Pony Legs

Issue 41 • Spring 2020 • Nonfiction

I knew what sex was from 90210. I was in the fourth grade, at a sleepover after the Sadie Hawkins dance. We spread a quilt on the living room floor and when the adults were asleep we flipped to the late-night networks. The good channels were always up high, past Discovery and Nickelodeon and A&E. We watched one of the Beverly Hills girls french kissing a boy and then there were bodies grinding and jeans unsnapping and the girl had her neck tossed back, moaning. We fell asleep in our felt poodle skirts, shoulder to shoulder, our pink lipstick smeared across our cheeks and pillowcases. 

I knew they had sex between them, my father and Clarissa. My father’s chest hair seemed significant, the way Clarissa smoothed her palm up his sternum and under his shirt lapel, caressing his shoulder. We were at the public swimming pool. He palmed tanning lotion up her legs and into the cavern of her inner thighs, massaged his fingertips right up to the seam of her bikini. He said, mmm these pony legs. I knew I shouldn’t be seeing this. I sat on the edge by the three-foot marker where the water slopped into the drains. I kicked my feet out over the surface and watched it ripple out in circles. 

We were supposed to be on a date, just him and I. My brothers and sisters got their turn, too. We rotated, one kid per week. Our father would pull up to our house on Tuesdays in a boxy white limousine that he drove for work. He’d gotten a big loan from the bank to buy a fleet of limos. He drove rich businessmen around Los Angeles and once in a while a movie star or someone in the NBA. The company was about to go under because he’d been doing laundry with it, as I’d heard my mother say on the phone, and this confounded me. 

My mother had planned the outing. I’d gotten out of school early for it. She sent me with a striped beach towel and two foldover sandwich baggies with pink frosted animal cookies, one for me and one for my father. They were my favorite. I liked the way the sprinkles crunched when I chewed. The way I imagined it going was my father kicking the water like a crawdad and pushing me along on a blow-up flamingo in an aquamarine lagoon lined with palm trees, something out of a magazine. We would drink our Capri-Suns and he’d scoop me up onto his shoulders, wade through the water like King Kong while I shrieked with laughter. 

But the pool was a neighborhood pool, and Clarissa was waiting for us at the turnstile. It was fifty cents per kid to get in. A woman ahead of us counted out change that looked like it had gotten sticky from sitting in a cupholder with spilled Pepsi. 

I watched my father kiss the rind of Clarissa’s shoulder. Then he pinched the skin that rode over the top of her bathing suit bottoms. She giggled and swatted at him. I got up and went to the bathroom. The sun was too bright and the chlorine was bothering my eyes and giving me small pink bumps on my skin. The toilets were metal. I didn’t know if the puddles on the floor were cloudy from some kind of bleach cleaner or from pee. 

I walked down the concrete perimeter to the deep end. I had inflatable rings snapped around my arms for safety. I wore a hand-me-down swimsuit from one of my sisters, pink with red polka dots. The bottoms were tied on the sides. I’d laced them up as tight as they went but they still gaped along my groin. I wondered if people were watching me. I wondered if they saw the peach fuzz on my legs and I wondered if anyone saw the way my bathing suit pinched my sides, the way the strings smooched into the squish of my skin. 

I thought we were going to have underwater tea parties, my father and I. The way you had an underwater tea party was you sucked in your breath until your lungs felt like balloons. You held your nose and you sank down into the water. You sat crisscross on the floor of the pool and let your breath out in slow bubbles. You used one hand to hold your imaginary tea cup and the other hand to hold the little china plate. You sat across from the other person, pinky up, drinking your tea. Whoever held their breath the longest won. 

My father was still with Clarissa on the plastic lounge chairs. I unsnapped my arm floaties and left them by the metal ladder mounted to the side of the pool. I didn’t need them. I inhaled in gulps and plunged below the surface and wondered how high I could count before I needed to come up for air. 

My father used to play water polo. I’d seen photos of him from high school. Shiny waxed muscles, long hair tucked into a swim cap, a speedo. He looked like a sea god. I knew I looked like my father—the blue eyes and thick nose. My mother had brown eyes and darker features. I didn’t like blue eyes. Blue eyes felt like they belonged to snakes and other reptiles, scaly things that had bellies close to the ground. 

My father kept a thirty-pound iguana in a glass tank in his apartment. Once a month, all five of us kids spent a weekend with him. The first time, he took us to the fifth floor of a building in Santa Monica, a studio with a black leather couch and shag rugs. It was lit by lava lamps. A mirror hung on the ceiling over the waterbed. The first weekend he had us, we snapped stakes off of the leggy aloe plant by the door and wielded the sticky spikes against each other like swords. He had to take us back to our mother the second night because a woman in hair rollers and a silk bathrobe came up and banged on the door and screamed that she was going to call the police and have us thrown out. Our father drove us back home. There was a sign in the driveway by then. We weren’t sure where we were going to move next. 

My brother had an asthma attack while our parents fought. My mother picked up the wall phone to call an ambulance, but my father told her there wasn’t money for it and pressed the receiver to kill the dial tone. She threw the phone at him but the curly cord didn’t reach. It snapped back and hit my brother where he was standing by her leg. She stuck a hard-plastic straw down his throat so his chest wouldn’t completely close up. She yelled at my father to stay with us until she got back and then she hoisted my brother up and ran from the house. When she came home from the hospital in the morning, she discovered our father had invited a woman to stay. Her name was Patty. She was sitting on the counter drinking coffee. You could see a mound of dark hair through the fabric of her shorts. 

The first man that really broke my heart had muddy green eyes. Once he told me, you look so much like your father. I was showing him pictures of my family. I was in my late twenties. By then I’d already gotten plastic surgery, changed my nose, my teeth. I shouldn’t have looked like my father. 

The first time on my nose was at a clinic in Texas. I said, I want something dramatic. I said, I want you to take off as much of this nose as you can. I showed the surgeon a picture of Adele. I said, this is a good nose. I would rather have this nose. The doctor said, I could collapse your nasal passage altogether if I chiseled off that much bone. You could sue me. You could lose your ability to breathe and then have a hole cut in your neck, use a throat tube for air. I said please try. 

I cried when he removed my nose brace a week after the surgery. It still looked like my father’s nose. The doctor said, you’re beautiful. Don’t cry, you’re beautiful. 

The second time I went to a doctor in Mexico. He was willing to do what I asked. He put a photo of my face on a computer and used fancy software to manipulate the image. He used his cursor to take in the bridge, lift up the tip. The nose he drew was delicate, elfish, a woman’s nose. He said my face would be fragile after the surgery. He said he was shaving off so much bone I would have to pretend it was thin as the nail on my thumb. He said no contact sports, no impact activities. This was a beautiful nose, but it was a nose that could shatter, and I didn’t want shards floating around in my head. They could affect my vision. They could wind up in my brain. 

My father spent a number of years with a woman who’d had multiple abortions and then had to get her uterus removed because one of the abortions had messed something up inside of her. She’d become very religious. She liked my father because he was handsome and had all these kids who could then become her kids, in place of the ones she didn’t get to have. She thought it was a good idea for us all to get sex talks from our father. He took me to a nice dinner at a fondue place. He gave me a ring with a black diamond in it, a symbol of purity. We checked in at the Ritz Carlton and listened to cassette tapes about the female genitalia and about copulation. At one point, the tapes instructed me to lay down on the bed with a hand mirror between my legs and examine myself, become familiar with my body. My father told me that I had some extra folds of skin, but that it was okay. That it was called bacon and some girls had it and they were all beautiful however they looked. 

I thought okay this is fine. I was only ten. He was my dad. He used to change my diapers. So it was fine. I didn’t want him to smell my discomfort. I didn’t want him to think I was making this weird. It made sense that this was happening. It was fine. 

It’s a similar thought I’d have later, when I was much older, and a man I met online took me out on a date. He was very nice. We went to an outdoor beer garden. There was live music, a man playing the guitar and the harmonica at the same time, another playing the tambourine. My date bounced his knee and drank his beer. He had clean fingernails and good strong teeth, a scrim of beard along his jaw. I could see the lines in his hair from his comb. The beer garden had picnic tables, Bavarian checkered blue and white tablecloths, cornflowers in beer bottles, bottle cap windchimes, wheelbarrows filled with ice and packed with booze. He made polite conversation and paid for our meal. 

Afterwards, we decided we would go for a walk. He took me back to my house to collect my dog. She was a tiny mutt I’d found in the streets and I loved her for this, the story behind her, the serendipity that she would wind up in my yard. I’d been living in New Mexico in a run-down town, out on the fringe, before the subdivisions turned into nothingness. My back fence butted up to a big open plain. A pack of coyotes had chased her onto my property. She’d scrabbled her way under the fence, a wiry-haired terrier, just a few pounds. She felt like a tiny baby rabbit in my hands when I scooped her up. I could feel her frantic heartbeat against my fingertips. She had hundreds of ticks embedded in her. I was up half the night with tweezers, plucking the ticks out under the light of the kitchen table, massaging her belly when she needed a break. She came with me everywhere after that, my little fix-up urchin. We had an understanding between us, her and I. I could feel it when I looked into her brown eyes, warm and soft as putty. 

We drove to the waterfalls a few minutes from my house. I was living in upstate New York. The town had hundreds of shale gorges with roaring falls. A network of hiking trails had been built after the Great Depression when FDR started putting people to work under the New Deal. I felt boozy from our lunch. I’d ordered only a pretzel with my beers because it was summertime and hot and I didn’t have much of an appetite. He led us off the path, up to the farmland flats that surrounded the rim of the gorge. I knelt down to let my dog off leash so she could run free through the fields. He said, you can stay down there if you want. His cock was out of his pants and he was nosing it towards me. I think I laughed. I think I laughed when I saw his cock because I couldn’t believe it. Then it was being stuffed in my mouth and he was pumping his hips against my face. I could feel the tiny bits of gravel in my knees, the softness of my own flesh. I was thinking where is my dog. Is my dog okay. She was already off leash. I was holding the leash in my hand. I felt around for her. She was pawing at my thighs, making small whimpering noises. My date was cradling the back of my head, just one hand firmly around the base of my skull. He pumped and pumped. I held the leash in one hand and the other hand was buried in the scruff of my dog’s neck. I thought, she shouldn’t be seeing this. I thought, I need to make sure she doesn’t think anything is wrong. This was okay. There was no violence here, no menace. It’s okay. 

When I got back from the pool date with my father, my mother was sporting a fresh manicure with red nail polish. She did this for herself once a week. The other kids were bathed and asleep. When it was our date night, we got to stay up late. My mother was sitting in front of the TV doing pelvic exercises, watching the evening news. I wanted my mother to scrub my hands and clip my cuticles until they bled. I was already developing a cluster of cold sores on my lips. I’d gotten them since before I could remember. At first it was just canker sores and then cold sores started blooming across my mouth when I’d get a sunburn or when I was sick. I chewed at the little buds of cauliflower on my lower lip. She asked me how my date was and I thought of my father rubbing aloe on Clarissa’s back and I told her it was fine. 

In my early thirties, another man asked me what he could do to help me. He was so kind. He wore paint-splattered work boots and a Carhartt jacket and he held my dog like she was a sleek, breakable little violin. I stopped his hand whenever he’d guide it inside the rim of my jeans. I’d kiss his jaw and wriggle away. I didn’t know how to tell him that maybe if he didn’t have the blue eyes. 

I was beautiful after my plastic surgery. I knew I was beautiful. He looked at me and I saw him witnessing my beauty. I knew he loved me and that it was real, but I felt like a mannequin inside a glass display. Please don’t touch. 

How can I help, he would say. 

I pulled these stories out for him one-by-one, like individual gems in tiny jewelry boxes. It started with the pony legs. That was my garnet. I presented it on a silk pillow, puffed and white, inside a velvet flip-up case. I said do you see this jewel. Do you see this garnet. See how it sparkles like a drop of blood. 

Issue 53 • Spring 2026

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry