The Mare (35 page)

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.

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.

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.

She was on the floor with her gown way up, reaching to pull a towel off the rack. “Mami!” I said. “Here!” And I got the towel for her, then went to run cold water on a cloth. I looked in the mirror—
oh shit
—I was dressed in my street clothes and makeup. But she just sat with the towel around her like she was cold, so I kneeled and put the cloth on her forehead; she looked at me with strange eyes. I said, “Mami?” and she had to puke again. I held her hair away from her face and remembered making rivers of puke in a blue rubber pail, how she held me. My ragged toy that somebody gave me, I would lean it out the window and pat its back and pretend it was puking,
plah plah plah
! What happened to that toy?

I stayed up with her all night. She saw my clothes and makeup; I saw her look and felt it. But she didn't say anything, not that night or next day. She yelled like always. But not about that.

My sponsor advised me not to tell Ginger about Polly because it was over and unless there is some
very
good reason to do otherwise, you don't tell the truth if it's going to hurt the other person.

“But she asked me,” I said. “And—”

“And you told her no. It's still no, right?”

“Yes, but then she asked why my face was flushed. She knows. It's sitting there waiting to happen. She's going to ask me again; if I keep saying no, it'll start to sound more and more false. If I say yes, it makes it worse that I said no to start with.”

“Worse for her or for you?”

“Both of us. Listen, Ginger isn't someone who cares about discretion or, or dignity. She cares about truth.”

He didn't say anything for a minute. My sponsor is a manual laborer with a degree in philosophy. He's been impotent for years because of a prostate operation. He can't take Viagra because of his heart condition, but he's recently been using a penis pump and it seems to be working for him. He cares about truth too. He also cares about dignity and discretion. Mostly, though, he wants things to
work.

“Well,” he said, “I don't think you need to throw the past in her face. But you could always ask her why she asked the question. If you really want to have the conversation.”

And so I did. And she told me. She said even Velvet noticed something.

Like I didn't already know there must be a reason that he'd suddenly become so kind and understanding of Velvet and me, that he'd stopped with the racial piety about how really, while I think I love her, it's actually
white guilt
or something even more perverted and sick; it can't possibly be what it looks like or feels like to me. Frankly, it was such a relief not to hear that shit anymore that I'd rather he shut up and “cheat” if it meant he could leave us alone or even actually show support and back me up like with the substitute.
Cheat.
What a stupid word, like you're playing cards and your partner cheats and the whole deck has to rise up and attack you, both of you, him because he didn't play right, and me because—why? Because I didn't catch him? Because therefore I'm now “humiliated,”
officially
? Well, guess what? Here's the good thing, the one good thing,
the one good thing
about being the girl on the side where the guy goes to act like he can't with his main squeeze: you realize it doesn't mean anything much except he feels like doing it with somebody else. The wife isn't “humiliated” or unloved or anything. If that's happening to anybody, it's usually the other one. He says he's not even seeing her anymore, but still here he is with his AA face on talking about amends and wanting to feel close again. All of it, the piety, the careful examining and blaming of himself for daring to want sex, of me for being—what? A guilty white person who must be doing something wrong? That attitude is so much more disgusting than his wanting strange pussy, not to mention his hard, fake self-righteous friends. Starting with that bitch he used to be married to.

She stared at me a long moment, then looked away. “I guess it's normal,” she said.

“Normal?”

“My dad did it. Everybody makes a production out of it, but every time you turn around somebody's doing it. It didn't mean anything, right?”

Her sarcasm was cheap but sharp, and though I meant to humble myself, it made me mad. I said, “Actually, it did mean something. It meant that somebody was paying attention to me and holding me like she meant it.”

“Then why is it over?”

Because Polly ended it. “Because I wanted it to be you.”

She frowned like she heard the unsaid thing, then shook her head, almost twitched it, like she was shaking something from her ear.

“I want
you,
” I said.

Her chin quivered; as though to hide it, she raised her hand to her face. The gesture was piercing, and for a second I was sure she was crying—though I knew that Ginger has not cried since childhood. I moved closer to her. “Ginger,” I said. “I wanted you to know because—”

She raised her head and dropped her hand. “Velvet is coming this weekend,” she said. “I can't cancel it. I didn't let her come last time because she messed up at school. But she needs to practice for an event.” And she stood up, like to leave.

“Ginger,” I said. “Where are you?”

“Where I always am, right in front of you.”

“Listen,” I said. “I know what I did was cowardly and fucked-up. But I love you. Do you love me?”

She looked at me then and her eyes finally showed her. “Yes,” she said. “But I don't feel it now.” And she left the room. I heard the front door open and softly close.

I went to the park where we took Velvet those years ago and sat on a picnic table with my knees up and held close against myself. A short distance away there were little kids on the swings, their father pushing them, the mother getting something from the car, watching them as she closed the door with her hip, guardian care visible to me in her neck and jaw even though I could not make out her face. The light child-voices sounded so far away in the cold spring air.

Cheating.
Of course I know why they call it that. I hate it, but I know. So much of what happens between people is comparable to a game. There is a deep, soft core that everyone longs for, too deep for games or even words. But to get to that, you have to play and play well. And I did not know how. Art, society, relationships, simple conversation—I couldn't understand how to do any of it. I don't know why; I don't know what was wrong with me. I tried, and when I was young and good-looking it could at least sometimes seem like my failure was actually an interesting
artistic
version of some special game. But now the truth is so plain that even Velvet's illiterate mother can see it. It's clear even to her—somehow
especially
to her—that I couldn't even do the thing every woman on the planet knows how to do. I can see her contempt, the question in her eyes:
What is wrong with her? How did she even get a husband?
And still, it was her child, the lovely girl that she
doesn't even want,
the child I finally loved, who somehow allowed me a way in, who made me feel what everyone else felt; finally I could join, be part of the play—except everybody thought that was wrong too, that somehow I still wasn't doing it right.

Everybody including my husband. I got up off the table and my movement caught the eye of the mother at the swing set. She waved at me and I realized I knew her; she was the aunt of one of the Cocoon Theater kids. I waved back at her and she came toward me.

Please God, I thought. Not now. I resisted the urge to put my hands over my face. She kept coming. But what is doing it right? What in hell can I do that's right?

“Hey,” she said, smiling. “Weren't you in the
Christmas Carol
a couple of years back?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I was.”

“I thought so! You were really good!”

“Thank you,” I said. “It was a lot of fun.”

Great, something I did right—act in a play for children.