Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

“Yes, it did. I think it did. Do you know Spindletop?”

She kept working, silently. Her silence answered yes before she did.

I texted him over and over and told him I needed to see him. He kept saying he would get back to me, but he didn’t. Until finally I told him I was at Lydia’s and he came to me. But then he wouldn’t kiss. He hugged me back but said he couldn’t kiss me. I dropped my arms and waited for him to explain. He just stood there, so I said, Why? He sat on the couch and said, I told you it could only be once. I said, Then why you here? And he looked away. The heat was still on high even though it wasn’t cold out, so the room was hot. He took off his hoodie and he sniffed all wet in his nose. I touched him on his leg and said his name. He said, “Brianna’s pregnant.” I pulled my hand away.

He got up and walked around. Brianna lived with her aunt, who was taking care of five other kids and a retarded girl from the neighborhood and also this other girl who tricked the retard into getting raped by a man with AIDS. He said it was like some rape crisis center over there, Brianna could not be bringing a baby into that reality show, he had to take care of her.

“You gonna support a family ?”

He said, “I have to try.” And he put his head down, but not ashamed.

“You can still see me.” I said it real quiet. “Like now.”

He looked at me and looked down. “If you was like some hood-rat puta, maybe I would. Even with you bein’ young. But you not that. You not that, and you would hate me if I did you like that. You’d hate yourself. I don’t want—”

“What you think I am ? Where you think I live? I live down the block!”

He came and sat close enough that I could feel how warm he was. “I know where you from. But it feels like you from someplace else.”

“What place?” I tried to make my voice mad so I wouldn’t cry.

He looked me in my eyes. “I don’t know. Someplace I can’t picture. Someplace I can’t be. Even if it’s beautiful.”

I looked down and bit the inside of my mouth to stop crying. I was thinking about the barn and Spindletop and Ginger and that gray dappled horse riding in a circle around the jump. I’d wanted to talk about it with Dominic, talk like before. Now I wished I’d never seen any of it. Because it was “someplace else.” He sat next to me like he felt what I was thinking, not saying anything. Then he took something out of his pocket and said, “Look.”

It was the picture he told me about, where he was Romeo in the school play. He was wearing pants that looked like velvet, and slippers and a silky shirt. He was smiling and holding his arms out like a girl was about to run to him. He looked even younger than me. The picture was so wrinkled and old, there was a crease right across his face. Still, he looked beautiful. Like he came from “someplace else.”

“So you know I don’t lie,” he said.

I took the picture and put it on my knee to smooth the wrinkles from it. “How old were you?” I asked.

“Twelve,” he said.

“Can I keep it?”

“Naw,” he said. “It’s the only one I got. I never even showed it to nobody else except my mom and my sister.”

I wanted to ask, What about Brianna? But I didn’t.

He took it from my hands and put it back in his pocket. He said, “You tell anybody you saw it, Ima say you a liar, right?”

I said I wouldn’t tell nobody.

He said he had to go.

I said, “But we can still talk, right? Like friends?”

“We friends,” he said. “I won’t forget that time.” He looked at me when he said that. “But for right now, don’t call me or text me, okay?”

My cell rang and somebody wanted to know if I was Velveteen Vargas’s godmother. I said, Yes, why?

Because there’d been a girl-fight in the Catholic school yard. Three girls on one, but the one fought so fiercely the others got the worst of it. When the social worker ran out to break it up, she saw the lone girl had one of the three by her hair; this lone girl looked so wild that for a minute the social worker thought she might be attacked — but the girl just spewed obscenities and then they all ran. The social worker’s car had gotten keyed, Velvet’s school was called, Velvet was ratted out and dragged by her ear over to the Catholic school. Where she was immediately recognized as the ferocious fighter.

“When we tried to call her mother about paying to repair the car, nobody answered. She says her mom can’t pay anyway. She says you might.”

They said it would cost four hundred dollars, and I said I’d pay for half, I don’t know why. Maybe because the car-keyed social worker had a kind, harried voice. Even when she said she’d never heard such ugly language come out of a young girl.

“When they brought her over, I confronted her. I said to her, You know I am a mother of two young children. How would you feel if somebody talked to your mother that way?”

“She’s actually very nice,” I said. “But in fact she talks to her m—”

“I know! I know she is! When I confronted her, when I said ‘How would you feel if someone talked to your mother that way,’ she just looked down, ashamed.”

I said, “You know, I’m not a mother, but I wouldn’t like to be talked at like that, either.”

“No, no, of course not. No woman would. I just thought, if she could think of it in those terms, she’d—”

I asked where I should send the check. She expressed gratitude.

I hung up and thought, Maybe they really are different from us. More violent, more dishonest — nicer in some ways, yes, warm, physical, passionate. But weak-minded. Screaming and yelling all the time, no self-control. Do her homework with her on the phone, she doesn’t turn it in and lies about it. Give her all the special treatment in the world and she throws it away because she can’t follow through. Just different.

So Paul was right. Everybody was right. I’m racist. At least now I know.

She said, You think I’m rich? You think two hundred dollars is pocket change for me? Why do you do this shit? You’re almost fourteen! I said, I’m sorry, but she didn’t even say, It’s okay, it’s all right. She said she’s afraid. She’s afraid because we’re drifting apart. I wanted to say, No, we’re not, but I couldn’t because we were. She said I couldn’t come for the weekend, making it happen more. I told her it didn’t matter. I wasn’t riding in any competition anyway, so I didn’t have to come up. And she’s, Mwah, mwah, mwah. Is that why you keyed that lady’s car and got them to call me? Because you don’t want to come up, you don’t even care about your horse anymore? Why you acting like this? Mwah, mwah, mwah!

I decided then that I was going out to find Dominic and make him talk to me. And if I couldn’t find him, then I’d find something, somebody, I didn’t care. At night I lay down in my clothes with my eye makeup on thick. But my mom suddenly got up and went past my room, bumping on the wall like she’s blind and not even cursing. She went into the bathroom and I heard a thump and then she puked horrible, like her gut was coming out. It scared me, but I thought, Good, she definitely won’t hear me leave, and I went out into the hall. I got to the door and stopped, waiting for some noise to cover me. The sink water ran; I flipped the lock. There was another thump, like maybe she fell; I stopped and listened. She groaned and it yanked me inside, she sounded so weak, I never heard her weak. She puked more, but weaker, like it was hard even to puke. I flipped back the lock and went to her.