Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

It was in Ohio that I developed what my mother came to call my “unattractive habits.” First, I stopped brushing my teeth, except on rare occasions. All at once, I hated putting the paste-laden brush into my nice warm mouth and scraping the intriguing texture of food from my teeth, annihilating the rich stew of flavors, the culinary history of my day, and replacing it with the vacuous mint-flavored aftertaste, the empty cavern of impersonal ivory. So I did it as infrequently as possible, even though the girl down the street called me “green teeth.” In addition, I began giving in to gross and unhealthy cravings: candy bars, ice cream, cookies, sugar in wet spoonfuls from the bowl, Hershey’s syrup drunk in gulps from the can, Reddi Wip shot down my throat, icing in huge fingerfuls from other people’s pieces of cake. Like my mother’s presence at night, it was never enough, and no threats or shaming lectures could stop me. The most offensive habit, at least according to my mother, was my way of deftly peeling back the edge of one nostril and delicately stroking the soft hairs inside. “If you do that in public,” said my mother, “no one will want to be your friend. They’ll think you’re a nose-picker.” I tried to wait until I was alone to feel the tiny hairs, but sometimes I would emerge from a daydream in, say, the middle of the A&P, to find a hand blissfully at a nostril.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized I’d gotten this hair-stroking habit from my father, who did it as he absently wandered the house.

When Justine was seven , she ordered the Catholic boy who lived down the street to tie her to his swing set and pretend to brand her, as she had seen Brutus do to Olive Oyl on TV. Sometimes she made him chase her around the yard with a slender branch, whipping her legs.

His name was Richie, and she remembers he was Catholic because his mother, faceless in memory, told her that if she lied there’d be a sin on her soul and she’d have to go to hell.

“Mrs. Slutsky is a good woman, but she is ignorant,” said Justine’s mother. “You must be kind and respectful to her, but don’t listen to anything she says.”

But Justine liked listening to Mrs. Slutsky talk about hell and encouraged her to do so every Saturday morning when she went to play with Richie. The Slutskys’ apartment was close and ramshackle. Once Justine put her finger on the wall and dirt came off on it; she felt like she was in a story about poor people. She loved the picture of the beautiful doe-eyed Jesus with a dimly flaming purple heart wrapped in thorns adorning the middle of his chest which hung in Mrs. Slutsky’s bedroom. She loved the ornately written prayer to the saints in the den. She loved to stand in the kitchen, which smelled of old tea bags and carrot peels, and question Mrs. Slutsky about hell.

“What if you do something bad but you believe in God? What if you believe in God but you’re always doing really bad things? What if you do something bad but you’re sorry?”

Mrs. Slutsky would explain everything as she did the dishes or ironed or smoked, expansively delineating the various levels of hell and purgatory. Sometimes Justine and Richie would sit at the kitchen table and draw pictures of a smoking red hell with the victim’s snarled-up arms writhing skyward. Justine liked to draw angels floating at the top of the page, looking down in sorrow and raining pink tears of pity into hell.

She and Richie spent hours watching Saturday morning cartoons on the Slutskys’ sagging, loamy-smelling green couch. She wanted to be tied up and whipped after watching cartoon characters being beaten and tortured by other characters for the viewer’s amusement. She watched the animated violence with queasy fascination, feeling frightened and exposed. It was the same feeling she had had when Dr. Norris touched her, and she felt a bond with docile, daydreaming Richie, simply because he was near her while she was having this feeling.

When she began making him tie her up, she couldn’t tell if he wanted to do it or if he were passively following her lead. She recalls his face as furtive and vaguely ashamed, as though he were picking his nose in public.

One day she saw a cartoon about hell. In it, a wily dog with paw pads like flower petals plotted against a kitten he was jealous of. He locked the kitty out of the house in a snowstorm, then settled down to rest before the fireplace. He fell asleep before the fire and suddenly, through a series of hallucinatory sequences, he went to hell. Hell was very hot and populated by demon ice cream vendors who sold blazing Popsicles on which the desperate dog burned himself while seeking relief; it was overseen by pitchfork-wielding devils who chased the hound, breathing fire and stabbing his bottom. He was tormented, howling and weeping, from one end of hell to the other until a coal leapt out from the fireplace and awakened him from the nightmare. He raced to rescue the kitten, but the happy ending did not mitigate Justine’s dismay at seeing an eternity of torture and punishment presented as an amusing possibility. She sat with the now familiar sensation of violation coursing through her body as if it could split her apart.

She was at home when she saw this, and she ran to her mother, crying.

“And they stuck him with pitchforks,” she wept. “He tried to buy a Popsicle and it burned him and they laughed!”

“That is very bad. They shouldn’t put things like that on television.”

Her mother consoled her with statements that cruelty and violence are wrong, and then helped her to write a letter to the TV station on the widely lined manila paper she used in school, in which she told them how much the cartoon upset her.

It had upset her, but she thought of it again and again. At night she would lie in bed and imagine being tormented forever because you had envious thoughts or were angry at someone. She didn’t have the vocabulary to express, even to herself, the feeling these images evoked in her; it was too overpowering for her even to see clearly what it was. It seemed to occupy the place that all her daily activities and expressions came from, the same place Dr. Norris had touched. It felt like the foundation that all the other events of her life played upon.

Of course, she didn’t think of it like this until much later, when she could only look at the ancient, entrenched feeling as an animal looks at a trap on its leg. At the time she soothed the demanding feeling by tying herself to her bedpost, gagging herself, and forcing morose but compliant Richie to beat her, or to pretend to.

Some time after she wrote the letter to the station, she received a reply from them apologizing for the cartoon and thanking her for writing. Her mother read it aloud to her when it came and then again at the dinner table.

“This is very good,” said her father. “It is a civics lesson. She can see how she can affect her environment, make her views known. Isn’t that right, Sugar?”

Justine nodded even though to her the letter was a surprising but irrelevant development that had nothing to do with affecting her environment.

When Justine’s father went to work in his own private office, Justine’s mother went to work with him as a receptionist. This was ostensibly to save money but was in truth because Mrs. Shade could not bear to be away from Dr. Shade during the day. On the rare occasions when he went somewhere without her, she would clutch his shirt and look at him with an expression that seemed to come all the way from the back of her head. She would ask when he would be back in a way that made Justine wonder if he might not come back at all. He would answer with a hearty certainty that did not acknowledge the expression in his wife’s eyes, as if it were normal for her to look at him that way. Then he would turn to leave. Justine’s mother would let go of him and turn back to Justine, the boundless need in her eyes replaced by her usual brisk confidence, as if she had stepped out of one world and into another.