Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

“Fuck if I know. It sounds like nail polish or something.”

“It don’t sound like nail polish. It sounds like she hates her horse.”

“I dunno.” She looked down and ate her sandwich. She looked up again. “You don’t curse, do you?”

I said, “No.” I thought about her saying I was gonna get deported. I thought, I could curse you out so hard, you’d fall down.

“Why not? Don’t you think it’s cool?”

“No,” I said. “I think it’s stupid.” But I sat on the feedbag with her anyway. We didn’t really look at each other.

She said, “Are you in a gang?”

I looked out at the paddock and at the path going out into the meadow beyond. But I was seeing the street where I lived, and the word almost faded off the wall: Cookie. I thought about him giving my brother some cookie. I thought about the man reaching up to touch his name on the wall. Some kind of feeling came up in me. And I said, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m in a gang.”

“Awesome,” said Gare. “I wish they had gangs here.”

It wasn’t about her being younger. I was never one of those guys. She wasn’t a kid; she was almost forty, a National Guardswoman who’d driven a supply truck in Iraq, and had gone back to school to get her MFA in writing. She was worn for her age, tough-skinned and rigid-backed, but with a beautiful mouth and strong, calm eyes — green, with hazel flecks. It wasn’t about her being younger. In fact, in spite of her relative youth, it was her maturity that appealed to me, her strength; I felt she was a woman who understood things without too much talk about them. I was at ease with Polly.

She wasn’t my student either; she was working with a colleague of mine on writing her memoir about her service in Iraq, especially her relationship with a translator whose brother was, like Polly’s, schizophrenic. I met her at a graduate-faculty tea and discovered she was also writing about Blake, whom she’d discovered while on her tour; she wanted to juxtapose his imagery with her experience and also with her brother’s. I invited her to come by during my office hours and she did. We talked about Blake and Iraq. We talked about our lives. When I told her about Velvet and the horses, tears welled in her eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “I never cry. But that is very moving.”

It wasn’t until a month or so into these conversations that I realized, while telling Polly about Velvet, I was using the pronoun I instead of we.

I woke up thinking about his nose, the little dent in it. About how his eyelashes and eyebrows made his eyes soft, but how inside they were strong. His lips were tense like a muscle, but still his mouth looked full of kisses. Soft, strong, tense, full; he had everything I knew about, with secret things sparking in between: Dominic.

Then my grandfather’s voice came in my ear and made me jump out of my dream. He was saying, Lo prometiste! I hadn’t heard it in a long time. But I knew what he meant right away. It was my last night and I still hadn’t taken her out like I said. I was treating her the same way everybody else did, and for the same reason as them; if it was just me and her, without Pat or Beverly, I was still a little scared of her.

I made myself get out of bed. I got dressed with music in my head: Amor no es amor / Son las cinco de la manana / Y no puedo dormir. The voice like a live ribbon unwinding, giving feeling. I walked out on the path and the song ribboned up in the sky, in the clouds, dark and with moon behind them. When I got in the barn, the music left my head but stayed in my blood. The horses woke up around me and started talking to each other. My horse was looking like, Girl, what you thinkin’ about? I took the halter down from the hook and opened her stall. She put her head up like, It’s night. We don’t do this at night! I came to her with my head low; I talked to her like she was a kitten. She let me come to her and touch her neck: She seemed like she was trying to decide and then, like with shiver inside, she put her head down for the halter. When she came out of the stall, the air around her rolled like water when a boat comes by, and it felt good to me and I wasn’t afraid; I felt her with me wondering what I would do. All the horses watched and wondered too. I could even see a cat watching at the mouth of the barn, its ears against the sky.

But when I put the saddle pad on, she moved sideways. She pushed out her belly so I could barely get the saddle on. I went to put the bridle on over the halter, but she fought the bit, tossing her head even with my arm around her face. I got the crop from the wall, but then I felt stupid because what was I gonna do with it? Her eyes stared and I smelled my own sweat; I felt the scars on her face like they were on me. I put the crop back and made my body quiet, stroking her shoulder. I tried again and again until she finally took the bit. I put the chain on her nose and led her out.

In our eyes and on our skin we felt the night. I felt her fear of it, felt her start to walk backward, and I turned her in a circle to the indoor ring. She calmed and let me take her there, but when I turned on the light, birds flew in the rafters and again she walked backward. I forgot how big she is and pulled her like a dog on a leash, and — damn! — she reared up and beat the air with her feet, killing hard. The lead line burned through my hands, but I held it, and she came down and I turned her in a circle, two, three times. She followed, and I felt our minds pressed together, each feeling where the other was. I remembered: Tell a gelding. Command a stallion. Beg a mare.

I got her to the mounting block and worked to make the girth right, over and over thinking, Beg a mare, beg a mare. Then I worked to get on — first just standing with my left foot in the stirrup, then both feet in, sitting very soft, just sitting, no legs on. Finally walking, thinking I won’t beg, I won’t beg, and then wind came through the arena, and she spooked, and I couldn’t turn her fast enough, and her head came up, she reared under me. I grabbed her mane, and prayed forward, my feet out of the stirrups, her body wilding under me like a snake, like Joker swimming. She came back down and I was ready, I turned her hard, right into my thigh. We went forward again, walking, trotting, walking. Each feeling where the other was, except it kept moving and changing. Was this what Pat meant by begging ? Because that’s not what it was, it was like finding —no, not that either. It was — I tried to think what it was so hard that my mind grew like a forest with everything in it: my mom and Dante and school and Dominic’s eyes, Shawn’s hands, Strawberry so close in the closet; Ginger. My grandfather said, You can walk your path better than that lady ever could. She loves you, and you should respect her love. But she doesn’t know your path. You can walk it. She can’t. And somebody else was there too, a twisted-up face coming at me sideways through a crack in the forest floor; Manuel, my father’s friend who lived with us. Walk your path! The forest closed up and I was just on my mare and for a long moment, I found her.

When I walked her back to the barn, we were both sweating. The moon was out from behind the clouds. In its light, I ran the hose between her legs and wiped her with a rag. When I took her to the stall, she stopped for me and then followed when I led her in. She turned herself around so beautiful. I stood in the barn for a long time, just looking at her.

—

I was almost asleep when the face came again, like a witch coming out the crack. When he first moved in, Manuel acted nice; he even gave me a dollar to make up for my dad taking my money. Then he started to get me between the legs and rub until it felt like it was burning. All day it felt like I needed the bathroom and like everybody could see. I told my mom and she told me to quit lying. But when she locked him out because he didn’t pay, and he was banging on the door and cursing, she said, “And what you did to my daughter!” And he shut up. Dante looked at me and looked away. Manuel started banging and cursing again. But I could tell he would go away. I could tell my mom was not afraid of him. If anybody was afraid, it was him afraid of her.