The Mare

Ginger

Maybe two weeks after Velvet went home, Ms. Rodriguez called me. She wanted to know if Paul and I could come to the school as chaperones for a class trip to the Statue of Liberty. I was thrilled for the chance, and even Paul was sorry he couldn’t come because of teaching.

But when the day came, the weather was so bad that the trip was canceled. Since I was already in the city — I’d spent the night with a friend — the principal invited me out anyway, just to visit. She said it would be a treat for Velvet to see me, that they were going to make it a surprise for her. They arranged for it to be at the end of the day, during the last class. I was sad that I had to go through a metal detector and show ID to a security officer to get into an elementary school. But mostly I was happy and awkward, wondering what it would be like to see Velvet in class.

When I walked into class, though, it didn’t feel awkward at all; it was easy for me to smile at these kids, to be sweet-voiced and gentle. “You know Velvet?” one asked, suspicious but also interested. “How?”

“She came up to visit me this summer,” I said. “And I thought she was so great, I had to see her again.” The kid looked at me, amazed.

Turning slightly to one side, I whispered to Ms. Rodriguez, “So where is Velvet?” Because I had not seen her.

The woman gave me a strange look and said, “She’s right there.” She pointed at a furious-looking girl seated apart from everyone else, her head down and her hair brutally straightened, fried-and-dyed, a horrible red color that had to have been a mistake. She looked like a completely different person than she did when she came to see me; it was like there was a sign over her head reading “Come close and I will fuck you up.”

She didn’t even seem to know I was in the room, so I talked a little more to the other kids, asked them what they were working on that day. She still didn’t look up. Finally Ms. Rodriguez said it was time for them to pay attention to the lesson. They more or less looked down at their notebooks and I approached Velvet’s desk. She didn’t look up even when I was right next to her. What would she do, curse me?

“Velvet,” I said. “Hi.”

She smiled, but not at me. She just sat there smiling at the scribbled-up paper on her desk.

I said, “How are you, honey?”

Finally she looked at me, still smiling. “Hi,” she said.

I sat next to her and tried to help her with the lesson. Which was hard because I couldn’t do the lesson; it was too fast. The teacher would write something on the board, a subject like, say, spending the night at a friend’s house, and ask them to write half a page about it. Then ten minutes later — while Velvet was still on sentence two — she would switch, reading to them out of a book and asking them to write a paragraph responding to what they’d just heard. It was not how I’d learned, and I wanted to say, Stop! Can’t you see this is too fast for anybody to feel anything, and how can they write if they can’t feel first? Don’t you know this girl needs to feel?

On top of that, I could see how strange it was for her to have me there, I could feel her body going back and forth on whether or not it was a good thing. This happened especially when another kid would turn and glance at us with an intense, curious face. Something was happening in the room that I didn’t know about, and whatever it was, that’s what Velvet’s intelligence was working on, or trying to feel her way through. The teacher’s suggestions were something she had to feel through too, and to do that she needed time to change the channel. I would’ve needed to do that too, and there wasn’t any time being allowed.

“It’s too fast for me too,” I whispered to her.

“Really?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Then why can everybody else do it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.” And I really didn’t. I thought, Great. Now she’ll think we’re both just stupid. Then I thought, Who cares, if this is supposed to be smart?