Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

I don’t know how she knew I was there, but she came and asked if she could sit with me. She asked me what I did in the summer and I opened my notebook and showed her me on Joker and Reesa. And she took the book and her eyes got big. “Marisol told me you rode horses,” she said, “but I didn’t believe her.”

So I told her about Ginger and Paul and the barn. The only thing I held back on was Fugly Girl. I don’t know why. I even showed her the picture of Ginger. Strawberry looked at her and said, “She looks nice. Is she?” I said, “Yeah. She would get me anything I wanted.”

Strawberry handed me back the notebook and started talking about going to Puerto Rico and how her cousin there had a big house and birds that could talk. I started to ask her about her brother, if he was really in Puerto Rico or if he was really dead but I didn’t; like she could hear my thought, she looked down and turned away. When she turned back she asked if maybe she could come with me and ride the horses, too. I wanted to say, How’re you gonna do that if you can’t even talk to me at school? Instead I said I could ask Ginger. And she said, “Thanks. But don’t tell Alicia and them, okay?” I didn’t answer, I just looked away from her thinking, How could she look in my eyes and say that? She knew, ’cause she got up to go back to the courtyard. Then she stopped and turned and said, “Maybe you could come to my house sometime?”

If it was anybody else I would’ve said, Fuck you. You think you can use me like that? But she was Strawberry. So I said, “Okay.”

I waited a couple of weeks into school before calling her because I wanted her to get settled in her routine and because I wanted to get settled myself; I felt shy about talking to her. When I finally did call, I didn’t know how to make my voice work right, how to fill it with encouragement and love. She said school was good, that she’d made a new friend and that she was keeping up with the work. I asked what I could help her with and she said she was supposed to write a book report about an African-American family from back when there was prejudice. So I asked her to describe the book to me; she couldn’t make a coherent story line. I asked her to read to me from the book, and she had no trouble with that. I asked her if she understood it and she said yes. It wasn’t until the next week that it occurred to me to ask her what the paragraph she’d just read to me actually meant; it was then I discovered that although she could sound the words out perfectly, and sometimes even understand their meanings individually, she could not really understand written sentences put together.

How could such a bright girl be so backward? “It’s like her mind is working too fast, not too slow,” I said to my friend Kayla. “She’s jumping to the end of the sentence before she’s absorbed the middle.” But privately, it felt more to me like her mind just kind of went limp when she read. I stayed on the phone with her three nights a week, working on written assignments. It would take at least an hour to do one page, and then she would usually have to do it again. I kept saying, Don’t you want to come up and see Fiery Girl? And I would feel her emotionally sweating over the phone, and I was just about sweating that way too. Finally she wrote a whole page that hung together and expressed something besides a garbled half summary of the plot. I was so proud. I could hardly wait to hear what the teacher thought of it. But every time I asked, Velvet would say she hadn’t gotten the paper back. She said the teacher was stupid and didn’t like her and was a liar. She said she probably lost it.

I didn’t need permission to go to Strawberry’s. I never went home after school anyway. My mom didn’t get off work until five o’clock, so I had to walk around till it was time to pick up Dante at day care, then we went home and waited for my mom there. Last year I was in day care too; I had my birthday there and they had a cake with my name on it and even my mom came for the party. There’s a picture of her smiling with her eyes closed and a paper hat on her head. But I’m too old now, so I just walk around for two hours. I can’t go home and wait to pick Dante up because my mom says if they find out she’s leaving us at home by ourselves she’ll be in trouble. I don’t know why nobody thinks it’s bad that I’m walking around by myself, but I guess they don’t. And I’m not always alone. I see people I used to know, like these men who sit out on their folding chairs, and they say, “Hey, Velvet! Velveteen from the block!” And sometimes Mrs. Vasquez, this old lady who lives in our old building, brings me up for some flavored tea with canned milk in it. But until Strawberry nobody from school invited me over yet.

Strawberry’s house was on South Third in a old building with the name Venus on it. The ceiling in the lobby was like a frosted cake with dust on it, with waves and lumpy flower-shapes painted red and green. And there were lamps hanging down and a plant that looked cool even though it was dead. It looked like a place where beautiful, strange people would live, but the lady Strawberry stayed with and the little girl, they were both normal and fat. Strawberry slept in the room with the little girl. She slept in a corner on a sleeping bag on a cot, and there was a big cardboard box unfolded and propped up by old cans of food and a chair, keeping her cot private from the girl’s bed. It was spray-painted silver and had Strawberry’s name on it in red. There was also a upside-down box by the cot with a silky scarf on it for Strawberry’s things, like lipsticks and a rose made of glass and the shell I gave her and pictures of people in special frames. It was cool. I was expecting to feel sorry for her, but really her cot and her silver box were better than a normal room.

Except that, when we got the little girl to stop bothering us, Strawberry wanted to take the pictures of her friends and go in the closet. It was a big closet with a light in it, but still. She made us go in there and pull winter coats off the hangers and get under them. We were so close. She looked even more beautiful that close. Her eyes were strong and bright, but her skin was so soft and her mouth was shaped soft, too, not like in school. Her breast was touching my arm under the coats, and that made me want to touch her, which made me feel funny.

She started showing me the pictures of her New Orleans friends and telling me stories about them. Mostly it was stories like who she smoked with for the first time, and partied with or fought with. But then there was this one girl with big eyes, and Strawberry said, “This is Miranda. She told me she saw a deer swimming in the water by her house.” And I said, “What, in a pool?” And Strawberry said, no, when this girl was on the roof of her house, she saw a deer in the water. This girl said he had horns, and he looked right at her and she saw he couldn’t swim anymore, and he was going to die. The water must’ve carried him far. I asked where Miranda was and she said she didn’t know. And we were just quiet, looking at the picture of Miranda.

I talked to her about Fiery Girl, too, how she only liked me, and how because she was abused she might still lash out at me with her hooves, like Scorpio had kicked at Pat so she thought they’d have to put her face back together. Strawberry said, “I’m sorry they did that to her, but if she tried that with me, I’d slap the shit outta her.” I said, “Trust me, you wouldn’t do that,” and she said, “Trust me, I would. I don’t care how big she is, I don’t take that shit from nobody.” And then she talked about somebody else from New Orleans.

I wanted to tell her more about the horse, but I didn’t like her saying she would slap my mare. It was just stupid and almost made me really mad. So I just listened to her and thought about the book Ginger read to me, where the little girl went to hide in the closet and came out in a pretend world. Because that’s what it was like; Strawberry’s voice was like a pretend voice. She was talking like a little kid and using kid words. Which would’ve been weird anyway, but was really weird because she was talking about the most real things and she was older than me.