“You don’t think?” I asked.
“She said she might, but I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” asked Paul, glancing in the rearview.
“She has to work,” said Velvet.
I said, “On Sunday?”
“That’s what she told me to tell you.” There was no smile/lie in her voice; she spoke as if a little stunned. “She said she’s sorry. She said she’ll call me if she can come.”
We got home and she went upstairs to settle in.
Paul said, “You know her mother could sue us if we do this without her say-so. Are you sure she gave permission?”
“She signed the form. She knew what it was for.”
He didn’t say anything.
We had sandwiches for lunch and then Velvet went to practice. I went upstairs and went into her room the way I usually do when she first comes. There was her open bag, her toiletries. There, on the dresser, was a torn, taped-up, wrinkled picture of a beautiful young boy in a costume, holding his arms out and smiling like a lover; there was a real almost completely dried-out sea horse and something I couldn’t identify until I picked it up and felt it: a piece of blue seashell. I held it and thought: Her mom has to come. She has to.
I went to call the translator.
Velvet
Pat said we’d walk the course the day of the show, but she wanted me to see it the day before so I’d “have a basic visual.” So I was expecting something scary or at least a little big. But it was just a place like Spindletop called Grace Meadow. I wanted to say, This is it? It’s so small! But I didn’t want Pat to know I’d been someplace else. Especially when I saw how she was with the Grace Meadow people. Or even how she was walking from the car to the Grace Meadow office: nervous, in her eyes and hands. I never saw her nervous before. Outside the building, a Mexican guy pushed a wheelbarrow of shavings—he saw Pat and they said hi, they knew each other’s names, and I could tell he didn’t know what she was even doing there, especially with me. Then she went into the office and introduced me to this lady Grace, who had a face like a muscle and spooky eyes, like if I was a dog and she looked at me, I’d whine or I’d growl. She talked polite to Pat, and to me she said, “What a romantic name”—but she looked like she did know what we were doing there and that it was something little and funny.
When we walked out to the main arena, I couldn’t help it, I said, “I thought it would be bigger,” and Pat said, “Compared to what? This is a schooling show.” I didn’t say anything. Mexican guys were turning out beautiful horses with thick shiny coats; the horses were moving like they knew they were perfect and the men were their servants. I looked at them and felt like I did at EQUAL, that they were part of some giant thing that I didn’t know or want to know. I was thinking, It’s so small. Why bother?
Until we walked back to Pat’s truck and I saw Lexy getting out of her car with I guess her mom. She looked right at me and at Pat too, running her eyes up and down on us. “Hi,” she said, meaning, You’re here?
“Where you know that girl from?” asked Pat.
“Just around,” I answered.
Pat didn’t say anything. Neither did I. But I was thinking: Yeah. I’m here.
Ginger
It took over an hour for the translator to get back to me and then another hour before she had time to make the call—and then Silvia wasn’t home. We tried off and on for almost the whole afternoon; if she really was working all weekend, how obnoxious of me to make this call. But still, we made it once more—and she picked up. “Tell her thank you,” I said to the translator, “for letting her daughter come.” Silvia responded as if she were being nice to an idiot, and then asked, “Is she behaving?” “Yes,” I said. “She’s sad you can’t be here, but I think she’s going to make you proud. I am confident she’ll win.” The translator inflated her voice with “awww” crap; Silvia’s silence went dark and hard. I said, “She’s practiced so much and gotten so good and it would mean the world to her if you could be here.” The translator coughed and tried and—Silvia exploded. She did that thing where she talked so fast it was more sound than words, sound and jagged laughter. “What is she saying?” I asked. “What is she saying?” “I don’t know,” said the translator. “I can’t get her to slow down.” And then Silvia was gone. The translator said she couldn’t tell if she’d said anything about a contest or permission, all she could really make out was something about “a can of whup-ass.”
Velvet
I felt my phone ring in my pocket right before I jumped. I knew it was my mom and that snagged my brain and my brain snagged the mare; she started to refuse, but I basically brained her forward so she jumped at the last minute, landing too hard in front and throwing me forward then back into the saddle. I didn’t care, I had to look, and right after the next jump I did, taking the reins in my one hand and digging for my phone with the other.
Pat went, “You’re looking at your phone? You? I don’t believe it!”
I rode around the next jump, slowing to a trot, then a walk. I said, “It’s my mom.”
“I don’t care if it’s President Obama. You don’t text while driving or while on horseback, you know that!”
“I wasn’t texting, I was just—”
She didn’t listen. She came to us and said Whoa so strong the mare stopped and let Pat take hold of her. “Give me that phone,” she said.
I didn’t. I don’t know why. I felt mad and Fiery Girl could feel me—she tossed her head and pawed the ground. I don’t know if Pat said, Be quiet, now or if the words just came off her body. I could feel the mare thinking up at me, What do I do?
“Give me that thing or get down and go home.”
I thought, I could make Fiery Girl rear up on Pat if I wanted to. I could—
Very low, Pat said, “You need to stop this mess, now.”
I sat the mare firm and told her, Whoa. I gave Pat the phone and told her I was sorry.
“You should be. You could’ve hurt yourself and your horse. Now show me that you’re sorry. Do it right. Collect yourself, and by that I mean take whatever crap that’s going on in you and get it under you and get it by the reins. And take these jumps without doing anything stupid. Now.”
I did what she said. Not just with the horse, but with myself. It took a few trips around the arena, to get it under me. But when I did, it was like I was riding a bullet instead of a horse. Or me and her both were riding it. On the bullet, I counted out the steps like Jeanne told me, rushed seven, slow seven. I released big on the high jumps, small on the lower ones. I stopped her exactly. I did it all in front of Pat, who didn’t teach me any of it.
“You ride like a damn dressage queen!” said Pat, and I would’ve thought she was mad. Except then she said, “You ride like that, you’ll take points from those girls like candy.”
I said, “Can I have my phone now?”
“Can I please have my phone now?”
I smiled and said, “Please, Miss Pat.”
“After you put your horse away.”
So I walked Fiery Girl and washed her and dried her and cleaned between her legs with mint. I brushed her and combed out her tail and then took her tail in my hands and leaned back to stretch her spine. These other girls Tracy and Chelsea were getting back from trail-riding and they watched like they couldn’t believe she let me do that. She not only let me, she braced her legs so she could get it all the way, and I felt her all the way, to her eyelashes; I could feel the soft expression in her eyes and lips without seeing them. Then I wished the day was a normal day. I wished there was no competition tomorrow. I wished my mom wasn’t mad at me.
“Good job,” said Pat. She gave me my phone.
I said, “Thank you, Miss Pat,” and put the phone in my pocket.
“Everything okay at home?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
And she kissed me. She kissed me on the forehead and said it again: “Good job.”
I walked out and sat on the feedbags on the side
of the barn. My mom had called me five times in two hours. The last two times she left messages. My mom did not leave messages. She called and expected you to see it and call back.
I put the phone facedown on the feedbag and watched Chelsea and Tracy get picked up by their moms. They called to each other and waved good-bye as they got in their cars. I called my voice mail.
The first message: This is what I have to say to you. If you ride in that race, don’t bother to come home, because there won’t be a home for you anymore.
The second message: And don’t think your home is there. You are all alone with those people. Trust me.
I put the phone back facedown. I watched Pat come out of the barn with a wheelbarrow full of dirty bedding, dump it out, go back. I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t feel anything. I just thought. I thought about this time when Ginger was driving me back from riding at Pat’s: We were talking about tattoos and I said I wanted to tattoo my mom’s name on my one hand and Dante’s on the other. Ginger pulled over on the side of the road and said, “Don’t do that.” I asked why. And she said, “Because your mom’s name is already written inside you. You don’t need to make it literal.” “But why?” I said. And she answered, “Because when somebody’s name is written on you, that person owns you. Like you’re a slave.” And I felt sorry for Ginger when she said it, that she would think like that. Now I felt sorry for me.
Pat came out with the wheelbarrow and went back in. The lights went off in the barn. Pat came out, got in her car, and drove away. I got up and went back to the house. And there was Ginger going, “Do you really have permission to compete? Because I talked to your mother and it sure didn’t sound like it.”
Ginger
“What did my mom say?” she asked.
“I don’t know. She was talking so fast, the translator couldn’t get it.”
“You got the paper, right? You saw she signed it.”
“Then why is she sounding so pissed off?”
“Because she’s always pissed off, Ginger. After all this time, don’t you get what she’s like?”
“I think we need to call her again after dinner.”
“You call her, I’m not going to. She can’t even bother to come see me and all morning she yells and calls me names?”
“Listen,” I said. “Do you know what kind of trouble I could get into if I’m acting against her wishes?”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Legal trouble. She could sue me and the barn.”
For just a split second her eyes changed—something changed—then snapped back. She said, “Are you kidding me? She’s not going to do that, she doesn’t care about me! She told me! She told me this morning she didn’t care if I was crippled!”
And she went up the stairs so fast and jerky that she slipped and fell on one knee. “Oh crap!” I said and went to her. She let me hold her. She didn’t cry. But I could feel the pain beating against her body like it was too big to get out without breaking her. It made me hold her tighter, and she hardened against my grip.
“Ginger,” she said, and her calm was terrible. “I can’t talk about my mom no more.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.”
I expected her to keep going upstairs to her room. Instead she said, “Ginger, do you have a Bible?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“Can I just see it?”
We went downstairs and I gave it to her and watched as she flipped through it, clearly looking for something. I asked what it was and she said, “Nothin’.” Then she found it and read it intently, moving her lips as she did.
Velvet
Once I heard my mom talk on the phone to this woman Rasheeda, the only black person my mom ever liked. It was when we just moved to Crown Heights, and my mom kicked Manuel out for not paying and maybe for messing with me and he’d come back pounding on the door. I heard my mom say, “It’s like there’s a hurricane and I’m sitting in my chair holding on with white knuckles.”
Now I knew how she felt. I couldn’t hear the hurricane and I couldn’t see it. But it was there and I didn’t even have a chair to hold on to. I had to ride a horse through it. I took out my phone and played my mom’s message again. There won’t be a home for you anymore. I knew she didn’t mean it, any more than she meant most of what she said. But still, her voice pulled on me and made me want to tell Ginger the truth and not compete, just go back to my mother’s hurricane.
That’s when I realized: When she said that to Rasheeda, it was only her in the hurricane. Like me and Dante were just part of the storm blowing around her with a bunch of other stuff. I turned off my phone and put it in a drawer. I took the piece of blue shell from Providence that I broke off to carry in my shirt pocket while I rode along with the sea horse and with Dominic. I took it all the way out into the field where me and Fiery Girl practiced jumping and I dropped it there. I looked up into the sky; it was cold with purple on the bottom of it. I thought the words I saw on Dominic’s chest and then I said them: “You armed me with strength for battle, you humbled my adversaries, you made my enemies run. And I destroyed them.”
Ginger
I was 95 percent sure she wasn’t telling me the truth—she would’ve convinced me but for that break in her expression, her concentration, then the forceful switch back before she spoke. Still, I didn’t make the call. I made dinner with Paul, acted normal, got the chicken in the oven, then went up the stairs to my workroom, address book in hand. I stared at my failed painting of Melinda, the divided face; ugly woman, haunted girl. That break in Velvet’s expression, in her concentration, the pain—I had to call, if only to try and make her mother come. Instead I sat and stared at the picture of my dead sister and felt my flesh tingle with the words no and don’t. Over and over: No. Don’t. The hair on my arm stood up. I heard Velvet come in the door and go into the kitchen. I went back downstairs thinking, I’ll do it later.
Silvia
The refrigerator is broken: the seal is worn away and water gathers, I have to clean it constantly to keep black mold from growing, and even so, I can’t keep the mold out of the cracks. When I got off the phone I cleaned it again, pulling everything out again, wiping and wiping. I washed the windows, mopped the floor. The whole time I’m thinking, It’s no good. We don’t belong here. Not in this neighborhood, not in this country, not on this filthy planet where anything good is chopped into little bits trying to join and be whole, but they can’t. My prayers are worthless, I have no grace, and my daughter does not respect me because some fool woman has made her into a pet. My son cries, “You think she’s going to be crippled but you let her go?” I hit him, but I was thinking, Yes, I let her go, like I knew she was sneaking out some nights and didn’t stay awake to stop her. A good mother would stop her, a good mother— A good mother wouldn’t let her daughter get turned into a pet for a few hundred dollars a month.
“And she’s not even worth a few hundred dollars a month!”
I said that out loud and shoved the mop so hard I banged a table leg and my only good vase fell and smashed, and I hit myself to not hit Dante again. I felt his fear and then my shame, coming on fast. I shut my teeth against it, pushing it back. Holding it back, I got down on the floor to pick up the pieces of my one beautiful thing, reaching under the couch for it—and saw the blue shell from the beach at Providence. My poor gift for her, the hope of a woman who gets it in the ass with a man who doesn’t love her. I would’ve smashed it, but surprise stopped my hand. What was this thing doing under the couch? I thought she kept it where she keeps her little things, what was it doing here? The beach; the light between water and sky. I sat on the couch and looked at it; it was broken. A big piece was missing, like it had been snapped off. My thoughts sank so deep I no longer knew what they were. The TV was on but Dante was watching me like he could see what was happening, like it was a picture being drawn. And it was a picture being drawn. She’d just sent three hundred dollars, and I just cashed it. I had it in my drawer
. “Dante,” I told him. “Turn that off and get the phone. I need you to make a call for me.”
Velvet
I expected dinner to be tense, but it wasn’t. Ginger kept drama out of her eyes and Paul seemed happy I was there; he asked me questions about the competition. But when I went back to see my mare again I started to wonder, Why am I doing this? I am alone here. I still like Ginger, but I can’t talk to her. I love Fiery Girl, but she’s not mine. If I win I can’t tell my mom, and nobody else where I live cares. I stopped walking and put my face in my hands; I was thinking about my mom hitting herself in the face because of me. She never did that before, never. Feelings by themself ain’t what matters. Dominic was right and it made me wish I wasn’t here on this earth. Not exactly dead, just not here.
Still, I went to the barn. And that’s when it happened: I heard the horses talking to me like the first time I came. I don’t know if I made it up because of being so sad, but it didn’t matter—it made me feel better. Hello, girl! We know you! Come see me! Have you got something for me? What’s the matter? But Fiery Girl didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She just looked at me like she saw me to the bottom, and all her muscles were proud and ready. Like a Jesus heart with fire and thorns inside it.
And I knew: I am doing it for this. If somebody asked me what this was, I wouldn’t be able to tell them. But I knew, I knew.
Silvia
With me my son is soft but arrogant too, and I can feel his maleness growing in him; with any other adult or older child, his arrogance hides, and without it his spirit is shy and so soft it has no shape; his words too are so soft they have no shape, and he mumbles like a half-wit. I understand him even in English. But the people he talks to don’t and they think he’s stupid, then he thinks he’s stupid.
The Mare Page 34