BETWEEN TAKES SANDI SONNENFELD

Georgia Hale isn't at all like me. But when one attends the same college, lives in the same dorm, and shares only the responsibility of getting papers in on time, it's hard to see the difference.  It is only here on her farm in Vermont that it is apparent.

Georgia believes in three things: family, God, and horses. But I think that if she had to choose between God and horses, God would have a long switchy tail. People say that one takes on the resemblance of those one loves most. Georgia Hale is horsey, then, with large strong teeth, and a ginger-colored mane of hair that falls straight down her muscled back. She is five-ten in her stocking feet and well-developed, but without a trace of softness.

"I'm of good stock," she says proudly.

When Georgia was twelve, her father Frank and her brother Case cut a hole in the ceiling over the tool room, built a wooden ladder, and made her a bedroom loft. The walls of the loft are sharply angled, so she and I can only dress in the center of the room or else we'll bump our heads. Georgia has pasted magazine cutouts of horses all around the room, and when she lies down on her bed she can see the stables from the room's only window.

Her side of the room is cluttered with riding pants, work blouses, stuffed Dankin animals, dirty underwear, and Dick Francis paperbacks. For college graduation, her mother bought her a new riding crop.  It hangs on a wooden chair.

On my side, there is an old mattress, a blue handmade quilt, an open suitcase, and a copy of Madame Bovary, which was the only gift you ever bought me. There is also my journal, a convoluted mixture of notes, short narratives, and these letters to you that I dare not send. A sort of survey of my life. Something as an historian I know you will approve of.

Georgia took your survey class once. She said you were a very good teacher.        

"A man came looking for your Mom today," I said to Georgia.

"Did you tell him that she and Frank were away?" she asked.

"Of course."

"What did he want?"

"He didn't say."

"What did he look like?"

"Tall, rather unattractive."

"What kind of car did he drive?"

"I don't know."

"Was it a pickup truck?"

"No," I said. "I don't think it was a pickup truck. But it wasn't a car or a van either."

"Well, could it have been a small pickup truck like a Datsun?"

"Maybe."

Georgia shook her head. She thought me unobservant.

I preferred to think I noticed other things.

You and I used to walk the campus. "Let's walk and talk," you would say. So we would walk the library to Mr. Walker's garden, past the conference center and Upper Lake, up to the golf course, and then doubling back by the gym and the waterfall to the old cat house (always waiting for some joke from you about a women's college keeping a cat house on campus) and you would talk. I wanted to stop you sometimes and ask you if you noticed it, the tense silence of the campus at sunset, the hushed sound of students as they poured over their books; if you heard the clip of the hedgers as the groundspeople cut at the weeds that perpetually threatened to choke the twisting ivy that climbed well-endowed buildings. But I didn't say anything. You would talk and I would listen. It was the lies that interested me the most; you told them casually, the same way some people speak the truth, knowing they have it on their side. I see you smiling now, your eyes darkening with amusement, because you think it was you who put that idea into my head. That this was what you intended all along.

"That's right, gypsy," you would say.  "Never believe anything anyone says."

But then you would add with that knowing, crooked grin of yours, "Except for me."

With all those lies, you could have told one more. I wouldn't have called you on it. You could have told me you loved me.

"How would you like to go to a concert tonight?" Georgia asked me.

"The philharmonic?"

"It's a band concert. On the town green. Every Wednesday. They are all volunteer musicians. Some of them have never had lessons. But they have been playing the same music now for twenty years, so they are starting to get good."

I laughed, "You always tell the truth, don't you, Georgie?"

"Of course. Now about the concert?"

"I don't think so."

"Why not?" Georgia asked. "It's a very country thing to do. It's fun. More of a social occasion than anything else. Case will be going. He plays trombone. Everyone comes. It's quite lovely. Wouldn't you like to meet some of Case's and my friends?"

"I wouldn't like. Not at all," I said firmly. Then, softly, "Georgie, I'm just not good in social situations, okay? I don't meet people easily."

"At least it's good to know that there is something I can do better than you."

"There are lots of things you can do better than me. I can't even ride a horse."

"Just get on the horse and ride," Georgia said. "It's easy. You'll love it."

I drew in a breath. I hadn't yet told Georgia how I felt about horses. How despite my spending time on this horse farm, I hated them, just as I hated anything that was beyond my control, beyond what could be mastered in books and in cynical statements about the decline of the Western world. My heart ached because for the first time in my life I was out of school and I was scared. I tried to make a joke.

"You don't want me to ride, Georgie.  What if I became better at it than you? Then you'd yell at me for doing so well."

"Oh, you just don't care," Georgia said, but not really angrily. "Three days here and you haven't even bothered to try. Anyway, you are better at things we both care about."

"Like what?"

"School. You graduated magna, for Pete's sake. And you won those history prizes. That woman came and interviewed you."

I stared at my friend. "I only pretend not to care. That way I can also pretend that it doesn't matter if things go wrong."

"The secret to success?" Georgia queried.

"Yes. A secret."

*

I've been thinking about the ceiling fixture in your office. The fixture was round and full as a fatty moon, and gave off a waxy light that would reflect off our bodies to the windowpane and out onto the winter-dark sky. Even so, the light never warmed me; secrecy was more important than comfort. I think that was why you chose oatmeal-colored curtains for the window; their ordinariness kept the situation from being absurd.  For there we were, you and I making love in your office in the library, my teeth chattering from the cold, you and I, and the janitor working just outside your door, pushing his metal bucket and mop up and down the deserted stacks.

*

There are people here at the farm all the time.  Neighbors drop in to see how Georgia is managing with her parents gone, or tourists seeing that horses are for sale always stop by and ask if Georgia rents by the hour. Sometimes she does, if she feels like going for a ride. And if she likes the people. She says she can tell in a minute if they are "horsey folk" or merely rich. Either way, she invites them in for lunch, so I always have to have extra muffins and soup ready, just in case.  She says it's good business. The people take a few pictures sometimes. They get a kick out of it. I watch them sitting at the table, their soupspoons going up to their mouths in unison.         

I picture them a month from now, when they've gone back to the city, telling their friends, "We had the most delightful experience in the country. It was a horse farm. The nicest people, really. A brother and a sister. And the sister's friend or something, she didn't say much. You really have to go down there. What was the name, Alex? Wait, I wrote it down. Really, it was just a charming place. So country."

Country, I guess, is the damp, musty smell of dogs and horses that permeates the house. They've long since given up trying to get anything clean here. It is not as though the Hales are slovenly. The stables are spotless. I guess that they are so used to the dirt outside that the inside seems pale by comparison. Georgia says that her mother Ruth hates doing housework.

I do the laundry, as well as the cooking and cleaning, but there is no dryer so things must be hung out on the line. Old, holey underwear is stained with dust and sweat and blood. Blood from murdered chickens and menstrual blood.

Life and death exist in close proximity.  Georgia and Ruth have a giant breeding chart tacked up in the barn. Month after month they make their plans, which horse goes out to stud, who's currently foaling, which horses should be cross-matched to bring about high spirits, a good temperament, and strong paces.

And in the kitchen where I work there is a freezer six feet deep freshly stocked with chicken, fish, and beef. I see the silvered pike lying side by side, their dead shiny eyes, gold-rimmed, perfect circles staring up at me, frozen forever in disbelief.

*

"Peter Strang called me down at the farm," Case said, heaping a pile of scrambled eggs and toast onto his plate. "The cows are out again. Mrs. Macey saw two heifers grazing down by the General Store."

"How many?" Georgia asked.

"Only twelve or so."

"Twelve?" I said. "What are you going to do?"

"Eat my breakfast," Case said.  "I'm starving."

"But they're out there! Running loose."

Case put his fork down and looked over at Georgia. She shrugged.

"They're cows," he said. "Not martians. Cows don't do anything but eat. Grass."

"But … "

Georgia laughed, "That's why Case brands them. In the event they get mixed in with someone else's."

"You mean someone else's cows have escaped too?"

Case held out his plate to me, "Is there any more toast?"

I gave Case an embarrassed smile, unsure if he was serious, then I shook my head. I had made a whole loaf just for him. I was amazed by his appetite; it baffled me that a man could eat so much and still be thin and sinewy as a garden hose. I thought of my own body and about the five pounds I had gained since arriving two weeks ago. I wondered what Case thought when he looked at me.

Case pushed his chair away and wiped his mouth with a napkin. He dropped a large calloused hand on my shoulder.

"You have a good day, city girl," he said. "We'll make a Fresh Air Kid out of you yet."

*

I'm thinking about seducing Case. The attraction of opposites and all that. He wears cowboy shirts and polyester pants. To church, he wears a bow tie. He works hard and is a technical wizard. He reads Reader's Digest, laughs at Beetle Bailey comic strips, and can sing the entire Bach Magnificat.

He is twenty-eight years old, owns his own farm, and possesses an associate degree in dairy management. He has wheat-colored hair, crooked teeth, and even after a shower, the smell of cow clings to him.

But I think what attracts me most is that he is happy. He is probably the first truly happy man I've ever seen. His hands are always warm with it. Every night when he brings me the milk in from the milking barn I touch his fingers and let the heat of him flow through me. He works fifteen hours every day, but never once have I seen that dazed exhausted look of the ambitious, or the discontented.

Is this why I have come here? After all the wandering I've done, going through books, and museums, music classes, and art schools, like a housewife rifling through a giant laundry basket, did I hope that when I got to the bottom all the socks would finally match? Even when we were at college, Georgia had some of the joy her brother has, her tall body erect and solid as a column at the Coliseum. It is why I accepted her offer to play housekeeper while her parents were away, even when you laughed at the idea, said I'd be like a tropical fish thrown into Love Canal; I had to see if the mutation might be contagious.

They grow people very strong here.

*

"Does Case have a girlfriend?" I asked.

"No," Georgia said.  "Why?"

"He said something that other day about wanting to build a house on his own land. 'You've got think about these things,' he said. 'Else you might wind up with a family and no place to put them.'"

"Well, there's Chris. She's the new accountant down at the General Store. Just joined the Church a few months ago. But he would never marry her."

"Why?"

"She's got a baby. A little boy. I don't know if she ever was married or not. Anyway, the man left."

"Case would really hold that against her?"

"He has great compassion for her. I know he admires her. It takes a lot of courage to live in this community as a single mother."

"Then if he admires her?"

"He told me once that he believed that there was only one man for every woman. And that sooner or later that one man would find that one woman. He told me that right before I left for college. I think he was trying to give me some brotherly advice."

"He has never made love?"

"He's very romantic. Don't you think it's romantic, saving yourselves for each other? Well, don't you?"

*

I am not thinking about seducing Case.

*

"You're going to stay here, aren't you?" I asked Georgia. She was mending a wooden fence. I held the nails. I had offered to hammer, but when I tried the metal bent ineffectively into the rough thick wood. Georgia's hits were clean and straight.

"Of course," Georgia said. "My parents are getting on now. And Case only bought Speas' last year. He's got no time to work here. A few years ago, my father talked about selling the horses. He thought they were too much for my mother with me away at school. But she and I made him promise that he wouldn't. I knew I'd come back."

"Georgia, do you remember the day of our graduation? All the women, all four hundred of us dressed in white, carrying that green laurel, the leaves wrapped around our arms and necks, pressing into our sweaty summer skin? We sang 'Bread and Roses,' marching for the women who couldn't? Marching because we were finished, marching because we were starting, marching against apartheid and poverty? And illiteracy. And rape.  And anything else we could think of. The instant when my name was called to get the degree, I thought I was going to cry and then laugh. I waited for the exhilaration to come. The only thing that came out was a sort of choked hiccup. I think if someone were to cut my body open then, no blood would have come forth, only dust. I was completely dry."

"I love it here," Georgia said. "I thought you would too."

"Oh, God, I want … "

"What? What do you want?"

*

I want to tell you about Blanche.  Blanche lives in a shack on a tiny piece of land next to the farm. Actually, I think Frank Hale owns it, but it's Blanche's. It's always been Blanche's.  She's been there sixty years. She is in her nineties now, myopic and crouched, missing most of her teeth. The first time I saw her I was tending Ruth's garden, looking for some carrots to cook for dinner. She came quietly; I didn't even hear her, just saw this brown bent shadow move stealthily up the walk, a paring knife in her left hand.

I drew my breath in. I think I thought she was a witch. She is the oldest woman I have ever seen. She came over to the garden, looked at me once, nodded, and cut down a dozen pink stalks of rhubarb. Then she walked back to her shack, her gait slow and uneven.

Case brings the mail over to her every morning.  It comes in with ours. She doesn't really have an address.

Just as I have no name. Babe, gypsy, young one. Sophomore. Junior. Graduate. They were nameless too. Wife, child.

"The wife doesn't read much," you would say as you piled up library books on my senior carrel. It was the closest you ever came to an explanation.

I admired your detachment. It was the first thing that drew me to you. I thought it came from experience. I didn't know it came from being stuck.

But then the administration announced that all incoming freshmen were required to have a computer course before they graduated.

"History is dying," you said.  "It gets smaller and smaller every year."

You told your classes that history was a collective myth. That it was Virgil who created Caesar. As Homer did. And Shakespeare. Only if the myth was continually told did it become fact. You recited schedules all the time, as though by reciting a specific place and task that proved you existed.

But I too was caught up in the myth, aware of its fabrication, and of the unhappiness that stems from a soul disappointed in itself, incapable of surviving without it. You see, I thought I was different from the others. I thought I could help you. I thought it was me that you wanted, me, Karin. City girl. Fresh Air Kid. Shall I tell Georgia how I won those history prizes?

*

"You'll have to take care of the chickens today," Georgia told me. "I don't have time."

"All right," I said.  "How?"

"Well, take the red bucket outside the coop and fill it with water from the river. But don't get any polliwogs in it."

I put down my dishtowel and sighed. To get from the kitchen to the yard, I had to go through the ski room and the mudroom. The ski room was where the dogs and cats slept and it was always heavy with the stench of wet fur and animal urine. In the mudroom, branches, naked-looking and raw, soaked in slimy water, awaiting planting season.

I always took a deep breath just before I went through these two rooms and held it so I didn't have to smell again until I was outside. Then the smell of horses hit me instead.

I grabbed the red bucket. Sandy little balls of grain had dried along its rim.

There was only one way to get to the river, over old wooden planking laid over a giant mud puddle, itself the size of a pond. I must cross this bridge to fill up my bucket. It was also the bridge to the meadow where the horses grazed. I hurried over it because I knew that Georgia had gone to get the horses to take to the meadow. I walked down to the river. My sneakers went slip-slosh in the boggy area by the water, the dirty moisture absorbing into the canvas.

"Silly," Georgia called out.  "There is a rock to stand on so you don't get wet."

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

"It never occurred to me that you wouldn't know where it was. Sorry."

I started back over the bridge, more slowly this time, for the now-full bucket made me unbalanced. I looked down at it.  Four or five black spots were swimming around. Polliwogs.

I was trying to decide whether to go back and refill the bucket when a black colt came tearing over the bridge. His hulking size and speed obscured everything from view, making the landscape whirl around like a carousel.

"Georgie," I called out.  "Geor-gie!"

Suddenly the horse, seeing the bucket in my hand, stopped dead still, investigating its contents. His coat felt prickly; his weight heavy against my torso. The horse's teeth were large and yellow.  He nudged at my wrist. Then, disappointed that there was no grain, he tossed his head and continued on to the meadow.

Georgia looked out the barn window laughing, "Don't worry. But stay where you are. Here come the rest of them."

"G-E-O-R-G-I-E!!!"

I felt the scream rise out of my throat as the horses' steamy breath surrounded me; I felt I was drowning in the strong paste-like smell. As I struggled with my fear, I saw the silver of newly-shod horses flashing in the sun like the blade of the French guillotine. But even as I felt myself falling, the horses rushed by me like wind, rescuing me from the forces of gravity. I felt myself growing light and I thought that this was what flying must feel like.

Time had fallen into itself, in a single moment my personal history seemed to merge with the continuous past. The sound of the horses' hooves as they beat upon the wooden planking was a chorus of African drums echoing through the forests of the Congo. It was the sound of Conestoga wagons making the westward journey. And in the last moment of their crossing, in one terrifying heartbeat, I heard bombs falling on the villages of Viet Nam.

And then, in a span of seconds, all was quiet. The horses had reached the meadow. Docile once more, unaware that my body had turned to gooseflesh, they grazed. I could scarcely breathe.

"You okay?" Georgia called to me. "You didn't get kicked, did you?"

I shook my head, unable to talk. As if in a trance, I walked the rest of the way across the bridge. All my limbs shook; I couldn't hold the bucket anymore in my trembling hands, so I simply let it fall. And as the water poured out wetting my legs and the yellow grass on which I stood, my stunned emotions broke like an eroding dam, flooding through my mind, spewing forth and I cried. I cried.

*

Is it possible that what people most want is also what they most fear? The wild freedom of the horses, living Blanche's ninety-three years, and the knowledge that because of you Case's honest fidelity will always seem pristinely, almost hypocritically, obsolete?

I've been at the farm twenty-eight days. The cycle of a moon. The cycle of a woman.

You never did ask me what I was going to do afterwards. I'm going back to Boston. I have a position at a publishing house, working as an assistant copy editor in the textbook department.

My job is to rewrite history.