Jane Smiley - Golden Age

When I was a baby in Iowa, thought Emily.

“There were maybe twenty riders in the field — not many, because it was late in the season, and only the real diehards were still at it. We’d run the fox into the corner of what’s now the Horse Park, and then chased it across Whiskey Hill Road. By that time, we two whippers-in and four of the field were still with the hounds, who were absolutely mad on the scent of a fox, which wasn’t what was supposed to happen — we’d been drag hunting, and a gray fox happened to cross our path. The fox headed west, but doubled back, ran over Sand Hill Road, and what did it do but run into the Linear Accelerator Stanford has there!”

The woman Mrs. Herman was talking to screamed, “Oh, heavens, Denise!”

Mrs. Herman laughed and said, “Well, the hounds were after it, the whole pack in full cry, and they went right in, thank goodness, not in the end but just across — there’s no door or anything, just a little barrier, and someone had to follow them. Since I was a whipper-in, it had to be me. I jumped in, ran across, jumped out. It took no time, but I was so embarrassed.”

“How did you dare?” said the other woman.

“What was I going to do? It would’ve been a nightmare to lose the hounds, and you can’t go around the Accelerator — it’s two miles long. I had to make up my mind in about a second. Fortunately, Barkis is willin’, always willin’.”

Barkis was Mrs. Herman’s chestnut hunter. He had a pretty zigzag blaze.

Emily knew where the Accelerator was — it was a white thing you could see from the road, and her dad always pointed it out, even though he had pointed it out a million times before. Her dad thought being a physicist was the most exciting job you could have, and he expected Emily to get 100s on all her math tests, including algebra. She had done it so far, all this year. It was not that hard.

“But that wasn’t the last of it.”

“Do tell!” The woman was laughing.

“The hounds chased that fox up into the hills over there, right into Jane Goodall’s chimp compound. I don’t even know if it’s still there. We ran right past the building, and the apes all stood at the bars of their windows, screaming at us. I told my husband they were rooting for us, but maybe they were rooting for the fox. We had the kill right there, at the far end of the building.” The two women laughed again.

Now Emily petted Pesky down the side of his near foreleg, then picked up his hoof and cleaned it out. She even leaned over and sniffed it — no thrush. She took good care of him. When she was finished grooming, she set her box outside the stall door, attached the lead rope to Pesky’s halter, and led him out. The two women were gone. Barkis was looking over the door of his stall and nickered as she and Pesky walked by.

It wasn’t a great day — a little chilly and windy — but Pesky had a thick coat, a forelock like a hat, and a mane like a fountain that sprang all around his arched neck. Emily was wearing a sweater, and now she pulled her leather riding gloves from her pockets and put them on. She walked down the aisle and turned left, toward the trail that ran along the edge of the property. It was starting to get green, but she knew that Pesky knew that she knew that he wasn’t supposed to eat, so he didn’t try, only followed in her footsteps, sometimes blowing out his nostrils and sometimes tossing his head. Once, he bumped her with his nose, and she said “No,” and rattled the lead rope. They walked along. When they came to the long side of the main arena, she saw that Mary Alice Forman was having a lesson; Mary Alice was ten, two years younger than Emily, and she didn’t have her own horse. She was the one who was always saying, “When are you going to ride him? He looks so nice!” But she didn’t say it like a bully or like a grown-up; she said it like she was the kind of kid who always said whatever came into her mind.

There was a saddle. There was a bridle. Mom, however, did not press her, and clearly she had told Dad not to press her, either.

Mary Alice saw her, and shouted, “Hi! Hi, Emmy!”

Randi, who was teaching her, called out, “Watch where you’re going, Mary Alice!”

“Oh!” said Mary Alice. “Yikes!”

But her horse, Peaches, wasn’t doing anything bad.

Pesky flicked his ears. He was much better-looking than Peaches, not only nicely built, but that warm golden color that was supposedly Icelandic. Emily loved him, and was distantly grateful to Mom for giving him to her. At the end of the arena, she walked through the parking lot, and into a little grove of eucalyptus, where she let Pesky snuffle around for grass. He was an easy keeper, so he didn’t get much hay, and was always hungry.

While Pesky was standing there, Emily stood next to him, facing him. She took her glove off, then started by his ears and smoothed her hand over his coat, as if she were brushing him, except that she could feel how smooth and silky he was. Emily found it soothing to do this, and sometimes, when she was in school, she took deep breaths and thought of it when the other kids were making her nervous. She had noticed this in her walks, too: If you looked at your feet, then you thought about falling over the edge of the road. If you looked at cars, you thought about them hitting you. But if you looked at the horizon, you kept going, and your breaths were bigger. All of these thoughts she kept to herself, because Mom pounced on them if she said anything about them. As soon as Mom took them up, they became flat and dumb. Emily didn’t know why this was. Everyone else thought that she had the nicest mom.

Mrs. Herman walked by again and waved. The story she had told made her sound like so much fun that Emily waved back and smiled, and when she stopped, Emily walked Pesky over to her and said, “Would you give me riding lessons?”

Mrs. Herman was perfect. She asked no questions, made no faces. She just smiled and said, “Of course I will. You want to start now?”

And Emily said, “Yes.”

—

JANET COULDN’T SAY that she’d forgotten to put in her diaphragm, only that she had been too lazy to put in her diaphragm, and it wasn’t the first time — she and Jared made love so intermittently that the challenge of coming all the way to full consciousness and going into the bathroom, five steps away, was sometimes more than she could handle. But she’d gotten away with it so often that the possibility of actually needing birth control had sort of slipped her mind. It had taken her two missed periods and some bouts of morning nausea even to come up with the idea that she might be pregnant. Then she’d given herself a test, told Jared, told Emily, gone to the doctor, started on the vitamins, told her mother and Debbie, even bought two roomier pairs of jeans, but still the whole thing seemed abstract, something more talked about than experienced. Her body took it in stride, Jared stopped asking her how she felt, and Emily seemed to forget about it entirely. Janet continued to ride — her balance wasn’t at all affected. She was riding four days per week and planning another trip to southern California in ten days.

One night, she was lying in bed, chatting with Jared about an odd thing Michael had told him: He had a friend who was a currency trader in Chicago. He’d stayed up late a couple of nights before, and, like all currency traders, he’d been unable to resist checking the rates. In a very odd way, he saw, the Deutschmark was crashing, as if someone somewhere with lots and lots of Deutschmarks were panicking and flooding the market. Of course, no one could tell where they were coming from, and then, twelve hours later, one of Gorbachev’s most important advisers left the party and predicted a coup d’état. The question, Jared said, was who would be dumping Deutschmarks and why, and they agreed that maybe it was Gorbachev himself, or some other representatives of the Soviet government, thinking that refugees would be flooding west, and so overwhelming Germany. The first thought Janet had was just an image — refugees in black and white, as if on World War II — era film, flooding across a white line; then she had that moment of automatic panic that she always had when she thought of the Soviet Union. All she said was “I thought they didn’t trade in capitalist markets,” and they both chuckled slightly. She rearranged herself — it was getting harder to find a comfortable position, though she’d only gained ten pounds. Jared went to the bathroom and stayed in there, flossing. In the quiet, she felt a fluttering. She knew instantly what it was — the quickening — as if the intervening thirteen years since it happened the last time had simply dropped away, and she thought, “Hello, little guy.”