Veronica

by Mary Gaitskill

  It got too cold to sell flowers outside. Lilet went to Las Vegas with a guy who had bought her an orange fake-fur coat. I got a dress at the Salvation Army and interviewed to be a file clerk. I still sold flowers, but instead of going to the park after, I went to my room and wrote poems. I was going to go home, go to community college and learn to be a poet. I fantasized about becoming famous, but I couldn’t picture what famous poets did. I could only imagine walking around while people photographed me. I could imagine Gregory Carson’s tiny hands clutching the glowing rim of my world, and his tiny, longing head peering over it. I imagined that over and over when I lay in bed at night.

  I was going to call my family and tell them I was coming home, but before I could, Daphne called and said our mother had just moved out and gone to live with a guy from the car repair place. “Daddy feels like everyone’s leaving him,” she said. “He cries at night, Alison. It’s horrible.” I asked her to put him on. I felt like a hero, telling him I was coming home to go to school. He asked when. I said in a few weeks—when I had the airfare. He said he’d send me the money, and I felt proud refusing it. I didn’t wonder how he felt offering it. He was quiet and then he said, “Just get here as quick as you can. I love you a whole lot.” When Daphne came back on the phone, I asked her if he’d really cried.

  “Just once that I heard,” she said. “But I think it’s been more.”

  She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “I think maybe if you come back, Mother will, too,” said Daphne.

  I still didn’t say anything. I was remembering something that happened when I was ten. I was walking with my parents in an underground parking lot and my mother tripped and fell on her face. She went straight down on the concrete, then lay there with her mouth wide open, arms bent and palms flat, like she wanted to push herself up but couldn’t. She lifted her head and made a long, low moan, like a cow. Her body had protected her face, but her breath had been knocked from her. I didn’t know what to do. I turned to my dad, who was just behind us. He was smiling, like it was really funny to see my mom fall on her face and make a stupid noise. When he came close, he hid the smile; it amazed me how fast he hid it. “Lord,” he said. “Are you all right?” He helped her up, and it turned out she was okay. But I still hated him for smiling. I remembered it now, and I tried to work up anger at him again. But all I could think about was him alone, crying.

  I didn’t get the file clerk job, so I sold flowers outside the stripper bars until late, when men would come out drunk and give me bills. At the end of the night, I’d go home to count it out on my bed and then I’d store it in a pair of folded socks in the back of

  the drawer. I’d sit on my bed in a T-shirt and underwear, writing poems while voices went past my window on clomping feet. I’d sleep at dawn to the sound of garbage trucks and wake to music from the weird-ass guy in the basement, the sound coming up through the heat vent like a haint.

  I had enough to buy my ticket when I saw John in the park. I didn’t recognize him until he walked up to me and started telling me he was sorry. He said, “We were in the same position that day, you and I.” That’s when I first noticed his neck, tense and rubbery, already angry and ready to torque around. “Gregory plays that game with girls all the time, and I go along because he gives me work. But I hate it, and after that day with you, I walked out and said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not doing this again.’” I tried to act like I’d known what was going on, that nobody had fooled me. And he let me act that way—his eyes did not say, Come on, girl, you know you got took!—maybe because he was kind, maybe because he didn’t notice I was acting. “But with you, he was also stupid,” he continued. “Because you really could do it. I saw it right away.” He wanted to send my pictures to a magazine modeling contest, and he needed me to fill out a contest form. He needed my address so he could let me know what happened.

  Imagine ten pictures of me at Carson Models. In nine of them, I’m a real stupid girl, but in the tenth, I’m somebody who could be a model. John was looking at the tenth one, and because he was, I did, too. I said okay and gave him my parents’ address in New Jersey. The next day, I got on the plane and flew home.

  It’s weird for me, too, looking at John and seeing a young guy turned into a twitchy middle-aged man being chased around his own office by invisible people; it’s like an emotional funny bone. The terrible, beautiful things zoomed up close, flattened us, and sped off. Well, they flattened me. Him they just sped past. Which was lucky for him. Now he actually has something good, when he can stop twitching long enough to enjoy it. He has a house with a family and he has an office, a nest of past and present, where a remnant of everything he thought he wanted comes and cleans his toilet for him. He can yell at it and be yelled at by it and the invisible people go quiet and fade away. Then there’s doughnuts with colored icing—pink, lavender, white with little hairs of coconut—and talk about the new baby he’s had at fifty-two with a woman fifteen years younger.

  “He just grooves on everything, Alison, and when he looks at me I do, too. To bring home food to them, to be the provider—I can’t tell you how it makes me feel.”

  He doesn’t have to tell me. I can see it in his face: Happiness shines on his dullard sadness and makes it scratch its head and blink with wonder.

  “But sometimes I feel shut out, you know? Lonnie and Eddie are so bonded, so physical, it’s like I’m a total third wheel, like this ... utility unit. And I wonder, What about my dreams? You know?”

  “John, when I was eight, I dreamed about being a ballerina. It was a good dream for an eight-year-old.”

  “What about now? What are your dreams?” A sly, sad look comes out of his eye like a tiny eye on a stalk, and he’s behind the camera again.

  “My dream is being able to sleep and to stop my arm from hurting.” To stop traveling through the endless rooms that don’t have music or people in them anymore. “But John, you’ve got your dream; you’re living it. I can see it in your face!”

  And he can see it, too, now that I say it. It’s something I can give him, something I hold out in warm arms. He talks about Lonnie and the baby again, how sometimes he’s scared he won’t make enough money for them, how he doesn’t want

  them to see he’s scared. Except he doesn’t come right out with that last part. I have to say it; he denies it, then says, “Maybe,” and looks off to the side, chewing.

  “I just want our house to be a house of love,” he says.

  “It will be,” I say. As long as you quit going mental about shit like one cigarette! I don’t say. We sit there together like satisfied animals, full of doughnuts. Maybe he hears what I don’t say and maybe he even listens; he pays me my hundred bucks for the month without checking to see what kind of job I did on the toilet. I say bye and walk out into the rain.

  The air smells of gasoline, dirt, and trees; cars farting out of hot iron stomachs; and the fresh BO of nature. Down the street, there’s still a picket line out in front of the Nissan dealership, people standing in mud-colored rain slickers, their faces looking like crude sketches under their dripping hoods: brows, nose, lips, jowls. Clear plastic bags are tied over their signs, which read don’t buy from nissan. don’t buy from scabs. Most of them trudge in a circle, like they are trudging through a ritual they no longer remember the meaning of but which they dimly believe is their only hope. Two others stand outside the circle, their plastic hoods thrown back, talking and laughing furious, face-crushing laughter as the rain pours down on their heads. They’ve been there a month. I try to catch somebody’s eye to wish them luck, like I usually do. But nobody looks up in the rain.

  The endless beautiful rooms inside the songs—wander through them long enough and their beauty and endlessness become horrible. There is so much, you always want more, so you keep moving, traveling ever more quickly, until you can’t stop. Ten years ago, I used to see these kids running around in white makeup, sleeping in phony coffins, and paying dentists to giv
e them vampire fangs. It was stupid, but it made sense, too. You want the endlessness to end; you want to go home, but there is no home. You despise the tender attachments of the liver and the body, but you also crave them; you bite other people in an attempt to find them, and when that doesn’t work, you bite yourself.

  Veronica and I went once to see an exhibit of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. She wore a bright red leather jacket with buckled pockets, and she promenaded through the gallery in it, making loud approving comments on the work. She was talking so loudly, she didn’t notice the two giggling boys who followed us for a good half minute, mocking her officious gestures. We lost them in front of the famous self-portrait, in which Mapplethorpe crouches naked, his back to the camera, a bullwhip coming out of his ass like a tail, his face turned round with a triumphant leer. A woman standing behind us said in a voice of thrilled dismay, “I didn’t need to see that!” and Veronica turned on her like the Red Queen. “Then why did you come?” she snapped. “/ certainly didn’t need to see or to hear you.” The woman nearly stumbled trying to hide behind her husband, who was trying to hide behind her.

  But when we walked out of the museum, Veronica began to cry incoherendy. “Everything we did is being erased,” she said. “They’re denying it all. They’re taking it all away.” I was embarrassed; I didn’t understand. Now' I understand.

  So one minute I’m standing outside a strip bar with my basket, flickering in the marquee light, on and off, like a ghost trying to be real. Women’s naked asses, men’s naked faces. The bouncer hugs himself against the cold and says he’ll buy me some hot cashews. Then I’m in an airplane hurtling through gray clouds. The plane ratdes like it will break, and the woman in the next seat moans with fear. Then I’m in the living room with my father. It’s like I crashed out of the clouds. Sara is upstairs, yelling at someone on the phone, and Daphne is in the kitchen, making dinner. We crash into one another; everything rattles and shakes like the airplane, only more, and we can’t hear one another even though we’re shouting.

  When they picked me up in Newark, my father’s eyes were inward and methodical. He did not show the love he’d talked about on the phone. I didn’t, either. All the emotion was in Daphne’s eyes, big and shimmering, with so much hope in them, I wanted to punch her. Sara looked at me and then looked away quickly. She was getting fat. She was disappearing in plain sight. Her look made sure I was okay, then went back to concentrating on whatever she was hiding. When she turned in profile, I saw her nose had been broken. “How’d that happen?” I whispered to Daphne. “I don’t know. I don’t know when it happened. I just noticed it one day, and she yelled, ‘I don’t wanna talk about it!”’ Daphne made Sara’s voice like a monster’s, like a stupid, crazy monster.

  We drove home through a whooshing tunnel of traffic. It was dark, with bright signs and lights flying by. Daphne sat up front and talked light and fast, turning her head to scatter her words in the backseat and out the window, into the whooshing tunnel. Quarters, halves, whole squares of light flew through the back window and ran over her soft hair. Even when she talked to me and Sara, I felt a strand of her attention stay on our dad, like she was holding his hand. Sara sat deep inside herself, her hands together in her lap, holding the secret of her broken nose. Her calm animal warmth filled the backseat.

  When we got home, my mother called. She said she was so happy to know I was there. Her voice ran and jumped, as if it were being chased by a devil with a pitchfork. “When are you going to enroll?” she cried. “I have to take the GED first,” I said. “I have to study.” “Well, I just think you’re great,” she said. She sounded like she was about to cry. My father stood in the next room, ramrod-straight and straining to hear.

  Daphne made a special dinner of kielbasa sausage and baked beans, which I used to love but which now seemed so sad,

  I didn’t want it. But I ate it, and when my father asked, “Do you like it?” I said, “It’s good.” Sara picked out the sausage, glaring at it like she was really pissed. She ate the beans and went upstairs. “She’s a vegetarian now,” said Daphne. “Probably stuffing herself with candy,” said my dad. Van Cliburn played Tchaikovsky in the next room; in the dining room, the TV was on mute. The months in San Francisco were folded up into a bright tiny box and put down somewhere amid the notices and piles of coupons. I was blended into the electrical comfort of home, where our emotions ran together and were carried by music and TV images. Except for Sara’s—she couldn’t join the current. I don’t know why, but she couldn’t.

  The next day, Daphne and I drove to meet our mom at a coffee shop in White Plains. We got there first and waited for her. It was a family place with tiny jukeboxes on the tables. Daphne turned the knob on our box, dully flipping through the selections—“You Are Everything,” “I Had Too Much to Dream,” “Incense and Peppermint,” “Close to You”—each a bit of black print inside a red rectangle. The people behind us picked one: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” The singer’s voice was light and gloppy at the same time, like a commercial for pudding. It had been popular when we were in elementary school, and the old recording gave off a dark, enchanted crackle. It made me think of teenage girls in bathing suits, lying in lawn chairs beside the public pool, eyes closed, breasts perfectly and synthetically cupped. Each blue wave sparkled with light. Boys shook water from their hair and looked at them. Daphne ran past, joyfully waving an inflated toy.

  A car pulled up to the curb. We glimpsed our mother’s boyfriend as he dropped her off—a dark mass of lust and need who kissed her in the car and drove away. Don’t bring me down, I pray. My mother came in wearing a pantsuit that was too short for her high heels. Her eyes looked like her leaping voice, and

  she walked like she was trying to go three ways at once. Here was the jealous, furious one: She was wearing big earrings and lipstick, and when she hugged us, sex came off her like a smell. Her jacket flapped open, showed hide with brisdes on it, then flapped back: Here was the one who lay where she fell, moaning like a cow.

  But then she sat down and crisply opened the plastic menu, and here was the true one: Mom, boss of food and treats. Our minds went blank and our bodies remembered when we were little: She was the one who bought us our first milk shakes. She carried them out to the car, holding all four huge shakes squeezed together in her hands. The four of us sat drinking the shakes in deep silence, until we had to get the last bit up from the bottom; then we all slurped together. The warm, close air of the car on our skin, cold sweetness in the mouth: It was a wonderful reversal of warm breast milk and cool air, and this was a breast we could all experience together. Just seeing her open the menu brought that feeling back without us knowing it. You’re just too good to be true. A slim white arm stirred the gold pudding. We went into a trance, staring at the things on the menu.

  But then there were the three directions and the bristling hide. As soon as we got our food, she started talking about how hard she knew it was. How hard it had been for her not knowing whether I was alive or dead for weeks on end and getting no support from our father. She ate her rhubarb pie. She had tried her best to understand that things were different now, and she hoped we would, too.

  “Do you want a divorce or not?” asked Daphne.

  Inside our mother’s eyes, an expression opened like a mouth and then snapped shut while her normal mouth prissily ate the pie. “It takes time to know something like that,” she said. “A relationship of so many years is complicated.” She ate with her prissy mouth. The bristling hide swelled out.

  “It’s not fair,” said Daphne.

  She sat up. Under the earrings and lipstick, she was a plain woman, and she knew the dignity of plainness. “Do you judge me?” she asked quiedy.

  Yes, said Daphne’s face. I judge you and I hate you.

  In my mind, I looked over my shoulder and pouted at a camera while the song played. Can't take my eyes off you. Invisible eyes on me were like an endless ribbon of sweet music. I don’t know what my face said.
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  “No,” said Daphne. “But I want to know if this is permanent, and so does Daddy.”

  “So do I,” said our mother. “So do I.” And she looked sad. Her entire body looked sad. Daphne could do nothing against this except be sad herself.

  The waitress came by with a sound of rasping and rubbing underclothes. She left the check on the table and disappeared through a swinging door. I glimpsed a busding kitchen of steel tables and orderly movement, sandwiches and dishes laid out. A sharp-eyed litde man in an apron suspiciously returned my look. What would it be like to work there?

  Our mother opened her frayed wallet and wondered aloud how I’d make a living while I was writing poems.

  “I could work in a restaurant. Or maybe I could be a model.”

  “Right.” She sighed, got her wallet out and counted the bills carefully, figuring the tip on her fingers. “That sounds like a beautiful life.”

  Inside Daphne, I felt something tremble like it would break, then hold steady.

  Then came routine. My father drove Daphne and Sara to school on his way to work. I slept until noon, then got up and drank tea for hours. It was late November and light moved from room to

  room with the active silence of a live thing. The cat lifted her head and blinked the deep black slits, the active green of her eyes. I paced from light to shadow, feeling my way back into the fleshy place I’d torn myself from. When I got there, I’d sit in the dining room and study for the GED with the TV on the rerun channel, volume off. I used to watch these shows with my family. The black-and-white people were so full of memory and feeling that they were like pieces of ourselves, stopped in a moment and repeating it again and again, until it became an electronic shadow of the fleshy place. Sunlight ran over the table and onto the floor. I’ve touched you all day, it said, and now I have to go.