Mary Gaitskill - The Mare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession was left unaided. Mary, don’t let my daughter die on a horse. Humble her, punish her, but don’t let her die. Surely she isn’t doing something so stupid. Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto you, Virgin of virgins, my Mother. Because she won’t listen to me, nothing I do works. Before you I stand sinful and sorrowful, punish me, punish her, but don’t let her die that way. She is foolish, but not bad except for pride, and it’s my fault that she was born wrong, not hers. Forgive, forgive, despise not my petitions, have mercy, hear and answer me.

I didn’t go find him to take him from Brianna, only to talk to him. It was my birthday and that made it seem okay. I didn’t text or call because he said not to. I went to the block where we first met and then met again. When I walked there this time boys looked but didn’t talk to me so much, I guess because it was still cold and my body was covered and my face was closed to them because I was all the time calling him, calling him with my mind. I know I was doing that because he heard me; I know he heard me because he came.

He wasn’t alone, he was with another boy — really he was a man, and he had a hard face. My heart opened too fast, and I said his name in a voice you shouldn’t speak on the street with a hard man there. And Dominic, he looked at me with his face hard too. His look froze my heart, but I could not close it. “What you want, girl?” He said it like he didn’t know me.

“Just to say hello. Just to tell you about my horse.”

His eyes went soft and then hard again, except not all the way. The man looked away, bored. “You got business with shawty here?” he said. “Ima catch you up tha way.”

The man left, and we started walking. I hoped he would go to the restaurant with the lights, but he just said, “So what about your horse?”

“Ima be in a competition with her.”

“Awesome.” His voice was sarcastic. I didn’t say anything. There was pounding in my ears and everything seemed like it was moving very fast. I wanted to say, Why are you being this way? I wanted to tell him about seeing the distance, but I couldn’t do that either — his hard voice made even that stupid. So I just asked, “Who’s that man?”

“That ain’t your business.”

“Why can’t I ask that? You said we were friends.”

“Not like that we ain’t.”

“Like what, then? I can’t even just ask you who somebody is?”

He stopped on a corner. His eyes went hard/soft/hard/sad. There were boys like a foot away. “Listen,” he said. “I know you come here and walk around looking for me.” His voice was mean, but his eyes looked sad and scared and cut me to the heart so I could not talk. The boys pretended not to see.

“You can’t be doin’ this,” he said. “If I wanna see you, I let you know. You get it?”

“But you told me, you showed me—”

“I told you not to bother me!”

Brianna’s girls came round the corner. Very quiet, I finished my sentence: “Dominic, you showed me that picture you didn’t show nobody else.” For about two seconds everything stopped. His eyes said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry sorry. But his back was to Brianna’s friends, and all they heard was him going, “ Picture ? That wasn’t nothin’, that wasn’t even me, I was just playin’ with you! It ain’t my fault if you don’t know game when you see it!”

One of Brianna’s bitches laughed low.

“A’ight? Now you need to go home and not bother people no more.”

And he turned his back and talked to Brianna’s friends.

Me just standing there. The corner boys watching me. This one bitch grillin’ me hatefully. And me ready to fly on her — but like he could feel it, he stuck his arm out between us and pulled the bitch by her shoulders, pulled her around, saying to her, Don’t get into that shit, come with us, we gonna —whatever, I didn’t hear. She looked at him sharp, like, Why do you care, but still she went. And quick, over his shoulder, he looked back at me.

Me doing nothing. Worse than a beat-down. You showed me that picture. Stupid and lame. I hated myself for saying it, more than I hated him for what he said back. If one of them looked at me then and laughed, I coulda run and punched the bitch, but nobody did; they were too busy trying to get attention from him.

The corner boys still stood there. I yelled, “What you lookin’ at!” and at least they looked down. But when I walked away I could still feel their eyes on me, like they could see my private body. I felt like I did that time after Manuel, when I wanted to hide in my own house, and now I was on the street and it felt like everybody was looking at my body. All the eyes, and the streets and buildings and cars as far from me as the trees and houses of upstate. But here was no horse to come and touch her face on mine. Fiery Girl, her face on mine — I tried to grab the memory of it. Instead I felt the eyes and remembered the substitute, and Alicia snapping her fingers at his face and Ginger saying, “I’m weak.” And my mom saying, “It’s not your fault. You have bad blood.”

For the first time I understood: She said that to make me feel better. From love.

I went to get Dante from day care. He leaned on me all the way home. I fixed my mind on his forehead and eyelashes until that’s all I saw.

There is a graveyard in the next town over that I like a lot. It’s small and very old, full of thin, crumbling stones so decrepit the names and dates are worn away, slanting sideways or lurching back, some with pieces broken off. There are few big display plots, just these plain, mostly anonymous stones from the 1880s. The living have worn a path through the grass on their way to the drugstore or the parking lot or the diner on the main street — where I’m going to meet Kayla for coffee.

I walk slowly, reading the few legible stones and feeling the gentle humor of the ground beneath me. As you are now, so once was I / As I am now, so you will be / Prepare for death and follow me —somebody who died in 1803 wanted his stone to say that. Numbly I smile and wonder how it will be on my deathbed to remember that when I was forty-eight years old I acted in a performance of A Christmas Carol with children wearing pajamas and bonnets, and that a Dominican family came from Crown Heights to see it. Where will Velvet be then? What will she remember of our time together? I remember when I talked to her about our periods, and I said, “You’re coming up and I’m going down.” How she smiled.

Prepare for death and follow me. Church bells ring.

Yes, I am going down. Like every human will, like every woman in particular, as her body splutters and gives out. Nothing wrong with Velvet’s satisfaction in the contrast. Maybe my whiteness gives it double meaning, double triumph for her. Whatever. I’m going down anyway, my husband going after somebody younger even as he protests his love. No wonder Becca hates me, Paul left her when she was about my age. He didn’t leave her for me, but I am almost ten years younger and must’ve seemed like a replacement.

A replacement: Michael. The fever-feeling of youth coming up inside me, suddenly animated like a cartoon trying to become human. Sparkling dreams of passion and tenderness unlimited by time and its wounds — stupid for any woman my age to dream of such things. But I did dream, so how can I complain about “cheating”? I didn’t get physical with Michael, or at least not genital; we made out like kids. But I tried to start it up again with him; for days, weeks, I e-mailed with him, trying to make it happen again even as he lost interest.