Borrowed Horses (4 page)

It’s the mantra that goes right back to the Pony Express. In wind and sleet and driving rain, come hell or high water, you throw on the saddle and work. In January, the cold seeped so deeply into my feet that they exploded with pain when I dismounted. Most days, I enjoyed riding. Other days, I went because of something deeper, the wish that dare not admit itself. Dreams were earned through sacrifice. We only had one life, and we had to take what it offered while we could. My mother had taught me that.

I was eleven when she had her first attack, although at the time we didn’t call it that. We were taking a family walk when my mother started limping a little. She laughed it off, saying she just had pins and needles in her leg. The wind blew loose strands of hair across her suntanned face, and she looked as healthy—no, as
invincible
—as she always had. Only later did I realize that people don’t get pins and needles when they’re moving. Hers lasted for two days. Dad almost convinced her to see a doctor when they went away again, as quickly and inexplicably as they had come.

I’d forgotten about the whole thing when, nearly a year later, it happened again. She woke up with pins and needles, and they lasted all day long. We didn’t know then whether to worry. It hardly seemed like much.

The third attack sent her to the doctor. She was cutting carrots for soup when her hand went numb. She dropped the knife, and it missed her foot by a fraction of an inch, standing itself point down in the hardwood floor. “Enough is enough,” my father had said. The shaft of the knife still shivered while he dialed the phone.

But the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong. He told her to take it easy, rest up. It was probably nothing but stress. She’d been complaining about tiredness. This was just a sign that she was trying to do too much. And so it went. Different parts of her body acted strangely, on and off, with weeks or months of normality in-between. Tests showed nothing.

By the time she started falling asleep in the middle of the day, she’d seen the doctor ten times and had been sent to two different psychologists. She dreaded the appointments. “I’m not crazy,” she said. Her jaw would set a full hour before a session started, and she’d come home tight-lipped and silent. She didn’t tell anyone about her narcolepsy.

On my fourteenth birthday, we’d picked up a pizza in town on the way home from my riding lesson. Mouse was coming to spend the night, and we were rushing to beat her back to our house. The pizza scalded my knees as we drove up 95 on the way home, but I was never happier than I was in our old Subaru that night. I sang along to Depeche Mode when suddenly, my mother’s chin dropped to her chest and the car swerved into oncoming traffic. I screamed and jerked the wheel to pull us back into our lane, but I over-corrected. We spun across the road. Even today, I can see the shining grill of the truck barreling toward Moscow as it whooshed by, inches away, neatly clipping the side mirror from the car. The sound of its horn still blares in my nightmares.

When we finally settled in the ditch facing north on the southbound side of the highway, my mother and I were both awake in the way only a near-death experience can wake you. Every sensation became crisp: the swish of passing vehicles, the strong smell of burned rubber mingling with pepperoni, the fainter smell of horses clinging to my clothes, the hum of the heater, the golden shafts of wheat bending against the breeze, everything I was inches away from never hearing or seeing or smelling again. I looked to the pines lining the hill, and it seemed each individual needle stood out from the next, under their fall dusting of thousands of individual snowflakes.

We didn’t say a word on the way home. I stared out the window marveling at each small thing I’d almost lost, trying to ignore my mother’s hand shaking on the gear shift. My heart rate refused to slow; every beat pulsed with urgency.

Mouse had arrived by the time we got home.

“What kept you?” Dad asked.

“Mom fell asleep on 95.” My lips were strange, disconnected from the words they made. In truth, the accident had taken little actual time; it was my riding lesson that had gone long, but the lesson had been overwritten by the time that stretched between the closing of my mother’s eye and its opening.

Dad turned for an explanation, but Mom had none to give.

Mouse lifted the silence as easy as lifting the pizza box lid. The cheese had slid to one side and the crust was smushed against one side of the box. She looked at me with one eyebrow raised, and the two of us both broke into laughter. It flowed out in waves, one after another crashing against that dead pizza, the night’s only casualty.

As she would do so often in the months before the diagnosis when I started to believe that my mother was just crazy, Mouse pulled the pieces back together and made the world normal again, sliding the cheese back onto each slice as she served. With Mouse there laughing, it was more obvious that we had, after all, survived.

While Dave showered, I fingered the seams of his quilt. My mother had made the quilt that covered me each night. Old coffee cans along her bedroom shelf held pieces cut from outgrown riding jackets, the skirt I’d worn to graduation, my first pair of scrubs, and the assorted leftover scraps from previous quilts so that any new quilt would not depose but merely succeed the quilt I used now. All her quilts held common scraps, segues from childhood to maturity. When the time came, she’d choose a pattern to transform shed clothing into something beautiful and warm.

White sunlight flooded the room through the uncurtained window. I rolled my body over toward the bathroom door, waiting for Dave to look at me and allow me to see myself from the outside again, the view by which I was powerful and gorgeous and moved with intentionality.

What would Mouse think of Dave? I needed my high school car back to know. It’d been a small, bullet-shaped two-seater, the paint dulled long ago from blue to an ashy silver. We called it “the Pod.” Mouse and I had decided it could serve as a sort of litmus test for potential boyfriends, a sort of reverse of the sword in the stone: The man who could fit comfortably in the Pod would be the man of my dreams, which safely ruled out damned near everyone. I wondered now whether Dave was the mythical man whose body would magically fold up comfortably in the torn vinyl of those small old bucket seats.

The bed was cold without him. I pulled the carefully pieced cotton over my shoulders. All quilts are displays of love. Dave’s was hand-made with small, even stitches. Its pattern was a classic one, the double wedding ring. Unlike mine, the fabric looked like store-bought calico, but it was beautifully worked. I pictured its maker sewing night after night by lamplight, her fingers cramped with tedium and fine-sewing.

His cigarettes lay on the nightstand next to a large box of matches and an ashtray overflowing with matchsticks, each burned down nearly to the end. How bored he must have been, and how lonely, lighting matches to pass the time. I slid a cigarette from its paper box and set it between my lips. I imagined lighting it, burning my lungs with its smoke. Instead, I returned it to the box. Later, Dave would shake it from the box, press his lips against the paper my lips had held, kissing me by proxy, inhaling the heat.

Dave emerged from the shower, towel-wrapped and resplendent.

“Can you give me a lift to a car rental place?” I asked.

“You think I’m going to let you just rush off?” he said.

A thump at the window stayed the answer on my lips. I pulled Dave’s shirt on and opened the door. At first I saw nothing. The parking lot lay cold and sterile with morning light; the highway was still. Then, on the ground, feathers caught my eye. I moved to it, the pavement slick with frost, an east wind chilling my bare legs. Dave watched me from the doorway, the color vanished from his cheek. On the concrete, a chickadee lay among its own feathers, the wind ruffling the plumage, its neck twisted unnaturally by the unseen barrier.

The Heard

N
o two people were ever so suited for each other as my parents. Both were retired, Mom from the Co-op and Dad from the law, old hippies finally at home in their self-created utopia. There was a great deal they’d never believed in: shoes in summer, compassionate conservatism, Walmart. My parents did believe, had always believed, and would always believe in one holy and apostolic catholic church for the forgiveness of sins, and they attended Mass every Sunday.

I had lapsed in so many ways, not only from their church but from their ideals. Not that I had totally gone in for capitalist materialism—not that I believed, as one president put it, that “America must shop.” Still, I owned more than I needed, I wanted still more, and whenever I went home, I felt the weight of my guilty desires, of my closet full of boots and running shoes, of my drawers of Eastwood DVDs, and I became conscious that it’d been a long, long time since my last confession.

The fact that my parents never reminded me of this guilt, never preached or even hinted, did not make me less aware. Their confidence that I would make good decisions always baffled me.

I walked into their house, fresh from sin, unannounced as usual, without bothering to knock because they always expected me, no matter how long it had been.

“If you’re staying for lunch,” Dad called from the kitchen, “say so now so we can put more potatoes on.”

“Lunch sounds good.” I stood in the kitchen doorway to watch my father bustle from drawer to sink to butcher block and my mother wheel from fridge to counter, each getting in the other’s way. I expected to be bothered by the sight of her in the chair, but instead, I seemed to breathe out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, a breath I took when I left for Jersey. “Can I help?”

“We’ve got it,” my mother said, and I could see it was true. She rolled with a practiced ease, fully able to help herself. Usually, patients take a little while to get comfortable in a chair, and I wondered if there had been temporary chairs that my parents hadn’t told me about while I was gone, secret episodes that they felt would distract me if I knew. It would be like them not to worry me if they could help it—better to bear pain in silence than to drag others into their anxiety.

My parents looked more alike every time I saw them, as if they were slowly, continually morphing into duplicates of the same person. Each had an identical long, straight waist and slightly stooping shoulders, accentuated now as they leaned to slice vegetables. Their hair was frizzy and pony-tailed, hair so ubiquitous at the Co-op that I’d started to wonder whether it grew that way because of something in the sesame seeds or quinoa. Even with the chair, things hadn’t changed all that much. Their hair, the earthy smell of the dark wood-paneled kitchen, the sight of Pilate curled on his dog bed in the corner: everything comforted. It might not match the pictures made in movies, but this was love.

My father didn’t used to wear shoes. Ever. A southern California kid who stayed in Los Angeles through his law degree, he envisioned them as an unnecessary shackle, a signifier of materialism and what he called the hyper-socialization of Westernized humanity. To understand our world, he said, we must feel our world, touch its changes, its dust and mud, our litter, the new grass, everything, with our soles. He understood the world this way for so long that now his feet were calloused against its pebbles and thorns, and shaded with dirt so embedded in the skin that it wouldn’t wash out.

He met my mother at UCLA, where she had gone to escape her parents’ rigid conservatism. My maternal grandparents still live somewhere in southern Idaho, but my mother has never told me where. She can’t honor a mother and father, she once said, who don’t honor life, all colors of life. She’s never told me that they’re racists—she avoids speaking of them—but from this comment, I imagine they are. Not just talking racists, but acting racists, the kind with club memberships, the kind who organize “nigger shoots,” the kind Idaho has been working hard to rid itself of. Perhaps I am wrong. There is much I will never know about my mother.

After four years of ever-changing majors and a year of dating my father, she left school and molded a life that would include all her loves: God, gardening, my father, Idaho. And eventually me, her child. I don’t know how my father felt about moving to Idaho at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy adjustment, and Idahoans, even in comparatively liberal Moscow, have never much cared for California immigrants. Yet now, when he sits on the deck and looks over the garden that he and my mother have planted, harvested, and planted again for over thirty years, he seems at peace.

He couldn’t go shoeless year ’round here—not if he wanted to keep his toes. He bought a pair of heavy duty Sorrels, thickly lined, for winter weather. The pair that stood in the closet must have been eleven or twelve years old. There had been another pair before them, worn until they were worn through. I believe these were the only shoes my father ever owned in his adult life. Two pairs of boots: concessions.

I love watching Dad in action. I’ve never asked him about it, but I imagine that he could have made a fortune in some California firm, even shoeless. Maybe especially shoeless, since that was part of how he worked: lulling people into over-confidence with his rumpled suit, his frazzled hair, his apparent daffiness. People always underestimated him, revealed too much, and then my father, scratching his head, apparently confused, would catalogue the ways in which the witness contradicted himself. I loved how, even making his panther pounce, he looked so much like an absent-minded professor.