Borrowed Horses (6 page)

Over the years, doctor after doctor treated my mother’s symptoms, but few looked beyond the symptoms and at the woman herself. I never wanted to make that mistake. “We’ll take some pictures of it at a few different angles, but I want you to tell me if it hurts to move it one way or another. I’m sure it’s pretty tender.”

She looked up with an almost guilty smile. “I feel so foolish,” she said.

“We all slip sometimes.”

The sun was rising when I got off work. I didn’t want to go home to a bare apartment, but I was too tired to ride. The October morning was cool and damp, tough weather for Foxy’s arthritic bones. Standing ankle-deep in wood shavings in a stall heated only by the warmth of his body, I just brushed and brushed him, focusing on nothing but the bloom of his coat, bright as a new penny.

I went home and tried to sleep, but my mind kept turning to Mouse. She’d moved to Moscow when we were in second grade. She was Jennifer then. Dad nicknamed her and “Mouse” suited her so much better that, once Dad called her that, it stuck. By the end of the year, even her teachers called her Mouse.

Her grandparents were not especially pleased to have a young child in the house but put up with her as long as she was quiet, so Mouse spent the year mostly in her room reading books, drawing, and getting fat.

Chubby girls have never done well in elementary school, and the wire-framed glasses she wore and her grandfather’s job as the school custodian only made matters worse. She spent her recesses alone, avoiding notice but noticing others. All the time, she studied us in quick glances stolen in between the pages of her book. If we caught her looking, her face would break into a splotchy blush that stretched right down her neck.

I can’t take any credit for our friendship. It did not start with any act of noblility on my part; I was too busy playing hopscotch and tetherball. Our friendship started with a seating chart. Seeing that we usually behaved ourselves even without his cold eye upon us, Mr. Linfield moved Mouse into my corner in the back of the classroom. For two weeks, we sat quietly next to one another without much more contact then we’d ever had. We did our math and read our stories and filled out our worksheets. Then, one day while we were reading social studies, she did something bold—something far more dangerous than I would have given her credit for. Without ever looking up from her textbook, she slid a piece of paper across her desk and onto mine. It was a picture of a sphinx, but with Mr. Linfield’s head for the face, complete with his hair greying at the temples, his bloodshot eyes, and his long, crooked nose.

I looked at the drawing for minutes, unsure what to do or what it meant. If our teacher saw it, he would have said her name, “Jenni-fer,” in that lingering, nasal way of his, and she would have missed every recess for the rest of the week and would be moved to a table by his desk. I owed her nothing, but something in me responded to the risk she’d taken, to the trust she’d shown. My eye followed the pencil lines, the soft shading under the elbows, the dark, confident stroke of the outline and facial feature. No one else in our grade could draw that well—it was like something from the Sunday paper—and yet even then I knew it was more than a cartoon. It was a test.

As Mr. Linfield turned to pace down the far side of the classroom, I quickly wrote “The Stinks” across the bottom in dark, thick, unmistakable letters and deftly slid it back. It was a calculated risk. If Mouse had laughed, if she had betrayed us with even a smile, Linfield’s sarcasm would have turned on us, making us subject to public scorn that kids in our class did not easily live down. But Mouse, schooled as she was in the art of being neither seen nor heard, slid under his notice.

The first weeks of our friendship were made entirely of silent correspondence, pictures and captions. From it, I learned that she was smart, sarcastic, and generally more interesting than other kids. Outside of class, I never thought of her. I didn’t give much thought to the kids who lived in town. Then one afternoon, as I was in the bus line, I saw Ben Topp in the middle of a group of boys throwing pieces of his leftover lunch at Mouse: a half a twinkie, torn bits of a roast beef sandwich. Despite her size, she looked small. I couldn’t stand to see her there, fighting the tears in her eyes, trying to muster her dignity, as he called her names and flung another bit of cake. I snapped. Without a thought, I took Ben down with a flying tackle that ended in a three-day suspension and a year’s worth of gossip.

By the end of second grade, Mouse was coming over to my house almost every day after school. On sunny days, we wandered the hills. On rainy ones, we searched the neighbor’s barn for rat nests and snakes. Her clothes began to sag as the puffiness of a year in her room fell away, and my mother began making skirts for her as she’d always done for me. Mouse spent more time at my house than her own. I had been an only child, but by the time we entered junior high, we were closer than sisters.

Mouse lengthened into beauty, but by then she’d been discarded and ignored too long to care much for popularity. The fact that she didn’t care made her more attractive still. On Friday nights when she stayed at my house, she’d talk about the guys who flirted with her. She didn’t know what to say or how to act. She didn’t trust their interest. They hadn’t liked her when she was dull, so why would they like her any better just because she’d become beautiful?

As Mouse grew lithe and the flaming red of her hair fell down her back in a thick curtain, more and more heads began to turn our way. We remained unchanged, convinced we were better than those who had ignored us all these years. While other girls were going boy-crazy, I was fantasizing a life with horses. Mouse was talking about becoming a doctor or medical researcher to help people like my mother, who had set a place for her at every dinner table and made the guest bed into Mouse’s own.

Mouse could find the underlying humor in anything. With Mom’s MS, I needed that. The summer I turned seventeen, Mom had a seizure that left her speech slurred and her left side weak. I had a lesson with Eddie, and Mom insisted I go. Mouse would keep her company. I came home tired, not so much from riding but from the daily insecurity my mother’s disease had brought into our home. I opened the door to find Mom and Mouse helpless with laughter. They’d been playing Canasta when Mom, who never cursed a day in her life, asked Mouse for all of her “asses.”

“Aces,” Mouse explained as the tears rolled down her face.

“It sounds right in my head,” my mother said. Her speech was slurred and garbled by a helpless tongue but her laughter came out pure and whole, and all I wanted in that moment was for her to keep laughing and laughing and laughing, to sound again like she was unaffected, like there was nothing wrong.

After a sleepless morning, I returned to the barn and rode. My eyes burned from being open too long. Weariness seemed woven into the honeycomb of my marrow. I’d dropped my defenses with Dave. Foxfire and I strode through newly turned fields, stubbled with the shafts of harvested wheat. The ground was surprisingly soft under Foxy’s feet, the frost only on the surface. With each hoof fall, I felt it give a little, then hold. The loam’s crumbling was only a way of gathering strength as the earth compacted itself: strength enough to hold the weight of a horse, the weight of its rider, the weight of any burden. I focused on nothing but that, the crumbling strength of earth, for an hour, and then I turned home, groomed Foxfire, and returned him to the lingering warmth of his stall.

Dave called and called, begging to see me. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t write, couldn’t
think
, he said. Self-hatred fueled my will, allowing me the coldness I needed to withstand my desire. He sounded as bad as I felt. All I had to do was give, but that I would not do, denying him even friendship.

Some days, my heart was full of birds, all flapping and trying to escape at once; other days, I could feel no heart at all. Those days were easier.

Dawn looked out from a stall as I walked in. “Well, look what the cat drug in,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“How long has it been since I saw you at Dick’s?” She was on the hunt. “I thought you’d gotten yourself kidnapped or caught under a bus or something.”

“Night shift,” I said, not looking at her lest she read more in my glance. “I’m riding in the afternoons.”

She disappeared again into the stall she’d been cleaning. “And here I was hoping you’d finally gone and gotten yourself a boyfriend.” She threw the words out with another pile of shit for the wheelbarrow.

I flinched, settling my saddle onto Foxy’s broad back, running my hand over the cool leather that wear had made soft and pliant. I remembered again what I’d long known: human relationships are less intimate than that of horse and rider. Foxy and I operated as one body, one mind. People, even people in love, spend too much of their time moving in different directions, learning how to compromise their desires and aspirations to meet their partners half way, both suffering a diminishment. The horse and rider brought out the unthinkable in each other; as one, they could fly. Love between people was nothing but a shackle. Love was the boots you bought to live your wife’s dream, or the afternoons you gave to please a lover. Love was giving up on yourself.

With Foxfire, there was never a question of equality in partnership. I was in control. He was bigger and stronger; he could hurt me, even kill me, if he wanted to. But I held the reins. In the herd, respect is hard won, a battle of teeth and hooves. Riders aren’t so brutal—at least, the good ones aren’t. As Eddie used to tell me, you give a command with just enough force so that you only have to give it once. You don’t beat, but you don’t nag either. Foxy now responded to the slightest of cues, shifts of weight rather than squeezes or kicks. Riding him was as automatic as walking, something the brain did unconsciously. I had come to move Foxy’s body the same way I moved my own, as if we shared a mind. It was the ultimate intimacy.

Dave would not respond to my cues. I told him to stop calling me. I slammed the door in his face when he begged on the step.

In the silence of my apartment after each invasion, I closed my eyes and thought of Foxfire. I breathed in and out. I had to move. There could be no more distractions. I replayed horse shows in my mind, feeling again the familiar rhythm of Foxy’s stride deep within my bones, feeling the dry, hot wind on my face as we galloped on, feeling the surge of adrenaline that comes with speed and the jump over the final fence. If I focused and saved every cent, if I found a young horse with potential that I could afford, I could still ride to some form of glory.