The Mare

Ginger

Back when she still talked about Strawberry, I asked her, “What’s she like?” Velvet smiled and said, “Like every girl.” I said, “What’s every girl like?” She answered, “Like, they see a boy and they see heaven.” I smiled at her twelve-year-old coolness; I hoped she’d hold on to it. But at thirteen she’d lost it already. I could feel the loss of it: in her sudden attention to romantic movie scenes, in the music she played on her princess boom box, in her soft, suddenly yearning eyes. I asked, “Honey, are you in love?” We were in the car, coming back from Pat’s place, and she took her time answering. She said, “I like somebody. A lot.”

Michael: his finger to his lips. “Shhh.” Sweet like high school, middle school even.

I said, “It almost hurts, doesn’t it?” She glanced at me — face grateful and shining — then away.

—

It did hurt the first time I “liked” someone, mostly because he didn’t like me back. I remember telling my mother and she said, “What do you like about him?” I blushed; the only things I could think of were the way he smelled and the sound of his voice, the expression on his face when he thought no one saw.

“What kind of person is he?” she asked.

“Nice.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know him. You can’t like somebody if you don’t know him.”

I said I knew he was nice because he looked away and didn’t join when his friends laughed at the ugly girl.

I didn’t tell her about the time I bumped into him on purpose, because I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to talk, but I didn’t know what to say, I just looked at him, hoping he would say something. Which was, “Get out of the way, dope.”

She shook her head. “Sex. That’s all it is. I hope to God you’re not going like Melinda.”

But I was nothing like Melinda. Boys liked Melinda. She always knew what to say. She always seemed like she was moving even when she was just standing with her hand on her hip, like her skirt was swinging though it wasn’t. When I was in elementary school and she was in middle school, I asked her what happened when you liked a boy. She said, “It’s like when you see him you feel this big warmth and he does too. It’s like there’s nobody else there. Except when you slow-dance together too long and you know you stink and then you wish he wasn’t there!”

Warmth; stink. My sister was natural. I was not. I didn’t feel warmth, I felt painful burning and tenderness so big it made me want to run and hide because how could something so soft live with such burning? Of course boys didn’t like me. Burning and stunned, I hid inside myself, stiff as a glass doll. Melinda went outward, smiling and warm.

Smiling and warm. Why was she hurt? She rode horses, she sat with her legs confidently open, she made funny animal noises in class sometimes. Her first year in high school, she was so popular that when my friends came over, they asked to look in her room, then stood at the threshold, peering in as if awed. Our father adored her. When we would go in the car as a family, Melinda sat up front with Daddy, her hand and her head on his chest, while Mom and I sat in the back. Two years later, she ran off with an older guy who worked at the barn. When the police found her, it was determined by somebody that she be sent to a mental hospital for evaluation. After two months at the “place” she came back still-faced and watchful. She returned to school and people who used to be her friends picked on her while I pretended not to notice. She got fat and hung out with skanks. Our mother called her a pig loud enough for the neighbors to hear. My father was gone by then, so there was no one to stop her. When Melinda shouted back, my mom would try to hit her, but Melinda was bigger; she warded off the weak blows just by raising her arms, yelling, “Mom, cut it out!” Sometimes my mom cried, and when that happened my sister would run from the house with her hands over her ears. My mother would walk around angrily praising me for not being “a pain in the ass.” Eventually Melinda would come back and stomp upstairs, or sometimes play cards with my mom, while I watched TV in the den with my homework in my lap.

Why did these things happen? I can understand why I was hurt; glass begs to be smashed. But why her? Why?