The Mare

Ginger

The next week was made of tense, beautiful days, in my memory a blur of summer sights and smells: the thick flowers of the azalea bush crushed against the house, fresh-cut grass, Paul on his knees in the dark, fertilized dirt, the manure of the horse barn, barbecue sauce, the roller coaster at the Dutchess County Fair, her hair in my mouth, Paul’s arms around me, the pink and yellow shacks of the flimsy fairway, our drooping plates loaded with sugared food, the heaped odors of jammed wastebaskets, the tossing cars, the roaring sludge of songs and carnie calls, Velvet’s eyes on the rodeo girls her age and younger, parading on decorated show ponies, the feel of her mind going deep and intense.

I worked to give her all of this, like I was handing her each piece and going, “See? See?” I devoured it all with her and still was hungry for more. And so was she; with all of this, she could still wander into the dining room, slump into a chair, and theatrically drawl “Ahhm bored.” At the grocery store, I once returned to the cart after looking for and finding a special sauce she had requested and she said to me, “I’m going to make you run around this store until you get everything I want.” And I went and put the sauce back on the shelf. “You won’t get anything with that attitude,” I said. Her face fell, and she said, “Sorry.”

I saved that moment. I did the right thing. I was the adult. But I never knew from one moment to the next if I was or not. Being this kind of adult was like driving a car without brakes at night around hairpin turns. My body tensed and relaxed constantly. I was always nearly ruining dinner or forgetting to pick something up. I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to drink — really wanted to, for the first time in years. Was this what parenting was like, 24/7? My God, how did anyone do it? How did her mother do it, in a foreign country, in a bad neighborhood where she didn’t speak the language?