From THE TROUBLE WITH HORSES
I was five, riding in the car on the way from somewhere to somewhere else in Southern California. We’d left behind the brilliant green lawns and palm trees of West Los Angeles—all those sprinklers and sparkling swimming pools leeching the Colorado River into a trickle. Instead, we were driving through a more natural chaparral growing where it could manage—scraggy shrubs, silver-grays and dust. There were big people in the car—I don’t remember everyone. My fashionable mother, certainly.
We passed a roadside attraction. A clutter of little round-bellied creatures stood under the manufactured shade of a pole tent. And even though I was only five, I could read the sign. Long ago I’d mastered Sam and The Firefly, so the placard was a piece of cake. In hand-painted block letters, it read PONY RIDES.
Stop! I begged. Please!
Ponies were in the rear window. Ponies were about to disappear and be lost forever. Ponies! The car turned around.
A cowboy sat on an aluminum folding chair with a cashbox and a pack of cigarettes in his plaid pocket. Dust colored his pointy-toed boots. His white hat too, though truthfully, I barely noticed. Or noticed the reluctance of the adults who’d been sidetracked on a hot day to indulge me. There were ponies in reach. Big-eyed, little-hooved, child-sized horses with delicate muzzles and too much mane. Better than the ice-cream truck, the swimming pool, and a puppy rolled into one. Not dolls. Ponies. City-child I was born to be, but I’d found them.
Each stood saddled and bored, not that I’d have noticed that either. This is the adult me, looking back, and understanding that the necessary state of every rental horse is long-suffering and inward. It’s in their job description.
The saddles were Western. A saddle horn to hang onto. Heavy, tooled-leather stirrup flaps. No bridles. There was no need, as the pony was to be led to its respective ring, no steering or stopping, a living merry-go-round. Or maybe I should call it a carousel, for merry was not to be a variable in this equation.
Three rings for different speeds. The inner ring was walk, the middle, jog, and the outer, gallop. The cowboy asked if I wanted to go slow, medium or fast. Suddenly overcome, I looked down and mumbled.
He lifted me onto the mouse-colored pony with ivory mane, the very one I was hoping for, just like the Shetland on the cover of The Child’s Book of Horses. My hands cupped happily around the disk of the saddle horn which, if you have never held one, is a perfect shape for hands. (Their true function is to secure ropes when working cows. Cowgirls don’t use them to stay on, but they are a comfort to unskilled riders, sometimes the only thing between them and the ground.) The tooled leather imprinted my bare thighs under my dress, a blue linen with three embroidered pockets that said Why? Why? Why? and a fourth at the hem that said Because.
Dusty pony mane bobbed in front of me. Dusty pony ears twitched. The dusty cowboy led us out from the shade of the tent and into the dusty lists, the outer most ring, and I felt that delicious rocking under me for the first time, the pacifying movement of four legs instead of two, the pony’s swinging quarters, the pull of its shoulders and the response in my spine.
I looked over at my mother watching through her sunglasses, her arms folded over her alligator purse, her blond curly hair and full red lips. She waved, my adored mother. I waved back. The man shut the gate behind the pony’s tail. There was a thwack. The pony lowered its haunches and took off.
I had said slow, not loudly enough. Apparently. That pony was pounding the ground as if a cougar were on its tail. I gripped the horn, not as if my little life depended on it; it did; to fall off into the fencing at full pony throttle could have been gruesome.
It was an era where all my adults drank and smoked. They were probably coming off a three-martini lunch on their way to happy hour. There were no seat belts in cars. There were no riding helmets. In most small cities, church steeples were still taller than insurance buildings, though not for long.
I was crying. I was slipping. This was terrifying. This was not it. The dreadful, jarring rat-a-tat-tat was not it at all. That pony was mad. The only good thing about “fast” was that it was over quickly for both of us.
“Did you like that?” the dusty man asked, grabbing the halter at the gate on the other side.
I nodded. Liar. How could I give voice to the worst betrayal of my life so far?
“Would you like to go again?” he asked.
I shook my head.
This is why we have selective memory. For years, I conveniently forgot this event. As well as the time, a year later, when my mother and I visited Uncle Jake, a former cowboy from Montana and an old friend of hers. (Understanding my mother as I now do, he might have been that kind of uncle.) He had borrowed a neighbor’s pony for our visit and lifted me into the saddle in a small fenced ring, while he and my mother stood at the rail, chatting. Why, I wonder now, was no one leading that pony?
A small course of jumps was set up. As the pony marched me around the perimeter, I was as pleased as any amnesiac, slate wiped clean. There was the saddle horn. There was the bobbing pony mane. But then the pony, bedeviled as many of its kind, took it upon itself to canter ten steps and jump a cross rail. I fell off.
“Wherever did it get that idea?” Uncle Jake wondered, dusting me off.
Or the time, a couple years later, when I was permitted to go with two friends to visit a pony in a field. It trotted up to us, kicked me in the thigh, only me, then ran away, shaking its boney head. You’d think I would have gotten the message.
No. In a drawer, I saved the sweater from that day because it smelled like pony. I would pull it out and bury my nose in it in bliss. Please don’t judge me.
CHAPTER TWO
There are three kinds of people in the world when it comes to horses. The first and largest group includes those who are indifferent.
Then come the prepubescent girls, who fall in love with horses when they are nine, fall out when they are fourteen, and rarely think of them again. Freud believed it was because girls are sexually stimulated by horses, or that their infatuation was penis envy. Really?
His daughter Anna Freud wrote: “A little girl’s horse craze betrays either her primitive autoerotic desires (if her enjoyment is confined to the rhythmic movement…); or her identification with the caretaking mother (if she enjoys above all looking after the horse, grooming it, etc.); or her penis envy (if she identifies with the big, powerful animal and treats it as an addition to her body); or her phallic sublimations (if it is her ambition to master the horse, to perform on it, etc.).”
To this I counter, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” which Freud either did or didn’t say.
For adolescents, the horse can be a compelling combination of the masculine and feminine, Platonic in the sense of a timeless, absolute Form, a physical manifestation of an ideal; the feminine, in their expressive eyes and long tails; the masculine, with their massive muscles—delicacy and power in one warm package. Not sexual, but giant living teddy-bears one can throw one’s arms around and love completely, and they will not say anything, just stand and accept one’s attention in a soulful way. As the poet Mary A. Koncel writes, “You can tell the horse anything.” This is true. For adolescents, horses are the opposite of sharp-tongued siblings and mean schoolmates. You can bring them all your love and sorrow.
Their size matters. When pre-teens are in the necessary and confusing business of breaking up with their parents, whom they recently idolized and now have discovered to be idiots, or worse, the enemy; when they find themselves looking for the towering gods of their toddlerhood only to stare nose to nose with bewildered people too like themselves, horses are bigger in every way, and much easier to love.
I belong to a third group, males and females alike, for whom horse is their third word. It’s an inherent, lifelong, deep-rooted love. It validates a belief in past lives, as if your passion comes from a time before this one, as if the day you are born, you have unfinished business with horses and in your crumpled, still-expanding soul, before you have words, you know this. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but how else to explain it?
Once this group figures out that birthdays come with presents, people like me ask for a horse every birthday. Either we are born into families who think horses are a splendid idea, or those who do not. My mother said they were dangerous and expensive. (Turns out she was right on both counts. Don’t you hate when that happens?) She always flagged the end of that discussion, emphatically, with “You can’t ride a horse in a living room.” How was this a crowning argument?
CHAPTER THREE
Like so many things in life, I asked for a horse and got a piano. You can play a piano in the living room. And a piano is not dangerous, though if you get good enough it can be expensive. A piano is not a substitute for a horse any more than all-weather tires are a substitute for watermelon, but it is marvelous in and of itself.
I touched my first ivory key when the keyboard was the height of my nose. I loved its resistance when I pressed it very slowly, that little bump halfway down, the silence before sound, the sound itself. I adored, and still do, its bell-like resonance, different one key higher and one key higher again, how the bass keys roar and the highest keys plink, and the way different middle registers die away differently. When I got a little taller, I loved pushing the pedals and watching the dampers shift inside, and the ghostly sounds that made. I even liked its spruce and copper smells. I was diverted onto the piano until horses became a whisper, though the unfulfilled desire never vanished.
My first piano was an ancient Chickering from the late 19th century, a monstrous blond wooden box with a cigarette burn on an ivory in the seventh octave—put there by Liberace. I’m not clear how that happened.
My first melody was “Trot Along My Pony.”
to be continued….