Jane Smiley - Golden Age

JANET HAD MEANT to leave Fiona’s place in the morning and take the 101, because, even though the 5 was quicker, it was much more sinister, and she was not looking forward to hauling the two horses over the Pacheco Pass. She also hadn’t meant to have two horses in the trailer, but Fiona had led out this Quarter Horse/Icelandic mix, named Pesky, trotted him around, and had him take two carrots from Janet’s hand with utmost politeness; Janet had not been able to resist him. Fiona was straightforward about his soundness issues — an old tendon injury, a little osteo in the hocks — but he was fifteen years old. He was easygoing and petlike; Emily would not have to ride him to enjoy him. But she might ride him. Janet was taking him home on spec. And then there was a little bit of lunch, for horses and for riders, and so here she was, and the radio was on, the highway was desolate, and Iraq and Kuwait were about to be invaded.

Through habit and concentration, Janet thought, she’d trained herself to believe nothing. She was forty now, the Peoples Temple was years in the past, she could watch her one-time-adored Lucas play a lawyer every week on L.A. Law and feel only curiosity about how he was aging (well) and whether she might run into him in an upscale supermarket sometime (that would be fine). She saw through Reagan, she saw through Dukakis, she saw through Pat Robertson, she saw through Eugene McCarthy, though she’d written him in in the ’88 election. She saw through Freudianism, she saw through Jungianism, she saw through M. Scott Peck, and she saw through Joseph Campbell. She saw through money, though she used some of it on horses, some of it on Emily’s school, and some of it on their house (a Minnesota-ish house in strangely Minnesota-ish Palo Alto, California, spacious but not pretentious, exactly what Jared felt comfortable in). She was happy to be as far from her father and her mother and her fucking twin brothers as she could be (she had lobbied to move to Seattle, but that had gone nowhere — Jared didn’t think that computer animation had a future in Seattle). Emily was a worry, but now that Janet had Sunlight, her worries were divided, and if she found herself obsessing about Emily, she would consciously shift her attention to Sunlight; with the addition of Pesky, she would probably end up giving the child room to breathe.

And so, how was it that so well-trained a person as herself — also trained by Fiona, at these clinics she took Sunlight to — driving a Ford F-350, a person who was hauling the best horse trailer money could buy (made in Iowa!), was so nervous? Why did she keep looking to the north, to the east, to the west, in the Central Valley of California for telltale signs of an invasion by vengeful Iraqis? For a rain of bombs, not nuclear, but firebombs, say, or cluster bombs? How was it that a grown woman who laughed at the very mention of George Bush, the “president,” felt a fluttering anxiety every time the radio said the words “Saddam Hussein”?

For a year now, she had been taking lessons in how to be Fiona McCorkle, which was, indeed, what most people did who took lessons from Fiona, though no one else drove as far for just a weekend. The physical part was hard enough — even mature, overweight, and sun-bleached, Fiona had a grace that you couldn’t stop staring at. Her husband rode the big jumps, but Fiona put the miles on the younger horses and the badly trained horses that came to them from other stables. She rode four hours a day, and gave lessons three hours a day, and said that if Charlie Wickett ever came their way, she would be happy to meet him, but it seemed to Janet that she viewed him like a horse that had been in the stable for a while and then gone on to another owner. When Fiona was on a horse, any horse, she settled in, made only the slightest moves, and that horse conformed happily to Fiona’s intentions. Fiona said that her nervous system took over the horse’s nervous system, and the interchange was in the small of her back — if it remained flexible and alive, supported by her abdominal muscles, then the two of them could float here and there, at any gait, doing anything, and be happy. She offered no advice about any other part of Janet’s life; in fact, they didn’t talk, as most women did, about husbands, children, clothes, hair, politics, cooking, or books. They talked about horses, flexion, strength, forward motion, tendons, back muscles, bits, and theories of horseshoeing. Was Fiona happy with her husband? Did she have a big mortgage and money problems? Janet had no idea, and suspected that Fiona didn’t even know Jared’s name, though it was right there on the checks Janet wrote for lessons and horses.

She turned west on the 152. The gas station by the side of the road at Santa Nella, small as it was, looked bright and appealing, and she was sorry, again, that she had passed the 46 without turning left and heading to Paso Robles. You missed both passes that way, but she never took the 46—it was even more barren than the 152, and added to that was the fact that James Dean had been killed there (only anonymous people had been killed on the 152). The reservoir shone flat and dark under the sky, and she started up the grade. She could feel the Ford exert itself. In the trailer, the horses would be spreading their hind legs, dropping their heads, shifting their weight forward. There wasn’t a moon, so when the Ford tilted upward she could see sprays of stars rising above the ridge, quiet and still, not at all like bombs or white phosphorus, something she didn’t have to know a thing about to imagine and fear. The radio was garbled now, a good thing, so she turned it off. The engine roared. She put down the window. The chill breeze blasted her face, and she wondered if believing nothing was a victory or a defeat, if it was evident in her looks, in her actions, if it led necessarily to suicide, and whether that was a bad thing? As her eyes adjusted, the stars got more numerous. Could you believe that the stars were millions and billions of light-years away, and also believe in life, in horses, in the importance of an odd-looking quadruped named Pesky?

As Janet now remembered, the Pacheco itself was less scary than the thought of it — the intimidating parts of the pass were the rough crags to either side, the roads that turned off the highway and crept over the ridges. People lived back there, and every day this was the easy part of their drive. The Ford was reassuring; plenty of gas, too, and it was big enough to steady the trailer on the descent. No Iraqi incoming. She knew she would joke about how rattled she’d been, and Jared would give her a little squeeze around the shoulders, and Emily would say, “Mom! Even I know that isn’t going to happen!”

She was going through the gate at the stables before nine. She could see a light in Marco’s cottage, and then he appeared as she pulled up beside Sunlight’s clean and empty stall. She got out of the truck and opened the front door of the trailer. Sunlight put his head out. His white-edged ears were pricked — home again. Marco said, “We turn pony out for tonight, okay?”

“ Sí , Marco. Okay.”

“Good trip?”

She nodded.

—

THERE WAS this woman who kept her horse at the stables, two stalls down from Pesky, who was the master of the Portola Valley Hounds. She was about Emily’s height, and she always smiled at Emily and asked her how Pesky was; she did not say a word about when Emily might want to get on Pesky. She was way older than Mom and probably almost as old as Grandmother Andy. Anyway, Emily was in the stall with Pesky, brushing him with the soft brush (she had already curried him and brushed him with the dandy brush). She couldn’t see the woman — Mrs. Herman, her name was — and so she didn’t know who she was talking to, but she was telling a story. “We were out with the hounds, this must be twelve years ago now.”