Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Come on,” he said. “I have to go.” He kissed her on the nose and walked out, bearing her with him. When they got outside he let go of her shoulder and walked down the gravel driveway slightly ahead of her, as if he were going to get a beer or something. He turned towards her. “Bye,” he said.

She went into the house and into her room. She pulled her pants down and looked at the blood and sperm. Some of it had dried, but the center of her underwear was still slimy and rank. She stared at it a minute and then pulled her pants back on and sat on the bed, feeling the sticky gunk squish against her genitals and thighs. She thought of her little hairs mashed up in it.

The main problem was, she’d told Watley about her planned seduction of Rick. She could lie about what really happened, but at the moment she didn’t feel up to it. Instead she listened to album after album of soft music about love that lasted forever as she lay in bed under a blanket, feeling the bleak air-conditioned air all around her.

Eventually she called Watley and told her story, working an element of truth into it so Watley wouldn’t be puzzled to hear it was all over between her and Rick. “He probably was afraid of his own feelings, which he projected onto you,” said Watley. “He was probably intimidated by your intensity.”

Weeks after the event, she told Dr. Venus, not because she needed to tell someone but in response to a series of questions, the first being, “Did you take the miniskirt because you were trying to attract boys?”

The late afternoon light was pouring in like a visitor from space, which after all it was. She absorbed the burgundy atmosphere of plant fronds and crystal paperweights. In the waiting room she had been listening to “Hey Jude” on the intercom, and she felt wrapped in its residue. She looked at the pictures of dreamy long-haired girls on the walls and thought with mild astonishment, “This is what a therapist is for.”

So she told him about Rick. He nodded, his heavily lidded eyes widening only in their innermost muscles, which he had not learned to control. “And that has been your only experience?” he asked cordially.

It sounded to her as if she’d disappointed him, that he’d been expecting juicier stuff; what if everybody who came in here had better stories than she? A little cautiously, she talked about her Action adventures, checking his face for reactions all the while, seeing empathy and encouragement in his nods, leg-crossings, and head-tiltings. As she talked she felt as if she were talking about someone else — someone who was complex and interesting, a femme fatale, yet a sad sensitive femme fatale who’d seen and done too much too soon, like one of those teenagers in decadent-society TV specials who drank or something. She recounted everything as matter-of-factly as she could, even the things that had shocked and upset her, like the afternoon with Rose Loris.

Here she noticed a discernible change in Dr. Venus. His whole body seemed to constrict even before Rose had all her clothes off.

“Do you think this is weird?” she asked. She’d noticed an uncharacteristic twitching in his jaw, and it gave her pause.

He shrugged jerkily. “My job isn’t to judge,” he said.

At the end of the session she felt like a character in a rock song. Even the thing with Rick didn’t seem so bad; it seemed very cool to have lost her virginity on the floor of a garage, cooler in its own way than her florid fantasy. Now that was out of the way and she could have one desperate-youth-of-today experience after the next until she met Him, the one who would look past her tough exterior to her tenderness and pain and then—

“Justine, could you tell your mother to come in and speak with me for a few minutes alone? You can just relax and enjoy a magazine. We won’t be long.”

This was the first time Dr. Venus had made this request, but she didn’t think anything of it. She sat in the waiting room listening to the Rolling Stones and thinking about sex for at least ten minutes before the potentially disastrous implications of this unusual move sank in. She remembered the promise Dr. Venus had made early on not to repeat the things she told him to her parents. She was reassured for a moment and then wondered what else he would have to discuss with her mother for ten minutes; she remembered the tic in his jaw. She made eye contact with the young Nehru-collared secretary behind her lavender, triangle-shaped desk. “Sandy,” she said as she stood, nonchalantly replacing a magazine. “Could you tell my mother when she comes out that I went to the Burger Boy? I’m really hungry.”

Sandy said “Sure,” and Justine walked out of the building and down the block until she was out of Sandy’s sight. Then Justine, who never ran, not even in gym class, pumped her elbows and shaved knees and flew until sweat ran down her back.

A block and a half later she gave up, suddenly embarrassed, and out of breath. She continued to walk away from Dr. Venus’s complex, panting, her heart leaping in her chest, her right foot sliding out of her battered sandal. She was on a sidewalk separated from a four-lane freeway by a thin strip of bright sod, and the rush-hour traffic droned by as she walked against it, its familiar sounds of motion highlighting her aimlessness. She saw the Hudson Mall a few blocks away and walked towards it thinking she’d call Watley.

But Watley wasn’t home. She hung up without leaving a message and walked among the counters laden with jewelry and perfume, soothed by the gleam of chromium and the caress of Muzak. She tried to think of what to do. She imagined herself hanging around the mall with her chest out, making eye contact with middle-aged men. Perhaps one would eventually offer to buy her a drink, and they would drive to a motel together. She found a middle-aged man and fixed her gaze on him experimentally. He smiled back uncertainly. Emboldened, she tried another one, a big one with eye-wrinkles and a nose like a snout. His cold eyes zipped up and down the length of her body; his smile was both rapacious and dismissive. She decided she’d go try on some clothes instead.

She returned to the doctor’s office imagining the trouble and punishment waiting for her there. Dr. Venus and her mother gravely discussing her incipient emotional illness, the recommendations of intensive therapy, of tranquilizers, maybe of institutionalization! She felt almost tearful as she imagined Dr. Venus advising her mother of her daughter’s complex emotional difficulties and needs. How would her mother react? With anger at first, probably a few tears, and then? Justine steeled herself as she walked the last half block feeling frightened, revealed, yet resolute. She opened the door to the office and there sat Dr. Venus and her mother, her thighs tensely crossed, the sharp toe of one fashionable shoe jabbing the air. Dr. Venus rose as she entered, his face consternated, his eyes moving rapidly from Justine to her mother.

“Justine, this is the height of rudeness,” said her mother. “Where have you been? I only hope the roast isn’t ruined.”

Dr. Venus’s eyes continued to move to and fro. He lifted his hand in the beginning of a gesture and gave up. “Well then,” he said.

In the car they were silent as her mother furiously negotiated the rush-hour traffic, twice hitting the brake so abruptly that she and Justine jerked then stiffly bobbed in their seats. Her mother seemed angry but not necessarily at Justine; she did not seem shocked or worried. Justine waited, her anxious fantasies crowding round, her memory of the middle-aged man with the cold eyes gliding among them. He had been sexy in a way, she thought with a pang of regret.

“What did Dr. Venus want to talk to you about?” she asked.

Her mother tossed a lock of hair from her forehead. “He was just giving me a summary of your progress to date. Most of what he said was encouraging, but your rudeness does not speak well for his treatment.”