The Brooklyn Rail

Coincidence brings Mare and Nightmare, two words that seem so naturally linked but, in fact, are etymologically unrelated, to this issue’s Fiction section. The narrator of Emily Haworth-Booth’s Mare reflects on nonmotherhood, care, and the desire to possess that which we care for. The waking horrors of climate and societal collapse are the only nightmares in this novel, and serve as strong, rational reasons not to have a child. At night, the narrator dreams of horses, and these dreams brim with the joy of attentiveness. She begins caring for a horse in her waking life as well:

The first time, she was an answer to a question I had not yet formulated. The question was yet to be written, but the answer was this: she with whom I could become one, who responded to every squeeze of my calves before I had even thought to kick, who did not trudge across the ground but rippled and slipped through the air, a thought too quick for the mind to seize.

The “she” is ambiguous enough to carry our thoughts to the French “mère,” but only as a swirl in the breeze of the present moment that Haworth-Booth so vividly communicates. This novel feels dreamt more than deliberately written, and I mean that in the best possible way. Think of it as a settling version of Samanta Schweblin’s unsettling Fever Dream.

*

I knew a mother who said, You want to know what it’s like? Write a list of all the things you love doing and then cross them out, one by one.

I knew a mother who laid her sketchbook on the handles of her buggy and drew as she walked the baby around the neighbourhood. She pushed the buggy with her hips, walking slowly and drawing fast, before the baby woke up.

I knew a mother who knew all the other mothers. As she walked through the park on the way to collect her son from school, this mother stopped every few strides to be greeted by other mothers, some with buggies, some pregnant. Other mothers stuck to this mother like burrs. Meanwhile I hung by her side, dragged along like a limp kite.

In a dream a mother, who was also the President of the United States, wore jewel-toned business suits. She told me she had been careful to have children with as many different fathers as possible. I’m diluting the dynasty, she said. There is nothing more dangerous than a pure line.

I saw a mother I didn’t know walking down the street pretending to be a robot, her eyes half closed and her arms bent at the elbows, moving up and down in a stiff rhythm. Beside her a man and a small boy laughed, making loud beeping sounds when she veered too close to a wall, a dustbin. Mummy’s a ROBOT! the boy shouted with delight.

I knew a mother who was a mirror-mother, an echo-mother who had a way of turning all questions away from herself. How are you, I asked this mother, and How are you? the answer came, so that I was never able to get under its surface to the woman beneath the mother.

I knew a mother who said, For the first two years you’re addicted to the smell of their head. Then the smell goes away, and you’re left thinking, What have I done?

*

I was walking in the park with my friend who was a mother. I was imagining riding the horse on the same paths we were walking. I was imagining being higher up. The mother finished telling me about her baby and asked me how my projects were going. I said, clearing my throat, I’m writing about a horse, about the horse. About her.

I mumbled as I said it, and at the same time the baby began to cry, so that my friend had to say, Sorry, what? which made it seem as though she was interrogating the idea behind what I had said, when she had simply not heard me in the first place. As I repeated myself I could feel my face reddening.

I didn’t know how to describe who the horse and I were to each other, why she had come to matter so much to me, or why it was that I found myself embarrassed by the strength of my feelings.

*

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe humans could fall in love with things that weren’t human. I had read stories, after all, about the women who fell in love with a bear, with a tree, with the colour blue. With a lettuce so delicious they would give up their firstborn for it.

In a sense I had given up my firstborn for her, too, because the life I had chosen had led me away from my might-have-been baby and towards her.

Still, I did not think I could distil what had happened into a fable. Not yet.

The horse stories I had grown up reading were about gentle girls who stole wild horses away from wicked men. In secret, the girls tamed the horses with their pureness of heart. And because the characters lived in a moral universe, eventually the horses belonged to the girls.

I didn’t know what kind of story this was yet, but it wasn’t that story. If there was a story here, a shape to what had happened and was still happening, I would have to discover it as I went. I would tell it to myself first, and then, if it made sense, I would tell it to someone else.

When I began it, I saw that the story didn’t begin with her at all, but further back. I decided to begin it, for now, with the dog.

*

Not having a child hadn’t been so much of a problem when the dog had been alive. A lot of the time I had almost not noticed it.

When we first got the dog our friends had said, You can practise on the dog, and if it goes ok, you can have a baby.

I had never been sure how to measure ok – when the dog died of old age, tucking its lifespan neatly inside my own, did that mean it had gone ok?

The dog had never been intended as a practice baby. If anything he had been meant as the baby itself. It had been possible, with the dog, to make the joke, I can’t believe he came out of me!

Not everyone laughed, in fact barely anyone did, but still some-how it was plausible that I could have given birth to the dog, I supposed because of his size. Stood up on his hind legs, he could have passed as a lanky eleven-year-old. And once upon a time, before we knew him, but within the realm of the imaginable, he would have been a tiny puppy smaller than a human newborn. The same joke would not have worked if made about a horse.

At any rate, we could sign Christmas and birthday cards with the dog’s name underneath our own, as though we really were a family. Most people didn’t seem to mind that, or if they did, they didn’t say anything.

When I was eight, at a family party, or perhaps it was a funeral, a teenage cousin grabbed my hand and flipped it over. I read palms, she said, do you want me to do yours, already tracing the curving creases with her index finger. She pulled me towards a standard lamp and for several minutes moved her finger up and across my palm, saying Hmm, and eventually:

You will be a lollipop lady and have five children.

For years I had waited for this to come true, to take an interest in high-vis clothing, in shepherding children across roads, to feel the stirring of the first of my five babies in my belly.

Instead, the dog had arrived, lived and died and now the house felt the way it did when we came back from holiday, cold and not quite ours.