Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

“John, when I was eight, I dreamed about being a ballerina. It was a good dream for an eight-year-old.”

“What about now? What are your dreams?” A sly, sad look comes out of his eye like a tiny eye on a stalk, and he’s behind the camera again.

“My dream is being able to sleep and to stop my arm from hurting.” To stop traveling through the endless rooms that don’t have music or people in them anymore. “But John, you’ve got your dream; you’re living it. I can see it in your face!”

And he can see it, too, now that I say it. It’s something I can give him, something I hold out in warm arms. He talks about Lonnie and the baby again, how sometimes he’s scared he won’t make enough money for them, how he doesn’t want them to see he’s scared. Except he doesn’t come right out with that last part. I have to say it; he denies it, then says, “Maybe,” and looks off to the side, chewing.

“I just want our house to be a house of love,” he says.

“It will be,” I say. As long as you quit going mental about shit like one cigarette! I don’t say. We sit there together like satisfied animals, full of doughnuts. Maybe he hears what I don’t say and maybe he even listens; he pays me my hundred bucks for the month without checking to see what kind of job I did on the toilet. I say bye and walk out into the rain.

The air smells of gasoline, dirt, and trees; cars farting out of hot iron stomachs; and the fresh BO of nature. Down the street, there’s still a picket line out in front of the Nissan dealership, people standing in mud-colored rain slickers, their faces looking like crude sketches under their dripping hoods: brows, nose, lips, jowls. Clear plastic bags are tied over their signs, which read DON’T BUY FROM NISSAN. DON’T BUY FROM SCABS. Most of them trudge in a circle, like they are trudging through a ritual they no longer remember the meaning of but which they dimly believe is their only hope. Two others stand outside the circle, their plastic hoods thrown back, talking and laughing furious, face-crushing laughter as the rain pours down on their heads. They’ve been there a month. I try to catch somebody’s eye to wish them luck, like I usually do. But nobody looks up in the rain.

The endless beautiful rooms inside the songs — wander through them long enough and their beauty and endlessness become horrible. There is so much, you always want more, so you keep moving, traveling ever more quickly, until you can’t stop. Ten years ago, I used to see these kids running around in white makeup, sleeping in phony coffins, and paying dentists to give them vampire fangs. It was stupid, but it made sense, too. You want the endlessness to end; you want to go home, but there is no home. You despise the tender attachments of the liver and the body, but you also crave them; you bite other people in an attempt to find them, and when that doesn’t work, you bite yourself.

Veronica and I went once to see an exhibit of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. She wore a bright red leather jacket with buckled pockets, and she promenaded through the gallery in it, making loud approving comments on the work. She was talking so loudly, she didn’t notice the two giggling boys who followed us for a good half minute, mocking her officious gestures. We lost them in front of the famous self-portrait, in which Mapplethorpe crouches naked, his back to the camera, a bullwhip coming out of his ass like a tail, his face turned round with a triumphant leer. A woman standing behind us said in a voice of thrilled dismay, “I didn’t need to see that!” and Veronica turned on her like the Red Queen. “Then why did you come?” she snapped. “ I certainly didn’t need to see or to hear you.” The woman nearly stumbled trying to hide behind her husband, who was trying to hide behind her.

But when we walked out of the museum, Veronica began to cry incoherently. “Everything we did is being erased,” she said. “They’re denying it all. They’re taking it all away.” I was embarrassed; I didn’t understand. Now I understand.

So one minute I’m standing outside a strip bar with my basket, flickering in the marquee light, on and off, like a ghost trying to be real. Women’s naked asses, men’s naked faces. The bouncer hugs himself against the cold and says he’ll buy me some hot cashews. Then I’m in an airplane hurtling through gray clouds. The plane rattles like it will break, and the woman in the next seat moans with fear. Then I’m in the living room with my father. It’s like I crashed out of the clouds. Sara is upstairs, yelling at someone on the phone, and Daphne is in the kitchen, making dinner. We crash into one another; everything rattles and shakes like the airplane, only more, and we can’t hear one another even though we’re shouting.

When they picked me up in Newark, my father’s eyes were inward and methodical. He did not show the love he’d talked about on the phone. I didn’t, either. All the emotion was in Daphne’s eyes, big and shimmering, with so much hope in them, I wanted to punch her. Sara looked at me and then looked away quickly. She was getting fat. She was disappearing in plain sight. Her look made sure I was okay, then went back to concentrating on whatever she was hiding. When she turned in profile, I saw her nose had been broken. “How’d that happen?” I whispered to Daphne. “I don’t know. I don’t know when it happened. I just noticed it one day, and she yelled, ‘I don’t wanna talk about it!’ ” Daphne made Sara’s voice like a monster’s, like a stupid, crazy monster.

We drove home through a whooshing tunnel of traffic. It was dark, with bright signs and lights flying by. Daphne sat up front and talked light and fast, turning her head to scatter her words in the backseat and out the window, into the whooshing tunnel. Quarters, halves, whole squares of light flew through the back window and ran over her soft hair. Even when she talked to me and Sara, I felt a strand of her attention stay on our dad, like she was holding his hand. Sara sat deep inside herself, her hands together in her lap, holding the secret of her broken nose. Her calm animal warmth filled the backseat.

When we got home, my mother called. She said she was so happy to know I was there. Her voice ran and jumped, as if it were being chased by a devil with a pitchfork. “When are you going to enroll?” she cried. “I have to take the GED first,” I said. “I have to study.” “Well, I just think you’re great,” she said. She sounded like she was about to cry. My father stood in the next room, ramrod-straight and straining to hear.

Daphne made a special dinner of kielbasa sausage and baked beans, which I used to love but which now seemed so sad, I didn’t want it. But I ate it, and when my father asked, “Do you like it?” I said, “It’s good.” Sara picked out the sausage, glaring at it like she was really pissed. She ate the beans and went upstairs. “She’s a vegetarian now,” said Daphne. “Probably stuffing herself with candy,” said my dad. Van Cliburn played Tchaikovsky in the next room; in the dining room, the TV was on mute. The months in San Francisco were folded up into a bright tiny box and put down somewhere amid the notices and piles of coupons. I was blended into the electrical comfort of home, where our emotions ran together and were carried by music and TV images. Except for Sara’s — she couldn’t join the current. I don’t know why, but she couldn’t.

The next day, Daphne and I drove to meet our mom at a coffee shop in White Plains. We got there first and waited for her. It was a family place with tiny jukeboxes on the tables. Daphne turned the knob on our box, dully flipping through the selections—“You Are Everything,” “I Had Too Much to Dream,” “Incense and Peppermint,” “Close to You”—each a bit of black print inside a red rectangle. The people behind us picked one: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” The singer’s voice was light and gloppy at the same time, like a commercial for pudding. It had been popular when we were in elementary school, and the old recording gave off a dark, enchanted crackle. It made me think of teenage girls in bathing suits, lying in lawn chairs beside the public pool, eyes closed, breasts perfectly and synthetically cupped. Each blue wave sparkled with light. Boys shook water from their hair and looked at them. Daphne ran past, joyfully waving an inflated toy.