Two Girls Fat and Thin (33 page)

Then the train entered the fecund green landscape of Princeton, and she was stunned by the order and prosperity, the brightly painted homes, tended gardens, and lush lawns. Flawless sidewalks ran and touched noses, big round mail boxes stood like jolly street corner burghers. Justine had grown up thinking that such neighborhoods
were normal places where most people lived, yet this neighborhood seemed foreign and mythic.

Max Nolte, a teacher at Rationalist Reaffirmation High, met her at the platform. He was a tall person with a big bottom and a little head and mild yet intent eyes. His open jean jacket exposed a full chest which, in its fleshy softness, suggested a sensitivity that was almost painfully swollen and tender and yet unrelievedly proud and out-thrusted, like the triumphant guitar chord of the crassest rock song.

He drove with one hand, gesturing with the other as he talked about the school and the English classes which he taught. “You go to most English classes today in the schools—have you? Well you should. Because you’d be shocked at what they teach. Joyce, Kafka—horrible stuff about people’s lives being destroyed by a baby crying. Or going to a carnival and getting lost and not being able to find what you wanna buy and getting depressed. Or a guy turning into a cockroach—it’s unbelievable. It’s all about defeat and helplessness. No wonder the kids hate it.”

Justine started to argue for the intrinsic value of beauty in writing, but as he continued, she found herself seduced by his blunt sensibility, so full of feeling yet so dumb, by his cheerful way of going after literature like a dog would a bone, snuffling, turning, chewing, genuinely enjoying it, provided it conformed to his belief. She thought he was a very nice person.

“What I teach is stuff like Ian Fleming, Mickey Spillane, Jack London, Hemingway, Conrad, and, of course, Anna Granite. Literature with clear plots, clear cause-and-effect connections, plenty of action and
heroes
. That’s the most important thing. Especially for kids at this age. Heroes who live by clear values.”

Justine remembered the man who had picked her up in the bar, his pale face, the eerie angle of his bones, his glittering eyes, the deliberate way he drew the smoking reed of cigarette to his lips. She remembered herself between his spread legs, sucking his cock, glimpsing his happy rat-toothed smirk with each upward bob of her pumping head. This memory, with its ugly eroticism, was not in the least arousing; however she recognized something compelling in it, a compulsion akin to that of a starving lab animal
which will keep pressing the button that once supplied it with food, even though the button now jolts its poor small body with increasing doses of electric shock.

“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, and 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.