dressed up in the mystery clothes from the old trunk. “Remember this?” Amy wrote. “I found it in my dresser drawer.” The picture, scanned in, was grainy but unmistakable; there we were in various stages of Victorian regalia, behind us the saddles and the sunbeams through the shuttered windows, our real clothes visible in piles on the floor. “Who could forget?” I e-mailed back. But there is one part I did forget, or maybe never knew: Who had taken that picture? Not Amy, because I found her. I found everyone, following form after form with my finger. All twelve of us accounted for. “Who gave you the photo?” I asked Amy, and she wrote back, “Don’t know.” Was someone looking in on us from outside, perhaps peering between the shutters; someone spying. Hank? Rose? Someone seeing.
That picture is remarkable for the way it captures a group of girls at play, in whim, but it is more remarkable if you realize we were so absorbed we never knew we were being watched. Or if we knew, we didn’t care, and thus forgot. We were twelve girls learning to do the work of womanhood—the shit-smeared feeding, cleaning, muscle-aching labor of loving an animal dependent upon you and
not
losing yourself in the animal. In fact finding yourself in the animal and all the associated tasks of care, shaping as you were shaped.
Practicing. Twelve in all. Girls, learning our mothers’ lives were not our future’s only form, and that, unlike those older women, we need not be diminished by the need to nurture. Twelve girls. Washing the tack on Sundays, cleaning the cupola on Mondays. We grew so strong those summers. Twelve girls freed in our faux corsets. Standing sure, we were. Learning. “My, you look lovely, madame.”
That I was the worst rider at camp seemed more a matter of character than skill, a fact that I accepted with an odd equanimity. My heels flew up; my reins tangled. I kicked when I should have squeezed, squeezed when I should have kicked. When the other girls cantered, I had to move my mount to the center and stand idle. Sometimes my mounts, probably bored beyond reason, would lift their heads and let loose a plaintive whinny, or a deep soft nicker, as though chuckling to themselves over me, the clumsy one who belonged in a Schul, not a saddle.
The fact is, my bloodline was entirely irrelevant. Religion did not hold me back; philosophy did. I rode like I lived, and vice versa: in a state of foreboding. What so scared me up there? Was it that I could feel, though the thick wedge of saddle, the orchestration of many muscles moving me, so I was moved, a passive person, a rider only in name? Or was it simply the gap between me and the ground, that descent decorated night after night with tales of horse lore as we lay in our beds; someone knew someone who had died going down, her neck snapped when the horse bucked her off, or worse,
had we heard
, or still worse,
there had been
… In the dark girls swapped stories, the purpose of which seemed to be to tether us to horses through terror, like a frightening film one can’t wait to see. I’d cover my eyes one second, peek out the next.
What is the purpose of loving what haunts you, of returning, time and again, to terror, or its kinder cousin, fear? What is the story here? Well, for starters, there appears to be no single story when it comes to girls and equines. Terror on the one hand, reassurance on the other, and then we run out of hands, but not contradictions. What is wild and domestic both? How can you find the ground by learning to leap? How can you hate what you love? Some researchers posit that the female brain has a thicker corpus callosum than does the male brain. What might this mean? In the female brain there could be more fibers connecting the separate hemispheres, so left and right swap stories, blend concepts, come closer. Male brains, in a vastly generalized sense, are better at keeping their twin bins on separate sides of the shelf, verbal here,
That picture is remarkable for the way it captures a group of girls at play, in whim, but it is more remarkable if you realize we were so absorbed we never knew we were being watched. Or if we knew, we didn’t care, and thus forgot. We were twelve girls learning to do the work of womanhood—the shit-smeared feeding, cleaning, muscle-aching labor of loving an animal dependent upon you and
not
losing yourself in the animal. In fact finding yourself in the animal and all the associated tasks of care, shaping as you were shaped.
Practicing. Twelve in all. Girls, learning our mothers’ lives were not our future’s only form, and that, unlike those older women, we need not be diminished by the need to nurture. Twelve girls. Washing the tack on Sundays, cleaning the cupola on Mondays. We grew so strong those summers. Twelve girls freed in our faux corsets. Standing sure, we were. Learning. “My, you look lovely, madame.”
That I was the worst rider at camp seemed more a matter of character than skill, a fact that I accepted with an odd equanimity. My heels flew up; my reins tangled. I kicked when I should have squeezed, squeezed when I should have kicked. When the other girls cantered, I had to move my mount to the center and stand idle. Sometimes my mounts, probably bored beyond reason, would lift their heads and let loose a plaintive whinny, or a deep soft nicker, as though chuckling to themselves over me, the clumsy one who belonged in a Schul, not a saddle.
The fact is, my bloodline was entirely irrelevant. Religion did not hold me back; philosophy did. I rode like I lived, and vice versa: in a state of foreboding. What so scared me up there? Was it that I could feel, though the thick wedge of saddle, the orchestration of many muscles moving me, so I was moved, a passive person, a rider only in name? Or was it simply the gap between me and the ground, that descent decorated night after night with tales of horse lore as we lay in our beds; someone knew someone who had died going down, her neck snapped when the horse bucked her off, or worse,
had we heard
, or still worse,
there had been
… In the dark girls swapped stories, the purpose of which seemed to be to tether us to horses through terror, like a frightening film one can’t wait to see. I’d cover my eyes one second, peek out the next.
What is the purpose of loving what haunts you, of returning, time and again, to terror, or its kinder cousin, fear? What is the story here? Well, for starters, there appears to be no single story when it comes to girls and equines. Terror on the one hand, reassurance on the other, and then we run out of hands, but not contradictions. What is wild and domestic both? How can you find the ground by learning to leap? How can you hate what you love? Some researchers posit that the female brain has a thicker corpus callosum than does the male brain. What might this mean? In the female brain there could be more fibers connecting the separate hemispheres, so left and right swap stories, blend concepts, come closer. Male brains, in a vastly generalized sense, are better at keeping their twin bins on separate sides of the shelf, verbal here,
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