Ginger
She humiliated her mother. It wasn’t her fault. It was mine. The look on her face when she looked back at us, walking with that obnoxious woman! I didn’t blame her. Her mom was a bitch, and she was getting back. But I couldn’t forget the way the woman shrank and then just went away. Like she was the child and her twelve-year-old daughter had all the power.
Velvet
She closed the door and knocked me down in the hall. She said, “Get up.”
Dante went away down the hall.
She said, “Get up, bitch!”
Dante turned the TV on and up loud.
My mother kicked me and yelled, “Get up!” I tried to stand; she kicked me in the stomach and I sat back down. I heard Dante talking to the TV, cursing and calling it “bitch.” I held back crying.
“Understand,” she said. “I will knock you down until you don’t get up. Every time you get up, I will knock you down again. Maybe you’re the boss with that fool woman, but here I am the boss.”
“Mami,” I said. “Mami—”
Dante talked faster, louder.
“You want to ride those horses, fine, ride them. You want to die, die. I don’t care.”
There was more, her cursing and kicking and then Dante ran at her yelling. “I don’t want Velvet to die!”
Then me running out the door, down the stairs. My mother was yelling at Dante and he was yelling back. I ran out into the street. It was snowing, and I ran in front of a car with music blasting out of it. People laughing at the crazy girl, but stopping, caring if I died. Laughing on their way somewhere else. I was never out this late before and the street was full of people I didn’t know. Lydia; I knew Lydia. I ran to her; I rang all the doorbells on her door. A man said, “Hey, lil’ mama,” but he saw I was crying and went away. I rang and rang but Lydia didn’t come. I sat on her steps and stopped crying. I looked at all the people going by. Some looked back, some kept going. I thought about the play where people were singing and dancing and pretending to be poor. I thought of Fiery Girl. I wanted to go into the stall with her and feel her body, see the snow falling outside the barn while I was beside her warm body.
A woman passed by carrying plastic bags full of bottles. She wore a winter coat, but instead of shoes she wore furry house slippers with socks that were soaking wet in the mushy snow. I realized she was the lady my mom called “the Haitian.” But I liked her; her hair was gray under her scarf and her eyes were deep and kind. “Young woman,” she said. “What’s going on with you? You look sad.”
“My mom hit me and said she doesn’t care if I die,” I said. “I don’t want to go home.”
She came close to me, but her eyes didn’t look at me. She looked past me, but like she was seeing me. Like Pat and the horses. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “You are blessed. Don’t forget, you are blessed.” Then she brought her eyes to mine. “But you need to go home. Your eyes are older than your years, but I can feel your heart is very young, too young to be out now. Go home. Your mother won’t hurt you any more tonight.”
Ginger
Her thirteenth birthday fell on a weekend, so she came. Paul was away at a conference and it was just the two of us. Waiting at Penn, she looked like she did the first time I saw her: tender, pure-eyed, with that gorgeous hair free and unstraightened. I knelt to hold her and I thought with my body, I love you.
I said, “Your mom says it’s okay for you to ride.”
The light left her eyes. She said, “I know. She doesn’t care if I die.”
I said, “She doesn’t mean that. She was angry because she felt disrespected.”
“She hit me, Ginger. She knocked me down.”
My mind went blank. I saw Mrs. Vargas’s face when she heard the love song in the play. I saw her telling Velvet she was ugly. I said, “I’m sorry. You did not deserve that.”
That evening she was sullen and snappish; she went to the barn, came back, and looked at me like she had nothing to do with me. On the second day, we fought because I asked her to help me with the dishes and she refused. I told her we would not go out to celebrate her birthday in that case and she stormed upstairs, I thought to her room, but when I went to use the bathroom, I found she was lying sprawled out in the hallway, face turned sideways so I could see its aggrieved expression. I stepped over her, to and from the bathroom. Eventually she got up and went out to the horses. I went for a walk. When I came back, she was sitting on the porch. I sat next to her and put my arm around her. She sat there staring straight ahead like she didn’t know me. I kept my arm there anyway. I asked her if she wanted to have a good time or a bad time. She looked at me like I was an asshole. I was about to say, “Maybe you should just go home,” when she said, “A good time.” I said, “Okay. Help me with the dishes and we can go out for your birthday.” She looked at me blankly. I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “I’m sorry about your mom and the horses. It was my fault. I should’ve told her.” We went in and she started running the water.
Velvet
We went to a fancy place to eat. The people there were fat ugly pigs who thought they were great. Their expressions were ugly and fat even when they were pretty and thin. I remembered this disgusting thing I heard a boy say about somebody: “She thinks her shit smells like ice cream.” I felt glad I don’t live where people think their shit is ice cream. I looked at Ginger. Why was she even here? We sat down and next to the table was a shelf of olive oil marked thirty dollars a bottle. I remembered something Ginger said to me about Republicans, how they were on the side of the most greedy rich people in the country. Right now, Ginger was looking at a menu while behind her greedy pigs laughed and stank up the air with their slit eyes and hairy hands and little red nasty mouths. I said, “This place is full of Republicans.” She said, “No, honey, probably not. This is a mostly Democrat county.” I said, “There’s a bunch of Republicans right behind you,” and she said, “How would you know by looking?” “Trust me,” I said. “They’re Republicans.”
Ginger
How adorable was that? Wondering what she saw, I turned to look: jowly guys with big arms spread out on the table, women in flowered dresses, a certain expression of…“Um, maybe,” I said. “Those might actually be Republicans.” I nodded at another party across from us. “But those are likely Democrats.”
“Why?” she asked. “They don’t look different.”
I tried to think of how to explain. A tray of red cocktails went past. Our waiter appeared. Velvet looked at the menu and frowned. “How about the steak?” I said. “It’s good here.” A roar of enjoyment swept the room; there were drinks, red drinks riding a sudden, bitter wave. What was I thinking bringing her here? “I’m going to have the calamari. Do you know what that is?” She shook her head. Her tight-curled hair fell over her lush cheek. “Octopus. You can tell people you know somebody who eats octopus.”
“Darling! Oh my God!”
Two guys wearing flowered shirts strutted into the room. Velvet gaped. One of the “Democrat” women stood up, clutched her heart, and screamed, “Oh, it’s been so long!” A flowered guy clutched his heart, “fainting” against the door and crying, “Darling, I want to smooch you!”
And Velvet cracked up. I mean, she really did burst into laughter. Flowered Guy Two looked over, ready to bitch slap, then saw he was apparently being laughed at by a black teenager. The other guy looked; the whole table looked. I giggled behind my hand. Velvet slapped the table and laughed. The Republicans smiled benignly. It was too ridiculous and Flowered Guy One knew it. “Ladies,” he said as he magnificently swept past, “have a wonderful night.”
I said, “Thank you.” And ordered a Cosmopolitan.
Velvet
I said, “But you don’t drink,” and she said, “I’m trusting you. Don’t tell anyone, all right?” I said I wouldn’t, but I didn’t like it because right away she wasn’t the same. Her eyes were different and she laughed like there was something wrong with her, like she was out of breath. Bu
t the steak was good and it was big. Also it was fun to watch her eat fried octopus.
Then she wanted to go for a drive and I said, “You will get in a lot of trouble if you get caught driving drunk with me.” She said, “There won’t be trouble. I only had one.” She turned down a tiny white road with black sky but also something glowing at the end of it. I felt like I used to when she read that book to me, like we were in a place I could only be with her; a place where nobody hit or yelled at anybody. Then Republicans didn’t matter anymore and the drink didn’t either. “Can we play music?” I said.
She put on this tape of old music by a group called the Shangri-Las. She said it was the name of a place where people didn’t get old, and there was a story about people getting lost there. Life was so perfect there that it made them crazy, so they couldn’t stay even though one of them fell in love. They tried to go back over mountains, but a huge snowstorm came and the Shangri-La woman who came with them turned old and died in front of her boyfriend while he cried. I asked if that’s what they were singing about, and she said no, it was just the name of the group. We were quiet for a while and I tried to like the music, even though it was corny. We drove into fog and everything got weird-beautiful: the red taillights on parked cars and numbers flashing on mailboxes, and sometimes deer-eyes. Ginger started singing, really soft. Her drunk voice was embarrassing, little and pinchy like a funny bone. But still, my neck tingled like when my mom did my hair. I said, “Can we drive a long time? Can we get a little bit lost?” And she laughed and said, “Honey, we already are a little bit lost.” I said, “Really?” She reached out and took my hand. “No,” she said. “Not really. Because we’re together.”
Ginger
I tucked her in like she was still a little girl and then walked around straightening the house and whispering, “Mistake, mistake, mistake.” I poured myself a large glass of water, slowly drank it, then brushed my teeth. I got into bed. My heart raced; my brain filled with clashing words and silent, hectic music. Yes, the drink was a mistake, but a healing one. Our beautiful time in the car; a moment of forgiveness; a way to the in-between place. The drink helped me to get there.
I sat up. The in-between place. It was my term for the tenderness that sometimes happened between me and Michael, usually when we were trying to get out the door in the morning in time for work; a time when our exhausted eyes would acknowledge the stupidity and nastiness of the night before, but would still say wordlessly, “It was not really that. No. It only seemed like that. Really, it was this.”
I got up and drank some more water, leaned over the sink absorbing it, then made myself throw it up.
Paul
I thought Ginger would know, would sense it when I got back. I flew into Manhattan and took the train in a daze of Polly, hip-deep in the feeling of her, the way she never stopped looking me in the eyes.
But then there was Ginger at the station and the meadow just outside; the cows as we drove by, tearing hay from the broken feed cart, working their jaws. And there too was Polly; my wanting to turn her over to see her that way, but thinking it might be just the one time, and not being able to give up the look in her eyes. The feeling was so intense, I thought Ginger would read my mind, thought she would say something.
And she did. She said, “Velvet told me her mother beat her. She said she knocked her down and kicked her.”
“I’m not surprised.” I was ashamed at the lack of feeling in my voice. But I had no room for more feeling. “Did you call social services?”
“No. She doesn’t want me to.”
“Then why is she telling you?”
“I don’t know.”
I said, “Ginger” and thought, Polly.
“I think it’s because she wants me to invite her to come stay with us.”
“That’s out of the question and you know it. She knows it.”
“If it wasn’t for you, I’m not sure it would be out of the question. We don’t know what her mother thinks.”
“Did you say that to her?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“You know, we did this because we were thinking about adopting a child. We can do it. We can adopt a child who can really be ours.”
“I don’t want a child. I want her.”
“You can’t have her.”
“If I can’t have her completely, I’ll have what I can.”
It was what Polly said to me. I know I can’t have you completely, but—
“Is this a Democrat county or Republican?”
“Republican. Dutchess County’s voted Republican for the last thirty years. Why?”
She smiled and told me.
I wanted to say, Please. You know what you’re like. You gravitate toward pain. If you want to get hurt, use a grown-up, not a little girl. But it wasn’t fair, and anyway, how could I talk that way now?
Velvet
The last week of school I got the sea horse from Strawberry. Alicia told me she had something for me, and I almost said fuck you but she said, “It’s from Strawberry.” I saw she had a real letter with pink script on it. She handed me the envelope and watched me open it; a picture cut from a magazine fell out. It was a glass sea horse cut with scissors, and there was a folded note in her handwriting that said, “I told you I would think of you when I saw one and I did. Friends 4 Life.” And then “Strawberry” in pink script with a heart.
I didn’t want to smile, but I did; I looked at Alicia and she was looking back like she used to. She said Strawberry e-mailed her but hardly ever, and that when she got an e-mail asking for her house address, Alicia didn’t even know why until she got the card for me. We walked down the hall like in elementary school. She asked me if I wanted to go to a party. I asked, whose party and she named a girl I knew was friends with Brianna. I said, “She helped spread lies about me.” Alicia said, “What, you mean the picture?” And her voice was like a animal about to eat something. I stopped walking and said, “You know that wasn’t me.” She put her eyes down. I thought it meant she was sorry. She said, “I do know. Brianna knows too.” She looked up and said, “So will you come to the party?” And then, “Dominic gonna be there.”
Ginger
She called me and told me her mother was going to die. “What? How? What happened?” She has a disease, sobbed the girl, in her stomach. The doctor said she’ll die and she couldn’t even tell Dante because her mother made her promise not to. Because Dante would be scared.
She was calling from school, from the social worker’s office. I asked to speak to the social worker, but it turned out she had no idea what was going on. She’d called Mrs. Vargas at work and was waiting to hear back. She said she’d let me know when she did.
“What are we going to do?” cried Velvet. “Ginger?”
“I’ll do anything I can to help, baby.”
I hung up and walked from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room and back, over and over. Maybe we could take Velvet and her brother could get into foster care here so they could see each other. Maybe it would be better to keep them together in foster care but up here so Velvet could stay with us on the weekends and ride horses. Maybe we could become foster parents and they could both live with us. Maybe I could divorce Paul and become a foster mother.
Break apart, come together, break apart. The rooms and their furniture were there before me. But invisibly, it all seemed to break, re-form, and break again and again.
The phone rang; it was the social worker. She said she had spoken to Velvet’s mother, and she was not dying; she just had irritable bowel syndrome. When the social worker asked why her daughter thought she was dying, Mrs. Vargas laughed. She said she was teaching the girl a lesson.
“About what?” I asked.
“I didn’t ask,” said the woman. “I’ve been doing this upwards of five years and I’ve never heard anything like that before.”
Break apart, come together, break apart.
Velvet
I put on the outfit
Ginger gave me for my birthday and the butterfly ring and the red earrings shaped like flowers. I took the Ginger-doll out of the cotton-ball box and put it in my front pocket where you couldn’t see it. I put the picture of my grandfather in my back pocket. I put clothes under my blankets until it looked like maybe I was under them. I turned off the light and walked down the hall quiet. I walked quiet all the way out the house and down the block and then ran for the bus that Alicia told me to take.
I’d never walked on the street or rode the bus that late at night, and it was scary, but it got me interested. The people were mad rude but funny too. In the seat behind me these older girls were talking like: “An’ then I said to her, ‘Bitch, all that ring means is he paid too much to fuck ya waffcake ass,’ she just stand there and look stupit!” And the other one laughed and went, “That bitch best get her weight up if she want to step to you, girl, you are a bossalina next to her!” And men were talking to me, and looking, their eyes soft or hungry or both. I sat next to a older lady all the way and she talked to me like she knew me to keep them off, and she said, “You take care, sweetheart!”
And I remembered that restaurant me and Ginger were at and I thought, Everybody on this bus is a bossalina next to them, even the old lady. Because she has something in her face and her voice nobody in that place had, even if they do eat thirty-dollar olive oil.
The Mare Page 19
