Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

“No, it’s not that,” I said, and she just looked at me.

So I decided to try. I decided to work from two pictures, one from when Melinda was ten and seriously beautiful, and another when she was a thick-necked, swollen-faced adult, some teeth already gone, her eyes dulled but still with a hard glitter deep in them. She was wearing a sweatshirt and holding a plastic take-out container; whoever took the picture had obviously surprised her. It must’ve been somebody she was happy to see because she was actually smiling. Which is probably why she’d even kept the picture in a drawer full of buttons, batteries, colored lightbulbs, and broken toys: It was the only one of her as an adult smiling so you could see her teeth.

I decided I’d put both Melindas in the same picture. I wanted to foreground the smiling, disfigured adult and have the pretty, sweet-faced child in the background. It was harder than I thought. I was unpracticed and couldn’t make the lines properly expressive. The adult Melinda was comic, nearly pumpkin-faced, the child wraithlike and weird. After dinner I came back to try again. This time I put them together, one half of the face a child, the other half an adult. That was worse. Did somebody else paint your sister? Blurry thoughts filled my head; gooseflesh came up on my arm. What was I doing to my sister? Why?

When Melinda was fifteen, our mother had her hospitalized. It was a state mental hospital and she got into fights with the other girls there; she came home for a weekend visit with a black eye and a swollen mouth. Her body was stiff and fearful, but her eyes were sarcastic and she mumbled tough, boasting things with her hurt lips. We shared a room and she sat in the corner of it listening to our little record player while I sketched in my diary. She listened to the same song over and over. It was by Alice Cooper, I think, crowing and clowning about runnin through the world with a gun at his back. Melinda listened to it hunched over and rocking intently. If the music hadn’t been there, it would’ve looked like she was crying. But I was barely twelve. I listened to the music over her body because I think she wanted me to. She just kept picking up the needle and putting it down in the same place. It didn’t even bother me.

I rested my brushes in a jar of mineral spirits and put away my paints. I turned off the lights and listened to the dense sound of bugs outside the open windows.

When Melinda was nineteen, she told me about being abused by the head psychiatrist at the hospital. He told her she had to be checked for VD. He actually did the exam himself and he didn’t even wear a white coat. When she saw him come into the room, she sat up on the table and said, “But I can’t have VD. I’m a virgin.” And he said, “Isn’t that sweet. Lie back and open your legs.” She started to get off the table and he told her she’d go into seclusion if she put up a fuss. She said he shoved the speculum in so hard she bled. She said the nurse obviously knew it was wrong, but she didn’t try to stop him. She just put her hand on Melinda’s belly and said, “Try to relax, dear.”

She was driving me somewhere when she told me. The radio was on, but it didn’t matter. I heard her, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. Melinda stole and she lied a lot. She even admitted it. She told me the story to explain why she stole from our mother’s purse; she said it was because when she told our mother what the psychiatrist did, our mother just said, “I’ll talk to him,” and then kept forgetting.

My school is in Williamsburg, where we used to live before Crown Heights. We’re not supposed to keep going there because you have to go to school in your district, but my mom didn’t want us to go here because she heard about gun violence. So she just pretended we didn’t move and the school pretends they don’t know we moved so we can go there. Which I’m glad for because I would rather stay there than go to school with new people, but it also means that in the summer all the other girls are together and I’m in Crown Heights with Dante. Everybody else is getting to know each other more and I’m not getting to know anybody because my mom is too afraid to let me out the house. We can’t walk to school anymore, and because my mom can’t let us go on the subway and the bus alone, she goes with us when it’s barely day and drops us off in the school yard before she goes to work. We stand there and wait, even when it’s freezing cold, for like an hour before everybody else comes to school together, looking at us like they’re sorry for us.

I used to be friends with three girls there: Helena, who dresses straight off the truck, whose mom does her hair like J. Lo blond; Alicia, whose eyebrows grow almost together, but whose mouth is so smart she still hangs out with the cutest older boys; and Marisol, with her chubby body and sweet voice, who watches cartoons like a little kid but reads books nobody else can understand. But when I moved, Helena started talking shit about my clothes, like telling me her mom said she couldn’t believe a Dominican mother would let her child walk around like that. And Alicia, if I found her alone she would talk like when we were kids — but in the cafeteria she would be grillin’ me with her new girls and calling me Velveeta behind her hand.

The only one who’s still nice is Marisol and that’s partly because she dresses like me, from stores that don’t have names, and her skin is bad now and she’s too serious. I still like her sometimes because you can talk about private things with her and not feel stupid. But really I wish I was still friends with Alicia and Helena even if I kind of hate them.

But that was last year, and this year I had hope it would be different. Partly because of the horses, and partly because of this girl called Strawberry. Strawberry wasn’t her name, but they called her that because every day at lunch she ate strawberry ice cream bars. And because of the red streaks in her long hair.

Strawberry didn’t know all the girls, either. She came to our school last year when there were only a few more months left. She was special and tragical. They said she’d moved from New Orleans because of the hurricane. They said she’d been on the roof with her family without any food or water. They said she’d been sent to one foster place in Texas but something happened and she’d had to leave and go to the place she was at here. And she still couldn’t go home even though the hurricane was a year ago because her family was someplace where people were acting crazy and killing each other’s dogs.

If she’d been a girl like us, we still would’ve been nice to her. But she was not like us. She was two years older than everybody on account of being held back twice, and she was beautiful like a woman. She had breasts, and she wore flowered bras that you could see through her clothes. She wore makeup and sat kind of sideways, and looked like she was smoking a cigarette in a black-and-white movie. Her mouth smiled, smiled hard, but her eyes did not smile, ever. Her eyes watched and looked for something they knew they’d never find. I liked her; everybody liked her. All the girls who used to be my friends and then laughed at me for having church clothes wanted to be friends with her.

Then in the spring we both had detention and the teacher was new and he let us sit together. His cell phone rang and he answered it and we started whispering. She showed me a picture of her older brother, Marco. I showed her a picture of my grandfather. At first I told her he was in DR like he was alive. I told her how he called me on the phone and sent me a sea horse. Then I said, “But then he died.” I don’t know why I told her. But when I did, she got quiet and her eyes got different and so did her mouth. She said, “My brother’s dead, too. He drowned in the hurricane. Him and his girlfriend were trapped in the attic and they couldn’t get out.” We both looked down and it was deep. Then she said, “What’s your favorite movie?” and before I could tell her, the teacher started to yell.