Virgin Bride Summer Camp

For Janet

我喜歡住在台北 I like living in Taipei, 因為我可以去全部東西跟我狗狗 because I can bring my dog with me everywhere. Bracing for my Mandarin tutor’s correction and follow-up question, I tilt my screen down so the laptop camera catches the auburn swirl of Milou in her typical pose, like an apple cider donut in the morning light. I had wanted to name her 甜甜圈 tián tián quān, donut, but we’d kept the rescue’s name. Consistency will be a comfort, everyone assured us.

她是什麼狗? What kind of dog is she?

米格魯! I answer enthusiastically. I suspect she’s actually more redbone coonhound, but ‘beagle’ is the one dog breed I know. Milou makes a convincing enough beagle that the rescue named her after the breed in an unintentional allusion to Tin Tin’s dog.

下一句子 next sentence.

I take a deep breath, 很多台灣人吃素食； 我也吃素食飯 many Taiwanese people eat vegetarian food; I also eat vegetarian food. My tutor corrects my uncolloquial phrasing: just eat vegetarian, not eat vegetarian food, then asks why, 為什麼？

The justifications I’d typically give in English are well above my Mandarin vocabulary, but a reason I haven’t thought about in years is coming out of my mouth. My endocrine response transports me back to 1990s California, standing excitedly in new paddock boots, blowing gently nose-to-nose into oblong nostrils that twitch above thoughtfully-smacking lips. 因為馬害怕吃肉的人 because horses are afraid of people who eat meat.

The choice seemed so obvious as a ‘tween in Virgin Bride summer camp, a family friend’s attempt to indoctrinate all the young girls she knew in horsewomanship.

“If they’re busy with horses, they won’t have time nor patience for boys,” Janet advertised.

“The camp worked!” my mother joked when I chose a women’s college. Then again more snidely when I started bringing home girlfriends.

That summer included a particularly deterring warning about proximity to boys, because Felina 2 was nearing the end of an 11-month gestation. (Felina 1 was Janet’s true love, stolen by horse thieves years before.) Between riding lessons in a compact backyard paddock, I mucked stalls, curry-combed and brushed the horses, carefully picked packed mud from their tender hooves, measured out flakes of alfalfa for their breakfast or mixed vitamins into apple cider vinegar digestifs. My mother would wrinkle her nose and cheeks up in a quick affectionate smile while watering the bougainvillea, whose papery magenta blooms (technically bracts, not flowers) on thorny vines were the sole survivors within horse-snacking reach. She spent the summer there too, covering Janet’s house in murals. The house already stood out in the futuristically-designed Santa Ana neighborhood whose large lots encircled cul-de-sacs intended not for cars now making 3-point turns, nor our horses’ hooves, but as helicopter landing zones. The architect was betting on the next new rage being chopper commute.

Elvis as the Angel Gabriel began to blow fecundly into my mother’s ear in an Annunciation scene self-portrait, while a larger-than-life Lord and Lady of Virgin Bride Camp pranced across the façade as Renaissance royalty abreast their steeds, loyal dogs at their heels. It was nearly time for Felina 2 to foal as my mother finished a trompe-l'œil balcony overlooking Tuscan hills. My parents had taken me out of school the year before to travel through Italy. Their justification for letting me fail every subject was that the US educational system was designed to produce docile factory workers, not artists nor intellectuals. I gloried in the churches and catacombs, but concealed my career goals. I knew they would argue that to be the Pope, I would need to be a man, or at least Catholic.

Feeding Felina 2 raspberry leaves to quicken her birth, admiring her paisley-whorl-shaped ears swivel and flick, a new career idea formed. The hair of her mane, paler than her chestnut coat, stuck straight up at the erogenous zone where her mane met her narrow shoulders. I should become a vet. It wasn’t watching her birth Antar that dampened any such desire. Even piecing together the afterbirth on the patio seemed like a thrilling puzzle. The seasoned vet who had seen what might go wrong if we missed a piece was an encouraging guide. It was finding a sickly sticky clump of unidentifiable clotted blood in my hair at night that cured me of any medical career aspirations.

Janet had taught me that looking a gift horse in the mouth comes from gauging the age of a horse and whether it had been cared for by having a vet float (file) its teeth.  For twenty years I’ve been suppressing the urge to explain the meaning to every person I’d heard use the phrase. Now I laugh to myself every time I recognize the Mandarin character for horse, 馬, for it looks to me like the overgrown teeth of a long-tailed wild horse on four stubby legs. My tutor is baffled by the characters I know, not recognizing simple verbs, but knowing electricity, 電. Doesn’t it look just like a cat? 

In Virgin Bride summer camp, we loaded horses into the firetruck-red trailer with a ‘race horses on board’ warning sign, and took them to Chino Hills. Driving through Norco, Janet pointed to the hitching posts in front of stores, the drinking trough outside the post office, the bridle path along the highway. The town’s utopian vision had its residents commuting not by helicopter, but on horseback. “Would you live here?” I asked, but Janet had another future planned: moving to Humboldt. I pictured her like Lauren Olamina, assembling a band of disciples as she trekked North to escape violence and drought.

For winter solstice, I took my partner to Humboldt, where she went galloping through the redwoods on Antar. Her guide, a younger alumna of Virgin Bride summer camp also successfully saved from any interest in boys, raced me along the hard sand of the beach. I advise my students to avoid idioms: “don’t steal other people’s poetry,” I implore. But feeling the clench of excitement in my stomach rising into a swelling thrum in my chest, the grin that squeezes tears of emotion onto my cheeks, I understand the sentiment behind so many equine idioms. I felt the unbridled joy as Felina 2 hit her stride going full tilt when I gave her free rein. The idioms were proof that I was not the only one to experience these feelings.

I wonder whether Janet, standing with her loyal dogs in the dunes above, heard me whoop.

老馬識途。The old horse best knows the way.

L. Acadia is a lit professor at National Taiwan University, a dog pillow at home, and otherwise searching Taipei for new vegan treats, urban hikes, and ghosts. L. has a PhD from Berkeley and writes on censorship, queer love, speculative fiction, religion, and pretexts—the justifications we give in place of true reasons. This is the author’s first non-pseudonymous fiction publication.

Published February 14 2022