Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

This time I did smoke. The smoke filled my body like Dominic’s leg, only this time it was Shawn’s leg. And then it was his hands. He kept trying to kiss me with that mouth of vampire rabbit teeth, and it just made me want to laugh. He kissed my lips soft, but it felt angry. He said, “You not really his cousin, are you? How old are you?” I said, “How old are you ? What grade you in?” He said, “I’m not in no grade, ” and the smoke filled my body again. He started kissing my neck. I said, “Your teeth are funny.” But he just said, “That so?” and then he took my hand and said, “Girl, you ever felt a man before?” And I pulled my hand back and said, “I’ve felt horses.” He laughed in this nasty way. I said, “I ride horses. Horses are bigger than a man. ” I said man like he said grade, and he pulled back and said, “I don’t see no horses here. It’s me here.”

A lot of minutes had gone by and dinner was not ready.

The clothes that woman bought my daughter! They were nice, but too nice, like the woman was saying to me, What’s wrong with you, you can’t even dress your child right? I know that’s not what it was supposed to be, but that was my first feeling and my first feeling is always right; whenever I’ve gotten into trouble, it’s been because I didn’t follow my first feeling. Besides, when Velvet put them on, she just looked conceited, a bitch royale, and she looks like that anyway. Maybe where Ginger lives girls can go around looking like that, but here you’re gonna get hurt and I knew it. But everybody keeps telling me I’m too hard, I yell, I don’t understand it here — okay, fine. I can see she hates the clothes I can get for her, she always wants better and more — okay, fine. Let her have it. Let her see. And she did see; she never wore those things again. But how stupid was this Ginger that she didn’t even talk to me? How disrespectful, did she think she was dressing a doll? I knew she was silly, but I believed her to be good, or good enough. Was she? There was something strange in her eye, es rara — but it never stayed long enough for me to know what it was. Mostly she looked immature, more girl than woman — a sad girl trying to be happy. Una sufrida — what else could she be, married but not one child? I could see the sadness and emptiness in her eyes and I’d feel her, that surely she’s been through some real hell. Then she’d stare at me, and I’d know she was also something else. But what? She acted so big, walking up to me like she knew my daughter better than I did. But then the next second she’d seem so lost. Who was she? Why was she being so nice?

Then she sent me fifty dollars, and whatever she was, I had to take it. Mr. Diaz was moving out and I didn’t know what I was going to do.

She passed her grade, even though she failed. Her grades were crap, but they pushed her through anyway. If the school passed her, did it make any sense to punish her? She was going on to middle school! So she came up again for the summer, this time for six weeks. I was going to tell her mom about the horses at the end of it, but I didn’t. I sent her money instead. I sent it in a greeting card with a picture of horses on it. I said it was for Velvet’s graduation, but really it was because Velvet told me that her mom was so broke a woman gave her money on the subway. The woman gave it to her mom because her mom was crying. The woman was Dominican, and she asked Mrs. Vargas why she was crying and she said, “I have no money for my family.” And the woman opened her purse and gave her five dollars. She said she wished she could give more, but she had a family too. Which I don’t.

When I went back to the barn, Beth wasn’t there anymore. Some of the horses weren’t there either: Spirit and Blue Boy and Baby were gone. Instead there was a new girl named Heather and her horse, this weird pale horse she called Totally Crushed. Heather wore gold things, rings and little chains, and she had short, shiny nails and Barbie hair. I thought maybe she was one of the rich people Beth told me about, the ones who Beverly trained the horses for just so they could look good. But Heather already looked good on Totally. She was everything right and did everything right and everything that wasn’t right made her sick. She didn’t like Joker because “he doesn’t want to work.” She didn’t like Rocki because he was “wimpy.” She didn’t like Fiery Girl because, besides being “psycho,” she had “ugly ears.” Who she liked was Beverly. And Beverly liked her a lot.

I hated her worse than Gare and I think Gare hated her too. After Heather came to the barn, Gare didn’t eat her lunch with everybody anymore. She went out and ate her sandwich on a feedbag, her shoulders curled up and her dumb purple head down in them.

The day Joker got loose was the day Heather finally did something wrong. It was mad hot, we were all sweaty and the horses were sleepy and all the big fans were going, and I was pushing this wheelbarrow of dirty sawdust to dump it when I heard Heather scream, “Loose horse!” And it was Joker. He’d gotten away from her when she was going in to clean his stall, and he was running, heading for the door, with his eyes going Hee hee hee! Pat yelled, “Get out the way!” and I threw myself flat against the wall and he went past like a smiling tornado, heading right for the door where Beverly was. I thought, Now she’s gonna learn some respect — even her.

But I was wrong. She saw him coming, and she grabbed a rake somebody left and stuck it right up in his face. He made a scared noise and turned around, and she followed him with the rake, chased him back into his stall.

“Good goin’!” yelled Pat.

“Watch what you’re doing next time,” Beverly snapped at Heather, who turned red.

Which I would’ve liked except for what happened then. When I first rode Joker and he didn’t do what I asked and Pat said, If he was your little brother, what would you do? I said, Hit him, and she said, I wouldn’t try that with Joker. I didn’t try it. I was nice and he did what I wanted and I was proud. Now Beverly was in his stall hitting him, like it was nothing. Like he was nothing. And Pat didn’t say nothin’.

So I stood around Beverly and waited for her to say something about it. And she did, kind of. She told me a story about a boy my age at a place she used to work at in Texas. She said he worked in his father’s stable and one day this stallion got loose. She said this boy knew that horse, that it was unpredictable. Still, that boy was stupid when he knew better. He saw that horse running right at him, and he stood in front of it and tried to stop it by waving his arms, and that stallion stood up and knocked the boy out with his hooves.

“The kid was out of it for days. They weren’t even sure he’d come back to normal,” she said. “And he deserved it. Even his father thought it. People thought he’d put the horse down, but he didn’t. It was a valuable horse and the kid did a dumb thing.”

“His own father?”

“Yeah.” She looked at me the way she looked at the horses when they were starting to make her mad. “It wasn’t the horse’s fault. He was just saying, ‘Get outta my way, you idiot.’ ”

Then I really didn’t understand. I still thought Beverly was cool. But like you think somebody scary is cool. Because she thought horses should be hurt if they acted up. And she did the same as the boy did, she got right up in Joker’s face. But she was still on the stallion’s side, and all I could think was, she felt that way because he was the one who hurt somebody. Like she did.