Don't Cry

by Mary Gaitskill

  The stewardess came down the aisle, closing the overhead compartments, making sure they were tucked into their seat belts. What luck: She had the whole row to herself.

  Before they went to sleep, her children would talk to her about anything, artlessly opening their most private doors so that she could make sure all was in order there. When Megan wet the bed, she would go, half-asleep, to her parents’ room, pull off her wet gown, and get between them in her mother's chemise, a little white sardine still fragrant with briny pee. Even at thirteen, Susan would run to her, crying, “Mama, Mama!” Once she sank down on the floor and butted Bea's stomach like she wanted to get back inside it.

  The plane pushed back. Now no private door was open to her; not even Megan's face was open to her. Susan hadn't come to her even when she was raped in the parking structure, hadn't even told her about it until ten years later, when she could say, clipped and insistent, that it wasn't “such a big deal.”

  The plane turned on the runway like a live thing slowly turning in heavy water. Sunlight glinted on its rattling, battered wing. Still, Megan had flown her out to visit, and taken her to a play Susan and her girlfriend were coming for Easter. Both girls came to visit every Christmas, and had since they'd moved away from home. When she left Mac and was living from apartment to wretched apartment, the girls divided their Christmas time with scrupulous fairness. Megan spent two nights in Bea's apartment, while Susan spent two nights with Mac; then they switched. The two of them spent Christmas Eve with her, and Christmas Day with him, then the other way the next year.

  But she knew they'd rather see her than Mac. Sometimes Susan even sneaked in extra time with her mother, pretending to Mac that she'd left on Tuesday, when she had really stayed through Wednesday with her mother. It was cruel, but so was Mac. When the girls stayed with him, he walked through the house, yelling about how terrible Bea was or declaring that he wanted to die, and that if it wasn't Christmas Eve, he'd kill himself that night. When he did calm down and talk to one of his daughters, it was about grocery-store prices or TV shows. “And I tell him over and over again that I don't watch TV!” said Susan, laughing. Susan laughed, but Megan got mad and fought with him. “Oh give it a break!” she yelled. “You've been talking about how you're going to kill yourself for the last ten years, and you know you aren't going to!” And then she told her mother and Susan about it.

  “When I was there, I did a meditation with him,” said Susan.

  “With him?” asked Megan. “Or at him?”

  “I told him I was going to pray,” said Susan. “And we sat together in the dark.”

  They were in the living room, she said, at night with the shades open so they could see the heavy snowfall. Susan went into “a light trance.” In this light trance, she “connected” with Mac as he lay on the couch, seemingly in a light trance of his own. She connected with his heart. In his heart she saw a small boy maybe five or six years old, alone in a garden. The garden was pleasant, even beautiful, but it was surrounded by a dense thicket of thorns, so that the boy could not get out and no one else could get in.

  “I asked him if he wanted to come out,” said Susan. “And he just shook his head no. He was afraid. I told him I loved him and that other people out here love him, too. He looked like he was thinking about it. Then Dad got up and went to the bathroom.”

  Megan sniggered. The plane picked up speed. Bea thought, Mac was six when his parents died. But she didn't say it.

  Stop it, you little idiot! You little—

  That child, playing on the chairs, full of hope and life. Making up a hero father whom he could be proud of, longing for him, longing to be worthy of him. Didn't the mother see? How dare you? said Megan. How dare you disrespect his service?

  The plane steadily rose, but she felt as if she were falling.

  Mac died in his apartment, with the girls taking care of him, or trying to. She did not spend the night there; she did not sit at his side. But during the day, she went there to be with Megan and Susan. They had a hospice nurse who monitored him, washed him, and told them how much and how often to give him morphine. The nurse's name was Henry, and they all liked him—Susan said that Mac seemed to like him, too. When he was finished upstairs, they made coffee for him, and he would sit in the living room, talking and looking at pictures of Mac when he was young. Megan showed him the picture of Mac in his army uniform, just before he shipped out. “He volunteered,” she said. “Before he was even eighteen, he signed up.”

  “That's not true,” said Bea. “He was eighteen. And he only signed up because he knew he'd be drafted anyway”

  Televisions came down from the ceiling in whirring rows. White-faced, Megan left the room. Henry looked at Bea, looked away. Colors flowed across the rows of dark screens, making hot rectangles, oblongs, and swirls. In the kitchen, Megan faced her, eyes glittering with tears of rage. “How dare you? How—” Bea said no to a beverage but accepted the packet of peanuts. She looked out the window, holding the nuts. The sky was bright, terribly bright, but still she felt the darkness coming. Do you remember the first time, Beatrice? How you were scared and I held you? You were so beautiful and so innocent. But you scared me a little, too, did you know that? Mac had written these things on brown grocery bags, cut to the size of notepaper to recycle and to save money He never sent them; she found them, stacks of them, when she and the girls were going through his things. We could have that passion again, I know it. Remember, Beatrice, and come back. Please, Beatrice, remember what we had.

  Faces bloomed on the overhead screens, clever, warm, and ardent.

  She did remember. She remembered that she had been frightened and that he had held her; that he had bruised her body with the salty spilling kisses of his sex, that each bruise bloomed with pleasure, and that pleasure filled her with its hot dissolving blossoms.

  And still she couldn't cry. A stewardess came down the aisle, headphones draped gracefully over her arm. It had been two years and she had not cried for him once. The stewardess smiled and offered her draped arm. Bea shook her head and turned away into the darkness. I am old and worthless, and I am going home to shadows on the wall. Susan— Megan— She raised her fists and weakly beat upon her forehead. Why are they so far away? Why don't they have children? Why does Megan stare at me so coldly when I tell her she is beautiful?

  Shadows on the wall: streetlamp, telephone wire, moths, bits of leafy branch. A pale rectangle of light. When the darkness came, these things lost their earthly meaning and became bacteria swimming in a dish or cryptic signaling hands or nodding heads with mouths that ceaselessly opened and closed, while down in the corner, a little claw pitifully scratched and scratched. Loving, conceiving, giving birth; if human love failed, it was bacteria swimming in a dish, mysterious and unseeable to itself. From a distance, it was beautiful but also terrible, and it was hard to be alone with it night after night, without even an indifferent husband lying with his warm back to you.

  Hard to bear, yes. But she could bear it. She had been a child herself, and so knew the cruelty of children. She knew the strength of giving, even if you did not get what you wanted back. She had thrown her body across a deep, narrow chasm; her daughters had walked to safety across her back. They had reached the other side, and she had stood again, safe and sound herself; all was as it should be. The darkness passed. She picked up her book. And he came to her: Michael, the little boy.

  He came first as a thought, a memory of his face that interrupted her reading in the middle of the second page. He had so much in his eyes, and so few words to express it. How could his mother give him the words? Or the music or pictures? She thought of him. And then she felt him. She felt him in a way she would later find impossible to describe.

  “He was looking for me,” she would say to Susan some time after. “He needed me.”

  But it felt more specific than that. She felt what was in his eyes, hot and seedlike and ready to unfurl. Waiting for the right stimulus, like a plant would wait for the sun.
Vulnerable but vast, too, like a child in her arms.

  When she told Megan, Megan surprised her by saying she'd had experiences like that, too. “But you never know,” she said, “if it's really the other person communicating with you, or if it's just your mind.”

  “No,” said Bea. “It wasn't my mind. It was him. It felt just like him.”

  Love me. See me. Love me. He had no words, but what he said was unmistakable.

  “What did you do?” asked Susan.

  “I answered him,” said Bea. “I tried, anyway. I tried so hard, I wore myself out.”

  I see you, she answered. You are a wonderful boy and you will grow into a wonderful man. I love you; I love to look at you. She put her arms around him, gently, not too tight. She held him and talked to him until finally, she felt him ebb away, as if he were going to sleep. She reclined her seat and closed her eyes. Just don't get lost in the thorn garden. We need you right here. Don't go behind the thorns. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she turned her head to hide it. We need you right here.

  She waited a long time to tell Megan because she was afraid of being sneered at. She waited a long time to tell Susan because she was afraid Susan would talk about the astral plane. But she didn't. She just said, “I've heard people who had abusive childhoods say they survived because they had a good experience with an adult outside the family. Even one, even if it was tiny.”

  Bea opened her eyes. Before her were clouds, vast and white, their soft clefts bruised with lilac and pale gray. She wiped her eyes with her little peanut napkin. She leaned back in her seat. Good night, Mama. Closing her eyes, she remembered the sudden warmth and heaviness as Megan sat on the edge of the guest bed in the dark. She remembered her singing “The Sun, Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” from The Mikado, her voice off-key but still piercing in the dark. She sang and then bent down, and her nightgown fell open slightly as she kissed her mother good night. Beatrice crumpled the peanut napkin with an unconscious hand as she began to dream a dream that began with that kiss.

  The Arms and Legs of the Lake

  Jim Smith was riding the train to Syracuse, New York, to see his foster mother for Mother's Day. He felt good and he did not feel good. Near Penn Station, he'd gone to a bar with a green shamrock on it for good luck. Inside, it was dark and smelled like beer and rotten meat in a freezer—nasty but also good because of the closed-door feeling; Jim liked the closed-door feeling. A big white bartender slapped the bar with a rag and talked to a blobby-looking white customer with a wide red mouth. A television showed girl after girl. When Jim said he'd just gotten back from Iraq, the bartender poured him a free whiskey “For your service,” he'd said.

  Jim looked out the train window at the water going by and thought about his white foster father, the good one. “You never hurt a little animal,” his good foster had said. “That is the lowest, most chicken thing anybody can do, to hurt a little animal who can't fight back. If you do that, if you hurt a little animal, no one will ever respect you or even like you.” There had been green grass all around, and a big tree with a striped cat in it. Down the street, ducks had walked through the wet grass. He'd thrown some rocks at them, and his foster father had gotten mad.

  “For your service,” said the bartender, and poured him another one, dark and golden in its glass. Then he went down to the other end and talked to the blob with the red mouth, leaving Jim alone with the TV girls and their TV light flashing on the bar in staccato bursts. Sudden flashing on darkness; time to tune that out, thought Jim. Time to tune in to humanity. He looked at Red Mouth Blob.

  “He's a gentle guy,” said Blob. “Measured. Not the kind who flies off the handle. But when it comes down, he will get down. He will get down there and he will bump with you. He will bump with you, and if need be, he will bump on you.” The bartender laughed and hit the bar with his rag.

  Bump on you. Bumpety-bump. The truck bumped along the road. He was sitting next to Paulie, a young blondie from Minnesota who wasn't wearing his old Vietnam-style vest. Between low sand-colored buildings, white-hot sky swam in the sweat dripping from his eyelashes. There was the smell of garbage and shit. A river of sewage flowed in the street and kids were jumping around in it. A woman looked up at him from the street and he could feel the authority of her eyes as far down as he could feel, in an eyeless, faceless place inside him, where her look was the touch of an omnipotent hand. “Did you see that woman?” he said to Paulie. “She look like she should be wearing jewels and riding down the Tigris in a gold boat.” “That one?” said Paulie. “Her? She's just hajji with pussy.” And then the explosion threw them out of the truck. There was Paulie, sitting up, with blood geysering out his neck, until he fell over backward with no head on him. Then darkness came, pouring over everything.

  The bartender hit the bar with his rag and came back down the bar to pour him another drink.

  He looked around the car of the train. Right across from him there was a man with thin lips and white finicky hands drinking soda from a can. Just up front from that there was a thick-bodied woman, gray, like somebody drew her with a pencil, reading a book. Behind him was blond hair and a feminine forehead with fine eyebrows and half ovals of eyeglass visible over the frayed seat. Beyond that, more foreheads moved in postures of eating or typing or staring out the window. Out the window was the shining water, with trees and mountains gently stirring in it. She had looked at them and they had blown up. Where was she now?

  “Excuse me.” The man with thin lips was talking to him. “Excuse me,” he said again.

  “Excuse me,” said Bill Groffman. “You just got back from Iraq?”

  “How did you know?” the guy replied.

  “I got back myself six months ago. I saw your jacket and shoes.”

  “All right,” said the guy, like to express excitement, but with his voice flat and the punctuation wrong. He got up to shake Bill's hand, then got confused and went for a high five that he messed up. He was a little guy, tiny really, with the voice of a woman. Old, maybe forty and obviously a total fuckup—who could mess up a high five?

  “Where were you?” asked Bill.

  “Baghdad,” said the guy, blatting the word out this time. “Where they pulled down Saddam Hussein. They pulled—”

  “Whatd you do there?”

  “Supply. Stocking the shelves, doin’ the orders, you know. Went out on some convoys, be sure everything get where it supposed to go. You there?”

  “Name it—Ramadi, Fallujah, up to Baquba, Balad. Down to Nasiriyah, Hillah. And Baghdad.”

  “They pulled down the statue … pulled it down. Everybody saw it on TV Tell me, brother, can you—what is this body of water out the window here?”

  “This is the Hudson River.”

  “It is? I thought it was the Great Lakes.”

  “No, my man. The Great Lakes is Michigan and Illinois. Unless you're in Canada.”

  “But see, I thought we were in Illinois.” He weaved his head back and forth, back and forth. “But I was not good in geography. I was good in MATH.” He blatted out the word math as if it were the same as Baghdad.

  But he was not thinking about Baghdad now. He was tuned in to the blond forehead behind him, and it was tuned in to him; it was focused on Jim. He could feel it very clearly, though its focus was confused. He looked at its reflection in the window. The forehead was attached to a small pointy face with a tiny mouth and eyeglass eyes, a narrow chest with tits on it, and long hands that were turning a piece of paper like a page. She was looking down and turning the pages of something, but still, her blond forehead was coming at him. It did not have authority; it was looking to him for authority It was harmless, vaguely interesting, nervous, and cute.

  When Bill was gone, he realized that nobody at home would understand what was happening. He realized it, and he accepted it. You talk to a little boy in broken English and Arabic, make a joke about the chicken or the egg—you light up a car screaming through a checkpoint and blow out a little girl's brains. You saw i
t as a threat at the time—and maybe the next time it would be. People could understand this fact—but this was not a fact. What was it? The guy who put a gun in his mouth and shot himself in the portable shitter, buddies who lost hands and legs, little kids dancing around cars with rotting corpses inside, shouting, “Bush! God Is Great! Bush!”—anybody could understand these events as information. But these events were not information. What were they? He tried to think what they were and felt like a small thing with a big thing inside it, about to break the thing that held it. He looked out the window for relief. There was a marsh going by, with soft green plants growing out of black water, and a pink house showing between some trees. House stood for home, but home was no relief. Or not enough. When he came home, his wife told him that the dog he'd had since he was sixteen was missing. Jack had been missing for weeks and she hadn't told him. At least six times when they'd been on the phone and he'd asked, “How's Jack?” she'd said, “He's good.”

  “Hey,” said the little guy. “You sure this a river?”

  “Positive.”

  Positive. She said she didn't tell him about Jack because he had only a few weeks left and she wanted him to stay positive. Which was right. They both agreed it was important to stay positive. And so she'd said, “He's good,” and she'd said it convincingly, naturally He hadn't known she was such a good liar.

  “The reason I'm asking is, it looks too big to be a river. A lake is always going to be bigger than a river. I remember that from school. The river leads to the lake; the river is the arms and legs of the lake. Only thing bigger than the lake is the ocean. Like it says in the Bible, you know what I'm saying?”