A Good Horse (22 page)

I said, “And you’re the one who always says it has to be the carrot or the stick or they don’t understand.”

Mom said, “Rusty probably saw them knock over the trough. She sees everything.”

Daddy said, “So she made the connection between dumping the trough and something being wrong?”

Mom smiled. “It’s you who always says that animals were made to serve man, and now you don’t believe your own eyes.”

I thought she had him there.

It wasn’t until bedtime that I remembered about the Goldmans. But Mom said yes, they seemed to be very nice people, and she gave me a little overnight bag for my clothes. She also said, “I think it’s good for you to get away for a night, I really do,” and she kissed me on the forehead, though she had to reach up to do it. No one said a word about Black George.

Of course I had to tell Gloria and Stella that I was spending the night at the Goldmans’. Stella exclaimed, “Are they even your friends?” and I could see that Gloria was hurt that I would go there when I hadn’t come to her house the week before. I said, “Well, we had fun doing the play. I don’t know why they asked me.”

“No one ever knows why they do anything. I mean, they practice music for hours. You’ll probably have to listen to that. They’re very artsy. My mom said they’re from New York.” Stella said this as though it meant something important.

Things got all quiet.

I said, “Well, I have more free time now, because that horse I was riding so much might be sold.” I glanced at Gloria as if this were a job that I was about to be relieved of, and she smiled and said, “Well, that’s good.” I nodded. And maybe it was, in a way.

But Mom was right—going to the Goldmans’ was a complete break from my entire life. Riding to their house on the bus was fun enough—Alexis and I sat in the front seat and Barbara sat right behind us, leaning forward with her hand on the back of our seat the whole time. They talked about the same things we all did—teachers, classes, homework, boys—but they talked about them in a different way, as if they were interesting rather than boring and offensive. Between them, they had a lot of teachers, because they took eighth-grade classes and ninth-grade classes, and because they were “separated” for most of their classes.

“Mom did that,” said Alexis, “because until we were in second grade, we refused to say who we were, so the teachers were always calling us by each other’s names. We thought that was really funny. I would go for a whole day saying I was Barbara, and then the next day, a teacher would ask Barbara something and she would not know it!”

“We used to dress alike,” said Barbara, “but that made it worse, so Mom put us in different outfits.”

“So we just went into the girls’ bathroom and switched clothes if we felt like it.”

“They had us in the principal’s office all the time.”

Alexis shook her head. “Mom was going out of her mind.”

“Well, that’s what she told us. But you couldn’t tell.”

“She already is out of her mind!” They laughed.

Barbara said, “So they figured out which teachers could deal with us and sort of divvied us up between them, and even though we don’t make any trouble anymore, they still do that.”

“It’s school district policy with all twins now.”

Barbara pursed her lips in a merry way. “We were such troublemakers!” They laughed again. I laughed, too.

I said, “Do you ever dress alike now?” It was true that it was hard to tell them apart, but sitting with them, I could—Barbara’s eyes were bluer, and Alexis had slightly fuller cheeks.

“Well,” said Alexis, “we are mirror twins. If those teachers had bothered to look, they would have seen that I’m right-handed and Barbie’s left-handed, and even though we’ve practiced, we can’t switch.”

“Our cousin Leo says you can change your whole personality if you practice writing with your wrong hand, but even though we’ve tried, we can’t do it.”

I said, “Kyle Gonzalez does that, too.”

The twins looked at each other and said, “Boys are from another world.” They nodded together.

Listening to them almost made you want to be a twin.

They didn’t have horses to ride when they got home, but they did have music to play, just as Stella had predicted, so while they practiced for an hour, I sat in the kitchen with Mrs. Goldman and her sister, Mrs. Marx, and their cousin, Leah Marx. Leah was a senior in high school, and the question was whether she should apply for early admission to Stanford or to Berkeley. I didn’t know what they were talking about. Finally, Leah turned to me and said, “Your brother, Danny, what’s he doing now? I always thought he was cute.”

“He’s working for a horseshoer.”

“He’s not in school at all?” said Mrs. Marx.

“He’s gainfully employed!” said Mrs. Goldman. “Abby here is a superb equestrienne. She rides every day.”

“Do you!” said Mrs. Marx. “I always wanted to do that. I thought I would have talent.”

“You couldn’t even skip rope,” said Mrs. Goldman.

“I couldn’t do doubles.”

“I could do doubles all day,” said Mrs. Goldman.

“Once, she skipped rope for three hours straight, from after school until dark. It took ten girls in shifts to twirl the ropes, and then she came home and passed out.”

“I’m sure it was a world’s record,” said Mrs. Goldman.

“I thought you were dead.”

“That’s what she told our mother,” said Mrs. Goldman.

“She didn’t react as if she cared much.”

“Only because she never believed a word you said, anyway!”

Mrs. Goldman slapped Mrs. Marx on the shoulder, and the two of them began to laugh.

I said, “Are you twins, too?”

“Not by a long shot,” said Mrs. Goldman. “I’m two years older, but thank you for not noticing the difference.”

“It’s much more visible in stronger light,” said Mrs. Marx.

“Abby, have a Coke,” said Mrs. Goldman. “You must be thirsty.”

She went to the refrigerator and took out a Coke, popped the cap, and gave it to me with a glass. Then she said, “You don’t want ice, do you? I like it full strength myself.”

I had never heard grown-ups talk this way.

For supper, there was a big crowd—the four Goldmans; three Marxes (Leah’s brother was already at college, at UCLA); a friend of Mr. Goldman’s who came home with him, named
Mr. Wiggins; the next-door neighbor, who was an old lady named Mrs. Allen (“She eats with us almost every night,” said Barbara. “All of her family is in Arizona now”); and me. We had a pile of noodles with a spicy red sauce called “linguini with puttanesca sauce” and big leaves of lettuce with cubes of toasted bread and cheese. Mr. Goldman made the dressing at the table by mashing little fish with oil and some egg and some other things. Barbara said, “Do you like Caesar salad?”

I said, “I have no idea.” I did what Mom always told me to do and ate a little of everything. The bread and butter was good. There was no grace and everyone at the table talked the whole time. The grown-ups drank wine. Mrs. Allen spilled her water, and Mrs. Goldman kept talking while she was cleaning it up, and then, after the food was all gone, everyone sat at the table and kept talking. Leah was the quiet one, but she was busy—she kept picking up the napkins (cloth) and folding them in the shapes of animals, then she would set them on the table in various positions and make them move as if they were talking to one another. She saw me watching her, and we kept laughing. She was not blond, like the Goldman twins, but about my size and with dark, curly hair. I wondered how well she had known Danny, but I didn’t ask her.

After dinner, we broke into two teams and played a game called “Adverbs” in the big living room where we had done the play. Alexis and I were on one team, and Barbie and Leah were on the other. Even Mrs. Allen played. When one of your team members left the room, the rest of you decided on an adverb for that person to act out when he or she came back, and then it was the job of the other team to guess the adverb he or
she was acting out. The first person to leave was Mr. Goldman, who was on the other team. When he came back, they whispered the word to him, and then he got down on his hands and knees and began dragging himself across the floor, putting his hand to his brow and looking around from time to time, or collapsing on the carpet. Our team kept calling out words, and finally Mrs. Marx shouted, “Desperately.” That was the word.

Then it was our turn. Alexis left, and we consulted one another (or they did—I didn’t say anything). When she came back, Mr. Wiggins (but everyone called him “Bill”) whispered the word
idly
to her. She carried a chair to the middle of the room, between the two teams, and sat down half turned in the seat, with her right arm over the back of the chair. Then she yawned, then she sighed, then she began to stare out the window and twist a lock of hair between her fingers. After only three or four minutes, Barbie shouted, “Idly!” Then they made a rule that Barbie couldn’t guess when it was Alexis’s turn and vice versa. The next word was
monstrously
, which was played by Leah. First she tromped around with her shoulders up and her chin out while everyone came up with variations on
tall-ly
, then she went over to Mr. Goldman and pretended to strangle him, at which point Bill guessed, “Monstrously.”

And so I had to go to the bathroom, and I couldn’t avoid being the next person. Their guest bathroom was nice, and I stayed there for a while, but I had to come back, and when I sat down on the couch, Alexis whispered “tentatively” in my ear. I thought for a minute.
Tentatively
was a word I had read but had never heard anyone use. I knew what it meant, though. I decided not to go out into the middle of the room—that wouldn’t
be tentative enough. I closed my eyes and put my hands in front of my face for a moment, then I opened my eyes and peeked between my hands. Mrs. Goldman said, “Oh, she’s doing it.”

“Shyly?” said Barbie.

I put my hands down, then waited a second, then put my foot out and brought it back. Then I peered around Alexis, but just for a bit. I put my hand in front of my mouth. I opened my mouth as if I were going to say something, then closed it. I could feel myself fill up with being tentative—thinking I might try something, and almost daring to do so, but not quite. Was “tentatively” about not wanting to or not daring to? Both, I decided. I half stood up, but sat down again, shook my head, but only a little.

The other team was calling out words—
hopefully, nervously, shyly
again,
anxiously
—and my team was laughing. I almost laughed myself, because I couldn’t help it, then I realized that I could make my laugh “tentative,” so I giggled, then covered my mouth and lowered my eyes. Mrs. Goldman shouted, “Tentatively!” and everyone said, “Yes! Yes! That’s it!”

We played a lot of rounds—when Barbie was acting, Alexis whispered words in my ear that I called out, but she wasn’t right any more often than anyone else was. I did
woodenly
(by acting like a tree, then a carpenter hammering),
nosily
(by going over to where the other team was sitting and sniffing them, which made everyone laugh), and
juicily
(by pretending to squeeze fruit and being surprised at how wet I got).

The best word Barbie did was
comically
, and for Alexis it was
automatically
. But the best word of the night was when Mr.
Goldman did
apoplectically
. First, he pretended to be so angry that all of us fell silent because he did such a good job that he made us a little afraid of him, and then, when we kept shouting variations on
angrily
, he made a face, grabbed his throat and fell down, and then jerked around on the ground. Because no one could guess, he went on for three or four minutes, getting wilder and wilder, which made it hard. At that point, Mrs. Marx shouted, “Apoplectically,” and Mr. Marx said, “Yes, apoplexy was originally a stroke!” We gave him a round of applause, and he said, “Well, finally! I was killing myself!” and started to laugh.

We staggered up to bed about midnight. They had set up a cot in Barbie and Alexis’s room, but they told me to sleep in the lower bunk, because that was more comfortable, and so I got out my pajamas. The girls also had their own bathroom, which they had painted themselves with trees and animals, mostly cats and birds, and when we had finished brushing our teeth, I stayed in there a minute to look around. I thought the rooster and the bluebird were the best, and the black cat sitting on a white step, but I couldn’t tell if just one of the twins had painted those, because there were no initials or anything. But really, they were all good.

By the time I got into the room, all the lights but the night-light were off, and Barbie and Alexis were in bed and seemed to be asleep. Only when I had gotten into my bunk did anyone say anything, and that was Alexis, in the cot, who sounded half asleep when she said, “Night night.”

I fell asleep right away, too. My head was full of adverbs and faces, and laughing, and the flat darkness, across the living
room, of that big window that looked out over the valley. The twins’ room had lots of windows, too, and I could hear an owl hoot as I fell asleep. My head was so full that I didn’t think of Mom or Daddy or Black George at all, and I forgot my nighttime prayer (though I remembered that and said it when I woke up for a moment in the night). I did not have any dreams.