The Mare

by Mary Gaitskill

  I wanted to, but I was scared and I told her.

  Help me.

  “But there isn’t even anybody here in case you hurt me.”

  Help me. I won’t hurt you. Help me.

  We looked at each other without any more words. She still did not kick or bite. I said, “All right. I’m going to trust you. But if you hurt me, I will never see you again.”

  And I got a wheelbarrow and a fork and went back to her stall. Normally I didn’t go into the stalls to clean, but I didn’t want to put a halter on her. I blocked the door with the wheelbarrow and went in. She got out of my way and let me clean. When I was finished with one half of the stall, she moved and let me do the other. She didn’t look at me. But her neck was soft, and her head was down. With her trembly lips she said, Thank you.

  I stayed in the barn and talked to the horses for like an hour. But no people came until I left. That’s when I saw Beth, the girl from my first visit. She told me Pat and Beverly were at a horse show and she was taking care of the barn. I thought, Not very well, and she got pink in the face like she heard me.

  Ginger

  The best part of that visit happened the first night; Paul and I fucked and it felt great. It was especially great because we hadn’t done it for a while, and we’d never done it when Velvet was in the house, I’m not sure why. But this intimacy now made her presence more real, and I felt joy at getting up and seeing her the next day. I felt like we were all putting roots down into something deep and rich.

  Velvet

  It was barely light when I woke up the next day. I didn’t wait; I got dressed and walked over. There was mist in the air and it was soft, and the sky was soft too, but with bright clouds. There was the so-much space and the green too, green and green. There were the little fences. There were the horses. The horses were out in the grassy place where girls had advanced lessons and they were running. I got closer; they were running wild, shining-wild. I saw Joker, he jumped straight in the air, with all his legs. Spirit kicked his back legs, Baby wiggled herself and kicked sideways, Officer Murphy jumped up front-ways, Little Tina ran in and out among them all, like she was laughing. And beautiful fat Reesa high-stepped in a circle all around them, like she was the proud grandmother. They were dancing, all different ways, and because they normally all ran together, it was crazy for them to be doing different things, showing their steps, throwing up mud and clumps of grass—dancing.

  Pat was by the fence with her sticking-out hair and her red face. “Hey,” she said. “I never saw you smile like that before.”

  I smiled more.

  “Look at them smiling. They’ve been in for a while, so they’re going a little crazy, but I’ve never seen ’em like this before. Hey!”

  She said “hey” because Spirit back-kicked Blue Boy’s leg right on the elbow part, and Blue Boy was running in a hurt way.

  “You stay outside,” said Pat, and she opened the gate and went in with the dancing horses. She wasn’t afraid of them even though they were wild; she walked through them to Blue Boy. And he came to her, and she stood there with him, petting his nose and talking nice to him while the others ran and played.

  When she came back out the fence I asked if Fiery Girl could come out.

  Pat said, “Who?”

  I felt my face turn red. “It’s my name for Fugly Girl.”

  Pat smiled and said, “I like it! But no, she can’t come out, not with the others. She fights with them.”

  “Can she come out later?” I asked. “By herself?”

  “No,” said Pat. “I don’t have anybody here to help me with her, and she’s all stirred up.”

  “I can help.”

  “Sorry.” She put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Miss Pat, I can handle her.”

  She just looked at me like, Don’t push it.

  So I went in and just talked to the mare, or tried. I saw what Pat saw: She was moving around hard and quick and her eyes were like covered up, not thinking. But she came to me right away, looking at me with thanks, still. She said, Touch me, and I put my hands in through the bars and put them on her head to stop her from bobbing it. I told her I’d let her out one day, I promised. She started to swing her head like she was upset, but she stopped just short. I promise. She wanted to believe me. But her wrinkled mouth said, I can’t.

  —

  Then when I was back at the house, just before we ate, something happened I would never believe. Somebody knocked on the door and it was for me. It was Gare. She had her hands in her pockets and she was looking at me like, I don’t know, a dog with its ears up. “Pat sent me to get you,” she said. “They’re bringing Fugly out.”

  We didn’t talk when we walked over except she asked how many times I came up and I told her. We got to the paddock and the mare was already out, running. Her muscles were going like the muscles of the world, and her face when she came around was like a crazy skeleton in a old cartoon, blowing from her open nose. But it wasn’t scary, it was cute, because her eye was on me like, Check me out! See what I can do! And then something more cute happened. When she slowed down, Beverly came out to stand with me and watch for a minute on her way out to her car. She watched and shook her head and pointed at the mare, like jabbed with her finger, and said, “That horse is trouble!” And Fiery Girl spun around in a circle, like a whole circle, and kicked with her back legs—it was like some nasty thing came out Beverly’s finger and made her spin around and around till she shook it off. Even Beverly had to laugh, and she said, “Damn straight!”

  But that wasn’t even the best. When she was done running, she sank down on her knees and went on her back like a cat on the floor. She wiggled in the dirt and her lips wiggled and she ran in the air except her feet were light. She rolled.

  There was calling over me and I looked up. There were big birds flying in a V shape and calling each other. Birds in the city fly like a moving hairnet. But these flew like a arrow in the sky, going somewhere definite. I thought, I am going to do my schoolwork like Ginger wants and bring Strawberry here. And I am going to ride Fiery Girl.

  Ginger

  I asked her what kind of grades she was getting on her papers. I asked her if she’d ever given Ms. Rodriguez her paper on the African-American family. And she said, Um, can I tell you what happened today with my friend Alicia? I said, Okay. And she told me that Alicia, who used to be her real friend but who was now only a little bit her friend, choked herself with her scarf in the bathroom. She said she walked in the bathroom with a hall pass and saw Alicia in there choking herself in front of the mirror. She was doing it because her mom was mad at her because she got a 2 on a paper. I said, That’s horrible. At least your mom’s not like that. But what about your paper? And she said it must’ve gotten lost.

  So I called Ms. Rodriguez and eventually she called back. She said she’d never seen the paper about the African-American family, but that Velvet was doing the homework and behaving in class—still fighting, but not so much. I asked what did she mean, “fighting”? Physically? The teacher said no, it was verbal. The other girls teased her because they knew she would get excited and they liked to see her blow up. But it was getting better.

  I hung up feeling mostly good. Except that all of a sudden I couldn’t stop picturing a little girl in the bathroom choking herself.

  Velvet

  I hated doing homework. But I liked talking to Ginger on the phone. I liked how her voice was trembly when she explained something to me; I liked how hard she listened, how you could feel her listening like she was close. I liked feeling her like me.

  My mom liked her calling me at first. If she answered the phone, she would make her voice nice and she would say, “It’s Ginger,” instead of “that lady.” And she would even kind of be quiet in the background, moving around a little stiff and straight, like she thought Ginger was there in the room, watching her. Once she even asked, “What did she teach you about this time?”

  But then she started not liking it. She
said, “Doesn’t she have anything better to do than children’s work? Does she work at all? Or does she just lie around?” I said, “At least she knows how to read.” And my mom said, “You think anybody’s gonna pay you to read? I don’t!” She laughed; Dante laughed. “Ginger’s husband didn’t marry her because she can read! Why he did, I don’t know, but something tells me it was more to do with this”—she slapped me on the ass—“than that!” So Dante tried to slap too, but I swung around to slap him and he almost fell over his feet getting out the way. We all had to laugh at that.

  I felt like saying to Ginger, See, we laugh. Later that night, my mom washed my hair and put relaxer and bleach on it and I felt like saying, See? I felt it again when I looked at my mom and Dante sleeping, the sweet way she was with him. And when I saw my mom do her push-ups every morning before she went to work, before she even made our food, before it was even light. And after we did eat, she cleaned everything in the kitchen, rubbed the counters really hard to keep out infection. My mom was so strong. I remembered how she said to us once that if anybody ever hurt us, she would come after him with her body, and I knew it was true. I knew it was more true than grades.

  And I also remembered what Alicia said to me, the thing I didn’t tell Ginger: “You stole my grade. And you better stop.” She said it like it was a joke. But it wasn’t funny.

  Ginger

  Maybe two weeks after Velvet went home, Ms. Rodriguez called me. She wanted to know if Paul and I could come to the school as chaperones for a class trip to the Statue of Liberty. I was thrilled for the chance, and even Paul was sorry he couldn’t come because of teaching.

  But when the day came, the weather was so bad that the trip was canceled. Since I was already in the city—I’d spent the night with a friend—the principal invited me out anyway, just to visit. She said it would be a treat for Velvet to see me, that they were going to make it a surprise for her. They arranged for it to be at the end of the day, during the last class. I was sad that I had to go through a metal detector and show ID to a security officer to get into an elementary school. But mostly I was happy and awkward, wondering what it would be like to see Velvet in class.

  When I walked into class, though, it didn’t feel awkward at all; it was easy for me to smile at these kids, to be sweet-voiced and gentle. “You know Velvet?” one asked, suspicious but also interested. “How?”

  “She came up to visit me this summer,” I said. “And I thought she was so great, I had to see her again.” The kid looked at me, amazed.

  Turning slightly to one side, I whispered to Ms. Rodriguez, “So where is Velvet?” Because I had not seen her.

  The woman gave me a strange look and said, “She’s right there.” She pointed at a furious-looking girl seated apart from everyone else, her head down and her hair brutally straightened, fried-and-dyed, a horrible red color that had to have been a mistake. She looked like a completely different person than she did when she came to see me; it was like there was a sign over her head reading “Come close and I will fuck you up.”

  She didn’t even seem to know I was in the room, so I talked a little more to the other kids, asked them what they were working on that day. She still didn’t look up. Finally Ms. Rodriguez said it was time for them to pay attention to the lesson. They more or less looked down at their notebooks and I approached Velvet’s desk. She didn’t look up even when I was right next to her. What would she do, curse me?

  “Velvet,” I said. “Hi.”

  She smiled, but not at me. She just sat there smiling at the scribbled-up paper on her desk.

  I said, “How are you, honey?”

  Finally she looked at me, still smiling. “Hi,” she said.

  I sat next to her and tried to help her with the lesson. Which was hard because I couldn’t do the lesson; it was too fast. The teacher would write something on the board, a subject like, say, spending the night at a friend’s house, and ask them to write half a page about it. Then ten minutes later—while Velvet was still on sentence two—she would switch, reading to them out of a book and asking them to write a paragraph responding to what they’d just heard. It was not how I’d learned, and I wanted to say, Stop! Can’t you see this is too fast for anybody to feel anything, and how can they write if they can’t feel first? Don’t you know this girl needs to feel?

  On top of that, I could see how strange it was for her to have me there, I could feel her body going back and forth on whether or not it was a good thing. This happened especially when another kid would turn and glance at us with an intense, curious face. Something was happening in the room that I didn’t know about, and whatever it was, that’s what Velvet’s intelligence was working on, or trying to feel her way through. The teacher’s suggestions were something she had to feel through too, and to do that she needed time to change the channel. I would’ve needed to do that too, and there wasn’t any time being allowed.

  “It’s too fast for me too,” I whispered to her.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then why can everybody else do it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.” And I really didn’t. I thought, Great. Now she’ll think we’re both just stupid. Then I thought, Who cares, if this is supposed to be smart?

  Velvet

  When the class was over, Strawberry and Alicia wanted to walk out with me. They never did that before, and it was because of Ginger. Her hair was white and shiny, and she was wearing pants that looked like leather and her diamond ring on one hand and her gold on the other, smiling and talking all sweet. Strawberry’s eyes could not stop staring at her; Alicia’s mouth was open. And Ginger seemed to like it. Who likes to be stared at? A stuck-up person who thinks they all that. But Ginger didn’t think she was all that. Did she?

  “Is it true you make paintings?” asked Alicia. “Are you an artist?”

  So Strawberry’d talked to her even though I asked her not to.

  “Yes,” said Ginger. “I don’t make money at it, I just do it because I love it.”

  “Does that mean you’re rich?” asked Strawberry.

  “No,” said Ginger. “Just that so far I haven’t made money. I would if I could.” And then she stopped in the hall in front of a picture of everybody in the class. “Oh, adorable!” she said.

  See how nice she is, I thought.

  But I could feel Strawberry thinking something different. I could feel part of her leaning toward Ginger and another part of her feeling very negative. Which didn’t make sense and did make sense at the same time.

  Ginger

  Strawberry was not what I expected. She was a beautiful young woman with a wounded, contemptuous mouth and distant, wistful eyes. Of course she had been hurt; God, she must’ve been hurt. But that hot blend of hope and scorn that happened so quickly in her eyes—I was uneasy for Velvet and wished that she had picked another friend. I felt bad about it because of what Strawberry had been through. But still. I wasn’t sure I wanted her around.

  Velvet

  We walked out with Ginger and then she said good-bye to me. She kissed me on the head in front of them. She smiled at them like…I don’t know, it felt like a funny bone. They said good-bye to her. And then they didn’t say nothin’. I was thinking they’d crack on her, and I didn’t know what I’d do, stick up for her or crack too. But they didn’t. We just walked for a while, quiet. Then Strawberry started cracking on this boy who kept wanting to mess with her, touch her, also on this teacher who stared at her, and then Alicia talked about this boy she liked, Dominic. I said, “Is he in high school?” She said, “I don’t think he goes to school.” I said, “I think I know him.” Strawberry looked at me. And they got quiet again.

  Ginger

  Right when the class got out, when all the kids were milling around, Ms. Rodriguez introduced me to the school social worker, a woman named Eliza Lopez. She had a deep, good face and she seemed very happy to meet me. She thanked me for “making a difference.” In the noisy hall, I tri
ed to express some of my doubts and fears; I wondered about how Velvet’s mother felt about it all, worried that I couldn’t understand her. Ms. Lopez’s face darkened. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said. “That woman is like a brick wall. Nobody can understand her.” And then Velvet was there with her friends.

  “Here’s my card,” said Ms. Lopez. “Call me any time.”

  And I went back out through the metal detectors. Wondering what it would be like to be eleven years old and to walk through that thing every day with a guard watching.

  Velvet

  It was a few days after that that Ms. Rodriguez picked my paper to read out loud in class. And when she was done, this boy in front named Junior said, “That’s good!” And I felt my face blush and I smiled and my head went to one side. Somebody whispered, “Look at her!” and I put my head normal and saw Alicia and them staring knives at me. Strawberry looked at her nails. Ms. Rodriguez said, “I’m proud of Velvet for all the hard work she did.” “Bitch,” whispered Alicia. Ms. Rodriguez didn’t hear. She came and put the paper on my desk. “Velveeta cheese,” said somebody else. “Flat-ass fathead.” “Douchebag.” Strawberry kept looking at her nails.

  Ginger

  I thought the visit to the school was good. But after, things got worse. Velvet still did her lessons with me. She worked hard: First we would discuss the book she was supposed to write about, getting her focused on what she wanted to say about it. She would then write a draft and revise it after my critique. But every time I asked her what grade she got on it, she said she hadn’t gotten the paper back yet.