The Mare

by Mary Gaitskill

  I rode a horse when I was six. Because my father was friends with Mr. Reyes, the man who ran a store down the street, and Mr. Reyes had a horse. One day my father held me up so I could see the horse’s face, and he had rough skin but soft eyes. I put my hands on his neck and it felt good. I wanted to get up on him, so my father laughed and put me on his back. And on that horse I saw the world: sky, trees, buildings, streets going in different directions. My life, going in different directions. My father was talking to Mr. Reyes with his hand on the horse; it was right by my leg. But then he turned and his hand came off the horse. And the horse began to move! He walked and then Mr. Reyes yelled and the horse ran, and the world was shaken so hard my teeth rattled. I grabbed the mane and watched the world clatter by, I clattered by my mother running out the house waving a towel. Somebody stood in front of the horse, and it reared up and I fell off. I banged my head; it felt like all my bones broke. I cried, Mami! A dark hole closed over me and I fell down into it.

  In the hole people were yoked to machines, thousands of people, naked, bent, and pulling, so angry that they bit the shoulders of those before them. Voices said, “You are lazy and selfish”; the voices came from faces joined together in a breathing darkness, one dark, expressionless face made of many faces, a black field of nose-holes, eye-holes, and many mouths. People fell down the slippery holes and mouths and into working guts; they were shit out into dreams of people who did not even know them. I was there, with the shit-people. We crawled in the dirt of dreams, the dreams of those who cursed us without knowing us. Above were signs, telling us what we were: crosses, dollars, flashing lights, thousands of quick-moving pictures showing pain and ugliness.

  And then my mother grabbed me up by my arm and slapped me awake, crying. My father said, “It’s not her fault!” but still she got me home and whipped my legs. Later, my father got me a piece of candy.

  Now he’s gone. When he died I could not even be with him to say good-bye because I had no money to get on the plane.

  Paul

  I had an aunt named Bea. She was a strange, frightened person. She was small, with a pretty, big-eyed face, but also huge, clumsy hands that I think she picked at. She was a terrible cook and once when my sister complained about a soggy grilled-cheese sandwich, Aunt Bea went into the bedroom and cried. She could play the piano and she acted in a community theater version of The Cherry Orchard, playing a jilted servant girl; she actually thought this was going to be the start of an acting career. My uncle went to see every performance and sat proudly in the front row; he was too charmed to notice the pathos of the ambition, not even when they wouldn’t let her act in another play. He reminisced about The Cherry Orchard for years, every single time we went to visit, while she just sat there and stared. Then their marriage went through a crisis and she got a little crazy, would hide under the bed sometimes and refuse to come out.

  Both she and my uncle are dead and I don’t normally think about them much. Then Ginger decided that she wanted to act in the children’s community theater; they were doing A Christmas Carol, and she wanted to play either the beautiful Ghost of Christmas Past or the depraved hag who steals Scrooge’s curtains when he dies. I thought it was wonderful until she told me why: She wanted to invite Velvet’s whole family up to see her perform. She was hoping Velvet and her brother would want to act in the theater too, and that Mrs. Vargas would realize what a wonderful place this was to live. And she couldn’t even tell the woman how much she’d have to pay for a carton of milk!

  My God, I thought. Under the jaded, ex-addict exterior, the wan, toughened survivor I’d fallen in love with, who could listen to and talk about the saddest, most brutal experiences at meetings—under that was Aunt Bea! I’d married Aunt Bea!

  Ginger

  The Cocoon Theater was on the second floor over the liquor store. When I came up the stairs, kids were running up and down a hallway full of hats, masks, robes, swords, helmets, wigs, and sparkling crowns. In the foyer, teenagers stood around a huge papier-mâché fortress and a rack of goofy dresses on cockeyed hangers. A sexy middle-aged lady with a bossy young butt burst in and yelled us into a big room with a linoleum floor and punched-up walls hung with black drapes. We had to sing a Broadway song while a small, intrepid man with a mild mouth and a teardrop nose played the piano. In an English accent I sang, All I want is a room somewhere / Far away from the cold night air. The kids stared at me. I tried to pantomime and my voice wobbled; the piano player sighed and started again.

  But it was perfect: The man who played the piano (Yandy) was married to the bossy middle-aged lady (Danielle); he was a dancer from Cuba and he spoke Spanish.

  Paul

  I hate to admit it, but in retrospect it’s clear: I didn’t put up enough of a fight about her plot to get the family upstate because I was sure it would never happen and also because I wanted her focus on something else besides us. I wanted to be feeling the resentment. I wanted a reason to look for Polly. Because that’s all it was, looking. And often finding her, walking alone across campus where I could come up beside her and touch her elbow and talk. That was even better than the times she came to my office.

  Velvet

  When I was walking around before I had to pick up Dante, this older boy I don’t know came up to me, going, “Hey, lil’ mama. What’s good?”

  I didn’t like his voice, so I just said, “Hey.”

  “So what’s good?” he say.

  “Nothin’.”

  “No? I got somethin’ good. You wanna come smoke it with me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You on your way somewheres?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “I hear that don’t matter, shawty.”

  I looked at him long enough for him to get embarrassed. I said, “I do not know what you are talking about.” And he said, “Well, you better figure it out, girl. You play your position or it play you.” There was no friendly in his voice at all. He looked at me to make his point, then walked away.

  Ginger

  I didn’t get what I auditioned for, but I did get several minor parts: solicitor for the poor, drunk, debtor, beggar, tortured soul. It didn’t matter; I loved it. I got to make faces, sing, and even dance in the crowd scenes. Danielle and Yandy ran the theater with their five kids; the whole family acted, sold tickets, ran the concession stand, and made costumes. Because they couldn’t come up with full costumes, Danielle decided we’d wear pajamas under our meager bonnets, skirts, top hats, and dressing jackets; then she decided we should all paint our faces blue. Rehearsals were like a cross between Dalí and Dr. Seuss: chaos, with sudden ecstatic bursts of order. Kids ran everywhere yelling their lines, waving props, having tickle fights, and slapping paint on each other while Danielle yelled about acting philosophy and Yandy played the piano. There were two other adult actors, an out-of-work female psychiatrist about my age and a male nurse in the middle of a divorce. We’d stand around together during the chaos and the psychiatrist would bitch that Danielle and Yandy were sloppy professionally, mentally ill, and probably drunks. I said, Oh, it’s just supposed to be fun. The nurse sucked on his cigarette and ogled my breasts.

  But I took it seriously too. I really tried. It actually hurt when Danielle criticized me in front of everybody because she thought my debtor’s reaction to hearing of Scrooge’s death was too nice. “You think she’d be ambivalent to hear that the guy who’s been putting the screws to her is dead? Are you nuts? She’d be overjoyed and nothing else!”

  “But wouldn’t you feel ashamed to think you’d come down so low on the food chain that you’d gloat over somebody else’s death?”

  Both Danielle and her husband cracked up. “You are some Goody Two-shoes,” he said.

  So I went back and tried to be more bitter for them. I tried to picture what Mrs. Vargas would feel if she heard about her landlord dying and not having to pay back rent. I thought she might cackle about it at first. I thought she might say pious things too, then laugh. But when
she was alone, I thought she’d feel weird. I thought she might even pray for the person. I don’t know why, but I did.

  Velvet

  Then one day I’m sitting in class and I get a note passed that says, “Kwan likes you.” I look over and Kwan is staring the gloopy-eyed hell out of me. Which I don’t like because he’s sixteen and still in my grade, and because he’s the boyfriend of Brianna, who’s fifteen and café au lait beautiful and basically the baddest bitch in the school. And I can see he knows about this note, but I don’t think it was his idea. And I can feel every girl in the class watching to see what I do. Which is, walk up to him in the hall and bitch him out so everybody can hear, and tell him to leave me alone before I tell Brianna.

  My mom said, “That’s what you get for being a troublemaker.” But Ginger said she was proud of me for handling it. I got a 3 on a paper that we did on the phone and I went upstate and jumped over a low pole on Little Tina. Pat told me she was proud of me too, and we went on a trail ride together. The leaves were changing color and the evergreen was alone in the sky. There were birds with huge wings circling over everything like searching eyes. Pat said they were searching; they were hawks out for prey. She said they caught mice, chipmunks, rabbits, sometimes even little dogs or cats. I looked up at them and my back tingled.

  Then I came back home and it was on everybody’s phone, the phone everybody had but me. This picture of a girl kissing what’s supposed to be Kwan’s naked chest and reaching her hand down his pants. You couldn’t see her face, but her hair was not good like Brianna’s, it was damaged, like mine was when my mom bleached it, but not now. And there was a message with it that went, “Here she go, slurpin’ away.”

  Marisol was the one who showed it to me. She said in her little voice, “They sayin’ it’s you. But I know it’s not.” She looked down instead of at me and her shoulders were turned in.

  “Who sent it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I said, “I don’t care about this shit,” and she said, “I don’t either,” but we knew we did. We sat quiet for a minute. I was remembering something else Pat told me on our ride: “The dominant mare drives the troublemakers to the outside of the herd. Because that’s where the predators are.”

  Ginger

  The woman called my cell phone Saturday morning when I was at the grocery. Her voice was friendly and hopeful but with a push behind it; she wanted to know if I was Velvet’s godmother. I had no idea where that came from, but I said, Yes, who’s this? Lydia, she said, down the block from Velvet. The girl had come to her, crying ’cause her mother was abusing her, and she had taken her in. I put down my wire basket and went out into the lot. There were orange and yellow paper turkeys in the windows and little evergreens. There was a Humvee with a sticker over its windshield saying GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY. “Does she have bruises?” I asked.

  “No,” said Lydia. “But I don’t think she’s making it up; she’s too upset. Some girl at school is saying Velvet tried to steal her boyfriend, and they’re following her home from school. Somebody threw a glass bottle at her. Velvet says the girl’s lying, but the mother believes the one she doesn’t know over her own child, and she’s been hitting the child and calling her a ho in front of her brother.”

  “Where is Velvet now?”

  “She’s in the other room sleeping still. She spent the night; I didn’t have the heart to send her back.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “Just from the block. She sits out on her front stoop like a little puppy, trying to talk to whoever talks back, and a lot do because that girl is pretty and she needs the attention. Last night while we were looking at the TV? She just leaned on me the same way, like a puppy, like way younger than fifteen. I hate to see her treated this way, and when she told me about you—”

  “Wait,” I said. “She is way younger than fifteen. She’s twelve.”

  There was a silence on the other end. “Maybe I’m mistaken.” The voice was harder, the friendly hope gone stiff and artificial. “But everybody thinks that’s how old she is. I don’t know why she would lie.”

  “She looks older than twelve. Maybe people just assume—”

  “Well, whateva. I got my own family to consider.” She said she was going to take Velvet back home as soon as the girl woke up so that her mother would know she hadn’t been doing anything wrong. She was going to see the situation for herself. She said she couldn’t really get involved because she had her own problems with the state system. But me being the godmother, she thought I should know.

  I thanked Lydia. She gave me her phone number. I put my cell away and stood in the lot. Why she would lie. Because she lies all the time. Because it’s the only way life is bearable. A big, angry-looking woman with gray hair came out of the store with a full cart of groceries plus a bag hanging off her arm. She went to the car that said “Get the Fuck out of My Way,” unloaded her groceries in it, and drove off.

  Velvet

  I listened to Lydia talking about me like I was a telenovela that she cried over and got mad at. I got my own family to consider. I thought about walking with Ginger in warm dark full of smells and fireflies past houses with decorations in their yards and sounds of children in them. I rubbed the Ginger-doll key chain with my thumb, down its sharp nose, checked coat, one leg and back. Now Ginger would know it wasn’t just me talking. An adult had told her and she would have to believe.

  Ginger

  Later that night I tried to call Velvet’s house. Mrs. Vargas answered, spoke angry-normal Spanish, then sad-brightly said, “Okay?” It was the first English word she’d ever said to me. It was also the first time I’d heard any sadness in her voice. Or brightness.

  I called Lydia. She said as soon as she walked in, the mother started crying and thanking her, and that Velvet did nothing but curse and yell. She said, “I told her, if you talked to me that way, I’d hit you too.”

  When I got Velvet on the phone, she said, “She acts so nice in front of everybody else! I am so sick of her bullshit!”

  Paul said, “And you want them to move up here? Really?”

  Velvet

  When I went back up there it was night and there were white Christmas lights in all the little trees on the main street of the town. But the next day it was rainy and cold with mud. I went to the barn. Horses stood outside, wet and streaked with mud, bony like dinosaurs, their heads like dinosaur birds with wings. Inside, they felt angry and bored. Fiery Girl felt worse. Fiery Girl would not even talk to me. She stood away from me like she didn’t know me. I said, Hey, don’t you remember when I brought you out? And she didn’t look.

  I walked through the barn to the office and I saw two more horses were gone: Rocki’s stall didn’t have his name on it anymore, or Officer Murphy’s. Their toys and ribbons were gone too. I looked for Pat, but I didn’t find her; this girl I didn’t know told me she wasn’t there but that Beverly was schooling a horse in the indoor ring. I went there and saw she had the horse on long lines, and a whip in her hand, and she was talking in her hard voice. “When I say whoa, I mean whoa! I don’t mean let’s talk it over, I mean you stop and no backing up, no nothin’! No! Don’t move, don’t think it!” But the horse did back up and Beverly whipped it and it ran and she dropped the lines and laughed. It ran around her and then it ran at her, but she raised up the whip and it ran in a circle on the outside of the ring while she followed it from the inside, shaking the whip at it. “You think running is a good option? Now it’s my option. This is my option!” She struck at the air, again and again.

  The horse’s coat was dark with sweat and its eyes were scared.

  “Whoa!” said Beverly. The horse stopped, trembling and panting. “That’s right, whoa! Good girl!” She went to the horse and touched it. “Look at this poor thing, she’s scared to death. It’s okay, sweet pea. That’s nice, that’s nice, that’s a pretty girl. Thank you. I’m gonna thank you.” She looked at me. “Always remember to say thank you. Always reme
mber your manners.”

  I left, but I did not go back to the house. I walked around the block, breathing hard. It felt like I was in an ocean looking at lights on a shore a long way away.

  The next day Gare told me that before I came, Heather’s horse, Totally, kicked this girl Jessie and broke her ribs. I said, “Why?”

  Gare went, “I don’t know, maybe because Jessie’s a bitch? I didn’t see it. I heard Jessie came up behind Totally too fast while Heather was giving the horse a hard time about something. I was like, way to go, Totally.”

  I thought, If I was a horse, I’d kick too. I’d kick whenever I could and even trample.

  Ginger

  On the phone I said, “Listen. I want to invite your mom and brother up along with you around Christmas. I’m acting in a play and I think it would be fun if you all came to see it. It’s a children’s theater.”

  “Why are you acting in a theater for children?”

  “Because it’s fun. Do you think you would want to act in it if you could?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Could you ask your mom if she’d like to come?”

  She didn’t answer. I felt her like she was next to me breathing.

  I said, “I’m thinking if she had a chance to look around up here, it might make her think about coming here to live.”

  I felt her, but I didn’t know what she felt.

  “Just a minute,” she said. I heard her talking to her mother, her mother answering back. They talked awhile. There was no anger or cursing. Velvet came back.

  “She says yes.”

  Paul