extent, my sister, because their worlds revolved around the barn and the shows. My sister soared over obstacles on her horse as my parents sat in canvas-backed director’s chairs ringside, drinking gin and tonics. Every day after school, my sister went out to the stables. On the weekends, there was a show on Saturday or Sunday, sometimes both, and they loaded up the maroon 1968 Impala station wagon and drove off to these events—in the countryside of southwest Pennsylvania, in the Brandywine Valley, in Delaware, in New Jersey, and in the Virginias, both West and regular.
While they were thus engaged, I stayed at home with Gammie and her friend Hilda and sometimes my aunt Gertrude, the seamstress. Gammie brought along a handle of vodka and sang songs for me on the piano, including one called “Animal Fair.”
The big baboon by the light of the moon was combing his auburn hair.
Hilda, a tiny woman from North Yorkshire, wore not particularly effective hearing aids. Sometimes, when Gammie started singing, she took them out entirely.
My aunt Gertrude worked at Lillian’s Bridal Salon, sewing together veils and gowns. She’d been married to my uncle Frank for a couple of years, back in the 1950s, but then he’d dropped dead. When we were little, Aunt Gertrude had lived up in our attic. We used to hear her listening to bossa nova music up there.
She had another record she liked, Eddie Lawrence’s “Old, Old Vienna.” This song told the amusing story of an Austrian village wiped out by a landslide of strudel.
The narrator of the song heaved a sentimental sigh at the ballad’s conclusion. Ah! he said. Zat was Vienna!
* * *
“I’m sorry we ignored you,” my mother said to me on the phone, years later. Her voice quavered. “We were just so proud of Cyndy. She was so beautiful, on horseback. We loved watching her. But we forgot about you. It wasn’t fair.”
What Hildegarde was saying wasn’t untrue, of course, and I’d spent no small amount of time in the intervening years grumbling about how I’d been ditched as a child, over and over again, so that they could drive off to watch my sister compete in horse shows. Indeed: that I spent so many hours listening to Gammie sing “Animal Fair” and eating hot dog stew was hardly fair.
But the truth of the matter is that I liked being alone. I woke up at dawn and headed out into the woods with Playboy. I explored the abandoned houses on the Earle estate. I fished for brown trout with my rod and reel in brightly trickling streams. I stood beneath the arch of a stone bridge and skipped stones upon Crum Creek. You could make the case for how sad it was, if you wanted, that my family was constantly giving me the slip. But if I were to be honest about it, I liked being ditched. Nothing made me happier than everyone else going away, leaving me to explore the universe with Playboy. In the end, Gammie and Hilda were just the price I had to pay for those blissful, silent hours in the forest with the dog, and after a certain point my parents didn’t even bother with the formality of Gammie anymore and just trusted me to fend for myself. I mowed the lawn with the Sears mower, my nostrils thick with the smell of gasoline and fresh-cut grass, my ears ringing from the roar of the engine.
The elephant sneezed and fell on his knees, and that was the end of the monk.
“It was fine,” I told my mother. “You did a good job.” She did, too.
And she was right about my sister. She was beautiful on a horse.
* * *
Actually, she was beautiful off of a horse, too. Cyndy was a year and four months older than I, born in February 1957. She had long bright yellow hair, and blue eyes like my father, and a poise and confidence that you could not have found in me. While I was off talking military code with GI Joe and changing the oil in the riding mower, she was busy becoming a child prodigy. By the time she was thirteen, my sister was the top-ranked junior rider in the state of Pennsylvania. It was a rarefied world, the world of competitive show jumping and riding. But she was a star.
Checkmate and my sister were beautiful to watch. There was something unworldly about them together, something that you could describe only as love or