B00768D9Y8 EBOK

by Gaitskill, Mary

  There were other evenings, though, when I lay upstairs trying to read while my parents’ voices floated up through the floor. I would visualize a part of my mind separating from my body like a cartoon character, tiptoeing away from the rest of me to listen at the door with cupped ear and then hurrying back to tap the complacent corporeal reader on the shoulder, gesticulating wildly. They were talking about me. My mother was telling my father how rudely I had greeted her that afternoon, or how I had told her to shut up that morning. The cartoon character reported sentences in scraps; “. . . it’s got to stop . . .” “What are we going to do?” “I just don’t know.” Soon my father would be pacing the living room to the martial bagpipes of the Coldstream Guards, ranting about “little shits” who deliberately rejected everything good and decent in favor of ugliness, who selfishly disregarded the feelings of those who’d sacrificed for them. In between declarations, he stamped up the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door so hard that my door trembled. His close presence came through my wall in a heavy wave, and I unconsciously padded the air for yards around me with numbness. When my mother called me for dinner, the table would already be set, and my father would be sitting at its head, watching me as I entered the room. His face was bitterly red, his eyes glassy, his hair stood away from his head in an oily halo gone askew. “There she is,” he might say. “The one who doesn’t want to be a part of her family. The one who ignores her mother and tells her to shut up.” We would eat silently, my mother consuming tiny forkfuls, my father noiselessly but violently chewing, squeezing his napkin into a shredded ball with his free hand. Slowly, starting first with veiled attacks on “selfish turds” and “fat slobs,” he began to tell me how awful I was. Soon he would be leaning towards me on his elbows, his mouth forming his words so vehemently that he showed his teeth. “You sit there on your fat butt night after night wearing the clothes I bought you, stuffing yourself with my food, stupid and ugly, contributing nothing.” He paused to study me as I chewed. Tears ran down my face and over my lips as I ate, mixing in my mouth with my hamburger. My mother ate her salad and traced a little design on the table with her finger. “Not only do you contribute nothing, but you attack. You attack a woman who’s never done anything but give you attention and affection.” He retreated back to his plate to seize another mouthful of hamburger. I stared at my plate and wept.

  Those dinner tribunals occurred with such frequency that I developed the ability to divide myself while they occurred; the external person who sat and cried while her father reviled her and the internal person who helped herself to more salad as he ranted, and noticed that the scalloped potatoes were particularly succulent tonight. With bitter pride I hugged the inner me to myself at night and thought how I had enjoyed dinner, no matter what. But my pride was marred by the dim awareness that it sometimes felt as though it was the external person who ate her dinner in dignified silence while the internal person hurt. “If you ever tell your mother to shut up again within my hearing, I’m going to knock you flat on your back. And if you get up, I’ll knock you down again. Every time you get up, I’ll just keep knocking you down.” I rose to clear the table. “I’ll help you, honey,” said my mother, gently patting my elbow.

  After the table was cleared, I went upstairs to lie in bed. I would lie in the dark, sensing my body sprawled out before my head like a country I had seen only on maps. My thoughts formed a grid of checkered squares clicking off and on in an industrial pattern of light and dark. Once this grid was in place, what had happened at the dinner table became a tiny scene observed from far away, and I would turn on the light and get my book and read, eating from a bag of orange corn curls I kept under my bed.

  It seemed that part of my father wanted to destroy me for leaving him, and that another part of him, which I could sense only at certain moments, wanted to follow me into my retreat, to wrap his arms around me and never let me go.

  Sometimes after I had put on my nightgown and gotten under the blankets to sleep, my father would come into my room. I would wake to find him standing beside my bed in the dark in his pajamas, looking at me with an invisible face, rubbing his fingers together. I would pretend to be asleep, feeling his presence and wondering if he was thinking about how innocent I looked in sleep. He would stay in the room for several minutes and then leave, nervously wiping his mouth with his hands before turning to go. I would lie there feeling a vague sense of vindication and satisfaction from this silent nocturnal contact. I thought he was trying to apologize.

  He did apologize once. I had been sitting on the floor beside the heat vent in the living room reading a paperback called Kennedy Days while my parents talked, my father pacing the floor with a glass of beer, my mother sitting on the couch. They were talking about a journalist who’d hoaxed the country with a book on the life of a millionaire who, as it turned out, had never existed. The journalist had gone to jail and was now writing another book from jail called Hoax. He had been offered a million-dollar contract in advance, which made my father furious. He was talking about how the writer, Irving Wiseback, had cheated not only the public but the memory of people like Obie and Aunt Cat, people who would never have cheated anybody, who died poor but honest. “Anyone who would enjoy reading that garbage is as worthless a bastard as Wiseback—and there’s one now. Look at her over there, reading that crap.” This was so unexpected that I had no time to create a padding of numbness. I dropped the book and walked quickly from the room. “Al.” My mother’s voice was full of gentleness and remonstrance.

  An hour after I had slammed the door to my room, my father came up the stairs with slow, soft thuds. He knocked on my door and opened it to find me sitting on my bed with a blanket wrapped around me. He came and sat on the edge of my bed. He said that sometimes he got so “goddamned upset at all the vicious immorality in the world” that he couldn’t think straight, and that in his urge to punish it, he sometimes “lashed out” at people who weren’t to blame at all, and that he actually found it commendable for a person my age to read about the Kennedys. I said it was all right. We sat on the bed, my father smiling tightly. I didn’t want to swallow because I was afraid he would hear it, so I let the saliva build up in my mouth as we sat. I became warm, and the blanket dropped from my shoulders. My father wiped his mouth and coughed. “Would you like to go for a walk around the block?” he asked.

  My mother looked away from the television and smiled as we filed down the stairs. “Just let me get a jacket,” said my father.

  Our walk was dreamy even though we both walked with habitual quickness, my father rubbing his fingers together and staring down at the sidewalk with distant intensity. The tall street lamps cast pools of light that graded gently into the dimness of street and sidewalk, then into the strange darkness of other people’s yards. Our neighbors’ front doors stood open, letting patches of weak light out onto their porches. I listened to the faint sounds of their televisions and their voices, occasionally a piece of laughter, with the covetous loneliness of an eavesdropper. We passed a group of adolescent boys lounging under a lighted basketball hoop nailed to their garage, and they stopped their conversation to watch the middle-aged man and the fat girl walk by. I had a moment of shame as I felt myself and my father perceived as the representatives of a world foreign to those agile basketball players with their easy limbs and voices, a stunted world of graceless movements, pathetic wants and weaknesses. I buried this feeling, and we passed the boys.

  We talked about ideas and events; a new TV show, what I was doing in social studies, what had ever become of that awful little dog of the Rizzos. Brown toads hopped out of the grass and onto the pavement before us, oblivious to the threat of our oncoming feet. My father talked to me about the pressure of his job, how he had to fight with people all day in subtle battles of the will which were never named, in which enemies tried “to cut your throat.” I saw my father in his office behind a desk, watchfully holding a sheaf of papers like a shield as another supervisor approached him. I a
dmired him as he sat there, the cagey champion of the office, ringed by formidable opponents. I saw myself and my mother standing vigilantly in the living room at home, ready for him to arrive. I saw a group of girls in the high school lunchroom, sitting around a table, talking out of their smiling, chewing faces. They seemed trivial compared to the vision of my embattled father with my mother and me standing behind him. They were pretty and happy, but my father and I aimed for higher things; we had relinquished beauty and pleasure and turned our faces towards the harsh reality of the fight against cruelty and falsehood. I saw his face and mine in profile together, like John Kennedy and Martin Luther King on a postage stamp, pressed against the stark gray sky, our expressions sad, yet resolute. Then my father did something he hadn’t done since I was a child: he took my lightly swinging hand and held it. I looked down smiling in embarrassment. He kept holding my hand, stroking it along its side with his thumb. I felt tension vibrating the length of his arm and hand, the tension of his complicated love for me, and I felt something like pity for him, as well as sorrow that I could no longer fully be a part of his life, nor invite him into mine.

  Just before we reached the house, he stopped walking and I stopped with him. He released my hand and I looked at him. His face held an expression I had never seen before and which looked like the suppression of pain. He reached out, cupped my head in one of his hands, and pulled it towards him. He stung my cheek with a fierce kiss and roughly tousled my hair. As we approached the front door lights of home, I felt peaceful and happy.

  The next day was a Saturday. My father and I spent the afternoon together watching Eerie Hours, four hours of old horror movies followed by The Arena, which featured gladiator movies hosted by a middle-aged man sitting at a desk in a gladiator outfit. My father sat in his black leather chair eating potato chips and drinking beer. I sat on the floor with Noxzema on my face eating popcorn, potato chips, corn curls, and diet grape pop.

  I wished that I never had to go to school again. I wanted to spend all of my days in the comfort and safety of this living room with the dirty wool carpet, flowered couches with used Kleenex tucked into their cushions, crumpled bags of potato chips, and the little black-and-white TV. I went into the kitchen to see if there were any more bite-sized Heath Bars in the refrigerator and saw my mother standing by the sink, gazing out the window with her arms folded around her thick waist. In the light of the window, I saw the dust on her glasses. She stood in a bundle, her bell-bottomed legs and tennis-shoed feet together, her stomach sticking out. Her mouth was slightly open and her face abstract with bewilderment. I stopped on my way to the freezer. My mother turned and recovered her expression. “Can I get you anything, honey?”

  One night my mother, calling up the stairs, asked me to set the table while I was on the phone talking with Donna Doe. I turned furiously from the phone, covered its receiver with my hand and bellowed, “Just a minute!” My mother called up again and I kicked the door shut. I snuggled against the wall and relished the phone. My father stomped up the stairs and opened the door so hard that the feeble old knob fell off. He tore the receiver from my hand, and Donna Doe became a planet hurled into oblivion by a tantruming god. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me from the room and out into the stairwell. I tried to steady myself by placing my hand on the wall; he took this as resistance and pushed me down the stairs. I tumbled briefly and broke my fall by grabbing a banister. He picked my hand off it and pushed me again. My mother sat watching quietly as he dragged me through the living room by my hair. “When your mother tells you to set the table, you move!” He shoved me against the dining room wall and yelled, “Do you understand?” again and again until I said yes. He let go of me, and I set the table.

  I ate my dinner of pork chops and green beans in silence. My father and mother chatted amiably about our neighbors and the last letter they had received from Edwina Barney. There was boxed lemon chiffon pie for dessert.

  I turned off my light earlier than usual that night, but I didn’t sleep. I lay having a fantasy about Jana Morgan and Emma Contrell as French waifs during the Second World War who had been driven to prostitution by poverty, but who doubled as resistance informants. My fantasy decomposed as I wobbled towards sleep. I dreamed I was sitting in social studies, but instead of feeling the dread that I felt in class, I felt a sense of triumph. A popular song overlaid the class scene, not its sound but its evocation of friendship and the eventual moment when everyone drops their public pose and exposes the goodwill they’ve harbored all along. I sat erect in my seat, smiling at everyone. The song said, “It’s so groovy now, that people are finally getting together.”

  I wobbled back into wakefulness. The room was covered with sleep fuzz. My father stood before my bed. I closed my eyes, imagining my innocent face as it appeared to him. He sat on the bed next to me. I peeked at him. I was surprised to see that he wasn’t doing the nervous things he usually did when he came to my room at night; he didn’t wipe his mouth or rub his fingers together, he just sat there exuding determined presence. I closed my eyes, feeling the tension and suspended contact. I remembered his nighttime kiss. There was a movement that seemed gracefully swooping and swanlike to me, even though I knew my father was pulling up his feet and awkwardly laying his body on my bed. My sense of anticipation, my feeling of intimacy, impending resolution, and fear almost nauseated me. When he put his hand under the blankets, I was surprised and opened my eyes. He was waiting for me. He put his fingers on my lips and said, “Shh.” His eyes were bright and his forehead was lifted into friendly wrinkles. “I don’t want to wake your mother,” he whispered. “I just thought we could have a little talk.” I nodded, feeling a sensation like warm tears trembling in my chest. It was as I thought: my father came into my room because he wanted to apologize. I felt so moved, I wanted to cuddle against his chest as I had done as a child, burying my nose in his warm, detergent-scented pajamas.

  “I just wanted to let you know,” he began, “that when you were born I thought you were the most beautiful little thing I ever saw. It wasn’t just me either. Everybody in the hospital thought you were special. You had the intelligence, the sparkle, the beauty—you had it all.”

  I smiled spastically. My father twitched a grin and touched the tip of my nose with his finger. “And I still think so. Say, can I get under the covers? It’s cold out here.”

  He kissed my face and neck as he had taken my hand during our walk: tenderly, the tenderness vibrant with inheld tension. He said how hurt he was when we “argued,” when it seemed like I just didn’t care about everything he’d fought for. I moved nearer him to protest that I did care, and I smelled him, the deep smell produced by his particular combination of organs and glands and the food he ate. He pulled me against him, crushing my face into the chest hairs exposed by his open pajama top. I felt the power and insistence in his embrace, felt how tight were the muscles of his embracing arm, and for a second I was afraid. Then with his other hand he caressed my breasts and nipples through my light gown. My breath stopped. Arousal rose through my body and seized it. My excitement terrified me and made me feel ashamed because I knew it was wrong to be excited. But underneath the fear and shame, underneath the excitement, it seemed that what was happening now between my father and me was only the physical expression of what always happened between us, even when he verbally reviled me. Tears came to my eyes; it seemed that his cruel words had clothed these loving caresses all along. I put out my hands and clutched his pajamas in my fists. “Yes,” he said, his voice crushed and strange. “Yes.” He moved his hand away from my chest, not loosening his grip on my shoulders. Through the gown, he touched between my legs. Shock impaled my body. As if he felt it, he snatched his hand away. He let go of my shoulder and lay silently staring at the ceiling with me paralyzed in a curl, my forehead touching his shoulder. At length he sat up and said, “Good night, Sweet Pea.” He left, stopping in the bathroom to pee before returning to his bedroom. I heard him cough nervously before he clo
sed his bedroom door behind him.

  For a long time I lay curled in the position he had left me in, held by shock and smothered feeling. My heartbeat threatened to break open my chest. It was not the same as sex, I thought. And truly, what had just happened seemed to bear no relation to “sex”: smiling big-breasted women in scanty bathing suits, modern couples winking and making jokes on television, boys whistling at pretty girls, the things I heard about Emma Contrell and Jana Morgan. This had been something secret, special, and symbolic; it had happened in a tiny place where only my father and I lived. I straightened my body and lay on my back, my breath returning. The room gradually slowed its disturbed pulsing. The shadows of branches moved back and forth on the ceiling.

  During the day there was no external change in our behavior towards each other. But there had been a change. I felt it both awake and asleep.