Mary Gaitskill: Don't Cry

On weekends, Patrick and Lily would sit around the kitchen for hours into the morning, cutting slices of rye bread for toast. After toast, they'd have tea and soft-boiled eggs, which Lily served in tiny porcelain eggcups with roses on them. Patrick would always finish his breakfast by peeling an orange or a grapefruit until every bit of white rind had been picked off it, then meticulously stripping the membrane off of each section with his teeth before eating it.

“You look like a kitten when you do that,” said Lily “A kitten playing with something.”

“He is a kitten,” said Dolores scornfully.

“Wash my dishes, slave,” said Patrick. Since Dolores couldn't stand the idea of work yet, Patrick paid her rent. Because of this, he tried to push her around a little. “Slave? The dishes.” He stretched his long neck out and grinned like a donkey.

“Give me some money, goon. I need cigarettes and medicine.”

“I gave you twenty dollars yesterday.”

“I need twenty more at least, fool.”

But she was as touched by his beauty as anyone. He was tall, but girlishly slim and narrow-built, with the sensitive, angular face of a greyhound, a face heightened piercingly by large transparent eyes and a full emotional lower lip. When he played the drums, he sat straight and earnest behind the set, his eyebrows furrowed, listening terribly hard to something only he could hear, and hitting with a thrilling fierceness that seemed to come from the center of his small chest. Girls loved him, which was why they were outraged to see him with a creep like Lily.

He twisted his pliant neck to one side, shifted his slender hips, and dug into his pocket. He handed Dolores ten dollars. She snatched it and stuck it in her pocket.

Mark lumbered into the room and, without turning his head, flickered his flat gray eyes at the three of them. He was a tall boy with wide, heavy hips and coarse hair that stood up on his head, giving his pale face a shocked expression. He went to the counter and began preparing his breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, and toast with mint jelly.

“Bernie Gahan called me last night,” said Dolores. “You know, from high school?”

“I remember,” said Patrick. “He was sort of a geek, wasn't he?”

“Who's he?” asked Lily, smearing slabs of butter over her hot toast.

“That guy I saw just before I went into the hospital. That store clerk, the one who fucked me in the ass.”

“I can't believe some of the things I hear in this house,” said Mark. He violently mixed his eggs around in their frying pan.

“He's crazy,” said Dolores. “The next morning, he had a fit when I put my coffee cup on his Village Voice. He said it proved how sick I was.”

“Why did you go out with him?” asked Lily.

Dolores shrugged. “I don't know. He was cool in high school, but now he's getting fat.”

“He was never cool,” said Patrick.

Lily looked at Dolores over her toast, munching solemnly Dolores could tell she wanted to hear more about Bernie Gahan.

“When he dropped me off at home, he put his finger on my nose and said, ‘Catch ya later, kid!’ God. I mean, I'm not a kid.”

“It's too bad for you that you're not,” said Mark. “The prognosis would be a lot better.” He sat on the edge of a chair with his feet together and paused over his eggs. “I think it's the ultimate hypocrisy, Pat, for a vegetarian to smoke.”

“Squeedle-de-bop,” said Patrick. He tipped his head back and blew a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling.

“Don't give me that. You may be a great drummer, but you're a slob.”

“And you're a grandmother,” said Dolores. “A sexually frustrated grandmother.”

“Just because sex isn't the be-all and end-all for me, Dolores.”

“If you ever had it, it would be the end-all,” said Lily.

“Why don't you try to seduce me, Dolores? Just try. I'll hurt your feelings.”

“The only thing you'd hurt is your reputation — wait, do you have one?”

“I could really hurt you, Dolores.”

Dolores doubted it. It would've made her feel better if she'd thought he could, but she knew he couldn't. She pushed through the papers and breakfast dishes and found her plastic bag of dried prunes. She picked through the prunes to find a soft one. “I saw your friend again,” she said to Mark.

“Which one? I actually have more than one friend.”

“The one who's going bald. The one who walks like a dinosaur.” She found a prune and began eating it.

“Was she mean to you again?” asked Lily.

Dolores nodded. “Yes. She was mean to me.”

“I'm sorry,” said Mark. “I don't know why she does that.”

“She's a bitch,” said Dolores. “Maybe she knows Allan and he told her something about me.”

“Do you sit in the Oasis and put on your false nails?” asked Patrick. He tipped his chair back until it stood on its hind legs. His T-shirt slid up and exposed his stomach, which he scratched.

“No. I don't put them on that early. Why?”

“A waitress might think they were disgusting. I wouldn't want to sit next to them. The glue stinks.”

The next time she went into the Oasis, she brought a box of Dragon Lady fingernails, and two bottles of red polish. After she got her coffee and rolls, with the usual trouble, she took out the box and laid the flesh-colored spears on the table so Teresa would notice them and wonder what the hell was going on. She got the glue and began working, periodically stopping to hold the claws up to dry.

Teresa didn't notice, but the guy at the next table did. “I didn't know anybody wore those things anymore,” he said.

“I do,” trilled Dolores in a hideously affected voice. “I'm naked without them.” Lily told her that she sometimes sounded like Blanche DuBois. She held up her taloned hands to her face and leered daintily.

“Oh, Dragon Lady,” he said, “have mercy.”

His friend laughed and scratched his beard.

I am a sexually potent woman, thought Dolores. Even if I am partially bald. During one of their last fights, Allan had said, “There's no love in you because there's no sex in you. Sex is light and fertility and life and communication! You only have this … pornography and submission and blackness and death! You're like a faggot!”

“You ass-wipe,” she muttered. She couldn't help it if fertility didn't interest her in the abstract. It did interest her in the real. “Do you want to have children?” she asked the man next to her.

“Yeah, one day Why?”

“Because I like to hear people say they want children. That's what would make me happy, I think, to have children. My roommate is beautiful and she's not interested in having children.”

“Your roommate is an idiot, that's why.”

Sasha thumped against Dolores's table. She was a fat girl, and her fat was like the fur of a Persian cat. Her eyes were arrogantly flat and brown-gold, rimmed with black kohl. She wore a purple skirt with a gold hem and long green stockings with ducks on them. Of Patrick's friends, she was chief among the Lily haters. “How are you, darling?” she said.

“Bothering somebody. How are you?”

“I'm eating. I'm going from house to house eating my brains out. Now I'm here to get some home fries off the cook. It's the first day I've eaten in two weeks and I'm going to make the most of it.”

“Where's George?”

“I don't know, getting chemotherapy.” She sneered in an affected way that Dolores found absurd but exciting. “I don't know where the hell he is and I'm tired of people asking me. That's all I hear everywhere I go. ‘Is she the one who's having an affair with George Hammond? Are they still together?’ Are there any home fries, Eddie baby? With catsup and mayonnaise? Come sit by me and let me play with the hair on your chest. Only don't talk to me about George Hammond. I don't have anyplace to live. I lost my job at the art school and I couldn't pay my rent. I'd come stay with you except for your creepy roommate.”