Mary Gaitskill: Don't Cry

I went to take Sonny from her, but the child refused; he hadn't let me hold him since I'd handed him off and run down the middle of the street and come back howling in pain. So I held his hand and walked out to the hall with him. Thomas walked out of the sun-shadowy water, stepping on his elegant pants, damp and sagging, and his shoes squishy wet, smiling as he handed me the dog's chewed-up ball, the dog, standing on its hind legs, dancing. With an ecstatic face, Sonny took the steps two at a time. Thomas's mother smiled and boarded the bus, the sun shining on her beautiful hair. Sonny looked up at me, gurgling with pleasure, forehead shining with effort. I stroked his hair. I thought of his mother's beaten face, her torn ears, her breasts hanging down. The child grabbed my hem with his tiny fist. Katya came back beaming, papers in her hand, her sweat rank and innocent.

That night, I dreamed Katya and I were in a small dark house of mud and thatch. Thomas was there, too, asleep on a dirty mat, and so was Sonny's mother, who was terribly sick. Katya kept trying to nurse the mother, to suckle her at her breast, but the woman couldn't hold her head up, and I kept wanting to say, Stop. It's ridiculous. She's the mother. But I was distracted by Thomas's mother in the next room, laughing as she played with Sonny; I was distracted, too, by gunfire, which came closer and closer. …

I woke in the dark with my heart pounding; I reached for my wedding rings on the table beside me.

“Katya,” I whispered, only half-expecting her to be awake, too.

She replied unintelligibly.

“When Sonny gets older, and he asks you about his mother, what are you going to tell him?”

She didn't answer. Shortly, she began to snore.

But the next day, when we were at the airport, she answered. She said, “If he asks, I'll tell him that his mother was a great woman. That she was a fighter, and because she had to fight so hard, she gave me her most precious child to keep him safe. Something like that. Here.” Without thinking, she handed me the baby, and bent to pick up her bag. I stiffened, expecting Sonny to protest. But he didn't; he reached for me. For the first time since I'd run down the street, Sonny let me hold him. I thrive, his body said to mine, I will thrive. I put my hand on the back of his head and held it to my shoulder, my cheek against his hair. It was time to go.

I would like to thank and acknowledge Pamela Laws, Tom Bissell, Maria Pallotta, Debra Losada, Beatrice Von Rezzori and Santa Maddalena, the MacDowell Colony, Jin Auh, Deborah Garrison, Deborah Treisman, Roger Hodge, Michael Ray, Eric Gottesman, Peter Trachtenberg, and especially my mother, Dorothy Jane Gaitskill. I am particularly grateful to Nuruddin Farah for his permission to use an excerpt from his novel Secrets in “The Agonized Face.”

Mary Gaitskill is most recently the author of Veronica , nominated for the National Book Award, and Because They Wanted To , which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998.