Don't Cry

by Mary Gaitskill

  Laura smiled a little. After the meeting, she'd asked Danielle, “Who tried to stick it in, you or him?”

  “Oh,” said Danielle, “we both tried.” They laughed.

  Such grotesque humility; such strange comfort. She remembered the paper plates of cookies, the pot of coffee at the low table in the back of the room at NA. She loved standing back there with Danielle, eating windmill cookies and smoking. Laura looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. “A stupid girl,” she said to her reflection.

  Well, but who could blame her? When she was still a teenager, out of nowhere her mother asked Laura what it had been like to lose her virginity. She wanted to know if the experience had been “special.” It was late and the living room was dark. They had been watching TV together. Laura was startled by the question. “Was it someone you loved?” asked her mother.

  “Yes,” replied Laura, lying. “Yes, it was.”

  “I'm glad,” said her mother. She still looked straight ahead. “I wanted you to have that.”

  What a revolting conversation, thought Laura. She couldn't quite put her finger on why; her mother had only been expressing concern. But her concern seemed somehow connected with the nun in the water, and the dirtbag trying to set the little girl on fire.

  She went back to the waiting room and got the grouchy middle-aged man. He didn't bother to take off his shoes when he weighed himself. He was there, he said, only because his wife had made him come. He had taken off from work and shot the whole day. “My wife loves going to the doctor,” he said. “She had all those mammo-grams and she lost her breast anyway. Most of it.”

  “Well, but it's good to come in,” said Laura. “Even if it doesn't always work. You know that. Your wife's just caring about you.”

  He gave a conciliatory snort. With his shirt off, he was big and flabby, but he carried it as if he liked it. His blood pressure was much too high. Laura let her touch linger on him as she worked because she wanted to soothe him.

  When the man was gone, she asked Dr. Phillips if she could go outside on her break. He usually didn't like her to do that because she was always a little late getting back when she went out, but he was trying to be extra nice since her father died. “Okay,” he said, “but watch the time.” He turned and strode down the hall, habitually bristling, like a small dog with a dominant nature.

  Outside, the heat was horrible. She started sweating right away probably ruining her uniform for the next day. Still, she was glad to be out of the building. The clinic was located between a busy main street and a run-down little street occupied by an old wig shop, a children's karate gym, and a large ill-kept park where aging homeless men sat around. She decided to walk a few blocks down the park street. She liked the trees and she was friendly with a few of the men, who sometimes wished her good afternoon.

  She walked and an old song played in her head. It was the kind of old song that sounded innocent and dirty at the same time. The music was simple and shallow except for one deep spot where it was like somebody's pants were being pulled down. “You got nothin’ to hide and everybody knows it's true. Too bad, little girl, it's all over for you.” The singer laughed and the music laughed, too, and the laughter was spangled all over with sexiness.

  Laura had loved the song; she had loved the thought of it being all over and everybody knowing. A lot of other people must've loved it, too; it had been a very popular song. She remembered walking down the hall in high school wearing tight clothes; boys laughed and grabbed their crotches. They all said she'd sucked their dicks, but really she'd only screwed one of them. It didn't matter. When her father found out, he yelled and hit her.

  “Was it someone special?” her mother had asked. “Was it someone you loved?”

  She stopped at a curb for traffic. Her body was alive with feelings that were strong but that seemed broken or incomplete, and she felt too weak to hold them.

  A car pulled up beside her, throwing off motor heat. The car was full of loud teenage boys. The driver, a Hispanic boy of about eighteen, wanted to make a right turn, but he was blocked by a stalled car in front of him and cars on his side. He was banging his horn and yelling out the window; his urgency was hot and all over the place. Laura stared at him. His delicate beauty was almost too bright; he had so much light that it burned him up inside and made him dark. He yelled and pounded the horn, trying to spew it out, but still it surged through him. It was like he was ready to kill someone, anyone, without any understanding in his mind or heart. That thought folded over unexpectedly; Laura pictured him as a baby with his mouth on his mother's breast. She pictured his fierce nature deep inside him, like dark, beautiful seeds feeding off his mother's milk, off the feel of her hand on his skull. She thought of him as a teenager with a girl; he would kiss her too hard and be rough, wanting her to feel what he had inside him, wanting her to see it. And, in spite of his roughness, she would.

  He turned in his seat to shout something to the other boys in the car, then turned forward again to put his head out the window to curse the other cars. He turned again and saw Laura staring at him. Their eyes met. She thought of her father showing his aunts the stars and all the planets. You are good, she thought. What you have is good. The boy dropped his eyes in confusion. There was a yell from the backseat. The stalled car leaped forward. The boy snapped around, hit the gas, and was off.

  Laura crossed the street. How to explain that? she thought. How to know what it even was? She thought, I told him he was good. I told him with my eyes and he heard me.

  Well, tonight she'd call Danielle and tell her about it; Danielle had a lot of strange emotional moments with, say, a lady standing in the prescription line next to her at the drugstore, or a guy in the car behind her whod yelled at her because she couldn't figure out the parking gate right away. Except it probably wouldn't seem like a story by the time the day was over.

  She walked up the block sweating, feeling so replete and grateful that she wondered if she was crazy She pictured the middle-aged virgin, this time at home at night, doing her meticulous toilet, rubbing her feet with softening cream. She pictured herself at home, curled on the couch, watching TV and eating ice cream out of the carton. She pictured the men in her dream, fighting. She pictured herself kneeling to hold the handsome man's cut-open head. She would pass her hand over his broken skull and make an impenetrable membrane grow over his exposed brain. The membrane would be transparent, and you would be able to see his brain glowing inside it like magic stones. But you could never cut it or harm it.

  She pictured her father, young and strong, smiling at her, the planets all around him. She thought, I love you, Daddy.

  She saw the homeless men moving about deep in the park, their figures nearly obscured by overgrown grasses and trees. For a moment, she strained to see them more clearly, then gave up. It was time to go back. She was late, but it would be okay, probably.

  The Agonized Face

  A feminist author came to talk at the annual literary festival in Toronto, one of the good-looking types with expensive clothes who look younger than they are (which is irritating, even though it shouldn't be), the kind of person who plays with her hair when she talks, who always seems to be asking you to like her. She was like that, but she had something else, too, and it was that “something else” quality that made what she did so peculiarly aggravating.

  Before I go any further, it must be said that I arrived at the festival tense and already prone to aggravation. I have been divorced for five years. I am the mother of a ten-year-old girl. My ex-husband is stalwart in his child-support payments, but he is a housepainter who is trying to be an artist, and out of respect for his dreams, his payments are not large. We met in graduate school, where I was studying creative writing, a dream-cum-memory rolling monotonously near the bottom of the subthought ocean. After years of writing in-brief book reviews, plus fact-checking and proofreading for an online magazine, I have recently begun writing full-length reviews (which means a little more money and a lot less tim
e for playing “The Mighty Michelle” with Kira); for the first time, I have been assigned to “do” something light and funny on the social scene at the literary festival. The idea of proximity to so many actual authors may ve caused some more intense than usual subthought rolling, which is perhaps why a fight with my daughter got nastier than it had to this morning. It did not help that it was a fight about whether or not she can, at ten, bleach her hair “like Gwen Stefani,” and that the fight then had to turn into a discussion with Tom about how he had to be sure that while staying with him this afternoon, she did not somehow get hold of boxed bleach and take charge of the bathroom. Or, furthermore, that she not be allowed to persuade him that red might be okay if blond was not.

  Still, for the most part, I was able to clear my mind of all this once I arrived at the festival. Writers from all over the world were there, people from Somalia, Greece, Israel, the United States, Italy and Britain. There were writers whod been forced to flee their countries, writers from police states, writers from places where everybody was starving; writers who wrote about the daily problems of ordinary people, the obscenity of politics and the pain of the lower classes, glamorous writers who wrote about the exciting torment of the fashionable classes. Writers with airs of gravity or triviality well-heeled or wearing suits they had probably rented for this event, standing at the bar with an air of hard-won triumph, or simply looking with childish delight at all the glowing bottles of delicious drinks and trays of foodstuffs. I glimpsed a smart blond woman on the arm of a popular author and fleetingly thought of my daughter: If she could see me here, she would feel curiosity and admiration.

  But getting back to the “feminist author;” it is not really right to call her that, as she was not the only feminist there, as, in fact, her presence may have annoyed other, more serious feminists. She was a feminist who had apparently been a prostitute at some point in her colorful youth, and who had gone on record describing prostitutes as fighters against the patriarchy. She would say stupid things like that, but then she would write some good sentences that would make people say, “Wow, she's kind of intelligent!” Some people may ve said she should not have been at the festival at all, but why not? An event such as this is dazzling partly in its variety; it is a social blaze of little heads rolling by in a ball of light, and all the heads have something to say: “No one should ever write about the Holocaust again!” “Irony is ruining our culture!” Or in the case of the feminist ex-prostitute, “Women can enjoy sexual violence, too!” Well. I had been asked to write something funny, and the feminist author sounded pretty funny. I pictured her in a short skirt and big high heels, standing up on the balls of her feet with her legs bowed like a samurai, her fists and her arms flexed combatively, head cocked like she was on the lookout for some patriarchy to mount. An image you could look at and go, Okay, now for the author who says, “We live in an entertainment society and it's terrible!”

  She was reading with two other people, a beautiful seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl who wrote about rapes and massacres, and a middle-aged Canadian who wrote touching stories about his daughters. First the Vietnamese girl read about a massacre, then came the feminist writer. She immediately began complaining, but she did it in a way that made her complaint sound like a special treat we might like to have. Her voice was sweet, with a sparkling rhythm that made you imagine some shy and secret thing was being gradually revealed. I felt caught off guard; she wore a full-length skirt and little glasses and round-toed clog-style boots.

  She wasn't going to read, she said; instead, she was going to give a talk about the way she had been treated by the local media, as well as by the festival organizers, who had described her in an insulting, unfair way in their brochure. I had not even read the brochure—I perhaps should've read it, but the information in such pamphlets is usually worthless—and from the look on other people's faces, they hadn't read it, either. The author, however, didn't seem to realize this. The brochure was not only insulting to her, she continued; it was an insult to all women, to everyone, really. They had ignored the content of her work completely, focusing instead on the most sensational aspects of her life—the prostitution, the drug use, the stay in a mental hospital, the attempt on her father's life—in a way that was both salacious and puritanical. “It isn't that these things aren't true,” she said in her lilting voice. “They are. I was a prostitute for six months when I was sixteen and I spent two months in a mental hospital when I was eighteen. But I have also done a lot of other things. I have been a waitress, a factory worker, a proofreader, a journalist, a street vendor! I am forty-five years old and now I teach at Impala University West!”

  There were cheers, applause; a woman in the back fiercely hollered, “You go, girl!” The author blinked rapidly and adjusted her glasses. “I can even understand it,” she continued. “It's exciting to imagine such a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff! I like the idea myself! But I am not that person!” It seemed to me that she kind of was that person, but right then it didn't matter. “And when we do that,” she continued, “when we isolate qualities that seem exciting, but maybe a little scary, and we project them onto another person in an exaggerated form, we not only deny that person her humanity but we impoverish and cheat ourselves of life's complexity and tenderness!”

  This wasn't funny This was something wholly unexpected. We were all feeling stirred, like we were really dealing with something here, something that had just been illustrated for us by a magical, elfish hand. We felt like we were being touched in a personal place, a little like our mothers would touch us—a touch that was emotionally erotic. Like a mother, she seemed potent, yet there was something of the daughter there, too, the innocent girl who has been badly teased by an importune boy and who comes to you, her upturned face looking at you with puzzlement. Yes, she seemed innocent, even with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her.

  She must've sensed our feelings, because she cut short her speech. We had been so kind, she said, that she wanted to give us something. She was going to read to us after all—in fact, she had her book right there with her, and she even had a story picked out. It was a story about a middle-aged woman dressing in sexy clothes to attend a party for a woman who writes pornography, which is held in a bar decorated with various sex toys. A good-looking boy flirts with the middle-aged woman, who allows that she is “flattered.”

  What had happened to the mother? Where was the injured girl? The voice of the author was still lilting and girlish, but her words were hard and sharp, the kind of words that think everything is funny. The middle-aged woman invites the young man to her home, gives him a drink, and then pulls his pants off while he lies there gaping. For the next several pages, she alternates between fellating him and chattering cleverly while he tries to leave.

  This was the feminist author we had heard about, all right. Her readers smiled knowingly, while the readers of the Canadian and Vietnamese authors looked baffled—baffled, then angry And I was feeling angry, too.

  I am not really a feminist, probably because, at forty I am too young to have fully experienced the kinetic surge of feminism that occurred in the seventies, that half-synthetic, half-organic creature with its smart, dry little mouth issuing books, speeches, TV shows, and pop songs. None of it is stylish anymore, and, in fact, feminists have come in for a lot of criticism from female pundits. Some of these pundits say that feminists have made girls think they have to have sex all the time, which, by going against their girlish nature, has destroyed their self-esteem, and made them anorexic and depressed. Feminists have made girls into sluts! Others, equally angry, say that feminists have imposed restrictive rules on nubile teens, making them into morbid neurasthenics who think they're being raped, when they're actually just having sex. Feminists have neutered girls by overprotecting them! I don't know what I think of any of it; it's mostly something I hear coming out of my radio on my way to work. But I do know this: When I hear that feminism is overpro
tecting girls, I am very sympathetic to it. When I see my fashion-conscious ten-year-old in her nylon nightie, peering spellbound before the beguiling screen at the fleeting queendom of some twelve-year-old manufactured pop star with the wardrobe of a hooker, a jerry-rigged personality and bulimia, it seems to me that she has a protection deficit that I may not be able to compensate for. When she comes home wild with tears because she lost the spelling contest, or her ex–best friend called her fat, or a boy said she's not the prettiest girl in class, and I press her to me, comforting her, even as that day's AMBER Alert flashes in my brain, it is hard for me to imagine this girl as “overprotected.”

  Which is, in some indirect way, why the feminist author was so affecting and so disappointing. She was a girl who needed to be protected, and a woman standing to protect the girl. But then she became the other thing—the feminist who made girls into sluts. She sprouted three heads and asked that we accept them all! She said she had been a prostitute, a mental patient, that she had tried to stab her father. She said it in a soft, reasonable voice—but these are not soft or reasonable things. These are terrible things. Anyone who has seen a street prostitute and looked into her face knows that. For her to admit these things, without describing the pain she had suffered, gave her dignity—because really, she didn't have to talk about it. We could imagine it. But the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene. Because the voice of the story was not soft. It was dry and smart as a dance step—but what it told of was neither dry nor smart. While the voice danced, making scenes that described the woman and the youth, an image slowly formed, taking subtle shape under the picture created by the scenes. It was like an advertisement for cigarettes where beautiful people are smoking in lounge chairs, and suddenly you see in the cobalt blue backdrop the subliminal image of a skull. Except the image behind the feminist author's words was stranger than the image of a skull, and less clear. It made you strain to see what it was, and in the straining you found yourself picturing things you did not want to picture. Of course, it can be fun to picture things you don't want to picture—but somehow the feminist author had ruined the fun.