The Mare

Ginger

I met her when I was forty-seven, but I felt still young. I looked young too. This is probably because I had not done many of the things most people that age have done; I’d had no children and no successful career. I married late after stumbling through a series of crappy relationships and an intense half-life as an artist visible only in Lower Manhattan, the other half of my life being sloppily given over to alcohol and drugs.

I met my husband, Paul, in AA. I only went for about a year because I couldn’t stand the meetings, couldn’t stand the language, the dogma. They tried to make it sound like something else, but that’s finally what it was. Still, it helped me quit, no question. And I met Paul. It was six months before we even had coffee, but I immediately noticed his deep eyes, the animal eloquence of his hairy hands. He was fifty then, nearly ten years older than me, and still married, but living in the city separately from his wife. It made him nervous that I stopped coming to meetings, and though he’d never admit it, I think that tension gave our slow courtship a stronger charge. We eventually moved to a small town upstate, the same town he’d moved from, where he made a good living as a tenured professor at a small college. A lot of his income went to support his wife and daughter, and we lived in an old faculty housing unit long on charm and short on function. Not owning didn’t bother us though. We were comfortable, and for a long time we were happy with each other; we went out to eat a lot, and traveled in the summer.

When people asked me what I did I sometimes said, “I’m transitioning,” and very occasionally, “I’m a painter.” I was embarrassed to say the second thing even though it was true: I still painted, and it seemed like I was better than I was when I showed at a downtown gallery twenty years before. But I was embarrassed anyway because I knew I sounded foolish to people who had kids and jobs too, and who wouldn’t understand my life before I came here. There were a few — women who also painted at home — whom I was able to talk about it with, describe what art used to be to me, and what I wanted to make it be again: a place more real than anything in “real” life. A place I remember now just dimly, a place of deep joy where, when I could get to it, it was like tuning in to a radio frequency that was sacred to me. Regardless of anything else, nothing was more important than carrying that frequency on the dial of myself.

The problem was, other people created interference. It was hard for me to be close with them and to hear the signal at the same time. I realize that makes me sound strange. I am strange, more than the bare facts of my life would suggest. But I have slowly come to realize that so many people are strange, maybe the word is nearly meaningless when applied to human beings. Still, people interfered. And so I created ways to keep them at a distance, including my increasingly expensive habit. What I didn’t see, or allow myself to see, was that drugs created even more interference than people; they were a sinister signal all their own, one that enhanced and blended with, then finally blotted out, the original one. When that happened I got completely lost, and for many years I didn’t even know it.

By the time I got to AA, art had all but gone dead for me, and I credit my time in those stunned, bright-lit rooms for waking it up again.

When we finally moved out of the city, I began to feel the signal again, but differently. I felt it even when I was with Paul, which did not surprise me — he was not “other people.” But I began to feel it with other people too, or rather through them, in the density of families living in homes, going back for generations in this town. I would see women with babies in strollers or with their little children in the grocery store, and I would feel their rootedness in the place around us and beyond — in the grass and earth, trees and sky.

To feel so much through something I was not part of was of course lonely. I began to wonder if it had been a mistake not to have children, to wonder what would’ve happened if I’d met Paul when I was younger. The third time we had sex, he said, “I want to make you pregnant.” I must’ve had sex hundreds of times before, and men had said all kinds of things to me — but no one had ever said that. I never wanted anyone to say it; girlfriends would tell me a guy had said that and I would think, How obnoxious! But when Paul said it, I heard I love you. I felt the same; we made love and I pictured my belly swelling.

But I didn’t get pregnant. Instead my sister Melinda died. I know the two things don’t go together. But in my mind they do. My sister lived in Cleveland, Ohio. She had been sick a long time; she had so many things wrong with her that nobody wanted to think about her, including me. She was drunk and mean and crazy and would call saying fucked-up things in the middle of the night. When she was younger, she’d hung around with a sad-sack small-time biker gang, and now that she was falling off a cliff — my guess is they were too — they didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to talk to her either, but I would, closing my eyes and forcing myself to listen. I would listen until I could remember the feeling of her and me as little girls, drawing pictures together, cuddled on the couch together, eating ice cream out of teacups. Sometimes I couldn’t listen, couldn’t remember; she’d talk and I’d check my e-mail and wait for her to go away. And then she did.

She had a stroke while she was taking a shower. The water was still running on her when they found her a few days later. It was summer and her body was waterlogged and swollen. Still, I could identify her, even with her thin, tiny mouth nearly lost in her cheeks and chin and her brows pulled into an inhuman expression.

Paul went with me to clear out her apartment. I hadn’t been to visit her for at least a decade — she always preferred to visit me or my mother, and I could see why. Her apartment was filthy, full of old take-out containers, used paper plates and plastic utensils, boxes and bags crammed with the junk she’d been meaning to take out for years. Months’ worth of unopened mail lay on every surface. There was black mold on the walls. Paul and I stood there in the middle of it and thought, Why didn’t we help her? The obvious answer was, we had helped her. We had sent her money; we had flown her out to visit on Christmas. I had talked to her, even when I didn’t want to. But standing in her apartment, I knew it hadn’t been enough. She’d known when I hadn’t wanted to talk, which was most of the time. Given that, what good was the money?

“You did what you could,” said my mother. “We all did.” I wanted to say, You did what you could to destroy her, but she was crying already. I was glad I didn’t say anything; my mother died of a heart attack a month later. When my sister and I were teenagers, my mother had acted like Melinda was nothing but an aggravation who had contributed to the end of her marriage. But then she would play cards and clown around in the kitchen with her like she never did with me. Toward the end of her life, Melinda was always on the phone with our mom; she’d even pull over and call my mom on her cell if she was lost on her way to wherever she was going, which was often.

When the shock was still wearing off, I would go for long walks through the small center of town, out onto country roads, then back into town again. I’d look at the women with their children; I’d look into the small, beautiful faces and think of Melinda when she was like that. I’d imagine my mother’s warm arms, her unthinking, uncritical limbs that lifted and held us. Shortly after Melinda died our washing machine broke and I had to go to the Laundromat; I was there by myself and this song came on the radio station that the management had on. It’s a song that was popular in the ’70s about a girl and a horse who both die. I was folding clothes when I recognized it. The singer’s voice is thin and fake, but it’s pretty, and somewhere in the fakery is the true sadness of smallness and failure and believing in beautiful things that aren’t real because that’s the only way to get through. Tears came to my eyes. When Melinda was little, she loved horses. For a while, she even rode them. We couldn’t afford lessons, so she worked in a stable to earn them. Once I went with my mother to pick Melinda up from there, and I saw her riding in the fenced area beside the stable. She looked so confident and happy I didn’t recognize her; I wondered who that beautiful girl was. So did our mother. She said, “Look at her!” and then stopped short. They say she died one winter / When there came a killin’ frost / And the pony she named Wildfire busted down its stall / In the blizzard he was lost. It was a crap song. It didn’t matter. It made me picture my sister before she was ruined, coming toward me on a beautiful golden horse. She’s coming for me I know / And on Wildfire we’re both gonna go. I cried quietly, still folding the clothes. No one was there to see me.

It was a year later that I started talking about adoption. At first Paul said, “We can’t.” Although he didn’t say it, I think he was hurt that I hadn’t really tried to have his child, but now I wanted some random one. Also, his daughter from his first marriage, Edie, didn’t want to go to school where he teaches and he’d promised to pay her tuition at Brown after his ex-wife had thrown a fit about it. Even if money weren’t an issue, he didn’t think we would have the physical energy for a baby. “What about an older child?” I asked. “Like a seven-year-old?” But we wouldn’t know anything about the kid, he said. They would come fully formed in ways that would be problematic and invisible to us until it was too late.

We went back and forth on the subject, not intensely, but persistently, in bed at night and at breakfast. Months went by; spring came and the dry, frigid winter air went raw and wet, then grew full and soft. Paul’s eyes began to be soft when we talked too. One of his friends told him about an organization that brought poor inner-city kids up to stay with country families for a few weeks. The friend suggested it as a way to “test the waters,” to see what it might be like to have somebody else’s fully formed kid around.

We called the organization and they sent us information, including a brochure of white kids and black kids holding flowers and smiling, of white adults hugging black kids and a slender black girl touching a woolly white sheep. It was sentimental and flattering to white vanity and manipulative as hell. It was also irresistible. It made you think the beautiful sentiments you pretend to believe in really might be true. “Yes,” I said. “Let’s do it. It’s only two weeks. We could find out what it’s like. We could give a kid a nice summer, anyway.”