The Mare (41 page)

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

So I feel bad to make him talk on the phone with one of these machine people who they get to answer phones—except it turns out, it's not even a machine-person, it's really a machine. Which at least can't think he's stupid as he tries to give machine answers, whispering so the thing can't hear him, finally shouting. “Mami, what do we want, a reservation or a service or something else? Coño, now it's talking about a dining car, it won't let you ask the price—something else, you stupid nonfiction puta, something else! Mami, I can't!” He slammed the phone on the floor so the cap broke off the end of it, and I knocked it on his head, the insane voice talked on and he cried, “Just call the man, Paul. Tell him to call them.”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“Wait,” he said and grabbed the phone, listening. “An agent is a person, it says it thinks I want to talk to an agent.” He told the phone, “Yes, agent, you puta,” and it answered him with music.

She was far away when she got ready for bed that night—she didn't even smile when she asked if she could have her favorite towel with the pink flowers on it. Paul said, “She's being amazing. Strong. Considering how disappointed she must be about her mother not coming.” “Yeah,” I said.
You don't know the half of it,
I didn't say. I called the translator, didn't reach her. I hoped to God I hadn't made a mistake in encouraging this.

The next morning she was still calm, but with something else too, something I could not define. “Velvet,” I said. “I know you can win this. I want you to win. But even if you don't? You've still done something incredible to get this far. I'm more proud of you than I've ever been of anyone in my life.”

Normally when I would compliment her, she'd smile awkwardly and thank me with a full, tender voice. This time she thanked me with her voice and face so measured she looked like a much older person, almost
middle-aged.
Again I wondered if I had done the right thing. Was any of this right?

But after I walked her to the barn, I didn't doubt. A girl with purple hair greeted Velvet warmly. “Is she competing too?” I asked. “No,” said Velvet. “She's just coming to help.” I stayed long enough to watch her lead her horse out. The animal seemed to look at me like it knew me and was thinking something very specific. Velvet did not look at me, just at the horse.

It was on the walk home that I finally identified what it was: She looked like her mother. Like her mother the fighter. Except that, unlike her mother, she wasn't in a tank. She was out in the open. I smiled. I knew: I
had
done the right thing.

I knew it even more when Paul greeted me on the porch, phone in his hand. “They're coming,” he said. “Dante just called me.”

“When?” I asked. “It's starting in like an hour!”

“That's why he called, they wanted to know what time it was. I get the sense it was a last-minute decision. I told them I'm pick them up at Poughkeepsie because it won't cost them as much that way.”

I don't know why I felt glad they were coming. This whole thing—Ginger's “project,” as Becca called it—had ruined my marriage, or allowed me to ruin it, and the ruin had just begun. What would happen to Ginger if we divorced? I imagined her in the city, living in a grimy studio in Queens or Brooklyn, maybe
Crown Heights,
trying to find a job (as
what
?) and attempting to maintain a relationship with a family who'd most likely have no use for her—and I sped to Poughkeepsie as if to forestall that future, Polly hurling away from me like a rapidly cooling planet wrenched off its axis.

I got there early but couldn't find a spot in the near lot, had to spiral up the parking structure for a space, thinking weirdly of Ginger's sister, whom I had once compared, after her death, to the Nabokovian character Hazel Shade, an ugly girl who kills herself on being rejected by a cloddish boy. I did not make a direct comparison between live Melinda and the fictional dead girl for Ginger; I just repeated one critic's somewhat quixotically made case that poor scorned Hazel is transformed by death into a Vanessa butterfly, a kind angel who gently guides her father into the spirit world and even comforts the egotistical lunatic (and great rejecter of women) who inadvertently drew her dad to his death.

I heard a train pulling in as I hurried down the concrete steps, feeling that strange gladness in anticipation of the lumpen, frowning woman and her odd boy whom I could deliver to my even more odd wife. Who had liked the connection between her sister and Hazel Shade because she felt that Melinda had guided her to Velvet and Velvet to the horse. And because she believed in transformation, she did not accept that anything just “is what it is”; she always thought it could be something else, something secretly beautiful and glorious.

I made myself visible at the foot of a main stairway, smiling expectantly as the last passengers left the train. My smile stiffened slightly; they did not seem to be there. I went to the other end of the platform, thinking they might be waiting for the elevator. But the conveyance was taking someone up, and I dropped the smile as I headed back up the stairs. “Pippa Passes”; Nabokov had used that poem wittily in connection with Hazel, Pippa being an insignificant girl who somehow transforms everyone around her into something better than they are. They weren't upstairs either or in the lobby. Exasperated—this was so typical—I reached for my phone, calling as I walked outside, where insignificant people passed and passed.

He is a funny man, even if he doesn't say anything funny, just the way his hairy uni-blond brows go together when he's trying to think of what to say. Before my mom got her crazy idea of going upstate to open a can of whup-ass, this guy on
South Park
was saying, “Black is beautiful, tan is grand, but the white man is the big boss man!” And I thought of the eyebrows.

But at least when a human came on the phone, she was nice and waited for my mom to find an envelope with the name of their town on it while I told her about going to see my sister race. But I remembered the name of the place anyway—it was like a name in that book about Unfortunate Events. And it was
very
unfortunate,
forty dollars to get there,
not even coming back, and we didn't know where the race was or what time it was or even if it already happened. I expected my mom to say hell no, but she just sat like she was dreaming, and then said, Tell her to make the reservation with the credit card.

But I called Paul before we left and he said to go someplace else, and I didn't tell my mom because there wasn't time to get on the phone again, and then the subway sat in the tunnel and we only had time to get the ticket out of the machine so we wouldn't have saved money, and then my mom didn't understand when we got to Poughkeepsie and I told her, “I think he said to get out here instead.” She said, “Why?” and I wasn't going to say “because he wanted us to save money” because then my sister's ass would not be whipped alone. Even if my mom looked like she forgot about that, she just stared out at Poughkeepsie like she was still in that same dream.

So I thought when we get there and he's not there she'll ask me to call him and I will and he will come to where we are. And she won't know I was stupid. Which is what happened. Except the phone was dead.