Mary Gaitskill: Don't Cry

“Lily's not so creepy You'd like her if you actually knew her.”

“Is it true she bangs her head on the wall?”

“She might.”

“Do you know what she said to me the last time I saw her? She was talking to John Francis about how, when she was fourteen, she used to want plastic surgery to change her lips and her eyebrows, and she turned to me and said, ‘If you could get plastic surgery, what would you do?’ Jesus Christ!”

“She didn't mean you should get plastic surgery.”

“What are you doing to your nails?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, here's my home fries. Thanks, honey. Open your shirt. See you, Dolores. My life's in a shambles.”

Dolores drank her coffee with even more sobriety Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores.

Sasha was sitting at the counter now, fondling the thin blond cook through his faded shirt, and skillfully nipping up mayonnaise-and-catsup-drenched fries, three fries at a time, with her pinkie extended. She was yelling about George Hammond. What would happen to Sasha? She almost had a degree in Russian, specializing in literature — but then she'd dropped out. Since then, she had been mulling around Ann Arbor in garish skirts and boots, sitting in bars and cafés gossiping all day.

Dolores was the same way, except that the degree she almost had was in history, and rather than gossiping in bars and cafés, she merely sat in them.

Teresa coursed by like a shark, her low forehead predominant as a snout. Dolores felt impotent detestation. Teresa saw the false fingernails, now standing out from Dolores's hands like evil thoughts. Dolores stared at her nails, like a sea blob heaved up on a hot beach, dimly realizing that its soft, flat flippers won't help it get back into the water. Teresa sneered and began scribbling on her little gray pad. She ripped off Dolores's check and threw it at her, mumbling something about needing more table space.

Was strength the ability to make someone leave a restaurant, mostly because they couldn't bear to be in your presence anymore? Was it being big and loud and going to a bar with other big loud people and making more noise than anyone else there? Insulting someone? People insulted Lily often, and though she pretended not to be affected, Dolores knew she was hurt by it. But she couldn't stop them from doing it. Did that mean she was weak? On the other hand, Dolores sometimes pushed Patrick around and all he did was say “Dolores!” But he was a promising actor and a successful musician, and she was a flop.

She sweated wonderfully as she ran around the gym. Every day there were lots of other people sweating around the track with her, in headbands and sweatsuits. They were all trying to be strong. The day before, in the checkout line at Kresge's, Dolores had overheard a girl with pounds of wavy blond hair and bulging calf muscles say to her friend, “And I'm getting up every day and running!” like it was the best thing ever.

Anyone would do anything to be stronger. In the gym next to the track, college students took karate classes. Little teenage girls padded out of the dressing rooms in their white karate uniforms, some of them wearing small gold chains and nail polish. She could hear the instructor yelling at them. “Everyone wants to have control!” he shouted. “And to have control, you have to fight for it, work for it!”

Lily and Patrick were obsessed with working. Whenever you asked Lily how she was, she would either say that she was good, she'd been very productive, or that she was awful, she'd been so unproductive. All night, they would sit at the kitchen table eating toast and working on their projects. Lily had her work for school and her articles for local papers and magazines, and Patrick had his rehearsals and homework, plus his music to write. Lily worked with her long legs drawn up under her and her shoulders in a curl; Patrick sat on his tailbone, his legs spread and his cotton shirt open, his head hanging from his neck like a heavy flower.

After she ran, she stopped by Majik Market to shoplift several eyeliner pencils and a box of peanut brittle. Then she went home to share the candy with Lily. They sat at the kitchen table and ate big slabs of it out of the open box.

“People have told me that my sexuality is death-oriented,” said Dolores, crunching her mouthful of candy.

“People have dumb ideas about sex,” said Lily. “How long have you been having sex?”

“Twelve years.”

“If your sexuality was death-oriented, you'd be dead by now.” She was picking through the candy; it looked funny to see her serious face bent over it.

“Well, they didn't mean literal death. They meant death in the abstract.”

“There's no such thing as death in the abstract. You're dead or you're not.” Lily's hand dived into the box and emerged with a nut-encrusted chunk. “You can't have a facsimile of death.” She leaned back in her chair like Patrick and popped the candy into her mouth. She sucked on it, her face slowly becoming tranquil.

“How do you know that if you don't know what death is like?” Dolores ran her tongue over her molars and found them coated with gnawed candy.

Dolores often wanted to die, even though she didn't know what it was like, either. Allan used to tell her about the recurring nightmares he had, in which his father humiliated him sexually He said it was the same thing as dreaming about death. Dolores thought that if to be humiliated was to be dead, she would be decomposed beyond recognition. But she was crazily alive, stuffed with blood and muscles, going to the bathroom regularly, having conversations.

If she were dead, her blood wouldn't suffer the pain of struggling to sing while life's constant attack made it hurt to move in her veins at all. Why couldn't people be nice? Why did you go into a restaurant and get attacked by a bitch who hated you for no reason? Why did Allan's friends, when they saw her, look at her with that vague leer and the concern they thought they should have for a disturbed older woman, the expression that felt like a razor across her face? Allan's friends were young and loud, their bodies hideously forceful in the occupation of space. Even though he was in art school, most of them were law students, always apparently happy and grabbing. Just the sight of them, with their rough, healthy skin and big legs and heavy, porous head hair made her feel horrible, especially when one of them cornered her and tried to be nice. Sometimes she encouraged it, and she was always sorry later.

She remembered a time she'd met one of them at a student party She and Allan had broken up a few days before. She was fairly drunk and slumped on a couch with a few kids whom she could no longer remember except as a mass of T-shirts and long hair. She was staring at a group of people stomping their way through a dance in the middle of the room. Harvey approached her and shouted through the music that he wanted to walk her home. She chattered to him all the way to her apartment, some grim inner monitor manipulating her shrill babble to impress him with her normality her happiness. She told him about her projects, her courses at school. He made his voice go gentle; he touched her elbow, put a hand on her shoulder. They sat on her front porch steps, watching ants run in and out of their grainy little nest in the crack of the second step. He was very careful with the way he talked to her; he wanted to show that he respected her. He talked about books and art. He asked her, “But seriously, what is your favorite Faulkner novel?”

Alan had said, “I don't like people who feel sorry for themselves. In the past, I have had the patience of Job with weak and neurotic women. Not anymore.”