make Russ tell it. I may not have remembered Rhonda, but everyone remembered what happened to Mel the Smell. It wasn’t uplifting. It was an everyday story, a story everyone knew, a girl driven so far down she couldn’t possibly recover. Her mother had found her one afternoon in her bedroom closet. Mel’s body hung from her father’s tie. She left no note. She’d been quiet to the last.

The waitress broke into our darkness with sizzling plates of fajitas, chili Colorado, carne asada, and a fresh margarita; it didn’t lighten the mood.

“I feel bad watching her carry all that food,” Jenny said. “She shouldn’t be carrying a heavy tray in her condition.”

I searched for something to change the subject, something to steer us away from regrets in general. The topic was too damned depressing—it’d even brought Russ down. “You know in Jersey they charge extra for guac?” I said.

The rest of the table stared at me and for a minute I thought the ploy could work. “It’s, like, two bucks extra.” I closed my eyes. Margarita danced in me: Rita Hayworth and Chaquita Banana. Her close-fitting yellow dress, rimmed along that exposed and perfect leg with frothy layers. The sequins shone like crystals of salt. Sex and alcohol, she seduced from the hips, sliding them loosely in undulating rhythm to canned mariachi.