From an entry in progress for Emily Spivack's "Worn Stories"

My father’s vintage Ralph Lauren cardigan is age-stained and moth-nibbled, the cuffs are all stretched out. Although I don’t have any memories of him ever actually wearing it, it certainly corresponds to the type of man that he was then. In the early eighties, he had great hair and a mustache—a long-legged, rare-steak eating, tennis playing man who belonged to clubs with letter-pressed stationary in royal blue and cream. He always gave me a sip of wine at dinner, but would tell me to smell the bouquet first. This will give you the impression that my dad is cultured, snobbish. He isn’t. He pushed the wine across the table to me to piss my mother off.

From "Tropical Storm"

Something here about the happy times. Who wants to hear about my mother’s drinking? Would you like to know instead that I once had a horse? My parents let me name it and I named her Fantasy. I feel no embarrassment about this, oddly.

From "Tropical Storm"

She knocks out four pins on her first roll, none on her second. I pick up my pink bowling ball and feel a certain amount of pressure. To our left, the lanes are filled with small gentlemen in collared shirts and khaki shorts. Their shorts feature utility pockets. They’re wearing high socks. Their legs show the weary tendons of a once athletic life, but their bodies are sloped lines now and supple semicircles. Gentle foreheads, many chins, everything moves downwards. Their balls roll slower than our balls, they rotate with intention. They move like manatees up and down their lanes.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

            Everyday with Peter felt like a confirmation that three hearts could make a world.

Their routine followed a pattern that was instantly familiar in that it replicated the daydreams of the life she’d always wanted. After coffee and the ceremonial splitting of the paper into his section, and hers, one of them would ride Belltello while the other mucked the stable. Then, after a weird breakfast of leftovers and fruit and this horrid, Swedish fish paste that Peter pushed through a tube onto whole wheat crackers, Lydia would go to her studio to paint, taking breaks at the window to watch Belltello and her lover—what other word was there for it?—dance.

Cut from "Airs Above the Ground"

Lydia settled on a scrapbook, scissors, three packets of stickers, glue and a rubber stamp all neatly enclosed inside an attractive plastic container. She hoped that the recipient of her “DreamMaker Set” would be happy, but they probably would not be. The guardian at the children’s center would probably remove the scissors, rendering the gift useless. What kind of person would give scissors to a child?

            The type of person who didn’t have children, obviously. The type of person who believed that severence was the most important step in art. It wasn’t until she finally admitted to herself that she wasn’t any good as a rider that she discovered photography, and painting. She’d felt whole again, less nervous. She’d felt in control.

            She paid for the DreamMaker Set (forty-seven dollars. She would have preferred to donate cash) and walked across the parking lot with her brazen pastel gift bag. Control. Control was something she’d been robbed of. And she didn’t see a future in which she got it back.

            In the car, Lydia fingered the gold tassell hanging from the pendant around her neck. She’d put on a pair of black wool trousers for the party, an eggplant blouse made of glossy silk, black heels. The heels were patent leather, shameful. This outfit wasn’t her. Several months ago, she wouldn’t even have been able to have worn it in her car. The upholstery would have been (matted with) horse hair, stray pieces of hay, dusty horse blankets thrown in the back seat and crumbled leaves on the (foot carpets), dead flies on the dashboard. Everything was nice now. Clean smelling. Hoovered. She could go to fancy parties now, all dressed in black.

            Lydia gathered herself. Ran her hand down her pant leg, seeking stray hairs. Thirteen years of dressage training had prepared her to be a mourner. Takt:

rhythm and regularity: you keep working, you show up when expected, once a month, you call your mother, you say yes to parties. Versammlung: straightness and collection: you keep your hair clean, you listen to talk radio while you eat your dinner to make up for the absence of that other voice, you put a hot water bottle on his side of the bed. On social days, you force yourself to reach for the mascara and the broken cake of blusher, and once a month, usually after speaking to your mother, you take a bath with water that is too hot and in this too hot water, you cry in the tub.

Cut from "Airs Above the Ground"

            Lydia reached out for Judith’s hand and squeezed it. Judith looked at Lydia with surprised eyes and squeezed her back. For a moment, Lydia considered whether or not this was all that it would take: a parade of loving gestures. A smile here, a laugh there, and in a little while, her friends would think her happy, or happier at least. Lydia put her hand back into her lap.

            The children began singing their carol. Their were voices gossamer-thin and waning. Lydia worried that they might not make it through the song.

Away in a manger no crib for a bed, the little lord Jesus lay down his sweet head. At what age did a head cease being sweet? Or did it depend on size? Belltello had had the kindest face in the world, but his head was too big to be sweet. He'd had an enormous, gray head, soft and alert and smelling of hay. You could lose your heart staring into his big eyes.

            “There she is,” said Judith, nodding in the direction of her daughter who was somehow, remarkably, already on her way up to the table with her lantern. The first grade had come and gone while Lydia was stuck on Bell’s head.

            “She looks beautiful,” cooed Lydia, because it was true. Josie was a beautiful girl with a beautiful, happy mother. Lydia would have hated Judith if she didn’t love her to death.

            I never wanted to be a mother, thought Lydia, staring at her friend. At least she’d never suffer for this particular decision. She would have been terrible at it. Lydia did well with animals because they accepted love in actions. You kept them clean, fed and exercised, reassured them with a caress. This is all that they expected. This was enough. But children. Children with their need for nipples, nighlights, healthy snacks and birthday parties, footwear, hand-written-notes in lunchboxes, and they drank so much juice. They needed you materially, physically, intellectually—and as a woman, they came out of your body, so they needed you sexually, as well. Lydia owed a lot to women like Judith. It was because of women like Judith that she got to be herself.

            Up on stage, the piano player began plucking out the opening notes of “O Tannenbaum” for the second graders. It was a disquieting song, really. The opening notes were staccato and brisk, but the melody was top heavy, dragging. O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, how loyal are your nee-dles. The little choralers squirmed under the ancient lyrics of their too-slow song. Lydia knew what it felt like to be those children, caught in the visceral clench of something you weren’t very good at, but were forced to do because it was charming and expected, because you had been asked. She’d been a rider before she’d been a painter, but she hadn’t been a good one. Her father had been a competitve rider, and his father before him. She’d never even been asked.

            One of the little girls in the front row kept twisting at her pinafore, crisscrossing her right leg across her left one, singing to the gymnasium floor instead of to the candles. Next to her, Judith’s girl was head-high with Christmas spirit. Lydia watched the embarassed one soothe herself with fidgets. Her heart sped. There’d been plenty of times that Lydia had wanted out of the ring, too.

From "Notes from Mexico"

On my second evening, I learn about the President. The French President, Sarkozy. His arrival is pending. There is much talk of whether or not he’ll be coming with his wife, Carla. There is much talk of whether or not their marriage is a hoax. “She’s a common prostitute,” a woman I don’t know says.

My husband’s father was married to Mirabelle for seven weeks before they divorced, although they’d been dating for seven years before that. Marriage, like having children, is something that older people have started to roll their eyes at. Do you have children, they ask? I answer in the negative. They roll their eyes. Say, “Don’t.”

From "Airs Above the Ground"

Away in a manger no crib for a bed, the little lord Jesus lay down his sweet head. At what age did a head cease being sweet? Or did it depend on size? Belltello had had the kindest face in the world, but his head was too big to be sweet. He’d had an enormous gray head, soft and alert and smelling of hay. You could lose your heart staring into his big eyes.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

She'd been there that evening to photograph the freestyle performance, but had been so transfixed by the connection between the horse and rider that she'd forgotten to take photographs. She'd paid dearly for this--after their record-breaking performance, Belltello and Peter were on the cover of every Dressage magazine in publication that year. They'd even made The Times.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

And the music! The awful Danish neo-pop that they laughed about the next morning; giddy as children from the unexpected victory and their encounter at the closing party that ended up with them in bed. It made her smile to remember how he slid across the carpet of her hotel room in his underwear, singing the lyrics to the song he’d used for his performance the night before, flailing his arms above his head and collapsing back into bed with her, desperate for breakfast.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

The ceremony was charming. The little girls looked proud. Lydia liked how the candles cast licks of color across their open mouths. She felt supportive of these children, especially the ones whose alto voices drifted frightfully off course.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

The little girls began the song in English and sang the chorus in French. Lydia couldn’t help but think that it would have been more appropriate to finish the song in German, what with the “O Tannenbaum” of it all, but it felt wrong to harbor a negative thought about the girl’s performance with Judith beaming at her side.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

On the morning of Belltello’s death, Lydia and Peter had made early morning love between the warm sheets of her bed. Right before she climaxed, Miranda remembered thinking that she was leading a successful life. Thirty-seven years old and making love with a world champion rider, a prize-winning love of a horse across the way. Uncharacteristically, she’d fallen back asleep and woken to a glass of fresh squeezed grapefruit juice on top of a note. I’ve gone to get the mail, it read. Be back in three years.
This was a private joke between them, the absurd length of her driveway. It was so long, Peter took his coffee with him on their walks to get the paper. When Lydia went out to join him that morning, she found his blue mug lying on the ground with a crack down the middle.
Peter was in the pasture, on his knees beside his horse. For one horrendous instant, Lydia felt relieved. She was aware that the tableau before her spelled out the downfall of it all. She’d never felt certain that she deserved to be so happy. And then the reality of the situation hit her. A prize horse doesn’t heal.
The words still felt foreign when she rolled them through her mind: break; cannon bone; marrow; how innocuous. With a sinking stomach, Lydia remembered the calls to the insurance company that morning in the kitchen; the sound of the veterinarian’s tires crunching to a stop. The Doctor’s accusatory questions and inadequate response: a break in the cannon bone, it happened all the time. Peter’s profile as he stared out the window at the empty field.
When the results came back—Belltello was developing laminitis in the opposite leg, and the coffin bone was pushing through the soft connection between the hoof wall and foot bone—they both knew what it meant. They couldn’t try to save him, no good vet would let them. Treatment would only prolong the horse’s pain.
Lydia tossed Judith’s CD case onto the passenger seat. Euthanasia was another word that sounded like something from a rock concert. My Utopian Euthanasia Zoophilic Fantasy. They’d been one week away from the Grand Prix in Kentucky. Two weeks away, Peter admitted later, from a marriage proposal he’d planned for their weekend in Lexington. Lydia still had the ring in her desk drawer.
Lydia got out of the car and opened up the trunk where Judith said the Christmas gift would be. It was huge and unwrapped: a plastic barbecue grill complete with plastic grill tools, a plastic T-bone, and two plastic ears of corn. Maybe after the shock has passed, they would still get married. But probably, they wouldn’t. No one understood their inability to move on. Her mother had tried to comfort Lydia with the assurance that Peter loved her as much as he’d loved his horse. It was a clumsy sentiment, and probably, not true.
In the weeks after Belltello’s death, after they’d held each other and cried and went for long walks in opposite directions and blamed each other and held each other again and wept, they found that they had little left to say. Every moment in their future had been crafted around the potential victories of their bright and joyful stallion; every competition, every vacation, every weekend away. Lydia fell in love with Peter because he was able to coax something eternal and magnificent out of a beast, and he loved her because she understood the complex nature of his gift. That horse had been a vase of promise, and now Lydia was too frightened to look forward to things again.
After much discussion about what they should do, they agreed that Peter should accept an offer to teach a semester at the Club Hipico del Norte school in San Isidro. And afterwards, they’d see. It would be summer in Argentina, winter in Connecticut. Peter could distract himself with teaching, which he loved.
Lydia would photograph the World Equestrian Games in Melbourne, and after that, the Brentina Cup in California. And she’d busy herself with commissioned portraits of riding ponies, a popular gift in New Canaan around Christmastime. And she’d go to parties and drink seltzer because alcohol made her feel melancholy and vulnerable and completely void of hope. And she’d watch other people sing. And when she’d done enough watching and non-drinking and waking up alone to realize that her heart missed something more than Peter, she’d have to make a decision about what it looked like to move on. But right then at the bottom of the Crawford’s snowy driveway with her hand in her friend’s trunk, that moment was out of reach to her, like a twinkling star that looks like a plane, and turns out to be a plane.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

Lydia had a family up until that fall. Not a traditional one, but still. She’d had beating hearts around her and eyes that brightened at her touch. And she’d had plans to show for it. But even the best laid plans crumble, burn, disintegrate. Completely fall apart.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

The warmth of their first morning together would stay with her, always. He’d had every reason in the world to leave her—interviews, a brunch— and yet he stayed. The ice bucket, the tartan bedspread, the dog-eared bible in the drawer, every object provided them with something to joke about. An excuse to get to know each other, to sink down into love.

From "Notes from Mexico"

When Benito replaced her, he gave Mirabelle a condo. He also lent his plane to her best friend, Maxine, so that she could fly down once a year from Paris to keep Mirabelle company when Benito could not.


Now Benito is in trouble. He did not anticipate the current trend of less is more. He built twenty-seven villas along the Turtle coast and he hasn’t sold a single one of them. Mirabelle took me to visit one of them and there was a dead seagull in the pool.

Excercise for Gotham Writer's Class

Antonia’s favorite candy growing up was Jolly Ranchers— watermelon flavored. She didn’t like to eat an entire one, however. What she liked was the initial thrill of the numbing syrupy taste that clung to her gums like jelly shoes on a bare, wet foot. When she’d sucked the candy down to a transparent, gem-like nub, she would remove it from her mouth and place it back in its wrapper; and then she’d shove the wrapper in the pocket of her jeans, her corduroys, her flannel PJ pants. Her housekeeper would come upon the caramelized pink deposits in the laundry room later as she stood there folding Antonia’s things, and she would think that Antonia hid these candies in her pockets because Mrs. Kauffman became anxious around candy. So the housekeeper never said anything to Antonia about the many pairs of sullied pants that she folded over the two years that she worked for the Kauffman family, and Antonia went on leaving half-sucked candies in her pants until she got into Dadaist poetry her junior year and decided that (blast it!) she agreed with her mother. Candy was for kids.

Socks

It was the month of my wedding; I thought the napkins were in the box. These napkins were a particular point of contention for me. I was dead set against them. As dead set as you can be against something that is actually going to happen. My stepmother insisted on printing them with a photograph of my fiancé and I, trying on hats. She’d designed a monogram to be positioned underneath this: the first letters of our names, connected by an illustrated version of a bubbling champagne glass. A complicated substitute for an ampersand, if you ask me.
We’d invited 50 people to the wedding, but she’d ordered 300 napkins. She told me we could use them again on our wedding anniversary, wouldn’t that be fun? So when my father came up the stairs from the garage into the kitchen with a big bucket of fried chicken on top of a larger, brown box, I thought that the oft-discussed napkins had finally arrived. My plan was to open them, to act enthusiastically, and then to hide them in the attic. Because everyone in my family had been coasting along in high spirits, attacking the wedding to-do list with tremendous good cheer, I felt sure that if these napkins went missing on The Best Day of My Life, my stepmother would turn to me and bravely say, “They’re only napkins!” and that this act of benevolence would do more for our relationship than the fact that she’d wanted to make me customized cocktail napkins in the first place.
But my father acted very shy and surreptitious, and made as if to hide the box away from us, which made it even more obvious that its contents were for me. So I leapt up from the table and lunged for the bottom box, knowing full well that my father’s instincts for survival would cause him to grab the bucket of fried chicken posed on top of it less it tumble to the floor, and this is exactly what happened. My stepmother beamed as I stole away behind the kitchen table with my booty, safely out of reach.
Using my sharpest fingernail, I dug underneath the packing tape and peeled it back with a tug. Across the room, my father held his breath. Gleefully, I pulled apart the cardboard flaps to reveal four dozen pairs of tiny white athletic socks, their reinforced pink tips touching like the snouts of sleeping piglets.
“Dad?” I said, looking across the kitchen to where he stood hugging the greasy bucket against his sweater.
“I got them on EBay!” he exclaimed.
I lifted out a single specimen to try and understand whose feet, exactly, the small white socks were for.

From an exercise for a Gotham Writer's Workshop

I could see how the cutlets could be sauteed with curried spinach, onions and cream, and how this would taste, if not delicious, certainly rewarding on top of a bed of rice. I could taste the future perfect of those chicken cutlets. I could smell the garlic frying.

But right now, those chicken cutlets were lying underneath a choke of plastic, like pale and fattened slugs. Where were the nerves, the rubbery tendons where was the puckered flap of cream-white outer skin?

The other meat choices were no more enticing. Every cut before me looked like the embodiment of nothing; the exact color and texture and glistening sheen I would attribute to this word. What do you feel like doing? Nothing. What did you learn at school today? Nothing. What do you feel like eating? Nothing. This.

From "Val Smells"

The Winklevosses has a life-size chess game in the west corner of the lawn that no one ever played with. Two children were playing with it now, however, pushing their pudgy faces behind and then to the right of the wooden figures, screwing their mouths into frightening shapes for each other.
Antonia pushed her body against the wooden railing. “Checkmate,” She said out loud, to no one. She thought about drinking more. She considered getting tossed. It would certainly make it easier to sit through the coming dinner and the dreadful obligation of a formal desert.
Desert was for children. Or it was for feeling like a child, at the very least. Desert was something that should be eaten in a field, that should be spilled, melted on to fingers, licked off of hands. It should be messy and irreverent, not quartered, cut and presented onto matching porcelain plates. This wasn’t going to last, none of it. Grey would remain friends with Robert forever, men were like that. Comfortable with comfort. But Antonia imagined that she would see this house two, perhaps three more times. And then? And then nothing. Dixon would go on smelling worse and worse and no one would ever tell him.