Mary Gaitskill - Don't Cry

Anna Lee didn't answer, but Laura could feel her become alert. Even in the dark, her eyes looked alert. Laura knew she should stop, but she didn't. “It was more a picture in my head,” she continued. “It was a picture of a woman's naked body that somebody was slashing with a knife. Daddy wasn't in the picture, but—”

“Oh for crying out loud!” Anna Lee put her hands over her face and turned away. “Just stop. Why don't you just stop.”

“But I didn't mean it to be—”

“He's not your enemy now,” said Anna Lee. “He's dying.”

Her voice was raw and hard; she thrust it at Laura like a stick. Laura pictured her sister at twelve, yelling at some mean boys who'd cornered a cat. She felt loyalty and love. “I'm sorry,” she said.

Anna Lee reached back and patted Laura's stomach with her fingers and half her palm. Then she withdrew into her private curl.

Laura lay awake through the night. Anna Lee moved and scratched herself and spoke in urgent, slurred monosyllables. Laura thought of their mother, alone upstairs in the heavy sleep brought on by barbiturates. Tomorrow, she would be at the stove, boiling Jell-O in case her husband would eat it. She didn't really believe he was dying. She knew it, but she didn't believe it anyway.

Carefully, Laura got out of bed. She walked through the dark house until she came to her father's room. She heard him breathing before her eyes adjusted to the light. His breath was like a worn-out moth feebly beating against a surface. She sat in the armchair beside his bed. The electric clock said it was 4:30. A passing car on the street filled the room with a yawning sweep of light. The wallpaper was covered with yellow flowers. Great-Aunt's old dead clock sat on the dresser. Great-Aunt was her father's aunt, who had raised him with yet another aunt. Two widowed aunts and a little boy with no father. Laura could see the boy standing in the parlor, all his brand-new life coursing through his small, stout legs and trunk. The dutiful aunts, busy with housekeeping and food, didn't notice it. In his head was a new solar system, crackling with light as he created the planets, the novas, the sun and the moon and the stars. “Look!” he cried. “Look!” The aunts didn't see. He was all alone.

Another car went by. Her father muttered and made noises with his mouth.

No wonder he hated them, thought Laura. No wonder.

Behind the reception desk, there were two radios playing different stations for each secretary. One played frenetic electronic songs, the other formula love songs, and both ran together in a gross hash of sorrow and desire. This happened every day by around 1:00 p.m. Faith, who worked behind the desk, said it was easy to separate them, to just concentrate on the one you wanted. Laura, though, always heard both of them jabbering every time she walked by the desk.

“Alice Dillon?” She spoke the words to the waiting room. A shabby middle-aged man eyed her querulously A red-haired middle-aged woman put down her magazine and approached Laura with a mild, obedient air. Alice was in for a physical, so Laura had to give her a preliminary before the doctor examined her. First, they stopped at the scale outside the office door; Alice took off her loafers, her socks, and her sweater to shave off some extra ounces. A lot of women did that, and it always seemed stupid to Laura. “Five four, one hundred and twenty-six pounds,” she said loudly.

“Shit,” muttered Alice.

“Look at the bright side,” said Laura. “You didn't gain since last time.”

Alice didn't reply, but Laura sensed an annoyed little buzz from her. She was still buzzing slightly as she sat in the office; even though she was small and placid, it struck Laura that she gave off a little buzz all the time. She was forty-three years old, but her face was unlined and her eyes were wide and receptive, like a much younger person's. Her hair was obviously dyed, like a teenager would do it. You could still tell she was middle-aged, though.

She didn't smoke, she exercised three times a week, and she drank twice weekly, wine with dinner. She was single. Her aunt had diabetes and her mother had ovarian cancer. She had never had an operation, or been hospitalized. Her periods were regular. She had never had any sexual partners. Laura blinked.

“Never?”

“No,” said Alice. “Never.” She looked at Laura as if she was watching for a reaction, and maybe holding back a smile.

Her blood pressure was excellent. Her pulse rate was average.

Laura handled her wrist and arm with unusual care. A forty-three-year-old virgin. It was like looking at an ancient sacred artifact, a primitive icon with its face rubbed off. It had no function or beauty but it still felt powerful when you touched it. Laura pictured Alice walking around with a tiny red flame in the pit of her body protecting it with her fat and muscle, carefully dyeing her hair, exercising three times a week, and not smoking.

When the doctor examined Alice, Laura felt tense as she watched, especially when he did the gynecological exam. She noticed that Alice gripped her paper gown in the fingers of one hand when the doctor sat between her legs. He had to tell her to open her legs wider three times. She said, “Wait, I need to breathe,” and he waited a second or two. Alice breathed with her head sharply turned, so that she stared at a corner of the ceiling. There was a light sweat on her forehead.

When she changed back into her clothes, though, she moved like she was in a women's locker room. She got up from the table and took off the paper gown before the doctor was even out of the room.

“She's probably really religious, or maybe she's crazy.” That's what Sharon, the secretary, thought. “In this day and age? She was probably molested when she was little.”

“I don't know,” said Laura. “I respected it.”

Sharon shrugged. “It takes all kinds.”

She imagined her father looking at the middle-aged virgin and then looking away with an embarrassed smile on his face. He might think about protecting her, about waving at her from across the street, saying, “Hi, how are you?” sending protection with his words. He could protect her and still keep walking, smiling to himself with embarrassed tenderness. He would have a feeling of honor and frailty but there would be something sad in it, too,

because she wasn't young. Laura remembered a minor incident in a novel she had read by a French writer, in which a teenage boy knocked an old nun off a bridge. Her habit was heavy and so she drowned, and the writer wondered, with a stupid sort of meanness, Laura thought, if the nun had felt shocked to have her genitals touched by the cold water. She remembered a recent news story about a nut job who had kidnapped a little girl so that he could tie her to a tree and set a fire around the tree. Then he went to his house to watch through binoculars as she burned. Fortunately, a neighbor called the police and they got there in time.

Instead of going back to the waiting room, she went to the public bathroom and leaned against the small windowsill with her head in her hands. She was forty; she tried to imagine what it would be like to be a virgin. She imagined walking through the supermarket, encased in an invisible membrane that was fluid but also impenetrable, her eyes wide and staring like a doll's. Then she imagined her virginity like a strong muscle between her legs, making all her other muscles strong, making everything in her extra alive, all the way up through her brain and into her bones.

She lifted her head and looked out the small window. She saw green grass and the tops of trees, cylindrical apartment buildings and traffic. She had not wanted her virginity She'd had to lose it with three separate people; her hymen had been stubborn and hard to break.