Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

Ginger said she didn’t think I really wanted to come live here because I would miss Dante and my mom. Her voice when she said it was high and hard with no love in it. She was right; I knew it wouldn’t be any good for me to live with her. Still, I wanted her to say yes. I wished she had said yes.

I rubbed my mare’s legs. Her head was down and her eyes were soft. I remembered how she was when I first got here, how she bit her stall and they had to put that strap on her face, how hard it was to even touch her. I kissed her scars, and I know she felt the love in my lips. Whatever happened with me and Ginger or Ginger and Paul, I had to keep coming here so that I could take care of my mare, always.

“The next time you come, Estella says you’re welcome back at her stable,” said Pat.

“Why?”

“I’ve told her how responsible you’ve been, and she could see it when you got the mare into the trailer. It probably helps that Beverly’s not around.”

“Why is she not around?”

“Let me count the whys! I’m sure you’ve noticed between the time you started coming and the time you left, there’s fewer students, fewer horses boarded. Which is another reason Estella would like you to be there. She’d like you to represent her place at an event coming up — you’d make the place look good.”

I was embarrassed about how I smiled, but I couldn’t stop. I said, “I could ride Fiery Girl?”

“I don’t think she’s the best choice. She has jumped before, I’m sure of that now, and she looks good taking the jumps. But she’s not consistent like Chloe; she’s temperamental — but on the other hand, she has competed before so…maybe! If you work hard on schooling her, maybe Fiery Girl.”

I didn’t dare say how much I wished she could live here, how I’d dreamed of it, prayed for it. Because then I’d have to tell her that it was Paul who blocked it and she would think he didn’t like her — that’s how she would feel it. I couldn’t talk to Paul about it either. He had changed since the confrontation about the teacher, and I felt him accept Velvet’s presence more sincerely. I didn’t want to mess that up.

But the next time I came, I didn’t go to Estella’s stable or even to Pat’s house, not the first day. Because that lady at the party, her daughter Joanne invited me to come and see where she rode because she was Edie’s friend. I could visit and watch and Joanne would give me her lesson. I wanted to go, especially when Ginger said the name of the place was Spindletop — I remembered that was where Heather went, and Beth before their parents couldn’t pay.

Spindletop at first didn’t look better than Estella’s except it had a big sign with a fancy horse on it. You could see the barn from the road and it did not look scary like Estella’s place the first time I saw it even though it was a lot bigger — maybe because it was winter and there wasn’t thick green secluding it. Or maybe because I wasn’t young. Anyway, it was two big buildings with a big parking lot in front and big paddocks with horses in them.

Then Ginger dropped me off and I went in the office and saw how different it was. In this office there were no bags of horse treats or horse medicine or boxes of horse combs or boots or blankets or dirty rags — no dirty anything really. There was no radio playing country music and no cats hanging off anybody. There were desks with computers on them and neat-dressed ladies with manicures. When I asked for Joanne they smiled and took me back into this big stable that was warm and bright-lit and so clean it didn’t even smell like horses. I was starting to get nervous when this smiling girl wearing tall boots and tight pants came and said, “Are you Velvet? What a great name for a rider!”

That was Joanne, and she took me into the tack room, where everything was hanging so neat, bridles all tied the same way with the nose pieces standing out, on hooks with horses’ names on them — not just hanging on the stall door like at Estella’s or Pat’s. There were so many horses and their stalls were all clean and they looked perfectly brushed and chill, like yeah, they had something to say but you needed to be somebody to get their attention.

Joanne’s horse was named Major Tom and he was big like Joker, but different, not wild or funny, more like a soldier at attention, like he was clean on the inside too. While Joanne groomed him, she told me what a great horse he was, and how much he loved her, that he would jump in her lap if he could. While she talked, girls in the same kind of tall boots and tight pants walked by; their hair was so perfect that if Alicia saw it she wouldn’t know whether to bow and worship it or rip it out. Men wearing work clothes walked by too, Mexican men pushing wheelbarrows and carrying buckets and mucking forks. Joanne smiled and said hi to them the same way she did to the girls. But they were the only ones who looked at all dirty.

“So where do you ride now?” asked Joanne.

“At Wildwood. Pat teaches me.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I know her and Estella. They’re sweet.”

And I thought, Sweet?

When I picked her up she didn’t look triumphant or even happy like I expected. She seemed troubled and subdued. I asked her how it went and she said, “Fine.” I asked if it was different from learning with Pat and she said, “Not that much.” We rode quietly for a while. Then she said, “Those women we met at the party in the summer, one of them is Joanne’s mom?”

“Yes,” I said. “And Joanne knows Edie.”

“And that was Edie’s mom there too?”

“Yeah. Becca.”

“Who was that other lady? The one Paul went to talk to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she’s probably a new teacher at the school.” And I turned on the radio.

The Spindletop trainer was not like Beverly or Pat; she was more like Estella, but smaller in her body and face. Her name was Jeanne and when she asked what I wanted to work on, I said jumping. We warmed up like usual: walk, trot, canter. About two minutes in she said, “Good hands, excellent hands!” and when she did, these two girls stopped to watch. It made me nervous, so I missed my diagonal when we went to the trot — but I sat a stride to fix it and Jeanne said “Good!” again, her voice surprised and her mind on me then.

But then she said, “Let’s see your two-point” and suddenly everything I did was wrong. “Stretch, don’t lean,” she said. “It’s bad form.” I even grabbed the mane bad form-ly. The girls walked away from the fence like they didn’t need to bother watching. She made me two-point for half an hour until she liked how it looked, walking, cantering, posting, then going from two-point to sitting trot and back. When we finally jumped I felt good, but she said I was too far forward in the saddle and I was releasing too much and I was supposed to stop after the line of jumps, that the horse couldn’t just canter. Pat never said that.

Joanne and those two other girls were watching again toward the end, and I felt like shit — even when Jeanne said, “That was outstanding. I hope you come back soon.” I didn’t believe her until I saw the way one of the girls was looking at me. Like I was a problem. The blond one.

—

The next day I went to Pat’s house. I wanted to talk to her about Spindletop; I wanted to hear what she had to say. But I couldn’t because there was an emergency and Pat had to stick her arm in Nut’s ass to save his life. It sounds funny, but it wasn’t. She had to do it because he was sick with colic and could die, and the only thing she could do was try to pull shit out of him herself. It was freezing and windy, and when I came, she was in the barn wearing rubber gloves almost to her elbow. She said it would be “educational.”