Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Both boys and girls covered their notebooks with drawings in hot Magic Marker and decals. Their drawings were of monsters with dripping fangs, long, roiling tongues, bugged-out veiny eyes, and short hairs all over them. The monsters were surrounded by Magic Marker words in huge ornate Gothic letters—“Cool,” “Eat Me,” and “Suck.” Almost everyone drew, with the same ornamental flourish and precision, a huge swastika or Maltese cross in some central place on his or her notebook.

It was pretty much the same situation as the last school except this one had more audiovisual aids, and instead of the teacher giving the usual talk during science period, she’d have one of the boys wheel in a television, and we’d watch a program called Adventures in Science . It was awful, and during the first week, a girl behind me said “I’d rather fart than watch Adventures in Science .”

I asked my mother what “fart” meant, and she said it was “a vulgar word sailors use when they mean to say ‘poot.’”

Sometimes on my way home, I’d see the fart girl walking a block or so ahead of me. She was big, with adult hips brutishly packed into a tight skirt, large knees with raw bumps on them, and eyes that wandered blankly as she gnawed her gum. Her name was Barbara Van Bent, and I was surprised when one day she waited for me to catch up to her on the sidewalk and said “Hi.” She was the kind of girl I was naturally afraid of, the kind of girl who pushed me out of the lunch line. But she said “Hi,” her eyes avoiding mine in the guarded, deferential way some children have of making friends.

She lived in my neighborhood, and the next day she waited for me to walk with her. I went to her house, and she showed me her autographed pictures of pouting boy rock stars and television personalities. She showed me her collection of naked bug-eyed rubber dolls with stand-up hair, and she shared a bag of orange and pink candy with me. Her mother, a big woman with stiff hips in stretch pants, gave us sloppy Joes on paper plates. She came to my house, and my mother made us hot chocolate and gave us paper and crayons. Barbara seemed surprised by this, but she took her paper and made drawings of girls with breasts wearing white go-go boots and boys with big eyes in Nehru jackets. I drew a picture of Never-Never Land and explained it to Barbara, as she had never heard of Peter Pan. I think she said “Cool,” but I don’t remember.

I can barely remember her face, just her mouth, full, dark-colored, and often slightly open, her fingers pulling and pinching it together. Her mouth could slide sideways in an expression of such sudden disdain that it would frighten me — then I’d silence my discomfort, and she’d be my friend again. I told her I never wanted to grow up. She said she did. I asked her why, and she said because then you could wear lipstick and sexy pants. Once I heard a boy say, “I’d like to make Van Bent strip,” and I imagined her naked. Later I saw him trying to pull up her dress on the playground. She tilted her hips and defiantly posed.

The last time she came to my house, we went into the backyard. Wretched pocked hunks of leftover snow sat near the house. Barb wore tight stretch pants and a blue ski cap with a big pom-pom. She wanted to throw snowballs at a target on the fence. I didn’t want to because I wasn’t any good at aiming or throwing, but I did it to please her. Her snowballs almost always hit; mine fell apart in the air. She got bored and didn’t want to play, and I felt it was because I wasn’t good enough. We stood talking in the damp yard, shifting our weight from leg to leg. She told me about the Nasty Club. She said it was she and three other girls who got together and showed each other pictures of naked people, or whatever else they could find that was dirty. Becky Pickren had once brought a rubber cock she’d found in her mother’s drawer, and Marsha Donnelly brought a used condom. To get into the Nasty Club you had to strip from the waist down in front of everybody, and according to Barb, Denise Biddle had hair between her legs.

Hearing about the Nasty Club shocked me and made me uncomfortable. My mother would hate it if she knew I was listening to such things. Why did they want to see these things? It seemed violent and humiliating to me. I tried to ignore these feelings. I tried to make Barb think I liked the Nasty Club.

For a while I didn’t see Barb after school; I’d wait for her in our usual place, but she didn’t come. Then I saw her walking a few blocks ahead with Sharon Ringle, a girl with a pushed-in face who I didn’t like. I quietly settled into my disappointment. I didn’t look at her in class, she didn’t look at me. “I didn’t think she was a nice girl anyway,” said my mother. “She just didn’t seem like a very high type.”

Then one day in the hall, someone said to me, “Hey, Footie. Van Bent says you’re a sweathog. She says you believe in Peter Pan.”

“Hey,” said a girl on the playground, “do you believe in Peter Pan?” I knew what had happened and I could see how the Peter Pan stuff sounded. I wanted to explain that I didn’t believe in it exactly, it was more that I wanted to believe it. But I didn’t know how so I just said “No.” That didn’t make any difference. The next week I was followed home from school by three big girls who walked right at my heels saying things like “Sweathog,” “Retard,” and “Hey, where’s Peter?” Barb was one of them. I didn’t turn to look at her or speak. I couldn’t even separate her voice from the others.

The next day there were five or six girls walking a foot behind me yelling “Footie is a sweathog!” over and over again. I tried to leave school ahead of them; I walked so fast my forehead sweated in the dry winter cold. Most of the time I escaped them, sometimes not. Sometimes I would see them blocks behind me, festively waving their Monkees or Barbie lunch boxes, confident as buffalo, and I would feel, for all my bulk, empty.

I told my mother what was happening. “Hoodlums!” she said. “Ignore them, honey, just pretend like you don’t even see them.” What she said was stupid, but I could hear that she was angry and hurt for me, and this caused me pain. She called Barb Van Bent’s mother and talked to her about her daughter “picking on” me. She called the school and tried to get them to protect me. My father said, “You’ve got to fight dirty with thugs,” and told me to smash their insteps and kick their shins.

The crowd continued to follow me down the street. My mother began walking to meet me after school. She would come marching up the block with a tight, upcurving smile that wrinkled her face and made naked the expression in her small gray eyes, twinkling with succor and cheer. There was nothing in her expression that acknowledged what the other children were saying to me — and continued saying, in her presence. She would bring me home for cookies and tea and put on a recording of a Broadway musical about a tropical romance, where soldiers and grass-skirted girls sang and danced in formation under coconut trees.

Part of me accepted my mother’s comfort, shutting out, with a huge effort, the rest of the world. But another part of me saw that the world created by my parents and me was useless. It was not translatable into the language of the tough, gum-popping kids around me, and it failed to protect me from them. I dimly recognized this world as pathetic, functional only in my parent’s house, but as there was no bridge between it and the outside, I had nowhere else to go.

One day when I was being followed by a group of five or so, one of them pushed me. This was too much and I turned, terrified but unable to stop myself. I faced startled Nona Delgado, a strong athletic Cuban girl with a soft mole on her cheek who, because of her beauty, style, and quick mouth had a place among the coolest in spite of the dark skin that relegated the few other Latinos to social obscurity. I had never looked at her up close; I had a second to register her sleek brows, the tiny white fleck caught on an eyelash, the parting of her dark colored lips, the glimpse of wonder and vulnerability that flared in her large eyes, momentarily stripped of their tough kid sheen. She was beautiful, and I felt a second of bitterness that this beautiful face was my enemy, then I punched her nose. She opened her mouth and stared. Convinced that I was about to be beaten by them all, I hit her again and again — about five times before she dropped her books and fought me. Surprise one: she did not know how to fight at all. Surprise two: her friends did not jump on me. They stood around us and yelled “Get her Nona!” while I, a fat girl, pounded her. After I recovered from my fear and anger, the fight became a squalid embarrassment I couldn’t find a way out of. We rolled and sweated on the ground, my Sears coat torn, her nose and tender mouth ribboned with blood. Finally a housewife came out and told us to stop fighting in her yard. As I walked away, my enemies stood around the angrily weeping Nona. One of them shouted after me “You fight like an animal, Footie!” My mother and father praised me for fighting, and I was glad I had. But I was only glad in the abstract; I was sorry I’d hit Nona, who I’d always secretly admired. I felt she couldn’t really be my enemy; she had simply been drawn into a bad crowd. I remembered the feeling of my fists on her face with a strange mix of disbelief, repulsion, and pride. Her tears and blood I remembered with tenderness. When I thought of her, I didn’t feel contempt or anger or triumph; I felt warmth and unhappiness. One or two times after our fight, I saw her face in the hall in school and saw in its sudden stiffness that I had affected her. It made me feel excited and troubled.