Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  The average life span of a horse is twenty-five to thirty-three years. Their prime ages for racing are between seven and ten, eleven to seventeen for other disciplines, like show jumping and eventing. An eighteen-year-old dressage horse is an elder statesman. Horses age much like humans; their hair becomes flecked with gray, their faces hollow. Concavities appear above their eyes, rather than at their cheeks. Their joints ache, they grow stiff. When they sleep, their lips hang slack.

  At thirty-five, I am at the upper end of a horse’s life span—decidedly a woman, no longer a girl. Finally mature enough to be in on, or at least on the outside of, the horse girl joke. There wasn’t a precise moment when I stopped being a girl and became a woman, but, while I haven’t been a girl a long time, there were many years when I was both. Nur Nasreen Ibrahim calls the transition between girlhood and womanhood “small blasts of understanding.” Maggie Shipstead writes of a gradual epiphany. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich imagines the girl they once were as an “artifact of history.”

  Most of the contributors to this collection stopped riding at some point, as I did, usually in their teenage years. For many in adulthood, riding indeed becomes a series of personal artifacts, a closed photo album, a box of ribbons, boots that no longer fit, a leather halter drying out. Some started riding again in their twenties, thirties, or forties, after marriages and divorces, trips around the world, bouts of depression, career changes, and children. They write about how growing up changed them, of what was lost: courage, or maybe recklessness, uncomplicated relationships with horses that are founded in innocence, the joy that comes from doing something just because you feel like it, the privilege of not asking questions.

  In my riding heyday, my horse Dave and I were the same age. My parents bought him when I was sixteen, when I was rising to the highest ranks I would ever achieve in equestrian competition, and he, unbeknownst to me, had just passed his. That we were the same age felt at once cosmically significant but also like a bit of novel trivia. At sixteen, I was checking off milestones, doing all the things teenagers do to grow up, but I was still a young rider. At the same age, Dave was an experienced competitor, had placed in the top five at high-level Three-Day Events. I was his second or third or maybe fourth owner; he had already brought one of the older girls at the barn up through the levels. Predictably, she sold him to me when she went off to college.

  If Dave were still alive today, he’d be elderly. I kept tabs on him for a while, watching on Facebook as he taught girls even younger than I was how to ride, carrying them over fences at their first competitions. To Dave, horse girls were a renewable resource. We grow up, and we quit, we leave our horses behind, but the horses don’t care. Dave went from being my horse to being a lesson horse, shared by many but belonging to no one.

  Any rider who doesn’t quit, who stays in it for their lifetime, will outlive their horse. Adrienne Celt writes about worrying about the eventual death of her horse on the day she bought it; a day that should have been happy but was instead spent anticipating future grief. Jane Smiley, who returned to riding as an adult and spent years breeding racehorses, has seen horses through their entire lives, from foalhood to pasture. A few years ago, when I heard that Dave had died, I cried as I might have done if it had happened when I was young, if he had died when I still knew him. Though I’d long since grown up and moved on, though it’d been years since I’d last felt the weight of one of his hooves in my palm, since I’d pressed my forehead into the base of his neck, since I’d watched him gleefully cake his freshly bathed coat in mud. Losing him made me a girl again.

  When I returned to riding as an adult I no longer had the run of the place. The girls whose voices echoed down the concrete aisle, who called to one another between stalls, were not my friends, or my peers. There wasn’t a horse, which I had seen yesterday and would see again tomorrow, waiting for me in the field. Instead there was just my name misspelled on the lesson board, next to the name of a horse I would ride for the first, but maybe not the last, time.

  When does a girl become a woman? Is it when she turns eighteen and becomes a legal adult? Is it when she loses her virginity, or when she first experiences a loss that forces maturity, or a trauma that shatters her naive sense of invincibility? Is it when she gets her first job, or falls in love, or gets married, or has children? Is it when she understands she was never a girl to begin with, and she instead becomes he, or they? When does a horse girl get to become a horsewoman, a horse person?

  Not all horse girls must leave horses behind in order to grow up. There’s nothing about riding that is innately infantilizing, or immature, or feminine. Because it can be understood in human years, perhaps a horse’s life span also describes the life span of girlhood, from its first inklings to its last gasp. We cling to the child within us—by reliving our past glory, by taking our hobbies seriously, by identifying with old insecurities—and we fight it, by putting ourselves at risk, by taking on more than we can handle, by denying our simple passions. But all that thrashing does nothing to forestall the natural way of things. A horse lives three decades, from rambunctious colt to seasoned athlete to lesson horse. The older the horse, the younger, or more inexperienced, the rider.

  By returning to a lesson horse, I was humbled, forced to admit that I’d given up my place, that I still had a lot to learn. I was also compelled to admit that the divisions between the two sides of myself, which I had previously considered irreconcilable, were of my own invention. As riders, as humans, we must take the lessons from horses that we can. If I could be an adult and ride a lesson horse, if I could be experienced and still be a beginner, maybe it was possible to love horses, to express that love in all its contradictions and nuance, and enjoy the ride.

  I Don’t Love Horses

  T Kira Madden

  Sonora Webster, or Gabrielle Anwar playing the real-life Sonora Webster Carver in the Disney movie Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, is so hot. That’s how it feels when I’m a kid. I’m a kid in a room with a TV, right up close to the screen, and kid me doesn’t know she’s gay yet. She loves Sonora especially when she scissors off her own hair, and even more when Sonora jumps on her horse, Lightning, in a field, bareback, no tack. No fear. She falls, of course. She doesn’t get good until later in the movie.

  When I am twenty-nine years old, I, too, mount a horse in my girlfriend’s backyard. That horse—Hank—did not look unlike Lightning. No tack, a few drinks in me. He looked so kind, so ready for it. Of course, I fall. Sometimes to build a connection is to build a cliché. Hank didn’t throw me, it was a tree. There were other horses in that backyard paddock, and those horses chased Hank into the woods. I had no reins; a tree branch caught me in the head; wipeout. But the details don’t matter, I don’t matter. I am just another horse accident.

  Riding accident, I told people after, when they asked about my neck brace.

  They heard writing accident. A neighbor asked how I split my head on a desk.

  No, I ride.

  And then, the usual: But what is riding really / I mean it’s not actually a sport not like a football sport / I used to ride as a kid / I rode once no I don’t remember English or Western / Don’t you just kind of hold on and steer / Doesn’t the horse do all the work?

  The fall was my fault. I was drunk, remember. It was all very boring, but now it’s a story. There was something so Sonora about it—something Gabrielle Anwar playing Sonora in a Disney movie about it—that makes the whole crash, now, feel mighty, feel Wild Girl. I’ve tried to write about horses so many times. But the thing about a horse is, it’s never about the horse.

  Everyone has a horse story.

  Horse people know this.

  The moment you announce yourself, bring your old show days or horse anecdote or writing accident into a room, you’ll get The Horse Story. Someone was thrown by a Bad Horse, once. They never got on again. Another horse tore across a field—He was crazy! Like a mustang!—but the storyteller held on heroically. Another woman, one you meet at a weddin
g, says she used to groom horses at summer camp and still misses those “big, fluffy paws” they had. That horse trusted her, she said. Intuition—the pawed horse could feel her goodness.

  Did you bleed the first time? she asks. Like, down there?

  Horse as pawed, intuitive being becomes the Hymen-Breaking Horse.

  Then comes another story, from someone else.

  Well, that sounds special, is how it goes.

  Here’s something horse people do: there is always The Age at which you first got on, gripped a saddle horn or a mane. By the time I could walk, or, Ever since my first pony ride. My mom tells it that I was two, which is about standard as far as The Age goes. A trail ride in North Carolina—the smile on my face—everybody knew. But I don’t remember joy as much as I remember balance, twitching ears, the boniness of withers, the power of steering. How, with those reins in my hands, I was not being led by a stroller, a tug at the arm, the clutch of an adult.

  I dreamed as a child of screwing up that steering, all that responsibility, jerking my reins more to one side than the other; I couldn’t control those yanks. A bent horse neck, never centered. Then, a fall right over the horse’s body. I lived in a storm of a household and developed early obsessive-compulsive disorder, ritualizing symmetry.

  Horses will help, everybody said.

  Everyone knows horses are therapy.

  I jerked and jerked in those dreams. Every fall more brutal. Trampled.

  I keep soft hands these days. Barely touch the reins. One of my favorite exercises, still, is arms out, no steering. It was one of the first things my wife ever noticed about me. But that was later, thirteen years after never again, when I finally got back on.

  Horses, they’re so goddamn American. A man is made sexy in proximity to his horse, his seat atop a beating-hearted animal. Wealth, status, that shining coat of power, a beast “broken” by its master. Broken. Saddle broke. To break green. Green broke. Those are the terms for a horse tamed, bettered, accepting this new weight on its back.

  I turn on the television. A bay, lunged by a small, pigtailed brat. The brat knows what she’s doing, shows the horse who’s boss in this relationship. The horse whinnies to no one, just to announce its horseness. Of course it does. There’s always the announcement, the stock sound.

  There is the white horse. The black stallion. The biblical horse and the horses of war. The girl who learns to love again because Horse! and the gruff man who softens, heals, in the presence of all that Horse Majesty. There’s the underdog horse and the horse who brings the family together in unexpected ways; a child, free with gladness, atop their first rocking horse. There’s the Horse to the Rescue and the horse who knows exactly which way to go. The horse that falls off the cliff; horses, our saviors, collapsed in battle. What they don’t tell you about are the trip wires that made the shots.

  Recently, someone brings up National Velvet, the horse.

  The horse wasn’t Velvet, I say. Elizabeth Taylor was.

  The horse was Pie.

  I don’t love horses. But of course I do. I did as a child, and as a teenager, and as an adult, and especially now. Sometimes it feels as if I was meant to love them, and I am possessive in that love. When I am in the presence of the basic Horse Story, a rage thickens in me. You don’t deserve that story, I think. You don’t even know. But, of course, my love, too, is the problem. How many times were my horses there to deliver me to a dream, a goal, a peace. Everybody knew. I’m a teacher these days, and I tell students often: if there’s a problem, write into the problem.

  I was a hunter jumper first. Then, one summer barrel racing. Then, a few years training to be a jockey. There were so many outfits, personas. So many shows. Numbers strapped to my back, embroidered saddle pads, custom chaps, helmet silks—new equipment for every new discipline. I still wear the gold nameplate leather bracelet with the name of my first pony, Cloud 9, stamped in. He’s a symbol now, too. He saved my life, I tell people. I could tell the weather by the temperature of his nose, I say. My first best friend, I wrote in the acknowledgments of my first book. We never made it big. There was no hero’s journey. My parents gave him away, and I never asked after him, simply because I grew up, and I took things for granted (that pigtailed brat), and I think I was afraid of where he went because it meant he was no longer mine.

  I reunited with him when I was twenty-five and he was thirty-two, for one day, and I like to think he remembered me, though this, too, could be romantic thinking. He died soon after. I waited for his horseshoes in the mail, but they never came.

  Nicky was his barn name. A Welsh pony who was always hungry, with the markings of a heart on his rump. He was so stubborn and so good. He knew how to give hugs by curling his neck around you. He loved apple pie and once he threw me so he could run to the show grounds hot dog stand.

  I want to write about the horses, not just the rider. I want to find where the two break.

  Gabrielle Anwar playing Sonora Webster strokes her horse Lightning in Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken almost erotically. She’s lost her sight by this part of the movie, by this point in her life—detached retinas from an open-eyed dive—so she’s feeling around, getting a grip of it all, as music thumps in the background of the scene, a storm brewing—cue lightning flash!

  Lightning, a gelding in the movie, will deliver Sonora to her destination of morality, growth, glory, a standing ovation. Good boy.

  What the Disney movie leaves out is how the real-life Lightning, a mare, was later forced to dive into the Pacific Ocean, instead of a water tank, for a California diving show. Confused by the currents, the pier, the rough breakers, the horse swam out into the open sea. Kept swimming until no one could reach her. Until her drowned body was towed back to shore by a single rope.

  Sonora wasn’t even there.

  Luhi ‘u‘a i ka ‘ai a ka lio is a Hawaiian proverb translated by Mary Kawena Pukui as “wasted time and labor getting food for the horse.” The rough breakdown of its meaning goes like this: if a person works hard, wins big, and brings in money and rewards to share with friends, those friends will use it up, take it all, and then move on to the next person who might be so generous, a person who has more to give. I’ve read this proverb many times, at first thinking the horse was a stand-in for the greedy friends, endlessly fed. Then I read the reversal: the horse as the subject, the one who gives and brings it all, sacrifices it all. And we take take take take, of course we do. But maybe the horse is not the hard worker, or the friend. Maybe the horse is simply the horse, the prop, the superfluous detail used to make the point.

  I had another horse. Bidster, my old chestnut Thoroughbred, and he’s still alive. I was there when he was born, when I was around seven years old, but my memory of that night is spotty. Slimed webs of membrane, all legs, a damp barn lit by orange light. I called him Glitter Man when he was born like that—wet and glowing for the world—which is still his show name. He felt like mine.

  Bidster belonged to a man named Frank, a battle-worn jockey who’d been rail pinned and trampled on the track, leaving him with a limp. I worked for Frank and his wife in the summers, helping them tack up for trail rides, mucking stalls. When Bidster was born, Frank said we were the winning ticket. His way back to the tracks. So we broke him together. We found open fields and construction sites in Seven Devils, North Carolina—the dead maw of open cranes, towers of bricks—land, I’d learn later, that did not belong to me. Cherokee land. Burial land. Which, back then, to kid me, carried a spooky importance. When I think about breaking a racehorse, tightening the girth, smacking that crop, on land that felt so much like ours, there is only shame there. The me of now would tell kid me this: there are always more important stories beneath your stories. Nothing is yours.

  I wore a helmet with green-and-white jockey silks over it, and Frank threw dirt from behind us: I want your hands at his ears, that’s how far forward. It is true that we were good together.

  Frank moved to Florida and into our house so we could train ev
ery day. We watched what felt like every race ever raced on my father’s big-screen TV. We went to Gulfstream. We studied stats, and I learned how to read them. Frank and his newspaper hands, blackened at the fingertips. I was good, he said. Everybody said it.

  Then, my body bulged. Puberty. Et cetera. You know this story.

  When we failed as a racing pair, Frank and I took Bid to a show in Yadkinville, North Carolina. This time, a Jumper division. He spooked; he refused; he hated crowds; we didn’t clear a single fence; my posture curled like burning wood; we were pinned dead last. I never showed again.

  Glitter Man is a “pony horse” now, meaning he escorts the star jockeys and mounts to the gates at Belmont. I went to see him not long ago and, you know, I’d like to think he remembered me.

  Just last month, Frank called to tell me Bid’s owner was looking to give him away.

  Doesn’t the horse do all the work?

  Gabrielle’s Sonora wears a paper bag over her head after that haircut, after her aunt (in real life, her mother) suggests she ought to be ashamed of her ugliness. Sonora leaves the house anyways, stomps the paper bag into the ground. I’ve never worn a bag over my head, although, on several occasions, I have wanted to. Real Sonora let her boss, Doc Carver, tell her what to do with her hair and how to dress for the rest of her life, even after he died. To be a diving girl, you must play the role.