The Mare

by Mary Gaitskill

  When the shock was still wearing off, I would go for long walks through the small center of town, out onto country roads, then back into town again. I’d look at the women with their children; I’d look into the small, beautiful faces and think of Melinda when she was like that. I’d imagine my mother’s warm arms, her unthinking, uncritical limbs that lifted and held us. Shortly after Melinda died our washing machine broke and I had to go to the Laundromat; I was there by myself and this song came on the radio station that the management had on. It’s a song that was popular in the ’70s about a girl and a horse who both die. I was folding clothes when I recognized it. The singer’s voice is thin and fake, but it’s pretty, and somewhere in the fakery is the true sadness of smallness and failure and believing in beautiful things that aren’t real because that’s the only way to get through. Tears came to my eyes. When Melinda was little, she loved horses. For a while, she even rode them. We couldn’t afford lessons, so she worked in a stable to earn them. Once I went with my mother to pick Melinda up from there, and I saw her riding in the fenced area beside the stable. She looked so confident and happy I didn’t recognize her; I wondered who that beautiful girl was. So did our mother. She said, “Look at her!” and then stopped short. They say she died one winter / When there came a killin’ frost / And the pony she named Wildfire busted down its stall / In the blizzard he was lost. It was a crap song. It didn’t matter. It made me picture my sister before she was ruined, coming toward me on a beautiful golden horse. She’s coming for me I know / And on Wildfire we’re both gonna go. I cried quietly, still folding the clothes. No one was there to see me.

  It was a year later that I started talking about adoption. At first Paul said, “We can’t.” Although he didn’t say it, I think he was hurt that I hadn’t really tried to have his child, but now I wanted some random one. Also, his daughter from his first marriage, Edie, didn’t want to go to school where he teaches and he’d promised to pay her tuition at Brown after his ex-wife had thrown a fit about it. Even if money weren’t an issue, he didn’t think we would have the physical energy for a baby. “What about an older child?” I asked. “Like a seven-year-old?” But we wouldn’t know anything about the kid, he said. They would come fully formed in ways that would be problematic and invisible to us until it was too late.

  We went back and forth on the subject, not intensely, but persistently, in bed at night and at breakfast. Months went by; spring came and the dry, frigid winter air went raw and wet, then grew full and soft. Paul’s eyes began to be soft when we talked too. One of his friends told him about an organization that brought poor inner-city kids up to stay with country families for a few weeks. The friend suggested it as a way to “test the waters,” to see what it might be like to have somebody else’s fully formed kid around.

  We called the organization and they sent us information, including a brochure of white kids and black kids holding flowers and smiling, of white adults hugging black kids and a slender black girl touching a woolly white sheep. It was sentimental and flattering to white vanity and manipulative as hell. It was also irresistible. It made you think the beautiful sentiments you pretend to believe in really might be true. “Yes,” I said. “Let’s do it. It’s only two weeks. We could find out what it’s like. We could give a kid a nice summer, anyway.”

  Velvet

  Dante wasn’t on the same bus as me—his was supposed to go at seven thirty and then me at nine. Outside the Port Authority were dirty homeless sleeping against the walls; inside, mostly closed stores, hardly anyone but police, and ugly music playing. We went where they said to meet them and nobody was there. My mom told me to ask a police if this was where the Fresh Air Fund was supposed to be and he said he didn’t know anything about that, which made my mom look worried and Dante glad because maybe we would just go home. I thought we were just there too early as usual, and I was right: While we were standing there, these people wearing green T-shirts came smiling at us, carrying yellow metal fences like they use to keep people back at parades. They said, “Great, you’re early, that’s great,” and then they made a big square place with the fences and put a sign on it. They laughed and smiled with each other and then over at us. They put up tables and got out their computers and said they were ready. But then they wouldn’t let us all the way in behind the fence, just Dante; he had to be inside the fence by himself. They told us he would get used to it, but that we could stand right by the fence until he left. They put a information card around his neck and gave him a coloring book, but he dropped it and ran to the fence to grab my mom, crying, “I’m hungry, I’m hungry!”

  If it was me, my mom would’ve told me to shut up and gone to work. But Dante, she put her hands through the fence and talked to him like a baby, like “my little mother-nature boy!” But he wouldn’t be quiet, so she gave me money and told me to go get him a cookie and her a coffee at this place that just opened, we saw this sad-faced man opening it.

  She always pays attention to Dante when he cries, so he cries a lot. Or pretends to. Especially since he got poisoned by the babysitter. That was before Crown Heights or even Williamsburg; we lived in Queens then, all of us in one room that smelled like the garbage under the sink no matter how many times we took it out. I was eight, Dante was three. The babysitter was a girl named Rose who lived down the block, the daughter of the lady who did my mom’s hair. She wanted to watch a TV show that wasn’t what Dante wanted and he wouldn’t shut up about it. He started crying that something hurt, so she gave him aspirin. He kept crying, probably because they were the orange chewy kind and he wanted more. She gave him the whole bottle and he went to sleep.

  When I got back with the cookie and coffee, he was still sort of pretend-crying; he even kept doing it while he ate the cookie. Other kids were inside the fence by then, and they were coloring in books with the Fresh Air Fund people. I wished I could go in there, just to sit down away from Dante and my mom. I even asked if I could, but they said no, I couldn’t go in until my group came.

  I walked around in a circle behind my mom, dragging my suitcase until this girl in a green T-shirt said I could leave it inside the yellow fence; then I walked around without it. More people were in the station, their faces looking like they were already someplace else. More kids were coming too—the fenced-in Fresh Air space was filling up. Kids were sitting on the floor coloring in books or playing cards while the people in green shirts watched. Other moms were standing along the fence, with their children close to them. This boy came up to Dante and said, “Don’t be scared. You’ll like it. Where I’m going, they have a swimming pool.” I felt like I could walk away and nobody would see me.

  After Dante ate all the aspirin we couldn’t get him to wake up. Rose called her mom to come, and then my mom came home. We were all crying, and pretty soon my mom was screaming at Rose that she would kill her if Dante died. Rose’s mom defended her daughter: She screamed back that if my mom was going to talk like that, Dante would die as punishment. The police came, an ambulance came. They put my little brother on the stretcher; my mom cried and threw herself on his body, they had to pull her off to take him down the stairs. When they drove away in the ambulance, our neighbor Mrs. Gutierrez hugged my mom and told her Dante would be all right, that she would be praying for us. My mom thanked her and smiled at her as she walked away. Then she turned to me and said, “How could you let this happen?”

  Finally the bus came and they made Dante get on it. My mom walked me up to the table inside the fenced area and they put a card on me that said “Red Hook.” “Be good,” she said. “Don’t give them any trouble.” And she kissed me, then left because she was late for work. I went in and sat down and this lady smiled and said hi and asked if it was my first time and I said yes. She asked if I wanted a coloring book and I said no. Other kids came in who were mostly younger than me; they sat on the floor and colored. A girl my age sat down and took out her phone. I didn’t have a phone, so I just sat down. More and more kids came—at least I wasn’t
the only one whose mom wasn’t there. But it did seem like I was the only one who didn’t have something to look at. And the ugly music was still playing.

  You’re no good, said some words in my head. It’s your blood that’s bad. These are words I hear a lot. I don’t really hear a voice saying them. It’s more like I feel them in my brain. Over and over. When that happens, I try to listen to the people around me to drown them out. Which is how I heard the white lady standing behind us talking to this other white lady. She was saying, “They got us to bend over backward to get this kid on this bus and now they don’t even show up?”

  “They don’t understand,” said the other lady. “Families arrange their whole summers around this and then they don’t even show.”

  “It’s their culture,” said the first one. “They don’t understand time the way we do.”

  I wanted to say, Excuse me, but we were here early? But then they changed the subject to themselves and how they were making a difference.

  “…they come up and they see this big house and all these nice things, and they want to know, How do you get all this?” The same lady was still talking like no one could hear her. “And I say to them, We get it with hard work. Do you see how Jeff gets up every morning at four a.m. and goes to work? And then comes home and relates to his kids?”

  “At least they have an example,” said her friend. “We’re showing them another way. What they do with that is another thing, but—”

  I tried to remember the little voice of the lady I talked to on the phone. I tried to put my mind on all the things she said we would do, the fair and swimming and horses. But it seemed like there was nothing but the bus station and that it would go on forever, my brain talking shit to me and these women talking basically the same thing.

  Right then a black man with dreads said, “Okay, let’s go!” And he picked up some bags and walked to the door Dante had gone through. Kids finally said good-bye to their moms and we all got on the bus, which distracted my brain from talking. This bus was a dark and rumbling cave, with deep seats full of close smells and tiny jewelly lights on the arm-parts. You had to step on a platform to get into the seats and all of them had TV screens in front of them. Even the shy little kids threw themselves into these seats so they could bounce. The woman who said that thing about a “example” got on last, smiling and talking about how we were going to watch Harry Potter. My brain started again: You’re no good. I told it, Oh, shut up.

  “Hey,” said a black lady in a green T-shirt. “Can I sit next to you?”

  I told her yes and I was glad; she was nice. She said, “Hi, Velveteen. My name is Roxanne. Have you ever been to Friendly Town before?”

  I said, “No,” and the bus rumbled for real.

  “You’re gonna like it,” she said. “I went when I was little. It’s a lot of fun.”

  The bus backed up and turned into a tunnel. Roxanne said she wished we were watching Freaky Friday with Lindsay Lohan instead. “It’s about a girl who switches bodies with her mom. It’s funny.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled and looked out the window. We were coming out onto the street. The Example lady was standing up and talking about the rules of the bus and the bathroom in the back. I wondered if Roxanne thought the same things she did.

  The night that Dante got poisoned my mother didn’t talk to me, not even when they said he was okay. I helped her make dinner and we ate it. She hardly looked at me. I cried and my tears ran into my mouth with my food. But when we got in bed, she didn’t turn away from me. She lay on her back with her eyes open and said, “It’s not your fault. You have bad blood from your father.” I said, “Bendición, Mami.” She didn’t answer. “Mami?” I whispered. She sighed and blessed me, then turned her back and let me curl against her.

  “Velveteen?” said Roxanne. “Are you a little bit nervous?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t be, sweetheart. Because your host family? They are gonna be so happy to see you. Trust me.”

  Ginger

  The bus came late. We waited in a hot schoolyard for an hour because we didn’t get the message. We figured it out when we saw nobody else was there, but we were afraid to go get a cold drink because we weren’t sure how early we were. Paul sat in the car with the door open listening to the radio. I got out and paced up and down the asphalt. I didn’t like the look of it, this dry flat line between earth and sky—who would want somebody else’s empty schoolyard to be the first thing they saw in a new place? I thought about the girl’s voice on the phone. Velvet—she sounded so full and round, sweet and fresh.

  I wanted to give that voice sweet, fresh things, to gather up everything good and give it. The night before, we had gone out and bought food for her—boxes of cereal and fruit to put on it, eggs in case she didn’t want cereal, orange juice and bacon and white bread, sliced ham and cheese, chicken for barbecue, chocolate milk, carrots. “Did your daughter like carrots when she was little?” I asked Paul. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I think so.” “All kids eat carrots,” I said, and put them in the shopping cart. “Ginger, don’t worry so much,” he said. “Kids are simple. As long as you’re nice to them and take care of them, they’ll like you. Okay?”

  I paced the asphalt. Other cars driven by middle-aged white people pulled into the lot. The problem was, I didn’t know if I had everything good to give. Or even anything. “Yourself,” Paul had said, holding me one night. “The real self is the best thing anyone can give to anybody.” And I believed that. But I did not think it would be an easy thing to give.

  Paul got out of the car. “Look,” he said. “They’re here.” And there were the buses, two of them huffing into the yard. I thought, Act normal. The buses stopped; doors jerked open and rumpled, hot-looking adults poured out, intense smiles on their faces. Last names and numbers were shouted out. Kids jumped out of the buses, some of them blinking eagerly in the sunlight, some looking down like they were embarrassed or scared. And then there was this little beauty. Her round head was too big for her skinny body, and her long kinky hair made it seem even bigger. But her skin was a rich brown; her lips were full, her cheekbones strong. She had a broad, gentle forehead, a broad nose, and enormous heavy-lashed eyes with intense brows. But it wasn’t only or even mainly her features that made her beautiful; she had a purity of expression that stunned my heart.

  I heard Paul’s name. We came forward. The child turned her eyes fully on us. I had an impulse to cover my stunned heart with my hand, and a stronger impulse to touch the girl’s face. “This is Velveteen Vargas,” said a nondescript someone with a smile in her voice. “Velveteen, this is Mr. and Mrs. Roberts.” She was ours!

  Velvet

  The place they let us off at was a school, but empty, with trees around it. Like dreams I have about school sometimes, where it’s deserted and I’m the only one there—or everybody’s there, everything’s normal, except that I’m invisible. When I got off the bus, this smiling lady was standing there. Her hair was white-blond and her eyes were blue. There was a man there too, wearing shorts that showed the blond-hairiest legs I ever saw. But it was her I looked at most. She didn’t look like the lady in the booklet at all. She was wearing white pants and a white top with sparkles on it. She was smiling, but something else in her face was almost crying. It was okay though. I don’t know why. I smiled back. She smiled like she was seeing heaven. I got shy and looked down.

  “Velveteen,” she said. “That’s a pretty name.”

  “Velvet,” I said. “That’s what people call me.”

  They said they were Ginger and Paul. They took me to their car. We drove past lots of houses with flowers and bushes in front of them. In the city when the sky is bright it makes everything harder on the edges; here everything was soft and shiny too, like a picture book of Easter eggs and rabbits I read in third grade when I was sick on the nurse’s station cot. I loved that book so much I stole it from the nurse’s station, and the next time I was sick I took it out and loo
ked at it and it made me feel better even though by then I was too old for it. I don’t have it anymore; probably my mom threw it out when we moved.

  The man turned around in the driver’s seat and asked me if I liked school. I said, “Yes.” The lady turned around, smiling with no crying anywhere now. She said, “Really, you like school? I didn’t think anybody actually liked school. I hated school!” She smiled like this lady in a movie I saw about a girl who everybody realizes is actually a princess. The girl gets discovered, and this lady with blond hair and blue eyes takes her into a room where all her jewels are waiting. The girl tries on her jewels while the lady smiles.

  I said, “I like school because I see my friends there.”

  “What about the work?” asked the man.

  “I like it because I get all 3’s and 4’s.”

  “Is that A’s and B’s?”

  “Four means you’re perfect, 3 means you’re good, 2 means not good—1, you got nothing.”

  “That’s great you get 3’s and 4’s,” said the lady, and she smiled like she’d put a crown on my head.

  The smile was nice, but it was starting to be creepy too. Because she was smiling like she knew me and she did not. But my face kept smiling back.

  “Did Ginger tell you we have horses right next door?” said the man. “A stable?”

  “Yes,” I said. And then we pulled into the driveway of a red house with a big spread-out tree in front. I was surprised. It did not look like the house of rich people.