To show him, my mother had one bright blue show suit and one brown, which complemented Toby’s chestnut coat. The suit jackets had wide skirts, and the pants were belled to accommodate hard-shined lace-up boots. She wore this ensemble with a brushed brown derby, her red hair pulled back tight and twisted into a netted, unobtrusive bun.
This was a kind of sanctioned drag, a man’s suit worn by women who wished to ride men’s horses. A “lady,” of course, would never ride astraddle. Until the early twentieth century, etiquette required that “gentlewomen” ride in skirts, sidesaddle, to protect their chaste reputations (and, ostensibly, the integrity of their hymens). Perched dangerously on one pelvic bone, a lady kept one foot in a stirrup, the other crossed awkwardly between two pommels. In fact, the second pommel, the leaping horn, is a relatively modern innovation that allowed the rider to safely hold the reins; in the Middle Ages, sidesaddles were so insecure that a woman riding in one was unable to control her own horse. Her mount had to be led by a walking servant or another mounted man.
As my mother is fond of telling people who challenge her equestrian bona fides, she could jump sidesaddle. She won a silver punch bowl sidesaddle. But the rest of the silver in my parents’ house—trays and julep cups, Revere bowls, enameled candy dishes, sterling tea sets, a two-foot-tall Sterno-heated coffee urn—she won in men’s clothes, a man’s hat, beating men on their horses, on their turf.
This was the life she’d made for herself—the challenge she set, and kept raising—inside the barn and out. Did you know that your grandmother flew planes? I ask my daughter, every year or so. Did you know that the dean of the law school told your grandmother she’d make a “fine legal secretary,” the day she graduated at the top of her class? As the first female maritime lawyer in Louisiana, my mother climbed down into the hulls of cargo vessels wearing stockings and heels. She stood in the doorways of the men-only clubs where conferences were held, her back against the jamb, and made prospective clients bring her drinks. Her beauty helped her go places no woman had gone before—when I was little, she looked like a redheaded Grace Kelly or, maybe, Samantha from Bewitched—but she needed all her strength to back that beauty up. And that strength came from training, what riding taught her how to master. She’ll tell anyone who’s shocked when her refined manner turns fierce, Darling, I grew up in a barn.
Under the lights in Germantown, Tennessee, my mother and Toby beat the trainers in the Five-Gaited Open. In the picture on the bookcase, she’s in her blue suit, flushed and grinning in the flash as they hand her the silver urn. Sweat lathers Toby’s shoulders. His nostrils are wide and red, blowing. His ears prick. Fear had made him high; there was a zoo down the hill from the arena, and he could smell the lions. My mother could smell them too—but she had never been happier, felt better vindicated or more alive.
Every summer, from the time I was eight until my early teens, while my brother and father traveled to baseball tournaments, my mother and I went on the road with Toby, horse-showing. Days were full of Waffle House grits and Hardee’s ham biscuits, books on tape rented from Cracker Barrel, and naps in the Suburban’s wayback. We spent the nights at “horse show motels” in tiny Southern towns. Their carpets were never clean. In a Harrodsburg Travelodge, my mother stole sheets off the housekeepers’ cart and laid a path for us from the beds to the bathroom. In a Best Western in Paducah, she pinched a stranger’s abandoned negligee from a hook in our closet and threw it into the parking lot, a slick black bird flying over the balcony rail. Even after it was gone, the smell of sex loitered in the room.
I couldn’t identify the odor then—some secret musk that made my mother’s face twist up—but I overheard her talk about it later with her barn friends, who often bunked with us or in the room next door. Laughing beyond the room’s connecting door, they whispered prostitute, john, strip club, lady of the night—words I’d look up in the dictionary when we got back home.
Debra, with her satin sleep mask that reminded me of the horses’ blinders, and Mrs. Fox, whose trunk was always full of Lindeman’s chardonnay, would caravan with us to almost every show, parking their vans beside ours in the motel parking lots. Late at night, I’d lie under the thin blankets, reading my mother’s old Black Stallion books, listening to the women gossip about horse sales, trainers, other people’s marriages, who could really ride and who couldn’t. Debra’s laugh was a crowlike cackle. Mrs. Fox did a lot of hollering into the phone. At home, my mother was all designer suits and dessert forks and discontinued French perfume, but this, I thought—this!—was real adult womanhood: footlockers full of makeup and ziplocked bobby pins, emotional combat, full ice buckets, and plastic cups of wine. Womanhood smelled like sweat and hairspray, and it was loud. Sometimes, you had to yell if you wanted to be heard.
I brought a friend of my own only once, and when we snuck out of the Shoney’s and up to the room during dinner to take what would be childhood’s final two-kid bath, my mother and Mrs. Fox called the police, thinking we’d been abducted by a man they’d noticed at the bar. We’d drawn his attention—the way he looked at you, they said. This, too, was something I didn’t understand for a good long time.
Going to the show barn in the morning was a pleasure. Clutching my Styrofoam cup of grits, I’d stand for a moment in the door to the waking barn, inhaling the smell of fresh shavings and liniment—that sharp, mentholated clean. Everything was in order: the tack room lined in colored silks and hemmed by potted hedges, the feed room full of neat cubes of plastic-wrapped shavings and bales of hay. Outside, in the arena, the trainers warmed up horses—big men hunched, whips up, over the backs of hobbled, glossy things.
During the day, I was alone while my mother trained and watched the barn’s other riders. I hot-walked pleasure horses, poked handfuls of grass through the bars of the raffle ponies’ pens, hunted for four-leaf clovers, got electrocuted (mildly) by the popcorn stand. But, mostly, I sat on restaurant-size bags of carrots and watched the grooms set tails.
Saddlebreds’ tails are lifted high and grown out long so that, in the show ring, they trail like pennants, an extra indicator of the horse’s speed. To achieve this look, a horse’s tail is set—the tendons progressively stretched or surgically nicked until the dock can be lifted upright, then held up vertically from the rump by a harnessed leather bustle. Resetting a tail after a class could take a groom the better part of an hour, first to pick the tail, strand by strand, free of any shavings, then to tie it, buckle the harness, wrap the crupper, arrange the feathers, tie down the dock, net it. Then the tail bag went on and was tied to the blanket.
I never learned to do this; my job was to keep the peppermints coming. (Hold your hand flat, tuck that thumb in. He’s being careful, but you don’t want him to chomp the wrong thing.) I was supposed to make as much crinkle with the wrappers as I could, to distract the horses from their other end. Left unoccupied, the horses danced in the cross ties as their tails were set—ears back, nervous, anticipating a night of discomfort, their docks rubbed bald, the flies un-swished. It did not once occur to me that this was cruelty; what I saw was care.
It was no different, really, from the way my mother got ready for the show ring, painting her face with bright pink blush and too much lipstick, curling her eyelashes, driving bobby pins against her skull. This was all extra—waterproof stage makeup that she put on thick and took off later with gobs of Pond’s cold cream—but even when she wasn’t wearing boots, her high heels pinched her toes, and her stockings left red lines around her tiny waist. Beauty came at a cost—that much was clear—but you had to be beautiful to win.
After working, the horses would be hot-walked up and down in the grass between the show barns until they’d stopped blowing. Later, cross-tied in the aisles, they stood sultry to be rubbed down with linens, their slender, shining bodies steaming as a groom mopped grease on their steeply shod hooves or sponged liniment over their legs, up under and beneath their bundled tails. Most of the horses were geldings—castrated to relieve them
of their wildness, that selfish, bite-prone edge—but it was hard to see that. They all looked like women to me.
When I was eleven or twelve, the Equitation Champion and her horse arrived at the barn from Kentucky, and, soon after that, she moved in.
My parents were always “adopting” people and animals into our safe and comfortable home—stray dogs and stranded exchange students, fainting goats and feral cats, a friend recovering from a fall, itinerant a capella singers, the contractor’s raccoon. From the ether, I gathered that the Equitation Champion’s father was “nasty.” I had no idea what that meant. All I knew was that she felt safe with us, not in the dorm. She felt safe at the barn, but not alone.
I related to that feeling. The barn was not a refuge but a place where you went to learn your defenses—how to protect yourself around large animals and lewd men. It was a place where the hazards were obvious and manageable (Touch the horse’s rump when you walk behind him. Keep your heels down!), a place where you made yourself tough. (Watch the farrier work—maybe you’ll learn something. Just kick him if he puts his hands where they don’t belong.) My mother was certainly tough. She’d hit a man once with a punch bowl when he tried to grope her, bashed him on the top of the head just like he was a nasty little stud. The lesson seemed obvious: if you could control a horse, you could control anything.
Into our house the Equitation Champion brought the things that had helped her take control: Molly McButter in its blue sprinkler can, SnackWells, SlimFast, potato chips fried in olestra, the fake fat that went right through you. Out on the show circuit with her, the Cracker Barrel menu became a freak show of fatty slabs of beef, seductive cobblers. My mother, the Equitation Champion, and I took to eating unbuttered grits and dry potatoes. We no longer stopped at Dairy Queen. Our Wendy’s salads went undressed.
To control a horse’s body, you must first control your own. Heels down! Chin up! Hands still! Imagine an iron poker taped along your spine. Imagine a rod running through the center of you, from the top of your head to the backs of your heels. Up, down. Up, down.
The Equitation Champion posted like a piston, converting the horse’s horizontal flow to her vertical. Up, down. She smiled steadily around the arena, her face unmoving even as her body kissed the saddle and rose, kissed the saddle and rose. Nothing jiggled, nothing bounced—she was that thin. I leaned on the sticky creosote rails of the ring and watched, as I’d been told to do. Out in the field, Gris Gris, Ruzon’s half brother, swished his tail, grazing. I wanted to be out there, too, lying in the clover and watching the clouds, or hacking bareback through the pines, or down the road at the drive-in, slurping a strawberry milkshake, but if I wanted to ride—really ride—I needed to see how it was done. This kind of control was what my mother wanted for me. I didn’t have it.
My body, thrashing through puberty, needed mastering. I was no Equitation Champion, not in sufficient control of my body to control a horse to the trainer’s satisfaction, not to be trusted with easy, unbroken speed. I rode in Three Gaited Country Pleasure, wearing a yellow-pinstriped brown hand-me-down suit, so close in color to the bay coat of my leased gelding, it looked off. Showing Spirit, I couldn’t keep to the corners, never remembered to check my leads.
After an early morning class in Jackson, my mother waited outside the ring, swatting her boot with a white-handled whip.
You were out in la la land, she said, exasperated.
Hormones, I know now, were responsible. My brain fog would vanish, along with my period, after I’d become too thin.
Once, though, I did manage to come in second place. In the photograph, a red ribbon is hooked to Spirit’s headstall, and my red face shines, spotlit. My chin is tucked into my second chin while Spirit’s tucked chin is creased, his jawbone sharp as a blade. But, even in my triumph, something is not quite right. My ears—elfish things that stick straight out—are invisible in the picture. My mother had superglued them to my head.
In my thirteenth year, my mother and the trainer suffered a rift. Something about the farrier, her opinions about Toby’s shoes. Something about how he didn’t like it when he got beat. When she tells me the story now, she sighs—stale reproach—and says what she wouldn’t have said then: he didn’t like that she was a woman, and that she knew more than him.
It all happened fast—my memory’s a blur. She pulled Toby out of the barn, moved him to a top-notch training barn in Indiana, where, on a visit, the Equitation Champion ran miles through the pastures in the snow. When we got home, I switched to hunters.
At the new barn, there were no tail sets, no derbies. Instead, we ripped the horses’ manes with a pulling comb to make them easier to braid. We still wore drag, but now it came in the form of spandex britches and high, calf-hugging boots, stock collars and jackets in somber hues. At the new barn, the vet was always there, arm-deep in a Warmblood, palpating ovaries or untwisting a gut.
My period started in the bathroom of the trailer that served as the barn office. Two years later, it stopped. I weighed 130 pounds at twelve; at fourteen, I weighed 106. I accomplished this by eating a diet a girl might feed her Breyer horse: one half of a bale of shredded wheat for breakfast, one apple for lunch. While my parents worked long hours, I took over the grocery shopping and cooking for my family, “perfecting” our family recipes until they contained less than eight grams of fat. Every night, I did six hundred sit-ups in front of the TV.
I write “accomplished” because the control I had taken over my body was treated absolutely as an accomplishment, rewarded as one. At dinner parties, my normally mild-mannered father would invite our guests to punch my “rock-hard abs,” and my mother bought me a horse.
Older than they told us he was, Nate was sweet and slow, big and almost black. He arrived at our barn in mourning. Unsure of where he was, missing his former rider—a girl named Kirsten, who I imagined in braids like the American Girl doll of the same name—Nate wouldn’t eat, and so I stood in his stall for hours every afternoon, feeding him by hand. He lost two hundred pounds.
Still, we got straight to work, learning how to hew to corners, to see distances, count strides. When the vet found us in the ring alone, he’d mount his stocky little jumper and give me lessons without my consent. He’d tell me to drop my stirrups at the trot, keep posting. Up, down. Up, down, he’d yell sarcastically, as if it were a joke. I’d post until my calves were raw. Until they bled. I had no choice. If I stopped posting, or picked up my stirrups, the vet and his horse would crash into us, broadside, driving us into the rail, so that my knees slammed into the fence posts at speed. Sometimes he’d use his crop to keep Nate moving. Sometimes he’d take my reins so that there was nothing Nate or I could do to get away.
One night, during a lesson, the ring slick and steaming after a summer rain, I pushed Nate, my legs trembling, into the corner. When the vet yelled, Switch leads! I pressed a spur into Nate’s side and squeezed the reins. His legs went out from under him. He fell. I fell. His body lay on top of mine, until, dazed, he scrambled upright again, knees shaking, and crushed my right hand.
All this happened so fast, I didn’t know I’d been hurt until Nate hung his head in a gesture of contrition, his eyes hooded, and began to blow. Pressed into the wet footing, my hand was bloody and already swollen. Though no bones were broken, it would remain the size of a softball for a month, a gauze-wrapped bundle I carried around with me like some sort of prize. For a long time, I showed it to everyone I met; it was my best scar, a badge of toughness—this smooth white hoofprint across the freckled bones of my hand.
Eventually, I figured out that if I punished myself enough, no one else could do it for me. I worked harder, ate less. The summers I spent living in Nashville to train at a better barn, I ate a sweet potato and a box of frozen spinach for dinner, every night. After I’d remained at 106 pounds for a whole year, my mother and I flew to New York, where I was fitted for bespoke knee-high boots to wear at my first big hunt show. Everything about the shop was beautiful. I can still feel t
he smooth solidity of the wooden lasts, smell the leather: baby calf, French calf, oxblood, pony skin, ostrich. I shivered as the cobbler bent to run a tape around the arch of my foot, up my shin.
So small. Elegant, he said, nodding, as he measured the muscle of my lower leg.
The boots, for a long time, were my most prized possession. So expensive. So black. While my mother picked her horse’s hooves, I sat on the floor of the tack room and polished them to a high, hard shine. The boots were rigor itself: mastery, control. They had no zipper, no snap, no gusset, only a short, waxed lace that crisscrossed over my foot’s high bridge. To get them on, I slipped two wood-handled hooks into the loops sewn into the boots’ lining and pulled. They fit like tougher skin.
I was a teenager, though, and I was growing. The boots did not grow with me, though I maintained my 106 pounds. I checked in on my inches by putting on the jeans I’d bought when I first hit that number—a white pair from The Limited with no stretch. Occasionally, I’d slip a little—eat, for instance, Thanksgiving dinner—but my body, by that point, was so unused to fat that butter made me sick. Nevertheless, all that posting without stirrups, all that running—my muscles grew. Before each show day, I sat on a tack trunk, tugging. I used silicone spray, baby powder. I wore knee-high compression hose over my taped-down britches. Eventually, a groom would have to sit on me to keep me from sliding, while my mother and my trainer pulled, one on each hook. Blushing hard, I’d let them wrench me into the boots then run away to the safety of Nate’s temporary stall.
At the end of all this, Nate and I looked great—Nice turnout!—his coat curried and brushed to the same high black shine as my boots, my hair in a close-pinned bun, his mane ripped down and braided tight. My fingers were not strong enough to do it well, and so we hired a braider who’d come in at dawn the day of a show and stand on a step stool, wrapping the coarse hair around her chapped fingers, stitching each tiny braid through itself with a fat silver needle. Nate hated every second of it. If we didn’t Velcro a spandex neck wrap around him, he’d rub the braids loose in an hour against the door of his stall.
Horse Girls Page 11
