The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

by Anton Disclafani

  “Hello,” I called, as I started to take off my boots by the door. A flurry of dust motes slanted through the morning light. All was in perfect order, left that way by Docey. I didn’t even have to make my bed here.

  I pulled my boots off. The thin socks I wore while riding were damp with sweat, and the air felt cool on my feet and calves. I needed to dust the insides of my boots with talcum powder. I knew that the barn would keep a supply, but I hadn’t looked. Of all the time spent with a horse, riding was such a small part of it.

  I went to Sissy’s closet first, found only clothes. Half her closet was occupied by party dresses, the silk soft beneath my fingertips. I thought I had a lot of clothes, but Sissy’s wardrobe was triple the size of mine. And for the last year Mother hadn’t bought any new clothes for herself or me. She said it would be in bad taste, with how poor everyone was becoming.

  In Sissy’s desk I found a few pens, a letter from her mother, received spelled wrong, the i and the e reversed. The letter was short, recounted a week she and Sissy’s father had spent “doing much of nothing.” A novel that looked brand-new, called The Art of Friendship. I traced the embossed lily on its red cover. Silly, Mother would have said. There was a hairbrush on her vanity, matted with her brown hair. Three bottles of French perfume in her drawer, full. I hadn’t noticed any scent on her. In the back of the drawer I found a rolled-up velvet pouch, with little compartments for jewelry. I held a pair of ruby studs to the light, each stone identical to the other, flawless and deep pink. An oval locket, engraved with initials—not Sissy’s—and a braided lock of hair behind the glass. I wondered who had died. I didn’t have any jewelry this nice. Mother had said I would have her jewelry one day, but I wondered if this was still true. It was all kept in a safe. As if anyone would bother it, or us, where we lived.

  The ruby earrings hurt to put in. I met resistance in both ears, especially the left, which was pierced slightly crooked. Mother and Idella had pierced them, with a hot needle and a piece of thread. I put them in less to see what they looked like and more to open the holes in my ears, but they didn’t suit me anyway, were too large and surprising. Mother might have said they brought out the auburn in my hair. Despite living so far out of town, she knew what was in vogue. There was a stack of magazines in our downstairs sunroom, but Mother also read books, the same ones Father did. Still, I didn’t have dresses like this, and I had never been given a piece of jewelry nearly this fine.

  What had Sissy’s mother said when she had given her the earrings? Maybe she had presented them to her before a party, dropped them into Sissy’s hand and closed her own around her daughter’s. The posts would have stung her palm, but the feeling would have been pleasurable. I’d never been to a party, only to restaurants. I could see Sissy at a dance, in the navy blue silk from her closet, the rubies offsetting her brown hair, her smooth skin, colored by the summer sun. Passed from boy to boy, flirting in her husky voice. I was suddenly angry at my parents for sending me to Yonahlossee unprepared. They’d kept me sheltered all my life, and then sent me here, ignorant of so many things.

  Eva’s desk was next to Sissy’s, under the window. The Square was still empty. There was a thick stack of pictures in her drawer. Her father was very heavy, had gotten heavier as the photographs progressed. Her mother was plump. Eva would have to be careful, which I’m sure she knew. She might lose her figure entirely after children, like I assumed Mrs. Holmes had. It happened to some women—Mother had told me this. The pictures were tied with a ribbon, but the rest was a mess—a tangle of paper and jewelry and pots of rouge and cream. There were sentences in French. The tins of makeup were hollowed out at the center. I wondered if she was a fast girl in a world where boys were involved. I knew about fast girls from books.

  Mary Abbott’s drawer was very spare. I almost didn’t bother with her. Her closet was nearly empty except for a few homely dresses and Yonahlossee uniforms. Her thick letters were from her father. The postmark was Raleigh, which wasn’t far from here. Mary Abbott dressed the same as the rest of us, so there was no way to know without looking in her closet that her things weren’t as nice as ours. Her family must have had enough money to send her here, so perhaps the bareness of her wardrobe was due to some religious fervor. I scanned a letter; indeed, God was mentioned a few times. I liked putting the pieces together like this. I returned the letters and opened a small compact; inside, taped to the mirror, was a picture of a baby. I recognized Mary Abbott’s features—her thin lips, her shocked-looking eyes. I touched the photograph, softly, and smiled. She had been pretty.

  I was terrified before I knew by what; I must have seen a shadow out of the corner of my eye; then I turned and saw Mr. Holmes through the window. Mr. Holmes also turned, and glanced inside, straight at me. He was more handsome than any movie star I had seen: his angular jaw, his dark eyes, framed by dark eyelashes and darker eyebrows. I stared at Mr. Holmes for another ten, fifteen seconds as he passed by, and he looked so nice that I almost thought, Let him find me. He’ll understand. But he didn’t stop, and I was instantly relieved the sun was too bright for him to see inside. Of course he would not have understood. I would have looked like a thief. Or worse, a lurker.

  I closed Mary Abbott’s drawer in a fit of relief, and as I did I heard the tap of a hard sole against the floor.

  “Hello?”

  It was Docey, with a stack of towels. She said nothing. I didn’t know where to look because of her wandering eye.

  “I was looking for powder,” I said. I walked to my bed and picked up my boots. “To sprinkle inside.” My face was hot. I held my boots to my chest, the leather still warm. She watched me for what felt like a long moment and I saw how this would go: she would tell, I would be an outsider.

  “That’s fine,” Docey said, and it took me a second to catch what she said, because of her accent. She turned her back to me and went to each girl’s closet, removing the dirty towel and replacing it with a clean one, accumulating a mass of dirty linen in her arms. When she was done, I thought maybe she’d leave without saying anything. She looked about my age, but she had a pale, ageless face. There wasn’t a trace of any sort of figure beneath her uniform. She was lean and small. I’d been stupid. I’d let myself be caught.

  At my closet, she paused, as if to ask permission. I nodded, and as she got my towel, she spoke: “I’ll let you get back.” At the door she turned briefly, and in a gesture so minute I might have imagined it, she brought her hand to her ear. I felt my own ear, the earrings I had forgotten. She wouldn’t tell.

  —

  Eva and I waited outside the cabin in our robes for Sissy.

  “She’s always late,” Eva murmured, “her only fault.” The comment struck me as odd, because Eva didn’t seem like the critical type, but then she grinned. When Sissy emerged, we left. The sun had gone down an hour ago and it was chilly, but my robe was thick and plush.

  “Are you settling in?” Sissy asked.

  I laughed. “Mr. Holmes asked the same question yesterday.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I was. What else could I say?”

  “Well, Mr. Holmes could make you say anything.” She whispered into my ear, “Henry.”

  I giggled.

  “Those eyes,” she said, and swooned. “But just so you know, he doesn’t flirt. He thinks he’s our father.”

  “Mrs. Holmes would slap your hand with a ruler if she heard you,” Eva said. “Did she already give you the founder’s speech? About how grateful we should all be for women’s education?”

  “She said Yonahlossee was named after a horse.” I liked this, walking in a group. Other girls glanced at us curiously, admiringly.

  “Oh. She doesn’t like horses,” Sissy said. “She doesn’t like anything.”

  She had apparently liked my mother, but never in a million years would I have said so.

  “Yonahlossee is har
d at first,” Eva said. “I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t manage to get up at the morning bell. I would miss breakfast, even my first class. At home I slept until noon every day.”

  I couldn’t imagine sleeping until noon. Sam woke me every morning before the sun rose. A tap on my shoulder was all it took; I was ready, eager to get started on the day. Sam was amused by my impatience. I had to ride early at home, to avoid the heat; Sasi was tacked by sunrise. “Didn’t you have things to do?”

  “No. That’s why they sent me here. Because there was nothing to do at home. But I was fine, actually. I liked having nothing to do.” Eva was taller than both of us, and she moved languidly. Her skin always looked slightly moist, in a pretty way, as if she’d just taken a bath. She did seem lazy.

  “Didn’t you get in trouble?”

  She lifted her shoulders and let them drop again, lazily. “You don’t really get in trouble here, Thea. Mrs. Holmes talked to me. And I got used to getting up.”

  “You can get in trouble here,” Sissy said. “I wouldn’t cross Mrs. Holmes.”

  “Who gets in trouble?” I asked.

  “Last month Gates’s sister and another girl were caught smoking. Last year a girl was meeting a boy from Asheville in the woods. The smokers got a warning. The other girl got sent away the next day. No one knew what happened to her until Mrs. Holmes announced it after morning prayer. It was like she disappeared.”

  We were at the bathhouse now, which was nothing more than a large room full of tubs, set about five feet apart from one another, in rows. Docey wove her way through naked girls, handing out towels.

  “Nobody looks,” Sissy whispered as we walked in, fiddling with a delicate diamond horseshoe that hung from her neck. Which wasn’t true—I looked. Everybody looked. Bath hour was an exercise in avoiding being caught looking. Mary Abbott was the scrawniest of us, looked like you could blow her over, light as a feather. I was thin, but my limbs were defined from riding. The hot water felt good and I closed my eyes and submerged my head. I scrubbed my scalp, the greasy spot at my crown. The room was steamy with all the hot water, perfumed by the various soaps and lotions.

  We were silent while we bathed, as if pretending we were alone.

  Then Docey stood over me with a towel and it was over.

  “Thank you.” But she had already moved on to another girl. I noted that no one else thanked her. I tried to modestly slide into my nightclothes, which proved impossible. I spotted a girl with white-blond hair in a tub near the corner, and the way her face was perched just above the water sent a chill down my spine.

  Docey was attending to Mary Abbott. Gates and Victoria were shielding each other with their towels while they dressed, but you could see perfectly the shapes of their bodies. This was bizarre, I felt very keenly. The strangest thing so far in the strangest week of my life. I knew we were safe, but it seemed foolish to put us all together like this, all in one place, naked.

  Victoria hurried past us on the way back to our cabins, and Sissy studied her retreating figure. Victoria had very close-set eyes, and a long, narrow face; improbably, she was pretty.

  “Victoria,” Sissy said.

  “She looks like a very pretty, very thin monkey.”

  Sissy burst out laughing, had to stop and lean against a tree because she was laughing so hard. The only other person I could make laugh this hard was Sam. I stood nervously; what would I say when she was done laughing? We still had several minutes to fill.

  “She does!” Sissy exclaimed, finally.

  “You can’t ever take a bath when you feel like it, can you?” I asked Sissy, after a moment had passed.

  She shook her head as we walked. “I guess you could sneak in. Like a bath bandit.” She grinned, her blue eyes crinkling, and I couldn’t help but grin back. She was so lighthearted.

  “Hold still,” she said, and darted behind me. I felt my hair lifted from my neck.

  “What—” I started, surprised, but Sissy only wrung the water out of it, for the second time that night.

  “There,” she murmured, still behind me, her hands in my hair. “Why did you come so late, Thea?”

  She dabbed water from my neck with her towel. My mother had barely hugged me when I left. It had pained Sam to look at me. This was the first time in weeks someone had touched me and not been angry, and I was surprised at how vulnerable and loved it made me feel. I wanted to offer Sissy something.

  “I was sent away.” As soon as I spoke I regretted it. What had I been thinking? That this girl would offer solace, this girl who knew nothing about me?

  Sissy dropped my hair, which she had twisted into a rope, onto my neck. I thought I could feel her deciding.

  “Oh,” she said finally. “Well, I was, too, in a way. Sent away to learn how to be a lady.” She deepened her voice, turned everything into a joke. And I was so grateful. Sissy’s cheeks were red from the steam, and her hair hung damply. She did not seem like the girl from her desk, with all that jewelry and perfume. Sissy was friends with nearly everyone here, there was always a girl waving to her, sidling up next to her to impart some bit of news. I wondered why she had chosen me, and hoped it was something besides my novelty. It seemed like it was.

  “I left a girl, but returned a lady,” Sissy intoned, in the same voice, and on and on back to the cabin, where I begged her to stop, I was laughing so hard. I felt a little bit like I was walking on air—to think that I had been nervous about filling the time as we walked back to the cabin. There was nothing to be nervous about around Sissy.

  We entered Augusta House a pair. Our beds were already turned back by Docey, like we were at a hotel. Eva smiled at us, unconcerned, but Mary Abbott didn’t like the look of us together, I could tell. We prepared for bed: Sissy patted cream onto her cheeks, Victoria brushed her hair. Eva’s leg dangled over her bunk, next to my face. Her toenails were painted. She was reading the book from Sissy’s desk.

  Gates was hard at work at her desk, practicing her handwriting, which was terrible, loopy and vague. Miss Lee, our matronly elocution and etiquette teacher, had shaken her head in dismay over Gates’s work today. Gates paused, and shook her hand dramatically. “It aches!” she cried. Her dirty-blond hair was cut into a bob, and two barrettes, adorned with tiny pearls, were clipped above each ear. She seemed like a girl who would not want hair in her face.

  “Wait until classes begin,” Sissy said. “Then it’ll really hurt.”

  Gates grimaced, and everyone laughed, even Mary Abbott.

  “What other classes will they have?” I asked. “The schoolgirls,” I added, when Sissy looked at me blankly. Our mornings were devoted to classes: elocution, then etiquette, then French, then instrument (piano for me). Then lunch, then rest hour, then riding, then “leisure” pursuits: bird-watching, botany, painting. Then free time until dinner, which we usually spent in the Hall in the Castle, short for Study Hall, though no one seemed to study there. I was bad at bird-watching: all I ever spotted were hawks and hummingbirds, which were a dime a dozen.

  “The schoolgirls?” Sissy asked.

  Gates put her book down, carefully, making sure to mark her place with a silver bookmark. I knew from my snooping that it was monogrammed. “Some of the girls leave,” she began, slowly, “but most of us stay.” Her voice was high, excited. She watched me solemnly. I felt my neck warm, the telltale sign of a blush.

  “I know,” I said.

  “It’s just,” Sissy said, “we’re all schoolgirls. This is a year-round cabin.” She looked at me carefully for a moment, and I smiled. She didn’t understand that I was not a schoolgirl, that I was only in a year-round cabin because there had been no place else to put me.

  Gates returned to her handwriting, pressing so deeply into the paper as she wrote that it tore; she cried out again in exasperation. Sissy lay back onto her pillows and picked up her needlework, a pretty embroidery of a mountain
stream. I watched her patiently color in the stream, stitch by blue stitch. This place was so odd. Yesterday a dozen of us had sat outside behind easels, facing the mountains, and been directed to paint them. Henny walked behind us, murmuring approvingly at some paintings, clucking sadly at others. I had received a cluck, of course; I wasn’t good at spotting birds, or stitching straight lines, or painting a leaf that looked like a leaf, pursuits I couldn’t ever imagine pursuing once I left this place.

  It was called the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, but it was neither a camp nor a place for girls. We were supposed to be made ladies here. I thought about where that left me. I still thought of myself as a girl, but I was not like my cabinmates. I would never be a girl like that again.

  And had I ever been like them? At home I had been a girl among boys and men. There had been no one prettier, or richer, or in any way better than I was. I did wonder, of course, if such a person existed, and knew that she must, but then the thought had dropped from my head. My place in my family was so well defined I’d had no need to wonder about what could be for too long.

  My mother was our standard of beauty. I knew nothing about curling my hair because Mother still wore hers up. And she had never painted her nails; the thought made me smile. I had always thought of her as timeless, like women I saw in the prints of paintings Father showed us during our lessons. But now I could see she was old-fashioned, of a different world. No less beautiful, but perhaps less becoming.

  Henny bustled in and switched off all the lights, told us good night.

  Gates lit a candle, to read. I touched the handkerchief beneath my pillow.

  {3}

  A letter from Father arrived on my seventh day at Yonahlossee. The postmark was from Atlanta. I pressed his letter to my lips. His script was slanted and flowery, like a woman’s. I had never in my life received a letter. A postcard once or twice from Georgie, when he was in Missouri visiting his mother’s family. But anyone could see a postcard—it was read first by Mother before she handed it to me. No one in the world knew what was inside the letter except for my father, and now me.