Playing House (2 page)

From far away my mother answered the phone, and I said, “I want to come home,” and she said, “Don’t be a quitter, Lauren.” She wanted a larger life for me, a life where girls stand on stages, take charge of a team, swim the length of a lake and back in a Speedo suit. But as long as she didn’t have these things, I felt much too guilty to take them for myself. None of this did I say.

At camp, we were divided into teams, and every activity, from drama to Newcomb (a kind of volleyball), was cast as a competition. I watched the older girls run with their lacrosse sticks, cradling them close to their sides, the ball in the gut-string pocket a soft blur. I watched as we, the younger girls, were taught to dribble and to shoot. Part of me wanted fiercely to win these games, while a still larger part of me could not even allow myself to participate, for somehow I would be betraying my mother if I did.

I was put on the Tigers team. Every morning after breakfast, standing at attention beneath that mounted swordfish, we would sing:

It was a summer of color war. I remember, in particular, a game called bombardment, which we played in the gym on rainy days, Tigers versus Bears. In this game, each side is given a whole raft of rubber balls, and the purpose is simply to hurl them at each other as hard as you can, and whoever gets hit, is out. Before I’d left home, maybe I could have played this game, but certainly not now. Brown rubber balls came whizzing through the air, smacked against the lacquered floor of the gym, ricocheted off a face or a flank, and one by one each girl got hit and so would sit out on the sidelines. I was so scared of bombardment that whenever we played it, I hung way in the back of the court, where the other team’s balls could not reach me. And then one day, because of this, I lasted throughout the whole game; everyone on my team had been hit except me, everyone on the other team had been hit except a senior girl named Nancy, a fourteen-year-old who had one leg shorter than the other. Because of this, she had custom-made shoes, her left heel stacked high enough to bring her up even, so she didn’t tilt. Out of the corner of my eye I’d watched Nancy walk; even with her shoes she was strangely clumsy, gangly, always giggling nervously just at the rim of a group of girls, her desire to be taken in palpable.

And now Nancy and I were the last two left in the game. Everyone on the sidelines was screaming
Go go go!
Nancy’s skin was as pale as milk, the strands of veins visible in her neck. Her gimp foot, supported by the huge rubber heel of her sneaker, seemed to wobble.
Go go go
, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hurl that ball at her. It seemed existentially horrible that we were called to do this sort of thing in the world, to live in a way so someone had to lose. I stood there, locked in place, mesmerized by her skin and her foot, while Nancy lifted the ball high above her head and hurled it towards me with as much muster as she could muster, and I just stood there and let the ball hit me on the hip. Nancy won. That was the only outcome I could tolerate.

It didn’t take long for the counselors to realize that something was wrong with me. I cried all the time. During free swim I retreated into the fringe of woods. The woods were next to a red barn where horses hung their heads over stall doors and there were golden squares of hay. Somehow, being near the horses calmed me. I liked their huge velvety lips, their thoughtful mastications. I liked the way they almost seemed to slurp up hay. I liked their rounded backsides, their plumed tails; I even liked their scat, flecked with grain and sweet smelling. Still, whenever I enter a barn and smell that smell, I do a Proustian plunge back to that first barn and the chestnut ponies.

Riding was a camp activity reserved for the older girls. I began to watch those girls cantering around the ring, the horses seeping dark sweat on their muscular chests. The riding coach’s name was Lisa. She was a wisp of a woman in tan jodhpurs with suede patches at the knees. Once, when I was alone in the barn, I found her riding clothes hung up on a hook near the tack room. I tried on her green hunt jacket. It hung huge on me, but it felt cozy, and on its lapel there was a tiny brooch in the shape of a dragonfly.

“Would you like to try?” Lisa asked me one day.

“I’m only nine,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “I have a horse who’s only nine too. Maybe you would make a good match.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“What’s yours?” she said.

“Lauren,” I said.

“Smokey Raindrops,” she said. “But we call him Rain.”

Rain
. What a beautiful name. It was more a sound than a designation. “Yes,” I said.

In fact, I didn’t get to ride Rain that day. First, all the counselors, along with Auntie Ruth, the camp director, had to discuss it. Should I have lessons even though that was not a part of my camp curriculum? Would that make me happy? They thought it might.

Riding is a sport that, like any other, requires doing more than just the circumscribed activity. There is the ritualistic preparation, like the waxing of skis or the oiling of strings or, in my case, the grooming before the tack. A few days later, Lisa showed me how to use a currying comb, pick a hoof, leaning down and cupping the hairy fetlock, lifting the leg, the shine of the silver shoe with six nail heads in it. Time passed. Days passed. I found caring for the horses soothing, and I found when I was at the stable by these big snorting animals that I could forget about my own breath and just breathe.

All through the summer Lisa taught me how to ride, alone, no other girl there. She taught me how to post, how to do dressage, how to jump. I learned to hoist myself up, foot in one stirrup, other leg flung over the broad rank back. “When you post,” she said, “watch the left leg. As it extends, you rise.” The trot of a horse is like a metronome. It synchronizes you. It hypnotizes you. Left foot rise. Left foot rise. Your whole mind funnels down into this foot, the flash of hoof in the summer sun. And I’ll never forget the day Lisa taught me to canter, how she said, “Trot out, give him a kick with your inside foot,” and suddenly the horse’s tight trot broke into the rocking run, around and around the ring we went, so fast it seemed, the world blurring by in a beautiful way.

Riding is largely a singular sport. Although there are shows and red ribbons, first places and sixth places, it can still be done, nevertheless, with no attention to that. You cannot really play lacrosse or soccer unless you are playing against someone, and this against-ness requires that you see yourself as separate, with all that that implies. But horseback riding you may do alone in the woods, or in a dusty riding rink, or even in your mind, which can canter too. Riding is not about separation. It is not about dominance. The only person you might hurt is you. You are, at long last, without guilt.

Riding. It is about becoming one with the animal that bears you along. It is about learning to give and take, give the horse his head, take the reins and bring him up. It is about tack, the glorious leather saddles, and the foam-stained bits, which fascinated me, how Lisa would roll them in sugar and slide them into the animal’s mouth, its thick tongue clamped. It is, more than anything else, about relationship and balance, and as Lisa taught me how to do these things—walk, trot, canter—a sort of peace settled in me, a working-through my mother and me, a way of excelling at no one’s cost.

And so the summer progressed. The only thing I could not do well was jump. Each time we approached the fence, the horse seemed to sense my primordial fear, fear of the fence and fear of everything it contained, and it would bunch to a scuttering halt or, more humiliating, the horse would stop and then, with me uselessly kicking and kicking, it would simply walk over the bar. I watched Lisa jump. She was amazing, fluid, holding onto the horse’s mane as she entered the air, her face a mixture of terror and exhilaration, the balanced combination that means only one thing: mastery.

One month into the camp season was visiting day. My parents arrived, carrying leathery fruit rolls and a new canteen for me. They seemed as separate as ever, not even looking at each other.

My mother was appalled at the condition of my wardrobe. My clothes stank of sweat and fur. The soles of my boots were crusted with flaking manure. That was the summer, also, when I started to smell. “What’s this?” she said, flicking through my steamer trunk. “Do you ever do your laundry?” She pulled out a white shirt with black spatters of mud on it and stains beneath the armpits, slight stains, their rims barely visible. “Lauren,” she said.

“What?” I said.

She pursed her lips and shook her head. She held the shirt out, as though to study it. And once again, I saw that look of longing cross her face, but this time it was mixed with something else. I saw the briefest flicker of disgust.

A few minutes later, she went into our cabin bathroom, which we called The Greenie. She closed the door. I stalked up to it, pressed my ear against its wood. What did I do with my body? What did she do with hers? I heard the gush of water from the tap, the scrunch of something papery. The bathroom had a lock, on my side only. Quietly, and for a reason I still cannot quite explain, I turned the lever and the bolt slid quietly into its lock.

A few minutes later, when she tried to get out, she could not. She rattled the knob. We were alone in the cabin. I stood back and watched. “Lauren?” she said. “Lauren?” Her voice hurt me. It was curved into a question, and when I didn’t answer, the question took on a kind of keening. “Lauren, are you there? Open the door.” I stood absolutely still. I was mesmerized, horrified, by the vulnerability in her voice, how small she suddenly seemed and how I was growing in size, seemingly by the minute. For some reason I suddenly pictured her trapped in a tiny glass bottle. I held the bottle in my hands. I could let her out, or leave her.

I let her out.

“What are you doing?” she said. She stared at me.

I stared back at her. I could see her sweat now; it ran in a trickle down the side of her brow. I wanted to wipe it away.

They left in the evening, when colored clouds were streaming across the sky. I stood in the parking lot and watched their station wagon rattle over the dirt road, raising clouds of dust. The next few days, I backslid. My fears returned. There was the problem with my breathing, but accompanying this obsession was now the need to walk backwards while counting. I saw for sure that I was growing while she shrank. I saw for sure that I was growing
because
she shrank. I also saw something pointed in me, some real desire to win. Hearing that bolt sink into its socket, there had been glee and power.

I stopped riding then. I stopped going to the stables. I stayed in my bunk. I wrote letters and letters to my mother, the act somehow soothing my conscience.
Love, Lauren XXX. Kisses and hugs. I love you
.

At last, after four days had passed, Lisa, the riding instructor, came to my cabin to get me. “You disappeared,” she said.

“I’m sick,” I said.

“You know,” she said, “I never much liked my mother.”

I stared at her. How had she known?

“What will you do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Are you going to sit on a cot for the rest of your life?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Just sit there and cry?” she said, and there was, suddenly, a slight sneer to her voice.

I looked away.

“I once knew a girl,” she said, “who spent her whole life going from hospital to hospital because she loved being sick. She was too scared to face the world. Is that you?”

I have thought of her words often: a premonition, an augur, a warning, a simple perception.

I followed Lisa back to the barn. It was noontime. The sun was high and hot. She brought Rain into the middle of the ring, tightened up his saddle strap, and tapped on the deep seat. “All aboard,” she said.

Sitting high on the horse, I could smell the leaves. I could smell my own sweat and all it contained, so many contradictions.

“We’re going to jump today,” she said and set the fence at four feet high. “Now, cross your stirrups and knot your reins. A rider has to depend on her inner balance only.”

I cantered towards the jump, hands on my hips, legs grasping. But each time, at the crucial moment of departure, Rain would screech to a halt, and I’d topple into his mane.

“He senses your fear,” Lisa said.

At last, after the third or fourth try, she went into the barn and came back out with a long black crop. Standing in the center of the ring, right next to the jump, she swizzled the crop into the air, making a snapping sound. The horse’s ears flashed forward. “You have to get over it,” she said. I centered myself in the saddle. I cantered twice around the rink and then turned in tight towards the bar. Lisa cracked the whip, a crack I still hear today whenever I feel my fears and I do, I often do, but I rose up, arms akimbo, in this leap merged with the mammal, its heart my heart, its hooves my feet, we sailed into the excellent air. I did it. I had found a way to move forward.