Spoiled Page 10

  “Saint Lucia,” Annabel supplied. “We were on Anguilla, but we went to Saint Lucia for the day—my mom’s new boyfriend has a plane.”

  “Oh, he does? Oh, wow, that must be fun—wow,” I stammered, trying to get a grasp on the various implications of what she was saying. “So, you’ve stayed in touch with her all these years?”

  “She and my mom have stayed close,” Annabel said. “She was my first nanny, you know.”

  The elevator arrived with a ding.

  “But how’s Sally?” Annabel wanted to know. “She must be so big!”

  I told her hurriedly that Sally was thriving, that she loved her nursery school, that she was very energetic, very active, that Win and I couldn’t keep up with her. We joked that it must have been all the gravel she ate in the park. “She’s older now, obviously, so we’ve sort of graduated from the nanny model,” I said, again feeling I owed Annabel some kind of explanation. “I’ve got a college girl who comes—an NYU student.”

  The elevator doors had opened and Win and the tour guide had gotten in and the latter was holding her arm across the door to stop it from closing and looking at me expectantly, not wanting to be rude. “It works out really well,” I said. I wasn’t sure Annabel had gotten the right impression—she was such a quiet, self-possessed child, she might have been thinking anything. I suddenly had a paranoid thought that all those years Marva was working for us she had been feeding every last incident to Annabel’s mother. Like the time Win got so fed up with me he checked into the Roger Williams for a week; or the time, screaming “You will fucking eat this!” I had chased Sally through the apartment with a stalk of broccoli.

  But then a lucky phrase came to mind that a mother at Sally’s nursery school had used to describe her new-and-improved help situation. “Everybody’s happy!” I called, as the doors closed.

  Win explained to the tour-guide woman as we rode down, “Annabel’s nanny used to work for us.”

  The woman quoted amicably that oft-repeated epigram about nannies in New York, that the good ones always got passed along.

  Spoiled

  FROM THE BARN Leigh could hear them honking for her, followed by Mrs. Murray’s bark of “Morning!” and the door to the cab of the truck slamming. She wound a few more strands of the horse’s mane around her fingers and yanked them out, wincing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she murmured, hating the moment when the hairs tightened around her fingers and she heard the tearing sound. It didn’t hurt the horse to have its mane pulled, Leigh knew that: There were no nerve endings along the crest. But the gelding was finicky about it, dipping his head and sidling away from her, and Leigh had become squeamish about doing it. So even though she had been up since quarter to six, the real task of the morning—the braiding—was barely begun. She would have to bribe Kim Murray into doing it for her.

  “Just one more, Rye, just one more—I’m sorry!” The gray tossed his head, rattling the cross ties. “All done! All done, I promise!”

  She looked anxiously out toward the driveway, where the Murrays were honking for her again, and stepped off the bucket she was using as a stool. She took the gray hastily off the cross ties and, carrying her grooming kit with the braiding supplies, led the horse out past her father’s dry, dog-day rhododendrons to the waiting trailer. There had been two weeks of a heat spell and today, too, was supposed to be in the high nineties; they would be suffocating under their coats and hats.

  It was the last show of the summer. The Murrays had driven over the night before so Leigh could load her tack trunk and garment bag into the back of the pickup, along with the bale of hay for Rye. “Summer flew, didn’t it, Dan,” Mrs. Murray had said to Leigh’s father, who had come out to help. She was a hard, unforgiving woman who took pleasure in reminding others of life’s harsh inevitabilities: “You can’t have everything, can you?” “You’re dead a long time.” She had confirmed her own remark with a satisfied nod: “It always does.” Then Leigh’s father had given Mrs. Murray the thirty dollars they paid her to bring Leigh and Rye to the shows, and Mrs. Murray had tucked it into her back pocket, the way she always did, without looking down at the bills. Mrs. Murray had once been Leigh’s riding instructor, and not just her transportation. After she upgraded from her old pony, Butterscotch, to Rye against Mrs. Murray’s advice, Leigh’s father had found her a fancier trainer who came out from Hamilton. The new trainer, Meg, was usually busy on the weekends, though, taking her top students—older girls—to the “A” shows. So the Houghtons had arranged with Mrs. Murray that Rye could have the extra spot in the trailer, next to Kim Murray’s pony.

  Most of Mrs. Murray’s students were little kids, beginners, as Leigh had been, who quit down the road to chase boys, or if they stuck with riding, moved on, as Leigh had done, something not quite correct about the woman’s operation—the barbed-wire fencing, the school horses that went both western and English, the proliferating black and tan barn cats that Donny Murray would joke about drowning in Ponkawog Pond.

  “Your boots, Lees! You forgot your boots!” It was Leigh’s mother, coming out of the house in a panic, eyes agog with the enormity of the near omission. She was wearing her old terrycloth bathrobe over her nightgown and her face looked drained and numb. She’d stayed up half the night with Leigh while Leigh polished all of her tack—all except for the boots, which Leigh’s father did for her at dawn, before he left to go run drills on base. Leigh’s mother cradled the boot bag in her arms awkwardly, as a childless woman might carry a baby.

  “Don’t give them to me,” wailed Leigh, turning up her hands, the horse’s lead in one, grooming kit in the other. “What am I supposed to do with them? Just put them in the trailer.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Well, don’t apologize—Jesus.”

  “You guys coming or what?” Mrs. Murray yelled from the bottom of the driveway, where she had parked the rig. She would turn in the road and back up so as not to jackknife it on the way out, and if a car trying to pass honked at her she would yell, “Hold your goddamn horses!” Once Leigh had pointed out the irony of her using this particular expression. Mrs. Murray, perhaps suspicious that she was being insulted, told her, “You know what, Leigh? You think too much.”

  “Oh, just forget it. I’ll take them—it’s fine, it’s fine.”

  “Good luck, Lees,” her mother said. “Good luck, Rye,” she added, and she gave the horse a cautious pat on the neck. “Hello, Kath!” she called to Mrs. Murray, but she didn’t approach the trailer. Leigh’s mother didn’t come to the shows anymore. She was scared of horses—scared Leigh might fall. She didn’t like to watch Leigh jump and would stand cringing at the rail, sometimes putting her hands over her eyes. That was until last year, when she had gotten so frightened that she’d gone and hid in the horse trailer. Leigh had found her there when the class was over and had ordered her never to come to another show as long as she lived.

  BY THE TIME they got Rye loaded, it was a quarter past seven, and Mrs. Murray’s face was red. “You oughta get after him, you know,” she told Leigh. “You can’t let him play you up like that. That horse is spoiled. You think you’re going to sell him like that? You think anybody’s gonna buy a pain-in-the-ass horse like that? Excuse my French, but Jesus, somebody oughta get after that horse.”

  She lit a cigarette and drove too fast down the Houghtons’ driveway. The horses had to jostle to keep their footing.

  Leigh pulled the collar of her ratcatcher shirt up over her nose and mouth to steal a breath of air.

  “You hear me?” Mrs. Murray said. The woman’s mahogany hair was limp against her temples—had lost its fight from so many dye jobs. She turned sharply to Leigh to make sure Leigh was listening.

  “Yes. I hear you,” Leigh said weakly. Mrs. Murray had caught her breathing.

  “Kim, roll your window down for God’s sake. Get some air in here. Leigh can’t breathe.”

  Leigh always sat between Mrs. Murray and her daughter in the front of the
pickup. “Your turn for the middle,” Kim would say, and she’d make Leigh sit on the hump.

  Mrs. Murray coughed and could not speak. Then she managed to get out, “You find a buyer yet?”

  Leigh shook her head.

  “Where’re you advertising?”

  “We’re not advertising. We’re doing it by word of mouth,” Leigh said, briefly enjoying the sound of authority that the phrase seemed to convey.

  “You’ll never sell him that way,” Mrs. Murray said scornfully. “Why aren’t you putting an ad in the want ads?”

  “Well, we don’t want to sell him to just anybody.”

  “Excuse me? What about us? We got Piper through the want ads!”

  Mortified, Leigh was stumped for a response, but to her relief Mrs. Murray didn’t seem to notice. “And Kim cleans up on him. Hah, Kim? Hah, honey?”

  “Yes, Mom,” Kim droned, her nose in a comic book.

  “Course Kim would do real well on any horse.” Mrs. Murray put a hand out the window to stop the oncoming traffic as she eased the rig out onto Route Two. “She’d teach that boy to behave all right.”

  “Oh, I know.” Leigh was quick to agree, quick to show she didn’t take offense at the implied insult to her own ability.

  “Kim wouldn’t put up with any of his stuff.”

  Leigh nodded and smiled, as if Mrs. Murray had just given her a compliment. “I know—I know she wouldn’t.”

  “You’re going to miss that horse, though, aren’t you?” Mrs. Murray glanced at Leigh. “I’ll bet you miss him a lot when you’re away at your prep school.” Before Leigh could answer, Mrs. Murray said, “Could be for the best, honey. He’s too much for you. Way too much. I can’t believe your mother let you buy him in the first place. It’s called looking for an accident.”

  “My mother lets me do whatever I want,” Leigh said with disdain, as if she would have expected Mrs. Murray to know better.

  Mrs. Murray flicked twice on her lighter before she got her next cigarette going, lighting it with one hand, steering with the other. “Feet off the dash, Kim—I’m not blind. How about your father? I’ll bet he doesn’t let you do everything you want, does he?”

  “No,” Leigh reflected.

  “I wouldn’t think so. I wouldn’t think Dan would let you get away with much. You toe the line for him, hah?”

  Leigh shrugged as Mrs. Murray mock-saluted, cracking herself up.

  Kim looked up from her comic book. She was a skinny girl, with a long brown braid down her back and a myopic squint. At nine, she already wore glasses. “How come you’re not allowed to ride in private school?”

  “Why do you think, Kimmo?” Mrs. Murray jumped on her but waited to hear Leigh’s answer, as if she, too, had not necessarily understood the connection between the Houghtons’ putting the gelding up for sale and Leigh’s going away to boarding school.

  “Everybody has to play a team sport,” Leigh said, quoting the woman in admissions at the campus where she’d taken a tour last fall—a Georgian quadrangle bordered by a river.

  “A team sport? A team sport?” Mrs. Murray was incensed. “What the heck’s that supposed to mean? Your Pony Club rallies—that’s a team, isn’t it? That’s teamwork if I ever saw it!”

  “No—like soccer,” Leigh said wearily: They had been over this before. “Field hockey. You have to do something like that.” Leigh would be behind her classmates; she had never picked up a stick or a racket or a ball. She had done nothing but ride for eight years. She would be behind the kids at boarding school, and next summer, when she might have gone for her C-3, she would be behind all the Pony Club kids who had ridden all year—Kim, for instance. Already now, even though Kim was four years younger than Leigh, she was only one rating behind her. She might even have been ahead of Leigh, except it took her two or three tries to pass the written parts of the tests, where you had to state the difference between a bone spavin and a bog spavin, or answer questions such as “What is roughage in a pony’s diet?”—the part that Leigh could do in her sleep.

  “Well, that doesn’t sound fair, does it?” Mrs. Murray turned plaintively to Leigh. “That sounds mighty unfair, if you ask me. If you ask me—”

  “Anyway, I might keep him, you know.” Leigh flushed, because she had interrupted Mrs. Murray, but she pressed on. “I might be able to get home on the weekends. I can ride him Sundays and vacations—”

  “Not this horse you can’t.”

  “—there are a lot of vacations. It’s only a two-hour drive.” The desperation in her voice disgusted her. “We could find someone to ride him during the week. We’ve been looking into it.”

  “Have a horse you never ride? Now, that’s smart! Come on, Leigh. I thought you were supposed to be brilliant—straight A’s, your mother’s always telling me. Even Kim’s got more sense than that.” Leigh looked away as a sudden garish expression of glee crossed Mrs. Murray’s face. “And she can barely read!”

  MRS. MURRAY DROVE fast to make up for the late start and they got to the fairgrounds on time. Leigh and Kim got the horses unloaded while Mrs. Murray went to pick up their numbers.

  “What do you have after the warm-up?” Leigh asked Kim. She felt obliged to make conversation while Kim finished Rye’s mane.

  “I don’t know. Mom’ll tell me,” Kim said. “Hold him still. Don’t let him move around, Leigh.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I can’t do it right if he moves.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Shit, Leigh!”

  Kim had a horrible mouth. She swore all the time, making swears play different parts of speech (“You’re fucking shitting me”) or making up new swear phrases (“Jesus Christ of Fuck”). Leigh knew things about Kim, things that Mrs. Murray had confided to Leigh’s mother and Leigh’s mother had passed on to Leigh, the way she did pretty much everything—Leigh’s father’s “issues with spending;” her friend Jo-Ann’s husband’s affair—concluding the confession with “I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have told you all this.” Kim had dyslexia, and Mrs. Murray wished they could afford private school but they couldn’t, so Kim had to stay in the special needs classes at the elementary school. She was Mrs. Murray’s youngest by a good five years. There was Linda, who was fat and sluttish and helped Mrs. Murray with the horses but didn’t really ride; and Donny, the older boy, who rode dirt bikes instead of ponies. “You have to stimulate children,” Leigh’s mother would say, after bringing up the subject of Kim’s intellectual deprivation to Leigh. “You have to read to them the way I read to you. We used to sit there for hours in the library. Kim’s probably never been read to in her life.”

  “Everybody looks so fucking good,” Leigh said. The people next to them had a blue and white gooseneck rig; a matching blue and white felt banner with the name of the farm emblazoned on it had been strung up on the side of the trailer.

  “What do you expect for Round Hill?” Kim said, talking with the pull-through in her mouth. “It’s not some shit show.”

  The elastic waistband of Leigh’s breeches was cutting into the flesh of her stomach. She yanked them up, then inched them down, trying to alleviate the tightness.

  “You want me to do his forelock, too?”

  “Could you?” Leigh said quickly. “Do you mind, Kim?”

  “Why the fuck should I care?”

  When they were pulling on their boots, Leigh had a fleeting sense of superiority for hers shone with a high military gloss. She said, trying to sound casual, “Is it me, or do the jumps look insanely big?”

  Kim put a hand over her eyes and squinted across the fairgrounds toward the closest ring, where the course for the first class, the warm-up, was being set up. She made a face. “You’re always scared, Leigh.”

  “I am, aren’t I?” Leigh gave a laugh to show that her comment had been lighthearted. A couple of years ago she had been packed around the courses on her old pony. But then she had seen Rye in an ad in the Horseman’s Exchange and she had wanted him so badly she had cried e
very night when her mother put her to bed. Her father got wind of this and said they would buy the horse. From the minute the gelding’s former owners had dropped him off—Butterscotch already sold, to a student of Mrs. Murray’s—Leigh had known it was a huge mistake; the horse was too much for her, way too much. It was called looking for an accident.

  She walked over to the far side of the trailer, where Rye was tied, saddled up and ready to go. She ran a hand down his neck and chest and under his girth, ran her stirrups down the leathers, reflexively checking their length under her armpits.

  “You going to be good today?” The horse’s ears went forward, as she walked around to the other side, then his eyes rolled forward so that the whites showed. He was flea-bitten gray in front, dappled behind—“mixed up as they come,” Mrs. Murray said. His expression seemed to answer her, “Who, me?” Leigh was just quoting Mrs. Murray. The horse was never good. Or bad. He was just out of control. He was four years old, he was totally green, and Leigh couldn’t handle him. When she got into the ring her thoughts went blank as she tried not to get run away with.

  Leigh’s stomach turned and she leaned against the wheel hub of the trailer for a minute, closing her eyes.

  “You all right, Leigh?” Mrs. Murray was back.

  “Oh, sure. We’re almost ready. We’re about to get going.” The light, when Leigh opened her eyes, seemed artificial. In the distance, Barbie riders rode model horses.

  “Take a sip of this. It’s not too strong.”

  Leigh mouthed the Styrofoam cup of black coffee without drinking. “That’s better.”

  “Sure. You just got jitters.”

  While Leigh fixed her hat over her hairnet, Mrs. Murray untied Rye from the trailer, tightened his girth a hole, making the horse lay his ears back and fling up his head. “Always playing, aren’t you?” She chuckled and cinched up the other billet tight. “Come on, Leigh, show-on-the-road time.”