The Mare

Velvet

The week before school, Dante put on a pair of pants but his ass was too big and they split when he moved. We all laughed and my mom said, “What am I going to do with my little piglet?” and pinched his arm. But she got mad when I tried on my favorite blouse from last year and couldn’t button it across my chest. She cursed and said she couldn’t afford to buy us new clothes, why couldn’t we make anything last. So we tried on all our clothes for school. She cursed again, but sad, not mad. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “We have to go to the ragpicker’s.”

By that she meant a church in Bushwick that had charity clothes in brown boxes or hung up on metal racks. They hardly had anything good. The best thing for me was a red sweater that was too big, but my mom said anyway, it would last. Also she picked out matching yellow sweatshirts for us that were brand-new but stupid, with pictures of whales on them. And a T-shirt for Dante that said “I’m the Big Sister,” and she didn’t even know, and neither did he because he didn’t care about reading even if he knew how. I started to tell them, but Dante was acting like such a mal nacido that I decided he would be wearing it to school.

Early the next day I went to my cotton-ball box in the closet and got out pictures of Ginger and the horses and picked the ones I would paste on my notebook for school. I would put the ones with ponies on the outside and the ones with Joker and Reesa on the inside so my mom wouldn’t see them. Though she never looked at the pictures anyway. I just put them in my box in the closet and she never said anything.