Read Online Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill - Free Book Online
Authors: Mary Gaitskill
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my system to metabolize.
I lay cuddled in the arms of my softly pajamaed father, waitingfor Mama, who was lazily brushing her hair at the vanity table. The rest of the room with its furniture, curtains, glimmering bottles, and snakes of Mama’s jewelry was a dream of objects that claimed to be familiar but weren’t. Then the light went off, and Mama slid between the sheets, her fragrant body heat lilting from the open space between nightgown and skin, and there was no longer any world outside the bed. When my eyes adjusted to see the gray squares of window and the trees beyond, they were faraway as stars, and the lumbering furniture was ephemeral as the half-dreams that bother you when you’re trying to wake up.
Justine Shade had unusually attractive parents, something she came to hold against them for reasons unknown to her. Even when she was five, she says, she knew that they were socially beautiful, although that concept is foreign to five-year-olds. They weren’t exquisite or perfect, but they had a reassuring, bigboned blondness (her mother), an elegant, slouching, Cary Grantesque authority (dad) that people responded to as though a cerebral complacency-center was stimulated by the mere sight of them.
When Justine thought of her childhood with them, she thought of the shoeboxes of color photos stored in a living room closet in their Deere Parke, Michigan, home. As an adult, Justine used these photographs as a set of icons, talismans against her fear that there had been something unusually nasty about her childhood. She would take the photographs out of their shoeboxes and vinyl albums and arrange them in bouquets that spanned the floor before her as she hunched near the radiator, holding her white-socked feet for warmth as she brooded over these proofs of family happiness and genetic beauty. There they were, eager, rosy, smiling young parents, kneeling to hold their tiny daughter upright between them as she stood on her unsteady legs like a worried poodle, her face quizzical, solemn, and concentrated. At age four, shewas caught in a wild charge across the living room in her white gown, her cheeks pink, her eyes glittering with a flashbulb-induced diamond pupil. She smiled on a swing set. She squatted shyly in a sandbox, squeezing the ruffles of her red swimsuit; she stood with her slender legs in bathing beauty position, one hand on her hip, her face demurely composed as an uncouth neighborhood child holding a garden hose gaped. At nine she dolorously examined the contents of an Easter basket; beyond a piece of cockeyed floor, tilted by her mother’s weird camera angle, her pajamaed father sat on the edge of a couch, holding a green coffee cup with both hands and looking bitterly into space, his glasses on the end of his nose. She stood in the doorway, a princess in gauze and yellow spangles, a delicate rhinestone tiara, and cheap sandals spray-painted gold, holding her Halloween bag and smiling as her mother captured her creation on film.
She could find nothing to link the charming world represented by her little photographs with the squalid, sweaty-pantyhose situation that became her adolescence—even though the pictures taken of her adolescence recorded a smiling, vulgarly pretty, confident young girl surrounded by friends wearing white lipstick and flowered miniskirts, her handsome, bemused parents in the background. Justine hated to look at these pictures, which, in her eyes, had the queasy, urgent, side-tilted quality of a dream that is rapidly becoming a nightmare. Her earliest memories though, weren’t as clear, and she was thus completely seduced by the bright old photos.
When she was five , they lived in Lancelot, Illinois, in a large apartment with two floors. Her father, having just graduated from medical school, was in residence at the hospital there. She pictures him returning home in his white coat, exuding safety, duty, and cheer. He is sitting slouched before the coffee table with little
I lay cuddled in the arms of my softly pajamaed father, waitingfor Mama, who was lazily brushing her hair at the vanity table. The rest of the room with its furniture, curtains, glimmering bottles, and snakes of Mama’s jewelry was a dream of objects that claimed to be familiar but weren’t. Then the light went off, and Mama slid between the sheets, her fragrant body heat lilting from the open space between nightgown and skin, and there was no longer any world outside the bed. When my eyes adjusted to see the gray squares of window and the trees beyond, they were faraway as stars, and the lumbering furniture was ephemeral as the half-dreams that bother you when you’re trying to wake up.
Justine Shade had unusually attractive parents, something she came to hold against them for reasons unknown to her. Even when she was five, she says, she knew that they were socially beautiful, although that concept is foreign to five-year-olds. They weren’t exquisite or perfect, but they had a reassuring, bigboned blondness (her mother), an elegant, slouching, Cary Grantesque authority (dad) that people responded to as though a cerebral complacency-center was stimulated by the mere sight of them.
When Justine thought of her childhood with them, she thought of the shoeboxes of color photos stored in a living room closet in their Deere Parke, Michigan, home. As an adult, Justine used these photographs as a set of icons, talismans against her fear that there had been something unusually nasty about her childhood. She would take the photographs out of their shoeboxes and vinyl albums and arrange them in bouquets that spanned the floor before her as she hunched near the radiator, holding her white-socked feet for warmth as she brooded over these proofs of family happiness and genetic beauty. There they were, eager, rosy, smiling young parents, kneeling to hold their tiny daughter upright between them as she stood on her unsteady legs like a worried poodle, her face quizzical, solemn, and concentrated. At age four, shewas caught in a wild charge across the living room in her white gown, her cheeks pink, her eyes glittering with a flashbulb-induced diamond pupil. She smiled on a swing set. She squatted shyly in a sandbox, squeezing the ruffles of her red swimsuit; she stood with her slender legs in bathing beauty position, one hand on her hip, her face demurely composed as an uncouth neighborhood child holding a garden hose gaped. At nine she dolorously examined the contents of an Easter basket; beyond a piece of cockeyed floor, tilted by her mother’s weird camera angle, her pajamaed father sat on the edge of a couch, holding a green coffee cup with both hands and looking bitterly into space, his glasses on the end of his nose. She stood in the doorway, a princess in gauze and yellow spangles, a delicate rhinestone tiara, and cheap sandals spray-painted gold, holding her Halloween bag and smiling as her mother captured her creation on film.
She could find nothing to link the charming world represented by her little photographs with the squalid, sweaty-pantyhose situation that became her adolescence—even though the pictures taken of her adolescence recorded a smiling, vulgarly pretty, confident young girl surrounded by friends wearing white lipstick and flowered miniskirts, her handsome, bemused parents in the background. Justine hated to look at these pictures, which, in her eyes, had the queasy, urgent, side-tilted quality of a dream that is rapidly becoming a nightmare. Her earliest memories though, weren’t as clear, and she was thus completely seduced by the bright old photos.
When she was five , they lived in Lancelot, Illinois, in a large apartment with two floors. Her father, having just graduated from medical school, was in residence at the hospital there. She pictures him returning home in his white coat, exuding safety, duty, and cheer. He is sitting slouched before the coffee table with little
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