The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (5 page)

“Who gets in trouble?” I asked.

“Last month Gates’s sister and another girl were caught smoking. Last year a girl was meeting a boy from Asheville in the woods. The smokers got a warning. The other girl got sent away the next day. No one knew what happened to her until Mrs. Holmes announced it after morning prayer. It was like she disappeared.”

We were at the bathhouse now, which was nothing more than a large room full of tubs, set about five feet apart from one another, in rows. Docey wove her way through naked girls, handing out towels.

“Nobody looks,” Sissy whispered as we walked in, fiddling with a delicate diamond horseshoe that hung from her neck. Which wasn’t true—I looked. Everybody looked. Bath hour was an exercise in avoiding being caught looking. Mary Abbott was the scrawniest of us, looked like you could blow her over, light as a feather. I was thin, but my limbs were defined from riding. The hot water felt good and I closed my eyes and submerged my head. I scrubbed my scalp, the greasy spot at my crown. The room was steamy with all the hot water, perfumed by the various soaps and lotions.

We were silent while we bathed, as if pretending we were alone.

Then Docey stood over me with a towel and it was over.

“Thank you.” But she had already moved on to another girl. I noted that no one else thanked her. I tried to modestly slide into my nightclothes, which proved impossible. I spotted a girl with white-blond hair in a tub near the corner, and the way her face was perched just above the water sent a chill down my spine.

Docey was attending to Mary Abbott. Gates and Victoria were shielding each other with their towels while they dressed, but you could see perfectly the shapes of their bodies. This was bizarre, I felt very keenly. The strangest thing so far in the strangest week of my life. I knew we were safe, but it seemed foolish to put us all together like this, all in one place, naked.

Victoria hurried past us on the way back to our cabins, and Sissy studied her retreating figure. Victoria had very close-set eyes, and a long, narrow face; improbably, she was pretty.

“Victoria,” Sissy said.

“She looks like a very pretty, very thin monkey.”

Sissy burst out laughing, had to stop and lean against a tree because she was laughing so hard. The only other person I could make laugh this hard was Sam. I stood nervously; what would I say when she was done laughing? We still had several minutes to fill.

“She does!” Sissy exclaimed, finally.

“You can’t ever take a bath when you feel like it, can you?” I asked Sissy, after a moment had passed.

She shook her head as we walked. “I guess you could sneak in. Like a bath bandit.” She grinned, her blue eyes crinkling, and I couldn’t help but grin back. She was so lighthearted.

“Hold still,” she said, and darted behind me. I felt my hair lifted from my neck.

“What—” I started, surprised, but Sissy only wrung the water out of it, for the second time that night.

“There,” she murmured, still behind me, her hands in my hair. “Why did you come so late, Thea?”

She dabbed water from my neck with her towel. My mother had barely hugged me when I left. It had pained Sam to look at me. This was the first time in weeks someone had touched me and not been angry, and I was surprised at how vulnerable and loved it made me feel. I wanted to offer Sissy something.

“I was sent away.” As soon as I spoke I regretted it. What had I been thinking? That this girl would offer solace, this girl who knew nothing about me?

Sissy dropped my hair, which she had twisted into a rope, onto my neck. I thought I could feel her deciding.

“Oh,” she said finally. “Well, I was, too, in a way. Sent away to learn how to be a lady.” She deepened her voice, turned everything into a joke. And I was so grateful. Sissy’s cheeks were red from the steam, and her hair hung damply. She did not seem like the girl from her desk, with all that jewelry and perfume. Sissy was friends with nearly everyone here, there was always a girl waving to her, sidling up next to her to impart some bit of news. I wondered why she had chosen me, and hoped it was something besides my novelty. It seemed like it was.

“I left a girl, but returned a lady,” Sissy intoned, in the same voice, and on and on back to the cabin, where I begged her to stop, I was laughing so hard. I felt a little bit like I was walking on air—to think that I had been nervous about filling the time as we walked back to the cabin. There was nothing to be nervous about around Sissy.

We entered Augusta House a pair. Our beds were already turned back by Docey, like we were at a hotel. Eva smiled at us, unconcerned, but Mary Abbott didn’t like the look of us together, I could tell. We prepared for bed: Sissy patted cream onto her cheeks, Victoria brushed her hair. Eva’s leg dangled over her bunk, next to my face. Her toenails were painted. She was reading the book from Sissy’s desk.

Gates was hard at work at her desk, practicing her handwriting, which was terrible, loopy and vague. Miss Lee, our matronly elocution and etiquette teacher, had shaken her head in dismay over Gates’s work today. Gates paused, and shook her hand dramatically. “It aches!” she cried. Her dirty-blond hair was cut into a bob, and two barrettes, adorned with tiny pearls, were clipped above each ear. She seemed like a girl who would not want hair in her face.

“Wait until classes begin,” Sissy said. “Then it’ll really hurt.”

Gates grimaced, and everyone laughed, even Mary Abbott.

“What other classes will they have?” I asked. “The schoolgirls,” I added, when Sissy looked at me blankly. Our mornings were devoted to classes: elocution, then etiquette, then French, then instrument (piano for me). Then lunch, then rest hour, then riding, then “leisure” pursuits: bird-watching, botany, painting. Then free time until dinner, which we usually spent in the Hall in the Castle, short for Study Hall, though no one seemed to study there. I was bad at bird-watching: all I ever spotted were hawks and hummingbirds, which were a dime a dozen.

“The schoolgirls?” Sissy asked.

Gates put her book down, carefully, making sure to mark her place with a silver bookmark. I knew from my snooping that it was monogrammed. “Some of the girls leave,” she began, slowly, “but most of us stay.” Her voice was high, excited. She watched me solemnly. I felt my neck warm, the telltale sign of a blush.

“I know,” I said.

“It’s just,” Sissy said, “we’re all schoolgirls. This is a year-round cabin.” She looked at me carefully for a moment, and I smiled. She didn’t understand that I was not a schoolgirl, that I was only in a year-round cabin because there had been no place else to put me.

Gates returned to her handwriting, pressing so deeply into the paper as she wrote that it tore; she cried out again in exasperation. Sissy lay back onto her pillows and picked up her needlework, a pretty embroidery of a mountain stream. I watched her patiently color in the stream, stitch by blue stitch. This place was so odd. Yesterday a dozen of us had sat outside behind easels, facing the mountains, and been directed to paint them. Henny walked behind us, murmuring approvingly at some paintings, clucking sadly at others. I had received a cluck, of course; I wasn’t good at spotting birds, or stitching straight lines, or painting a leaf that looked like a leaf, pursuits I couldn’t ever imagine pursuing once I left this place.

It was called the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, but it was neither a camp nor a place for girls. We were supposed to be made ladies here. I thought about where that left me. I still thought of myself as a girl, but I was not like my cabinmates. I would never be a girl like that again.

And had I ever been like them? At home I had been a girl among boys and men. There had been no one prettier, or richer, or in any way better than I was. I did wonder, of course, if such a person existed, and knew that she must, but then the thought had dropped from my head. My place in my family was so well defined I’d had no need to wonder about what could be for too long.

My mother was our standard of beauty. I knew nothing about curling my hair because Mother still wore hers up. And she had never painted her nails; the thought made me smile. I had always thought of her as timeless, like women I saw in the prints of paintings Father showed us during our lessons. But now I could see she was old-fashioned, of a different world. No less beautiful, but perhaps less becoming.

Henny bustled in and switched off all the lights, told us good night.

Gates lit a candle, to read. I touched the handkerchief beneath my pillow.

A
letter from Father arrived on my seventh day at Yonahlossee. The postmark was from Atlanta. I pressed his letter to my lips. His script was slanted and flowery, like a woman’s. I had never in my life received a letter. A postcard once or twice from Georgie, when he was in Missouri visiting his mother’s family. But anyone could see a postcard—it was read first by Mother before she handed it to me. No one in the world knew what was inside the letter except for my father, and now me.

Dear Thea,

I was so very sorry to drive away from the camp. Although I must say that it is a beautiful place to spend some time. Before your mother knew me, she loved to be around other people; her coming out lasted nearly a year. I see so much of her in you.

We all love you very much. Take care of yourself at the camp. Think of it as an opportunity to learn more, from different (perhaps better) teachers. It bears repeating that your family is your tribe; this is but an interruption in our lives. We kept you too secluded at home. We should have sent you away sooner. You will learn how to behave around other children there, Thea. I hope that is not too much to ask. We know what’s best for you, though at this moment you may believe, very fervently, otherwise. That is the way of parents and their children.

Love,

Father

He had called it a camp, not a school—I was here until the end of summer, no longer. I placed the letter back into its envelope and slid it under my pillow, next to Sam’s handkerchief. I was not a child. And it
was
a punishment, to be sent here, even though he and Mother had said it was not; he had as good as admitted it in his letter. Anyway, he was just parroting what Mother had said. She was the one who had always decided what to do with us.

But mostly, I missed Father. I could hear his voice, softly reading the words. Miss Lee would have told him to speak up.

My cabinmates were whispering about an announcement Mr. Holmes had made at lunch; Sissy told me I was lucky, here one week and already a dance to attend. Most of the girls waited months and months for a dance, the bright spot of a boy turning the winter months bearable.

I closed my eyes, even though no girl used rest hour to nap. But I was exhausted: I’d stayed up last night memorizing a Robert Frost poem, “The Cow in Apple Time,” for elocution. I’d read Frost before, at home, but Miss Lee was only interested in how we pronounced each word, how we measured our voices, not in what the poem might have meant.

Though Yonahlossee was an odd place to me, it was quickly turning familiar. Not missing home had at first seemed inconceivable, but I understood how the human heart operated, that it was fickle, capricious.

—

I
was born in the house my parents sent me away from, built by my father as a gift for his new bride. My mother’s family was New Florida, as those families were called, those that went there after the War Between the States when Georgia was no longer a tenable place to live. My great-grandfather, Theodore Fisk—for whom I’m named—decided on Florida because it was close, and he had heard the land there, worthless, was for the taking.

He and his wife were crackers first; wealthy landowners later. When the railroad was built—Henry Flagler was said to have been entertained and wooed in the Fisk family home—my mother’s family’s fortune multiplied exponentially. Mrs. Fisk served Mr. Flagler a piece of key lime pie, a delicacy the Northern man had never tasted. Citrus was from then on shipped by railroad, and an industry was born.

My father’s family was Old Florida, of Spanish descent. They weren’t as wealthy as my mother’s side: they’d herded cattle on land that no one owned until Florida began to sell this land, and then it became impossible to drive the cattle south, through newly erected fences and homesteads, toward the coast, where they would be shipped to Cuba.

Florida was a different place then. My father and his older brother, George, would require a new way of life. My father, Felix, went to Atlanta Medical School on scholarship; George, to law school in Illinois, but they both came back—each with a new wife. My mother, Elizabeth, was in her second year at Agnes Scott College and was expected to find a husband in Georgia when she met my father at a semiformal dance. She was twenty years old; he five years older. It was a perfect match.

George and his new wife, Carrie, settled in Gainesville, a stone’s throw from Emathla. My father could have practiced medicine anywhere, but he wanted to help people, so he went to a place where he was the only doctor for miles and miles. This was how it was always explained to me and Sam, anyway: we could have lived anywhere, but lived here because of my father’s goodness. And at first Mother, accustomed to the bustle of Miami, thought she would be lonely in such a rural place. But the magic of our home was that it destroyed loneliness. You could see other people—and Mother did, once every few weeks, tea with a neighbor, a Camellia Society meeting—but other people and places only made you love your home, your people, more.

These were my people: Sam, my mother and father; Uncle George and Aunt Carrie and their son, my cousin, Georgie.

That was our first story, how we had come to be situated in this little piece of heaven carved from the Florida wilderness. Luck, partly, but also love: Mother and Father had become engaged two weeks after meeting. George and Carrie and Georgie were part of this story, of course, not central to it but it is easy now to see how the story would have collapsed without them. We needed them in Gainesville to illuminate our own lives.

—

T
he bell rang, signaling the end of rest hour, and I woke with a start.

“Finally!” Gates said. She liked to ride as much as I did. Everyone else was already pulling on their breeches and boots. This was the first time I was going to ride with everyone else, and I was both nervous and excited, a combination I loved. I tugged my boots on with boot hooks, and saw Sissy out of the corner of my eye, watching. She smiled, I smiled back. I was eager to please her.

I tucked my shirt into my breeches. We wore white breeches here; even the suede at the knees was white. Our clothes were laundered by the maids so it didn’t matter to us how dirty we got, but it seemed silly to dress us exclusively in white.

When I walked outside the cabin into the smell of pine trees and sunshine, I saw Sissy had waited for me.

“A letter?”

“From my mother.” I remembered from my snooping that Eva and Sissy’s fathers had not written to them, only their mothers.

“My mother writes me,” Sissy said, “three times a week. But her letters are so boring. My sister, hardly ever, only when she’s made to.”

Other girls flocked around us, all identically dressed. They waved at Sissy, and because I was with her, at me. I smiled back. I’d never smiled at so many people in my life.

“I hate writing letters,” I said, “it takes so long to write what you could say in half the time.” There were butterflies in my stomach; I was glad Sissy provided a distraction.

Another girl walked by, so close she grazed my arm. I started to say something, then stopped. She was the girl with the white hair I’d seen bathing in the bathhouse. And, I realized with the small, pleasurable shock of recognition, the girl from the horse photograph, from the Castle. I knew even before Sissy said her name.

“That’s Leona.”

We both watched Leona disappear around a bend. We had passed the privies, now we were almost at the stables. Leona was a giant, her strides covered twice the ground of my own. Her white-blond hair was pinned into a tidy bun. Her boots were navy blue, the only girl among us who didn’t have black boots.

“She’s from Fort Worth,” Sissy said. She said
Fort Worth
as if she were saying some other, more improbable place—Constantinople, Port-au-Prince. She was whispering now, even though Leona had disappeared. “Her father is an oil speculator who made it big, her mother is royalty. She has her own horse, shipped by train. She’s trained by masters. The shipping costs were more than her room and board.” Leona had not said hello to Sissy. I wondered if Sissy meant that Leona’s mother was truly royalty, and decided she must not. I didn’t know very much about the world, but I didn’t think there were any princesses in Texas. “She ignores everyone, mostly.”

Leona from Fort Worth, Thea from Emathla. Out of all the places in this world, I was at the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. It was half past one in the afternoon. I was one among dozens of girls on our way to our daily riding lesson. Sissy had threaded her arm through mine; her skin was soft, she smelled faintly of rosewater. At home, Mother would be out in the garden, a towel around her neck to soak up the sweat, a worn, floppy hat on her head to protect her fair skin. My father would be working. Thursday was one of his traveling days, so he would be at someone’s house, giving an injection, listening to an account of pain. And Sam.

He would be feeding his squirrels. They had to be fed often, more often than a human baby—which was what Mother always said, that Sam tended to his animals more faithfully than most human parents did their children. And he was faithful, my brother, faithful and good. It was not the first time Sam had raised a litter of squirrels—raccoons got their mothers all the time. Their nests were always hidden in nooks that only Sam was patient enough to find.

When I had said good-bye, after everything had happened, he was out back on the porch, holding one of them.

“It has hair now,” I said, because I did not know what else to say. It was early in the morning, but still hot. The squirrel was less ugly than it had been a week ago. It looked so vulnerable; I could see why Sam loved it.

He wore his clothes from yesterday. His hair was wild, stuck out in all directions from his head. It scared me a bit. I wanted to smooth it down, but knew not to touch him. The rims of his eyes were pink. In that moment, his hazel eyes were so dark they almost looked brown. I knew in full sunlight they would look light again, translucent. Our eyes were different. Mine were plain brown, like Father’s.

“Did you sleep?” I asked, though I knew the answer. I had not slept, either; in fact, I had gone into Sam’s room, hoping to find him. Instead, in the dim room, I could faintly see the outlines of his made bed, which looked so perfect and untouched I started to cry, though I could not say why. The sight of his perfect bed, made first by Sam, then straightened later by Mother, disturbed me. His electric fan was trained at the space where he would have slept, and it droned on and on, cooling nothing.

I switched it off and went to his window, which provided a view of our backyard. But to call it a backyard was false; it was the beginning of our thousand acres. There was no fence, no border. Mother’s gardens ran into the orange grove. These oranges weren’t for sale, but for my mother, who loved them, said she could not live without them.

Sam sat in the grass, next to Mother’s rose garden, which was blooming. I could not smell it from here, but he could. I watched him for a long time; he didn’t move, sat still as a statue. He had always been able to sit still for longer than I; I was fidgety, restless.

I could not see his face. Only his narrow back, his skinny arms. His voice was beginning to change. I knew what happened to boys’ voices; Georgie was two years older and his had changed a few years ago. I could hear Sam’s voice right now, a child’s voice, so pretty and light. I wished I could make a recording of it before it was gone.

If Sam had turned to face me, I would have seen his bruised eye, the small cut above it. Minor injuries, healing quickly. Father called them superficial. This was the first time I could remember seeing Sam hurt. I tried very hard to remember another time but could not. I had broken my arm, twice, and bruised myself more times than I could count. That was what happened when you rode horses. But Sam did not court danger. It was not his way.

He turned his head as if he had heard something, and he probably had: the rustle of an animal in the bushes. I saw his profile in the moonlight. We both had Father’s nose, which was strong but handsome. I thought for a second that he could feel me watching him. I put my hand to the window.

“Sam,” I murmured.

He peered down at something, and I knew he held one of the infant squirrels; how unmoored he was, how badly I must have hurt him, was confirmed. Because how many times had he told me not to touch a baby wild animal, that if I did, it would become accustomed to human scent and, once released into the wild, be unafraid of humans. And wild animals needed to be afraid of us, to survive.

“Thea?” Sissy asked. “Have I lost you?”

I looked sideways at her. She did not know the dark recesses of my heart. I knew Sam thought of me as often as I thought of him; that when he was not asleep I was on his mind. On it, threatening to displace everything else like a weight dropped in water. But he could not imagine my life here, which might be a curse or a blessing. I did not know.

Soon we arrived at the barn and parted ways. I took a deep breath: the smell in a barn was always the same, hay tinged with manure. It was a smell you either liked or did not. A groom—the handsome one Eva had mentioned my first night here—showed me to my horse: Naari, a flea-bitten gray mare with a pink muzzle.

“Thank you,” I said to the groom, “I’ll tack her up.”

I clicked my tongue and Naari looked up from her hay. There were hundreds of brown dots scattered across her white coat, hence the term, which I’d always thought was an ugly way to describe such a beautiful pattern. I was excited, though I tried not to be. I did not want to get too attached to Naari, because I would have to leave her here when I left.

After I had tacked her up, I stood in a single-file line with the other girls in my group, the horses so close Naari’s muzzle almost touched the reddish tail of the chestnut in front of her. Leona stood at the front of the line, the de facto leader of my group. Her gelding was huge, like his owner. He was beautiful, a big bay with white stockings and a white blaze down his face. I also recognized him from the picture.