A Horse for Elsie Read online

  She picked up a romance novel with a horse on the cover and turned it over. $13.99. She read the paragraph on the back, was stabbed with intense longing, but placed it back on the shelf. You could get all kinds of books at yard sales for a quarter, fifty cents, or a dollar. Mam rejected every one that looked vaguely intriguing, said they weren’t fit. None of her girls were ever going to fill their heads with that romance stuff. It wasn’t true, anyhow.

  That left Elsie to wonder how much her mother felt slighted by her father’s mishap. Or maybe she had just let love and romance wither and die, leaving only bitterness and a sour attitude.

  But no. Her mother and father sincerely loved each other. There was too much happiness and love in their house to think such thoughts. Her parents truly loved each other, no doubt. So with books, like horses, Elsie gave up. She obeyed, didn’t question, stayed within the boundaries her parents set for her.

  Mam sewed the three dresses, allowing Elsie to sew the top of one, the least expensive. Elsie found it frustrating, setting the sleeves properly, learning to sew in a straight line, but with her mother’s encouragement, she didn’t do too badly. The bib aprons were harder, so Mam sewed them herself, pressed them, and let Elsie slide one over her head and tie it behind her back.

  Elsie stood back, turned slowly for her mother’s benefit.

  “All right.”

  That was all she said.

  Just all right.

  Elsie thought she looked at her with a strange light in her eyes, but that was probably from bending over the sewing machine all day.

  She was surprised when her mother came into her bedroom after the lamp was already extinguished. She carried a small battery lamp, her old, faded housecoat swishing as she moved across the floor.

  “Elsie.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I want you to be aware of yourself at market. Not all men are honorable. Some might do you harm by wanting you the way a man is not supposed to want a young girl. Here is a book for you to read. It’s about how to conduct yourself in a Christian way when you’re out in public. You have grown up in the past year, so I think you need to be aware of the proper behavior for a young girl.”

  With that, she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

  Obediently, Elsie read the thin booklet. It changed her life forever. She was so deeply shaken she read her Black Beauty book for an hour before falling into a restless half sleep that left her tired and irritable in the morning.

  When her mother asked if she had read the book, she threw a withering look in her direction and went to the washhouse to begin sorting dirty laundry.

  Chapter Four

  And so Elsie entered the vast, bewildering world of the farmers’ market, thrust into an atmosphere of hustle and bustle, a fast-paced energy that carried her in its unwilling arms and spilled her on the cracked cement floor, struggling heroically to maintain a smidgen of composure.

  She knew nothing of piecrusts and rising yeast rolls. Eli Beiler said they would train her. Ha. The “training” composed of being yelled at by a fat, domineering woman with thin black hair, a unibrow, and, perched on a sausage nose, heavy glasses with lenses so thick they made her eyes appear like little black marbles.

  She was vast. Huge. Her white bib apron was so tight the strings that were knotted around her waist were completely hidden in rolls of flesh. They called her Rache, as if she was too busy to finish pronouncing her name. If you tried to call her Rachel, she’d be through the swinging doors before you could say the last syllable.

  Elsie was given a recipe, a few basic instructions on the mechanics of a huge electric mixer, introduced to a girl named Lillian, and told to take a fifteen-minute break at ten o’clock.

  Lillian was short, blond, and almost as loud as Rache. She was also extremely fancy, wearing a pink dress with tight sleeves and a hem that scraped the soles of her shoes. She talked nonstop, chewed gum and snapped it with regularity, drank Pepsi from a plastic cup filled with ice, and ran around on her Nike-clad feet, darting everywhere like an anxious bee.

  “OK, here. This is what you do. You dump this out, like this.”

  She was interrupted by a screech from the mountainous Rache.

  “Lillian, stop doing everything for her. She’ll never learn. Elsie, here, step up and get that pile of dough onto the kneading table. Lillian, step back, there.”

  So Elsie dumped, heaved, and learned by bitter trial and error. Lillian was basically very kind, she was just so terribly speedy and outspoken. Rache grumbled all day about being stuck training these new ones, Eli sending them in as innocent as babies.

  She eyed Elsie and asked who named daughters that anymore. Poor thing.

  Kindhearted Lillian took up for her, said Elsie was old-fashioned, it was cool. “I’ll call you Els.”

  Rache snorted and popped half a custard-filled doughnut in her mouth.

  “Elsie, don’t wad that dough up like that. These are dinner rolls, so they have to be handled lightly. Use more of that oil spray. These rolls will stick to the pan if you don’t.”

  Elsie was lightheaded with hunger and fatigue by lunchtime. Her ten o’clock break had consisted of hiding in the bathroom for fifteen minutes, ashamed to let anyone in that bakery know she didn’t have money to buy snacks. Mam had said she could eat bakery items, but she was too shy to ask for a doughnut or a whoopee pie. Lillian brought back a few bites of a cheeseburger and some limp fries with wet ketchup stains on them.

  “You want this? I’m full.”

  “You sure?”

  Nothing had ever tasted quite as good as those soggy fries and that tepid burger.

  All day they mixed, kneaded, shaped, and baked bread, dinner rolls, sandwich rolls, and sticky buns.

  Rache yelled at them about the size of the sandwich rolls. “Who was shaping these? Elsie, you need to use more dough.”

  Not once did Elsie venture into the crowded aisle ways. It seemed like a human stampede, a place where all manner of humanity would walk all over you, crushing you in the process.

  She had nothing to eat all day, except the few bites of Lillian’s leftover food. She rode home in the back seat of the fifteen-passenger van, crossed her arms over her empty stomach, and didn’t talk to anyone.

  She burst into tears the moment she spied her mother’s face, the story of that awful day coming out in bits and pieces.

  “Ach my, Elsie. I had no idea. I am so sorry. Here, sit down.”

  Elsie shook her head, blew her nose, said she wanted a long, hot bath first. When she returned, her hair dark and wet and wavy, the fine dark smudges of fatigue below her large eyes, the freckles like a constellation of beauty dust, her mother kept the astonishment at her daughter’s budding young beauty to herself.

  She ate a steaming bowl of vegetable soup with saltines and applesauce, a thick grilled cheese sandwich made with Velveeta cheese and margarine, and sliced peaches and ginger cake for dessert. Then she handed her mother a fifty-dollar bill, two twenties, and a ten. The sensation of gratitude was an unspoken pact.

  “Here is your ten dollars, Elsie.”

  She folded it and put it in the small cedar chest with the horse painted on the lid. She received five more dollars to buy food the next day at the market, then went to bed and slept so deeply her alarm clock’s jangling threw her rudely into a strange and alien world.

  The second day at Beiler’s Bakery was no worse than the first, but didn’t prove to be much better, either. She accidentally dropped a heavy plastic dishpan of dough, which set Rache to yelping like a frightened puppy. She came at them like a steaming locomotive, saying she couldn’t put up with any of this nonsense, she had too much on her mind.

  “You mean your hips,” muttered Lillian.

  Elsie caught her eye and grinned.

  At lunch she realized she’d have to brave the crowded aisles to buy food. She stepped out timidly, staying near the wall as much as possible, and bought a hot dog and a drink, plus a bag of potato chip
s, all for $2.50. She would pocket the remaining money and add it to her savings. She was given an apple by the white-bearded Amish man at the produce stand and a chocolate cupcake by Eli Beiler himself.

  He asked how her day was going.

  “All right. OK, I guess.”

  “Good.” And he was off.

  He didn’t care, Elsie reminded herself from time to time. Neither did Rache or Anna or Judy, the English lady who sat at the cash register. In the world of profit and sales, it was each man to himself. Or each girl. So Elsie learned not to expect praise, to be seen without being noticed, to work hard and do her best, just like at school.

  Lillian helped her comb her hair to complement her face. She told her she could actually be very pretty if she learned a few things.

  “You have gorgeous eyes. You should let me shape your eyebrows.”

  Elsie was horrified. She had never heard of such a thing.

  “You just pull out some of those stray hairs from your eyebrows.”

  Mam noticed the hair immediately.

  “Elsie, how you comb your hair! Now, this is not alaubt. Absolutely no way will any girl of mine comb her hair like that. You look awfully worldly. Now you go upstairs and roll your hair back the way I have always taught you. Now go.”

  Mam fussed. Dat’s eyes twinkled at her in a happy, dancing way, so she knew her father understood what it was like to be young and wanting to be a part of something. What it was exactly, Elsie could not be sure, but it was there. A possibility. A tentative knowledge that she would not always be the lone girl who said nothing as she ate her cheese sandwich hurriedly, before the others could see the cheese and homemade bread.

  As the weeks turned into months, Elsie’s little bundle of money grew. Twenty dollars a week for twenty-four weeks amounted to over four hundred dollars. She had spent some on new coverings and a new pair of sneakers that Lillian bought for her when she went to Rockvale Square, a place Elsie had never seen.

  So by the time her sixteenth birthday was a month away, Elsie was one of the best workers the bakery had ever hired and was fast friends with Lillian, who was planning on introducing her to her set of youth. Lillian had taken it upon herself to coach Elsie into popularity, telling her she needed to buy a new pattern for her dresses and redecorate her bedroom, that she should smile when a cute boy came to the stand, and that she needed a particular cream to clear up the occasional blemish that appeared on her jawline.

  Sometimes it irked Elsie. She would never fit in, whether she smiled at the right moments and spent all her savings on new things or not. She didn’t even have her own room. How was she supposed to redecorate it? She had never chosen her bedroom color or the furniture and she would never ever be allowed to go away in cars with other youth on Saturday evenings. Lillian had taken over her life, telling her what was cool, how to dress, how to act, what to say and think and do, as if programming a robotic person.

  She spoke to her parents, who said there was nothing wrong with Lillian, that they just were not quite on the same level. They knew Lillian’s parents, in fact. Mam had gone to school with her father. But they had always hoped Elsie would join the group that most of the church girls belonged to, which was not the same group that Lillian went to.

  Elsie didn’t particularly want to go to Lillian’s group, but she also didn’t want to disappoint her one friend. She agonized over standing her ground, telling Lillian she would be joining the more moderate group of youth.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to join either group, really, but she supposed she’d have to eventually. Part of it was that admitting she was old enough to join the other youth meant admitting she was too old for a pony. It didn’t seem fair that she had outgrown her childhood dream without ever having had the chance to own even a cheap, old little pony she could hitch to the express wagon. It seemed to her as if the best years of her life were gone, the rides with Benny and Cookie and her sisters only a memory.

  It probably wouldn’t be long before Benny started blushing and disappearing right off the face of the earth, the way Elam had. Boys were as strange as they’d ever been.

  All you had to do was watch Amos, and you’d know boys were strange and disturbing creatures. Amos cut earthworms with his little sand trowel and ran after the skinny barn cats screeching like a mountain lion. He ate raw beans from the garden like a guilty little rabbit, his nose twitching with pleasure, but if you tried to get him to eat cooked vegetables with mashed potatoes, he threw himself back against his highchair and pounded the footrest with his heels. He wasn’t even close to potty trained, and it was disastrous every time Mam made a feeble attempt at achieving it.

  “He needs a brother,” Dat said.

  “He needs discipline,” Mam said.

  Amos said he didn’t want a brother, and he didn’t want that other thing, either.

  Everyone laughed, which set Amos into all kinds of ungainly antics, until he wore himself out and sat on the couch with his hands clasped in his lap, breathing hard.

  A few weeks before Elsie’s sixteenth birthday, Lillian bounced into the bakery and announced the fact that Jason Riehl had asked her for a date on Saturday evening. Her face was flushed and her eyes shone as she accepted everyone’s congratulations.

  Suddenly she turned to Elsie, her smile fading. “Sorry, Els. Since I’ll be dating, I guess I can’t bring you to my group.”

  Elsie couldn’t have been more relieved.

  “That’s OK, Lillian. I’m … eh … joining the group my friends at church go to. I just hadn’t told you yet.”

  “Oh, great! Wonderful. That’s good.”

  Elsie was thoroughly hugged, wished the best.

  Rache lumbered in with a shipment of yeast. “What’s this I hear?”

  “I have a date! With Jason. Jason Fisher.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “You wouldn’t know.”

  And with that, the day swung into motion. By now Elsie was so accustomed to the mixer, the dough, the time to bake rolls and bread, it seemed as if she could do it with her eyes closed. The bakery was her friend now, her supporter of dreams. She figured by the time she was eighteen years of age she’d have a few thousand dollars, which would enable her to purchase a horse. A riding horse. Then she’d have to pay for the feed.

  She hummed as she worked and smiled at Lillian as she relived the evening of the big question. It seemed like she’d been waiting for ages for Jason to ask her, and now he had.

  “Well, I don’t want a boyfriend,” Elsie said, feeling more confident. “I want a horse.”

  Lillian’s mouth fell open. “A horse? Seriously? What for?”

  “I love horses.”

  “You love horses. Hm. That’s different for a sixteen-year-old. I mean, isn’t it? If you were English you could ride competitively, like girls doing the barrel-racing thing. Hey, did you ever go to that horse thing in Harrisburg? You know, I think it’s in February.”

  Elsie shook her head, then left to bring another fifty-pound bag of flour from storage. Lillian had no clue. Their lifestyles were so completely different, you could hardly begin to compare the vast underlying separateness of their everyday existence. If Lillian guessed that Elsie’s family didn’t have much extra, it wasn’t because Elsie had said anything. She had learned in school to say nothing, to listen, to show happiness for others.

  But being sixteen would hold its own new challenges. Elsie could not be expected to compete with any of the other girls. Things like dresses, sweaters, coats, shoes and purses, money to pay drivers or purchase Christmas gifts or wedding presents would have to come out of the amount she was saving for a horse. The horse was far more important than any number of dresses or shoes, she confided to her mother, who responded with raised eyebrows, an incredulous expression.

  “But, Elsie, how do you expect us to pay for all your needs? Surely you want your room painted, with new curtains? I thought perhaps we could find some decent furniture at an estate sale, or a moving sale. Suvilla ca
n move in with Malinda. They won’t mind sharing a room. And you’ll need new dresses, of course.”

  “I don’t care about that stuff.”

  And she didn’t.

  Elsie insisted that they not celebrate her sixteenth birthday. It would simply cost too much to buy that enormous cake and gallons of ice cream. She knew her parents murmured in the living room, each one on their old recliner, reading and relaxing before they retired for the night. Both of them thought it inappropriate, this refusal to enter her years of rumschpringa without the traditional party, but Elsie remained adamant.

  Shortly after her birthday, she received a substantial raise from Eli Beiler. He told her she was carrying the workload of two girls. Elsie blushed furiously, her gaze fastened on her worn thrift-shop sneakers, having no idea how highly Eli Beiler thought of her.

  Here was a rare girl. She deserved every penny of the large raise. It wasn’t just the fact that she was a hard worker, it was the efficiency of her movements, her quiet, friendly demeanor, her conscientious fifteen-minute breaks that meant she always appeared back at her workplace a few minutes before it was time to start.

  She had even won over Rache, which was no small feat. He had often fancied getting rid of Rache, but knew she was indispensable. He needed her to help manage the place, especially the ordering and distributing.

  Elsie told her parents about the raise and offered them the amount she had received. In the end, they allowed Elsie to keep thirty dollars instead of twenty, which they declared only reasonable, seeing how she had pleased her boss, been a good example.

  “You have truly honored your father and mother,” they told her. Now there was thirty dollars. Twenty for the horse, and ten for what she was slowly accepting as necessities for teenagers.