The Mare

Ginger

“Never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled.”

I sat in the dark watching last years’s footage of John McCain talking outside a church in New Orleans. Fast forward to now: there’s still crap from broken houses on the sidewalks, and signs for mold removal on telephone poles. What will Obama do?

Paul was cooking in the kitchen, making pasta with the swordfish from last night. I was drinking wine, but he didn’t dare say anything. The night I slapped him we did it for the first time in months; he was not going to say anything. Yet.

The phone rang and I got up slowly. Last year, of course, the house defied the president, preventing the administration from cutting federal spending for the poor. Halfway up the stairs, I heard Velvet’s voice come on the machine; the poor, my poor, my poor kid. I thought of her friend, the cruel child in the see-through shirt — Strawberry — stranded on her roof with rising water all around. When I got upstairs, her voice was saying something about her mother changing her mind; I grabbed the phone.

“Changed her mind about what?”

“About the competition. She says I can do it.”

“That’s so great,” I said. “Why did she change her mind?”

“Ah dunno. She’s just like that sometimes…”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“I am.”

For a strange and active moment I felt my house close around me — water pipes and wires and slow-speaking wood with insects living in it, wallpaper and rugs and furniture, emotions and odors, the air beating with thoughts — and all of it, all of me so far away from the girl on the other end of the phone, even though she had slept and ate and cried here.

Downstairs Paul went, “Ginger?”

“You don’t sound happy,” she said, and I felt it coming from her side too: her apartment, her family, her friends, the street outside — the things she never told me but that I could feel in the warm electronic phone dark where the voice is tactile and subtle as an animal.

“I am really happy that you’re going to do it,” I said. “Your mom needs to sign the permission though, like now.”

“You can send it, she’ll sign.”

“That’s great. Is she going to come?”

“Ginger, dinner’s ready.”

She said yes, in the smiling voice she used for lying, and I believed it for the same reason she told it; because believing made the good thing real for a second.