Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

I stopped going to the phone when they called. Soon I stopped going to my classes. It wasn’t a decision; I simply couldn’t stand going anymore. I couldn’t stand not going either. I would pace the dorm room as my aspirations of graduation and success crowded into one corner of my head, yelling and screaming. I thought it was already too late, I was ruining my life, I’d missed too much material. A phantasmagoric comet of historical facts, philosophical yammerings, and French phrases would fly about the room, impossible for me to grab. And then the phantom of my parents’ house would appear, trembling and weightless in my skull, and I’d think of the way I’d feel if I went out and walked among the people with their slabs of face and darting eyes. In contrast was the world of Anna Granite, clean and logical, sealed off and growing ever remote, Solitaire, Skip and the others, gazing at me regretfully as they floated farther away. To keep them near, I spent more and more time on my bed, reading Anna Granite while the rest of my life pressed in on me.

Then, within a two-day period, I read two pieces of information. One was that Anna Granite, who never attended college, had left her parents’ home in pre-revolutionary Romania, left the country at age fourteen, and never spoke to them again. Two was that Anna Granite was now living in Philadelphia where she was giving a series of lectures at her Definitist Institute. It was some time that week, as I lay in bed listening to tinny rock music seeping through the wall from the unit next door, that a path seemed to clear before me, a walkway through the writhing information I woke up to each morning. If Anna Granite could do it, why not I?

I stopped even thinking about going to classes. I changed from part-time to full-time at the restaurant and feverishly double-shifted. I received a letter from the administration which I threw in the drawer with the unopened letters from my mother.

I threw the letters away when I left for Philadelphia, but not all unread. The last thing I did before fleeing my dorm room (during the dinner hour so my gobbling fellows wouldn’t see me departing with my meager luggage) was to read letter after increasingly frantic letter, the last of which said, “We’re worried about you, honey.”

The bus trip to Philadelphia was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. The vinyl seats, ripped and exploding with dirty foam rubber, the greasy windows, the droopy heads of my companions, the odor of lavatory disinfectant, the merrily sloshing bit of blue at the bottom of the mysterious toilet — the foreignness, the oddity of it thrilled me. I felt I could ride around in the bus forever, going from one dismal, echoing station to the next, eating stale sandwiches and coffee from machines, talking to no one, my identity shrunk to that of fat girl on the bus. Strangely, as I rode through the concrete landscape, dreaming about a life of achievement, beauty, and excellence, I found repose in anonymity and ugliness.

I thought of my parents, fleetingly. I saw my mother standing in the kitchen, her arms limp, her eyes absent. She was exactly the type of person Anna Granite depicted as a vehicle for evil, and she had been. My father’s image I had no trouble rejecting. He was a bully, a weak nasty little man who had accomplished nothing. He was a denier of reality who had almost destroyed me. I shut a door on him forever as I rode the Greyhound eating potato chips and Junior Mints.

I ensconced myself in the Euella Parks Young Women’s Hotel, a maternal building with round scrolling flourishes on eave and cornice. According to the schedule I’d received via mail from the Definitist Institute, Granite lectured on Wednesday. It was Sunday. I spent the entire first afternoon and evening pacing the room, sorting and resorting my clothes in their rickety new drawers, arranging my few dresses in the closet, studying the traffic on the street below, rehearsing what I would say to Anna Granite when the moment came, and imagining what she would say to me. My heart swelled with anticipation and fear as scene after scene unreeled before me. I’m not sure why fear; possibly because the intimacy and understanding that I fantasized was such that it would rip my skin off. She would look at me and know everything I’d endured. I wouldn’t have to hold back; I could tell her about it all, I could allow her to penetrate that part of myself I’d held away from everyone, the tiny but vibrant internal Never-Never Land I’d lived in when there was no other place for me. I imagined how moved she would be by my inner world, how angry she would be at how I’d been betrayed. The mere idea of her powerful emotions were enough to make me weep as I circled the room, running my hands up and down the sides of my body. I imagined myself in a psychic swoon, lush flowers of surrender popping out about my head as I was upheld by the mighty current of Granite’s intellectual embrace.

But what if it didn’t happen that way? I had never seen this woman; how could I imagine she would care for me in a way that no one else ever had? This question made me feel a loneliness so insupportable that I’d hug my original fantasy until it hurt, then let go into the loneliness again.

At first daylight I rose from my snarled bed clothes (I’d vainly tried to sleep), got dressed and went out. It was a gray dirty morning; squashed milk cartons and eggshells lay in the street. People were walking with their faces against the wind, clothes flapping. I imagined them all in their offices and their apartments, living their fascinating lives (All the little knickknacks! The cartoons taped to refrigerators! The romances, the phone conversations, the families!), occupying their complicated inner worlds as full humans yet appearing in public streets every day to become walking knickknacks in someone else’s landscape.

I had spent almost my entire life in rooms, both literally and figuratively, and my awakened sense of private versus public hammered me in the head. I was absorbed by every face that passed me; the jowls, the eye wrinkles, the bumpy noses, the flower-petal quality of young female skin, the parasitic crust of mascara, the leakages of lipstick into tiny mouth lines, the delicate eyebrow hairs, the blue frond of vein at the temple — how could I ever have viewed these organisms as slabs! Even more unlike my campus experience, I didn’t feel either isolation or exposure as I walked among the citizens of Philadelphia. I felt as though I occupied a compartment of personal space that they instinctively respected as I respected theirs, out of which I could gaze with total impunity.

I roamed the city in this fashion all day, breakfasting on french toast, riding the bus, sitting in parks, strolling a museum, a department store, a Laundromat. I returned to the hotel with a bag of burgers, fries, and orange drink and slept almost immediately after consuming them. I woke in darkness, shoved out of sleep by a terrifying dream, unable to identify my surroundings or the menacing ear-piercing buzz which was, I finally realized, the big pink hotel sign outside my window. I had dreamed that my mother was under the ground in a container so small she couldn’t move. In the slow darkness of my dream landscape, she sent me telepathic messages from her prison. She said, “I’m in hell, Dotty.” In the dream this filled me with pain and terror and I tried to find my mother to comfort her. But I could only sense her locked deep underground, away from me forever.

When I recovered enough to turn on the light, I noticed that the Euella Parks Hotel had cockroaches, many of which were forming a living mosaic on my take-out containers. I spent the rest of the night fitfully pacing, thinking obsessively of Anna Granite until the sun came up and I burst out of my cage and went to have french toast for breakfast again.