Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

After the table was cleared, I went upstairs to lie in bed. I would lie in the dark, sensing my body sprawled out before my head like a country I had seen only on maps. My thoughts formed a grid of checkered squares clicking off and on in an industrial pattern of light and dark. Once this grid was in place, what had happened at the dinner table became a tiny scene observed from far away, and I would turn on the light and get my book and read, eating from a bag of orange corn curls I kept under my bed.

It seemed that part of my father wanted to destroy me for leaving him, and that another part of him, which I could sense only at certain moments, wanted to follow me into my retreat, to wrap his arms around me and never let me go.

Sometimes after I had put on my nightgown and gotten under the blankets to sleep, my father would come into my room. I would wake to find him standing beside my bed in the dark in his pajamas, looking at me with an invisible face, rubbing his fingers together. I would pretend to be asleep, feeling his presence and wondering if he was thinking about how innocent I looked in sleep. He would stay in the room for several minutes and then leave, nervously wiping his mouth with his hands before turning to go. I would lie there feeling a vague sense of vindication and satisfaction from this silent nocturnal contact. I thought he was trying to apologize.

He did apologize once. I had been sitting on the floor beside the heat vent in the living room reading a paperback called Kennedy Days while my parents talked, my father pacing the floor with a glass of beer, my mother sitting on the couch. They were talking about a journalist who’d hoaxed the country with a book on the life of a millionaire who, as it turned out, had never existed. The journalist had gone to jail and was now writing another book from jail called Hoax . He had been offered a million-dollar contract in advance, which made my father furious. He was talking about how the writer, Irving Wiseback, had cheated not only the public but the memory of people like Obie and Aunt Cat, people who would never have cheated anybody, who died poor but honest. “Anyone who would enjoy reading that garbage is as worthless a bastard as Wiseback — and there’s one now. Look at her over there, reading that crap.” This was so unexpected that I had no time to create a padding of numbness. I dropped the book and walked quickly from the room. “Al.” My mother’s voice was full of gentleness and remonstrance.

An hour after I had slammed the door to my room, my father came up the stairs with slow, soft thuds. He knocked on my door and opened it to find me sitting on my bed with a blanket wrapped around me. He came and sat on the edge of my bed. He said that sometimes he got so “goddamned upset at all the vicious immorality in the world” that he couldn’t think straight, and that in his urge to punish it, he sometimes “lashed out” at people who weren’t to blame at all, and that he actually found it commendable for a person my age to read about the Kennedys. I said it was all right. We sat on the bed, my father smiling tightly. I didn’t want to swallow because I was afraid he would hear it, so I let the saliva build up in my mouth as we sat. I became warm, and the blanket dropped from my shoulders. My father wiped his mouth and coughed. “Would you like to go for a walk around the block?” he asked.

My mother looked away from the television and smiled as we filed down the stairs. “Just let me get a jacket,” said my father.

Our walk was dreamy even though we both walked with habitual quickness, my father rubbing his fingers together and staring down at the sidewalk with distant intensity. The tall street lamps cast pools of light that graded gently into the dimness of street and sidewalk, then into the strange darkness of other people’s yards. Our neighbors’ front doors stood open, letting patches of weak light out onto their porches. I listened to the faint sounds of their televisions and their voices, occasionally a piece of laughter, with the covetous loneliness of an eavesdropper. We passed a group of adolescent boys lounging under a lighted basketball hoop nailed to their garage, and they stopped their conversation to watch the middle-aged man and the fat girl walk by. I had a moment of shame as I felt myself and my father perceived as the representatives of a world foreign to those agile basketball players with their easy limbs and voices, a stunted world of graceless movements, pathetic wants and weaknesses. I buried this feeling, and we passed the boys.

We talked about ideas and events; a new TV show, what I was doing in social studies, what had ever become of that awful little dog of the Rizzos. Brown toads hopped out of the grass and onto the pavement before us, oblivious to the threat of our oncoming feet. My father talked to me about the pressure of his job, how he had to fight with people all day in subtle battles of the will which were never named, in which enemies tried “to cut your throat.” I saw my father in his office behind a desk, watchfully holding a sheaf of papers like a shield as another supervisor approached him. I admired him as he sat there, the cagey champion of the office, ringed by formidable opponents. I saw myself and my mother standing vigilantly in the living room at home, ready for him to arrive. I saw a group of girls in the high school lunchroom, sitting around a table, talking out of their smiling, chewing faces. They seemed trivial compared to the vision of my embattled father with my mother and me standing behind him. They were pretty and happy, but my father and I aimed for higher things; we had relinquished beauty and pleasure and turned our faces towards the harsh reality of the fight against cruelty and falsehood. I saw his face and mine in profile together, like John Kennedy and Martin Luther King on a postage stamp, pressed against the stark gray sky, our expressions sad, yet resolute. Then my father did something he hadn’t done since I was a child: he took my lightly swinging hand and held it. I looked down smiling in embarrassment. He kept holding my hand, stroking it along its side with his thumb. I felt tension vibrating the length of his arm and hand, the tension of his complicated love for me, and I felt something like pity for him, as well as sorrow that I could no longer fully be a part of his life, nor invite him into mine.

Just before we reached the house, he stopped walking and I stopped with him. He released my hand and I looked at him. His face held an expression I had never seen before and which looked like the suppression of pain. He reached out, cupped my head in one of his hands, and pulled it towards him. He stung my cheek with a fierce kiss and roughly tousled my hair. As we approached the front door lights of home, I felt peaceful and happy.

The next day was a Saturday. My father and I spent the afternoon together watching Eerie Hours , four hours of old horror movies followed by The Arena , which featured gladiator movies hosted by a middle-aged man sitting at a desk in a gladiator outfit. My father sat in his black leather chair eating potato chips and drinking beer. I sat on the floor with Noxzema on my face eating popcorn, potato chips, corn curls, and diet grape pop.

I wished that I never had to go to school again. I wanted to spend all of my days in the comfort and safety of this living room with the dirty wool carpet, flowered couches with used Kleenex tucked into their cushions, crumpled bags of potato chips, and the little black-and-white TV. I went into the kitchen to see if there were any more bite-sized Heath Bars in the refrigerator and saw my mother standing by the sink, gazing out the window with her arms folded around her thick waist. In the light of the window, I saw the dust on her glasses. She stood in a bundle, her bell-bottomed legs and tennis-shoed feet together, her stomach sticking out. Her mouth was slightly open and her face abstract with bewilderment. I stopped on my way to the freezer. My mother turned and recovered her expression. “Can I get you anything, honey?”