B00768D9Y8 EBOK

by Gaitskill, Mary

  The boys across the street blurred before the vision of an elderly Granite on the dull gray box of my TV set. She was the guest on a talk show, sitting in a plush swivel chair. “Do you know what I have to say to those who don’t agree with me? Fine, don’t agree. But don’t come on my show and ruin it for everybody else.” The audience laughed.

  I viewed the exercisers sadly. Justine followed my gaze. They were bending in unison in solemn, balletic toe-touches. We could faintly hear the sonorous thump of the disco music that bore them along.

  “Do you see a contradiction in the sexual behavior of her characters—the pattern of dominance and submission that she says is, in other spheres, irrational? Do you find that the behavior of her female characters is a denial of themselves in reality—for example, when Skip beats up Solitaire and she likes it?”

  The stupid and self-righteous nature of this question cast a grim shadow on my hopes for the quality of Justine’s article. The sight of the joyful exercisers soured, as did the awful green of the instructor’s sweatsuit. “Solitaire likes it, not because she’s hit, but because it’s Skip. It’s totally different from the kind of neurotic masochism you’re implying.”

  “Well, then, there’s the rape thing with Asia Maconda and Frank Golanka.”

  “Look, I’m a sex abuse victim and so are you, and you ought to be able to understand. Asia is presented as having a problem, for one thing. She’s neurotic and she needs this kind of crushing force to act upon her because she needs to be broken in a way, but it’s got nothing to do with masochism. Asia is exalted when Frank Golanka takes possession of her. She is not demeaned. A masochist is somebody like my mother who was demeaned by her subservience to a cruel, dishonest, contemptible man. When the women in Granite’s books submit, they do it out of strength, out of choice, as a gift. That’s the difference between masochism and love, and if you don’t see that, then you’re crazy.”

  Justine’s jaw muscles flinched spasmodically as she scribbled; her fingers were tight on her pen. She was skewed by a renewed blast of sunlight. Minute cinders of light darted and vanished in the air between us, the hallucinated discharge of my wrath. My head felt separated from my body; I floated, stretched out, calm and naked in a soothing space above our ugly disconnected conversation. Below, my intestines contracted into a malign snake. A large gas bubble solemnly floated up from my abdomen. The exercisers jogged gaily in place, hands flopping at their sides.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

  In the placid enclosure of aqua tiling, my intestines warred, suffered, and subsided. The fierce cylindrical lights on either side of the mirror above the basin revealed a surprising face; instead of the angry, adamant woman I had expected to meet, there was the porous, puffy, pink-splotched face of an exhausted person on the verge of tears. Only my bright eyes, shining bravely and a little too enthusiastically above dark and heavy skin revealed my fighting spirit. But who was I fighting? The collegiate mouse in my living room? I finished my ablutions in the aqua basin, opened the window a crack, and sat on the edge of the tub for a moment.

  I returned to the living room to find Justine contemplatively eating an egg roll.

  “I think you’re misunderstanding me,” she said. “I’m not asking these questions because I think those things about Granite’s work. It’s just that these accusations have been made against her, and if I’m going to write an article, I have to address them.”

  “But do you understand what I’m saying? I wouldn’t consider it demeaning to worship at the feet of a hero.”

  “I know what you mean. I even know what you mean when you say that Asia needed to have something taken from her by force for it to mean anything. I’ve had an experience like that myself.”

  All my eagerness to like Justine frolicked in the air between us. “Really?”

  “It wasn’t that I was raped or anything. Just that about three years ago I had a relationship with someone who sort of . . . in bed, opened me up in a way that I had no control over.”

  “Oh! Really?”

  “And it was the most moving thing because I was never able to open up to anyone else before that. And no one else had been able to really penetrate me. I didn’t have any choice either, the way he did it. He just made it happen.”

  “Oh!” I was intoxicated with the ravishment of Justine. I envisioned her, her nervous jaw relaxed, her neck arched, throat exposed, the brittle crust of her public persona broken and stripped off. What would you find under that crust? “Did he say anything about what happened?”

  “No. We didn’t talk about it.”

  “How wonderful of him not to say it!”

  “I’m not sure he noticed, actually.”

  “Oh, surely he noticed! Are you still together?”

  “No.” She inclined her head downward, closed her notebook. “He was sort of awful, generally.”

  She put her red-shoed feet together and began to organize her papers. From the kitchen, the refrigerator whirred and droned. A gauzy float of dust twinkled in the fading sun. What did she mean, sort of awful?

  “I just brought it up so you’d know that I understand you.” She closed her notebook and put her pen in her small fat burgundy handbag. “I’m done interviewing you. Unless you have anything more you’d like to say.”

  “No, I think we’ve covered it.” My body posed in a sore slump on the edge of the couch. Justine stood, glancing around as though she’d dropped something. “But if you’d like to stay and visit a while and help me finish these snacks, we could talk some more about some of the things we’ve started. Just in a personal way.”

  Her eyes widened and lightly filmed over, as though she had withdrawn behind a veil of polite embarrassment. “Thank you but I really can’t. I’ve got a lot to do today and I’ve already spent more time than I’d planned. But thank you. It’s been very interesting.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to come back tomorrow? Or the next day? We could have lunch.”

  “I don’t know, I . . . maybe. I’m busy but I could . . . I could call you.”

  He hand was on the doorknob. She was fleeing.

  Every loneliness is a pinnacle. I opened the door for her. From the safety of the hall she promised to send me a copy of the published article, and then she was gone. I returned to the couch and sat on it. The rims of my eyeballs had dried out. My tail bone had become a focal point of exhaustion. But I knew I couldn’t sleep. I sat for several seconds feeling the apartment recover from the presence of a stranger. While she had sat before me, a foreign vibration had quivered through the air, handling and examining everything it brushed against, subtly changing the attitude and appearance of my knickknacks and furniture, giving everything the stiff, careful quality of the scrutinized. Slowly, the room settled into ease as the last tremors of that inquisitive quiver subsided. The cool beige carpet crawled happily along the floor. The refrigerator whirred. I turned on the television. It was Firing Squad with Austin Heller. His guests were Donovan Milundira, the exiled Czech author and somebody else, a dense old fellow with massive eyebrows and a hand lifted to dangle before his mouth. I sat on the floor to watch it, my back against the soft white plush of the couch, my legs stretched before me.

  “So I am not exaggerating to say you despise Chernovsky?” asked Heller. He popped his eyes and rapidly flicked the tip of his tongue against both corners of his open mouth—a weird and unattractive habit he had developed recently.

  I raised my baggy flowered dress and crept along the floor to the window. I stood upright on my knees and rested my arms on the ledge. The exercise class had ended. A few lone boys still lolled about, stretching and chatting. One leaned pensively on the window ledge, a fluff of blond hair across his sulky brow, his squared chin resting on his fist. Beyond him, in the fluorescent shadows of the gym, I dimly saw two boys standing to talk, their inclined hips almost touching. The taller one rested his thick forearm on the shoulders of the lighter boy, who looked shyly down. I dropped my eyes to the st
reet below. Everywhere there were people with their arms around each other.

  I picked up the bottle of Magic Bubble that I kept on the window sill, and removed the slim wand from the mysteriously blue, ether-smelling liquid. I dipped the wand again and leaned out the window with it; the iridescent chemicals that stretched invisibly across the wand’s small hoop caught the sun and glimmered before I blew. A dozen bubbles floated free. They dallied wondrously in midair, as though unsure what to do with their new life, and then meandered on the wind, all the way to the corner below, into crowds of people waiting for the light with their briefcases and bags. The pedestrians looked up, confused, looked all around for the source of the bubbles, watching in fascination as the shiny circles drifted into the street to be murdered by traffic. I raised my wand and blew another doomed, shimmering flock.

  I envisioned pale Justine in the arms of her powerful lover, her small head thrown back in surrender. I felt a pinch of pain. The pouting boy across the street had left the window. Only vague shadows were visible in the fluorescent depths of the gym. Every loneliness is a pinnacle.

  I turned away from the windows and faced the room. I had wanted to tell Justine about my childhood.

  Part Two

  Whenever I think of the house I grew up in, in Painesville, Pennsylvania, I think of the entire structure enveloped by, oppressed by, and exuding a dark, dank purple. Even when I don’t think of it, it lurks in miniature form, a malignant doll house, tumbling weightless through the horror movie of my subconscious, waiting to tumble into conscious thought and sit there exuding darkness.

  Objectively, it was a nice little house. It was a good size for three people; it had a slanting roof, cunning shutters, lovable old doorknobs that came off in your hands, a breakfast nook, an ache of dingy carpets and faded wallpaper. It was our fifth house, the one we collapsed in after a series of frantic moves which were the result of my father’s belief that wherever he lived was hell. Eventually he became too exhausted to move again and made our sedentary status a virtue, gloating as he gazed out through the cracked shutters at the arrivals and departures of several sets of neighbors on both sides—the Whites, the Calefs, and the Hazens on the left, and the Wapshots, the Rizzos, and the morose, relatively stationary old Angrods on the right. “We live in a society of cockroaches,” he said. “Scurrying all over the face of the map with no thought of community or family, nothing.”

  The Painesville house was the most significant point of my upbringing, and it unfolds from its predecessors with the minor inevitability of an origami puzzle in several pieces. With each house the puzzle becomes more sinister, then more sad, then simply strange, the final piece made from a grainy photograph of Anna Granite’s face. I imagine Justine Shade picking up the various paper constructions to examine them, furrowing her brow, tapping her lip with her pen.

  I was born in Blossom, Tennessee. I think of grape arbors, trellises clotted with magnolias, the store downtown that sold white bags of candy. (There actually was a grape arbor in our backyard in Blossom, but our second, more lived-in Tennessee house near Nashville had a square backyard full of short grass and festering sunlight.)

  One of my succession of therapists used to say that “the body remembers everything,” meaning that on some level so deep you don’t even know about it, you’ve stored compressed yet vivid details of everything that’s ever happened to you, including, she was later to assert, everything in your past lives. This could be true, I guess, but these bodily memories are so unevenly submerged and revealed, so distorted—as the deficient yard is garnished with imaginary arbors and trellises—that they may as well be completely invented; it’s only the hideous physical shock that attends the mere shadow of one remembered gesture, that fraction of some past agony that reminds you they were real.

  My mother, whose name was Blanche, came from a poor but respectable matriarchal farm family. She was the oldest of three girls, but she was the shortest, the shyest, the one most likely to be teased. As the oldest she was responsible for taking care of her sisters, Camilla and Martha, when there was no school and their mother went into town to clean rich people’s houses. This was a hopeless arrangement, as Camilla and Martha were strong, boisterous girls who banded against their sister, barred her from their games, and ridiculed her. They refused to get up to eat her carefully prepared breakfasts, they wouldn’t help her with the dishes, they ran around the house like cats, knocking things down while she tried to clean. The sole factor that enabled the harried girl to maintain any order at all was her intense and agitated seriousness. Her idea of the world was a pretty picture of shiny pink faces and friendly animals in nature scenes, of dulcet conversations and gestures, a lively but always gentle and harmonious world that could not accommodate (and could be totally undone by) sarcasm or cruelty. Out of the need to impress a lacelike pattern on brutish reality came her unshakeable determination to clean and sew and mop the floor. She got up before sunrise to get cream and eggs. She wreathed her table settings with clover and daisies. She made jam and arranged the jars so that their colors complemented one another: mint, plum, cherry, apple. Her sisters’ jeering hurt her, but it also roused and locked into position a surprising element of strength that dignified her melancholy zeal, which caused her unkind sisters to remember her, in their broken-down middle years, with pathos and respect.

  The same frantic need to prettify informed her mothering. We spent a lot of time together when I was five, more than I spent with other children. On Saturdays, we sat at the kitchen table, intently drawing crayon animals in their jungles or under cloud-blotched skies. We made stories illustrated by pink-earred families of mice. We built homes for my animals that ranged across rooms, and my mother always consented to “hold” the wicked frog who lived in a penthouse atop my dresser. Or my mother would read The Wizard of Oz aloud. Other times we would sit on the couch and my mother would show me art books and prints, inviting me to invent stories about the little boy in red and ruffles standing alone with a bird on a leash. And at night, she would sit on my bed and tell stories of her girlhood. I would hold her hand as she constructed airy balloons that floated by in the dark, bearing glowing pictures of her and my father holding hands on the porch swing, or of her lying in a meadow of clover, dreaming and looking for fairies while horrible Camilla called her home.

  My father entered this magic world in the evening, when he returned home from work in grandness, and our phantasms and elves stood at attention to receive his directions. He would put on one of his records—opera, marching music, or jazz—and turn up the volume so that it trumpeted aggressively through the house, ramming his personality into every corner. My mother worked in the kitchen, stirring a big pot of chili, or peeling potatoes, and my father would pace excitedly between kitchen and living room, drinking beer after beer and eating the dry roasted peanuts, sliced Polish sausage, and hot green peppers that my mother had arranged in little dishes as, against a thundering soundtrack, he expounded upon his day. He was an office manager in the clerical department of a sales firm in Nashville. He would talk about the office intrigue as though it were symbolic of all human activity, as though he were enacting daily the drama of good versus evil, of weakness versus strength, of the fatal flaws that cause otherwise able men to fail, of the mysterious ways of the universe that make the rise of “bastards” possible. He would start on some tiny incident—how “that socialist shit-ass Greenburger” had tried to undermine the unfortunate clubfoot Miss Onderdonk in order to cast favor on a pretty new typist, and how he was publicly exposed and deplored—and then link this to some greater abstract principle, cross-referencing it to events in his childhood, or his stint in the army, as though one had led, inexorably and triumphantly, to the other. The room filled with overlapping scenarios from the past—his past, as created by me—that appeared in a sweet-smelling, melancholy wave of events, picnics, days at school and old ladies that had clasped him in their perfumed arms before slipping away forever, carrying on its crest, and deposi
ting safely in our living room, the scene now transpiring.

  He paced as he talked, now and then walking close to the windows to peer out, rubbing his fingers together as though grinding something to powder, nibbling zestfully at the snacks that occasionally dropped down his shirt front, and drinking beer. My mother moved about the kitchen in a frilly apron, her hair bound into a ponytail with a rubber band garnished with large plastic flowers. She listened enthralled to the stories of betrayal and redemption, nodding vigorously, shaking her head in disapproval or agreeing, “Absolutely! That’s right!” as the music underscored her husband’s stirring rendition of his eventual triumph. “You can’t throw your weight around like that in my office, buddy. It’s okay to be a tough guy, but you’d better be sure I’m not tougher. And nine times out of ten I am.” I would listen gravely as they talked. It seemed as though they were arranging the world, making everything safe and understood. By the time we sat down to dinner, life was friendly and orderly, and we could regally feast on chili over spaghetti noodles, with chocolate ice cream in little ceramic cups for dessert. Then there would be TV—soldiers winning, dogs rescuing children, criminals going to jail, women finding love—and then my mother would carry me to bed singing, “Up the magic mountain, one, two, three. Up the magic mountain, yessiree.”

  When I was five years old, my mother had a friend named Edwina Barney who came almost every afternoon to teach her how to drive and later, how to swim. She was tall, slender, and gracefully slow-moving; she had a large benign face with slightly pouchy cheeks, a relaxed mouth, and heavy-lidded eyes that, in glasses, had a slightly crocodilian look. She wore loose clothes with big, bright patterns on them and sandals with red cherries on the toes. She towered over my nervous-moving little mother. When I went with them to the “Y” for the swimming lessons and sat in the tiled “pool area,” rolling ungnawable jawbreakers from cheek to cheek, I admired her gliding through the pool like an imperious seal, my mother dog-paddling behind, her sincere obedient head lifted tensely out of the water. After class, Edwina drove us home with one long arm hanging halfway out the open window, talking about small subjects with a manner that made them big, all her words planted firmly in the low, relaxed sound of her voice. When we got home, she and my mother would sit in the kitchen drinking coffee, their swimsuits hanging on chairs placed before the stove, Edwina stretching her legs out over an extra chair, talking in her strong, melodious voice that my mother’s voice responded to or complemented rather than met. It was clear to me where the authority lay between them. Our family was self-contained and hoarding, with a clear sense of separation from other people, and Edwina was like an emissary from another kingdom, an ally who traveled through the chaos of cars and strangers and traffic systems to share this authority with us, this quality that enabled her to say whatever she wanted to say and have it be so. That, along with her physical grace (and in my eyes, beauty), made me love her. I rushed to meet her when she came to the door, I introduced her to my stuffed animals and showed her my drawings which she would study and say, of my portrayal of a lion, “That’s a real lion all right. It may not look exactly like a real lion, but that doesn’t matter because it’s got lionness,” and it would be so.