Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“You fucking liar,” I said.

The cab driver’s eyes flickered in the mirror.

“I don’t mean you,” I said. “Have you read this week’s Urban Vision ?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t read that paper.”

His words were polite, but his voice harbored another quality which I could best describe as a readiness to see me as several different kinds of asshole at once. It was different from an assumption in that an assumption is passive; the quality in his voice was watching and waiting. I ignored it and pressed on, secure in the knowledge that I am not an asshole.

“Well good for you,” I said. “Because it’s a piece of trash. Ordinarily I don’t buy it either, but I did this week because there’s an article in here about Anna Granite, the most important thinker of our time. Do you know who she is?”

He turned his head to curse at a car which had forced its snout between us and the lane we were rightfully headed for. We jerked to a halt as a dark, leaping boy skipped in front of us and continued nimbly through the traffic, a yelling man in baggy red pants stumbling in pursuit. The driver ferociously manned the wheel; we swerved, and I fell to one side in a rattle of paper. I struggled up and briefly took in the awfulness of the moment, the panting vehicles, their primitive engines covered with a thin veneer of colored metal and cheap style, all tiny compartments for embattled humans on seat-belt leashes, vainly trying to assert their presence with the classical or rap or rock music spilling crazily out their windows to be consumed by the grinding of gears and the clouds of noxious fumes. Construction workers hammered and drilled, bicycle messengers shot into the invisible future of their destination, thousands of faces passed through my line of vision, thousands of expression lines, eye-glints, and hair cuts. An unoccupied strip of street opened before us; the driver gunned his motor, and I was thrown back against the seat.

“Do you know who Anna Granite is?” I persisted.

“No. Maybe I heard of her but I don’t really know.”

“Well she’s a philosopher who stands for everything that makes life possible. She believes in total freedom for the individual as opposed to living for the state. She believes in the primacy of rationality over emotion, although she respects the truth of emotion.” I faltered and groped for the words to express succinctly what Granite had been, her hot leonine face in a haze of turquoise light refracting off the crystal chandeliers, the feel of her hand on mine, my life saved, so many lives saved. He was black; I would mention her stand against racism, except I didn’t want to patronize.

“She’s a Scientologist, right?”

“No, not at all.”

“A Moonie?”

“No! She, she was a Definitist, an inventor of a whole movement dedicated to the power and sanctity of the individual—”

“White individuals, I can assume.”

“No! Not at all! She was absolutely against the kind of collective tribal mentality from which racism springs!”

He snorted. “So what does Urban Vision have to say about it?”

A tornado of explanations, political points of view, sociopolitical lines of thought roared through my head. There was no time to explain it all and anyway, none of it addressed the real issue. “ Urban Vision ran this article by this bitch who lied to me about everything she believed, who got me to talk to her about the most personal things in my life, and then, then used it in the service of, of evil, of everything that’s destroying this society. This person betrayed me, she—”

He sharply swerved and pulled over to the curb. I paused and looked. We were in the Village, but this was not Charles Street.

“Get out of my car,” he said.

The chattering voices in my head stopped, confused. “Why? Is something wrong?”

“No, lady, nothing’s wrong. I’ve just been driving around all day listening to the crazy piss-ant problems of white people, and I can’t stand it anymore. Get out.”

Explanations lunged forward, all talking at once, knocking each other down and climbing over each other. “This is not a crazy piss-ant problem!” To my shame, I heard a whine streaking down the center of my voice. “I’m talking about something that affects both of us, I’m—”

“Whatever it is, I can guarantee it doesn’t affect us in the same way. You owe me three-forty.” Smartly, he struck the stop button on his meter.

Shocked, I sat back and reached for my purse. Distress signals flew from my body in bright flares that perished in the dead air between the driver and me. He was a wall, impervious to the stewing explanations, hurt feelings, and angry impulses that hurled themselves at him, tugging at his clothes. I tried to awaken the anger that had so recently reigned in me, but what I felt was the hurt passivity that knew such walls very well. My coins and dollars fell from my fingers and I had to grope for them on the floor of the cab. He muttered contemptuously.

The problem was, when I looked at myself as he probably saw me, I couldn’t blame him. A fat white woman with dyed hair who he imagined came from a pampered suburban life and had had everything given to her, but was ranting and screaming anyway. I felt a tingling sensation in the back of my throat, like you get before you vomit. I sat up, the skin on my face hot with sensations. I made myself talk as I thrust the money over the ripped and taped up seat.

“I know what it looks like,” I said. “I know what you think. And I don’t blame you.”

Tears panted in my hoarse voice. His eyes darted in the mirror, eyes of anger, puzzlement, and strangely, an element of fear.

“But if you knew me.” I stopped to muffle the tears. “If you knew the truth about me, you would be sorry you are doing this. I’m not your enemy.”

His eyes changed, his jaw softened, and in a terrible moment I saw that he was sorry, if not because of my words, then because he was gentleman enough to be distressed by the tears in my voice. It was a terrible moment because neither of us knew what to do about it. He looked away in embarrassment. I dropped the money on the seat and got out of the car.

I stood trembling on the pavement, trying not to cry. I heard his voice behind me. “Charles is just a couple more blocks to your left,” he said. I turned in time to see him roll up his window and drive away.

I began walking to my left. The full weight of my exhaustion pressed the backs of my eyeballs. Why had he been so angry? I passed fruit stands, beggars, wastebaskets jammed with trash. The only reason I could think of was the recent acquittal of the white kids who’d beat a black kid to death, an event which had made a lot of people mad. He was right, I thought miserably. If I were he, I’d be in no mood to listen to white people’s problems either, however universal they might be. The thought was like a punch in the gut, and I was no longer sure I had the stamina to carry out my mission. My single focus had been cleft in two, and now only half my mind was lunging towards my revenge on Justine, while the other half was riding to Brooklyn with the cab driver to find the white brawlers and beat them senseless or kill them. I sweated in triumph as I imagined the terrified expression on the face of a young thug as I picked him up and pinned him against the wall, fixing him with my righteous stare before I — but although I was big and at that point very strong, it was unlikely I could pick up a strapping eighteen-year-old boy. How would we know where they were anyway? We could find out, but if a white fat lady and a black guy drove into Brooklyn inquiring about these local heroes, we’d probably be set upon by the entire community before we even got out of the car. Besides, the cab driver was long gone.