Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  In the final movie dive, Gabrielle Anwar’s Sonora Webster reaches her hands out for Lightning and listens to every amplified stomp of those hooves up the ramp; the audience gets that slow-motion listening, too. Gabrielle’s Sonora has been practicing for this moment; she’s trained and ready; we are all in on it. We all get the applause.

  Real Sonora always wore a helmet after her accident; it was custom-made with a special shield to protect her eyes, just in case any future medical advancements could restore her vision. Real Sonora did not practice. Her first go at diving without sight happened because the other diving girl canceled. She pulled on her special helmet and waited at the top of the ramp, only to realize the helmet made it impossible for her to hear. There was no stomping, no dramatic countdown. It was more amazing than that, more amazing than the movie. She reached her hands out and just, quite simply, knew.

  When the fabled, stand-in, whinnying horse needs more impact, horses are anthropomorphized. The high-pitched voice-over in Black Beauty. Mister Ed, with a thread in his mouth to cue the movements of his talking.

  Beauty, played by Docs Keepin Time in the 1994 film, is mercilessly abused, disfigured, sold, repeatedly forgotten. The voice-over narrates, tells us just how bad it is. In the Entertainment Weekly review of Black Beauty, Lisa Schwarzbaum writes, “Girls will inevitably love all this. Boys will torment those girls by saying ‘oats, oats, oats!’ in twitty voices that make their sisters cry.”

  There were two Mister Eds. One: the acting horse, a gelding named Bamboo Harvester. Another palomino named Punkin was used only for photographs and press. The former horse was, according to some accounts, accidentally murdered by “inadvertent tranquilizer.” The horses became interchangeable, one replaced the other, and still there is only a single grave marker, shared by them both. The granite tombstone does not feature either horse’s name; it reads, simply, “Mister Ed.”

  When Al Carver, the real Sonora Webster’s husband, was questioned by the S.P.C.A., pausing their diving act, Al loaded one of their horses onto the bed of a truck with a sign that read I’m being taken to jail for jumping in a tank of water! He drove that truck all over town. He then brought Lightning to the courthouse and made the judge walk outside, take a look at this poor, beautiful girl, useless without her job, and just like that, they were back in business. Doesn’t the horse do all the work?

  There is thrill in trying to re-create history, and I am troubled when my body halts that re-creation. I try to fit into the old clothes—of course not. I order the same blue ProStretch tool to stretch my calves by rocking, readying myself for the saddle. The tool worked then, but nothing now. Overdeveloped hamstrings, no give, taut mess of muscles. Still, the blue of it in the corner of my room offers a comfort.

  My velvet helmet, too, was laughed down when I showed up to ride in it thirteen years after I quit. Not up to snuff, that thin pathetic shell, phased out years ago by new safety standards. My once-gleaming show helmet, the blackest of black, had marooned in the sun. It sits on a bookshelf now. Funny. Decorative.

  The question comes up sometimes, still. Why did you stop? But that answer is simple. I’m more interested in why I started again.

  My wife says I’m one of the only riders she knows who still rides with joy. By that, I think she means I’m not as burdened by what it all means—the barns, the aspiring show girls applying glue to the insides of their boots, the privileged elitism, the horse doping, the abusers, all the horses who are “given away,” disappeared. The undocumented grooms—braiding those manes, polishing leather, offering a leg up to the next pigtailed brat—who, after horse show sweeps, also disappear. I got out of the industry early enough, perhaps, to ride past that.

  I am still riding for the horse of it.

  Or, I am trying to.

  Sonora, I think, tried, too. “The drop from the tower down to the tank is a pleasure totally lacking in psychological or philosophical meaning. It’s the sheer exhilaration of being entirely free of the earth as well as everything human; to me no other physical sensation can be so acute, so deeply intoxicating,” she wrote.

  Free of the earth.

  But for whom?

  No, I’ve always said, of course the horse doesn’t do all the work. The rider does plenty. It’s the rider memorizing the course, the surroundings, the footing; the rider directing; the rider working her body just as hard to apply pressure and then to release; the rider is counting, the rider is steering; the rider has shined her boots, she’s been practicing, she knows enough to know when Lightning is right there without seeing or hearing. The rider has done so much to win.

  Hank has died by now. Nicky has died by now. They are both buried in backyards, where other horses roam. I tell Frank I’ll take Bidster in, my old retiree, because I’d rather pay his medical bills than have him disappear to who knows where. My other ponies disappeared to who knows where; I never asked. I’d left those ponies out of the story.

  I still have the halter, bright pink with puffy paint, of my miniature horse named Tulip. The puffy paint is that of my own, shaky child hand. Tulip, it says, with drawings of not-Tulip flowers. Decorative now, too. Hanging in the guest bedroom, with my spurs, just for show.

  I have one photograph of my bay pony, who my mother and I saved at auction for $200. She was always sick and couldn’t quite recover, and the photograph shows it—swollen eyes, a wet nose, emaciated. I broke her, but didn’t have her long. Her name was not Pie. I named her Velvet.

  Maybe I ride with joy because I’m able to imitate some of my own Horse Stories, and all the others out there. Because I’m Sonora and I’m Velvet. Because I’m still me, the kid, who once loved horses before I swore I didn’t and then I did again. Who once thought an animal could be broken, owned, mine. Now I want so badly not to love them, to step out of the problem. If I’m not the brat in pigtails perhaps I could be a Noble Horsewoman, reclaiming something by dropping the reins, letting go.

  When I sold my first book, I saved a small portion of the advance money to buy myself a saddle. I returned to the HITS show grounds to pick one out; it was used and soft, my first adult saddle. Second stop: I walked to the trailer selling gold-plated horse ID bracelets and I gave them Nicky’s show name, Cloud 9, so I could wear a replica of the one I once wore for him. My first best friend. It looked exactly the same as my old bracelet, though this one was shiny and stiff, no mold or softness or scratches to the plate.

  Soon after, I visited my mother’s house in Long Island and woke up in the morning to see my bracelet aged overnight. Delusional thinking, I thought. Impossible.

  But my mother had saved my old bracelet, had it out on my nightstand all along, though I’d never noticed it. Decorative.

  I’d swapped them by accident—at some point, I did. Fastened the old bracelet on without even knowing.

  I’m not sure which one I wear now.

  My wife was a show kid and a groom and a champion and a professional trainer. Yes, I met her through horses; when I came back to them, she was my trainer. She’s all movie-version Sonora. All guts. But there is nothing she hates more than the horse show industry.

  When my father died, she wrapped my legs in polos because I didn’t own boots or half chaps anymore, gave me a leg up on Hank. We rode through the mountains of upstate New York with no numbers strapped to our backs. We just rode. Everyone knows horses are therapy.

  It was. They are. Sometimes, even for those who don’t deserve it, they are.

  Sonora did not attribute her peerless diving abilities to other senses strengthening. She attributed her skills to an obsessive attention to detail, to memory. She knew when her husband Al was boiling potatoes because the big pan carried “a deeper voice than the others.” She knew the “dull metallic” of the potato masher hitting counter. She even knew when someone was checking the time because of the rustle of a shirt sleeve, the ticking of a clock drawing nearer, then more muffled in the pocket.

  “All a person had to say was ‘red,’” Sonora wro
te, “and immediately the color flashed across my mind; like Mother’s cannas along the backyard fence; red like the ribbons we tied on Christmas packages; red like the dress I bought when I was sixteen which was supposed to make me wicked.

  “All description is based on comparisons,” she continued, “and I had the basis for comparisons.”

  Real Sonora kept diving those horses with no vision for eleven years, but couldn’t eat soup. That was what broke her wild heart, what surprised her most. She couldn’t level a soup spoon blind. It was simple like that.

  I quit riding horses at thirteen, after an accident. I’d stopped showing and my horses and ponies were sold, gone, but my school had a riding program, so I exercised other rich peoples’ horses for them.

  One day, after school, I was asked to work a horse named Sprout. The owner told me Sprout had behavioral problems, and I mounted as I always did. I jumped one course and tried for another. Sprout was bad; Sprout fell and I fell and the jump fell, too, and he dragged me by a stirrup; he crushed my ribs in the fall, he bucked like a maniac, but these sentences are in the wrong order; they carry the wrong active subject. He didn’t do anything I didn’t direct him to do. Sprout was lame, injured; I rode him anyway. He had the wrong bit. I pushed him at the fences. I kicked and spurred and smacked with my crop. I jerked the reins all wrong, and too soon.

  Aia ke ola I ka waha; aia ka make i ka waha is another Pukui Hawaiian proverb. It means, “Life is in the mouth; death is in the mouth.”

  And another: Aia ke ola i ka ihu o ka lio, or, “One’s life is where the horse’s nose points.”

  There is one video I found on the internet of Real Sonora and her high-diving horses. Someone has edited the footage so Neil Sedaka sings the ballad “You” over the flickering tape, and it’s not one graceful motion the way it looks in the movie. Lightning actually stops at the top of the pier, drags her front legs over the edge in painful slow motion. I cannot hear the audience cheer but I know they are cheering, and Lightning resists, looking stunningly terrified. “You showed me how to live again,” sings Sedaka. “You gave me strength when I was falling.” Sonora in her helmet pushes forward until Lightning not exactly dives, but slides off the ledge and into that pool, neck twisted, hooves digging at air.

  Yes, is the true answer. The only answer I can find. The horse does all the work.

  Horse Girl: An Inquiry

  Carmen Maria Machado

  As if this big

  dangerous animal is also a part of me,

  that somewhere inside the delicate

  skin of my body, there pumps

  an 8-pound female horse heart,

  giant with power, heavy with blood.

  —“HOW TO TRIUMPH LIKE A GIRL,” ADA LIMÓN

  I told him I never bit anything but grass, hay, and corn, and could not think what pleasure Ginger found in it.

  “Well, I don’t think she does find pleasure,” said Merrylegs; “it is just a bad habit. She says no one was ever kind to her, and why should she not bite?”

  —BLACK BEAUTY, ANNA SEWELL

  WHAT I WANTED

  I wanted, more than anything else, to be a horse girl. I wanted to ride horses, to own a horse, to go to a stable after school, to be known as a girl who went to the stable after school. I wanted to outrun a fire or a flood or a bad guy on a horse; I wanted to leap on a horse in order to gallop somewhere to warn people about impending danger. I wanted to groom a horse, to keep her clean and safe and well exercised. I wanted my horse to be distinctly colored, sired under mysterious and auspicious circumstances, birthed under a peculiar star. I wanted to name her, to have people know that name and know my name, too, as the one who had chosen her and been chosen by her. I wanted to know her fears, her bad habits. I wanted to know her from birth, like a sibling or a child. I wanted a horse to feel affection for me; to nicker when I grew near and let no one ride her but me.

  WHAT I GOT

  For my eleventh birthday, I was gifted a trip to a weeklong horse day camp in New Tripoli, Pennsylvania. Later that summer, my mother drove me every day half an hour out of town. The smell of the farm—fresh green air, the sharp stink of manure—was the most exciting thing I could imagine. It smelled like someone else’s life.

  WHAT I LEARNED, OR WHAT I REMEMBER OF WHAT I LEARNED

  How to gently scoop their fetlocks into our hands and clean their hooves with a pick to prevent thrush. (It had all the satisfaction of peeling Elmer’s Glue off its own ridged, orange tip.) How to groom them. How to post—that is, to move up and down with the movement of the horse as they canter. How you should never walk behind a horse, lest they kick you. How to put your feet in the stirrups—ankles angled down. How to steer the horse in both the English and Western styles. How to put on a bridle and saddle and remove them again.

  WHAT WAS MINE

  A water bottle and packed lunch I brought with me every day. The clothes I wore. A bike helmet.

  WHAT WAS NOT MINE

  Every camper was assigned their own horse for the duration of the camp. Mine was a bay—reddish brown, tipped with black. His name was JC, but his show name was One Sexy Thang.

  I didn’t know before this camp that horses had barn names and show names. It tapped into some pleasurable core I didn’t know existed—the kind that finds drag identities and Roller Derby handles so magical now. To have one name you are called in your everyday life, and then some second, better name—a fragment of a phrase, a lovely idiom or a turn on one—it seemed like some new dimension that horses possessed. Two names, just like that.

  It should be said that I didn’t fully understand his show name. I understood, very roughly, what sex was, but I had never heard the adjectival form. When I asked the young man helping us—in my memory the son of the owner of the farm—what “sexy” meant, he said it meant that you looked nice. Later that afternoon, while the young man was explaining horse anatomy, JC dropped his penis—surprising, massive—and peed in gushing, endless waves as the young man’s voice rose louder and louder over the sound.

  SHOW NAMES

  Talk of the Town. All That Jazz. Shadow of a Doubt. Ask No More. Chief Lord and Sugar. Return to Sender. A Cut Above. Blood Diamond. Mark My Words. A Fine Turn. Maybe Tomorrow. No Autographs Please. Nine of Cups. North by Northwest. Note to Self. On Second Thought. Be My Daddy. Between the Lines. Runs with Scissors. Change the Song. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Coffee and Cigarettes. Since You’ve Been Gone. The Velveteen Rabbit. The Way We Were. To Catch a Demon. Friday Night Lights. King’s Mistress. Look Who’s Talking. Lost in Translation. Made You Look.

  WHAT WOULD NEVER BE MINE

  At the end of camp, when my parents came to see me ride and show off what I’d learned, I told my father that JC was for sale. Could we buy him, please? My father looked at me like he’d never seen me before in his life. No, he said. Please? I asked. Carmen, he said in a measured, patient voice, where would we put a horse? It was a very good question—an engineer’s question. It did not try to shame, or laugh, or encompass the ridiculousness of my request; rather, it was specifically designed to root out a fatal flaw without having to waste time pulling apart the very foundation of the query. I left that day without a horse, and have been horseless ever since.

  PHOTOS OF ME ON OR NEAR HORSES

  From the New Tripoli horse camp, there are three images that remain in my possession. They were all taken on the same day, as I am wearing the same outfit in all of them: jeans too short for my legs, white crew socks, white sneakers, a pink shirt that says “Yes I Can!” which was the name of the Girl Scouts cookie initiative in 1993, and a knock-off Tamagotchi—an ambiguously specied dinosaur—on a watch. All the photos were almost certainly taken by my mother, and most likely on the last day of horse camp.

  In one photo, I am riding JC in an arena with a helmet on my head and a riding crop in my hand. The camera flash has caught his tapetum lucidum; his eye is white and sharp as a tooth.

  In another photo, JC is sticking his head out of an o
pening in his stall and is very close to nibbling my ear. My baby sister is standing next to me. The photo is not in focus.

  In another photo, this one in focus, I am performatively grooming JC with a round brush. I am staring directly into the lens. I am clearly wearing lip gloss and tiny gold hoops in my ears. Again his eye glows; this time, a silver crescent moon.

  THE FIRST LESSON

  One day at the horse camp, I wore a pair of overalls with a tank top. It made me feel very rugged and cute. (My mother had refused to buy me the “riding gear” that I begged for, and this was the next best thing.) That afternoon, the young man from the first day told me, an eleven-year-old-girl, that I looked sexy. After he walked away, I remember feeling feverish and uncomfortable; the way I’d felt the last time I’d been laid up with a stomach flu, naked underneath a woven afghan, a tiny, sour-smelling wastebasket on the floor near my head.

  He didn’t do anything else, though, after that. This isn’t that kind of essay.

  A NASTY THING

  At the camp, I hesitated to put the bit in JC’s mouth, because I’d read a glossy, faux leather–bound edition of Black Beauty, which went on about the foul nature of bits at great length and in the horse’s voice. (“[A] nasty thing! Those who have never had a bit in their mouths cannot think how bad it feels—a great piece of cold, hard steel as thick as a man’s finger to be pushed into one’s mouth . . . no way in the world can you get rid of the nasty hard thing. It is very bad! yes, very bad!”) The farmer’s son insisted that the horse did not mind, he was used to it, and I wondered what it meant to be used to something unpleasant; what it meant to know something was awful but then let that knowledge go down, and under.