I watched Leona lead King in a figure eight. He kept dropping his shoulder on the diagonal, and she corrected him. She stared straight ahead, which was where, Mother was always reminding me, you were supposed to look—Look where you want to go, and Sasi will follow you there. Looking at my hands was a habit I couldn’t quite break; neither could I pretend a broom was hooked through my arms, to keep my back arched and my arms positioned in just the right way. Leona passed through the diagonal again, and this time King trotted through smoothly. Leona turned him, abruptly, and met my gaze briefly and I squeezed Naari into a trot, embarrassed that I had been caught watching.
We filed out of the ring when our riding time was over, Leona still led, but that was fine. She was more technically expert than I, had been schooled by masters, but she wasn’t better. I wasn’t as physically strong a rider as Jettie, or as pretty as Gates, but I had a way with horses; I could get them to do anything I wanted. I felt strangely powerful: I was a girl of fifteen, locked away in the mountains, surrounded by strangers. But I would be all right; I would emerge from this place.
—
I fiddled with my books as Mr. Holmes led morning prayer. I could feel Henny watching me from the corner of my eye. Sometimes I looked up and studied the ceiling when we were supposed to be praying. I had never seen anything like it before, tin stamped with an intricate pattern of flowers. Rhododendron, Sissy had told me, and later pointed out a cluster of bushes with a pretty pink flower that lined the path to the barn. I wondered, as I often did, who had done it, and if the work had taken hours or days, days or months, and let Mr. Holmes’s voice recede into the background. As far as I could tell, he asked for the same things every morning: health, happiness, and prosperity. I couldn’t get used to all this sitting still; first at breakfast, then here, then all through classes. By the time lunch hour came, I felt like a caged animal.
And though I still missed my home, terribly, I was getting used to this new order of things. I was learning. I knew, for example, that though Yonahlossee had first seemed enormous, it was not even as large as our farm, only three hundred acres, and most of it was mountain land, uninhabitable.
Mr. Holmes shuffled a stack of papers on his lectern. We all paid attention, for the most part. Mrs. Holmes had caught my eye a few times when she noticed my attention wandering. She sat beside her husband, along with their three girls. When I wasn’t watching the ceiling I was watching the Holmes girls, who fascinated me. Just now Sarabeth put her hand over Decca’s, to stop her fidgeting. Sarabeth was the oldest, at eleven, and reminded me of her mother. Rachel was next, ten, and she was moody, a storm always passing over her face, or threatening to pass over, while her father spoke. I was jealous of them. The distinction between the Holmes girls and everyone else was very clear: they were not alone.
Decca was tall and dark like her father, and even at seven you could tell that she would continue to be tall and dark, would grow, it seemed almost certain, to be beautiful. It was unfair that nature had been so precise: each child born prettier, Sarabeth the first attempt, Decca perfect.
Decca caught my eye, and I looked away, but not before I saw her smile. I wondered what she thought of me. Did she think I was pretty? Did the other girls? I wasn’t sure where I landed on this list. My mother was beautiful, this I knew, both because I could see for myself and also because it was a fact in our family. She had even modeled for a milliner, briefly, before she met Father. I looked like her, but I had always known I was not beautiful. I had my mother’s hair, which was auburn and wavy, wild. I’d once seen a picture of Amelia Earhart in a magazine; the caption had called her handsome. I thought that’s what I was. Handsome.
“And there’s something more,” he said, and paused. He looked up, out into our midst. He stood in front of the window, which afforded the most perfect view of the mountains in the whole camp. When he looked out at us like this, it was as if the room disappeared, as if we were all on top of a mountain. Alice Hunt straightened beside me. We all felt it. “Something very serious.” Heads snapped up. “You all know Herbert Hoover?” A titter spread through the room. “Oh, of course not personally.” He smiled, and I found myself smiling back. “Though I dare say some of you might have met him.” Out of the corner of my eye I studied Leona, who sat next to Sissy. Maybe Leona was one of the girls who might have met the president? “Our president has lately spoken of his belief that our country will recover from this financial crisis.” He held up a newspaper, though we were all too far away to see it. A girl in front of me yawned. “This is a little old, of course.” He paused, as if anticipating our laughter, which of course followed. All of the magazines and newspapers were, at the very least, “a little old.” More often they were months and months old, sent to us by our mothers and sisters.
“Here our president declares the Depression over.” He tapped the paper, lightly, with his fingertip. “He asks for our continued effort in supporting the economy.”
Gates, who sat a row ahead, raised her hand.
“Yes, Gates?” Mr. Holmes said. He folded the paper neatly while Gates spoke.
“How can we help?” she asked. I thought that she was perhaps being impertinent, but Mr. Holmes didn’t seem to think so.
“A good question,” he said, “and one best answered by your fathers. To put it bluntly, money begets money.” Even Mrs. Holmes smiled a little bit, behind her husband. “Encourage your fathers to invest, to spend, to trust the banks.”
At first I didn’t understand what had triggered the merry laughter that followed Mr. Holmes’s answer. Sissy was giggling next to me, and as I watched her pretty fingers cover her mouth I understood completely: there was nothing we could do to help. We were but daughters. The idea that we would offer our fathers financial counsel was, indeed, laughable. I smiled, too, but not because I was amused; I smiled so that I was indistinguishable from the other girls.
“Let us pray that by the time you leave Yonahlossee, you will reenter a world that will be happier,” Mr. Holmes said, and stepped back so that his wife could step forward.
I hadn’t heard the name Hoover since I’d left home. I thought of Uncle George, who had returned from Miami the last time and said he would not go back, that it was useless, that the bank could take it all. How President Hoover was handling the crisis was a point of contention between my father and his brother: my father thought he was handling things fine. Uncle George thought more needed to be done, and soon.
Everyone here seemed so rich and Southern, impervious to the slings and arrows of the world. And there was me, who had learned to ride from Mother, on a pony without papers. My middle name was not an important family name, my family did not have five homes stateside, or spend Christmas in Venice. We were fine, because of the citrus money, but my father was a physician, not a cotton magnate or an oil king.
Yonahlossee was where important Southern men sent their daughters. I would later learn more: an Astor, via marriage to the Langhornes of Virginia, had graduated the year before I arrived. One of the girls counted Robert E. Lee as a relative. Her family owned rubber plants in Malaysia. There were other girls’ schools, but Yonahlossee was the oldest, and it must have provided a certain comfort to these men, locked away as it was in the mountains; nobody could reach their daughters here. Nobody could touch them. After World War II, these same men would begin to send their daughters to Northern schools, where they would become worldly. But in this moment, worldly wasn’t what anyone was after. The South was still a land unto itself, in some ways it was a land that time had forgotten. There were girls here who refused to believe, or at least admit, that the North had claimed victory in the War Between the States.
“Thank you, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Holmes began. There was still tittering, somewhere from the back, and Mrs. Holmes abruptly stopped speaking. “Girls!” The tittering disappeared.
“On that same note, but perhaps more specifically”—here she smiled, almost impe
rceptibly—“allow me to bring your attention to a way you might do more than simply keep those less fortunate than you in your prayers.” Her elocution was perfect. Miss Lee would have approved. “In the spirit of Christian charity, please consider making a pledge for a contribution to a Fund for the Mill Girls, who live a few hours’ drive from us and enjoy none of our benefits.”
Jettie and Henny stood and walked to the front of the room, carrying a papered box with FUND FOR MILL GIRLS carefully lettered on it in red. Jettie placed a stack of small papers next to it, along with a cup of pencils, and girls started to rise and scribble figures on the papers, then fold them and drop them into the box. It resembled the kind of box Mother had brought home from the Red Cross, for which she had volunteered when we were very small.
“Thank you in advance for your generosity,” Mrs. Holmes said. I didn’t have any money, not a single cent. I’d never had any money, or at least any that I could touch. “All right, girls,” Mrs. Holmes said. This is what she always said when she finished. It was a place maintained by routine. Mrs. Holmes was nice enough, I supposed. But not too nice, which was how you had to act if anyone was going to listen to you. That’s how I was when I rode.
Henny stood. We were going to class—I had elocution, then etiquette, one right after the other. They were so boring I could have cried. My parents had never seemed interested in a daughter who had perfect handwriting, or could spot the difference between an olive fork and a lemon fork (an olive fork had two tines; a lemon fork, three), but I wondered if Mother knew or any longer cared exactly what kind of education I was getting. Someone pinched my arm.
“Ow,” I cried. It was Eva.
“Sorry.” But she was giggling. “You just always look so lost in your own world. I ate so much! I love hash-brown day.” She smoothed her hands over her waist.
I smiled. “I stuff myself like a roasted pig at every meal.” And it was true. I did. My appetite had reappeared after the first few days.
“Eva,” I said, as we climbed the stairs to our classroom, “I didn’t bring any money with me.”
It felt like a dirty word, money, but Eva didn’t seem bothered. I’d never met someone so unconcerned.
“Oh, that,” she said. “You just ask your father.”
I nodded, and knew I would never request money from my father. It would mean that I cared about this place.
“My father,” Eva continued, “says he gives enough with tuition. And Mrs. Holmes comes knocking every winter, in person, for donations to the school. My father says she’s very persuasive.” She smiled, and I noticed she had dusted her face with powder, her cheeks with rouge, but very subtly. “She’ll probably visit your parents, too. But maybe not, since you’re from Florida.” She paused, and bit her lip. “I didn’t mean—”
“No,” I said, “it’s fine.” We had reached our classroom; I could see Miss Lee’s broad back from behind, writing in cursive on the board. “I know Florida’s . . .” I trailed off, and Eva looked at me expectantly. “A strange place,” I finished. “Not for everyone.”
{4}
The day of the dance another letter arrived, this one from Mother. It was long, over two pages of my mother’s rose-scented stationery, her initials engraved at the top of the thick, cream-colored paper. EAC, the E and C flanking the ornately drawn A. Elizabeth Collins Atwell.
My mother had surprising handwriting, inconsistent and loopy. Dear Thea, the letter began, and went on about the vegetable and herb garden and the swarms of bees and butterflies it attracted, before concluding:
Sam is fine, as fine as can be expected. No one knows quite what to expect, though. It’s all undecided, will stay that way for a while I predict. Sometimes I’m so angry with you. Other times I’m so sorry for you. Such a terrible thing. May God grant them and us peace.
Everyone here misses you. Do the mountains make you feel small, Thea?
I glanced around the room and saw that Mary Abbott was staring at me. I stared back. Her eyes unnerved me, pale, almost colorless. Mary Abbott relented, shrugged her small shoulders, and mouthed Sorry across the room, though of course she wasn’t.
I lay back on my thin pillow (my pillows at home were plump and perfect, I wished I’d brought one with me) and ran my fingertips along the smooth wooden planks of our floor, marked by an infinite number of scratches. Girls wearing riding boots inside, Docey pulling the beds out to make them, dropped books. At home, no one was allowed to wear shoes in the house, only visitors, and if anything fell and my mother heard there would be a price to pay.
Sissy spun around the room, humming a waltz. When she was next to our bunk, Eva climbed down and bowed, held out her hand. Sissy accepted it, and they began to dance, Eva playing the boy’s part. They both wore white skirts. Eva was taller, and more solid; her hair alone seemed to outweigh Sissy. They looked like mother and daughter dancing. Even I knew that waltzing was old news, but there was no jazz at Yonahlossee. Because it was hypnotizing, Mary Abbott had explained.
Both Sissy and Eva came from families that entertained regularly. Eva from a North Carolina cotton empire and Sissy from Monroeville, which she referred to as the center of the earth, where her father did something vague in her father’s family business, and was also the mayor. All her jewelry was from her mother’s side; I assumed most of the money was from her, too.
Only Mary Abbott and I were unexcited about this evening, when boys from a boarding school in Asheville would arrive at eight o’clock, and we would all be expected to dance the evening away. I pretended to be excited, at least; Mary Abbott didn’t know how to pretend.
“Another one,” Mary Abbott said when Eva had bowed and Sissy had curtsied, the waltz over. We were all startled by Mary Abbott’s voice. We respected rules at Yonahlossee, and though it was likely no house mistress would pass by during rest hour, we knew they could.
Mary Abbott rose and clapped her hands like a child who wanted her way. Her squinty eyes were bright. Eva told me Mary Abbott’s father was a Methodist preacher, that her mother had died when she was an infant.
“Shh,” Victoria whispered, a finger on her lips.
Eva put a hand on her hip and studied Mary Abbott, amused.
“You’ll see plenty of dancing tonight,” Sissy whispered. “I wouldn’t worry.”
Mary Abbott lay back on her bed and folded her arms. I wondered what she thought she was missing now that Eva and Sissy had stopped dancing. When I saw my friends twirling around the room, I saw two innocents.
—
Mother’s favorite story—more beloved than the story of how she and Father met—was the story of our births, transformed into a kind of fairy tale by her, the mother who carried twins and did not know it. My brother and I were born during an early winter storm: it snowed, birds dropped from the sky, dead from the unexpected freeze, all the plants in my mother’s garden shriveled and turned from green to deep russet. My parents were expecting a large boy, because my mother carried so low. So I was the surprise, not Sam. I was the child no one expected.
There was no history of twins in our family. When we were born, our family was cautious, especially of me. I had either sapped Sam’s strength and was the stronger twin, or Sam had enfeebled me. I was either a selfish or useless girl. My father tried to dispel these notions, said there was no evidence. But even he was worried, a boy and a girl born together, contrary to the order of things.
We were cranky babies, both colicky. My mother lay in bed for weeks, my father tended to her and then to his other patients, who were always my father’s responsibility, always, the only doctor in Emathla. A woman from town took care of the new babies, Theodora and Samuel, us. My mother had only just begun painting scenes from Grimms’ fairy tales when we arrived: a swath of Rapunzel’s hair circled the wall of our nursery, only partly painted gold. The mural had been painted over years ago, but I still remembered it so clearly. I had loved it.
> I spoke first, at nine months; Sam waited another five, though he spoke to me earlier, in the dark, in the soft light of morning, when the rest of the house was asleep. My first word was orange, which I mangled, but my parents knew what I meant. My mother liked to attribute it to my inherited knowledge of citrus. Sam and I cut teeth late, we were both bald until age two, we hated nap time, we loved bread and orange marmalade.
But there was still the gloom of our early days: the surprise of us, then my mother’s convalescence. There was always the possibility of death with childbirth, an unavoidable risk, so even before my mother went into labor there was concern she might not handle it well. The winter storm, snow on the ground for the first time in a decade, my mother in bed from the contractions. It must mean something, their babies born on this day, not any of the other, snowless days.
First me—A girl! my father said, so my mother would know. Everyone would have preferred a boy for the first child, that went without saying, a person to inherit it all; then, as my father toweled me off and clipped my umbilical cord even closer, so it would not be agitated by clothes, another head crowned and was born quickly, much more quickly than I was, and—A boy. My father did not shout this time, ashamed, confused: he’d wanted a boy and gotten a girl, but now a boy? Something was wrong; the gods didn’t grant wishes like that, without expecting something given in return, in gratitude.
My mother was in too much pain to hold us properly, so the woman from town cleaned us, smoothed our patchy hair, twisted bits of cotton and coaxed the mucus from our noses and mouths, the afterbirth from our ears. We were tiny. My father held each of us, one after another, to my mother’s breast. We ate indifferently while my mother writhed. My mother had decided during her confinement that she would nurse her child. It was the style then to bring in a wet nurse, but who from Emathla would be suitable? Who could nourish her child as well as she could?
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls Page 6