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"

            Every time we come down from Massachusetts for a visit, I think that if I can stay cheerful, the visit will be different. As long as we have fun during the daytime, I will be okay. That when five o’clock comes and my mother loads her wineglass full of ice and vodka, I will think: today I touched a porpoise! I went for a bike ride! I had shrimp on a bamboo skewer! And I will look the other way.

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.

From "Tropical Storm," an essay in progress.

            We watch the mechanical teeth send all the pins back to the same place. We wait for the ball return to give me back my ball.

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.