Jane Smiley - Golden Age

The three of them agreed, no Miami Beach and no Key West, but no other restrictions — none of them had been to Disney World, for example. Two days down and back, five days driving around in Miriam’s mom’s Civic, staying in cheap hotels. It was a daring vacation for three girls from South Hadley.

It was Miriam who suggested Ocala; her mom thought the horse farms were beautiful. You could make a St. Augustine — Daytona Beach — Orlando — Ocala — Jacksonville loop and it was almost an American history lesson, and so they did, driving past the rodeo on the way into town. Miriam said, “Horses!” and Tory said, “I like horses!” and when they both looked at Emily, Emily said, “I know zip about rodeo.”

It was before noon; the class was not an important one. The speaker system had a hum, but it was interesting to see how many guys there were, compared with a horse show. At a horse show, there were male trainers, but most of the riders were girls. Here, it was hard to recognize what few girls there were. The three of them bought Cokes and headed into the empty stands. Miriam and Tory put their elbows on the wooden railing and stared. At the far end, a gate opened, and a calf came running. A guy on a buckskin came right after him. Four fast strides, and his rope was twirling above his head, sailing toward the calf, but the calf spun and the loop missed.

Emily picked up a program that had fallen under the seat. In the class they were watching, the sixth horse was Bogey, #345, ridden by Chance Markham. Moments later, the gate opened (somehow the previous calf had been scuttled out of the arena), and here came a bright chestnut with a lean kid in an orange shirt. The calf moaned; the rope went out and settled itself over the calf’s head. A split second later, the calf put his right foot into the loop, and the rope tightened around both the leg and the neck. The calf continued to baa in short bursts. The horse slid to a halt and stood, while the guy in the orange shirt, who was, indeed, her cousin Chance, eased his hand down the shivering rope until he got to the calf, at which point he tilted the animal onto its side, tied three of its legs together, then sprang up, raising his arms in the air. The timer read 7.3 seconds. Emily said, “You’re not going to believe this, but that guy is my cousin.”

Both Miriam and Tory looked at her, jaws dropped.

“I thought he was in California.”

“How old is he?” said Miriam.

“Nineteen.”

“He’s cute,” said Tory.

Time to go, thought Emily. Chance left the arena, and three other guys in boots and hats ran to the calf and untied it; it stood up mooing and headed out the other end of the arena to its buddies. They watched a few more, then some of the bronc riders, including one kid who was tossed on his face. Disney World seemed bland by comparison.

When she called her mom a day or so later about seeing Chance, Janet said, “I told you he was in Florida for a month. Then it’s Texas. Loretta bought herself a nineteen-foot camper van to stalk him with. I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”

“He calls himself Chance Markham.”

“That was some relative on her side who rode with the Texas Rangers.”

“Did not,” said Emily.

“Pony Express, then,” said Janet.

The natural next question was “Dad there?” but Emily was afraid of the answer, so she said, “I’m sure Pattycake’s abscess will be fine when I get back.”

“Keep him sound.”

“I do, Mom!”

“I wish he had more turnout.”

“So does everyone!”

And their voices rose.

—

ONCE SHE STARTED looking into it, Janet found out that there were Anonymous organizations for just about everything. The easy thing was to go to all sorts of meetings as — she told herself — an observer, or a contemplator of George W. Bush, who she quickly decided was a dry drunk. A person with her history was not going to accept the existence of any power higher than the power of the group itself to induce conformity. That was fine. What was not fine was that she was exceptionally sensitive to bullshit. Having known Pastor Jones at the Peoples Temple, she now found herself gripping her hands together or writhing in her seat when the Al-Anon people used certain words—“wayward,” “backslider,” “healing,” “God,” “we,” and, sometimes, “love.” Certain tones of voice — kind, generous on the surface, but hostile underneath — also drove her from the room.

The meetings were held at a modern building that was also a yoga studio just past the light-rail station in San Carlos, not an area where she normally went. The yoga mats were rolled up and the shades drawn; overhead lights made the room dim and yellowish. The six tables pushed together for the group looked like old schoolroom tables, and the chairs didn’t match, either, but Janet knew it was her task to cultivate gratitude, and so she did, for about ten minutes of each session, until the revelations began to get edgy. It did not help that most of the participants were younger than she was — sometimes half her age. One who was her age — nearly fifty-one now — had only just emerged from his room in the last two years. He had been hiding out since his father beat his mother to death before being put in Soledad Prison. The father had died in 1987. Another of the terrified ones said nothing except “That’s not true” under his breath. He never said what was true. The majority of the participants were risk takers, though, not risk avoiders. One had started hang gliding in high school. He was now twenty-eight, and the sole survivor of his hang-gliding group of friends. He had broken both ankles in a ski accident on a closed slope in the winter of ’99 and decided that maybe he was out of control in the most literal sense. Several had had three or more car accidents, one regularly drove his BMW 1000 motorcycle at over a hundred miles per hour. One woman had, like Janet, married someone she hardly knew. Janet admitted that she had once joined a cult, but didn’t say which one, and implied that it was located on the East Coast. The problem was that the risk takers and the risk avoiders found each other deeply irritating, and each of the four meetings she dared to attend eventually devolved into arguments — after the fourth, she saw one of the risk avoiders pause outside the door of the building after the meeting and elbow one of the risk takers hard in the ribs. Janet ran for her car, avoiding risk, leaving the fracas to the more experienced members.

However, she rather liked Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, because the participants’ stories were adventurous and sometimes funny, and she didn’t mind AA itself, though she could not speak honestly about her drinking habits, since she didn’t drink. By comparison with the offspring of alcoholics, the alcoholics were good-natured, often helpful, and eventually it got somewhat easier to say that she was powerless over the Bush administration, that she had come to believe that some power greater than herself would have to restore the nation to sanity, that she had been a pain in the ass to most of her friends and relatives for a long time, that she could give up her shortcomings rather than give up her marriage, that she was willing to make amends not only to Jared and Jonah and Emily, but also to her mother and Richie, if not to Michael and Loretta, that she could get in the habit of admitting she was wrong when she actually was, and that a few minutes per hour of silent meditation were better than none at all.

Every time she picked up a newspaper, though, she saw Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld through the lens of AA, barreling out of control toward something she could not name, which they called redemption. The main thing she learned from AA was to shut up, even when Rove and Cheney admitted that they had stock in Enron, even when a government official confessed to being “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Defense,” even when Tommy Thompson decided to extend health care to “the unborn.” She got through the summer, though they had to sell Pattycake for sixty thousand dollars (they would have gotten $150,000 the year before). She and Jared got through the summer, though he had to fire a quarter of his staff. She and Jonah got through the summer — although he didn’t love his day camp, he made a friend there from two blocks away that he hadn’t known before, because the friend went to public school. She and Emily got through the summer, because Emily admitted that she preferred Sunlight to Pattycake after all — Pattycake was good in the show ring, but acted as if he didn’t know you from Adam when you arrived at the barn, and he could not go on the trail, which was what she wanted to do until she headed off to Idaho in August, to help Aunt Tina run her gallery.