Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

I have to confess that a large part of my reason for being there was the beauty of the ritual, the solemnity and delicacy of it all. Justine had been right; Anna Granite would not have approved.

The Reverend Jane saw me and floated towards me. “Dorothy, so nice to see you, it’s been a while.” She rested her long arm across my shoulders, and her body warmth sank into my outer flesh and vanished. I uttered my greeting, and she stepped slightly away from me, her hand still resting on my shoulder. She looked at me, and her expression seemed to spiral inward as her eyes released darts of light that covered my forehead and cheeks with bright barbs.

“There seems to have been a change in you,” she said. “Quite recently. Yes.” Slowly her eyes eased back into their normal function and she smiled, emitting nothing but kindness and interest. “You’re probably not aware of it yet but you will be. A nice opening is taking place.” She nodded happily, and I was embarrassed by the little lilypad pulse that answered her from somewhere in my chest, eager for her words and voice simply because they were kind.

I saw Jodie and Marie, a couple that faithfully attended the meetings. I felt for Jodie a strange affinity born of our mutual awkwardness and our politeness in the face of it. We had nothing to say to each other, yet we felt a bond based on the unspoken sense of an elusive similarity between us and the fear that if we actually got to know one another the result would be disappointment. The similarity was not physical; she was a tall, sharp-featured strawberry blonde with an almost expressionless face and stiff Kabuki grace. Her girlfriend Marie, a young, sarcastic, alcoholic Southerner with gorgeous green eyes and bad skin, scared me, but I approached them anyway as they lounged by the snack table.

Marie regarded me resentfully as Jodie and I made our usual pointlessly locked-in eye contact and clumsy small talk. I wanted to talk to them about Justine and the interview but could find no way to do so as they knew almost nothing about me. Instead I made oblique references to a certain “strange person” who had appeared in my life and who was “playing games” with me, a person I could see was trouble, yet felt drawn to. In between sentences I directed hard, confusing thoughts at Jodie, and she seemed to sense the scrambled text beneath my banal phrases, for I could feel a reaction pressing against her austerity like a curious animal. Even Marie seemed sympathetic. “Get rid of her,” she said. “Don’t cut her any slack.”

Reverend Jane clapped her hands and called out, “Okay! Let’s begin!”

We sat in our circle of chairs, and Jane began her talk. She’d been thinking about the limitations we place on ourselves. She told of a story she once read in a National Geographic which reported that when tigers accustomed to captivity were taken to nature preserves, they refused to leave the perimeters of their cages, even after the cages were removed. My eyes scanned the attentive faces. Who were these people? Mostly attractive, healthy-looking women in their thirties who wore bright-colored clothing. One of them, a Puerto Rican woman with a sternly beautiful face and huge starved eyes, had recently lost her mother to cancer and her brother to AIDS. She sat in her chair as if she were a cactus drinking in the tiny rivulet of nourishment at the center of Jane’s voice; it was very little, but she was drawing on it with all her deep plantlike might. I felt for her.

“. and I just kept seeing that strong beautiful tiger in the midst of that lush greenery, with those wonderful tropical flowers and the fresh air all around him, yet unable to step out and live it. And I said to myself, that’s been me. That’s been a lot of people I know.”

I wondered if it had ever been me. It didn’t seem like it. I looked around the circle. People were nodding their heads. Then it was time to link hands, close our eyes, and focus inward, visualizing pure golden light bathing our heart chakras. Usually when we did this I found that while there was nothing much in my heart chakra, my head was a-boil with nasty little memories. The teenagers on the subway who called me “porky,” the cab driver who’d called me a cunt, bitchy Ms. Feigenbaum, the lawyer with illegible handwriting, all chattering hatefully to the accompaniment of the Top 40 trash I was subjected to from my work-mate’s desk radio. I sighed, linked hands, and encouraged my thoughts to skip with idiotic lightness over my recent plans for joining a gym and losing weight. Salads, I thought. Water. Threads of tonal music penetrated my skull. I must’ve been tired for I experienced a sudden cerebral dip, the startling change of level one feels when stepping into sleep, not one layer at a time, but down several layers with one elongated step. I yawned. I thought of my mother. This was not unusual; I thought of both my parents on occasion, usually with intense anger. But at this moment I felt acutely my mother as she was in Ohio, still young, still pretty, and in my child’s eyes so much more than pretty that “pretty” would demean features that to me were the fine articulation of her deep internal life, which made meaningless the social concept “pretty.” I remembered her rubbing my shoulders as I lay in bed ready for sleep, remembered her gentleness, her innocent undefended nature entering my body through her fingers. I remembered my body responding to her. All at once I felt my heart chakra, which was filled, not with light, but with pain.

I must have transmitted this to the women who held my hands, for I felt gentle squeezes on each side. This only made it worse. My mother was swallowed up in black.

“Okay, now we’re just going to go around the circle and give everybody the chance to say a few words — maybe to ask for support or to give thanks or whatever you want. If you feel like keeping quiet, just squeeze the hand of the person next to you. Ready?”

I sat shivering and cold as a woman began expressing gratitude for all the wonderful changes in her life during the last year. The image of Justine Shade flitted across my mind, and I wondered why. Was my life so empty? I thought of Anna Granite the first time I had seen her on the dais in Philadelphia.

I was so overwhelmed by my emotional response to Granite, that I could only comprehend her speech in fragments. She talked about how tragic it was when the individual was sacrificed for the majority, how the needs of the weak became an excuse for undermining the strong. I wept for the entire time, deep in the turbulent waters of my feelings, terrified by and agog at the fanged and finned beasts that swam by; I heard the speech only when I rose to the surface for air. What I heard corresponded with what I was seeing in my underwater maelstrom. I had been stronger than my parents. I had been damn strong to survive a childhood that was completely lacking in emotional or mental sustenance and in fact would’ve killed most people. And it was my strength that had made my father hate me. It wasn’t because I was worthless, not because I was ugly or fat. It was because I was worth something and he knew it and he wanted to destroy me for it. I wept with rage, yet with decorum. The handsome man next to me furtively looked, but not with anything but kindness.

When the speech was over, my tears were done. I sat quietly in the back row resting as I watched the audience crowd around Granite to ask her questions and to shake her hand, or merely to look upon her at close range. My emotions gently ebbed as the audience began to filter out of the building, their faces upturned and glowing. I wasn’t even surprised when the man who had been sitting next to me appeared in the aisle beside my seat and, putting his hand on my shoulder, said “Goodbye now”—even though no handsome man had ever touched or spoken to me in that way.