Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

The next day I gave her the pink-brown shell that my father gave me. I showed her the sea horse, too. I gave her the shell and let her hold the sea horse and it happened again: her eyes got feeling in them. She asked if she could have the sea horse too, but I said no, it was the only other thing I had from my grandfather. Her eyes changed back, and for a second I thought she was gonna keep my sea horse. But then she changed them back again, and they smiled with her mouth only not mean, and she said, “When I see one of those Ima think of you,” and gave it back. “Where you gonna see a sea horse?” I asked, and I laughed because it sounded funny. She laughed too, and said, “SpongeBob.” And everybody saw it, her talking and laughing with me with her real eyes, and all the way to the end of the year, nobody started anything with me.

The one bad thing was that being friends with Strawberry made me sometimes pretend I didn’t really know Marisol. Which was sick. Except really I didn’t know Marisol so much anymore, all she did was read.

So I wanted to see Strawberry and show her the pictures of my real horses. I picked the best ones — me on Joker and Reesa, me grooming Rocki, who was mad big — and I pasted them inside the cover of my school notebook. I didn’t put the one with Ginger in because I didn’t want to explain her to everybody. Except for Strawberry. I thought maybe I’d show it to her.

But when I got to school, I didn’t find her at the assembly and I thought she went back with her family. Then when I saw her in the hall and I started to go to her, she gave me a grill with her eyes like dead. Like she never knew me, or talked to me about the most private thing. It made me feel sick. I couldn’t believe she meant it at first. But then in class she sat with the girls who were bitches to me. I sat behind them and I whispered to Alicia, my friend turned bitch, and she whispered to me, but turning around like I was somebody following them and then turning back to the others. That’s how they were to me all day. Except for Strawberry. She didn’t turn to me at all. She just talked loud like to make sure the whole room heard her, and the teacher didn’t really stop her. She talked about her brother Marco in Puerto Rico. Like he was alive.

Paul and I bickered about having Velvet up on weekends. Then we fought. He repeated the things he’d said about my needs, her needs, expectations I would not be able to meet. He said we had nothing in common. Then he started about race. He said things like “white benefactor” and “She’s too different from you” and “What are you going to do when she gets pregnant?” Which made me yell, “And you think I’m racist?” before I left the house and slammed the door.

We made up. And fought about it again. Maybe once a month, he said. If her mother agrees. Twice a month, I said. If she keeps her grades up. If she continues the good work, we’ll make it every week, I didn’t say.

Whatever I said, I was afraid Paul might be right. Not so much about race but about need; about my feelings. A few days after we had the argument, I did something I hadn’t done in years: I took the train into the city to go to what used to be my favorite AA meeting there. People I knew in the ’80s go to it, artists and failed artists mostly, whom I can talk to better than anyone upstate. After I hung around for the meeting after the meeting and wound up talking with an old enemy who had been a loved friend for about six months a long time ago; someone I could not help but see as a half friend. I talked to her about Velvet, starting with the organization that had brought her to see us. My half friend put on her program face and said, “It sounds like you’re really wanting to nurture yourself. I think you need to be looking at your own shit.” I said, “I’ve spent the last ten years nurturing myself and looking at my own shit. It’s time to nurture somebody else now.”

She didn’t push it. But her precise little needle had struck home. Because even though she spoke ignorantly, she did know something about me. She knew the way I had lived: blank loneliness broken by friendships that would come suddenly into being, surge through the color spectrum, then blacken, crumple, and die; scene after drunken idiotic scene, mashed-up conversations nobody could hear, the tears and ugly laughter quieted only by the rubber tit of alcohol or something else. Friendship was bad, sex was worse, and love — love! That was someone who rang my doorbell at three a.m. and I would let him in so he could tell me I was worthless, hit me, fuck me, and leave unless he needed to sleep over because his real girlfriend was — for some reason! — mad at him. It was not pleasure, it was like a brick wall that a giant hand smashed me against again and again, and it was like the most powerful drug in the world. Paul knows about this, but he doesn’t know. Because how can I describe it? It was like being locked into a nightmare more real than anything until I woke and couldn’t really remember the details or make sense of it, knowing only that it was terrible and that I would do it again.

“Sex addiction”; “addicted to emotion”; these were the sober terms by which I learned to describe this dull little hell, and for a while such terms helped me the way crutches help a broken-legged person to walk. They helped, but they did not heal.

Yes, my enemy-friend knew me. Or rather she had known me. She had known me in the hard, ungiving way she knew herself. She did not know Velvet’s eyes when I read to her. She did not know what it was like to walk with her in soft, earth-smelling darkness or to see her on a horse. Maybe that bitch Becca was right; maybe that was playing at something if that was all I did. But I could do more, and I was willing.

I rode home on the train and I looked out the window at the shining dark water with its glowing rim of light left over from the day and I knew: Just because I had been in hell, I don’t have to be there always. Love is not always a sickness, and I don’t need grim, dry terms in order to walk. I have changed. I can trust myself. I love Paul. I love Velvet. I can trust it.

This bullshit went on all week. I would sit at the end of the long table in the cafeteria trying to ignore Marisol while Strawberry and Alicia sat together laughing and basically ignoring me. It finally blew up when I told my mom what was happening and she gave me some dates with powdered sugar on them to offer at lunch. I brought out the dates and before I could even share them, Alicia said, “Gross!” and they laughed and somebody made a fart noise. I didn’t even get what she meant until we were sitting down in class and then I realized and I grabbed the wastebasket and emptied it on Alicia’s dirty-mouth head. Everybody laughed and she waved her arms around like a jackass and Ms. Rodriguez yelled, “Velvet, that is it ! You get a week of detention and also you will sit separate from the rest of the class!”

But I didn’t care because when I did that to Alicia, Strawberry turned and looked at me, smiling with her eyes for the first time since school started.

A few days later, she found me during recess. Recess was in two different courtyards, one for the real little kids like Dante and another one for us. Both of them had bars to balance on and there was a jungle gym for the little kids, but most boys chased each other or threw crushed-up paper at the bended-up basketball hoop because there was no ball. Girls mostly listened to their music and styled their hair and told stories. Usually I twirled on the bars or messed around with somebody so I could listen to their radio, but that day I was in the cafeteria reading this book I found about a girl who had a weird disease when she was little. I didn’t want to read in front of people messing around, and anyway I liked the cafeteria when it was quiet and everything was echo-y and the old food smelled sad in a nice way.