Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Still she liked to sit with her in the evening, doing her homework while her mother read about current affairs in important magazines, so she could discuss events with women at Glade of Dreams. She liked to be in the car with her, both of them in sunglasses, listening to Adventures in Good Music . She even liked to shop with her mother sometimes, feeling protective towards this big, chic, but pathetically dreamy woman in the short skirt and knee-high suede boots. Sometimes they would go to Glade of Dreams, and Justine would lie next to her in a lounge chair, aware that they were objects of speculation, the divorcee and her troublesome daughter.

She liked being with her mother better than she liked visiting her father on the weekends. Her father was no longer handsome; his face had been weakened and coarsened by sagging and wrinkles, his body was paunchy and brittle. Their conversations were meticulous affairs about music, books, politics. He didn’t ask her about her life, and she didn’t desire to talk about it with him. There were occasional discomfiting moments when his sharp brown eyes would swivel into focus and he would seem to be looking right at her, wondering about her, perhaps pitying her. She hated that and tried to distract him immediately. He was easy to distract so they had polite dinners, and then her father kissed her, put his hand on her head and said, “Good night, my beauty!”

Thus she calmly moved from parent to parent to school, counting the months, holding her aloneness around her like a magic cloak.

When she moved to New York after graduating from college years later, the cloak was wound about her so completely she no longer knew it was there.

When I was eighteen , my father paid for me to go to college in Blythetown, Pennsylvania. His decision to do so evolved over a period of months, during which he would sit at the dining room table with all his bills related to me spread before him, along with my high school report cards. Finally he announced that he would pay my tuition but that I would have to pay my other expenses.

Headley Cramer College was the benign experiment of a wealthy liberal nut who wanted to create an inexpensive two-year school for the working class with all the amenities of a university, including a dormitory, and without the tedious practical bent of the average community college. It enjoyed brief prestige as a uniquely cheap and high-quality institution and it attracted a number of enthusiastic MA’s and PhD’s with esoteric predispositions, as well as hordes of snobby working-class kids with boxes of art-rock records. Unfortunately Cramer went broke or lost his mind, I don’t recall which, and the school deteriorated into a squalid teen slum which occasionally made the papers when there was another stabbing in the special Male Bonding dormitory or something. But that wasn’t until much later, and anyway the main virtue of the place from my point of view was that it was a two-hour drive from Painesville.

Immediately after registering, I took a job in a restaurant owned by a stunted creature who sat in the back office with a bottle of whiskey, paralyzed before a color TV for most of the day. I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea. I walked to my classes on cold concrete paths surrounded by yards of snow upon which lay frozen piles of dog shit. There were always other students walking all around me, in groups or alone, a continuous flow of movement in crisscrossing directions. I would close my eyes at night and see a facsimile of this moving grid in the form of endless trails of light ticking on in the dark. I ate alone in a cafeteria filled with lively students who expended more energy in gobbling their ice cream sandwiches than I discharged all day. Their voices echoed in the dormitory halls as I walked back to my room at night to be greeted with a ritual “Hi” by my roommate.

I hadn’t thought college would be so like my previous life; there was an awful thematic sameness under the deceptive novelty of the experience. I had so wanted to do well and in a way I did; my passionate papers always came back with A’s on them. But something was wrong. Despite my relief at being away from home, I think I missed the dark, rank security of it, the reliability of having it to crouch in, feeling the huge violent energies of my parents encircling me like a fortress of thorns. Walking the concrete paths, I felt the world stretch out before me with sickening boundlessness. The people around me appeared more mechanical and remote every day, even though sometimes I passed by close enough to see their mouths working and their long hair swinging in their faces. I felt myself walking in place through a landscape that pulsed, swelled, and receded like a cell under a microscope.

One day as I walked back to the dorm from history class I began to cry. People focused their eyes on me briefly, then looked away. They probably thought I was crying because I was fat and didn’t have a boyfriend. I went into the Student Union bathroom to compose myself, came out, and began to cry again. The next day I made an appointment to see a counselor. I will always remember that kind, watery-eyed woman who sat looking at me with a gentleness and concern that made me cry again. She wanted to know about my family. I told her gingerly, planning to work up to the part about my father and I at night. But the more I minced around it, the more impossible it became to tell her. She sat, furrowing her brows and shaking her head at the scenes I described. I left to go to class and sat looking at the people around me, marveling at my difference from them. I had had sex with my father.

Sometimes I would gloat over this fact in a perverted way, feeling weirdly vindicated and special, enormous and corporeally real in comparison with the hateful skinny boys and girls prissing around me in their fashionable clothes. But most of the time I felt as if my body had been turned inside out, that I was a walking deformity hung with visible blood-purple organs, lungs, heart, bladder, kidneys, spleen, the full ugliness of a human stripped of its skin. I turned the facts over and over in my mind, trying to find some acceptable way to present them to my kindly counselor. But I never did.

It was during the beginning of my increasingly ghastly second year that I rediscovered Anna Granite. One Saturday night when my roommate was out being neurotic, while I sat on my bed with my French homework scattered about, a box of donuts and a bag of potato chips on either side, I heard the sounds of happy people walking past my window. Their warmth and pleasure caught in my protective screen and tore it. I remembered that afternoon, when I’d taken advantage of a quiet moment at work to lounge against the counter with a damp rag in my hand, enjoying the bit of pink and blue sky visible from the front window; during this moment of repose a tall handsome boy walked by and said, “You look like a real winner.” His friend said, “Really,” and they seated themselves in my section. The words cut me. I wrapped the wound in mental preoccupation, a binding shredded by the voices outside my window. I tried to concentrate on the stiff foreign phrases before me. That only made it worse. I crumpled my papers as I collapsed on the bed, dry sobs scoring my rib cage. I saw my college experience in comic book panels — at my desk in class, walking between buildings, in the dorm — and then I saw the panels come unstuck and spin away from each other, their borders torn, their images blackened and bursting into flames, disappearing into darkness. I ripped the blankets off the bed and sent French book and donuts sprawling (one donut rolling under my roommate’s desk, where it waited to start a fight over my loathsome habits) as I thrashed around, snorting and weeping as I tried to think of something that wasn’t terrible. I veered forward into the future, imagining myself as a lawyer, a fashion editor, a magazine journalist — all these possibilities seemed like cheap paper cut-outs moving up and down against industrial gray. I clawed backward into the past and found no comfort in anything there unless “comfort” could be had in the excruciating sight of brute, ignorant love, cowed and trapped, exposed by the wildly panning camera of my memory.