Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Cunt,” I said.

“Excuse me,” said a female wearing purple contact lenses. “Would you mind watching your language?”

“Mind your own business,” I snarled.

She reared back and clicked her tongue.

“The irony is that, like the wicked liberals in her books, Granite’s rational answers are based on illusions. She stood for rationality, yet her novels shamelessly (and what’s worse, unknowingly) use emotional manipulation, melodrama, jargon, and sexual fantasy to make her points. While claiming to exalt the individual, she plugged into a mass psyche, using archetypal characters devoid of real individuality, with the same vulgar emotional power as the Wicked Witch. Granite’s work is a phenomenon worth looking at as a fun-house mirror for a society that is one part sober puritan and one part capitalist sex fiend. It’s an odd thing to watch a culture start to look like the plot of a bad novel.”

“Goddamn it!” I yelled.

There was a rustling sound around me as the commuters strained their bodies to put a token of space between themselves and the crazy person. I the crazy person! When obviously demented people got paid to write stuff like this! I felt and stopped the approach of tears. From that point I only scanned the piece for particularly telling and offensive passages, of which there were many.

“She succeeded because she was, however clumsily, onto something much bigger than a first glance at her silly novels would reveal. Her writing was like the broad slashes and gaudy colors of the cheapest comic strip — but it was a comic strip about life and death and everybody knew it.”

I inhaled deeply and looked up to be sure I hadn’t missed my stop. The doors were rattling open, people were moving in and out, wiping their noses, securing their purses, locking their blank stares into place. I was okay. I looked back down and saw “She was repeatedly molested by her father during what sounds like a horrific childhood, and she says Granite’s books were what enabled her to see that life could be other than hideous.”

My anger suspended itself as I experienced the strange sensation of seeing my life rendered publicly. It was on one hand a demeaning experience, like seeing myself as a paper cut-out doll, marched by a huge hand through the toy landscape of somebody else’s opinions and purposes, unable to register my distaste because my words had been cut into dolly balloons and frozen before my mouth. But it was at the same time aggrandizing. It was only a small part of me, but so enlarged, so magnified, on a national scale, that it was like having a gross image of myself inflated into a giant parade balloon, floating above the crowd, my stubby arms helplessly extended, my face crudely painted in some fiendish expression designed for maximum impact. I watched myself, fascinated, entertained, waving and cheering at the balloon with the rest of the crowd.

I had to admit Justine had quoted me more or less fairly. Of course, my words were taken out of context and distorted as is always the case with such articles, but the quotes were fairly accurate, and I didn’t sound like a fool or a maniac, unlike most of the other people she’d skewered on paper. She couldn’t resist putting in snide parentheticals in which she suggested that my opinions were not well-founded, but there was still room for the intelligent reader to make a decision. Gingerly I moved from reaction to myself as public item and into my life again, unscathed, safe, still me.

Then I read the next paragraph. “Dorothy is a huge woman, who floats with the slow grace of the always fat in airy, gaudy single-cloth garments of indeterminate nature. Her face is intelligent, and her emotional intensity rises from her like a force field. In conversation, she is incisive, and she displays an acute sensitivity to nuance and an uncanny ability to read a situation emotionally by scanning the minutia of expressions and gestures that frame it. When she talks of the early days of the Definitist meetings, she does so in symbolic, mythological terms. when she discusses the split between Bradley and Granite she is like a child talking about her parents’ divorce a month after it happened. ”

I looked up and sat still for some moments, my bulk stewing in isolation from my lone head. I felt much as I had on first meeting Justine; insulted and yet seduced. She did not have to refer to me as “always fat,” and there was condescension in her description. Yet I also felt in her printed words a respect for me, a desire to understand me, to make her readers understand me, and I couldn’t help being touched by this. She said I was “intelligent,” “authentic,” and “incisive,” yet she compared me to a traumatized child. Worse, she implied that my fealty for Granite was the fealty of a traumatized child. I sat still while the possibility that she was right hovered about me like the evil enchanter closing in on Don Quixote.

I noticed that I was three stations past my stop and rose, cursing. My purse fell off my arm and onto the floor, my keys, lipstick, and change poured out of it. All at once I was engulfed by life’s physically mechanical nature, all the tiny movements and functions you have to perform correctly just to get through the day, all the accoutrements you must carry which can malfunction at any time. Panicked, I fell on the subway floor, groping for my belongings. Legs shifted about me as the animated forest of humans came to life like enchanted trees; hands shot forth, stealing my change, helpfully extending my keys to me, returning my rolled-away lipstick with an impressive hand-to-hand relay involving several school children and a “Yo! Lady!” I was helped, hindered, patted, pulled up, and nodded at, and then the people turned into trees again, frozen on their straps. I passed through them to exit with the ritual Excuse me’s, the doors rattled shut behind me, and I realized I’d left the paper on the train.

My hands made fists, released, and made them again. It was too much, it was unbearable. The darting people about me were like the hurtling debris of an exploded planet, and I could not stand to look at them. I fled the subway and found I was just above East 14th Street, where, I realized I could easily buy another paper.

I made my purchase at a newsstand and was soothed by the ease with which this was accomplished. As my panic receded, I remembered that I was exhausted and decided to sit down in a coffee shop to finish reading the article.

Soon I was seated with the paper open in my trembling hands, a cup of coffee on its way. I read on, my attention caught on the protruding nails of the deliberate meanness that held the piece together. The coffee came and I drank the bitter stuff. The shop had few customers and I was grateful for that. A dowdy woman read a soiled paperback. A teenager stared into space. A handsome boy mutely reached across a linoleum tabletop to touch the hand of his scowling handsome boy companion. The small dark proprietor strolled behind his counter, absently pulling his ear.

If I had been seduced, I had also been abandoned. I thought of Justine sitting in my apartment fixing me with that stare, spindly fingers working her pen. Even then she had known she would write something that attacked everything I had founded my sane life on, even as she allowed our words and feelings to twine and knot, bringing us together again in an effort to disentangle them. She had talked to me, too, exposed herself — and yet not really, because it was ultimately she who walked away and made this house of cards, this article, this canned result of our exchange which had meant so much to me and so little to her. It was she who stepped back, wrote in her notebook, and pronounced me a “child.” It was she who, after our intimacy, stroked me with the flattering words “authentic,” “incisive,” “intelligent,” caressing me under the table like a flippant ex-lover, using the remains of her power to invoke the memory of our shared closeness, a memory meant to render me helpless. That was the most painful thing; in this article, in which she used me to further demean the memory of Granite, she also invoked, in an encoded still life, the genuine moments we had experienced. Her sensitivity to me had been real, she had illuminated me gently, with respect, and yet she had done it in a context that made a joke out of everything I believed in, and, indirectly, made a fool of me.