The beauty salon
My daughter J. is giving her horse Caprichosa the full beauty salon treatment with the Shop Vac (I don’t have one of those fancy horse vacuums, never have, although I wouldn’t mind.). I have to help a little, because 9-year-old J. can’t reach the mare’s back without standing on a bucket. She’s taking the Andalusian to school this Friday for Show and Tell. I’m hoping when J. is a teenager, she will still be crazy, passionate, mad about horses, and less about other things.
Equines probably kept me out of mischief as a girl, although I was never really prone to much of that anyway. Most of the time as a teenager, I preferred my horse to most boys. (And the joke perpetrated upon me by the comedy duo of my husband and 8-year-old son C. is that they suspect I love my big draft horse Toby more than them. Hah. Hah.) If you have a daughter, here's what I think─A horse is well worth the investment, and the time, and all of the work for this reason alone.
So given my predilection for living in the barn, by the autumn of my sophomore year I had a very big problem. My friend’s brother had a big, gooey crush on me.
To which my reaction was … yuck.
Anyway, I decided the best way to get rid of this pimply-faced, kinky-haired nuisance of a marching band trumpet player was to stop ducking him in the hallways at school, to stop ignoring the elaborately folded (dare I say origami?) college-ruled love letters he dropped into my purse in algebra class, and to stop looking wildly for an escape route when he peered at me like a lovesick cow from across the football field while we marched eight to ten.
I invited the boy over to my house.
When he arrived on Saturday morning, my dad (as requested) escorted him (probably chuckling under his breath now that I think of it) down to the barn where I was waiting in my oldest, cruddiest overalls, a ratty flannel shirt, hair twisted in two braids. My quarter horse was cross-tied in the aisle where he’d just left an enormous pile of green steaming manure, and I was grooming. I’d been grooming for hours, in fact. Mucking stalls. Hauling hay. Emptying and cleaning water troughs. I didn’t have a horse vac then either, but my mom’s old Sears canister did the trick. Pearl the white goat (whose job it was to keep my high-strung quarter horse company) was also roaming the barn at will.
I figured Romeo would get one look at me in my natural habitat and bolt. That was the simple beauty of the plan.
But he didn’t.
That boy planted himself on an upturned feed bucket in his neatly pressed gray polyester disco pants, black silk shirt, shiny belt, and platform shoes (I believe he fancied himself some kind of John Travolta) and proceeded to talk my ears off. I am ashamed to say that I answered mostly in monosyllabic grunts. Occasionally I asked him to hand me a brush. Pearl the goat was delighted to have a captive audience. She thrust her dainty muzzle into his face, eyed him with her green shifty eyes, sniffed at his odoriferous aftershave, tasted his socks. He patted the obdurate goat on the head and even said she was pretty. How long had I had such a nice goat for a pet, he asked. Luckily, he hadn’t brought flowers.
Boy, that was sure mean of me.
And he still asked me to the homecoming dance. (Being at the height of my feminine charm, however, I wound up not going with him or anyone else. That year. Or the next. Or the year after that.)
