Free The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani Page B

new babies, Theodora and Samuel, us. My mother had only just begun painting scenes from Grimms’ fairy tales when we arrived: a swath of Rapunzel’s hair circled the wall of our nursery, only partly painted gold. The mural had been painted over years ago, but I still remembered it so clearly. I had loved it.
    I spoke first, at nine months; Sam waited another five, though he spoke to me earlier, in the dark, in the soft light of morning, when the rest of the house was asleep. My first word was
orange
, which I mangled, but my parents knew what I meant. My mother liked to attribute it to my inherited knowledge of citrus. Sam and I cut teeth late, we were both bald until age two, we hated nap time, we loved bread and orange marmalade.
    But there was still the gloom of our early days: the surprise of us, then my mother’s convalescence. There was always the possibility of death with childbirth, an unavoidable risk, so even before my mother went into labor there was concern she might not handle it well. The winter storm, snow on the ground for the first time in a decade, my mother in bed from the contractions. It must
mean
something, their babies born on
this
day, not any of the other, snowless days.
    First me—A girl! my father said, so my mother would know. Everyone would have preferred a boy for the first child, that went without saying, a person to inherit it all; then, as my father toweled me off and clipped my umbilical cord even closer, so it would not be agitated by clothes, another head crowned and was born quickly, much more quickly than I was, and—A boy. My father did not shout this time, ashamed, confused: he’d wanted a boy and gotten a girl, but now a boy? Something was wrong; the gods didn’t grant wishes like that, without expecting something given in return, in gratitude.
    My mother was in too much pain to hold us properly, so the woman from town cleaned us, smoothed our patchy hair, twisted bits of cotton and coaxed the mucus from our noses and mouths, the afterbirth from our ears. We were tiny. My father held each of us, one after another, to my mother’s breast. We ate indifferently while my mother writhed. My mother had decided during her confinement that she would nurse her child. It was the style then to bring in a wet nurse, but who from Emathla would be suitable? Who could nourish her child as well as she could?
    Dead birds littered the lawn outside. Later, by moonlight and a lantern, my father would collect them in a wheelbarrow and burn them in the rubbish heap, watch feathers float from the plume of smoke, blue feathers, scarlet, brown, white that did not hide dirt. He would watch and consider. He would feel vaguely hopeful, by the moonlight, his breath its own plume in the air, his babies small and pale but healthy, as far as the human eye could tell.
    Mother would tell us that we were loved even before we were born. But that wasn’t quite true: one of us was loved, the other unknown.
    We would not ever leave. I had known about Miss Petit’s, the school where Mother had gone, but I would never be sent there. There was no need. Soon I would go away to a finishing school in Orlando, but only for a few weeks, only long enough to interact with girls my own age, see how they behaved. Mother assured me that I wouldn’t have any trouble learning the ropes. This was to prepare me for my coming out, which would happen before I graduated from college. I would go to Agnes Scott, like Mother, and Sam would go to Emory. We were to be educated. Our minds were fine, important—Atwell minds.
    Sam would become either a doctor or a lawyer. It didn’t matter. Something to do on the side, while he managed our farm. We made our real money in citrus farther south—crops and land now attended to by Mother’s brother on our behalf—and Sam and I would inherit that, too, but right now Mother’s brother tended to it.
    I would live where my husband did, but somewhere nearby. Gainesville, perhaps. Not everyone