The Mare

Paul

It wasn’t about her being younger. I was never one of those guys. She wasn’t a kid; she was almost forty, a National Guardswoman who’d driven a supply truck in Iraq, and had gone back to school to get her MFA in writing. She was worn for her age, tough-skinned and rigid-backed, but with a beautiful mouth and strong, calm eyes — green, with hazel flecks. It wasn’t about her being younger. In fact, in spite of her relative youth, it was her maturity that appealed to me, her strength; I felt she was a woman who understood things without too much talk about them. I was at ease with Polly.

She wasn’t my student either; she was working with a colleague of mine on writing her memoir about her service in Iraq, especially her relationship with a translator whose brother was, like Polly’s, schizophrenic. I met her at a graduate-faculty tea and discovered she was also writing about Blake, whom she’d discovered while on her tour; she wanted to juxtapose his imagery with her experience and also with her brother’s. I invited her to come by during my office hours and she did. We talked about Blake and Iraq. We talked about our lives. When I told her about Velvet and the horses, tears welled in her eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “I never cry. But that is very moving.”

It wasn’t until a month or so into these conversations that I realized, while telling Polly about Velvet, I was using the pronoun I instead of we.