Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

After just a week with us, she came back from the barn one day and asked could she please, please, please take a bareback riding class. I said, “Let’s see,” and we went over to the barn. Pat introduced me to the woman who she said would be the trainer and I thought, no. The woman had a powerful body, a hard, blunt voice, and an insane face. Her eyes were simple mentally but emotionally snarled, aggressive and shrewd like an orangutan’s. She looked out of her eyes so hard you couldn’t look into them. She was verbally polite to me while her face dismissed me with the fast scorn of a teenager. She looked like the kind of person who could really mess up a child.

But then I saw: She respected Velvet. Or at least she was paying attention, she was interested, and I felt the woman wasn’t interested in much. I could feel Velvet change around her, come to attention in a way I hadn’t seen before. So I decided to risk it. It was a four-week class, just enough to take Velvet through the summer. It was a thousand dollars, which would be hard to explain to Paul. Unless I took it from the private money my mother left me. Which is where I got the money I’d started sending Velvet’s mom every month. Two- or three-hundred-dollar checks that she never asked for or acknowledged but always cashed.

The bareback class started early in the morning before it was hot. I woke up even before the alarm, swimming like a fish out of sleep, making clouds of mud come up from the bottom. Clouds of dream settled down and I remembered: Shawn. I was dreaming of his hands on me even though I’d said no. Except in the dream, he turned into Dominic and I said yes. And then the alarm beat my head and I slammed my hand on it and got up to go, feeling the dream still in my body while I ate scrambled eggs.

The class met in the barn. There were six girls and they all knew each other, but except for Heather they didn’t know me and she acted like she didn’t know me. Then Beverly came in carrying a whip. Not a crop or a lunge whip, but a black whip so big she had it looped around her arm. My heart pounded; something swam out of dark privacy and swam away. We went outside and she said, “Meet my friend and helper,” and she cracked her whip hard, like black lightning, and the cats ran with their tails low. Everybody was very quiet when she told us to go get our horses.

I didn’t have a horse so I said, “Which horse should I get, Miss Beverly?”

She said, “I think Joker.”

Which made me feel funny because…she didn’t like Joker. Because he threw her high, wide, and handsome.

The bareback class was something to see, and I didn’t even see all of it. That crazy woman was so completely in her element that she didn’t even look crazy. They started out in the small ring I’d seen Velvet ride in; they mounted there and then walked the horses to a larger ring, where they trotted in a circle for ten minutes at a time before slowing to a walk, then picking it up again. The trainer kept them trotting with a bullwhip, which she used with gloating skill — she hit each horse precisely on the crook of its back leg with a rhythmic flick that was almost hypnotic to watch. The whole time she would bark out military-style instructions—“Sit up straight! Stay with him! Give him his head! Sit on your seat bones, Jessie; let go that mane! Seat bones, crotch, seat bones, crotch! Legs, legs, legs!”—while the girls bounced on their fannies so hard they got sores, holding on for dear life.

She did not hit the horses hard, but still you could feel how big that whip was. You could feel something else too, something big and oily in the air around her when she used it. I realized then what she’d meant when she talked about controlling them from inside. When I was on Joker, I could feel something psychological happen inside him, like he was mixed-up and didn’t know which way to go. It wasn’t the whip. He understood the whip. It was the something else, and I had to use my legs not just to stay on but to tell him, It’s okay, you’re okay. It made me feel like I was riding against Beverly, even if she was the one teaching me to ride.

Then one day we went on the trail into the green that I used to be scared of a long time ago. The bushes and plants were fat back there and thick, like beautiful songs are so thick in your brain sometimes you can’t think. We walked until we came to a river. I thought we were going to turn around, but Beverly didn’t stop, we went up to the river and I made a scared noise, and Joker slowed up, nervously. Beverly said, “Steady! They know how to swim!” And I felt Joker telling me to relax, and then we went into it — we went into the water. My heart hammered; the water went almost up the horses’ backs, and our legs went under the water too. All the girls were screaming about the cold, but I wasn’t. Not even when it got deep and I could feel Joker’s legs running in the water under me, his body moving incredible, like a snake. I just closed my eyes and felt: cold water. Hot sun. Thick green. Shawn. His hands on me, his mouth, his voice in my ears. The snake-moving feelings of the world. You so beautiful, I wanna kiss you all over, touch your breast, feel your legs holding me real tight. But where was the one I wanted? We reached the other side and I held Joker with my legs as he climbed out onto shore, rocking back and forth, horse-strong and heavy under me again. Shawn’s lumpy dick like a crocodile in his pants, his grandma knocking on the door — but where is the one I want?

—

It was later that day that I asked Pat why she said I should not hit Joker when she thought it was good that Beverly hit him. She said, “Because you don’t have the authority. Not then you didn’t. Beverly does have the authority and also that time he got loose was a particular situation.” We were grooming Joker together; she’d just been out working him, and he was all wet and peaceful. He was on cross-ties almost right in front of the mare, and she was right up against her door, watching us. Not kicking, quiet, almost like she was listening. “You hit only as a last resort,” Pat said. “Or at least I do. Some people do it different.”

“Beverly told me that hitting doesn’t really hurt them. She said it’s more psychological.”

“That’s kinda true. You can make a horse crazy hitting him, especially if he can’t figure out what you’re hitting him for. But he did know in that case. It made sense.”

“So if hitting is okay sometimes, what is abuse?”

“You know Little Tina, right? She used to have this issue with cleaning her hooves. I’d pick up her hooves to clean ’em and sometimes she’d go like to kick me. That’s dangerous. So I’d hit her with the crop. Once, maybe twice the next time she did it. Abuse is when you don’t just hit once, but over and over. I’ve seen people do things like beat a yearling to the ground ’cause it reared up ’cause it was young.”

We took Joker off the cross-ties, and I led him back to the stall. As soon as he was in, my mare went to the side of her stall then and put her nose up where Joker was. He came to her; I noticed they were talking more this summer.

“You think anybody ever beat Fiery Girl that bad?”

“I don’t know, but I doubt it. The thing about mares? They will always draw a line in the sand. Stallions, geldings, they can be tough. But while a mare’ll take a lot of shit, eventually she will draw a line in the sand, and when she does that — cross it and she is going to take you down, even if she has to die doing it. Just like a woman. It’s why some people don’t like mares.”