My mother taught her three daughters to set a proper table. I alone cared enough to get it right and sighed whenever a careless sister failed to align the bread plate with the salad fork’s central tine. Mom also sent me to cotillion classes in white gloves and a floor-length gown. There, a lady in battery-powered, light-up, acrylic high-heels taught me to do the foxtrot with dull boys who scuffed my party shoes and got in the way of my deep, elegant curtseys.

A fiend for sewing with spools of lace to spare, Mom made all my ballroom dance dresses by hand. I designed and she sewed: a row of embroidery here, a rosebud there, whatever I wanted. In her spare time, Mom crafted homemade photo albums with puffy fabric covers and jazzy trim rippling around the edges. On the shelf, these albums stood out from the ordinary three-ring binders holding our baby pictures as if to assure any passerby that nowadays, we couldn’t abide a world without fancy bric-a-brac at every turn.

For my eleventh birthday, Mom spent hours at the kitchen table with a phone book, dialing bakeries, asking, “What do you mean you don’t have petit fours?” and bemoaning the state of a world that had become so hip by 1979 that Elizabethan pastries were no longer waiting in bakery display cases for life’s many formal soirées. When she found a place willing to custom-make the tiny, fondant-covered cakes, Mom threw me a “princess” birthday party. We served the petit fours atop a lace tablecloth set with my grandmother’s priceless china and dotted with beribboned party favors. The main qualification to get invited to this party was that the girl’s mother must be counted on to play along with our request for formal attire and not send over grubby little brats in play shorts. Mom clicked photos of us girls in our frilly pinafores and knee socks until she used up all the Kodachrome.

My sister Maureen, just a year older, was twice my size. She used to climb to the top of a three-story-high buckeye tree, cling to the topmost branch as fierce winds blew it side to side, and scream-laugh her head off with death-defying glee. I admired Maureen’s penchant for terrifying play and longed to also be a terrifying person, but it wasn’t in my blood.

To climb higher than the first, easily accessible branch, I would have had to stand tiptoe on it, throw my hands in the air, experience a moment of freefall before I contacted that second branch, leap to wrap my arms around it, swing my legs up to clutch it, then squirm over its rough bark to get to the next branch. These things weren’t just physically difficult; they filled my soul with abject, paralyzing terror. Other terror-tolerant neighborhood kids not only climbed up but built wooden forts high in this famous tree, called The Buckeye Tree, where they conducted all the kid business in the neighborhood, leaving me to my table-setting, patent-leather-shoe polishing, and dancing of the Grande Promenade.

Maureen’s blonde hair was perpetually messy and windblown, her sneakers muddy, her jeans grass-stained. As for me, I pulled my long brown hair back in a ponytail tight enough to hurt, brushed it ramrod straight, and adorned it with a bow: preferably satin, preferably pink. My existence embarrassed my sister like a bad test grade affixed to a bright flag that whipped in the wind for all the world to see. She hated me without shame, very much as if a chimpanzee had escaped from the zoo and, for no reason at all, everyone was acting like it was her sister. After all, she was cool; I, uncool. And, as everyone knows, the uncool are untouchables with no rights except those enforced by the affirmative action of rational-thinking adults.

Then, one day, we learned my parents had hopes and dreams we knew nothing about, which could only be fulfilled by moving the family from Muncie, Indiana, to Tucson, Arizona, where Mom had a best friend from childhood who owned a horse ranch and Dad had already bought a cabinetmaking business. Our lives were now to revolve around cabinets and horses: two things I had never thought about, even once.

Selling our house took longer than expected, so Mom worked out a plan for the summer of 1980. Maureen and I would fly all by ourselves to Tucson, about which we knew nothing, to live on that horse ranch with Mom’s friend Linda Stacy, whom we had never met. Meanwhile, my father was to rent an apartment in Tucson and spend the summer working twelve-hour days getting his business off the ground. Maureen and I would learn to ride horses at Linda’s during the week and stay with Dad, in his temporary bachelor pad, on weekends, like the children of cool, modern, divorced people. Meantime, Mom would sell our Indiana house, hire a moving company, rent a house in Tucson, relocate our stuff there, and drive cross-country with our littlest sister and pets. According to the plan, the family would reassemble as one body, in a new home, just in time for me to start junior high. The whole thing was Mom’s idea: a scheme designed to reunite her with the woman she called her best friend even though they hadn’t seen each other since before we kids were born.

In Muncie, my mother had friends—one did quilting and the other had red hair—but apparently neither could hold a candle to Linda, whose alliance with Mom stretched back to an unfathomable past that predated the beginning of what I considered time itself. If I had better understood this single detail, I might have guessed the fate awaiting me. After all, adult life swallows time to such a degree that a child’s entire lifespan is but one star in the vast Milky Way of her mother’s experiences.

Brusque and aloof, clad in summer clothes and dirty high-heeled sandals, Linda picked us up at the Tucson airport arrivals gate. Her hip-swinging walk told us she got stuff done with a minimum of fuss. I was right in assuming Linda’s house would contain not one ounce of embroidery thread or sparkling crystal, and silk petticoats would be thin on the ground there, indeed.

Linda whisked us down I-25, past a dusty landscape straight out of a coyote and roadrunner cartoon. On our subsequent tour of the horse ranch, Maureen and I got our first taste of dirt roads, cactus, concrete-block buildings, searing sunshine, piles of horse shit, and a world filled with hostile plants and animals that can literally kill you.

That evening, the Stacy family had arranged to entertain us with a Ping-Pong tournament in their detached carport. Maureen won a game or two, establishing herself as a normal, fun-loving child, but when it came my turn to play, Linda, her husband Harry, and their son Sean discovered I had no awareness of my body as a thing that existed in space. I missed the easiest volleys, flailing my arms like octopus tentacles. The balls I hit bounced all over the woodshop, tack room, horse trailer, and 4H-award-winning guinea pig cage. Though a year my junior, Sean gleefully won every game; meanwhile, a million moths clustered around the fluorescent lamp and dive-bombed my head. I squealed whenever one smacked me in the eye or flew into my mouth. The Stacys as a family—along with Maureen, who was apparently one of them now—didn’t hold back their laughter at my prissiness.

Before long, I felt sufficiently humiliated for the night and asked to go to bed while the others continued enjoying the horrors of the desert. Linda shrugged and declared I was welcome to head back to the house on my own. Simple as that. There would be no “tucking in” protocol, which was a shame as it prevented me from showing off my floor-length, formal, lace-trimmed nightgown.

Crossing the dirt lot between the carport and the house, alone in the warm, starlit darkness, I met not one but two huge, hairy tarantulas—half black, half orange. They crept slowly across my path while I stood frozen in a state of mind-bending horror. That night, I wrote my mother a lengthy letter about all the awful creatures I had seen so far and warned her this place was not fit for habitation.

At Skyline Drive Horse Ranch, just when you were picking at your blistered lips, or burning your elbow on a car hood, or drawing designs in the scaly film that used to be your arm skin and thought it was impossible to be any hotter and still alive, the wind would kick up. It felt like a giant hair dryer filled with sand singeing off your eyebrows.

“Isn’t it weird how a breeze here doesn’t cool you down but makes you hotter?” I asked Linda one day as she saddled a horse. Shortening the stirrups with a firm leather thwack, Linda shrugged as if to say no, that was not interesting at all. She seemed to have no memory of living in a place where cool breezes blew, nor, her demeanor suggested, did she want to hear about them. Undaunted, I reported the hot wind phenomenon in another letter to my mother, in Indiana, where jasmine-scented zephyrs still danced across fields of Queen Anne’s lace. Strangely, no epistolary discussion of the matter ensued.

One day, a horse stepped on Maureen’s foot. Her big toe looked like hamburger. The next day, it looked like day-old hamburger left out on the counter. Over the next couple of weeks, the toenail turned black and fell off. Maureen showed it to Sean and me regularly, like a self-updating toughness report card, until the toenail slowly grew back over the vulnerable skin beneath, as a tide returns to protect the undersea world.

In spite of the toe, or perhaps because of it, Maureen didn’t fear horses one bit. Walking a horse, with its hooves so close to her toes, seemed merely to fulfil my sister’s daily terror quotient. Linda and Sean were nonplussed by the whole toe thing as well. Apparently, on horse ranches, people lose their toenails all the time. “So what?”

I reported all these phases of the toe to Mom, yet, in her return letters, she showed little interest in my elaborate descriptions of the toe, the wind, the tarantulas, the horny toads, the rattlesnakes, the mesquite thorns, or the nosebleeds I got from the dry air.

Once I saw a big spider in the house and told Linda about it in what I deemed an appropriate tone of alarm.

She shrugged. “So what?”

Ironically, Linda taught and rode English style—with its sleek fox-hunting saddles, velvet helmets, and spiffy riding crops—but her attitude was straight out of the O.K. Corral. I was pretty sure if one of us had fallen off a cliff, Linda would have shrugged, buried the kid in a shallow grave among the tumbleweeds, and gone back to feeding the horses.

Although I deemed the horse ranch unsuitable for a lady, I also understood my mother’s silence on this issue to be a rebuke of my complaints. I therefore tried to present my notes as “scientific observations” but to no avail. Fact was, I couldn’t seem to find anything to write about that interested my mother, but I understood. After all, there weren’t any sun hats, satin hair ribbons, or elaborate sewing projects, and certainly no pretty dresses—just jodhpurs and long black boots. Poor thing. When Mom gets to Arizona, I worried, what will she even find to do?

***

Eventually, my mother fulfilled her complex mission. After arriving in Tucson, reuniting the family, and installing the five of us and our pets in a rented home in a good school district, she continued hauling us kids out to Linda’s ranch every weekend. There, she ran around shoveling horse shit with her old buddy like she’d been born to it. Apparently, horse-ranch living was to be our permanent new entertainment, from which I deduced I wouldn’t be resuming cotillion. In fact, apparently, that summer Mom had gathered my white gloves, framed cross-stitch samplers, and the pretty white canopy that had once adorned my bed, as well as her own skeins of lace and bric-a-brac, and on some obscure exit between I-25 South and I-10 East found a black hole to shoot them into that erased their existence from history.

Linda enjoyed neither crafts nor frills of any kind, so now, neither did we. On the weekends, Linda’s life was our life. The tough, no-nonsense, horse-lady persona Mom instantly embodied in Tucson was apparently the way she had been as a teen, with Linda, and she made it clear she was now returning to her old self, her “real” self. The four years Mom and I had spent perfecting my debutante training were now an embarrassment to which we as a family never alluded, even in jest. This change came into bold relief one day as Mom strode across a paddock to halter a twelve-hand palomino mare.

Apropos of nothing, she chuckled and said, “Gee, you wrote me so many letters last summer about the awful bugs and creatures in the desert, I was afraid I had raised a wimp!”

Turns out, Mom’s former penchant for my intrinsic girliness and the exquisitely wimpy art forms I loved so well had only been a short-lived, kooky phase for her, albeit a phase that had lasted my entire life so far. The subtext was unmistakable: to Mom, those things were no longer cool. Now, Linda was cool. The slavish devotion Mom had once shown to the manufacturing of party dresses was now directed toward the advancement of all things Linda. Meanwhile, it seems a chimp had escaped from the zoo, and, for no reason at all, everyone was acting like it was her daughter.

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Ruby Peru has ghostwritten more than twenty books and has worked as a humor columnist for Local Flavor Magazine; an editor for Christie’s International Real Estate magazine; and an editorial liaison and proofreader for McGraw Hill Publishing. She studied with Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, and Alan Arkin. Ruby is a judge for the Austin Film Festival. She has self-published several books, including the novel Bits of String Too Small to Save, which won “distinguished favorite” from New York Big Book Award (2021). Ruby was the keynote speaker on humor in memoir at the Association of Personal Historians (2009). She received a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Ruby plays zydeco fiddle and volunteers with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Maine.