B00768D9Y8 EBOK

by Gaitskill, Mary

  “I have them read Joyce and Kafka and other junk, but I give them a solid Definitist perspective.”

  “But is a Definitist perspective only looking at whether or not a story concerns happy themes and strong characters?”

  “Strong characters, yes. Happy themes, no. Shakespeare is great even though he deals with disaster and betrayal and the worst aspects of human nature because his characters are strong and you can feel something for them when they fall. They at least try for the heroic. When a man tries the heroic and fails, it’s a great tragedy. Telling about a man going through a boring day, sitting on a toilet, watching a girl expose herself—what is that?” Max held out his hand and let it drop. “It’s nothing. It’s antilife.”

  “But mundane things and even miserable things are a part of life.”

  “They’re not a part of life I aspire to.”

  The Rationalist classes were held in the rented classrooms of a local community college. The fourteen young Definitists sat on their tailbones, their spines outlined under their shirts. Justine sat in the back of the room, legs crossed and note pad open. Max paced before them, his enthusiasm protruding from him like an invisible spear.

  “So what kind of guy is Jake? He’s a nice guy, a smart guy. The kind of guy who’d sit for hours in a parlor in Boston and talk about social problems and try to come up with solutions. He’s an intellectual, in other words. A liberal in fact. But he’s not a phony!” Max’s voice went up in register and became both conciliatory and probing, as though he were verbally peeling away the slightly ridiculous outer layer of Jake’s character and revealing his deeper, truer nature, while at the same time pleading with the listener to take a peep at this more genuine Jake and not merely laugh at his outer manifestation. “He’s really after the truth in life, he wants to experience it instead of just talking about it. That’s why he’s signed up for this voyage, he doesn’t have to go, he’s not like the rest of these guys.”

  Justine looked at the boys and again imagined Bryan, only this time as a young boy, sitting in this classroom listening to Max. What would he be thinking? How would it affect the daydreams he would doubtless be having, sitting on his tailbone in the heavy sun? She remembered Ricky Holland and his gang on a heartless expanse of playground standing in a circle around a trapped fourth-grader who had been forced to lift her skirt. She remembered Emotional and felt a pang of sensitivity and remorse which was so painful it was immediately stamped out by a ferocious burst of internal rock music which, if it had a face, would’ve been sticking out its tongue.

  “So,” concluded Max, “that’s what you have to do when you read a book. I know it may seem hard at first, but if you practice it, say, when you go to the movies, you’ll get the hang of it. Movie after movie, break it down—plot, character, theme, resolution, message. Pretty soon you’ll be doing it automatically, and then you’ll be able to defend yourself from the crap they’ll throw at you in college.”

  Justine returned to Manhattan depressed and nauseous from the treats she had consumed on the train. As soon as she entered her apartment, the phone rang. He said “Hi” as though she was supposed to know who he was, and annoyingly she did.

  “How did you know my number?”

  “I got it from you last night, don’t you remember? Well maybe you were drunk.”

  I was at the gym doing lat pull-downs when I thought of my mother: she and I baking cookies, hula dancing in the living room, making crayon heavens, or together in my bedroom, her tender presence taking me into the night. As I felt these images, weakness spread through my shoulders and the weights became heavier. I thought instead of my mother’s voice as I’d heard it from my bedroom in Painesville, telling my father how terrible I had been that day, punctuating and goading his bursts of anger. The strength came back to my arms, and again I pulled down, pushing my breath out between my teeth with a hiss. I remembered her at the dining table, her eyes covered with impenetrable film, her forkful of salad frozen in space. My father told me I was sitting on my fat ass while he worked and slaved with bastards. I pumped at twice my usual rate. A hirsute Hispanic fellow in a leopard-skin leotard glanced, alarmed. “Take it easy,” he said. “Don’t overwork.” I checked my body for stress in mid-pump and felt none; my blood beat like a marching band. My father gesticulated and showed his teeth. My mother’s eyes remained unseeing. Then, like the hand of a phantom, a palpable feeling of love and longing extended itself to me. It touched my cheek. Superimposed over my indifferent mother, another mother leaned towards me with tears in her eyes, wanting to protect me, to console me. A chemical release bathed my muscles. I pressed my weight for the last time and let it go. Pain shot up my back and sides. I slumped on the bench, trying to rotate my shoulders.

  “Ma’am,” said the Hispanic fellow, “I know you’re big and strong, but are you trying to kill yourself or what? They ain’t gonna pay your hospital bill, you know, remember that paper you signed? Hey, are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, “thank you.” He helped me off the machine and advised me to take a steam bath and stretch out. It was only with the faintest twinge of pride that I registered the incredulous remark made by the muscle boy who’d stepped up behind me and seen how much I’d pressed.

  I walked into the dressing room, pain and adrenaline vying for bodily dominance. I pulled off my wet clothes with effort, not even trying to hide the grotesque display of cellulite crushed by spandex. The girl next to me was a homely little thing anyway.

  I had never used the steam room before, mainly because I had been too embarrassed to sit there unsheathed. Now discomfort overruled embarrassment, and besides I was in no mood to care.

  I entered the steam room clutching defiance to my body as well as one of the gym’s skimpy regulation towels. I quickly dropped both; there was no one in the room, and even if there had been, I was partially obscured from critical eyes by billows of hot steam. I stood for a moment absorbing the experience and decided it was pleasant. I eased myself onto the wooden bench, leaned back and had the novel sensation that the world was a safe, gentle place.

  I had last seen my mother in a coffee shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, where I had lived briefly. Her face had aged shockingly since I’d seen her last; there were dark circles under her eyes. Our conversation had ended with her collapsing onto the table, her head hidden in her folded arms as she wept, the fingers of one hand blindly groping my arm across the table in pitiful supplication. I had sat silent and immobile. She had asked me to come home and see my father who was very ill, and I had refused.

  That was not the first contact I’d had with her since I had left home. There had been letters and phone conversations, some of which were with my father. I had seen my mother twice before that last meeting. The first time was in Philadelphia. She had put aside a portion of her weekly allowance over a period of weeks to hire a private detective to find me.

  The encounter occurred one afternoon as I returned home from work early, compensating as I sometimes did for a long night of conference transcription. She was sitting on the steps with a newspaper folded on her lap. The crossword puzzle, on which she was writing with a stubby pencil, sat on her knee. When she saw me she stopped, her pencil suspended. If I hadn’t been stunned I would’ve run; I was paralyzed by the certainty that my father was nearby. My mother rose, came forward, and embraced me. “Dotty,” she said. “Dotty, darling, thank God you’re safe.”

  It wasn’t until we were in my room sitting on my bed that she told me that my father wasn’t there, that he didn’t even know what she was doing. I was shocked at this information; my mother had never done anything without my father’s permission. I listened as she went on, tracing an invisible pattern on my bedspread with her finger. She wanted me to come home, she said. Maybe college had been a bad idea, but I should come home. She knew there had been problems at home. She drew her pattern with meticulous care, examining every aspect of it. But still. Home was the place for a young girl. She looked up, smiled wretchedly, an
d touched my cheek.

  “No,” I said. “And you can’t make me.”

  Her expression shrank from me. There was silence, and then she came slowly forward again. She repeated what she had said, adding that they would be willing to “get help” for me. She said my father was “half crazy” with worry. I kept saying no, my conviction that she could not force me growing with each repetition of the word. I was of legal age, and Anna Granite was on my side. If my father wanted so badly to see me, he could have hired a detective; he probably didn’t because he was terrified of opening the Pandora’s Box of family counseling.

  In the end she gave up. She said she wouldn’t tell my father where I was on the condition that I write to her regularly and tell her how I was doing. I agreed. We had a short conversation about my job and my life. I told her that I was a secretary for an art dealer and that I had made two new friends—this last out of a desire to reassure her that I was happy, for even then I couldn’t be indifferent to the pain I saw her in. She said well, I’m just starving to death and I’d love a grilled cheese sandwich, how about you?

  We had a snack at a diner. Our meal was accompanied alternately by bright conversation and my mother’s tears. She chewed and wiped at her eyes, then at her mouth, clearing her throat with ladylike sounds.

  Once past the initial resentment, I wrote my regular letters with enthusiasm, inventing bright anecdotes I knew would please her. I think I liked writing the letters because they prevented the development of homesickness and remorse, which might have led me to return home. I liked recounting my pretend successes, knowing my real accomplishments were all the greater. I had fantasies of returning home unexpectedly, after a triumph in banking or industry, dispensing munificence and superiority. They would plead with me to stay with them, just for a few days, but I would have to rush off to a conference or something. I imagined my father looking at me with awe, shamed to realize his judgment of me had been so wrong.

  The letters from my mother, also full of anecdotes, were small notations of my old life, memories of chili dinners, the evening news, the sound of electric fans and of marching music, the close, dark rooms of the Painesville house, threads worked into the now vaster tapestry of my complex new life—present but safely contained and circumscribed.

  This contact alternately fell off or intensified over the years and was, often at Christmas or Thanksgiving, supplemented by phone conversations. During one of those conversations my father came on the line and without warning began talking to me as if he’d seen me the previous week. It was only minutes before the strength of his voice, resonant with the conviction that what he was doing was perfectly normal, drew me into a conversation. I heard my voice change as I talked to him, become small, soft, constricted—the voice of my childhood. His voice was fat with generosity when he said, “Come home for Christmas next year, okay?” and I said okay even though we both knew I wouldn’t. I hung up feeling disgust and pain and covetousness—covetousness because part of me held onto the pain like it was a precious pet, the favorite stuffed animal I had clutched as a child.

  One day I called when my father was alone. He began talking about the neighbors who hated him and the bastards he worked with, how much he’d like to smash their skulls with hammers. There was marching music in the background. I said nothing.

  “And then,” he continued, “there’s my selfish bitch daughter. Who wasted my money flunking out of college and then deserted us. Who calls us every few months on her royal whim. My daughter—”

  “Yes,” I said, “your daughter who you raped.”

  “Raped.” My father spoke furiously. “If you think you were raped, you don’t know what rape is. I’m the one who’s been raped, sister. Raped all my goddamn life by the army, the school system, the bosses, the neighbors—”

  I hung up.

  For a long time I stopped reading my mother’s letters, and I never wrote to her. When I moved I left no forwarding address, and for a time there was no contact at all. Then came the inevitable reconnection, Christmas cards, a birthday present, a shopping trip with my mother, events like a trail of pebbles leading to that final conversation in Hoboken.

  I picked at my misshapen bran muffin while she described my father’s illness and how her days were spent caring for him. From the moment she told me he was seriously ill and might soon die, I felt my own assumption that I would go home to see him plant itself in my solar plexus. I didn’t say anything about it though; I merely listened and asked occasional questions. I could hear in her voice that she shared my assumption that I would come home.

  The conversation went on, and I tried to imagine a scene of forgiveness and reconnection. But the stick figures of myself and my father stood mute in the dark rooms of my internal house. I tried to imagine him looking at me with tears in his eyes, speechless with sorrow as he clasped my hand to beg forgiveness. But I could only imagine him with his eyes glassy and glazed, muttering about bastards with his dying breath. “You prick,” I said to him. “You ruined me.” He didn’t hear me.

  I looked at my mother. The sentence I had just imagined saying to my father stood between us in full view, but she didn’t see it. She began talking about travel arrangements.

  “Mother,” I said. “I don’t want to go.”

  She didn’t look surprised. Her body went into its habitual posture of readiness to receive pain, and then I saw her gather herself to argue with me. She began with the “difficulties” between my father and me. We talked round the fact of what happened; I felt angrier and angrier. I backed away from my feelings, using the conversation to parry and evade them. Unknowing, my mother cornered me, stripping away my defenses as fast as I could secure them. My feelings pressed against my control like the fists and feet of a baby trying to punch free of the womb.

  We paused for a moment. There was a light sweat on my forehead. A thin layer of composure constrained my anger. If she had remained silent only a little longer, the layer might have thickened enough to protect us both, but she said, at that fragile moment: “Can’t you be big enough to forgive him, Dotty? Can’t you stop thinking of your problems just this one time?”

  Her face recoiled from my expression, she put her hand to her throat as though in self-protection, and then my words garrotted her. “No, mother,” I said, “no I can’t forget about my problems. Because my problems are that my father did everything but fuck me, again and again. You know, incest? You watch television, don’t you?”

  Her face confirmed my worst fear; she was not surprised by what I’d said, but wounded to the death that I’d said it. Ashy noise rose and died in her throat, and she collapsed on the table like the weak old woman she was.

  Some weeks later, she sent me a card announcing the funeral. I disregarded it. Once or twice I worried if I had made the right decision in not going to see him. Then the worry went into oblivion. My mother and I had not communicated since. I did not even know if she was alive.

  I left the steam room, my body relaxed and heavy. I didn’t bother to clutch my towel over my nakedness; I exposed even my horrible pubic hair. No one gawked. Only another fat lady glanced at me with mild curiosity. A skull with wavy blond hair was tattooed on one of her huge arms. The girl next to me carefully dried her breasts, gently patting the tiny rings that pierced both nipples. No wonder nobody looked at my cellulite, I thought, defiantly assuming poses that I knew would best reveal it. People are used to weirdness, inured to ugliness. It’s beauty we stare at, disbelieving and furious.

  I lumbered into the street thinking perhaps I should try to find my mother. She was probably still living in Painesville, unless she was one of those old people who moved to Florida. It was also possible she had died and, since I’d changed my name, no one had been able to locate me.

  As soon as I entered my apartment I ripped open a bag of potato chips and a bag of candy, turned on the TV, and sat before it, eating from both bags. The news was on. Two white teenagers who had beaten a black teenager to death with a baseba
ll bat had been fined $100 for misconduct and black people were demanding a retrial. The families and neighbors of the white teenagers were outraged by this, saying that they were being unfairly judged because they were white. A bleached blonde with a huge wad of gum in her mouth spoke to a newsman’s microphone. “Cuz I known these guys all my life,” she said in defense of the white boys. “They’re the nicest, most unprejudice people in the whirl.” I hit the remote control button. On the next channel a talk show featured schoolchildren who said they’d been sexually abused by their allegedly Satan-worshipping teacher; they were confronting the accused teacher. The parents of the children stood behind their seated offspring, gripping the backs of their chairs, their faces held in strangely combined expressions of anger, disgust, prurience, and awareness that they were on TV

  “And so Miss Peatrosinski,” said the host, stalking the tense young teacher with his mike, “what do you have to say to that?”

  The teacher blinked rapidly and nervously rubbed the corner of one deeply shadowed eye. She said, “This is nothing but a witchhunt based on gossip and faulty—”

  A child of twelve or so leapt to his feet and shouted, “I wanna say something. How do you think we little kids could make up stuff as dirty as that? How would we know about Satanism and all that other stuff?”

  The audience roared in approval, the children cheered and shook their fists in the air.

  I imagined my mother in a room watching television, alone with memories of a rapist husband and a daughter who hated her. I remembered my father as I used to find him sometimes when I returned from school, alone in the darkened house, feeling the hairs in his nose with his thumb, his eyes looking as if he didn’t know where he was. His face would come to life as he saw me, a familiar reference point moving through the room. I remembered the way he would lie in the dark in his room before dinner, listening to the soft music emerging through the static on the radio. Sometimes I’d be in the hall and he’d appear, his oiled hair traveling in conflicting directions on his head, his face set like a carving, his eyes totally bewildered. On one such occasion he said to me, “I had a dream. A dream I was back in Michigan at the Bowlarama. Mama and Aunt Cat were alive and happy, and there were flowers everywhere.” He put his finger to his nose, turned up a nostril and tenderly stroked the hairs.