Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

“Who is it?”

I can’t tell you.

“Is she evil?”

No. But she is close to evil. You can help her because you call to the good in her. You have to hurry. She is getting more lost every second.

And so I did. I opened the door and I went down the stairs. It was a long stair, and there were a lot of floors with weird things happening on them. But that is all I remember.

When she came downstairs, sleep-dazed and a little sullen, I asked her if she wanted to stay for another two weeks, and she woke fully and said yes in the soft voice that meant she was happy and scared to trust it. So I told her, quick and soft, before Paul came, that when we called her mother, she and I, we shouldn’t tell her mom everything about the horses, that it might be best to wait until she could really ride and then…I started to say “surprise her” but trailed off. It didn’t matter. The child simply said okay.

I called the agency right at nine o’clock. I had to talk to several different people, each sounding more suspicious and displeased than the last, like parts of a machine that didn’t like its operation reset for any reason. Finally somebody told me that if Velvet’s mother agreed, we could keep her as long as we wanted, but that it would not be under agency auspices and that they would not insure us. If we didn’t want to send her back to her mother on the bus, we would have to bring her back to the office and deliver her to her mother there. After that, we could do whatever we wanted as long as we understood they weren’t involved.

Then we called her mother, who was not a machine. First Paul talked, using his Spanish, cajoling her to politely talk back. Then Velvet came on, wheedling like a teenager in a movie about adorable teenagers. Yelling came from the handset; her mother obviously thought that movie was a piece of crap. Velvet yelled, cajoled, wheedled. A slow smile spread over her face; she looked at me and nodded. The whole thing took about ten minutes. “I told her I was working at the barn,” she said. “That they were teaching me how to work.”

It wasn’t a lie. Velvet planned to work at the barn. Pat had already agreed to give her a lesson every day in exchange for several hours of work.

After they decided I could stay longer, I woke up in the middle of the night, I guess because I was excited. At first I thought it was late, but I saw light coming from under the door and I heard Paul and Ginger talking downstairs. Something about their voices made me feel like something was going on, and I wanted to know what it was. So I got up and went out of the room, walking quietly. I went half down the stairs and sat down right next to the wall. They were in the kitchen and I couldn’t hear them all the way; it was words, then pissed-off hiss-mumbling, then words. I creeped down the wall some more and I heard Paul say: “There’s a limit to what you can be to each other, and you are mumble mumble pushing that limit. It’s taking it out of the boundaries set by the organization mumble mumble personal!”

“It’s supposed to be personal!” Ginger mumble-hissed. “…families…the same kids up every year…even birthdays— mumble mumble !”

Paul didn’t answer. They just moved around. There were dish sounds and water running, which didn’t sound mad, and I thought that if they were really mad, I would hear it in the dishes: they would bang them around like when my mom is mad, when she’s mad, even the water runs mad. So I thought it was okay. But it didn’t feel okay. It felt like at the bus station, only harder to understand. Like I was in the Alice in Wonderful story where she is really, really tiny and then really, really big, like I was something tiny in their house and huge at the same time. I went back upstairs and lay down and tried to think like I wasn’t really sure what they said. But I was.

Before we got on the train, I took some pictures of her in the stable. I made sure I got as many as possible of Velvet with the one actual pony and the colt. Of course there were other pictures too; I had dozens of them. I thought, We can show them to the mother after she’s met me, after she sees how happy her daughter is, how unharmed. Hopefully she will skip over the thing about the little ponies, think it’s a misunderstanding. After all, the agency person hadn’t really stressed the part about the ponies. She had stressed that we were nice and that everything we might give her daughter to do was safe.

Or maybe we just won’t show the pictures at all. I could just say I forgot them.

The train ride to the city was boring. It was better than the bus — there was a river outside the window instead of just a road with cars, there was more than one bathroom, and there was a place you could buy soda and chips. There were older white boys with big jackets and Converse on, their feet out in the aisle, and they cut their eyes all over my body when I went past, and one of them whispered “Rihanna.”

But it was just mostly white people talking on their cell phones about boring things or people playing music on their iPods so nobody else could hear it; it was the sound of the train going and going and going. Ginger said, “Look out the window. You might see something you never saw before.” But there was just water and trees and sky. For a second there was a broken-down castle in the middle of the river, but we went past it too quick to see anything. Ginger said, “When I used to tell my mother I was bored, she would say, ‘If you are bored, it’s your own fault.’ ” And she handed me the book about the witch.

I opened the book and thought about what would happen when my mom met Ginger. She would look at Ginger’s Barbie hair and her pink toenail polish and her sandals with jewels on them. She would see how Ginger smiled, and how soft her voice was. She would see how Ginger liked me. She would see that I was wearing the same sandals as Ginger, that were better than anything she ever got me, and she would realize she never bought anything nice for me. She would feel like I did when she called me stupid and ugly.

There’s a limit to what you can be to each other and you are—

The book fell out of my hand into my lap. My mother would feel stupid and ugly. I was glad she would feel it. Except it was me feeling it now. I looked outside.

They come up and they see this big house and all these nice things and—

Suddenly I wanted Ginger to feel it. The sun was hitting the water white-hot and putting silver on the waves. I thought of Ginger trying to make my mom like her while my mom told her she was stupid and ugly and worthless until Ginger cried. I thought of my mom scratching Ginger’s face and slapping Ginger hard. The water and the light and the tree shapes kept going by and by. In my mind, I laughed while my mom smacked Ginger. But also I tried to make her hold back. I tried to protect Ginger too. Because she had been nice to me. She had smiled and taken my picture while I made Joker go to her. She had fought for me to stay. Under the water, the hitting and the smiling ran together. In my mind, my mother hugged Ginger and thanked her. I rode Joker out of the round pen, out into the field. Ginger and my mom watched me together.

Velvet’s mother was short, thick, powerful-looking. She was much older than I imagined, I thought at least forty, maybe close to fifty. Her heavy jaw and low brow had none of her daughter’s lush softness. She was very light-skinned and her features were small, hard, and fine. Even if she lacked her daughter’s dark beauty, she had obviously been pretty once. It took me a minute to realize that the power in her body didn’t come from her musculature or size, but from her character; she sat in her body like it was a tank. When I walked in with Velvet, she looked at me first; it was an intensely focused look, rapid and bright, going instinctively from assessment to approval in seconds. She greeted her daughter, but her eyes dimmed at the sight of the child, no longer approving but acknowledging only. Docile, Velvet sat on the couch next to her. I sat in a chair to the side. In front of us were two erect, alert, smiling women from the Fresh Air Fund, one of whom was Carmen, the sweet-voiced Latina who had translated for me on the phone. But Mrs. Vargas sat there like she was alone in her tank, bored like a fighter is bored when there is no fight.