The Mare

by Mary Gaitskill

  I didn’t leave a message. I put my cell in my pocket and went to pick up Dante.

  Ginger

  I didn’t go to the New York meeting to find him. When I did find him, I didn’t approach him. It was enough to know he was there, and that no harm would come, that goodwill lived between us. But, at the tail end of the meeting after the meeting, he came to me. He said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for how I was, everything.” I said, “I am too.” He put his arm around me, and without thinking, I put my hand on his heart. I said, “Can we go somewhere and talk?” His eyes thought off to the side and then he said, “Yes.”

  As we walked out, my enemy-friend from a long time ago stared me in the face. But I didn’t care about her.

  We walked for blocks looking for someplace quiet; every restaurant or coffee shop was loud and crowded. I talked nervously. I said that when I had met him I did not know how to be part of life. He said, So now you know? I said, I’m figuring it out. I’m married and I’m fostering a child. I felt this statement touch him, though I wasn’t sure how. He said he lived nearby, that if I wanted, we could go to his place.

  I realized I was afraid like this: He offered to make us tea, and when he opened a drawer, instead of spoons, he took out a large knife and held it up in his fist. I stood and shouted, “Put that down now!” He laughed and said, “It was a joke.” I sat down and we had tea. His phone rang and he answered. I checked my phone; Velvet had called but left no message. He was talking to a woman; I could hear her angry voice. He was telling her that his plans had changed unexpectedly; he said, “Trust me.” She hung up on him. He said, “That was my girlfriend.” I stood and said, “I guess I should go.” He said, “No. Let’s go into the other room.”

  The trapdoor opened and I went down the stairs.

  Velvet

  I tried to sit and watch Napoleon Dynamite with Dante, but I couldn’t, not with Shawn dead, sit there and act like nothing happened. I couldn’t talk about it to my mother and I didn’t want Dante to hear it anyway.

  So I waited until just before my mom would be home and then I went to Lydia. I had not been there for a year, but I saw her sometimes on the street and she was nice to me. So I went to her door. Her daughter Kristal answered wearing a shirt with Tweety Bird on it; she was only a few years older than me, but in a year her body had grown up all the way even in that shirt. She didn’t let me in; she went to get her mom. Lydia opened the door, but she didn’t let me in at first either. She just went, “What up, sweetheart?” with not much sweet. When I told her why I couldn’t go home, her voice got so hard she almost shut the door with it. “Then you have to go to the police,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

  “But the police know,” I said, and I was crying then. “It happened while I was up riding horses and I just found out. His grandmother told me.”

  “Why don’t you go home then, baby?” she said. I told her because my mom lost her job and had too many bad things already, and she opened the door. She put her hand on me and asked if he was my boy, and I said no, he was just a boy, but we talked sometimes, and she said, “Come in and sit with us, then. We just sittin’ together. Don’t talk about it—my babies don’t need to hear it. But just sit and watch some TV with us.” And she let me stop crying and then we went in with her family and she sat with me on the couch with her arm around me while a little boy and his girl twin watched Madea.

  Ginger

  When I called her back, her mother put her brother on the phone again. He said, “She’s not here.” It was dark by then, so I said, “Where is she?” And he said, “I don’t know.” His voice wasn’t scared but almost high-spirited, as if he were delighted by some funny thing. He said, “My mom says Velvet’s going to live in a box on the street.” I said, “But she’s not doing that now, is she?” And he said, “Nooooo.” I said, “Then tell her to call me when she comes back, okay?”

  I got off and felt how bad I wanted to sit outside in the cold and drink. I put on a jacket and a scarf. I poured myself some pomegranate juice, mixed it with lime, soda, and a ton of sugar. I went outside and drank it and thought of Michael.

  We kissed with our whole mouths, but the feeling was delicate, too delicate for sex. He touched my face and we held each other. I sang a song to him, a nonsense song from when we were teenagers, and he looked it up online to see who it was by because I didn’t know. It was so gentle, like something young springing from inside age, smiling and sweet like I was never able to be in middle school, or high school, or when I knew this man nearly two decades ago; in that foolish moment, the hard glass of my girlhood became flesh as if for the first time.

  Middle school; where Velvet was.

  Velvet

  Kristal said to come in the kitchen and help her get some soda and chips, and when we were in there, she said, “You can stop by on Friday if you want to. Lydia’s goin’ out that night, and I’m taking care of the kids. You can come. Maybe you can stay when I go out. I’ll give you a little cash.”

  I said, “Okay, let me find out.”

  Madea said, “Sometimes I look at you, I don’t know if you got a mirror or a friend.”

  I wanted to ask Kristal why she called her mom “Lydia,” but I didn’t. I was tired, and everything was strange. I wanted to see the old Haitian lady. On the way home, I hoped I would see her. If I knew where she was, I would’ve gone to find her, but I didn’t know.

  Ginger

  The phone rang in my lap; I picked it up and said, “Honey, what’s going on? It’s late; why were you out?”

  “It’s before ten,” she said.

  I said, “It’s still late for you.”

  She ignored that and said, “When can I come up there? I want to see my horse.”

  “You know you can come whenever your mother says it’s okay. But your voice sounds different. Why haven’t you been talking to me?”

  She was quiet a long moment. Then she said she hadn’t been going to school, that she thought I’d be mad at her.

  “Honey,” I said, “why aren’t you going to school?”

  “Something bad happened.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Something bad happened this summer. You got thrown off a horse and got a concussion and you got kicked out of the barn. But you kept riding and now you’ve moved your horse to a better place where you can ride her again. You walked your path. You asked me how to do that; now you know because you did it. Keep walking your path.”

  She listened to me. I could tell. Because I believed my words and she could hear it in my voice. Of course I believed it. If a man who had told me I wasn’t worth anything could hold me and kiss me and I could sing him a song, then any good thing might happen. If what I had longed for, blindly and brokenly, and struggled like an animal to find in the most unlikely form, if it had really been there and was now simply, gently revealed—any good thing might happen. Anything.

  “Ginger,” she said, “somebody I know got shot. This boy who didn’t even do nothing.”

  Velvet

  I went back to school. Ginger said, “You’ve got to, you’ve got to,” and she sounded so fucked-up I felt bad for her and also I needed to see my horse. I didn’t act different in class or in the lunchroom and I didn’t take bullshit from anybody. But I paid more attention to teachers even when everybody else was clowning and throwing gummed-up paper at everything. I did some work and gave it in.

  When school got out, I went to the block where I first met Dominic and walked around there until it was time to go get Dante. I saw the same little kids who stared at me before. Once I saw Mrs. Henry, who took care of Strawberry, and she talked to me. I saw boys who said, “Dayum, you need to break me off a piece of that, girl.” Except for one who said, “Charlie, I don’t think so. Look at her eyes, that girl is a hundred miles away, she is aficionado, she belongs to somebody for sure, she’s in love.”

  That even made me smile. But I didn’t see Dominic.

  I tried not to think about it. I thought about my horse ins
tead. I thought about her following me up into the van, the way her feet looked confused and almost funny, like somebody acting scared by running with their feet high. But my mind kept coming back to his lips and his hands touching me, his open legs, his eyes flashing as he turned to look at me over one shoulder and then the other; feeling flashed at the memory, all through my whole body, moving and breathing, coming out my skin and eyes, quiet and wild in the air. Where are you, where are you, where are you?

  I thought, This is stupid. This is the last day I’ll do this.

  That was the day I saw him.

  He was with the boys who said break off some of that, and he looked at me like they did before he saw me. I stopped; his face changed. He turned from the other boys and said my name. The other boys looked away, then moved away, just a step, but it was like a mile. He said, “How you doin’?” I said, “Okay. How you doin’?” He shook his head and said, “Like hell.” And we started walking like we planned it. He said, “You know about Shawn?”

  “Yeah. You know what happened?”

  “Yeah, it was crazy. He was just standing next to Angel on the corner—”

  “What corner? Where was it, in Williamsburg?”

  “No, Bushwick. On a corner of Harmon, Irving—I dunno. This guy Juan, he’s beefin’ with Angel, he come up with his crew and had words and they shot Angel and Shawn.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  We didn’t talk for a minute. He said, “So, you were with him?”

  “Not really. Once or twice. I—”

  “Wha’d your grandfather say about that?”

  “Dominic, my grandfather’s dead.”

  “That old man, that night? He died?”

  “No, my grandfather died three years ago. I never even met him. But that night, that man called me granddaughter, and I called him grandfather before I knew what I was saying.”

  “You a strange girl.”

  His eyes flashing while he walked away with Brianna and some girl, one shoulder then the other. “Vete pal carajo,” I said, then I turned and walked away.

  “Hey, no, wait,” he said, “wait, you want to get something to eat?”

  “I’m not strange.”

  “I don’t mean it bad, I mean more like, you complicated.”

  “I have to pick up my little brother in an hour.”

  “We can be quick.”

  “And why you asking me about Shawn when you with that nasty ho Brianna and also with her equally nasty friend, that is some ratreria shit.”

  His face was surprised, like, You funny, but soft too, his open lips and eyes and even his nose so soft they were blurry. But when he closed his lips, the shape of them was cutting. “I don’t know what friend you mean—”

  “Janelle, for one.”

  “Oh, she—” He smiled, like embarrassed. “She seventeen. And Brianna’s almost seventeen. I’m seventeen, and Shawn is—I mean was—older than me, and you a little girl.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You the same age as my little sister.”

  “I’m not your little sister.”

  He smiled and my body flashed sick-hard.

  “Okay, big girl, why don’t you come eat with me?”

  I thought he would take me for pizza. But instead we went blocks away to this place on Grand, with Christmas lights, where my mom took me and Dante once for New Year’s a long time ago. I got a mango drink; he got salami and cheese.

  “Why do you call me complicated?” I said.

  “I don’t mean nothin’ bad.” He moved his chair around so he was next to me. I was embarrassed, but the man behind the counter looked with nice eyes. Dominic said, “I just mean you diff’rent. I felt it the first time I saw you. It’s in how you carry yourself—even when you was eleven!”

  “That’s why they say I’m a conceited wannabe.”

  “You think I care what girls in school say? I can see you ain’t any a that. You just diff’rent. I don’t know how. But it ain’t about white people or horses neither.”

  And then he kissed me on the side of my head. “But I’d like to see you on a horse!”

  Paul

  Ginger wasn’t even going to tell me about the boy. She wasn’t going to tell me because she thought I wouldn’t want to hear it, but it woke her in the middle of the night; I could feel her body pulling against itself as she turned and turned in place like some old animal.

  “You’re helping her,” I said. “Ginger, you’re doing everything you can. It’s amazing what you’ve done. It’s amazing what she’s done, and she knows it, and that will hold her in good stead.”

  I held her close and stroked her heart, and I felt her slowly become right again: fragile, strangely young, but strong, with the fanatic strength that thin girls sometimes have, more fierce nerves than muscle. I remembered that night she said, “I want to be a woman! I want to be a normal woman!” It was as if her whole body said that now, that she wanted to be a woman, she wanted to protect this girl.

  I wasn’t sure I believed what Velvet had told her: that the murdered boy had done nothing wrong, that the girl didn’t know the people he’d been with when he’d died. But right then, it didn’t matter. If she’d asked about Catholic school then, I would’ve said yes.

  Ginger

  I thought: I have a good man. What happened with Michael was a blessing. But his body has no feeling like this. Even now, even though he’s better than he was. It was wonderful to see him. But I’m not in middle school. She is and she needs me. I may not be a normal woman. But I can pretend. I can try.

  Velvet

  When Ginger dropped me at Pat’s, Pat waited till Ginger drove away—then she took my shoulders and looked in my eyes. “What happened to you?” she said.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Nothin’? Then why do you look like you got hit by a truck doin’ sixty?”

  I looked down and didn’t say.

  She let go of me. She said, “Make that a truck doin’ eighty. C’mon, let’s get to work.”

  And we went and worked on jumping Fiery Girl. Who did not want to jump. Chloe and Nut watched from their side of the paddock while we trotted around and around and I tried to make her go over the jump and she would not go. Pat yelled, “Be clear! You’re not being clear! You decide and you get your legs on her and tell what you want to do!” But I couldn’t be clear because nothing was clear. There was Dominic’s lips on me and an old man crawling on glass and Shawn dead and his eyes and Dominic’s eyes and my body burning all the time and the noise coming in all night while I lay on the couch, some idiot yelling. I kicked Fiery Girl and told her to jump, but all I wanted to do was look at my phone and see if Dominic texted, even though he hadn’t even once. The only clear thing I could feel was that Fiery Girl was scared of jumping and she was getting pissed at me, and still I couldn’t focus right. She was starting up with this crazy jog-dance when Pat yelled, “Whoa!” and came and took the rein sideways in her hand.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “This poor horse looks like she’s hearing ten different things from five different riders, and she’s getting ready to say, ‘Shut the F up!’ ”

  “She’s scared of the jump, Miss Pat.”

  “I see that. I also see you’re doing one thing with your hands and another with your legs and your head is all over the place.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dismount. We’re going to get focused and work on trust.”

  What that meant was leading Fiery Girl where she didn’t want to go. First I walked her through mud puddles, which she did not like. Then we walked on this piece of shiny tarp that Pat brought out. She didn’t want to. I had to make her, gently. It sounds boring, but it wasn’t. Because I felt her through the line, at first just her normal mouth-self and then something that was soft and round and just starting not to be afraid. And there it was: the leg-feeling. It was in my hands, but it was the same. Dominic and the poor man and Shawn and everything else was there, but it was in the dista
nce and this feeling was here now.

  Girl, where I am now is basically a trap house. You don’t wanna come there. But give me your number. Maybe I’ll come see you one night when you’re over at what’s her name, Lydia’s? When the other girl’s got something else to do, maybe I’ll be up around your way.

  I thought: He will. He hasn’t. But he will. I don’t have to worry; it’s over there in the corner, waiting to happen.

  Then Pat gave me some peppermints and I got my mare to follow me without the line. We walked on the tarp again, and in the puddle, sometimes me giving her a mint. Then Pat lowered the pole on the jump so it was almost on the ground. My horse hopped over the pole and broke into a run. Across the paddock, Chloe tossed her head and ran too; Nut chased her, bucking and farting.

  “Can you come next weekend?” said Pat. “Next weekend I bet she takes the jump.”

  I said yes, and I meant it.

  But I didn’t do it.

  Silvia

  “You don’t need to ride a horse—you need your own feet on the ground. Take your dumb face out of the mirror and listen to me! There’s no man out there you can trust, and if you forget that, next thing you know, your belly’s out to here and you’re watching the door for somebody who never comes.”

  She said, “Mami, I’m thirteen,” and put on more of that greasy lip gloss, which I grabbed away so hard I crushed off the tip. She yelled like she does, like a stupid animal, like she can’t even talk, “Na-urhhh!” like an elephant or a cow. I mocked her and laughed at her. I said, “You think I don’t know how old you are? The day I gave birth to you was the loneliest day of my life. No one was here except your aunt Maria, she was the only one, and she was already half dead.” She didn’t care, she just grabbed for the lip gloss. “Listen, you ungrateful girl, I’m trying to educate you. Watch yourself! Men are babies screaming for love. They get it, they throw it across the room until it breaks and then start screaming again. And always some dumb woman comes running. It makes no difference to them if it’s you or the one before you or the one after you or the one down the street.”