Two Girls Fat and Thin (5 page)

They were lining up, jostling into position like ponies, pointing their toes against the floor to flex their calves. The instructor stood by, slim hip tilted, indolently lifting and dropping a small barbell in one hand. I wasn’t usually awake to see this class. They were restful and pleasing to watch when they did their exercises in formation: dozens of boys bending, stretching, and jumping in harmony, standing splay-legged to lift weights, or on their backs, rapidly curling and uncurling like wounded ants.

“People only accept the validity of movements that champion the underdog and scorn those that champion people of great accomplishment. You always have to take the dumbest as your lowest common denominator.” The phrase caught in my throat; it had a hard, treacherous shape. I imagined my words tumbling atop each other, snarling together, forming a hostile tangle around my feet that I vainly struggled to escape as a chorus of Granite’s enemies stood and pointed and said, “So! You despise the weak, the helpless . . .” “So people start to think that someone like me, a Definitist, would not feel sympathy for the weak and helpless. Well, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Pardon my French.” I wrenched myself free of the trap and stood defiant, fists clenched at my sides. Justine stared at my sudden anger. “I had a friend once named Kim who happened to be retarded. We used to belong to a women’s support group, and those women there, those Marxist, feminist bitches, they ignored Kim, they hurt Kim, they would kill Kim if they thought it would further a cause. They would victimize the weak and the helpless. Not me. And not Granite.” Kim’s loose-eyeballed face and pathetic form stood peeping from behind my defiant, fish-clenching figure.

The exercisers began their jumping jacks.

“How did Granite react to the press?”

“She was hurt by them. She could never really defend herself against them, especially after Bradley left. She was a tough lady supreme. But somehow her very toughness made her vulnerable to jerks. If she was wrong but thought she was right she would go
to the death to defend it—and she did in the case of Beau Bradley. She was brilliant, she was powerfully sexual, and she spoke with a glamorous accent. When the average person sees a woman with all these qualities plus, he is going to be overwhelmed with how small he is in comparison. She scared the shit out of them. She believed in herself and they didn’t believe in themselves, and they hated her for that. The critics gang-raped her. She tried to fight back but she just wasn’t capable of dealing on their niggling, ugly level.”

The boys across the street blurred before the vision of an elderly Granite on the dull gray box of my TV set. She was the guest on a talk show, sitting in a plush swivel chair. “Do you know what I have to say to those who don’t agree with me? Fine, don’t agree. But don’t come on my show and ruin it for everybody else.” The audience laughed.

I viewed the exercisers sadly. Justine followed my gaze. They were bending in unison in solemn, balletic toe-touches. We could faintly hear the sonorous thump of the disco music that bore them along.

“Do you see a contradiction in the sexual behavior of her characters—the pattern of dominance and submission that she says is, in other spheres, irrational? Do you find that the behavior of her female characters is a denial of themselves in reality—for example, when Skip beats up Solitaire and she likes it?”

The stupid and self-righteous nature of this question cast a grim shadow on my hopes for the quality of Justine’s article. The sight of the joyful exercisers soured, as did the awful green of the instructor’s sweatsuit. “Solitaire likes it, not because she’s hit, but because it’s Skip. It’s totally different from the kind of neurotic masochism you’re implying.”

“Well, then, there’s the rape thing with Asia Maconda and Frank Golanka.”

“Look, I’m a sex abuse victim and so are you, and you ought to be able to understand. Asia is presented as having a problem, for one thing. She’s neurotic and she needs this kind of crushing force to act upon her because she needs to be broken in a way, but it’s got nothing to do with masochism. Asia is exalted when Frank Golanka takes possession of her. She is not demeaned. A masochist is somebody
like my mother who was demeaned by her subservience to a cruel, dishonest, contemptible man. When the women in Granite’s books submit, they do it out of strength, out of choice, as a gift. That’s the difference between masochism and love, and if you don’t see that, then you’re crazy.”

Justine’s jaw muscles flinched spasmodically as she scribbled; her fingers were tight on her pen. She was skewed by a renewed blast of sunlight. Minute cinders of light darted and vanished in the air between us, the hallucinated discharge of my wrath. My head felt separated from my body; I floated, stretched out, calm and naked in a soothing space above our ugly disconnected conversation. Below, my intestines contracted into a malign snake. A large gas bubble solemnly floated up from my abdomen. The exercisers jogged gaily in place, hands flopping at their sides.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

In the placid enclosure of aqua tiling, my intestines warred, suffered, and subsided. The fierce cylindrical lights on either side of the mirror above the basin revealed a surprising face; instead of the angry, adamant woman I had expected to meet, there was the porous, puffy, pink-splotched face of an exhausted person on the verge of tears. Only my bright eyes, shining bravely and a little too enthusiastically above dark and heavy skin revealed my fighting spirit. But who was I fighting? The collegiate mouse in my living room? I finished my ablutions in the aqua basin, opened the window a crack, and sat on the edge of the tub for a moment.

I returned to the living room to find Justine contemplatively eating an egg roll.

“I think you’re misunderstanding me,” she said. “I’m not asking these questions because I think those things about Granite’s work. It’s just that these accusations have been made against her, and if I’m going to write an article, I have to address them.”

“But do you understand what I’m saying? I wouldn’t consider it demeaning to worship at the feet of a hero.”

“I know what you mean. I even know what you mean when you say that Asia needed to have something taken from her by force for it to mean anything. I’ve had an experience like that myself.”

All my eagerness to like Justine frolicked in the air between us. “Really?”

“It wasn’t that I was raped or anything. Just that about three years ago I had a relationship with someone who sort of . . . in bed, opened me up in a way that I had no control over.”

“Oh! Really?”

“And it was the most moving thing because I was never able to open up to anyone else before that. And no one else had been able to really penetrate me. I didn’t have any choice either, the way he did it. He just made it happen.”

“Oh!” I was intoxicated with the ravishment of Justine. I envisioned her, her nervous jaw relaxed, her neck arched, throat exposed, the brittle crust of her public persona broken and stripped off. What would you find under that crust? “Did he say anything about what happened?”

“No. We didn’t talk about it.”

“How wonderful of him not to say it!”

“I’m not sure he noticed, actually.”

“Oh, surely he noticed! Are you still together?”

“No.” She inclined her head downward, closed her notebook. “He was sort of awful, generally.”

She put her red-shoed feet together and began to organize her papers. From the kitchen, the refrigerator whirred and droned. A gauzy float of dust twinkled in the fading sun. What did she mean, sort of awful?

“I just brought it up so you’d know that I understand you.” She closed her notebook and put her pen in her small fat burgundy handbag. “I’m done interviewing you. Unless you have anything more you’d like to say.”

“No, I think we’ve covered it.” My body posed in a sore slump on the edge of the couch. Justine stood, glancing around as though she’d dropped something. “But if you’d like to stay and visit a while and help me finish these snacks, we could talk some more about some of the things we’ve started. Just in a personal way.”

Her eyes widened and lightly filmed over, as though she had withdrawn behind a veil of polite embarrassment. “Thank you but I really can’t. I’ve got a lot to do today and I’ve already spent more time than I’d planned. But thank you. It’s been very interesting.”

“Perhaps you’d like to come back tomorrow? Or the next day? We could have lunch.”

“I don’t know, I . . . maybe. I’m busy but I could . . . I could call you.”

He hand was on the doorknob. She was fleeing.

Every loneliness is a pinnacle. I opened the door for her. From the safety of the hall she promised to send me a copy of the published article, and then she was gone. I returned to the couch and sat on it. The rims of my eyeballs had dried out. My tail bone had become a focal point of exhaustion. But I knew I couldn’t sleep. I sat for several seconds feeling the apartment recover from the presence of a stranger. While she had sat before me, a foreign vibration had quivered through the air, handling and examining everything it brushed against, subtly changing the attitude and appearance of my knickknacks and furniture, giving everything the stiff, careful quality of the scrutinized. Slowly, the room settled into ease as the last tremors of that inquisitive quiver subsided. The cool beige carpet crawled happily along the floor. The refrigerator whirred. I turned on the television. It was
Firing Squad
with Austin Heller. His guests were Donovan Milundira, the exiled Czech author and somebody else, a dense old fellow with massive eyebrows and a hand lifted to dangle before his mouth. I sat on the floor to watch it, my back against the soft white plush of the couch, my legs stretched before me.

“So I am not exaggerating to say you despise Chernovsky?” asked Heller. He popped his eyes and rapidly flicked the tip of his tongue against both corners of his open mouth—a weird and unattractive habit he had developed recently.

I raised my baggy flowered dress and crept along the floor to the window. I stood upright on my knees and rested my arms on the ledge. The exercise class had ended. A few lone boys still lolled about, stretching and chatting. One leaned pensively on the window ledge, a fluff of blond hair across his sulky brow, his squared chin resting on his fist. Beyond him, in the fluorescent shadows of the gym, I dimly saw two boys standing to talk, their inclined hips almost touching. The taller one rested his thick forearm on the shoulders of the lighter boy, who looked shyly down. I dropped my eyes to the street below. Everywhere there were people with their arms around each other.

I picked up the bottle of Magic Bubble that I kept on the window
sill, and removed the slim wand from the mysteriously blue, ether-smelling liquid. I dipped the wand again and leaned out the window with it; the iridescent chemicals that stretched invisibly across the wand’s small hoop caught the sun and glimmered before I blew. A dozen bubbles floated free. They dallied wondrously in midair, as though unsure what to do with their new life, and then meandered on the wind, all the way to the corner below, into crowds of people waiting for the light with their briefcases and bags. The pedestrians looked up, confused, looked all around for the source of the bubbles, watching in fascination as the shiny circles drifted into the street to be murdered by traffic. I raised my wand and blew another doomed, shimmering flock.

I envisioned pale Justine in the arms of her powerful lover, her small head thrown back in surrender. I felt a pinch of pain. The pouting boy across the street had left the window. Only vague shadows were visible in the fluorescent depths of the gym. Every loneliness is a pinnacle.

I turned away from the windows and faced the room. I had wanted to tell Justine about my childhood.

Whenever I think of the house
I grew up in, in Painesville, Pennsylvania, I think of the entire structure enveloped by, oppressed by, and exuding a dark, dank purple. Even when I don’t think of it, it lurks in miniature form, a malignant doll house, tumbling weightless through the horror movie of my subconscious, waiting to tumble into conscious thought and sit there exuding darkness.

Objectively, it was a nice little house. It was a good size for three people; it had a slanting roof, cunning shutters, lovable old doorknobs that came off in your hands, a breakfast nook, an ache of dingy carpets and faded wallpaper. It was our fifth house, the one we collapsed in after a series of frantic moves which were the result of my father’s belief that wherever he lived was hell. Eventually he became too exhausted to move again and made our sedentary status a virtue, gloating as he gazed out through the cracked shutters at the arrivals and departures of several sets of neighbors on both sides—the Whites, the Calefs, and the Hazens on the left, and the Wapshots, the Rizzos, and the morose, relatively stationary old Angrods on the right. “We live in a society of cockroaches,” he said. “Scurrying all over the face of the map with no thought of community or family, nothing.”

The Painesville house was the most significant point of my upbringing, and it unfolds from its predecessors with the minor inevitability of an origami puzzle in several pieces. With each house the puzzle becomes more sinister, then more sad, then simply strange, the final piece made from a grainy photograph of Anna Granite’s face. I imagine Justine Shade picking up the various paper constructions to examine them, furrowing her brow, tapping her lip with her pen.

I was born in Blossom, Tennessee. I think of grape arbors, trellises clotted with magnolias, the store downtown that sold white bags of candy. (There actually was a grape arbor in our backyard in Blossom, but our second, more lived-in Tennessee house near Nashville had a square backyard full of short grass and festering sunlight.)

One of my succession of therapists used to say that “the body remembers everything,” meaning that on some level so deep you don’t even know about it, you’ve stored compressed yet vivid details of everything that’s ever happened to you, including, she was later to assert, everything in your past lives. This could be true, I guess, but these bodily memories are so unevenly submerged and revealed, so distorted—as the deficient yard is garnished with imaginary arbors and trellises—that they may as well be completely invented; it’s only the hideous physical shock that attends the mere shadow of one remembered gesture, that fraction of some past agony that reminds you they were real.