Before They Rode Horses

by Bonnie Bryant

  “Yes,” said Stevie.

  “No,” said Carole and Lisa.

  Deborah rolled her eyes. Stevie continued her story.

  Well, the way we got along was different then, because we were littler. Chad was the big brother and he always did everything first. He learned to swim first. He rode a bike first. He lost his teeth first. Everything for him was first. Then came Alex and me. Since we were twins, it seemed like the whole world spent all day every day comparing us. It was “Stevie has lighter hair,” or “Alex can climb trees better,” or “Stevie is a better reader,” or “Alex runs faster, doesn’t he?” Every time somebody made an observation about either one of us, it was a comparison, and one of us came out ahead of the other.

  In fairness to my parents, I’ve got to tell you that they didn’t do that. They knew better. They’d just tell me how proud they were that I could read so well, or they’d admire how fast Alex could run. They tried really hard—and they still do—but I know that when they admired my reading, Alex would wonder what was wrong with the way he read. I know it because when they admired how quickly Alex ran, I wondered if they’d noticed how fast I could run. To tell you the truth, it was a no-win situation for them.

  The thing I had going for me was that I was the girl in the family. That was how I stood out. People would describe us as “the boys and Stevie,” and I liked that. My brothers got bunched in, but I got singled out. That made me feel better. Until Michael arrived. First of all, he was cute as a button. That’s what people said all the time. I never saw anything particularly cute about buttons, but apparently my parents’ friends have been admiring buttons for years, and Michael qualified in that department.

  I didn’t think he was so cute. For one thing, he couldn’t do anything. He just cried and slept. Every once in a while, he’d gurgle, drool, or spit up, and all the adults around would act as if that were the most exciting thing in the world. If I did it, I’d get sent away from the table!

  Now, some people might just decide to give up at this point, maybe join up with the ogling adults or at least stop trying to get noticed. Not me. I decided to be the best possible Stevie. By that, naturally, I meant that I was going to be better than my brothers at everything no matter what.

  It was easy being better than Michael. All I had to do was burp louder. Anybody could do that, so I set my sights on Chad and Alex. If Alex climbed to the sixth set of branches in the tree in front of our house, I climbed to the seventh. If Chad swam two laps of our pool, I swam three. Of course, I nearly drowned doing it because I wasn’t nearly as good a swimmer as he was, but I did it and Dad said he only lost ten years of his life dragging me out of the water. Seemed to me like a fair trade-off.

  Chad and Alex and I played together a lot because we had to. I mean, we were in the same house and we were too young then to have friends over all the time the way we do now, and, besides, Chad hadn’t discovered girls yet. We played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, pirates and sailors—you name it. The two of them always tried to get me to be the loser. I got to be better at robbing than they were at policing. I figured out how the pirates could clear the seas of all the galleons of gold. In short, I was good. But they ganged up on me. One robber could defeat one cop, but with two against one, I was a sure loser.

  I don’t like losing. I never have.

  Lisa and Carole exchanged glances. They didn’t have to say anything. They both knew they’d heard the understatement of the year. They didn’t have to explain it to Deborah, either, since she was politely smirking into her napkin. Without a doubt, Stevie was the most competitive person any of them had ever known.

  “Oh, go ahead and laugh at me,” Stevie said to them. “Hating to lose has made me work harder and do better than I would have thought I could at a lot of things. But that’s another story.”

  It wasn’t easy being a younger and a twin sister to two boys. Chad was better at soccer, touch football, even kick the can. Alex was good at all of these things, and better than I was. I was just a girl. I began to wish that I’d been born a boy so that I could be as “good” as they were. I wanted to be as good as someone.

  And then there was Michael. He’d stopped being compared to buttons by this time. He’s three years younger than Alex and me, so I guess he was about five and I was eight when this all happened. It was like I’d never much noticed him before, and then suddenly he could play soccer and kick the can with us. He was having a ball at it, and I was beginning to have fun, too, because suddenly there was someone I was always better than. I could always beat him in a race, run faster, jump higher, play better. I found it very satisfying. The fact that my skills—to say nothing of my attitude—often left my little brother bathed in his own tears didn’t bother me in the least. I was number one compared to somebody, and that was all that mattered to me.

  My parents had a different point of view on the subject. I suppose my mother was a little tired of constantly having to comfort Michael, and my dad wasn’t too pleased with having to explain to me, every single day, that Michael was younger and it was my responsibility to look after him, not just to beat him. It wasn’t a lesson that sank in very well. To my parents’ credit, they tried not to yell at me about what I was doing. They actually did understand how tough it was for me to be the one girl in a crowd of boys. They thought that if they yelled at me, I’d just start hating Michael. Of course, they were completely wrong there. I couldn’t hate him. He was the only one around I could always beat. He meant a lot to me!

  “Deborah, I’m trying to give you some pointers here on mothering. It’s really important to understand what’s going on in your kid’s mind. You’ve probably heard a lot about things like grounding and removing privileges and time-outs. Forget that stuff. Keep in mind words like treat and extra television time and raise in your allowance, okay?” Stevie said. Then she continued her story.

  Anyway, my parents tried very hard to change the situation. About the only time there was ever total peace in the house was when Mom or Dad was reading to us. We loved to have them read to us. They read anything and everything and we listened to it all. My favorites were the animal stories, like Charlotte’s Web or the Uncle Remus tales. Alex liked stories about history, like Johnny Tremain, and Chad would listen to anything that was science fiction. His all-time favorite was A Wrinkle in Time.

  When we weren’t hearing a good story, that’s when trouble broke out. To be perfectly honest—not that I’m ever not perfectly honest, mind you—I was actually being something of a bully to Michael. Somewhere along the line, Mom and Dad figured that this probably wasn’t very good for Michael or for me. That was when they decided to “Do Something about Stevie.”

  That’s what I heard Mom say. She was talking with her mother on the phone. Now, at that point, I think my mother’s idea of Doing Something might have been to send me to reform school. She was pretty fed up with me, so it was my lucky day that Mom was saying that stuff to Granny. Because Granny’s idea of Doing Something had nothing to do with reform school. I could only hear one end of the conversation, and if Mom had known I was sitting on the other side of the wall, I wouldn’t have heard any of it. But I could tell from what Mom was saying that Granny was on my side.

  “Well, of course it’s hard for her.… The boys gang up on her, sure.… What do you mean, ‘make it possible for her to be a girl’?… But Mother, she is a girl. I only have one daughter.… Well, I suppose … I suppose I could take some time off.… But where? Who? Oh, I have an idea. Maybe you’re right.…”

  It went on from there, but the rest is unimportant because by then my mother had decided and all it took was a few more phone calls. Believe me, I didn’t move an inch from where I was sitting. I didn’t want to miss anything. I wasn’t exactly sure what was coming, but I knew I was going somewhere with my mother, no brothers, not even Dad. Just me and Mom.

  It turned out to be more than that, too. Mom had this friend from college who lived in Massachusetts. Her name was Annie Pine.
They hadn’t seen one another for years, but they talked on the phone a lot and Mom got letters and Christmas cards from her. It seemed that every Christmas card talked mostly about her daughter, Madeleine. Madeleine was just my age, eight. She was pretty and she was smart.

  I still remember almost everything my mother said on the phone when she called Mrs. Pine to see if we could come for a visit. No, that’s not true. I don’t remember much of it, but I do remember her saying, “Stevie’s been having a rough time this year. It breaks my heart to see such a precious child have such a difficult period.” She called me precious. I wasn’t more precious than one of my brothers, or less precious. I was simply precious to her. It made me feel about two feet taller. It wasn’t as if my mom never told me she cared about me, but there she was telling someone else how great I was. Sometimes I’ve thought that maybe we could have skipped the rest of the trip to visit the Pines and just stopped there. But that wasn’t what happened, and this is, so I’ll get back to it.

  Before I knew it, Mom and I were on a plane. I loved the plane ride. I spent a lot of time looking out the window, and I also spent a lot of time telling Mom the things I wanted to do with Madeleine when we got there. I bet that she liked to play kick the can and soccer. I thought it would be fun to have races with someone who wasn’t my brother, to climb a tree with somebody who didn’t want to get me to sit on the far end of a limb while he wiggled it so much I almost fell off. The Pines lived near a lake. I couldn’t wait to go swimming in it and show Madeleine that I could swim under water a whole long way. If she could do things I couldn’t, I’d ask her to show me how. Maybe she could do a backwards somersault into the lake. I wanted to learn how to do that. We could play Monopoly and Clue—if they had those games. We could paint mud pictures on wood. We could build a miniature fort out of twigs. I even wrote down a list of all the things I could do during the visit. My mother helped me spell somersault. The whole flight was just wonderful.

  It was great when we arrived, too. Mrs. Pine and Madeleine were both there. Mrs. Pine had a big grin on her face and gave Mom a gigantic hug—me, too. Madeleine shook hands with me. I guess that was polite, but it seemed a little strange. I never had a kid my own age shake hands with me, but I just figured maybe she was a little bit shy and didn’t know how to smile very well. I was sure this would change, and I was right.

  We all got into the car to drive back to the Pines’ house. Mom sat in the front seat with Mrs. Pine. The two of them were talking a mile a minute about all the people they remembered from college and what had happened to them. Madeleine and I didn’t know most of the people they were talking about, so it wasn’t a very interesting conversation, but it was more interesting than what we said to one another, which was almost nothing.

  I thought about the list of activities I’d made on the plane, and suddenly it didn’t seem as if we’d play any of the games I wanted to play. Finally Madeleine said something.

  “Did you have a good trip on the plane, Stephanie?” she asked me.

  Now, you know me and you know that nobody in the world ever called me Stephanie. I wasn’t even sure who she was talking to.

  “Oh, right, yeah, it was a good trip,” I said. “Everybody always calls me Stevie,” I said. “That’s short for Stephanie—kind of a nickname. I bet you have a nickname. Do your friends call you Mad-die?”

  There was this big long silence. I think our mothers even stopped talking. Just as I’d never seen someone my age shake hands with a friend, I’d never seen someone my age who could look down her nose at you—I didn’t know Veronica diAngelo then—and Madeleine took in a deep breath of air.

  “Nobody,” she said, “ever called me Maddie, and I trust that nobody ever will. My name is Madeleine.”

  I gulped. She pronounced it so that the -leine part rhymed with her last name. No sloppy pronunciation that might result in a sort of “Mad-uh-lin.” I’d already learned the first thing that Madeleine Pine was going to teach me. It wasn’t a lesson I was likely to forget—or forgive.

  II

  MADELEINE’S ROOM WAS bright and sunny. It was all decorated in pink, with dolls on all the shelves. Where there weren’t dolls, there were doll things—houses, teacups, all that stuff. Most of it was new to me. I’d been brought up with soccer balls, baseball bats, and tennis rackets. I didn’t think I’d missed much with only a few dolls, but I’ve got to say that Madeleine’s collection was impressive.

  There was one that was particularly nice. She had shiny brown hair and the prettiest pink dress I had ever seen. I dropped my suitcase and walked right over to the shelf where she was kept. I reached up to take the doll down so I could look at it more closely.

  “Oh, please!” said Madeleine. “That’s a valuable doll that my father bought me in Europe when he was on a business trip. Her name is Elena. She’s not for playing. She’s for show. I guess I should keep her in a locked glass cabinet so people who don’t know any better won’t try to touch her.”

  I blushed. I felt terrible that I was going to touch something that belonged in a glass cabinet.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “That’s all right,” said Madeleine. For some reason, I felt better when she told me it was all right. I guess I’d had this idea that what I was going to do was awful and now I was forgiven. Some people really confuse you sometimes, and Madeleine was one of them. She went on to be more confusing.

  “I guess you should sleep in that bed,” she said, pointing to one of the twin beds in her room. “I was going to have my best friend, Maggie, sleep over tonight, but since you’re here …”

  She really said that, and she said it that way, like maybe I should just disappear so that somebody she actually liked could stay over. All the nice thoughts I’d had on the plane were disappearing fast, but they weren’t totally gone. I still wanted this to be a special trip and a special visit. Maybe there was a way.

  “Look, why don’t we get a sleeping bag,” I said. “One of us could sleep on the floor.”

  “You mean you’d be willing to do that?” Madeleine asked.

  “Sure,” I said. Only later did I wonder how a suggestion that “one of us” could have gotten turned into “you” by Madeleine. At the time, the only thing I noticed was that I’d made Madeleine smile at me. It was the first smile she’d made since I arrived.

  “Stevie!” Deborah said. “This story is supposed to inspire me to be a great mother! All you’ve told me about is awful children … uh, you included. How am I supposed to learn anything from this?”

  “Just wait,” Stevie said. “I’ll get to the good part pretty soon. And besides, remember that my mother had no way of knowing how awful Madeleine was. She really, truly, was trying to do something nice for her ‘precious’ daughter, okay?”

  “Okay,” Deborah said. But for a second she didn’t look okay. The girls knew by now what was happening. She was having another contraction. Carole stood behind her and massaged her shoulders to help her relax. Lisa held her hand. Stevie looked at her watch. Twelve minutes.

  “No change,” Stevie said. “Still twelve minutes.”

  “Shouldn’t you call your doctor again to report progress?” Lisa suggested, reminding Deborah that her doctor had wanted her to call.

  “Oh, sure,” Deborah said. She picked up the phone and dialed. It turned out that her doctor wasn’t there. The answering service told her that he’d left the office for an emergency in Cross County. He wouldn’t be available for several hours anyway. They could page him, though. Deborah said that wasn’t necessary. She was just reporting that everything was going the way they expected. If the doctor called in, they could let him know that.

  “I’ll call again later,” she said. She hung up the phone and turned to Stevie. “Okay, so what happened next?” she asked.

  Well, Maggie arrived then. I thought I’d like Maggie because she had a nickname. She wasn’t called Marguerite or anything fancy, just a nice, normal Maggie. She was, too. Normal,
I mean, at least compared to Madeleine, but she wasn’t all that normal.

  “What should we do?” Maggie asked.

  I thought about my list of fun things I wanted to do, and I held out this hope that a nice game of tag or kick the can might warm things up between me and Madeleine. She wasn’t interested in those games. Maggie just sort of stared at me.

  “How about climbing some of the trees?” I asked. The Pines’ house was surrounded by woods. There had to be some good climbing trees out there.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Madeleine.

  “How about a rock, then? Can we climb some rocks?”

  “And get rips in our shorts?” Maggie asked.

  I had been ready to suggest a rousing game of cops and robbers, but I could tell that wouldn’t succeed any more than anything else I’d suggested. I was about to suggest a game of hide and seek, but I could see myself hiding and nobody seeking. I’m not a fool. It was time to let them make a suggestion.

  “How about a tea party?” Maggie said. “We can take our dolls along, the way we usually do.”

  A tea party, with dolls. I’d never done anything like that. I couldn’t imagine having a tea party with my brothers, with or without dolls. Tea parties with dolls was something little girls did. I was a little girl and I’d never done that. Maybe I’d been missing out on something all those years. It was about time I tried something new.

  “Okay,” I said. “What do we do first?”

  It turned out that what we did first was to get Mrs. Pine to do all the work. It was more like a picnic than a tea party. She made a whole little lunch box filled with treats, plus a thermos of tea for us. There were little sandwiches and little cookies. We had small teacups for us and tiny ones for the dolls. Madeleine carried the dolls. Maggie carried the lunch box. I got to carry the blanket.

  My mother watched us pack up. She was beaming with pride at her precious tomboy daughter going on such a girlish excursion with Madeleine and Maggie. I was pleased that she was so proud, even though I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want a tiny little cucumber sandwich when there was peanut butter and honey to be had. Still, it was a new experience, and I was game to try it.