Two Girls Fat and Thin (32 page)

Justine had just awakened
in the hellish but reassuringly familiar suburb of Hangover. Her eyeballs hurt, her vision was static, the mucus in the passages of her head had turned to mud. Insects with many slow-moving legs patrolled her skin. The inside of her mouth and her upper digestive tract felt as if she’d spent the last six hours valiantly vomiting to counter an unsuccessful poisoning attempt. Other than that, she had no idea where she was, and worse, what time it might be. She pictured herself fumbling with the EKG machine, explaining to old Mrs. Hoffenbacher that she was a little hung over; she wondered if the comic element of the situation might mitigate her clumsiness, her possible odor. At the sound of a flushing toilet she lifted her concrete head, squinting into the planes of light and shade that filled the room. A human entered wearing nothing but rumpled socks. He sat on the bed she was prostrate on and said, “I don’t know about you, but I have to be at work in forty minutes.” Considering the personal nature of the memories that now unfolded in her skull, memories in which this naked person had a lot of prominence, she felt his words were pretty cold. “Don’t I even get a kiss?” she rasped.

He pinched his wrinkly face together. “No. But I’ll get you coffee if you want. I’m going down to the take-out.”

He slowly picked his clothing off the floor and pieced together his own personal puzzle of how to put it on. She fell into a reverie of the recent events between them. She didn’t think she’d ever committed such pornographic acts before.

He was moving heavily out the door, a bleary and oppressed look on his face. She sat for a moment, her energies divided between trying to figure out if she were upset or not and attempting to support her monstrous head. A hostile clock said “8:30,” and she was struck with fear and shame about failing Glenda and the helpless Mrs. Hoffenbacher.

She was fully dressed by the time he had returned with two cups of hot coffee and a bag of sugars, stirrers, and petroleum milk substitutes. She was waiting for him with uncomfortable questions. He smiled, a bright spark showing deep in the murk of his tired eyes. “Good morning,” he said. “It’s a nice day out.” He sat next to her on the edge of the bed, leaned and kissed her mouth from the side. “I had fun last night,” he said. “You did too.”

With a conspiratorial air they prepared their coffees, resting the full cups precariously on the rumpled bed while, with mouselike movements, they opened the packets of sugar and petroleum byproducts. Her questions dissolved in the warmth of the moment; she loved the familiarity imparted by having coffee together in the morning. They made small talk and jokes. He hailed a cab for her and kissed her as she got into it. She took it to her apartment, asked the cabby to wait, and remembered, as she ran up the hall stairs to change her clothes, that he couldn’t call her, as he’d said he would, because he didn’t have her number. She rode to work feeling rejected and exploited.

Glenda was arranging the medical implements on the counter when Justine burst into the fluorescence of the examining room, heroically pulling on her white coat. “Sleep late?” she asked. “It’s all right, I have everything under control. But could you make us some coffee?” She looked at her watch. “The doctor is late. Are you feeling well, Justine? Your eyes are very dark.”

During the next fifteen minutes of routine, Glenda’s presence, the familiar smells and sights, the reassuring sound of
Adventures in Good Music
—still borne along by the same mournful voice Justine had loathed as a teen!—calmed the disturbed pulse of her body
and stilled her feelings of abandonment and fear. Well, she thought, he was sort of a weirdo anyway, and, as she remembered their conversation at the bar, an unpleasant one. If she was going to be upset, it should be because she’d gone home with an abusive mental case, not because he wasn’t going to call her. She tried to concentrate on how lucky she was not to have to see him again and instead found herself, as she often did, mentally listing all the people she’d screwed since she’d been in Manhattan, and categorizing them in terms of the emotional quality of the experience, good, bad, or neutral. The numbers changed depending on her mood (today, almost everybody had a minus by his name; Eric had three minuses) but even at her most cheerful, there was an abundance of neutrals and bads and, out of twenty-six, only two or three grudging pluses.

No happy person would do this she thought.

Glenda moodily popped her Dexatrim with her coffee and looked at her watch. Two old ladies had come into the waiting area and were sitting with their hands on their purses. One of them, Mrs. Oliphant, walked with a cane. She was fat, and Justine imagined a life made up of the panting, sweating struggle to get from one corner of one city block to the next, your pantyhose gaping between your legs, your ankles leaden in your terrible shoes. For fleeting seconds she saw herself moving around the office like that, only caneless, her bloated legs unable to propel her frantic torso, her elongated noodle arms gesturing impotently. She recalled herself the night before, on her knees with her face pressed into the mattress, Bryan hungrily crouched over her from behind, popping his small penis in and out of her. It was the same numb image of a thousand pornographic pictures, almost consoling in its banality. Show this picture to someone, they know what you mean. His small teeth flashed in his head as he lay on his back and smiled at her. She was telling him a story about an old boyfriend of hers. Ron, a handsome musician with the big-eyed face of a teen fanzine idol, was drinking in a bar in Ypsilanti, Michigan, when he was approached by a middle-aged woman and her visibly anxious sixteen-year-old daughter. After some bewildering small talk the woman asked him to come to their home and deflower her daughter. She explained that the daughter liked him and that she, the
mother, thought that he seemed okay too and wanted to supervise the event to be sure it was safe. The daughter was a frail creature wearing unfashionable glasses. Ron, who as Justine explained, was one of the nicest men she had ever been involved with, knew it was sick but he, as he phrased it, “went along with it anyway” because he felt aroused. “That girl didn’t know what was happening to her,” he said. “She was totally helpless. And I wolfed on her.” As she quoted him she pictured him thrusting crazily at the girl on a stiffly made bed in an oblong room with square windows. The mother was waiting outside in the kitchen, sitting with her legs tightly crossed, perhaps drinking a cup of coffee.

“Did he screw the mother too?” asked Bryan interestedly.

“No. I don’t think so. He left right afterwards.” She imagined Ron fleeing the house as the girl sobbed on her bed, and the mother yelled at her to stop being such a baby. “In a way it was a horrible thing to do,” she said. “It was horrible. But I don’t blame him. It would be such an extreme, how could you not do it?”

“Yeah.”

Miss Stilt, the other old lady in the room, was looking at her quizzically. Justine smiled at her. Miss Stilt was one of her first old ladies. Justine remembered her because of the way she’d stood before the small mirror in the examining room, striking at her mouth with her lipstick as she griped, “I don’t know why I bother. I look like hell anyway.”

“Honestly, it must be an emergency, I am going to find out,” said Glenda, picking up the phone to call the hospital.

Justine thought Dr. Winkgard was probably having an affair, possibly more than one. She thought he loved and respected Glenda but that he believed it was his prerogative to screw other people in much the same way he believed it was his prerogative to keep patients sitting in his waiting room for hours. She remembered her father striding around the house talking about his scrawny broken patients, inert in their beds, totally dependent upon him, this human embodiment of vigor and health, talking as if the world were polarized into those who were weak, ill, and unhappy and those who were not. Justine would imagine him striding among the patients, dispensing wellness and energy; somehow that image became an image of her father roaring through the world in a celebratory
rampage of grabbing and eating and expressing himself at the top of his lungs, saying things like, “She’s only unhappy because she wants to be.”

Dr. Winkgard crashed in through the front door, his eyes radiating fierce outgoing beams, his dark hair ridged against his forehead with the wetness of his morning swim.

Glenda smiled and put down the phone. Justine took Mrs. Oliphant into the examining room and waited outside for her to take off her clothes before she went in to glue and clamp her. She stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, and stood in the hum of the odor-removing fan, looking at herself in the mirror. She scanned her twenty-eight-year-old face for lines and, finding none, concentrated on how huge the pores around her nose had become in the last two years and how ugly it was.

She swam through the day just below the surface of mental alertness, bumping her head on the floating detritus of impressions and thoughts. She woke a little when she went outside to buy the muffins that Glenda and the doctor ate for lunch. Justine bought herself a bag of cookies and walked around the block, eating them out of the bag, absorbing the cacophonous energies of the people around her. A man in rags with one eye gone grabbed at her sleeve as if it were the bow of a lifeboat he was trying to pull himself into. “I’m hungry, mama,” he said, “please give me a dime, a nickel, anything, please.” She gave him a quarter and the rest of the cookies, and he fell back into the sea.

The most interesting moment of the day came in a conversation with the generally taciturn Mrs. Thomas. During the cardiogram, Mrs. Thomas said, “Dr. Winkgard is the best doctor I ever had. Because he’s not only a good doctor, he’s a good man. When I was on the operating table and that other doctor was saying they had to amputate my breast, I could hear Dr. Winkgard fighting for me. He said, ‘Don’t you take away that lady’s breast.’ And they didn’t. They did have to take a piece out of it”—she indicated the spot with her hand—“but they didn’t take the whole thing. And he was right. That was two years ago, and I’ve been okay since.”

Justine wholeheartedly agreed that Dr. Winkgard had done the right thing and left the room with a new respect for her employer. She was bewildered though that while he had been indifferent to
Mrs. Rabinowitz who was beaten by her husband, he had respected Mrs. Thomas’s body and protected her breast. Well, Ron had made her a birthday cake and stayed up all night massaging her head; he had also assisted a demented woman in the rape of her daughter. And she, Justine, had said she didn’t blame him for doing it.

She returned home that evening with a severe headache. Her apartment seemed silent and void. She sat on the foam cushion before her low coffee table and ate a take-out salad from a plastic container. The air between her and the phone was thick and hostile. The bathroom seemed to be at the end of a treacherous tunnel even though it was only a yard or so from where she sat. Her stomach felt too tight even for chewed-up mouthfuls of salad, and she ate uncomfortably, forcing herself because it was good for her. She stared at the clothing she’d thrown on the floor that morning and decided that what had happened the night before hadn’t meant anything, that the blade lodged in her chest had always been there, that this incident had just reminded her of it. She adjusted her posture to accommodate the blade and went out for a walk.

The evening was cool and vague. Justine watched everyone who walked past her, and irksome tiny facts about them entered her orbit and clustered about her head. A young couple approached her, the man with his square pink head raised as if he were looking over a horizon, his hands thrust angrily in his pockets, his slightly turned-out feet hitting the ground with dismal solidity, his cheap jacket open to his cheap shirt. The woman on his arm crouched into him slightly, her artificially curled hair bounced around her prematurely lined face, her red mouth said, “Because it’s dishonest to me and to everybody and even to yourself.” Justine looked headlong into the open maw of their lives; they passed, and the pit closed up again. She looked into the windows of a restaurant and saw in the various wordless postures—a man with his body close in to the table at which he sat, his elbows supporting the intimate lunge of his torso; a woman holding herself in a reserved straight-backed position; a boy displaying himself with an aloof, cross-legged twist to one side as his grinning, socializing head held forth—varying gradations of human relationship that were so strange and unreadable to her, they made her feel like a lost dog. No one accosted or terrorized her.

The next day was a short day at the office; Justine left work at one o’clock. She went to Penn Station and boarded a commuter train to Princeton, New Jersey, to visit Rationalist Reaffirmation High. She had never taken a commuter train to the suburbs before, and the visit seemed like a special outing to her. She brought a bag of cashews, a bag of marzipan, and an apple and was looking forward to eating the treats.

She was startled by the appearance of the train; she expected anything associated with the suburbs to have a gloss of orderliness, cleanliness, and characterlessness, yet the train was a metaphor for decrepitude. Balled up potato chip bags, bottle caps, crumpled cigarette packages, and cans rolled on the floor or collected in corners under a gray gauze of dust. Foam poked out of the vinyl seat coverings. The cracked and taped-over windows had strange rattling collections of tiny paper wads, food crumbs, and unidentifiable granules in their loose-fitting casements. A businessman seated across from her put his briefcase down, pressed the recline button on his chair, leaned trustingly back, and fell into the lap of the man seated behind him.

Justine was more careful with her recline button, but there was nothing to worry about as it didn’t work. How, she wondered, could suburban people tolerate such a level of disrepair? She was disconcerted to find herself thinking that perhaps, since she’d been in New York, the entire country had deteriorated as seriously as Manhattan had, that everywhere people were wading ankle-deep in rolling, rotting trash, that everywhere homeless people pissed in the streets and railed at the well-to-do who slunk shame-faced along the walls. This of course was exactly what Anna Granite had said would happen, due to weak-willed liberals and governmental meddling. For a moment she looked at the possibility of total collapse as if she were a Definitist and found the idea to be somehow dramatically and ethically satisfying.