The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (25 page)

Nothing happened for a long time. The mare lay on her side, then stood up, then threw herself back down on the stall floor. Justice whinnied now and then and lifted her head. Finally her sides began to heave at regular intervals. I started to feel frightened; the horse looked as if she were in pain but trying to sleep through it. Her enormous dark eyes were glazed and unblinking.

When the foal began to crown, Mom went into the stall and kneeled beside Justice’s head, stroking the horse’s neck, which by now had foamed with sweat. Eventually the foal emerged. As it did, Justice lifted her head and whinnied again.

To my astonishment, the foal, though still halfway in its mother’s body, nickered back. Spurred on by the murmur of sound, Justice pushed once more and the foal slid free. I started to cry, for no reason I could explain, and Joanne and Mystique both put their arms around me, wiping tears away as well.

In less than half an hour, the mare and foal were both on their feet, and the foal was nuzzling its mother for milk. The
foal was black with one white sock and a white blaze down the length of its nose.

“Must be a boy, if he’s on his feet already,” Whitney crowed. “Look at him. So strong! What a boy!”

Next to me in the loft, Joanne wiped her eyes and made a scissoring motion with her fingers, then pointed to Whitney. “Some men would be better off as geldings,” she whispered.

T
HROUGH
the years, only one man ever boarded his horse with us. This was Francis, the nineteen-year-old son of a dentist and the owner of an elegant Appaloosa quarterhorse gelding. Francis quickly won my mother’s admiration and tried hard to win mine.

Francis had only one aspiration in life, and that was to be a cowboy. While we all used lightweight, flat English saddles, he rode in a heavy, hand-tooled Western saddle over a Navajo blanket. Francis kept a rope hanging from the saddle’s tall pommel and could lasso a running dog (though where he learned that in Massachusetts, I hadn’t a clue). He never went anywhere, even the movies, without wearing his broken-in brown cowboy boots, and he carried a bandanna in his pocket instead of a handkerchief.

Francis had an acne-scarred face, but his blue eyes made me wobbly in the knees until I let him kiss me. That kiss left my lips so bruised and raw that I avoided repeating the experience.

“I keep telling Francis that he has to love you less in order for you to love him at all,” Mom said, apropos of nothing, over breakfast one morning. “But he just won’t listen.”

“You talk to Francis about me?” I was horrified in the way only a teenage girl can be by her mother.

She waved her cigarette at me. “Well, what was I supposed to do? He’s so desperate,” she said, pouring herself a second cup of coffee. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You always want to be with a man who loves you more than you love him.”

Men, in my mother’s view, were useful rather than necessary. She relied on Francis for his trailer, to help her take the horses to shows and perform animal rescues. Whenever they heard about animals being neglected or abused, they’d contact the animal control officer and show up with Francis’s trailer if the animals had to be removed. Mom would nurse the horses back to health and use them in her riding lessons, or she’d give them to girls whose families would pay the board.

In this way we acquired Sniffles, a Shetland pony that flew into rages if you tried to boss him around. Since Sniffles was so small—his back reached no higher than my waist—Mom decided that the shaggy bay pony would be the ideal candidate to introduce my brother Philip, now five years old, to the joys of horseback riding.

“After all,” Mom mused, “he needs something to do, poor kid.”

This was a true statement. Philip was just as wild as Donald had been, though he expressed himself intellectually rather than physically. He had started reading as a four-year-old and, with Grandmother to spur him along, was already devouring my father’s
Time
magazines every week. Whereas Donald at that age was scaling walls and stealing tips from waitresses, Philip was mouthy and big-headed, correcting his teachers
rudely whenever they misspelled something or made a mistake. He had elicited a phone call from the school after taking a hundred-dollar bill from Dad’s dresser and presenting it for show-and-tell. During story hour, he had opened his desk lid and slammed it shut to protest the teacher’s decision to repeat a certain picture book rather than choose a new one.

My mother’s responses to the teacher’s complaints were casual. “If she continues to bore Philip in school, then I can’t be responsible for the consequences,” she sniffed. “You’d think elementary school teachers would wise up and do something different for boys than they do with girls.”

So, one bright autumn afternoon, I eagerly saddled up Sniffles. Francis picked Philip up and sat him on the pony’s back.

Sniffles ran away immediately, taking the bit in his teeth and snatching the reins out of my little brother’s hands. We chased Sniffles all around the riding ring, the pony’s eyes rolling as his little hooves churned dirt, until Sniffles found the gate and made a dash for it.

Philip raised his arms and let himself be scraped off the pony’s back as Sniffles plunged under the gate and headed straight for the grain room. Philip never rode another horse.

Sniffles proved to be just as feisty when Mom tried to harness him to pull a driving cart a week later. “This pony’s eyes turn red whenever I try to get him to do something useful,” Mom said in frustration. “I can’t control him at all.”

“Let me try,” Francis suggested.

Mom handed him the driving harness. As he approached Sniffles with the leather straps dangling over one arm, Sniffles reared like the Black Stallion, pawing at the air with his hooves, eyes gleaming. Sure enough, those eyes looked red to me.

Mom and I ducked behind the mounting block in case the pony decided to charge us. But Francis dropped the harness and grabbed both of the pony’s front legs. He pushed Sniffles up higher on his back legs, nearly toppling him over backward, and held him that way until the pony’s eyes rolled white and the sheer terror of being so unbalanced made his neck foam with sweat.

Gently, Francis let him down. He buckled the harness onto Sniffles’s back without further incident and gave the pony a smart smack on his shaggy brown rump. “There now, old boy,” Francis murmured. “I wager you won’t give these ladies any more trouble, will you? Because you know I’m watching you.”

Watching Francis as he danced with that pony and let him down so gently, and surrounded by the sweet autumn scents of hay and oats mixed with molasses, I wished, with all my being, that there could be some way to make yourself fall in love with the man who worked hardest to win your heart.

entered our lives, my grandparents owned a gift shop in Bangor, Maine. Mom drove us north from Virginia to stay with them whenever Dad was at sea. The gift shop was a barn where my grandparents sold antiques and pottery, oil paintings small enough to hold in your palm, and china cats curled up on miniature rugs that Grandmother crocheted herself.

Their house was even better. A creaky old white Colonial with broad pine floors and rocking chairs in the kitchen, the house had a view of the river and a generous sun porch. In winter, the snow drifted above the first-floor windows, and in summer wild blueberries grew in the fields around the house. To Donald and my cousins and me, Maine was paradise.

Maine was also where Mom and Grandmother first tried to impress upon me that a lady always wears underpants.

This happened during the summer my cousin Candy was visiting. She was my age and had red hair the color and texture of a rusty scrub pad. One day, after Candy and I had run through the tangle of blueberry bushes below the house, we returned with our legs scratched and bleeding. Our palms and
tongues were black from eating as many blueberries as we’d picked. Grandmother sent us straight upstairs to bathe.

We spent a long time in the bubbles. Then we emerged from the bathroom with our towels draped around us like elegant floor-length gowns and paraded around the attic bedroom we shared with Donald, daring my little brother to show us his if we showed him ours.

Grandmother caught us at this game. “You girls put on your underpants
this minute
!” she cried, wringing her hands. “Ladies
always
wear underpants!”

The very next night, Candy and I took another bubble bath after dinner—Lord, how we loved that old claw-footed tub—and came downstairs in our nightgowns with an exciting plan: to show her parents, my parents, our grandparents, and even dumb Donald how we could stand on our heads at the same time, elbow to elbow, a trick we’d been practicing for a week.

We summoned our audience into the living room and directed them to sit while we assumed our pyramid positions, with our heads on the braided wool rug in front of the fireplace and our bony knees propped on our elbows. And then, wobbling but regaining our balance, we slowly raised our legs in the air and pointed our toes like ballerinas. Our nightgowns fell like soft cotton curtains over our heads, and there we stood, upside down and blinded by flannel, the blood rushing to our cheeks as we imagined our toes touching the ceiling.

“Girls, girls, girls!” Grandmother clapped her hands so sharply that we both toppled right over. “You forgot your underpants! Never,
ever
forget your underpants! A lady
always
wears underpants!”

A lady must wear underpants: that was the first rule in
an entire code book that Mom and Grandmother heroically tried to convey to me throughout my adolescence. Other rules included: