Growing Girls Read online

  Gretta said when all the ewes were pregnant they’d let the ram know. She said at that point we’d probably need to put the ram in a very strong pen or else he would run off down the road in search of more ewes.

  Alex and I walked around trying to figure out where to build a very strong pen. We found a place that was perfect. Except there was no water source. We talked about just using a garden hose. Which would freeze in the winter. We talked about digging a ditch and installing a pipe.

  You always think it’s just one more thing. Just one more thing to do to complete this sheep/lawn-mowing project and then you can move on with your life.

  If you want to be a sheep farmer and you have six expensive ewes and one expensive ram, after you figure out where to put a strong pen and how to get water to it, certainly the most important thing to talk about is what you’re going to do about the coyotes. It’s a significant problem in our area, especially in spring, during lambing season. Up at the hardware store, starting in March, all the conversation is always about how many lambs any particular farmer had lost to the teeth of coyotes. To protect their flocks, some of the farmers had taken to sleeping outside with shotguns.

  Gretta said there was a better way.

  We stood down at the barn with our hips jutted out, standing like farmers stand. We listened to Gretta and we decided okay, we’d get a livestock guardian dog to protect our investment. We really couldn’t think of a reason to say no.

  Alex was surprisingly gung-ho about the dog acquisition. In fact, the entire sheep enterprise seemed to delight and fascinate him. He had none of the pig-and-pancake reaction I was having; or if he did he never said anything. That was another reason I banned that book from our house, so as to protect my husband from seeing his life as a never-ending, continuously unfolding sequence of stupid events.

  Now, the thing about the dog was, we were not allowed to bond with it. I worked on not bonding with it long before it arrived, as per the instructions from the breeder, who made it plain that we were not buying a pet. The breed, Maremma, originates in Italy, where for centuries these dogs have been protecting sheep and goats from predators. Like other livestock guardian dogs, Maremmas make their own decisions in the absence of a master. Engaging one in a more submissive pet role would only be to handicap it. So none of this poochie, poochie, smoochie stuff. You’re supposed to just introduce yourself, your family, and then allow the dog to grow up with the livestock it will instinctively protect.

  The Maremma breeder lived in South Carolina. She sent pictures when the puppies were born, with instructions on how we were not supposed to remark on just how achingly cute those little white fuzz balls were. She told Alex to wear the same undershirt for two days, then mail it to her, so the puppy could sleep with it; she said that was all the introduction the dog would need. Alex did what he was told. He studied the Maremma Sheepdog Club of America Code of Ethics. He went online and printed out maps to the breeder’s house, then found a hotel midway back that would take dogs. He left for the two-day trip like a soldier with a mission. When he returned he looked more like a kid with a new dog, all soft and proud. I tried to snap him out of it. I said, “Guard dog! Grrrr.”

  He handed the leash over to me. The dog was just three months old, but already thirty-five pounds of fluff. She had a gorgeously solid cinderblock of a head, and she was white as the moon so we named her Luna. “Hello, dog,” I said. “I am not bonding with you.” Then I went inside to make dinner. Alex put her in a seemingly secure pen in the barn, and came inside.

  I was chopping celery when I saw her outside the kitchen window, bounding with determination up and over the hill. “The dog! The dog!” I yelled. I ran outside in my slippers, up the hill, and yelled down to Alex that the dog was gone.

  He went to the barn and got the ATV. I felt terrible. Terrible for him that his new dog was already gone but also, deep in a place I am not proud of, terrible for me because I knew he was going to ask me to ride on that damn ATV with him.

  There’s probably a clinical name for this, some fancy phobia, but I just call it “tippy issues.” I get tippy issues when I am in a vehicle on a slope. Not heading up, nor heading down. I can do those fine. But sideways? The feeling of leaning over like that? I become consumed with the thought of toppling over, rolling down and down and down into hell itself, and that’s basically why I hyperventilate the way I do. Tippy issues.

  Would that I had discovered this disorder before I found myself living on a farm made up of nothing but large lumpy hills, and before I got me a husband who so loves motorized vehicles that the sound of his revved-up four-wheel-drive ATV turns him into He-Man who wants nothing more than to strap his woman onto the back of that thing and haul her off into the tippy sunset.

  “Maybe another time,” is how I usually answer these invitations.

  But not that day, a messy one by anyone’s measure. It was dusk. It was not a pretty dusk, the fog and the rain holding the sky close. Of course I got on the ATV with Alex. Of course I did. Soon I was hanging on to He-Man’s chest with my every fingernail fiber as we went bounding sideways forth and I was thinking: tippy, tippy, tippy, tippy. Followed by: If this isn’t true love, I don’t know what is. Followed by: tippy, tippy, tippy, Hail Mary full of tippy, tippy, tippy.

  “Do you see that white thing over there?” he asked. “Is that her, or is that a sheep?”

  “It’s too dark,” I said, which I’m pretty sure would have been true even if I were able to open my eyes. “We’ll have to try again tomorrow.”

  “This is a disaster,” he said.

  “Well, at least we didn’t bond with the dog,” I said, clinging to all there was to cling to.

  In the morning he headed off again and I got out of the whole tippy deal by volunteering to make lost-dog posters. I tried to avoid saying the obvious: This lost dog was a lost cause. We knew nothing of the dog’s habits; she was probably on her way home to South Carolina. We hadn’t even had a chance to put a collar on her, and she’d barely gotten a chance to sniff out our place and mark it with her own scent. Alex would hear none of this. In the afternoon he left with the lost-dog posters, said he would put them up at the post office and the hardware store and anyplace else he could think of.

  Alone in the house, I thought: We should have never started this whole stupid sheep enterprise. But at a time like that it’s hard to tell where, exactly, the beginning of the story even is. Maybe we should never have started the whole farm enterprise. Maybe we should have bought a house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with an asphalt road out front and the kind of lawn people had other people come by and spray to discourage dandelions.

  I was doing dishes when I saw Skippy up on the hill, staring east. Just frozen there in his posture of concern and dismay. That mule had long ago emerged the king of all our animals, and he took the responsibility seriously. Skippy was always on the lookout. I looked out. I traced his line of sight as best I could, across the fence and into the woods. And then I saw it: a large ball of white.

  “The dog!” I hollered. I ran out in now my second pair of soggy slippers, up the hill, flip-flopping through the field to the edge of the woods. “The dog!” I yelled. “Skippy, you found the dog!”

  “Oh, puppy, puppy, puppy!” I yelled in the high-pitched squeal humans instinctively use to talk to puppies. “You came back! Come to Mamma, sweetie.” And “Poochie poochie poo.” I was crouching on my knees holding my arms out, like you do for any lost dog, even though I wasn’t supposed to be doing quite this with this dog. Um. How do you get a dog to come home if you don’t give it some loving to come home to?

  More to the point: How do you not bond with a beautiful white dog that has come back to you after a night of running and whose coal black eyes look hungry and scared and who comes at you wagging her tail feverishly with love and apology?

  “Luna, girl! Come to Mamma! Mamma loves you, Luna girl!”

  Alone with that dog in the woods, scratching her belly and praising her and loving
her, one thing I learned about myself was that I was no good at not-bonding. I was only good at bonding. Was that really such a bad thing?

  When Alex drove up the driveway, he saw me up there waving my arms and he popped the trunk open and got something out and came running up the hill. I told him Skippy found her, I told him about the ball of white in the woods, I told him she was a good dog, I was breathless with glee. He was shaking his head, smiling, trying to catch up, and he was holding a large steak bone.

  “You bought her a bone?” I said.

  “In case she ever came back—”

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to buy her presents,” I told him. “I don’t think it’s in the code of ethics—”

  “I bought a pork shank for her and also a hairbrush,” he said.

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Oh, well,” he said.

  We loved Luna. There was nothing that anybody at the Maremma Sheepdog Club of America could do about it. Alex bent down and scratched her belly and gave her the bone. I thought: Oh, look at this. I thought there should have been daisies in a nearby meadow, and a beautiful rainbow stretching across the sky. And a unicorn flying and emitting a shower of glitter. The completed picture, I thought. Here it was, a real happily-ever-after tale. The pig had her pancake and was now going to move on. Close that book. Throw that book out. All righty, then. The end.

  That weekend my friend Robin came for a visit from New York. She brought her husband, David, with her, and a notebook with a list of questions written inside. Robin and David were adopting a baby from China, and they were coming to Alex and me for answers. Nearly all the questions were about bonding and how to make it happen. I remembered this one: When you’re adopting a child you have a fear as real as a toothache that somehow, since the baby didn’t grow in you, she isn’t going to attach to you. Or, worse, you aren’t going to attach to her.

  Robin said that one of the things she planned to do when she got her baby in her arms was she was not going to allow anyone but herself and David to hold her until the bonding process was complete. That way, she said, the baby could avoid the confusion over just who, exactly, her real parents were.

  I asked her how she would know the bonding process was complete.

  “Well, I have no idea,” she said. “How did you know?”

  I told her that with Anna, I felt connected the moment I touched her, and with Sasha the process may have been a millisecond shorter, or longer, I couldn’t remember exactly. “It was all more or less instantaneous,” I said. “It’s your baby. You’re the mom. You bond.” I told her not to worry about it, knowing that nothing I could say would quell her private fears. I told her that I thought all you really had to do was want to bond. But I was no longer sure even that much was necessary.

  She looked at her notebook, seemed almost disappointed that there wasn’t more to write down than that.

  I told Robin about Luna, the dog Alex and I promised not to love. I told her I thought bonding was the natural order of things and the much harder job was not bonding.

  I believed all of this, and still do. But that day with Robin I felt all wise and important. Then things went downhill because our second and last remaining pecky rooster made a beeline for Robin. I don’t know what we’re doing wrong that all our roosters end up being pecky, but I was done with roosters. We were standing down by the chicken coop and Robin was admiring the whole Green Acres theme of the place, and just out of nowhere and completely unprovoked, that rooster came charging at Robin while he puffed his chest and he started attacking her ankle.

  “Oh!” Robin said. “Ouch!” She was so polite about this. She had lived her whole life in Manhattan and she had no practice with chickens and I think she thought there was something very normal and chicken-y about this attack.

  There was not. Chicken beaks are like jackhammers. They hurt like hell. I had had it with the roosters of this world. I ran up to this one and kicked him like a football. “You’re going to Gretta’s!” I shouted, as he flew up into the sky and tumbled beak over feet, then fell to the ground with a thud. I ran after him and kicked him again. “You’re going to Gretta’s!” I shouted again and again in what everyone that day regarded as a full chicken fit.

  Robin looked a lot more afraid of me than of the rooster. I don’t know what this display did to my eloquent talk about bonding. One false move and you’re outta here. I don’t think of myself as a person who relates to others that way, but when it comes to pecky roosters this is who I am.

  In the end, we didn’t get the ram pen built in time. No, of course we did not. Because there never is an end to the pig-and-pancake story, no, once you open that horrible book you are stuck in an endless loop of responsibility and anguish.

  One day we woke up and looked outside and counted the sheep and realized that the burly ram was gone.

  We knew where it almost certainly had escaped to. Just over our fence lay the land of George’s milk and honey: some five hundred ewes.

  I told Alex he had to call George and tell him our ram was loose in his field.

  He said, “I know.”

  We both sighed. We didn’t want to have to deal with this. The whole point in becoming sheep farmers was so that we wouldn’t have to deal with George’s anger with us, whatever it was. And now look.

  “Look!” I said to Alex.

  George’s pickup was barreling up our driveway. There was a ram in the back.

  “Oh, God,” Alex groaned.

  This was one of those times I was glad I had to bathe my children. I would have to stay inside and rinse their hair. Darn it, I would have to miss the duel with the neighbor.

  “You have to admit it was nice of him to bring the ram back,” I said to Alex. “Maybe it’s a peace offering.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “Yeah…”

  I rinsed extra good. Then I put in conditioner. I told the girls it was important to sometimes let conditioner stay in your hair and really get in there deep. I was hiding in the bathroom.

  Alex was down by the barn with George for nearly an hour. Every time I peeked out, neither of them were flailing their arms or putting up their dukes.

  When Alex finally came back in, he didn’t look upset.

  “You worked it all out?” I said. “Just like that?”

  “We talked about how to build a ram pen,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He said I should use cattle fence.”

  “Right…”

  “And I told him we need a water source because I’m not hauling water every day—”

  “What about the feud?”

  “I don’t think we’re having a feud.”

  “What?”

  “Well, he didn’t say anything about it.”

  “Nothing?”

  “He said to say hello and he said Pat’s heart has been bothering her again.”

  Oh, my God. “These people don’t speak to us for two years and then they just pick up where they left off with no explanation?”

  “I don’t think they were not-speaking to us,” he said. “Could it be possible that we weren’t speaking to them?”

  I considered the option. “We’re not in a feud?” I said.

  “Apparently not.”

  Oh, God.

  “He said he heard we got a livestock guardian dog.”

  “Did you show him? Did you introduce him to Luna?”

  “He said he doesn’t believe in livestock guardian dogs.”

  Well, that was the George I remembered and loved. George was a man with a belief system. “Did you talk about anything else?”

  “Mostly just all sheep things.”

  Jesus.

  We may have evolved into farmers, but we were only beginning to understand farm culture. Out here, emotions run high but then just as quickly can go underground, unspoken. I suppose if you’re lucky they choke on negligence. Or they might take root and grow like underground tubers, o
ne generation to the next. It was way too soon to know which would be the case here.

  “He said he was planning to ask us if we wanted him to bring sheep over this summer,” Alex said. “He said we didn’t have to go and get our own sheep.”

  I took a deep breath. After all this? After all this it turned out we never even had to get started with this stupid story? “Tell him to bring his sheep over!” I said. “Call him up and tell him right now! We don’t have nearly enough to eat down the hill.”

  “I asked him,” he said. “He said he can’t do it now.”

  “He can’t now?”

  “No, because we have hair sheep.”

  “Yeah…”

  “He doesn’t believe in hair sheep. He doesn’t want to mix.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “You know what, I really need to go watch TV,” I said.

  I got in my pajamas. I put on The Bachelorette. I watched Jen weep her brains out over whether to pick Jerry or John Paul, the two men she had fallen in love with, and then in the end she didn’t pick either. I considered throwing a brick at the TV, but instead I turned off the TV and the light and I put a blanket over my head, leaving only a tiny passageway—a meager but necessary invitation—for oxygen.

  fever all through the night

  I’m reporting live, from a cozy blue room generously appointed with trains and toy mice dressed in tutus. I’m here on a sliver of an edge of a too-small bed, but I do have this bit of quilt cover, so I’m, ouch, good. Really I am.

  The rest of the bed, and the rest of my life, is taken up entirely by my daughter, a three-year-old with the heaviest and hottest head imaginable. Her head, featuring a 102-degree fever, is resting on my belly, somewhere around my spleen, I’d guess. But this is really just a guess. I don’t know where my spleen is, or what, really, it even does, but at 4:05 in the morning you think about things like spleens. I am thinking that human spleens can’t take this kind of sustained weight; I am really starting to think they can’t.