Nebraska. What I remember most about growing up there was the wildness of the sunsets--at twilight, blue and magenta and gold and purple spilled out far across the open sky as if that flat unbroken landscape of sandy-colored soil never climbed into rich loamy mountains and stopped short at the eerie phosphorescence of the sea.
***
Whenever she would make an apple pie, he would come into the kitchen, sit down at the table, and help her peel the apples. My grandfather always called my mother “darling girl” and would tell her that his son had picked the prettiest woman in Lincoln for his bride.
She would laugh and say, “What are you buttering me up for? Can’t you see I’ve already decided to make a pie?”
***
My grandfather is ninety-four years old, I am twenty nine, and when my Aunt Gerda sent him East last year to live with my father--her youngest son having moved back home with a wife and baby after losing their small farm--we hadn’t seen each other in over seventeen years.
Over the telephone, after giving me directions to the nursing home, my father, who is busy with his other family--the family he left my mother and me for when I was fifteen--said he just couldn’t take care of my grandfather and why should his sister expect him to manage any better than she could. After all, my father tried to explain, he had two teen-age sons and his wife Ellen was pregnant again.
“It’s a question of space,” he said.
When I visit my grandfather at Riverview, I bring him butter cookies, French vanilla ice-cream, or chocolate-covered cherries. He’s always loved sweets. I tell him I’m Jenny, his son Eric’s daughter. My grandfather nods his head and smiles.
He is thin, has white hair, summer-sky blue eyes, and an intelligent face. He tells me stories of Sweden. He only lived there until he was nineteen, but Sweden was his home just the same.
When dusk comes, I pat his hand and tell him I have to go home and make dinner for my husband Aidan. My grandfather smiles and says, “I’m glad you came.”
When my father stops in on Sunday afternoon, my grandfather will tell him a pretty brown-haired girl came and brought him a surprise.
***
My grandfather’s furrows were always neatly, evenly aligned. They stretched out from our house in a wide arc towards the east like the tail of some gigantic comet and in the moonlight they had a silver cast to them. Perhaps, that’s why my father grew up longing to go east.
***
“His name is Orion,” my grandfather said as he opened the stall door.
I squinted into the semi-darkness of the enclosed space. I couldn’t see the new-born foal anywhere. All I could see was his mother--a black, threatening shape which barred our way.
My grandfather clucked his tongue and put his hand on the mare’s silky neck. “Come on, Jenny,” he reassured me, “she won’t hurt you.”
I followed him into the stall.
In the corner, near the back wall, the colt lay sleeping.
“Go ahead and touch him,” my grandfather said. “After all, you’re going to have to really get to know each other if you plan on winning the state championships together in a couple years.”
I leaned forward and, with my fingertips, gently stroked the warm, sleeping animal. He didn’t even stir.
My grandfather knelt down beside me, put his arm around me, and said, “Happy Name Day.”
***
“We’re moving to New York,” my mother told me one late November afternoon when I’d come in from helping my grandfather clean out the horses’ stalls. She looked like she’d been crying.
My father, who had been a pilot during the Korean War, had landed a job with a major airline. He’d become tired of crop-dusting.
That same night, he explained to me that there would be no room for any type of four-legged creature, let alone a horse, in an apartment.
I had to leave Orion and the wide-open sky behind.
***
When my mother and I moved to the house in Congers--a house with a small yard bordered by huge overshadowing pines--my father would come up from Westchester on Saturday afternoons to take me to dinner--Chinese, Italian, Indian--and then to the movies--comedy, drama, horror--until my step-brother Michael was born. After that, the phone calls filled with guilty explanations--the baby was sick, his in-laws were coming to visit, Ellen needed help around the house--replaced those outings. But, after a while, even the calls stopped.
So, instead, I began to go roller-skating, bicycling, or bowling with lanky seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old boys who, in the back seats of their car when darkness fell, pressed their lips to my throat, fumbled with my shirt buttons, and rubbed their hands up and down between my thighs.
***
My grandfather bought me a pair of soft, black jodhpurs and a cap. During school vacations, I would put them on as soon as I got up in the morning and wouldn’t take them off until I got ready for bed.
At night, after I went to sleep, my mother would come into my room, pick my riding clothes up off the floor, and bring them downstairs to be washed. In the morning, I would find my pants and a clean shirt neatly folded on top of my dresser.
***
My grandfather didn’t come to my wedding. My father said that according to my aunt Gerda he didn’t even make the eight mile trip into Lincoln to the small Lutheran church on Sunday mornings anymore.
“Gerty can’t even get him to go to Christmas services. He just doesn’t want to leave the farm,” my father explained.
“But I want him to come,” I replied.
“You can’t always have things your way. Don’t you know that by now?”
My father signaled the waitress over to our table and asked for the check.
***
Everyone knows that nice girls don’t. But, I couldn’t stop. I would slide my jeans and pink cotton panties, which my mother still bought for me, down for them and use my hand to guide them to the place.
My first-year college roommates called me “slut” behind my back, but by the time we were juniors they were asking me what men liked best.
***
The day my father left us he knocked on my bedroom door and asked if he could speak to me.
“I’m going away,” he said.
“I nodded my head in reply, as if I understood. I was afraid to ask him when he thought he would be coming back.
Sometimes, late at night, I could hear my mother crying. I tried not to listen.
***
Two weeks after we met, to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday, Aidan asked me to go tenting with him in the Adirondacks for the entire month of August. We spent our days hiking, swimming, fishing, and canoeing. At night, we would build a huge fire and sit around trading stories about our lives. When it got late and chilly, we crawled into our sleeping bags, which we had zipped together, and slept late into the morning, with Aidan’s seventy pound Labrador retriever Benny stretched out across our legs and feet.
Aidan showed me how to tie a fly, how to hang our food far out on a tree limb so the raccoons couldn’t get it, how to bake a cherry cobbler over an open flame and how to really make love--a love that for the first time was gentle and quiet and filled with aching.
My mother would come out of the house and lean against the fence and watch me race Orion.
“You’re as fast as the wind,” she would say.
Sometimes, she would be standing there when my father came home from work. He would come up to her and put his arm around her shoulder. I remember how young they looked.
