The Mare Read online

  Whatever I said, I was afraid Paul might be right. Not so much about race but about need; about my feelings. A few days after we had the argument, I did something I hadn’t done in years: I took the train into the city to go to what used to be my favorite AA meeting there. People I knew in the ’80s go to it, artists and failed artists mostly, whom I can talk to better than anyone upstate. After I hung around for the meeting after the meeting and wound up talking with an old enemy who had been a loved friend for about six months a long time ago; someone I could not help but see as a half friend. I talked to her about Velvet, starting with the organization that had brought her to see us. My half friend put on her program face and said, “It sounds like you’re really wanting to nurture yourself. I think you need to be looking at your own shit.” I said, “I’ve spent the last ten years nurturing myself and looking at my own shit. It’s time to nurture somebody else now.”

  She didn’t push it. But her precise little needle had struck home. Because even though she spoke ignorantly, she did know something about me. She knew the way I had lived: blank loneliness broken by friendships that would come suddenly into being, surge through the color spectrum, then blacken, crumple, and die; scene after drunken idiotic scene, mashed-up conversations nobody could hear, the tears and ugly laughter quieted only by the rubber tit of alcohol or something else. Friendship was bad, sex was worse, and love—love! That was someone who rang my doorbell at three a.m. and I would let him in so he could tell me I was worthless, hit me, fuck me, and leave unless he needed to sleep over because his real girlfriend was—for some reason!—mad at him. It was not pleasure, it was like a brick wall that a giant hand smashed me against again and again, and it was like the most powerful drug in the world. Paul knows about this, but he doesn’t know. Because how can I describe it? It was like being locked into a nightmare more real than anything until I woke and couldn’t really remember the details or make sense of it, knowing only that it was terrible and that I would do it again.

  “Sex addiction”; “addicted to emotion”; these were the sober terms by which I learned to describe this dull little hell, and for a while such terms helped me the way crutches help a broken-legged person to walk. They helped, but they did not heal.

  Yes, my enemy-friend knew me. Or rather she had known me. She had known me in the hard, ungiving way she knew herself. She did not know Velvet’s eyes when I read to her. She did not know what it was like to walk with her in soft, earth-smelling darkness or to see her on a horse. Maybe that bitch Becca was right; maybe that was playing at something if that was all I did. But I could do more, and I was willing.

  I rode home on the train and I looked out the window at the shining dark water with its glowing rim of light left over from the day and I knew: Just because I had been in hell, I don’t have to be there always. Love is not always a sickness, and I don’t need grim, dry terms in order to walk. I have changed. I can trust myself. I love Paul. I love Velvet. I can trust it.

  Velvet

  This bullshit went on all week. I would sit at the end of the long table in the cafeteria trying to ignore Marisol while Strawberry and Alicia sat together laughing and basically ignoring me. It finally blew up when I told my mom what was happening and she gave me some dates with powdered sugar on them to offer at lunch. I brought out the dates and before I could even share them, Alicia said, “Gross!” and they laughed and somebody made a fart noise. I didn’t even get what she meant until we were sitting down in class and then I realized and I grabbed the wastebasket and emptied it on Alicia’s dirty-mouth head. Everybody laughed and she waved her arms around like a jackass and Ms. Rodriguez yelled, “Velvet, that is it! You get a week of detention and also you will sit separate from the rest of the class!”

  But I didn’t care because when I did that to Alicia, Strawberry turned and looked at me, smiling with her eyes for the first time since school started.

  A few days later, she found me during recess. Recess was in two different courtyards, one for the real little kids like Dante and another one for us. Both of them had bars to balance on and there was a jungle gym for the little kids, but most boys chased each other or threw crushed-up paper at the bended-up basketball hoop because there was no ball. Girls mostly listened to their music and styled their hair and told stories. Usually I twirled on the bars or messed around with somebody so I could listen to their radio, but that day I was in the cafeteria reading this book I found about a girl who had a weird disease when she was little. I didn’t want to read in front of people messing around, and anyway I liked the cafeteria when it was quiet and everything was echo-y and the old food smelled sad in a nice way.

  I don’t know how she knew I was there, but she came and asked if she could sit with me. She asked me what I did in the summer and I opened my notebook and showed her me on Joker and Reesa. And she took the book and her eyes got big. “Marisol told me you rode horses,” she said, “but I didn’t believe her.”

  So I told her about Ginger and Paul and the barn. The only thing I held back on was Fugly Girl. I don’t know why. I even showed her the picture of Ginger. Strawberry looked at her and said, “She looks nice. Is she?” I said, “Yeah. She would get me anything I wanted.”

  Strawberry handed me back the notebook and started talking about going to Puerto Rico and how her cousin there had a big house and birds that could talk. I started to ask her about her brother, if he was really in Puerto Rico or if he was really dead but I didn’t; like she could hear my thought, she looked down and turned away. When she turned back she asked if maybe she could come with me and ride the horses, too. I wanted to say, How’re you gonna do that if you can’t even talk to me at school? Instead I said I could ask Ginger. And she said, “Thanks. But don’t tell Alicia and them, okay?” I didn’t answer, I just looked away from her thinking, How could she look in my eyes and say that? She knew, ’cause she got up to go back to the courtyard. Then she stopped and turned and said, “Maybe you could come to my house sometime?”

  If it was anybody else I would’ve said, Fuck you. You think you can use me like that? But she was Strawberry. So I said, “Okay.”

  Ginger

  I waited a couple of weeks into school before calling her because I wanted her to get settled in her routine and because I wanted to get settled myself; I felt shy about talking to her. When I finally did call, I didn’t know how to make my voice work right, how to fill it with encouragement and love. She said school was good, that she’d made a new friend and that she was keeping up with the work. I asked what I could help her with and she said she was supposed to write a book report about an African-American family from back when there was prejudice. So I asked her to describe the book to me; she couldn’t make a coherent story line. I asked her to read to me from the book, and she had no trouble with that. I asked her if she understood it and she said yes. It wasn’t until the next week that it occurred to me to ask her what the paragraph she’d just read to me actually meant; it was then I discovered that although she could sound the words out perfectly, and sometimes even understand their meanings individually, she could not really understand written sentences put together.

  How could such a bright girl be so backward? “It’s like her mind is working too fast, not too slow,” I said to my friend Kayla. “She’s jumping to the end of the sentence before she’s absorbed the middle.” But privately, it felt more to me like her mind just kind of went limp when she read. I stayed on the phone with her three nights a week, working on written assignments. It would take at least an hour to do one page, and then she would usually have to do it again. I kept saying, Don’t you want to come up and see Fiery Girl? And I would feel her emotionally sweating over the phone, and I was just about sweating that way too. Finally she wrote a whole page that hung together and expressed something besides a garbled half summary of the plot. I was so proud. I could hardly wait to hear what the teacher thought of it. But every time I asked, Velvet would say she hadn’t gotten the paper back. She said the teac
her was stupid and didn’t like her and was a liar. She said she probably lost it.

  Velvet

  I didn’t need permission to go to Strawberry’s. I never went home after school anyway. My mom didn’t get off work until five o’clock, so I had to walk around till it was time to pick up Dante at day care, then we went home and waited for my mom there. Last year I was in day care too; I had my birthday there and they had a cake with my name on it and even my mom came for the party. There’s a picture of her smiling with her eyes closed and a paper hat on her head. But I’m too old now, so I just walk around for two hours. I can’t go home and wait to pick Dante up because my mom says if they find out she’s leaving us at home by ourselves she’ll be in trouble. I don’t know why nobody thinks it’s bad that I’m walking around by myself, but I guess they don’t. And I’m not always alone. I see people I used to know, like these men who sit out on their folding chairs, and they say, “Hey, Velvet! Velveteen from the block!” And sometimes Mrs. Vasquez, this old lady who lives in our old building, brings me up for some flavored tea with canned milk in it. But until Strawberry nobody from school invited me over yet.

  Strawberry’s house was on South Third in a old building with the name Venus on it. The ceiling in the lobby was like a frosted cake with dust on it, with waves and lumpy flower-shapes painted red and green. And there were lamps hanging down and a plant that looked cool even though it was dead. It looked like a place where beautiful, strange people would live, but the lady Strawberry stayed with and the little girl, they were both normal and fat. Strawberry slept in the room with the little girl. She slept in a corner on a sleeping bag on a cot, and there was a big cardboard box unfolded and propped up by old cans of food and a chair, keeping her cot private from the girl’s bed. It was spray-painted silver and had Strawberry’s name on it in red. There was also a upside-down box by the cot with a silky scarf on it for Strawberry’s things, like lipsticks and a rose made of glass and the shell I gave her and pictures of people in special frames. It was cool. I was expecting to feel sorry for her, but really her cot and her silver box were better than a normal room.

  Except that, when we got the little girl to stop bothering us, Strawberry wanted to take the pictures of her friends and go in the closet. It was a big closet with a light in it, but still. She made us go in there and pull winter coats off the hangers and get under them. We were so close. She looked even more beautiful that close. Her eyes were strong and bright, but her skin was so soft and her mouth was shaped soft, too, not like in school. Her breast was touching my arm under the coats, and that made me want to touch her, which made me feel funny.

  She started showing me the pictures of her New Orleans friends and telling me stories about them. Mostly it was stories like who she smoked with for the first time, and partied with or fought with. But then there was this one girl with big eyes, and Strawberry said, “This is Miranda. She told me she saw a deer swimming in the water by her house.” And I said, “What, in a pool?” And Strawberry said, no, when this girl was on the roof of her house, she saw a deer in the water. This girl said he had horns, and he looked right at her and she saw he couldn’t swim anymore, and he was going to die. The water must’ve carried him far. I asked where Miranda was and she said she didn’t know. And we were just quiet, looking at the picture of Miranda.

  I talked to her about Fiery Girl, too, how she only liked me, and how because she was abused she might still lash out at me with her hooves, like Scorpio had kicked at Pat so she thought they’d have to put her face back together. Strawberry said, “I’m sorry they did that to her, but if she tried that with me, I’d slap the shit outta her.” I said, “Trust me, you wouldn’t do that,” and she said, “Trust me, I would. I don’t care how big she is, I don’t take that shit from nobody.” And then she talked about somebody else from New Orleans.

  I wanted to tell her more about the horse, but I didn’t like her saying she would slap my mare. It was just stupid and almost made me really mad. So I just listened to her and thought about the book Ginger read to me, where the little girl went to hide in the closet and came out in a pretend world. Because that’s what it was like; Strawberry’s voice was like a pretend voice. She was talking like a little kid and using kid words. Which would’ve been weird anyway, but was really weird because she was talking about the most real things and she was older than me.

  We didn’t always do that; we at least a couple of times went to Grand Street, and she showed me how to shoplift from Rainbow and the Gem superstore. I would go in by myself wearing a big coat and walk slowly, leaning on the displays, and the store people would follow staring the crap out of me—and she would walk out with makeup or a manicure set and once even a purse. The one time I tried I only took a nail file, but still they almost caught me. I just got away because I ran into the traffic and the man chasing me almost got hit, and when Strawberry caught up with me, we walked to her house singing “Pon de Replay.” That was fun.

  But mostly she just wanted to go to her room and talk about what her friends in New Orleans said or did while we looked at magazines with stars in them. Either that or she wanted to put makeup on—except it was mostly her putting makeup on me. She put makeup on me like her friend Maciella used to wear. She did it over and over, like she was trying to make it perfect. I asked when I could do her, and she just said I didn’t even know how. She let me brush her hair and then she plucked my eyebrows, which made my mom really mad when I got home. The next time, I said, “Strawberry, stop. I’m not Maciella.” And she said, “Could you just pretend to be?”

  And I did. It was not fun. In school Strawberry acted like she barely knew me. Even on the days I went to see her, I had to wait and meet her at a bus stop and she would look around like she was making sure nobody saw we were together. Then she’d get in the closet with me and put makeup on my face. If I didn’t say the right things, Strawberry would stop me and say, “No, that’s not what she was like.” It was not fun. But I kept on doing it. I don’t know why.

  Ginger

  I started calling the school, but nobody would return my calls. Finally I was told that they weren’t allowed to talk to me unless Velvet’s mother gave me written permission. And so I found somebody who could speak Spanish and I figured out how to make a conference call. But the call was near impossible. The translator was Kayla’s aunt, who’d learned Spanish in the Peace Corps. She was religious and churchy-voiced, and worse, her Spanish was apparently too crude for her to understand Mrs. Vargas’s rapid-fire style of speech. I hadn’t wanted to involve Velvet because I knew she was sick of having to read and translate for her mom. But we had to get her on the phone finally. And I don’t know why, but that seemed to help; Mrs. Vargas was clearly amused by the translator’s ineptitude. She laughed; she said she’d sign the permission letter if I wrote it, even though it wouldn’t matter because Velvet was always doing bad.

  But she wasn’t doing bad. When Ms. Rodriguez finally called me back, she said that while Velvet still had “discipline issues,” she was definitely behaving better than she had last year. She was even turning in some homework and it looked like she was doing the reading.

  “What about the book report about the African-American family?” I asked.

  “The what? Oh, right. I haven’t assigned a book report on that. They were supposed to write on another book. Which she didn’t do. But still, I’m happy with her progress.”

  I was thrown only for a second. I told the teacher that Velvet had done a beautiful job on the African-American family and that she should ask her to show it to her. And I asked her to be sure that Velvet’s mother knew about how well she was doing. Ms. Rodriguez promised that she would.

  Velvet

  So I told Strawberry I was going to the horses. I told her in front of people. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve, but she was pretending she didn’t know me and it was making me mad. The other girls got quiet and all she said was “So?” But then in the bathroom she said, “You gonna ask her?” And I sa
id, “Yeah” like what a dumb question. Also like I might not really do it. And she did not talk back.

  I went on Friday night after my mom got off work. She yelled at me the whole time, even on the subway. The people on the subway looked at us because my mom sounded crazy yelling at me about what an idiot Ginger must be and saying I stole out of her purse and I eat too much and I wore her nightgown, dragging Dante along while he talked to himself about killing some people he made up in his head. When we came up out of the train, the wind was blowing trash all over and we had to walk into it. At least that made my mom shut up. Crazy people were all over the place by then though, so nobody would’ve noticed her. “Look,” said Dante, “there’s your stupid woman.”

  And there was Ginger, in white leather pants and a white puffy jacket, and her white-blond hair blowing around, shading her eyes with her hand and her legs apart, so she looked powerful, like the White Witch in her book. Except that then she saw us and she dropped her hand and smiled with her sad eyes and was Ginger again. And I went to hug her.

  Ginger

  She was strange on the train, like she didn’t quite know me. I felt awkward, too; I didn’t know what to talk about with her. She was restless in her seat, asked me twice how long it was going to take to get there, was saying she was bored before we were even out of the station. I thought, An easy way to play at being a parent; my heart felt cold.

  Then she said an amazing thing. We were leaving the city and she was looking out the window at the buildings across the water. Her lips were parted slightly and she had that dreamy look on her face. Then her expression changed abruptly and she turned to me and asked if it was true that they were planning to put a new building at Ground Zero that was even taller than the World Trade Center. And I said yes, that’s what they were talking about. She said, “That is the stupidest thing I ever heard. That will just make them want to knock it down again.” So I said, “But that’s why they want to do it. To show we’re not afraid of being knocked down.” And she said, “Are you kidding me? Everybody in New York City is afraid. You should not build to be what you are not.”