Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

I waited until there were only a few people standing around Granite and she was reaching to collect her things as she answered their final questions. Then I rose and approached her. I saw her glance flicker at me and then back to the boy who was telling her of his plans to become an architect. I stood next to him, heavy with determination. I could feel her becoming aware of me, taking me in, trying to interpret the surge of resolve emanating from this silent fat girl. I could see the coarseness of her skin and hair, the deep lines on her forehead, her mouth creases, and the swollen pockets of brown and purple under her eyes. It didn’t matter anymore that she was not beautiful. She turned to me. Her aquamarine eyes were shielded, questioning, very tired.

“I. I. I. ” To my horror I was unable to speak. She frowned at me, she gestured with impatience. “I just had to tell you. ” My feelings swelled up through my lungs and into my throat. I made a choked noise. My moment had come, I was before my savior, and I was falling away from her as if down a dark pit. Her face seemed to come apart, cracking like that of a witch in a mirror. Alarm bolted from her eyes. My hand thrashed out reflexively, as though to break my fall and then the miraculous thing; she stood and gripped my shoulders with both hands, and I felt her body heat enter my system with the blind muscularity of an eel whipping through deep water.

She said, “I can see you’ve had a lot of pain in your life.”

“Yes I have.” People were looking, but I didn’t care.

“There were times I didn’t know how I would survive. Even recently. I just wanted to die.”

Her eyes radiated the gentlest strength I had ever experienced, her tough, hot, callusy hands supported me with the full intensity of her life. “Yes,” she said. “I can see that.”

“But I did survive, and the reason I survived was you. I had to tell you that. I had to thank you.”

She looked at me and, as in my fantasy, she saw me, saw my pain — which no one had ever acknowledged or even allowed me to acknowledge. However, unlike my fantasy, to be seen and acknowledged by her wasn’t to be penetrated and ripped apart by an obscene burst of energy. I did not feel her gaze boring through my pores to envelop my swooning spirit; I felt her at the perimeters of myself, attentive, very close, but respectful, waiting for me to reveal myself. So I didn’t swoon. I stood and met her gaze and felt my self, habitually held in so deep and tight, come out to meet her with the quavering steps of someone whose feet have been asleep for a long, long time.

“Sit down,” she said. “I am very tired, but I feel we must talk.”

We sat down to talk as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Everyone else was gone, but I could hear people milling around behind the curtain, occasionally putting their heads out to see what was happening between Anna Granite and the unknown fat girl. She still held my hand.

“Tell me,” she said. “Just tell me.”

I did. What I had been unable to say to anyone, barely even to myself, came out in normal sentences. I didn’t even feel embarrassment, let alone shame. As I talked she sat erect, her whole body in a state of alertness, taking in, I felt, not only my words, but my voice, my eyes, my movements, the invisible mist of my secret bodily qualities, that which makes you sense a person before you’ve seen them. When I told her that my father had molested me, her eyes became suffused with such an extremity of feeling that they became walls of fierce unfeeling, inanimate as fire or radiation. I told of how I’d read The Bulwark , how I’d gone to college hoping to find meaning in my life and had instead been battered by everyone and everything around me, how once again her work had been the only thing for me to hold on to, how I’d come to the decision to leave college, cut myself away from my parents forever, change my name and become a student of Definitism.

When I was finished she stared at me in silence for a long moment, her hand still on mine. She said, “And how will you support yourself?”

“I can type fast,” I said. “I’m a good speller. I could be a secretary.”

There was another moment in which her eyes absorbed me slowly, and then she said, “Would you like to work for me?”

“Be your secretary?”

“Not mine directly. But for my protégé, Beau Bradley. It is part time, I’m afraid, but we are paying almost double the standard hourly wage. And for that we expect double the competence.”

She was talking to me as if we were both characters in her novels! I wanted to answer her like one, but I couldn’t quite. “Are you sure?” I said. “I’d love to try but I’ve never been a secretary before and—”

“If it doesn’t work out we’ll know soon enough. But I think it will. I see incredible strength in you. I also see intelligence, which is proven by the fact that you were drawn to my work. If you could live your life up to this point in the face of such terrible opposition, I think you will do amazing things now that you have removed that opposition. I want you to know that. And I want you to report for work tomorrow.”

The last words between us occurred as I was on my way to the door. She said, “Oh, wait, you haven’t told me — what is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you.”

And I said, “Dorothy. Dorothy Never.” And she smiled and repeated it.

And now we’re going to open our eyes,” said Reverend Jane.

I opened my eyes to the sight of happy strangers unclasping their hands and looking around. I caught Jodie’s curious glance and looked away.

“Why don’t we end the service with a little song,” continued Jane. “I always enjoy that, don’t you?” We reached for our songbooks.

I remembered Anna Granite and me alone in the hotel hall like two lovers clasping hands in a closing restaurant. I remembered leaving her that night and walking through the streets feeling my secret slowly releasing itself from my body. I felt my inner tissue open and lie breathing and restful. I felt yellow flowers blooming on my internal organs.

But now Anna Granite is dead, and sometimes I think my memories of her don’t mean as much to me as I’d like to think they do. I remember my sense of release and freedom that night, but only cerebrally. Well, Granite would say that is the most important way, I guess.

We held our songbooks before us and sang: “Happiness runs in a circular motion/Thought is like a little boat upon the sea/Everybody is a part of everything anyway/You can have everything if you let yourself be.”

Justine Shade rolled down the cheap black socks of a large male patient. She dotted glue on his thick ankles and applied the clamps.

“Just rest your arms at your sides,” she said gently. She moved to glue and clamp his wrists.

What an idiotic thing to spend your days doing, she thought. She looked at the heavy man on the table, exposed in his underwear. He looked calm and potentially very purposeful, despite his passive body. She wondered if he was a Definitist.

“Mr. Johnson, have you ever read The Gods Disdained by Anna Granite?”

“No, I haven’t. Although I think I’ve heard of her. Why?”

“I don’t know. You remind me a little bit of a character, Skip Jackson. Maybe because your name is Skip, too.”

“What’s Skip Jackson like?”

“Well, he’s an industrialist supercapitalist. He’s brilliant and rich. He’s one of the only successful supercapitalists left in the world because the liberals and weaklings have pretty much taken over and are trying to destroy the strong, productive people.” He looked interested. “Most of the other supercapitalists have hidden out in a capitalist paradise with the head capitalist and are just waiting for the world to collapse without them. Which it does.”