Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction
Because They Wanted to: Stories
‘Tiny Smiling Daddy’ is the first story in the collection – and it’s killer. I almost didn’t want to finish it. Again, Gaitskill has that effect on me sometimes. I find her unblinking stare a bit hard to take – and I need to gear up, to gear up for her stuff. In this story, an older couple wonder what happened to their daughter Kitty. Kitty was a regular little kid, happy, and life was good. Then she became a lesbian, and all hell broke loose. She began to move away from them – in her lifestyle, her beliefs – she became fascinated with prostitution and the parents were worried that she might have taken up hooking, just to see what it was like. But they could no longer talk to her – because she seemed to have some kind of anger towards them, only neither of them knew why. The story is told from the father’s point of view – and he asks himself at one point, “What exactly had he done?” She was angry because they didn’t want her to be a sex worker? Who could blame them? Where had they gone wrong?? Eventually, she breaks contact with them altogether and years pass. ‘Tiny Smiling Daddy’ opens with the father going to a magazine store, by himself … He had seen his daughter’s face smiling from the cover of some artsy magazine. There is some interview with his long-lost daughter inside. He needs to go and stand, in public, and read the article. Who is she now? What will she say? What is she like?
By breaking it down like this, I’m taking away from the sheer power of the story. I can tell. It’s only 7 or 8 pages long but when I finished it I felt like I had been punched in the gut and had the wind knocked out of me.
The father’s pain and embarrassment and baffled helplessness brings tears to my eyes. He loves his daughter. What happened?
But then – typical Gaitskill – at the very very end – 2nd to last sentence – she jujitsus you with something else, a bit of context not shared before … and it’s truly awful.
You ache for everyone involved.
EXCERPT FROM Because They Wanted to: Stories
He was horribly aware of being in public, so he paid for the thing and took it out to the car. He drove slowly to another spot in the lot, as far away from the drugstore as possible, picked up the magazine and began again. She described the “terrible difficulties” between him and her. She recounted, briefly and with hieroglyphic politeness, the fighting, the running away, the return, the tacit reconciliation.
“There is an emotional distance that we have both accepted and chosen to work around, hoping the occasional contact – love, anger, something -will get through.”
He put the magazine down and looked out the window. It was near dusk; most of the stores in the little mall were closed. There were only two other cars in the parking lot, and a big, slow, frowning woman with two grocery bags was getting ready to drive one away. He was parked before a weedy piece of land at the edge of the lot. In it were rough, picky weeds spread out like big green tarantulas, young yellow dandelions, frail old dandelions, and bunches of tough blue chickweed. Even in his distress he vaguely appreciated the beauty of the blue weeds against the cool white-and-gray sky. For a moment the sound of insects comforted him. Images of Kitty passed through his memory with terrible speed: her nine-year-old forehead bent over her dish of ice cream, her tiny nightgowned form ran up the stairs, her ringed hand crushed her face, the keys on her belt jiggled as she walked her slow blue-jeaned walk away from the house. Gone, all gone.
The aritcle went on to describe how Kitty hung up the phone feeling frustrated and then listed all of the things she could’ve said to him to let him know how hurt she was, paving the way for “real communication”; it was all in ghastly talk-show language. He was unable to put these words together with the Kitty he had last seen lounging around the house. She was twenty-eight now, and she no longer dyed her hair or wore jewels in her nose. Her demeanor was serious, bookish, almost old maidish. Once, he’d overheard her saying to Marsha, “So then this Italian girl gives me the once over and says to Joanne, ‘You ‘ang around with too many Wasp.’ And I said, ‘I’m not a Wasp, I’m white trash.’ ”
“Speak for yourself,” he’d said.
“If the worst occurred and my father was unable to respond to me in kind, I still would have done a good thing. I would have acknowledged my own needs and created the possibility to connect with what therapists call ‘the good parent’ in myself.”
Well, if that was the kind of thing she was going to say to him, he was relieved she hadn’t said it. But if she hadn’t said it to him, why was she saying it to the rest of the country?
He turned on the radio. It sang, “Try to remember, and if you remember, then follow, follow.” He turned it off. The interrupted dream echoed faintly. He closed his eyes. When he was nine or ten, an uncle of his had told him, “Everybody makes his own world. You see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear. You can do it right now. If you blink ten times and then close your eyes real tight, you can see anything you want to see in front of you.” He’d tried it, rather halfheartedly, and hadn’t seen anything but the vague suggestion of a yellowish-white ball moving creepily through the dark. At the time, he’d thought it was perhaps because he hadn’t tried hard enough.
mary gaitskill scares me.
i’ve never read her, but this week that you’ve been featuring her has been frightening for me.
Is this excerpt from the story’s end? I’ve never read it–and, god, it seems harrowing. Love your bro’s comment, too: Halloween, two weeks early, courtesy of M.G. Oh, that unblinking stare of hers. Quite apt–esp. since you still can’t somehow look away from what she’s exposing– with equal parts tenderness and terror. Just that litany of organic matter at the edge of the parking lot alone speaks volumes. And the fact of his sitting in a parking lot under an overcast sky, ashamed of and baffled by and yearning for his daughter–it’s really intense. And also how the entire set-up reminds us of someone looking at pornography on the sly–which of course he isn’t, but associatively still gets invoked not only through his furtiveness in the car with a glossy, but also because Kitty had in fact been a sex worker. Which is how M.G. turns the scene into a parody of perversity, the turn made all the more heartrending given how and what the father’s actually feeling. Which then makes us wonder finally if the entire situation is “perverse” precisely because of how many wildly opposing notions and images M.G. is threading through it. And with lightening speed. Very complex. And dark.
Jon – it’s not the story’s end. There’s about 2 more pages and it gets even more awful until in the second to last line, Gaitskill pulls out the big guns and we are left breathless with the loss and awfulness- the terrible things we do to one another and the long-lasting effects.
Horrifying. So so good, but man. You need to take a nap afterwards.
Your review of “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” is inaccurate and misleading. Kitty writes an article for Self magazine, which I would not call artsy, and the father finds out about from a friend. Both of those details in the story are important, the father values his privacy, then finds out his friend knows before he does that Kitty has written an article in popular magazine. He reads the article in private. The fascination with prostitution is a minute detail, a phase Kitty went through as a teenager. And Kitty and her parents are never cut off. Kitty starts her own life, as most young adults do, but still remains in touch with her parents. Did you even read the story? Was Gaitskill’s unblinking stare too much for you? The plot summary you give is incorrect, but even worse seems to be your interpretation of the story.
“You’re a lesbian? Fine,” he said. “You mean nothing to me. You walk out that door, it doesn’t matter. And if you come back in, I’m going to spit in your face. I don’t care if I’m on my deathbed, I’ll still have the energy to spit in your face.”
Leigh – wow. I must have touched a nerve. Your tone is rude and defensive. “Is her unblinking stare too much for you?” Assume much? It’s my interpretation of the story. I get to do that all on my own. I know. It’s incredible. And so do you! You want to have a discussion? Adjust your tone to something more civil.