Free Edie by Jean Stein Page A

convinced everyone that I was too heavy for him and that he’d get tired under my weight. That was cool; it didn’t bother me.
    We were on top of horses at fourteen months. They’d prop us up on them for a picture to be taken, and then you’d keep wanting a horse. Everybody rode, and you just started riding the first thing you could. The big game was Cowboys and Indians. One would be a cowboy and the other an Indian and we’d chase each other through the trees. Edie and Suky rode at night, through the moonlight. I didn’t ever go with them. I don’t know what they talked about. They’d get up really early and watch the sun come up—things like that.
    I remember this picture of us being lined up on our horses. Weird trip. Bobby didn’t like it at all. Saucie thought it was strange. Pamela tried to play it super cool. Minty was just bashful, and Kate was smily. But Edie . . . she seemed French to me when this one was taken. The picture was for an article in
Life
magazine which never appeared, called The Working American” or something like that, and it was supposed to show how we worked the ranch with horses and eight children. Edie is on Zorillo, which means Skunk in certain derivations of the word in Spanish. Otherwise it means Little Fox. She really knew how to get it on. Look at her, man. Little French lady. Already her hands are in place; nobody else has their hands that way. She already has her little thing going.
    SAPCIE SEDGWICK  I remember thinking how phony the
Life
pictures were—the family wasn’t united like that at all. The main thingI resented was the image of everyone sitting together devotedly reading after dinner. We read after dinner only because nobody could
talk
about anything. It was a form imposed, like a cookie cutter, from outside.
    There isn’t much in common between these cosmetic pictures and the old photos of the earlier Sedgwicks with their amusing, knobbly faces . . . they all looked like a bunch of Jerusalem artichokes. The “Sedgwick Nose” is large and curves downward like a beak. None of us got it, though my parents kept an eye on Minty. I told you my father thought I looked like a sausage when I was born. “Sausie” is what’s in the early photograph albums and on my christening pin. My father used to say, “Sauce, pauce, puddin’ and pie, kissed the boys and made them cry.” He also called me Puddin’. He had nice nicknames for us. Kate was Miss Rincus, Kate-a-rinks-Kate-a-rincus. Minty was Squints, Squinterino. Pamela was Pamelelagraph, Giraffe. Edie was Weedles, sometimes Weasel. At dinner he would carve, and he would say, “Well, what are you going to have, Miss Weedles?” He would sometimes refer to the whole lot of us as “monkeyshines.”
    My parents also named animals very well. My mother had a mare named Lady Murasaki, and Flying Cloud was my father’s horse—so beautiful, a pale strawberry roan. Gazette was also my father’s horse, even though he was too heavy for her. She was a lovely dappled gray, small and slight and narrow in the chest, and my father was a big man and he had all this macho stuff on his saddle. He kept a rope, though he didn’t rope. His saddle must have weighed 50 or 60 pounds, and he weighed 180. He was so heavy for her that she would “cross feet” when she was tired in order to support his weight. She was the most beautiful, affectionate, intelligent creature . . . absolutely responsive. My father practically didn’t have to use the reins at all. He loved her very much, but he didn’t reduce the weight of his tack. It reminded me of the scenes where Vronsky breaks his mare’s back in
Anna Karenina.
My father looked terrific on a horse, but my mother was “with” her horse when she rode, though she didn’t look like much. She never braced like a cowboy; she rode forward as an English rider might who was sitting to the trot, so she jiggled a lot. But the cowboys said she was really the good rider. She had wonderful hands