Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

One night my mother, calling up the stairs, asked me to set the table while I was on the phone talking with Donna Doe. I turned furiously from the phone, covered its receiver with my hand and bellowed, “Just a minute!” My mother called up again and I kicked the door shut. I snuggled against the wall and relished the phone. My father stomped up the stairs and opened the door so hard that the feeble old knob fell off. He tore the receiver from my hand, and Donna Doe became a planet hurled into oblivion by a tantruming god. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me from the room and out into the stairwell. I tried to steady myself by placing my hand on the wall; he took this as resistance and pushed me down the stairs. I tumbled briefly and broke my fall by grabbing a banister. He picked my hand off it and pushed me again. My mother sat watching quietly as he dragged me through the living room by my hair. “When your mother tells you to set the table, you move!” He shoved me against the dining room wall and yelled, “Do you understand?” again and again until I said yes. He let go of me, and I set the table.

I ate my dinner of pork chops and green beans in silence. My father and mother chatted amiably about our neighbors and the last letter they had received from Edwina Barney. There was boxed lemon chiffon pie for dessert.

I turned off my light earlier than usual that night, but I didn’t sleep. I lay having a fantasy about Jana Morgan and Emma Contrell as French waifs during the Second World War who had been driven to prostitution by poverty, but who doubled as resistance informants. My fantasy decomposed as I wobbled towards sleep. I dreamed I was sitting in social studies, but instead of feeling the dread that I felt in class, I felt a sense of triumph. A popular song overlaid the class scene, not its sound but its evocation of friendship and the eventual moment when everyone drops their public pose and exposes the goodwill they’ve harbored all along. I sat erect in my seat, smiling at everyone. The song said, “It’s so groovy now, that people are finally getting together.”

I wobbled back into wakefulness. The room was covered with sleep fuzz. My father stood before my bed. I closed my eyes, imagining my innocent face as it appeared to him. He sat on the bed next to me. I peeked at him. I was surprised to see that he wasn’t doing the nervous things he usually did when he came to my room at night; he didn’t wipe his mouth or rub his fingers together, he just sat there exuding determined presence. I closed my eyes, feeling the tension and suspended contact. I remembered his nighttime kiss. There was a movement that seemed gracefully swooping and swanlike to me, even though I knew my father was pulling up his feet and awkwardly laying his body on my bed. My sense of anticipation, my feeling of intimacy, impending resolution, and fear almost nauseated me. When he put his hand under the blankets, I was surprised and opened my eyes. He was waiting for me. He put his fingers on my lips and said, “Shh.” His eyes were bright and his forehead was lifted into friendly wrinkles. “I don’t want to wake your mother,” he whispered. “I just thought we could have a little talk.” I nodded, feeling a sensation like warm tears trembling in my chest. It was as I thought: my father came into my room because he wanted to apologize. I felt so moved, I wanted to cuddle against his chest as I had done as a child, burying my nose in his warm, detergent-scented pajamas.

“I just wanted to let you know,” he began, “that when you were born I thought you were the most beautiful little thing I ever saw. It wasn’t just me either. Everybody in the hospital thought you were special. You had the intelligence, the sparkle, the beauty — you had it all.”

I smiled spastically. My father twitched a grin and touched the tip of my nose with his finger. “And I still think so. Say, can I get under the covers? It’s cold out here.”

He kissed my face and neck as he had taken my hand during our walk: tenderly, the tenderness vibrant with inheld tension. He said how hurt he was when we “argued,” when it seemed like I just didn’t care about everything he’d fought for. I moved nearer him to protest that I did care, and I smelled him, the deep smell produced by his particular combination of organs and glands and the food he ate. He pulled me against him, crushing my face into the chest hairs exposed by his open pajama top. I felt the power and insistence in his embrace, felt how tight were the muscles of his embracing arm, and for a second I was afraid. Then with his other hand he caressed my breasts and nipples through my light gown. My breath stopped. Arousal rose through my body and seized it. My excitement terrified me and made me feel ashamed because I knew it was wrong to be excited. But underneath the fear and shame, underneath the excitement, it seemed that what was happening now between my father and me was only the physical expression of what always happened between us, even when he verbally reviled me. Tears came to my eyes; it seemed that his cruel words had clothed these loving caresses all along. I put out my hands and clutched his pajamas in my fists. “Yes,” he said, his voice crushed and strange. “Yes.” He moved his hand away from my chest, not loosening his grip on my shoulders. Through the gown, he touched between my legs. Shock impaled my body. As if he felt it, he snatched his hand away. He let go of my shoulder and lay silently staring at the ceiling with me paralyzed in a curl, my forehead touching his shoulder. At length he sat up and said, “Good night, Sweet Pea.” He left, stopping in the bathroom to pee before returning to his bedroom. I heard him cough nervously before he closed his bedroom door behind him.

For a long time I lay curled in the position he had left me in, held by shock and smothered feeling. My heartbeat threatened to break open my chest. It was not the same as sex, I thought. And truly, what had just happened seemed to bear no relation to “sex”: smiling big-breasted women in scanty bathing suits, modern couples winking and making jokes on television, boys whistling at pretty girls, the things I heard about Emma Contrell and Jana Morgan. This had been something secret, special, and symbolic; it had happened in a tiny place where only my father and I lived. I straightened my body and lay on my back, my breath returning. The room gradually slowed its disturbed pulsing. The shadows of branches moved back and forth on the ceiling.

During the day there was no external change in our behavior towards each other. But there had been a change. I felt it both awake and asleep.

It was many weeks before my father came to my room again. Then he began to come more frequently. Each time he touched me, the physical sensation I had felt the first night became more hardened with fear and shame until I couldn’t feel it at all. I would think of my mother asleep in her bed, and she seemed as far away as when she sat and watched my father yell at me. Sometimes I would pretend I was asleep or ask him to stop, but he continued. I could not resist him anymore than that because with each visit my body seemed less mine and more his.

When I say to people that my father molested me, I visualize myself sprawled on the living room floor with my pants pulled down or my dress over my head. My father storms around the room, gesticulating violently and shouting about something. My mother sits on the couch, looking into space. An almost visible bolt of horror and panic splits the room. This scene, even though it never occurred, is more real to me than what happened those nights in my room, mainly because my mind has flattened those real events, which now become three-dimensional only in involuntary screeches of memory. My father pressed tightly against my back, his hand pinching my jaw and mashing my lips together, his legs pushing mine apart. My flannel gown scrunched up around my shoulders and my buttocks rubbed by what felt like the blunt, hairless limb of a medium-sized animal. His fingers hard implements inside my body, gouging me.