Growing Girls Read online

  These were complicated characters not because of some vast intellect or awe-inspiring talent or spotlight of fame, power, or influence. These were complicated characters because they had been bounced about by the world, thrown this way and that, chewed up and spat out as they tried to make sense of it all. Characters any of us could be.

  This was exactly the kind of story I signed up to write, way back in grad school, when I checked the “nonfiction” box instead of “fiction” or “poetry” as my intended genre. Go out and live in the world. Talk to people. Find ordinary people living ordinary lives and start to understand passion and joy and misery in ways you never did before. Re-create those characters on the page. Play with voice, set scenes, stack dialogue, massage metaphors, use all the tools you know how to use to make those characters come alive on the page.

  “But why?” asked a literature professor who was questioning me a few years ago. I was interviewing to join the faculty of a large English department where I would teach “creative non-fiction,” a trendy term that had been invented long after I started writing stories. I hated that term. Why did we even need a term? “Creative nonfiction” made it sound as if we made stuff up, that we were “creative” with our facts, slippery writers taking license with other people’s lives. We were not. Worse, it made us sound as if we were begging for respect—that nonfiction writing was somehow and certainly by definition “not creative.” Because it deals in facts. Because we begin with the real world as opposed to, as is assumed, the fiction writer’s meandering through the imagination, which is somehow presumed to be … a more literary place? People never, for instance, have to say “creative fiction” to distinguish it from any other kind. But we have to say “creative nonfiction” to somehow beg for its legitimacy?

  Well, if I was a fighter, I would wage a campaign and write long essays for prestigious literary magazines as I gnawed on this stuff. But I’m not a fighter. I don’t care enough. I have chickens hatching and kids to get bathed and I have phantom hemorrhoids. If I didn’t have all of this, the marriage and the farm and the one-two punch of glory known as Anna and Sasha, maybe I would be a better writer. Maybe I would be a fighter. I would have long days in libraries with nothing more important to do than give my brain daily and huge concentrated doses of literature. I think about this sometimes, and feel regret. I wonder about my deathbed, and regret. I think of God as an army sergeant, giving us life so that we can be all we can be. He gives you a dose of talent, and you’re supposed to run with it, and run hard. That’s your job. That’s why you were put on this earth.

  “But why?” asked the literature professor who was interviewing me. He wasn’t asking about the term “creative nonfiction.” He was questioning the whole genre. Why re-create a character from the real world? Why all this playing with voice, setting of scenes, stacking of dialogue, massaging of metaphors, to evoke these characters? Why evoke the characters in the first place?

  Well, then. Why do I do what I do? Um. I had been writing nonfiction stories for fifteen years and had never once asked myself why I bothered doing it. What a question! Why does the accountant do what he does? Why do any of us do what we do? Oh my God, we should at least be asking the question! I was sitting there asking myself the question, spiraling into what I figured was my first actual midlife crisis. How did I end up here? Why did I pick this path instead of some other path? Why do I do what I do?

  I must have had a very contorted upper lip. The room was hot and stuffed with literature professors, all of them leaning back and about to pass judgment, a court of cranky angels you had to pass through before you got through the Pearly Gates. That’s what it felt like. A practice round. This was a preview of the afterlife. This was a near-death experience?

  But why?

  Finally, I shrugged. “I guess you could ask the same question of a photographer,” I said. “You know, why take pictures? Or, why does a painter decide to do a portrait of a lady or a man or a dead fox?”

  “Dead fox?” one of them said.

  Okay, that was stupid. I was thinking of those English hunt pictures you see in fancy homes.

  “You do it to evoke emotion?” I guessed. “Or to record history or to have a lasting effect on people?” Or, you do it because you’re all worked up about your own mortality? You do it because you have a certain point of view you want to share?

  I wasn’t sure of any of these answers, which is probably why they came out as questions. “I don’t know why anyone creates anything,” I said. “It’s probably a combination of a lot of things.”

  Duh. Pull the lever. Send this girl down the chute. No sense even bothering giving God a crack at this one.

  I figured the literature professor would come back at me with something, probably something that made use of the word “pedagogy” and maybe “dialectic” and “hegemony” and some of those famous English department words.

  But no. He shrugged right along with me. “It’s a fun question, isn’t it?” he said.

  I wanted to kiss him. Oh, so this was a game! This was … fun! That was when I realized that reentering academia could be a wild romp as opposed to the slog of drudgery you so often hear about.

  I ended up getting the job and loving the romp. It turned out to be an oddly disorienting pursuit to stand in front of a classroom and talk about writing, about researching a story, all the how-to stuff that students have paid good money to learn about. I became a different person in the classroom. A person with lived experience and a bulging brain that was expected to hold wisdom. For the first time in my life I was part of a writing community. How wonderful it was to talk to other people who did what I did! People who went off on stories and gathered facts and came home and stewed over them. I was one of them! I was part of an Us! How very civilized and grown-up! I bought fancy silk trousers and pointy-toed shoes and a briefcase and a new watch and I had … appointments.

  When I am off on a story, I am not that person. When I am off on a story, I am a kid. I am twenty-six years old, fresh out of grad school, hopping on a barge for two weeks, just letting go of my life, leaving the cat in the charge of the neighbor, while I plod down the Monongahela River with two ornery deckhands and a grumpy pilot and a cook with silver teeth. Sailing off to the ridiculous, not knowing what will happen and gradually entering, becoming a little of them but still a little of me, the me shrinking as they take over. An adventure. That’s what I decided my life would be back when I checked the “nonfiction” box. My life would be one adventure after another, sailing off into the unknown, collecting stories and coming home, like a potter who just spent time in a creek bed gathering clay, and making something of my find. An artist. I would be an artist. And so of course I would be lonely. You couldn’t form lasting relationships living like that, living like a gypsy. Well, maybe you could. I would have to see. The main thing was art. God gave me a dose of talent; it was my duty to run with it.

  And so, walking down Bloor Street in downtown Toronto, thinking about Josh, thinking about what I needed to say to Brandi, I was excited. I was feeling a familiar kind of alive, being inside a story, tossed about inside an adventure. And then Alex called to tell me the chicks had started hatching, that the girls were jumping for joy, that the girls had actually watched one of those chicks peck its way out of that egg, and so naturally I was caught. Caught between this alive and that alive, caught between the life of adventure that by now had become routine, and motherhood, an adventure I had never planned on way back when. But motherhood had come along and when it did it came on like a punch. One-two and three-four and five-six-seven. Punches in my heart that hurt and bruised and demanded to be known, and got that muscle pumping. Motherhood, the mother of all adventures, the great unknown.

  I was and remain caught. Caught between a God Who wears army boots and shouts marching orders, and this God, a God in His slippers. “Love,” He tells me. “Love comes first, you ninny.”

  The bright red mass on the back of the ewe looked like a giant ripe tomato.
I looked away. I pretended I didn’t see it. I pretended it wasn’t there. I felt nothing. I felt no hemorrhoids, no bulges, no bloat. Numb. This was weeks after Toronto, weeks after the newly hatched chicks, which were now five yellow balls hopping to and fro, the very picture of spring.

  Our “yield” during this, our first lambing season, so far was six. An amazing five females—the more valuable—and one male. He was the prettiest of all, with a coat whiter and smoother than the rest, a kind of kitten. The others were in their own way adorable—you can’t look at a gangly lamb with her long legs and tight fuzzy coat and not believe in fairy tales—but the thing that got me was how the five of them all looked exactly the same and none of their mothers seemed the least bit distracted by this. Seconds after a lamb is born it calls, “Meeee,” for its mother, and the mother answers, “Meeeeh,” and that just seems to do it. The bond is formed; the lamb nurses and the mother licks and it’s a real happily-ever-after tale. Occasionally a lamb might get confused and walk up to its aunt for a drink, but that big old girl will nudge her good and send her sailing, so the lamb will cry, “Meee,” and the real mother will answer, “Meeeeh,” and life goes on.

  We had only one ewe that didn’t live up to the task. Ironically, it was Sweet Pea, the only ewe with a name, our pet. She had herself been an orphaned lamb; years earlier she had been brought to us by our neighbor George, who thought, perhaps, our nursing goat would adopt her, which she did. I had always held on to that adoption story, a perfect metaphor for Anna and Sasha to think about whenever they got sick of me and wished they had gotten a better mother. “You think you got problems,” Sweet Pea could say, “my mother is a goat….”

  So naturally I was eager to see what sort of mom Sweet Pea would be. She was the only one of the ewes to give birth to twins, which was in itself heroic, but she rejected one of them. This was not subtle. She threw that baby with one great nudge, flinging it clear across the pen. “Meeee,” the lamb said. Sweet Pea offered no reply. She obviously did not consider herself mother to this lamb. Instead she stood and intently licked her second-born, allowing it to drink.

  “Meeee,” the first lamb said. Again and again, waiting for an answer that never came.

  I expected a lot more of Sweet Pea, and felt personally wounded. After all we did for you? But I made sure the girls didn’t hold her responsible and explained what I learned in one of our sheep books: Birthing can be wildly traumatic for a ewe, especially the first time around. And a ewe with twins has a prolonged labor; sometimes, by the time she finally gets the second lamb out, she forgets all about the first. The pain that triggers the instinct to clean and call and nurture is attached to the thing that came out that stopped the pain. The last lamb. That first one hanging around, waiting for her mother to finish, waiting to get cleaned up and to be fed, might as well be a stray cat or an orangutan. And so the mother nudges it away.

  There is always a reason. There is always a logical explanation.

  We bottle-fed the lamb and named her Emily.

  “Meee!” she would cry.

  “Emily!” we would answer.

  Sasha, who had just turned four, became the best at this, and made it her job to do those feedings four times a day. I would make up the bottle and warm it for thirty seconds in the microwave and hand it to Sasha, who would walk out back and yell, “Emily!” Those were three pretty distinct syllables for a child with a language disorder to manage, and so at first it came out “Em-we,” which frankly we all thought was pretty good. Changing from “m” to “w” like that in the middle of a word would not have been something Sasha could have accomplished before. But already she had moved far with her ability to speak, defying the odds of the speech therapists who had labeled her apraxic.

  Within a few weeks, and with considerable coaching, she was able to say “Em-il-y” as clear as day and we all applauded. She took to running while Emily followed, back and forth along the fence line, Emily leaping for joy at the attention of her mother, and Sasha, like any youngest child, clearly thrilled to have her very own kid to boss around.

  All the rest of the sheep stayed with their more traditional mother-daughter sheep pairings and language, “Meee!” and “Meeeeh!”

  And so the music filled our fields that spring, the lullabies that inevitably follow the trauma of new life, if everything goes as planned.

  Ellen, our babysitter, finally said something about the giant ripe tomato on the back of the one ewe that I refused to acknowledge. “Did you see?” she said. “There’s like a big red ball coming out.”

  “Yeah, I saw,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I suspected I knew what it was. I just didn’t want to talk about it. “Did you tell Alex?” I asked.

  “I told him yesterday,” she said. “He didn’t say anything to you?”

  No, he did not. He never mentioned it to me and I never mentioned it to him. If you don’t talk about things, they don’t exist.

  The next day, I went out to look and the tomato was gone. Gone! It seemed to have gone back in. Obviously, this wasn’t prolapse. Because it went back in.

  “It went back in,” I said to Alex. He knew exactly what I was talking about. That was all we said. We were leaving for vacation in a few days. Our first in two years. We were going to Cape May for a week.

  Then, the next day, the tomato was back. “The red thing is back,” Ellen said. “Did you see it? There’s like a million flies on it.”

  Oh, God.

  “It came back out,” I said to Alex.

  “I know,” he said. “I called Dr. Hurley. He said maybe he could stitch it.”

  When Dr. Hurley came over he said this wasn’t vaginal prolapse, but rectal. He said this as if it were a good thing. Congratulations, the vagina wasn’t coming out, the rectum was! He said it would likely repair itself.

  “We’re lucky,” I said to Alex. “Don’t you sometimes walk around thinking how lucky we are?” Prolapse, the kind Gretta told me about, happens to other people’s sheep. We were special. We were not like those other people.

  None of the other sheep seemed to take note of the grotesque nature of the tomato, and neither did her lamb, nursing as usual.

  Then, the day before we were to leave for vacation, everything fell out. Something broke, perhaps the membrane between the rectum and the vagina, and all the insides of the ewe were spilling out. She was lying on her side, panting, with her baby curled up by her head. The mass of red on the ground was the size of two or three basketballs.

  Alex called Dr. Hurley, who said, yes, that must be the membrane. Bad news. He said there was nothing we could do. He said all of her insides, all of the guts, the spleen, the stomach, the intestines, the vagina, the ovaries, all of the things that make a sheep a sheep were falling out. Alex looked at me, shaking his head to say, “Nothing.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Alex was saying and he was about to hang up.

  “How are we supposed to do it?” I shouted. “Ask him how!”

  “What do you recommend?” Alex said into the phone. “Just, like, a gun?”

  Alex listened, looked at me, nodded his head yes.

  Ellen came with me outside and helped me pull the baby lamb away from the dying mother. “Meee! Meee!” the lamb screamed. “Meeh,” the mom answered. She still had plenty of strength to answer. We took the baby down to the barn and put it into a pen, where she didn’t have to watch.

  “Meee!” cried the baby.

  “Meeeh!” cried the mom.

  That was the hardest part. In those cries naturally I heard Anna, and naturally I heard Sasha. I saw someone stealing them from me and them crying for me and me crying for them. But that was ridiculous. That was a silly fantasy. A cartoon. Nothing like that was happening. Don’t be so melodramatic.

  “Meee!” cried the baby.

  “Meeeh!” cried the mom.

  In those cries I heard Anna and Sasha and the ghost-mothers of China, the loss, the loss, the loss. A torturous image. No sense going there. Nothing you can do ab
out that one. Now, stop it!

  “Meee!” cried the baby.

  “Meeeh!” cried the mom.

  In those cries I didn’t have to hear or see anything but what was right there in front of me to feel the heartbreak of centuries. A baby losing a mother.

  Alex got the pistol. He had fired that thing only once, over on the field on the other side of the road where he had set up a little target practice. I remember because the boom was so loud it sent the dogs running under the bed.

  Ellen put on a SpongeBob tape for the girls, hid inside with them.

  I told Alex I would go with him, fully expecting that he wouldn’t take me up on the offer. He didn’t say yes but he didn’t say no. He just kept walking and so I followed. The ewe had dragged herself and all of her exposed guts into the large doghouse we had supplied for the lambs, in case of rain. We were surprised she was able to pick all of herself up and move there.

  “You think you can just … shoot in?” I asked.

  “I can’t get a clean shot,” he said. “I don’t know where the bullet would end up.”

  He grabbed a leg and pulled the sheep out. I didn’t offer to help. I should have offered to help. This was all so far out of my league. Wasn’t this out of his league? One of us had to step up and I loved him for being the one.

  I wanted to say, “Look, if you need me here for this, I’ll stay.” But I was afraid he might answer in the affirmative. I wanted him to save me. I wanted him to say, “You go on inside.”

  But he didn’t. He wasn’t thinking. He was doing. He got the sheep out. She was on her feet, half her insides spilling there. He pointed the gun. I could hear the lamb still screaming. I was so far out of my league. Did he need me to stay? Should I stay? And we didn’t say goodbye to the sheep. We didn’t thank her and we didn’t apologize. Wait!