Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  And who was that girl who rode Carefree, who felt so ill at ease in her body and needed him to make her free? If I could reach back across time and give her every story she never knew, every possible future she never dreamed, would I be able to write for her a happier beginning? Or did I need that loneliness she felt, the loneliness that would become a drive to imagine, a drive to bust free?

  And will we ever learn what simplified myths cover up? That we are not the only outcast at the barn, that we are not alone in history or in our sorrows. That we stand at the doorway of our own hearts, hat in hand like Sarah, asking our own quiet selves to take a risk and imagine a future.

  The girl I was is just as much an artifact of history as anyone I can uncover in a book. Just as mysterious to me. Just as gone. In her place, I imagine Carefree. We do with animals what we do with the past: project our hopes onto them, our human feelings and failings. I used to wish that whoever named Carefree had chosen a more fitting name, a name that wasn’t always and incessantly what we both weren’t. But what do I know of his ornery heart? I looked, on the outside, like a girl back then, and no one but me knew I wasn’t.

  He carried some secret of his own, I am sure. I hope he got to live it.

  Playing Safe

  Courtney Maum

  On the fifth day, the horses were released into the wild: three strings of twelve into the scrub. The horses had been in training for the Agua Alta polo match in April and were in peak condition; manes hogged, hair clipped, flanks muscled and twitching. Their shaved manes put them at a disadvantage for their premature vacation. The hot season was approaching, and the flies with it. From our house on the hill, I watched the polo ponies circumvent the horses that had been in the brush some time. These horses pranced and flung their useful manes around while the others hung their heads low, cattle egrets standing sentry next to them. Although I knew how to ride a polo pony and the horses were a short walk from the house that we were sheltering in, I would not be riding them. Nobody would.

  I had come to Mexico in early March with my family to promote my third novel, Costalegre, which had just come out in Spanish. The trip to western Mexico was the last leg of our tour, a reunion with the seaside village where the book is based. The journey should have been celebratory—I was with my husband and my daughter and had been working hard all year—but while we were in Mexico City, a virus that had seemed contained, or at the very least, remote, when we left, bloomed into a pandemic that was touching the whole world. Faced with the choice between a four-airport journey home plus possible quarantine or isolating in Careyes, a private estate on Jalisco’s jagged coast, a long stay in the jungle felt like the safest bet. We called ahead to make sure that Adeline—my father-in-law’s ex-wife—would let us overstay our welcome by a week or two if necessary, not yet understanding that we would stay for months. With her assurance, we left the hand-cranked organs and the traffic and the vendors of a city for the bird noise of a savanna and the panteras at night.

  One airplane ride and a hundred miles later, we reached the wooden gate to Careyes. A guard leaned into our rental car and aimed a thermal imaging laser at our foreheads, calling out the results in Celsius. 36°, 34°, 34°, respectively—these numbers clearly erroneous, because if they weren’t, two of us were hovering around 93° Fahrenheit and nearing hypothermia, but they satisfied the guard. We were given a scrap of paper to prove that we’d been gifted entry. Were told not to come out.

  Founded in 1968 by the Italian real estate magnate Gian Franco Brignone, Careyes is a twelve-mile-long stretch of sandy coast and tangled selva sitting off a two-lane highway on the Pacific coast. Discreetly housing some of the most fantastical real estate (and fortunes) in the world, this rococo land—where the residents own one-word commodities like “sugar” or “railways”—is something of a muse to me, not only because I’m fascinated by the mores of the wealthy, but also because I’m drawn to the emotional complications of monogamy and divorce, topics our hostess Adeline espoused in spades. Adeline had turned away from a career as a professional cellist to marry my husband’s father, and when his womanizing sabotaged their union, she took up with another Italian, the aforementioned Gian Franco, who enthroned her in a cobalt blue ocean casita for a decade until he replaced her with a younger model and gifted Adeline with a tract of land as a consolation prize. Referred to among locals as the “ex-girlfriend plots,” Gian Franco’s parting gifts to his ex-lovers explains why Careyes has a curious mixture of billionaire tycoons and scrappy, bohemian feminists living in its arid hills.

  In addition to it being a source of inspiration for my fiction, Careyes reignited a horse obsession that lay dormant many years. I can track the deepening of my relationship to riding with each of our trips here. On our first visit (me, my French husband, and his Italian father, en route for a two-week stay with his ex-wife), the car ride from Puerto Vallarta that takes three and a half hours today took six then. The road was dirt from kilometer 175 to Adeline’s home at 50: eroded and crumbling in many places, washed out in others, blocked by cattle constantly. On that trip, it had been twenty-seven years since I’d last been in a saddle. The horses we passed in the corrals and cattle ranches of Jalisco thrilled the horse-mad kid within me, but they didn’t tweak my muscles; I didn’t need their backs.

  On our second visit to Careyes, it was only me and my husband, Diego—his aging Italian father having declared that, primo, the journey over was too long for him, and secondo, our last visit to his ex-wife’s had reminded him of the reason that they got divorced in the first place. As for his son—my husband—Diego was just as taken as I with the perverse beauty of the region, and I think he felt an allegiance to Adeline—a woman who had never had children, partly because her ex-husband hadn’t wanted them. It made Diego feel good—or at least, assuaged—to check on her biannually, to make sure his would-be stepmother was sound and safe.

  On that second visit to Careyes, the road was just as terrible and the horses just as pretty, but expensive lawn art they remained. By our fourth visit, however, I was a mother for the first time and a rider once again, and I couldn’t pass a horse without wanting to run up to the pasture gate to feel the hot exhale of its muzzle, imagine what the bush would look like from the slope of its sweet back.

  By that visit in 2018, the road to kilometer 50 had much improved, and I joined the Mexicans and the Argentineans who gathered in the jungle to chase after a polo ball on a field bordered on the southern side by a crocodile lagoon. This month—an endless month in a century of a year—marks our fifth return. The people who used to yelp and shout and swear on the horses beside me have put hurricane protection on their windows and turned their horses out to pasture where the boarding was cheaper and the feed was free, signing themselves—and their horses—with the cross first. Though I miss the players’ companionship, the missing is nostalgic. I wouldn’t be out there with them even if the virus hadn’t come. It took me a long time to build up the confidence to play polo competently. But something happened to me this year, and the confidence that used to allow me to charge into a train of horses with my mallet at the ready isn’t with me anymore.

  Except for my ongoing obsession with the myth and mythology of horses, there is nothing about my pocketbook or personality that cut me out for polo. Sometimes brave emotionally, I’m the opposite physically: I sit down on my behind when I have to descend a steep slope, especially one with rocks; I’m tired out by tag; I have a twenty-minute stamina for most physical exertions, including sex. I’m prone to panic and depression and anxious, racing thoughts. My high-strung disposition makes the risky sport of riding even chancier for me. When I mount an equine, they take in what my nerves are communicating, and they think they need to run.

  Although my life today varies between scrabbling together paychecks from my freelance writing and enjoying the rare windfalls of a book well sold, growing up, I knew a life of favor and stability—at least of the financial kind. The lucky firstborn of a Wall Street father, I wa
nted for nothing, needed for nothing; my little-girl horse madness was heartily indulged. I had a brown pony and riding lessons, special ribbons for the braids I needed to score turnout points at horse shows, leather garters to buckle round my six-year-old calves.

  When I was nine, my parents divorced, and the horseback riding stopped. So did the stability. My father remarried quickly and made new children with a new wife. My mother married a man who already had some children of his own. I wasn’t an only child any longer, and I definitely wasn’t the favorite; there were new babies and kitchen redesigns to oversee; big life plans that didn’t necessarily include me. It was around this age that I deemed self-sufficiency a survival tool, a decision that led me to go after my first of many jobs—shopgirl in a costume shop—so that I could make my own allowance instead of blushingly asking my father if I could have pizza cash.

  The pride that came from a small degree of financial independence (earned six dollars an hour, by hour, for so long) was supplemented by a new fervor for writing. The cracks that had previously been caulked by horses and the security of married parents were mended by invented worlds. Sometimes I wrote about the horses that I considered lost to me, sometimes I wrote about the boys who kept me from mourning the lost horses, but eventually those elements fell away, and it was just the stories. I was building safe, expansive word-worlds that I could live inside.

  I tried to fight my return to horseback riding at thirty-seven years of age. The novel I was working on at the time had horse people in it, a dressage rider and a breeder, and I’d started conducting interviews with riders to put flesh on my characters. I assumed I’d be able to fight off the intoxicating barn smell and the high that comes from the potent musk of horses with the armor of my empty bank account. By that point, I’d been a proudly independent but not-so-proudly broke freelance writer for decades, and the price of something like sesame oil was enough to make me wince hours after I’d purchased it. The truth was in my tax return; I couldn’t afford to ride.

  But at thirty-seven, my center wasn’t holding; the cracks inside of me were inching toward a gape. After the publication of my first novel, I became the financial hope for my husband and child, which meant not only that I had to write well and often, but that I had to write commercially. My daughter turned two, and in addition to the caretaker she’d successfully found in me, she suddenly wanted a playmate. I was stressed out, foundering, insomnia-plagued, and overworked; I couldn’t still myself to play. My husband convinced me to sign up for a therapy appointment, and after filling out the mass of intake questions, the therapist suggested that I was too depressed to drive home alone.

  I tried medication; it worsened my bad sleep. I tried aromatherapy, supplements, energy therapy, yoga, meditation, acupuncture, journaling. I tried running many miles. My husband and I signed up for couples therapy. I increased my iron intake. I tried eating less bread. I stayed off social networks, avoided the documentation of other people’s functioning. On my agent’s advice, I took time away from a manuscript that had become a parasite. I missed my book deadline. I didn’t get the payment I would have if I’d made it. Lost in a hell of my own making, I barely slept at all. As a last-ditch effort at self-care, I signed up for a riding lesson at one of the barns where I’d interviewed a trainer for a short story I hadn’t published. I put a cracking leather saddle on top of a big, black horse who smelled of the hay and neatsfoot oil of my easy childhood. In the ill-lit ring, I pulled myself into the saddle and looked straight between the patient horse’s ears. A lost part of me returned.

  My six-year-old daughter and I have taken to tracking our time in Mexico by the horses’ movements in the valley. At our last count, there are thirty horses grazing—most of them bays, except for a white horse with a black mane and tail that we have dubbed “The Unicorn.” This horse is majestic and powerful and looks up from his faraway perch when we call out. Our day begins with The Unicorn’s approach. Although he isn’t a polo pony—his mane was never hogged—he appears to be the herd leader, guiding the horses out of the valley that they sleep in (which we can’t see) to lowland that we can. Around eight in the morning, The Unicorn ushers in a slow parade that ends with the various herds taking up positions in the pasture: most of the bays with bays, the white horses with the pintos, all of them accompanied by their loyal, pecking birds. At noon, the horses disperse to the shade of the cape figs to stare glumly into space, motionless enough to scare me.

  Until our equestrian espionage in Mexico, I had never seen so many horses fall still at the same time. Something worse is coming, is what I told myself the first time that I saw them, dead still in the valley. The next day, when they napped in the same pattern, I felt ashamed of my suspicion. Around six p.m., the horses call out to one another and make their slow way home. There are at least two foals so far, maybe more; it’s possible there are others. So much can happen here in the jungle while the grass waits for the rain.

  Sometimes I think that a propensity for polo was subliminally drummed into me from the way that I grew up. My father has been a lifelong wearer of Polo by Ralph Lauren, and I have strong memories of my sink-high self sneaking into his dark bathroom to examine the way the liquid tilted back and forth inside the green glass of the cologne bottle, the smell a stand-in for a father absent on business trips that were not strictly business.

  There were also polo mallets around the house, used as decorations even though my father didn’t ride. When my parents divorced, my father moved to a development in Greenwich, Connecticut, that had a polo club inside it. This club was more or less defunct by then, the field more of a depot for the owner’s sculptures than an active playing field, but still, on weekends, I would take my bicycle out to that green swath, scrambling up into the empty bandstand to scour the property’s tree line for errant polo balls. I never imagined myself riding a polo pony—absolutely not. I was dreamy, prone to spaciness, uncoordinated in a body growing fast. In school, gym class was the subject I feared most. While I was more than happy to toil away over my textbooks, I did not want to sweat—especially at an age where we weren’t permitted showers; we were just supposed to exchange our funky gym clothes for the uniforms we’d left heaped on the locker room bench. No, I never imagined myself that kind of a rider. If anything, I spent many of those polo club explorations pretending to be the horse.

  The Greenwich Polo Club has come back to life today, a destination for the shift-dress and boating-hat set who pay to sit as close to the red sideboards as possible, even though this means they are in harm’s way of the flying turf sods and the galloping mares that make them fly. I haven’t watched a game there since the club opened back up; my father left Connecticut in 2007, my mother in 2005. The Greenwich Polo Club—all the polo clubs—will surely lie dormant and bird-filled this summer; the USPA has forbidden grass and arena matches, and even here in Mexico where the governing body is a different entity, the horses are set free.

  Normally, around this time in Careyes—the very eve of April—the grooms would be exercising their patrón’s numerous polo ponies on the gallop track twice a day, sending up ranchera music and dust blooms in an effort to prepare the horses for the Agua Alta match.

  I worked these warm-up laps with the grooms on my last visit. You ride one saddled horse and you “pony” three or four other horses, leading them alongside. Two sets around the track at a walk, a trot, and a gallop each, then time back at the barn for watering down the horse’s legs where the tendons warm and throb.

  Those warm-up laps were some of the happiest moments of my life. To feel part of a moving energy, to be in a line of so many beating hearts, to hit a turn in the right way and keep four horses at heel, the burn of the nylon rope that brought three thousand pounds of horse flesh into the control of my small hand, these were times when I felt powerful and beautiful and capable of so much. It has been true for me in the four years since I’ve started riding again that I feel happiest when I can control a horse. When I can’t, I come apart.

>   We build responses to the horses that put delight into the day. When we hear the thunder of a gallop, I yell, “We’ve got a runner!” and my daughter and I dash to the veranda to see which horse it is. There is always a troublemaker—most days it’s a dun gelding with a striking black mane. A persistently slow learner, he’s always sniffing his way into a herd of mares, running up small hills to cut them off at a narrow pass where he’s inevitably bit by competitors and exasperated mares. There isn’t a television here at Adeline’s, and the internet isn’t strong enough to stream programs or watch movies. The herd is our entertainment and our grandfather clock. It is also a form of therapy for my heart and ears; with every neigh that rises up the hill to us, I feel comforted in my identity as someone who writes about horses more than she rides them. I am a child in the bleachers of the polo club again; observing from a distance that feels powerful, but safe.

  Enough time passes that the remaining grooms move the horses to a pasture we can’t see. It’s a question of new grass; even terrain this expansive can’t sustain a herd indefinitely. Although the move is necessary, I’m not handling it well. Now that the horses are far away and out of view, the energy that the simple act of watching them provided is leaching from my body. I am limp and lost. Not someone who watches horses, not someone who rides them.