The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (7 page)

“Ow,” I cried. It was Eva.

“Sorry.” But she was giggling. “You just always look so lost in your own world. I ate so much! I love hash-brown day.” She smoothed her hands over her waist.

I smiled. “I stuff myself like a roasted pig at every meal.” And it was true. I did. My appetite had reappeared after the first few days.

“Eva,” I said, as we climbed the stairs to our classroom, “I didn’t bring any money with me.”

It felt like a dirty word,
money
, but Eva didn’t seem bothered. I’d never met someone so unconcerned.

“Oh, that,” she said. “You just ask your father.”

I nodded, and knew I would never request money from my father. It would mean that I cared about this place.

“My father,” Eva continued, “says he gives enough with tuition. And Mrs. Holmes comes knocking every winter, in person, for donations to the school. My father says she’s very persuasive.” She smiled, and I noticed she had dusted her face with powder, her cheeks with rouge, but very subtly. “She’ll probably visit your parents, too. But maybe not, since you’re from Florida.” She paused, and bit her lip. “I didn’t mean—”

“No,” I said, “it’s fine.” We had reached our classroom; I could see Miss Lee’s broad back from behind, writing in cursive on the board. “I know Florida’s . . .” I trailed off, and Eva looked at me expectantly. “A strange place,” I finished. “Not for everyone.”

T
he day of the dance another letter arrived, this one from Mother. It was long, over two pages of my mother’s rose-scented stationery, her initials engraved at the top of the thick, cream-colored paper.
EAC
, the
E
and
C
flanking the ornately drawn
A
. Elizabeth Collins Atwell.

My mother had surprising handwriting, inconsistent and loopy.
Dear Thea
, the letter began, and went on about the vegetable and herb garden and the swarms of bees and butterflies it attracted, before concluding:

Sam is fine
,
as fine as can be expected. No one knows quite what to expect, though. It’s all undecided, will stay that way for a while I predict. Sometimes I’m so angry with you. Other times I’m so sorry for you. Such a terrible thing. May God grant them and us peace.

Everyone here misses you. Do the mountains make you feel small, Thea?

I glanced around the room and saw that Mary Abbott was staring at me. I stared back. Her eyes unnerved me, pale, almost colorless. Mary Abbott relented, shrugged her small shoulders, and mouthed
Sorry
across the room, though of course she wasn’t.

I lay back on my thin pillow (my pillows at home were plump and perfect, I wished I’d brought one with me) and ran my fingertips along the smooth wooden planks of our floor, marked by an infinite number of scratches. Girls wearing riding boots inside, Docey pulling the beds out to make them, dropped books. At home, no one was allowed to wear shoes in the house, only visitors, and if anything fell and my mother heard there would be a price to pay.

Sissy spun around the room, humming a waltz. When she was next to our bunk, Eva climbed down and bowed, held out her hand. Sissy accepted it, and they began to dance, Eva playing the boy’s part. They both wore white skirts. Eva was taller, and more solid; her hair alone seemed to outweigh Sissy. They looked like mother and daughter dancing. Even I knew that waltzing was old news, but there was no jazz at Yonahlossee. Because it was hypnotizing, Mary Abbott had explained.

Both Sissy and Eva came from families that entertained regularly. Eva from a North Carolina cotton empire and Sissy from Monroeville, which she referred to as the center of the earth, where her father did something vague in her father’s family business, and was also the mayor. All her jewelry was from her mother’s side; I assumed most of the money was from her, too.

Only Mary Abbott and I were unexcited about this evening, when boys from a boarding school in Asheville would arrive at eight o’clock, and we would all be expected to dance the evening away. I pretended to be excited, at least; Mary Abbott didn’t know how to pretend.

“Another one,” Mary Abbott said when Eva had bowed and Sissy had curtsied, the waltz over. We were all startled by Mary Abbott’s voice. We respected rules at Yonahlossee, and though it was likely no house mistress would pass by during rest hour, we knew they could.

Mary Abbott rose and clapped her hands like a child who wanted her way. Her squinty eyes were bright. Eva told me Mary Abbott’s father was a Methodist preacher, that her mother had died when she was an infant.

“Shh,” Victoria whispered, a finger on her lips.

Eva put a hand on her hip and studied Mary Abbott, amused.

“You’ll see plenty of dancing tonight,” Sissy whispered. “I wouldn’t worry.”

Mary Abbott lay back on her bed and folded her arms. I wondered what she thought she was missing now that Eva and Sissy had stopped dancing. When I saw my friends twirling around the room, I saw two innocents.

—

M
other’s favorite story—more beloved than the story of how she and Father met—was the story of our births, transformed into a kind of fairy tale by her, the mother who carried twins and did not know it. My brother and I were born during an early winter storm: it snowed, birds dropped from the sky, dead from the unexpected freeze, all the plants in my mother’s garden shriveled and turned from green to deep russet. My parents were expecting a large boy, because my mother carried so low. So I was the surprise, not Sam. I was the child no one expected.

There was no history of twins in our family. When we were born, our family was cautious, especially of me. I had either sapped Sam’s strength and was the stronger twin, or Sam had enfeebled me. I was either a selfish or useless girl. My father tried to dispel these notions, said there was no evidence. But even he was worried, a boy and a girl born together, contrary to the order of things.

We were cranky babies, both colicky. My mother lay in bed for weeks, my father tended to her and then to his other patients, who were always my father’s responsibility, always, the only doctor in Emathla. A woman from town took care of the new babies, Theodora and Samuel, us. My mother had only just begun painting scenes from Grimms’ fairy tales when we arrived: a swath of Rapunzel’s hair circled the wall of our nursery, only partly painted gold. The mural had been painted over years ago, but I still remembered it so clearly. I had loved it.

I spoke first, at nine months; Sam waited another five, though he spoke to me earlier, in the dark, in the soft light of morning, when the rest of the house was asleep. My first word was
orange
, which I mangled, but my parents knew what I meant. My mother liked to attribute it to my inherited knowledge of citrus. Sam and I cut teeth late, we were both bald until age two, we hated nap time, we loved bread and orange marmalade.

But there was still the gloom of our early days: the surprise of us, then my mother’s convalescence. There was always the possibility of death with childbirth, an unavoidable risk, so even before my mother went into labor there was concern she might not handle it well. The winter storm, snow on the ground for the first time in a decade, my mother in bed from the contractions. It must
mean
something, their babies born on
this
day, not any of the other, snowless days.

First me—A girl! my father said, so my mother would know. Everyone would have preferred a boy for the first child, that went without saying, a person to inherit it all; then, as my father toweled me off and clipped my umbilical cord even closer, so it would not be agitated by clothes, another head crowned and was born quickly, much more quickly than I was, and—A boy. My father did not shout this time, ashamed, confused: he’d wanted a boy and gotten a girl, but now a boy? Something was wrong; the gods didn’t grant wishes like that, without expecting something given in return, in gratitude.

My mother was in too much pain to hold us properly, so the woman from town cleaned us, smoothed our patchy hair, twisted bits of cotton and coaxed the mucus from our noses and mouths, the afterbirth from our ears. We were tiny. My father held each of us, one after another, to my mother’s breast. We ate indifferently while my mother writhed. My mother had decided during her confinement that she would nurse her child. It was the style then to bring in a wet nurse, but who from Emathla would be suitable? Who could nourish her child as well as she could?

Dead birds littered the lawn outside. Later, by moonlight and a lantern, my father would collect them in a wheelbarrow and burn them in the rubbish heap, watch feathers float from the plume of smoke, blue feathers, scarlet, brown, white that did not hide dirt. He would watch and consider. He would feel vaguely hopeful, by the moonlight, his breath its own plume in the air, his babies small and pale but healthy, as far as the human eye could tell.

Mother would tell us that we were loved even before we were born. But that wasn’t quite true: one of us was loved, the other unknown.

We would not ever leave. I had known about Miss Petit’s, the school where Mother had gone, but I would never be sent there. There was no need. Soon I would go away to a finishing school in Orlando, but only for a few weeks, only long enough to interact with girls my own age, see how they behaved. Mother assured me that I wouldn’t have any trouble learning the ropes. This was to prepare me for my coming out, which would happen before I graduated from college. I would go to Agnes Scott, like Mother, and Sam would go to Emory. We were to be educated. Our minds were fine, important—Atwell minds.

Sam would become either a doctor or a lawyer. It didn’t matter. Something to do on the side, while he managed our farm. We made our real money in citrus farther south—crops and land now attended to by Mother’s brother on our behalf—and Sam and I would inherit that, too, but right now Mother’s brother tended to it.

I would live where my husband did, but somewhere nearby. Gainesville, perhaps. Not everyone was lucky enough to live in such a secluded place; not everyone was lucky enough to make a living in the way Father did, on his own terms. And he was lucky like this because of Mother’s money. He was a philanthropist—that’s what Mother said. He helped people, and many of those people could not pay.

This was the story of our futures. And it was always a joint future, a combined venture.

But Mother might as well have been speaking Greek when she mentioned these things—that Sam and I would marry, and live apart. We had never been farther south than Orlando, farther north than Gainesville. I had never even seen a college. When I pictured it, I saw my own house, peppered with people. That’s how I conceived of Yonahlossee, too, before I entered its world: my own beloved home, threaded with strings of girls. Of course I knew this would not be true. Of course. But I knew in my brain, not in my heart.

And Georgie? He would live somewhere nearby, it was assumed. But his future was not as well mapped as ours. He was not Mother’s child. I would say that Georgie was like a brother except that he was not; I could see him more clearly, because he was separate from me.

People can lie about their childhoods, they can make up any sort of story and you must believe them, unless you were there with them, unless you saw for yourself. It is a burden to know a person so well. Sometimes a gift, but always a burden.

—

I
t was a relief that my lavender dress, the same one I’d worn to the dinner with my father in the hotel, seemed stylish enough.

I shivered. It was almost eight o’clock in the evening but the sun still shone, a different kind of light from daylight, less severe, bluer. It had rained earlier, and the air tasted damp, the packed-dirt path springy beneath our feet. Swarms of fireflies darted through the throngs of girls. I was still enchanted by them. It was too hot for them in Florida, there we only had mosquitoes and enormous, noisy dragonflies.

I had hesitated to wear my mother’s mink stole, afraid it might be too good for the occasion, but furs abounded. Alice Hunt brushed by me, a dead fox wrapped around her neck.

I raised my hand in a wave, but she wouldn’t meet my eye. She wasn’t the kind of girl who gave anyone the time of day. My cheeks burned. It was so hard to remember whom to be friendly to, whom to coolly ignore.

“Alice Hunt,” Sissy called, and Alice Hunt stopped, turned around slowly. Everyone gave Sissy the time of day.

“Sissy,” she said, her gray eyes briefly darting in my direction. “Thea.”

Then she was on her way again, off to join the rest of the Memphis girls, who all had a soft manner about them, spoke barely above a whisper, and almost never looked directly at you. They had a way of looking through you. They were widely recognized as the camp’s most snobbish clique.

“The sun never sets on Memphis,” Sissy murmured under her breath, and I giggled, though the first time she’d said this I’d had to puzzle out what she’d meant. She was full of sayings like this: Mrs. Holmes was wound tighter than Dick’s hatband; Leona’s family was in high cotton. More like she’s in high oil, I’d said, and then Sissy had laughed.

Girls swarmed around Sissy and me as we walked, dressed in their colorful silks, fur capelets and shimmering shawls upon their shoulders, diamond barrettes in their hair. I saw Katherine Hayes, from Atlanta, who was the biggest gossip at camp. Her throng of Atlanta girls surrounded her, all laughing dramatically. It seemed to me that they were all named Katherine, but only Katherine Hayes was allowed to use her full name. The rest were called Kate. Katherine had wildly curly brown hair; she wore a navy-blue sleeveless dress, which was the closest anyone came to black. I knew from the magazines that it was in vogue for the stars to wear black. But that was in Hollywood. People in the South didn’t wear black unless someone had died.

Katherine’s fingernails were painted red. The Atlanta girls were big-city, walked around camp with their bobbed hair and painted fingernails (Mrs. Holmes would order their nails scrubbed whenever she saw them); they were always gesturing and laughing as if everyone was watching. And generally, everyone was watching, like now. They
would
scrub their nails, and then give Mrs. Holmes a few days to forget before they all appeared with freshly coated fingernails, all the same hue, like a band of exotically clawed birds.

We all wore stockings, and so our legs gleamed. Most girls’ hemlines, including my own, were modest, but if Eva sat a certain way you caught a glimpse of her knees.

There was so much of the world to see, and most of us had never held a boy’s hand. We wanted to do more than that, anyway, we wanted boys to hold not just our hands but all of us, gather us into their sturdy arms and ring our slippery curls around their thick but tender fingers.

But none of that could happen, not to the good and correct daughters of wealthy and powerful men, with family names and family connections and family duties. We would be debs first, wives second. We would all be married one day, hopefully after we turned eighteen but before we turned twenty-one, though I doubt any of us tied marriage to passion. We’d seen our parents, our aunts and uncles, our sisters and their husbands. We weren’t stupid. We understood that desire was a dangerous thing that needed to be carefully handled, like a mother’s antique perfume bottle, passed down to the eldest daughter when she turned sixteen.