Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

I didn’t like his voice, so I just said, “Hey.”

“So what’s good?” he say.

“Nothin’.”

“No? I got somethin’ good. You wanna come smoke it with me?”

“No.”

“Why not? You on your way somewheres?”

“I don’t know you.”

“I hear that don’t matter, shawty.”

I looked at him long enough for him to get embarrassed. I said, “I do not know what you are talking about.” And he said, “Well, you better figure it out, girl. You play your position or it play you.” There was no friendly in his voice at all. He looked at me to make his point, then walked away.

I didn’t get what I auditioned for, but I did get several minor parts: solicitor for the poor, drunk, debtor, beggar, tortured soul. It didn’t matter; I loved it. I got to make faces, sing, and even dance in the crowd scenes. Danielle and Yandy ran the theater with their five kids; the whole family acted, sold tickets, ran the concession stand, and made costumes. Because they couldn’t come up with full costumes, Danielle decided we’d wear pajamas under our meager bonnets, skirts, top hats, and dressing jackets; then she decided we should all paint our faces blue. Rehearsals were like a cross between Dalí and Dr. Seuss: chaos, with sudden ecstatic bursts of order. Kids ran everywhere yelling their lines, waving props, having tickle fights, and slapping paint on each other while Danielle yelled about acting philosophy and Yandy played the piano. There were two other adult actors, an out-of-work female psychiatrist about my age and a male nurse in the middle of a divorce. We’d stand around together during the chaos and the psychiatrist would bitch that Danielle and Yandy were sloppy professionally, mentally ill, and probably drunks. I said, Oh, it’s just supposed to be fun. The nurse sucked on his cigarette and ogled my breasts.

But I took it seriously too. I really tried. It actually hurt when Danielle criticized me in front of everybody because she thought my debtor’s reaction to hearing of Scrooge’s death was too nice. “You think she’d be ambivalent to hear that the guy who’s been putting the screws to her is dead? Are you nuts ? She’d be overjoyed and nothing else!”

“But wouldn’t you feel ashamed to think you’d come down so low on the food chain that you’d gloat over somebody else’s death?”

Both Danielle and her husband cracked up. “You are some Goody Two-shoes,” he said.

So I went back and tried to be more bitter for them. I tried to picture what Mrs. Vargas would feel if she heard about her landlord dying and not having to pay back rent. I thought she might cackle about it at first. I thought she might say pious things too, then laugh. But when she was alone, I thought she’d feel weird. I thought she might even pray for the person. I don’t know why, but I did.

Then one day I’m sitting in class and I get a note passed that says, “Kwan likes you.” I look over and Kwan is staring the gloopy-eyed hell out of me. Which I don’t like because he’s sixteen and still in my grade, and because he’s the boyfriend of Brianna, who’s fifteen and café au lait beautiful and basically the baddest bitch in the school. And I can see he knows about this note, but I don’t think it was his idea. And I can feel every girl in the class watching to see what I do. Which is, walk up to him in the hall and bitch him out so everybody can hear, and tell him to leave me alone before I tell Brianna.

My mom said, “That’s what you get for being a troublemaker.” But Ginger said she was proud of me for handling it. I got a 3 on a paper that we did on the phone and I went upstate and jumped over a low pole on Little Tina. Pat told me she was proud of me too, and we went on a trail ride together. The leaves were changing color and the evergreen was alone in the sky. There were birds with huge wings circling over everything like searching eyes. Pat said they were searching; they were hawks out for prey. She said they caught mice, chipmunks, rabbits, sometimes even little dogs or cats. I looked up at them and my back tingled.

Then I came back home and it was on everybody’s phone, the phone everybody had but me. This picture of a girl kissing what’s supposed to be Kwan’s naked chest and reaching her hand down his pants. You couldn’t see her face, but her hair was not good like Brianna’s, it was damaged, like mine was when my mom bleached it, but not now. And there was a message with it that went, “Here she go, slurpin’ away.”

Marisol was the one who showed it to me. She said in her little voice, “They sayin’ it’s you. But I know it’s not.” She looked down instead of at me and her shoulders were turned in.

“Who sent it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

I said, “I don’t care about this shit,” and she said, “I don’t either,” but we knew we did. We sat quiet for a minute. I was remembering something else Pat told me on our ride: “The dominant mare drives the troublemakers to the outside of the herd. Because that’s where the predators are.”

The woman called my cell phone Saturday morning when I was at the grocery. Her voice was friendly and hopeful but with a push behind it; she wanted to know if I was Velvet’s godmother. I had no idea where that came from, but I said, Yes, who’s this? Lydia, she said, down the block from Velvet. The girl had come to her, crying ’cause her mother was abusing her, and she had taken her in. I put down my wire basket and went out into the lot. There were orange and yellow paper turkeys in the windows and little evergreens. There was a Humvee with a sticker over its windshield saying GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY. “Does she have bruises?” I asked.

“No,” said Lydia. “But I don’t think she’s making it up; she’s too upset. Some girl at school is saying Velvet tried to steal her boyfriend, and they’re following her home from school. Somebody threw a glass bottle at her. Velvet says the girl’s lying, but the mother believes the one she doesn’t know over her own child, and she’s been hitting the child and calling her a ho in front of her brother.”

“Where is Velvet now?”

“She’s in the other room sleeping still. She spent the night; I didn’t have the heart to send her back.”

“How do you know her?”

“Just from the block. She sits out on her front stoop like a little puppy, trying to talk to whoever talks back, and a lot do because that girl is pretty and she needs the attention. Last night while we were looking at the TV? She just leaned on me the same way, like a puppy, like way younger than fifteen. I hate to see her treated this way, and when she told me about you—”

“Wait,” I said. “She is way younger than fifteen. She’s twelve.”

There was a silence on the other end. “Maybe I’m mistaken.” The voice was harder, the friendly hope gone stiff and artificial. “But everybody thinks that’s how old she is. I don’t know why she would lie.”

“She looks older than twelve. Maybe people just assume—”

“Well, whateva. I got my own family to consider.” She said she was going to take Velvet back home as soon as the girl woke up so that her mother would know she hadn’t been doing anything wrong. She was going to see the situation for herself. She said she couldn’t really get involved because she had her own problems with the state system. But me being the godmother, she thought I should know.

I thanked Lydia. She gave me her phone number. I put my cell away and stood in the lot. Why she would lie. Because she lies all the time. Because it’s the only way life is bearable. A big, angry-looking woman with gray hair came out of the store with a full cart of groceries plus a bag hanging off her arm. She went to the car that said “Get the Fuck out of My Way,” unloaded her groceries in it, and drove off.