Shearling

She never did get out of that town. It is a very common story and this one is hers:

1. Her father insisted she and her sister wear skirts until the 7th grade. No one understood why he did this. Everyone understood why he did this. They had no brothers.
2. Her stepmother was famous at their school for packing unnecessarily elaborate Even the teachers wanted to know what was inside.
3. They lived on a farm that grew nothing. They had four horses and they called the one with the white mane Chancho because he would eat anything—piles of sawdust, split bags of chickenfeed, bits of gravel from the He was her favorite.
4. More than anything, she loved to read.
5. She and her sister became accomplished barrel racers by the ages of 12 and 13. They kept their gold buckles in wood cases with silver latches. The cases were locked in the bottom right drawer of her father’s desk. The gold still shone even in the dark.
6. She met the man she thought she would marry when she was 17. This was the age of maidenhood. This was the age when she thundered through stadiums on top of her horse and people watched her and she rose into their At 17 there was so little of herself inside her own body that she could hold all their fantasies in her mouth. It felt like swallowing cobwebs and was only unpleasant if she really let herself think about it.
7. He arrived in He was 23 and had rich-people teeth in a poor boy’s mouth. Every story in the world had been preparing her to crawl into the ribbed muscle of his body and find herself inside.
8. He was warm under his uniform.
9. Her father cried all night in his favorite recliner covered with dog hair when he found out she wasn’t a virgin.
10. There was no proposal of marriage.
11. Her sister went away to college and found a tall, thin man who did the dishes and took out the trash and wanted to marry her. He was sweet and insistent and filled with self-hatred. The wedding was tasteful thanks to his side of the family, and the marriage was long.
12. Everything with the man in uniform ended This was predictable and embarrassing exactly for its predictability.
13. When she came back into her own body, it felt like she’d pulled her skin on. It would never have quite the same fit again.
14. Her father was a man who had always been invested in the idea of his own sadness. He wore it around himself in the shape of a shearling blanket. Like everything else in the house, it was covered in dog hair. After his second wife left, the reason for his sadness presented itself to him, and also the solution.
15. He started sewing his daughter into his despair.
16. He had a needle built exactly for this purpose. He’d inherited it from his mother, who had scratched it out of her own bone. She never told him the story behind it but he knew it was terrible because the needle was sharp and white and perfect.
17. When he was finished, the blanket was twice the length of his body. Sometimes he pulled it over himself while he watched TV. He usually fell asleep to Westerns, the bucket of his hat falling open into his lap.
18. Every day when he left for work, he spread the blanket across the back of the couch. The couch faced a window. The window faced Chancho, grazing in the pasture.