The Georges and the Jewels by Jane Smiley

was two fences set one stride apart. You jumped twice, but it counted, for scoring purposes, as one effort. This, too, was harder than it looked, but I made it. When I came back to her, she said, “Abby, that wasn’t bad.”
    I knew there was a
but
coming.
    “But you seemed a little out of control. This time, I want you to go more slowly, sit up more in the turns, and not let the pony lean to the inside.”
    When I did it again, I realized how bad the previous time had been by the fact that I actually felt the pony canter to the jumps this time in a balanced way and jump them in a balanced way, without leaning to the inside. The last thing you want your pony to do when he’s jumping is take them tilted.
    She said, “I would like you to think about the jumps thatare coming up when you are going
into
the corner of the arena rather than coming out of it.”
    I tried this the third time around. It was much better.
    This time she said, “You’re a fast learner. And a good rider. Try the first course again.”
    She stood with me in the center of the ring and gestured to demonstrate the course again. I was to fix the turns in my mind first and the jumps in my mind second.
    I repeated the course back to her.
    She said, “That’s right. One other thing.”
    “What?”
    “Look where you are going to be ten strides ahead, not two or five strides ahead.”
    It was easy.
    In fact, that night in bed, I lay there for a fairly long time, trying to figure out how it had gone so quickly from being impossible the first time to being easy the last time. I pictured the jumps in my mind, one after another. I realized that the most important thing was not that I was jumping jumps, but that I was riding a route from one spot to another, just like on a map. If I remembered the map and sat up, we would get there.
    When we arrived at the show the next morning, Daddy went right up to Melinda’s father, Mr. Frederick Anniston, held out his hand, and introduced himself. Mr. Anniston was wearing a tweed jacket and another coat and a dark-colored hat with a green feather in the band. He had on gloves and seemed to be cold; Melinda was pressed against him and looked as though the weather had shrunk her down to nothing. Melinda’smother didn’t seem to be around. Mr. Anniston didn’t speak to me, but he watched me.
    There were six other ponies in the warm-up area, which was fairly large, and six trainers calling out to six riders. Two of the ponies were very fancy—they almost looked more like reduced-size horses than ponies. The other four were just ponies. Gallant Man, the only gray, was prettier than all of those four. I wove my way among the other ponies—this part wasn’t hard. After we warmed up, Daddy held Gallant Man, and Miss Slater walked with me around the course, step by step, so that I could learn it on my feet. The course had more than two turns—it had four—and more than seven fences. If you counted both halves of the in-and-out, it had nine fences.
    I got back on Gallant Man. One of the girls and her pony were jumping the jumps in the warm-up area, a crossbar, a single bar, and an oxer, which was two bars parallel to one another, the back one a little higher than the front one. Her pony was one of the plain ones. He was willing, but he looked dull to me. The girl counted as she approached every fence—“One two one two one two one two”—and then they jumped. The other thing she did was lift her eyes higher and higher as she got closer to the fence, so that when she was over the top, she was looking up into the trees. This made me smile.
    We warmed up by trotting the cross-rail, then cantering it. He kept me right with him, and by the time we were ready for a real jump, I couldn’t wait. But I did. One thing I knew (and there weren’t many of those) was to wait. I took slow breaths. I could see Mr. Anniston standing by the rail, staring at us. Melinda was pressed up against his leg. Neither one was smiling.Now we did