The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

by Anton Disclafani

  Dead birds littered the lawn outside. Later, by moonlight and a lantern, my father would collect them in a wheelbarrow and burn them in the rubbish heap, watch feathers float from the plume of smoke, blue feathers, scarlet, brown, white that did not hide dirt. He would watch and consider. He would feel vaguely hopeful, by the moonlight, his breath its own plume in the air, his babies small and pale but healthy, as far as the human eye could tell.

  Mother would tell us that we were loved even before we were born. But that wasn’t quite true: one of us was loved, the other unknown.

  We would not ever leave. I had known about Miss Petit’s, the school where Mother had gone, but I would never be sent there. There was no need. Soon I would go away to a finishing school in Orlando, but only for a few weeks, only long enough to interact with girls my own age, see how they behaved. Mother assured me that I wouldn’t have any trouble learning the ropes. This was to prepare me for my coming out, which would happen before I graduated from college. I would go to Agnes Scott, like Mother, and Sam would go to Emory. We were to be educated. Our minds were fine, important—Atwell minds.

  Sam would become either a doctor or a lawyer. It didn’t matter. Something to do on the side, while he managed our farm. We made our real money in citrus farther south—crops and land now attended to by Mother’s brother on our behalf—and Sam and I would inherit that, too, but right now Mother’s brother tended to it.

  I would live where my husband did, but somewhere nearby. Gainesville, perhaps. Not everyone was lucky enough to live in such a secluded place; not everyone was lucky enough to make a living in the way Father did, on his own terms. And he was lucky like this because of Mother’s money. He was a philanthropist—that’s what Mother said. He helped people, and many of those people could not pay.

  This was the story of our futures. And it was always a joint future, a combined venture.

  But Mother might as well have been speaking Greek when she mentioned these things—that Sam and I would marry, and live apart. We had never been farther south than Orlando, farther north than Gainesville. I had never even seen a college. When I pictured it, I saw my own house, peppered with people. That’s how I conceived of Yonahlossee, too, before I entered its world: my own beloved home, threaded with strings of girls. Of course I knew this would not be true. Of course. But I knew in my brain, not in my heart.

  And Georgie? He would live somewhere nearby, it was assumed. But his future was not as well mapped as ours. He was not Mother’s child. I would say that Georgie was like a brother except that he was not; I could see him more clearly, because he was separate from me.

  People can lie about their childhoods, they can make up any sort of story and you must believe them, unless you were there with them, unless you saw for yourself. It is a burden to know a person so well. Sometimes a gift, but always a burden.

  —

  It was a relief that my lavender dress, the same one I’d worn to the dinner with my father in the hotel, seemed stylish enough.

  I shivered. It was almost eight o’clock in the evening but the sun still shone, a different kind of light from daylight, less severe, bluer. It had rained earlier, and the air tasted damp, the packed-dirt path springy beneath our feet. Swarms of fireflies darted through the throngs of girls. I was still enchanted by them. It was too hot for them in Florida, there we only had mosquitoes and enormous, noisy dragonflies.

  I had hesitated to wear my mother’s mink stole, afraid it might be too good for the occasion, but furs abounded. Alice Hunt brushed by me, a dead fox wrapped around her neck.

  I raised my hand in a wave, but she wouldn’t meet my eye. She wasn’t the kind of girl who gave anyone the time of day. My cheeks burned. It was so hard to remember whom to be friendly to, whom to coolly ignore.

  “Alice Hunt,” Sissy called, and Alice Hunt stopped, turned around slowly. Everyone gave Sissy the time of day.

  “Sissy,” she said, her gray eyes briefly darting in my direction. “Thea.”

  Then she was on her way again, off to join the rest of the Memphis girls, who all had a soft manner about them, spoke barely above a whisper, and almost never looked directly at you. They had a way of looking through you. They were widely recognized as the camp’s most snobbish clique.

  “The sun never sets on Memphis,” Sissy murmured under her breath, and I giggled, though the first time she’d said this I’d had to puzzle out what she’d meant. She was full of sayings like this: Mrs. Holmes was wound tighter than Dick’s hatband; Leona’s family was in high cotton. More like she’s in high oil, I’d said, and then Sissy had laughed.

  Girls swarmed around Sissy and me as we walked, dressed in their colorful silks, fur capelets and shimmering shawls upon their shoulders, diamond barrettes in their hair. I saw Katherine Hayes, from Atlanta, who was the biggest gossip at camp. Her throng of Atlanta girls surrounded her, all laughing dramatically. It seemed to me that they were all named Katherine, but only Katherine Hayes was allowed to use her full name. The rest were called Kate. Katherine had wildly curly brown hair; she wore a navy-blue sleeveless dress, which was the closest anyone came to black. I knew from the magazines that it was in vogue for the stars to wear black. But that was in Hollywood. People in the South didn’t wear black unless someone had died.

  Katherine’s fingernails were painted red. The Atlanta girls were big-city, walked around camp with their bobbed hair and painted fingernails (Mrs. Holmes would order their nails scrubbed whenever she saw them); they were always gesturing and laughing as if everyone was watching. And generally, everyone was watching, like now. They would scrub their nails, and then give Mrs. Holmes a few days to forget before they all appeared with freshly coated fingernails, all the same hue, like a band of exotically clawed birds.

  We all wore stockings, and so our legs gleamed. Most girls’ hemlines, including my own, were modest, but if Eva sat a certain way you caught a glimpse of her knees.

  There was so much of the world to see, and most of us had never held a boy’s hand. We wanted to do more than that, anyway, we wanted boys to hold not just our hands but all of us, gather us into their sturdy arms and ring our slippery curls around their thick but tender fingers.

  But none of that could happen, not to the good and correct daughters of wealthy and powerful men, with family names and family connections and family duties. We would be debs first, wives second. We would all be married one day, hopefully after we turned eighteen but before we turned twenty-one, though I doubt any of us tied marriage to passion. We’d seen our parents, our aunts and uncles, our sisters and their husbands. We weren’t stupid. We understood that desire was a dangerous thing that needed to be carefully handled, like a mother’s antique perfume bottle, passed down to the eldest daughter when she turned sixteen.

  Yet I did not have as much to put at risk as other Yonahlossee girls. I saw this now. My family was never in society pages; my mistake could not have ruined any of my father’s business deals. I had only risked my family’s connections to each other.

  “I can see the boys,” Sissy whispered.

  I whispered, too. “They won’t bite.” We were almost at the Castle, and the boys stood in a line, their backs facing the windows. They were dressed in light-colored summer suits and bow ties, like they were playing dress-up with their fathers’ clothes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Sam or Georgie in a suit, even though my parents had given one to Georgie for his last birthday. They’d said he’d be applying to college soon; this was when that still seemed possible.

  Sissy giggled. She was giddy tonight, and I was glad for the distraction, glad not to think of Georgie and the suit he had not yet worn, at least not in my presence.

  The staircase to the Castle was narrow, only three girls could fit on it at a time. Mary Abbott, her hair pinned back in a high, old-fashioned bun, joined us on the bottom step. Sissy and I linked arms. I offered my left to Mary Abbott, w
ho clasped my hand instead.

  “Your hand is cold,” Mary Abbott said. Her voice was higher than it normally was, her eyes wide.

  “Yours is damp.” It felt like a dead, wet thing in mine.

  “Will you find a beau tonight, Mary Abbott?” Sissy asked, teasing. Sissy’s dress was pale green. Its square neckline was embroidered in iridescent silver, which seemed to illuminate Sissy’s long, slender neck. Her hair had been curled that afternoon, like mine, but unlike mine her hair wouldn’t hold curls. Eva had powdered all our faces, save Mary Abbott’s, and Sissy’s light freckles had disappeared. She had painted our lips with gloss, too, but very subtly, so Mrs. Holmes wouldn’t notice. Paint was forbidden, but this was apparently one of Yonahlossee’s more bendable rules, since most of the girls I saw tonight looked a little brighter than they usually did, their features lit. Surely Mrs. Holmes noticed. She wasn’t stupid. You had to pick your battles, I supposed.

  Sissy wore a strand of pearls clasped by a bright ruby, and a turquoise ring, the stone as big as a nickel, flanked by two round diamonds. She wore her ruby earrings, too; they matched the necklace. I’d never seen anyone, not even my mother, wear such grand jewelry. She was so thin that the ornate jewels seemed to wear her—her everyday necklace, the diamond-studded horseshoe, suited her better—but still, Sissy, if not beautiful, was nearly incandescent tonight. Her wide-set eyes—any wider, and she would have looked odd—emphasized her otherworldly quality. She looked like one of the fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Sissy had startled Mary Abbott. “None of us will. We’re not old enough.”

  “How old do we have to be?” I asked.

  “Old enough to want one,” Mary Abbott said, and dropped my hand, giving it a final squeeze that was hard enough to make me wince. Then she sped ahead, hiked her too-long dress up to her calves and took the stairs two at a time until she was stuck behind another threesome of girls. I looked at Sissy.

  “She’s odd.”

  “Don’t be unkind,” she said, “it doesn’t suit you.”

  I was surprised, wanted to ask Sissy what she meant, but we had almost reached the top of the stairs, and we were nervous. The gas lights at the door burned, like they always did, morning and night, though during the day you could hardly see them. Then the door was opened by Mr. Holmes, who smiled at us. He was opening the door for each set of girls, then letting it close again, then swinging it open—when really, he should have just propped the door open, like it was when we filed in for our meals and classes.

  Though that would have ruined the effect, we would have been able to see in advance.

  Our dining hall had been transformed. The Yonahlossee garden must have been robbed of all its flowers. They were everywhere, as far as a girl or boy could see. In vases, arranged by color: clusters of bloodred, burnt orange, pale yellow, electric pink, pure white, flecked cream. The smaller, heirloom roses, which bloomed in dense clumps, had been woven into a thick rope that dangled from the ceiling, high enough that we could not reach it, not even our tallest girl. I’d never seen so many flowers out of a garden. My mother always thought it a shame to cut them, and when she did she never arranged her flowers according to a single color, like this. The harsh electric lighting had been switched off, for tonight; instead, huge silver candelabras held candles as thick as my forearm. The candelabras themselves were taller than I was, beautiful in the way that a weapon was beautiful: I would stay away from them, lest one of their otherworldly flames, as big as a fist, catch my dress on fire.

  A group of gray-haired men was seated at the opposite end of the dining hall, partially obscured by an Oriental folding screen. Perhaps they weren’t supposed to look at us. They sat at attention on their stools, each with an instrument: the band.

  The boys stood in their perfect line, stretched from one end of the dining hall to the other, distinguished only by the random sparkle from a wayward gem when it caught the light, while the girls messily clumped opposite them. I wondered if the boys had flasks hidden in their pockets, like Eva said they would. I knew from morning announcements that Mrs. Holmes was a vocal prohibitionist: drink was evil and immoral. Miss Brooks stood near them, as if to stop an errant boy before he made it to the other side. Miss Brooks led us on our bird-watching and botany walks in the afternoons and taught history during the school year, and though she seemed dull she was nice. I liked her, at least compared to Miss Lee, who watched everyone like a hawk.

  Docey and another maid served us punch out of a giant crystal bowl. I inclined my head to Docey, who didn’t acknowledge me. A formal serving outfit, like the kind that the maids in hotels wore, had replaced her normal uniform: a starched black pinafore, a crisp white blouse underneath.

  “Docey’s dressed up,” I whispered to Sissy when we both had our punch.

  “Look,” Sissy said, “no, don’t look, they’ll see.”

  This was the first time I had seen Sissy nervous. And it was the closest I had ever been to a group of boys. I knew what they expected of us. I also knew what we were supposed to expect from them, which was very different—to be led in handfuls of dances, twirled around the room underneath the watchful eyes of adults. We wanted a certain handsome boy to take a fancy to us, to become half of a pair for a night. And then, maybe most of all, we wanted them to leave, so that we could pine away.

  I didn’t answer Sissy. I was nervous, too, but for a different reason. Silly as this sounds, I had never been around a boy I wasn’t related to. Surely Mother and Father hadn’t known that there would be a dance, with a busload of boys in attendance.

  Henny and Jettie and another senior, Martha Ladue, entered the dining hall, and something about Henny looked strange, and it was a second before I realized that her mole had been powdered over. Martha was the most beautiful girl at camp. She looked like Louise Brooks, except prettier, calmer.

  Sissy nudged me. Leona was at the door, dressed in a dull gray silk, a diamond-and-pearl choker around her throat. Everyone watched her, it was impossible not to, for Leona was the type of girl who commanded a room’s attention; she was tall, almost six feet, and her white hair hung down to her waist, which was a style for younger girls. I wondered if it had ever been cut.

  Mr. Holmes called us to attention at that moment. He stood at the head of the room then, Mrs. Holmes stood next to him, a corsage of a striped cream-and-red rose on her wrist. Mr. Holmes towered over his wife, as slender as she was plump. She wore the same pearl earrings, the old-fashioned skirt that fell to the floor, that she did every day.

  “Let the dance commence,” Mr. Holmes said, gesturing to the band, which struck up a song. We fanned out so that a boy could approach us definitively, without our having to wonder if he was really after our cabinmate, our best friend. The boys rushed toward us; I took a step back, impulsively, bumping Leona.

  “Pardon me.”

  “Pardon accepted,” she said; I forgot to worry about the boys and instead peered up at Leona, who stared ahead, probably hoping that a tall boy would ask her to dance. She was even taller when you were close to her. I looked down and saw that her shoes were flat, and dyed silver to match her dress. The rest of us wore heels when we dressed up. I supposed she was rich enough to have any type of shoe made, in any color she wanted.

  “Thea.” I looked up, surprised by the sound of my name. I hadn’t thought Leona knew who I was. “Someone wants you,” Leona said impatiently, and I turned to face a skinny, pale boy.

  “May I have the pleasure of this dance?” he asked, and I accepted his arm, realizing as we walked that a slow song was playing, which meant I would have to get close to this boy. His voice was unsteady. I looked back to Leona as I was escorted to the dance floor. She was watching, which satisfied me for some reason.

  “Thea, pleased to meet you,” I said, nodding my head since I couldn’t curtsy, not while we were walking. I hoped I was remembering all my manners.

&
nbsp; “Harry, pleased to meet you,” he said.

  Before I knew it we were dancing, caught up in the flock. I recognized the song—“Carolina Moon”—even absent the words. It was one of Mother’s favorite songs, and it seemed foolish, now, that I had just thought the melody was pretty, had never connected it to a place. Here I was, in Carolina, dancing to its slow, sad anthem.

  “Where’s your home?” I asked.

  “Mainly here,” he answered, after a pause. He did not dance particularly well. He led, but barely. And yet he smelled like Sam, and Georgie; I had forgotten the smell of boys, which was so different—sharper, more pungent—from the smell of girls.

  “And when you’re not here?”

  “Louisiana. My family’s in the lumber business.” He was eager to please, Harry. His answers were questions—Mainly here? Louisiana? The lumber business?

  There were boys I would have swooned over here—there was a tall, black-haired boy, in a pale blue jacket, and Sissy had snagged a handsome redhead—but Harry was not one of them. Molly, the first- year from my table, twirled by, her knotty hair combed. Even the youngest of us danced. Sissy had told me these dances were progressive; before the Holmeses, each girl was assigned a boy whom she danced with the entire night. He would escort her to the Castle, her white satin dancing shoes carefully tucked under his arm. There had been members of the board—Sissy’s grandfather, for one—who had fought hard against the change, who thought that Yonahlossee dances should model themselves on the old, prewar debutante balls.

  When the waltz ended, I curtsied, Harry bowed, and I excused myself to the refreshment table. I accepted another cup of punch from Docey, who met my eyes briefly.

  I felt a hand cup my elbow; for an instant I thought it was a boy, and I blushed, but then I turned and saw Sissy.