Riding Lessons

by Jane Smiley

  My dad was gone from Monday until late Wednesday night, and when I got up Thursday, he was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking his coffee. He looked like he was in a pretty good mood, which meant that he must have sold some vacuum cleaners, and when Mom came down with Joan Ariel, he took her on his knee and said, “Joanie girl, who do you think is going to win the Kentucky Derby?”

  I finished chewing my piece of toast because a good girl does not talk with her mouth full, then said, “Why are you asking her?”

  “Just joking around. Who do you think is going to win?”

  “I hope it’s Damascus. I love that name.”

  Dad said, “He is a good horse. You never know if their luck will hold, though.”

  I went up the stairs, got dressed, and walked backward to school. It was May now—the clouds floated around in the blue sky, but the fog was out before I woke up. The bay was smooth and pale, and there were three sailboats in the distance and lots of birds whooshing up and down. I had two days of school left in the week. I felt good, even though it seemed like those two days were going to last the rest of my life.

  Of course, if you want bad, it has to be a boy, and as soon as I got to school, I saw that someone had been very very bad. Our school is red and white—mostly brick, with white window frames and steps and doors. It’s pretty, for a school. But sometime after the teachers left the day before, and before anyone got there this morning, someone had climbed the fence and spray-painted faces on the doors and the windows in green and black. Some of the faces were smiling and some were screaming, and beside them, the person had written HA HA HA HA in three places. There were also some exclamation points. The painting was all along the front of the school, where you could see it from the street.

  It took a long time to get everyone into their classrooms, and then a long time for everyone to sit down and be quiet. I don’t know why we were pretty excited, but we were. Miss Cranfield kept slapping her ruler on her desk and calling out, “Silence! Sit down!” Then, after we sat down, she told us about how destroying public property is a crime and also an insult and also ugly. I personally would not have used the word “destroy,” since the school was still standing, but I clasped my hands together and kept my mouth shut.

  After a while, everything settled down, but when we were doing division, the classroom door opened, and the principal, Mr. Gretzky, and another man came in. They went over to Miss Cranfield and whispered, then they stood there frowning while she turned to us and said, “Children, we are going to get back to arithmetic in a few minutes, but for now, I want you all to sit up in your seats, put away your books and papers, and then place your hands on your desks, palms down.” This took a couple of minutes, but then we were dead quiet, and Mr. Gretzky and the other man walked along the rows of desks, looking at our hands. I knew what they were looking for, and it was not bitten nails. My dad painted our house about two years ago, and no matter how many times he washed his hands with turpentine and all of that, he still had paint under his nails and in those edges where your nails go into your fingertips. After looking at all of our hands, Mr. Gretzky and the other man thanked Miss Cranfield and left the room. Why they thanked her, I have no idea. I looked at Jimmy Murphy and his usual spitball-throwing friend, Brad Caswell. They are in fourth grade, so even if they wanted to, they could not paint the front of the school. Even if Mrs. Murphy had no idea what Jimmy was doing half the time, she would have known if he wasn’t home for dinner, or went out after dinner. But I imagined looking out our front window and seeing Jimmy and Brad hiking up the street with paint cans. It was fun to imagine, and it made me smile.

  After school, when Mom came with Joan Ariel in the baby carriage, she clucked and clucked about the damage. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head, but she was smiling a little. The faces did make you smile and even laugh. They looked happy. But Mom and I pretended that it was such a scandal, as Grandma would say, and went on around the block. I said that maybe it was watercolors, and would wash away if it happened to rain (it was a little cloudy), and Mom said that they don’t put watercolors in spray cans, and Joan Ariel meeped and meeped as if she was very happy, and then we had fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, and so that day passed much more quickly than the days before.

  Friday morning was back to normal, and I was back to being good good good. In our reading group, we got to vote on the last book of the year, and we voted for Black Beauty, and Miss Cranfield said that it would be sad, but actually, all the books we read were pretty sad, but not as sad as, say, “Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop.” We got some free time before lunch, which we always got on Friday, and I started reading Black Beauty, and I discovered that it is not only about a horse, but about a horse who talks.

  After lunch, it went around that the kids who did the painting were in seventh grade—at the junior high—and only one of them, Ralphie Short, who really was short, had gone to our school. Last year, he somehow put a big wad of gum on the piano bench on the stage in the auditorium (which is also the lunchroom), and when Miss Harrison, who is the music teacher, stood up after playing “America the Beautiful” so that we could sing along, her skirt stuck to the bench and ripped. When I told my dad about this, he said that when he was a boy, if anyone did something like that, they would be whipped, but Ralphie just had to pay for the skirt, and I guess he did not learn his lesson. He and the other two boys were going to spend the weekend with some painters scrubbing down the doors and the windows. I knew I could walk up the street and watch them, and I thought maybe I would.

  And so the week passed, and here I was, on Friday night, lying in my bed in the dark, with the window open, smelling some nice things from the garden, including some roses and some jasmine and some cut grass. My door was partly open, and I could hear Mom talking to Joan Ariel in her room across the hall, and also that Dad had the TV on downstairs. The night sky at the top of my window, above the trees, was clear, and I could see some stars, a few bright ones, but only the brightest, because the moon was up there, too. I took some deep breaths and closed my eyes just a little, and then Ned walked over and said, “Hello.”

  I said, “Hello.”

  Ned said, “Are you coming tomorrow?”

  “Yes, but maybe for the last time, because Blue is going back to the stables on Monday.”

  “He doesn’t like it there.”

  “Why not?” I thought he was going to say something about the stalls or the turnout, but he said, “It’s cold. They clipped him all over, and then they put a blanket on him, so he is always cold or hot, never just right.”

  “Did you ever wear a blanket?”

  “At the racetrack, there are all kinds of blankets, but they are mostly to keep you clean. I prefer to keep clean by rolling in the grass.”

  “Who doesn’t?” shouted Gee Whiz.

  “He is always butting in,” said Ned. “Someone kicked him right on the haunch.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Blue.”

  I stuck this in my brain very carefully so that I would be sure to ask Abby if this was true. “Is he hurt?”

  “He limped around for a day, but he was just showing off. Today he was galloping all over and bucking and kicking up, but he did stay away from Blue.”

  I said, “So even an old horse can learn a lesson?”

  “Horses learn lessons all the time.”

  “I saw Ben learn some lessons the other day.”

  “He has to do it to know how to do it. He doesn’t see very well.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you watch him. When he isn’t eating, he is looking up the hill or over at the mares or toward the house. He sees all of those things really well, but when I say, ‘Oh, do you see that snake?’ or ‘Do you see that vulture?’ he never knows what I’m talking about. He had to go over those poles with his body in order to figure it out, but h
e does it a few times and then he understands it all completely.”

  “He’s farsighted.”

  “Huh,” said Ned. “I will tell him.”

  “My dad is farsighted. He wears glasses.” The thought of Ben wearing glasses made me laugh. I barked one laugh, then slid under the covers and put the corner of the pillow in my mouth so that Mom wouldn’t hear me and come in and tell me it was ten-forty-five or something.

  Ned was still there. I said, “You were really good.”

  “It was easy. Gee Whiz says that if you can gallop, you can jump. Ben says that, too, but you have to feel the jump.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I say no big deal, but it is fun. I saw there were bigger jumps in there.”

  I said, “Someday.”

  And then I went to sleep, just like falling into a hole. I didn’t even have a dream, and then I woke up at dawn because there was a bee buzzing around my head from the open window. The first thing I thought was that it was Saturday and this was maybe the last time I was going to see Ned, because in addition to the fact that Blue was going back to the stables, Dad and Mom were both getting a little annoyed with how far it was to Abby’s ranch. It was pretty clear that my days of being spoiled were numbered, as Grandpa would say. I got up and made my bed, because even though being good is boring, you can see wherever you look that doing everything you are told to do before you are told to do it leads to at least a little more spoiling, and I needed as much as I could get.

  It should’ve been a sunny day at the ranch and a gloomy day at our house, but for once, things were reversed. Dad kept talking about this while we drove, as if the weather were the most amazing thing there is. He kept saying, “I knew you should have brought a sweater. Around here, you never know what you’re going to find. And you can’t believe the forecasters, either. They are just talking through their hats.”

  Not only was it chilly, it was windy. Every time we passed some trees, I could see them bending over a little bit and their leaves shaking. Things skittered across the road in front of us. This, of course, led Dad to talk about the tornadoes back east. He had never been in one, but he had a cousin in St. Louis, and a tornado went down the street that his street turned onto, right down it like a railroad train, but the curtains didn’t even ruffle at the cousin’s house. It was nighttime, he couldn’t see anything, and he couldn’t figure out what that noise was. Dad said that he wouldn’t mind seeing a tornado someday, at least from a distance. There were people in Texas who chased tornadoes in their cars, could I imagine that?

  I said, “No,” because in fact I had never even seen a picture of a tornado, and so I didn’t know what in the world he was talking about.

  He dropped me outside of the gate and went into town to have the oil in the car changed.

  Abby wasn’t wearing a sweater, but she did have her sleeves down, and she had her hard hat on to keep her hair out of her face. She wasn’t paying much attention to me, and was talking too fast, and so when we were tacking up, I said, “Is something bad happening?”

  “No.”

  “You were happier last week.”

  “I was happy last week, that’s true.”

  “Did something happen?”

  “Not yet.”

  Now I stopped right where I was standing and put my hands on my hips and gave Abby a look, and she laughed out loud and said, “You are way too short for that, but it is funny. Anyway, my Jack is running in his first race today.”

  “The Kentucky Derby?”

  “No! My heavens!” She laughed again. “Just a maiden handicap, the second race of the day, when exactly no one is there to watch. They were going to run him next week, but decided he was ready, so they entered him.”

  “When is post time?”

  “What do you know about post time?”

  “Nothing, but my dad said that post time for the Derby in Kentucky is five-twenty, which is two-twenty here, and he wants to be sure to watch it.”

  She handed me the lead rope, and we walked toward the pasture. The trees were rattling so hard you could hear the branches creak, and the hay that the horses hadn’t yet eaten was ruffling in the grass. I straightened my shoulders and started taking bigger steps, as if I didn’t care a thing about the weather.

  Abby said, “He’s the favorite.”

  I knew what that meant. I said, “Did you bet on him?”

  “We don’t bet. My dad says having horses is a big enough bet. You don’t have to waste your money by giving it to the bookies.”

  “What are bookies?”

  “They’re the people who take the bets. I guess they keep some of the money. My dad says they keep a lot of the money.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. So I said, “Well, I hope he wins,” and Ned said, “I doubt it.”

  Ned was on the other side of the fence, and he was looking at me.

  I said, “Did your Jack and Ned ever know each other?”

  “Not here. I don’t think at the track, because Ned came here before Jack left the training farm.”

  I said to Ned, “Be nice.”

  He flicked his ears.

  We opened the gate. I shouted, “Blue, Blue, where are you?” He lifted his head, whinnied, and turned toward us, but Gee Whiz, who was pretty far behind him, came running. He was running fast, too. Another thing to make me scared. Abby said, “Stand absolutely still. He will stop.”

  And he did, a sliding halt to right in front of Abby. She patted him and gave him a sugar cube. She said, “He likes to do that.”

  Blue, of course, was much more considerate. He ambled over, took a few strokes along the neck, and pretended that he didn’t know I had treats, that he was just glad to see me. Abby said, “He’s going back to the stables on Monday, so we’ll have the lesson there next week.”

  We snapped on the lead ropes and walked the horses out of the pasture. I asked my question: “Did Gee Whiz maybe get kicked this week?”

  She glanced at me, then said, “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  I didn’t answer. Blue, as usual, said nothing.

  Blue and Gee Whiz were grown-up horses, and they were not acting silly or afraid, but because of the wind, they were picking up their feet, pricking their ears, snorting a little bit, looking around. They were, in fact, acting the way horses do out at the stables. Jane told me once that horses who come from places like LA tend to get extra excited when they come to the big show at the stables, and their trainers have to be prepared. It crossed my mind to wonder if Abby was prepared.

  That had never crossed my mind before.

  I said, “Where’s your dad and your mom? I never see them.”

  “Dad is doing something over at the Jordan Ranch, maybe some branding. Mom went into town.”

  “How will you find out about the race?”

  “The trainer’s going to call me.”

  “Too bad you can’t watch it on TV.”

  “We don’t have a TV. But I wouldn’t want to watch it anyway.”

  I didn’t ask why.

  We brushed the horses down, tacked them up, and led them to the mounting block. Abby waited for me to get on, but she didn’t hold Blue’s reins—I’m too old for that. I climbed the mounting block and pulled down the stirrup. The very next thing that happened was that I fell right off the mounting block on my butt. I sat there for a moment or two. Blue was looking down at me. And guess what? I started to cry. Maybe I haven’t cried since I was a baby, because I hate to cry. Abby came over and held out her hand. She said, “Are you okay?”

  But I pushed her hand away and got to my feet, then climbed the mounting block again. This is how good Blue is—he never moved.

  Abby mounted, and we walked toward the arena. The wind was still blowing, and the trees were still rattling and creaking
, and the clouds were still scudding through the sky, and the birds were still skating through the same sky. The wind dried the tears on my cheeks—I could feel them there—but here is the funny thing. I was not scared anymore; I was too mad at myself for being such a dunce. I gave Blue a little kick, both sides, both heels, and made him walk ahead of Gee Whiz. I never looked back, and Abby followed me into the arena. It was me that closed the gate.

  Abby didn’t have to say anything. I rode Blue at the walk, trot, and canter in circles and serpentines and U-turns. We halted and did transitions, and backed up and went forward, and even did a turn on the forehand in each direction. Why would she have to tell me what to do? She’d told me what to do so many times that I knew what to do. It was just like school. For a few weeks, I’d been very very good, but Miss Cranfield repeats herself and repeats herself, and it is not my fault that Jimmy Murphy and Todd and all the others aren’t listening. It’s also not my business that Melanie doesn’t mind listening to the same thing over and over, but between you and me, why do I have to be bored most of the time? Why can’t I finish my jobs and then do what I want? I imagined myself saying this to Miss Cranfield on Monday. I could feel myself scowling.

  I have to admit that I asked more of Blue than I usually do. Usually, I let him go along mostly as he wants to, and he’s always agreeable, if a little slow. Once in a while, I’ve carried a crop, and sometimes I’ve waved it, but I never hit him with it. Today, I wasn’t carrying a crop, so I gave him little presses with my legs and little kicks with my heels, and then because I did that, I had to hold the reins a little more firmly. His neck arched some and I could feel his back sort of lift underneath me, and it was pretty clear we were going faster, though he didn’t seem to be going faster. Abby sat for a minute in the middle of the arena, watching us, then called out, “Nice stride!” This meant that his steps were bigger. I stopped scowling. We went like this around the arena, then across the diagonal, then around the arena in the other direction, then across the diagonal again. When we came down to a halt, Abby said, “I never realized that Blue could be a dressage horse.”