Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  Maybe what I meant was: Am I capable of doing this at all? It seemed portentous that, on my first day as a horse owner, I was being called upon to contemplate the proportions of her grave. Perhaps, I thought, the universe was trying to tell me something. Teach me a lesson about overreaching.

  Lady did not die. I did not, despite my inexperience, ever bring her to any harm. But when I look back on that conversation now, it still feels like a piece of foreshadowing. The way that endings are implied in every beginning, as much in life as in a story. How choices, even when they’re yours, can still feel like they’re beyond your control.

  I did get used to being a horse owner. I drove to the barn, forty minutes each way, three or four times a week, even though that first summer I was also working two jobs, revising my novel, trying to have a life. I was busy and tired, but being with Lady was like letting go of a deep and painful breath.

  She was tricky to ride at the trot, bouncy and easily distracted. A bossy mare, but bad at leading on trails. She liked having her way, but not taking charge. There was a difference. Very quickly, I began to project my own qualities onto her, as people do with the animals in their lives. We both like James Taylor, I thought, when I sang to her while warming up. We’re both try-hard, we both get frustrated, we both feel bad when we have cramps. With the help of a trainer from our new barn, I softened Lady’s trot until it was smooth and pleasant. With patience, I learned to read the signs that indicated she was in heat, or had just eaten, or might be injured in some small way. My trainer and I were very different people—she was older, conservative, and a bit of a daredevil. She had once competed in Three-Day Eventing, an exquisitely dangerous type of riding that involves galloping cross-country and jumping over solid objects. But we talked during lessons and found we were both sarcastic and cynical, and enjoyed making fun of the men, full of bluster, who came out to ride the barn’s obstacle course, only to be unseated within minutes.

  “You’re good with her,” the trainer told me, nodding to Lady. “And she’s not a bitch, like some mares I know.” After the election in 2016, when I was feeling like a bitch myself, I went out to the barn, ignoring the Trump flags I saw flying in the neighborhood nearby, the “Killary” bumper stickers. My trainer, a likely Trump voter herself, was wary around me for a while. “I’m not racist,” she told me one day, in the middle of a story about a friend of hers playing loud mariachi music. “Okay,” I said, not knowing what else to say. Lady was the same as ever. She was the still point in my world, while politics and emotions spun around her. She and I stood together that hot November, while I pressed the bit gently into her mouth and pulled the bridle over her ears. I adjusted the girth of the saddle, ran my fingers through her mane, and lifted myself onto her back. There was no wind, there was no sound, except the birds overhead, the generator humming into life. Together, we survived.

  Meanwhile, the novel I was writing began to slip away from me. I remembered the excitement I’d felt the night I wrote the first few pages, how I’d read them over to myself in bed and my pleasure glowed within me. This is something real, I’d thought. I will make my name with this. It was my second book, meant to telegraph my range to a wide new readership, a marker of my ability to write about violence, tenderness, wilderness, suspense.

  Now, when I reread passages for revision, all I felt was exhaustion. This was the book that had led me to Lady in the first place, but spending time with her didn’t help clarify the issues I was having with the novel’s plot. The horsemanship was working: it was the human characters that gave me trouble. I loved them all too much, it turned out, to make them act realistically. I wanted to save them, both from their worst impulses and from the world. But doing so meant I was no closer to publishing the novel and reaching my imagined readers than I had been several drafts before.

  How could it be, I wondered, that my best intentions are making everything turn out so badly? Given that it wasn’t my first novel, I thought that I knew how to write them by now. That getting over the hurdle of my debut, a few years before, meant I could take any story I liked and turn it into a part of my career. I didn’t realize that books are fragile. That you can crush them; that they can crumple beneath the weight of your expectations. That they often remain private and unpublished, a period of your career that is invisible to everyone but you.

  One September, about two years after buying Lady, I left for an artist’s residency in Sheridan, Wyoming, trusting my horse to the steady hands of the barn staff, and taking a step into the unknown. As I was packing for the trip, I had to make a decision: to bring along the pages of my long-suffering novel and start yet another revision, or to leave them behind and use the unstructured time to begin something new.

  I’d been working on the novel, on and off, for years by that time. Lady had found her way into the book under the guise of a fictional horse named Candy, who was a gelding with different coloring, but her same rugged body and picky mannerisms. And yet, the two things—my riding life, and the novel that had presaged it—didn’t feel as inextricably linked as they had at the beginning. The connections were more oblique. Was Candy also Lady? Yes and no. It was possible for me to imagine moving on to a new story, and still riding my flesh-and-blood horse. In fact, I’m sure it would’ve seemed silly to me, then, to talk about them in the same breath.

  The residency would afford me a month away from my day job and other responsibilities, and I knew I needed to take advantage of this rare opportunity to justify leaving everything else in my life behind for the sake of art. The old book haunted me, but the contradictions I’d long felt, between the characters and the mechanics of the plot, were still there, impossible to reconcile.

  When I stepped onto the plane, I brought only my empty notebooks, fresh pens, the blank page.

  That September, the air in Sheridan was yellow and hazy, as smoke from the California wildfires drifted over and settled in. It changed the quality of light, and so, even though it was unhealthy, I didn’t mind it. I would leave my studio and walk down the dirt road, over the river, past herds of deer. The deer would startle when they saw me, but then pacify. All I ever did was lean on the fence posts and watch them, from a distance. Sometimes, when I walked back home, the residency’s white cat would vogue for me on the driveway. I wrote half of a new book in those weeks.

  Every night, the other residents and I would gather around a big table and eat the food one of us had cooked. We talked about the people we’d left back home, the projects we were pursuing, the things we loved. One man, who’d raised horses in his youth, was creaky with age and from the years he’d spent being thrown, jostled, and stomped on by his charges. Still, he told me, “Hold on to your girl, if you can.” The pressure of this directive made me uncomfortable. And yet, I assured him that I would hold on to Lady with all my might, because, at the time, it felt true.

  I could not yet put into words the new sensation I had, of drifting. The way the tentacles of responsibility had loosened from my neck, my arms, my tight-squeezed lungs, now that I was far enough away from my horse that her beauty and her personality were not there to compensate. Gone were the long drives to the barn, the hours spent on tedious, if loving, chores. Even before leaving for Wyoming, I’d begun to doubt whether I could really afford a horse in the long term; always there were unseen costs, from a new saddle pad to an urgent vet’s visit. (And someday, I still knew, the backhoe.) Now, my energy was pouring into my new novel, and I didn’t want to slow down.

  But I couldn’t break my own heart twice, in the space of such a short time. I’d left the novel. I told myself I’d keep the horse. It was a way of holding on to the person I thought I was, even as I became something else entirely.

  Around the halfway point in the residency, we all got stir-crazy and decided to venture out to an event called Don King Days, which celebrates a famous saddle maker from the area—not, you know, the other Don King—and showcases a number of equestrian events, mixing the ruggedness of Western apparel with the
unmistakable whiff of money. The fairgrounds were full of sno-cone machines and barbecue stands, screaming children and laughing adults; there was a tent full of small molten forges and flying sparks, where men and women built like Mack Trucks competed in the World Champion Blacksmiths Contest hammering iron into free-form horseshoes. Polo was being played, politely, on a field nearby, the spectators sipping free mimosas.

  I remember that day for many reasons. Before the Pledge of Allegiance, two men jumped out of a helicopter and crisscrossed in the air while holding a large American flag between them. Apparently, one of these men had lost both his legs performing the same maneuver in the Army, during a jump that also, as it happens, killed his fellow paratrooper. Bionic of leg, now, he had re-enlisted in the military, and was here today to celebrate America. He landed safely in front of us, the flag floating gently beside him. The cheering was loud; the mood, surreal.

  After the parachute jump, they set up for calf roping on the same, slippery, fenceless field where the polo match had been played. Usually, rodeos are run in dirt arenas, where the calves and ropers alike can find purchase, and the change of venue was nearly catastrophic. Several times, the little cows—“little” meaning up to 280 pounds, with prominent horns—slipped away from the cowboys at the last second and barreled straight into the crowd. I tried to capture it on video, but most of my shots were ruined as I scrambled away from the action, fear of death trumping my desire to record. We left when the wranglers brought out bucking broncos, because the broncs, too—lacking horns, but almost twice as large as the cows—ran right at us, furious at having been tied up by their balls. There was a cheerful sense of danger, everywhere. A sense that no part of the proceedings could possibly be insured.

  It was also the kind of event where half the crowd was milling around on horseback, and by the time we left, I remember feeling distinctly less-than, left out, missing Lady. I took a last, mournful look behind me, at the cowboys galloping across the glimmering fields, the blacksmiths in their tent, hammering away like the gods. I could belong here, I thought. I had the expertise by then. I knew this way of life like I knew the back of my hand.

  But a strange thing happened as we pulled away from the parking lot—and this I remember most of all. As we drove, my mind slipped back to my studio, and the work that was waiting for me there. Thoughts of Lady drifted away. It made me feel guilty at first, but the guilt didn’t last. For the last couple of weeks of the residency, I barely thought about her at all.

  I could talk forever about the smallest moments of my time with Lady. The ways she changed my life. The cowboy hat I bought at an antiques store and had to wear home on a six-hour plane ride; the now-intuitive awareness of temperature changes and how they can cause too much wind; the feeling of her gait picking up to a canter, and the two of us turning through a clean figure eight. What’s harder to say is this: a year or so after returning from the residency in Wyoming, I decided to sell her. I wanted to start writing full time, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do so while also giving Lady the care and attention that she deserved. So I found a nice woman who owned property with trail access and private stables, and together we agreed on a price. I don’t regret this decision, exactly: it got me exactly what I’d hoped. But still. You can imagine. She was not just a part of my life, she was a part of my identity. Not just the kind of person I was, but the person I was. Until, I guess, I decided I wasn’t.

  The last time I rode Lady, I didn’t know it was the last time. I’d been planning to come back to the barn the next day to say goodbye, but my trainer, who’d helped me set up the sale, suggested at the last minute that it would be better if I did not. She wanted to keep Lady healthy, since the buyer’s vet was coming out soon to do a final assessment, and with horses, you never know. They can turn an ankle, they can get pricked with a cactus, they can swallow too much air. It was good advice, but still a shock, which I felt detonate, sickly, in my stomach. I took my time grooming Lady after my ride, and then turned her out in her stall, to roll the clean off of herself, like always. I took some pictures. Then I walked away.

  Before putting my old novel aside, I revised and rewrote it one last time. I typed the whole thing out again from scratch, and when I still could not fix it to my satisfaction, at least I knew I had done all I possibly could. Leaving Lady was not the same. As I drove away from the barn, I sobbed until I thought I’d break in half, saying out loud, to no one, I don’t want to, I don’t want to.

  But I did want to. I must have.

  I used to sometimes go to riding lessons with a very mild hangover, just a sleepy one, not a headache one, god forbid a vomit one, and those lessons always went very well. My natural inclination toward anxious perfectionism was smoothed away, and as a result my posture softened. I telegraphed my turns more elegantly, and read my horse’s body language instinctively, especially if I was riding bareback and could feel her breathe: warm, like an enormous, animate teddy bear. I would breathe deeply, then, along with her. Let myself bend, fold, settle, ache. I try to re-create that feeling, now, without her. Not so much “be hungover” as “be gentle.” Let yourself, occasionally, relax.

  When I finally sold Lady, I had to meet my trainer in the parking lot of a strip mall to get the envelope of money, meeting in the middle between our respective places of work. It felt like a drug deal, and I left with the sensation of grime coating my fingers and my heart. It took me a long time to get over the suspicion that I’d betrayed Lady by selling her, even though I did so in order to improve her life as much as my own. Maybe I’m still not over it. Friends remind me every so often that it was the compassionate decision; I sent her to a plot of land where she had acres to graze, a new and loving companion, unhindered by the creative ambition that so often leads me to sequester myself for months at a time. They tell me, these friends, to take it easy on myself. Be gentle. It’s good advice, if hard to follow.

  People used to love hearing about how I bought my horse. It was a good story, with a happy ending, which left me in the role of the cowboy. It sounded bold, and brave, and beautiful, and it was those things. But the story of selling her, though less majestic, is, I think, the braver one. Not so entertaining, and certainly less cool. But the right choice, made the hard way.

  When I was with Lady, I always felt as though, together, we were more than the sum of our parts. Standing and sweating in the hundred-degree heat; riding beneath hawks’ nests, watching a three-legged coyote yip at an enormous crow. On a particularly windy Saturday, while I was jangling from mis-prescribed steroids, we won an amateur trail obstacle competition, both of us just barely holding it together. I still have the ribbon. I still have the memory of those deer in Wyoming, of the man drifting through the air on a piece of silk puffed out like a jellyfish, waving the American flag. The blacksmiths driving hot iron until it went liquid, until it was fire. There are certain things that never leave you. Wherever you go, there they are.

  A Racer Without a Pedigree

  Sarah Enelow-Snyder

  I was flipping through the newspaper want ads after church one day when I found Leo. He had a cribbing problem, meaning that he gnawed on the wood planks in his stall while grunting, which not only damages the stall, but also the horse’s teeth and digestion, and the owner only wanted a few hundred dollars for him.

  My father drove me in our small black pickup to go meet Leo, hauling an empty horse trailer behind us. I saw right away that Leo was docile and a lovely reddish-brown sorrel. I let him sniff my hand, nuzzle my curly Afro, and look me over. In my imagination he was perceptive and liked me exactly as I was, an eleven-year-old biracial girl, a string bean on my way to something other kids would later call a “Black-girl ass.” I mounted up and rode him in the owner’s round pen for a few minutes while my father spoke to the owner about price. When I dismounted I said that I liked Leo’s style and wanted to bring him home. My father gave a warm, approving nod.

  When we pulled up to our weathered gray barn, the one horse we already
had came running over to see what all the commotion was about. Buck was chronically anxious, so he was pacing, high stepping, and whinnying while we unloaded Leo from the trailer. We supervised their first meeting with halter and lead rope, and once they were suitably acquainted, we let them loose. It was originally my father’s idea to have horses, and it quickly became our father-daughter activity. My father showed me how fun and freeing it was to ride, how majestic these animals were, and how human they could be. He used to say that Buck was his best friend. The way Buck came running when my father was at the gate—they seemed almost telepathically connected, and I wanted that kind of rapport with Leo. I carefully groomed and fed him, built a friendship with him, and felt the breeze on my face as we rode all over the hills near our house.

  My parents had lived all over the country, studying at different universities and pursuing various jobs, and my older brother was born during a one-year stint in Texas. Then they moved up to New York State, where I was born, and we settled back down in central Texas in 1989 when I was six years old. My father was a professor of mathematical applications in political science, and he’d gotten a job at the University of Texas at Austin. Our ranch-style house out in nearby Spicewood was the same reddish color as Leo’s coat and sat on ten acres. My stay-at-home mother kept a garden next to the house with tomatoes, peppers, and cilantro underneath a wooden sunshade, and on the opposite side of the house grew a sturdy peach tree.