Free Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner Page B

both of them chattering about bots and mash and foundering hooves, sharing blue jeans so that sometimes when I saw a pair of strong faded legs striding by my basement window my stomach would clench up and then it would turn out to be silly Claire, leaving me embarrassed. I tried to get them in for coffee, and spent time sitting in each of my chairs, gauging Claire’s brother’s view of my narrow rooms, my parents’ hand-me-down bridge tables and cheap ethnic hangings. But only Claire ever came, squinting and dusty after work, carrying her velvet-wrapped huntcap, which she kept on her lap the whole time. Shetold me about her day indiscriminately and I had to wait, blank-faced, for the topic of her brother to come up, feeling real pain somewhere behind my ribs. He wore two button-down flannel shirts on cold mornings, one under the other, his blond chest under them, and seeing this from my window, or imagining it later while I pretended to listen to Claire, gave me angry waves and chills, hard frustration.
    Claire was all right, though, in that she never caught on, or pretended not to catch on, and spoke in great swells of overstatement, sometimes making me pay attention to her in spite of myself. “I fixed that trunk lock a hundred and fifty thousand times yesterday,” she’d say, or “That sick horse has more worms than veins.” Then she would laugh, surprised at herself, and I’d laugh, and she’d say, “Why don’t you come down there with us, Caroline, and we’ll take you out on the trail? It’s free, with us, you know.”
    â€œI know,” I said. “It’s not the money.” I always left it at that, wanting to go, but not wanting to be seen as a novice; surely I would get up on the wrong side of the horse, or call the horse the wrong thing, or steer the horse into a wall, or make other equestrian mistakes that I was too inexperienced to even imagine.
    Claire tried; she told me riding was all predilection and magic, that she and Dale only did it because when they were teenagers they’d gotten stuck with an ugly pony their grandfather left them in his will. They’d tried raffling the pony off to the neighborhood kids, but the ticket Dale drew had their own names on it, mysteriously, and that was that, here they were making a career of it. “Besides, you can’t just sit in here a million hours a day,” she said. “Don’t you just want to shoot out the ceiling?”
    â€œI think I have the ideal situation,” I said. In the corner were twelve cartons of the makings of brochures, which I sorted and assembled and once a week drove to a warehouse downtown, where I was given more cartons, as many as I could fit in my car. I was one of the people who made direct-mail advertising work for
me
, said the caption under my picture in the newspaper adthat ran continuously. I was a success story, and my smiling face seduced dozens of lazy others into signing up. But I’d been doing it the longest.
    â€œNever drive on a slant street,” my mother always said, meaning: Don’t do what you don’t know how to do. I followed this and thought it was better to
imagine
Dale taking my sweater from my shoulders, imagine him learning that my bra unhooked in front, than it was to go ahead and accept Claire’s invitation and make a fool of myself at the stables.
    Once when I went up to their apartment I saw something small and curved glinting on a dresser in their back room and thought it must be Dale’s—part of a knife or razor—but it turned out to be Claire’s barrette, and this made me wonder: was petty danger all I wanted? I noticed messy tins of polish and liniment on their kitchen counter, and week-old mail lying unopened on their bathroom floor, whereas at my place I knew which drawer my birth certificate was in, original and copy, and where I had a screwdriver small enough to repair the hinge on a pair