The Mare (20 page)

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.

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.

I
rode a horse when I was six. Because my father was friends with Mr. Reyes, the man who ran a store down the street, and Mr. Reyes had a horse. One day my father held me up so I could see the horse's face, and he had rough skin but soft eyes. I put my hands on his neck and it felt good. I wanted to get up on him, so my father laughed and put me on his back. And on that horse I saw the world: sky, trees, buildings, streets going in different directions. My life, going in different directions. My father was talking to Mr. Reyes with his hand on the horse; it was right by my leg. But then he turned and his hand came off the horse. And the horse began to move! He walked and then Mr. Reyes yelled and the horse ran, and the world was shaken so hard my teeth rattled. I grabbed the mane and watched the world clatter by, I clattered by my mother running out the house waving a towel. Somebody stood in front of the horse, and it reared up and I fell off. I banged my head; it felt like all my bones broke. I cried, Mami! A dark hole closed over me and I fell down into it.

In the hole people were yoked to machines, thousands of people, naked, bent, and pulling, so angry that they bit the shoulders of those before them. Voices said, “You are lazy and selfish”; the voices came from faces joined together in a breathing darkness, one dark, expressionless face made of many faces, a black field of nose-holes, eye-holes, and many mouths. People fell down the slippery holes and mouths and into working guts; they were shit out into dreams of people who did not even know them. I was there, with the shit-people. We crawled in the dirt of dreams, the dreams of those who cursed us without knowing us. Above were signs, telling us what we were: crosses, dollars, flashing lights, thousands of quick-moving pictures showing pain and ugliness.

And then my mother grabbed me up by my arm and slapped me awake, crying. My father said, “It's not her fault!” but still she got me home and whipped my legs. Later, my father got me a piece of candy.

Now he's gone. When he died I could not even be with him to say good-bye because I had no money to get on the plane.

I had an aunt named Bea. She was a strange, frightened person. She was small, with a pretty, big-eyed face, but also huge, clumsy hands that I think she picked at. She was a terrible cook and once when my sister complained about a soggy grilled-cheese sandwich, Aunt Bea went into the bedroom and cried. She could play the piano and she acted in a community theater version of
The Cherry Orchard,
playing a jilted servant girl; she actually thought this was going to be the start of an acting career. My uncle went to see every performance and sat proudly in the front row; he was too charmed to notice the pathos of the ambition, not even when they wouldn't let her act in another play. He reminisced about
The Cherry Orchard
for
years,
every single time we went to visit, while she just sat there and stared. Then their marriage went through a crisis and she got a little crazy, would hide under the bed sometimes and refuse to come out.

Both she and my uncle are dead and I don't normally think about them much. Then Ginger decided that she wanted to act in the children's community theater; they were doing
A Christmas Carol,
and she wanted to play either the beautiful Ghost of Christmas Past or the depraved hag who steals Scrooge's curtains when he dies. I thought it was wonderful until she told me why: She wanted to invite Velvet's whole family up to see her perform. She was hoping Velvet and her brother would want to act in the theater too, and that Mrs. Vargas would realize what a wonderful place this was to live. And she couldn't even tell the woman how much she'd have to pay for a carton of milk!

My God, I thought. Under the jaded, ex-addict exterior, the wan, toughened survivor I'd fallen in love with, who could listen to and talk about the saddest, most brutal experiences at meetings—under that was Aunt Bea! I'd married Aunt Bea!

The Cocoon Theater was on the second floor over the liquor store. When I came up the stairs, kids were running up and down a hallway full of hats, masks, robes, swords, helmets, wigs, and sparkling crowns. In the foyer, teenagers stood around a huge papier-mâché fortress and a rack of goofy dresses on cockeyed hangers. A sexy middle-aged lady with a bossy young butt burst in and yelled us into a big room with a linoleum floor and punched-up walls hung with black drapes. We had to sing a Broadway song while a small, intrepid man with a mild mouth and a teardrop nose played the piano. In an English accent I sang,
All I want is a room somewhere / Far away from the cold night air.
The kids stared at me. I tried to pantomime and my voice wobbled; the piano player sighed and started again.

But it was perfect: The man who played the piano (Yandy) was married to the bossy middle-aged lady (Danielle); he was a dancer from Cuba and he spoke Spanish.

I hate to admit it, but in retrospect it's clear: I didn't put up enough of a fight about her plot to get the family upstate because I was sure it would never happen and also because I wanted her focus on something else besides us. I wanted to be feeling the resentment. I wanted a reason to look for Polly. Because that's all it was, looking. And often finding her, walking alone across campus where I could come up beside her and touch her elbow and talk. That was even better than the times she came to my office.

When I was walking around before I had to pick up Dante, this older boy I don't know came up to me, going, “Hey, lil' mama. What's good?”

I didn't like his voice, so I just said, “Hey.”

“So what's good?” he say.

“Nothin'.”

“No? I got somethin' good. You wanna come smoke it with me?”

“No.”

“Why not? You on your way somewheres?”

“I don't know you.”

“I hear that don't matter, shawty.”

I looked at him long enough for him to get embarrassed. I said, “I do not know what you are talking about.” And he said, “Well, you better figure it out, girl. You play your position or it play you.” There was no friendly in his voice at all. He looked at me to make his point, then walked away.

I didn't get what I auditioned for, but I did get several minor parts: solicitor for the poor, drunk, debtor, beggar, tortured soul. It didn't matter; I loved it. I got to make faces, sing, and even dance in the crowd scenes. Danielle and Yandy ran the theater with their five kids; the whole family acted, sold tickets, ran the concession stand, and made costumes. Because they couldn't come up with full costumes, Danielle decided we'd wear pajamas under our meager bonnets, skirts, top hats, and dressing jackets; then she decided we should all paint our faces blue. Rehearsals were like a cross between Dalí and Dr. Seuss: chaos, with sudden ecstatic bursts of order. Kids ran everywhere yelling their lines, waving props, having tickle fights, and slapping paint on each other while Danielle yelled about acting philosophy and Yandy played the piano. There were two other adult actors, an out-of-work female psychiatrist about my age and a male nurse in the middle of a divorce. We'd stand around together during the chaos and the psychiatrist would bitch that Danielle and Yandy were sloppy professionally, mentally ill, and probably drunks. I said, Oh, it's just supposed to be fun. The nurse sucked on his cigarette and ogled my breasts.

But I took it seriously too. I really tried. It actually hurt when Danielle criticized me in front of everybody because she thought my debtor's reaction to hearing of Scrooge's death was too nice. “You think she'd be
ambivalent
to hear that the guy who's been putting the screws to her is dead? Are you
nuts
? She'd be overjoyed and nothing else!”

“But wouldn't you feel ashamed to think you'd come down so low on the food chain that you'd gloat over somebody else's death?”

Both Danielle and her husband cracked up. “You are some Goody Two-shoes,” he said.

So I went back and tried to be more bitter for them. I tried to picture what Mrs. Vargas would feel if she heard about her landlord dying and not having to pay back rent. I thought she might cackle about it at first. I thought she might say pious things too, then laugh. But when she was alone, I thought she'd feel weird. I thought she might even pray for the person. I don't know why, but I did.

Then one day I'm sitting in class and I get a note passed that says, “Kwan likes you.” I look over and Kwan is staring the gloopy-eyed hell out of me. Which I don't like because he's sixteen and still in my grade, and because he's the boyfriend of Brianna, who's fifteen and café au lait beautiful and basically the baddest bitch in the school. And I can see he knows about this note, but I don't think it was his idea. And I can feel every girl in the class watching to see what I do. Which is, walk up to him in the hall and bitch him out so everybody can hear, and tell him to leave me alone before I tell Brianna.

My mom said, “That's what you get for being a troublemaker.” But Ginger said she was proud of me for handling it. I got a 3 on a paper that we did on the phone and I went upstate and jumped over a low pole on Little Tina. Pat told me she was proud of me too, and we went on a trail ride together. The leaves were changing color and the evergreen was alone in the sky. There were birds with huge wings circling over everything like searching eyes. Pat said they
were
searching; they were hawks out for prey. She said they caught mice, chipmunks, rabbits, sometimes even little dogs or cats. I looked up at them and my back tingled.

Then I came back home and it was on everybody's phone, the phone everybody had but me. This picture of a girl kissing what's supposed to be Kwan's naked chest and reaching her hand down his pants. You couldn't see her face, but her hair was
not
good like Brianna's, it was damaged, like mine was when my mom bleached it, but not now. And there was a message with it that went, “Here she go, slurpin' away.”

Marisol was the one who showed it to me. She said in her little voice, “They sayin' it's you. But I know it's not.” She looked down instead of at me and her shoulders were turned in.

“Who sent it?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

I said, “I don't care about this shit,” and she said, “I don't either,” but we knew we did. We sat quiet for a minute. I was remembering something else Pat told me on our ride: “The dominant mare drives the troublemakers to the outside of the herd. Because that's where the predators are.”