Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  She expected them to cheer Blue, or to ask about him, but instead they abruptly slid off their chairs and ran to play with their toys. She was puzzled and even a little hurt; she thought they would like the story. She walked over to where they played and crouched beside them. They had a strange assortment of toys, some of which weren’t even toys. They had rubber dinosaurs, colored rocks, a metal truck, a turtle with hair, a cymbal with a pink elastic wrist strap, a stuffed dog, a battery-operated gorilla, a knotted leather cord with two marble balls on either end, a wind-up chickie, and a ceramic mermaid. Alex had the metal wind-up chickie and Eric had the mermaid. They talked urgently in cartoon voices and marched their toys around so that they acted out a story. They talked loudly, as if they were putting on a show for her and, at the same time, using their loudness to shut her out. On impulse, she picked up the gorilla and made it walk up to Eric’s mermaid. “Hey, good-lookin’,” she said. Eric tensed. “Hey,” she said. She wiggled the gorilla. Eric ignored her; she blushed. She felt as if she were trying to squeeze into a spot too small for her. She decided to do the dishes, even though there were only two of them.

  She washed the cereal bowls with a little bit of green steel wool. Then she wiped the counter with it. She looked at the baby, who wasn’t doing anything. She sat at the table by the window. On the table was an old digital clock and an empty bud vase made of clouded plastic. The clock said 9:41. Elise looked out the window. There were people out walking around now, and she watched them. Normally at this time of day she would be walking up and down Granville, asking people for change. Most of the panhandlers her age sat on the sidewalk and begged in groups. They sat huddled as if they were glad to have arrived at the absolute bottom, where it was nice and solid and they could sit. They sat huddled as if protecting something very special, and their begging seemed like an after-thought. Elise much preferred the walking method. People were more apt to give you money if you went up to them and asked them for it, and besides, she liked the big dumb rhythm of everybody going in the same two directions and, inside that, all the tiny, concentrated rhythms of different walking styles. She liked moving quickly in and out of other people’s rhythms.

  Sometimes she’d have a conversation with someone who gave her money or insulted her, and for a moment that person would loom out of the generality with a loud blare of specificity and then fade back as Elise walked on. Once, she had approached a young guy who had come out of a fast food store and was opening the box of fried chicken he’d bought there. He gave her a dollar. He said he was giving it to her because she reminded him of a girl he knew in San Francisco. “She’s a sex worker,” he said, “a pros-tee-tute.” He dragged the word out singsong style and smiled at her with an aggressive, bristling air as rank and particular as a deep body smell. “I’ve thought of doing that,” she said. His aggression turned into surprise and then into a funny, sour acceptance. He asked her if she wanted some chicken. She said yes and tore all the fried juicy skin off the breast. “Hey,” he said, “it’s no good without the skin,” but he still let her sit with him and eat, even though she’d ruined his chicken.

  Andy ran over to her with his metal chickie. “This is Jago,” he said. “He’s a fighter orphan bird. When the hunters come into the forest to get birds and they see Jago, they scream and run away!”

  “Oh!” said Elise.

  “You pretend to be the hunter,” said Andy. “You’re coming in the woods and you see this bird and you don’t know it’s Jago so you start to shoot, okay?”

  Elise pretended that her finger was a gun and pointed it at the metal chick.

  Andy flipped up one of the chick’s metal wings to reveal Jago written on the underside in felt pen.

  Elise waited.

  “It’s Jago!” prompted Andy.

  “Oh, no!” said Elise. “Jago!”

  Andy ran back to his game in triumph.

  Little kids always wanted to set things up so they got to yell a certain satisfying thing or to make you yell it. When she was little, she or her brother Rick would yell something like, “Why did Miss Grinch and Miss Butt take all their clothes off?” and the other would yell back, “Because they wanted to!” Then they would roll around, tickling each other and giggling, yelling more questions and yelling the same answer again and again.

  The sunlight shifted, and the surface of the table became warm and bright. Elise extended her arms into the warmth; her pale arm hairs stood up in the air, and the sight made her feel tender toward herself. All those thousands of tiny hair follicles, each earnestly keeping its special hair going. She lifted her arm and rubbed the soft hairs against her lip. Outside, a child flashed down the street, waving something bright in his hand.

  When she was seven and Rick was eight, they would dress in skirts and hats and dance around the mulberry bush in the backyard of their old house, picking the berries and singing, “Oh, we haven’t got a chance for our vegetables! For our vegetables!” Their mother had taken pictures of them in their outfits, each holding a plastic bucket of mulberries. Elise stood with her stumpy little legs apart and made her stomach stick out on purpose. Rick posed with one hand on his slim hip, his smile innocent and arrogant and glad. His bare legs were long and finely shaped and made him look more delicate than he was.

  With a soft blending motion, that memory turned into another one. She and Rick cuddled on the couch while the family watched TV Their mother sat on the end of the couch with her legs tucked up under her; Rick leaned against her hip and Elise sat against him. They were eating sticky refrigerator cookies and watching It’s a Wonderful Life. Through her thin nightgown she could feel his warm haunch and his bare foot, cool and faintly sweaty against her thigh. He was radiant, thoughtless, quick, and very male. His heart was tender, but the rest of him was darting around too fast for him to feel it. Elise could feel it, though. Their mother’s old knit afghan covered their laps and legs, and while their heads were busy watching TV and eating the special cookies, under the afghan she was knowing him and letting him know her, in an invisible way too complicated for words. Meanwhile, their father presided in his leatherette recliner. Their little brother, Robbie, sat close to the TV, but instead of watching the movie, he was concentrating on his red crayons and his drawing. They were safe in their lair.

  It was very hot in the apartment, hotter than outside. She was already sweating around the waistband. She glanced at the boys; she wished she could take off her shirt but she wasn’t sure it was right, even though it was natural.

  In Seattle, she had stayed for a few weeks in an apartment with ten other kids. It was okay to take off your shirt or change your clothes there, whether or not you were having sex with anyone. She’d had sex with a boy named David who stayed there sometimes. Even before that they saw each other naked sometimes because they liked each other so much, like brother and sister. He had green eyes with black eyelashes, and a wine-colored birthmark on his prominent right hipbone. He had written a whole page in his journal about her and then read it to her. But the day after they slept together, he took acid and went off with some other guys to steal animal statuary, and she never saw him again. It was all right; she understood that they were both traveling. But she wished she had an address where she could write to him.

  “No! No! No!” Eric’s whine was smothered and aggrieved. Elise sat up and listened alertly to see if Andy was picking on him. “Okay,” said Andy. “Now they’re going to attack the mall.” “Okay,” said Eric. Elise relaxed.

  Rick had picked on Robbie a lot when they were little. Before their parents got divorced, he picked on him just by laughing at him. Then the divorce happened. The children went to live with their mother, even though she couldn’t afford them. Everybody was upset and unhappy. Their mother cried all the time. Elise had bad dreams. Robbie wet the bed. Rick began hurting Robbie. He slammed the car door on his leg. He punched him in the stomach while he was asleep. He peed on his drawings.

  Their mother would yell and then she’d cry, and for a
while Rick would try to be nice to Robbie. He would put his arm around his little brother and share his ice cream cone and smile like they were in a secret league together. There would be two feelings in his eyes when he did this. One of the feelings was mocking, as if his kindness was just another, more complicated version of his meanness. But the other feeling was pure sweetness for Robbie. It was so sweet Rick couldn’t resist feeling it, and so sweet that he couldn’t quite stand feeling it. So he would just taste it, like a piece of candy, and then throw it away. But Robbie couldn’t help reaching out for the sweetness. He would look up at Rick and then look down and reach for the ice cream cone and politely eat at it with the shy tip of his tongue. Rick would look at him, and tenderness would shimmer under his eyes, trying to get out. But then he would go back to being mean again.

  Their mother would yell when Rick was mean, but she loved him too much to really punish him. She loved his boyish arrogance and his radiance. When he bragged about winning in sports or outsmarting somebody or even being mean, she would look at him as if he had something she needed more than anything in the world. And he would bathe in her look. She would come up behind him and stroke his hair, and he would act like he wasn’t paying attention, but really he would lean into his mother, welcoming her. She would ask him to do things: Open a can, carry a bag of groceries, kill a big bug, rub her feet with oil. And he would do it with an air of chivalry, even though she was the bigger and stronger one. Maybe their mother had been afraid that if she lost the meanness, she’d lose the chivalry, and she couldn’t bear to lose that. But she loved Robbie too, and she was frightened by the way Rick treated him.

  So she got cheap state psychiatrists to look at Rick and Robbie. Once a week they would go to a clinic to be examined, while Elise sat in the waiting room with her mother. Elise didn’t mind going to the clinic. She kind of liked sitting on the orange furniture in the lounge, eating candy out of the machine at the end of the hall and observing the mentally ill people who went in and out. She liked her mother’s certainty that, finally, she was accomplishing something.

  But the psychiatrists didn’t find anything wrong, and things went back to normal. Then Rick hung Robbie upside down in a neighbor’s barn and made him swing back and forth until Robbie’s head hit the wall and his forehead cracked open. When their mother saw, she screamed and put her hand over her mouth; then she turned and hit Rick in the face. She bundled Robbie up and carried him to the house, his forehead bleeding onto her pink blouse, one leg hanging limp off to the side. She didn’t cry; she made choking, struggling noises that were terrible and female. Elise ran after her; Rick just stood there.

  That night Elise had a dream about Robbie. She was in the fifth grade, and had just learned about how Mount Vesuvius had erupted. In her dream, a volcano had erupted in San Anselmo, and their father came in the car to save them. While they were driving to safety, Elise looked back and saw that they had forgotten Robbie. He was running after the car, screaming for their father to stop. Elise held her hand out the window for him to grab, but their father wouldn’t slow down.

  Her dream came true, sort of. Their father married a woman who owned and operated a salon where she tattooed color onto women’s faces so that they would look like they had makeup on all the time. It was decided that Rick and Elise should go live with their father and his new wife and her daughter, Becky, while Robbie stayed behind with their mother. It wasn’t until years later that it had occurred to Elise that the barn incident had something to do with this arrangement.

  “I’m cutting his head off! I’m cutting his head off!” yelled Andy.

  “No!” Eric’s voice had a shrill, stubborn push.

  Swiftly, Elise crossed the room. “Don’t cut off his head!” she said.

  There was a burst of silence. Elise felt the boys shrink deeper into their privacy. Stiffly, they moved their toys. She felt embarrassed. She thought of saying, “Be nice to Eric,” but she was too embarrassed. She stood over them, feeling she couldn’t move until something else happened.

  “What are you playing?” she asked.

  Andy looked up. “The turtle is trying to cut off the mermaid’s friend’s head and Jago is coming to help,” he explained patiently.

  “Oh.” She relaxed. They relaxed. She stood there a minute in the new atmosphere. Then she went to check on Penny. The baby was still just lying there. Elise sat on the bed, feeling that everything was okay. She had shown authority and made contact. She thought about picking the baby up and walking back and forth with her, but she’d never picked a baby up before. Instead, she put her hand on Penny’s stomach and rubbed her. The baby smiled and made sounds that were like light, tumbling bubbles. Nervously, Elise stroked the exquisite little forehead. The baby looked at Elise solemnly and then drew her gaze back inward as she returned to the business of creating a person who could survive in the world. Elise looked out the window. Two shabby old women wearing brimmed hats stood on the pavement, talking. They touched each other and smiled and nodded vigorously.

  It was funny, thought Elise, that she had told the children “we have a cat” when she wasn’t with her family anymore. He wasn’t her cat now. They hadn’t discovered Blue under a porch with an orphaned litter, either. And he had never faced down a dog. He was an expensive Persian cat from a breeder. Their father had bought him as a special gift for their stepmother, Sandy.

  When she and Rick moved in with their father and Sandy, their father had said to her, “Now you’ll have a sister,” as if she had always wanted one. But she had not wanted, at the age of eleven, to have a nine-year-old stranger dropped into the middle of her life. It was like suddenly having to live with somebody who sat across the room from her at school.

  But Becky was nice. She was diffident and she always shared. She was also weird, or, as her own mother said, “neurotic.” She picked the fur off her stuffed animals. All her animals were bald. Her mother said it was because she needed to “act out her anger” at her parents’ divorce. It didn’t look like anger to Elise. Becky would sit with an animal and suck her thumb and pick the fur off it with two fingers, collecting it in her palm until she had a handful. Then she’d put it in a blue plastic bucket called “the picky bucket.” If you wanted to torture Becky, and Rick and Elise sometimes did, you could threaten to dump the pickies in the toilet or throw handfuls about the room while Becky screamed and ran around trying to catch them. Even when she got older and stopped picking the animals, Becky kept the overflowing picky bucket under her bed. Then her mother found them and threw them away, because she said it was “over the top” for Becky to have them. For a while after that, Becky defiantly picked the stuffing out of the mattress and dropped it on the floor, but she was really too old by then, so she didn’t do it long.

  Elise came to like Becky and to feel protective of her shy peculiarity. But she was more impressed by her stepmother. Rick had hated Sandy from the beginning, but Elise found her too strange and fascinating to hate. Sandy was a little younger than their mother, but she had a bright, bristling competence that made her seem older. She was thin and her stomach was hard and she’d had her face tattooed so that she appeared to be wearing full makeup all the time. Even when she got up in the morning, her lips were bright red, her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were outlined in black. “I fixed it so I wouldn’t have to wash my face off at night,” she said. She said it with brisk self-deprecation, as if her face, everybody’s face, was a vaguely ridiculous thing that could come off at any moment. She also said it with pride that she’d acknowledged the problem and then gone right in there to fix it. Her whole being seemed to be bursting with self-deprecation and pride and the need to fix things.

  Their father may have gotten Blue as a present for Sandy, but he had grown to like the cat more than anybody did. He thought it was soulful and beautiful. He brought Blue special treats and talked to him, even sang to him. Blue would be resting on the floor, and their father would bend over to look the cat in the face and he would sing: �
��Six foot, seven foot, eight foot—bunch! Daylight come and Blue wants to go home!”

  Rick despised it when their father did that, and would imitate him viciously. Elise defended their father and reminded Rick that he had been in Vietnam, where he’d risked his life and fought.

  “Yeah,” said Rick. “The retards are strong.”

  This was the thing he said when somebody who was ugly or unpopular did something smart. He could say that and take anything away from anybody. When she was younger, it hurt her to hear Rick talk about their father this way. But when she got older, she saw what he’d meant; their father was kind of a retard. She remembered him at the dinner table, yelling.

  “You think you’re such a bunch of smart, tough feminists!” he yelled. “But you don’t know anything! About men, about sex!” He grabbed the edge of the table and lunged over his dish. “There’s guys out there who would cut your bowels out to have it!”

  Elise looked at Rick and rolled her eyes. Becky, who was fourteen, began to cry. “See!” said their father. “The big feminist! Crying!” But his voice wobbled on the second exclamation, as if it was embarrassed, and his last word was almost sorry about the whole thing. He withdrew into his chair, wiped his mouth, and ate with the slightly offended air of someone who just wants to mind his own business.

  If Sandy had been there, he would never have said those things. But she was at a codependency meeting, which was why he was in a bad mood to begin with.

  Elise looked at Becky so she would see that Elise didn’t look down on her for crying, but Becky was busy composing herself and didn’t notice. Elise was angry and disgusted that their father had made Becky cry when he had actually been yelling at Elise for talking about a woman on TV who’d been saying that if girls wanted to dress like prostitutes, they should learn to act like prostitutes. Becky sniffed, tucked her fine red hair behind her ears, and took up her silverware with the delicate resolve of a young cat. Elise furtively tried to meet her brother’s eye so he would see how contemptuous she felt, but Rick was too deep in his own special contempt to respond. He stroked his dyed black hair and fidgeted disdainfully as if trying to locate some small spot worth being in, even though he knew such a spot didn’t exist, at least not among these people. One cuff of his angora sweater slid down over one long, severely articulated hand, adding to the exquisite quality of his disdain. Elise felt a pang of admiration for him. She felt dejected that he wouldn’t look at her, but she didn’t blame him. He was seventeen, and not necessarily interested in looks across the dining table, and anyway, if she were as beautiful as Rick, she thought, she’d be stuck-up too.