Two Girls Fat and Thin (21 page)

Then there were the hellish fantasies. All day, all night, they battered her until her body was alternately in an agony of sensitivity and completely numb. He lay on top of her in an enormous double bed, cossetted with chiffon and silk, his eyes waxy with desire. Their richly appointed boudoir exploded with flowers; lace curtains flailed the air as the thunderstorm raged outside. Everything in the room became monstrously enlarged and pulsated as the huge event transpired on the bed. He would hurt her but only because he loved her.

However, although her father, who did not like Rick, had intoned that boys that age go out with girls her age to “get one thing only,” she felt that she was more interested in that thing than he was. She began to drop hints. “I don’t know why people think rape is so bad,” she remarked. “I’d like to be raped.”

“No you wouldn’t,” he snapped. “You wouldn’t like it at all. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head—angrily, it seemed to her. She felt demeaned and hurt. He obviously wasn’t attracted to her, she thought.

It was a sticky summer day, just weeks after school ended, that her parents made a social call, and Justine called Rick, invited him
to come over, rather bluntly explaining that her parents were gone. There was a moment of silence, and then he said he’d come.

He arrived wearing dark glasses. His whole body had a defensive yet tenacious look, like that of an animal creeping into a bush with a hunk of food in its mouth.

She invited him into the house, but he said no, he wanted to go into the rec room behind the garage. She reached for his hand and, looking the other way, he let her take it, locking a finger around two of hers.

The rec room was a damp space extending off the garage. It was carpeted with unconnected pieces of thin beige nylon and crammed with cheap hideous furniture which had been left by the people who’d lived there before and which was now covered by dust and cobwebs. On the walls were knickknack shelves and a huge plastic salmon. There was a radio the size and shape of a bread box. Rick turned it on and up very loudly, not bothering to adjust the dial, which was caught between two wavering, incoherent stations. They hit the floor almost immediately, he suffocating her with his weight, his shoulder scraping her face. She made what she hoped were attractive moaning noises as he worked her pants down with one hand, swiping at her mouth with his lips. She barely recognized his body. It seemed to be boiling with conflicting impulses contained by ironlike swaths of muscle. A feeling of alarm and disappointment rose in her, and she fiercely jammed it down. He grappled with his pants, raising his pelvis so that his chest mashed hers. A gasp interrupted her careful moans. He reached away from her and turned the radio up even louder, inadvertently adjusting the dial so that a hoe-down cavorted oafishly through the room. She felt him between her legs and in a burst of reflexive panic tried to close them. He pushed them open, gripped her shoulders and, as he had in her fantasy, hurt her, with a great deal of vigor.

“Hurry and put your pants on,” he said, easing back from her onto his knees. “You’re bleeding.” It was true; she sat up stiffly and saw bright red smears on her inner thighs. He was tucking himself away into his pants with a certain tender efficiency, straightening his shirt, standing up. She stayed on the floor and squirmed into her panties with a rocking hip-to-hip movement. She didn’t want
to extend her curled-up body to get her blue-flowered pants out of their broken twist and put them on but she did. She finally stood. Her underpants were a fetid swamp. There was a rug burn on her lower spine. He stared at her from under his dark glasses. His jaw and lips were stiff and stony as if he were angry about something he couldn’t do anything about.

“Okay kid?” he said. His voice sounded like it always did.

She nodded yes.

“Good.” He put an arm around her shoulders. This gesture pierced her, and she huddled against him, nuzzling his chest with her nose and thinking at last they could enter their special make-out world. But instead of that remote condescending tenderness she knew and relied on, she felt him squarely there with her, every organ, synapse, and pustule in full operation, the whole hot engine of his body receiving her with utter indifference.

“Come on,” he said. “I have to go.” He kissed her on the nose and walked out, bearing her with him. When they got outside he let go of her shoulder and walked down the gravel driveway slightly ahead of her, as if he were going to get a beer or something. He turned towards her. “Bye,” he said.

She went into the house and into her room. She pulled her pants down and looked at the blood and sperm. Some of it had dried, but the center of her underwear was still slimy and rank. She stared at it a minute and then pulled her pants back on and sat on the bed, feeling the sticky gunk squish against her genitals and thighs. She thought of her little hairs mashed up in it.

The main problem was, she’d told Watley about her planned seduction of Rick. She could lie about what really happened, but at the moment she didn’t feel up to it. Instead she listened to album after album of soft music about love that lasted forever as she lay in bed under a blanket, feeling the bleak air-conditioned air all around her.

Eventually she called Watley and told her story, working an element of truth into it so Watley wouldn’t be puzzled to hear it was all over between her and Rick. “He probably was afraid of his own feelings, which he projected onto you,” said Watley. “He was probably intimidated by your intensity.”

Weeks after the event, she told Dr. Venus, not because she
needed to tell someone but in response to a series of questions, the first being, “Did you take the miniskirt because you were trying to attract boys?”

The late afternoon light was pouring in like a visitor from space, which after all it was. She absorbed the burgundy atmosphere of plant fronds and crystal paperweights. In the waiting room she had been listening to “Hey Jude” on the intercom, and she felt wrapped in its residue. She looked at the pictures of dreamy long-haired girls on the walls and thought with mild astonishment, “This is what a therapist is for.”

So she told him about Rick. He nodded, his heavily lidded eyes widening only in their innermost muscles, which he had not learned to control. “And that has been your only experience?” he asked cordially.

It sounded to her as if she’d disappointed him, that he’d been expecting juicier stuff; what if everybody who came in here had better stories than she? A little cautiously, she talked about her Action adventures, checking his face for reactions all the while, seeing empathy and encouragement in his nods, leg-crossings, and head-tiltings. As she talked she felt as if she were talking about someone else—someone who was complex and interesting, a femme fatale, yet a sad sensitive femme fatale who’d seen and done too much too soon, like one of those teenagers in decadent-society TV specials who drank or something. She recounted everything as matter-of-factly as she could, even the things that had shocked and upset her, like the afternoon with Rose Loris.

Here she noticed a discernible change in Dr. Venus. His whole body seemed to constrict even before Rose had all her clothes off.

“Do you think this is weird?” she asked. She’d noticed an uncharacteristic twitching in his jaw, and it gave her pause.

He shrugged jerkily. “My job isn’t to judge,” he said.

At the end of the session she felt like a character in a rock song. Even the thing with Rick didn’t seem so bad; it seemed very cool to have lost her virginity on the floor of a garage, cooler in its own way than her florid fantasy. Now that was out of the way and she could have one desperate-youth-of-today experience after the next until she met Him, the one who would look past her tough exterior to her tenderness and pain and then—

“Justine, could you tell your mother to come in and speak with me for a few minutes alone? You can just relax and enjoy a magazine. We won’t be long.”

This was the first time Dr. Venus had made this request, but she didn’t think anything of it. She sat in the waiting room listening to the Rolling Stones and thinking about sex for at least ten minutes before the potentially disastrous implications of this unusual move sank in. She remembered the promise Dr. Venus had made early on not to repeat the things she told him to her parents. She was reassured for a moment and then wondered what else he would have to discuss with her mother for ten minutes; she remembered the tic in his jaw. She made eye contact with the young Nehru-collared secretary behind her lavender, triangle-shaped desk. “Sandy,” she said as she stood, nonchalantly replacing a magazine. “Could you tell my mother when she comes out that I went to the Burger Boy? I’m really hungry.”

Sandy said “Sure,” and Justine walked out of the building and down the block until she was out of Sandy’s sight. Then Justine, who never ran, not even in gym class, pumped her elbows and shaved knees and flew until sweat ran down her back.

A block and a half later she gave up, suddenly embarrassed, and out of breath. She continued to walk away from Dr. Venus’s complex, panting, her heart leaping in her chest, her right foot sliding out of her battered sandal. She was on a sidewalk separated from a four-lane freeway by a thin strip of bright sod, and the rush-hour traffic droned by as she walked against it, its familiar sounds of motion highlighting her aimlessness. She saw the Hudson Mall a few blocks away and walked towards it thinking she’d call Watley.

But Watley wasn’t home. She hung up without leaving a message and walked among the counters laden with jewelry and perfume, soothed by the gleam of chromium and the caress of Muzak. She tried to think of what to do. She imagined herself hanging around the mall with her chest out, making eye contact with middle-aged men. Perhaps one would eventually offer to buy her a drink, and they would drive to a motel together. She found a middle-aged man and fixed her gaze on him experimentally. He smiled back uncertainly. Emboldened, she tried another one, a big
one with eye-wrinkles and a nose like a snout. His cold eyes zipped up and down the length of her body; his smile was both rapacious and dismissive. She decided she’d go try on some clothes instead.

She returned to the doctor’s office imagining the trouble and punishment waiting for her there. Dr. Venus and her mother gravely discussing her incipient emotional illness, the recommendations of intensive therapy, of tranquilizers, maybe of institutionalization! She felt almost tearful as she imagined Dr. Venus advising her mother of her daughter’s complex emotional difficulties and needs. How would her mother react? With anger at first, probably a few tears, and then? Justine steeled herself as she walked the last half block feeling frightened, revealed, yet resolute. She opened the door to the office and there sat Dr. Venus and her mother, her thighs tensely crossed, the sharp toe of one fashionable shoe jabbing the air. Dr. Venus rose as she entered, his face consternated, his eyes moving rapidly from Justine to her mother.

“Justine, this is the height of rudeness,” said her mother. “Where have you been? I only hope the roast isn’t ruined.”

Dr. Venus’s eyes continued to move to and fro. He lifted his hand in the beginning of a gesture and gave up. “Well then,” he said.

In the car they were silent as her mother furiously negotiated the rush-hour traffic, twice hitting the brake so abruptly that she and Justine jerked then stiffly bobbed in their seats. Her mother seemed angry but not necessarily at Justine; she did not seem shocked or worried. Justine waited, her anxious fantasies crowding round, her memory of the middle-aged man with the cold eyes gliding among them. He had been sexy in a way, she thought with a pang of regret.

“What did Dr. Venus want to talk to you about?” she asked.

Her mother tossed a lock of hair from her forehead. “He was just giving me a summary of your progress to date. Most of what he said was encouraging, but your rudeness does not speak well for his treatment.”

“He’s a shrink, not an animal trainer,” muttered Justine.

Her mother gripped the wheel more tightly and didn’t answer.

Perhaps Dr. Venus hadn’t repeated what she’d told him. Or perhaps he’d repeated it glowingly, seeing in her confession evidence that she was normal after all. Slowly, Justine’s images of punishment
and drama decomposed, leaving a bewildering cloud of half-formed feelings in their wake. She sat in the uneasy silence of this cloud, relieved but unnerved.

A few days later, her mother told her they were going to end her sessions with Dr. Venus because it seemed she had recovered. Justine felt angry but, as she had always resented and complained of being forced to see Dr. Venus, she didn’t feel she could protest being forced not to see him. But after telling Dr. Venus those things about herself, she didn’t want to stop seeing him. She didn’t see how he could be sitting there knowing all those things about her and not be seeing her. It was like being on the verge of consummating your love and then being snatched from the arms of your loved one and borne out the door. She began to dream about him. Sometimes he would be standing on the periphery of the action, watching her with a mysterious, caring expression. In other dreams he played a more central role, such as the time he stood watching, fatherly and encouraging, while Justine had sex with Rick on his office couch. She had told him her secrets, and he had understood her—or had he? Perhaps he had been the one to end the sessions because he found her stories repugnant. No, she thought. The look on his face had spoken only of understanding and acceptance.

She wasn’t trusting enough of his understanding and acceptance to call him and see if it was still there. But it haunted her and she ached to experience it again.

She was at Watley’s house, in Watley’s bed with Watley, a pale fluffy comforter pulled up to their chests. They ate from a box of chocolates, some of which had ladies’ faces imprinted on them, and talked about sex. Watley was saying how unfortunate it was that it couldn’t always be like the first time, that possibly it got boring after a while.

“Watley,” said Justine, “I didn’t like the first time very much.”