Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Justine went on talking, saying that not only had she and Debby done the things depicted in the comic but that everybody did this, didn’t Rose know? She never knew if Rose believed her, but at the moment she also knew it didn’t matter, that Rose was going to pretend she believed her. The torture feeling was roused and roaring as she wheedled and teased, moving closer to the agitated, awkward kid until she was all but cornered against the wall, pulling her hair across her lips, Justine whispering that Rose was a baby, a goody-goody, that she didn’t know anything.

It took surprisingly little to get her in the basement bathroom, where they were least apt to be discovered.

It is with a mixture of incredulity, guilt, and conceit that she remembers that dreamy session in the Lysol-smelling toilet with the concrete walls of a jail cell. She was incredulous at Rose’s docility; every cajolement or command elicited another trembling surrender, and every surrender filled Justine with a boiling greed that pushed her further into the violation she’d started as a game. The occasional feeble resistance — Rose’s pleading hand on the arm that rampaged down her pants — only increased Justine’s swelling arrogance and made her crave to rip away another flimsy layer of the hapless girl’s humanity. Justine felt her eyes and face become shielded and impenetrable as Rose’s became more exposed; she felt her personality filling the room like a gorging swine. Rose was unquestionably terrified and doubtless would’ve liked to stop, but she had been stripped of the territory on which one must stand to announce such decisions, as well as most of her clothes. For although Justine had only meant to cop a feel, within a few delirious moments Rose was placed on the closed lid of the toilet, her pants and panties in a wad on the floor. Her shirt was pulled up to reveal her tiny breast mounds, her legs splayed and tied with her own knee socks to conveniently parallel towel racks, her hands ritualistically bound behind her back with a measuring tape, her mouth stuffed with a small roll of toilet paper.

Justine stood and surveyed her victim. She was shocked at the sight of the hairless genitals; they reminded her of a fallen baby bird, blind and naked, shivering on the sidewalk. It disgusted her to think she had something like that too, and she focused the fullness of her disgust on Rose. There were no more cajoling words, the mouse had been hypnotized, she was free to strike at leisure.

Fascinated by the meek unprotected slit but too appalled to touch it, she plucked a yellowing toothbrush from its perch above the sink — pausing to glance at herself in the mirror as she did so — and stuck the narrow handle into her playmate’s vagina. From the forgotten region of Rose’s head came a truly pathetic sound; her face turned sideways and crumpled like an insect under a murdering wad of tissue, and tears ran from her closed eyelids.

But it was not the tears that brought Justine to her senses, it was the stiff, horrified contraction of the violated genitals which she felt even through the ridiculous agent of the toothbrush, a resistance more adamant than any expressed so far. Suddenly she realized what she was doing.

She left the sobbing child crouched on the cold concrete floor, pulling on her clothes with trembling fingers, while she bounded up the basement stairs and out the back door yelling, “I’m gonna tell everybody what I made you do!”

But she didn’t. Out of a muddled combination of shame and barely acknowledged pity, she kept it to herself, for her own frenzied, crotch-rubbing nocturnal contemplation.

Rose was absent from school for a week and then appeared like an injured animal dragging its crushed hind legs. No one remarked how her head, previously so busy and alert, had joined the collapse of her shoulders, or how her cheerful little spine had somehow crumpled. She avoided Justine and the gang, then tentatively approached and realized no one knew. She once accompanied Justine home from school in an abject silence that Justine was too embarrassed to break, except when they both mumbled “Bye.”

Although Justine told no one, the other girls sensed some new vulnerability in Rose, unconsciously recognized the loss of that nervous puppy spirit that had been her particular charm. They became aggressive and cruel to her; Debby was especially unkind. Rose walked home with Justine one more time and, at the corner where they would’ve said goodbye, blurted out an invitation to Justine to come play the game they played before, in the bathroom. Justine snarled and turned away. Rose never came near the gang again. Since she was not in Justine’s class, Justine only caught occasional glimpses of her in the halls or on the periphery of the playground, wandering by herself or standing with a crowd of other mousey unpopular girls.

This incident did not interfere with Justine’s other make-out activities, except in one way: after a squatting self-examination over a mirror, she vowed that while they could touch it all they wanted, she’d never allow anyone to look at that ugly thing between her legs. But she was only eleven and knew nothing at all about her future, so one can’t be too hard on her for breaking vows made at this time.

My family moved to Painesville , Pennsylvania, when I was thirteen. Physically, the neighborhood was as I had been expecting the neighborhood in Michigan to be. There were big trees, lawns, gardens, and a small main street downtown. Our house was a pointy-roofed charmer with shutters on the windows and rose bushes cuddling against the walls. There was a patio and a breakfast nook, and for months before we moved, my father walked around our house in Chiffon holding snapshots of the Painesville house and smiling. But, within months after moving in, he discovered we had been betrayed by the real estate people. The house was dark, drafty, weirdly put together. Doorknobs fell off, the basement tended to flood, and the roof was so moldy that a wind-blown seedling rooted in it and grew into a sapling. My father was bitterly disappointed, first with the house, then with the neighborhood, then with the town.

After Michigan, I was suspicious of Painesville’s alleged splendor, and so I was not disappointed. I employed the same methods I had learned in Chiffon to chop up and organize my life to lessen the impact of the outside world.

In the morning I would roll from my bed without turning on the light to put on my turquoise polka-dot girdle, my pantyhose, and my dress. In the bathroom my father ran water, coughed, blew his nose, rubbed the radio dial back and forth, spat into the sink, and flushed the unhappy old toilet. I finished my reluctant dressing ritual as he burst from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, and went to wash my face, brush my hair, and pee. The toilet seat was moist with steam, the mirror fogged, the bath mat damply rumpled on the floor, and the sink blobbed with his thick discharges of toothpaste. I performed my toilet cocooned in my father’s smell of hair oil, Old Spice deodorant, sweat, and faded urine, and then went to sit at the breakfast table with him. He hunched at his place eating his eggs while I chewed my cold cereal and my mother flitted from kitchen to table in her robe. On the radio was a morning show called Put On a Happy Face , hosted by a man who sounded as if he viewed happiness as the most hopeless, yet most necessary, form of human gallantry.

I rode to school with five other girls, whom I remember mainly as knees tinted beige by pantyhose and arms clasped around books. Four of us were ugly and unpopular. When the car pulled up at the school, the one pretty, popular girl would leap out and walk ahead with frantic briskness so that no one would suspect that she had any connection with us.