Horse Play

by Bonnie Bryant

  The music helped the girls to establish an even pace, but it didn’t solve everything.

  “Slow down, Stevie!” Carole warned.

  “I slowed down already,” Stevie shot back. “It’s Comanche who keeps trying to catch up to Pepper!”

  “Very funny,” Carole returned. “Try using a little pressure from your outside hand to slow him down.”

  “Maybe you guys should just go faster,” Stevie suggested. But just then Comanche responded to Stevie’s signal and shortened his stride.

  “Good!” Carole said excitedly, for she could see that if all three of them maintained their pace exactly as it was, they’d succeed, meeting precisely in the middle of the ring.

  “Very good!” Max’s voice boomed over the music. He had paused on his way across the ring to watch a few minutes of their practice.

  A small part of Carole wanted to smile. A larger part made her face a picture of determination and concentration. She didn’t want compliments from Max to distract her. She only had eyes for her friends. She watched them as carefully as they watched her, and each other, until the magical moment when they were at the center of the ring. Their horses were still trotting, now nearly head to tail, in a tight circle.

  “Now slow to a walk,” Carole said. The horses changed gaits at the same instant. She allowed herself to smile then. “And stop,” she said quietly. The music came to a climactic end. The horses stood still. The three girls grinned.

  “We did it!” Stevie yelled, patting Comanche enthusiastically on the neck. “We really, really did it.”

  “We really are getting better,” Lisa said, almost in disbelief

  “Yeah, maybe we will be good enough by next Friday,” Stevie said.

  “What’s happening Friday?” Max asked. He pushed the “off” button on the stereo and joined the girls in the center of the ring.

  The girls glanced nervously at one another. One thing they hadn’t planned for was how to tell Max about their surprise.

  “What’s happening next Friday?” he repeated. There was a little sharpness in his voice.

  Lisa and Stevie looked to Carole. She knew they would. Lisa might be the oldest of them, and Stevie might be the boldest, but when it came to handling Max, they expected her to take the reins.

  Carole didn’t have the faintest idea what to say. She leaned forward in the saddle and patted Diablo. “Well,” she began. “It’s sort of a surprise.”

  “I don’t like surprises,” Max said. “Especially when they have to do with my stables, my riders, and my horses.”

  “You’ll like this one,” Carole told him reassuringly. “We’ve been working for weeks and weeks on our drills and we think we’ve gotten good enough to do a demonstration. So, we’ve invited a few people to come watch us work next Friday at six o’clock. You can come, too.”

  Max’s face darkened. “I can’t,” he said. “And you can’t either.”

  The girls stared at him in disbelief. They had thought about all the different kinds of reactions he might have to their plan, but refusing to let them do it was not one of them.

  “Why not?” Stevie asked. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “You didn’t ask my permission, for one thing,” he said. “For another, there’s something else going on here then.”

  “But people are planning to come,” Carole protested. “We’ve sent out announcements already and put them up all around town!”

  “Then you’re just going to have to take them down,” Max told her, his face now stormy.

  “But—” Stevie began.

  “No buts,” he said. Before they could try again, he turned and left them.

  “How could—how can …” Lisa spluttered at his retreating back.

  “All that work!” Stevie groaned. “And it’s for his own good!”

  “But he doesn’t know that, does he?” Carole reasoned.

  It was not much consolation.

  • • •

  LISA FELT EMPTY inside as she walked home. Stevie and Carole each had things they had to finish up at the stable, so she walked by herself. She could have used a friend right then, though it didn’t seem likely that either of her fellow club members would have been able to think of anything to be cheerful about.

  After she’d untacked Pepper, and while he was cooling down, she’d knocked on the door to Max’s office to ask him to reconsider. “The answer is still no,” he’d said without even looking up. Lisa found out that Carole and Stevie had each tried, too, with no more success.

  On one hand, Lisa could see that even without putting on a show, she and her friends had learned an awful lot just practicing. Drill work required a special kind of riding and tremendous concentration. Their purpose, however, hadn’t been to do something for themselves. They’d wanted to do something for the stable—and especially Max. But it wasn’t going to work.

  She kicked at the gravel angrily and only succeeded in filling her sneaker with gritty dust. Disgusted, she sat down by the side of the road and untied her shoe. As she worked to get the dirt out of it, she thought about the whole mess. No matter how she looked at it, it didn’t get any better. Sullenly, she stood up and continued on her way home.

  Her outlook didn’t improve when she arrived at her house. Her mother was busily baking yet another batch of something in the kitchen. Lisa passed right through, ignoring her mother’s cheerful greeting and the promise of a “delightful” surprise awaiting her. Lisa was determined to retreat to the comforting solace of her room.

  She slammed the door behind her and tossed the backpack onto her bed. She tugged her still-gritty sneakers off, threw them in the general direction of her closet and flopped down on her chair.

  But it wasn’t her chair. It didn’t have the comfortable, familiar feel of the nice soft overstuffed chair that had occupied the window corner of her room for several years. She stood up to stare at the thing. This chair was a super-modern contraption. All chrome and foam. It wasn’t the kind of chair you could curl up in to read a book or sprawl across to study history. It wasn’t a chair that Lisa liked at all.

  “Mom!” she yelled.

  Her mother came running and appeared breathlessly at her door. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Mrs. Atwood said excitedly, her face glowing with excitement while she pointed to the despised chair. “I looked and looked until I found just the thing for you.” Mrs. Atwood smiled proudly. “It’s the latest in design. Melanie Antwerp told me about this fabulous store at the mall. I knew you’d love it—” Then, for the first time, she noticed the look on Lisa’s face. “You do love it, don’t you?” she asked.

  Thoughts flashed through Lisa’s head. The thing about Lisa’s mother was that she cared—a lot. Lisa knew her mother really had spent a lot of time looking for the horrible chair and that she’d genuinely thought Lisa would love it. This was the “delicious” surprise her mother had promised when she’d walked in the kitchen door. She had put so much thought and time into a project that didn’t need doing—and wasn’t that the story of Lisa’s mother’s life these days? She was forever fixing things that weren’t broken. Just looking at her mother’s face, Lisa knew that it would break her heart if she told her how she actually felt about the situation. There had to be a way.…

  “What did you do with my old chair, Mom?” she asked calmly.

  “I put it in the den for now. I’ll have to recover it because it doesn’t match at all, but we can do that later.”

  The den, Lisa thought. That gave her an idea.

  Lisa told her mother how much she appreciated her spending all the time, and money, on the beautiful new chair. Lisa admired the design and styling of the thing. “But,” she said. “Wouldn’t this actually look better in the den than in here?”

  Mrs. Atwood looked at her thoughtfully. “I suppose,” she agreed. “But I want you to have the new chair if you want it.…”

  “Oh, no,” Lisa protested. “The whole family should share the new chair.”

  “Hmmmm,
” Mrs. Atwood said. Before she could object, Lisa told her mother that she’d ask her dad to help her switch the chairs after supper.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Atwood agreed. She sounded a little bit as if her feelings were hurt, but Lisa knew they weren’t hurt nearly as much as they would have been if Lisa had told her what she’d truly thought about the new chair.

  Her mother returned to the kitchen, where a timer bell was ringing insistently. Lisa sat back down in the uncomfortable chair and tried to think. She couldn’t think in it. She took a shower instead. She could always think in the shower.

  Later, when it was almost dinnertime, Lisa decided to take her mother-troubles to a higher court: her father. She thought of it when she looked out of her window and saw him struggling with the outdoor grill. She skipped downstairs and hurried out the back door.

  “Would you like to help me shuck the corn?” her mother suggested as she flew by.

  “No, I’m going to help Dad,” she said. The screen door slammed behind her.

  “With the grill?” her mother asked. Mrs. Atwood never touched their grill. Lisa knew that her mother felt barbecuing was a man’s job. Lisa wasn’t so sure that her father felt the same way.

  “Here, Dad, let me help,” Lisa offered. He was about to remove the dusty used charcoal.

  “Don’t get dirty, honey,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t mind. Besides, I need you to help me with something in return.”

  He looked at her quizzically. Lisa put the lid of the grill on the ground, removed the grate, and began sifting through the debris for reusable charcoal. Her father held the plastic bag where she deposited the dusty ashes.

  “It’s about Mom,” she said, scooping a small shovelful into the trash bag. A cloud of gray ashes rose out of the top of the bag. “Looks like a volcano, doesn’t it?” she asked. “The ashes, I mean, not Mom.”

  Her father nodded, patiently holding the bag. Lisa continued.

  “It’s like she can’t leave me alone,” Lisa explained. “She has this idea of things she ought to be doing, and that I ought to be doing—”

  “And that I ought to be doing,” her father said, nodding towards the barbecue grill. “She’s always been that way,” Mr. Atwood reminded her.

  “But it’s getting worse,” Lisa said. She took the cleaned-out grill and set it straight up again.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that her mother was fretting while she watched Lisa work with her father. Her mother probably didn’t want Lisa to get dirty. Lisa thought she was a little old for her mother to spend time worrying about things like that. She told her father so. He agreed.

  “I tried to figure out what’s going on, Dad,” Lisa said. She swallowed uncomfortably. She didn’t want to ask the next question, but her father waited while she collected her thoughts—and her courage. “Dad,” she began. “Is Mom pregnant?”

  Her father smiled and then chuckled.

  “Is she?” Lisa asked, bolder now.

  “No, hon. She isn’t. I was just laughing because I remember when she was pregnant with you. She just sort of put her feet up for the whole time. It was just the opposite of this flurry of activity.”

  He poured fresh charcoal into the grill and put the electric starter onto the coals. Lisa readjusted it so that it was touching as many of the coals as possible. “Works better that way,” she explained.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You’re better at this than I am. You should do the outdoor cooking.”

  “Mom would die,” she said.

  He nodded in agreement. “Listen, Lisa,” her father said, putting his arm around her shoulder. “I know Mom’s being sort of a nuisance these days and I’m not sure what it’s all about myself. I do know that she loves you, and me, and I have the feeling this will all work out. For now, have patience. I don’t know why I’m saying that to you. You’ve got loads of patience. I have an idea. But sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for; it might just come true!”

  THAT NIGHT, STEVIE studied the bottles of nail polish in front of her. Carole and Lisa were at her house for an after-dinner Saddle Club meeting. Stevie had decided that they could polish their nails while they talked about horses.

  “Carole, you try the sparkly pink. I’m going to use the deep red. Lisa, you get green.”

  “Green? Why me?”

  “It’ll be good for you,” Stevie told her. “You always want to do what people expect you to do. So, do something different. After all, it’s the silly season, isn’t it?”

  Without further comment, Lisa reached for the green nail polish and unscrewed the top. She took out the little brush and began painting her nails a deep forest green. She finished one nail.

  “I don’t know if it’s still the silly season,” she said, admiring her green pinkie nail. “I think it may be the mystery season. Not only is my mother up to her same weird stuff, but my father’s getting mysterious, too—”

  “Pickles and ice cream?” Stevie asked. “Dad always teases Mom about the strange stuff she ate, especially when she was pregnant with Alex and me. Maybe that’s why I’m so weird!”

  Lisa and Carole smiled at their friend.

  “No, Dad promised me she’s not pregnant,” Lisa said. “He’s noticed her doing weird things, too, but he didnt’t tell me what was causing the situation, or what he was going to do to solve it. Just said he had an idea. Wouldn’t say what.”

  “Speaking of not saying what,” Carole said. “What is going on with Max?”

  “Now that was weird,” Lisa said. “Maybe some sort of mysterious disease is sweeping the adult population these days.” Lisa had finished one hand. She held it out so her friends could admire her work. “Now, I think I’ll do the other hand in bright red. Then I can cover my face with my hands and hide in a Christmas tree!”

  Stevie grinned, and then turned to Carole. “See, it’s working,” she said.

  Carole began giggling. “You really think you can keep Lisa from being logical and normal just by having her polish her nails?”

  “In the silly season, anything can happen!” Stevie declared, reaching for the green nail polish herself.

  “CAROLE, LISA, AND Stevie, please report to the office. Carole, Lisa, and Stevie!”

  Carole cocked her head in curiosity. She and her friends were in the middle of their afternoon chores before their drill practice, though Carole didn’t know why they were bothering with drill practice after Max’s edict the other day.

  What on earth could be so important that Max would have then interrupt chores? She took one more shovelful of wood chips and spread them on top of the peat in Diablo’s stall. He watched her silently, but responded with an affectionate nicker when she patted him on his silky neck.

  “Don’t know what this is about, boy,” she whispered into his ear, “but I hope Max isn’t still angry with us.”

  The horse nuzzled her neck and tickled her. Carole stowed the shovel in the equipment closet and headed for Max’s office.

  She met up with Lisa and Stevie at the door to Max’s office. Lisa had her hands shoved into her pants pocket. Carole glanced at her.

  “I didn’t have time to take off the red and green polish,” she explained. “I don’t want Max to think I’m crazy.”

  Standing between them, Stevie put a green-polished hand on Lisa’s shoulder and a red-polished one on Carole’s. “He already knows I am,” she joked.

  They went in.

  “Stop and go?” Max asked, looking at Stevie. He had noticed her nails first thing.

  Stevie and Carole relaxed a bit. If Max was joking, then he wasn’t angry any more. But Lisa blushed and shoved her hands further into her pocket.

  “Listen,” he said. “Mrs. Reg told me that you girls told her about the show and she okayed it. So, it turns out that the problem is really that I should have told her about my plan, but it was supposed to be a surprise. She assumed you’d already told me about yours. I assumed she knew about what I was doing. She coul
dn’t tell you because she didn’t know what it was that I hadn’t told her and the whole problem comes down to the fact that I’ve been busy out of my mind with one billion new students here which is great but it’s awful, too. You know what I mean?”

  The girls exchanged glances. Carole wondered briefly if Max was losing his mind. She’d never heard him say anything so garbled.

  “Are you okay, Max?” she asked, genuinely concerned.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “I’ve just been too busy to pay attention to things I ought to be paying attention to,” he explained. “And it’s gotten me in trouble.”

  Trouble was where they had begun, and trouble seemed to be where they still were. There had been too many secrets for too long. Stevie, never very good at keeping secrets anyway, couldn’t hold it any more.

  “That’s what we trying to help with!” Stevie blurted out. “You should be able to spend your time teaching and running the stable and not worrying about Mr. diAngelo!”

  “What’s he got to do with this?” Max asked.

  Carole poked Stevie in the ribs. Stevie clapped her green-nailed hand over her own mouth.

  “Nothing,” Carole said. And then to switch subjects as quickly as possible, she asked, “What was it you didn’t tell Mrs. Reg that you should have told her?”

  “Huh? Oh, that,” he said. “Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about. I thought it should be a surprise, but I’m beginning to get the feeling that surprises aren’t always a good idea.”

  He paused. Carole had the distinct feeling that that was as much of a lecture as they were going to get. It was enough, though. They all certainly got his point.

  “You remember me talking about my student, Dorothy DeSoto?” he continued.