Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  “You’re such a ham,” I said the day we met, to convince us both he could be different. With me he wouldn’t need violence. I would be his girl, and my love would transform us.

  Now, five years since Ham came into my life, and I am nearly a woman. I am eighteen, about to age out of the junior exhibitor division in which I’ve competed for half my life. It is the morning of my last ride, my last chance to win the World Championship title I’ve wanted my whole girlhood. I try not to think about it, the ending, the last chance, the potential for loss.

  I mount and my body becomes Ham’s. We walk from the barn and into the morning’s music: metal shoes on cold pavement, the crack of a whip, the jangle of chains, wrapped around a show pony’s ankles, to make him trot high and square and rhythmic as a drumbeat, calling me.

  The paved strip between small show arenas leads us toward the Coliseum, where World Championship titles are vied for, awarded, lost. As we near, I visualize our ride, picture each transition, each pass before each judge. Visualization is a technique my father taught me. Through it I tap into what he calls pure Force; I become one with the universe, limitless in my power.

  The Force is a concept my father learned from his favorite book, which shares a title with its signature concept. In The Force, author Stuart Wilde, seemingly unaware of the Star Wars entendre, teaches of a “massive, exhilarating, magnanimous” energy in and around all things. Only those who believe in the Force can tap into its power. But once we’re tapped in, we can visualize anything we desire, and it will manifest. I visualize Ham, ears pointed forward, eyes bright; I see him speed up and slow down when I ask him to; I feel him breathe, I watch us win.

  A golf cart carrying a group of girls whines up behind us and returns me to the moment. They speed past, tan legs hanging. Good luck, I hear. They shrink into the distance. Ham and I steer into the A Barn practice ring; we move from bright morning into a dull, familiar light.

  I know to expect the dark. Once a year for the last five years, I have taken this path, moved from this kind of day into this same muted space and then, the Coliseum. Each year I have ridden to win a World Championship in Junior Exhibitor Hunter Pleasure, a division made up of girls under eighteen years old, and their Morgan horses, all of us outfitted for a hunt we’ll never ride. We ride, instead, in circles, performing the commands of a disembodied announcer: walk please, ladies, come down to the walk; reverse directions at the trot; canter please, riders, canter please. The most beautiful pair to follow these commands without fault wins.

  Each year I’ve ridden for the World title, my father has stood on the rail, arms crossed, eyes trained on my body and Ham’s, like he might direct us with his gaze. Each year we have been perfect, the most beautiful. We have been perfect until I’ve made an essential error, a rookie mistake. It is something about the World, I sometimes think, the pressure, the heft with which I want to win; it is something about the wanting that makes me choke the way I do. Every year we’ve tried for the roses, I’ve let other horses envelop us, box us in, and Ham has reared up; we’ve been subject to surprise attacks, riders I didn’t watch for, cutting us off, shaking us from our strategy. Ham has thrown leads, flipped the bit, taken the metal shank in his mouth, and wrenched. Which is to say, for six years we’ve traveled sixteen hundred miles, from New Hampshire to Oklahoma City, and lost.

  A long, downhill chute connects the warm-up ring and Coliseum. Already, horses and riders—horses and girls—outfitted and groomed like us, have formed a line. Ham and I take our place among them. As one we wait, soldiers on the front, uniformed and ready. I shorten my reins, glance around to see who might be watching, who might be afraid. Ham is not the only beautiful horse and I am not the only girl riding her last ride. The World Championship will be mine, or it won’t. And regardless of the outcome, for the first time in six years, my father isn’t here to see.

  Come on in, ladies, the announcer calls. The first rider descends, the second follows. They pass into the Coliseum and the stands erupt with cheers, shouts, whistles. Ham and I walk down the chute. We near the gate and begin a trot.

  There is a path before us, so bright it blinds. Riding for the World Championship, the announcer booms. I push us into the humming light.

  I am eight years old. Stirrups too short, helmet askew, tufts of curls puffed out around its edges and tangled in the straps. I ride through the early morning fog that hangs over the cornfield and river and dusty ring, too big for just one girl. I trot it anyway, measure circles with gentle geldings my teacher, Andrea, assigns. I check diagonals and leads, practice equitation, back arched, thumbs pointed to the sky, a doll in the saddle.

  “Heels down, Al,” Andrea yells. She is tough, calloused, her voice nasal and blunt. She stands center-ring, head shrouded by the hood of her windbreaker, coffee mug abandoned on a rusted folding chair.

  “You can come in here, George,” she calls to my dad, stationed on the fence-line.

  “No,” he says, “I’m good.” He prefers the rail, the outer edge; he waits there, and studies.

  When the lesson ends, Andrea returns to cleaning stalls and my father returns to the car. I ride around the cornfield, past the river and back toward the circle, as if surveying the bounds of my world, invisible walls beyond which I am not safe. My horse points his ears; he scans the distance. When dry stalks rustle and let loose a flock of blackbirds, we both jump, then settle.

  Horses smell fear, a common lesson for young riders; bury your fear, and your horse will, too. Maybe there’s truth to it. Horses and humans are ancestors, after all. Hundreds of millions of years ago we crawled together from the sea. From a single-cell organism, a mutual mother, we diverged. Skeletal vestiges prove our bond: identical patellas, for example; or the modern horse’s hock joint, akin to a small bone in the human foot. So perhaps we share survival mechanisms, too, subconscious memories: how it feels to be abused; what it takes to live through war.

  I am eight when I begin to ride, nine when I decide to win. My parents and I live in a log house perched high on a hillside. It’s a cavernous space, and cold; the echoes of anger bounce from every wall. They fight most in the kitchen, the countertop between them. I climb up and lie down on the butcher block, that neutral space. I demand each person stop. I am a peacemaker, but the mission is one I always fail, abandon.

  For a time, I retreat to the woods, but they’re thick, all forest, no paths. So I beg to ride, search the phone book and find the farm, sign up for nightly chores, morning lessons. Five a.m. and I’m waiting in the car, ready to return. My father climbs in the driver’s seat with bowls of oatmeal for us both. We roll down the rutted driveway, spooning in bland bites, and it feels like an escape.

  Before the woods, my parents and I lived by the sea. My mother was sick and my father was scared, angry when he couldn’t help her, as if cancer was a failure of his will, or hers. I was an amateur whale enthusiast and planned an adulthood in marine biology. Now, the forest surrounds us and my mother is in remission. But my father’s rage persists. Now, it’s horses I love. I pore over easy-reader young-rider books, to learn their history, from war mounts and agricultural aids, to saddle clubs and shows. Andrea gives me her outdated copies of The Morgan Connection and The Saddle Horse Report and I memorize show results, learn the foundational bloodlines of the Morgan breed, to which the farm herd belong. I learn the rules of showmanship, equitation, proper grooming and care. I learn the other farm girls, learn who works hard, who slacks, who Andrea thinks is aggressive enough to win, who she thinks too soft.

  Soft or not, on summer afternoons she teaches all of us equine anatomy on Spunky the one-eyed pony; Sundays, we trailer to 4-H shows, earn ribbons, mugs of candy; we return sunburned, and full of glory.

  My father hangs photographs of my victories on the foyer wall. It’s a drafty, transitional room, full of other pictures: my father’s parents, whom I never met; shots of his own eighteen-year-old face, dirt streaked and beautiful behind the wheel of a car. And a few black-and-wh
ite photos of a boy my age. Here he stands and grins, haloed by sunlight. Here he is somber and holds a dead bird in one hand, the gun that killed it in the other.

  “Who is this?” I one day think to ask. I point at the boy.

  “That’s me,” my dad says. He sounds surprised that I don’t recognize him.

  The longer we live in New Hampshire, the longer my mother stays healthy, the less I recognize my father. He spends his time alone, locked in his office, the room overlooking the driveway from which he tries to manage everything—comings and goings, finances and stock futures, mealtimes and homework schedules, bedtime and morning rituals.

  Everything in the office once belonged to the grandfather who died when I was three: the long wooden desk and rolling chair; the tattered green recliner where my dad meditates; the racks of antique firearms my grandfather collected, each one responsible for the dozens of taxidermied animal parts he also bequeathed to my dad, so many that they fill not only the office, but the entire house. Busts of impala and gazelle hang from every wall. Elephant legs serve as end tables; the feet of wild boars, severed above the ankle and topped with metal ashtrays, adorn every coffee table. The head of a Cape buffalo, taller than a man, hangs above the fireplace; the skin of a lion, its head stuffed and still intact, its mouth gaping, stretches across the floor, shedding strands of wiry mane. In the photographs of my grandfather that hang in the foyer, he is gun-slung, fragile-bodied. He kneels next to the animals he’s hunted and killed, his palms on their bodies like a healer.

  I am used to these items, these trophy animals. They feel like protectors. My mother complains they feel, instead, like artifacts, the house a monument to power, wealth, white masculinity, so much dangerous privilege. She makes art in protest, dioramas of animal figurines: plastic elephants, whales, horses, sawed up and reassembled in surrealist jumbles she places around the house, side by side with my grandfather’s kills.

  “A total clusterfuck, the things I’ve been through, the things I’ve had to put up with, and never say a fucking word about.” This is what my dad says when we speak of why his dream career failed to launch. He had wanted to be a professional race car driver. “You would be blown away if you knew what I’ve been through, but you never will, because I’m not that kind of person. I don’t dwell.” He talks to me like I’m a grown-up, capable of relating. I nod along, listen like I think a grown-up should. “I had the talent,” he says, “I had the ambition. I had everything but support. My father didn’t help me the way I help you.”

  My grandfather was larger-than-life, charismatic. “He was a genius,” my father says, and tells me that during the “Great Wars” he built propeller parts and firearms, then traveled from place to place, teaching soldiers how to use them. But he was also haunted: alcoholism, a sense of having failed to make more of what his parents left. It’s a feeling my father inherited, too, a chromosomal curse.

  “Whatever it takes,” my dad says of my riding, the World Championship title I hope to someday win. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make your dream come true.” He will leverage what’s left of his father’s wealth. He will play the stock market to earn enough for a horse, a prestigious training barn, a private plane that he himself will fly, all the way to Oklahoma City, the World Championships, where I will win and win and win.

  “Picture this,” he says. “You’re a World Champion, then next thing you know, you’re a professional trainer. You wake up in a mansion in Northern California. You look out the window and see a field of horses, all for you. You go to the basement, and find barrels of wine.”

  I prepare for my future, belly down on my bedroom rug, studying horses, their history, a long lineage of winners and losers into which I must fit. I learn that scientists date horses’ domestication from approximately 5,500 years ago, but quibble over the advent of riding. Most believe that by the year 1500 BCE, horses were pulling chariots, and by 900 BCE, humans were riding them. These dates mark the beginning of a global tradition in which horses were commodified, turned to tools of conquest, tools of men.

  For centuries, regardless of location, conflicts between cultures with different approaches to horses boiled down to a simple fact: winners rode. An army on horseback always trumped an army on foot. But because horses were also often symbols of aristocracy and priced accordingly, they were typically in short supply.

  Even Napoleon Bonaparte, whose fearlessness and drive to win has become legend, confined his cavalry to noblemen and at times struggled to drum up enough animals to supply his officers. Napoleon’s own horse, Marengo—the rearing white stallion whose image is inextricable from his owner’s—carried Napoleon to numerous victories. Until, that is, the Battle of Waterloo, which Napoleon fled, leaving Marengo wounded on the road.

  Horses were conduits for Napoleon’s victories, bodies he treated as extensions of his own until they failed and he moved on, saving himself. This, I suppose, could be considered the personality of a winner. But I have seen it become a formula for loss.

  After my early morning rides, my dad drives me to the school bus stop. When we miss the bus, as often happens, he parks, slams the steering wheel with both hands. Then he stills and stares into dead morning air, the town’s single stoplight, the single Sunoco station beyond it. He makes a shadow-puppet shape with his right hand, lifts it to his nose, blocks one nostril, and inhales. He blocks the other, and exhales.

  He drives me to school, still breathing this way, thirty minutes to the soundtrack of his snot, the stuck, negative emotional energy he needs to cleanse. “Cleanse” is a word my father favors. To tap into the Force, he tells me, we must first cleanse ourselves of bad feelings, trauma, fear. This is because the Force mirrors our thoughts and feelings; if we feel joy, happiness, success, the Force will deliver more joy, happiness, success. If we feel afraid, the Force will give us more to fear. Fear is toxic, the result of toxic friends and family, the toxic past we must release through isolation, positive affirmation, visualization and strategy, expedient silencing of negative vibes.

  “Cut that out,” my father says when I cry, as if my tears might poison us both.

  “Good job, Sport,” he says when I win my walk trot classes, as I often do.

  Sport was what his dad called him, a nickname I heard for the first time the first time I won. Sport is who my father wants me to be, a child in the image of the champion my father should have been, a child who always wins and never loses, a child I secretly fear I’ll never be.

  “We’re the same, Sport,” my dad tells me when I win. “We’re different than other people, I understand you.”

  “Jesus Christ, Allie, only you can make yourself feel bad,” he says when I’m myself, feeling too much, wanting too much: food, attention, affection, all of it excessive, unbecoming of Sport.

  “Make it a great day,” he says when he drops me at school. I attend a private academy in Vermont, a river away from the farm, and my report cards reflect the distance. A moony child, they say, a girl whose mind is somewhere else.

  “I will,” I promise, and get out, slam the door harder than I mean to. I know my father’s morning, the early hours after the stock market’s bell, have been lost by the missed bus, the long drive. Most likely he will still be angry about it when night comes and he returns me to the farm for chores.

  I sit through science and math, subjects I am slow to understand. I sit through American history, search for myself in stories of men and war. I tuck the collar of my sweatshirt over my nose, my mouth, and inhale. I smell like sweet feed and horse sweat, a certain wildness. It comforts me.

  My history books are full of horses, so I like the subject best. Grant’s Cincinnati, Stonewall Jackson’s Little Sorrel, and Lee’s Traveller, they hover in squares on every flimsy page; small blocks of text tell their stories. I learn that during the American Civil War, even as both armies struggled to obtain enough horses, they trumpeted the supernatural bravery of their cavalry. Tales of special horses, horses with transcendent powers, were tossed b
ack and forth across enemy lines like cannon fire. Certain horses could, soldiers claimed, intuit the arrival of enemy forces long before their riders; should a rider fall off or die on horseback, his mount returned to her home army, her band of fellow warhorses, of her own volition. She didn’t need her freedom, the story went, her loyalty trumped it.

  The reward for loyalty was dignified death, a place in history, a bronzed statue in the town square, a framed photo, memorialized on the foyer wall.

  I watch my body change in photographs of victory passes, show seasons, levels of competition. Here where I’m a 4-H rider, dimpled and small, a winner of candy and hollow plastic trophies. Here where I’ve graduated to A-rated shows but my hunt coat puckers and my last-place ribbon is purple, brown. Here where I am taller, thinner, almost adolescent, and back in the red and blue, back to being Sport, but burdened by my body’s power, failure, fear.

  Fear is toxic, my dad warns. Horses smell fear, the Force mirrors fear, enemies feed off it; he doesn’t want his girl to be afraid. But when a bearded man at the General Store—an artist, he says—asks to take my picture and I agree, my dad erupts in rage. I should know to fear that man. I should know I am a girl, not a horse, not stronger than a man, not faster. Fear is something I should know to pick and choose.

  I cancel the photo shoot, start high school at a new academy where I know no one. My parents give me a cell phone, and a group of popular boys gets the number. I wake in the middle of the night to messages from unknown callers. “This is the vet, it’s about your horse,” a gruff voice says, and I panic. “I’ve heard you like horse cock, big hard horse cock.” In the background, laughter. “I think you should try my big hard horse cock.”