B00768D9Y8 EBOK

by Gaitskill, Mary

  Justine stood and surveyed her victim. She was shocked at the sight of the hairless genitals; they reminded her of a fallen baby bird, blind and naked, shivering on the sidewalk. It disgusted her to think she had something like that too, and she focused the fullness of her disgust on Rose. There were no more cajoling words, the mouse had been hypnotized, she was free to strike at leisure.

  Fascinated by the meek unprotected slit but too appalled to touch it, she plucked a yellowing toothbrush from its perch above the sink—pausing to glance at herself in the mirror as she did so—and stuck the narrow handle into her playmate’s vagina. From the forgotten region of Rose’s head came a truly pathetic sound; her face turned sideways and crumpled like an insect under a murdering wad of tissue, and tears ran from her closed eyelids.

  But it was not the tears that brought Justine to her senses, it was the stiff, horrified contraction of the violated genitals which she felt even through the ridiculous agent of the toothbrush, a resistance more adamant than any expressed so far. Suddenly she realized what she was doing.

  She left the sobbing child crouched on the cold concrete floor, pulling on her clothes with trembling fingers, while she bounded up the basement stairs and out the back door yelling, “I’m gonna tell everybody what I made you do!”

  But she didn’t. Out of a muddled combination of shame and barely acknowledged pity, she kept it to herself, for her own frenzied, crotch-rubbing nocturnal contemplation.

  Rose was absent from school for a week and then appeared like an injured animal dragging its crushed hind legs. No one remarked how her head, previously so busy and alert, had joined the collapse of her shoulders, or how her cheerful little spine had somehow crumpled. She avoided Justine and the gang, then tentatively approached and realized no one knew. She once accompanied Justine home from school in an abject silence that Justine was too embarrassed to break, except when they both mumbled “Bye.”

  Although Justine told no one, the other girls sensed some new vulnerability in Rose, unconsciously recognized the loss of that nervous puppy spirit that had been her particular charm. They became aggressive and cruel to her; Debby was especially unkind. Rose walked home with Justine one more time and, at the corner where they would’ve said goodbye, blurted out an invitation to Justine to come play the game they played before, in the bathroom. Justine snarled and turned away. Rose never came near the gang again. Since she was not in Justine’s class, Justine only caught occasional glimpses of her in the halls or on the periphery of the playground, wandering by herself or standing with a crowd of other mousey unpopular girls.

  This incident did not interfere with Justine’s other make-out activities, except in one way: after a squatting self-examination over a mirror, she vowed that while they could touch it all they wanted, she’d never allow anyone to look at that ugly thing between her legs. But she was only eleven and knew nothing at all about her future, so one can’t be too hard on her for breaking vows made at this time.

  My family moved to Painesville, Pennsylvania, when I was thirteen. Physically, the neighborhood was as I had been expecting the neighborhood in Michigan to be. There were big trees, lawns, gardens, and a small main street downtown. Our house was a pointy-roofed charmer with shutters on the windows and rose bushes cuddling against the walls. There was a patio and a breakfast nook, and for months before we moved, my father walked around our house in Chiffon holding snapshots of the Painesville house and smiling. But, within months after moving in, he discovered we had been betrayed by the real estate people. The house was dark, drafty, weirdly put together. Doorknobs fell off, the basement tended to flood, and the roof was so moldy that a wind-blown seedling rooted in it and grew into a sapling. My father was bitterly disappointed, first with the house, then with the neighborhood, then with the town.

  After Michigan, I was suspicious of Painesville’s alleged splendor, and so I was not disappointed. I employed the same methods I had learned in Chiffon to chop up and organize my life to lessen the impact of the outside world.

  In the morning I would roll from my bed without turning on the light to put on my turquoise polka-dot girdle, my pantyhose, and my dress. In the bathroom my father ran water, coughed, blew his nose, rubbed the radio dial back and forth, spat into the sink, and flushed the unhappy old toilet. I finished my reluctant dressing ritual as he burst from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, and went to wash my face, brush my hair, and pee. The toilet seat was moist with steam, the mirror fogged, the bath mat damply rumpled on the floor, and the sink blobbed with his thick discharges of toothpaste. I performed my toilet cocooned in my father’s smell of hair oil, Old Spice deodorant, sweat, and faded urine, and then went to sit at the breakfast table with him. He hunched at his place eating his eggs while I chewed my cold cereal and my mother flitted from kitchen to table in her robe. On the radio was a morning show called Put On a Happy Face, hosted by a man who sounded as if he viewed happiness as the most hopeless, yet most necessary, form of human gallantry.

  I rode to school with five other girls, whom I remember mainly as knees tinted beige by pantyhose and arms clasped around books. Four of us were ugly and unpopular. When the car pulled up at the school, the one pretty, popular girl would leap out and walk ahead with frantic briskness so that no one would suspect that she had any connection with us.

  The rest of the day was divided into hours and rooms labeled “math,” “social studies,” etc. There were minutes of travel through teeming hallways and there was lunch. Of these divisions, I found the classroom hours the most painless because they were most controlled. I divided this time even further, first by the spaces between the clock’s numbers, then by the gestures and whispered conversations that took place without any words suddenly leaping out to injure me, then by the written exercises to be performed. Between these markers I toiled, slowly connecting one to the other. The moments in the halls were horrible because they were not divisible and because I was exposed to a striding, grinning, shouting chaos of people, many of whom possessed an unbearable youthful beauty, all of whom were connected to each other by feelings and conversations I could not understand, people with whom I could never connect, except when someone screamed, “Look! It’s Twiggy!” Lunch was less jarring, but, after I got through the various points in the line, there was no way to mark off my existence, and for a full half hour I was skewered by the sight and sound of others celebrating their youth and vitality. I began to eat my Choco Chunk bars and french fries in the bathroom in the company of two or three girls with nests of hair, threadbare skirts, and leather jackets. They drooped on the wall, put on lipstick, teased their hair, and smoked cigarettes, languorously blowing the smoke ceilingward as they talked about their boyfriends or how much they hated someone. I still remember, with useless clarity, the large pink bump that one of these girls had at the corner of her nose, a pimple that was always inflamed and set off by a delicate circle of orange makeup at its base.

  The most rigid pattern was not the one imposed by the school system or the adolescent social system. It was the pattern I made of the people around me, a mythology for their incomprehensible activity, a mythology that brought me a cramped delight, which I protected by putting all possible space between myself and other people. The boundaries of my inner world did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my most external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded, like the force field of clouds and limitless night sky that surrounded the island of Never-Never Land. My mythology was based on images rather than words because I could not generally understand the conversation around me. A cluster of girls would sit behind me on the floor in the echoing hollow of the gym and say things about clothing—what they wanted to buy that spring, how much they liked pink or paisley or lacy cuffs, how cute Leslie’s dress was, as opposed to how ugly Kitty’s dress was (sometimes engaging in subtle battles over whether or not someone was acceptable throug
h an exchange concerning her clothes)—what someone’s boyfriend did to her the night before, or a television program. Then suddenly, one of them would bite out, “Oh God, we don’t want that ugly scuz on our team,” or some other comment that I could not associate with dresses or television programs. It seemed to me that the rest of the conversation had been a mere basket for the snake of cruelty coiling under the banal weave of words.

  Yet I knew that these were nice girls. I sensed that if their mundane words covered cruelty and aggression, the cruelty and aggression covered other qualities. Vulnerability, tenderness, curiosity, kindness—I sensed these qualities in the child harridans around me, yet I could not experience them. Even more bewildering, it seemed that they did not experience them either. Perhaps this was because these softer feelings were so immature, so frail, and, if allowed their full measure of expression, so potentially unbearable that the girls instinctively protected their gentleness with impenetrable harshness, unconsciously fearing it would otherwise not survive. If this were true then the rigid and complex social structure they adhered to, with its confusing rules of dress and conduct, must be a code for the deeper reserves that lay beneath, and thus, if this code were cracked, it would allow access to that friendliness and compassion I saw them sporadically express. So I listened desperately and tried to understand the code. But I could not do it, and on the rare occasion that someone spoke to me, I was struck dumb by trying too hard to discover the correct response. Either that or, having stood within earshot of a conversation on the cuteness of a particular TV show or the sluttiness of a heavily madeup twelve-year-old, I would blurt out a comment that seemed to me very like everyone else’s comments and be met with stares of incomprehension.

  Thus the mythology.

  There was a delicate underweight girl named Emma Contrell with round gray eyes painted stormily black and blue, and a curly bunch of short peroxide hair that made her small head heavy on her slight neck. She sighed and walked with her shoulders hunched and her arms held inward. She belonged to an elite band of girls who wore too much makeup and short skirts. They drank and smoked cigarettes and went to parties with seventeen-year-olds. They were gossiped about, envied, and feared. Emma was the frailest and dreamiest of these girls; even her vicious taunting of the wretched lone “special education” student was giddy and whimsical. She had a bad reputation with the other girls for being a “nympho” and she would’ve been outcast if she hadn’t been protected by her formidable friends. I saw her lingering in the halls or in the parking lot with one large lumbering lad after the next; their big bodies and limbs seemed to menace Emma merely by close proximity to her. Emma always appeared to be under some terrible stress; she carried a large bottle of aspirin with her, her hands trembled, she had urgent whispered conversations with her friends in the toilet stalls. I sat behind her in math, and I once heard her whisper to the lewd, snide child next to her, “Don’t you think Mr. Johnson has a fab bod?” Her voice was tiny and sharp, like an especially foolish bird. I decided from that moment on that Emma was in love with the cheaply suave math teacher and that she was involved with her apish series of boyfriends simply to kill her miserable passion under their stampeding bodies. But no matter how ardently they felt her up in the parking lot, her arched neck and open lips were not for them. Their fumbling paws only provoked her bitter longing for the math teacher until one day after school she put her hand on his thigh and gazed at him sorrowfully with her huge smudged eyes. He gloatingly took her hand and led her out to his car. He took advantage of the romantic child, enflaming her love and driving her to acquiesce even more frantically to her parking lot swains in an effort to divert public attention from her real love, in order not to destroy his family life and position, which he had warned her could happen. She was promiscuous also because he loved to hear her talk about her adventures in his overheated car.

  I felt a throb of admiration every time I saw little Emma in the bathroom, her hands trembling as she applied pink lipstick to her plump lips. I pictured her clinging to the rutting math teacher in the back seat of his car, her face abandoned to love and despair, and I forgave her everything, even her cruelty, even the time she tripped my polio-crippled friend, poor dull defenseless Donna Doe.

  I was astonished to hear one day, while sitting quietly on a toilet, a whispered conversation about the scandal at Bev Pawler’s pajama party, when Emma was found kissing Mona Prescott. I was taken aback only for a moment; then my loyalty and devotion swelled like an infected gland. I imagined Emma and Mona Prescott (a coarse girl with pockmarked skin and blank, intent brown eyes, who once remarked, as Miss Vanderlust, the bowlegged gym teacher, relegated me to an unwilling volleyball team, “Oh no, not that fat weirdo”) gazing passionately into each other’s eyes. I imagined Emma, scorned by the boys who had used her, rejected by the math teacher, tormented by rude phone calls in the night. I imagined Emma crouched in her underwear, sobbing on the floor of the deserted gym class locker room. Mona’s concerned face would appear from behind a row of lockers. “Hi. Wanna go for a swim?” They swam in the deserted pool, moving under the water in slow rippling bands of light. Mona, the stronger one, led the way. In my mythology, she had a large red flower tattooed on her inner thigh, exposed like a betrayed secret. Emma watched the flower through the rippling water and wondered how she could’ve overlooked it before.

  I did in reality see them in the locker room together, padding around in their underwear, whispering and giggling. I did see them swimming together once, and perhaps, in some dim way, recognized two familiar prototypes as Emma, like my mother, paddled nervously behind while Mona, like Edwina Barney, cut through the water with brisk strokes. The rest of the class gamboled about them, their playful screams rising in the echoing air while I sat in my chair and watched with the silent group of girls who always had their period when a swimming class was scheduled.

  There were many others about whom I formed such beautiful and elaborate fantasies. There were the D’Arcy twins, tall and bony-legged girls with curly black hair and prominent ribs. Their strident athleticism, their barking voices, in which they talked of “really creaming” somebody made me envision them in white leather, armed with bows and arrows, smiling as they entered a field of battle and carnage, perhaps looking for souvenirs of teeth or buttons.

  There was Jana Morgan, close friend of Emma Contrell and even more of a slut, a dumb-eyed girl with a big oval face, big lips, and a graceful, acquiescent neck. She was loud, foul, and kind, she wanted more than anything to attract the attention of everyone around her. She sat straddling her chair in her short skirt and badly run pantyhose, twisting her torso coquettishly as she whispered to a boy or passed a note to a girl; she popped big bubbles of gum and flirted with teachers. She often had to report to the principal’s office, and she went with defiance in the swing of her hips, turning when she reached the door to whisper dramatically, “I’ll never tell!” in imitation of those handsome and noble TV prisoners of the Gestapo who always escape over the barbed wire on their motorcycles. In the frequent wars of my dreams, she appeared as the most valuable prisoner in the enemy’s detention system; she and I were among the unbreakable cadre that our captors had so far failed to brainwash. Although they led her away daily to be savagely interrogated, Jana still gallantly cried out, “I’ll never tell!” and she looked at me with eyes of such understanding and connection that I awoke feeling deeply and tragically moved, as though someone I loved had died in my arms.

  I attached these bright phantasms and others like them to the people around me, like exuberant billowing shadows more real than the flesh they shadowed, phantoms living full lives that I was excluded from, even though I had created them.

  When I arrived home from school, my mother would be in the kitchen, preparing dinner. She employed the same energy with which she had once cleaned the house of her girlhood, stirring the pot, prodding the meat, peeling the potatoes with concentration and zeal. I hated the careful, exacting way she watched the food. I
hated it when she patted my lower back or squeezed my shoulder and said, “Hi, honey” as I lumbered through the kitchen. My mother didn’t care if I was fat and ugly. She seemed to like it in fact. In my diary I wrote, “I fear my father’s anger, but I fear my mother’s love.” This phrase was destined to sink slowly and heavily to the bottom of my memory and to sit there, undulating like a baleful underwater plant.

  For, in creating the imaginary world inside me, I had abandoned the world that had existed between my parents and me, leaving them alone with their chipmunks and their triumphant heroes. It was a silent defection but they felt it, my father especially felt it. He would watch me as I moved through the rooms of his house as if trying to decide if I were his friend or enemy. Step by step I moved further away, and he registered each internal retreat with growing outrage and fear.

  Sometimes when I came downstairs for dinner, my father would be resting in his black leather armchair; he would raise his eyebrows in greeting as I stumped down the stairs. I would set the table and talk with my mother. Dinner would be accompanied by television voices and the sound of my father gnawing his steak-bone. During warm weather, we would sit at the table long after we’d finished eating, with our chairs pushed out and our legs comfortably extended, drinking iced tea and watching television. I stirred so much sugar into my tea that it went to the bottom of my glass in a grainy swirl and sat there; I fished it out with a spoon and ate it when I had finished drinking. Newscasters would talk to us, and my father would translate, commenting on the bastards who were trying to undermine the United States in its fight to protect Vietnam from communism. Sometimes he would ask my opinion on what the newscaster said; I would give it and he would say, “Good comprehension. You’re following it pretty well,” and lean back in his chair, his mouth a satisfied line. Eventually, my mother and I would clear the table, scrape the food from the plates and load the dishwasher. My parents would move into the living room to concentrate on the TV, and I would go back upstairs to read. The evening would grade easily into night.