The Mare

by Mary Gaitskill

  Velvet

  We drove there slow on curved roads with trees and bushes growing almost into the road; it was light but darkish anyway because of wet mist coming up. It took almost an hour to get there, and it seemed like the whole time Lorrie and Lexy talked about their boots, Lorrie said some boots called Tuff Riders had a knockoff that looked just like Parlantis, but Lexy didn’t believe it, she would never buy Tuff Riders. Jeanne tried to talk to me about Brooklyn, where she used to live, but it was hard to pay attention because I didn’t know any of the places she talked about. We turned onto a road with just one big gray building on it and then nothing, like somebody tore a hole in the trees to make it that way. It was the place. It wasn’t twice the size of Spindletop, it was five times the size of Spindletop, and we were just in the parking lot, which was full of cars and trailers and big curtained places for horses, and horses being walked, and also people speeding around in tiny carts.

  We parked at the end of the lot next to a place where people were lunging horses. We got out and all three of them started putting black polish on their boots; Jeanne talked on her phone with one hand and polished with the other. I just stood there noticing Lexy’s manicure and jewelry. Nobody at my barn had a manicure, not even that bitch Heather. Lorrie smiled at me and said, “Is Velvet your real name? Because—” But Jeanne started talking to her too quiet for me to hear, and then Lexy was taking Alpha out and suddenly Jeanne got on a bicycle that was lying in the grass and rode away going, “Meet me at Hunter Ring 3!” Lexy pulled out her phone and told Lorrie to lunge Alpha, and got on her phone with her back to me. A lady with big earrings and bigger lips went by on a cart with a little dog in her lap. I watched Lorrie exercise Alpha next to a woman whose horse was lunging with a brat-ass attitude and even rearing up on her. I could hear her say, “Oh, stop it!”

  “Excuse me?” said Lexy. “Maybe you could tack up Spectacular?” She didn’t even wait for me to answer, she just turned her back and talked on the phone. I did it, but I had to work to keep my hands soft and let Spectacular know I wasn’t mad at him. Which I wasn’t. He seemed like a nice horse who didn’t understand why people sometimes all of a sudden wanted to run a electric thing on his ears so bad they had to clothespin his face. When Lexy got off the phone she thanked me, but her voice was more petting itself down the middle than saying anything nice to me. Or even anything to me. Which made me feel pissed off, like sick pissed off. Even when she said she had to be on the phone because of a personal crisis, which she said mostly to Lorrie, who lunged her horse for her.

  Anyway, she got on Alpha and rode him to where we were going, and Lorrie led Spectacular and walked with me. She told me Jeanne had left the bicycle there the day before so she could ride on it today, that Jeanne had to ride fast to find out when Lexy’s event was, because sometimes they changed them. She told me she wasn’t competing; she was just there to help and to ride in the practice arena. Her parents couldn’t afford to pay the entry fee for her to compete, it cost them two hundred dollars just for her to practice. I asked her why this was called EQUAL. And she said it stood for something, she could never remember what it was, though. We went over a little stone bridge to a place like the fair, with buildings made of flat walls that sold food and also horse things; there was a sign that said “European Fashion Horze” next to a sign for pizza. Horses walked and people rode them, and there were more women with little dogs. We turned and instead of stuff for sale, there were rings with people riding horses, and the jumps in the rings were all bright colors and covered with flowers. I saw a lady holding a little dog up to a horse’s nose like it was a bunch of flowers.

  We came to Hunter Ring 3, but I didn’t see Jeanne or Lexy. Lorrie said Lexy was warming up, and she was going to warm up Spectacular. She said I could come watch, and I went over with her, but I only stood by the fence for a few minutes watching this gray horse with beautiful spots curving his neck against the bit while his rider made him canter around the same jump again and again. Then I walked down the path and sat on some empty bleachers in front of a empty ring. Because I did not want to be here. There were horses all around me and I did not feel them at all, it was like they were part of machinery that I didn’t know how to work, and they were controlled by this machinery. All of them were beautiful, more beautiful than any horse at Pat’s or at Estella’s, like models compared to people you see on the subway. But I couldn’t feel them. Horses usually make me feel calm, and these were making me feel something else.

  Voices started coming into the air, people were talking into speakers. A girl rode into the ring in front of me and a voice said, “Miss Mumble Mlech from New Jersey!” and she rode like hell even though nobody was watching her but me and I didn’t care about her. And I was going to have to be here all day.

  Ginger

  She called me sooner than I expected and said she was getting a ride back to Spindletop early, could I come get her. When I got there she was sitting blankly on a bench outside the office. I asked her why she left early and she said they didn’t have anything for her to do and Jeanne had to come back to drop off a horse and pick up two more, so Velvet rode with her. I asked if she had fun and she said, “It was okay” and then, “Ahm tired” and then, “Can we listen to the radio?”

  When we got home she took a nap and then wanted to watch TV. Paul asked her questions about the event and she talked about women with dogs and some woman holding a dog up to a horse’s nose. And a gray horse whose rider took him in circles around a jump. That was it. She didn’t go to the barn, not that day or the next.

  That night I sat on her bed like I used to do when we still read to her. I asked if anything was wrong. She said no, but that she’d decided something. She didn’t want to ride in a competition.

  “Why?”

  “Ahh dunno. I just don’t think I do. I don’t want to make my horse jump over things with a lot of people watching, I don’t care about that. I just want to ride her by myself and take care of her.”

  “But you can still ride her by yourself. The competition is like an accomplishment; it’s out in the world. It’s like…you can read and write at home, but at school you take tests and then—”

  “It’s not like school.”

  “But it is. It’s important to show what you can do, to be tested. It’s important in life. It…” Builds character.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I think you would feel really good about it. Because I think you could win and then—”

  “I don’t think I would win.”

  “Why not? Of course you could win. I think you would win!”

  “No, Ginger, I wouldn’t!” She sat up as if yanked, facing me in a twist. “All those girls today were better than me and their horses were better!”

  “But Pat says you’re really good!”

  She didn’t answer immediately. She lay down. Then she said, “Maybe she’s just saying that.”

  “Why would she say that if she didn’t think it?”

  “To make me feel good about myself. To ‘make a difference.’ ”

  And she turned her back to me.

  After she left the next day, I went to see Pat. It was late in the day and when I first walked into the barn it seemed like nobody was there. The horses were quiet; maybe they’d just finished eating. I stopped to look at a white one—I think it was the one Velvet had ridden first. It didn’t look at me; it stood facing the back of its stall smelling of shit and brute personality. When it finally looked at me, its body said, Oh. You. “Hi,” I said. “I know I’m not her. But I—”

  “Excuse me?” said Pat. She’d just come around the corner with an empty wheelbarrow. There was nothing sarcastic in her tone; she seemed pleased when I said that I’d been talking to the horse, and I don’t think she realized I was being whimsical. “By all means, go ahead,” she said. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”

  “It was a short conversation,” I said. “I really came to talk to you.”

  “Ab
out?”

  “Velvet.”

  “Yeah?” The woman walked the wheelbarrow down the aisle to an open stall and went in with it. I followed.

  “I was hoping you could talk to her. She…I think she’s feeling insecure. She’s not sure she wants to ride in the competition you talked about.”

  “Huh.” She began methodically and gracefully shoveling shit. “You have any idea why? Did something happen?”

  “Yes, it did. I think it did. Do you know Spindletop?”

  She kept working, silently. Her silence answered yes before she did.

  Velvet

  I texted him over and over and told him I needed to see him. He kept saying he would get back to me, but he didn’t. Until finally I told him I was at Lydia’s and he came to me. But then he wouldn’t kiss. He hugged me back but said he couldn’t kiss me. I dropped my arms and waited for him to explain. He just stood there, so I said, Why? He sat on the couch and said, I told you it could only be once. I said, Then why you here? And he looked away. The heat was still on high even though it wasn’t cold out, so the room was hot. He took off his hoodie and he sniffed all wet in his nose. I touched him on his leg and said his name. He said, “Brianna’s pregnant.” I pulled my hand away.

  He got up and walked around. Brianna lived with her aunt, who was taking care of five other kids and a retarded girl from the neighborhood and also this other girl who tricked the retard into getting raped by a man with AIDS. He said it was like some rape crisis center over there, Brianna could not be bringing a baby into that reality show, he had to take care of her.

  “You gonna support a family?”

  He said, “I have to try.” And he put his head down, but not ashamed.

  “You can still see me.” I said it real quiet. “Like now.”

  He looked at me and looked down. “If you was like some hood-rat puta, maybe I would. Even with you bein’ young. But you not that. You not that, and you would hate me if I did you like that. You’d hate yourself. I don’t want—”

  “What you think I am? Where you think I live? I live down the block!”

  He came and sat close enough that I could feel how warm he was. “I know where you from. But it feels like you from someplace else.”

  “What place?” I tried to make my voice mad so I wouldn’t cry.

  He looked me in my eyes. “I don’t know. Someplace I can’t picture. Someplace I can’t be. Even if it’s beautiful.”

  I looked down and bit the inside of my mouth to stop crying. I was thinking about the barn and Spindletop and Ginger and that gray dappled horse riding in a circle around the jump. I’d wanted to talk about it with Dominic, talk like before. Now I wished I’d never seen any of it. Because it was “someplace else.” He sat next to me like he felt what I was thinking, not saying anything. Then he took something out of his pocket and said, “Look.”

  It was the picture he told me about, where he was Romeo in the school play. He was wearing pants that looked like velvet, and slippers and a silky shirt. He was smiling and holding his arms out like a girl was about to run to him. He looked even younger than me. The picture was so wrinkled and old, there was a crease right across his face. Still, he looked beautiful. Like he came from “someplace else.”

  “So you know I don’t lie,” he said.

  I took the picture and put it on my knee to smooth the wrinkles from it. “How old were you?” I asked.

  “Twelve,” he said.

  “Can I keep it?”

  “Naw,” he said. “It’s the only one I got. I never even showed it to nobody else except my mom and my sister.”

  I wanted to ask, What about Brianna? But I didn’t.

  He took it from my hands and put it back in his pocket. He said, “You tell anybody you saw it, Ima say you a liar, right?”

  I said I wouldn’t tell nobody.

  He said he had to go.

  I said, “But we can still talk, right? Like friends?”

  “We friends,” he said. “I won’t forget that time.” He looked at me when he said that. “But for right now, don’t call me or text me, okay?”

  Ginger

  My cell rang and somebody wanted to know if I was Velveteen Vargas’s godmother. I said, Yes, why?

  Because there’d been a girl-fight in the Catholic school yard. Three girls on one, but the one fought so fiercely the others got the worst of it. When the social worker ran out to break it up, she saw the lone girl had one of the three by her hair; this lone girl looked so wild that for a minute the social worker thought she might be attacked—but the girl just spewed obscenities and then they all ran. The social worker’s car had gotten keyed, Velvet’s school was called, Velvet was ratted out and dragged by her ear over to the Catholic school. Where she was immediately recognized as the ferocious fighter.

  “When we tried to call her mother about paying to repair the car, nobody answered. She says her mom can’t pay anyway. She says you might.”

  They said it would cost four hundred dollars, and I said I’d pay for half, I don’t know why. Maybe because the car-keyed social worker had a kind, harried voice. Even when she said she’d never heard such ugly language come out of a young girl.

  “When they brought her over, I confronted her. I said to her, You know I am a mother of two young children. How would you feel if somebody talked to your mother that way?”

  “She’s actually very nice,” I said. “But in fact she talks to her m—”

  “I know! I know she is! When I confronted her, when I said ‘How would you feel if someone talked to your mother that way,’ she just looked down, ashamed.”

  I said, “You know, I’m not a mother, but I wouldn’t like to be talked at like that, either.”

  “No, no, of course not. No woman would. I just thought, if she could think of it in those terms, she’d—”

  I asked where I should send the check. She expressed gratitude.

  I hung up and thought, Maybe they really are different from us. More violent, more dishonest—nicer in some ways, yes, warm, physical, passionate. But weak-minded. Screaming and yelling all the time, no self-control. Do her homework with her on the phone, she doesn’t turn it in and lies about it. Give her all the special treatment in the world and she throws it away because she can’t follow through. Just different.

  So Paul was right. Everybody was right. I’m racist. At least now I know.

  Velvet

  She said, You think I’m rich? You think two hundred dollars is pocket change for me? Why do you do this shit? You’re almost fourteen! I said, I’m sorry, but she didn’t even say, It’s okay, it’s all right. She said she’s afraid. She’s afraid because we’re drifting apart. I wanted to say, No, we’re not, but I couldn’t because we were. She said I couldn’t come for the weekend, making it happen more. I told her it didn’t matter. I wasn’t riding in any competition anyway, so I didn’t have to come up. And she’s, Mwah, mwah, mwah. Is that why you keyed that lady’s car and got them to call me? Because you don’t want to come up, you don’t even care about your horse anymore? Why you acting like this? Mwah, mwah, mwah!

  I decided then that I was going out to find Dominic and make him talk to me. And if I couldn’t find him, then I’d find something, somebody, I didn’t care. At night I lay down in my clothes with my eye makeup on thick. But my mom suddenly got up and went past my room, bumping on the wall like she’s blind and not even cursing. She went into the bathroom and I heard a thump and then she puked horrible, like her gut was coming out. It scared me, but I thought, Good, she definitely won’t hear me leave, and I went out into the hall. I got to the door and stopped, waiting for some noise to cover me. The sink water ran; I flipped the lock. There was another thump, like maybe she fell; I stopped and listened. She groaned and it yanked me inside, she sounded so weak, I never heard her weak. She puked more, but weaker, like it was hard even to puke. I flipped back the lock and went to her.

  Silvia

  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.