The Mare (9 page)

When we drove to the train station, she cried. She seemed okay that morning; she smiled and said she wanted to see her little brother. She went to visit the horses one last time and came back with a big rusty horseshoe that she wrapped carefully in one of her shirts.

But on the way to the station I turned around in my seat and saw her face withdrawn and her body slumped like it had no feeling. Then when we got out of the car, she dropped her suitcase—it seemed like on purpose—and it popped open and she began to quietly cry.

“Don't cry,” said Paul. “You'll be back.”

“When?” she asked.

He paused uneasily and then said, “Next year.”

But she heard his unease louder than his words. She stopped crying and withdrew again. She stayed withdrawn for most of the train trip, staring out the window at the bright river with her lips parted and her eyes a thousand miles away.

Her mother and little brother met us at the station. The woman surprised me by kissing me on both cheeks; Paul she merely approved with her measuring eyes. The boy eye-checked us and pretended to ignore his sister. He was beautiful too—lighter-skinned than Velvet, more inward, more visibly intense, eyes flashing privately.

“I'll call tonight,” I said to Velvet. “Don't forget about the homework.”

And it happened again; she put her head down and quietly began to cry. Her mother's eyes darkened powerfully. Her brother began whispering to himself with his face turned away.

“Here!” I said, my voice too bright. “Here's some pictures of Velvet's trip.” Small-voiced, Velvet translated. I handed Mrs. Vargas a carefully edited envelope. She took it angrily, stuffing it into her purse. She took Velvet by the arm and headed toward the subway.

“Those people weird,” said Dante. “That ugly man and that lady like a cat food and sugar sandwich.”

“They're not weird,” I said. “They're like people are supposed to be. They're nice and they don't yell, not even when they're mad.”

“That lady is nice because she's in the sky,” said my mom.

“Her name is Ginger.”

“Whatever her name is, she lives in the sky. She's nice like a little girl is nice.”

“The people I stayed with were fucked up,” said Dante. “The food they ate was crap.”

“Mami,” I said. “The place I worked? There was a horse who really liked me because the little girl who owned her before looked like me. I was the only person there that she liked.”

“What happened to the little girl who owned her before?”

“Her parents wouldn't let her see the horse anymore because—”

“Because they didn't want their daughter to get killed. Listen, you think I don't know? Where I grew up, horses used to walk in the street. Now stop talking before you give me a headache.”

I called her that night. Not right after we got home, but during the soft time before bed. She picked up the phone eagerly. She asked what we had for dinner and if I went for a walk. She asked if there were any fireflies.

And then there was screaming in the background, vicious, hateful. Velvet screamed back, wild strings of Spanish words, raging but imploring too—and then she dropped the phone and the scream went raw. I shouted her name, almost hung up to call the cops when somebody else picked up the phone and said “Cat food!” at me like a curse; the brother. Then Velvet had the phone again, yelling sideways off it before sobbing to me that her mom had told her she was no good all night even though she didn't do anything bad and now she called the horseshoe dirty and threw it out the window.

I talked to her; I called her honey, darling. I said if she was with me, I'd hold her in my arms like she was a little girl. I said it would be all right. The words came out of me—desolate, helpless, and real. She got quiet; her silence felt a little incredulous, embarrassed even. I told her she could find the shoe tomorrow, sneak it back in and hide it. I told her we would do homework together and she could come to see us soon, on the weekend. The yelling in the background became angry talking, then normal talking between the mother and little boy. Velvet said, “I just decided something.”

“What?”

“I'm not gonna yell anymore, not even when I'm mad.”

“There's nothing wrong with yelling when you're mad. You're a fiery girl,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“That you're intense, you have strong feelings.”

She didn't say anything, and I began to worry that I'd insulted her somehow. Then she said, “I just decided something else. From now on, I'm going to call my mare Fiery Girl.”

When we hung up, there was a smile in her voice.

I didn't speak about it to Paul. But when we got in bed, I turned with my back to him and curled into a ball. I thought over and over of Velvet, of holding her like I said I would, brushing her hair, singing to her. I thought of the way she said “My mare,” like “mah mare” or “ma mère”—my mother in French.

I went to bed that night not even wanting to touch my mom because she threw my horseshoe out the window and started screaming when Ginger called. But I fell asleep and then I woke up and she wasn't there and I was scared. Instead of her, Dante was holding a pillow put sideways, like somebody took my mom and put the pillow there to fool him. I hoped she was just in the bathroom, but I knew she wasn't and I was right. I got out of bed and went to look for her. When I got to the kitchen, I thought she'd gone away and left us. I opened the window—I don't know why, maybe to call for help—and I looked down and saw she was standing on the sidewalk with her hoodie on over her nightgown. It didn't make sense, she was afraid of this place. She turned her head sideways so I saw her nose and forehead from above; that made her look small, like a kid who was lost. I went downstairs and opened the door. I put my head out and said, “Mami, what are you doing?” When she turned around, her face was quiet and far away. I came out and I saw—she had my horseshoe in her hand. It made me smile so much I couldn't talk. We stood together. The air was smelling like fall already. I saw that her legs were bare, but she had her sneakers on untied. “Peaceful,” she said. “It's peaceful.”

We just stood there, hearing the quiet, feeling the buildings in the dark and the ground humming under us. A car went by booming music and it was different than during the day.

When we went in to bed, she put her back to me like always. But when I put my arm around her, she held my hand. I said, “Bendición, Mami,” and she answered with a smiling voice. “Dios te bendiga.”

I went back to my painting; classes started for Paul. The feeling of normalcy was delicious. I still went “walking at night,” but alone, feeling my signal again, now big and broad and full of new things.

I found myself talking to women I barely knew—the manager of the health food store, a colleague of Paul's, somebody I'd met at a wedding—in the store, in the middle of a parking lot, at the post office; talking a mile a minute, I would confide in them about Velvet. About the remarkable things she'd said or done. About the fight I'd heard on the phone, about how I was going to help her with her homework. About how scared and excited I was. It felt like I was actually talking to women for the first time. I felt this even though the conversations were fleeting and partial. It was something about the way our eyes met, the way they took my words in; it was something that had never happened before. It was like
being
the signal rather than hearing it.

Of course, not every conversation was this way. The weekend after Velvet went home, Paul and I went to a party given by a local celebrity photographer who had just won some big award for taking pictures of Muslim kids. Paul's ex-wife, Becca, was there along with her friends, all huge women whose bodies exude importance, or as my mom used to say, “im
po
'ance.” They sit together like a high school clique, these women in their fifties, and they walk like they're saying, “Get out the way. I've got tits.” One of them is an editor in the city, one of them is an artist who shows in the city, one of them was a model about a hundred years ago; they all have kids and they all act like bitches to me. At least if Becca is there. If Becca's not there, they're basically polite. If my friend Kayla is there, they even try to be nice because she's friends with the editor. I understand the situation, but it's awkward, especially if Kayla's at the party and I have to sit with them either monopolizing Kayla or being ignored.

This time, though, I tried to connect, even though Becca was there. I couldn't help it. I told them about Velvet and the horses, especially the horses. And even
they
got interested, even if Becca got hard in the face; they overflowed like women will do, giving suggestions for activities, horse camps, children's theater, petting zoos. Until Becca spoke and they all stopped. “Sounds like a fun project,” she said. “Sounds like an easy way to play at being a parent.” And the conversation moved on.

The week before school, Dante put on a pair of pants but his ass was too big and they split when he moved. We all laughed and my mom said, “What am I going to do with my little piglet?” and pinched his arm. But she got mad when I tried on my favorite blouse from last year and couldn't button it across my chest. She cursed and said she couldn't afford to buy us new clothes, why couldn't we make anything last. So we tried on all our clothes for school. She cursed again, but sad, not mad. “It's not your fault,” she said. “We have to go to the ragpicker's.”

By that she meant a church in Bushwick that had charity clothes in brown boxes or hung up on metal racks. They hardly had anything good. The best thing for me was a red sweater that was too big, but my mom said anyway, it would last. Also she picked out matching yellow sweatshirts for us that were brand-new but stupid, with pictures of whales on them. And a T-shirt for Dante that said “I'm the Big Sister,” and she didn't even know, and neither did he because he didn't care about reading even if he knew how. I started to tell them, but Dante was acting like such a mal nacido that I decided he would be wearing it to school.

Early the next day I went to my cotton-ball box in the closet and got out pictures of Ginger and the horses and picked the ones I would paste on my notebook for school. I would put the ones with ponies on the outside and the ones with Joker and Reesa on the inside so my mom wouldn't see them. Though she never looked at the pictures anyway. I just put them in my box in the closet and she never said anything.

Sometimes I don't care what Becca says; other times it cuts. It cuts when I feel myself small and insignificant against her and her friends and their big proud bodies, when I feel the fear and chaos that's always in me, and the nothingness, the nothing I've done with my life except to continue to live. But it's not too late. I am stronger than I was. And now I have Velvet.

I decided I was going to do a painting of Melinda, a figurative painting for the first time since art school. It was Velvet who put that idea into my head—after I showed her my sister's “portrait,” she said, “Why don't you do a real picture of her?” She asked the day after she saw the red abstract, which meant she'd been thinking about it. I told her I didn't do representational or figurative work; she looked at me blankly and said, “Why not?” I started explaining to her that everything had already been painted at this point, and that there was no reason to represent figures anymore. The way she looked at me, I was suddenly embarrassed. “Did somebody else paint your sister already?” she asked.

“No, it's not that,” I said, and she just looked at me.

So I decided to try. I decided to work from two pictures, one from when Melinda was ten and seriously beautiful, and another when she was a thick-necked, swollen-faced adult, some teeth already gone, her eyes dulled but still with a hard glitter deep in them. She was wearing a sweatshirt and holding a plastic take-out container; whoever took the picture had obviously surprised her. It must've been somebody she was happy to see because she was actually smiling. Which is probably why she'd even kept the picture in a drawer full of buttons, batteries, colored lightbulbs, and broken toys: It was the only one of her as an adult smiling so you could see her teeth.

I decided I'd put both Melindas in the same picture. I wanted to foreground the smiling, disfigured adult and have the pretty, sweet-faced child in the background. It was harder than I thought. I was unpracticed and couldn't make the lines properly expressive. The adult Melinda was comic, nearly pumpkin-faced, the child wraithlike and weird. After dinner I came back to try again. This time I put them together, one half of the face a child, the other half an adult. That was worse.
Did somebody else paint your sister?
Blurry thoughts filled my head; gooseflesh came up on my arm. What was I doing to my sister? Why?

When Melinda was fifteen, our mother had her hospitalized. It was a state mental hospital and she got into fights with the other girls there; she came home for a weekend visit with a black eye and a swollen mouth. Her body was stiff and fearful, but her eyes were sarcastic and she mumbled tough, boasting things with her hurt lips. We shared a room and she sat in the corner of it listening to our little record player while I sketched in my diary. She listened to the same song over and over. It was by Alice Cooper, I think, crowing and clowning about runnin through the world with a gun at his back. Melinda listened to it hunched over and rocking intently. If the music hadn't been there, it would've looked like she was crying. But I was barely twelve. I listened to the music over her body because I think she wanted me to. She just kept picking up the needle and putting it down in the same place. It didn't even bother me.

I rested my brushes in a jar of mineral spirits and put away my paints. I turned off the lights and listened to the dense sound of bugs outside the open windows.

When Melinda was nineteen, she told me about being abused by the head psychiatrist at the hospital. He told her she had to be checked for VD. He actually did the exam himself and he didn't even wear a white coat. When she saw him come into the room, she sat up on the table and said, “But I can't have VD. I'm a virgin.” And he said, “Isn't that sweet. Lie back and open your legs.” She started to get off the table and he told her she'd go into seclusion if she put up a fuss. She said he shoved the speculum in so hard she bled. She said the nurse obviously knew it was wrong, but she didn't try to stop him. She just put her hand on Melinda's belly and said, “Try to relax, dear.”

She was driving me somewhere when she told me. The radio was on, but it didn't matter. I heard her, but I wasn't sure I believed her. Melinda stole and she lied a lot. She even admitted it. She told me the story to explain why she stole from our mother's purse; she said it was because when she told our mother what the psychiatrist did, our mother just said, “I'll talk to him,” and then kept forgetting.