The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater Page B

rock-strewn stream, each girl hugging, the one in front hugging the horse hard, her ear pressed to a floss-soft mane, mink black. Slick stones. Sun slant.
    There.

3: Flat Rock Farm
    Here, the summer of 1974. The summer after the series of blizzards that buried the East Coast under so much snow. When the melt finally arrived, we found the pavement buckled and, come summer, cosmos bloomed in those cracks. In Maine, where Flat Rock Farm was, the fields were saturated all through July.
    Flat Rock Farm. The entire camp consisted of twelve girls in a single cabin below the main farmhouse where Alice lived with her husband, Hank, and their daughter, Rose, the riding instructor and stable manager.
    We went there in the Cadillac Seville. I recall a long, rutted road, tree-lined and shadowy, an arrow nailed to a post—
left here—
and then, quite suddenly,
space.
Verdant pastures as far as the eye could see. Mounded hills and horses high on them, the air so clear I could see across the acreage the blond plume of a palomino’s tail, a Welsh star, a pair of stark white socks on lean legs.
    We parked in a clearing and each of us emerged from the car’s interior. My older sister, fifteen, her hair in a high ponytail, had come along for the ride. I saw her peer around, squinty eyed. Her tennis sneakers seemed a shining white against this verdant backdrop otherwise known as
where we stood.
A space of hills and horses and grass all headed to hay.
    And everywhere, running about this space, swerving here and there, dashing around my sister and parents and me as though we were mere obstacles in an agility course—my sister and mother flinching when the contact came too close—were horse girls gone giddy from the thought of eight weeks immersed in saddles and straw, girls with scabbed knees and sloppy, unlaced sneakers laughing, calling, pulling from their parents’ well-kept cars stuffed duffle bags and knapsacks. The girls stomped across the soil in their muddy shoes, jodhpurs, and fancy show jackets slung over their arms. I heard new words:
Friesian
;
dressage
;
snaffle.
These words felt good in my mouth when I whispered them.
    My mother, however, did not look good. My father seemed lost, just peering about, staying still in his spot. All around us were flies feasting on clods of fresh manure. Alice, wife of Hank and mother of Rose, was serving punch from a bowl on the lawn. My first view of Rose, I recall, was unremarkable. She was leaning languidly against a fence post, her hemp-colored hair in a long braid over one shoulder. Rose looked young and lovely, the way you’d want your teacher to be. Meanwhile Alice ladled four drinks into Dixie cups for the clot of family we were, standing so tightly together we must have seemed sealed.
    “I take it you’re Lauren,” Alice said, and before I could answer she’d pressed a nametag to my chest.
    I felt her hand against me. I saw her face, roughed up from wind and weather, somehow the skin still soft.
    My mother set her the Dixie cup on the table. My sister peered inside hers. “There’s a fly in here,” my sister said. I looked. Yes, there were. Two flies, alive and struggling. Alice laughed.
    “They won’t harm you” Alice said. She looked at my sister. She looked at me. “Nothing here will harm you,” Alice repeated.
    Turns out, she was half right.

    We had lessons twice a day, three hours in the early morning, two hours in the late afternoon, when the coolings came. The fact that I often recall less about those lessons than the events surrounding them speaks to the strangeness of the situation I would soon discover I was in. Our sheets were dewy each evening when we climbed into bed. The tarnished bell in the paint-peeled cupola tongued out the time when Hank tugged the old rope. The old rope, the old desk in the old office in the old barn with its closet beneath the hayloft, the door as dark as the wall, so it was almost invisible. Opening that closet door to get at its