As they grow sleepy in the scent of Savannah, of jasmine, of magnolia, Father flips to his favorite section — sports, where he reads the horse-racing results out loud.
“They run fast as the wind,” Lucy says.
“Like the wind,” Mother says, and her voice wavers, “the wind.”
“Yes,” Father says, “as fast as the wind.” And with those words they are asleep. Her father closes the paper and leaves the house for the night shift.
She could dream of petting one. She could dream of running her hand down its smooth, broad nose, between the large, brown eyes — the gentlest of all eyes. She could touch its coarse mane, put her arms around its tremendous neck. She could hear its heart, its loud, huge heart, kept in the wide silky box of its chest.
She watches it play in a field of sweet clover — its rounded haunches, its curving neck, in the golden light of day. She says the word graze; it sounds good to her.
If she had one she would offer it apples and feel its square nose flatten her hand. She would make it a soft bed of hay. She would cover it w ith a red blanket, put fresh water in the drinking trough, put feed in a jute and burlap sack.
At night she would stay with it in its stall. If she saw an animal like that she would never leave its side. She could feel its large, warm breath in the dark, making a veil of protection, a home of breath. She would put her mother in that safe, warm tent where she might live forever.
Now he turns to the sports section in the drowsy room. He gets out his wallet and hands his wife and his two daughters two dollars each. They sit straight up and listen with great care as he begins to read the litany of names: Bride-to-Be, Let’s Go Stella, Off the Sauce, Lunar Landing, French Lace—
“Lunar Landing!” Lucy says, “I want that one to win!”
“French Lace,” my mother sighs, claiming her horse.
Their father marks off their choices on the newspaper. They consider nothing but the sounds of those names — not the jockeys or the trainers, not their racing records or the conditions of the track or the odds.
“Double or nothing,” the father says, or “Miguel Hernandez will be riding.” Their mother, Alice, picks “Christmas Bells.” Father picks “Chrissy the Wissy” because of his daughter, Christine.
She loves the language of horses her father can speak. “It’s the Perfecta,” he says, “the Daily Double — the purse of a thousand dollars.” She thinks what she would do with that much money. She closes her eyes and sees the jockey in satin bouncing up and down, up and down — the reins, the whips, the numbers; the horseshoes of flowers; the arms of roses. She spins garlands. She places laurels of her own making around their thick necks.
She could dream of riding one, feel her legs gripping its powerful sides. “They go as fast as the wind, Lucy.” She could dream of never coming back.
She would ride as fast as the wind, feel the great heart pumping, the lungs breathing, the fierce neck straining, she straining too toward the finish, their bodies yearning toward home. She looks to her sleeping mother, squeezes her pale hand — aching — kisses her on the cheek — striving.
She joins her mother in a green pasture of sleep where they walk together longing for those horses. She knows how much they need them. They grow large in her dreams. She says the word graze. It sounds good to her. Each horse floats in ghostly procession in front of them, countable as sheep. Giants, they pass in slow motion, the sound of their hooves magnified a hundred times. An endless procession, one by one they lope over the hill and are gone. She names them as they pass her: Bluebell, Hibiscus, Daffodil, Mimosa. They walk, they prance, they canter, they gallop — they never tire. This is what she must do. This, she knows, is what she has to do: help her mother onto the floating back of one of those gentle ghost horses, make the trip as easy as possible for her — over the green hills, into the blue sky.
I know when she shuts off her light. I know when she shifts in her sleep or when, unable to sleep, she walks in her high rubber boots through fields of snow near our house. Her restless body plows through my every dream, my deepest sleep.
My mother raises her arm, bends her knee. The pasty dance instructor veils in a shrill voice, “One, two, cha-cha-cha. Three, four, cha-cha-cha. Head up, cha-cha-cha. Smile, smile, cha-cha-cha. Good, good, cha-cha-cha.”
The sun is a steady drone in the sky. She covers her eyes as she ascends toward it. Her ears flood with the melancholy voice of the pilot. He sounds like a skinny man, she thinks, with no family. She laughs. To him she has given her ridiculous life, filled with gravity.
The steward offers after-dinner drinks: amaretto, Kahlua, Cointreau. The plane shifts its path. She wants nothing but to see Natalie in France again. Even if Natalie whispers lies, even if she talks about someone else’s dark eyes, she will allow it; she would allow Natalie anything. “I will,” she says to the woman fastened securely next to her. “I will see her again.”
“Natalie,” she whispers in the tiny, steel bathroom. “You would like this, you would really like this.” She smoothes the lining of her coat and adjusts her belt, which is heavy with hash, with cocaine. “If only you were here,” she thinks, looking at the tanned arms Natalie once said she loved so much.
Her name is Marta. She is not on her way to meet Natalie. She is not going to France. She is going, of all places, to Poughkeepsie, New York, back to college for her senior year. Alone, she thinks she will watch her body grow white without sun in the Hudson Valley winter. The small toilet spins like the empty cylinder of pills she holds so tightly. Dizzy, she kneels on the floor. She is caught in its circular motion as if it were a tornado, as if it could carry her away and when it stopped she would be safe finally. If she could only keep the pills down, she thinks. But her body has its own logic. It pumps out the poison, insisting on life. She vomits again and again, expelling the small ovals of white. She drops the bottle, disgusted, it having taken her nowhere.
“Natalie, did you forget our plan? The River Gauche, Capri, London? Have you forgotten everything? The way we carved our promises into one another’s arms, slowly, deeply, so we might never forget? And how much we bled? Has the skin grown back so thick over those words?”
Blood flows up from the toilet: clouds, mangled birds, hands — Natalie’s hands, her punctured arms, Natalie’s blood, dark and purple — a storm — Natalie’s blood. She leaves the bathroom, looks out the window. The sky is covered with it. She will see her again. The whirling wind will take her there, she tells the woman next to her. She smiles and sucks in the sweetness of high altitude. She is spinning, she is turning, she is moving away, far above the troubled earth, to Natalie.
I do not think he could help but let the past back in as he drove down Raymond Avenue and we approached Vassar College where my mother had gone to school, where he had first seen her that night at the dance, and w here now I, their daughter, would be. Though he had not been back in years, he was probably not surprised at how little it had changed. There were places like that, he thought. I imagine, as we approached the main gate, that he could still see my mother there, sitting on the bench in a cotton dress and a straw hat holding a small suitcase and waiting for the bus. As we passed the library, which he pointed out to me, his eyes seemed to linger there as he watched her under that huge tree, reading Baudelaire and Rimbaud to him tentatively in French.
Perhaps once these images started coming they did not seem so dangerous to him and he no longer fought them off. I would like to think that in the consistent Vassar air he could go back easily in time and feel comfortable there.