Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

My friendship with Darla and Eileen did not, however, ease my feeling of isolation as I sat in class or walked home alone from school. It was like an aberrant pocket of comfort that could not emit enough warmth to extend into the coldness surrounding it.

I was still afraid to venture out of the house into my neighborhood, although I didn’t think of it as fear. It felt more like a natural aversion; the very air outside our door seemed unbreathable, the voices of the neighborhood children, hard and bounding as rubber balls, cut into my sphere and left no space for me. Where were the friendly Michiganders my father had spoken about so confidently? I watched him and waited for an answer, which came in the form of a speech. “They’ve ruined everything that Michigan ever was,” he said. “They ripped down the old buildings and paved over the old roads and put crap up all over everything. It’s terrifying.”

He spoke in the dark of evening after dinner, from his vinyl reclining chair. My mother sat on the edge of the couch, examining her nails.

“It’s all part of the general trend,” he continued. “I thought Michigan would’ve escaped it, but I was wrong. We’re being destroyed, like the Romans.” He was answered by the tiny click of my mother’s thin nails being peeled into her cupped palm.

He said these things again on many other nights as he paced through the house like a soldier, rubbing invisible granules and making bitter comparisons between our neighborhood and the Michigan of his happy summer, sometimes punctuating his words by rushing out into the yard to seize a piece of litter or a crumpled beer can which he would bring in and hurl onto the kitchen table. His words seemed to hover over the house in a useless attempt to shield it.

Then it was October, and we found out about Devil’s Night. There had been a Devil’s Night in Ohio, too; the night before Halloween, teenagers could go around ringing people’s doorbells and throwing toilet paper over trees, and nobody would mind. In Chiffon, it wasn’t just one night. It started a whole week before Halloween, and it wasn’t just ringing doorbells and throwing paper. Gangs of kids would wander around, rubbing layers of soap onto people’s windows and walls, setting fires on front stoops and splattering the houses of unpopular people with eggs.

Our house was “egged” the first night, and my father screamed with rage. “These are the people who pick on old people, who terrorize the small and the defenseless!” The next night he turned off all the lights and, with me at his side, waited in the living room for the next pranksters. We hid behind an armchair together with a flashlight, some crackers and peanut butter — our “rations,” just like in the army. I was proud to be part of my father’s battle against juvenile delinquents. The first pranksters were a gang of doorbell ringers whose faces registered shock as my father burst out upon them with his machete, who scattered and fled in all directions as he chased them down the block shouting, “Come back and fight, bastards!”

By this time my parents had made friends with the neighbors on both sides of us, the Sissels and the Kopeikins. They had put on their bathing suits and gone to swim in the Sissels’ pool; my mother had many afternoon snacks with bespectacled, limply grinning Mrs. Kopeikin. But for me the friendly presence of these kind people was only a thin layer of civility that could be peeled away to reveal the gangs walking the streets on Devil’s Night, or, on the next layer, my father and me crouched behind the armchair, waiting.

My mother and I began having story times again, mostly on the weekends. Our favorite thing to do was sit at the kitchen table with paper and crayons, drawing stories for each other. If we couldn’t think of a story, we’d draw heaven. My mother’s heaven was blue and almost empty except for one or two angels with yellow hair, large silver stars, and a rainbow of many colors that she would work on for several minutes, slanting her crayons on their sides for more subtle hues. My heaven was full of grinning winged children, candy bars, cake, ice cream, and toys. When we were finished drawing, we would put our best pictures on the wall with Scotch tape and sit admiring them over dishes of cake and ice cream.

At night on Sunday, she would read me books like My Father’s Dragon, Little Witch , and Peter Pan . When she read Peter Pan , I stopped drawing pictures of heaven and began drawing Never-Never Land. Never-Never Land was pink and blue and green, it had trees with homes inside them, cubby holes and hiding places, tiny women in gauze robes, and flying children with rapiers in their elegant hands. Its very name made me feel a sadness like a big beautiful blanket I could wrap around myself. I tried to believe that Peter Pan might really come one night and fly me away; I was too old to believe this and I knew it, but I forced the bright polka-dotted canopy of this belief over my unhappy knowledge. And I tried to conform the suburban world around me to the world of Victorian London described in the book — which resulted in a jarring sensation each time I was forced to look at my true surroundings.

My mother’s presence protected me from these moments. Sometimes when we would go out on our drugstore errands — sailing forth in the car with our elbows thrust out the window, the radio playing cheerful music — we would encounter kids my age slouching in a group outside the store, teasing their hair, gnawing their gum, and they would turn to look at me, and I would see myself in their eyes, a fat girl wearing white ankle socks and heart-shaped sunglasses. If my mother hadn’t been there, they would’ve made jokes about me. But she was there and she bustled by them wagging her hips, saying, once we’d reached the store, “Do you know those girls? They look like gun molls!”

My closeness with my mother was physical as well as emotional. She washed my hair and rubbed my feet, and at night she would rub my back as I lay in bed. Occasionally, she would have me bend over her lap and, lifting my cotton nightie, she would spread my hips and check to see if I had worms up my ass. I could’ve questioned why she thought this was possible, but I didn’t. The certainty of her movements made it seem perfectly natural that I’d have worms in my ass and that she’d better check. It was to me as normal as the massages she gave my father almost every night.

I would often say good-night to them as my father lay in his reclining chair with my mother kneeling at his bare feet with a bottle of baby oil. Or he would be lying on his stomach on the floor in his pajama bottom with a sheet spread beneath him while she knelt over him in her nightgown with her bottom facing toward his head, rubbing his back, bending forward so that her long, loose hair brushed his hips.

Sometimes I would be allowed to take part, and we would both sit on Daddy in our gowns, massaging him with oil while he said, “Oh, that feels so good to the old father.” We would change positions often — I’d start at his feet and she at his shoulders, and then we’d switch. His skin would glisten with cheap oil, and he’d give off a hot, glandular smell that mixed with the smell of my mother’s light sweat and perfume. The little gold locket she wore around her neck swung back and forth as she moved, and her nightgown came away from her body so that I could almost see her breasts. I loved massaging my father with her.

When I started the sixth grade , our neighborhood was rezoned. Eileen and Darla now had to take a bus to a school half an hour away, and I was transferred to yet another school. The new school was filled with crowds of strangers with ratted nests of bleached hair, makeup, and breasts. The girls wore pointy boots and stood with their legs apart and their hips thrust out; the boys wore cleats and had faces like knives. I once saw two boys standing in the hall by their lockers, one boy passive and expectant, the other gently holding the passive one’s face with his palm, and then, with a sudden movement the touch turned to a slap, leaving the slapped face hot red. This caress/slap was repeated again and again, with varying gradations separating the caress from the slap, on one cheek and then the next. The slapped boy’s expression remained impassive, even insolent.