Barrelhouse Reviews: Come to the X, by Julia Wendell
Review by Alison Turner
Galileo Press / April, 2020 / 345 pp
If you grew up in a rural area, you may be familiar with the kid in elementary school whom the other kids called “horse girl.” Horse girls drew headshots of stallions on their folders, manes flipped flirtatiously over the neck. Horse girls wore riding pants to school, and they made the bus smell like hay because they had it in their hair.
Julia Wendell is a horse girl. Her memoir Come to the X is about what happens when a horse girl is also a mother, a partner in sickness and in health, a farm owner, and a writer of poetry, chapbooks, a previous memoir, and video poems. Her new memoir weaves together the different genres in which she has written in the past into a unique form of riding log that records her striving for a perfect partnership between herself and her horse (and if it’s not one horse, it’s another). Each description of trail rides, events, and training sessions is about riding horses as much as it is about not riding horses. When searching for the elusive perfect bit that would allow her to communicate flawlessly with her horse, Wendell explains, “That’s the rub — any bit that controls forward motion takes away steering. Any bit that helps turn takes away forward control. At some point, it’s up to the horse, and to the troubled rider who comes to him every day, saying, ‘Heal me, heal me.’” Wendell needs the perfect bit so that she can ride a perfect event, and she needs to ride a perfect event because — well, that is what this book is about: where desires for perfection come from and what to do with them when you are cursed enough to have them.
If reading is like riding, Wendell puts her readers into the saddle without instruction. At first, we need to hold on tight. Wendell does not explain the nuances of who boards horses at her farm, the differences between a riding instructor, mentor, or colleague, who has four legs and who two, or the significance of each detail during a particular ride. For example:
Stephen wants me to find the middle stride out of which I’ll have more options — either moving up or holding to the fences. The first serious combination is downhill to a narrow brush fence situated in the crotch of a tree, then uphill several strides to a rolltop. Shiva plants his front legs under the jump and vomits over the lip, backs up, whips around, and I’m pitched in front of the saddle, which explodes my air vest. I wiggle back in the tack as the horse commences a toe spin.
Wendell writes at capacity. There is no time to explain what “middle stride” or “combination” means, or why an air vest might explode when riding a horse, or why one might wear an air vest at all. She believes in the reader to find their seat without her instruction. This book is for riders and non-riders, but if you asked a reader from each camp to explain the book’s plot, you might get two different stories.
For this non-rider, the details of riding and their repetition become a meditation, a rhythm that sets the pace for the story Wendell needs to tell. Neither pedantic nor estranging, this rhythm is there for its interruptions: a daughter, Chance, whom Wendell loves too desperately; a husband whom she needs with increasing urgency, despite appearances that it is he who needs her; and a crowd of “ghosts,” various apparitions of demanding mentors, past failures, self-doubt, the grief particular to aging, and a nineteenth-century tragedy that left what is now Wendell’s farm to a new widow. More than a century old, this widow has been responsible for family and farm, and now, also, Wendell, when summoned. In one of the poems that dapple the memoir, Wendell writes:
Who is this woman, looking long
and hard, after the children are put to bed,
seeing glimmers of me in the star lanes?
How will the corn get chopped?
Wendell canters away from these ghosts, believing she wants to escape them, but she always turns back. She needs their company.
Wendell is sardonically self-aware of how her addiction to event riding affects her family, and she is remarkably generous with examples. Her husband, Barrett, suffers from one incapacitating disease and then, through re-diagnosis, another. Though Wendell makes countless trips to the hospital to support him, she is also always pulling away. “Barrett’s fever is 101.2 this morning. I insist he get to his doctor. I need him well enough by next weekend to drive [horses] Patrick and Calvin and me to Lexington, and do all the work of a groom once there.” After eagerly awaiting her daughter’s Christmas visit, Chance and Wendell fight, and Wendell escapes her family Christmas for a trail ride with two of her horses: “My Christmas, this small hour with Calvin and Georgia.”
In the hands of a less forthright memoirist, the push and pull between family and riding might wear on the reader’s patience, but I couldn’t help but root for Wendell. I found myself sharing in her nightly cocktail hour, pairing my gin with her Chardonnay, willing her, this time, to cancel the next event, to be with her family, to stay. In these short evening hours I felt both angry at her for keeping her husband at her beck and call and relieved that he sticks with her. Wendell is a demanding partner on the horse and in her marriage, a fact she knows better than anyone: “I...won’t say what’s on my mind, while silently judging the person I’m chatting with,” she writes. “I am my own specter, my own dark father. I might betray you.”
If Wendell’s new memoir endears the reader to a demanding narrator, it also summons the reader’s own demands. This book is written by a horse girl, but it is not only for horse girls or about them. Those of us who do not know how to put a bit in a horse’s mouth, let alone the benefits of one bit over another, are nevertheless drawn into the pursuit for perfection. Come to the X records the negotiations between the body’s aging and its ambitions, a riddle that has no answer. Or, if there is an answer, it is not one for the living. When Wendell and her husband put down their old dog, Daisy, Wendell confides: “I whisper something in the dog’s ear I will never admit to anyone, before...I return to the barns, and before the second fatal shot.” Come to the X offers something better than the answers for how to fix our imperfections: a way of living with the ghosts of our future and former selves that sustain the difference between how we ride, and why.
Alison Turner grew up in the mountains of Colorado, where she learned to endure large amounts of time in inclement weather waiting for buses. She is a PhD candidate in Literary Studies at the University of Denver interested in community literacy, historical fiction of the American Old West, community-engaged scholarship, and archives. Her critical work appears in the World Literature Today blog and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice and is forthcoming in Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture and Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric. She is the co-host and co-creator of the When you are homeless podcast miniseries, and her creative work appears in Blue Mesa Review, Wordrunner eChapbooks, Little Patuxent Review, Meridian, and Bacopa Literary Review, among others.