On Swift Horses

At the Heyday Lounge the horsemen think they are the only gamblers. They file in each morning, their shoes dusty and their pockets jangling with coins, like parishioners. They sit in a dark corner under a single blade fan, a plantation relic hauled from the lounge owner’s Southern home to this coastal city thirty miles from Mexico. Above them the fan has the look of salvage but it makes no sound, and though it keeps the flies from their faces and necks and midmorning cocktails they do not notice it.

Every weekday the men come. They speak openly because they believe the lounge owner to be simple—which is true—and Muriel, their waitress these long mornings, to be a woman and therefore incapable of both memory and complex reasoning. It does not help that she is young, that she looks like the empty plains she comes from, flat and open and sad. She and Lee, newly married, have been in San Diego only a few months and are learning slowly how to be modern, and though she has always worked it is fair that the horsemen take her for a housewife forced into labor by circumstance. They could not know from her wide shoulders and square waist and rural modesty that she had taken the bus from Kansas on her own, that she could play cards and drive a car, or that she’d left behind a house she owned outright, to come here.

So they wave their hands at her and call her sweetheart from across the room and order their drinks with pointed enunciation as if she were hard of hearing. Though she remembers not only their drinks but the clip of their mustaches, the red-rimmed dimness of their eyes, she writes the orders down on a notepad and hands the paper to the bartender. The horsemen are retired trainers from the furlongs at Del Mar or bookmakers for rich men in the coastal hills. A few are ex‑jockeys, burned out and overweight, unsure what else life might have to offer them. They talk as men do, confident and gently adversarial, about the coming race day, the horses off their feed, the jockeys with tapeworm, the cup and feel of the track. They set long odds and argue over them.

For a few months Muriel listens. She writes down their private speculations and begins to join their language to its objects. When her shift ends at two she walks toward the sea and takes a late lunch at a restaurant where she works a second job on the dinner shift. She sits in a booth in the corner and studies her notes and the previous day’s racing form. She might rise and walk then, along the rolling line of surf. She thinks of horses, and her mother, and the day she was married. As she walks she collects shells and beach glass and slips them in the pocket of her sweater. Before she returns to work she unfolds the pocket and dumps these same items back onto the beach, so all that’s left is a rim of sand in the pocket hem. At ten Lee walks to the restaurant from the factory a few blocks away and they go home together, arms linked like young lovers and not like married people, because they do not know each other very well.

THEN, IN EARLY DECEMBER, Muriel has a night off from the restaurant but tells Lee she’s working. In the drugstore across the street from the Heyday Lounge she buys a pair of sunglasses she considers ridiculous. They cover her eyebrows and half of her nose and make her look much older, like a woman in possession of a fortune or a married lover. She buys a sunhat and a thin scarf printed with flowers. She removes her sweater though her arms show and she worries they will burn in the low winter sun and make her sleep difficult. She takes a twenty-minute bus ride to the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The bus winds around Jimmy Durante Boulevard and from the windows of the bus she can see the grand entrance to the track, the high hedges and the waving flags. A statue of Bing Crosby, the track’s founder and financier, gleams hard and gold in the afternoon light. In San Diego in those days it was said that Crosby used the track to impress Grace Kelly, who hated horses but loved men. Muriel lets the bus wind back around to Camino del Mar and gets out to have a coffee in a diner along the beach. She smokes and looks around as if she is waiting for someone. Her shoulders are warm and the bridge of her nose sweats under the sunglasses. The sea is soft and cold-looking. From the beach several others watch as a woman wades out to the breakers and stops. Muriel thinks of her mother, who had told her about the shore at Galveston, where she had been once with a man Muriel knew was not her father. Her mother said the sea was smooth as a lake and brown, and that someone told her it was filled with jellyfish. Muriel watches as the woman at sea turns and lifts a hand to her forehead and seems to regard the shore in contemplation of some final leaving. It is a curious thing, being married, how Muriel must think of this odd afternoon errand as something done for both of them, an adventure Lee will share in one way or another. She had thought it would be difficult to lie to him but she found it easier than their daily recitations of the truth. She had expected for herself the same power her mother found in men. But she often finds her husband’s gaze embarrassing.