Lillian on Life Read Online Free PDF

getting ready to take another sip. “Just don’t come crying to me if he’s cooled off a bit today after meeting us last night.”
    When we’re young, we’re unfit to judge whether our parents know what they’re talking about. Sometimes we want them to be right, sometimes we want them to be dead wrong, but we can’t tell which they are actually being. If we could figure out which instinct guided them, the terrain would be much easier to navigate. I couldn’t tell if Mother was speaking from the instinct to protect me, or the instinct to protect herself. It was gruesome.
    In any case, Dave hadn’t cooled off at all. We went out to visit the Budweiser Clydesdales. Driving over, we had the windows down because the day was so warm and muggy. Dave had to shout to ask me how I thought dinner with my parents had gone. He was smiling and his normally neat and gleaming hair was flapping crazily every which way. I couldn’t bring Mother’s cutting comments into that sweet car. I squeezed his hand and smiled back. I didn’t mind lying, but I didn’t want to have to do it at high volume. He took my smile as an answer and went back to concentrating on the road.
    We joined a tour. Walking from the ticket office toward the beautiful old stables with my hand in Dave’s, lagging a bit behind the group, I experienced a wonderful shiver of anticipation, like the ones you get on the nights before Christmas when you step out of your house or out of a warmcar and the full, sparkling force of the season hits you. I could marry a handsome northern lawyer, I was thinking. An enthusiastic and handsome northern lawyer. The shiver went up my trunk and into the roots of my hair. I squeezed Dave’s hand again, really hard, to stop my scalp from popping off the top of my head. He squeezed back, and leaned over to steal a kiss, and we walked from the sun into the thick darkness of the stable.
    We reassembled as a group to listen to the guide. As my eyes adjusted to the low light and my nose started to relax after the initial shock of straw, piss, leather and ripe maleness, the guide opened the half door of a stable to our right, motioned us to move back a bit and led a horse out. Dave pulled me around the side of the group to get closer. Clydesdales were originally bred in Scotland. That’s all I can remember from the guide’s spiel. That’s all I remembered even on the day we went, because once the horse stood before us I felt like a child. We only came to his shoulder. The guide, who was quite short, invited volunteers to come forward and stand by the animal to let us all feel the shift in perspective. Dave stepped forward first, looking so pleased, and my sense of childishness intensified. All I wanted was to get back out into the sun and feel tall again. The guide made it possible for us all to touch the patient Clydesdale ifwe wished, one by one, and of course I got in line. I’m happy around horses, but when I stood at his head and reached up to place the palm of my hand on his muzzle, the softness between his enormous nostrils suddenly felt deceptive, like it might be quicksand.
    We went to see the hitch, and Dave asked questions about how much the reins weighed when held together at one time, and it was a lot. “Wow,” he said, “you’d have to really prepare yourself for that.”
    â€œImagine lifting weights just to be able to control a team of horses,” I said.
    â€œPreparation is everything,” he said.
    We drove back to Columbia and went to lunch at the soda fountain near my house. On the way there I looked at Dave a lot. I studied his hands. They were grown-up hands. Were they elite hands? I thought so. Were they
elitist
hands? It had never crossed my mind. Sitting at the counter with our liverwurst sandwiches and root beer floats, like I had so often in high school, I didn’t feel any better. Dave looked happy as a clam, but I felt