The Mare

Ginger

There is a graveyard in the next town over that I like a lot. It’s small and very old, full of thin, crumbling stones so decrepit the names and dates are worn away, slanting sideways or lurching back, some with pieces broken off. There are few big display plots, just these plain, mostly anonymous stones from the 1880s. The living have worn a path through the grass on their way to the drugstore or the parking lot or the diner on the main street — where I’m going to meet Kayla for coffee.

I walk slowly, reading the few legible stones and feeling the gentle humor of the ground beneath me. As you are now, so once was I / As I am now, so you will be / Prepare for death and follow me—somebody who died in 1803 wanted his stone to say that. Numbly I smile and wonder how it will be on my deathbed to remember that when I was forty-eight years old I acted in a performance of A Christmas Carol with children wearing pajamas and bonnets, and that a Dominican family came from Crown Heights to see it. Where will Velvet be then? What will she remember of our time together? I remember when I talked to her about our periods, and I said, “You’re coming up and I’m going down.” How she smiled.

Prepare for death and follow me. Church bells ring.

Yes, I am going down. Like every human will, like every woman in particular, as her body splutters and gives out. Nothing wrong with Velvet’s satisfaction in the contrast. Maybe my whiteness gives it double meaning, double triumph for her. Whatever. I’m going down anyway, my husband going after somebody younger even as he protests his love. No wonder Becca hates me, Paul left her when she was about my age. He didn’t leave her for me, but I am almost ten years younger and must’ve seemed like a replacement.

A replacement: Michael. The fever-feeling of youth coming up inside me, suddenly animated like a cartoon trying to become human. Sparkling dreams of passion and tenderness unlimited by time and its wounds — stupid for any woman my age to dream of such things. But I did dream, so how can I complain about “cheating”? I didn’t get physical with Michael, or at least not genital; we made out like kids. But I tried to start it up again with him; for days, weeks, I e-mailed with him, trying to make it happen again even as he lost interest.

I stop on the edge of the graveyard, paralyzed with sadness and loss. It’s dead now, my adolescent longing, and even so I can’t help but press it against my cheek one more time, hoping to bring it alive again. Paul is flawed but alive and here I am still rubbing this dead thing on my face — why? How did this dead thing come up out of the past and eat my happiness? Why did I allow it?

I walk out onto the parking lot. People pass me and our eyes do not meet. What will I tell my friend? Nothing. Just that Paul and I are having trouble. It doesn’t matter why I allowed it; I did, and so did he, and now nothing will be good again. I am finished. Except for Velvet. Velvet and the horse. Even though she is so aloof now and doesn’t tell me anything. Even though Paul is right, everyone is right, the whole coarse world is right: I can’t even be her pretend mother. I give in. I agree. I’m over. It is what it is. But I can still get her on that fucking horse. I can help her win.