Come here till I tell you...On a winter night I heard horses on a country road beating sparks out of the stones. And I said they are running out to death, which is with some soul and their eyes are mad and teeth out.

J.P.Donleavy, The Ginger Man

The stable is immaculate, opulent, exclusive. The stalls are fragrant and deep, the ceilings high, the tack room polished and gleaming. But no whickers, no whinnying, no neighing. It’s a

cloister. The stalls are fresh and dark, the horses’ black profiles silhouetted against the afternoon light. Outside the stable the day is lush with birds and sunshine. The mountain air breathes clean and sweet. Several miles out, our guide’s horse bucks and jerks. My horse’s ears go flat at every kick. I glance over at my husband of a few weeks, and he smiles back. Reassured, the birdsong lulls me into a reverie.

The trail narrows and we proceed single-file under the shade of the high trees. A sheer rock face rises above our right side while the cliff falls deeply beneath us. I glance over the side. We ride above the city of Hondarribia in the Basque mountains of Spain. The valley framed by the firs is so light, so golden. The conical mounds of hay

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2 The Bridal Path

stand like sentinels against the deep green glades. The flaxen fields charm me, distract me.

My horse dropped as though a trap door had opened under his hooves. In one motion he pitched forward to his knees and rolled to the right, against my body and towards the cliff. As he fell, my right ankle snapped with his weight. The crack sounded like a gun shot.

We kept falling, his side pinning me down and splintering the bones below my knee. My bewilderment was flattened by the explo- sions in my leg. My lower spine would be next. I have to move right now. We were on the ground.

Push my hands against the saddle crushing my chest, push against the horse. I drag my trapped leg out from under him with both hands. Hooves flashed silver before my eyes; they drummed wind into my ears. The horse was still coming over me, he was still rolling. Dig elbows into the dirt, squiggle back into the cracks of the rocks. Squeeze down into the mud until he rolled, rolled over me, and rolled back. Until he stood up, grunting, brown, huge.

My right leg was like broken glass encased in a baggie of skin. My hands slipped around the pieces, trying to keep them still. Our guide bolted into the forest, the teenager yelling in Basque. Allan bends over me, shaking. His eyes are dark pupils.

“He’s broken my leg,” a child’s voice said.

“I’m running for help, I’m going now,” Allan said, his voice com- ing from a conch shell.

My ears are numb, the rest of me a sound tunnel for the blistering lava under the skin of my leg.

Allan grabs the bridles and pulls the huge horses towards him, both horses balk, testing the reins. Allan looked wretched, his fright trembled his shoulders. My chocolate horse looked back, eyes glit- tering, nothing personal. Their shadows dwindled along the dirt path as a cloud passed over the sun.

My breath struggles inside my chest. Panting, flaming cords lace my body. Every spasm might stab sharp edges of bone through the skin. The forest falls quiet, the breeze drops. I gulp air that tastes like fresh grass. The cushion of leaves is a sponge. The dirt smells soggy.

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The tops of the trees sway, bending down. The sun sprinkles a show- er of light that warms my cheeks. The forest sounds full of breath. My father’s pipe smoke lingers in the trees, his favorite cherry tobacco. Time walks away, my thoughts flap like bats. Cherry tobacco, pipe smoke. My father loved to whistle Gilbert and Sullivan when he was shaving. Whenever you heard “I am the very model/of a modern major general” the house swelled with his voice. He was usually fresh from the shower, Old Spice cologne wafting down the hallway.

I inhale the verdant air, snatches of The Pirates of Penzance march to the beat of my heart. When we were little my father was the phan- tom of the home movies, visible only by the curling pipe smoke that blew across the lens. He kept his tobacco in a humidor next to his special lounger, and when I was little I used to sneak little bits of it to smell and taste. The tobacco intoxicated me. Steady now. The trees are shadows, bending close, exhaling.

Sway with the grass, smell the bog-like earth freshly turned to the sun. No more thunder in my ears, the air smells quiet. Twigs rustle in the brush, little speckles of birdsong bounce like freckles off my cheeks. Somewhere down below I hear a tractor grinding in the corn.

Then there is a car engine. There are shouts, and rough hands pull me along the ground, half lift me to the backseat of the tiny car we came in. My leg bumps and screams. The car engine booms and down we wind the corners of the hills, down and down and down. Blurs of brown dirt to asphalt to stretcher. An ambulance, a ride to San Sebastian, one of the medics holds my leg together and the other props me up against his chest. Allan holds my hand.

I fly through the back window and join the ravens circling a hay- stack. I squint into the sun and see a small figure riding on top of the ambulance and that is me, the girl on the roof, waving at me through the window where I gasp against the medic’s grip.

I recognize her. This girl. She is sixteen and doesn’t have a date for the Junior prom. She hasn’t actually gone on dates at all. At her parochial school there are the jocks, the future lawyers and politi- cians, and then there was her club, the theatre club, which saved her

4 The Bridal Path

life. I laugh when I see her waving. She doesn’t know anything. She’s going to have to learn the hard way.

The x-ray room is a small, dark square. A nurse puts her hands on my knee and ankle, and moves my leg. My shattered bones encased in a skin-bag scream. The nurse clucks her tongue. The x-ray machine buzzes. She turns my leg straight for another picture. I howl and the machine buzzes and I think what a pair of wolves we make, this robot- ic machine and me. Then she turns my leg for another x-ray, another buzz. Another howl. A dark voice fluttered through my mind. “What a pitiful room this would be to die in,” it murmured, “what a dark, close, stupid space.” Then I didn’t hear anything at all.

“Are you there?” I whisper. The morphine puts my tongue back in my head. It is like flying slowly through a clear blue sky, swaying in the breeze of a sunny beach. There is nothing wrong with me.

“I’m here.” Allan murmurs. The morphine wonders at the tears on his cheeks. “They made me leave the building when you start- ed screaming,” he says. “Come here,” I say. “Bend down.” He comes close, his shirt damp with sweat. “Teach me to whistle before you go.” I say. The nurse puts a blue blanket on my chest and it hugs me.

The gurney creaks to a Spartan, whitewashed room. I watch the ceiling above, its panels missing, its rusted pipes shredding pink-and- gray insulation like cotton candy. A crucifix hangs over my head, a window blinks beyond my arms. A bathroom hovers near the door, impossible steps away. There are sounds from the hall, strange calls, cries for help, fists banging against the wall. The only private room left in the hospital is on the fourth floor. The fourth floor houses the senile, the distressed, and the mad. The switchboard outside my door buzzes whenever someone needs aid. It was buzzing now, an angry hornet’s nest.

“Your leg has grade II, class B fractures.”

My surgeon spoke in halting English, his Basque accent salty with consonants. “I hammered an intermedullary nail into your tib- ia, down your leg. You have pins that act like screws. They lock into place both under the kneecap and through the ankle.” The “nail” was a rod of titanium that supported the broken tibia, a bone notorious

Chapter 1: The Red Demon 5

for its difficulty in fusing back together. I would be setting off airport detectors for years.

Allan practiced unhooking IV needles from the drip, so he could carry me in my gaping hospital shift to the bathroom before he left for the Parador. Our Parador, the gift of a dear friend. A castle, a for- tress. One could always be safe there.

“Take me too!” I called out. But he was already gone. *** *

It didn’t have to be this way, this was not the story I wanted to write. We had met one year ago. I was thirty seven; I was a profes- sional; I had been there, done that, as far as meeting men was con- cerned. This unexpected, and wholly unprepared for, marriage just crushed me against a cliff, and where would it all lead to? We met in Los Angeles, I left for a job in Texas, we got engaged at six months, and then I gave up the Texas job and came back to marry. One year, really, most of it absent.

I had always feared that marriage was a dangerous trap with no way out but the brutalization of the courts. Of course, not from ex- perience. My own parents didn’t divorce. But I had found ample ev- idence of it in my own world of show business. Nothing stable about our profession, nothing secure in our plans, temporary relationships of convenience and proximity. Why had I gone and married this nearly perfect stranger?

The next morning I don’t know where I am. The door knob turns and an ancient lady wanders in and gestures with her newspaper. There is a silence while she waves the paper over my head in a magi- cal circle. “No, no paper today,” I said. She nodded. She left. The sun is a pink shadow behind the drawn blinds, and there is definitely a sausage on bed that I recognize as my wrapped leg.

I startle at the buzzing of a thousand bees coming from the hall- way. The switchboard. It beeps outside my room, and I remember everything; the clamor of the bells sounds like a declaration of war.

Allan walks in and takes my hand. “Bien dormi?”

6 The Bridal Path

I smile because he is here. “Yes, good sleep.” He rubs my hands, my arms.

Before I could think of anything to say, my broken leg felt pecu- liar; it was somehow awake and moving under the skin.

An electrical shock jolts me. First it lights a match against my skin, then, as though my skin were fuel, fire snakes from my ankle to my knee, until my whole leg bursts into flame. “Oh!” I said, “Oh! Oh!” Allan was sitting next to me, stroking my arm. “It burns,” I said. “My leg is on fire!”

Confused, Allan got up and knocked his chair over. Another match was set to my right ankle, and a second wave of flame lapped up my leg. “It’s not you!” I panted. “It’s my leg!” Allan turned pale and left the room. I heard his Spanish faltering down the hall as the burning pain radiated up my spine and twisted me to one side of the bed. I was furious at this new assault. I had sent my new husband out of the room again, scrabbling on my side like a June bug. The pain is white, blinding, a complete newcomer to the throbbing in my bones. Time curls up and nibbles its tail.

My red demon is an acute onset of Reflex Sympathetic Dystro- phy (RSD) or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) as it is now called. Like a parasite, CRPS exists on or alongside trauma wounds. It’s a sympathetic nervous system response to limb injuries that oc- cur under emotional duress, most often multiple fractures with vio- lent inciting incidents. The illness thrives on pain, injury and danger.

Along with the instant blaze, there are other, more baffling symptoms. My swollen leg looks lacquered by clear nail polish. This is a condition known as ‘marbling’, or red-and-blue discoloration ac- companied by a stretched ‘shiny’ skin. My leg looked burned under glass. Over the next days, we failed to explain in Spanish what was happening. The nurses and the doctor didn’t understand.

“Tell them it’s like fire!” I said, and Allan said, “Como fuego!” “Tell them it cuts my leg like a knife of burning gasoline!” I panted. This was beyond his Spanish.

I cried. I acted out the seesawing motion on my leg. Allan tried

to translate, and again the nurses assured that broken bones would

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heal. The doctor was mystified. I felt trapped in one of those horror movies where no one listens to you, no one believes you.

I become expertly aware of the difference in pain between my fractured leg and the heated visits from the strange inquisitor who uses a poker, a knife, and a sword at random. The CRPS guerilla attacks leave me stunned. Sometimes several different grenades hit my leg simultaneously. I shouted in surprise when this happened, whether I was holding a spoonful of yogurt at breakfast, or stretched over the bedpan, or reading under a dim bulb in the wee hours. During the day, I’d count numbers until the flare passed. Sometimes number twelve; sometimes thirty five, until the dragon eating my leg was sated, leaving me sprawled like a rag doll.

Not knowing what it was, or whether it was a permanent con- dition, left us speechless. Allan remained stoic and cheerful around me. But I fantasized how he worried. He had married someone who would be crippled, who would be immobilized for the rest of her life. Or worse, a woman tormented by invisible demons that no one else could see. Maybe I was crazy; maybe my mind was becoming unhinged. The possibility filled me with terror. No one in the San Se- bastian hospital knew what Complex Regional Pain Syndrome was. I didn’t blame them. I wanted to kill them.

Visiting hours in the hospital ended at nine PM. By ten o’clock, my injured leg would flicker into that strange, early warmth that pre- saged violence. I lay pinned to my bed, wondering which circle of hell Dante had in mind for this condition. Thinking back over past misdeeds, lapses in spirit and judgment and kindness, I consigned myself to my own circle of penitence, and hoped I could bargain my way out. What could I trade? My voice, like the little mermaid? Singing fed me full. I didn’t really want to trade that, but daily add- ed more items to the trade list, including singing, if only this pain would stop. I traded everything but my dogs.

I tried to stay awake, because sleep was not oblivion. When I slept the dreams were vivid; my dogs running off cliffs and screaming into the rocks below, bone sticky with red blood, my youngest sister clinging to a raft, her eyes wide and drowned. These night dreams

8 The Bridal Path

possessed me with the illusion of reality. They used my childhood as a weapon. We grew up near Asbury Park, New Jersey, in the shadow of Bruce Springsteen. My sisters and I loved the arcade, but not the face above the rollercoaster. It was a round neon face with peeling paint that turned his grin into a leer. This night Dad was in the roll- ercoaster with me, turning to me with a face green and pickled, his teeth blackened to a point. He leered. I woke up half out of the bed, my trapped leg kept me from falling. But hot flashes burned ground along my back. I vowed to stay awake.

Dawn brings in the rooster. The woman who sells newspapers door to door in the hospital. Since my neighbors are beyond reading headlines, I don’t know what luck she has, but she’s intrepid. Every morning as the pink sun slanted light through my shades, this lady cracked the door and greeted me like a significant customer. I never bought a paper, but she never held it against me. We were like two Beckett characters politely acting the same scene for eternity. “We can’t go on.” “We’ll go on.” “Buy a paper?” ”Not today.” “Buy a paper?”

Breakfast alarms me. A round bowl of tepid tomato sauce arrives with four hard-boiled eggs sitting in it, the red liquid semi-congealed around the whites as though the poor hen had suffered some terrible fate. We were only fifteen miles from France; if my horse had decided to mutiny there I would be gorging on profiteroles and wedges of Brie and Port Salut cheese, French baguettes and salty ham.

Basque nuns run the place, and Sister Dolores takes me on as a special case. She arrives at midday, built like a bull on short legs with thick ankles, her black habit standing off her body like a bad tablecloth. She bangs in shoulders first, paces around my room, and mimes eloquently along with her Basque.

“Your tears do not make me happy!”

“Today, now!” and raising her finger, she pointed to her sorrowful face and her slumped, crumpled body, the very picture of my sad self. “Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow” she said, grinning, and

hopped around the room.

“Soon, soon, soon!” she yelled, and shuffled around the tiny

room like the hunchback from Notre Dame, her long arms aloft,

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fists raised, her face a triumph. She showed me jagged scars around both ankles; some kind of tractor accident when she was a teenager that almost took off both feet. I wondered if that’s when her convent training began. Maybe the nuns she met in hospital had so impressed her she wanted to grow up and be like them, or maybe a farmer’s daughter, nearly crippled, had no marriage prospects and traded the convent for the bread line. Her heavy face was kind; her skin looked thick enough to go twelve rounds, and she regarded me with a con- tinual curiosity. My lack of stoicism baffled her, the explosions in my leg invisible to her kind stare; she must have thought I really be- longed on the fourth floor, mentally confused about phantom pain.

I didn’t feel mentally confused. But my mind was drifting in and out of time. As the morphine dripped, I kept traveling back, my dreams took me back, to where everything began.

*** *

Four years ago I was asleep in my apartment in West Los Ange- les. My dog Sage circles the room, a low moan comes from him that I have never heard. Now I feel a pulse coming from somewhere un- derneath the dresser. A creature from the deep moves in the ground under my bed and then I hear it. A freight train twists under the earth and derails underneath my bedroom. The room shifts, surges, unfurls, and finally blows with the rushing loud thunder of collapse. My bed rocks, the television set crashes off the wall, plants upend, and the kitchen cabinets spill their dishes, soaking broken china and glass in soy sauce, olive oil and spice bottles. When the awful bang- ing stopped, there wasn’t a sound from the street, and the slow shake of the aftershocks continued in silence, like waves lapping under a shipwreck.

The phone rings. It’s my mother’s New Jersey twang.

“Honey, do you know you’re having an earthquake?”

“Yes, mom, yes I do.”

“We’re watching it on the news right now...” her voice popped

and snapped. The phone went dead. It was four o’clock in the morn-

10 The Bridal Path

ing. 6.8 earthquake in Los Angeles. I was living at the time near the fault line south of Northridge.

I had just moved from the valley to the west side of Los Ange- les, near the 405 freeway. Now the earthquake took its weathered hand and scrambled my living room into an agility course for the blind. The dogs stumbled into darkness. Sage – ever the bright one - herded us towards the front door, his blond coat glowing from some invisible source. “Good boy,” I whispered. He settled us under the doorframe. We didn’t have bottled water, flashlight, radio. The door groaned like an old tree. Along with lethal gas leaks, there was dan- ger above us. Glass-paned doors ran the length of the living room, the kind of place that ‘pan caked’ flat when the ground shattered the glass and tore the building down. The doorframe shielded us from the hallway upstairs, from the antique grandfather’s clock toppling down on our heads. In a tornado you hide in the recess of a bathtub, but in a Pacific earthquake what is above you or below you can kill you like a roly-poly on the sidewalk.

The streets hold unknown dangers: snapped wires will electro- cute, unseen sinkholes in the road will eat you whole. Freeways had collapsed, gas fires burned all over the city, but in our vibrating room I buried one fist in Sage’s thick fur, and wrapped Cyrano in my other arm. These were big canines; we would wait for the dawn together.

Sage was my first mate on my arrival in Los Angeles. We had res- cued each other from our respective loneliness, his in the West Val- ley pound, mine as a hatchling from the Yale School of Drama. Sage looked like the dog Disney always had driving cars; his amber eyes and shaggy coat won him Chuck Wagon dog print ads and well paid double work as Einstein in the Back to the Future movies. Now as we huddled together against the aftershocks, his body protected me and Cyrano. His fur smelled like fresh cotton socks from the dryer and Bergamot tea. Cyrano was the runt of the litter my best friends’ had; a small golden retriever with an enormous nose that kept unbalanc- ing his stubby legs.

I had steady work in Los Angeles as an actress in television and stage, and I loved it. But the random luck of the business gave you

Chapter 1: The Red Demon 11

flush years and then spare ones with no permanent signs of progress. Flexibility is also crucial; you may audition on Friday and be flying to a location shoot Monday morning. Nothing can hold you back by holding you down. It’s difficult to maintain close relationships or have dependents. The acting profession isn’t kind to having a family. It can be lonely and frustrating. The motto for camera is “Hurry up and wait.” Hours and hours spent in your ‘honeywagon,’ your home while you’re on the set. Usually it’s a trailer with several units, each consisting of a table, chair and bunk and bathroom. The higher you go, the bigger the trailer. The hours were long, and spare time went to auditions. It was impossible to date someone you didn’t work with, because remember: proximity and convenience. That left you with a carousel of directors and actors on your love-life resume.

The mayhem of the earthquake held a mirror to my messy life. The Los Angeles Times reported that an off-duty officer leapt into his car to help during the earthquake and flew right off the edge of a freeway split in two. The image obsessed me. I felt the world as I had known it was dissolving under my feet. Random and destructive aftershocks kept coming for days, for weeks. Several actor friends left town, feeling the quake was their cue to migrate. The earthquake woke us up.

The fear I felt was primitive: ground shaking, RUN, HIDE. Your senses are bombarded by sound and rumbling and objects get hurled and the utter darkness. You realize that the cradle of gravity that se- cures your days can be disrupted by a giant in the sky, beneath the earth, under the ocean. All is change, impermanence rules. I needed some roots, so in the next storm I would have more to hold on to. My family, a close knit bunch of sisters with parents raised in the fif- ties, was scattered. Six months after the city’s earthquake, there was an aftershock that threw me to the floor with all the weight of my childhood on top of me.

We had just spoken that afternoon about my career. Dad wanted me to call a producer directly and I was trying to explain that I needed to go through my agent, and dad was stubborn. I asked him how he was doing and he said “I’m just so tired.” That night he thanked my

12 The Bridal Path

mother for making lamb chops and headed up to his room. When she brought him his orange juice the next morning, he was gone.

My father was wreathed in pipe smoke. He and mom were mar- ried thirty-nine years. The four daughters never expected him to leave us. He was so hushed, so cunning to depart in his sleep without a chance to say good-bye, because we would have tried to talk him out of it. In his last dream, did he have the chance to stay, or did he accept a graceful exit? I was furious at him, at the temerity to assume we’d be all right without him, the only man in the tribe.

All four daughters arrived home to the Jersey beach by four o’clock of the following morning. We appeared one by one like un- steady birds landing in the dark. Nancy was rocking in my father’s chair, Mary was in tears, and Kate and I were ragged from the down- pour at the airport. Mary is the oldest. Nancy is one year younger than I, and Kate is the youngest. We had had our feuds, but now, restless and heartbroken, we sat on the porch as the humid mist tried to drown us before dawn. The front porch of our family home is a deep one, and by the end of summer the bushes and the spiders and the honeysuckle overwhelm. As my mom slept, we drank chilled beer and propelled our arms through the inviolate cobwebs to our rooms and succumbed to the bitter dark.

That July sun came up hot and early. Kate and I were sleeping in the twin beds my parents had pushed together in their conjugal room. Mom had long ago abandoned her stake there and claimed my sister’s room across the hall. I slept in my father’s bed, and tossed and turned until the family next door started heading for the beach with squealing children and a lot of coolers, each one slammed by a car with endless doors. We followed the honeysuckle and ivy roads to the graveyard.

And with my father’s death, it all broke apart. After my father died, my mother wanted to sell the family house and flee to Florida where her cousins lived. She craved the sunshine and company, the bridge games and riding her bike. None of us could save the house, so the homestead went on sale. We ended up giving away everything. Unfortunately, the ad mom had placed in the paper suggested this was “an estate sale” rather than a ‘garage sale’ so at dawn we had a

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line of cackling geese at the front door. They were under the wrong impression. They expected a mansion, a feast.

We were still in our pajamas having coffee when we heard the ris- ing throng and realized they were talking about us, about our house. They wanted numbers to enter so the early ducks could be rewarded with the fattest worms we had.

I took the ground floor, Kate ran to the basement, Nancy flew upstairs and Mary headed out to the backyard, where the guts of the garage spilled down the driveway. I caught people pocketing un- tagged items: little porcelain eggs and my mother’s bell collection, small plates and wedding heirlooms. Even the tagged furniture sold at ragged prices because my mother couldn’t bear to barter our his- tory with strangers. Her cherry wood hutch she gave to newlyweds. I used to stick my head in its drawers to inhale the deep rich red scent of wood and linen napkins, brittle china and ornate souvenirs from the trips mom and dad had managed to take. Bus tours mostly, while we were in college.

Down the stairs came our beds, our little desks, lamps and books. I sold poetry to an old man who offered me the change from his pockets. Kate’s bargain basement hustled through the floorboards: our card games and dad’s World War II books by Winston Churchill, his blue piggy bank with a red hat that tipped you for coins. Mary was donating macramé sets and pictures we had painted, while the driveway melted under her feet like tar.

The piano in the den was adopted by friends. That was a tough one. All through high school Mom played and I sang until I was hoarse and happy. We shared songs like a fine wine between us, drinking up the drama from the classic musicals we loved.

As the house emptied from the sale my mother wandered around the emptiness. The sun was going down and the light was fading. We held hands and her fingers fluttered a little bird on my palm, flutter- ing and damp. As darkness fell we tallied up the meager grosses of the day and we all drank a lot of beer.

I walked around the quiet upstairs and watched the sunset from my parents’ bedroom. The summer before my Gramp died I used to

14 The Bridal Path

see him down by the lake through this window. Gramp lived with us after Nana passed away. He wove quilts and rugs from kits my moth- er bought him. He smoked and fished and watched baseball and my school plays. That last August he was down at the lake a lot, standing still with his baseball cap pulled low. There were always flocks of Canadian geese summering at the lake. The locals included coots, mallards and swans; the swans’ wings beat over our house with a roar like a battalion, all bugles and drums. Screaming swans chased children until they dropped their Wonder bread and fled.

In August we sucked ice cubes in the backyard. We grew up wa- terlogged, sprinting across the beach like sandpipers, as slippery and spotted as snakes. In winter the sand on the beach froze like a lake, and broke under your feet in large seismic plates. You could pretend you were walking on the moon.

In winter all the ‘bennies’ would leave us alone, and we’d prowl the long avenues and Victorian porches and Red Rover fields scat- tered along the beach. We pedaled everywhere, around the small lakes and bungalows, up and down the boardwalk that meandered between sea and street.

There was no place like this home, and never would be. All our dreams began here; the glimmer of our futures beckoned here; my father had his last dream on earth here. Maybe that was one rea- son why we daughters weren’t married. Creating homes of our own would mean letting go of this one, and we couldn’t do that. My dogs were my roving pack, my sisters and mother were my family; it was difficult to imagine it otherwise.

When the sun dipped below the willow trees I went downstairs for another beer. Nancy did impressions of the customers. Kate re- counted her wheeling and dealing. Mary and mom were still trying to track the vanished and unaccounted for among our things. I felt like I had been whacked in the head with a two by four. And then it was all over. We flew away, migrating back to the lives we were inventing.

Without brothers, boys were mysteries. My three sisters would occasionally bring home a man-of-the-moment. We’d booby trap a

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plate of celery and olives. Each olive displaced was like a game of Jengo, and he was always the one to tumble the dish. But my sisters moved on from their boyfriends. The boys fell like soldiers, and over the years returned like veterans to the battlefield, bringing my mom flowers and candy, showing off their firstborn, their third.

My mom was the favorite of the boys. She giggled, she laughed and bells rang from an old country church. She adopted the boys we knew and they came to her on the deep summer porch for sessions long after we were gone.

My mother used to take me into New York to see a Broadway show on my birthday. We always ordered strawberries and vanilla ice cream crepes, and made sure we passed the famous Algonquin Hotel, ducking into the Blue Bar to pay our respects. When I was a teenager I won some writing contest, and my mom and I lunched around our own round table of authors at the Algonquin. The place had such character, such a frayed former gentleman down-on-his- luck aura. Founded in 1902, the hotel quickly became a haven for writers , actors and musicians. Alexander Woolcott and Dorothy Parker presided over the ‘Round Table.’ The New Yorker magazine was birthed there.

The Algonquin Hotel. The ghost of Simone de Beauvoir would hover over me while I ate profiteroles. My dogs would be allowed their own table and linen napkins and beef. Afterwards we’d listen all night to the cabaret singers until the rose dawn slanted through the shades.

There is such yearning for me associated with the hotel. It’s a nameless yearning that drills holes in your mind that you keep try- ing to fill up. Yearning makes you thirsty all the time, yearning wants to grab the brass ring off the carousel again and again. The Algon- quin made me want to succeed, to be one of the elite regulars, to feel at home in its deep couches. That yearning had no domesticity in it.

My sisters and I preferred to stay wild, skiing slick slopes, nav- igating murky western lakes, clumsy with maps and trusting to in- stinct to bring us through, which it usually did. Kate and I once gam- bled on a road trip in my weathered mustang convertible during the

16 The Bridal Path

hottest part of the summer in the southwest. My car broke down outside the north rim of the Grand Canyon, miles from nowhere on a red dirt road. A rough bearded angel driving an enormous battered truck appeared over the hill and pushed us about a dozen miles to a gas station. He wore a complicated belt buckle that barely contained his belly, and said his name was Hammer.

When we pulled off the road, concrete basins lined the gas pumps with German Shepard puppies curled up in each one. “FLOWER POTS FOR SALE DOGS INCLUDED.” Our arrival surprised the proprietor, sleepy in patched overalls, halfway through a morning six-pack of Budweiser. Kate and I bought him another one, and he handed us the phone; saved again to navigate the back country the backward way.

If you ever find yourself in a foxhole, you need my sister Kate. Like the indefatigable pioneers of the west, Kate never met an ob- stacle she couldn’t melt into a puddle. During a blizzard one family Christmas in Colorado, we all got snowed in on departure day. A blizzard couldn’t stop Kate. We found ourselves on the snowbound road, pushing the truck, one behind the wheel navigating, the rest of us encrusted with the freezing blowback from the tires as we pushed and pushed. The planes weren’t flying, but we made it to the airport. Mission accomplished. Never say never to Kate. She’ll only grin and bear you away.

My oldest sister Mary also had a sturdy mainframe. She hiked in Iceland, in all weathers: she roamed everywhere with her cairn terrier Emma. Once we camped in Yosemite together. Mary and I hiked the backcountry and learned the rules as we went. Hard hiking and nights spent reading; Mary was on a Louis l’Amour book, and I was reading Henry James. We both kept journals we wrote in every night, and Mary had a sketchbook.

One of the rules was to bear-bag all the supplies by attaching the packs to a rope that I had to throw over the topmost limb, and then drag the bags high enough to be out of reach of even the tallest bear. Despite our precaution, we discovered that bears can climb trees. I only thought they did that in cartoons.

Chapter 1: The Red Demon 17

We had camped out under the stars by a river that special night. Three large brown bears waddled into camp in the hour before dawn, and woke us when the huge bough of the tree snapped and broke and fell, exploding the packs on impact. The ground shook as the bear dropped with the bough he had broken. We shivered in our sleeping bags as they tore apart the food, eating everything we had packed for fifteen miles out from the base camps in the Tuolumne Meadows. They left some Pepto Bismol tablets, which some wandering deer ate. It was a long hike back.

Mary got sick. She vomited outside the tent again and again. That night we woke to the sound of a moan and dragging feet. Four feet pacing in mad circles around the tent, lumbering and moaning. We shriveled again inside our sleeping bags, worrying about the supplies cached in the trees and our own helpless selves in the flimsy tent. We remained wide awake until daylight, when a ranger came and told us there was a sick bear in the woods they were looking for. Had we heard anything?

That was when we headed down the valley and out of Yosemite and into a comfortable motel. We were begrimed and taut with mus- cle and sweat. That night, hot showers and wine.

“You know what?” Mary said. “That bear might not have liked the way the tent smelled. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tear at the can- vas.” Maybe the bear didn’t claw our tent to death because the smell of Mary’s sickness surrounded it. Maybe we had inoculated the tent with a big red sign saying “Keep Out.”

We used to rent a houseboat on Lake Powell in Arizona, back when there was a high water mark at the landings. There you find sea shells from long ago, when there was an inland ocean. Dinosaur bones stick out of the hills and there are ghosts of early intrepid pi- oneers. Lake Powell itself was formed when the Glen Canyon Dam was created back in the Sixties, flooding the plains and drowning ancient artifacts and all evidence of the tribes who came before. It has always been controversial, but it is spectacular. It’s like a Grand Canyon you can swim around. You can almost breathe under water, your legs shimmering into fish tail.

18 The Bridal Path

My mother had had heart surgery that made us nervous about being in bad cell phone zones. But mother wouldn’t hear of not at- tending the annual houseboat trip. Nancy was the Captain (“Just keep Cappy Happy”), Mary read maps, I cooked, and both Kate and I had to anchor the houseboat’s two anchors behind the rocks. There is a lot of loose gravel, sand and shale among the sturdy red rocks, so you have to find a really solid crevasse to sink the anchor into.

But one day we were so thirsty for Happy Hour we did a bad job of it, and as we sipped our gin the anchors tumbled, the rocks rolled away and we drifted towards the red cliffs. Kate and I chased them down, scraping and sliding. All I could think about was the damage to the boat, and what it would cost. As the boat swayed wildly back- and-forth, Mom never dropped her gin and tonic. She was the cen- trifugal force that kept us all spinning together.

By the time the earthquake rolled my life around, I had dropped even the pretense of dating. My single friends composed a strong posse of career women: agents, lawyers, therapists, actors. They filled rooms with the contagion of internet dates: the rocket scientist who lived on Edwards Air Force Base in a cardboard house webbed by black widow spiders, where ladies got their own killing can. There was the dashing dot.com executive who met you for lunch, but ate his food before you arrived. There were the married men hiding be- hind chat room superhero disguises and 800 numbers. There was the eccentric who kept a stack of pictures of you on the kitchen counter. When he wanted to break up he just changed the pictures on the kitchen counter. When you saw a picture and you weren’t in it, you were history. You didn’t even get to keep your own pictures.

No, I was done with dating.

I relied on the horses. I learned to ride at seven years old, wearing a leather vest and posting on an English saddle in a ring around a maestro with a horsewhip. My favorite mustang was a brown gelding named Cannonball. The stable smelled like leather, buttery polish, clean sawdust, and muddy dark manure dirt; and just one draught of it was like inhaling a solid piece of earth that filled your airways, expanded your arteries, and fed you like chocolate.

Chapter 1: The Red Demon 19

You mount the left side of the horse and sit without flopping on his back. Keep your heels down and your toes up. Use your thighs to direct the horse, never your boot heel. Use your hands and your voice; if you seesaw the reins so that the bit works in his mouth, if you are loud and rude and heavy and mean, if you work his flanks with your heel, that makes you a bully. It’s simple. Respect the soft flanks, stroke the arched neck, attend the tufted ears, interpret the Otherness shifting under you.

The thrill of speed is a duet between my body and twelve hun- dred pounds of unpredictable mass. Riding is communion between running and flying. I rode through the holy Badlands of South Da- kota, the lush ranches on Hawaii, the moonscape depths of Bryce Canyon.

Immobilized in the hospital, I still had trouble believing the whole event was happening. I was sleeping with nuns on my honeymoon.

“Do you believe in luck?” I asked Allan.

“Why? We don’t have any?” he laughed.

“Do you think I should have jumped?” I whispered.

“Off the cliff?” He looked at me, eyes wide. Nagging scenari-

os still tugged my mind, visions of jumping free, manhandling the horse before he dropped.

“Maybe I could have clung on to the side of the mountain.” “Honey you did the best you could.”

“Did I?”

Napoleon used to look at the roster of recommended soldiers

for his army and write in the margins, “Is he lucky, though?” Skill is one thing, but luck, now there’s a gift. But luck is a tricky thing. A Kokopelli character keeps changing sides. It keeps shape-shifting on you, a butterfly by day, then a coyote grinning like a bandit, howling at the full moon. ‘Brains will only get you so far’, it’s been said, ‘and luck always runs out.’

The Vo2yage Out

On horseback it is as though you are reborn, you come

back to life.

George Sand

Iam on the horse, gigantic, his eyes as big as saucers. We are gal- loping, and the horse blows fire from his nostrils. We are bathed in blood-red light. The horse rears and snorts smoke. Then I am

off the horse and running madly ahead of him, overwhelmed by the heat and the fire. Thundering hooves overtake me in a silver flash and I scream.

Allan is shaking my shoulder gently. Late afternoon sun hints the time through the shades of my cell, and I shiver in my wet sheets. Allan is buoyant. He’s been to the Frank Gehry museum at Bilbao, and he wants to share. We are in Spain; I am in hospital. The dream still burns, the smoke still rises.

Our intimacy strains, we struggle to accept the ‘new normal.’ The new normal means Allan doesn’t sleep with me; he consults with the surgeon and finds d