Bright Young Women

Ed would drop by the barn with bags of carrots for the horses and cigarettes for the instructors. All that hay and wood everywhere, the animals trapped in their stalls, and horse people smoked like you wouldn’t believe. Tina never saw Deb eat, only smoke and drink whiskey that she kept out on the barn’s kitchen sink, next to the bottle of leather polish.

Tina welcomed Ed’s visits because Deb held her tongue around her father. Ed would sit on a bench outside the ring and watch Tina warm up with a long rein in canter, and Deb would refrain from shouting at her Lean back before you fall off and break your neck and can never brush your pretty blond hair again as Tina approached the fence. Tina rode for seven years and never once took a fall. You were not considered a real rider until you were thrown, and Deb might have respected Tina more if she’d just let it happen, and no doubt Tina would have been a better rider if she weren’t always choking up on the reins to avoid the inevitable, but Tina could never bring herself to let go. It drove Deb crazy. She called Tina a princess, a pampered baby who was afraid of getting dirty and getting hurt.

One day, after a tense hour in the ring, Ed approached Tina as she was hosing down her horse. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been coming around so often, he said, patting the horse’s neck, but I don’t want to see you take a spill. Ed chucked her chin with a knuckle, the gesture brief but establishing—a commencement of something. Gotta protect that face of yours. Tina focused hard on guiding a white stripe of sweat from the horse’s flank to his hoof. Later, after she quit riding, she learned it was a sign of excessive labor when the horse’s sweat foamed white, and she cried for all those times she’d unwittingly rode a living creature so close to collapse.

Ed started bringing little gifts for Tina after that—a horse-shaped Christmas tree ornament, lemon-scented oil for her saddle. For her mother, pouches of French potpourri to hang in her car. I know how that barn smell lingers, he’d say, and they’d share a laugh as the unlucky parents of horse children. Tina’s mother was thrilled by the attention. She was the type of woman who went around saying she’d met Tina’s father “at the office,” allowing everyone to assume she was the receptionist. In truth, Tina’s mother was the cleaning girl for the building, the daughter of a married white man and an unmarried Mexican teenager, and Edward Eubanks’s interest in her daughter, in her, subsidized all the gaps in her newly minted Highland Park pedigree.

Ed was a figure in the community, obscenely charitable and well connected. Tina’s family found themselves invited into smaller and smaller social circles, on island vacations in smaller and smaller planes. Sometimes her parents weren’t invited at all, and it was just Tina and Ed on those islands. Ed was in his seventies and twice divorced. Tina was the same age as most of his grandchildren, and wasn’t it fun for Tina, as an only child, to go on vacation and pretend like she had siblings? From the top deck of his beachfront compound in Maui, a cowboy-hatted Ed would watch Tina and his grandkids try to surf. With the Pacific dissolving the orange fireball on the horizon, Ed would call to Tina that it was time to get ready for dinner.

Ed would bathe her in his bathroom, lapping soapy water over her nascent breasts and between her legs. The house was full of people, and no one acted like there was anything inappropriate about this. Tina’s body was developing, but she was only eleven years old, very much a child. But then she was twelve, and fifteen, and still Ed was the one to give her a bath. Complicity was reshaped—from the faultlessness of a loving grandfather taking a vested interest in a promising pupil of his daughter’s to the faultlessness of a red-blooded man taking a vested interest in a beautiful young lady he intended to marry.

Ed came to the house the day after Tina’s seventeenth birthday and proposed marriage to the whole family. He was nearing his final act in life, and he did not want to be alone at the end. In turn, he would offer Tina what no man her age could. With tears in his eyes, he told Tina and her family that he would see to it that she could do whatever she wanted with her life. Go to Radcliffe, if it called to her, and live anywhere in the world. Tina thought about the barn that Ed bought Deb right after high school, and she felt ill because she understood how it was that Deb was so miserable doing whatever she wanted with her life too.

Ed left Tina and her family to think it over for a few days. You’ll never have to worry about any of this, her mother said the next morning at the breakfast table, the electric bill splayed alongside the plate of bacon. You’ll never know this kind of tired, her father bookended when he came home from work that evening. On Tina’s wedding day, her mother pulled her great-grandmother’s veil over her daughter’s face and compared the whole thing to punching in at an undesirable job for a solid retirement package.

Tina quit riding soon after, but just before that happened, the barn hosted a group of women from a halfway house in South Dallas. They arrived on a school bus with a female psychiatrist who explained to Tina and Deb that horses were often used for therapeutic purposes, to help people feel connected to their bodies again after trauma. Deb stayed glued to the side of the counselor all day, and later, Tina discovered a scrap of paper in the office with the counselor’s name, address, and an appointment time. In the weeks that followed, she began to notice a distinct change in Deb—the whiskey bottle disappeared from the kitchen sink, and she spent less and less time with the family, and, consequently, with Ed. She seemed gentler, more introspective, and Tina was both impressed and intrigued. She wanted to know what sorts of things went on in these sessions, and a not yet awakened part of her wanted to know how to distance herself from Ed too.

Tina enrolled at the University of Dallas, majoring in organizational psychology, and met Frances when she came to deliver a lecture on a technique she had developed, known as the Strange Situation Assessment, which demonstrated the importance of healthy childhood attachments. Tina approached Frances after the lecture, and they hit it off. When Frances went back to Seattle, they remained in touch through letters and phone calls. Though, later, Frances admitted that her goal was always to extricate Tina from what she saw as a blatantly abusive and disturbing marriage.

After graduation, Frances talked Tina into moving up to Seattle. In Texas, marriage and family therapists needed to complete two thousand supervised hours before getting a license. In Washington, it was half, and Frances agreed to take Tina on as an apprentice, which would account for many of those hours. One of the age spots on Ed’s head had turned out to be cancerous, and his doctors endorsed a move farther from the equator. He built the Spanish-style mansion in Clyde Hill as an ode to the architecture of his hometown.

Tina and Frances lived close and grew even closer. Ed liked Frances too, or rather, Frances allowed Ed to like her. He was in his eighties by then, and growing frail. He never even touched Tina anymore. All he asked for was companionship, and Tina didn’t see how she could refuse him that, not after everything he’d done for her.

For their seven-year anniversary, Frances invited Tina and Ed over for dinner. Ed was a stickler for Frances’s steak frites with peppercorn sauce. He could go through three ramekins of the stuff, and Frances always set out extra for him.

That night, after the first few bites, Ed started licking his lips, clearing his throat. “More peppercorns in the sauce this evening,” he remarked, not yet afraid.

“I’m experimenting with Chinese hot mustard instead of Dijon,” Frances said.

Ed coughed. “What’s in that?”

“Just mustard powder and water,” Frances said, as Ed rubbed his lips together and wondered why they were going numb.