The Mare (10 page)

My school is in Williamsburg, where we used to live before Crown Heights. We're not supposed to keep going there because you have to go to school in your district, but my mom didn't want us to go here because she heard about gun violence. So she just pretended we didn't move and the school pretends they don't know we moved so we can go there. Which I'm glad for because I would rather stay there than go to school with new people, but it also means that in the summer all the other girls are together and I'm in Crown Heights with Dante. Everybody else is getting to know each other more and I'm not getting to know anybody because my mom is too afraid to let me out the house. We can't walk to school anymore, and because my mom can't let us go on the subway and the bus alone, she goes with us when it's barely day and drops us off in the school yard before she goes to work. We stand there and wait, even when it's freezing cold, for like an hour before everybody else comes to school together, looking at us like they're sorry for us.

I used to be friends with three girls there: Helena, who dresses straight off the truck, whose mom does her hair like J. Lo blond; Alicia, whose eyebrows grow almost together, but whose mouth is so smart she still hangs out with the cutest older boys; and Marisol, with her chubby body and sweet voice, who watches cartoons like a little kid but reads books nobody else can understand. But when I moved, Helena started talking shit about my clothes, like telling me her mom said she couldn't believe a Dominican mother would let her child walk around like that. And Alicia, if I found her alone she would talk like when we were kids—but in the cafeteria she would be grillin' me with her new girls and calling me
Velveeta
behind her hand.

The only one who's still nice is Marisol and that's partly because she dresses like me, from stores that don't have names, and her skin is bad now and she's too serious. I still like her sometimes because you can talk about private things with her and not feel stupid. But really I wish I was still friends with Alicia and Helena even if I kind of hate them.

But that was last year, and this year I had hope it would be different. Partly because of the horses, and partly because of this girl called Strawberry. Strawberry wasn't her name, but they called her that because every day at lunch she ate strawberry ice cream bars. And because of the red streaks in her long hair.

Strawberry didn't know all the girls, either. She came to our school last year when there were only a few more months left. She was special and tragical. They said she'd moved from New Orleans because of the hurricane. They said she'd been on the roof with her family without any food or water. They said she'd been sent to one foster place in Texas but something happened and she'd had to leave and go to the place she was at here. And she still couldn't go home even though the hurricane was a year ago because her family was someplace where people were acting crazy and killing each other's dogs.

If she'd been a girl like us, we still would've been nice to her. But she was not like us. She was two years older than everybody on account of being held back
twice,
and she was beautiful like a woman. She had
breasts,
and she wore flowered bras that you could see through her clothes. She wore makeup and sat kind of sideways, and looked like she was smoking a cigarette in a black-and-white movie. Her mouth smiled, smiled hard, but her eyes did not smile, ever. Her eyes watched and looked for something they knew they'd never find. I liked her; everybody liked her. All the girls who used to be my friends and then laughed at me for having church clothes wanted to be friends with her.

Then in the spring we both had detention and the teacher was new and he let us sit together. His cell phone rang and he answered it and we started whispering. She showed me a picture of her older brother, Marco. I showed her a picture of my grandfather. At first I told her he was in DR like he was alive. I told her how he called me on the phone and sent me a sea horse. Then I said, “But then he died.” I don't know why I told her. But when I did, she got quiet and her eyes got different and so did her mouth. She said, “My brother's dead, too. He drowned in the hurricane. Him and his girlfriend were trapped in the attic and they couldn't get out.” We both looked down and it was deep. Then she said, “What's your favorite movie?” and before I could tell her, the teacher started to yell.

The next day I gave her the pink-brown shell that my father gave me. I showed her the sea horse, too. I gave her the shell and let her hold the sea horse and it happened again: her eyes got feeling in them. She asked if she could have the sea horse too, but I said no, it was the only other thing I had from my grandfather. Her eyes changed back, and for a second I thought she was gonna keep my sea horse. But then she changed them back again, and they smiled with her mouth only not mean, and she said, “When I see one of those Ima think of you,” and gave it back. “Where you gonna see a sea horse?” I asked, and I laughed because it sounded funny. She laughed too, and said,
“SpongeBob.”
And everybody saw it, her talking and laughing with me with her real eyes, and all the way to the end of the year, nobody started anything with me.

The one bad thing was that being friends with Strawberry made me sometimes pretend I didn't really know Marisol. Which was sick. Except really I didn't know Marisol so much anymore, all she did was read.

So I wanted to see Strawberry and show her the pictures of my real horses. I picked the best ones—me on Joker and Reesa, me grooming Rocki, who was mad big—and I pasted them inside the cover of my school notebook. I didn't put the one with Ginger in because I didn't want to explain her to everybody. Except for Strawberry. I thought maybe I'd show it to her.

But when I got to school, I didn't find her at the assembly and I thought she went back with her family. Then when I saw her in the hall and I started to go to her, she gave me a grill with her eyes like dead. Like she never knew me, or talked to me about the most private thing. It made me feel sick. I couldn't believe she meant it at first. But then in class she sat with the girls who were bitches to me. I sat behind them and I whispered to Alicia, my friend turned bitch, and she whispered to me, but turning around like I was somebody following them and then turning back to the others. That's how they were to me all day. Except for Strawberry. She didn't turn to me at all. She just talked loud like to make sure the whole room heard her, and the teacher didn't really stop her. She talked about her brother Marco in Puerto Rico. Like he was alive.

Paul and I bickered about having Velvet up on weekends. Then we fought. He repeated the things he'd said about my needs, her needs, expectations I would not be able to meet. He said we had nothing in common. Then he started about race. He said things like “white benefactor” and “She's too different from you” and “What are you going to do when she gets pregnant?” Which made me yell, “And you think
I'm
racist?” before I left the house and slammed the door.

We made up. And fought about it again. Maybe once a month, he said. If her mother agrees. Twice a month, I said. If she keeps her grades up.
If she continues the good work, we'll make it every week,
I didn't say.

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.

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.”

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 teacher was stupid and didn't like her and was a liar. She said she probably lost it.