Growing Girls Read online

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind, too,” she assures me. “It’s so hard to remember things.”

  “It’s hard to remember not to rip apart the gas pump?” I say.

  “Look, the way it came out, I’m sure it was designed that way because people must do this all the time.”

  “You,” I say, “are a good person.” I tell her about Christmas. I’m holding the nozzle, dragging the hose back to the pump. She and I agree that, no, I can’t just run away and pretend this did not happen.

  I lug my wretched self into the little store, wait for the tattooed teenager behind the counter to finish talking on the phone, and then I report my crime. “What’re you talking about?” she says curtly.

  “The hose,” I’m saying. “It’s off. It’s, you know, not on.” I find that I don’t have the vocabulary for this admission, nor do I seem to have the ability to use the words “I did it.”

  “Well, can’t you just use a different pump?” she says.

  “No, I got gas,” I say. “But you need to know that the hose, it’s off.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” she snarls, following me out, and when I show her the damage she gives me the look of disdain and disbelief and horror that I deserve.

  Check that off my list. Am I done here? Um. She is still looking, her chin jutting out with expectation.

  Me (mumbling): “I don’t need to, like, do anything, do I? Maybe this is covered under my car insurance…”

  Her (heavy sigh): “Just … go.”

  I am gone. So far gone.

  killing a sheep

  If the prolapse is uterine, you must have the sheep’s head down in order to put the uterus back in the sheep. If the uterus has swelled, you can put sugar on it to reduce the swelling. It is not always possible to put the uterus back in the sheep.

  —DR. BILL REYNOLDS, DVM,

  GARDEN STATE SHEEP BREEDERS

  We started spatting a lot, Alex and I, ever since lambing season began. Maybe it was birth anxiety, the stress of new life. Just like the pregnant wife who can no longer see her ankles, can hardly sleep what with those little feet stabbing her in the liver—and here’s her husband rattling on about how in God’s name hell be able to handle changing a dirty diaper. Oh, for heaven’s sakes—what in the world is he doing thinking so far into the future while she’s sitting there so very locked in the present, a fantastic blob of misery with half a mind to go ahead and explode into tiny shreds if it means getting this creature out of her once and for all?

  I’ve never been pregnant so I am only imagining. Is it anything like being a pregnant farm? We had seven pregnant ewes, one pregnant donkey, a dozen eggs about to hatch, courtesy of our broody bantam silkie hens. A pregnant farm, that’s how I imagined myself, and all around me was a landscape teeming with expectation; sometimes I would sit on the porch and believe I could hear the hills swelling, bulging as if ready to burst, woww, woww, woww—hold on folks, here comes a whole new cast of characters.

  A woman knows. Any female anywhere near another pregnant female knows, and even if she doesn’t know she knows, her hormones know. Just like college roommates who find that after a few months their periods are suddenly in sync, women have eerie powers in this arena that we have never figured out how to capitalize on. In my case—and I’m not sure there was any good at all to come of this—I found myself looking at our pregnant ewes, fat as hogs, dragging their massive udders around, and I could completely and consciously and passionately feel their bloat.

  (There’s a danger, of course, in indulging yourself in this kind of cross-species empathy. Our vet told us that when a donkey is ready to deliver, she’ll start “bagging up.” That means her breast milk comes in and you can see the swell. So every day I would walk to the barn, bend over, and check, only to be disappointed. Then one day Alex and I were at Applebee’s restaurant waiting to be seated at a table for two and the hostess had on a very low-cut blouse and I found myself saying, and way too loud, “Wow, now she’s bagging up real good.”)

  We had, up until that spring, assisted in the birth of just one farm animal: Greg, our goat. So we were in every respect rookies, anxious and excited and testy. Our arguments weren’t big blowups, but rather huffy little standoffs. We’re by and large respectful. We know how to spit, spat, apologize, and get on with things. Every couple has to learn how to fight. They say parenting either strengthens a marriage or destroys it, and I think mostly it depends on if the two of you know how to manage and forgive each other’s incompetence.

  I lost the argument over tail docking. Okay, now that was one I didn’t even bother pursuing. I thought: Hey, these are his sheep. This is his project. He gets to decide if he wants their tails to be too short.

  A day or two after a lamb is born, you’re supposed to dock its tail. That means: cut it off. There are several methods of doing this, with preferences seeming to fall regionally. Around us, people use the band method: you put a tight rubber band around the tail, strangling the blood flow, and about a week later the tail falls off. This is said to cause no pain to the lamb, but there could be a lot of wishful thinking supporting that claim.

  The reason for docking the tail is not a cosmetic one, as I assumed back in the beginning when I naively proclaimed myself to be morally opposed to the barbaric practice. It was easy to think: Hey, if God didn’t want sheep to have tails, He wouldn’t have given them tails. A sheep’s tail has a function, especially when you are talking ewes; the tail protects the udder from chilling. Docking the tail would seem to be an unnecessary mutilation.

  Maybe so, for some Scottish Blackface grazing the rocky Highland hills in search of mere morsels of food. In those extreme conditions, a tail is a good and fine asset, and hardly in the way.

  But take your average American Dorset, grazing on our long and lush pastures, and you have a different story altogether, a story you never imagined getting into whenever you first saw sheep grazing on a hillside and fantasized about living a bucolic shepherd’s life. Sheep with a lush diet have soft feces. A long tail traps the feces. Flies lay eggs in and around the fecal mass, hatching into maggots. The maggots attack the flesh under the tails, eventually entering the rectum and vagina. A lamb with this condition, known as “fly strike,” is a very sick lamb and will almost certainly die.

  You just don’t need to know a whole lot more about this before you say: “You know what, dock the tail.”

  Gretta was the first person to introduce me to the fact that there are people in this world who take a stance when it comes to where, exactly, to dock a lamb’s tail. This was way back when she brought us our ewes, which she purchased for us from a farm in South Carolina. She apologized as the sheep inched timidly off the ramp of the pickup and moved into our awaiting pasture.

  “I just had no idea those people docked the tails so short,” she said. “This makes me so mad.”

  “I think they look great,” I said, defending the sheep.

  “Oh, these tails are way too short,” she said, explaining that she had a real issue with farmers who didn’t leave at least a little tail length. “Every prolapsed ewe I’ve ever had was on account of a too-short tail.”

  I said, “Prolapsed ewe?”

  “A ewe that prolapses,” she said.

  “Prolapse?”

  “The vagina falls out,” she said.

  I looked at her, my eyes all squinted and my head twisting away as I tried to quickly ascertain if, perhaps, it was April Fool’s Day and she was working me over.

  “Falls out,” I said.

  “It happens,” she said.

  “Oh, Gretta, Gretta, Gretta,” I said.

  She said the reason for the vagina falling out, in her experience, was a too-short tail.

  “Oh, Gretta…”

  “It doesn’t happen often,” she said, explaining that if it does it’s during pregnancy or just after.

  “Well, how do you know it’s happening?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said.


  “How?”

  “The vagina falls out,” she said.

  “What do you mean it falls out? Like, into the body somewhere?”

  “I said ‘out’” she said.

  “Like onto the ground?”

  “It’s a large red mass that hangs from the rear.”

  “Gretta, Gretta, Gretta.”

  Standing there watching our sweet yearling ewes sniff and introduce themselves to our ready pasture, I knew right then and there that none of them would ever prolapse. That was something that happened to other people, like horrible tornadoes and murders you read about in distant lands.

  Even so, I never completely got control of my growing prolapse-anxiety, especially as those ewes went on to become pregnant. It was all part of the mother-empathy engulfing me, as I sat on that porch imagining the sounds of the hills swelling, woww, woww, woww, and then feeling all that ewe bloat. On top of all that, or rather below, I was having phantom hemorrhoids. How very terrible. I imagined our ewes prolapsing, and I felt their pain, and what it felt like was a large red mass hanging from the rear, a fantastic, giant hemorrhoid attached to my very self.

  “I don’t know if I’ll survive all this,” I said to Alex that day on the porch. “I just wish we would get all this birthing over with.”

  But he was rattling on, something about grain, about which formula to feed a lamb, and how much, and when—all of which seemed to my bloated self to be quite beside the immediate point.

  Our first lamb was born dead. Now, that was really terrible. It was delivered in the middle of the night with no assistance from us, as often happens. But it was dead. I was in the kitchen when Alex came in to tell me, and I went out to see, even though I didn’t want to see. When you are in a loving relationship, you show support.

  “Well, it’s huge!” I cried. And so eerily peaceful. A completely formed lamb, beautiful in its completeness, dead.

  “I can’t believe this,” Alex said. “I just can’t believe this.”

  “Maybe it’s the sacrificial lamb,” I said. “Like, you just have to get one dead one over with and then all the rest are healthy and perfect.”

  He didn’t answer at first. Finally he said, “It’s a bad omen.”

  “Oh, honey…”

  “Obviously I did something wrong,” he said.

  “Oh, honey…”

  I hate it when he’s miserable. I immediately need to undo the misery, like he’s got a splinter in his finger and if he would just sit still long enough for me to pop it out, all would be right with him and me and us.

  “Hey, wait a second,” I said. “Shouldn’t this lamb be coated in goo or something? I mean, why is it so clean?” I figured that perhaps lambs came into the world as human babies do, with plenty of mother matter to clean off. Our goat Greg had come into the world this way, and goats and sheep are related.

  “The mother probably licked it clean,” he said.

  We looked over at the ewes, tried to figure out which one had delivered this lamb. None of them looked any different than they had last time we checked, and none of them appeared to be even mildly interested in the dead lamb in the pen.

  “Wait a second,” I said again, slow and easy like a TV detective who already knew the answer. “Where is the afterbirth?”

  We looked around the pen, which was completely enclosed by a fence. We had never seen a sheep’s afterbirth, but we figured on at least a small pile of glop. We saw nothing of the sort.

  “There has got to be an explanation,” I said, and as if to rescue my miserable husband, I went into policewoman mode, pacing slowly around the pen. Then I advanced my theory: this lamb was not delivered by one of our ewes at all. It was … dropped here. It was one of George’s from just over the hill, and picked up by a hawk, and the hawk was flying and just dropped it right here.

  Alex looked at me. “So then why didn’t the hawk swoop in and pick it back up?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  He looked at the sky, as if to actually check for hawk evidence. That was promising. Maybe he was going to buy into this and start forgiving himself, or at least get off the omen theory. Hawks do steal lambs. And we always had plenty of hawks flying around.

  “But it just happened to drop in right here in our lamb pen?” he said.

  “Hey, things fall out of airplanes and land in swimming pools,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I’m just saying…”

  He went over to the lamb with a shovel and a shoe box he brought out; his intention was to bury our first dead lamb up under the magic tree, where many of our pets are resting in peace. “It’s not going to fit in the shoe box,” he said.

  “Listen, if you want me to, I’ll take care of this,” I lied. I was betting he wouldn’t take me up on the offer. I can’t even walk by the magic tree without howling in pain over Bob, my long-lost cat. Burying the dead has never been my forte. But when you love someone, you throw out offers like this, taking calculated risks.

  “I’ll do it,” Alex said. “You go on inside.”

  “Yeah, all right,” I said, trying not to show my relief.

  He came back inside after it was all over, and I put on the TV but he went up to his office and just sat.

  A day later our next two lambs were born healthy and strong and it probably was good we had to dock their tails, get busy, forget about that dead lamb. Alex was all Mr. Confidence, holding the little docking tool, sort of like a hole puncher, he picked up out at Agway. I was Ms. Fatigue, feeling the relief of our two ewes who had delivered successfully, my phantom estrogen battling my phantom progesterone and God knows what all else.

  I held the lamb while Alex did the docking using the band method. It was hard to know what was too short and what was too long, hard to weigh the risk of fly strike versus that of prolapse. The lamb squirmed as Alex applied the band, and when I put her down she walked like a kid with too-tight pants, but within minutes she was romping as if nothing had ever happened, so we went ahead and docked tail number two.

  George stopped over to see our lambs. He had a keen interest, seeing as our ram had been caught over in his field offering its services to perhaps fifty of his ewes, and so our lambs were for him a kind of preview of what his yield might look like. Alex was proud to show George his lambs. Mighty proud of our ram, too, what with all that extra sperm to share. There was so much testosterone swirling amidst the estrogen that spring, it was hard for any of us to see straight. Alex and George stood out there for an hour doing sheep talk.

  “Our tails are too long,” Alex reported when he came back in. “George said we have to dock them up higher.” He grabbed the tail-docking device and asked if I had time.

  “No!” I said. I told him Gretta said they could prolapse if they were cut too short.

  “George said they prolapse if the tails are too long” he said.

  “No, too short,” I said, and explained why I thought my way, or rather Gretta’s way, made a lot more anatomical sense. “If you cut the tail short you loosen some important muscles up there,” I guessed.

  Alex shook his head. “Our tails are too long,” he said, and he held up the device.

  It was one of those standoff moments in a marriage. You have to decide if it’s worth it. Soon enough we were in the sheep pen and I was holding the two-day-old lamb while Alex snapped a band about an inch higher than the one we had placed the previous day. I felt disappointed and sorry, but not angry. I figured hey, these are his sheep. This is his project. If it weren’t for him and his project, I wouldn’t know anything about fly strike or prolapse, anything about how very brutal and gruesome the bucolic life is. It is no more so than regular life, I suppose. There’s an awful lot of horrible stuff you have to learn to block out. Any mother who has ever delivered a baby has a lot of cleaning up to do before she can go home and go into coochie-coochie-coo mode in her Pottery Barn Kids nursery with the pastel colors and the super-soft Humpty Dumpty afghan her mother made. It somehow
seemed honorable, or maybe elevating, that the lamb, the symbol of peace and tranquility and fabric softener and all good things, had so much going on behind the scenes.

  “Sorry about this, girl,” I said to the lamb, referring to the inch of tail she was losing, and also to the fact that, like all new parents, we had no idea what in the hell we were doing.

  I was in Toronto working on a story when the chicks started hatching, and even though I didn’t want any more chickens at all in my life, I was sorry to miss the excitement. Alex called me on my cell phone to tell me about it, and I got hit with the now familiar ache of homesickness. Ever since marriage, and the farm, and the one-two punch of Anna and Sasha, I don’t travel nearly as much as I once did. It gets harder and harder to leave, which I guess is a lot better than feeling the opposite.

  The story I was researching in Toronto was about a U. S. soldier who had fought for seven months in Iraq, then deserted and fled to Canada. There were six other guys in Toronto I was talking to who had similar stories, and a lawyer who was a Vietnam draft dodger who was helping them try to obtain legal citizenship, but Josh was my favorite and my focus. Before going to Canada, he hid out in Philadelphia for a year and a half with his wife and four children. He was a terrified young man, unsure of his stance on any of this, brittle and naive and soft and hopeful. That’s what I liked about him. “Liking” when it comes to writing isn’t about liking someone personally, although I did Josh. But this kind of liking is more akin to loving, the way a fiction writer might love a character. You love him for his vulnerability, the tender shell you vow silently to protect even as you imagine exploiting it. He’ll give away everything, all of his secrets and all of his pain and all of his heartache if you ask for it. Your job is to listen. Your job is to portray him, in all his glory and all his foolishness, but that doesn’t mean you steal his dignity. That’s your promise and that’s your responsibility.

  I loved Josh’s tattoos. I loved his wife, Brandi, and her tattoos. She started with the comedy and tragedy theater masks on her back, but she later got that tattoo converted into Gemini panthers above a tulip. I loved that throughout all their troubles, all the rude awakening to an America that once was the land of freedom but became, to them, a land of betrayal—through all of it, they kept a little box they put pennies in, to save for their next tattoos.