Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  MORE PHOTOS OF ME ON OR NEAR HORSES

  In another set of photos, I am at my grandfather’s farm in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. By then he had sold the farm to a man who trained horses for the Barnum & Bailey Circus, though my mother and her eight siblings and their children were permitted to visit, which we did every summer. The fact that my mother grew up on a farm always amazed me. But they didn’t have horses, my mother said, though they did once have a pony named Strawberry Roan. I don’t remember if they rode her, or what happened to her.

  In one photo, I am sitting on a horse with my kid sister in the doorway of a barn. I am tan and in overalls. My sister is missing a tooth. My arms are wrapped around her, clutching the front of the saddle. The horse’s ears are back in faint alarm. In the background is one of my mother’s older brothers, his eyes closed in a forever blink.

  In another photo, a long herd of distant horses—speckled, blazed, starred, striped, bald-faced—bisect a pale green meadow. I almost certainly took this photo myself, with a disposable camera.

  In another photo, I am standing shyly in front of two massive Clydesdales as if they are my bridegrooms and I can hardly believe my luck. I am leggy as a colt. My long hair is up, I am wearing large glasses, and a halo of frizz floats around my face. It was almost certainly shot with the same disposable camera, though I—obviously—did not take it.

  THE SECOND LESSON

  The first time I ever wore a tampon, at age twelve, I walked around the house bowlegged, agitated from the sensation. My mother said I looked like I’d been in the saddle all night, which implied a kind of agency and rugged self-sufficiency that seemed as distant as adulthood. Cowboys rode in the saddle all night, if they had to or wanted to, but they did not have to wear internal menstrual products in order to participate in swim class. (“You can’t just bleed everywhere,” my mother said.) I had been given a body. Choices had been made for me.

  A CONFESSION

  I am exasperated that my essay about girls and horses contains inappropriate compliments from older men, sexual innuendo, sexual exploration, menstruation, outfits.

  SEXUAL EXPLORATION?

  I’m getting there.

  WHAT OTHERS HAD

  My best friend, Fiona, lived an enviable life as the only child of two older parents. My own parents tried to temper my envy—it must be so lonely, just her, they said, and her parents are older and will die much sooner than we will, plus they smoke cigarettes. I didn’t like the stale and ashy smell of her house, true, but I did love her shelves full of collectible Breyer horse figurines (!), her regular horseback-riding lessons (!!), and a massive mural of a white unicorn on her bedroom wall (!!!). It would, I thought, be worth it to be lonely, and to have my parents die sooner than other people’s parents, to have those things; after a while, the cigarette smoke would almost certainly become barely noticeable.

  WHAT A HORSE GIRL IS

  Lithe teenage girls with impossible French braids, who as adult women will tell men they’re not like other girls. If you were to lean close and breathe deep, she would smell like heterosexuality, independence, whiteness, femininity. Then a heart note of old-school feminism, both admirable and dated. And at its base, the warm whiff of rural wealth, the kind that thinks of itself as different from other kinds of wealth even though it is very much the same.

  WHAT A HORSE GIRL IS NOT

  Fat. (Though I wasn’t, not really, not yet.) Queer. (I didn’t know I was, but maybe they knew?) Latinx. (Despite a robust nonwhite tradition of horse riding that dates back centuries—vaqueros, rancheros, charros, Black cowboys, Indigenous horse riders, paniolos from Hawai’i—we think of horseback riding as being necessarily the sport of the wealthy—and, by extension, whiteness.) Me, though I didn’t know it yet.

  WHAT A HORSE GIRL IS NOT, ALSO

  When my best friend from college got married in Shenandoah National Park, I took my then-girlfriend with me. By then I was openly queer, very fat. One of the offered activities was horseback riding, which I insisted on doing. “I used to love it,” I said to anyone who listened. “I loved horses so much when I was a kid.”

  My girlfriend was amazed that I wanted to get on a horse and ride it down a trail. She’d never ridden a horse before. That’s some gentile shit, she said. I was such a shiksa, she said. She was always calling me that; she’d read too much Philip Roth. We rode on a trail with a guide, each on our own horse, and I was amazed at how much I remembered from camp, all those years ago. Posting up and down on the horse’s back; the sensation that I was this tall, magnificent creature, that all of her blood and bone and muscle were my blood and bone and muscle. My horse seemed a little old and a little tired, but it didn’t matter; I was a little old and a little tired, and anyway, I felt pleasure down to my marrow.

  Years later, when I was dating another Jewish person, I told them about my ex calling me a shiksa—her voice teasing, how she’d occasionally follow it with the word goddess, the way she insisted it was a compliment because I was so beautiful. They listened with a furrowed brow and then told me that it was not, precisely, a nice thing to call someone. The phrase did not convey the tender, loving teasing I’d hoped it had. They seemed a little sad about it. More recently, someone else told me that shiksa also implies whiteness (and blondness, and a kind of WASPy sensibility), and I found myself tallying points about my body and my family and my identity and my upbringing and the things I loved in mental columns of whiteness and nonwhiteness. Later, someone else disagreed that shiksa implied whiteness, though they acknowledged it was an unpleasant word, and I scribbled a messy line all over the math. All I understand is that there is so much that I will never understand.

  So instead of parsing the memory of that afternoon in the mountains along lines of race or identity or beauty, perhaps this is the only way to think about it: riding behind my then-girlfriend on the only creature that could hurt me worse than she could.

  HORSES I WANTED

  I remember, as clearly as anything, Fiona’s horse-themed birthday party, in which a small, vinyl horse figurine was placed at the head of each of the paper plates that ringed the table, where a wine glass might go. I rushed to sit at the seat with a jet-black one, but Fiona’s mother gently guided me to a gold-and-white one instead. As an adult I recognize that a palomino is a perfectly fine and even beautiful horse figurine to possess—writing this I am possessed by a powerful urge to have it, still—but back then I wanted the black horse because it was clearly the superior creature. Everyone knew that black horses were the most elegant and rebellious, the fastest and most brave, the kind of horses that entered into legend. Fiona sat at the coveted seat. He was hers, now. Later, when we were playing some game, I picked up the black horse and touched it to my lips, like a rosary.

  METAPHORS THAT DON’T FIT ANYWHERE ELSE

  Fiona was the person who first told me about sex. She told me that it meant getting naked and kissing. More than once we played “mom” and “dad,” lying on the floor in my basement or hers and lifting up our shirts for each other. It is the first sexual memory I have.

  I haven’t talked to her in twenty years. I do not know if her parents are dead or alive. I do not know if she still rides horses or loves horses or has her Breyer figurines. I do not know if she remembers me and the keenness of my envy.

  HORSES I HAD

  The aforementioned vinyl palomino, a different scale than any of the horses that follow, and which I refused to give a name.

  A set of hollow plastic horses that came with a Western stagecoach, which I later repurposed for a fourth-grade history project, in a diorama about the Amish.

  A rideable, child-size horse Flyer on springs and a metal frame, upon which my siblings and I would launch ourselves day in and day out, the entire thing squealing in protest as we rode it wild-eyed, scrambling to get on first, hauling each other off as often as possible.

  A set of Breyer knockoffs my parents gave me one Christmas: a chocolate-and-white dappled Appaloosa father frozen in
a high step; a bright palomino mother with her head dipped, demure; a gawky baby with the mother’s coloring and the father’s spots. All had soft, lifelike hair that could be brushed, braided, and managed, which I did with great care.

  A plastic, electronic horse of unknown provenance—brandless, likely older than I was—that was too big for a Barbie and too small for an American Girl doll, with a cord and controller that when activated made her legs move stiffly and eventually caused her to fall over with a tremendous crash, which I bought from a yard sale with five dollars of my own money.

  A unicorn snow globe that was surrounded by ceramic roses that my dad got me to apologize for going away on a business trip for my birthday. We bought it at a shop that exclusively sold fancy snow globes. He tried to persuade me to buy a pegasus that played “Wind Beneath My Wings,” but I insisted on the unicorn, which played “My Favorite Things.”

  A My Little Pony: Blue Belle, with her plasticky, cupcake-scented haunches. When her scent faded I tried to refresh it with my mother’s perfume. She caught me and took it from me, dangling the toy from her pinched fingers like Achilles’s mother dipping him in the River Styx. I had ruined it, she said, and threw it away.

  A series of images advertising vaguely racist Native American–themed ceramic horse figurines and collectible plates for sale in Parade magazine, which I clipped out and kept in a photo album.

  HORSES I MADE

  I had a small library of horse-drawing guides. I was very partial to horse heads and necks; the architecture of their jaw, the swooping parabola of their necks. Decapitated horse heads, à la The Godfather, littered my grade-school notebooks.

  HORSES I WAS

  Later on, after Fiona, my friend Margaret and I often played a game in which, on land, we were alternately girls with horses or unicorns, or horses or unicorns themselves, which translated to dolphins in the pool where we swam all summer. I often called my horse, or horse-self, or dolphin, or dolphin-self, Fire Maiden, which to me seemed the most eloquent thing you could be named, or be.

  ARE UNICORNS HORSES?

  Unicorns are horses that can only be ridden by virgins.

  ARE HORSES UNICORNS?

  Horses don’t care what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you.

  WHAT ARE HORSES?

  A species of odd-toed, ungulate mammal, primarily domesticated, belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. Useful, expensive, dangerous. Beautiful.

  WHAT ARE HORSES TO ME?

  An admittedly impressive animal. Something that held value for me as a girl that holds less value for me now, as a woman.

  WHAT WERE HORSES TO ME?

  A creature that I believed could hold me up, make me better, give me context.

  A desirable thing that, had I become part of them as I wanted to (through knowledge, ownership, skill, love) with all of my tiny, terrible heart, could have permitted me a streamlined relationship with my own gender, and offered me a kind of highly specific authority that would have softened the edges of a strange and unpleasant adolescence.

  A metaphor. Or, multiple metaphors. The way the desire for independence and power and control can become tangled up in domesticity, into the things that can weigh you down. How means of movement need to be bought, fed, cared for. How you can easily acquire a false sense of control, how appealing it is to let something into your life that could crush you if it wanted to, or even if it didn’t.

  BUT WHAT WERE THEY, REALLY?

  “As one woman I interviewed said about her beloved childhood horse, ‘He was my beauty’—not in the sense that he was her beautiful possession, but in the sense that his beauty became hers too.”1 A beauty that could be borrowed.

  CAN YOU BORROW BEAUTY? IS BEAUTY A THING THAT YOU CAN ACHIEVE THROUGH DESIRE, POSSESSION, OSMOSIS? CAN YOU BE BEAUTIFUL WITHOUT A BEAUTIFUL CREATURE BENEATH YOU?

  I’m still not sure I know.

  BreyerFest or Bust

  Laura Maylene Walter

  To travel to the Kentucky Horse Park on the outskirts of Lexington is to drive through acre upon acre of rolling pastureland. This is the heart of Kentucky’s horse country, a land of luscious bluegrass, rich brown fencing, stone stables, and priceless Thoroughbreds. The Kentucky Horse Park itself is a sprawling complex of arenas, stables, shops, museums, memorials, and training facilities. The park hosts equestrian demonstrations of all disciplines, prestigious competitions, and other major events like the one that brought me there for the first time in 2019—BreyerFest, a three-day celebration of horses both real and plastic.

  I was drawn to BreyerFest not only because it sounded like a kitschy getaway, but because it presented the rare chance to be a tourist in my own past. I was in my late thirties, horses were no longer an integral part of my life, and my childhood collection of Breyer models was relegated to a single box in the attic, but even so, I was reluctant to let go of my former horse girl self. If revisiting that part of my past meant attending a festival where attendees worked themselves into a frenzy over plastic horses, then so be it.

  Which is how, only moments after arriving on the grounds, I found myself staring transfixed at a model horse diorama competition. The dioramas were set up on folding tables that twisted through the park’s visitors’ center, an impressive display of the creative possibilities unlocked by dressing up toy-size plastic horses. One model horse was styled to look like Lady Gaga, another like Elton John, and yet another as an astronaut with a little space suit and bubble helmet. Elsewhere, equine firefighters worked to save model horses from a burning building, an act of heroism that included a fire truck and ladder, a life net to catch jumpers, and a paramedic foal using its mouth to pull an emergency blanket across another horse’s back. My favorite entry depicted none other than the diorama contest itself, in which a plastic donkey wearing a judge’s badge and diamond earrings scrutinized a collection of mini dioramas.

  My husband and I happened upon this display after making the long walk from the parking lot, where our hatchback was dwarfed by minivans and SUVs with messages like “BreyerFest Bound” painted on their rear windshields. As festival first-timers, we thought we’d get oriented at the visitors’ center. Instead, we found ourselves gazing at a model horse spray-painted gold in a cardboard celestial backdrop filled with cotton clouds, twinkle lights, and dangling planets. “My diorama is out of this world,” the entrant had written on the accompanying card, and I couldn’t exactly disagree.

  This year was BreyerFest’s thirtieth anniversary, and over the course of three days, upward of 30,000 people would swarm the Kentucky Horse Park to purchase limited-edition models, watch riding demonstrations, attend model repair and painting workshops, meet the real-life horses who inspired some of the models, and commune with other collectors.

  Peter and I left the visitors’ center to cross under a Breyer-branded welcome arch and join the crowds outside. I paused to take a photo of a life-size inflatable horse soaring over an inflatable jump. All around me, people wore shirts emblazoned with horse heads and carried bulky bags full of new Breyer models. I walked on, my attire horseless, my hands empty, and felt unmoored. No matter how much horses had once been a part of my identity, I had become an outsider, a stranger in the land of plastic ponies.

  For the uninitiated, Breyer horses are ubiquitous plastic toys that have delighted both children and adults for the better part of a century. The first model, a palomino in Western tack, was introduced in 1950 as part of a mantel clock sold at Woolworth’s; it proved so popular that Breyer began manufacturing stand-alone plastic horses. Today, thousands of Breyer models are available in nearly every breed, color, and pose imaginable.

  Before hitting the road to Kentucky, I tried to explain the allure of Breyers to friends who could not grasp how plastic horses support a three-day festival. The models are realistic, I said. The molds are sculpted by artists and scaled accurately for each breed. They are not mere toys but are incredibly detailed, with visible muscle tone, bodies posed to suggest movement, and the
illusion of life emanating from their painted eyes. Accessories like miniature halters, blankets, and tack were also available. You could purchase a scaled-to-size stable with miniature feed buckets and bales of hay, or even tiny leg wraps to protect your model horse before loading it into a plastic trailer. The Breyer universe was a stage for the imagination, providing a physical outlet for the dreams so many horse-obsessed girls share.

  I had once been one of those girls. As a child, I received a new Breyer horse as a gift for every birthday and Christmas, and I saved to buy more whenever possible. Back then, I could obtain a Traditional model for $9.99, so each crumpled ten-dollar bill that landed in my hands transformed, in my mind, into a new model horse. I amassed three dozen Breyers over the years, including a mix of the Traditional 1:9 scale models along with some smaller versions. I could still recall my favorites: the Clydesdale stallion, the rearing Appaloosa, Misty of Chincoteague, the prancing Arabian mare.

  When BreyerFest was founded in 1990, I was nine years old, a horse-crazed girl growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Had I known BreyerFest existed back then, I surely would have clamored to go, and had that happened, I would have fit right in. I, too, would have marveled at the live horse demonstrations, geeked out over my favorite models, and begged with fiery passion for that year’s commemorative model—or for any new Breyer horse, that magical toy molded from girlish dreams and cellulose acetate.