The messages are my secret; they are mine to be ashamed of and I fear their arrival. When they come, I press delete, lie awake and hope they don’t return. At school, I trudge around, shoulders slumped in, like my body is an overcoat, pockets full of stones. I fantasize invisibility, which only riding offers. On a horse I am not a girl, not a body. I am a horse, and closer to escape.
Escape is a privilege for any girl. Protection is a privilege. My father makes this clear. He sits in the driver’s seat of his parked car and pulls his checkbook from between the seats. He writes out numbers so I can see how much he pays for my lessons. He signs his name in an anxious scribble, tears out a slip of blue, hands it to me to deliver.
A particular ritual, a weekly ritual and extra costly when my parents finally separate. They refuse to speak, let alone fight, and hire lawyers to do the talking, screaming, bargaining, for them. Around me they are guilt ridden, worried. They move through separate fogs of grief and anger, and money flies from their hands like it’s abstract and meaningless. They drain my college fund to buy me Ham and pay his board at a fancy training barn on the New Hampshire seacoast. They take turns driving me two hours west each weekend, so I can practice for the coming season, my graduation from the “thirteen and under” junior exhibitor age group, to the “fourteen through eighteen” division in which Ham and I will show.
When we meet, Ham is called Rambo. He is violent, but with time, attention, a different name, he begins to soften. Still, my new trainer keeps all her horses in stalls; they never go outside, and Ham is no exception. His isolation is for his safety, she says. Outside, Ham might spook, run, hurt himself. “We can’t trust him,” she says, and smiles.
Ham is not, it turns out, closer to escape than I. We are both isolated, both fearful. He lives in a cage, and I am a friendless freshman. My parents are at war. For the sake of my show career, I have left the farm and ride now only on the weekends.
Without barn chores at Andrea’s, the weeks are long. I spend my free time locked in my room at either house, waiting for Saturday’s long drive to Ham, and memorizing show results in the Morgan Connection magazine. I note which horses and girls to dismiss, which ones to beat; I finally read The Force. The book makes sense to me. The book teaches that I have the power to effect great change. I already believe this to be true. My mother’s illness, for example, onset in tandem with my birth; my father’s anger, my parent’s divorce, which I feared and so, by the logic of The Force, created. “You create your own reality,” The Force reminds me, and everything that’s wrong in my life began as a bad feeling I dwelled on, and manifested. To do better, I must think only positive thoughts, feel only positive feelings; I must distance myself from people who might doubt my ability to win or, worse, compete with it.
“Don’t you want friends?” my mother says. She stands in the kitchen of her new house, hands on her hips.
“I have friends,” I snap.
Once she and I were bonded. We spent time together, grateful that we had it. She had been sick, and I had feared her death. Now, The Force has taught me not to fear. Or divorce has changed what scares me. Since my mother left, my father has weakened, his rage and grief so drastic, I wonder what they’ll create. When I’m at my mom’s, I lie awake and imagine finding my dad’s mottled body, hung by his own hand, swinging from a beam in his empty house. The vision rises up and I quickly tuck it away, somewhere in my body even I can’t see.
“Where are you?” my mother asks. I say nothing and she answers herself. “You’re shut down,” she says, “always somewhere else.” I am in another world. I am at school, the barn, my dad’s house.
“Whose fault is that?” I spit, like she should have stayed.
I know she’s better off here, in this new house, sweet and squat, with a wood-burning stove, maple syrup pails in the yard, a rain barrel. My dad’s cavern on the hill was always too big. Now he closes off whole rooms to save heat, lets toilets dry up and rust. In the summer, black flies crawl from between the logs of his office walls. Ladybugs infest my mother’s kitchen. I turn fifteen and my parents, unwilling to call each other and coordinate, give me the same presents; when I unwrap a duplicate book, sweater, set of stubby silver spurs, at my dad’s house, I feign surprise. All I want is to win anyway. And I do, for now. For now, Ham and I coast through the show season as undefeated champions, projected to win the World Championship in October.
My father calls me Sport and helps me visualize my rides. We sit at the kitchen counter, that old battlefield, and close our eyes. I picture Ham, bathed in roses, a spotlight; I picture my body, blotted by the glow.
As Worlds approach, school starts. Since my parents split, since I quit barn chores at the farm and read The Force, my grades are up and I’m in accelerated classes, studying European History, doodling horses in textbook margins, careful to erase them after. I listen as I draw; I learn that despite propeller parts and artillery, the likes of which my grandfather and his father produced, during the Great Wars European armies clung to cavalry-specific strategies, and the death toll, both human and equine, staggered. In cities and on farms, horses were still effective tools of labor and transport, but they were wasteful—in 1900 New York City, horses produced 1,100 tons of manure a day—and prone to spooking and bolting. The automobile, high-speed trains, motorized tractors, were rational alternatives to so much excessive waste, excessive instinct, need.
But with technological solutions, critics complained, came a loss of connection, the enmeshment of human and nature exemplified by the enmeshment of human and horse. Machines, it was argued, sucked men’s souls, but horses fed them.
First Wave feminists waded into the debate. With a vehemence cringe-inducing to subsequent feminist movements, first wavers relished the old Aristotelian ideas of women’s innate connection with anything animal, physical, emotional. As they campaigned for freedom from so-called chattel marriages, they also advocated for the rights of animals considered chattel. And so the corset, the sidesaddle, the layers of heavy fabric designed to hide women’s dangerous flesh, fell from favor alongside the “bearing rein,” a tight strap used to hold carriage horses’ heads at painful, unnatural, and life-shortening angles.
Time passed, technology advanced; women left the home in greater numbers; horses disappeared from urban landscapes and farms, became objects, pets, hobbies, a perceptive shift that primed them to belong, in the Western cultural imagination, to women. Which is how we arrive at a modern day in which Western women and horses are often framed as uniquely bonded. “It is more than a relationship, more than an attraction. The thing is undeniable, even indescribable,” writes GaWaNi Pony Boy, editor of Of Women and Horses, an anthology both parents gave me on my fifteenth birthday. “Do women have an innate gift that allows them to commune with our equine brothers and sisters?” Pony Boy asks.
For many women, the answer is yes, perhaps because, like it or not, our bodies define what we’re considered capable of. Embodiment is a burden, a history, we can’t escape; horses, valued or discarded for their bodies depending on situation and cultural mood, remind us of ourselves.
Innate or not, many women riders perform our bond with horses in the competitive sphere, reenacting equestrian pastimes: the fox hunt, the battlefield, the cattle drive. Of course we do. Why wouldn’t women want to reimagine a history that has excluded us? Why wouldn’t we want to align ourselves with “masculine” traits, or insert ourselves into masculine spheres? Why wouldn’t we want to ride the wild warhorses, become fighters, hunters, cowboys, explorers? On a horse I am not a girl.
It’s October, the week before our first World Championship show, our first shot at the title, and hives erupt from Ham’s body like a badly buried secret. He trailers to Oklahoma anyway, shivering with itch, tied to a hay bag he won’t eat. My father says, “Use the Force to visualize the welts away.” But mantras, oatmeal baths, antihistamines all fail to erase their prickle and stick.
We decide to show anyway. Stake night, my dad sits
on a trunk outside Ham’s stall with his eyes closed. “I see it,” he says, and tells me about the Winner’s Circle, the roses, all that glow. In the warm-up he stands on tiptoes to whisper in Ham’s ear. The only word I hear is “light.”
I try to see the light my father sees; as Ham and I descend the chute, I tell myself it’s mine. I touch my spurs to Ham’s lumpy coat, ride deep in the corners and aggressive on the straightaways. The three judges see us. My father does, too; every pass I make I watch for his body, grim and focused, beyond the out-gate. He’s tapped into the Force, guiding us with the force of his feelings, but it’s as if Ham’s trotting through water, every step weighed down, and no matter how I ask for more energy and attention, he can’t deliver.
When finally the work is done, the judges turn in their cards and all the riders retire to wait. Minutes pass. The judges deliberate, the crowd stirs. The World Champion is—the announcer calls a number, a name. The audience cheers for a horse, a girl, who isn’t me. This happens for the reserve champion, too. Third place, fourth. In the end, Ham and I leave the ring without a ribbon.
I know not to cry about it. My dad holds Ham and I administer an oatmeal bath. After, he takes me to a chain restaurant and I shovel chips into my mouth, manic in my attention to their sharp edges and caloric worth. My father watches, wordless. He doesn’t like to see me lose control. Sport would never lose control, get too fat, too thin, too emotional about defeat. The check comes and he scrutinizes the sum total, sighs like it’s too high. Eventually, he pays. We return together to the long New England winter.
A season of loss. My own, my father’s, the money his father left him, gone on the day Enron crashes. My father screams like he’s been shot. He breaks a framed photograph of Ham and me. He sobs, “What’s wrong with me?” The Force, Stuart Wilde, his daughter, the dog, none of us can answer.
Time passes. One by one, my dad removes his father’s guns from their racks and sells them. The heat goes off, returns. Taxidermy trickles away. The dog dies. Soon, only the two of us remain.
Summer comes, then another. Bills pile up on my father’s desk. I work as a groom to pay them. I groom more than I ride. I travel between temporary barns and braid other people’s horses. I feed myself in one hundred–calorie doses, keep count in my head. Just as my body begins to turn toward womanhood, I starve it small again, starve it back into a girl.
“I got it, Sport,” my dad says with every bill. “Trust me.” He says this as the debt keeps growing and the phone keeps ringing, collection agencies and credit card companies jamming the line until my father unplugs it. What he does for money, I no longer know. Nor do I ask. Nor do I trust him, though I feel his pain like it’s my own. I work to turn off the pain, work to save us. I work to become the girl my father wants, thin and willing, a Sport, a soldier for the Force, a soldier in the war against fear.
But in the show ring I lose like it’s my job: regional titles, national titles, world titles, the trust of my horse, who I no longer have time for. Only my father still believes in us. “I understand you,” he reminds me. “We’re the same, you and I.” And he’s right, he does understand. My mother does not. As my last season in junior exhibitor approaches she wants to sell Ham. I have college coming up, she says. And my father isn’t keeping his end of the financial bargain; she’s tired of shouldering more than her half of Ham’s expenses, and mine.
“You don’t understand,” I scream at her, and we fight, always returning to the fact of my failure. Because no matter what I earn, it’s never enough to cover my father’s debt, the mountains of delinquent bills he hides from, the running list of what he’s supposed to split with my mom and me, but never can.
Money is a problem for everyone but him. “There’s no such word as can’t,” he says. “Trust me.” He finds me a car I pay for. He gives me a credit card for gas. It never works, and I steal from my mom’s purse to make it to the foot of his driveway, where I leave the empty car, walk the rest of the way, up ruts that run like veins to the cold house, the unplugged phones, the missing guns, my father in his meditation chair, manifesting.
“He’s in a fantasy world of denial,” my mother says. “You’re both in a fantasy, pretending you’re rich.”
Time passes, and I begin to suspect she’s right: I’m not Sport and my father’s not pure Force. But I’m still with him in the dream that he is. I’m with him in the dream and I’m at war with who I have to be, to stay there.
I do my best to heal. Weekends, I drive to the barn, visualizing freedom for myself and Ham, a grassy field in which he grazes, a college I attend, far from my parents and their pain. At the barn, I exercise Ham before I get to work grooming, lunging, stall picking. I put him first and go slow when I ride, reminding myself to soften the way I want my horse to soften. I speak to him, say his name, tell him he’s safe, there’s nothing to fear. After we train, we ride outside; I loosen the reins, stand in the stirrups, let him run.
It’s then I develop a new obsession, a secret history I study to rewrite my own. In library books and novels, on the internet and in myth, I find horsewomen. I find them painting mustangs on cave walls and milking mares on Mongolian steppes. I find them in the Celtic goddess Epona, a woman, a warrior, a horse. And in the Amazons, empowered by their rage. I find, in Russia, Catherine the Great, who refused the customary sidesaddle and demanded that the women of her court follow suit. In a famous portrait by Vigilius Eriksen, she sits atop a prancing white warhorse, dressed in full military regalia, brandishing a sword like a dare.
“That woman doesn’t understand you,” my dad says about my mom. “I understand, we’re the same, you and I, I know you need Ham, know you’ll die without Ham.” We understand the Force, he reminds me, and my mother does not. The Force won’t let anything happen to Ham, my father promises, but soon it’s the week before we’re supposed to leave for Oklahoma, our last World Championship ride. The horses are scheduled to trailer out ahead, and the truckers won’t load Ham until my dad’s account is settled.
“I’m so ashamed,” he chokes when I call him from my mother’s kitchen. “But I just can’t.” Can’t afford the expenses, the flight, the time off from work. He’s driving for FedEx, a job he’s kept secret but confesses now, just to me. “This stays between us,” he says and then, “I love you, Sport.”
“Love you,” I say. We hang up. My mother pays for Ham’s journey and mine. We leave for World without my father and though it shames me, I am relieved to be alone.
Soon it is the morning of my last ride. My mother has hung for-sale flyers all over the show grounds, hoping a new girl’s parents will purchase Ham, and trailer him away at the week’s end. My father is home in the woods and hasn’t called. So it’s my last chance, my last morning like this, the barn still before the big lights, Ham napping on the cross ties as I braid. I finish, move around the stall, primping. I dress—breeches, button-up shirt and collar, gold horseshoe pin; boots, jacket, gloves—the same uniform as the girls I ride against. I pin a synthetic blond bun to the back of my head, wipe my face in a slivered mirror and see exhaustion in my skin. I have fought for the length of the girlhood I am leaving now. I bridle, mount, disappear; we ride from the barn, toward the Coliseum, the show, the announcer’s final call.
At home in the woods my father checks the time. He walks to his office, emptied of everything but his father’s chair. He sits, closes his eyes to visualize my ride. It’s dark before he sees me, projected by his mind’s eye, in among the girls and horses. I am riding, and it’s just like we’ve imagined, every step ordained. My father breathes to bridge the space between us. I breathe. Ham’s breath matches mine. We stop. We breathe together. Together we wait.
The judges deliberate. The Coliseum stills. There will be another war, I know this now. Win or lose, my father will remain in the cavern on the hill, foreclosure notices on the door, last pieces of taxidermy gathering dust on the walls. Win or lose, he will love me from that distance.
The World Champion is—
my number, my name, and Ham’s. The crowd erupts, music rises. We move to the Winner’s Circle like there’s a force there, pulling us.
The photographer takes our picture. The ring stewards approach with a blanket of roses; they cover us in all that bloom. The ring goes dark and the spot comes up, makes a circle in which Ham and I are safe, blind beyond the yellow edge. And still I picture my father, waiting in his father’s chair. His palms are open, his body is a beam. We are alive together in the light.
We Aren’t Close to Anywhere
Rosebud Ben-Oni
Hrafnkel had one animal in his possession that he valued more than others . . . which he named Freyfaxi . . . He had such a love for this stallion that he made an oath to bring about the death of any man who rode it without his permission.
—FROM THE SAGA OF HRAFNKEL FREY’S GOÐI
When I talk about Odin now, I’ll never forget my then husband’s reaction to my stories and poems that were sparked by that relationship, which was not an affair per se, but has come to feel like one. I’ve been reading poems about Odin in public for the last few years, until one night when my usually calm and collected Brian spit out after a reading: “I can’t believe four years later, you are still this obsessed with someone you knew for less than a week!”
I remember seeing the candid frustration in his eyes, holding in my breath—and then bursting out in laughter on the 7 train, as we made our way from Manhattan back to Queens.
Lest you think I’m a terrible person, please realize that he was more upset that I’d fallen in a big way for this Odin because I knew him for less than a week.
And it doesn’t make it any less threatening to him that Odin is, in fact, a horse.
In 2016, I went to Iceland to ride horses. Or, rather, we went on a two-week trip that included a five-day horseback-riding excursion. There were other reasons we went to Iceland. According to scientists, the Northern Lights would be the brightest they’d been in a decade, as they occur on an eleven-year solar cycle. Brian and I also found a good deal online. Yet while he was focused on hiking, visiting the capital Reykjavik, eating fresh fish, and trying specialties like svið (sheep’s head, which I tried) and puffin (which I declined), all I could think about were the horses.
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