B00768D9Y8 EBOK

by Gaitskill, Mary

  I can barely remember her face, just her mouth, full, dark-colored, and often slightly open, her fingers pulling and pinching it together. Her mouth could slide sideways in an expression of such sudden disdain that it would frighten me—then I’d silence my discomfort, and she’d be my friend again. I told her I never wanted to grow up. She said she did. I asked her why, and she said because then you could wear lipstick and sexy pants. Once I heard a boy say, “I’d like to make Van Bent strip,” and I imagined her naked. Later I saw him trying to pull up her dress on the playground. She tilted her hips and defiantly posed.

  The last time she came to my house, we went into the backyard. Wretched pocked hunks of leftover snow sat near the house. Barb wore tight stretch pants and a blue ski cap with a big pom-pom. She wanted to throw snowballs at a target on the fence. I didn’t want to because I wasn’t any good at aiming or throwing, but I did it to please her. Her snowballs almost always hit; mine fell apart in the air. She got bored and didn’t want to play, and I felt it was because I wasn’t good enough. We stood talking in the damp yard, shifting our weight from leg to leg. She told me about the Nasty Club. She said it was she and three other girls who got together and showed each other pictures of naked people, or whatever else they could find that was dirty. Becky Pickren had once brought a rubber cock she’d found in her mother’s drawer, and Marsha Donnelly brought a used condom. To get into the Nasty Club you had to strip from the waist down in front of everybody, and according to Barb, Denise Biddle had hair between her legs.

  Hearing about the Nasty Club shocked me and made me uncomfortable. My mother would hate it if she knew I was listening to such things. Why did they want to see these things? It seemed violent and humiliating to me. I tried to ignore these feelings. I tried to make Barb think I liked the Nasty Club.

  For a while I didn’t see Barb after school; I’d wait for her in our usual place, but she didn’t come. Then I saw her walking a few blocks ahead with Sharon Ringle, a girl with a pushed-in face who I didn’t like. I quietly settled into my disappointment. I didn’t look at her in class, she didn’t look at me. “I didn’t think she was a nice girl anyway,” said my mother. “She just didn’t seem like a very high type.”

  Then one day in the hall, someone said to me, “Hey, Footie. Van Bent says you’re a sweathog. She says you believe in Peter Pan.”

  “Hey,” said a girl on the playground, “do you believe in Peter Pan?” I knew what had happened and I could see how the Peter Pan stuff sounded. I wanted to explain that I didn’t believe in it exactly, it was more that I wanted to believe it. But I didn’t know how so I just said “No.” That didn’t make any difference. The next week I was followed home from school by three big girls who walked right at my heels saying things like “Sweathog,” “Retard,” and “Hey, where’s Peter?” Barb was one of them. I didn’t turn to look at her or speak. I couldn’t even separate her voice from the others.

  The next day there were five or six girls walking a foot behind me yelling “Footie is a sweathog!” over and over again. I tried to leave school ahead of them; I walked so fast my forehead sweated in the dry winter cold. Most of the time I escaped them, sometimes not. Sometimes I would see them blocks behind me, festively waving their Monkees or Barbie lunch boxes, confident as buffalo, and I would feel, for all my bulk, empty.

  I told my mother what was happening. “Hoodlums!” she said. “Ignore them, honey, just pretend like you don’t even see them.” What she said was stupid, but I could hear that she was angry and hurt for me, and this caused me pain. She called Barb Van Bent’s mother and talked to her about her daughter “picking on” me. She called the school and tried to get them to protect me. My father said, “You’ve got to fight dirty with thugs,” and told me to smash their insteps and kick their shins.

  The crowd continued to follow me down the street. My mother began walking to meet me after school. She would come marching up the block with a tight, upcurving smile that wrinkled her face and made naked the expression in her small gray eyes, twinkling with succor and cheer. There was nothing in her expression that acknowledged what the other children were saying to me—and continued saying, in her presence. She would bring me home for cookies and tea and put on a recording of a Broadway musical about a tropical romance, where soldiers and grass-skirted girls sang and danced in formation under coconut trees.

  Part of me accepted my mother’s comfort, shutting out, with a huge effort, the rest of the world. But another part of me saw that the world created by my parents and me was useless. It was not translatable into the language of the tough, gum-popping kids around me, and it failed to protect me from them. I dimly recognized this world as pathetic, functional only in my parent’s house, but as there was no bridge between it and the outside, I had nowhere else to go.

  One day when I was being followed by a group of five or so, one of them pushed me. This was too much and I turned, terrified but unable to stop myself. I faced startled Nona Delgado, a strong athletic Cuban girl with a soft mole on her cheek who, because of her beauty, style, and quick mouth had a place among the coolest in spite of the dark skin that relegated the few other Latinos to social obscurity. I had never looked at her up close; I had a second to register her sleek brows, the tiny white fleck caught on an eyelash, the parting of her dark colored lips, the glimpse of wonder and vulnerability that flared in her large eyes, momentarily stripped of their tough kid sheen. She was beautiful, and I felt a second of bitterness that this beautiful face was my enemy, then I punched her nose. She opened her mouth and stared. Convinced that I was about to be beaten by them all, I hit her again and again—about five times before she dropped her books and fought me. Surprise one: she did not know how to fight at all. Surprise two: her friends did not jump on me. They stood around us and yelled “Get her Nona!” while I, a fat girl, pounded her. After I recovered from my fear and anger, the fight became a squalid embarrassment I couldn’t find a way out of. We rolled and sweated on the ground, my Sears coat torn, her nose and tender mouth ribboned with blood. Finally a housewife came out and told us to stop fighting in her yard. As I walked away, my enemies stood around the angrily weeping Nona. One of them shouted after me “You fight like an animal, Footie!” My mother and father praised me for fighting, and I was glad I had. But I was only glad in the abstract; I was sorry I’d hit Nona, who I’d always secretly admired. I felt she couldn’t really be my enemy; she had simply been drawn into a bad crowd. I remembered the feeling of my fists on her face with a strange mix of disbelief, repulsion, and pride. Her tears and blood I remembered with tenderness. When I thought of her, I didn’t feel contempt or anger or triumph; I felt warmth and unhappiness. One or two times after our fight, I saw her face in the hall in school and saw in its sudden stiffness that I had affected her. It made me feel excited and troubled.

  One night almost a month after the fight, I called her house. Mrs. Delgado, who had her daughter’s large liquid brown eyes, answered and told me Nona was skiing. I said, “Tell her that Dotty Footie called. Tell her I’m sorry I fought her.”

  The next time I met Nona in the hall, I was shocked to see her look directly at me, her eyes holding an almost unbearable expression of receptivity and humanity. “Hi,” she said, and disappeared into the yelling mass of kids. I felt as if I had been stripped of clothing; her second of kindness pierced me and touched a naked private place so unused to contact that I cringed with shame and discomfort, as if a stranger had put a hand down my pants.

  And it didn’t stop there. To my dismay, Nona began calling me at home and inviting me out to play. My mother was delighted; even I could see that here was a chance to make a friend. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go out into the barren squares of neighborhood snow and play with this television-beautiful person in a pink ski cap. I didn’t know how.

  But I couldn’t refuse, so out I went. A nature walk, a game of catch, a cup of cocoa in Nona’s pink room checkered with photos of rock and TV stars. Our activities were b
urdensome, tense affairs devoid of the girlish giggling and trash talk I had never learned how to do. I wanted to go back in the house and draw pictures of Never-Never Land elves or listen to a musical with my mother. Strangely, unbelievably, I had the feeling that Nona liked me. In her cautious conversation I sensed discomfort, curiosity, a sense of duty that had somehow been irrevocably triggered by my phone call. But I also sensed actual interest and liking waiting for me to show myself.

  I wanted to show myself but I could not. I vainly groped for words that would let her see what I was like, things to say that she would understand. Desperately, I called other children “retards,” “niggers,” and “queers,” something she seemed always ready to do. But when I talked this way, her face would become confused and remote, as if she knew these words from me were lies, and she didn’t understand why I was lying.

  The awful climax of our attempted friendship came in early spring, as we were crouched stiffly in my backyard near our shelterless wire fence, moving our naked rubber troll dolls around my mother’s tomato plants. Suddenly, across the Sissels’ exposed yard, I saw Barbara Van Bent and her gang. And they saw us. They paused for a second, registering the shock of seeing Nona in my yard with me. Then they began to yell, “Delgado is a spic! Delgado loves the sweathog!” For a second I saw Nona’s body fractionally withdraw from me; I saw she had been wounded by what they said. I saw her stop and pause. I saw her slowly return to me. I felt her stay by me, defying the other girls. On her face was a look of mild puzzlement, as if she couldn’t imagine what she was doing in this situation.

  I began turning down Nona’s invitations, and soon they stopped. She kept looking at me and saying “Hi” in the halls, and this made me so uncomfortable that I avoided her the same way I avoided Barb and her friends.

  One day just before school was over, something unusual happened. As I was struggling down the pavement on my way home from school, my fingers sweating around my lunch-box handle, I almost bumped into Barb Van Bent, who was hustling along almost faster than I was. It had been so long since I’d seen her alone, I didn’t recognize her. She was completely different without her group. She seemed relieved when she turned and saw it was only me coming up behind her; her eyes had been uncharacteristically wide with terror. “Hi,” she said.

  I was so nonplussed I fell into step with her, and we walked at breakneck speed in sweating silence.

  “Did you see Donnelly back there?” she asked. She meant her friend Marsha.

  I hadn’t.

  “She says she’s gonna beat my butt,” explained Barb. “That Jew bag.”

  This was a very interesting idea and an altogether plausible one. Barb was a big girl, but Marsha was bigger, with huge, frozen-hamhock hands and tiny, brainlessly sparkling eyes flanking a giant nose that looked like it could live independent of her face. What was strange was that Barb should tell me about this. Was it a weird form of companionship? Or did she simply have no sense of irony? Did she not care that I saw she was even more cowardly than I?

  Bewildered into silence, I listened to her describe Marsha’s hideous body and warped personality. “. . . and she’s got pimples on her butt and holes in her underwear,” she said. “And she’s a bitch. Do you know what she’d do?” Barb paused while a tiny kindergartner came within range and addressed herself to him. “She’d say, ‘Get out of here you nigger lips or I’ll beat your butt.’” The child fled. “That’s what she’s like,” finished Barb.

  By the next day she must’ve decided these qualities weren’t so bad, because I saw them in the cafeteria together, giggling over their lunch boxes.

  Summer came, and I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. I never went out of the house. I stayed down in the basement rec room all day watching Dialing for Dollars and eating Sara Lee cheesecake, bags of potato chips, and diet pop. When that was over I’d watch the gladiator movie and then go upstairs to play with my troll dolls or draw pictures of Tarzan and the Lion Queen. Then I’d sit and talk to my mother while she made dinner, and then we’d eat in the anesthetic wind of three fans trained on the table as we watched Walter Cronkite. My father would walk around, talk. I’d see the kids of the neighborhood wheeling dreamily on their bikes in the lamplight and feel that all was as it should be. They were outside and I was inside. I gained fifteen pounds that summer.

  When Justine was ten she read a poem about French resisters during the Second World War in her children’s classics book. In it, a French hero was crucified to a barn door with bayonets and tormented by SS men before a crowd of weeping French patriots. The poet dwelt voluptuously on the hero’s torment, and the poem climaxed with the death of the smirking SS captain. It excited her even more than the cartoons that had induced her to make Richie tie her to the swing set. She kept the children’s classics under her bed so she could read it at night with a flashlight and masturbate.

  They had moved from Lancelot to Action, Illinois. Richie was no longer at her disposal, and she hadn’t yet found anyone to take his place.

  Action was a thriving industrial suburb outside of Chicago. Justine’s father was a successful cardiologist at the Action Medical Center, an interesting building that appeared to be made of plywood and concrete. Her father had told her mother that she couldn’t be his receptionist because they already had a receptionist, so her mother did volunteer work at a center for emotionally disturbed children instead. Their house was a large, wandering, one-story with a flamingo worked into the aluminum grille on the front door.

  They had moved there during the summer, when the sidewalks of the new neighborhood were alive with lounging, bicycling, roaming kids. When Justine ventured out onto the pavement, she was accosted by three gum-chewing girls who looked like they were trying to find something wrong with her. But suburban Michigan kids have almost the same laconic, nasal speaking style as the kids of suburban Illinois, and she was immediately accepted into the group.

  Justine was drawn to the most sexual of the girls in the neighborhood, Pam Donovan and Edie Bernard, who wore the tightest pants and tightest shirts over their tough little chests. Edie, the blonde, was even sophisticated enough to wear pink powder and black mascara. Although their friends described them as “cute,” they were not pretty. They were skinny and sharp-boned, with sullen, suspicious eyes, thin, violently teased hair, and faces generic to thousands of suburban little girls. But they were made beautiful by the erotic ferocity that suffused their limbs and eyes and lips.

  Yet these girls, who harbored such power, were the most passive of the neighborhood gang. The three of them didn’t like to play tag or baseball or even to ride bikes. They liked to sit on the small squares of concrete that were called “porches,” sometimes getting up to walk around the block, getting whistled at and sprayed with light stones by boys. They talked about boys with a nervous mix of fear, disgust, and attraction, about girls with malice or displays of alliance, about their mothers with contempt, and about their bodies with a range of emotions from protective, reverent secrecy to loathing.

  There were race riots in Detroit that summer and there was a lot of talk about that. Darcy Guido stood up to imitate Martin Luther King, tap dancing, rolling her eyes and pulling her lower lip down and sticking her tongue up to make weird wet lips that looked like the genitals of an orangutan. The day the national guard flew over their rooftops in helicopters, they stood in the streets and cheered. Even Pat Braiser’s mother came out on her concrete slab and said, “That’ll teach those animals to be decent!”

  Justine sat quietly during the first days of the riot, hearing the distant people called animals and watching the genital-lipped, eye-rolling clowning. Her memory of Gemma rose up and stood mute, like a sign forbidding her to laugh at Darcy’s joke, even when Pam, her best friend, nudged her and said, “Why don’t you laugh?”

  For days there were pictures of the riot on television. At dinner, Justine and her parents would sit at the table, eating and watching the dark figures run around on the screen while flames flickered
in the blackened buildings. Her father would speak on the reprehensibility of rioting and violence, smartly wielding his utensils, the very posture of his haunches expressing the rightness of his disapproval. Her mother would agree, adding praise for Martin Luther King. The people on the TV apparently felt the same way; after showing clips of rioting or angry black spokespeople, they would console their viewers with old footage of Dr. King giving his famous dream speech. Justine became tired of seeing him, and of hearing him, and of hearing him praised. She didn’t see what was so great about him.

  Then the riots were over and it was time to go to the Wonderland Mall for clothes. Justine loved Wonderland. It was dotted with shrubs and waste containers, there was a fountain with a rusting cube placed in the center of it. Muzak rolled over everything, decorously muffling sound and movement. Huge square portals led into great tiled expanses lined with row upon dizzying row of racks hung with clothes. Signs that said “Junior Miss,” “Cool Teen,” or “Little Miss Go-Go” in fat round letters protruded from the tops of the racks, some of them illustrated by teenaged cartoon girls with incredibly frail bodies, enormous staring eyes, tiny O-shaped mouths and large round heads with long straight swatches of brown or yellow hair.

  The dresses on the Cool Teen racks seemed to have been manufactured in a country where no one sat at home waiting for their mother; it seemed that in wearing the hot orange and yellow polka-dotted “hip-hugger” skirt with matching vinyl belt, the paisley jumper with purple pockets, or the high-collared chartreuse dress, Justine would suddenly occupy a place in which her mother didn’t even exist.

  She did real shopping, ironically, with her mother, but what she loved best was to go with Mrs. Bernard and Edie and Pam. All the way to Wonderland, she and her friends would lounge all over the back seat giggling about pubic hair or how stupid somebody was while Mrs. Bernard, a strangely thin woman with a face that looked like it was held in place with tacks, talked to herself in a low, not unattractive mutter. (Edie said her mother had a mustache that she tore off with hot wax, but Justine didn’t believe it.)