The Books: “Two Girls Fat and Thin” (Mary Gaitskill)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Two Girls Fat and Thin – by Mary Gaitskill. This is her first novel. I first read it, I recall, in 1992 … in the early days of my time in Chicago. I’ve written about that time, that vivid almost jagged time … and I had loved Gaitskill’s first collection – but for some reason Two Girls Fat and Thin was not what I needed at that moment. It’s not that I couldn’t get into the writing – I can always get into the writing. There was a cruelty and a brutality in the book which is, after all, not surprising, considering the rest of her work – but I don’t think I was in the mood for it then. I remember one scene in particular where I winced my way through it. I had to force myself to finish the book. I was in the process of trying to “get healthy” myself – after a couple of years of depression – and maybe there was something in Two Girls Fat and Thin that seemed to threaten to pull me back under. That’s the sensation I recall anyway. Like: hmmm. I need to stay away from this right now.

It’s the story of two girls, one fat and one thin. (Duh) Here’s what I remember: the fat one is a fanatical follower of an Ayn Rand-like writer named Anna Granite. Anna Granite’s philosophy is defined as Definitism – and if I’m remembering correctly – there’s something in the stark unblinkered philosophy that pierces through the fat girl’s pain and misery and outsider status … and then the other girl, the thin girl, is a journalist. With a penchant for masochism in her personal life. She is doing a story on Definitism – and encounters the fat girl (I can’t remember her name). She wants to interview some Granite followers. So the lives of these two girls become intertwined … do they become friends? I seriously can’t remember. They have two totally separate journeys. The fat girl’s part of the story is told in first person. Thin girl’s is third person.

I should read it again – this is all I really remember. What I mostly remember when I think of this book is my first apartment, on Melrose, a block from Lake Michigan … my cat Sammy … the mattress on the floor … no possessions … temping in downtown Loop offices … meeting crazy improv boys and having adventures … feeling a giddy and dangerous sense of freedom. Anything could happen at any time. To me, it’s the larger context of the book – and it might be a completely inappropriate connection – I’m not sure – but my life is linked to the book somehow. That happens sometimes!

Here’s an excerpt. You’ll see pretty early on the unforgiving tone, the unemotional quality of it. I’ve said it before – that I think the short story is Gaitskill’s true milieu. I’m not sure what it is – and I’ve had interesting conversations with those (Jon!) who think otherwise. I’m not convinced I’m RIGHT – this is probably a taste issue more than anything else. To me, it seems that Gaitskill is best in small doses. Like cayenne pepper or something.

EXCERPT FROM Two Girls Fat and Thin – by Mary Gaitskill.

When Jutine was seven, she ordered the Catholic boy who lived down the street to tie her to his swing set and pretend to brand her, as she had seen Brutus do to Olive Oyl on TV. Sometimes she made him chase her around the yard with a slender branch, whipping her legs.

His name was Richie, and she remembers he was Catholic because his mother, faceless in memory, told her that if she lied there’d be a sin on her soul and she’d have to go to hell.

“Mrs. Slutsky is a good woman, but she is ignorant,” said Justine’s mother. “You must be kind and respectful to her, but don’t listen to anything she says.”

But Justine liked listening to Mrs. Slutsky talk about hell and encouraged her to do so every Saturday morning when she went to play with Richie. The Slutsky’s apartment was close and ramshackle. Once Justine put her finger on the wall and dirt came off it; she felt like she was in a story about poor people. She loved the picture of the beautiful doe-eyed Jesus with a dimly flaming purple heart wrapped in thorns adorning the middle of his chest which hung in Mrs. Slutsky’s bedroom. She loved the ornately written prayer to the saints in the den. She loved to stand in the kitchen, which smelled of old tea bags and carrot peels, and question Mrs. Slutsky about hell.

“What if you do something bad but you believe in God? What if you believe in God but you’re always doing really bad things? What if you do something bad but you’re sorry?”

Mrs. Slutsky would explain everything as she did the dishes or ironed or smoked, expansively delineating the various levels of hell and purgatory. Sometimes Justine and Richie would sit at the kitchen table and draw pictures of a smoking red hell with the victim’s snarled-up arms writhing skyward. Justine liked to draw angels floating at the top of the page, looking down in sorrow and raining pink tears of pity into hell.

She and Richie spent hours watching Saturday morning cartoons on the Slutsky’s sagging, loamy-smelling green couch. She wanted to be tied up and whipped after watching cartoon characters being beaten and tortured by other characters for the viewer’s amusement. She watched the animated violence with queasy fascination, feeling frightened and exposed. It was the same feeling she had had when Dr. Norris touched her, and she felt a bond with docile, daydreaming Richie, simply because he was near her while she was having this feeling.

When she began making him tie her up, she couldn’t tell if he wanted to do it or if he were passively following her lead. She recalls his face as furtive and vaguely ashamed, as though he were picking her nose in public.

One day she saw a cartoon about hell. In it, a wily dog with paw pads like flower petals plotted against a kitten he was jealous of. He locked the kitty out of the house in a snowstorm, then settled down to rest before the fireplace. He fell asleep before the fire and suddenly, through a series of hallucinatory sequences, he went to hell. Hell was very hot and populated by demon ice cream vendors who sold blazing Popsicles on which the desperate dog burned himself while seeking relief; it was overseen by pitchfork-wielding devils who chased the hound, breathing fire and stabbing his bottom. He was tormented, howling and weeping, from one end of hell to the other until a coal leapt out from the fireplace and awakened him from the nightmare. He raced to rescue the kitten, but the happy ending did not mitigate Justine’s dismay at seeing an eternity of torture and punishment presented as an amazing possibility. She sat with the now familiar sensation of ciolation coursing through her body as if it could split her apart.

She was at home when she saw this, and she ran to her mother crying.

“And they stuck him with pitchforks,” she wept. “He tried to buy a POpsicle and it burned him and they laughed.”

“That is very bad. They shouldn’t put things like that on television.”

Her mother consoled her with statements that cruelty and violence are wrong, and then helped her to write a letter to the TV station on the widely lined manila paper she used in school, in which she told them how much the cartoon upset her.

It had upset her, but she thought of it again and again. At night she would lie in bed and imagine being tormented forever because you had envious thoughts or were angry at someone. She didn’t have the vocabulary to express, even to herself, the feeling these images evoked in her; it was too overpowering for her even to see clearly waht it was. It seemed to occupy the place that all her daily activities and expressions came from, the same place Dr. Norris had touched. It felt like the foundation that all the other events of her life played upon.

Of course, she didn’t think of it like this until much later, when she could only look at the ancient, entrenched feeling as an animal looks at a trap on its leg. At the time she soothed the demanding feeling by tying herself to her bedpost, gagging herself, and forcing morose but compliant Richie to beat her, or to pretend to.

Some time after she wrote the letter to the station, she received a reply from them apologizing for the cartoon and thanking her for writing. Her mother read it aloud to her when it came and then again at the dinner table.

“This is very good,” said her father. “It is a civics lesson. She can see how she can affect her environment, make her views known. Isn’t that right, Sugar?”

Justine nodded even though to her the letter was a surprising but irrelevant development that had nothing to do with affecting her environment.