Two Girls Fat and Thin (13 page)

“Come and see,” she said, “there’s a drooling retard in the dressing room.”

Naturally they hurried back. Justine had imitated her deranged slump with embellishments of jaw and eyeballs, and they approached the dressing room with a sense of cruel, illicit excitement. But when they got to the dressing stall and flung the curtain back, there was no one there. They sighed with disappointment and turned to go, and there was the girl again, standing up and peeping at them from behind the curtain of another dressing stall. Her face was accusing and almost snotty. Edie and Pam knew it was her, but somehow they couldn’t make fun of her, even though they would’ve liked to; her staring face made them feel caught.

“God, what a queer,” said Pam as they left the dressing room.

They found Edie’s mother eating candy necklaces at the coffee counter of Woolworth’s and left.

When the first day of school
arrived, Justine had accumulated ten interchangeable outfits. And, in spite of all the fussing, picking, and mutual encouragement from her friends in the purchase of them, she was afraid that when she walked into the classroom she would be ostracized for fashion reasons that would become horribly clear to her as she made her way to her desk through a blinding sheet of jeers. What if none of her neighborhood friends were in the class, or even if they were, what if they turned out to be hopeless retards so low down on the social scale that association with them condemned her forever?

She was so numbed with fear that she accepted, without retort,
her mother’s breakfast table assurances that she looked “adorable” in her yellow and turquoise checked skirt and yellow knee socks.

The drive to school would’ve taken place in silence, if it hadn’t been for infuriating
Adventures in Good Music
, which she hadn’t the strength to object to, on the radio. She felt the whole magical summer of huddling safely with her friends, talking trash, and rejecting black people in a blur of hot bright days amid the changeless squares and rectangles of the trusted landscape had taken place in another world that would have no bearing on this terrible new place she was headed.

This was not true. The assigned classroom was filled with murderously aggressive boys and rigid girls with animal eyes who threw spitballs, punched each other, snarled, whispered, and stared one another down. And shadowing all these gestures and movements were declarations of dominance, of territory, the swift, blind play of power and weakness.

Justine saw right away that she’d be at home here.

When they were let out on the asphalt playground that morning, she found Edie and Pam, and they huddled together, chewing their gum and sending sharp stares of appraisal over their shoulders. They told each other who was cool and who was queer. By the afternoon recess, they had gathered three other girls about them, Debby, Dody, and Deidre. The D girls were all big and tough, charmed perhaps by Justine’s sullen beauty and the sophisticated style of Edie and Pam.

Justine had made friends with Dody, the pretty one of the three. Her prettiness was of an unusual type in this time of anorexic cuties with ironed hair and white lipstick, she being a big raw-boned girl with large fleshy shoulders and hips, and big active hands and feet attached to long, confused arms and legs, multidirectional like rubber. Her eyes were extraordinary, huge and brown, shot with mad glowing strands of yellow and gold which, in conjunction with the tawny mass of hair sprawling frantic and uncontrollable on her head, gave her the look of a restless, fitful lioness. Her size and weight gave her no center; Justine’s first retrospective image of her is of Dody splayed, arms and legs, as though in the middle of a tornado, only laughing, open-mouthed and loud. The next image is an actual memory of the time Dody, humorously
displaying her size and strength, picked up a scrawny fourth-grader by a fistful of hair and swung her in a complete circle three times before letting the screaming creature fly. Justine remembers her strange vulnerability, her terror of thunderstorms and spiders, her moment of wide-eyed panic that time she and Justine were making out in the Mall restroom with two boys they’d met, when Justine had to hold her trembling paw. Ten years later, it had not surprised her to read by chance in the paper that Dody LaRec, college junior, had become an unusual statistic, one of the few females to commit suicide with a bullet to the brain.

The others, Debby and Deidre, were not pretty, but they exuded an awful cynicism that impressed people and they knew dirty things—Deidre claiming, at the age of eleven, to have “done it.” Besides, they were brutal. The six of them terrified the other kids as they patrolled the playground, looking for trouble. In gym class they were always on the top team, hand-picking the ablest girls to be on their side, pitting themselves against the feeblest people, whom they happily pounded. Parents were always calling to complain about them pulling down their son’s pants or dropping someone’s lunch in the toilet. Teachers cajoled, pleaded, and occasionally ranted, but they couldn’t do anything and they knew it. Justine believed teachers to be secretly on their side as they trampled the weak and the uncool, people adults have to accept, and, as a result, become like.

There was only a small group of boys who weren’t afraid of them, on account of their being so tough themselves. They were small, sinewy boys whose main strengths were their monstrous voices and inhuman indifference to pain. They were always getting bashed with baseballs, splitting their skulls in rock fights, chipping their teeth, ripping open their elbows and knees, beating each other up as often as they beat retards and queers. They hung around with Justine and her group on the playground, pushing and pinching and pulling up their skirts. Sometimes they’d stand quietly and talk together, and Justine would feel her private torture feeling glowing through her lower trunk. She particularly liked little Ricky Holland, whose beautiful, almost dainty hands were such a contrast to his morbidly cruel personality. He was a loner within his gang, almost protected by the other boys in some unconscious way, as if
they knew that just a slight shift in their perception would render him a victim rather than a cohort. He seemed happiest when torturing small animals by himself, yet he had an inexplicable kind aspect that appeared randomly and could lead him to risk rejection, like the time he protected a crippled girl who had been circled by the others. He was the first among them to smoke cigarettes, which, since drugs had not yet come to suburban playgrounds, was as chic as one could be. Justine loved his expressionless face, his blank, lusterless eyes. There was nothing in that face anyone could hurt or even approach. Love would find no opening there except perhaps in that quirky kindness which appeared for no reason and vanished again, too transient to support a reckless prepubescent ardor ready to crucify itself on a heartless boy. He paid no attention to her.

Meanwhile her mother worked at the home for emotionally disturbed children. This was very embarrassing to Justine, and she took pains to make sure her friends never found out about it, forbidding her mother to mention it in front of them. “I’d die if they know my own mom works with the ’tards,” she said, hoping her mother would be ashamed. But her mother just answered, “There isn’t any need for them to know. I understand darling, peer approval is very important at this age.”

Justine alternately despised and admired her mother. It was hard not to admire this tall still-beautiful woman who dressed so well, who kept active, who led the dinner conversation with a ringing voice. Compared to other mothers she was an athlete, still rising in the morning to exercise in her leotard. She impressed all of Justine’s friends, who thought she looked like somebody on TV. Her mother never told her she couldn’t buy a dress because it was too short, like some mothers did. She did talk to her about being “nice” in reference to boys and to bullying other kids, but Justine understood from her tone of voice that “nice” had nothing to do with what anybody really felt or thought or observed but was something everybody had to pretend. Justine could also tell from her mother’s voice that her mother believed this pretense was very important.

This was where she began to despise her mother; once she started she couldn’t stop. She despised her earnest expression when she talked about a “breakthrough” made by some mental case at the center; she despised her straight posture, her diets, her exercises,
her humming along to
Adventures in Good Music
. When they were in the same room together and her mother farted (silently, of course, but Justine could smell it), she felt such revulsion and hatred she wanted to hit her mother in the face. She wanted to see the attractive propriety of her mother’s face collapse into tears, loud, ugly tears.

She never saw this, but once she heard it. She was awakened late one night by the sound of it, although at first she didn’t know what it was; at first she thought the ungainly sounds were a dream. Then she heard her father’s voice. He was angry. Her mother was crying, a deep moaning cry, saying something over and over again to him. Justine was stunned with horror and disbelief. Her father raised his voice and said a bunch of words, out of which Justine could only distinguish “stupid cow” and “off the floor.” And then her mother was quiet. Justine’s heart pounded deep and hard in her chest.

The next morning she watched her parents at breakfast. Her mother was pink and perfectly madeup, briskly leading the breakfast conversation as usual. What Justine now noticed was the reason she was leading it; her father, dourly pushing his eggs around on his plate, was making polite noises, not really responding to her. At first she thought it was because they’d had a fight, but as the week went on she realized he was acting as he always did. Justine thought: He doesn’t like her either.

The thought was disconcerting, and she pushed it away, but it kept coming back, especially when her father began staying away for overnight conferences. Sometimes it would make her gloat, sometimes she’d try to hurt her mother with falsely innocent questions about where dad was. Other times she’d imagine her mother looking old and weak, crying on the floor while her father scorned her, and it would fill her with fear and pity. She would hate her father then and have fantasies of yelling at him, warning him to leave her mother alone. But she never heard him say those things to her mother again, although some nights she lay awake listening for it. Sometimes too, her father would stop ignoring her mother and would act the way he used to, smiling at her, hugging her shoulders, standing beside her, handsome and proud, calling her “my lady.” When this happened, the things Justine had heard that
night seemed like something that had happened between people who were only pretending to be her parents.

At the beginning of October a new kid entered Justine’s class. Her name was Cheryl Thomson. She was big, she had acne, and she wore old plaid skirts what were obviously not from Sears or Wards. This would’ve been all right; some very cool kids—Dody among them—dressed this way. But they had a sloppy panache, a looselimbed grace that made their flapping shirt-tails and shifting skirts seem sassy; halting, thick-bodied Cheryl did not. She sat in her seat with her stubby hands in her lap, talking to people politely before class, a dull dreamy look coating her gray eyes. Then the teacher came in and, in an innocent effort to help everyone get to know the new student, opened class by asking Cheryl questions meant to gently reveal her, for example, “What is your favorite food?” Cheryl did all right with that, but when asked about music, instead of saying “the Monkees” or “the Beatles” she answered “country music,” causing a ripple of disbelief to alert the room. From that point on, every answer she gave confirmed her to be a hopeless alien in the world of primary-colored surfaces. She wanted to be a fire fighter when she grew up! Her favorite TV show was
Andy of Mayberry
! She liked to go fishing! Every answer seemed to come out of some horrible complex individuality reeking with humanity, the clarity and trust in her soft voice made them squirm with discomfort.

In the lunchroom, everybody was talking about how queer she was. Her second day at school, somebody tripped her in the hall; the following week somebody put a tack on her seat. When she sat on it, she cried, and little Marla Jacob sneered, “God, what an emotional!” From that day on she was known as “Emotional,” the worst insult imaginable.

Her presence changed the whole composition of the class, uniting everyone, even other unpopular kids, against her. Everything she said became further proof of her stupidity, her social failure. Every ugly and ridiculous thing introduced into any discussion, in the classroom, on the playground, at the mall, was “like Emotional.” She was most often taunted verbally, but there was also physical abuse—a shower of orchestrated spit balls, an ambush by a dozen or so boys and girls who struck her legs and arms with their belts.

Emotional’s reaction was by turns angry, hurt, bewildered, but her most constant expression was one of helpless good nature. She was too even tempered to remain angry or brooding; she always tried to reverse the tide against her, to make jokes, to be positive, to join in. Once Justine saw a smiling face drawn in Magic Marker on her notebook with the words “Happy-Go-Lucky” written underneath and knew, sickeningly, that it was true, in spite of everything.

Of course, Justine took part in the Emotional pogrom. As with all the other little social massacres she’d taken part in, she was more a goader and abettor than an attacker; she was too small to be a real bully and not aggressive enough to be a ringleader. Besides, she was secretly too ambivalent. When she looked at the chalky, rigid face of some kid who was being shoved to and fro between Deidre and Debby, she felt deep, excruciating enjoyment as well as equally deep discomfort that she deliberately provoked, like she’d chew a cold sore. These two feelings met and skewered her between them while she giggled and cajoled and incited her friends to riot, making her feel monstrously alive and enlarged beyond the boundaries of herself, exploding into the world like her memory of tornado-splayed Dody—yet unable to bear being in the world, turning in on herself like an insect run through with a needle.