by Jane Smiley
The woman was magnificent. She adjusted her coat and her gloves before doing anything else. Then she righted the stroller. Then she picked up the boy. She adjusted her purse on her shoulder. Then she picked up the stroller. Then, very deliberately, holding up traffic all over Manhattan, she lowered herself and her things down the steps, pausing before stepping down onto the curb. As the bus pulled away, Rosie looked back and saw the woman serenely strap the boy, who was no longer crying, into the stroller, then hand him a banana from her purse, then begin her promenade down the sidewalk. It was a riveting sight. She said to Mary, “Did you see that?”
“What?” replied Mary.
“That woman.”
“God, she was rude,” said Mary.
And from that Rosalind knew that Mary would live the rest of her life in the Midwest, which she did.
Rosalind saw that, if you had enough self-possession, you could reconnoiter, plan ahead, take your time. It went beyond being careful. Being careful was something you did if you were in a rush. If you were self-possessed, you never had to be in a rush.
And so Rosalind had cultivated her self-possession at Smith College, at Mademoiselle magazine, working as an intern, at Condé Nast Traveler, working as an editor, and in Westchester County, as the wife of Alexander P. Maybrick and the stepmother of his three children, who didn’t especially like her but admired her capacity for resisting their father. This was the self-possession Rosalind put into play every time she chose to take Eileen on a commercial airplane with her, whether Eileen was allowed to be there or not. Right now, for example, Rosalind knew that the gate personnel working behind the desk sensed that Eileen was in her carry-on. Her carry-on was trembling, so she pressed it against the desk with her knee and said, “May I just go on the plane, then?”
“We aren’t quite ready to board, ma’am.”
Eileen made a little noise in her throat, a gurgling noise. Rosalind cleared her own throat to cover it, and then carried Eileen over to a seat beside the door, where she sat down and arranged the hem of her fur coat over the top of the carry-on. She never zipped Eileen in entirely—not enough air for her—and so she had to be careful of that little head snaking inquisitively out of the opening, and those eager button eyes catching sight of something.
Al had gone on ahead the night before in the company jet, but Rosalind didn’t care for Fort Lauderdale, and planned only to take in the race and return that evening. It was the seventh race, and so she would, of course, have plenty of time. She always had plenty of time.
Inside the bag, Eileen flopped over, but just then the door opened, and Rosalind stood up smoothly and went down the jetway, soon taking her seat, 2A, beside the window. She slid Eileen in her case under the seat in front of her and placed one of the airline’s own blankets over the opening, only allowing Eileen to look out at her for a moment or two. Then she slipped Eileen a cookie and told her to be quiet and good, that she, Rosalind, was going to take a nap. The best thing about Eileen, Rosalind thought, was that she had a perfect command of the English language, and she listened to what you were saying (though, of course, she didn’t always obey). Between New York and Fort Lauderdale, the two of them had a lovely nap, and woke up refreshed. Only at the very last minute, as they were leaving the plane, did Rosalind reveal to the flight attendants that Eileen had been with them all along.
But Rosalind woke up in a funny mood. It took her twenty minutes in the limo to define the shift, so unfamiliar to her was any sort of shift. But at last she put her finger on it. She wanted something, but she didn’t know what it was. Wanting something, for an accomplished shopper like Rosalind, was certainly not a novel feeling. Marriage to Al meant that there were houses to be filled, parties to be prepared, a wardrobe to be cultivated. The division of labor in their marriage was specific—he earned all day every day and she spent all day every day, and they both knew that she worked as hard as he did and that spending was no more or less a privilege for her than earning was for him. The sexiest thing he had ever said to her was “Rosalind, I have no taste whatsoever.” Desire was, for Rosalind, both a talent and a skill, and she knew her way all around it. Therefore, she expected the object of her desire to filter up from her unknown depths and reveal itself. Something Florida-ish, she thought, maybe as minor as a new swimming suit? Or a catamaran? A cruise? Some cracked crab? It felt like that at first, just a small thing—less than a desire, more like an appetite. She gave Eileen, who was sitting beside her on the seat of the limo, several more cookies.
The limo driver took her to the owners’ entrance at Calder, where, as planned, Al was waiting for her. Al opened her door and handed her out. Eileen jumped out on her own, and leapt at Als knees. Of course she didn’t bark, but barks were rampant within her. That was why she was jumping and spinning. That was why she jumped onto the hood of the limo. Al picked her up. He said, “Hi, Eileen. Hi, honey. Good trip?”
Eileen licked him on the chin, and Rosalind gave him a peck on the other side.
“Fine,” she said. And they walked through the owners’ entrance to the track.
Rosalind never wondered whether she really loved Al, as some of her friends wondered whether they really loved their husbands (of course, some of her friends had given up wondering long ago, and knew that they didn’t love their husbands). Al was not an appealing man. He had no manners and no charm, and life as a successful manufacturer and importer of heavy metal castings from distant, impoverished nation-like locations had allowed Al to let go of many of the sorts of personal habits that make a man’s humanity endurable to his intimate companions. Most of Al’s bodily functions were noisy, for example, and so were most of his mental functions. His children reported that during their youth he had been a remote workaholic drinker who stayed out of the way and didn’t say much. As a result of therapy and AA, he now said everything that came into his mind, and was almost always soliciting someone’s attention. Rosalind knew that others wondered how she could stand the man, but Rosalind could stand him fine, because he was utterly himself. There was no mystery to Al. If he was screaming at you that he wanted sex, God damn it, then that was what he really wanted, and he was screaming because he felt like screaming. He could also take no for an answer. Rosalind had discovered this early on. The first two or three times that he had screamed that he wanted some love and attention from her, she had been intimidated and given in, but the fourth time, maybe a year into their marriage, he had started in, and she had just said, calmly, “No, Al. I don’t feel like it.” And he had looked at her, startled, and said, “Oh, okay.” A good firm “no,” spoken with integrity and self-possession, calmed Al down and reassured him. And a deliberate “yes,” as in “Yes, I would like to have sex with you, Al,” made him happy and playful. You just had to be clear and let go of the rest. Appearances weren’t everything. It would surprise her friends that she would say so, because she had a lot invested in making a good appearance herself, but she didn’t have a thing invested in Al’s making a good appearance. In fact, contrast between them made them an interesting couple.
They found their box. Rosalind set her bag down, and looked out over the track. Some horses were running. She said, “What race is this?”
“Fifth.”
“Do you have any bets?”
“Nah. I put fifty on that number-eight horse, but I can’t say I had any conviction about it. She’s a half-sister to that filly we had last year, the Jade Hunter filly.”
The bunch of horses came around the turn and the thing that usually happened happened—those in the lead dropped back, and a horse that hadn’t looked like much came up and won. Rosalind didn’t especially like racing, because all the races looked the same to her. They weren’t decided by the horses or the jockeys or the trainers, they were decided by the finish line. She wondered if she wanted to place a bet and picked up the Racing Form. Then she put it down. As always, the Racing Form’s attempt to individualize every horse, with statistics on the one hand and remarks on the other, dr
ied up the whole enterprise for her even more. What she really wanted to do was to pay attention to this little appetite she was having, and to follow it out. It gave her a funny feeling of being on the verge of something. She took Eileen in her lap, flipped her over, and began rubbing her belly. Eileen’s little short legs flopped, and she let her head fall back. She was nothing if not solid—one hard muscle from nose to tail.
After the sixth race, which, as far as Rosalind could see, was an exact replay of the fifth race, they got up and went out to the saddling enclosure. The trainer, Dick Winterson, was already there with a couple of grooms and the filly. Al went in with them, but Rosalind, because she was carrying Eileen, decided to stay behind the rail with the bettors. Rosalind saw that Dick greeted Al almost flinchingly and then tried to make up for it by putting his hand on Al’s shoulder and waxing enthusiastic about the filly’s chances in the race. The filly did look good. She was grinding her teeth against the bit, so that the groom had to stand in front of her and hold both reins. While he held her, the groom talked to her in a nice voice—down the row, another groom, with the trainer standing right there, was giving his filly a jerk in the mouth and she was throwing her head in the air. Rosalind didn’t approve of that at all. Now Laurita arched her neck and moved in to the groom, but he stood firmly, only reaching up to scratch her on the forehead. Dick placed her numbercloth on her back, 4, and the assistant trainer placed the saddle on top of it. The filly stood quietly while they tightened the girth and then pulled out her legs, first the left, then the right. After she was adjusted, the groom walked her out in the circle with the other fillies, and then the paddock judge—wasn’t that what they called him?—said, “Gentlemen, lead out your horses!”
Now the jockeys came out of their room like a flock of tropical birds, and the horses moved out in order to the walking ring. Al and Dick were walking along together behind the horse, and Rosalind felt herself momentarily look at them as if she were a stranger, one of the bettors. They looked confident and enviable—relaxed and chatting while a sparkling, beautiful large creature radiated life right in front of them. They looked as though you could ask of them, how could they have so much of all the good things in the world that they could ignore this one? Their very relaxation in the presence of what excited everyone else set them apart and made them attractive. The jockeys were like the horses and the men both. They chatted, like the men, didn’t look at the horses, like the men, but their bodies were alive and full of contained grace and spring, like the horses’ bodies. They acted deferential to the trainers and the owners, but it was just the noblesse oblige that life accorded to money, that was all. The horses paused in their circle, and the trainers threw the jockeys into their saddles.
Back up in the box, Dick sat with them as the horses came out onto the track and began their slow trek around to the starting gate. The race was a mile. The starting gate was down the track to their left, being set in place. Rosalind looked at it for a moment, then turned her head and looked at Dick Winterson, who had been training their horses for some three years now. She was perfectly familiar with Dick. She saw him every month or so. They had spoken cordially time and time again, and she had hardly noticed him. Now he gazed intently at the line of horses moving out with the ponies, and he transformed before her very eyes. He wasn’t paying a bit of attention to her, was thinking some sort of enigmatic horse-trainer’s thoughts, God knew what those could be, but they would be something expert and focused and habitual—that thought gave her a little shiver. His eyes were brown, she noticed, and he didn’t wear glasses, and he had a nice, rather beaky nose. Something she had truly never noticed before was that he had lovely lips, neatly cut but full and soft-looking. At this Rosalind looked away, but then she looked back. When she looked back, and this was the turning point, she knew that he was, underneath everything, sad about something, and she felt her little appetite of the morning suddenly burst through her body so that she had to sit back and pick Eileen up again and pet her. And she sneezed. She sneezed three times. Dick Winterson said, “Do you have a cold?”
“No, not that I know of.”
In Rosalind’s view, those were the first words they ever spoke to one another. This was the moment when, afterwards, it seemed to Rosalind that she had cast her spell. There seemed nothing voluntary about it. It was more as if her wish that she hardly knew yet was a wish went out of her and re-created the world. The first thing that happened was that the horses arrived at the starting gate and loaded in, one by one, with Laurita routinely doing her job, as all Dick’s horses did, because they were well trained and well prepared. Then there was that pause, so short, of equine uniformity, as all eight animals stood in a row. Then the bell clanged and the gate opened. Right then, Rosalind felt, she created the race of a lifetime. Six of the horses got away well, and Laurita might have also, but the number-three horse stumbled as the gate opened, and half fell into her path. The filly did an amazing thing—she launched herself and her jockey over the head and neck of the stumbling horse in a graceful bascule, and took off after the others. Everyone in the stands gasped, for the action was taking place right in front of them. Dick gasped himself, then chuckled in relief, and said to Al, “Those Northern Babys can jump, all right! Little did you know when you sent that mare to him! Ha!” But then he fell silent, they all fell silent, as the filly ran down the field as if they were standing still. She overtook them one by one, her stride seeming to lengthen by the second. And she hadn’t ever been a heroic filly. It was as if the jump over the other horse told her who she was, and now she was glorying in it. Halfway down the backstretch, she was in the lead by a neck. The other filly, a rangy gray, was the favorite, and had already won over half a million dollars to Laurita’s $104,000. And the other filly was a fighter. She matched Laurita stride for stride. Even though she had created this race, Rosalind didn’t herself understand it. It looked to her as though the gray, bigger, longer-legged, more experienced, more mature, more expensive, and better bred, would surely press her natural claims and take the race. They were head and head around the second turn and into the home-stretch. Laurita was on the outside, and the other filly had the rail. They looked pasted together. The rest of the field was nowhere, and the grandstand was roaring, every bettor, no matter whom he or she had bet upon, screaming in joy. Now the jockeys went to their whips. But it was no contest. Laurita found another gear so easily it seemed she hadn’t even looked for it. She simply drew away from the bigger filly, opened up daylight, and crossed the finish line by herself. The jockey had stopped with his whip, had lost his whip. Now he stood up in his stirrups, transfigured, his mouth open, his whip hand in the air. Later, when they published the photo of him in the Thoroughbred Times, you almost couldn’t look at it, since the wonderment of eleven thousand onlookers was concentrated in his visage. Dick said, “I never saw anything like that in my whole life.”
Then they all got up and came together in the winners circle, horse and jockey, trainer, groom, owner, owner’s wife. A few weeks later, they got the win picture. Rosalind taped it up in her bathroom. She looked at it often, pondering the blank look on everyone’s face. Every human face, that is. The filly looked bright and interested, as if she had just awakened from a long, sleepy dream.
Their group left the stands right after that. Even the jockey, who had a mount in the eighth race, left, not because he didn’t want to ride the horse, but because he forgot what he was doing for about four hours.
They followed the filly under the stands, through the walking ring, back to the test barn. The whole way was paved by a sea of smiling faces and shouts of “Great job! Wow! What a filly!” Al said nothing, rendered speechless for the first time in Rosalind’s experience. Dick said nothing, either. And, of course, Rosalind said nothing. She was a quiet sort of person. But her powers were in full flood. Every time she looked at Dick, he looked at her and she didn’t turn her eyes away and neither did he. She fancied that he knew she had made this race for him, to relieve h
is sadness, and now his sadness was relieved. Al never saw them look at each other, either. That was another thing she did. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was hurt Al.
When the filly had been put in her stall, taken care of in every way possible, and then left alone to contemplate her greatness, Al said to Dick, “Dinner? Champagne? I’ll treat everyone. You round ’em up and I’ll get the limo. Rosalind, you pick the restaurant, and call for a private room.” Al was really happy—that registered. In the limo, back at the hotel, he caroled about plans, the way he always did when he was happy. “Rozzy! That filly’s got Breeders’ Cup written all over her. You know how I feel about the Breeders’ Cup. I am a breeder! All the breeders, that’s their test, the Breeders’ Cup. Seven races, what is that, seventy horses, the best Thoroughbreds, of all kinds, colts, fillies, sprinters, turf horses. There’s nothing like it. I always said there’s nothing like it anywhere in the world, didn’t I? You know I did! This filly—” But she smiled and nodded and listened and said, “Maybe so, Al, maybe.” Maybe. That was an interesting word. Maybeness was something rather unusual for her.
