Two Girls Fat and Thin (26 page)

I must have transmitted this to the women who held my hands, for I felt gentle squeezes on each side. This only made it worse. My mother was swallowed up in black.

“Okay, now we’re just going to go around the circle and give everybody the chance to say a few words—maybe to ask for support or to give thanks or whatever you want. If you feel like keeping quiet, just squeeze the hand of the person next to you. Ready?”

I sat shivering and cold as a woman began expressing gratitude for all the wonderful changes in her life during the last year. The image of Justine Shade flitted across my mind, and I wondered why. Was my life so empty? I thought of Anna Granite the first time I had seen her on the dais in Philadelphia.

I was so overwhelmed
by my emotional response to Granite, that I could only comprehend her speech in fragments. She talked about how tragic it was when the individual was sacrificed for the majority, how the needs of the weak became an excuse for undermining the strong. I wept for the entire time, deep in the turbulent waters of my feelings, terrified by and agog at the fanged and finned beasts that swam by; I heard the speech only when I rose to the surface for air. What I heard corresponded with what I was seeing in my underwater maelstrom. I
had
been stronger than my parents. I had been damn strong to survive a childhood that was completely lacking in emotional or mental sustenance and in fact would’ve killed most people. And it was my strength that had made my father hate me. It wasn’t because I was worthless, not because I was ugly or fat. It was because I
was
worth something and he knew it and he wanted to destroy me for it. I wept with rage, yet with decorum. The handsome man next to me furtively looked, but not with anything but kindness.

When the speech was over, my tears were done. I sat quietly in the back row resting as I watched the audience crowd around Granite to ask her questions and to shake her hand, or merely to look upon her at close range. My emotions gently ebbed as the audience began to filter out of the building, their faces upturned and glowing. I wasn’t even surprised when the man who had been sitting next to me appeared in the aisle beside my seat and, putting his hand on my shoulder, said “Goodbye now”—even though no handsome man had ever touched or spoken to me in that way.

I waited until there were only a few people standing around Granite and she was reaching to collect her things as she answered their final questions. Then I rose and approached her. I saw her glance flicker at me and then back to the boy who was telling her of his plans to become an architect. I stood next to him, heavy with determination. I could feel her becoming aware of me, taking me
in, trying to interpret the surge of resolve emanating from this silent fat girl. I could see the coarseness of her skin and hair, the deep lines on her forehead, her mouth creases, and the swollen pockets of brown and purple under her eyes. It didn’t matter anymore that she was not beautiful. She turned to me. Her aquamarine eyes were shielded, questioning, very tired.

“I . . . I . . . I . . .” To my horror I was unable to speak. She frowned at me, she gestured with impatience. “I just had to tell you . . .” My feelings swelled up through my lungs and into my throat. I made a choked noise. My moment had come, I was before my savior, and I was falling away from her as if down a dark pit. Her face seemed to come apart, cracking like that of a witch in a mirror. Alarm bolted from her eyes. My hand thrashed out reflexively, as though to break my fall and then the miraculous thing; she stood and gripped my shoulders with both hands, and I felt her body heat enter my system with the blind muscularity of an eel whipping through deep water.

She said, “I can see you’ve had a lot of pain in your life.”

“Yes I have.” People were looking, but I didn’t care.

“There were times I didn’t know how I would survive. Even recently. I just wanted to die.”

Her eyes radiated the gentlest strength I had ever experienced, her tough, hot, callusy hands supported me with the full intensity of her life. “Yes,” she said. “I can see that.”

“But I did survive, and the reason I survived was you. I had to tell you that. I had to thank you.”

She looked at me and, as in my fantasy, she saw me, saw my pain—which no one had ever acknowledged or even allowed me to acknowledge. However, unlike my fantasy, to be seen and acknowledged by her wasn’t to be penetrated and ripped apart by an obscene burst of energy. I did not feel her gaze boring through my pores to envelop my swooning spirit; I felt her at the perimeters of myself, attentive, very close, but respectful, waiting for me to reveal myself. So I didn’t swoon. I stood and met her gaze and felt my self, habitually held in so deep and tight, come out to meet her with the quavering steps of someone whose feet have been asleep for a long, long time.

“Sit down,” she said. “I am very tired, but I feel we must talk.”

We sat down to talk as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Everyone else was gone, but I could hear people milling around behind the curtain, occasionally putting their heads out to see what was happening between Anna Granite and the unknown fat girl. She still held my hand.

“Tell me,” she said. “Just tell me.”

I did. What I had been unable to say to anyone, barely even to myself, came out in normal sentences. I didn’t even feel embarrassment, let alone shame. As I talked she sat erect, her whole body in a state of alertness, taking in, I felt, not only my words, but my voice, my eyes, my movements, the invisible mist of my secret bodily qualities, that which makes you sense a person before you’ve seen them. When I told her that my father had molested me, her eyes became suffused with such an extremity of feeling that they became walls of fierce unfeeling, inanimate as fire or radiation. I told of how I’d read
The Bulwark
, how I’d gone to college hoping to find meaning in my life and had instead been battered by everyone and everything around me, how once again her work had been the only thing for me to hold on to, how I’d come to the decision to leave college, cut myself away from my parents forever, change my name and become a student of Definitism.

When I was finished she stared at me in silence for a long moment, her hand still on mine. She said, “And how will you support yourself?”

“I can type fast,” I said. “I’m a good speller. I could be a secretary.”

There was another moment in which her eyes absorbed me slowly, and then she said, “Would you like to work for me?”

“Be
your
secretary?”

“Not mine directly. But for my protégé, Beau Bradley. It is part time, I’m afraid, but we are paying almost double the standard hourly wage. And for that we expect double the competence.”

She was talking to me as if we were both characters in her novels! I wanted to answer her like one, but I couldn’t quite. “Are you sure?” I said. “I’d love to try but I’ve never been a secretary before and—”

“If it doesn’t work out we’ll know soon enough. But I think it will. I see incredible strength in you. I also see intelligence, which is
proven by the fact that you were drawn to my work. If you could live your life up to this point in the face of such terrible opposition, I think you will do amazing things now that you have removed that opposition. I want you to know that. And I want you to report for work tomorrow.”

The last words between us occurred as I was on my way to the door. She said, “Oh, wait, you haven’t told me—what is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you.”

And I said, “Dorothy. Dorothy Never.” And she smiled and repeated it.

And now we’re going to open
our eyes,” said Reverend Jane.

I opened my eyes to the sight of happy strangers unclasping their hands and looking around. I caught Jodie’s curious glance and looked away.

“Why don’t we end the service with a little song,” continued Jane. “I always enjoy that, don’t you?” We reached for our songbooks.

I remembered Anna Granite and me alone in the hotel hall like two lovers clasping hands in a closing restaurant. I remembered leaving her that night and walking through the streets feeling my secret slowly releasing itself from my body. I felt my inner tissue open and lie breathing and restful. I felt yellow flowers blooming on my internal organs.

But now Anna Granite is dead, and sometimes I think my memories of her don’t mean as much to me as I’d like to think they do. I remember my sense of release and freedom that night, but only cerebrally. Well, Granite would say that is the most important way, I guess.

We held our songbooks before us and sang: “Happiness runs in a circular motion/Thought is like a little boat upon the sea/Everybody is a part of everything anyway/You can have everything if you let yourself be.”

Justine Shade rolled down
the cheap black socks of a large male patient. She dotted glue on his thick ankles and applied the clamps.

“Just rest your arms at your sides,” she said gently. She moved to glue and clamp his wrists.

What an idiotic thing to spend your days doing, she thought. She looked at the heavy man on the table, exposed in his underwear. He looked calm and potentially very purposeful, despite his passive body. She wondered if he was a Definitist.

“Mr. Johnson, have you ever read
The Gods Disdained
by Anna Granite?”

“No, I haven’t. Although I think I’ve heard of her. Why?”

“I don’t know. You remind me a little bit of a character, Skip Jackson. Maybe because your name is Skip, too.”

“What’s Skip Jackson like?”

“Well, he’s an industrialist supercapitalist. He’s brilliant and rich. He’s one of the only successful supercapitalists left in the world because the liberals and weaklings have pretty much taken over and are trying to destroy the strong, productive people.” He looked interested. “Most of the other supercapitalists have hidden out in a capitalist paradise with the head capitalist and are just waiting for the world to collapse without them. Which it does.”

“What happens to Skip Jackson?”

“He gets to the paradise with the others and then comes back in the end to take over the world.” She worked the knobs of the machine. “Plus there’s some romance and some sex.”

“That sounds interesting. That sounds like something I might like to read. I haven’t read for years now.”

“I told Skip Johnson he reminded me of Skip Jackson in
The Gods Disdained
,” she said to Glenda that afternoon.

“Ah, what a compliment.”

“Now he’s probably going to read it and think I have a crush on him.”

Glenda laughed throatily. “You know, he really isn’t anything like the character. Do you know he is forty-five years old and he lives with his mother?”

“Oh my.”

“That’s right. His mother is Regina Johnson who comes in about every six months. She is really the mover and shaker of the family. She still manages a floor of Bloomingdale’s and she is sixty-seven years old.”

“That’s wonderful.”

Justine filed patients’ cards and brooded. According to Definitist thought, for every imperfect entity, be it human or material, there exists a perfect counterpart; a lovely princess for every pimply shop girl. This perfection was not an annulment of the shop girl, but an ideal for her to aspire to, and the clerk who whistled at her in the street could see and love the princess in her, just as she could see the glamorous playboy in him. That is why, said Anna Granite, advertising is deeply moral; its smiling billboards are openings into the perfect beauty that we can all strive for and attain, to one degree or another, depending on our individual components.

Maybe, thought Justine bleakly, there is a perfect Justine Shade somewhere. A tall, full-lipped beauty who wears silk and leather. She lives in a beautiful, austere apartment and condescends to write a half-dozen or so brilliant pieces of journalism a year. They all sound the same, and they are never ambiguous. She has lilac-point Siamese cats and a few strong, handsome, powerful lovers who never stand her up or make her feel awful, instead of a series of eccentrics, instead of a tiny apartment filled with gewgaws and
balls of dirt, instead of a job putting clamps on old people and arranging cards in alphabetical order.

This can’t go on, she thought. Somehow, I have to get out and Live.

On the other hand, Anna Granite’s heroines rarely got out and Lived. They didn’t want to either, as it would require that they mix with the herd. They just worked hard at their careers, thought, and were beautiful in grand, square-jawed isolation, at least until the hero appeared who had also, until this point, been sitting alone in his room when he wasn’t working hard. Perhaps there was something starkly beautiful about her simple job and her functional apartment, her daily subway ride, her small bags of groceries and neat dinners, her staring vigils over the clanking typewriter. It was possible, except there was nothing stark or beautiful about the gewgaws or the dirtballs. Maybe she would begin sweeping more regularly and throw some things out.

“How is the article coming?” asked Glenda.

“I’m making progress. I’m interviewing people this afternoon, these guys who run a Definitist school.”

“That should be interesting,” said Glenda, absently examining a postcard from a forgotten patient.

“And I’m trying to arrange an interview with Austin Heller next week.”

“Really?” Glenda looked at her with tentative reappraisal. “That would be a feather in your cap, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know. He probably won’t understand why anybody would be interested in Anna Granite now. He might not have anything to say.”

“But still, just to mention his name in your article.”

Justine crouched on the slim ledge of Glenda’s validation, her enjoyment of the perch only partially marred by its smallness and flimsiness.

The offices of Rationalist
Reaffirmation High were located in a small oblong apartment building in Brooklyn. The third floor stairwell had “You Die” written in Spanish on its wall.

Jack Peach, president of Reaffirmation High, was a plump fellow
with a proud fleshy chest and a normal smile. He shook her hand and guided her through the functional apartment, which was defined by boxes of files, a desk layered with organized paper, and a glowering answering machine. She sat in a small chair with a vinyl seat and arranged her notebook. “My partner will be joining us in a few minutes,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind the mess.”