The Double Life of Laura Shaw

Yankee, May 2000
Best American Sports Writing — 2001

She is middle-aged, buck-toothed, and homely, with thick, gold-rimmed glasses and frizzled blond hair she wears in a ponytail. She rarely bothers with makeup. Her clothes are cheap, dowdy, and mostly out of style. It’s unlikely she cares. She has no one to dress for: no husband, no boyfriend, no friends. There is only her mother — whom she lives with — and a son by a man she says she never married and hasn’t seen in years.

She lives in a rented cottage on the Massachusetts shore and drives to work each morning in an old Dodge pickup to a job in downtown Boston, where she sits all day in a cubicle the size of a toilet stall. She hates it, she says, but needs the money — about $10 an hour after taxes — and has had the job 20 years.

She is timid, awkward with strangers, and is said to walk in a slouch. One acquaintance describes her as “mousy,” another as “pathetic,” a third as “a loser without a life.” No one who knows her, when asked, can say for sure the color of her eyes.

She is rich. A millionaire horsewoman with homes in three states. Some say she’s a lottery winner. Or the daughter of a Midwest jeweler. Or a supermarket heiress from old New England money. It’s hard to know which story to believe.

But the horses are real. She lives for them: saddlebreds, quarter horses, broodmares — she owns as many as 30 at a time. She bids for them at auctions, then rides them in showrings, in black tie and tuxedo, jodhpurs, and a high silk hat. She’s won ribbons and trophies. She owns champions. She golfs with owners and trainers. She trains three afternoons weekly in a practice ring in Massachusetts, while her mother watches in a full-length mink.

She spends money like water: horses, horse vans, a camper, a Mercedes, hotel bills, riding lessons, vet bills, trainer fees, airfares to Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania — wherever there is a show — $3,500 monthly in boarding fees alone. She gives ponies to children, sponsors shows, donates trophies, buys her mother anything she wants. It’s all she can do to stay within her income, which averages $400,000 a year.

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The full story (as well as sixteen others) is available in the collection, ‘The Grifter, The Poet, and The Runaway Train’ (click title to access the book).