Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

So I called Ms. Rodriguez and eventually she called back. She said she’d never seen the paper about the African-American family, but that Velvet was doing the homework and behaving in class — still fighting, but not so much. I asked what did she mean, “fighting”? Physically? The teacher said no, it was verbal. The other girls teased her because they knew she would get excited and they liked to see her blow up. But it was getting better.

I hung up feeling mostly good. Except that all of a sudden I couldn’t stop picturing a little girl in the bathroom choking herself.

I hated doing homework. But I liked talking to Ginger on the phone. I liked how her voice was trembly when she explained something to me; I liked how hard she listened, how you could feel her listening like she was close. I liked feeling her like me.

My mom liked her calling me at first. If she answered the phone, she would make her voice nice and she would say, “It’s Ginger,” instead of “that lady.” And she would even kind of be quiet in the background, moving around a little stiff and straight, like she thought Ginger was there in the room, watching her. Once she even asked, “What did she teach you about this time?”

But then she started not liking it. She said, “Doesn’t she have anything better to do than children’s work? Does she work at all? Or does she just lie around?” I said, “At least she knows how to read.” And my mom said, “You think anybody’s gonna pay you to read? I don’t!” She laughed; Dante laughed. “Ginger’s husband didn’t marry her because she can read! Why he did, I don’t know, but something tells me it was more to do with this”—she slapped me on the ass—“than that!” So Dante tried to slap too, but I swung around to slap him and he almost fell over his feet getting out the way. We all had to laugh at that.

I felt like saying to Ginger, See, we laugh. Later that night, my mom washed my hair and put relaxer and bleach on it and I felt like saying, See? I felt it again when I looked at my mom and Dante sleeping, the sweet way she was with him. And when I saw my mom do her push-ups every morning before she went to work, before she even made our food, before it was even light. And after we did eat, she cleaned everything in the kitchen, rubbed the counters really hard to keep out infection. My mom was so strong. I remembered how she said to us once that if anybody ever hurt us, she would come after him with her body, and I knew it was true. I knew it was more true than grades.

And I also remembered what Alicia said to me, the thing I didn’t tell Ginger: “You stole my grade. And you better stop.” She said it like it was a joke. But it wasn’t funny.

Maybe two weeks after Velvet went home, Ms. Rodriguez called me. She wanted to know if Paul and I could come to the school as chaperones for a class trip to the Statue of Liberty. I was thrilled for the chance, and even Paul was sorry he couldn’t come because of teaching.

But when the day came, the weather was so bad that the trip was canceled. Since I was already in the city — I’d spent the night with a friend — the principal invited me out anyway, just to visit. She said it would be a treat for Velvet to see me, that they were going to make it a surprise for her. They arranged for it to be at the end of the day, during the last class. I was sad that I had to go through a metal detector and show ID to a security officer to get into an elementary school. But mostly I was happy and awkward, wondering what it would be like to see Velvet in class.

When I walked into class, though, it didn’t feel awkward at all; it was easy for me to smile at these kids, to be sweet-voiced and gentle. “You know Velvet?” one asked, suspicious but also interested. “How?”

“She came up to visit me this summer,” I said. “And I thought she was so great, I had to see her again.” The kid looked at me, amazed.

Turning slightly to one side, I whispered to Ms. Rodriguez, “So where is Velvet?” Because I had not seen her.

The woman gave me a strange look and said, “She’s right there.” She pointed at a furious-looking girl seated apart from everyone else, her head down and her hair brutally straightened, fried-and-dyed, a horrible red color that had to have been a mistake. She looked like a completely different person than she did when she came to see me; it was like there was a sign over her head reading “Come close and I will fuck you up.”

She didn’t even seem to know I was in the room, so I talked a little more to the other kids, asked them what they were working on that day. She still didn’t look up. Finally Ms. Rodriguez said it was time for them to pay attention to the lesson. They more or less looked down at their notebooks and I approached Velvet’s desk. She didn’t look up even when I was right next to her. What would she do, curse me?

“Velvet,” I said. “Hi.”

She smiled, but not at me. She just sat there smiling at the scribbled-up paper on her desk.

I said, “How are you, honey?”

Finally she looked at me, still smiling. “Hi,” she said.

I sat next to her and tried to help her with the lesson. Which was hard because I couldn’t do the lesson; it was too fast. The teacher would write something on the board, a subject like, say, spending the night at a friend’s house, and ask them to write half a page about it. Then ten minutes later — while Velvet was still on sentence two — she would switch, reading to them out of a book and asking them to write a paragraph responding to what they’d just heard. It was not how I’d learned, and I wanted to say, Stop! Can’t you see this is too fast for anybody to feel anything, and how can they write if they can’t feel first? Don’t you know this girl needs to feel?

On top of that, I could see how strange it was for her to have me there, I could feel her body going back and forth on whether or not it was a good thing. This happened especially when another kid would turn and glance at us with an intense, curious face. Something was happening in the room that I didn’t know about, and whatever it was, that’s what Velvet’s intelligence was working on, or trying to feel her way through. The teacher’s suggestions were something she had to feel through too, and to do that she needed time to change the channel. I would’ve needed to do that too, and there wasn’t any time being allowed.

“It’s too fast for me too,” I whispered to her.

“Really?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Then why can everybody else do it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.” And I really didn’t. I thought, Great. Now she’ll think we’re both just stupid. Then I thought, Who cares, if this is supposed to be smart?

When the class was over, Strawberry and Alicia wanted to walk out with me. They never did that before, and it was because of Ginger. Her hair was white and shiny, and she was wearing pants that looked like leather and her diamond ring on one hand and her gold on the other, smiling and talking all sweet. Strawberry’s eyes could not stop staring at her; Alicia’s mouth was open. And Ginger seemed to like it. Who likes to be stared at? A stuck-up person who thinks they all that. But Ginger didn’t think she was all that. Did she?

“Is it true you make paintings?” asked Alicia. “Are you an artist?”

So Strawberry’d talked to her even though I asked her not to.

“Yes,” said Ginger. “I don’t make money at it, I just do it because I love it.”

“Does that mean you’re rich?” asked Strawberry.

“No,” said Ginger. “Just that so far I haven’t made money. I would if I could.” And then she stopped in the hall in front of a picture of everybody in the class. “Oh, adorable!” she said.