Champion Horse

by Jane Smiley

  Saturday night was the party. I wore a green cotton skirt and a white shirt – very simple, as Mom said, but she gave me an old necklace she had, which was a silver heart and a silver violet hanging on a chain. I had some new pumps for school, black patent leather. They had one-and-a-half-inch heels. When I came downstairs to be driven to the party, Dad wondered where my Mary Janes were, and before I could even answer, Mom said, ‘She outgrew those.’ Dad looked surprised. Since I am now at least an inch taller than Mom, I think the reason for his surprise must be that he is so tall he can’t tell the difference between us from way up there.

  The Goldman twins had invited the whole eighth-grade class. We were about to be freshmen at the high school, so this was our last party with just us. I got there the same time as Larry Schnuck, who was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and boots. The other boys had on regular button-downs, except for Billy Russell and Sergio Garcia, who were wearing cowboy shirts that my dad would have liked. The girls all looked less ‘simple’ than I did – Linda A. had a tight skirt, black, which made me realise that green is a really boring colour for a party. Alexis and Barbie had gone into their mother’s and aunt’s closets and come up with dresses from the 1940s. Alexis’s was dark blue, with buttons down the front and short sleeves. The sleeves, the collar, and the pockets were trimmed with white, and she had found a pair of short white gloves. Barbie was wearing a shiny grey dress with a wide belt and a huge skirt, and under that was about ten acres of petticoat. She had on a small white hat pinned over her bun. They looked both fun and beautiful, and I missed them already. Barbie kissed me on the cheek and said she loved my necklace.

  Stella and Gloria were very up to date. Gloria was wearing a nice sleeveless dress in beige and grey. The beige top came straight across and then angled down towards the waist, and then the grey skirt flared out. She looked right out of Seventeen. Stella had on checked tights, white culottes, and a short square jacket. She looked really good, and I saw the others watching her.

  The first thing I did, though, was go into the kitchen and find the cat, Staccato. He had been our kitten, and we had given him to Barbie and Alexis. He was half grown now, tall and thin. When he saw me, he came over and rubbed against my legs, then he squatted down with his front and back paws neatly together and his tail wrapped around them. He closed his eyes and started purring, waiting for me to pet him, which I did. I said, ‘To think you could have ended up a mangy barn cat, running away from every human instead of being spoiled rotten.’ After a moment, he slumped to the side and stretched out, half opening his eyes, as if to say, ‘Mmmm. Spoiled rotten is good.’

  In the family room, Barbie and Alexis were dividing us into teams, one to be led by Barbie, of course, and one to be led by Alexis. We were going on a scavenger hunt. They had typed out a list for each team of the things we were supposed to find. We had an hour and a half – sunset was around eight. We could go anywhere in the neighbourhood, including knocking on doors and asking for things, but the whole team had to be back by eight, or we would forfeit the game.

  Kyle Gonzalez said, ‘What’s the prize?’

  Barbie said, ‘Status.’

  Kyle looked disappointed.

  I was on Barbie’s team. There were twenty-five items on the list. One was a single Cheerio. Another was a baby’s nappy. The weirdest one, I thought, was a recording by Frank Sinatra. The list read as follows:

  A postcard from somewhere east of California

  Last week’s edition of Time magazine

  A roll of LifeSavers

  A sprig of wild rosemary

  A single Cheerio

  A red rose

  A left-hand glove

  A baby’s nappy

  A book from Reader’s Digest Condensed Books

  A can of tuna

  An acorn

  A partly filled-in crossword puzzle

  A hair slide

  A safety pin

  A green crayon

  A toy car

  A photograph of someone nobody knows

  A pat of butter

  Last Sunday’s newspaper

  A lug nut

  A Coke bottle

  A rubber band

  A chopstick

  A recording by Frank Sinatra

  A hat

  I wondered if Barbie and Alexis knew what a lug nut was.

  Barbie said, ‘All the neighbours know us, and are never surprised by anything we do.’ In the last fifteen minutes, we could run back to the Goldmans’ house and look for what we hadn’t been able to find (but there was no guarantee that any of these things was there) or we could keep combing the neighbourhood – we had to vote which one to do. Kyle and Stella were on our team, also Billy, Maria, and Lucia. Mrs Goldman shouted, ‘One, two, three, go!’ and we ran out of the house, following either Barbie or Alexis. Alexis turned right and Barbie turned left. Almost as soon as we got into the street, Kyle bent down and plucked something. It was the sprig of rosemary. Barbie put it into her paper bag. Maria said, ‘Can we produce something ourselves, or do we have to find it?’

  Barbie looked at her a moment, then said, ‘We didn’t talk about that, so either way.’

  Maria reached into her pocket and brought out a safety pin. Barbie smiled and dropped it into the bag. She said, ‘Only one minute gone.’

  It became my job to go to the nearest front door and ask for a Cheerio. The lady was nice – she waved to Barbie and smiled – but no Cheerios, only Rice Krispies. As we were crossing to the next house, Kyle picked up an acorn; I knew from my seventh-grade mission project that having Kyle on your team was always an advantage. The high school kid at the next house had a Cheerio. Kyle then asked him for a Kleenex, which he also had, and Kyle wrapped the Cheerio in the Kleenex and put it in his pocket.

  And so we went along, asking for things and finding things. Billy and Martin Orlovsky seemed to think that trash cans were the key, and sure enough, they did find some things, including the red rose – wilted, but recognisable – and the Time magazine, last Sunday’s newspaper, the Coke bottle, and, strangely enough, the hat – a torn straw hat, but nobody said things had to be new. Barbie would not let them look for the nappy in the trash – she herself asked for that at the Barkins’ house, since they had a new baby. She promised to bring it back in the morning, and Mr Barkin said, ‘Please, not too early.’ He did look tired.

  It was Kyle who found the lug nut. We were walking along, and only Kyle was looking down. As we passed one car, he said, ‘I see one.’ It was lying on the ground, between the car’s tyre and the kerb. He bent down and picked it up.

  Billy said, ‘Now that wheel’s going to fall off.’

  Kyle said, ‘We didn’t remove the lug nut. It was lying there. Anyway – ’ he looked at the tyre – ‘it has few more.’

  Lucia said, ‘I think we should—’

  ‘Leave a note,’ said Barbie. She tore a piece off the paper bag and wrote, ‘Your lug nut is at #246, up the street.’ She stuck it under the windscreen wiper, and Kyle dropped the lug nut into the bag.

  By 7.40, we had found everything except the Frank Sinatra recording, the toy car, and the chopstick. Barbie was not allowed by the rules to say whether those things were at her house, but it was getting cold, so I voted to go back there and take our chances – after all, we had the lug nut. I was in the majority, and we were pretty far from the house, so once we had voted, Barbie said, ‘Run!’ and we ran. It was fun. We got warm, and we were laughing by the time we got there. Alexis and her group had decided to stay out. It wasn’t quite dark, but almost. The house was bright – every room was lit up. While we were gone, Mrs Goldman and her sister, Mrs Marx, had put all kinds of food on the dining-room table, and it made me hungry just to see it.

  Barbie had to sit down and stay silent while we looked for our last three things. She couldn’t even roll her head around to tell us where to go, or shout ‘Warm!’ or ‘Cold!’ Kyle went straight into the kitchen and started looking through all the drawers for a chopsti
ck, but Stella found it in the pantry, in a picnic basket. The Frank Sinatra recording was not by the stereo in the living room, but upstairs, in Barbie and Alexis’s room, right next to the Rolling Stones. It was the toy car that stumped us, and when the other kids ran in at two minutes to eight, we still hadn’t found one.

  It was completely dark when they got there, and as they came in, we could hear a couple of coyotes out in the valley howling and yipping. Everyone’s hair was all wild and our clothes were messed up, but we were laughing like crazy. Barbie and Alexis poured out our finds on the coffee table, and Kyle set the Kleenex with the Cheerio in it on top of our things.

  The other team did have a toy car and they also had a red rose, a fake – but nothing on the list said it had to be real. They did not have a lug nut. Other than those things, both teams had found everything on the list – Alexis, too, had stopped at the Barkins’ house, and Mrs Barkin had given her a nappy. It looked like there was going to be a tie, until it came to the pat of butter. Ours was wrapped in waxed paper; theirs had melted into the old newspaper. You could see a big oily circle, but no pat. Mrs Goldman agreed that we had won. Our reward was that we got to eat first, and we were hungry. There were hamburgers and hot dogs, potato chips and drop doughnuts. The closest they came to something strange was Apple Brown Betty, which was crunchy breadcrumbs over cooked apples, like a pie but sweeter.

  By the time I was finished eating, all the other girls had gone into the bathroom to comb their hair, put on more lipstick, and straighten their outfits. Stella had completely redone her French twist and I thought she looked really good. I couldn’t figure out why Gloria kept looking at me and opening her eyes really wide and then closing them again, but then I looked more carefully at Stella and saw that she was wearing false eyelashes. I didn’t know how I’d missed them – they went halfway up to her eyebrows. But she looked good anyway. Gloria didn’t need to go into the bathroom. She could redo her lipstick and fix her hair by feel. She practised it because it was ‘an essential skill’, according to her. One wall of her room was a big bulletin board, and on it she tacked a Polaroid picture of herself that she took every morning before she went to school. Her mother just laughed and said it was an ‘art installation’.

  We danced. I didn’t dance every time, or even most of the time, but the music just kept going, and pretty soon everyone who wanted to dance was dancing, girls with girls, girls with boys, boys with boys. Barbie and Alexis got me up out of a chair once and made me twirl around and around, both directions, until I was crying with laughter. Then we jumped up and down until we fell onto the couch. Everyone who did not want to dance sat around looking at the ones who did and yawning. It was an active party. There wasn’t a single moment where you wondered, ‘What next?’ except in a bigger way – once the Goldmans were gone, what was the next thing we were going to do for fun? I had no idea. When Mom came to pick me up at a quarter to eleven, Alexis hugged me at the door, and Barbie walked me to the car. She put something in my hand. It was a box of sugar cubes – brown ones – for Blue, the horse she liked to ride. She gave me two kisses on the cheek and said, ‘One of those is for him, okay?’

  She stood and waved as we drove away.

  Mom knew better than to ask me how I felt.

  I spent Monday preparing for the clinic and trying not to think, Well, they must be heading to the airport now, well, they must be on the plane now. I cleaned and oiled my tack, ironed my shirt, and put some spot remover on a little stain on my canary breeches. I polished my boots. I found an old sweater of Mom’s, a green crewneck from who knew when. The sleeves were too short, but I thought I could push them up if I had to put it on. My raincoat was not very good for riding, but it wasn’t supposed to rain.

  We gave Blue a bath and combed his mane. We put some oil in his tail to help us comb it out, and washed his white foot with extra soap, then wrapped the two front legs. He was going to stay in that night so he would still be clean in the morning. Unlike the others, he didn’t mind, because he had his hay all to himself. By the end of the day, I felt almost normal – and rather proud of Blue.

  *

  A clinic, it turns out, is a lot like school. After nine years of school, including kindergarten, I won’t say that I felt right at home, but I did feel as though I’d been there before. There were fourteen of us on our horses in the big arena at exactly 9.00 a.m. We were to ride together for the first session, then split up into three groups for the real jumping. Obviously, Blue and Onyx would not be jumping in the same group.

  I saw Sophia and another girl from the stables named Alice, and a few whose names I didn’t know but whom I had watched at shows. There were eight I had never seen before. Sophia, I knew, was fourteen already, and I would be fourteen in a few weeks. Everyone else looked like they were fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen. We were on all kinds of horses. There was a very flashy bald-faced bay with four white socks, and another bay, a mare, who didn’t have a white hair on her but was so graceful that she looked flashy, too. Her name, I heard them say, was Parisienne. That part was like school, too – some horses were beautiful, some were smart, some were show-offy, and some kept to themselves, and one, a chestnut, looked mad about everything, and reminded me of Rally – Grumpy George, whom we’d sold to a rancher and never heard about again (which is what happens most of the time). Blue was the only grey.

  Peter Finneran had those bowlegs you see on lifelong horsemen like Dad and Danny, except that his bowlegs were inside very elegant black boots. He was short – I guessed that if I were to stand up next to him, we would see eye to eye. His breeches were not canary, either – they were a sort of beigey sand colour that made canary look ‘loud’, as Mom would say. His shirt was blue and he had on a tweed wool cap with a fastened-down peak. The most unusual thing about him was the way he walked. He didn’t roll a bit from side to side, like Dad and Danny; he seemed to spring from here to there, like he just couldn’t contain himself. And for such a small guy, he had a very loud voice.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘California girls! Hair everywhere, shirts not tucked in, leathers out of their keepers, dirty horses.’ He walked over to one of the chestnuts and flicked something off the horse’s shoulder. ‘I can tell you girls have never served in the US Army.’ Two of the girls looked at each other sort of nervously, as though they were wondering if they’d missed an assignment – the assignment of serving in the US Army. Then he said, ‘You know, young ladies, just because you haven’t been told to do something, that doesn’t mean you just sit there slouching in your saddles, letting your horses do whatever they please.’ He looked straight at that same chestnut, who was tossing his head like he had a fly on his nose. ‘Stand up now! Form a line along here, right in front of me. It should be in order of size, but my guess is that’s beyond you.’

  We lined up the way you do after a hack class in a show. I put Blue between Parisienne and one of the chestnuts. Onyx was at the far end. Sophia did not have her hair everywhere, because she wore plaits, and, thanks to Rodney, no leathers were out of their keepers. Peter Finneran walked down the line, stopping at each horse and asking for the rider’s name, the horse’s name, and where they were from. Then he would say the names and ask a question or two. He started with Sophia, but I couldn’t hear him very well until he got to Parisienne.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Nancy Howard.’

  ‘Nancy.’ He made her name sound like a bit of a joke. ‘Horse?’

  ‘Parisienne.’

  ‘Parisienne. You are from?’

  ‘Here.’

  He laughed. ‘Show experience?’

  ‘Parisienne was a first-year green hunter last year, champion at four shows. Then I got her. This year, she’s gone second-year green and got some ribbons at two shows—’

  ‘Going into decline, then?’

  Nancy looked a little shocked at this, and began to say, ‘Well, I—’

  ‘Does your opinion matter? I’m giving the clinic. It’s my opinion that matters. We
will figure it out. What is she, an old racehorse?’

  ‘She was bred for the track, but I don’t think she ran.’

  ‘Well, that’s good and that’s bad. It’s good, because she’s probably pretty sound, but it’s bad, because they had some reason to reject her.’

  In the midst of Nancy’s shrug of ignorance, Peter Finneran turned suddenly to me and said, ‘Name?’

  ‘Abby Lovitt.’

  ‘Abby. Horse?’

  ‘True Blue.’

  ‘True Blue. How sentimental. I recognise him. Pretty worthless in the show, wasn’t he?’

  I didn’t speak or move.

  ‘Ah. Struck dumb. Where are you from?’

  I had to clear my throat. ‘We have a ranch in the valley.’

  ‘Experience?’

  ‘I usually ride western. We just got Blue in the spring. That was his first show.’

  ‘I could tell.’ He was already looking at the chestnut, though, and then he went on. Nancy and I exchanged a glance that said, Well, that’s over anyway.

  Once he had come to the end of the line and recited our names in a list, he sent us to the rail and watched us for a long time, it seemed, and it felt like a test. You went around and went around, and the longer you walked and then trotted, the more self-conscious you got. Who was he looking at? Thank goodness, not me.

  And yet the ninety minutes passed pretty quickly. With fourteen horses in the ring, he didn’t have much to say to any one person. His comments were not about heels down or look ahead or chin up, like a riding lesson. They were about ‘I need to see some energy in that mare, Margie. Sit deeper and push her on with your legs,’ or ‘Square corners, Eileen. Your horse is able to bend, even if you don’t realise it.’ Blue’s flat work was good, and I made sure to ask him to lift his inside shoulder the way Jem Jarrow taught. I even sort of lost track of where I was during the canter, because Blue’s canter was so dreamy and light. I got a compliment when we had to do the voltes, which were small circles. Blue and I started ours just where we were told to, and made just the right size circle, perfectly round. Peter Finneran boomed out, ‘See that, girls? Very precise. If she can do it, you can do it.’