Companion to an Untold Story

Figurines (1)

91 Figurines (1). I am not a collector. When I was seven or eight years old, Aunt Virgie began to give me horse figurines for Christmas and birthdays, knowing that I loved real horses. Other aunts and uncles followed suit, and soon the shelves in my bedroom held a herd of carved wood ponies and plastic stallions. But I wanted horses in the flesh. I liked my horses outside in pastures , in well-kept stables that smelled thick with hay, horses scratching their behinds on the doors of stalls.42 If I couldn’t look at the sheen of a living flank or muzzle, I’d have nothing —certainly not the matte plastic of these substitutes. I did not want to bring the noble animals home, to shrink them down so they would fit through the door, to freeze them in one stationary pose, rearing up and pawing an air they could not feel. As soon as propriety allowed, I gave the figurines to my niece, who, lacking an engagement with the living creature, cared for them and 42 “I first saw him on my thirteenth birthday. My parents drove me through the snow to the stable. A brass plate on his stall read alert indian in large letters. When Miss Reba opened his stall, snow was falling outside the window behind him, and the straw was fresh and golden and piled thickly. Standing in the straw was sixteen hands of blackness. When the door slid open, every inch of him was startled. His muscles tensed from his head all along his back to the flicking tail. His neck was arched and tight, his eyes widened and white, his head high and turned toward me. It was finely shaped, intelligent, watchful. His muzzle was a soft, smooth black. He exceeded my thought of what a horse could be” (Marcia Aldrich, “Ingenuity,” in Girl Rearing [New York: Norton, 1998], 99). 92 displayed them proudly. Sometimes on a visit, entering her room I felt a cold breeze, a shivering along my spine, at the sight of a horse mounted on a shelf. I have never wanted to collect, am compelled to minimize my attachments, to essentialize. I tell myself this is part of my philosophy of living: to compact all things into myself. As a rule I don’t keep letters, cards, drafts, backup copies, paper trails, as most writers I know do. One friend saved every word I had written her since we were in college, arranging the corpus in color-coded folders. She thought this would please me, attest to her belief that we would be famous. I informed her that I had not kept her letters and wished she’d destroy mine. She would not, and I stopped writing her. During one period of my life I kept letters in an old trunk. Then one summer when it had filled I burned them in the driveway. This impulse to destroy was a response to pain, of course, for some of the letters came from a man whose affections I no longer held. To burn his love letters was the only act left to me: if I couldn’t have him, I didn’t want his haunting words. With some emotions, there is no substitute for Good riddance. Perhaps this was Joel’s feeling in his final stage. Until the very end of his life he kept everything. His instincts and training made it impossible for him to throw away so much as a cheap lapel button with a silly slogan. He wore shirts until they were threadbare and buttonless and then wore them more. But at the end, what thing could he keep, what might he collect , that would keep him alive? It is impossible to collect health or happiness, isn’t it? Objects that spoke of a life worth living would have been mere signs of it, like tiny horses rearing on a windowsill. ...