“I’m hungry, Mother,” Blue-Eyes said. She handed Mary a knife with a curved blade. “I never get enough to eat.”
“Where did you get this?” Mary asked, before she remembered that Blue-Eyes couldn’t talk yet. Something else was talking — that had to be the explanation.
“Your milk is like water. Nursing at your breast is like trying to get water from a hose with knots in it.”
Mary took the knife her daughter had handed her and cut the hare’s body into pieces.
The Four Horsewomen
YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED NEXT, RIGHT? JANICE asked. She stood there balanced on one leg in what had come to be called the Mary Pose, after the famous Mary who had lived in number 47.
But no one knew; girls never know what happens next. Days went by, weeks, years even. Everything in life stood poised like Mary on the verge of what was possible. For example Janice had a boyfriend — no one could have predicted this. He went to Our Mother of Consolation and used to be one of the boys on bikes who appeared on the street to throw eggs at anyone who didn’t get out of the way. A little girl jumping rope opened her mouth to scream and an egg went in and after a while a chick hatched in her stomach.
No one was interested in trading cards anymore. All the good trades had been made, the black horse and the white horse at last together in a pack in the bottom of the cigar box in the back of Janice’s closet. At some point her mother decided to have a new closet system put in. She didn’t admit it to herself, but her mother was preparing for the day when Janice would get married and leave home for good and she could take over the closet as her own. The cigar box was hidden under a pair of toe shoes and a tutu and a black velvet riding helmet and a ton of foil candy wrappers from back when Janice used to lie stomach-down in the closet, producing one foil-wrapped chocolate egg after another from somewhere underneath her like an exotic type of frog. Janice’s mother put everything except the candy wrappers in a carton along with her fox stole and several Reader’s Digest condensed books and took the carton to church for the Christmas bazaar.
The obsession with trading cards had been replaced with a fad for writing novels about horses. The novels were composed in the same marbleized notebooks that had once been fashionable for schoolwork. The system was: one novel per notebook. Fathers still were forced to buy cigars they would never smoke, but now it was so their daughters could enter a contest sponsored by the cigar company and win a racehorse. “Lightning Bolt,” “Black Dancer,” “Speed Demon,” “Nightmare”—any one of these names could be a winner, plus they also made excellent titles for the novels. “White Cloud.”
“In a dank cave in the mountains of the west a baby foal named White Cloud was born. It arose slowly on its dainty legs, its fetlocks wobbling with the superhuman effort, its mother, the dapple-gray mare who had just found sanctuary there from the wrath of the thunderstorm, was nickering softly to it.”
Horses aren’t born in caves, someone pointed out. Also, a foal is a baby.
It was like a club: Saturday afternoon they all met with their notebooks in the park at the foot of the street and took turns reading their novels aloud. The park had once been a vacant lot where people’s dogs defecated without anyone bothering to pick up after them, but over time the community association had brought about a great many improvements, including planting a flower garden more or less at the center of the triangle and moving the three benches so they faced in at the flowers rather than out at the traffic. An old-fashioned street lamp was added later and a koi pool with a plaque on it commemorating the famous baseball player who had lived on the street and had once been Mary’s true love. Superhuman doesn’t apply to horses, Janice said.
Something in her tone made the author of “White Cloud” bristle. This was a curly-haired girl everyone knew wanted to be a writer when she grew up. I know that, the girl said.
That also happens to be a run-on sentence, Janice added.
She wasn’t a member of the club but often wandered through on her way to or from meeting her boyfriend. This was where she said she was headed or had been — no one knew for sure, only that she dressed the part of girlfriend with her camel-hair coat and tartan tam and brown leather pocketbook with its clasp shaped like a horseshoe. As Janice had gotten older she hadn’t gotten prettier. Her face was round like risen dough someone had stuck fingers in to make eyes. Still, she wore coins in her loafers, which meant she was going steady.
If she wore them in her eyes it would mean she was dead, the curly-haired girl whispered, not loud enough for Janice to hear.
There were no longer any flowers blooming in the garden, and sometimes overnight a sheet of ice formed above the two gigantic vermilion fish in the koi pool. The fish seemed to hang suspended without moving a muscle — some of the little girls, the ones who weren’t really club members but whose older sisters were — found the fish frightening. The only way you could tell they were alive was how every now and then one or the other of them would release a long dark string of excrement into the pool. The string would drift for a while and then break apart, making a horrible brown cloud.
I used to take riding lessons, Janice said. I know a lot about horses. I had a natural seat, Miss Haines told me.
She would rise and fall at the triple bar, the water-jump, the gate, the imitation wall, her hands buried in the flying mane firm on the stout muscles of her horse’s neck. He was a natural jumper, Janice said. She did not need to dictate to him. They cleared the wall together, wildly, ludicrously high, with savage effort and glory, and twice the power and the force that was needed.
Those aren’t her words, whispered the curly-haired girl. That’s National Velvet.
Almost everyone knew that at Miss Haines’s riding stable Janice had been put on the oldest and slowest horse, a tall white gelding with a tail so thin you could see the bone through the hair. As Janice posted around and around the ring, holding the reins stiffly to either side like a dowser, Miss Haines stood at the rail, shouting directions. Janice was a terrible rider; she was afraid of horses, of all animals really.
You think you’re so smart, Janice said. She pointed at the sky and a few girls looked in the direction of her finger.
What was that? someone asked, but there wasn’t anything there aside from an airship and a long thin airship-shaped cloud.
If you have to ask, I’m not telling, Janice said. If you have to ask, it’s too late.
Too late for what? someone asked.
For a very important date, said someone else.
Go ahead, Janice said. Laugh why don’t you. She told everyone to thank their lucky stars she was there to laugh at. We were all too young to remember, but for a while after the Rain of Beads there weren’t any girls anywhere. On the street you could hear the sounds of boys playing baseball and sprinklers watering lawns and crickets rubbing their hind legs together and ice cubes clinking in highballs. So many of the sounds everyone expected to hear were there that it took a while before anyone realized the high-pitched sound of girls’ voices was missing. The boys’ voices hadn’t changed yet — that might have been part of the problem. But it was also true that no one wanted to admit what had happened.
The saddest thing, Janice said, was that everyone was very sad but no one could talk to anyone else about it. They were so sad they didn’t notice how some of the new girls were coming through wormholes instead of birth canals. It was hard to tell since often the wormholes were inside the mothers. Even the doctors couldn’t tell the difference.