Jockey by Maddie Crum

My mother wanted to be a jockey. When she was young, she read horse books obsessively: King of the Wind, Misty of Chincoteague. She liked the drawings, which were Romantic, suggesting movement, adventure. Manes and branches blurred, whirling. The horses on the covers were proud, muscular. They bucked or they stood tall and flexed.  

I suspect that she saw herself, or her ideal self, in these illustrations. My mother is, has always been, a painting of a storm cloud, a line denoting the curve of a hind leg. Young girls who were loud or unruly were considered boyish, were called trouble. Horse books were an acceptable outlet, a way of imagining strength and freedom.  

But dreams must be slotted into reasonable agendas. You can’t be a horse when you grow up.

One way to be closer to horses, though, is to ride one. My mother asked her own mother for lessons. But the six of them were living on a single, unsteady artist’s income. The answer as usual was an evasion, a “maybe,” an ashamed and indirect “no.”

Deprived of her dream, she willed it to me, as mothers sometimes do.  

What I remember about riding lessons: feeding a tall horse a sugar cube, wondering if he’d eat my hand along with it. 17 hands tall. I was tall too, but I didn’t see myself in the horse, and I didn’t see the horse in me. I couldn’t believe something so massive could move on its own.  

My mother had labeled my riding boots, L for left, R for right, so I wouldn’t forget. I’d been anxious about forgetting. I’d been anxious in general. There’s a picture of me beside the horse, dwarfed by it, smiling a huge, fake smile. My boots, though, were on the right feet. 

▲

My mother also willed me her dream of excelling in math and science. Growing up, she’d read her grandfather’s anatomy books, paging through them while the rest of the family talked after dinner—meatloaf and ketchup. In spite of her interest, her grandfather offered to send her brother, not her, and not her sisters, to medical school. Medical school wasn’t for girls, he’d said. Her mother was a mother of four, made-up and slowed by exhaustion. No thank you to that, my mother said; she would only have one child, me. Her father was a photographer working for a museum dedicated to the successes of an enterprising car factory. He was also an angry drunk. My mother took out loans for state school. She decided to major in statistics and advertising. She was determined, I think, to move away, to move quickly, to be uninhibited, like the horses from her books.  

It was 1977. That same year, the National Women’s Conference took place in Texas, where my mother would later wind up for work. 

The midwest is dying, her father told her once, slurring. Choking on its own fumes. Get out quick. The nation’s most resourceful feminists had already been advised. Gloria Steinem was there. Maya Angelou was there. Betty Friedan and Lady Bird Johnson and Coretta Scott King. It was the culmination of feminism’s second wave, a chorus of its loudest voices. The focus of the summit was leadership. Women needed to have leadership roles in education, in media. Women needed to own businesses. 

Across town at the Houston Astrodome, another conference was taking place. Led by Phyllis Schlafly, it displayed the power of a burgeoning countermovement. Women did have rights, Schlafly said: namely, the right to stay home. Schlafly argued that women had already made gains in the social sphere, and any further assistance from the government would be a hindrance, an insult. She spoke against welfare and other programs that would support minority women, working-class women, and “rural women”—the women who hadn’t yet had the chance to make said gains. Her words resonated most with women who felt they had something to lose. As a result, the Equal Protection Act, which just years earlier had been expected to pass easily, came just short of ratification. In 1982, just as my mother was entering the workforce, Ronald Reagan sent Phyllis Schlafly a congratulatory telegram.  

If my mother wanted to be treated equally at work, she’d have to fight for it on her own. She saw this, I think, as a welcome challenge, a chance to try out her strength. She had a series of jobs, of bosses. Public sector, private sector. Telecommunications, the CDC. Seedy men and enterprising women—she complained of both equally. She wrote questionaries and analyzed the results. Her work was good work, but she was ditsy, or else bossy, aggressive. Aggressive, or else spacey, a ditz. There were layoffs; there were more layoffs. There was always a new job, a new boss. 

The precariousness was exhausting for her to bear, for me to witness. My mother sighed often, letting her stress into the room. What’s wrong? I’d ask. Nothing’s wrong, she would say. You notice too much. 

I watched my mother apply wet stain to the center of her lips and pucker. Her mother must have taught her about that. I watched her leave for work wearing a head full of hot-ironed curls; I watched her come home late, her hair limp. The task of keeping up her professional-yet-feminine demeanor: Sisyphean, like housework. After dinner we sat at the kitchen table and she taught me about math. Math was what had freed her, she told me. She still had on her nude pantyhose, which looked tight and itchy. The kitchen table was covered in ringed stains. I liked to stare at the stains, half-moons and full moons, a new language forming. In her negligence toward the state of our home, my mother had left behind a wonderfully interpretable world. Cabinet drawers contained systems of coins, scraps, and dust. Hair rollers and silly putty. Ambitious recipes from countries she hadn’t had the time to visit, crisply folded, unused. Phone numbers and melted candle wax. Business cards and cookie crumbs. I used my disposable camera to catalog what I found. My mother felt accused. I’ll clean that later, she’d say of the table. But the table would only accrue more of her junk. That she didn’t hire a cleaner was a matter of pride, not prudence. She wanted to do it all on her own.  

▲

In math class, I’d been playing a game called Mad Minute. 

The goal was to answer as many questions as you could in sixty seconds. You began with your worksheet facing down, and when the teacher said to go, you went, and in some fury you accessed a store of knowledge, or, in the case of long-division, a latent ability to complete the task. You worked with your pencil and not with your mind. Your mind was preoccupied with the boy who sat across from you. Were you out-pacing him? You were, usually. Usually, you finished first. This was probably because you practiced Mad Minute every night after dinner with your mother. She watched you proudly before changing out of her nude pantyhose and going to sleep. 

But first, before bed, she read to you from her horse books, books in which strength and swiftness were prized attributes. A foal born on a new moon promised to be strong and swift. A foal with a white spot on its heel: strong and swift. It turned out that horse books tended not to be about the horses. The owners’ greed, the groomers’ attentions, the jockeys’ zeal, the crowds’ enthusiasm. What about the horse? you wanted to know. Beyond her strength and swiftness, the horse was unknowable. She was treated badly or she ran races; that was it. I don’t like this book, you said to you mother. You couldn’t say why. She put down her copy of King of The Wind. She looked stricken, and you felt you had failed to be good. 

I have been tempted in writing about this to lie, to sketch a quiet girl urged on to minor scholastic successes as if by a riding crop. But the truth is that while playing Mad Minute, I liked going fast. It was a break from the vagueness, the inertness, I was prone to: staring out my bedroom window at the weeds in the flower beds my mother had planted but wouldn’t tend. Mad Minute was orderly, concrete. There were answers, right and wrong ones. I filled them in, consumed by adrenaline, my mind otherwise blank. 

I imagine it was like being chased, or like pulling ahead around a track’s final bend, wind whipping, legs tensing, pure unconscious drive. It feels inaccurate to say I completed the worksheet on my own; all I did was supply the answers I’d been taught. Still, I was praised, by my mother and by my teacher, Mrs. Bleuth.  

Mrs. Bleuth took an interest in what I wanted to be when I grew up. Career day was coming up, and I hadn’t decided yet. Our assignment was to type up our goals and to print them out and paste them on trifold posters, granting our hazy aims the gravity of triptychs. Most kids wanted jobs with corporeal value: to work with other people, or with animals, or with their hands. Veterinarians, marine biologists. But I liked spending time in my head. Earlier that year I had a formative experience while staring at an icicle hanging on the school gate. It was long and spindly, almost wending, having grown into an individual and complex shape while holding still. I waited, but for as long as I watched it never fell. It was important to me that I told no one about this. “She would not tell anyone about the icicle,” I narrated. I was often narrating situations. Not with the swiftness of my mother’s horse books, but in the assured tone of our other bedtime reading genre: passages from a children’s Bible. I decided my tendency to narrate made me a writer.  

“Do you mean a reporter?” my mother said. We were sitting together at her computer, using the dial-up before she needed the phone again for work. The desk was strewn with doodles on paper, with dried-out lipstick tubes. We looked up the difference between a writer and a reporter on dogpile.com. A reporter reported the necessary facts. A reporter worked under a deadline. I thought of the icicle.  

“No,” I said.  

“Writer is not a career,” my mother said. “Reporter is a career.”  

I could tell she was disappointed I hadn’t chosen to be something else entirely. An astronaut, or a statistician like her. Reporter seemed like a compromise. 

Dreams must be slotted into reasonable agendas. 

My printer was low on ink, so my presentation—decorated in clip art of a woman in a skirt suit speaking into an overlarge microphone—was streaky, impressionistic. This undermined what little confidence I had in my choice; maybe I should have picked marine biology.  

On career day, we presented our plans to a crowd of parents and teachers. I still wasn’t sure I understood what a reporter was, exactly. Did she write stories or did she talk about them on television? I liked to write stories, but I didn’t like to talk in front of audiences. My presentation was among the meek ones, met with courteous applause.  

There were quirky jobs, like weatherwomen, and lofty goals, like senators. Three girls in my class announced that they would each be the first woman president. Three times, the crowd was overcome with lightness, pleased laughter, spontaneous clapping. I was annoyed.  

▲

I’d stopped taking riding lessons not long after starting them, but we lived near a stable under a trafficked overpass. Beneath trucks and SUVs zooming to or from work, the stable’s patrons rode in a circle through a field of dry grass. Bucolic, I’d say. Let’s go, my mother said, every time we drove by. Finally we went. I rode in front of her on a small horse that was spotted like a cow. Cluck and she’ll go faster, the instructor said. I didn’t want that kind of power, and anyway I was happy hobbling along until this was over. I turned around to look at my mother and her eyes were closed. Was she communing with the horse? Controlling it? Maybe in that moment she was both horse and jockey, her own boss, her illusion of self-sufficiency realized. I’d never seen her so calm. She clucked and cantered ahead, another loop around the wide, gravelly track. Come on, she called out, but I stayed back and watched her.

▲

Ambition is an imprecise word. It can be ambitious to own a business or to otherwise lead. It can also be ambitious to try to make something original, or to say something subversive. Where I grew up — in a suburb of Dallas; a city devoted to sports, advertising, and other measurable pursuits; that is, pursuits with winners and losers— the former was considered admirable and the latter was considered indulgent. 

If I was to be ambitious, I was not to sit at home and make art, confining myself to the private, domestic space where art-making happened, in my bedroom alone like some housewife. I was to be a strong woman, a leader who supported herself, whose accomplishments had apparent breadth.  

Writing, I felt then, was a shameful practice: useless, slothful, anti-social. Still, I pretended to be sick so I could stay home from school or from sports practice, where I was excelling, to write prose poems about our weedy garden on my LiveJournal. In high school, I joined the newspaper staff. I put together an exposé on the nutritional value of school lunches. We had heated discussions about circulation, about moving online. For my college paper, I speed-wrote overly confident reviews of books and plays, and they were posted on a website that’s now archived. I thought often of the icicle. 

After college, I got a good job at an online media company where I worked as an editor and aggregator of cultural news. There, reporting meant compiling and attributing with haste. It wasn’t unlike Mad Minute. I filled in the answers savvily, racing against an imagined competitor. Once, a colleague told me that her editor had instructed her to “add some language” to the body of the article, as though language were an exchangeable good like any other. My colleague and I marveled at the absurdity of this; we laughed about it often. But it began to affect me, the bald expeditiousness. There were layoffs; there were more layoffs. I didn’t even bother to curl my hair with a hot iron; I left it limp instead. One day I quit unceremoniously. My mother was silent on the phone.  

“I don’t know what I want for you,” she said finally, sounding exhausted. She often sounded exhausted. I imagined her in her nude pantyhose, though she was no longer expected to wear them. That was something: at least her legs could go free. “Something different from what I had,” she said.  

This was the first time she had confessed her unhappiness at work instead of feigning positivity for my sake. 

“It sounds like you worked at an ad agency,” she said. “Everywhere is an ad agency.”  Everywhere relies on replaceable stewards of minutia. That, I think, was what my mother meant. Strength and swiftness. 

But what about the horse?

▲

When Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, she observed that domestic life was trying, a never-ending cycle of “general and inessential” tasks. “The housewife wears herself out marking time,” she wrote. “She makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present.” But what if the public sphere—the working world—was as trying and alienating as the home? We would have gained material comfort—no small thing—but not autonomy, not a sense of who we are beyond our inessential work. Our cabinets would be filled with coins and scraps. 

It took me a long time to slow down, to engage the private part of myself that is not my mother. To not run or flex. To sit still and by doing so to take on a shape. To hang precariously. To simply hope I don’t fall. I told someone about the icicle and nothing bad happened. I told others and I learned that I wasn’t alone. It is a privilege and a betrayal, this slowing down. My mother sees it that way. You’re a snob, she said during our worst fight. Childish, entitled. There’s no use in resisting, she said. People are and will continue to be how they always have been. One looks out for oneself, she said, more or less. She invoked the name of my troubled generation. I believe that she is proud of me.  

During this fight, I was reminded of career day, of the three first women presidents, of the levity in the gym when they announced their candidacies, their high ponytails, the spontaneous clapping. A different kind of ambition. 

My mother had been annoyed that day, too. They can’t all be the first, she’d said. 

▲

Now when I look at the cover of King of the Wind, I notice a trait characteristic of Romantic painting. The central subject—in this case, the horse—is rendered in realistic detail, while the background, the context, is obscured, whipping around in a fit. There’s a shaded mouth and muzzle, painful gnawing. The rest is a mess of clouds and sand. 

The image terrifies me. It’s possible that it always has, only now I’ve taken the time to describe why. It’s a small kind of freedom, a rejection of what I’ve inherited. A decision to use words and not merely add language, to not lose myself in unmeditated pencil strokes, in quick answers, erratic and supposedly correct. 

Maddie Crum's writing can be found in Joyland, The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.