Growing Girls Read online

  If I have one overarching responsibility to her and her sister, I suppose it is in applauding them as they grow, unhindered, into the people they are aching to be.

  It isn’t until day four of camp that Anna finally comes home with a Jesus observation. “Mom, Jesus goes to camp,” she says.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, He comes off a boat,” she says. “But not a real one. It’s, like, cardboard.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Jesus is real, right?”

  “Well, of course Jesus is real, but—” I don’t quite know how to field this one, and I wonder if perhaps she and Zoe have been sharing spiritual doubts. I’m so happy she’s asking. I’m so happy for this opportunity. What is a mother’s number one job if not to guide her child through life’s mysteries? “I mean, Jesus is always with us,” I say.

  “Well, He sure knows a lot of songs,” she says. “He has a good voice.”

  “That’s … good.”

  “Then He goes behind a curtain, but I don’t know what happens to Him back there.”

  “Oh, I’m sure He’s fine back there,” I say.

  “Oh, I’m sure He’s fine,” she says. “He probably gets a hamburger. Plus He has to feed His cats.”

  “Jesus has cats?”

  She shrugs.

  “Did they teach you today that Jesus has cats?” What the hell kind of camp is this?

  “No,” she says. “I don’t know how I know that. Sometimes you just know things, Mommy.”

  “Right.”

  In Anna’s mind, all is fine with Jesus, so I don’t see any point in pushing it. But then again I sort of do. I stand here with my lips pushed out and my eyeballs stuck up in the ten o’clock position, the very portrait of competence.

  In a happy turn of events, a few days later the ducks find the pond. They’re down there swimming hysterically, gleefully bobbing their heads in and out, and so we all go down to watch. It is one of God’s minor works, I know, but these days I am clinging to any miracle I can get.

  the young folks’ home

  “Inside every old person is a young person trying to get out.” This is my mother’s maxim for the weekend. She often has one of these sayings she walks around with. I’m certain she makes them up, but her authoritative delivery has a way of suggesting Aristotle or Benjamin Franklin.

  The new saying has been her refrain as she watches her granddaughters, with their infinite energy. She keeps catching herself. She thinks, for a split second, that she can jump out onto the driveway and join them on their tricycles, and then, in a burst of awareness, she remembers.

  “Inside every old person—” she says.

  “I know, Mom,” I say. “You already told me.”

  This is the first time in about four years that my parents have visited our house. It is, in that way, a big deal. All their previous attempts over these past years were thwarted by illness—a broken hip, a heart thing, an intestine thing, a whole bunch of undiagnosed things, neuropathy. “Face it,” my mom told me last summer, “we’re too old.”

  Her surrender only made me more determined to help my parents make the five-hour trek to my house. Recently I cooked up a deal with my brother, who would drive them out. When it finally looked like it was really going to happen, I got on to the business of worrying. Would they be comfortable here? We live on a slope. We have a lot of mud. We’re hardly handicapped-accessible. Would they be able to handle the noise of my rambunctious girls? And all the stinky pets?

  So I reserved a room for them at a nearby hotel. One of those suite places with a walk-in shower and no steps. I washed the dogs. I told my girls, “Now listen, they’re old, so you can’t be bashing into them.”

  “They could fall over?” Anna asked.

  “They could fall over,” I said.

  “Well, I would like to find out how they got so old,” she said.

  My parents took on celebrity status as we prepared for the visit. Actual old people in our house! We see plenty of senior citizens when we visit my parents in their retirement village, but this would be the first time my girls had them on the home turf. I didn’t think the novelty factor would last. In fact, I worried that my kids would quickly grow bored with the old folks, as kids do. I figured my job for the weekend would be to keep the old folks entertained, while at the same time keeping the kids … quiet.

  And now look. We’re already on day three of the visit, and the novelty has not worn off. At the moment, the two old people and the two young people are hunkered down together in my living room. It’s raining outside. My mom is on the couch drawing pictures of cats and witches and rainbows with Anna. On the big leather chair next to them, my dad is all smiles and applause, as he watches Sasha dance and bow and curtsy.

  I’m watching this. I’m thinking: Well, this isn’t a disaster at all. I’m marveling at just how well old people fit with very young people, and vice versa.

  Sasha is all flirt. My father is all flirt. These two have discovered each other in a way they never have been able to before, when we’re at the retirement village and all the cousins are around. Sasha has been following my dad, curling up next to him and, in her Sasha-speak, whispering in his ear. “Bess frenz, Granddat,” she said this morning. “Bess frenz.”

  Anna, the artsy sister, has taken charge of my mother, an artist who had her muse largely stolen by a body of aches and pains. My mom has not drawn this much in years. She has found in Anna a mission: “You’re going to be an artist when you grow up, aren’t you, sweetie?”

  Anna looks at her with gentle confusion. “I am an artist,” she says.

  The two have been working all day on a picture book about how people get old. Anna thinks her hair will get curly like Grandmom’s and that she’ll walk on very skinny legs.

  It has gone on like this, these four people, two old, two young, forming a club that excludes the likes of me. I’m the cooker and the cleaner and the driver. I wonder if I’ve ever been so happily irrelevant.

  When the rain stops, Sasha is the first to react. She grabs her shoes, then finds my father’s shoes. She wants to take him out to the sliding board. He says, well, then, let’s go get a towel and dry that sliding board off! My mother protests. She says he won’t be able to climb the hill to the swing set. My father says, yes, he will. My mother says, well, then, he has to take her cane. The negotiations continue. Eventually, I stand with my mother at the kitchen window and we watch my father out there splashing in puddles.

  “Inside every old person is a young person trying to get out,” she says.

  Yeah, well, I guess he made it.

  the foggiest notion

  In the beginning there was fog. That’s how that one should have started. Every new idea, the dawning of every adventure, begins in the worst kind of fog—thick, murky slop you can’t see through and so you half consider pulling over and going to sleep.

  Alex is plugging along. He’s just chattering away up there, leaning forward as if that will help with visibility, telling stories about the good old days in college, and quoting Voltaire.

  We’re in the pickup. It’s after 2 a.m. We are somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia, driving home, and I’m squished back here in the so-called “extended cab” portion of the truck, Anna snoring on my left shoulder and Sasha’s head, hot with dreams, resting on my thigh.

  Behind us we’re towing a horse trailer and inside the horse trailer we have “À Votre Santé,” an enormous four-year-old Standardbred gelding, and “Strong Fort,” an even more enormous ten-year-old Thoroughbred gelding. Both of these big boys, with a combined weight of well over three thousand pounds, are retired racehorses, and we are taking them home to live with us.

  I can’t believe we’re doing this. I can’t believe no one in this truck is saying, “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” Even I think we’re lunatics, and I’m usually the one cooking up schemes like this, owing in part to my failure to fully tame my inner Lucy Ricardo and my inner Ethel Mertz.

>   But this, yes, this is bigger than Lucy and Ethel. In this darkness and in this fog, I am officially cowered.

  Up front next to Alex is Cindy, our new friend who used to be our dog groomer but then evolved into our horse trainer/instructor. Next to Cindy is her boyfriend, Bob, who used to work as a trash collector but last year he fell off the back of the trash truck going at an illegally high speed, so he quit trash collecting and started college instead.

  So, we’re driving. Alex has remarked more than once that he can’t see five feet in front of him. He is wisely going just thirty-five miles an hour on this highway. His point is that if we have to stop suddenly, the tonnage of horse meat behind us is sure to create some drag. Fortunately, no one else is on the road. We’ve passed a lot of rigs parked over in rest areas, apparently preferring the aforementioned option of snoozing. Every time he sees one of those idle rigs, Alex points it out. I can tell it’s because he thinks he’s heroic, pushing on while even the pros have surrendered, and that he wants acknowledgment.

  “You’re amazing,” I say, because this is what a spouse should say. And because I have to admit I’m impressed. I would never drive in this stuff, with or without the baggage. I could not do this alone. That’s what’s impressing me. The common conclusion is always that I’m the one responsible for creating this family, that it’s all my inner Lucy and Ethel fueling us to get a farm, adopt kids, go chicken and duck and sheep and goat and horse shopping. But look, folks, look who’s driving. If it were up to just me, none of this family would have happened at all. I wish I knew how to give him more credit, and if he wants it.

  We’ve got about ninety miles to go. Besides giving Alex credit, all I can think about is how big those horses are. It’s the bigness that is getting to me.

  “You know what?” Alex says. “I’m starting to think I’ll be able to see better in this fog if I just turn these headlights off.”

  “Oh, honey, I don’t think so …”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, dear …”

  “What happened?”

  No, we most definitely can’t see better without light. Now we are towing our bigness down this highway in the pitch and total dark. We are a misguided missile falling off a plane; we are an asteroid dropping through space; this is the beginning of something new or this is the end of everything. This is it. We’ll crash here. In the morning they’ll be talking about the traffic delays on 1-79. They’ll be talking about the tragedy, six people, two of them children, and two horses splashed all over the highway, such a shame. Traffic on 1-79 northbound will be backed up for miles while they clean up the mess, so please, folks, find an alternative route.

  “Okay, that’s better,” Alex is saying, finding the switch and turning the lights back on.

  Here, as our summer has begun to slip toward fall, here we are with a whole new horse life. It seems to have come out of nowhere, but if I look back I can see the pieces falling together over the years, little pixels arranging themselves haphazardly, and then suddenly the picture begins to emerge.

  Did we even want a horse life? Was this ever even an objective? In the spring we signed the girls up for horseback-riding lessons at a local stable with the idea that if they’re going to grow up on a farm they should know how to behave around horses. It was a safety issue, on the one hand, and an experiment more or less on behalf of our three beloved equines on the other. Alex and I had long since stopped paying attention to Skippy, my mule, and Maggie, his mare with the sore feet, and even Blitz, the pony I naively got for the girls when they were still way too young.

  Yes, I suppose we did want a horse life, that much is obvious, and I can see that over the years we flirted with the idea as we tried to manage the difference between fantasy and reality. Fantasy is you and your husband blissfully romping over the hillsides atop your big, strong stallions, and wearing your cute little riding hat and those slick tight pants and boots, don’t forget the boots! And who’s that emerging from the bushes? Oh, hi, sweeties! It’s your little girls on their fine ponies, one wearing braids and the other with her rosy cheeks, clip clop, clip clop, come on, family, let’s gallop together toward the top of the hill where our tea party awaits!

  Most dreams start out as cartoons. If you knew about all the work, all the financial as well as emotional outlay involved with the dream, you’d never talk yourself into bothering with it.

  Skippy and Maggie came into our lives long before the girls. That’s when the fantasy was still in the Mr. and Mrs. stage, no kids in the picture. I fell in love with Skippy and I encouraged Alex to fall in love with Maggie and we tried to figure out which end of our new saddles pointed forward and what, exactly, a bridle was. We didn’t know how to tie a cinch knot, let alone how to ride. We took some lessons. Alex even built a round pen on the other side of the road where we would go and practice, much to the amusement of Skippy and Maggie, both of whom had our numbers. (“These people are idiots.”)

  When you are new at riding, the first thing that hits you is that the very large animal beneath you doesn’t want to do what you want it to. No, that large animal would really prefer to go back to the barn and eat. This may be fine for bossy types determined to conquer beasts, but for regular old animal-lovers who come from a basic dog-lover culture, it presents challenges. Dogs want to please you. Dogs will do anything for a scratch behind the ears. Dogs are smaller than you and depend on you.

  Horses are … big. Horses outweigh you by about half a ton and so they really don’t have to pay any attention to you if they choose not to. And why would they choose to? That’s what I could never get. Who was I to boss Skippy around? Skippy had been trained by a famous mule trainer, had won ribbons in rodeos, so I knew he wasn’t the problem. It was me. I was not worthy. I was puny and unentitled. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I would say to him when he wouldn’t obey my most tentative commands. “Aw, sweetie, you don’t want to go around the ring today? I’m sorry. Poor baby. Mama’s gonna take you home and give you some treats….”

  As I tried to learn to ride Skippy, mostly what I did was turn him into a spoiled brat. It got so that mule would do nothing that I asked of him. Why would he?

  Alex was better at handling Maggie, who was, however, clearly too small a horse for him. Her thin back was no match for his manly thighs and every time he’d mount her you could see her eyes pop out in pain.

  Alex fell off Maggie and broke a rib during this period, and Maggie’s feet developed problems so then she really couldn’t handle his weight, and then Anna came, and then Sasha. One thing I learned is you can’t do motherhood and horseback riding at the same time. At least not early motherhood. These two lives have virtually zero intersection. One could conceivably strap one’s child papoose-style on one’s back and ride one’s mule, but one such as me would probably and rightfully be hauled off to the Department of Children and Family Services.

  So Skippy and Maggie went on about their lives in the field, occasionally getting called in for carrots. We loved watching them graze up on the hill with the backdrop of the setting sun. We got insulted when Mike, our farrier, would come to trim their feet and call them “expensive lawn ornaments.”

  Hey, we took good care of them. What was wrong with having equines as pets? We got Blitz when Anna was four and Sasha was two because a friend was selling him and I knew he was a bomb-proof pony, and I was watching Mary Poppins a lot, feeling inspired by that scene when Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke go sailing with the kids on those carousel horses that magically prance about the colorful English countryside.

  The farrier was the one who told us about Storybrook Stables and the group lessons for kids. He said it might be good to teach our girls to ride on horses that have been kid-tested, and then maybe, someday when the girls were older, we could rescue our equines from their lazy days of munching toward equine obesity.

  At first, the main reason Anna wanted to take horseback-riding lessons was because Michael, her boyfriend, had agreed to take them with her. She was six n
ow and she and Michael had been an item since they were both five, when they met in gymnastics class. That’s where the sparks first flew. So much of Anna’s little life changed in that gymnastics class. It was supposed to be Sasha’s thing. I thought Sasha’s tiny little body would be a natural at tumbling, and some of her speech therapists had said that the lessons in movement and coordination and muscle-sequencing would ultimately help her speech.

  I figured Anna would drop out of gymnastics after a few weeks, preferring something more cerebral. Delayed physically in so many ways when we adopted her—at eleven months she couldn’t even sit up or roll over on her own—I never figured on her being much of an athlete. She was always “the artsy one.” And Sasha was “the spitfire,” “the flirt,” the girl who would try anything once.

  Labeling children one way or another is something all parents say they’ll never do and lo and behold all parents do.

  But Anna blossomed in gymnastics. Soon she could do a perfect cartwheel and in no time a round-off. She was becoming known for her athleticism. Her athleticism? It took a while for this to sink in. And the athleticism had brought her out of her shell, out of the AnnaLand she had so blissfully lived in before; now, so comfortable in her body, in the physical world, she was ready to come out and play.

  But it was in the horse life that Anna found a real home. Soon, at riding lessons, the instructors came out to watch the six-year-old who possessed the posture and poise and confidence of an experienced rider. She was a natural, they all said. It seemed as if when she was on that horse she was once again in AnnaLand, fully focused in the moment, in the intersection of muscle and mind, and somehow she found a way of allowing the horse to be right there in AnnaLand with her.

  She would come home and draw pictures of all the ponies at Storybrook Stables, and tape them to the wall. She had me look up the difference between an Arabian and a Quarterhorse and a Palomino and other breeds, information she memorized until she could recite it on command. Horses were becoming her everything.