Gee Whiz

by Jane Smiley

  “And a thunderstorm!” exclaimed Diana.

  “And a tornado!” shouted Lucia.

  “And a Martian attack!” exclaimed Leslie.

  Barbie said, “I don’t see any problem, really.”

  And then I fell asleep.

  It may be that I was the only one at the party used to going to bed before ten and getting up before six, and it also may be that I was the only one who as a rule slept like a log. I hadn’t even unrolled my bedroll. I was lying on the couch watching the fortune-telling, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up and yawning, and the room was quiet and dark. Various mounds around me indicated that others were asleep, too, but one of these was not Barbie. I could see her with Sophia and Marie over in the corner, doing something. I yawned again, and Barbie turned around, put her finger to her lips, and waved me over. I crawled.

  The corner was dim, but there was some light from the moon, which was big and bright outside the window. The three of them were sitting with their legs crossed about six or eight feet from Alexis, who was asleep in her sleeping bag. She was lying on her side, with one elbow bent, and her hand under her pillow. Her other arm was resting on her hip. The sleeve of her pajamas was kind of pulled up and twisted. As I looked at her, she made a little snore.

  Barbie, Marie, and Sophia were kneeling around a pot of water, talking in very low voices. Barbie said, “It works. It worked at school. You stick the hand of the sleeping person in a pot of warm water, and it makes them say something. The thing they say is the truth. It’s like hypnosis. You ask them a question in a really low voice, so as not to wake them up, and they tell the truth, no matter what they’ve been saying when they’re awake.”

  Sophia was shaking her head. She said, “They don’t tell the truth. They wet their pants. The feeling of the water makes them wet their pants.”

  “It didn’t do that at school.”

  “Did you do it to someone?”

  “I didn’t, but some other girls did, and four of the boys did it, too.”

  Marie said, “I’m not sure whether boys care enough about wetting their pants to remember if they did it.”

  We all laughed quietly. Apparently, Alexis was to be the victim.

  I said, “What are you going to ask her? Didn’t you always tell me you could read her mind, anyway?”

  “I can read the good thoughts.”

  Marie said, “Alexis doesn’t think bad thoughts.”

  Barbie said, “That’s what I want to find out.”

  Sophia was still serious. She said, “If she wets her sleeping bag, it’s very hard to get it out.” She had put her hair into a loose braid that went down her back and looked comfortable. She was wearing a nightgown, yellow flannel with little teddy bears. I still had on my clothes, Marie had on shortie pajamas, and Barbie was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of long johns like my dad wore on very very cold days. She picked up the pot of water, which sloshed a little bit, and moved it closer to Alexis’s hand. She put her finger in it, to test it. I put my finger in it, to test it. It was about the temperature of bathwater. We all crept closer to Alexis, who snored once again, and heaved a sigh. Once we were next to her, Barbie made a motion with her hand that we were to sit very still and not say anything. We sat like that for what seemed a long time, then Barbie slid her fingers underneath Alexis’s fingers and kept them there. I found myself holding my breath, as if something bad was going to happen. We all waited, and then bit by bit, Barbie eased Alexis’s hand toward the pot and slid it into the water. Alexis did not wake up. I glanced at Sophia. Her eyes were wide and blue in the moonlight.

  Finally, Barbie leaned very close to Alexis. We all leaned in. Barbie whispered, “Where did you hide my cashmere sweater?”

  I had to put my hand over my mouth not to laugh, and I saw Marie grin, too. But there was no answer from Alexis, just another snore. Barbie leaned in again and repeated the question. There was a moment of silence, and then Alexis muttered, “I sold it on the black market.” We all laughed, even Alexis, who opened her eyes. She had been awake the whole time.

  After that, we settled into our beds and gradually fell asleep. The last thing I heard was Marie and Alexis whispering about something.

  You would have thought that the sun would wake us up—that room was so bright—but we slept all the way until Mrs. Goldman brought in a coffee cake with cinnamon swirls through it and brown-sugar crumbles over the top. She also had orange juice, hard-boiled eggs, and strips of bacon, and it was all very good—we sat around in our pajamas eating from paper plates. Some of the others said what they were going to do for Christmas—Sophia and her parents always went to the club that was attached to the stables and served a huge buffet. Leslie was going caroling with her cousins in a certain neighborhood not far from the high school that was famous for elaborate decorations—the three of them had already rehearsed their carols five or six times. Leslie sang alto. Lucia always went to midnight Mass (Marie’s parents liked that, too—the town where they lived had a beautiful cathedral from about the year 1100, which was hard to imagine). Of course, the Marxes and the Goldmans did nothing for Christmas, but they had celebrated Hanukkah by eating potato pancakes. Ingrid said, through Marie, that in her family, they had a storytelling contest where they told traditional Christmas fairy tales about an elf called Fjøsnisse who plays tricks on Christmas Eve. I didn’t say what we did, and no one asked, but I did look around and think that Dad would consider every single one of my friends “unsaved.” He thought that going among the unsaved was necessary but dangerous. The fact was, I went among the unsaved all the time, but thinking about Christmas made it more obvious.

  Around noon, we cleaned up after ourselves, and pretty soon, the cars started showing up. Mom was the only one driving a truck. As I opened the door to get in, Barbie said, “So, I’ll come for my lesson tomorrow at two, but can we do one thing?”

  “What?”

  I thought she was going to say go for a trail ride or something, but she said, “Can we get Gee Whiz out and play around with him?”

  This struck me as a really good idea, just the sort of idea that I should have come up with on my own. I said, “I’ll ask Danny.” But I was sure he would say yes, and I thought maybe he would show up, if he could. When we drove away (I was waving good-bye to everyone), the first thing Mom asked me about was what we’d had to eat—I told her about the fondues, especially the chocolate one, and the white cheeses. She had heard of fondue, but never seen it. Apparently, there was a restaurant somewhere not far away that served only fondue. She thought that it didn’t sound very filling—she and Dad liked food that “sticks to your ribs.” She and Dad had done a lot of shopping—we were on our way to pick him up at the hardware store. As she talked, I looked at her, and I looked around at the truck—it was old. The greatest thing about California, as far as Dad was concerned, was no ice and therefore no salt on the roads, so a car or a truck could last forever, say two hundred thousand miles, no problem, because no body rust. Uncle Matthew in Oklahoma had driven a car for years that had no floor on the driver’s side—you could watch the road whizzing by underneath it—so when he started seeing Aunt Rhoda, he had put a piece of plywood in there somehow. Dad acted as though this was funny. I thought about spending the rest of my life driving around in a truck as old as I was. With, I found myself thinking, parents who never had fondue, would never go to Paris, or probably not Los Angeles, and maybe not even San Francisco. Mom was pretty and young, but she would never wear makeup, or a short skirt, or fishnet hose. I mean, there were lots of mothers who would never wear fishnet hose, but Mom, pretty as she was, would also never have worn them. And maybe, somehow, my parents had made of me the sort of person who would never wear them, either.

  Truly, the most interesting person at the party was not, for once, a Goldman. It was Marie. I’d hardly said a word to her; she and I had smiled at each other a few times. But I watched her. Everything she did was good-natured, graceful, and smart. She had been to England an
d Italy and even Turkey and Morocco. Coming to school in Malibu, and adding to that a skiing vacation in Colorado, were easy as pie for her. I had never been on a plane. Mom had never been on a plane. Dad had never been on a plane. No wonder Danny didn’t mind the thought of being drafted.

  It took forever to get home, and after Dad got in beside me, they talked around me all the way home about candles for church and food—pot roast or turkey? What kind of potatoes? Mashed were good, but there were also baked and boiled. How about sweet potatoes? Which was more festive, and what did the brothers and the sisters like? When we drove through our gate, I jumped out when Dad got out to open it and went straight to the barn—not because I was dying to ride, but because I was dying to get away from my parents.

  Chapter 7

  IT WAS ALREADY LATE, SO I DECIDED TO RIDE JUST ONE HORSE, purely for pleasure. Of course I chose Blue. He was standing by the gate, so all I did was open it, put a halter on him, and walk him to the barn. As we left the pasture, Gee Whiz let out a ringing whinny. I turned around, and he nickered, too. His ears were pricked, and he looked very handsome, his dark eyes in his white face. I glanced at Blue. Even in the short time we’d had him—since the late winter—he had shed out twice, and he was noticeably lighter than he had been a year before. He was now almost eight, we thought—that would be a year younger than Gee Whiz, but he was a good deal darker. You never knew with grays how quickly they would gray out, how quickly their stars and blazes and white stockings would disappear completely as the rest of the horse turned white.

  Jane had told me about a horse she knew who was born a chestnut and stayed a chestnut for years, and then the spring when he was ten, his winter coat fell out, and he was white. That was rare—I’d never heard of anything like it. Every horse is born dark, but if a horse has a gray parent (and every gray horse has at least one gray parent), you can look at his eyelids and the area around his eyes and see gray hairs. That means he’s a gray and will eventually turn white. If a gray parent produces a nongray colt or filly, then the gray has gone out of that line, because gray is a dominant gene—if it’s there, you see it (we had learned about dominant and recessive genes in biology). Dad said that meant that the population of grays was always getting smaller, but I didn’t know if that was really true. Lots of horsemen swore up and down that coat color and temperament were related—they had never seen a gray mare with a good temperament, or they said chestnuts were like redheads, sensitive and hard to handle. But in my experience, horsemen had lots of theories, and all of them changed when they bought another horse.

  I cross-tied Blue and got my boots off the back porch. It was very nice just to say nothing and to have the only sounds I heard be Blue blowing out a little air, or even just breathing. Horses breathe in a comforting, serious way, and Blue, like all Thoroughbreds, had wide nostrils that seemed to be taking in a lot of air. His winter coat was thick, smooth, and silky, not at all fluffy. Even though he lived outdoors, he hardly had to be curried, and after I brushed him with the soft brush, I polished him with my favorite chamois. He always liked that best. Then I very carefully combed his mane, which was a little long for the winter, but not terribly tangled. I took the twigs and the burs out of his tail, but I didn’t brush it—I would save that for the show season. Even Rodney, out at the stables, didn’t brush horses’ tails except for the show season. He said, “A long hair that gets yanked out takes a fair long time to grow back.”

  I put my English tack on him, and thought, as usual, that I needed to clean it, and then I led him out of the barn toward the arena. Almost immediately, another loud whinny rang out. I turned. It was Gee Whiz again. His whinny was distinctive—sharp and steady, like the note of a brass instrument. Dad didn’t think that horses were saying anything with their whinnies, and maybe they weren’t saying “See you later” or “Watch your step,” but I knew that their whinnies were so individual that they were saying “This is me.” Blue didn’t answer.

  I had spent a lot of time doing groundwork with Blue, and I considered him trained enough now that I could get on, ride a little bit, and then decide if I needed to get off, so I sided him up to the fence, climbed to the third rail, and mounted. Then I loosened him up at the walk by stepping him over in both directions, asking him to back, doing a few spirals in each direction, and then something Jane called a turn on the haunches and Danny called a spin, where you ask the horse to steady his back legs and pivot his front legs around them. Then a few figure eights, then some long strides and short strides, then the trot. Blue moved along agreeably. Every so often, he looked at something—a bird flying, or Rusty up the hill, watching us (and everything else). The fourth time we went around the end of the arena near the barn, I saw that Gee Whiz had stationed himself at that end of the pasture again.

  I realized that I had never known a horse who was so determined to communicate something. All the time I was looking at him, and thinking thoughts about him, I now realized, he was looking at me (or us, maybe just humans in general) and thinking thoughts about us. He was a horse who wanted something. Since he had water and food and equine companions, since he was no more or less interested in pieces of carrot than any of the others, I realized that it had to be something else, something that he thought only humans could give.

  But I went back to concentrating on Blue. At the trot, we did some more figure eights, then a long curlicue that Jane called a serpentine. We did some big loops, then a pattern that I thought of as a shamrock, not so different from a figure eight. We practiced transitions from the walk to the halt, the walk to the trot, the trot to the halt, the walk to the canter, and then the halt to the canter. I tried asking him to back, then asking him to canter on the left lead, then backing and asking him to canter on the right lead. He did everything very nicely, and, in fact, he did backing and then cantering beautifully, as though he particularly enjoyed it, even though we’d started working on it just a few days before. We cantered and galloped and cantered and galloped both directions, then counter-cantered, which Jane said he had to know. Counter-cantering is, basically, cantering on the wrong lead. If you ask a horse to do it, it’s a good exercise, since it helps him stretch his muscles and learn good balance. While we were doing all of these things, I got into that state of mind I always did when he was good, very calm and smooth, almost like dreaming, in a way, where I felt his body moving under me, and I also felt the way his feet stepped and the movement of the air as I passed through it. I was aware of the sun and the trees and the railing of the arena, of the jumps and the cones and the other things in the arena, but mostly I sensed the swaying of the two of us together, moving.

  When we were done with all of these exercises, I gave him a long rein and we walked around the arena, relaxing. I petted him by gently taking his mane in my hand and running my fingers along the top of his neck. And I said, “Well, True Blue, I think you’re trained.”

  I hadn’t meant to say this, and my first feeling when I heard myself was to feel a little proud—he had, after all, learned all of his lessons and gone, in nine months, from a well-meaning but ignorant mystery horse to a cooperative and knowledgeable friend. I didn’t plan to jump, but I had jumped that week, and he had learned that pretty well, too—he didn’t love it, but he did a good job over modest jumps, gauging his takeoff, making a nice arch, and landing in a well-balanced way. I might have wanted him to be like Onyx or Pie in the Sky, to have the sort of spring and talent that made onlookers gasp, but he didn’t have that. Jane and I thought that maybe 3′3″ was his optimum height. Above that, even if he could do it (and Ralph Carmichael thought any horse was capable of four feet, but Jane said this was a very old-fashioned cavalry and English fox hunting way of thinking, and if I never saw horses in a hunt field crashing through a fence or falling over one, that would be good), he would not feel happy doing it—he would only be doing it because he had to.

  He was good about siding up to the gate and standing quietly so that I could bend down to open it. We walked back t
o the barn. Dad was there, tacking up Lady. He said, “I watched you two for a few minutes. That horse is a completely different animal. You’ve done a good job with him.” In the barn, Dad looked like himself, tall and thin, with big shoulders, wearing his work hat with the brim rolled up at the sides, working around a horse as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I thanked him and gave him a little hug. He didn’t know what the hug was for, but it was for just being himself.

  It was Ellen who called Jane, not her mom. Jane was laughing that night when she called me, to see if we could reschedule the normal Saturday lesson. According to Ellen, “Christmas Eve is a very busy day, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to concentrate, so I would prefer to take my lesson tomorrow.” Barbie was coming at two o’clock, so I asked Mom if she could take me to the stables at ten, and she said she could, because then she could pick up the turkey and the parsnips, and hadn’t we once served …

  I tuned the rest out, but I did keep nodding and smiling.

  And Ellen did concentrate, as only Ellen could. Her trot circles were round, her figure eights had identical halves, her transition to the canter was at just the right spot, and her canter down the long side was even and rocking. She didn’t have to be asked to pet her pony, and I didn’t have to be asked to set the jumps at two feet, which was exciting enough for Ellen, totally routine for the pony, and not too exciting for me (I could just imagine something going wrong, but I tried not to). The arena we were using was a rectangle, so I set a jump in the middle of one end, another one about halfway down one side, and a third one about halfway down the other side. The first exercise was to do small circles in both directions, at the trot and at the canter, taking in each jump as she went around the circle. She did this very neatly. The second exercise was to do all three jumps, first to the left, then to the right, letting the pony pick his own comfortable gait. He picked the canter. The third exercise was to canter to the right over the three jumps, make a big loop after the last one, and then go back the other way. The pony landed on all his proper leads, and Ellen stayed with him the whole time, her heels down, her eyes up, and a smile on her face—the judge likes to know you are having a good time. She was good. He was very good. Or at least, that’s what she told Jane when we got back to the barn. Jane laughed and patted her on the head, then she said to me, “If you’ve got a minute.” But of course she knew I had plenty of minutes. As I walked into her office, I could hear Ellen telling Rodney in detail about every single jump, and Rodney saying, “You’re joking me, miss. Surely you didn’t do that!”