Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Why are you doing this article anyway?”

When Justine walked into the café and saw Dorothy sitting there, she was reminded, with unexpected vividness, of the power of the woman’s presence. In the precious café she seemed even more huge than she had in her apartment, even more insistently strange, the emblems of her derangement circling her in an invisible but palpable personal mandala. For a moment she felt embarrassed to be sitting next to a fat lady wearing hideous chartreuse sweat pants, big red hair and the plastic jewelry of a drag queen with an ironic sense of humor. Horrified, she considered the possibility of an acquaintance coming in and seeing her with this person, or even the waitress, who would surely notice how odd they looked together. Then the stubborn kid who had defied society once before spoke up; “I don’t care what you douche-bags do. I’m not gonna hate Emotional anymore,” and she sat down, smiling.

She immediately noticed a difference in Dorothy and was taken aback by it, although she wasn’t sure what the difference was. She surreptitiously glanced across the table as they surveyed their menus; she was touched and amused to see the suppressed excitement in Dorothy’s face. Dorothy seemed solid, stronger than she had at that last encounter, during which, as Justine remembered it, the fat woman, for all her weight, had seemed groundless and insubstantial, floating, sometimes flapping as she was buffeted by the abnormal ferocity of her own emotions. She felt the ferocity was still there, but centered this time, shimmering like precious metals in some invisible cache. Her vague fear of the woman appeared behind her like a shadow and tapped her on the shoulder. She ignored it and drew forward, unconsciously intrigued by her strength and where it could be coming from. Perversely, she started with a question she knew would provoke Dorothy. Sure enough, although Dorothy answered the question politely, Justine could feel in her voice and see in her eyes that hornet swarm of anger that had thickened the air during the first interview. But instead of releasing the swarm, Dorothy abruptly asked her that question.

She didn’t know what to say, and was glad when their snacks were placed before them and they could become involved in the neutral movements of stirring and arranging. “Just a minute,” she said to Dorothy and then saw that it was quite unnecessary; Dorothy was looking with delighted absorption at the huge piece of chocolate cake that had been set before her and was already reaching for her fork. Justine saw her face become immobile and sealed off, as if all reception of signals from outside had become temporarily suspended so that all units could be devoted to the eating of cake. She felt a flash of repulsion at this sight of greed on automatic pilot, and then that was superseded by an odd feeling of tenderness based on her certainty that behind this mask of blind compulsion was a little girl in a state of solemn ecstasy over an extra-special treat — and then she was saddened by the equally strong certainty that food was the only kind of treat this little girl ever got.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said.

“Very good,” replied Dorothy. “Really tasty.”

They ate in silence for a moment as Justine reflected on something a girlfriend had said once, that men bond when they drink and women bond when they eat dessert together.

“So,” she said, “I’m doing the piece because I’m fascinated that people would be so influenced by the work of a fiction writer and would base their lives on the acts of fictional characters. Also I think that in spite of Granite’s scorn for collective culture, she in fact embodied — in her work — major contradictions and dilemmas in the way Americans view money and the way individuals interact with groups. And she did so in a very pop culture medium with these archetypal pop characters. That’s remarkable to me.”

As Justine spoke, Dorothy slowly lowered a fork of cake and fixed her with her large eyes. Justine prepared herself for a burst of indignation and instead felt a chink open in Dorothy’s impenetrability; a soft little beam of light came forth.

She was smarter than I’d thought . I momentarily lost interest in my cake. Interestingly, once I’d softened in my attitude towards her, due to sympathy for her emotional disturbance, I felt a dispassionate interest in her point of view, which I suddenly saw as an abstract extravaganza of mental reaction, beams of thought darting and ricocheting from one point in Granite’s world to the next, growing in heat and light with each connection. “You’re right,” I said. “It is interesting, and you’ve hit it on the head when you say she embodied the central moral dilemmas in the country. But why are you paying attention to dumb stuff like people thinking her work meant this or that when the important thing was what it did in fact mean?”

“For two reasons. One is that I think Granite was often attacked unfairly by well-meaning liberals who looked at the work from a shallow perspective—”

Ah ha! She was an ally, a defender after all! An explosion of sweetness went off in my mouth as I chewed, coinciding spectacularly with a burst of mental pleasure.

“—and also because when people adopt a political position or philosophy, they rarely take it into their personality whole hog, whether they think they do or not. It is filtered through a life-long construct of individual perception, emotional needs, and unconscious assumptions about life. That doesn’t make the philosophy any less strong or valid. In fact it is a testimony to its vitality and viability that it is capable of subtle transmutation and expansion into various forms without losing its essential characteristics.”

This reeked of subjectivism, and I of course saw it as rot. Yet. it was interesting rot. I couldn’t help but be curious even as I rejected it. “But you are making a mistake,” I said. “You are taking sheer confusion for vitality and viability. Yeah, there are plenty of people who misunderstood Granite in many ways but still grasped enough of Definitism for it to be of immeasurable value in their lives. You should focus on the value, not the confusion.”

Her back straightened, and I saw her go into that prim boxed-in mode that I remembered. “But I think sheer confusion is vitality and viability. The interplay between the imaginary and the real, the private emotional world and the discourse of ideas. that stuff. When a person takes Anna Granite’s ideas and — well, like you did. When you first read Granite’s work, you were living in an unbearable situation in which you were forced to hide everything precious in you because there was no place safe for you.”

My stomach shut against the cake, and I put my fork down, pressing my spine against the back of my chair.

“So when you read Granite’s work not only did she awaken your sense of beauty and pleasure in life, not only did she illustrate for you a positive use of strength and power, but she provided a springboard for you to create an internal world richer and stronger than the external world which wasn’t giving you any support at all. But she was only the departure point.”

I stared at her, mortified and speechless. Her impending mental collapse had apparently shattered her judgment, made her reckless, aggressive, oblivious to any concept of the natural boundaries between people, careening into my territory with her wheels spinning. Yet she was right, at least about me. I tried to stir myself into being offended by her reference to Granite as a “departure point,” but I was too confused to do so. I felt invaded and imposed upon, skewed, as I had been so long ago by the kind gaze of Nona Delgado in the hallway. This girl was talking to me as I had fantasized Anna Granite would talk to me before I met her, breaking down doors I couldn’t bring myself to open and storming in. That wasn’t all; when she had talked she was like a tiny magician in a cape and top hat drawing back a velvet curtain and pointing with her wand to the unsuspected tableaux of my life, a place where Anna Granite entered a human woman and was changed into a mythical winged thing with myriad powers — transformed by me and in fact part of me. As I say: rot, but seductive, flattering rot.