The Mare

by Mary Gaitskill

  “What?”

  “I’m not gonna yell anymore, not even when I’m mad.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with yelling when you’re mad. You’re a fiery girl,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That you’re intense, you have strong feelings.”

  She didn’t say anything, and I began to worry that I’d insulted her somehow. Then she said, “I just decided something else. From now on, I’m going to call my mare Fiery Girl.”

  When we hung up, there was a smile in her voice.

  I didn’t speak about it to Paul. But when we got in bed, I turned with my back to him and curled into a ball. I thought over and over of Velvet, of holding her like I said I would, brushing her hair, singing to her. I thought of the way she said “My mare,” like “mah mare” or “ma mère”—my mother in French.

  Velvet

  I went to bed that night not even wanting to touch my mom because she threw my horseshoe out the window and started screaming when Ginger called. But I fell asleep and then I woke up and she wasn’t there and I was scared. Instead of her, Dante was holding a pillow put sideways, like somebody took my mom and put the pillow there to fool him. I hoped she was just in the bathroom, but I knew she wasn’t and I was right. I got out of bed and went to look for her. When I got to the kitchen, I thought she’d gone away and left us. I opened the window—I don’t know why, maybe to call for help—and I looked down and saw she was standing on the sidewalk with her hoodie on over her nightgown. It didn’t make sense, she was afraid of this place. She turned her head sideways so I saw her nose and forehead from above; that made her look small, like a kid who was lost. I went downstairs and opened the door. I put my head out and said, “Mami, what are you doing?” When she turned around, her face was quiet and far away. I came out and I saw—she had my horseshoe in her hand. It made me smile so much I couldn’t talk. We stood together. The air was smelling like fall already. I saw that her legs were bare, but she had her sneakers on untied. “Peaceful,” she said. “It’s peaceful.”

  We just stood there, hearing the quiet, feeling the buildings in the dark and the ground humming under us. A car went by booming music and it was different than during the day.

  When we went in to bed, she put her back to me like always. But when I put my arm around her, she held my hand. I said, “Bendición, Mami,” and she answered with a smiling voice. “Dios te bendiga.”

  Ginger

  I went back to my painting; classes started for Paul. The feeling of normalcy was delicious. I still went “walking at night,” but alone, feeling my signal again, now big and broad and full of new things.

  I found myself talking to women I barely knew—the manager of the health food store, a colleague of Paul’s, somebody I’d met at a wedding—in the store, in the middle of a parking lot, at the post office; talking a mile a minute, I would confide in them about Velvet. About the remarkable things she’d said or done. About the fight I’d heard on the phone, about how I was going to help her with her homework. About how scared and excited I was. It felt like I was actually talking to women for the first time. I felt this even though the conversations were fleeting and partial. It was something about the way our eyes met, the way they took my words in; it was something that had never happened before. It was like being the signal rather than hearing it.

  Of course, not every conversation was this way. The weekend after Velvet went home, Paul and I went to a party given by a local celebrity photographer who had just won some big award for taking pictures of Muslim kids. Paul’s ex-wife, Becca, was there along with her friends, all huge women whose bodies exude importance, or as my mom used to say, “impo’ance.” They sit together like a high school clique, these women in their fifties, and they walk like they’re saying, “Get out the way. I’ve got tits.” One of them is an editor in the city, one of them is an artist who shows in the city, one of them was a model about a hundred years ago; they all have kids and they all act like bitches to me. At least if Becca is there. If Becca’s not there, they’re basically polite. If my friend Kayla is there, they even try to be nice because she’s friends with the editor. I understand the situation, but it’s awkward, especially if Kayla’s at the party and I have to sit with them either monopolizing Kayla or being ignored.

  This time, though, I tried to connect, even though Becca was there. I couldn’t help it. I told them about Velvet and the horses, especially the horses. And even they got interested, even if Becca got hard in the face; they overflowed like women will do, giving suggestions for activities, horse camps, children’s theater, petting zoos. Until Becca spoke and they all stopped. “Sounds like a fun project,” she said. “Sounds like an easy way to play at being a parent.” And the conversation moved on.

  Velvet

  The week before school, Dante put on a pair of pants but his ass was too big and they split when he moved. We all laughed and my mom said, “What am I going to do with my little piglet?” and pinched his arm. But she got mad when I tried on my favorite blouse from last year and couldn’t button it across my chest. She cursed and said she couldn’t afford to buy us new clothes, why couldn’t we make anything last. So we tried on all our clothes for school. She cursed again, but sad, not mad. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “We have to go to the ragpicker’s.”

  By that she meant a church in Bushwick that had charity clothes in brown boxes or hung up on metal racks. They hardly had anything good. The best thing for me was a red sweater that was too big, but my mom said anyway, it would last. Also she picked out matching yellow sweatshirts for us that were brand-new but stupid, with pictures of whales on them. And a T-shirt for Dante that said “I’m the Big Sister,” and she didn’t even know, and neither did he because he didn’t care about reading even if he knew how. I started to tell them, but Dante was acting like such a mal nacido that I decided he would be wearing it to school.

  Early the next day I went to my cotton-ball box in the closet and got out pictures of Ginger and the horses and picked the ones I would paste on my notebook for school. I would put the ones with ponies on the outside and the ones with Joker and Reesa on the inside so my mom wouldn’t see them. Though she never looked at the pictures anyway. I just put them in my box in the closet and she never said anything.

  Ginger

  Sometimes I don’t care what Becca says; other times it cuts. It cuts when I feel myself small and insignificant against her and her friends and their big proud bodies, when I feel the fear and chaos that’s always in me, and the nothingness, the nothing I’ve done with my life except to continue to live. But it’s not too late. I am stronger than I was. And now I have Velvet.

  I decided I was going to do a painting of Melinda, a figurative painting for the first time since art school. It was Velvet who put that idea into my head—after I showed her my sister’s “portrait,” she said, “Why don’t you do a real picture of her?” She asked the day after she saw the red abstract, which meant she’d been thinking about it. I told her I didn’t do representational or figurative work; she looked at me blankly and said, “Why not?” I started explaining to her that everything had already been painted at this point, and that there was no reason to represent figures anymore. The way she looked at me, I was suddenly embarrassed. “Did somebody else paint your sister already?” she asked.

  “No, it’s not that,” I said, and she just looked at me.

  So I decided to try. I decided to work from two pictures, one from when Melinda was ten and seriously beautiful, and another when she was a thick-necked, swollen-faced adult, some teeth already gone, her eyes dulled but still with a hard glitter deep in them. She was wearing a sweatshirt and holding a plastic take-out container; whoever took the picture had obviously surprised her. It must’ve been somebody she was happy to see because she was actually smiling. Which is probably why she’d even kept the picture in a drawer full of buttons, batteries, colored lightbulbs, and broken toys: It was the only one of her as an adult s
miling so you could see her teeth.

  I decided I’d put both Melindas in the same picture. I wanted to foreground the smiling, disfigured adult and have the pretty, sweet-faced child in the background. It was harder than I thought. I was unpracticed and couldn’t make the lines properly expressive. The adult Melinda was comic, nearly pumpkin-faced, the child wraithlike and weird. After dinner I came back to try again. This time I put them together, one half of the face a child, the other half an adult. That was worse. Did somebody else paint your sister? Blurry thoughts filled my head; gooseflesh came up on my arm. What was I doing to my sister? Why?

  When Melinda was fifteen, our mother had her hospitalized. It was a state mental hospital and she got into fights with the other girls there; she came home for a weekend visit with a black eye and a swollen mouth. Her body was stiff and fearful, but her eyes were sarcastic and she mumbled tough, boasting things with her hurt lips. We shared a room and she sat in the corner of it listening to our little record player while I sketched in my diary. She listened to the same song over and over. It was by Alice Cooper, I think, crowing and clowning about runnin through the world with a gun at his back. Melinda listened to it hunched over and rocking intently. If the music hadn’t been there, it would’ve looked like she was crying. But I was barely twelve. I listened to the music over her body because I think she wanted me to. She just kept picking up the needle and putting it down in the same place. It didn’t even bother me.

  I rested my brushes in a jar of mineral spirits and put away my paints. I turned off the lights and listened to the dense sound of bugs outside the open windows.

  When Melinda was nineteen, she told me about being abused by the head psychiatrist at the hospital. He told her she had to be checked for VD. He actually did the exam himself and he didn’t even wear a white coat. When she saw him come into the room, she sat up on the table and said, “But I can’t have VD. I’m a virgin.” And he said, “Isn’t that sweet. Lie back and open your legs.” She started to get off the table and he told her she’d go into seclusion if she put up a fuss. She said he shoved the speculum in so hard she bled. She said the nurse obviously knew it was wrong, but she didn’t try to stop him. She just put her hand on Melinda’s belly and said, “Try to relax, dear.”

  She was driving me somewhere when she told me. The radio was on, but it didn’t matter. I heard her, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. Melinda stole and she lied a lot. She even admitted it. She told me the story to explain why she stole from our mother’s purse; she said it was because when she told our mother what the psychiatrist did, our mother just said, “I’ll talk to him,” and then kept forgetting.

  Velvet

  My school is in Williamsburg, where we used to live before Crown Heights. We’re not supposed to keep going there because you have to go to school in your district, but my mom didn’t want us to go here because she heard about gun violence. So she just pretended we didn’t move and the school pretends they don’t know we moved so we can go there. Which I’m glad for because I would rather stay there than go to school with new people, but it also means that in the summer all the other girls are together and I’m in Crown Heights with Dante. Everybody else is getting to know each other more and I’m not getting to know anybody because my mom is too afraid to let me out the house. We can’t walk to school anymore, and because my mom can’t let us go on the subway and the bus alone, she goes with us when it’s barely day and drops us off in the school yard before she goes to work. We stand there and wait, even when it’s freezing cold, for like an hour before everybody else comes to school together, looking at us like they’re sorry for us.

  I used to be friends with three girls there: Helena, who dresses straight off the truck, whose mom does her hair like J. Lo blond; Alicia, whose eyebrows grow almost together, but whose mouth is so smart she still hangs out with the cutest older boys; and Marisol, with her chubby body and sweet voice, who watches cartoons like a little kid but reads books nobody else can understand. But when I moved, Helena started talking shit about my clothes, like telling me her mom said she couldn’t believe a Dominican mother would let her child walk around like that. And Alicia, if I found her alone she would talk like when we were kids—but in the cafeteria she would be grillin’ me with her new girls and calling me Velveeta behind her hand.

  The only one who’s still nice is Marisol and that’s partly because she dresses like me, from stores that don’t have names, and her skin is bad now and she’s too serious. I still like her sometimes because you can talk about private things with her and not feel stupid. But really I wish I was still friends with Alicia and Helena even if I kind of hate them.

  But that was last year, and this year I had hope it would be different. Partly because of the horses, and partly because of this girl called Strawberry. Strawberry wasn’t her name, but they called her that because every day at lunch she ate strawberry ice cream bars. And because of the red streaks in her long hair.

  Strawberry didn’t know all the girls, either. She came to our school last year when there were only a few more months left. She was special and tragical. They said she’d moved from New Orleans because of the hurricane. They said she’d been on the roof with her family without any food or water. They said she’d been sent to one foster place in Texas but something happened and she’d had to leave and go to the place she was at here. And she still couldn’t go home even though the hurricane was a year ago because her family was someplace where people were acting crazy and killing each other’s dogs.

  If she’d been a girl like us, we still would’ve been nice to her. But she was not like us. She was two years older than everybody on account of being held back twice, and she was beautiful like a woman. She had breasts, and she wore flowered bras that you could see through her clothes. She wore makeup and sat kind of sideways, and looked like she was smoking a cigarette in a black-and-white movie. Her mouth smiled, smiled hard, but her eyes did not smile, ever. Her eyes watched and looked for something they knew they’d never find. I liked her; everybody liked her. All the girls who used to be my friends and then laughed at me for having church clothes wanted to be friends with her.

  Then in the spring we both had detention and the teacher was new and he let us sit together. His cell phone rang and he answered it and we started whispering. She showed me a picture of her older brother, Marco. I showed her a picture of my grandfather. At first I told her he was in DR like he was alive. I told her how he called me on the phone and sent me a sea horse. Then I said, “But then he died.” I don’t know why I told her. But when I did, she got quiet and her eyes got different and so did her mouth. She said, “My brother’s dead, too. He drowned in the hurricane. Him and his girlfriend were trapped in the attic and they couldn’t get out.” We both looked down and it was deep. Then she said, “What’s your favorite movie?” and before I could tell her, the teacher started to yell.

  The next day I gave her the pink-brown shell that my father gave me. I showed her the sea horse, too. I gave her the shell and let her hold the sea horse and it happened again: her eyes got feeling in them. She asked if she could have the sea horse too, but I said no, it was the only other thing I had from my grandfather. Her eyes changed back, and for a second I thought she was gonna keep my sea horse. But then she changed them back again, and they smiled with her mouth only not mean, and she said, “When I see one of those Ima think of you,” and gave it back. “Where you gonna see a sea horse?” I asked, and I laughed because it sounded funny. She laughed too, and said, “SpongeBob.” And everybody saw it, her talking and laughing with me with her real eyes, and all the way to the end of the year, nobody started anything with me.

  The one bad thing was that being friends with Strawberry made me sometimes pretend I didn’t really know Marisol. Which was sick. Except really I didn’t know Marisol so much anymore, all she did was read.

  So I wanted to see Strawberry and show her the pictures of my real horses. I picked the best ones—me on Joker and Reesa,
me grooming Rocki, who was mad big—and I pasted them inside the cover of my school notebook. I didn’t put the one with Ginger in because I didn’t want to explain her to everybody. Except for Strawberry. I thought maybe I’d show it to her.

  But when I got to school, I didn’t find her at the assembly and I thought she went back with her family. Then when I saw her in the hall and I started to go to her, she gave me a grill with her eyes like dead. Like she never knew me, or talked to me about the most private thing. It made me feel sick. I couldn’t believe she meant it at first. But then in class she sat with the girls who were bitches to me. I sat behind them and I whispered to Alicia, my friend turned bitch, and she whispered to me, but turning around like I was somebody following them and then turning back to the others. That’s how they were to me all day. Except for Strawberry. She didn’t turn to me at all. She just talked loud like to make sure the whole room heard her, and the teacher didn’t really stop her. She talked about her brother Marco in Puerto Rico. Like he was alive.

  Ginger

  Paul and I bickered about having Velvet up on weekends. Then we fought. He repeated the things he’d said about my needs, her needs, expectations I would not be able to meet. He said we had nothing in common. Then he started about race. He said things like “white benefactor” and “She’s too different from you” and “What are you going to do when she gets pregnant?” Which made me yell, “And you think I’m racist?” before I left the house and slammed the door.

  We made up. And fought about it again. Maybe once a month, he said. If her mother agrees. Twice a month, I said. If she keeps her grades up. If she continues the good work, we’ll make it every week, I didn’t say.