Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

I got my translator to do a conference call to tell Mrs. Vargas how much I’d enjoyed Velvet’s time with us. At the end of the conversation, I asked if she’d ever consider moving the family here. If she could get work. There was a long silence and then she asked me, “How much does a carton of milk cost there?” I said I was sure things were more here, but that it could be worth it if she got a job that paid more. If she cleaned houses, she could make at least ten dollars an hour, maybe more. There was another long silence. I thought of the lawn party down the block, the lights, the smiling woman who glanced at us as we passed. I asked if she might want to come up for Christmas with Velvet and her little boy. She laughed. But she said, “Maybe.”

I hung up feeling good. Even though it was embarrassing that I didn’t know how much a carton of milk was.

Middle school was so big I hardly knew anybody. The halls were too big and if you walked alone, your feet echoed. The boys were suddenly big and they stank big too. There was broken glass on the playground and there were men guards and metal detectors in the halls, not just at the door. There were a lot of different classes with different teachers. There was at least some of the same girls, Alicia and Helena and Marisol and this other girl, who I was friends with before I got held back. And they were all mad bugged about their hair. They always were, but now it was like war, who had good or bad hair, whose hair was smooth and straight, whose color was ugly, which meant me, these new girls followed me in the hall going, “You need some foster care, your mami let you walk around with that fucked-up hair, it is abuse. ” Marisol, they called her “nappy wildebeest,” even girls who used to be her friends, because her hair wasn’t done. And Marisol, when I said to her that Ginger liked my hair natural — even she looked sarcastic and said, “She’s white. She don’t know nothing about hair.”

It felt like people were acting in a show and they didn’t even pick the show, somebody else did, but who? I would hear things they said, shit girls fought about, things teachers got mad about or liked you about: stories we had to “discuss.” The first week there was a special assembly where people who used to be in gangs came to talk to us about how it was bad to be in gangs, and at the end of it they gave us shiny buttons for not being in gangs, but how did they know we weren’t?

These things were the show, and underneath was something else that you couldn’t even tell what it was — it was too big to fit in our words or in the things you were allowed to do, but I could feel it all the time trying to get out. Once I talked to Marisol about Fiery Girl, how she was so powerful but still so sensitive that Beverly’s sick-ass jabbing finger made her spin around so hard she had to kick it out. You could say things like “sensitive” to Marisol, and she totally got the story; her face lit up, and the something else was there. I could even see it sometimes in the eyes of people on the bus, or feel it in my mother’s hand; I could hear it when she screamed at me that I was a puta, mal nacida. I could feel it when I curled against her back. But then we would wake up and the show would take over again.

When I thought about Ginger and Paul it was the same, just the show was different where they were. There was the crying in Ginger’s face all the time, and she didn’t even know it was there because if I asked her why she was sad she would say, “I’m not sad.” There was riding the mare and then sitting at the table with Ginger and Paul or sitting at the table with my mom and Dante; being on the mare happened on another planet, someplace beautiful but with outer space all around it. I couldn’t even tell it to anybody. I was locked away from everybody. I couldn’t even beat on the door because there was no door.

—

Then one day I was helping my mom make dinner, tearing up lettuce for salad. She was making pork and tomato sauce that we would eat with pan sobao. It smelled so good, it made my mouth water and my stomach weak. Her food was so much better than Ginger’s and I wanted to tell her that, but something stopped me. Instead I said, Mami, I’m hungry. Could I have some bread now? and I took it before she answered. She said, Put that bread down! I said, Please, Mami, I’m hungry, and she answered, I don’t care! And I crushed the bread in my hand and she hit me. I yelled, I didn’t do it on purpose! And she yelled, You did! And hit me again. I thought, That is not abuse. Because I did crush it. And then she did it again. And I ran.

Crushing that bread and pretending she doesn’t know! And that look — not only in her eyes and her mouth, but her body, the way she moves. Doesn’t she know everybody sees it? Why does she think those girls hate her? She’s conceited, spoiled by that sad rotten-belly woman.

I leaned out the window and saw the top of her head, like a little dog on the porch, turning to look at the people going past. People playing music, the girl with her red head scarf across the way, talking on her cell with her baby in her arms. I looked and I remembered sitting on the stoop in my aunt’s lap, watching a storm moving through the mountains, heavy clouds pouring dark rain, coming toward us but me safe in the lap. My mother looking with faraway eyes; half her body was somewhere else. Not that girl in the red scarf; she is right here with the music banging in her body, shouting in her phone, walking up and down…I remember music too, coming down the street on a summer night. My boyfriend coming on his bike. Vegetable smells in the heat. The bell on his rusty purple bike. My mother’s prayers when she thought I couldn’t hear. Please don’t let me hurt my child. I love her so much. The horses walking in the street.

Well, it’s her time of life too. Her body’s an alarm about to go off; she’ll be needing her own room.

Once a teacher asked the class if we had to show the whole world in just one picture, what it would be. A boy said he’d show a picture of war, a girl said she’d show a baby being born. I didn’t say, but I thought, All the feet walking past my building. Like these old-lady feet with a cane and quick boy feet like rubber running past her and this girl in strappy red shoes and this man walking after her trying to make her smile. And sometimes somebody trying to make me smile.

Like Mr. Nelson at the store downstairs. He’s old and so dark he’s black, with a big stomach, but he has happy wrinkles around his eyes, and he’s kind to my mom — he gives her extra sandwich meat sometimes. She says it’s garbage, but still. He comes now and says, Hello, Sweets, what’s good? So I tell him, Nothin’. I’m hungry and my mom wouldn’t give me nothin’, not even bread. So he says come to the store, he’ll fix me something. I ask him to give me a egg and cheese sandwich and he says yeah. I go to the store with him and he makes it on the grill behind the counter. People come in and out the store. He talks to them and me. He asks about school. He asks if I went to “those people” in the country. I say yes. I tell him I rode my favorite horse. I tell him I rode her at night when nobody knew. It was the first time I told it to anybody, and when I told it to him, his eyes changed, like he’s a child listening to me give him a story for bed.

I think that’s what made him want to kiss me. He gave me the sandwich on a paper plate and waxy paper and I said, Ima go eat it on my steps and he said, You not even gonna stay with me? And I said, Noooo, but I smiled so he would know I still like him and he said, At least Ima walk you out, and he did, but before we were out, he put his hand on my head and kissed me on my mouth. I kissed him too. Even though his mouth was old with gray hairs around it. He said, “Keep ridin’ that horse,” and I smiled.