Two Girls Fat and Thin (20 page)

“He is so upset when a patient dies,” said Justine’s mother. “He cares so deeply.”

And Justine would feel the way she did when there was a dying dog scene on TV; on one hand she could barely control her tears, on the other she felt like being really snotty.

She felt like being snotty almost all the time to her mother, who didn’t have a retard center to work at and was thus at home a lot. Her mother suddenly wanted to be snotty to her, too. After ignoring the tight clothing and white lipstick worn by her daughter in Action, Mrs. Shade began to be obsessed with Justine’s clothing, about which they fought on the stairway and in the driveway almost every morning before school. “Really, Justine, you look like a cow,” her mother would snap as she regarded her daughter’s slight, optimally revealed bustline. “What kind of attention are you trying to attract?” One morning, the dog-walking Mrs. Kybosh next door was treated to the sight of Justine’s mother trying to pull Justine back into the house by her hair and skirt while obscenity-shrieking Justine beat her about the head and shoulders with her purse.

Her mother also censored the clothes she bought, leaning spitefully in the direction of sweaters and long plaid skirts—this when Justine was walking around with a girl like Watley! Justine was forced to shoplift chic ensembles, smuggle them to school in her big leather handbag, and change in the bathroom, stuffing her ugly plaids in her locker.

Once she adopted this strategy, there were no more morning battles, and the criticism shifted to Justine’s laziness and poor posture. The connection between mother and daughter stiffened and frayed down to a wire sharp enough to cut your hand on; it was through a long dark tunnel that Justine viewed her parents as they moved about the house.

The connection between her parents had further frayed as well. Although unaware of it at the time, in retrospect she could see it clearly. As a young child she had watched her parents create constructions of concrete and steel with words that swung triumphantly
upward; now they dug circuitous tunnels around each other, one every now and then setting up a cul-de-sac for the other to stumble around in while he or she ran off in the opposite direction. Her father would tell a story about something that had happened at the hospital, emphasizing a particular part with his voice. Her mother would respond to some other part, and he would continue as if he hadn’t heard her. She would respond again to that part of his story he neglected, and relate it to some story of her own about, say, a neighbor. He would discount her story by stating, “Mrs. Kybosh is a stupid woman,” and then disappear behind his wall of important concerns. They seemed to want to create these mazes of crosspurpose and misunderstanding, and to need each other to do it, possibly because they needed the dry rasp of contact that occurred when they collided on their way to their separate destinations.

Justine’s own mazes led away from them both, and she minced around their house like an heiress on an ocean liner. She stayed up late at night, crouched near her radio listening to rock music on “underground” stations and fantasizing about the soft-voiced disc jockeys who played it.

She remembers a strange thing she said one night at the dinner table, without knowing why she said it. Her mother asked her how school had been that day, and, recalling a study hall conversation, she answered, “Sally Hinkel is going to fuck Jim Thorn tonight.” Her father’s eyes widened in alarm, her mother’s mouth opened in midbite, and a mallet of incomprehension flattened their previous conversation.

Perhaps it was this remark that prompted her father to ask her about Dr. Norris. She was in the car alone with him on a weekend errand. They were silently progressing on a scenic back road, when without any preamble he said, “Justine I want you to tell me what happened between you and Ed Norris.”

She didn’t say anything.

“There was an incident, wasn’t there?”

“I remember something,” she said.

“What? He touched you somewhere? Where did he touch you?”

Justine felt the full force of his surgical concentration, probing between her legs. His invulnerable eyes remained fixed on the sunny road. She held her breath.

“I want to know what happened, Justine, because I care for you. What exactly did he do?”

She remembered lying over the lap of some forgotten boy who stuck his fingers inside her. She thought of herself crouched over a mirror thinking how ugly her vagina was. Her pelvis became rigid.

“He touched me between the legs. He masturbated me.”

There was a moment of silence. “That is all?”

She said nothing.

“How many times did it happen?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I should kill him,” said her father. “I should find him and I should kill him.”

He sounded like he did when he complained about an incompetent orderly at the hospital. She listened, interested, but he said nothing more. She refrained from pointing out that it would be ridiculous to kill Ed Norris now, roughly ten years after the fact, if her father actually did mean to kill him, or even yell at him, which she knew he didn’t.

They continued to drive along, her exposed pelvis constricted like an animal in a trap. They went home, and the discussion dropped silently into the deep pool of their three-way life.

Everything was fine until she was caught shoplifting a miniskirt. The store detective took her elbow with such insinuating intimacy that she jerked her arm away from him and gave him an eyeful of the special scorn adolescents reserve for middle-aged mashers before she realized she was staring at a badge.

All at once she was the delinquent kid in the manager’s office, sitting with her legs crossed, staring at a corner and pulling her hair across her mouth. The manager, a thin stylishly suited woman, talked about juvenile correction facilities as she paced the office, adjusting papers and emptying the ashtray. “I could see it if you were some poor inner city kid who didn’t have anything nice to wear,” said the manager. “But for somebody like you to steal, it’s sick.”

Justine had to admit it was true. She felt ashamed, but the idea of being sick had a certain drama—or at least she could pretend that it did. Her mother swept in, Saks Fifth Avenue skirt swishing grandly. “Really, Justine, this is impossible,” she said. Justine shrugged her shoulders and scowled while her mother and the manager agreed
on how awful she was. Her mother seemed gratified to hear official confirmation that her daughter was bad.

From there, it was a short step to her mother’s surprise visit to the high school, where Justine was discovered in an illicit outfit. She was summoned to the principal’s office for a confrontation, then walked to her locker by both principal and parent, where the hideous cast-off plaid was disgorged. Before the whole milling between-class student body, she was forced to leave school with her mother, clutching the wadded up woolly jumper to her chest. To her irritation, she encountered Judy Hollis and Becky Tootle, two popular girls she and Watley made fun of and who made fun of them in return. She felt acutely the ridiculousness of her position as they stared at her with greedily mocking eyes that lingered with particular satisfaction on the jumper. She’d already heard herself sneered at for “sneaking in clothes and changing so she can parade around in skirts up to
here
and necklines down to
there
,” and now, as she was being marched through the hall in this way, she saw a virulent strain of gossip germinate before her eyes.

There was a tedious scene at home, and Justine was informed that she would now have a weekly appointment with a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist was a very expensive private doctor named Dr. Venus. He had a burgundy waiting room decorated by large glossy photographs of Siamese cats. He had beautiful teenaged patients, some of whom had interesting personal habits. He was a large, very happy man with completely flat, almost nonexistent hindquarters, pigeon toes, and curly black hair. Justine thought he was an idiot, but she grew to like him. It was hard not to like someone who desired to talk exclusively about her and who also made her feel superior. She was genuinely touched by his obvious concern for her, his wish that she come into the fold of mental health. He was so pleased when she took an interest and joined in. She even told him the Emotional story, the whole thing, and sat there feeling the same tenderness and vulnerability she had felt for Emotional, feeling his approval, feeling like a little girl as they sat smiling at one another.

This is not to say she wasn’t deeply resentful at being forced to see Dr. Venus. She asked her mother: “Why don’t you find another mental health center to work at so you won’t have to use me?”

The summer was damp and uneasy. Dr. Shade took a month’s vacation and slept late every day. Justine’s nervous body awoke every morning at six o’clock, regardless of when she went to bed. She would pad through the silent house and make herself a cup of coffee with three spoons of sugar and sit on the back terrace drinking it as she stared at the bright wet grass and the insects walking on the lawn chairs, trying to decide if she were happy or miserable.

The following fall
, Watley found a boyfriend. He was new at the school, a handsome, quiet, studious boy who Justine privately considered a little dopey.

At first the boy (his name was Donald) was a lot of fun for Justine. It was a continual source of entertainment planning strategies for Watley to get his attention, ways to let him know she was intelligent as well as beautiful, for example, by carrying around large volumes on Freud. They both knew these schemes were hare-brained and girlish, but that only added to their enjoyment.

Then Watley acquired the boy, and there wasn’t much for Justine to do except listen to stories about him or admire Watley in her frilly new dresses as she walked arm in arm with him in the halls. She did admire Watley for pursuing a social anomaly like mildmannered Donald when she could easily have had a more glamorous consort; it was in its own way as daring as taking up with some menacing greaseball, except Donald was a lot easier to control. His retiring, polite personality, although it contained the requisite intelligence, was like a nice big screen on which Watley could ardently project her needs. He was easy to direct in the big scene in which modestly weeping Watley lost her virginity, a scene which Justine imagined with a mix of interest, envy, and irritation. She felt abandoned by Watley and she began to resent her for it. Her resentment was exacerbated by Watley’s behavior when Justine visited her; Watley always wanted them to stand before the mirror with their faces together and then compare them, feature by feature, culminating in an analysis of their respective types, something like, “You’re the cute pixie type and I’m the voluptuous beauty type.”

She hoped that her envy of Watley didn’t play too great a role in her strange coupling with Rick Houlihan, a senior bordering on
greaseballness. It was springtime; he was a big swarthy boy with muscles, cruel lips, and a long gum line. She met him at the cast party for the drama club version of
The Man of La Mancha
, in which he played a rapist muleteer. She was drawn by his large virile oiliness and his condescending manner. A skinny red-headed girl who noticed them talking said, “Stay away from the little girls, Rick.” They were sucking face within the hour.

They continued to suck face in the back seat of his friend’s car as the friend drove them home, all the while making sex jokes about sophomore girls. Rick joked back as he felt her breasts, and she giggled, feeling like a soft, palpitating baby animal that might be passed back and forth and petted by these noisy humans and then left by the side of the road.

But the way he touched was romantic, his embrace a thrilling combination of condescension, rapacity, and gentleness. She knew he believed her to be too stupid and passive to object to what he was doing, and that, while this made him view her with jovial contempt, it also rather endeared her to him as it meant he could fondle all he wanted and feel superior too, free of the guilt that a more human girl might’ve engendered. If he’d known Justine’s history of basements, rec rooms and johns, it would have been different, but he had no idea.

They dropped her off at her house, and he said, “See ya in school, kid.” She immediately called Watley, who was impressed and somewhat chagrined that her little pixie handmaiden had spent time in a back seat with someone so glandular and dashing as the rapist muleteer in
The Man of La Mancha
. All weekend, Justine fantasized him crushing her to his big pink chest while the very air about them exploded in ribbons of delirious color. On the verge of hysteria, she walked around with pimple cream on her face, her muscles furiously coiling and uncoiling under her skin. Monday came; she flew to her beloved.

He passed her in the hall with a smile and hand flap. She was wounded but she ignored that and submerged herself once more in the loud theme song of their great love. She saw him again in the cafeteria, standing in line with a tray. She noticed for the first time the slug-like curve of his fleshy shoulders, the way his bulky legs
seemed to have been hastily jammed into his pelvis, but she didn’t let these details stand in her way.

She admired his manly reserve in greeting her, the way his eyes slowly dropped to view her hand on his arm and then rose to gaze enigmatically into hers. Chatting happily, she followed him to his table, then out of the lunchroom, into the hall, and to the door of his French class.

They didn’t have much to talk about, and the conversation that did occur was strange and arduous. This disturbed Justine, but she found the disturbance easy to ignore. Making out with Rick, his big tongue disporting itself in her head, was a little world which existed beyond the uncomfortable job of conversation and which could be literally touched upon at any moment. Even the distance of reserve and incompatibility had an odd charm; across this distance she could occasionally feel his desultory signals answering her ardent emanation, and the slight tickle of contact was so poignant in contrast with his coldness that it felt to her like a full embrace.