Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

“Is Fiery Girl a good jumper?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her jump. I don’t even know if she’s been jumped. She does have the build for it, though. Got a beautiful neck.”

I thought we were going to bring the horses in, but they didn’t want to come in, so we went to clean their feed and water buckets instead. We brought the buckets out of the barn and ran the hose. It was still hot; plant and vegetable smells spread in the air like invisible color with dark horse-smell underneath. I remembered Shawn in my mouth. I remembered Dominic in front of me with his legs open and soft heat coming from between them. I remembered his eyes when he was holding Brianna and looking at me over his shoulder, sharp like the arrow in the valentine, sharp in my heart, my real heart, like in the science chart of your body, the heart-muscle in the dark of my body. Soft/sharp. Love. We scrubbed while the horses played.

“Miss Pat, do you think Beverly would hurt Joker because of me?”

She didn’t look at me or answer right away. Then she said, “No. I can see why you would ask. But no.”

“Would she hurt my mare?”

“No. Beverly is crazy, but she knows horses. She knows the mare would kill her. Even if she had to bide her time. She’d kill her.”

What I thought was, Good. What I said was, “If you think Beverly is crazy, why are you friends with her?”

“We work together. It’s not my choice who Estella hires.” She dumped soapy water from a bucket. We rinsed the buckets and took the water buckets back to hang. We filled them up. While we were running the water, Pat said, “I’ve known Beverly a long time. We went to school together. She’s Estella’s half sister. Here.” She handed me the hose so I could fill Nut’s bucket.

“What’s a half sister?”

“Beverly’s mom married Estella’s dad when Beverly was like ten. Estella was born something like five years later. Beverly’s dad wasn’t in the picture anymore.”

I said, “Oh.” And I felt a little bit sorry for Beverly. Because it would be hard to have Estella for a sister, especially if you had to work for her.

“It was Estella’s dad who had horses. He used to own the place.”

I said, “Oh” again.

When we were done with the buckets, we got brooms and swept the floor and cleaned cobwebs. We got forks and cleaned the stalls. I wanted to ask if I could still see my mare sometimes, but I was afraid of the answer. So instead I said, “Miss Pat, what’s a competition?”

“There’s different ones. Hunter paces, eventing, hunter-jumper shows.”

“Estella said she wanted me to be in one.”

“Yes, she did. I did too. We were thinking you could do a hunter-jumper schooling show next spring.”

“What would happen if I won?”

“It’s complicated. You’d basically get a ribbon and points. Schooling shows are awarded in points; girls go to different shows and build points within the Equestrian Association. At the end of the year, if you have the most points, you get a big honkin’ ribbon.”

“Oh.”

“It means you’re recognized as the best in the county. And you can show bigger after that.”

“Do you ever get money?”

“There’s cash prizes for some shows, yeah.”

“Could I still do it?”

She stopped cleaning. “I don’t know, you tell me.”

I didn’t answer, or even look at her, but I stopped cleaning too.

“Can you stop putting yourself and other people in danger? Can you respect what I say to you and follow instructions?”

“Yes.”

“Can you? Because I went out on a limb for you and you made me look like an idiot. Truthfully? If I was your mother, I’d smack you.”

I wanted to say, That’s not what you looked like when you saw me on my mare. I felt mad and I put my head down so she wouldn’t see.

“You could never see the mare again, you know that?”

My head shot up, pain on it.

“Glad to see you still care about something.”

“I’m sorry. I told them I was sorry!”

“Then show it.”

“How?”

She didn’t answer me, she just went back to cleaning. The next thing she said was, “Come with me. Time to bring the horses in.”

Back when she still talked about Strawberry, I asked her, “What’s she like?” Velvet smiled and said, “Like every girl.” I said, “What’s every girl like?” She answered, “Like, they see a boy and they see heaven.” I smiled at her twelve-year-old coolness; I hoped she’d hold on to it. But at thirteen she’d lost it already. I could feel the loss of it: in her sudden attention to romantic movie scenes, in the music she played on her princess boom box, in her soft, suddenly yearning eyes. I asked, “Honey, are you in love?” We were in the car, coming back from Pat’s place, and she took her time answering. She said, “I like somebody. A lot.”

Michael: his finger to his lips. “Shhh.” Sweet like high school, middle school even.

I said, “It almost hurts, doesn’t it?” She glanced at me — face grateful and shining — then away.

—

It did hurt the first time I “liked” someone, mostly because he didn’t like me back. I remember telling my mother and she said, “What do you like about him?” I blushed; the only things I could think of were the way he smelled and the sound of his voice, the expression on his face when he thought no one saw.

“What kind of person is he?” she asked.

“Nice.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know him. You can’t like somebody if you don’t know him.”

I said I knew he was nice because he looked away and didn’t join when his friends laughed at the ugly girl.

I didn’t tell her about the time I bumped into him on purpose, because I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to talk, but I didn’t know what to say, I just looked at him, hoping he would say something. Which was, “Get out of the way, dope.”

She shook her head. “Sex. That’s all it is. I hope to God you’re not going like Melinda.”

But I was nothing like Melinda. Boys liked Melinda. She always knew what to say. She always seemed like she was moving even when she was just standing with her hand on her hip, like her skirt was swinging though it wasn’t. When I was in elementary school and she was in middle school, I asked her what happened when you liked a boy. She said, “It’s like when you see him you feel this big warmth and he does too. It’s like there’s nobody else there. Except when you slow-dance together too long and you know you stink and then you wish he wasn’t there!”

Warmth; stink. My sister was natural. I was not. I didn’t feel warmth, I felt painful burning and tenderness so big it made me want to run and hide because how could something so soft live with such burning? Of course boys didn’t like me. Burning and stunned, I hid inside myself, stiff as a glass doll. Melinda went outward, smiling and warm.

Smiling and warm. Why was she hurt? She rode horses, she sat with her legs confidently open, she made funny animal noises in class sometimes. Her first year in high school, she was so popular that when my friends came over, they asked to look in her room, then stood at the threshold, peering in as if awed. Our father adored her. When we would go in the car as a family, Melinda sat up front with Daddy, her hand and her head on his chest, while Mom and I sat in the back. Two years later, she ran off with an older guy who worked at the barn. When the police found her, it was determined by somebody that she be sent to a mental hospital for evaluation. After two months at the “place” she came back still-faced and watchful. She returned to school and people who used to be her friends picked on her while I pretended not to notice. She got fat and hung out with skanks. Our mother called her a pig loud enough for the neighbors to hear. My father was gone by then, so there was no one to stop her. When Melinda shouted back, my mom would try to hit her, but Melinda was bigger; she warded off the weak blows just by raising her arms, yelling, “Mom, cut it out!” Sometimes my mom cried, and when that happened my sister would run from the house with her hands over her ears. My mother would walk around angrily praising me for not being “a pain in the ass.” Eventually Melinda would come back and stomp upstairs, or sometimes play cards with my mom, while I watched TV in the den with my homework in my lap.