Things I Learned About Sex, Love, and Attraction at the Barn
By Nancy Parshall
Cheating
I’m 12, opening the door to Tack Room #3 and finding the handsome, Amway-selling husband of a boarder kissing the riding instructor, not in that peckish way, but in that full-on arms around each other, heads tilted, no-one-else-in-the-world way, including me, who the lovers didn’t see as I closed the door and suddenly understood why he came to the barn on weekdays for his wife’s riding lessons, and me, not able to sleep for a week wondering what I was supposed to do with the information, and me, probably the only one at the barn who understood why, a year later, in the middle of the night, his wife left him and their son and her horse and the state of Michigan without notice, not to return.
Wrestling
At 13, I’m in a tickling match turned wrestling match with the 20-year-old barn manager, his fiancé looking on, when suddenly, face to face on the floor, our eyes lock, the wrestling stops, one second, two seconds, three seconds, four, and we stand up, me brushing imaginary dirt off my jeans, walking off while his fiancé looks at him, then me, then him.
Teasing
At 14, I watch a broodmare being taken to the window of the chestnut-colored stallion’s stall, the stallion who shouldn’t have been passing on those genes, the ones that made him crazy, that made the whites of his eyes pop, that made him so unpredictable that he was left behind bars unless breeding a mare, but first, each day before the act, the mare was led to his stall for teasing, which meant she stood on the other side of the bars while he grunted, his engorged penis swinging as he paced the stall, and her, within a week, coming into heat and being ready, and me, left wondering who was really being teased.
Arousal
Still 14, I’m invited by the barn guys to watch the teased mare being bred. I see her tied in the shoot, her tail wrapped in an ACE bandage to not be in the way, her legs hobbled so she couldn’t kick the stallion if she didn’t want it, which wasn’t likely since she was in heat and receptive, the lips of her vagina winking and squirting, and the stallion, controlled by a chain over his nose, prancing, already hard and swinging, until he was allowed to mount her. I remember the handler grabbing the stallion’s penis and guiding it into her vagina, and once in, the stallion biting the crest of her neck for purchase, to maintain balance while he pumped, all before being backed off, semen still dripping from his penis. And me, mouth agape, feeling aroused and wondering if the guys felt the same, if they had hard-ons in their jeans. And me, not being able to look any of them in the eye for several days.
Impaled
At 14, I receive a phone call telling me to stay away from the barn, telling me that the gentle bay stallion, not the crazy one, had been led outside for breeding on that beautiful summer’s day, and I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but I hear that the sweet stallion, in his excitement, had reared up and come down on a metal T-post impaling himself through the belly, never to breed again, never to breathe again, and there's me, staying away from the barn that day and the next, giving them time to bury him and clean up the mess, me, never asking questions yet wondering why-in-the-world they’d breed a mare near a sharp T-post, me, left wondering why it had to be the good stallion, the nice stallion. And me, thinking we shouldn’t have to die for sex, for passion.
Sleepover
She’s 19. I’m 15, and not wanting to sleep in her full-size bed. Earlier that summer she’d offered to haul my horse with hers to shows in her trailer. “We can share the gas bill. It will be more fun to go together.” She was a capable, well-schooled equestrian who walked like a softball player, which she was, and I was proud to be associated with her, proud to have been asked. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a girl-crush upon first meeting her months before, the kind where you watch from a distance, the kind where you’re tongue-tied. We travelled to local shows most weekends that summer, sometimes on both Saturdays and Sundays. The night before a show, we’d load our tack in the trailer, add hay bags and grain, so we’d be ready to haul out early, needing only to load the horses. She said I had to go home with her the night before shows so we could start early, so we’d arrive together in the morning, so there wasn’t a risk of me oversleeping, which had never happened on the morning of a horse show. Being in her bed felt funny, like I was sleeping with a boy, though I’d never done that, and while we each slept on our own edge of the mattress, I couldn’t help but think her intentions of having me there were more about exploring possibilities than getting to the barn at the same time in the morning.
Carsick
At 15, I’m traveling to Detroit for the annual breeder’s futurity after being told to ride with our 50-something potbellied farrier. “Ninny, you’re riding with him.” I didn’t question things. I was just happy to be going. We drove the four hours between Traverse City and Detroit, just the two of us on the bench seat of his pickup truck, him plying me with lemon drop candies and patting the spot next to him. “You can move over if you want.” And me, a sassy girl gone quiet, feeling I might throw up.
Statutory
The victim and I were both 15. I remember seeing the name of the forty-something husband of one of the boarders, a handsome, twinkly eyed man, on the front page of the local paper, accused and later convicted of statutory rape. Did I know her? Was she in my class? How could this happen? He was so nice. His wife, so nice. I wondered where it happened, in his pickup at a job site? I wondered how many times it happened, more than once? I wondered if his penis was short and fat like his fingers.
First Love
I’m 15 and falling in love for the first time, real love, breathless love, not like my fantasy love affairs with Batman, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, Bruce Springsteen. I fell in love at the barn. With a horse. She was a yearling Quarter Horse filly who’d been trailered-in on her way to the breeder’s futurity in Detroit where she would win a prize. Her copper color, her flaxen mane and tail, her four white socks, her kind eye. She was perfection. The first time I saw her, my heart beat wildly. I felt flushed. I couldn’t have known that in another year, I’d be the one to lead her, to show her, to ride her. I’d upgrade my horse and she would be all mine.
Nancy Parshall’s writing has been nominated twice for the Best of the Net awards, and her fiction chapbook, Proud Flesh, won the 2017 Michigan Writers chapbook competition. This piece is an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress that centers around six weeks spent in the Coral Sea as the only woman on a prawn trawler. She resides in Northwestern Michigan.