The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  “We keep hydrated,” he answered. “We wear sunblock.”

  Mrs. Marksmen shook her head. She gave me a look that practically pleaded How could you? Riley laughed into her hand. Her fingers were the skinniest and most girllike I’d ever seen; somehow I’d never noticed. She should have been a dancer, I thought. She laughed as light as a breeze.

  Later that night, after a spaghetti and meatball dinner that Kev turned into the civilized world’s biggest mess—“They’re not softballs, stupid,” Geoff had declared, glaring; “No dessert,” Mom said, “if you can’t keep the meatball on your plate”—the house grew strangely still. All of us in our own places, with our own thoughts, even Kev somewhere off the trouble radar.

  I was taking a look at one of Geoff’s old SAT books, trying to pack in more vocab for one more round of show-me-you’re-smart testing, even though I knew that chances were I had all the words I’d ever learn already stuck up in my head. There’s just a certain amount that fits up there, in the landscape of my brain cells. Only a certain number of neurons that work; I was already packed to capacity. I was on my back with the book held above me. I was on my side, then, practically asleep. I was drifting off remembering Mrs. Marksmen with her perfect hand surf when I realized that there was someone at my door.

  “Your father has something for you,” my mom said when I turned and saw her there. She’d changed into her pajamas—old alma mater sweats from the U of Penn, a worn-out gray T-shirt; and behind her, now beside her, was Dad, blocking the light from the hallway. He pushed himself through the door frame, and they both walked to my bed. Mom sat down, then he did, and then I slid slightly north. I tossed the old SAT book to the floor, where it fell with a thud.

  “I didn’t bother to wrap it,” Dad said, handing me a box. “It’s a digital. Small but mighty.”

  “You got me a camera?” I raised my voice though I hadn’t meant to, took the box in my hand, pulled the camera from the wrapping. I’d always envied my ultra-megapixeled-camera-endowed friends. I’d always thought that taking pictures—real pictures—was another way of writing poems. Or reading the poems back later. Or something. Whatever it was, the two were tangled in my mind, and now I heard Kev down the hall, jumping off his bed and opening his door. Kev, a flash of lightning through the dark hall of the house.

  “Extra batteries and memory sticks,” Dad was saying, and Kev was still running. Down the hall, through my door, a slam against my bed.

  “What’d you get her?” he demanded.

  “A camera,” Mom said.

  “How come she gets a camera?” He reached, but I held my camera high. Mom caught Kev’s hand gently, tried to nest it inside hers.

  “Because she’s going to Mexico,” Mom said. “Going to see it for the rest of us.”

  “Mexico is hot,” Kev declared.

  “Thanks for the info,” I said. I lowered the camera, stared through its eye. Turned it on and let it focus. Snapped a picture of my dad.

  “So you’re taking pictures for prosperity?” Kev said.

  “For posterity,” I said. Dad laughed. Now I turned the camera on Mom and Kev. She’s smiling in that photo graph. Kev’s looking half surprised.

  nine

  The next day I woke to the quadruple clopping of hooves, the slamming and latching of a pickup truck. Boots on asphalt. I grabbed my glasses, sat up. From my bedroom window I could see them best—the long line of trailers that had arrived overnight: from California, Connecticut, New Jersey, from every state that claimed a horse with the heart or brawn to win. The trailers were nose to rear up and down my street—some of them posh as limousines, some with room to spare for the polished carriages and sulkies that would be paraded later that week at the fairgrounds two blocks north.

  The horses were like kindergartners being let out of school—shuddering and tossing their tails as they reverse-walked down the grated ramps. Their eyes were as big as purple summer plums, and all I wanted to do right then was breathe in the horses, press my cheek against their cheeks. It was early, a Sunday; I called Riley nonetheless. The horse show came to town only once each year, in May; and the show was a Georgia-Riley tradition.

  “Riley,” I whispered, so that my brothers couldn’t hear. “They’ve come.”

  “Who has?” Riley had sleep all over her voice, cobwebs thrown over her vowels. The only thing she knew right then was that I was the one who had called. I’d have felt guilty, except that I didn’t. I knew how mad she would have been if I’d let her sleep through any segment of the news.

  “The horses.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, her God cracking. “Isn’t it…early?”

  “They came in overnight.”

  “The big ones?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The Falabella, too?”

  “I’m looking at it right now, Riley. Still as small as last year, maybe smaller.” As I talked, I watched the scene beyond my bedroom window—the little horses mixed up with the big ones, the trainer in the dirty jodhpurs whose chestnut mare was trimming the edge of the lawn across the street. There was some kind of commotion involving a trailer that paralleled my lawn. Two men, maybe three, trying to coax a big horse out from the trailer it had come in so that it could walk down the street and take its place inside a fairgrounds stall. They were calling its name. They were getting nowhere. All the horse would do was whinny. Finally the trainer had turned to see; and this had stirred up the chestnut mare, whose ears snapped forward as she lifted her head, making ripples up and down her neck, like pleats.

  “Georgia?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I was just…They were just…” I couldn’t really explain what I was seeing. “Trying to get a big horse out.”

  “What kind of horse?”

  “I don’t know.” I left the window and went downstairs and over to the front door so that I could get a better look. I stepped onto the porch in bare feet, the cell phone still pressed against my ear. It was as if the volume had been turned way up, as if I’d gone from watching a movie to watching a movie getting made. I could hear the men calling the big horse Don Juan, could hear the horse’s hooves striking the truck. Finally the trainer with the chestnut mare gave her reins to another man and walked over Don Juan’s way. She sang his name, two syllables. She talked to him so quietly, saying words I couldn’t hear.

  “What’s happening now?” Riley pressed.

  “Still unloading Don Juan,” I said, then said nothing, because finally the big horse made his appearance—this great white Andalusian, his tail so loose and long that it dragged against the grate and tore itself off and snaked in long white strands toward my lawn. I was wishing, really wishing, that Riley was right there, to share the scene. Near the bottom of the ramp, the big horse skidded, then caught his balance. He stood up proud, and mad.

  “You’re doing a lousy blow-by-blow,” Riley said.

  “Well, then get over here.”

  The trailers had been emptied of their horses by the time Riley arrived; they’d been driven around to the Acme, where they would sit all week on the fringe of the parking lot until they moved off to another town’s show. Riley had swept her hair into a barrette, and the cut of her top made her arms seem so narrow. Her mom had dropped her at my curb. It wasn’t as if she and my mom ever stopped to talk, ever colluded over their girls.

  Now we were out on the street, heading north, climbing the slight incline of the hill. Down below us, a block away, were the fairgrounds. We stopped to get the bird’s-eye view. There were the milky blue walls that fortressed in the fair; and there were the flags, as bright as jockey silks, snagging the breeze. To the right were the stables, to the left the exercise rings, and straight ahead, deep in, the shops and vendor stands, the giant Ferris wheel, the alley of games where Riley always won, the fish in the bowls swimming nowhere, sleeping never. Hours from now there would be rich women in ridiculous hats and kids holding cotton candy as high as the Olympic torche
s. There would be men not smoking their expensive cigars. But at that moment it was only the horses, and the gates were open, and Riley said, “Come on,” and we went flying, the two of us, Riley so light on her feet that the only feet to be heard were mine, going down hard on the macadam.

  At the fairgrounds, the stalls were one after the other on either side of a dark corridor that was so long, it seemed to bend and then disappear behind horse steam. The floor was hay and the trainers were busy and the long faces of the horses were practically floating over the wide doors of their slatted stalls. It was like being in church, like joining in the hymn—the sawdust and manure, the sound of horse teeth on carrots and sugar. No one minded Riley or me, and we minded no one either, just walked down the corridor between the horses as if we belonged, stopping when we wanted to—to touch the snip or the star on a horse nose. Outside, there were blackbirds overhead on the electrical wires, and the dogs that came to the show every year had begun to chase one another, dig for old bones.

  Riley and I had been going together to the show every year since we were ten, when our parents finally relented and let us navigate the harmless fairgrounds alone. Mrs. Marksmen would drop Riley off at my place, and then Riley and I would walk down the street, me toting my mother’s radio-sized cell phone for just-in-case scenarios. When we were younger, Riley would wear big sunglasses and floppy hats, skinny halters, denim miniskirts. Her thighs were always the width of her calves, or almost. She’d throw her sinewy arms around the horses’ necks—the ones we were allowed to touch inside the shadows of the stables.

  Riley was different at the horse show, always. More introspective, more telling. She spoke to the horses as if they could understand her; and most of the time I think they did, letting her settle her hand on the soft slopes of their noses. “Hello, my love, did you miss me?” she’d say. It seemed they had, that they remembered her year to year, the stories she would tell: small, quiet, whispered stories—revelations, I thought them, disclosures. She’d remove her shades. Toss her hat to the sawdust floor.

  “My mother named me Audrey,” she had confessed to a gray spotted mare one day, standing on her toes—maybe we were fourteen. “When I was five I started calling myself Riley.” The mare had lifted her long nose and dropped it again, grunted politely; Riley continued. “I pretended not to know who Audrey was. It drove my mother crazy, until one day she just gave in; and now probably she doesn’t even remember that she named me for the movie star I refuse to be.” She’d smiled. She was so pretty when she did.

  I’d met Riley the year she’d renamed herself, in kindergarten, a delicate blonde whom we all called Glitter after she started glue-sticking sparkle dust to every single thing—jump rope handles and umbrella stands, easels and paintbrush handles, dollhouses and doll cheeks, the big plastic boxes where the millions of crayons were stored. For the first whole year that I knew Riley, she had sparkle somewhere in her hair or clothes; and always her mother would make a big stink of it, marching Riley over to the sink at the end of each day before she’d drive her home.

  “I invented my name,” Riley had told that mare. “It suits me.” She’d never said where she’d first come upon the name. She always claimed that it was her creation, her first work of art, the first manifestation of her talent.

  Once, last year, Riley had gotten obsessed with a chestnut Hanoverian whose name (they hung the horses’ names on cards outside each stall) was Windfall. “Oh, you poor thing,” Riley had said, looping her arms about his neck. “Windfall is no name for a horse.” The horse pricked his ears at the sound of his name, and now he was all Riley’s, a captive—Riley, who hadn’t said much to me when her mother had dropped her off that day, who had seemed moody, distracted, even testy. I’d tried to get her to talk, but here’s the thing: You can’t ask Riley a question straight on. You have to wait until she’s ready. I’m Riley’s best friend because I’ve always had patience. Because I understand the place where secrets live, and how dangerous it seems to out them.

  “Guess,” she had said, looking into one of the horse’s big eyes, “what happened to me today.” Windfall had stirred the straw at his feet with one of his hooves; reading that as encouragement, Riley continued. She spoke so softly that I had to move closer to hear her.

  “Well,” Riley said. “Well. Some background: My mother is the kind of woman who had a child just because that was the fashion—because there were toddler clubs and play date clubs that she decided to want access into.” She pulled a bag of baby carrots from her red cotton tote and put some on her palm and continued talking. Lowering his head, Windfall started chomping. “You need a kid,” Riley explained, “to get into kid clubs.

  “Well, today, Mr. Windfall, my mother took the cake. At school, like, around noon, we lost all power. Weird, but true. Blue-sky day, no storm coming up, no wind—yeah, I know, I didn’t get it either—and still the whole place fizzes. Classrooms go gray. Cafeteria goes cold. The machines in the admin office go quiet. Like dead, you know? A dead zone. We all hung and waited for twenty minutes or so—some teachers still teaching, the cafeteria aides handing out soft pretzels for free because the registers weren’t working, the secretaries sitting around on their green metal chairs talking—and then we get word that school is canceled. The buses rolled up, the walkers walked home; but see, Windfall? I don’t take a bus and I live five miles away. I’ve been driven to school since I started going to school—one of my mother’s ten commandments. She says buses are just mobile trouble; and besides, driving me looks really good on her mom résumé. She’s sensitive, let’s put it that way, to people’s opinions.

  “So I call my mother—you know, the fashion maven, Mrs. Marksmen—with my cell; and she says that it’s just slightly inconvenient at this very moment to stop everything and pick me up, but that she’ll get there, she will, give her some time. She says I should stand by the flagpole, where I always wait, and that she’ll come when she comes; I should do some homework or something, I should read, stay occupied. So what are my choices, Windfall? What would you do? My best friend over here, she’s already on a big bus, headed home.”

  “Ri…,” I started, but she held up her free hand like a traffic cop’s stop, and I knew that if I pressed, she’d end her story.

  “So, guess what, Windfall,” Riley continued. “I sit there, and I’m sketching. I sit there, and I’m reading. I sit there, and above my head the flag is flapping. I sit there, and my butt is hurting from the concrete wall on which I’m sitting. And all this time, my mother never comes. She up and forgets—forgets. It’s not like she’s got fifty kids to tend to. Somebody called, and after that somebody else, then someone stopped by, and she’s feeling sorry for herself because my father’s away on another trip, and she’s telling that story, and whatever. Whatever Mrs. Marksmen does all day, that’s what she was doing while I waited.”

  “You should have called me, Ri,” I said, couldn’t help myself from again interrupting, from asking, “Why didn’t you call me?”

  Ri put up her hand again, silencing me with her eyes. “I know my friend’s mom would have given me a ride,” she continued, keeping her voice low and calm. “I know that. Because my friend is the coolest ever, and so is her mom, and they are always there for me, they always have been—on my gravestone, it’s going to read AUDREY (RILEY) MARKSMEN: RAISED BY GEORGIA AND HER MOTHER. But that’s not the point. Because the longer I sat waiting by the flagpole watching the teachers leave and the parking lot empty, watching the principal go, even the principal, Windfall—all this time I sat until it was just me and the landscape guys and the security guard—the more I wanted Mrs. Marksmen to feel the shame of having abandoned me for, like, forever. I wanted her to pull up and see that the whole place, practically, was empty, that of all the parents of all the kids in that whole school, she had managed to do the very worst job.” Riley’s voice was so steady, so quiet, not threatening. Windfall continued to munch from her palm.

  “I walked home,” she told the Hanoveria
n. “That’s the end of my story. I walked all that way after more than an hour had gone by, in my flip-flops, too, which was, like, a hundred minutes of pure torture. When I opened the door to my house, I found my mother with her knees tucked up to her chin on the white plush couch in the great room, having a cup of ginger tea with Julie Caruthers from down the street. You should have seen the expression on her ravishing face, Windfall. Not concern, it wasn’t that. It was embarrassment. ‘Nice one, Mrs. Marksmen’ is what I said. That’s it. Sum total of my accusation and complaint; I’d practiced the sentence all the way home. Mrs. Caruthers left about five seconds later. My mother took me to Georgia’s in a snap-of-the-fingers instant.”

  “Jesus, Ri.” I felt sick to my stomach. Clammy. Wrong.

  “I didn’t say a single word the whole drive over.” Ri looked at me then. “For once I didn’t have to.”

  Windfall whinnied to register his opinion. A trainer walked by. We moved on.

  This particular day at the horse show, in this summer of Juárez, I’d been telling Riley a story about Geoff. About how he’d come into my room the night before and just hung out until—lightning bolt—I realized he actually wanted to talk. To me. I had grown so used to Geoff’s absences, his barricades, his sending Kev away, that I’d stopped hoping for time with him myself.

  Because the fact of the matter is that Geoff’s an über-talented, funny-when-you-catch-him-right guy, and when he leaves for S. I. Newhouse in the fall, Rennert High will be less than it was. Geoff has been the voice of the school’s morning announcements for three years running. He masterminded these insanely popular TV Studio shows. He started a club to help a friend with cancer. Geoff was a million things to a million people—outside in the world, away from home, where I’d concluded he belonged. All through high school I’d been asked one question: Are you really Geoff Walker’s sister? And the answer was yes, and I bet you can’t believe it, and no, I rarely see him, and when he’s home, he’s closed his door.