The Mare

Ginger

Sometimes the three of us would do things together; sometimes Velvet would go off alone with Paul and work in the garden with him, or just do an errand, like accompany him to the hardware store. But mostly it was her and me together. We would go to the mall, make dinner together, see movies, take long walks at night and talk about “private things.” I tried to get her to draw, but she was too scared of doing something wrong; reluctantly, she made cliché cats (ovals with tails and ears) and pigs, a few dull, dutiful flowers. They were the drawings of a five-year-old trying not to be messy. But I told her they were beautiful and although she probably knew that wasn’t really what I thought, she smiled. At night Paul and I would both sit on her bed and read to her and her eyes would go from alert to enchanted to blurred, sweet and private as she slowly stepped down into sleep.

Her presence made everything special: a cheese sandwich cut into four pieces, carrots sliced the way my mother used to serve them, her special towel with pink flowers on it, the soap I got for her with a plastic horse in it, her favorite radio station when we drove to the store. The glow on her face when I served her breakfast and said, “There you go, Princess.” The order of the house, which before I took for granted, now looked to me like something alive and full of goodness when I got up every morning and found the dishes she and I had washed in the drainer, the fruit in the bowl, the cereal and bacon ready to be cooked and eaten by somebody besides me and Paul.

It was like we were both living a dream we had known from television and advertisements and children’s books, a dream that neither of us had believed in yet had both longed for without knowing it. A dream in which love and happiness were the norm.

I know this was a dream for her, because of the way she responded to idealized movies and songs. I know because I found out she’d lied to create an ideal picture for me — or at least a nice one. I found out because she told me one night when we were walking in the neighborhood behind the campus, listening to the sounds of crickets and frogs, of kids playing in the street and families in their homes. It was just dark, and I couldn’t see her face, but I heard the embarrassment in her voice; I heard the trust. She reminded me of the time we’d first met, and she told me what her grades were.

“I don’t really get 3’s and 4’s,” she said. “I just told you that.”

“What do you get?”

“Ones and 2’s. Ones mostly.”

I remembered how she’d said “1, you got nothing.” We walked quietly for a moment and then, in a lower voice, she said, “I even got held behind in third grade. I should be going into middle school in the fall and I’m not.”

“Do you want to do better?” I asked. “Do you want to go to middle school next fall?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like me to help you? Work with you on the phone with your homework?”

She said yes again. I could hear that she was smiling in her voice.

I didn’t tell her about the conversation I’d had with her mother. I saw no reason to.