Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

So we went to somebody’s bedroom with clothes all over their bed. Shawn went to sit next to me, but Dominic moved too fast for him, between me and Shawn so close that his leg was against mine. Shawn didn’t say nothin’; they just talked about something else. Sondra talked to me separate. She said, “Your boyfriend bought you the outfit? It’s cute.” Her voice was nice.

“I didn’t say it’s from a boy. My godmother got it for my birthday just today.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twelve.”

“It looks like money. She rich, I guess. Really, you don’t look twelve.” And then she passed me this sweet-smelling rolled cigarette, but I didn’t take it. Because Dominic was there and he didn’t want me to. So I just sat and felt Dominic’s leg like it was breathing his life into my leg, up into my whole body. What they talked about after that didn’t matter. I was just breathing in life. When we walked out of the room, Alicia and Helena gave me eyes like they did not know who I was and hated me anyway. But I didn’t care. Dominic was walking in front of me. He had his arm around Sondra, but he turned his head to look at me. And his look was not candy. It was tight and hot, joking and serious. Like a song I never heard before.

They attacked her and beat her. That’s what Edie said. Not at the party, but later, they swarmed her and beat her. She didn’t even try to fight back; there were too many of them. Her little brother was there, but he didn’t help. He actually stood there and laughed.

Between me and Ginger, there was hell to pay. Leave the girl alone, I told her. What do you want to do, get her hurt worse? And she went nuts. She beat the wall and screamed that if it weren’t for me, she could come stay with us and nobody would hurt her again and I told her she was crazy and selfish and she ran out the door. It was raining and she just ran out into it. I waited and she didn’t come back for I don’t even know how long. So I went out in the car and found her walking in her sopping pants.

I opened the door; she got in. We drove around, up in the neighborhood where we’d first taken Velvet bike riding. I waited for her to talk. She said, “Please don’t take her away from me. You wouldn’t let us adopt, so at least let this happen. Can’t you see how good it is for me? Don’t you see how even Edie finally respects me? She finally sees me as a normal woman. I am a normal woman. I want to be normal. If we can’t adopt, this is the closest I can come to having a child.”

I told her I was willing to consider adoption. She said no. She said, “I love her.”

I struggled to control my voice. I said, “If you love her, think about her safety. She’s already been hurt. The truth is, she could get more hurt on those horses.”

She didn’t answer until we were almost home. Finally she said, “I know.”

But when we talked to Velvet, she said it wasn’t about the clothes. She said those girls just didn’t like her. She said the clothes made them respect her. She said she was friends with some of them again.

It wasn’t all of them right away. It was Alicia that called me a pig at recess and told me to “go hang around with the rich people.” I hit her and knocked her head to the side; I was strong because of working in the barn and she did not dare hit me back or even talk, she just held on to her face and stared at me.

It was later that her friends came up on me when I was walking to the train with Dante. Dante laughed while they hit me, but what else could he do? He was only seven. If he didn’t laugh, he’d have to put his head down and feel like shit. So he laughed, and when they were done, he picked up my backpack and carried it for me. And when I got home, my mother looked at the places somebody’d cut my face with heavy rings and she put medicine on it. It made me remember when I was little and she would wash me and comb my hair more softly than she does it now. Sometimes she would hum a song and her touch and her voice would wrap us up in a place where there was nothing but her and me. I would be very still and I would want her to keep doing it forever. It was like that now, except it was even better because she was angry too, and not bitch-angry like at Mr. Nelson at the grocery. She was deep angry, but not at me; she was angry for me. This angry was big and warm like a horse, and it felt better than her nice. It was better than anything Ginger had, and what Ginger had was good. My mother said, “If this ever happens again, if they do this to you again, swear to God, I will hurt them like they have never been hurt before.” She said what she said before: “I will come after them with my body. ”

Except that she didn’t. It was Shawn that helped me the next time. They were following me down the street, and not even Dante was there. They were saying they were gonna beat me down, put me in the hospital this time. I looked at the buildings and cars going by and it was like everything was normal, like me getting beat down was normal. I thought of Ginger and my mare; that didn’t make me feel stronger. It made me feel weaker. The girls got closer. And then like in a movie, Shawn came up beside me. “Hey, girl,” he said. “What’s good?” I said, “Nothing good now. You see those girls?” He looked, I looked. “They gettin’ ready to jump me like before.” All he had to do was look their way with a hard face. They stopped; him and me started. He asked if I wanted to smoke some weed with him. And I said yes.

On the phone, I asked if those girls were still bothering her. She said they were not. I told her a story from when I was her age, how a bunch of girls attacked me, how I knocked one of them down and they didn’t bother me anymore.

She said, “I wouldn’t do that.” She sounded amused.

I asked her, “Why not?”

Instead of answering, she asked if I believed in hell. At first I said no. Then I said, “Honestly, I think it’s possible. Though I don’t think you get sent there. I don’t think God would have to send people there. I think they would go there by themselves.”

She asked, “Why do you think that?”

I said, “Look at how people act. They walk right into horrible things all the time. They actually go out of their way.”

I told her about the time I dreamed of going to hell on purpose. I was only seven, and in my dream, I went to hell to take the devil’s treasure. I got lost, but finally I succeeded and I came back up and put the treasure under my bed. The dream was so realistic that when I woke up, I looked under my bed to see if the treasure was still there.

“Was it?” she asked.

“I don’t remember. But really, those girls, they aren’t bothering you?”

“No,” she said. “Not anymore.” And then, “I dreamed I went to hell too. Because my grandfather told me to. There was a door in your backyard.”

The hair on my arms stood up when she said it.

I went with Shawn because I wanted to get away from those girls and also show them what I could do — walk away with a boy who looked famous. And because even though he wasn’t Dominic, he was close to Dominic. Maybe Dominic would even be there, where we were going.

But he wasn’t. There was only Shawn’s grandmother there, and I could see where he got his dark skin; she was very black with her gray hair up in a net and she did not look happy to see me. The TV was on really loud; we sat on the couch and watched it. A woman was in the hospital and she had cancer and her man was with another woman. Shawn’s grandmother said there would be dinner in a minute and we went into his room.