Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

I asked Carmen to tell her, “Your daughter is beautiful,” and was sorry immediately. Mrs. Vargas grimaced, as if with disgust, and made a gesture I understood as, Don’t give me that. I flinched. Velvet didn’t react. Carmen’s smile froze for a moment and then she translated: “Don’t swell her head, it’s already too big.”

And then Mrs. Vargas withdrew into herself, answering questions when asked, seeming to barely hear as the translator told her what Velvet and I were saying about the fair, the lake, the little ponies. Velvet glanced at me when I said those words, and her eyes were full of complicity. Her mother didn’t react. I felt no guilt or embarrassment at this. What I felt was unease that she had looked at me with approval but not her daughter.

I don’t know what anyone else thought of this. There was institutional friendliness (Carmen) and probing (the white social worker). Papers were filled out. When we got up to leave, Mrs. Vargas kept her head down and yanked on her skirt. She frowned. I thought, She moves like a farmhand. But she had style, even though she dressed very poor; her skirt was beige, but her high-heeled shoes were orange and so was her blouse. She gave me another glance; I realized she was checking me that way too, and liking my cheap but great sandals — which I’m sure she noticed on Velvet.

When we came out of the building and onto the street, Mrs. Vargas seemed to wake up. She put her arm around Velvet and talked to her harshly, but with warmth. Velvet and I had to wait for the train, so I suggested we get coffee and sandwiches.

In the coffee shop, Mrs. Vargas’s demeanor changed. She sat across from me, next to Velvet, touching the girl with a proprietary air. When she looked at me, her face was open. I couldn’t understand what she said, but she was out of the tank; I could feel her. I couldn’t say exactly what she felt like, except that she was substantial. I liked her. I liked her even though she had made that nasty face when I’d told her Velvet was beautiful. First I didn’t understand why and then I knew: it was the way she met my eyes. When I need to know who someone is and if I can trust them, I sometimes look too deep into their eyes. I don’t do it on purpose, but sometimes I can feel it happening and that it makes people uncomfortable — most people just look away; some get pissed off. Some look back, but like they’re scared. So I don’t do it on purpose, but if I need to know, I can’t help it, I look. I looked at Velvet’s mother in the diner. And she looked back. She looked in exactly the same way I was looking: like she wanted to know who I was and if she could trust me. It was like, for that moment, we were speaking the same language. I could not remember the last time I’d had that experience.

Ginger was right: It bothered me more than I said that she wanted Velvet out for another two weeks, and it’s hard to say exactly why. I liked the girl. I could see how much she and Ginger liked each other, and I could see how much the horses meant to her; the kid was lazy like any kid — you had to push her to help with the dishes or make her bed — yet she was willing to spend hours shoveling shit just to be near those animals. It was adorable.

But there was something unnerving about the way Ginger was toward Velvet, something fevered, with a whiff of addiction. I knew it had to do with Melinda, and with maternity, but in relation to the latter, it seemed distorted, mistaken, a version of reverse imprinting, like baby ducklings who will take the first creature they see to be their mother and follow the thing, no matter how hopelessly. In relation to the former, it was just sad and backward-looking. And there was that unmistakable whiff. I respected her for staying sober so long on her own. Sometimes I even grudgingly admired her independence. But in truth, she had not fully dealt with addiction. I could feel it.

What effect could it have on Velvet, all that coming at her and not knowing what it was about? She was poor, she lived in a shit neighborhood, and when she talked about her mother, there was something in her voice that made me think of a shadow on the wall in a horror movie. The woman’s voice on the phone confirmed the feeling: She sounded abusive, half crazy. This girl had need, big need. I could feel it under her uncertainty and diffidence. And here was Ginger with her need, looking at Velvet with shining eyes, calling her “princess,” and tucking her in at night. It seemed an unstable mix of things, combustible, a promise that could not be kept.

The next week was made of tense, beautiful days, in my memory a blur of summer sights and smells: the thick flowers of the azalea bush crushed against the house, fresh-cut grass, Paul on his knees in the dark, fertilized dirt, the manure of the horse barn, barbecue sauce, the roller coaster at the Dutchess County Fair, her hair in my mouth, Paul’s arms around me, the pink and yellow shacks of the flimsy fairway, our drooping plates loaded with sugared food, the heaped odors of jammed wastebaskets, the tossing cars, the roaring sludge of songs and carnie calls, Velvet’s eyes on the rodeo girls her age and younger, parading on decorated show ponies, the feel of her mind going deep and intense.

I worked to give her all of this, like I was handing her each piece and going, “See? See?” I devoured it all with her and still was hungry for more. And so was she; with all of this, she could still wander into the dining room, slump into a chair, and theatrically drawl “Ahhm bored.” At the grocery store, I once returned to the cart after looking for and finding a special sauce she had requested and she said to me, “I’m going to make you run around this store until you get everything I want.” And I went and put the sauce back on the shelf. “You won’t get anything with that attitude,” I said. Her face fell, and she said, “Sorry.”

I saved that moment. I did the right thing. I was the adult. But I never knew from one moment to the next if I was or not. Being this kind of adult was like driving a car without brakes at night around hairpin turns. My body tensed and relaxed constantly. I was always nearly ruining dinner or forgetting to pick something up. I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to drink — really wanted to, for the first time in years. Was this what parenting was like, 24/7? My God, how did anyone do it? How did her mother do it, in a foreign country, in a bad neighborhood where she didn’t speak the language?

I always came to talk to Fugly Girl in the twilight, when I knew Pat was gone and nobody else would be around either. During the day I just said hello to her with my eyes when I walked by, and usually she said it back. Pat never said nothin’, but she saw. I was sure she did.

Then one day when I was raking shit up from Graylie’s stall, Beverly and Pat took Fugly Girl out to work her so she wouldn’t go crazy. I’d never seen her out of the stall before; her tail was high up, she was trotting kind of sideways like she was trying to push on something, her eyes were bugged-out white, and her whole face looked raw, like her hair was on the wrong way, even though it wasn’t. Beverly had her tight by the lead rope and I saw there was a chain across her nose. Pat was walking on the other side of her like she was a police lady, and it still looked like they barely had her. Gare Ann and the retarded boy came out of the stable to look. Right then Fugly made a twisty hump with her back and kicked out with her hind feet. “Knock it off!” Beverly yanked down on the rope and yelled with her mouth big and tight and her jaw stuck out to the side. “You hear?”

I came out of the stall and tried to catch Fugly’s eye.