Mr. Holmes seemed to be studying Martha, too. His face was very calm. I did not want to admit to myself that Martha was more beautiful than I was, though of course I knew she was, I knew almost everyone at the camp, if asked, would point to Martha as the most beautiful girl. But I also knew there wasn’t any real way to measure beauty, and perhaps something specific about my face was something Mr. Holmes might love.
Mr. Holmes turned his head, and it was a second before I realized he had caught me staring. I looked away, quickly, flustered.
“How does this all sound to you, Thea?” Leona asked again.
“I think,” I said, and glanced at the sketches laid upon the table, “I think this all sounds perfect.”
Leona smiled. “Are we distracting you?”
My cheeks flamed. Everyone watched me. Leona turned in her seat and looked pointedly at the table where Mr. Holmes and Mr. Albrecht sat. I shook my head. I didn’t want to submit so easily to Leona, but it seemed like the quickest way to stop her.
“Well, good,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to do that.”
Gates trailed beside me as we gathered our things and left, her sketchbook tucked neatly beneath her arm.
“Thea.” Her voice low. Her cheeks red underneath her heavy freckles. “Leona won last year. She was the youngest girl to ever win.”
“I know,” I said. Didn’t everybody know?
Gates nodded slowly. “Then you must also know how badly she wants to win again.” She touched my arm. “Just be careful,” she whispered.
I was surprised that Gates cared. She didn’t usually involve herself in camp pettiness.
We watched Leona, who sat alone at the table, reviewing Gates’s sketch. She seemed to be giving the piece of paper all her attention, which is how Leona moved through the world: whatever she did received her full attention.
“Who knows if she’ll even be here by the show,” Gates said, and what I felt was disappointment, not relief. Leona was my only true competitor.
That night I opened a letter from Mother. Sissy was gone, with Boone. I had been impudent in my last letter, I knew; addressing Mother as if she were my equal, when of course she was not.
Dear Thea,
You sounded angry in your last letter. I understand, of course. Yes, I was friends with Beth Holmes. She was Beth Babineaux, then. Her family was a great New Orleans family. Rich as the day was long. I don’t suppose they’re rich like that now, but who knows. I lost touch with her; I lost touch with everyone, and would you like to know why? I had all I needed with you and Sam and your father. I could have had twenty friends; I could have had thirty. But your family is your greatest friend, Thea. I didn’t tell you I knew Beth before you left because there were so many other things on my mind. It wasn’t a plot, Thea. I honestly wouldn’t have imagined you’d cared.
We sold the house. Astonishingly, someone wanted to buy it; I hadn’t thought there would be any takers but your father was right: there are still people with money. We are among them, luckily. I am packing up all our things now. We are moving to Orlando, where your father will work. We might eventually move farther south, to Miami. It’s all up in the air. We needed to get Sam away. We needed a fresh start, as you have there, at Yonahlossee.
Love,
Mother
I tore the letter into tiny bits as soon as I was finished. I was not astonished that someone else wanted my house; it was beautiful, perfect. What shocked me was that my parents would do this. That it was gone. I truly hadn’t thought that Mother would ever leave.
I knew even as I was ripping the letter that it was foolish, a gesture no one but myself would see. I’d have to get on my hands and knees tomorrow to gather any stray pieces from beneath the bed. And the other girls might notice, they might wonder what in the world I was doing, and then I’d have to come up with a lie, yet another one, to make my family seem like a different one.
My next thought was Sasi. I had known he was going to be sold, since I was getting too big for him anyway, but I had pushed the thought from my mind. Would we live on a farm in Orlando? Or a place where you could see your neighbor’s house, or both neighbors’ houses, from your own? Would they sell Sasi to a girl or a boy? Would Sam go to school in Orlando? And did she think I was dumb? That Yonahlossee was anything but a place to get rid of me? If it was a fresh start, I was a monkey’s uncle.
A year ago and I would not have believed any of it: Father leaving his patients, Mother leaving her house. But I believed it now. The worst thing I could do, I knew, the thing to hurt her most, would be to not write a letter in return.
—
I was afraid he wouldn’t come back, but he did, the very next day, sent Decca upstairs just like the last time, and I felt both grateful and fearful.
“Decca’s doing well?”
I nodded. He was looking around for another drink, had already polished off the first. I waited for his voice to waver a little, for his gestures to become less precise. Alcohol turned Mr. Holmes into a boy.
What I noticed about him in the flesh—that his pinky joint was swollen, rubbed raw by something, that there was a dry patch of skin on his forearm—was not what I noticed when I imagined him. It was the same with Georgie. I would dream about how blissful it would feel when he touched me, but then when he did I would notice strange things: how bony his elbow was, how he smelled faintly of stale hay.
“Have you heard about Leona’s family?” he asked.
I was surprised. He’d never mentioned another Yonahlossee girl to me; he was breaking a rule.
“Yes,” I said, “everyone has.”
“Have they?” He smiled, and fiddled with a cuff link. It looked old. His father’s, his grandfather’s. “And what has everyone heard?”
His tone unsettled me. “It’s none of my business,” I said. I didn’t want him to think I was nosy.
“Has that ever stopped anyone before? It would be unnatural, in a place like this, not to care about other people’s concerns.” It was all happening so quickly, this shift from fine to horrible.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, but I did. I tried to keep my voice light, so that we could talk about something else, but the sound of my light voice irritated him, and he shook his head.
“Oh, of course you do. You’re always watching, aren’t you? All these silly girls, you watch them, don’t you? They come to you with all their worries and you listen and tell them nothing in return.”
“They don’t come to me that often.”
“You watch, I know, because I watch you, sometimes, I see how you slink, how you creep around all the other girls and notice things—” He stopped. “Your face doesn’t move, Thea. You hold yourself apart. What must the other girls think of you?”
I willed myself not to cry. “I don’t think they do, much.” I felt fragile, Mother’s letter a week old but still every word fresh and stark; if I ever saw my home again I would see it as a stranger. It was lost to me. Would Sasi’s next boy or girl love him as I had? It did not seem possible. I’d spent more time with Sasi than I had with Sam. I knew from the way he cocked his ears if he was frightened or simply excited; I knew from the way he nipped my shoulder if he was angry or playful.
“And I don’t think you really believe that.”
If he had been my friend, I would have asked him: Why are you being so mean? So cruel? But he was not my friend.
I stood. “I have to be going now.” I had been so, so stupid. I wasn’t Mr. Holmes’s confidante. I wasn’t his friend. I was no more, no less than a gossipy Yonahlossee girl. But I was even worse than that: Mr. Holmes believed I thought I was better than everyone else. Nothing could have been further from the truth—that was my first thought. And my second, which came so quickly I wondered if it was the truer thought, was that I was better. I didn’t let myself get too involved with the camp because I felt, somewher
e deep down, that I was better than all of those girls. That I knew more, had understood more, was destined for a different sort of life.
I walked past him to the coat closet, fiddled with the knob, I didn’t know how to open it, I had never opened it before. Where was Emmy, she should be here, she should have interrupted us, stopped him. I wanted to tell him that the different sort of life I was destined for was not a better sort of life. That in some dark moments I would give anything to take back everything I had done.
My ears roared and I didn’t hear him until he was right behind me. I stayed where I was; for the world, I wouldn’t have turned and faced him. He drew a finger along my spine.
“Always hold yourself so straight, even when you’re slinking. Did I ever tell you that was the first thing I noticed about you, when your father came here? That your posture was perfect.” His finger traveled down my back, stopped at my tailbone. “I suppose I wouldn’t have told you that, would I? Wouldn’t have had the occasion. Leona will have to leave, Thea. It has all fallen apart, it is all falling apart. I can’t get my tenses straight.” His voice had turned soft.
I turned to face him, and he touched my cheek. “I’m sorry, Thea. I have a mean streak, it seems. It is all wrong,” he said, and then he was gone.
I didn’t open the coat closet until I heard him upstairs, above me, in Decca’s room. I tried to button my coat but my hands shook, both of them, terribly. And my hands never shook.
I left and went to my cabin. I was alone, and even though I knew everyone else would be at the Hall, I was still grateful. Everything was in order, our nightgowns folded and tucked into drawers, our lotions and perfumes carefully capped and lined on our washstands, our beds made in the morning and then straightened by Docey after rest hour. There were personal effects: framed photographs, pictures from magazines, purple velvet jewelry boxes. Ghosts lived here, we haunted this cabin, we hadn’t ever truly claimed it.
I felt tricked. I had liked his kindness, and now his kindness had disappeared, but I still wanted him. I wanted him more, if that was possible.
I didn’t bother to pull the covers up. No one was here, no one would see that I hiked my skirt up over my waist, put my dirty shoes on the quilt, moved my hand so roughly that I was raw afterward. No one heard me. No one saw the smear of blood, no one asked why I stared so long out the window, what could I possibly be watching for that long? Nothing, nothing.
—
When I sat at my dressing table I straddled my chair like I was riding. I was riding, even when I wasn’t, a horse was always in my head. I spent at most two hours a day on a horse, the rest on the ground like a girl, but even so, when I walked on my own two feet my gait was vaguely, constantly unsettling, as if I were always stepping onto dry ground from a ship.
I was on a streak, I cleared every jump with an inch to spare. With two inches. Mr. Albrecht had me lead demonstrations for the other classes. This is what it looks like. You are not a pretty rider, he told me once, you are not graceful but you are technically flawless.
I wanted to win. Leona was making it easy, to want to beat her. I saw now that her friendliness toward me coincided with my convalescence. And now that I was a threat, her only real threat, she ignored me when she saw me in the Castle. At the Hall last week I’d seen her giggling with Jettie. I’d smiled at Jettie but she’d turned her back, and Leona had looked over Jettie’s shoulder for a long second, assessing me, until she’d whispered something else into Jettie’s ear and Jettie’s sturdy back was shaking from laughter. I’d looked down quickly and checked myself, but nothing seemed amiss; my cheeks burned and I’d turned to Eva, asked her a dumb question, and tried to look like I didn’t care.
I realized that other girls probably wondered what was said about them all the time. But I had never before known the peculiar sensation of both wanting to know and then never wanting to know what someone else thought of you.
Being so close to Sissy had served me well; I was liked because she was liked, I absorbed some of her radiance and passed it off as my own. Mostly, though, I was not well known.
At dinner, Molly had once teased me about being too solemn. When I had said something funny in the Hall, the group of girls Sissy and I were sitting with had laughed and looked a little stunned that I had a sense of humor. Now Mr. Holmes told me that I slinked. What else slinked? Animals, criminals.
Did Leona and Jettie make fun of how solemn I was? Did they think I was proud?
During practice Leona cut me off, twice. And then I did a strange thing: I trotted Naari directly in front of King, passing them so closely King left a trail of spit on my boot. I polished it off later, still surprised.
It was unusual for two third-years to be the best. And it must have been doubly unusual that Leona had been the best last year, as a second-year. Besides me, Gates, and Leona, the rest of our class were seniors. And though Gates was a very elegant rider, she was too fussy, too appraising on the back of a horse, to ever be excellent.
But now I wanted to be inserted into Yonahlossee history. I wanted to be admired, I wanted my photograph to hang on the wall outside Mr. Holmes’s office. I wanted him to pass by me a dozen times a day, every time he came or went. I wanted people to see me and think I was pretty, yes, but that I was more than pretty: that I was good at something the way few people are good at anything in their entire lives.
Was it too much to want that? Was it too much to want him? Yes and yes. In the back of my mind, the nasty thought always lingered that I would be happier if I did not want so much.
{16}
When are we going to Gainesville?” I asked Mother, as we were stripping my bed.
“I don’t know—let’s move a little faster, hmm?”
I tugged the sheets from Mother and threw them on the floor, adding them to the pile of dirty linens. “All right,” I said, “can we go soon, do you think?”
Mother glanced at me, but seemed distracted.
“Maybe Georgie could come here?”
She unfurled a sheet, tucked it beneath her chin, and smoothed out wrinkles with her palm. All in one motion—she was so deft at these chores, she could fold a complicated blouse in a second, iron my father’s shirt in under a minute. We hadn’t seen Georgie’s family in three weeks, nearly a month. I understood that there was a reason we had not seen each other in so long; Mother had made this reason clear to Sam. But I wanted to see my cousin. I wanted to see him badly.
“Why isn’t Idella doing this?” I resented my mother’s quick, able hands, scurrying over my bed, my private bed, tucking in corners and picking up invisible specks of lint, dust, something.
She ignored me. “There, all done.”
“Is Father eating with us tonight?”
She turned from the curtains, which she had been shaking—particles of gleaming dust were suspended in the air.
“I don’t know that, either.”
“I guess nobody wants to see us.”
She turned from the curtains. “What do you mean?”
“I’m lonely.”
She sat down next to me; her breath smelled like coffee and the lavender toothpaste she used. She looked around my room, then finally spoke. “This house charms people. I’ve always thought that. It’s so beautiful. It’s so . . . lovely. You’ll never live in a place like this again, Thea. You should love it.”
“I do love it,” I said.
“Someday you’ll meet a man and fall in love and want to go where he goes,” she said, as if she were reading aloud from a fairy tale, as if she were hardly listening to me, “and you’ll have to make a new home for yourself.”
“Mother!” I tugged at my hair. I hated when she did this, changed what you had said you wanted. I thought about my cousin’s thick, sturdy hands. That was all I wanted. Not a husband. But she continued, trancelike.
“You will meet a husband, Thea.” Mother stood, and I s
aw the crow’s-feet that framed her eyes, the worry lines that creased her forehead. I said nothing. I gave her nothing.
“And you’ll have to be careful to choose the right one. It will seem like fun and games, but it’s not. Not at all.”
“It was like that for you?” I asked. “Unfun?”
She smiled, and shook her head. “Unfun isn’t a word, Thea. It was fine for me—look at the result.”
She gestured around the room, grandly, and stopped at me, as if to say—You, you are what I got. Which I suppose I was.
—
But then Georgie’s family did come, the very next week. Mother told us over breakfast, as if it was nothing unusual. And perhaps it wasn’t. The money Uncle George had borrowed had fixed whatever needed to be fixed, like a paste, like the hay I stuffed into a crack in the barn’s wall.
Greetings were exchanged on the front porch—I was kissed, exclaimed over.
“Perfect weather,” Mother pronounced. It was perfect weather, the brief stretch of spring we would have before descending into the maddening heat of summer. But Mother thought it boring to talk about the weather. She was trying to be cheerful, I saw, trying to distract.
I kept my eyes trained away from Georgie as I spoke to my aunt and uncle.
The adults left us and then it was only the three of us, as it usually was. I smoothed my hands across my bottom to make sure I hadn’t bled through, a movement so practiced it was unconscious. I wasn’t menstruating right now, but I wasn’t regular, as Mother put it, and so I could start any time, really. I wondered if other mothers kept such close track of their daughters’ bodies.
“Let’s go out back,” Sam began, “I’ll bring my tent, and Idella will pack us lunch, and . . .” While Sam was explaining his plan, I met Georgie’s eyes for the first time. He met mine, I should say. I watched for a glimmer of something.
I felt almost insane with desire. Should I call it that? Lust. A specific yearning. I didn’t know how this would be.
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls Page 22
