The Mare Page 5

  Before I could answer, the weird boy said, “So why does a Mexican kid walk around like she owns the place?”

  “It’s in the Caribbean next to Haiti.”

  “So why does a Mexican—”

  “Would you shut up?” said Beth.

  He said, “It’s a joke, and she isn’t even Mexican!” But he shut up like he knew he was retarded, which made me feel sorry for him instead of mad.

  —

  The next time I saw Beverly, she was leading Blue Boy. The way Blue Boy followed her was different from how he followed Pat. With Pat, he walked normal; with Beverly he walked sharp—like a kid who knows he better not do nothin’ wrong. I thought, That’s how I want a horse to walk with me.

  While I was watching, she stopped to talk to Gare Ann, who was cleaning the stall of a horse called Spirit. She was cleaning with Spirit standing in the stall with her. When I got closer I heard Beverly say, “You want to watch that one. He kicked Beth on the cross-ties last week.”

  That girl usually ran her mouth, but not to Beverly; she kept her head down, said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He kicked me once. Then we had a little conversation about it and he never did it again.”

  “What did you say to him?” I asked.

  Everything stopped. Beverly turned like in slow motion and stared the crap out of me. Her strong red face had thin lips and small deep eyes. It was a face that could make you do things just by looking. “I hurt him,” she said. “I hurt him more than he hurt me.”

  Gare was looking at me too, probably because that was the first time she heard me say anything. She wasn’t gonna crack on me though. Not with this lady there. Even though she was turning around and taking Blue Boy away.

  Ginger

  Sometimes the three of us would do things together; sometimes Velvet would go off alone with Paul and work in the garden with him, or just do an errand, like accompany him to the hardware store. But mostly it was her and me together. We would go to the mall, make dinner together, see movies, take long walks at night and talk about “private things.” I tried to get her to draw, but she was too scared of doing something wrong; reluctantly, she made cliché cats (ovals with tails and ears) and pigs, a few dull, dutiful flowers. They were the drawings of a five-year-old trying not to be messy. But I told her they were beautiful and although she probably knew that wasn’t really what I thought, she smiled. At night Paul and I would both sit on her bed and read to her and her eyes would go from alert to enchanted to blurred, sweet and private as she slowly stepped down into sleep.

  Her presence made everything special: a cheese sandwich cut into four pieces, carrots sliced the way my mother used to serve them, her special towel with pink flowers on it, the soap I got for her with a plastic horse in it, her favorite radio station when we drove to the store. The glow on her face when I served her breakfast and said, “There you go, Princess.” The order of the house, which before I took for granted, now looked to me like something alive and full of goodness when I got up every morning and found the dishes she and I had washed in the drainer, the fruit in the bowl, the cereal and bacon ready to be cooked and eaten by somebody besides me and Paul.

  It was like we were both living a dream we had known from television and advertisements and children’s books, a dream that neither of us had believed in yet had both longed for without knowing it. A dream in which love and happiness were the norm.

  I know this was a dream for her, because of the way she responded to idealized movies and songs. I know because I found out she’d lied to create an ideal picture for me—or at least a nice one. I found out because she told me one night when we were walking in the neighborhood behind the campus, listening to the sounds of crickets and frogs, of kids playing in the street and families in their homes. It was just dark, and I couldn’t see her face, but I heard the embarrassment in her voice; I heard the trust. She reminded me of the time we’d first met, and she told me what her grades were.

  “I don’t really get 3’s and 4’s,” she said. “I just told you that.”

  “What do you get?”

  “Ones and 2’s. Ones mostly.”

  I remembered how she’d said “1, you got nothing.” We walked quietly for a moment and then, in a lower voice, she said, “I even got held behind in third grade. I should be going into middle school in the fall and I’m not.”

  “Do you want to do better?” I asked. “Do you want to go to middle school next fall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like me to help you? Work with you on the phone with your homework?”

  She said yes again. I could hear that she was smiling in her voice.

  I didn’t tell her about the conversation I’d had with her mother. I saw no reason to.

  Velvet

  I started really liking Ginger. At first I was sorry that she wasn’t more like the big-legged lady with the orange flower, then I started thinking that really, she was better. Her hair looked like Barbie-doll hair. She wore pink polish on her toes; she had rubber sandals with jewels on them, and when I told her I liked them, she went and bought me a pair. When she washed the dishes, she would take off her gold wedding ring and her diamond and put them on the windowsill. She had a gold lipstick case with blue stripes on it and she sometimes put that on the windowsill too, next to this little plant in a purple pot and these little skinny plastic giraffes in beautiful colors that she said were to stir drinks with. She didn’t yell, ever. She was always nice, even when she got mad. But she didn’t act “all that.” The way she looked from behind, like when she was cooking food or something, made it seem like she didn’t even know where she was for sure. She blinked a lot. She always forgot things, like even her bank card in the ATM. It made her seem even more nice, I don’t know why.

  One day she showed me her art. It was all up in the top of the house, in this small room with low ceilings, and windows, even windows in the ceiling. Her art was made out of colored shapes. She didn’t like to paint real things, just these shapes. Sometimes they weren’t even shapes, they just looked like things you’d do in preschool. I didn’t like them, but I acted like I did. And there was one I did like a little because the shapes were cool—there was this round red thing like the sun when it came up over the dark line, only this was like the sun down in a hole. She said it was a picture of her sister and I’m like, What?

  She said, “That’s what my sister’s personality was like.”

  I thought, She must’ve been crazy. But I didn’t say it.

  “My sister was very passionate. Do you know that word?”

  “No.”

  “It means strong feelings, deep feelings. Like this.”

  She touched the red. I nodded. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “You’re passionate too, I think. You seem deep.”

  —

  That night I took her ring. It was from this glass box where she kept rings she wore before she got married. It wasn’t stealing because she showed them to me once and asked if I wanted one. I said no. But I went and took one, a tiny one with an orange flower that she wore on her little finger when she was a teenager; it reminded me of the orange plastic flower of the big legs lady. I slept with it on my pinkie finger that night.

  —

  The second week I was there I got to ride a bigger horse, a boy. Pat said that normally, she would wait till I’d had more lessons, but that I was doing so good I could ride him sooner. His name was Joker and he was light brown with white socks. He looked a lot stronger than Reesa, and he lifted his feet higher when he walked. I was scared to ride him and that made me want to ride him even more.

  I came early and went to talk to Fugly Girl. Pat pretended not to see me leaning right up against the door of her stall. The horse came to me and stretched her head out like she wanted some apple, but when she saw I didn’t have anything, she stayed still and licked her stall, like thoughtfully. I asked her if I could touch her nose for courage. She looked down like, Oh, all right—and flared it op
en; quickly I kissed it. Then I knew I could handle Joker.

  Except I couldn’t. He wouldn’t do anything I said. He would stop and he would go, but not when I asked. He moved too fast for me and he wouldn’t go in the direction I wanted. Pat was getting on my nerves, saying dumb things about sticking my chest out like Dolly-somebody. Either that or telling me to do things I couldn’t do.

  “Focus your mind,” she said. “Pick a direction, pick a spot right there on that fence, then look at it. He’ll feel your intention, but you have to mean it.”

  I tried and it seemed like it almost worked.

  “Do it again,” said Pat. Her voice was starting to sound mean. Joker walked toward the barn while I tried to turn him. Pat said, “You have a little brother, right? When he was three years old and he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to do, what did you do?”

  “Hit him,” I said.

  “You don’t want to try that with Joker. Was there anything else you did besides hit?”

  “Pick him up and move him.”

  “Then do it. That horse is just like a three-year-old. Pick him up and move him!”

  And I did it. I picked him up with my legs and I moved him with my butt. I did it before I even picked a spot. I could feel it happening, and then I saw Ginger. She was walking toward us, smiling. I saw she had her camera again. I looked at her and Joker went to her. It wasn’t what I told him, but when he did it, I tapped him and made him go faster. And when I did, all of a sudden I didn’t see Ginger, I saw my mother. Not really—it was Ginger standing there. But it felt like my mother, my mother smiling at me, more than she ever really did. Then it was just Ginger again, and it felt like I was running to her, not the horse but me, on my own legs. And she was taking my picture and telling me I looked like a movie star.

  —

  I decided I would put the tiny flower ring on the blond key-chain doll with the checked coat. It would be like having Ginger in my box.

  Ginger

  That day was the first time it looked like she was really riding a horse. It wasn’t because it was trotting—I’d seen her on the white horse when it was trotting. But then, she was just on the white horse and it was trotting. She was riding that big brown horse; even I could see the difference.

  The lesson was over then, and I went with them into the barn. I stood to the side and watched Velvet secure the horse in the middle of the barn and begin to groom it. The way she moved was very different from the way she moved around the house; there was no deference or absentmindedness in her, just purpose. She looked bigger, stronger, and completely comfortable with the huge animal. “She’s a natural,” said Pat. “It takes most kids twice as many lessons to get where she got today. Too bad she’s leaving next week.”

  Velvet

  That night they both sat on the bed and read to me like always. The witch had hypnotized this boy by giving him too much candy, and it made him bad so that he went over to the witch’s side against his family. They took turns reading and their voices made me think about my mom, singing at night: The little chicks say “pio pio pio” when they are hungry, when they are too cold to sleep. The mother looks for corn and wheat, she gives them food to eat. She sang that to my brother at night before we slept. She sang to him, with her back to me. Once I asked her to sing to me too, and she said, “You’re too old for that!” But she didn’t sing to me when I was young either. Still, I listened to the singing, and she knew I listened. Safe under mama’s wings, huddling up, sleep the little chicks until the next day.

  I tried to stop thinking and pay attention to the story. But I couldn’t. I missed my mom. I missed lying next to her and hearing her. I tried to think of how I would tell her about all the things that had happened—Ginger, riding Joker, Pat, the purple-haired girl, Beverly, and Fugly Girl. But I just pictured her getting mad and finding some reason to call me stupid. I tried to look at Ginger and see my mom, like what happened when I was on Joker. But how could I see my mom reading? She didn’t know how to read, even in Spanish. Right then, Ginger looked up and smiled at me. And I wondered what it would be like to live with her instead of my mom. Some of the time.

  I tried to pay attention to the story again. The witch had locked the boy up and his family was trying to save him. I didn’t care. I was sad. I closed my eyes so Ginger and Paul wouldn’t see.

  Ginger

  After we put her to bed—she looked at me so longingly, her golden eyes slowly and heavily closing—I talked with Paul about keeping her longer. “We can’t,” he said. “It’s time for her to go back.”

  We were sitting at the kitchen table, the little red Formica table I’d moved from my East Village studio, drinking soda from juice jars. I told him about the way she was on the brown horse. “She needs more of this,” I said.

  “Do you mean you need more?”

  “I want more, I don’t need it. But so what if I did?” My voice went from soft to sharp back to soft. “What’s wrong with satisfying a mutual need?”

  “Nothing, if you’re talking about people in an equal position. But you aren’t. She’s a disadvantaged child. She has needs you can’t satisfy. It’s unfair to act like you can. And—”

  “I can get her horse-riding lessons.”

  “—you have needs she can’t satisfy. And I thought this was supposed to be maybe a first step toward adoption.”

  We both took drinks; he put his glass down too hard and looked away. He was mad, and so was I, but why?

  “Do you even know she wants to stay longer?”

  “Yes. If it weren’t for the horses I wouldn’t say that. But you didn’t see her on that horse.”

  He looked doubtful.

  “What if the organization agrees to it?” I asked. “Would that make you feel better?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Though I doubt they will. At least not on their insurance.”

  Velvet

  I dreamed that I woke up and it was day, but only for me; that it was light for me and dark for Paul and Ginger and they were sleeping. I got up and walked through their house, looking at everything: the fruit in the bowls, the colored curtains, the paintings and tiny giraffe toys on the windowsill. I went out into their yard and looked at Paul’s garden; in the plants and flowers I saw a trapdoor, and I knew that it was the door to hell. I was scared, but then I realized that my grandfather was there, in the backyard. Don’t be afraid, he said. The devil isn’t paying attention—now is your chance. I’ll guard the door.

  “Grandfather,” I said. “Why are you telling me to go to hell?”

  Because someone you love is there and she is in danger of being lost.

  “Who is it?”

  I can’t tell you.

  “Is she evil?”

  No. But she is close to evil. You can help her because you call to the good in her. You have to hurry. She is getting more lost every second.

  And so I did. I opened the door and I went down the stairs. It was a long stair, and there were a lot of floors with weird things happening on them. But that is all I remember.

  Ginger

  When she came downstairs, sleep-dazed and a little sullen, I asked her if she wanted to stay for another two weeks, and she woke fully and said yes in the soft voice that meant she was happy and scared to trust it. So I told her, quick and soft, before Paul came, that when we called her mother, she and I, we shouldn’t tell her mom everything about the horses, that it might be best to wait until she could really ride and then…I started to say “surprise her” but trailed off. It didn’t matter. The child simply said okay.

  I called the agency right at nine o’clock. I had to talk to several different people, each sounding more suspicious and displeased than the last, like parts of a machine that didn’t like its operation reset for any reason. Finally somebody told me that if Velvet’s mother agreed, we could keep her as long as we wanted, but that it would not be under agency auspices and that they would not insure us. If we didn’t want to send her back to her mother on the bus, we
would have to bring her back to the office and deliver her to her mother there. After that, we could do whatever we wanted as long as we understood they weren’t involved.

  Then we called her mother, who was not a machine. First Paul talked, using his Spanish, cajoling her to politely talk back. Then Velvet came on, wheedling like a teenager in a movie about adorable teenagers. Yelling came from the handset; her mother obviously thought that movie was a piece of crap. Velvet yelled, cajoled, wheedled. A slow smile spread over her face; she looked at me and nodded. The whole thing took about ten minutes. “I told her I was working at the barn,” she said. “That they were teaching me how to work.”

  It wasn’t a lie. Velvet planned to work at the barn. Pat had already agreed to give her a lesson every day in exchange for several hours of work.

  Velvet

  After they decided I could stay longer, I woke up in the middle of the night, I guess because I was excited. At first I thought it was late, but I saw light coming from under the door and I heard Paul and Ginger talking downstairs. Something about their voices made me feel like something was going on, and I wanted to know what it was. So I got up and went out of the room, walking quietly. I went half down the stairs and sat down right next to the wall. They were in the kitchen and I couldn’t hear them all the way; it was words, then pissed-off hiss-mumbling, then words. I creeped down the wall some more and I heard Paul say: “There’s a limit to what you can be to each other, and you are mumble mumble pushing that limit. It’s taking it out of the boundaries set by the organization mumble mumble personal!”

  “It’s supposed to be personal!” Ginger mumble-hissed. “…families…the same kids up every year…even birthdays—mumble mumble!”

  Paul didn’t answer. They just moved around. There were dish sounds and water running, which didn’t sound mad, and I thought that if they were really mad, I would hear it in the dishes: they would bang them around like when my mom is mad, when she’s mad, even the water runs mad. So I thought it was okay. But it didn’t feel okay. It felt like at the bus station, only harder to understand. Like I was in the Alice in Wonderful story where she is really, really tiny and then really, really big, like I was something tiny in their house and huge at the same time. I went back upstairs and lay down and tried to think like I wasn’t really sure what they said. But I was.