Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

“But the police know,” I said, and I was crying then. “It happened while I was up riding horses and I just found out. His grandmother told me.”

“Why don’t you go home then, baby?” she said. I told her because my mom lost her job and had too many bad things already, and she opened the door. She put her hand on me and asked if he was my boy, and I said no, he was just a boy, but we talked sometimes, and she said, “Come in and sit with us, then. We just sittin’ together. Don’t talk about it — my babies don’t need to hear it. But just sit and watch some TV with us.” And she let me stop crying and then we went in with her family and she sat with me on the couch with her arm around me while a little boy and his girl twin watched Madea.

When I called her back, her mother put her brother on the phone again. He said, “She’s not here.” It was dark by then, so I said, “Where is she?” And he said, “I don’t know.” His voice wasn’t scared but almost high-spirited, as if he were delighted by some funny thing. He said, “My mom says Velvet’s going to live in a box on the street.” I said, “But she’s not doing that now, is she?” And he said, “Nooooo.” I said, “Then tell her to call me when she comes back, okay?”

I got off and felt how bad I wanted to sit outside in the cold and drink. I put on a jacket and a scarf. I poured myself some pomegranate juice, mixed it with lime, soda, and a ton of sugar. I went outside and drank it and thought of Michael.

We kissed with our whole mouths, but the feeling was delicate, too delicate for sex. He touched my face and we held each other. I sang a song to him, a nonsense song from when we were teenagers, and he looked it up online to see who it was by because I didn’t know. It was so gentle, like something young springing from inside age, smiling and sweet like I was never able to be in middle school, or high school, or when I knew this man nearly two decades ago; in that foolish moment, the hard glass of my girlhood became flesh as if for the first time.

Middle school; where Velvet was.

Kristal said to come in the kitchen and help her get some soda and chips, and when we were in there, she said, “You can stop by on Friday if you want to. Lydia’s goin’ out that night, and I’m taking care of the kids. You can come. Maybe you can stay when I go out. I’ll give you a little cash.”

I said, “Okay, let me find out.”

Madea said, “Sometimes I look at you, I don’t know if you got a mirror or a friend.”

I wanted to ask Kristal why she called her mom “Lydia,” but I didn’t. I was tired, and everything was strange. I wanted to see the old Haitian lady. On the way home, I hoped I would see her. If I knew where she was, I would’ve gone to find her, but I didn’t know.

The phone rang in my lap; I picked it up and said, “Honey, what’s going on? It’s late; why were you out?”

“It’s before ten,” she said.

I said, “It’s still late for you.”

She ignored that and said, “When can I come up there? I want to see my horse.”

“You know you can come whenever your mother says it’s okay. But your voice sounds different. Why haven’t you been talking to me?”

She was quiet a long moment. Then she said she hadn’t been going to school, that she thought I’d be mad at her.

“Honey,” I said, “why aren’t you going to school?”

“Something bad happened.”

“Listen,” I said. “Something bad happened this summer. You got thrown off a horse and got a concussion and you got kicked out of the barn. But you kept riding and now you’ve moved your horse to a better place where you can ride her again. You walked your path. You asked me how to do that; now you know because you did it. Keep walking your path.”

She listened to me. I could tell. Because I believed my words and she could hear it in my voice. Of course I believed it. If a man who had told me I wasn’t worth anything could hold me and kiss me and I could sing him a song, then any good thing might happen. If what I had longed for, blindly and brokenly, and struggled like an animal to find in the most unlikely form, if it had really been there and was now simply, gently revealed — any good thing might happen. Anything.

“Ginger,” she said, “somebody I know got shot. This boy who didn’t even do nothing.”

I went back to school. Ginger said, “You’ve got to, you’ve got to,” and she sounded so fucked-up I felt bad for her and also I needed to see my horse. I didn’t act different in class or in the lunchroom and I didn’t take bullshit from anybody. But I paid more attention to teachers even when everybody else was clowning and throwing gummed-up paper at everything. I did some work and gave it in.

When school got out, I went to the block where I first met Dominic and walked around there until it was time to go get Dante. I saw the same little kids who stared at me before. Once I saw Mrs. Henry, who took care of Strawberry, and she talked to me. I saw boys who said, “Dayum, you need to break me off a piece of that, girl.” Except for one who said, “Charlie, I don’t think so. Look at her eyes, that girl is a hundred miles away, she is aficionado, she belongs to somebody for sure, she’s in love.”

That even made me smile. But I didn’t see Dominic.

I tried not to think about it. I thought about my horse instead. I thought about her following me up into the van, the way her feet looked confused and almost funny, like somebody acting scared by running with their feet high. But my mind kept coming back to his lips and his hands touching me, his open legs, his eyes flashing as he turned to look at me over one shoulder and then the other; feeling flashed at the memory, all through my whole body, moving and breathing, coming out my skin and eyes, quiet and wild in the air. Where are you, where are you, where are you?

I thought, This is stupid. This is the last day I’ll do this.

That was the day I saw him.

He was with the boys who said break off some of that, and he looked at me like they did before he saw me. I stopped; his face changed. He turned from the other boys and said my name. The other boys looked away, then moved away, just a step, but it was like a mile. He said, “How you doin’?” I said, “Okay. How you doin’?” He shook his head and said, “Like hell.” And we started walking like we planned it. He said, “You know about Shawn?”

“Yeah. You know what happened?”

“Yeah, it was crazy. He was just standing next to Angel on the corner—”

“What corner? Where was it, in Williamsburg?”

“No, Bushwick. On a corner of Harmon, Irving — I dunno. This guy Juan, he’s beefin’ with Angel, he come up with his crew and had words and they shot Angel and Shawn.”

“That’s crazy.”

We didn’t talk for a minute. He said, “So, you were with him?”

“Not really. Once or twice. I—”

“Wha’d your grandfather say about that?”

“Dominic, my grandfather’s dead.”

“That old man, that night? He died?”

“No, my grandfather died three years ago. I never even met him. But that night, that man called me granddaughter, and I called him grandfather before I knew what I was saying.”

“You a strange girl.”

His eyes flashing while he walked away with Brianna and some girl, one shoulder then the other. “Vete pal carajo,” I said, then I turned and walked away.

“Hey, no, wait,” he said, “wait, you want to get something to eat?”

“I’m not strange.”

“I don’t mean it bad, I mean more like, you complicated.”