Margaret was the most experienced rider on the Hollins equestrian team. She also had designed her school’s flashy riding jackets. Their coats of white silk with bright blue felt letters sewn onto the back stood out against the prominent brown tweeds or black velvet customarily worn by the other teams. Margaret had known her design would catch the judges’ eyes. She also knew that the best way for her to be noticed was to remove her hat as she entered their view, allowing her hair to fall free. This trick, along with her considerable talent, had earned the golden-haired beauty on the golden palomino many ribbons over her four years at the school.
Margaret was glad her mother was there, but it felt odd to have Roberta at Hollins. The sisters had grown apart these last four years. The little time they spent together on Christmas break or on vacation in Maine only seemed to emphasize their differences. Hollins was something Margaret alone had shared with her mother. Her sister felt like an interloper.
The graduation horse show was going far better than the previous year’s event, when a car had startled one of the horses. At the time, the riding ring’s fence was only partly finished, and the small pine trees they had used to outline the oval couldn’t contain the frightened mare when it bolted. The runaway horse didn’t stop until it reached Carvin Creek, where it dumped its rider into the water with an abrupt halt. It had been the first competition for several of the girls, and more than a few had fallen from their horses. The ashes the equestrian team shoveled into the ring fortunately softened their spills.
Margaret’s first jump was effortless, and she kept her horse at an easy canter as they flew over the next fence. She loved the feel of the horse as it lifted itself off the ground. It was up to the rider to position and pace a horse and then relinquish control to the horse as it carried them into the air and over the gate. It wasn’t the horse’s ability to leap over the jumps that was in question but the rider’s ability to become one with the horse at just the right moment. Margaret loved that moment.
Lately, worry had wrapped itself around her. She was leaving college with no certifications that would earn her a respectable job. She hadn’t applied to graduate schools because of her engagement to George. Margaret wondered what was wrong with her. Why couldn’t she be like most of her friends who were happily preparing for marriage? She wanted, more than anything, to be a writer, but that seemed entirely unlikely. She felt like a candle burned at both ends. Her only option was to move home and look for work.
Margaret and her horse faced the last two jumps. This was the last time she would compete in this ring she had helped to build. She was going to miss this school, her friends, and her teachers. Hollins felt more like home than the big house on Long Island. She desperately wished she could stay on there instead of returning home. Barely a single civil word passed between her mother and father anymore. Bruce’s de facto home was his large boat anchored close to the Brown house in Great Neck. Margaret would have no such escape available to her when she moved back. Perhaps she had given up the fairy-tale wedding because she was afraid of repeating her parents’ miserable marriage.
Margaret refused to let her friends or family know how much she feared failing as a writer, nor would she let them see the waves of regret that flooded over her every time she thought about George Armistead. Humor, she decided, was the best way to deflect doubt and fear. She laughed off her broken engagement in front of her friends but was angry with herself for being the oddity instead of the norm.
Of course, there were moments when that strategy failed and her heart ached. But she didn’t want to think too deeply about that now. She settled herself in the saddle and sped the horse forward. They cleared the last jumps with ease. Their performance was certainly worthy of a ribbon, if not the trophy. Margaret looked toward her mother and sister along the rail, then slowed her horse to a walk as she led him slowly out of the gate.
Six
1934–1935
Black and yellow
Little fur bee
Buzzing away
In the timothy
Drowsy
Browsy
Lump of a bee
Rumbly
Tumbly
Bumbly bee.
Where are you taking
Your golden plunder
Humming along
Like baby thunder?
Over the clover
And over the hay
Then over the apple trees
Zoom away
BUMBLE BEE
Every seat in the auditorium was taken, but people continued to file in. Gertrude Stein had requested that only five hundred tickets be sold to the lecture, but it appeared the struggling Brooklyn Academy of Music was reluctant to turn patrons away. Chairs lined the aisles, and people perched where they could in the slivers of space that remained.
The audience was primarily comprised of women, although Stein’s arrival in America had been widely heralded to all. Newspaper headlines and an electric sign in Times Square welcomed the famous author home from her self-imposed exile in France. The academy was her first stop on a thirty-seven-city lecture tour. A radio interview, the only one she had ever given, had been broadcast two weeks earlier from NBC’s studio. Margaret and another Hollins alumna listened to the broadcast at Margaret’s Greenwich Village apartment. They shared an admiration for Stein’s work while at Hollins, unlike most of the girls at the school who found the writer’s work perplexing. Stein’s repetitious style was meant to evoke clarity, but her use of minimal punctuation frustrated many American readers. In the interview, Stein claimed that punctuation crippled deep understanding of the written word. Margaret wanted to take colored chalk and write that theory all over the blackboard of the professor who had made her repeat freshman English.
Both of the girls were living in New York and attempting to write for a living. Neither was succeeding. Her friend had sold only one poem, and Margaret hadn’t sold a single piece. Her work as a nanny and shopgirl didn’t cover her living expenses, but an allowance from her father gave her a comfortable enough life. Her apartment didn’t have hot water, but she always had enough money to dine out, see plays, and attend lectures like the three that Stein was to give at the academy.