Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

Then I went and sat back down on the steps and ate my sandwich. I watched the people. It was between day and night, so both day and night people were out. I remembered when Manuel grabbed my head and pinched my jaws till my mouth came open and put his tongue in. I remembered him banging and cursing at the door, me being scared, hiding behind my mother. But I wasn’t nine now, I was twelve, and I was watching the whole world get ready for the night.

I finished my sandwich. My mom shouted out the window, I thought you were hungry. Don’t you want some food? So I went up and she told me I was going to have my own room where Manuel and then Mr. Diaz used to be.

She came back in and the night was like always. Lying in bed but feeling like I’m walking in mud up to my chest with Dante in my arms and Velvet on my back like a monkey, with her hands around my neck going mami this, mami that. Street noise keeping me awake, music, people yelling, strings of angry words I don’t know except money and bitch and money. Money, always money. I can’t get enough shifts, and they say they’ll turn the lights off if I don’t pay. I can’t pay, if I do there won’t be enough for rent. I’m supposed to send money for my sister in DR. I’m supposed to make cookies for a sale at the school. The only thing that makes me feel better is talking to the one person who’s really my friend, a black woman named Rasheeda who even speaks Spanish. And I can’t go to her now because her pregnant daughter tested positive for HIV and now she won’t even talk to Rasheeda; how can I come to her with my problems?

I turn on my back for just a moment. Dante stirs. I think, Just a minute. Just a minute away from him and from her, remembering: my father’s soft cheek at night, the smell of his body, tobacco and sweat. The time I went to a party when the hostess had a tray of prizes for the kids, and I reached up to it and got a tiny doll with no face in a big dress. The horses walking in the street; the horse.

I rode a horse when I was six. Because my father was friends with Mr. Reyes, the man who ran a store down the street, and Mr. Reyes had a horse. One day my father held me up so I could see the horse’s face, and he had rough skin but soft eyes. I put my hands on his neck and it felt good. I wanted to get up on him, so my father laughed and put me on his back. And on that horse I saw the world: sky, trees, buildings, streets going in different directions. My life, going in different directions. My father was talking to Mr. Reyes with his hand on the horse; it was right by my leg. But then he turned and his hand came off the horse. And the horse began to move! He walked and then Mr. Reyes yelled and the horse ran, and the world was shaken so hard my teeth rattled. I grabbed the mane and watched the world clatter by, I clattered by my mother running out the house waving a towel. Somebody stood in front of the horse, and it reared up and I fell off. I banged my head; it felt like all my bones broke. I cried, Mami! A dark hole closed over me and I fell down into it.

In the hole people were yoked to machines, thousands of people, naked, bent, and pulling, so angry that they bit the shoulders of those before them. Voices said, “You are lazy and selfish”; the voices came from faces joined together in a breathing darkness, one dark, expressionless face made of many faces, a black field of nose-holes, eye-holes, and many mouths. People fell down the slippery holes and mouths and into working guts; they were shit out into dreams of people who did not even know them. I was there, with the shit-people. We crawled in the dirt of dreams, the dreams of those who cursed us without knowing us. Above were signs, telling us what we were: crosses, dollars, flashing lights, thousands of quick-moving pictures showing pain and ugliness.

And then my mother grabbed me up by my arm and slapped me awake, crying. My father said, “It’s not her fault!” but still she got me home and whipped my legs. Later, my father got me a piece of candy.

Now he’s gone. When he died I could not even be with him to say good-bye because I had no money to get on the plane.

I had an aunt named Bea. She was a strange, frightened person. She was small, with a pretty, big-eyed face, but also huge, clumsy hands that I think she picked at. She was a terrible cook and once when my sister complained about a soggy grilled-cheese sandwich, Aunt Bea went into the bedroom and cried. She could play the piano and she acted in a community theater version of The Cherry Orchard, playing a jilted servant girl; she actually thought this was going to be the start of an acting career. My uncle went to see every performance and sat proudly in the front row; he was too charmed to notice the pathos of the ambition, not even when they wouldn’t let her act in another play. He reminisced about The Cherry Orchard for years, every single time we went to visit, while she just sat there and stared. Then their marriage went through a crisis and she got a little crazy, would hide under the bed sometimes and refuse to come out.

Both she and my uncle are dead and I don’t normally think about them much. Then Ginger decided that she wanted to act in the children’s community theater; they were doing A Christmas Carol, and she wanted to play either the beautiful Ghost of Christmas Past or the depraved hag who steals Scrooge’s curtains when he dies. I thought it was wonderful until she told me why: She wanted to invite Velvet’s whole family up to see her perform. She was hoping Velvet and her brother would want to act in the theater too, and that Mrs. Vargas would realize what a wonderful place this was to live. And she couldn’t even tell the woman how much she’d have to pay for a carton of milk!

My God, I thought. Under the jaded, ex-addict exterior, the wan, toughened survivor I’d fallen in love with, who could listen to and talk about the saddest, most brutal experiences at meetings — under that was Aunt Bea! I’d married Aunt Bea!

The Cocoon Theater was on the second floor over the liquor store. When I came up the stairs, kids were running up and down a hallway full of hats, masks, robes, swords, helmets, wigs, and sparkling crowns. In the foyer, teenagers stood around a huge papier-mâché fortress and a rack of goofy dresses on cockeyed hangers. A sexy middle-aged lady with a bossy young butt burst in and yelled us into a big room with a linoleum floor and punched-up walls hung with black drapes. We had to sing a Broadway song while a small, intrepid man with a mild mouth and a teardrop nose played the piano. In an English accent I sang, All I want is a room somewhere / Far away from the cold night air. The kids stared at me. I tried to pantomime and my voice wobbled; the piano player sighed and started again.

But it was perfect: The man who played the piano (Yandy) was married to the bossy middle-aged lady (Danielle); he was a dancer from Cuba and he spoke Spanish.

I hate to admit it, but in retrospect it’s clear: I didn’t put up enough of a fight about her plot to get the family upstate because I was sure it would never happen and also because I wanted her focus on something else besides us. I wanted to be feeling the resentment. I wanted a reason to look for Polly. Because that’s all it was, looking. And often finding her, walking alone across campus where I could come up beside her and touch her elbow and talk. That was even better than the times she came to my office.

When I was walking around before I had to pick up Dante, this older boy I don’t know came up to me, going, “Hey, lil’ mama. What’s good?”