Velvet
One day when Gare was eating her sandwich on the feedbag, I was going past her on the way to the house for lunch, and she said, “Hey.”
I stopped and looked.
“Heather’s a cunt, right?”
I just looked at her.
“Calling her horse Totally Crushed?”
I stayed quiet, looking.
“She told me she wanted to call her Totally Fucking Crushed, but they wouldn’t let her register the horse that way. Duh.”
I said, “Why did she want to call her horse that?”
“Fuck if I know. It sounds like nail polish or something.”
“It don’t sound like nail polish. It sounds like she hates her horse.”
“I dunno.” She looked down and ate her sandwich. She looked up again. “You don’t curse, do you?”
I said, “No.” I thought about her saying I was gonna get deported. I thought, I could curse you out so hard, you’d fall down.
“Why not? Don’t you think it’s cool?”
“No,” I said. “I think it’s stupid.” But I sat on the feedbag with her anyway. We didn’t really look at each other.
She said, “Are you in a gang?”
I looked out at the paddock and at the path going out into the meadow beyond. But I was seeing the street where I lived, and the word almost faded off the wall: Cookie. I thought about him giving my brother some cookie. I thought about the man reaching up to touch his name on the wall. Some kind of feeling came up in me. And I said, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m in a gang.”
“Awesome,” said Gare. “I wish they had gangs here.”
Paul
It wasn’t about her being younger. I was never one of those guys. She wasn’t a kid; she was almost forty, a National Guardswoman who’d driven a supply truck in Iraq, and had gone back to school to get her MFA in writing. She was worn for her age, tough-skinned and rigid-backed, but with a beautiful mouth and strong, calm eyes—green, with hazel flecks. It wasn’t about her being younger. In fact, in spite of her relative youth, it was her maturity that appealed to me, her strength; I felt she was a woman who understood things without too much talk about them. I was at ease with Polly.
She wasn’t my student either; she was working with a colleague of mine on writing her memoir about her service in Iraq, especially her relationship with a translator whose brother was, like Polly’s, schizophrenic. I met her at a graduate-faculty tea and discovered she was also writing about Blake, whom she’d discovered while on her tour; she wanted to juxtapose his imagery with her experience and also with her brother’s. I invited her to come by during my office hours and she did. We talked about Blake and Iraq. We talked about our lives. When I told her about Velvet and the horses, tears welled in her eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “I never cry. But that is very moving.”
It wasn’t until a month or so into these conversations that I realized, while telling Polly about Velvet, I was using the pronoun I instead of we.
Velvet
I woke up thinking about his nose, the little dent in it. About how his eyelashes and eyebrows made his eyes soft, but how inside they were strong. His lips were tense like a muscle, but still his mouth looked full of kisses. Soft, strong, tense, full; he had everything I knew about, with secret things sparking in between: Dominic.
Then my grandfather’s voice came in my ear and made me jump out of my dream. He was saying, Lo prometiste! I hadn’t heard it in a long time. But I knew what he meant right away. It was my last night and I still hadn’t taken her out like I said. I was treating her the same way everybody else did, and for the same reason as them; if it was just me and her, without Pat or Beverly, I was still a little scared of her.
I made myself get out of bed. I got dressed with music in my head: Amor no es amor / Son las cinco de la manana / Y no puedo dormir. The voice like a live ribbon unwinding, giving feeling. I walked out on the path and the song ribboned up in the sky, in the clouds, dark and with moon behind them. When I got in the barn, the music left my head but stayed in my blood. The horses woke up around me and started talking to each other. My horse was looking like, Girl, what you thinkin’ about? I took the halter down from the hook and opened her stall. She put her head up like, It’s night. We don’t do this at night! I came to her with my head low; I talked to her like she was a kitten. She let me come to her and touch her neck: She seemed like she was trying to decide and then, like with shiver inside, she put her head down for the halter. When she came out of the stall, the air around her rolled like water when a boat comes by, and it felt good to me and I wasn’t afraid; I felt her with me wondering what I would do. All the horses watched and wondered too. I could even see a cat watching at the mouth of the barn, its ears against the sky.
But when I put the saddle pad on, she moved sideways. She pushed out her belly so I could barely get the saddle on. I went to put the bridle on over the halter, but she fought the bit, tossing her head even with my arm around her face. I got the crop from the wall, but then I felt stupid because what was I gonna do with it? Her eyes stared and I smelled my own sweat; I felt the scars on her face like they were on me. I put the crop back and made my body quiet, stroking her shoulder. I tried again and again until she finally took the bit. I put the chain on her nose and led her out.
In our eyes and on our skin we felt the night. I felt her fear of it, felt her start to walk backward, and I turned her in a circle to the indoor ring. She calmed and let me take her there, but when I turned on the light, birds flew in the rafters and again she walked backward. I forgot how big she is and pulled her like a dog on a leash, and—damn!—she reared up and beat the air with her feet, killing hard. The lead line burned through my hands, but I held it, and she came down and I turned her in a circle, two, three times. She followed, and I felt our minds pressed together, each feeling where the other was. I remembered: Tell a gelding. Command a stallion. Beg a mare.
I got her to the mounting block and worked to make the girth right, over and over thinking, Beg a mare, beg a mare. Then I worked to get on—first just standing with my left foot in the stirrup, then both feet in, sitting very soft, just sitting, no legs on. Finally walking, thinking I won’t beg, I won’t beg, and then wind came through the arena, and she spooked, and I couldn’t turn her fast enough, and her head came up, she reared under me. I grabbed her mane, and prayed forward, my feet out of the stirrups, her body wilding under me like a snake, like Joker swimming. She came back down and I was ready, I turned her hard, right into my thigh. We went forward again, walking, trotting, walking. Each feeling where the other was, except it kept moving and changing. Was this what Pat meant by begging? Because that’s not what it was, it was like finding—no, not that either. It was—I tried to think what it was so hard that my mind grew like a forest with everything in it: my mom and Dante and school and Dominic’s eyes, Shawn’s hands, Strawberry so close in the closet; Ginger. My grandfather said, You can walk your path better than that lady ever could. She loves you, and you should respect her love. But she doesn’t know your path. You can walk it. She can’t. And somebody else was there too, a twisted-up face coming at me sideways through a crack in the forest floor; Manuel, my father’s friend who lived with us. Walk your path! The forest closed up and I was just on my mare and for a long moment, I found her.
When I walked her back to the barn, we were both sweating. The moon was out from behind the clouds. In its light, I ran the hose between her legs and wiped her with a rag. When I took her to the stall, she stopped for me and then followed when I led her in. She turned herself around so beautiful. I stood in the barn for a long time, just looking at her.
—
I was almost asleep when the face came again, like a witch coming out the crack. When he first moved in, Manuel acted nice; he even gave me a dollar to make up for my dad taking my money. Then he started to get me between the legs and rub until it felt like it was burning. All day it felt like I needed the bathroom and like everybody could see. I to
ld my mom and she told me to quit lying. But when she locked him out because he didn’t pay, and he was banging on the door and cursing, she said, “And what you did to my daughter!” And he shut up. Dante looked at me and looked away. Manuel started banging and cursing again. But I could tell he would go away. I could tell my mom was not afraid of him. If anybody was afraid, it was him afraid of her.
Ginger
I got my translator to do a conference call to tell Mrs. Vargas how much I’d enjoyed Velvet’s time with us. At the end of the conversation, I asked if she’d ever consider moving the family here. If she could get work. There was a long silence and then she asked me, “How much does a carton of milk cost there?” I said I was sure things were more here, but that it could be worth it if she got a job that paid more. If she cleaned houses, she could make at least ten dollars an hour, maybe more. There was another long silence. I thought of the lawn party down the block, the lights, the smiling woman who glanced at us as we passed. I asked if she might want to come up for Christmas with Velvet and her little boy. She laughed. But she said, “Maybe.”
I hung up feeling good. Even though it was embarrassing that I didn’t know how much a carton of milk was.
Velvet
Middle school was so big I hardly knew anybody. The halls were too big and if you walked alone, your feet echoed. The boys were suddenly big and they stank big too. There was broken glass on the playground and there were men guards and metal detectors in the halls, not just at the door. There were a lot of different classes with different teachers. There was at least some of the same girls, Alicia and Helena and Marisol and this other girl, who I was friends with before I got held back. And they were all mad bugged about their hair. They always were, but now it was like war, who had good or bad hair, whose hair was smooth and straight, whose color was ugly, which meant me, these new girls followed me in the hall going, “You need some foster care, your mami let you walk around with that fucked-up hair, it is abuse.” Marisol, they called her “nappy wildebeest,” even girls who used to be her friends, because her hair wasn’t done. And Marisol, when I said to her that Ginger liked my hair natural—even she looked sarcastic and said, “She’s white. She don’t know nothing about hair.”
It felt like people were acting in a show and they didn’t even pick the show, somebody else did, but who? I would hear things they said, shit girls fought about, things teachers got mad about or liked you about: stories we had to “discuss.” The first week there was a special assembly where people who used to be in gangs came to talk to us about how it was bad to be in gangs, and at the end of it they gave us shiny buttons for not being in gangs, but how did they know we weren’t?
These things were the show, and underneath was something else that you couldn’t even tell what it was—it was too big to fit in our words or in the things you were allowed to do, but I could feel it all the time trying to get out. Once I talked to Marisol about Fiery Girl, how she was so powerful but still so sensitive that Beverly’s sick-ass jabbing finger made her spin around so hard she had to kick it out. You could say things like “sensitive” to Marisol, and she totally got the story; her face lit up, and the something else was there. I could even see it sometimes in the eyes of people on the bus, or feel it in my mother’s hand; I could hear it when she screamed at me that I was a puta, mal nacida. I could feel it when I curled against her back. But then we would wake up and the show would take over again.
When I thought about Ginger and Paul it was the same, just the show was different where they were. There was the crying in Ginger’s face all the time, and she didn’t even know it was there because if I asked her why she was sad she would say, “I’m not sad.” There was riding the mare and then sitting at the table with Ginger and Paul or sitting at the table with my mom and Dante; being on the mare happened on another planet, someplace beautiful but with outer space all around it. I couldn’t even tell it to anybody. I was locked away from everybody. I couldn’t even beat on the door because there was no door.
—
Then one day I was helping my mom make dinner, tearing up lettuce for salad. She was making pork and tomato sauce that we would eat with pan sobao. It smelled so good, it made my mouth water and my stomach weak. Her food was so much better than Ginger’s and I wanted to tell her that, but something stopped me. Instead I said, Mami, I’m hungry. Could I have some bread now? and I took it before she answered. She said, Put that bread down! I said, Please, Mami, I’m hungry, and she answered, I don’t care! And I crushed the bread in my hand and she hit me. I yelled, I didn’t do it on purpose! And she yelled, You did! And hit me again. I thought, That is not abuse. Because I did crush it. And then she did it again. And I ran.
Silvia
Crushing that bread and pretending she doesn’t know! And that look—not only in her eyes and her mouth, but her body, the way she moves. Doesn’t she know everybody sees it? Why does she think those girls hate her? She’s conceited, spoiled by that sad rotten-belly woman.
I leaned out the window and saw the top of her head, like a little dog on the porch, turning to look at the people going past. People playing music, the girl with her red head scarf across the way, talking on her cell with her baby in her arms. I looked and I remembered sitting on the stoop in my aunt’s lap, watching a storm moving through the mountains, heavy clouds pouring dark rain, coming toward us but me safe in the lap. My mother looking with faraway eyes; half her body was somewhere else. Not that girl in the red scarf; she is right here with the music banging in her body, shouting in her phone, walking up and down…I remember music too, coming down the street on a summer night. My boyfriend coming on his bike. Vegetable smells in the heat. The bell on his rusty purple bike. My mother’s prayers when she thought I couldn’t hear. Please don’t let me hurt my child. I love her so much. The horses walking in the street.
Well, it’s her time of life too. Her body’s an alarm about to go off; she’ll be needing her own room.
Velvet
Once a teacher asked the class if we had to show the whole world in just one picture, what it would be. A boy said he’d show a picture of war, a girl said she’d show a baby being born. I didn’t say, but I thought, All the feet walking past my building. Like these old-lady feet with a cane and quick boy feet like rubber running past her and this girl in strappy red shoes and this man walking after her trying to make her smile. And sometimes somebody trying to make me smile.
Like Mr. Nelson at the store downstairs. He’s old and so dark he’s black, with a big stomach, but he has happy wrinkles around his eyes, and he’s kind to my mom—he gives her extra sandwich meat sometimes. She says it’s garbage, but still. He comes now and says, Hello, Sweets, what’s good? So I tell him, Nothin’. I’m hungry and my mom wouldn’t give me nothin’, not even bread. So he says come to the store, he’ll fix me something. I ask him to give me a egg and cheese sandwich and he says yeah. I go to the store with him and he makes it on the grill behind the counter. People come in and out the store. He talks to them and me. He asks about school. He asks if I went to “those people” in the country. I say yes. I tell him I rode my favorite horse. I tell him I rode her at night when nobody knew. It was the first time I told it to anybody, and when I told it to him, his eyes changed, like he’s a child listening to me give him a story for bed.
I think that’s what made him want to kiss me. He gave me the sandwich on a paper plate and waxy paper and I said, Ima go eat it on my steps and he said, You not even gonna stay with me? And I said, Noooo, but I smiled so he would know I still like him and he said, At least Ima walk you out, and he did, but before we were out, he put his hand on my head and kissed me on my mouth. I kissed him too. Even though his mouth was old with gray hairs around it. He said, “Keep ridin’ that horse,” and I smiled.
Then I went and sat back down on the steps and ate my sandwich. I watched the people. It was between day and night, so both day and night people were out. I remembered when Manuel grabbed my head and pinched my
jaws till my mouth came open and put his tongue in. I remembered him banging and cursing at the door, me being scared, hiding behind my mother. But I wasn’t nine now, I was twelve, and I was watching the whole world get ready for the night.
I finished my sandwich. My mom shouted out the window, I thought you were hungry. Don’t you want some food? So I went up and she told me I was going to have my own room where Manuel and then Mr. Diaz used to be.
Silvia
She came back in and the night was like always. Lying in bed but feeling like I’m walking in mud up to my chest with Dante in my arms and Velvet on my back like a monkey, with her hands around my neck going mami this, mami that. Street noise keeping me awake, music, people yelling, strings of angry words I don’t know except money and bitch and money. Money, always money. I can’t get enough shifts, and they say they’ll turn the lights off if I don’t pay. I can’t pay, if I do there won’t be enough for rent. I’m supposed to send money for my sister in DR. I’m supposed to make cookies for a sale at the school. The only thing that makes me feel better is talking to the one person who’s really my friend, a black woman named Rasheeda who even speaks Spanish. And I can’t go to her now because her pregnant daughter tested positive for HIV and now she won’t even talk to Rasheeda; how can I come to her with my problems?
I turn on my back for just a moment. Dante stirs. I think, Just a minute. Just a minute away from him and from her, remembering: my father’s soft cheek at night, the smell of his body, tobacco and sweat. The time I went to a party when the hostess had a tray of prizes for the kids, and I reached up to it and got a tiny doll with no face in a big dress. The horses walking in the street; the horse.
The Mare Page 16