Game Over 
Good-bye to a Horse
My daughter's first love was tall, dark, and handsome. He helped her grow from a girl into a woman. Then the day arrived when she had to say ...
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SHE NAMED HIM MARK. I realize now that I don't know why. He was still somewhat thin when he arrived at the stables, but everyone told us not to worry about that. We showed him around and had him trucked to a vet for examination. When the reports came back positive, we put down our check, most of it Vivian's inheritance. I went out late one afternoon to watch Vivian ride him for the first time at the stables, but as she led him out of the stall, it was clear something was amiss. Suddenly he was favoring his left front hoof. Vivian never got on him. After much discussion and examination over the next several days, the conclusion was that he had been shod improperly and that his front hooves had been filed down too low in the back in the process. All we needed was the right type of shoe and enough time for his hoof to grow back into its proper shape. The days dragged by.
There is a definite hierarchy among the riders at a stable. Beginning riders, regardless of age, are on the lowest rung, and from then on, in a surprisingly pure way, skill is the crucial defining factor in the hierarchy. The only other factor that separates riders is owning a horse. Owners pay a monthly boarding fee, but they can ride as often as they want under the eye of the best trainers the stables can offer, with no charge for lessons. At our stables, the horse owners rode each evening starting about six. Now, with Mark, Vivian was eligible to ride with the other owners. Some were young girls, but most were older women, often in their thirties and forties, who had bought and sold many horses, who rode in every show they could, and who were helpful and friendly but who, for all that, were not an easy audience when you were thirteen, walking into the ring with your own horse.
When, after more than a month, Mark was finally sound enough to ride, that was what Vivian had to do. I took her to the stables for her riding lesson. It was a heavy, humid evening. As she walked with Mark from the stables to the ring, I could hear her gasping for breath, and her hands were shaking.
"Relax," I told her.
"Okay, okay," she said. "I hope this works."
"It will if you just relax."
She took him into the ring and led him to the mounting block, where he stood quietly while she got on. She walked him slowly around to the right and then to the left and then began to trot. She was tense and apprehensive at first, but then so was Mark. After a while, though, he began to settle down and at the end of the lesson ran a nice course over a series of fences. The other riders complimented Vivian on her new horse and sighed and said how pretty he was. Vivian had been accepted as one of the women—not girls—in the world of horses.
Soon enough, Vivian wanted to take Mark to a show. After forcing ourselves out of bed at five on a Saturday morning, Tracy, Vivian, and I drove along deserted streets and freeways to the stables. There, with dawn just breaking, we found a swirl of activity. A long trailer with room for ten horses stood open in the parking lot. Grooms spouted curses and warnings in Spanish as they led each horse to the loading ramp. Invariably, the horses backed away. Several reared, their wild eyes flashing white in the darkness. It was humid and windless, sticky hot even in the gloom. A groom led Mark out, wrapped his lower legs to protect them during the trailer ride, and led him, protesting, to the ramp and then up into the trailer.
At the show, Vivian entered classes (levels of the competition) involving lower fences than she was accustomed to jumping at the stables; as it turned out, she dominated her classes, and Mark never made a false step. After watching her for several years, and learning to ride myself, I had begun to see what a good ride was supposed to look like. The horse should take each fence in his natural stride, neither jumping too close to nor too far from the fence. He should keep his body straight along the line between fences and, around curves, bend it in the same arc as the curve. Also, the horse must canter with the left leg leading when moving left and the right leg leading when moving right and change leads mid-stride when changing directions. The rider, meanwhile, should show little or no effort while controlling the horse with tiny adjustments to the reins or subtle pressure from the legs. The ideal is the "invisible ride," where the horse follows the course perfectly and changes leads at just the right moment with no apparent cues from the rider. Now I could recognize such a ride on the rare occasions when there was one, and I could also begin to see the faults in the frequent less-than-perfect rides. As Vivian rode in her classes, I knew, really for the first time, whether she had had a good ride or not. We left late that afternoon with Vivian in the back seat of the car. She had a fistful of ribbons and a crystal vase, which was the grand prize for her division. She was so tired she fell asleep and only awoke fifty minutes later, when I came to a stop in our driveway.
Soon there was another show at the same place. Vivian's victories forced her to move up to classes with higher jumps and much tougher competition. Before each show begins, there is an hour set aside for "schooling." Riders can go into the ring where they will be competing and warm up over the jumps they will encounter in their classes, although not necessarily at the same heights. Since everyone must school during the same short period, the ring is always too crowded. The horses, having just arrived in new surroundings with unfamiliar horses and people all around them, are excited, tense, and difficult to control. The riders and their trainers are determined to pack as much instruction as they can into the few minutes available to them, so they work with unusual intensity and abandon.
Vivian entered the chaos of the schooling pulling hard on Mark's reins. He was holding his head high, trying to avoid the bit, prancing and shaking his head. She trotted him around the ring several times in each direction to try to settle him down. Then she asked for a canter. Tracy and I were standing at one end of the ring. As Vivian cantered around the curve, I could see another girl coming over a jump in the middle of the ring looking to her left rather than where she was headed. In a single instant, I could see, without believing it, that the girl and Vivian were on an unavoidable collision course. The horses ran right into each other. The other girl stayed on, but Vivian was tossed out of the saddle, spinning horizontally in midair and landing facedown in the dirt. She didn't move. Tracy and I ducked under the top rail of the fence and ran to her amid the confusion of horses. I was certain she had been crippled for life. What had we been thinking when we let her get involved with horses?
Vivian was moaning. "Ohhhh," she said, then lay quietly, hardly breathing. Tracy took off her helmet. A doctor arrived and checked her pulse, her eyes, and moved her gently to see if anything was broken. I stood up and took Mark's reins. He had stopped the moment Vivian came off and stood by, looking at her. Soon the doctor had her sitting up, still dazed but apparently with nothing broken. After a while, Tracy and I helped her to her feet and led her out of the ring and to a chair in the shade. Then I tied Mark up and went back to Vivian.
By now the show had started. One of the classes Vivian had entered was under way, but we scratched her. I got Mark's bridle and put on a more severe bit. Gradually, Vivian improved. She drank a Coke and ate a handful of grapes. Although she still looked pale and her walk was stiff and slow, she wanted to ride in the show. She put on Mark's bridle with the new bit, cooing to him and stroking his neck. I gave her a leg up, and she rode him at a slow walk to an empty pasture where a few practice jumps stood beneath the strong summer sun. Soon the announcer was calling her number for a class she had entered. She walked Mark toward the ring.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"I'm fine," she said. "I can do this."
"All right," I said and let her go on.
I found Tracy standing next to the rail about ten yards away from the entrance. She looked at me, aghast. "She's fine," I said without much conviction.
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