Two Girls Fat and Thin (12 page)

One night almost a month after the fight, I called her house. Mrs. Delgado, who had her daughter’s large liquid brown eyes, answered and told me Nona was skiing. I said, “Tell her that Dotty Footie called. Tell her I’m sorry I fought her.”

The next time I met Nona in the hall, I was shocked to see her look directly at me, her eyes holding an almost unbearable expression of receptivity and humanity. “Hi,” she said, and disappeared into the yelling mass of kids. I felt as if I had been stripped of clothing; her second of kindness pierced me and touched a naked private place so unused to contact that I cringed with shame and discomfort, as if a stranger had put a hand down my pants.

And it didn’t stop there. To my dismay, Nona began calling me at home and inviting me out to play. My mother was delighted; even I could see that here was a chance to make a friend. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go out into the barren squares of neighborhood snow and play with this television-beautiful person in a pink ski cap. I didn’t know how.

But I couldn’t refuse, so out I went. A nature walk, a game of catch, a cup of cocoa in Nona’s pink room checkered with photos
of rock and TV stars. Our activities were burdensome, tense affairs devoid of the girlish giggling and trash talk I had never learned how to do. I wanted to go back in the house and draw pictures of Never-Never Land elves or listen to a musical with my mother. Strangely, unbelievably, I had the feeling that Nona liked me. In her cautious conversation I sensed discomfort, curiosity, a sense of duty that had somehow been irrevocably triggered by my phone call. But I also sensed actual interest and liking waiting for me to show myself.

I wanted to show myself but I could not. I vainly groped for words that would let her see what I was like, things to say that she would understand. Desperately, I called other children “retards,” “niggers,” and “queers,” something she seemed always ready to do. But when I talked this way, her face would become confused and remote, as if she knew these words from me were lies, and she didn’t understand why I was lying.

The awful climax of our attempted friendship came in early spring, as we were crouched stiffly in my backyard near our shelterless wire fence, moving our naked rubber troll dolls around my mother’s tomato plants. Suddenly, across the Sissels’ exposed yard, I saw Barbara Van Bent and her gang. And they saw us. They paused for a second, registering the shock of seeing Nona in my yard with me. Then they began to yell, “Delgado is a spic! Delgado loves the sweathog!” For a second I saw Nona’s body fractionally withdraw from me; I saw she had been wounded by what they said. I saw her stop and pause. I saw her slowly return to me. I felt her stay by me, defying the other girls. On her face was a look of mild puzzlement, as if she couldn’t imagine what she was doing in this situation.

I began turning down Nona’s invitations, and soon they stopped. She kept looking at me and saying “Hi” in the halls, and this made me so uncomfortable that I avoided her the same way I avoided Barb and her friends.

One day just before school was over, something unusual happened. As I was struggling down the pavement on my way home from school, my fingers sweating around my lunch-box handle, I almost bumped into Barb Van Bent, who was hustling along almost faster than I was. It had been so long since I’d seen her alone, I didn’t recognize her. She was completely different without her group. She seemed relieved when she turned and saw it was
only me coming up behind her; her eyes had been uncharacteristically wide with terror. “Hi,” she said.

I was so nonplussed I fell into step with her, and we walked at breakneck speed in sweating silence.

“Did you see Donnelly back there?” she asked. She meant her friend Marsha.

I hadn’t.

“She says she’s gonna beat my butt,” explained Barb. “That Jew bag.”

This was a very interesting idea and an altogether plausible one. Barb was a big girl, but Marsha was bigger, with huge, frozen-hamhock hands and tiny, brainlessly sparkling eyes flanking a giant nose that looked like it could live independent of her face. What was strange was that Barb should tell me about this. Was it a weird form of companionship? Or did she simply have no sense of irony? Did she not care that I saw she was even more cowardly than I?

Bewildered into silence, I listened to her describe Marsha’s hideous body and warped personality. “. . . and she’s got pimples on her butt and holes in her underwear,” she said. “And she’s a bitch. Do you know what she’d do?” Barb paused while a tiny kindergartner came within range and addressed herself to him. “She’d say, ‘Get out of here you nigger lips or I’ll beat your butt.’” The child fled. “That’s what she’s like,” finished Barb.

By the next day she must’ve decided these qualities weren’t so bad, because I saw them in the cafeteria together, giggling over their lunch boxes.

Summer came, and I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. I never went out of the house. I stayed down in the basement rec room all day watching
Dialing for Dollars
and eating Sara Lee cheesecake, bags of potato chips, and diet pop. When that was over I’d watch the gladiator movie and then go upstairs to play with my troll dolls or draw pictures of Tarzan and the Lion Queen. Then I’d sit and talk to my mother while she made dinner, and then we’d eat in the anesthetic wind of three fans trained on the table as we watched Walter Cronkite. My father would walk around, talk. I’d see the kids of the neighborhood wheeling dreamily on their bikes in the lamplight and feel that all was as it should be. They were outside and I was inside. I gained fifteen pounds that summer.

When Justine was ten
she read a poem about French resisters during the Second World War in her children’s classics book. In it, a French hero was crucified to a barn door with bayonets and tormented by SS men before a crowd of weeping French patriots. The poet dwelt voluptuously on the hero’s torment, and the poem climaxed with the death of the smirking SS captain. It excited her even more than the cartoons that had induced her to make Richie tie her to the swing set. She kept the children’s classics under her bed so she could read it at night with a flashlight and masturbate.

They had moved from Lancelot to Action, Illinois. Richie was no longer at her disposal, and she hadn’t yet found anyone to take his place.

Action was a thriving industrial suburb outside of Chicago. Justine’s father was a successful cardiologist at the Action Medical Center, an interesting building that appeared to be made of plywood and concrete. Her father had told her mother that she couldn’t be his receptionist because they already had a receptionist, so her mother did volunteer work at a center for emotionally disturbed children instead. Their house was a large, wandering, one-story with a flamingo worked into the aluminum grille on the front door.

They had moved there during the summer, when the sidewalks
of the new neighborhood were alive with lounging, bicycling, roaming kids. When Justine ventured out onto the pavement, she was accosted by three gum-chewing girls who looked like they were trying to find something wrong with her. But suburban Michigan kids have almost the same laconic, nasal speaking style as the kids of suburban Illinois, and she was immediately accepted into the group.

Justine was drawn to the most sexual of the girls in the neighborhood, Pam Donovan and Edie Bernard, who wore the tightest pants and tightest shirts over their tough little chests. Edie, the blonde, was even sophisticated enough to wear pink powder and black mascara. Although their friends described them as “cute,” they were not pretty. They were skinny and sharp-boned, with sullen, suspicious eyes, thin, violently teased hair, and faces generic to thousands of suburban little girls. But they were made beautiful by the erotic ferocity that suffused their limbs and eyes and lips.

Yet these girls, who harbored such power, were the most passive of the neighborhood gang. The three of them didn’t like to play tag or baseball or even to ride bikes. They liked to sit on the small squares of concrete that were called “porches,” sometimes getting up to walk around the block, getting whistled at and sprayed with light stones by boys. They talked about boys with a nervous mix of fear, disgust, and attraction, about girls with malice or displays of alliance, about their mothers with contempt, and about their bodies with a range of emotions from protective, reverent secrecy to loathing.

There were race riots
in Detroit that summer and there was a lot of talk about that. Darcy Guido stood up to imitate Martin Luther King, tap dancing, rolling her eyes and pulling her lower lip down and sticking her tongue up to make weird wet lips that looked like the genitals of an orangutan. The day the national guard flew over their rooftops in helicopters, they stood in the streets and cheered. Even Pat Braiser’s mother came out on her concrete slab and said, “That’ll teach those animals to be decent!”

Justine sat quietly during the first days of the riot, hearing the distant people called animals and watching the genital-lipped, eye-rolling clowning. Her memory of Gemma rose up and stood
mute, like a sign forbidding her to laugh at Darcy’s joke, even when Pam, her best friend, nudged her and said, “Why don’t you laugh?”

For days there were pictures of the riot on television. At dinner, Justine and her parents would sit at the table, eating and watching the dark figures run around on the screen while flames flickered in the blackened buildings. Her father would speak on the reprehensibility of rioting and violence, smartly wielding his utensils, the very posture of his haunches expressing the rightness of his disapproval. Her mother would agree, adding praise for Martin Luther King. The people on the TV apparently felt the same way; after showing clips of rioting or angry black spokespeople, they would console their viewers with old footage of Dr. King giving his famous dream speech. Justine became tired of seeing him, and of hearing him, and of hearing him praised. She didn’t see what was so great about him.

Then the riots were over and it was time to go to the Wonderland Mall for clothes. Justine loved Wonderland. It was dotted with shrubs and waste containers, there was a fountain with a rusting cube placed in the center of it. Muzak rolled over everything, decorously muffling sound and movement. Huge square portals led into great tiled expanses lined with row upon dizzying row of racks hung with clothes. Signs that said “Junior Miss,” “Cool Teen,” or “Little Miss Go-Go” in fat round letters protruded from the tops of the racks, some of them illustrated by teenaged cartoon girls with incredibly frail bodies, enormous staring eyes, tiny O-shaped mouths and large round heads with long straight swatches of brown or yellow hair.

The dresses on the Cool Teen racks seemed to have been manufactured in a country where no one sat at home waiting for their mother; it seemed that in wearing the hot orange and yellow polka-dotted “hip-hugger” skirt with matching vinyl belt, the paisley jumper with purple pockets, or the high-collared chartreuse dress, Justine would suddenly occupy a place in which her mother didn’t even exist.

She did real shopping, ironically, with her mother, but what she loved best was to go with Mrs. Bernard and Edie and Pam. All the way to Wonderland, she and her friends would lounge all over the back seat giggling about pubic hair or how stupid somebody
was while Mrs. Bernard, a strangely thin woman with a face that looked like it was held in place with tacks, talked to herself in a low, not unattractive mutter. (Edie said her mother had a mustache that she tore off with hot wax, but Justine didn’t believe it.)

Once at the mall, the four of them would comb the grounds like a gang of cats, rifling the racks, plunging into dressing rooms, snacking savagely between shops. Mrs. Bernard would wander ahead, continually bush-whacked by salespeople who thought her mutter was addressed to them, leaving the girls to stare and giggle, and to furtively admire the groups of tough older kids lounging on the public benches, smoking cigarettes and sneering. Sometimes glamorous older boys would follow them saying “I’d like to pet your pussy” and other dirty things; this was exciting, like the poem about the crucified man, only it made her feel queasier as it was real and in public. It was horrible to be in front of people having the same feeling that she had while masturbating and thinking about torture. She was sure that Edie and Pam didn’t have feelings like that; probably they didn’t even masturbate. They blushed and giggled and said “You guys better stop it,” but they swung their purses and arched their backs, their eyes half-closed and their lips set in lewd, malicious smiles. Justine would imitate them, and when she did, sometimes a door would open and she’d step into a world where it was really very chic to walk around in public with wet underpants, giggling while strange boys in leather jackets and pointed shoes called you a slut. The world of Justine alone under the covers with her own smells, her fingers at her wet crotch, was now the world of the mall filled with fat, ugly people walking around eating and staring. It was a huge world without boundaries; the clothes and record and ice cream stores seemed like cardboard houses she could knock down, the waddling mothers and pimple-faced loners like dazed pedestrians she was passing on a motorcycle.

Once, at Sears, she was sullenly picking through the dressing rooms, trying to find a vacant stall, when she flipped back a scratchy yellow curtain and saw a strange person. She was about Justine’s age and weird-looking, Justine thought, ugly, with pale cold skin, a huge exposed forehead, and blue plastic glasses on her face. She was fully dressed and slumped on the floor in a position of
utter passivity and defeat, right against the mirror, staring at herself with the lack of expression that comes from extreme mental pain. Their eyes met for seconds—the stranger’s face faintly reflecting embarrassed humanity—and then Justine backed out. The sight of such mute, frozen pain was stunning and fascinating, like an animal with its legs hacked off. Justine had never seen such a naked expression on her parents’ faces, let alone on the face of a stranger. It made her feel queasiness and fear; it also made her want to poke at the queasiness and fear so she could feel it all the more. To see and feel something so raw in the mall was obscene, much more obscene than the whispering boys. She went to get Edie and Pam.