a horse is a horse, and other lies

by shaindel beers

    “She’s a broodmare,” he muttered, waving his hand.

It pained her that Ted’s first reaction at these times was to belittle his wife.  It only made the guilt weigh heavier on her.  Sometimes she wanted to come out and tell him where her gut told her her loyalties should lie, but they had to work together for at least four more months, and she didn’t want their affair to turn ugly.

   

    “You,” he kissed Sonia’s stomach—the female four-pack made up of ribcage and breasts—she couldn’t get defined abs no matter what she did—“are a racehorse.  Of the same species but obviously suited for different purposes.”

   

    “Everyone knows that all of the best broodmares used to be racehorses.”  She instantly regretted her retort, letting the laugh die in the back of her throat.  She didn’t want him to think that she meant it as a hint—that she wanted him to leave his wife and marry her or, worse, impregnate her year after year until she became like Brenda.  She’d learned the best way to keep a married man coming back was to keep your distance; it was like working with feral cats.  They feared your desperation to be loved more than anything else.  She thought of the Mr. Ed theme song and wondered if that would have been a better comeback or just another lie.

   

    They’d just been through a tense moment, so she hoped he hadn’t read too much into it.  They had been in bed—not yet entangled but getting there, and he’d let the answering machine pick up and put a finger to his lips as Brenda rushed to avoid getting cut off by the beep—“We made it, Hon’.  We’re at the campsite now!  We love you—wish you were here!” and then a chorus of “We love you, Dad!”  Four of them.  She wondered if there was a special circle of hell reserved for women who had affairs with men with four children.  And what kind of woman was this Brenda, loading up four kids and taking them on a series of week-long trips all during the summer? 

   

    Usually women with children made her feel superior.  They had given up, dropped out of the world that mattered.  Their worlds were small, made up of soccer games and making sure the diaper bag was packed.  Sonia knew that they made her feel inferior in some ways, too.  Every time she saw a pregnant woman, she wondered if her body could handle that whole process.  What about her mind?  Being in the same grocery store with a crying child could make her snap.  She usually left—even if her cart was full at the time—at the first sound of wailing.  Weighing in on the other side of this insecurity was the sense of power she got from fucking Brenda’s husband.  She liked to think of Brenda and the children (she tried to remember their names but for some reason always forgot one of them) as Maria with the Von Trapp children singing their way through the Alps and twirling about madly.  Recently, she had started picturing them while she was under Ted, her legs wrapped around his waist so tightly that he was close to her the entire time and couldn’t compare the thwack-thwack of their stomachs hitting and realize it didn’t sound that different from Brenda’s stomach, four children later.  She would definitely have to keep working on her abs. 

   

    Picturing his wife and children during sex made her wonder what was wrong with her.  Was it a guilt complex?  Had she become Lady Macbeth, and Brenda and the kids were the stain she couldn’t wash off?  She told herself it was because of all of the family pictures around the bedroom.  Brenda and the children stared at her from the nightstand, the dresser.  It was like the opening of Scooby-Doo with the hundreds of bat eyes glowing in the cave.

   

    The last time they had been in bed when Brenda called, it was after sex, and they were both falling asleep.  Emily, the youngest, had wanted to tell him goodnight even though he’d called them for the night when he and Sonia had first arrived at his house. The warmth in his voice as he verbally tucked in six year old Emily made Sonia feel oddly safe pressed against him, but as she listened to him tell Emily a quick bedtime story, she held her breath and pulled the sheet over her head. She wished she could sink into her guilt by lying flat against the mattress.  He made the “hug noise” as Emily requested—an exaggerated squeezing grunt into the phone’s mouthpiece, and something pulsed within her. She was on top of him as soon as he put the phone back in its cradle. 

  

     “If you think men with children are so sexy, maybe you should have a few.”  He was inside of her again already.

    “Oh, you’re my fourth,” she whispered, grinding herself further down on top of him.  It was the smartest reply she could come up with without something in her voice catching.  The thought of losing him before the project was over seemed like a defeat; sometimes she felt like Ted was a bonus she had gotten with the Bradley account, something she was entitled to for a job well done.  They had been seeing each other for six weeks, and had at least four months to go on the project. 

    She knew she only had him like this for the summer while Brenda was here for a week, gone for a week, taking the children cycling, sight-seeing, educating them at museums, a tiny dynamo of a woman armed with a borrowed RV and a road atlas.  In her colder moments, Sonia wanted to drop her a thank-you card for leaving a perfectly good husband alone for the summer, like maybe it was part of Brenda’s plan.  Maybe she wanted Ted to do this, got off at night thinking about it, the RV creaking quietly while the children slept.  Before Brenda had left, Sonia had had Ted at her apartment, in her office, on the conference table—cliché of clichés in the office affair handbook—but something about having sex with him in the bed he shared with his wife seemed like a triumph.  She was a lioness taking down prey in another pride’s territory.

    Being with Ted seemed more than risky; it was dangerous.  He was so fertile, even with all the precautions, she could end up with a surprise.  Like when she called the male escort on a whim and was shocked when he was a bodybuilder who could have snapped her like she was made of twigs. 

   

    Ever since she had started seeing Ted, she had recurring daydreams about having a baby.  What would she do?  Cram it into daycare immediately?  No, she knew she could get a full year of paid time-off, thanks to those girls in HR and the fuss they raised.  What would she do making $105,000 a year and not working?  Drink a bottle of red wine a night and wake up at eleven each day?  Masturbate each morning and imagine a good-looking window washer, magically outside the window watching her, evidence of his arousal too, too evident?

   

    Then she remembered a baby was part of the fantasy and it became too distasteful.  Ted was already asleep, and she realized the part of it that seemed simple was taking the same man to bed every night.  She rolled over to switch off the lamp and studied the faces in the picture on the nightstand.  All blond except for Hayden, who was ten, the oldest boy.  His hair was that magnificent bright strawberry blond, and she thought how it would probably fade as he got older and he would be as nondescript as any sandy blond haired man.  They all wore primary color T-shirts and khaki shorts and tennis shoes in the picture.  They looked like members of some sort of club.  Their faces held the bright zeal of Mormons on a mission trip.  It seemed the oddest form of egocentrism, Brenda reproducing her tiny blond self over and over and over.  She wondered what they were dreaming right now and clicked off the light.

   

    She’d had “a scare” once.  That was how she always thought of it.  Pregnancy was always “a scare,” like thinking you might have gotten HIV or that you might have left your underwear in a married man’s couch cushions.  She wondered how Brenda coped with it.  Maybe it wasn’t a scare to everyone.  Maybe Brenda was a broodmare and she didn’t even have to think about it.  It was just what she did—like showering, eating, and shitting.  She had been living with Dan for a year and was a few days late for her period.  She’d gone to the local drugstore, bought the package that had two pregnancy tests for the price of one, and done both of them, back-to-back.  Both came out negative.  But she still had an eerie fear in the back of her mind.  She drove to the clinic that she’d passed every day on the way to work and demanded an appointment.  A patient woman took her history and said they would try to schedule her as soon as possible.  When she brought up the two at-home pregnancy tests, the woman had said, “Ma’am, you’re definitely not pregnant.”

   

    She had gone ballistic.  She wanted a real test—and soon.  Not something that you could purchase at Walgreens.  “We use basically the same test here.  If it said you’re not pregnant, you’re not pregnant.”  The woman had begun wringing her hands.  Sonia knew she had a way of making people nervous when she was upset.

    “I’m only thirty.  I can’t take chances like this!”  She’d nearly screamed it, then looked around and realized that the faces staring at her from the waiting area were mostly early teenage ones.  If they, indeed, were pregnant, they could have children their age by the time they were her age.  Completely flummoxed, she grabbed her health history from the woman, tore it up, and left. 

    She told Dan a few weeks later, and he pulled her closer.  He was always good about spooning her.  “You could have told me.  I would have taken care of you.”

    “Don’t be silly.  I always have enough money on hand for an abortion.”

    It was too dark to see that his eyes probably widened, his lips pressed unpleasantly together, but she could feel his hold on her release a little, and when he thought she was asleep he turned over.  She didn’t remember what the fight was over, but he moved out three weeks later.  Up until now, she was glad she had dodged both bullets.

    Now there was a curiosity after being with Ted.  He was so good-looking, so funny.  Could that kind of commitment be worth it?  Even a tattoo, once the ultimate symbol of permanence, could be lasered off.  You couldn’t laser children off a relationship in any acceptable way, could you?

    She liked spending the night with him.  They had to drive to the office separately, so he was a gentleman and let her sleep for an extra hour while he got ready in the morning.  She loved the way he smelled when he got out of the shower and briefly crawled back into bed with her, before he sat on the edge of the bed, putting on boxers and socks.  He used the Calvin Klein Eternity shower gel which Brenda had bought him, and Sonia wondered if the irony was lost on him, or if he found it as funny as she did, though she felt bad about how funny she found some of the situation.  She was sure that Brenda was a perfectly pleasant person and that it was somehow doubly cruel to let him call her a “broodmare” when he was in bed with her.  But Brenda was the sort of person who existed in a different world, and they would never run into each other, so the next moment, it wouldn’t matter to her in the least bit.

   

    Today she couldn’t stay in bed any longer.  They had a meeting at eleven, and she was geared up for it already, so to spend her excess energy, she went around the bedroom, studying the family pictures.  Then she ventured to Brenda’s closet, slowly pulling the door open as if Brenda might be in there, ready to jump out and catch her.  The clothes hung in precise rows, and on the top shelf was a box, neatly marked in black marker Maternity.  She listened to the pelting drops of Ted’s shower and quietly pulled it down.  There was a navy blue sailor dress with a white collar folded on the top and she slipped it over her head, turned sideways in the full-length mirrored closet door.  The front of the dress fell to below her knees, and the back was hiked up, so she grabbed a pillow, stuffed it under the front of the dress, and turned sideways, studying her new figure.  She would leave it on and let Ted find her in it when he climbed back into bed.  His reaction might help her decide what to do next.   

Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry Miscellany, Minnesota Review, and The New Verse News. She is currently a professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and also serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary (www.contrarymagazine.com), and as a Poetry Reviewer for Bookslut (www.bookslut.com). Recent work can be found online at www.thievesjargon.com, www.projectedletters.com, and www.ignaviapress.com.