Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

I felt it coming on at work, sharpness in my stomach, light head, hard to stand. Juanita next to me said somebody’d been in the bathroom already, sick from the food truck salad, did I have it? I did, but my body is good; if I tell it to hold on, it does. Still, it made me dizzy to keep moving my hands in the same stupid puzzle, the same sounds I hear every day driving me like a pain motor. I broke into a sweat and this woman Lena told about how she used to work for, basically, an ass doctor and she was sometimes in the room when people, white people, were examined. The look on they faces, when they realize what’s going to take place, that they are going to be on their knees with their face and pants down, getting they ass thoroughly finger-fucked in front of a black woman! Everybody laughed, and for a second the motor was beautiful motion, like we were all walking inside a conch shell spinning like a wheel, our feet in exact grooves like gold threads. And he had arms like a white gorilla, and I think he lo-o-ved his job, because he went at it! We laughed, and she said it again: The look on they faces! And my sweat passed. I came back to the line, hot then cold, my fingers moving without my telling them.

I got home to fix food. I had crackers and ginger tea instead of dinner and for once Velvet didn’t act like a malcriada, just sat and read her book in a corner. I lay in bed coming in and out of sleep while street noise patterned up and broke. Cars, voices, music, lights, subways rumbling in their dirty holes. Except that sometimes there was a forgotten passage and a crack to hide in, or a flight of stairs, and I ran down, and there was a young blanca running too. She was looking for something and she was in danger and she did not know it. Street noise filled my ears; good voices forced into vicious shapes by iron hands, whose hands? Dante came into bed with me and I held him tight. Where was my daughter? God, with the white girl! And the white girl walked in a hall with living heads sprouting from walls and they spoke all languages but not one could understand the other and their talk split our ears. I screamed, Shut up! And woke with truck poison coming up my throat.

She was on the floor with her gown way up, reaching to pull a towel off the rack. “Mami!” I said. “Here!” And I got the towel for her, then went to run cold water on a cloth. I looked in the mirror— oh shit —I was dressed in my street clothes and makeup. But she just sat with the towel around her like she was cold, so I kneeled and put the cloth on her forehead; she looked at me with strange eyes. I said, “Mami?” and she had to puke again. I held her hair away from her face and remembered making rivers of puke in a blue rubber pail, how she held me. My ragged toy that somebody gave me, I would lean it out the window and pat its back and pretend it was puking, plah plah plah ! What happened to that toy?

I stayed up with her all night. She saw my clothes and makeup; I saw her look and felt it. But she didn’t say anything, not that night or next day. She yelled like always. But not about that.

My sponsor advised me not to tell Ginger about Polly because it was over and unless there is some very good reason to do otherwise, you don’t tell the truth if it’s going to hurt the other person.

“But she asked me,” I said. “And—”

“And you told her no. It’s still no, right?”

“Yes, but then she asked why my face was flushed. She knows. It’s sitting there waiting to happen. She’s going to ask me again; if I keep saying no, it’ll start to sound more and more false. If I say yes, it makes it worse that I said no to start with.”

“Worse for her or for you?”

“Both of us. Listen, Ginger isn’t someone who cares about discretion or, or dignity. She cares about truth.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. My sponsor is a manual laborer with a degree in philosophy. He’s been impotent for years because of a prostate operation. He can’t take Viagra because of his heart condition, but he’s recently been using a penis pump and it seems to be working for him. He cares about truth too. He also cares about dignity and discretion. Mostly, though, he wants things to work.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t think you need to throw the past in her face. But you could always ask her why she asked the question. If you really want to have the conversation.”

And so I did. And she told me. She said even Velvet noticed something.

Like I didn’t already know there must be a reason that he’d suddenly become so kind and understanding of Velvet and me, that he’d stopped with the racial piety about how really, while I think I love her, it’s actually white guilt or something even more perverted and sick; it can’t possibly be what it looks like or feels like to me. Frankly, it was such a relief not to hear that shit anymore that I’d rather he shut up and “cheat” if it meant he could leave us alone or even actually show support and back me up like with the substitute. Cheat. What a stupid word, like you’re playing cards and your partner cheats and the whole deck has to rise up and attack you, both of you, him because he didn’t play right, and me because — why? Because I didn’t catch him? Because therefore I’m now “humiliated,” officially ? Well, guess what? Here’s the good thing, the one good thing, the one good thing about being the girl on the side where the guy goes to act like he can’t with his main squeeze: you realize it doesn’t mean anything much except he feels like doing it with somebody else. The wife isn’t “humiliated” or unloved or anything. If that’s happening to anybody, it’s usually the other one. He says he’s not even seeing her anymore, but still here he is with his AA face on talking about amends and wanting to feel close again. All of it, the piety, the careful examining and blaming of himself for daring to want sex, of me for being — what? A guilty white person who must be doing something wrong? That attitude is so much more disgusting than his wanting strange pussy, not to mention his hard, fake self-righteous friends. Starting with that bitch he used to be married to.

She stared at me a long moment, then looked away. “I guess it’s normal,” she said.

“Normal?”

“My dad did it. Everybody makes a production out of it, but every time you turn around somebody’s doing it. It didn’t mean anything, right?”

Her sarcasm was cheap but sharp, and though I meant to humble myself, it made me mad. I said, “Actually, it did mean something. It meant that somebody was paying attention to me and holding me like she meant it.”

“Then why is it over?”

Because Polly ended it. “Because I wanted it to be you.”

She frowned like she heard the unsaid thing, then shook her head, almost twitched it, like she was shaking something from her ear.

“I want you, ” I said.

Her chin quivered; as though to hide it, she raised her hand to her face. The gesture was piercing, and for a second I was sure she was crying — though I knew that Ginger has not cried since childhood. I moved closer to her. “Ginger,” I said. “I wanted you to know because—”

She raised her head and dropped her hand. “Velvet is coming this weekend,” she said. “I can’t cancel it. I didn’t let her come last time because she messed up at school. But she needs to practice for an event.” And she stood up, like to leave.

“Ginger,” I said. “Where are you?”