Mary Gaitskill: Don't Cry

And because it is chaos, there are moments when the woman's mind slips through the bullying order of the music and the assault of the men. There are many trapdoors in personality and obsession, and she blunders down some of them — even though she doesn't realize that she has done so. Like the killer, she is now able only to occupy her surface because extraordinary physical demands are being made on her surface. By turning herself into a fucking machine, she has created a kind of temporary grid. But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand.

What no one would guess about this woman who is having intercourse with a thousand men: She is afraid of men. Her father was a weak, ineffectual man; his own weakness enraged him, and so his daughter grew up surrounded by his silent, humiliated rage. Her mother smothered her own strength in order to make her father look strong; that didn't work, so the girl grew up with her mother's rage, too. She had no way to put male and female together inside herself without rage. This is the core of her fear. Her fear is so great that she cannot afford to recognize it. It is so great that it has taken on a thrilling sexual charge. Because the woman is courageous by nature, she has always gone directly toward what she most fears. When she began to have sex with boys, it was as if she were picking up a doll marked “Girl” and a doll marked “Boy” and banging them together, hoping to unite herself. As she grew older, the woman inside her became more insatiable and the man became more angry. He became angry enough to kill.

Because this woman is decent, she will not kill. But in deep sleep, she dreams of terrible men. In the worst of these dreams, the men rape and murder women over and over again and they cannot be stopped. The dreams are so terrible that the woman forgets them before she wakes. But they are still part of her: the male who would kill and the female he wants to kill. Deep inside, she is still trying to bring them together. And for one moment, down a special trapdoor, she has found a way. If the corporeal murderer who appeared on the talk show had been fucking the marathon woman at this moment, he might've had a feeling of anxiety: For she has entered the deep place of sex and it is not a place the killer wants to be. This is a place without form or time. There can be no grid here. Even the shape of his closed heart will no longer hold; it will be forced to open. Sorrow, terror, hate, love, pity joy: All human feeling will come in and he will be unable to bear it. He will dissolve. His killing nature will be stripped to abstract movement, a bursting surge overtaking the weaker prey, the principle of pouncing and eating. In this place, all pouncing and eating are contained, because this place contains everything. This place is her ovaries and her eggs, bejeweled with moisture, the coarse, tough flowers sprouting in her abdomen, the royal, fleshy padding of her cunt. Some people say that nature is like a machine. But this is not a machine. This is something else.

When male turtles fuck, they thrust deep inside their mates, they stretch out their necks, they throw back their heads, and they scream. They don't have to drop through trapdoors or travel down layers. They are already there. Animals want to live because they are supposed to. But they know death better than a human killer. Life and death are in them all the time.

The marathon woman is more than halfway through, and she is tired. You are tired, too, just from thinking about it. The theme from Chariots of Fire is on the sound system, but you are hearing a very old song from the Industrial Age called “John Henry” It is about a steel driver of great strength who outperformed the machine invented to replace him. He won, but in doing so, he died. The song ends, “He laid down his hammer and he died.” This song is not about sex or about women. The marathon woman is not going to die, nor is she going to win. She has no hammer to lay down. But she is like John Henry anyway because she is trying to make herself into a machine. A machine can never be hurt or raped or killed. But no matter how she tries, she will not succeed in becoming a machine. Because she is something else.

Laura was walking around her apartment in a flannel nightgown with green-and-yellow flowers on it, muttering, “Ugly cunt, ugly cunt.” It was a bad habit that had gotten worse in recent months. She caught herself muttering while she was preparing her morning coffee and made herself stop. But it's true, she thought to herself. Women are ugly She immediately thought of her sister, Anna Lee, making herself a chicken-salad sandwich to have with a glass of milk. Anna Lee was not beautiful, but she wasn't ugly, either. She thought of her mother, frowning slightly as she sat at her kitchen table, drawing a picture of fruit in a dish. If anyone had said “ugly cunt” to her sister or her mother, Laura would have hit him. She would hit anyone who said it to almost any of her friends. Well, she didn't really mean it when she said it. At least not in the normal way.

She put her foot up on the table and drank her coffee out of a striped mug the size of a little bowl. She had to be at her job at the medical clinic in half an hour; she wasn't even late, and still, her body was racing inside. Even though she'd been at the clinic for five years, every morning her body worked like the crew of a sinking ship, when all she had to do was get out the door in the morning. This was even truer since her father had died. The death had turned her inside herself. Even when she was in public, talking to people, or driving through traffic, or carrying forms and charts and samples in the halls of the clinic, she dimly sensed the greater part of herself turned inside, like a bug tunneling in the earth with its tiny sensate legs. All through the earth was the dull roar of unknown life-forms. She could not see it or hear it as she might see and hear with her human eyes and ears, but she could feel it with her fragile insect legs.

She finished her coffee and got out the door. Houston in the summer was terribly hot and humid, and the heat made her feel grossly physical. She gave a tiny grunt to express the feeling; it was the kind of grunt her cat made when she lay down and settled in deep. She opened her car; there were cassettes and mixed trash on the floor and the passenger seat, and she thought there was a sour smell coming from somewhere. She let the air conditioner run with the door open, sitting straight up in the seat with her legs parted wide under her tented uniform skirt.

Across the street, there was a twenty-four-hour flower market in an open shack; she could dimly see the proprietor inside, wiping his brow with a rag. He looked like he was settled deep into something, too.

Last night, she had dreamed of two men in a vicious fight. At first, they had been playing basketball. One of them seemed the apparent winner; he was tall, handsome, and well developed, while his opponent was short and flabby. Watching the game, Laura felt sorry for the little one. Then the game became a fight. The men rolled on the ground, beating each other. The little flabby one proved unexpectedly powerful, and soon he had the tall, handsome man pinned on the ground. As Laura watched, he pulled out a serrated knife and began to cut the top of the handsome man's skull off. The handsome man screamed and struggled. Laura ran to them and took the knife away from the small man. He pulled out another knife and tried to stab her. She cut him open from his neck to his crotch. He remained standing, but blobs of brown stuff fell from his opened body.

Laura lit a cigarette and closed the door. Her father had been a small man. When he was younger, he would strike boxing poses in front of the mirror, jabbing at his reflection. “I could've been a bantamweight,” he'd said. “I still have some speed.”