Two Girls Fat and Thin (34 page)

“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 baseball 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.

My poor father. My poor, poor father. Pity spread through my body, paralyzing me. My father had lived and died in terrible pain. My mother might be lost forever. Anna Granite had not saved me.

The phone rang. I stared in the direction of the ringing. It was my mother. It was one of those instances you read about in
Reader’s Digest
; she had been psychically penetrated by the strength of my thoughts and was now trying to reach me. I stood up. Except how would she know my number? I sat down. There were lots of ways! I leapt up and headed for the phone, which immediately stopped ringing. “Shit!” I slammed my fist on the wall and the ringing began again. I dove at the phone with tears in my eyes, barely able to control my voice as I answered hello.

“Hi,” said the thin little voice. “It’s Justine Shade. Remember me?”

Justine looked
at the Medicaid billing forms before her, fearful that she had filled them out incorrectly but unable to tell how. When she looked at the numbered instructions, boxes to fill in and various codes, she could not see them as specific abstractions with easily understood meanings which began and ended when you put the obvious information in the box. The grid of green ink that made up the form seemed rather the opening of a hellish labyrinth at the end of which sat checks in envelopes made out to Dr. Winkgard. She steeled herself and filled in a code of numbers; immediately the numerals sent out invisible threads attaching them to a machine of paper that ground along on a cloud of thoughts, the now totally abstract thoughts of whoever had come up with this method of defense against a cruel and exorbitant medical system.

Her mind had been moving in this psychotic direction all morning, and it was beginning to alarm her. Even worse, it seemed as though other people could see the distressed twistings and turnings in her head. Patients would approach the desk to request an appointment or to pay their bill; she would look at them and she would suddenly see their facial expressions and body movements as though through the tiny end of a telescope, leading to an infinity of personality, and then beyond personality to a place out of
which the personality grew in a thick tough stalk, a place unreadable by even her grossly heightened perceptual mechanism. She would look at the appointment book, and see there a list of names symbolizing people, people who were each as complex as the one standing before her and yet reducible to a list of squiggles in an appointment book anyone could buy in any stationery store. Shaken, she would fill out an appointment card and hand it to the patient and see on her face a vague expression of discomfort and puzzlement, as if she’d registered Justine’s weird consternation. When one of them asked her a question and sensed her groping confusedly for an answer, he looked past her to Glenda and said, “Perhaps you could tell me, Mrs. Winkgard?” And Glenda’s voice sailed forth, cheerfully acknowledging the chaos that so stupefied Justine, then sweeping it into a corner with the brisk broom of her voice, neatening and simplifying, answering the question.

Probably it was obvious to everyone, on a deep level, that Glenda was a conduit for the forces of order, rationality, and strength, and that she, Justine, was a mere appendage, useful only insofar as she was a conduit for Glenda. Further, it seemed that this had been true all her life and would probably always be true, no matter how many articles she wrote or how old she got. And it was only ten thirty! How was she going to get through the day?

She turned to Glenda, who was sitting beside her doing some paperwork, her furrowing dewlaps giving her the appearance of a masticating little animal. Surely Glenda would realize that something was wrong with her soon; she thought she’d better comment on her condition so that she wouldn’t appear too far gone to have noticed it herself.

“Glenda,” she said as casually as possible, “do I seem to be acting weird today?”

“No. Are you feeling well?”

“I don’t feel sick. I just feel strange.”

Glenda put aside her paper and looked at her alertly. “Strange how?”

“Well . . .” She almost said, “Like I’m going up on LSD” and decided that although it was the most accurate description, it wasn’t the wisest and instead said, “I feel like I’m on nitrous oxide, you know, laughing gas? Have you ever had it? It makes your thinking
a little distorted. I keep going off on mental tangents, and everything seems to be connected to something huge and complicated.”

“Ah,” said Glenda, “it sounds like an anxiety attack.”

Justine looked at Glenda gratefully. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“No.” Glenda said this as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “You are perhaps just a little tired and nervous, and I need to take care of you today.” She patted Justine’s shoulder. “Don’t worry.”

“Maybe it is just anxiety.” Justine cautiously felt around the benign explanation, as if it were a chair that might collapse if she sat in it. “I did have kind of a peculiar date last night.”

“Peculiar good or bad?”

“I don’t know.”

She had met Bryan
at a Japanese restaurant where they had shared a plate of jewel-like sushi and shiny purple seaweed. She noticed that when he held his tiny cup of sake, he cupped both hands around it for warmth, a gesture she usually saw in women and which she found inexplicably touching. She noticed he didn’t eat very much, that he seemed to have little interest in food. His long, black hair fell across his eyes and she wanted to smooth it back. He saw her looking at him and he looked at her, his face infused with a complicated expression of craftiness, interest, and eager excitement. He looked as if he were being drawn into a game that he wasn’t sure he wanted to play, and that while this seduced him, it also made him look for a way to give the appearance of full participation while he was in fact scrutinizing her from the sidelines as she charged around after the ball by herself. This expression was frightening but it was also flattering to her because it suggested an extreme and personal reaction.

They didn’t refer to their recent heinous intimacy. They talked instead of their childhood experiences, their jobs, her article, and his travels in Southeast Asia. He said he felt greatly attracted to the people who lived in the Patagandrian rain forest.

“They’re small and feline and they please me aesthetically,” he explained. “There’s a sense of delicacy and propriety about everything they do, even the con men. It’s partly because their culture is so old, I guess. They have such a strong sense of who they are,
individually and in relation to other people. They don’t have our kind of demented identity problems.”

“Well, if you’re talking about a very traditional culture, it’s not so hard to find a sense of identity within such parameters,” said Justine, happy to disagree so early in the evening. “The more open and diverse a culture is, the less you can rely on the culture to define you, and you have to define yourself. That’s harder.”

“I don’t just mean their culture though. The way they live puts them in direct contact with the most fundamental human needs—food, sleep, shelter. When you talk to those people about supermarkets, they’re astonished that anyone would do something like that, going to buy packaged food instead of hunting for it. It’s not just a stupid macho thing. They understand the importance of ritual and how it has to be played out in a context of practical need. They don’t see how any man with any pride in his masculinity could live such a physically easy life as we do.”