Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  In the absence of the herd, we have started counting arachnids. At least one scorpion goes into a jam jar of alcohol with a pair of toast tongs each night. Adeline has a friend here who bakes them into resin trivets, and he has asked us not to squash them, to save him the big ones that we find.

  Normally, we find the alacranes hiding in between the wooden shades that cover the mosquito screens in our bedroom windows, but the other day, Adeline woke up to realize she had shared a bed with one. Aside from loosened bedsheets, they like to sleep on top of doorjambs where it is dark and still. We found one of these door sleepers the other day, a royal flush: a huge scorpion made even larger by her pregnancy. Although I know that a scorpion bite would be a disaster in these times—the city hospitals overburdened because of the pandemic, and in the case of some small villages, closed to keep out the sick—it has deepened the growing sadness within me: the pitch of Adeline calling for my husband, the thwack of a slapped shoe. They’re always sleeping, these scorpions, just sleeping somewhere cool, doing their best to stay safe and sheltered in the dark.

  The valley below our house is empty, dry, and yellow. The rain won’t come for months. The grooms have to keep on moving the horses around to the places where there’s grass. In the absence of running hooves and our efforts to name them, I think about the way that people have yearned for horses and believed in their powers over time. The Romans, the Celts, the Persians—so many cultures have used them as an augury, in battle especially. Entire wars would be called off depending on the way that a white horse walked (or didn’t walk) over a spear. It was believed that an oath taken on horseback could never be broken—never ever—no matter what. Another expectation passed down by old wives: if a horse neighed outside of your front door, a member of your family would fall ill. I believe in augury. With the horses’ relocation to another pasture, I can’t track the hours anymore, nor the terrible things happening within those hours as they pass.

  ITEMS DROPPED IN THE JAM JAR OF ALCOHOL SINCE OUR ARRIVAL ON MARCH 12TH:

  Six scorpions (baby)

  One pregnant adult scorpion

  Six medium-size scorpions

  One giant desert centipede—a furious biter, found writhing by my husband’s foot as we spoke to our French friends about the hearses double-parked on the streets of Paris

  Breakfast: Discuss the quality of the sleep we did or didn’t have, strategize on what to do with the chachalaca birds that keep us up with their tin-can cackles, consider what we will make for lunch even though it’s always the same.

  Lunch: Silence.

  Dinner: Beer, pasta for our daughter, we don’t fight her on trying new vegetables anymore.

  Evening: Listen for the horses. Hear cowbells clang, instead.

  After my comeback riding lesson at the first barn, I landed at a smaller place in western Connecticut with reasonable group lessons. I was put into an afternoon class with female retirees, kind women who brought post-lesson sandwiches of egg salad on wheat bread. I trotted around in circles for a few months before I admitted that as much as I relished the newfound contact with the horses, I needed a challenge. I needed to shake my soul up and run down the fears that had been clutching me for months.

  Maybe my father’s cologne imprinted a fetishistic relationship with polo mallets into my head as a young child. Maybe it’s a hang-up with the trappings of the elitist lifestyle I rejected when I decided to make my own way as a writer, whatever the cause (mine now to find in therapy), I asked my instructor if she knew someone who could teach a total beginner polo, and there I was, off to see one man and then another and another about getting on his horse.

  I was youngish and not unattractive; men were generous in teaching me what they knew about the sport for free or at a steeply reduced price. Other times I traded copywriting, press releases, work on a website. At the places that allowed it, I worked off my lessons physically, exercising the horses, cleaning stalls and wrangling hay, my forearms furious with rashes from the straw. I loved the necessity and the monotony of these daily chores, loved scrubbing out the algae from a horse’s water bucket, separating manure from fresh wood shavings, washclothing the morning gunk out of a horse’s eyes. I found it all methodical and calming, but I felt this way about it because I was working in exchange for something I wanted. It wasn’t my day job.

  Absurd as an athletic endeavor (so dangerous! so classist!) polo nevertheless came to me—or I to it—at a time when I needed something that would make me trudge through the darkest marshlands of myself to an arid other side. Two years after becoming a mother to a child who initially brought me pride and a purpose to all hours, I had become a mother who didn’t know how to entertain her daughter, wife to someone I didn’t want to touch or to be touched by, author of a book I couldn’t write, dame to a depression whose existence I denied.

  Riding brought me happiness and forward motion, but in order to play polo, I had to have a heart-to-heart with the demons underneath my rug. I was an impatient person and a nervous one, I did things quickly and poorly just to get them done. I was a taker of shortcuts and dishonest about my feelings, and while I could get away with these lousy traits in my forgiving group lessons, in polo, they got me thrown off the horse. When I rode quickly after the ball without having put the time in to improve my seat: tossed. When I proved unable to leave my dark thoughts out of the arena, I was run away with, lost my stirrups, struggled to stay on, and all of this in front of teammates who had managed to clear their minds before they mounted. Additionally, I was terrified of speed. Whenever I felt the rush of energy build beneath me I would tug back on the reins. I couldn’t get past the conviction that a fast horse equaled a horse out of control. And so I was constantly behind the game, outside the play, losing a battle with a horse in my very efforts to control it. It soon became clear that if I didn’t ditch my worst-case scenario attitude, I was going to get hurt.

  It took nearly a year of getting on and on again, giving myself pep talks that I failed to deliver on in the arena, months of bad-faith reasoning before something finally clicked. One morning, after warring with a pint-size hotshot named Macarena, I just let her run, and something marvelous happened. I realized that the mare’s desire for speed didn’t come from panic, but from the desire to play. She was a player, and an excellent one at that, and her previous fights with me had been about me holding her back from doing her best job.

  After that epiphany, I learned that when I trusted the horses (and thus, myself) to go quickly, the play was tremendous fun, a level of fun I had never before allowed my body. When I let up on the control obsession that was always primed inside me, I realized something else: I was good at polo. I had a natural swing and a clean pass, and although I wasn’t great at the rideoffs—one horse crashing into another to throw the opponent off the line of the ball—I managed to be where I needed to be to get the ball that emerged from such a fight. This new realization was baffling to me, it was a crisis of identity; all my life I had thought of myself as a nonathletic person who had nothing to offer except for excessive languor, when buried deep inside of me there was a team player who wanted to laugh, score, and belong. All of a sudden, I was the proprietor of something unbelievable: athletic potential.

  This is where my love for polo and the contents of my pocketbook clashed. I did not have the money to exploit that potential. I was worlds away from good enough for anyone to let me ride horses for free in matches, and I didn’t have the money to rent horses for the seven-and-a-half-minute match segments known as chukkers. And while I had the money to buy a horse (there is always someone out there looking to give away a horse for nothing), I didn’t have the money to pay for a horse’s board. And so it was that I found myself at a kind of stalemate; I’d improved up to a certain point and could not afford to improve any more. Big picture, this was fine for me. I was more than happy in my weekly arena matches (which were much cheaper than grass), and in the summers I was still invited to warm up the patrón’s polo ponies with friends wh
o worked as grooms. I kind of liked the idea that I had a secret talent, one that would necessitate exceptional circumstances to show off. But then something unexpected happened. My obsession with control returned, and my sadness with it. When I did have the occasion to ride, I rode terribly again.

  Week three. Week four. The horses have been moved to a pasture by the beach where sun-whitened crab skeletons dot the land like ghosts. We can’t hear them. We can’t see them. We eat tortillas every day, for breakfast and for lunch. Even the tortillas are cracking from the sun.

  We find more scorpions. The jar is nearly full. A tarantula clings to the front door and my daughter names it Fluffy. At night, the courtyard garden is full of raccoon-like coati who gnaw on Adeline’s limes.

  The barn below the house stays still and mostly empty. The ocean starts to smell. “It’s the red tide,” a local friend writes in a WhatsApp message to me, “La marea roja.” The air cools and the sea thickens with plankton. I wait for whales to come. We walk on an empty beach filled with stranded blowfish, their bodies puffed in death. We come upon an eel with a mouth full of yellow teeth. This could end soon, this fearfulness, this terror. But it probably won’t.

  A local friend and polo player who used to give me pointers admits that he’s been giving lessons to an oil heiress on his ranch. The girl’s oil-baron father thinks it’s passable to check-box the precautions; the heiress has a driver who wears a mask and gloves, she tacks the horse herself and rubs down all of the equipment with bleach wipes, terrible for leather. But it’s been a few weeks, and now the oil baron is worried about what people will think if they find out that the wealthiest community members aren’t actually sheltering in place.

  But she is hooked, his daughter. She won’t stop learning polo. A compromise is eventually landed on; a seaplane touching down. The oil baron buys two of my friend’s horses and leases out his groom and they improvise an arena on their oil-money land. “She was getting quite good, actually,” my friend says of his lost student, and this makes me jealous. Last year at this time I was playing in his arena with him, and even though the government has told us not to leave our houses and I’m scared of speed again, it stings that he hasn’t asked me to return, that I don’t have the money or the confidence to play like she can play.

  Just like horseback riding, writing is a stallion that needs to be dominated and fed. Stay too long away from it and it will convince you to stay away some more.

  But if you avoid what intimidates you for too long, its size becomes prodigious. You’ll not approach again.

  The year my confidence left me, I was touring for two books. I was far away from horses, sleeping in strange houses because there wasn’t a budget for hotels. Never a good sleeper, I was doped up on Ambien to turn off the electricity inside me. In the mornings, I had to stuff myself with protein-rich foods and chocolate to override the sedative stupefying my brain; a necessary fight back to alertness so I could teach and tour and interview, shilling for my books.

  During those months away from horses, I went from missing them to dreading the moment that I would ride again. What had been a well of calm for me soon became a bog; polo was a depository for my worries and self-fulfilling deceptions, the things I didn’t like about myself, the feats I wasn’t up to. In November of 2019, I was home long enough to join my arena team for a match. It was cold and the horses were under-exercised. They were dancing with nerves and excitement in their boxes, and when my coach told me she was putting me on a horse from her personal string that she called “The Machine,” I was too flattered to voice the fear inside my heart. My worst-case scenario attitude returned, I convinced myself that the horse—already fast in normal times—would be unstoppable in the cold, that I would be too weak for her and sloppy, and this is what occurred. The Machine was influenced by my terror and tore around the ring, head high and rear ready. I eventually lost my stirrups, so she went faster, still, further panicked by my change in balance. It ended with the groom and the coach forming a wall of their own horses so that my horse would stop, and with me convinced that I was worthless, had dreamt up all my progress, should not ride again.

  We haven’t seen The Unicorn in weeks, now. From our perch on the hill, I can see my friend Melanie arriving and leaving every day at the defunct polo barn below us, carrying on the same schedule—feed, water, and ride at 9:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.—that she carries out each day, a decade of such rituals stretching out behind her. She’s the only rider who has continued with her practice during COVID-19, who tacks her mounts herself. I have a text message from Melanie inviting me to ride; she knows that I have quarantined, that I’m playing safe. When I close my eyes, I can feel the girth of the retired polo pony she lent me to accompany her in past years. His name is Poker, and he has sleepy, gentle eyes and a demeanor she calls “noble.” But he’s fast on the beach. I haven’t responded to her message yet. Instead I ask myself, is he too fast for me? When I walk with my daughter on the beach in the cool hours, I find hoofprints in the sand. Proof of Melanie’s movements. Proof of her consistency.

  From the house that isn’t ours, I look at the azure horizon that slips into the Pacific, a vastness so great it can hold both hopefulness and dread. If I don’t get back on a horse, I am going to become depressed again, a prisoner to my fears. If I fight those fears, I know what I will feel like; I will feel free and more alive. Because it isn’t dead yet, the small moments of greatness and the impractical potential that I carry low. I am someone who can hit a ball one-handed at a gallop. Twist over a horse and hit the same ball backward at a gallop. Fall off a horse at forty and get up to run again.

  I reply to Melanie. I thank her for the invitation. Yes, I say, I’ll ride.

  The Shrinking Mountain

  Nur Nasreen Ibrahim

  As a child, I liked to sketch my version of a piece of art over and over again, copying it from an old printout. Two radiant blue horses locked in a playful prelude to a leap. One horse curves away from the viewer, its back leg lifted, the muscles in its neck straining as it twists. The other faces forward, its mouth open in what looks like a wild exclamation of glee, its front legs floating above the ground.

  The horses could be suspended in water, were it not for the stark shadows beneath their feet. From a distance, it looks like an old, crumpled photograph. I must have been around twelve years old when I studied a printout of the horses closely one summer and observed small cracks I’d never noticed before running through it. What I had previously seen as fluid was revealed to be a mosaic of rich blue stones, ranging from the colors of the night sky to white marble.

  Those are the horses of my dreams, the horses depicted by the artist Ismail Gulgee. The first time I saw them was in a book about Pakistan’s greatest artists, commemorating Gulgee’s career with pages that were filled with his signature calligraphies. They stood out in brilliant tones of aquamarine and light blue, amidst the multicolored oil paintings that the artist was most known for.

  The image had a rough-hewn look about it, and multidimensionality that made it rise above the smooth and shiny pages containing it. I would press my fingers on the pages, perhaps hoping to feel the roughness, to grasp the sense of a homecoming it awoke in me, even though I was home, I had lived in that same home my entire life. I could not explain it, but I understood it.

  My mother explained to me that this was not a painting. Gulgee’s horses, both wild and in the midst of polo games, were immortalized in lapis lazuli, stones that traveled from mines in Afghanistan to Pakistan. These rocks came in shades of rich blue and turquoise, and were so rare and highly prized that the artist used them for portraits of world leaders.

  My attempts at sketching those horses in my cheap notebook always went awry. I would glance down at my work, which looked nothing like the crumpled printout. My horses were ill-proportioned, their legs too long, necks too short, whereas Gulgee’s were elegant and proud. But still, in a small way, I felt close to the artist.

  My family had known the arti
st for years, but the first time I recall visiting his studio was in 2003, the same summer I attempted to sketch his horses. Ismail Gulgee’s studio in the mountains was minutes away from our summer home in Nathiagali, a resort town in the mountains of Pakistan. During those long, unsupervised days, my cousins, brother, and I traipsed onto the road above our house, crossing lines of horses bearing tourists, the dark pines, locals grilling corn over coal and crackling fires, past the waterworks and the broken-down building that managed electricity for the hill station, and arrived at Gulgee ki Aankh (the Eye of Gulgee), the unofficial name given to the artist’s residence in the hills.

  He resided here almost every summer into the early 2000s. The portion of his house visible from the road was a puzzle of mirrors, rocks, tiles, and beads that formed a large blue eye nestled under a triangular tin roof—hence the nickname. The eye watched us as we walked past. Some days it shone in the rain, or from the condensation in the clouds sinking around the tin roofs. Sometimes the eye looked tired, the cracks in every piece of glass that made up the iris and cornea appearing sharp in the sunlight. Appointments with the artist were rare. But on the special occasions when we were able to secure one, he welcomed us into his studio.

  The first time we visited, we were firmly instructed by whichever parent accompanied us to sit in a line and not touch anything. I folded my hands tightly in my lap, my stomach fluttering with anticipation, and we all sat obediently on rickety stools, sneaking glances around us.

  A diminutive man in a paint-stained shirt that hung over his withered body, he greeted us in a rasping voice, and paced in front of the blankness of his canvas. In those days, approaching his twilight years, Gulgee painted large abstract calligraphies, focusing on Quranic verses or the ninety-nine names of Allah. We took in Gulgee’s canvases, the glint of tiles strewn in a corner, the splashes of color on every surface, and the brushes larger than our hands. Next to his easel was a chipped china teacup (that we all assumed held alcohol), which he would gulp down before facing the looming canvas.