Bear Witness (Out of Line collection)

by Mary Gaitskill

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Mary Gaitskill

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542010177

  Cover design by Zoe Norvell

  She was my teacher in third grade. She was Miss Pietrisinski, but we called her Pietrastinky or Miss Pie Crust or just Crusty Pie. But she was nice then. She was the first lady I liked who wasn’t really pretty but I liked her anyway. She had dark, stiff, shiny hair that flipped up and her jaw stuck out like a fighting dog’s and there were little pimples on it that were cute, I don’t know why. Her boobies weren’t big, but they stuck out like cones, and you wanted to touch—see, even now I put up my hand when I say it. Even now I remember the lines of her bra and how it seemed like her bras were lacy.

  And she had nice legs. In the warm weather she wore bare legs. The school was red brick and there was no AC just loud fans and the air was syrup. During reading time, when we would sit on the floor and she would read to us from a book, she would slowly move one ankle up on her knee to unstick her legs, and if you were sitting right, you could see panties. One of the books was about a man with his dogs in the woods at night in winter, and they were surrounded by wolves; there was this one she-wolf, she one by one tricked the dogs to come and play and then all the wolves killed them. It all blended in, her panties and her voice and her brown eyes, looking up into our eyes every time a dog went to the wolf slapping her paws on the ground. I hated books, but I liked when she read them. And when she walked between our desks to be sure we were doing our work, you could feel her soft body and smell her personal smells. Sometimes she stopped at my desk and put her hand on my shoulder. Her hand was warm on my shirt, and I thought about her legs and panties. She said, “Good work, Mark,” and smiled at me.

  I could tell she liked me. Even though I was in trouble a lot. I got held back so I was nine when everybody else was eight, and I was bigger too. Which meant I could beat ’em on the playground, this one kid especially. She had to punish me and send me to the principal. But even then I could see she liked me and that it made her sad to send me away. I think I even heard her say once “I just feel so bad for him.” But I don’t remember who she said it to. Or even if it was about me. But I think it was.

  I might not remember any of this except for what happened later. When I was thirteen and had to take special ed, she was my teacher again. It was a good surprise because it was in a different district and a different system so I didn’t expect to see her. Also a bad surprise because she’d turned into such a bitch.

  Moira M. had finally been drafted into the jury pool. She had successfully avoided jury duty until she was fifty-five years old. She didn’t vote until the age of thirty-one, when she’d woken as if from a stupor to realize that the president was a corrupt boob and that the only thing she could do about it was vote. So she voted, but it didn’t matter; the boob was reelected and Moira was summoned for jury duty. She had not realized that this could be a consequence of voting, and she was outraged. She put off serving for as long as possible with pleas of ill health and the rigors of self-employment (she was a freelance graphic artist as well as a waitress), but finally, two years after voting, she couldn’t get out of it. Someone told her that if you appeared unstable or difficult in any way or even expressed weird opinions, you could get dismissed early. She dyed her hair and eyebrows blue; she loudly voiced the belief that drugs should be legal; she said people committed crimes because of government mind control; she said she’d been victimized by black and Hispanic people. She was dismissed in three days and didn’t vote again until someone else that she hated was president. And so at age fifty-five the system caught up with her. Her best friend said, “Why don’t you just get it over with? You’ll do it and then you won’t get called again for ten years or something. It could even be interesting!”

  At least she’d drawn “grand jury,” which at least meant she didn’t have to do it every day, but she had to call every morning and find out if she had to come in or not. At the moment, she and her partner, Eddie, had only one car between them, and while he could drop her off at her new job before going to his job (he did contract work and his current project took him an hour away from home), he couldn’t drive all the way into the county seat to drop her off at whatever dismal building it was and then pick her up again in the evening. Luckily, she found a ride with a fellow juror. At the grocery she had run into the woman who ran a charity organization for kids that Moira had been involved with the previous year (art for kids at a camp for the disadvantaged and mentally ill), and discovered that the woman’s niece had been called to duty at exactly the same time and place. “She would be happy to give you a ride!” said the charity lady, and Moira, who liked to do things for herself, unhappily accepted.

  The kindly niece (Ana) actually came to Moira’s home to pick her up; she had even brought coffee and pastries to share in the car. Moira talked with Ana about the work she had done with her aunt; the project included the idealistic element of bringing disadvantaged children up from the city to spend time with mentally ill local children in the same camp. “It was magic,” said Moira. “I don’t get to spend much time with kids, and I didn’t realize how much I needed that.” This was maybe a dishonest thing to say as Moira had found the experience uplifting and aggravating in equal measure, but it didn’t matter; it was a way to bond. Ana was single, and although she didn’t say it, Moira imagined she was looking for a husband; she was a pretty thirty-two-year-old who freely shared her longing to have a family.

  The conversation was dreamy and melancholy as they sped down the back road off Route 30, past abandoned restaurants and decrepit bars and seamy fitness establishments. The Cabinets To Go store, where she and her ex-husband had once bought a beautiful chest with shelves and drawers, each painted a different color, was still doing business on the same dirt lot, and the sight of it pierced Moira with sudden reflexive hope that was more memory than actual feeling. They had bought the chest almost thirty years ago when they moved into their first rental house (as opposed to an apartment), full of plans to eventually buy. And they had bought. And lost. They had lost Tanya before she was two years old; her thin-lipped little face, once so real, now a blur of sweetness and pain so indistinguishable that Moira had no ability to separate the memory of her child from what had happened to her. Her mind just veered away, and well, then she’d met Eddie at Ms. Poochie’s and her marriage went down the tubes. At least there had been a little money from the house.

  This old road; how little it had changed through the years! The rough textures, the shabby signs (“Keep Christ In Christmas”), the lush greenery pushing through every vacant place, the felt presence of animals. How it had persevered.

  Maybe, she thought, this experience would be good. It would probably be improving to focus on the problems of others for a change.

  Special ed sucked, and I wasn’t even in it most of the time, just some of the time they would pull me out of normal class and put me in Gimp World. The room was too small and it wasn’t just sixth
graders—they put fourth, fifth, and sixth all together—and it was a mess. The teacher had somebody helping her, which meant you couldn’t do anything, and the other kids were retarded and ugly except for Chris, this fifth grade girl with a big oily nose and a big dirty smile and a hot ass. And this guy Tyrone who was cool. He was older than me and bigger than everybody, and his brother burned his tongue with acid when he was little so it looked all cut up and rad. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was different: more mean, more tough. She still had cone-shaped boobs, but forget about lace, and she looked like she’d hit you if you touched them. It was hot then, but her legs weren’t bare. She looked like she had on panties made from an army tent. She acted like she didn’t see me probably because she didn’t.

  She asked us to pick our favorite animal: dogs, cats, horses, or hamsters. Tyrone said, “Snakes.” She asked if anybody else liked snakes and I raised my hand, but a girl said she was scared of snakes so Crusty said there wasn’t gonna be snakes that day. She made us get in groups based on our animals. Like we were third graders. The guys picked “dogs”; the girls were horses or cats. She said, “See we all have something in common.” It was stupid, but at least I got to talk to Tyrone about dogs.

  At the end I went up to her and reminded her of the book she read us about the wolves tricking the dogs. She looked at me like gobs of snot were running out my nose. Then suddenly she smiled and looked like she used to. “Mark!” she said. “Mark Carter from Gangwish! That’s right, and you mean White Fang! How wonderful that you remember that!”

  I am saying it in a stupid voice because that’s how she said it.

  The first few days of grand jury were not especially improving. They watched an instructional video. They waited a couple of hours to be called into the room. It was a nondescript room, windowless, with residual human smells saturating the porous old furniture. They were told they had to sit in the same seats every day that they were there, no switching. The guy next to Ana was a big sexy sixtysomething, a type Moira especially appreciated because he was sexy even though he was ugly. Appetite said his big gut; satisfaction said his wide, pleased mouth; I see you said his eyes. As Ana sat down he took her in with a gentleman’s side-eye, and Moira saw the young lady hold in her stomach and sit up a little more. Uh-oh, she thought, here we go!

  But not right away, of course.

  They spent the morning indicting drunk drivers (one of whom had gotten out of the car and run into the woods, temporarily escaping when the cop dropped his flashlight, stumbled down an embankment, and sprained his ankle), parking-lot drug dealers, and a bar fight with a shooting. That happened in the richest town in the county, a town Moira’s family used to drive to on Sundays just to look at the nice houses. Her dad would say, “I could live there, what about you?” He didn’t think they would ever really live there, none of them did, but that didn’t spoil their enjoyment one bit. They’d admire the homes, maybe visit the oldest amusement park in the state, and then have ice cream at the pizza place and go home. Moira couldn’t imagine anybody actually getting shot there, and on the night in question, no one did. Two middle-aged guys got in a fight about politics and wound up rolling around on the floor hitting each other until they got kicked out, and then one of them fired a shot at the other and missed. People laughed when the DA described it (“Jeez, what stooges!” said the sexy guy), but they indicted the shooter anyway.

  Then Moira and Ana went to lunch at a coffee shop in a little square near a defunct train station. They talked about the ridiculous bar fight, how typical it was that the con pulled the gun and not the lib. Moira talked about how different the town was when they used to go there, how you used to be able to sit on a bench outside the pizza place for five entire minutes without a car going by; now you could barely walk across the street even with the new lights.

  Fighting wasn’t such bad trouble. Boys fight! My mom used to say boys are better than girls because boys fight and are friends after but girls are bitches who stab each other in the back. But I also walked around the room during break and took other kids’ snacks. I yelled and ran around. There was something in the bathroom with a girl, but I don’t remember that too well; she was a girl who stood by herself on the playground. There was spanking the teacher, which was her fault. She grabbed on to me when I was fooling around in front of everybody and pulled me right against her and smacked my ass, so I reached around and smacked her ass and the whole class laughed so hard I kept doing it and held on to her when she tried to pull me off. I was just old enough to get hard, and it felt so good she had to pull my hair and slap me in the face to make me let go. She’d lose her job for that now, but back then kids weren’t allowed to get away with that shit, and they shouldn’t be. We had to go to the principal a lot and when we left my dad would say, “Okay, sport!”

  Anyway, by the time I was thirteen I was officially badass. But I wasn’t. It was Tyrone that did the really bad stuff, I was just with him. Jenny knew that—I mean Pietrisinski. She said to the principal, “He’s a follower, not an initiator,” and you could see my dad didn’t like that. But it was true. I was even nice to this one boy that we used to do shit to. I once wasn’t getting along with Tyrone so good and I left school out the back way by this little gate and I saw this boy walking home by himself. He tried to run away from me, but I caught him and I was real nice to him. I saw how scared he was and I felt like acting different. I walked with him and we talked about Hot Wheels and the Wolverine. So that made it worse when Tyrone and this other kid made him take off his shoes and put pebbles in them and then run on the track. He was looking at me like he expected me to help, and not only did I not help, but I laughed and called him “Hot Wheels.”

  Pietrisinski always said, “I don’t know why you act this way, you’re a good kid.” There was something about the way she said it: her voice was like the music in a movie that lets you know something bad is going to happen no matter what you do. It was somehow worse than the way she screamed in class (“Stop doing this, stop doing that”), wrinkling her mouth up like a hate-hole.

  But then she recommended me for the job with her dad. Or maybe she didn’t recommend me but she didn’t tell him not to hire me. It was years after I graduated, maybe five years. She walked into the office in the middle of me talking to her dad and stopped dead. It had been years but she remembered me that time. Her eyes got wide and she smiled and said, “Mark, is that you?” The next day her dad called me and told me I got the job.

  The rest of the week in court was more drunk driving, a home invasion, and a couple of teenagers who’d roughed up and robbed an old white man while forcing him to shout “White Power!” There was some discussion over whether or not that should be prosecuted as a hate crime. The two African American jurors thought not, they said, because of the youth of the perpetrators. Ana wasn’t sure. “Think about it,” said Moira. “If it were reversed, and it was white kids beating a black man while making him shout ‘Black Power,’ would there be any doubt in your mind?” The sexy old guy nodded approvingly. Finally, Ana voted with the majority that yes, it was a hate crime.

  I was warned about Mark Carter before I even met him, when he was going to be in my third grade class. He’d punched his second grade teacher in the stomach, hard enough to wind her, what seven-year-old does that? They took him to the principal, and he used language you’d expect from a dirty-mouth teenager. They had to threaten him with the police, and I guess that scared him; they said he cried and begged them not to. Still, I wondered. He was a big soft-bodied kid with deep eyes and a spoiled, sneaky mouth, like an older boy. Which was funny because he didn’t seem spoiled. His parents dressed him shabbily even for poor people, and he was shy, would hardly look anybody in the eye. He had decent manners, though, knew how to say “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” I said to him, “What do you want, Mark? Do you want this class to be a good time or a bad time?” He lowered his eyes and thought. He spoke so soft you could barely hear him, and his words seemed half s
wallowed. He said, “I want it to be a good time.” I said, “I do too.” And, barely above a whisper, he said, “Thank you, Miss Pietrisinski.”

  His voice and words touched my heart. He seemed like a baby to me, like a tenderhearted kid trying to make himself seem tough. He wasn’t bright, and he had discipline issues. Couldn’t sit still or concentrate, would sometimes bounce up and down at his desk and drum on it or start yelling things if he got excited. He wasn’t exactly a bully, but he would be mean if he thought he could get away with it—then, if I pointed out that he’d hurt someone’s feelings, he would be quick to apologize in that small, soft voice. I tried to give him positive feedback, but it was hard because he didn’t do well at anything in terms of learning. Even so, I praised him for just sitting still and trying, for being on time, or for doing something nice for somebody. He wasn’t the type of kid to have a big response. But he did respond. He would look up at my face, and when he saw my smile, his eyes brightened before he looked back down. When I put my hand on his shoulder, I could feel his body drink in the kindness, like he was thirsty for even that little bit.

  I felt bad for him. Even when he acted terrible. I felt he was a good kid trapped in the body of a bad kid.

  Afterward, Sexy G invited Moira and Ana to lunch—he struck up a hallway conversation with Moira first and then invited them when Ana appeared, fresh from the ladies’ room. He suggested a nicer place than the coffee shop they’d gone to before—an upscale sports bar with fancy items like beer-and-cheese soup, bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with blue cheese, and something called “Eggs in Hell.” Sexy G said he’d treat; he needed a break from eating alone at the awful courthouse cafeteria, and besides he’d had a fantastic business week. Ana smiled and assented with a little shrug/neck-dip; Moira noticed for the first time how pretty her neck was, and her collarbone. Also how nicely she used her hands as they examined their menus and extracted the cutlery from its heavy napkin; how she played with her honey-brown hair, how precisely she scratched the side of her snub nose with the nail of her elegant index!