Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

She hoped that her envy of Watley didn’t play too great a role in her strange coupling with Rick Houlihan, a senior bordering on greaseballness. It was springtime; he was a big swarthy boy with muscles, cruel lips, and a long gum line. She met him at the cast party for the drama club version of The Man of La Mancha , in which he played a rapist muleteer. She was drawn by his large virile oiliness and his condescending manner. A skinny red-headed girl who noticed them talking said, “Stay away from the little girls, Rick.” They were sucking face within the hour.

They continued to suck face in the back seat of his friend’s car as the friend drove them home, all the while making sex jokes about sophomore girls. Rick joked back as he felt her breasts, and she giggled, feeling like a soft, palpitating baby animal that might be passed back and forth and petted by these noisy humans and then left by the side of the road.

But the way he touched was romantic, his embrace a thrilling combination of condescension, rapacity, and gentleness. She knew he believed her to be too stupid and passive to object to what he was doing, and that, while this made him view her with jovial contempt, it also rather endeared her to him as it meant he could fondle all he wanted and feel superior too, free of the guilt that a more human girl might’ve engendered. If he’d known Justine’s history of basements, rec rooms and johns, it would have been different, but he had no idea.

They dropped her off at her house, and he said, “See ya in school, kid.” She immediately called Watley, who was impressed and somewhat chagrined that her little pixie handmaiden had spent time in a back seat with someone so glandular and dashing as the rapist muleteer in The Man of La Mancha . All weekend, Justine fantasized him crushing her to his big pink chest while the very air about them exploded in ribbons of delirious color. On the verge of hysteria, she walked around with pimple cream on her face, her muscles furiously coiling and uncoiling under her skin. Monday came; she flew to her beloved.

He passed her in the hall with a smile and hand flap. She was wounded but she ignored that and submerged herself once more in the loud theme song of their great love. She saw him again in the cafeteria, standing in line with a tray. She noticed for the first time the slug-like curve of his fleshy shoulders, the way his bulky legs seemed to have been hastily jammed into his pelvis, but she didn’t let these details stand in her way.

She admired his manly reserve in greeting her, the way his eyes slowly dropped to view her hand on his arm and then rose to gaze enigmatically into hers. Chatting happily, she followed him to his table, then out of the lunchroom, into the hall, and to the door of his French class.

They didn’t have much to talk about, and the conversation that did occur was strange and arduous. This disturbed Justine, but she found the disturbance easy to ignore. Making out with Rick, his big tongue disporting itself in her head, was a little world which existed beyond the uncomfortable job of conversation and which could be literally touched upon at any moment. Even the distance of reserve and incompatibility had an odd charm; across this distance she could occasionally feel his desultory signals answering her ardent emanation, and the slight tickle of contact was so poignant in contrast with his coldness that it felt to her like a full embrace.

Then there were the hellish fantasies. All day, all night, they battered her until her body was alternately in an agony of sensitivity and completely numb. He lay on top of her in an enormous double bed, cossetted with chiffon and silk, his eyes waxy with desire. Their richly appointed boudoir exploded with flowers; lace curtains flailed the air as the thunderstorm raged outside. Everything in the room became monstrously enlarged and pulsated as the huge event transpired on the bed. He would hurt her but only because he loved her.

However, although her father, who did not like Rick, had intoned that boys that age go out with girls her age to “get one thing only,” she felt that she was more interested in that thing than he was. She began to drop hints. “I don’t know why people think rape is so bad,” she remarked. “I’d like to be raped.”

“No you wouldn’t,” he snapped. “You wouldn’t like it at all. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head — angrily, it seemed to her. She felt demeaned and hurt. He obviously wasn’t attracted to her, she thought.

It was a sticky summer day, just weeks after school ended, that her parents made a social call, and Justine called Rick, invited him to come over, rather bluntly explaining that her parents were gone. There was a moment of silence, and then he said he’d come.

He arrived wearing dark glasses. His whole body had a defensive yet tenacious look, like that of an animal creeping into a bush with a hunk of food in its mouth.

She invited him into the house, but he said no, he wanted to go into the rec room behind the garage. She reached for his hand and, looking the other way, he let her take it, locking a finger around two of hers.

The rec room was a damp space extending off the garage. It was carpeted with unconnected pieces of thin beige nylon and crammed with cheap hideous furniture which had been left by the people who’d lived there before and which was now covered by dust and cobwebs. On the walls were knickknack shelves and a huge plastic salmon. There was a radio the size and shape of a bread box. Rick turned it on and up very loudly, not bothering to adjust the dial, which was caught between two wavering, incoherent stations. They hit the floor almost immediately, he suffocating her with his weight, his shoulder scraping her face. She made what she hoped were attractive moaning noises as he worked her pants down with one hand, swiping at her mouth with his lips. She barely recognized his body. It seemed to be boiling with conflicting impulses contained by ironlike swaths of muscle. A feeling of alarm and disappointment rose in her, and she fiercely jammed it down. He grappled with his pants, raising his pelvis so that his chest mashed hers. A gasp interrupted her careful moans. He reached away from her and turned the radio up even louder, inadvertently adjusting the dial so that a hoe-down cavorted oafishly through the room. She felt him between her legs and in a burst of reflexive panic tried to close them. He pushed them open, gripped her shoulders and, as he had in her fantasy, hurt her, with a great deal of vigor.

“Hurry and put your pants on,” he said, easing back from her onto his knees. “You’re bleeding.” It was true; she sat up stiffly and saw bright red smears on her inner thighs. He was tucking himself away into his pants with a certain tender efficiency, straightening his shirt, standing up. She stayed on the floor and squirmed into her panties with a rocking hip-to-hip movement. She didn’t want to extend her curled-up body to get her blue-flowered pants out of their broken twist and put them on but she did. She finally stood. Her underpants were a fetid swamp. There was a rug burn on her lower spine. He stared at her from under his dark glasses. His jaw and lips were stiff and stony as if he were angry about something he couldn’t do anything about.

“Okay kid?” he said. His voice sounded like it always did.

She nodded yes.

“Good.” He put an arm around her shoulders. This gesture pierced her, and she huddled against him, nuzzling his chest with her nose and thinking at last they could enter their special make-out world. But instead of that remote condescending tenderness she knew and relied on, she felt him squarely there with her, every organ, synapse, and pustule in full operation, the whole hot engine of his body receiving her with utter indifference.