“Herd,” I say. “Do you know how much you’re herding me?”
But Yegina is already brushing past Rick on the way to her line, and he looks befuddled first, then sly, then licks his lips.
Time-lapse cameras could not capture the negative speed at which I move toward Greg, who gives me a casual wave. He is wearing clothes I recognize—an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt for a Vermont reggae festival—and the sheepish expression he gets when he feels outnumbered by women. As I approach, I feel like I am walking into the past, into the era when he was still my boyfriend. I wave back, attempting nonchalance, but it looks like I’m swatting at gnats.
Kaye, cancer survivor and woman of the hour, throws her leg over Uncle Bud and gives a whoop.
Greg leans toward me. “Can you give me a lift home tonight? I need to talk.”
“But I drove Yegina,” I say.
“Can she get another ride?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Already I’m falling into my old pattern with Greg, almost unable to refuse him.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t call you back,” he says. There’s an emotion in his voice that I can’t read.
“Friends, Angelenos, and the cancer-free,” a helmeted Kaye shouts from atop Uncle Bud. The horse ducks his head as if to put distance between himself and Kaye’s vocal cords but otherwise remains motionless. “I am so touched and honored that you could be with me today.”
A few cheers go up, and so do a couple of riders, awkwardly spraddling their mounts. One woman in pink flip-flops gets into a heated conversation with Rick, and then storms off to her car. Kaye blinks at the exchange and then soldiers on with her speech. Kaye excels in soldiering on. She is the classic beautiful girl from the Midwest who comes to Los Angeles to break into TV and ends up as a personal assistant to a celebrity—in Kaye’s case, to the same famous actor/collector duo who once hired Greg.
The sight of Kaye usually fills me with both admiration and despair, but tonight I’m just admiring. Tonight I need to sun myself in her blithe optimism. A blue-eyed honey brunette with fabulously long legs and the waist of an ant, Kaye could easily get through life without female friends, but instead she courts as many as possible. I have never known anyone else as warmly and successfully social as her. I have also never met anyone else with such cheerful self-love. When Kaye found out she had throat cancer, she transformed herself from a human being to a living campaign; she started a blog and a fund for cancer research; marketed a green-tea cookie line (Kaye’s Anti-Cancer Snaps); and wrote daily updates on her radiation, surgery, and experiments in holistic treatments. “Don’t let the ‘meanies’ rule your life,” she posted. “The reins are in your hands.” (Sixth-grade slang and horse metaphors abound in her prose.) The way Kaye talks about the disease, you’d think cancer was something she invented in her quest for self-improvement.
Yet within eight months, Kaye beat back her tumor. She looks radiant now.
“Saddle up,” she says to me, to her life-coach friends Sara and Nelia, and to a new woman who has been introduced as Kaye’s “personal acupuncture savior.” “First round of margaritas is on me.”
I click on my helmet and cheer with the others. If I didn’t feel Greg’s amused eyes on my face, I could fully enjoy being Kaye’s eleventh or twelfth best friend. Instead of acknowledging him, I focus on the horses that Rick is leading our way: a tall cream-and-brown pied gelding and a slender black mare who keeps lunging sideways and tossing her head. I am not much of a horsewoman, but it’s apparent to me that something is bothering the mare.
“Babe,” says Rick, and mutters something low. The mare ducks her head, nostrils flaring. “Come on, Babe,” he says.
He hands the gelding’s bridle to Greg. “This is Cheyenne,” he says. “You might need to give him a kick up the hills, but he’s a good boy.”
Then Rick appraises me again, holding Babe’s bridle. “She’ll be fine. She’s never been out at night, so keep her with me and the others,” he says. “S’okay?”
She’s never been out at night? It’s not okay. Yet under Rick’s and Greg’s gazes, my defiant little-sister self kicks in: I want a different horse, but I’m not going to admit it in front of the boys.
“Rick!” calls the ranch owner from across the swirl of horses and riders. “We need six more mounted over here.”
“S’okay?” Rick says to me again.
“I’ll switch with her,” Greg calls from beside the giant shoulder of Cheyenne.
“I’m fine.” I take Babe’s reins. Greg once had a rich girlfriend who played polo, but I bet he’s never ridden on a real trail in his life.
I swing into the saddle. The musty warm smell of horse, the way Babe’s dark spine bobs beneath me, makes my Vermont childhood come back again in a rush of grassy memories. We did own a horse. He was old and hated going down hills, so mostly I curried him until the air in the barn shone with his red-gold hair.
Babe stomps and pulls at her bit, but I hold her back, waiting for others to rise into their saddles. Finally we all start moving, led by Rick, and I get absorbed in the business of steering a large creature. Greg leans across from his own mount and asks me if I’m sure I’m all right. It’s then, in that weird swaying second as Babe lurches from Cheyenne, that I really regard Greg and see through his polite mask to the hollows gathering under his eyes and cheekbones. His skin is the color of cement.
“You need to eat,” I say to him. “You’re not eating.”
He smiles remorsefully at this. “Maggie,” he says.
But then Rick is whistling at us all to follow him out the ranch gate, and the whirl of horses distracts me again. By the time I reach the dirt road leading to the ridgeline, we’re in the last throes of the sunset. I can’t see the ocean yet—it’s blocked by the rim of hills—but the sun must be close to the Pacific. Our faces are bathed in light, but the shadows have risen as high as our stirrups. The slope’s shrubs are also sunk in shade, and the pebbles that spin from the horses’ footsteps roll beneath their branches and vanish. Part of me can’t believe that I am riding a horse here, in this dusty-green chaparral above sprawling Los Angeles, that this city and this wilderness can coexist, that I can exist on top of this massive uppity animal that carries me. According to Kaye, we’ll be riding a total of five miles tonight, up through the treeless hills and down the other side to eat and drink, and then return.
“It’ll be dark coming back,” the ranch owner shouts, “but don’t worry because the horses all want to get home.” She slams the gate behind us. “Just keep them away from your margaritas.”
Weak laughs scatter over our group, and we’re off. The earth is still sun-warm now, but a damp cool is spreading. I wish I’d brought a jacket.
“Pull to the right to go right,” Rick hollers. “Pull to the left to go left. Give them a little kick if they get slow. Let the horses lead. They know the way.”
I steer Babe after Rick, but suddenly Rick is breaking away to retrieve Yegina, whose dull-eyed brown mare seems fixating on going back to the paddock. Yegina, ordinarily graceful, looks lumpy and lopsided, as if she can’t find the right place to balance.
“No, no. No. Please,” she entreats the mare. “Not that way.”
“Susie, Susie,” Rick clucks, grabbing the reins from Yegina, pulling the horse around. “You got to go out one more time.”