Sidesaddle Page 6

  “Y’all come in now?”

  IT WASN’T THAT it hadn’t been a fun time with her friends, Stevie thought, but sometimes it was just nice to be alone. Carole and Lisa had both had to leave very early that Sunday morning. Lisa, of course, had homework to do. She always had homework to do. Lisa could find homework to do even over summer vacation.

  Carole was spending the morning with her father. That was one of the really nice things about Carole and her dad. Not only were they father and daughter, but they really liked being father and daughter and spending time together. That day, Carole had said, her father wanted to take her to a nearby Civil War battlefield. Carole had promised Lisa she’d bring her any material they had about horses in the battle.

  Stevie had nothing to do. She had no homework—or at least she only had homework she could more or less ignore. Her parents were going antiquing and then having lunch with a classmate of her father’s from law school. The Lake children had been invited to come along, but none of them really liked this man. In fact, Stevie wasn’t convinced her father liked him much, either, but that was what they were doing with their Sunday.

  It was only seven o’clock. Stevie’s brothers were still asleep. Stevie was essentially alone. She’d finished breakfast and her friends had helped her clean up before they left. She was going riding, but not until late morning. She had time for whatever she wanted.

  It was high time she did some laundry. Mr. and Mrs. Lake expected their children to wash their own clothes. They could get help with tough stuff like ironing or washing on the delicate cycle, but they were essentially in charge. For Stevie that generally meant a monthly project. When the stack of dirty clothes in her closet became taller than she was, she’d bite the bullet and get the job done.

  She went back up to her room, made the bed, tidied up the bathroom, folded the towels she and her friends had used, and put them back on the rack. Then she turned her attention to her closet.

  When she opened the door, she was nearly bowled over by dirty clothes tumbling out of the overstuffed space. She stood back and let the clothes fall where they would. Then she shook her head in dismay, disappointed in herself for letting the situation get so bad.

  “Dirty clothes don’t make a good impression,” she said to herself, clucking her tongue.

  It took a while to sort them all—whites, colors, delicates, and heavy-duty dirty. The last category was mostly jeans and barn clothes.

  She hauled the first pile to the laundry room and began the tedious job of doing the wash. It wasn’t that bad, really. The machines did all the work. She only had to sort, load, add the right chemicals, and wait.

  She did delicates first because they’d dry the fastest, and then the permanent press stuff, followed by cottons and so on. When the first load was in, she brought the rest downstairs and lined them up on the floor next to the washing machine. They looked a little bit like schoolchildren standing in line in the cafeteria.

  Schoolchildren reminded her that she actually did have some homework. She went upstairs to fetch her book bag, brought it back down, and set up a study center at the kitchen table.

  First was prealgebra. Stevie didn’t like to admit it, but she sort of liked prealgebra. The arithmetic wasn’t very hard—nothing like, for instance, long division. And when she got the right answer, it was sort of tidy and satisfying. When she found that X = 2, she knew it was right. She wasn’t so confident about Y = 13.76598. She did that problem again until it came out to Y = 7. That was right. She smiled, satisfied.

  By the time the colors were in the dryer, Stevie really was finished with her homework. She’d read eight pages of history and answered six questions about plate tectonics. There was an English paper due at the end of the week, but she’d finished the reading and she’d have more time later to do an outline.

  When the whites were dry, she switched loads, drying colors and washing heavy-duties.

  She folded all the clothes that were dry so far and then picked a pretty white blouse out of the stack to wear. It looked clean, but it had some wrinkles. She located the iron and ironing board and pressed the blouse. It looked much better. She took it upstairs and laid it on her bed while she showered and washed her hair.

  Her new hairdo did take longer, but the curls were so different from what she was accustomed to that they made her smile. Then she put on her pressed blouse, retrieved a clean pair of riding pants from the dryer, and pulled on a fresh pair of socks and her boots. She found her riding helmet and set it out to take with her, but a second glance told her it needed some work. It was covered with dust and straw. She found her mother’s lint brush and took the helmet out onto the back porch to clean it. It only took a little while before the pretty black velvet emerged from the dust.

  Back upstairs, she spotted herself in the mirror in her room and immediately recognized the need for some lip gloss and a hint of blush. She smiled back at the face in the mirror. She looked good, but she needed something else, just a little something. What was it?

  Stevie began combing through her drawers. An accessory. Something with a little color to brighten her outfit. And there it was—a baby blue pullover sweater with decorative seed pearls outlining a kitten. So cute! She remembered that it had been a gift from some relative last year. Why hadn’t she ever worn it before?

  It was almost time to leave, but first Stevie finished folding her laundry and put it all away. Then she was out the door, headed for Pine Hollow.

  Everybody was busy at the stable. The only one who actually greeted her was Belle. Max was teaching a class, and Red was busy with a colicky horse. Mrs. Reg was on the phone with someone who apparently was considering boarding his horse at Pine Hollow and wanted to know everything about the place, from the quality of the other horses there to the number of nails that had been used to put the stable together.

  Stevie was essentially alone, and that suited her just fine.

  She gave Belle a quick grooming and then went into the tack room. She took her bridle off the hook but left her saddle there. She was ready to learn something new.

  She found the two sidesaddles that belonged to the stable. One of them looked as if it would fit Belle better than the other, so she took that one with her back to Belle’s stall.

  Belle gave Stevie a very funny look when she saw the saddle, but she behaved as well as she always did while Stevie tacked her up. Looking at her own handiwork, Stevie shook her head. It seemed very strange indeed. But then that was probably because neither she nor Belle was used to it.

  “Come on, girl,” she said, clucking gently to the mare. “Let’s go someplace where nobody can see us and try out this contraption.”

  Max had his class in the main schooling ring. That was what Stevie was hoping for, because it left the side paddock for her and Belle. She walked the horse out the side door, touching the good-luck horseshoe as she passed it. She had the feeling she was going to need it.

  Maybe I’m being too pessimistic, she told herself. I’m smart and capable. And, after all, in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve changed my hairstyle, washed all my clothes, ironed a blouse, cleaned my riding helmet, and finished my homework. Could anything be impossible?

  She drew Belle to a halt at the mounting block. Now came the first challenge. She thought about her method of attack. It wasn’t like sitting in a chair, but it wasn’t like climbing into a regular saddle, either. She’d seen Tiffani do it half a dozen times; she had even watched Lisa do it, but she had no idea how they’d managed.

  “Nothing like simply trying,” she said to herself and to Belle, who looked back at her curiously. Stevie put her left foot in the stirrup, hiked herself up and back at the same time, and ended up in the dirt on the far side of a rather confused Belle.

  Stevie stood up, dusted herself off to regain her dignity, and returned to the mounting block. It took a few more tries, none of which she thought would appear in any sidesaddle riding manuals, and finally worked out a sort of compromise that involved sw
inging her right leg up over Belle’s back end and then hiking it up over Belle’s withers to get her knee into the hook on the left side of the saddle. If the style was questionable, the result was not. Stevie was in the saddle, not the dirt.

  It took a few seconds for her to adjust her weight in a way that made any sense to her. Rather than sitting into the saddle, she was more resting on it. That was going to change everything, and that was what learning something new was all about.

  She gently flicked the reins to the right, and Belle obediently turned in that direction, but there was no forward movement. Hmmm. How could she tell the mare to move ahead when she could only give her half a signal?

  Normally the signal to walk came when a rider squeezed gently with her legs. Now all Stevie could do was squeeze Belle’s left side, because that was the only place she had any legs in this saddle.

  She put pressure on Belle’s belly with her left leg. Belle moved to the right. That was perfectly logical. Horses had a natural inclination to move away from pressure, and they were trained to follow that inclination. Stevie tried again, and Belle did the same thing.

  “Okay, girl,” Stevie said gently but firmly. “We’re playing with different rules today, okay? And the trouble is that neither of us knows what they are.”

  Stevie decided she should try to equalize the pressure by using her riding crop on the horse’s right side. She didn’t slap Belle or anything, but when she used her leg on one side, she pressed her crop against Belle’s belly on the other. It might not have been what the proper sidesaddle rider would do, but Belle understood what she wanted. They moved forward.

  “Whew,” said Stevie.

  And that was the way the whole hour went. Every time Stevie tried one signal, Belle misunderstood it until Stevie figured out a way to equalize her signals. Within the hour, she’d figured out how to get Belle to walk, trot, and turn. She even devised a sort of posting system at the trot that was almost easier than when riding astride because of the rest for her right leg. It was also more precarious because it was so hard to figure out how to balance.

  Stevie was pretty sure Belle didn’t like any of it one bit more than she did, but Belle was as willing as she was to give it a try. When she pulled the mare up to the final halt of the afternoon, Stevie leaned forward to give her a great big well-deserved hug, the result of which was that she totally lost her balance and slid right out of the saddle and onto the ground.

  “I guess that means I don’t have to figure out how to dismount, eh?” she asked Belle. Belle snorted. Stevie thought she knew what that meant.

  Even though it had been hard, even though most of it seemed futile, Stevie felt good about the ride. She dusted herself off, took the reins, and walked Belle back to her stall. It wasn’t often in riding that Stevie faced so many challenges in an hour. It wasn’t as if she’d learned a lot about sidesaddle riding, but she’d learned a lot about figuring things out, and that was always satisfying for her.

  Belle seemed to sigh with relief when the sidesaddle came off. Stevie took it back to the tack room and then returned to give her horse a quick grooming and some fresh water. When she was returning to Belle’s stall for a final good-bye, she passed the little mirror over the sink in the tack room and saw herself for the first time in a couple of hours. She was startled. It was almost as if it weren’t Stevie who looked back at her.

  The girl she saw wasn’t wearing a soiled T-shirt. She was wearing an ironed white blouse. She wasn’t wearing a torn sweatshirt. She was wearing a pale blue sweater with seed pearls. Sure, it had gotten a few smudges of dirt from the two tumbles she had taken, but it was still pale blue and pretty. The girl in the mirror didn’t have straight dirty blond hair. She had curls—a lot of them. She was Stevie, all right—the new and improved Stevie. She paused for a moment, smiling at the girl, who smiled back. She could almost imagine someone standing behind her—one Phil Marsten, smiling broadly, warmly, and lovingly. “Elegant, feminine, and charming,” Phil’s image seemed to say, squeezing her shoulders gently.

  Filled with a new and improved confidence, Stevie bade Belle farewell and headed for home.

  WHEN STEVIE GOT HOME, her parents had returned from their visit with Mr. Lake’s friend. Stevie greeted them quickly and retreated upstairs. She barely registered her mother’s furrowed brow as she passed by.

  Once out of the shower, Stevie slipped into a clean pair of jeans and a clean, carefully folded T-shirt, but as soon as she saw herself in the mirror, she changed her mind. That wouldn’t do at all. Neither would the droopy straight hair. She dried her hair, fluffing it with her fingers as best she could because she didn’t want to borrow her mother’s curling iron when her mother was at home. The finished product looked pretty good. Then it was time to choose her wardrobe for the rest of the day.

  It took a while. In fact, it took a long time. Stevie hadn’t realized how totally devoid of suitable clothes her wardrobe was. Her mother was right. She needed some new clothes and she needed them right away. Finally she settled on her only non-denim pair of slacks, some yellow ones that were a little too big. She found a blouse that more or less went with them and a knit top. It wasn’t as nice as the blue sweater with seed pearls, but it would do.

  She pulled on some socks and school shoes, since she didn’t want to wear sneakers, and went downstairs.

  Her mother did a slight double take when she saw Stevie, but she said nothing. Stevie noticed it and took that as a compliment on her new fashion sense.

  “Mom, you’re right about something.”

  “Where’s the band and fireworks?” Mrs. Lake teased.

  “Well, even a swell mom like you will be right about something every once in a while,” Stevie responded, going along with the joke.

  “And it is …?”

  “I need some new clothes.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, sweetheart. Some of those jeans of yours, with the seven or eight tears on each leg—well, they’re just barely getting broken in. You should be able to get two or three more years of wear out of them.”

  Stevie smiled, recognizing her own words. But that had been before—long before—when she hadn’t realized what some good taste and a fresh look at her style could do for her.

  “Well, but I was wondering if we could go shopping this afternoon?”

  “You mean, like now?” Mrs. Lake asked, looking at the newspaper she was clearly intending to read.

  “If that’s okay with you,” Stevie said.

  “I will not miss an opportunity to take you shopping when you’re actually willing,” said Mrs. Lake. She stood up, grabbed the magazine section with the crossword puzzle in it, picked up her car keys and pocket-book, reached for a jacket, and said, “We’re off.”

  Stevie followed her out the door.

  The mall was a twenty-minute drive from their house. While they drove, Stevie tried to give her mother an idea of what she thought she needed: a couple of pairs of slacks, perhaps a skirt or two, some blouses that didn’t look like little-girl things or as if they were just for dress-up.

  “But they might need to be ironed,” said Mrs. Lake.

  “That’s okay,” Stevie said. “I don’t mind.”

  Mrs. Lake drove back into the lane she’d been driving in before Stevie had stunned her.

  “And I want some sweaters, too,” said Stevie.

  “You’ve got drawers full of sweatshirts,” said Mrs. Lake.

  “No, I mean like sweaters that go with the skirts and the blouses, not just to keep warm, but, you know, pretty sweaters.”

  “You mean, you want, like, clothes,” said Mrs. Lake.

  “Right, that’s what I mean,” said Stevie.

  “Wow,” said Mrs. Lake, pulling into a parking place by the mall’s main department store.

  When they walked into the store, the first person they saw was Veronica diAngelo. Veronica rarely missed an opportunity to shop, but she usually did so at the more exclusive shops.

  “Oh, what are you do
ing here?” Veronica asked rather disdainfully.

  Before Stevie answered, the thought flashed through her head that Veronica was capable of asking the time of day disdainfully. Disdain was her principal attitude.

  “I’m looking for some new clothes,” Stevie answered. And then, in a moment of weakness inspired by the fact that Veronica was always impeccably dressed, she asked: “Any suggestions where I should shop?”

  “The Salvation Army Thrift Shop is on the other end of the mall, as you no doubt remember,” said Veronica.

  Stevie opened her mouth to make a withering retort, but she stopped herself. Hassling with Veronica was definitely not elegant, feminine, or charming.

  “Come on, Mom,” she said instead. “Let’s see what they have in the juniors’ department here.” The two of them headed for the escalator.

  “What an ill-behaved child that Veronica is,” said Mrs. Lake. “She always reminds me of her mother.”

  “Way to go, Mom!” Stevie agreed.

  In the sweater area Stevie and her mother ran into Carole and Lisa.

  “Hey!” Carole greeted her.

  “Stevie’s shopping!” said Lisa.

  “Well, I need some new clothes, but what are you two doing here?” Stevie asked. Happy as she was to see her friends, a small part of her had hoped to sort of surprise them with her new look. That was okay, though. They could be part of the change, and that would be just as much fun.

  “When Dad and I finished touring the battlefield, I had so much information for Lisa on horses in the battle that I called her, and it turned out the best place for us to meet was right here. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Stevie.

  “Um,” Mrs. Lake interrupted. The girls all looked at her. “If you three want to spend time together, I could go get myself a cup of coffee at the food court. And then you could come get me when you need me and my credit card.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Lisa. “Shopping with Stevie’s easy: four pairs of jeans and six T-shirts and we’re done. We know where to find you.”