Two Girls Fat and Thin (40 page)

Mrs. Dubois says her children
don’t give a damn about her,” said Justine to Glenda.

“Ah! That is nonsense. She is probably just depressed.”

“How do you know?”

“Because her daughter has come to pick her up here before and she seems to be a fine young person. She wouldn’t come pick her up if she didn’t care about her.”

Justine didn’t see that that was necessarily true but she didn’t want to argue. Glenda oscillated the radio dial to escape the news for more classical music and was interrupted by a phone call. The dial was caught for a moment on a pop song undercut with the processed mutter of the news broadcast. The song told about love and then the news voice gained ascendancy long enough to mention the latest in a series of incidents in which gangs of young girls surrounded lone women and jabbed them in the butt with needles. So far, the jabbing girls had been black and the jabbed women had been white, and the media was solemnly speculating that the attacks might be racial; one commentator said she thought that perhaps they were making a statement about the spread of AIDS in the black community via hypodermics. The love song swelled forth again, smothering the news with one and only true love. Justine was stung by the sweet, calculated young voice, its high pitch like a tiny knife cutting a valentine heart out of the coarse flesh of love.

Mrs. Dubois emerged from the office, her little hat askew on her head. For the first time Justine saw her composure become undone in embarrassment as she reacted to the sight of Justine’s face, which
was crying spare, almost dry tears as she filled out Mrs. Dubois’s appointment card, talking as if nothing unusual was taking place even as the tears ran over her lips.

Justine was glad
when they let her leave work early because that way she would have more time to work on her Anna Granite piece. But it had probably made a bad impression to cry at work, even though she had done it discreetly, even though Mrs. Dubois had been nice about it.

She bought a bag of cookies in lieu of dinner and ate them as she sat on the floor with her legs extended before her, thinking about the article. She justified going without dinner by telling herself that preparing and eating it would take away too much of her writing time. The eating of meals had somehow become burdensome to her; she was losing weight and becoming anxious about her health, yet she couldn’t make herself eat nutritionally sound food. Well, she’d worry about it later. She wadded up the empty cookie bag and left it on the floor. She put her notebook on her lap, picked up her pen, and began: “The national swing to the right, in progress for the last five years, has developed the skewed, triple exclamation point character of a bad novel.”

The phone rang, and she picked it up. “Hi,” he said. “Feel like getting your ass whipped?”

“I’m busy,” she snapped and hung up.

The phone rang again, four times before she answered it.

“God, what’re you so testy about?” he asked. “At least you could say hello.”

“It didn’t seem necessary.”

“You know my nutty sense of humor.”

“Okay, hello. I’m working on my article and I can’t see you tonight if that’s what you were asking about.”

“I understand. You’re writing really important stuff and you can’t be interrupted.”

“Fuck off.” She hung up again.

The phone rang again. Again she picked it up.

“Is this behavior modification or what?”

“You’re acting like an asshole.”

“So what else is new? Justine, I don’t want to make you mad. I
know you have to do your work. It’ll probably be great. I just wanted to see you. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“I’ve been thinking about you too,” she lied.

“That’s nice.”

“I’d love to see you, it’s just I can’t now. If I get this done tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

They hung up civilly. She continued writing. “This cultural utopia of greed, expressed in gentrification and the slashing of social programs, has had its spokesperson and prophet for the last fifty years, a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are now experiencing. Anna Granite, who coined the term ‘the Truth of Selfishness,’ has been advocating the yuppie raison d’être since the early forties; it is only now that her ideas are being lived out, in mass culture and in government.”

The phone rang again.

“How about if I just come over and whip you and then leave so you can keep working?”

She hung up, cursed, unplugged the phone, and kept writing.

Justine had said that
she would call me when the article was going to appear in the
Vision
, and I believed her. I knew that it often took months for magazines to print articles, so I wasn’t suspicious or impatient when two months passed without my hearing from her. I kept it in the back of my mind like a present to be opened when the time was right. I imagined reading it and then meeting with Justine to discuss it. I would praise her overall insight and then criticize the finer points of her analysis, instructing her in how she might present her arguments better in the future. I imagined her following my finger with her eyes as it traced the place she had gone slightly awry in her article, I imagined her humbly nodding.

But she didn’t call me.

I was leaving work after a grueling twelve-hour shift. It was 10:00
A.M.
, and I was exhausted. Tiny particles of paranormal light swam before my eyes; the day workers, with their bright, tense faces, their jaunty manic walks, swinging purses and dangling belts were an onslaught. I made my way out of the building, bubbles of disorientation popping about my head.

Ordinarily I rode a company car home from work, but at this hour it was faster to take the subway, so I went to the nearest noise-boiling
pit. The train was delayed, or so I deduced from the mangled voice that roared from the speakers above us. The mob on the platform grew in number, everyone bearing down hard on the track of daily habit, staring into the maw of the impending day, pacing in insect circles, pitching their thoughts and feelings into the future or the past, anywhere but the subway.

I spotted a concession stand and thought of little mints and chewy candies. I made my way towards the booth to participate in the mechanical ballet of giving and receiving choreographed by the muttering man behind the counter. As I waited my turn I scanned the magazines and papers, the horrific headlines and happy faces that help give form to our inchoate and vulnerable mass psyche. I looked rather fondly at the
Vision
—yet another headline about the political import of some rock band—and absently turned the front page to stare at the table of contents. “Anna Granite,” it said, “Yuppie Grandmother—by Justine Shade.”

The snottiness of it was like a bracing blow to the face—but I recovered. Probably Justine had nothing to do with the headline, and not everyone used the word “yuppie” pejoratively. I muffed my part in the newsstand ballet by turning to walk away with the paper without paying, and the newsman screamed at me, scowling at my cheerful attempts at explanation. I paid for it and opened it—there it was again! That classic photograph of Granite’s imperial face, so long absent from public pages! My pleasure rose and combined with my exhaustion, and for a moment my brain came undone from its dense gray coils and merrily bobbed in the colorful miasma of irrationality. I started to read, and the subway came bawling into view. I folded the paper under my arm and fought savagely for a seat so I could comfortably read, shamelessly using my size and weight to get my way. People glared, but I didn’t care. I was smiling insanely as I opened the paper. I was puzzled, even in my magnanimous state, by her first sentence and its metaphor of the bad novel. I was still game though and read on; I became even more puzzled. “Yuppies, power breakfasts, the leering, double-crossing bed-hoppers of ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’ stalking their victims in glitzy gowns, a national obsession with exercise and physical perfection, a riot of matching spider-limbed furniture, surreal TV Prayathons . . .” What did this have to do with Anna Granite? She
went on in this irrelevant way until I began to think I was reading the wrong article. Then: “It sounds like a bad novel and it is.” My distended happiness hemorrhaged in inky black spurts as I was lashed in the face with that serpentine phrase “a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are now experiencing.”

“That bitch,” I said, “that goddamn bitch.”

The nyloned thighs to my right shifted away from me.

I read on, my concentration now razor sharp. She went on to describe Granite’s influence and its present day manifestations: the taped lectures, the yearly Philadelphian gatherings, the Definitist courses offered at various small colleges, an expensive three-day workshop held in Honolulu, the Rationalist Reaffirmation School, and the fact that Knight Ludlow, “highly placed city financial analyst” had been her “personal protégé.”

“Her novels,” continued Justine “are like phantom comic-book worlds shadowing, in exaggerated Kabuki-like form, the psychological life and anxieties of our society.”

“Shit!” I muttered. “A comic book! A comic book!” I turned to the young black woman on my right with some vague idea of showing her I wasn’t another subway madwoman. “Have you read this?” I asked.

She glanced at me, more with her face than her eyes, tightly shook her head “no” and returned her attention to her paperback.

“Well if you do, you ought to know it’s crap, one hundred percent. I know the writer and I know the person it’s about. I was interviewed by this . . . writer and it’s a vindictive piece of falsification.” She ignored me. Well to hell with you, I thought. I looked at the people across from me. They were staring resolutely in every direction but mine. I cracked the paper assertively and continued reading.

Justine went on for several paragraphs in that breezy pop
Vision
-speak, invoking television shows, movies, and media jokes about the inner conflicts of American psychology—the “pop icon” of the lone hero versus the “pathological” desire to be part of the crowd, the assumption that the strong individual is somehow inherently in opposition to society. “This confusion extends most painfully into the conflicting American attitude towards money,” pontificated
the bitch. “Does an individual with money have a responsibility to society and does the government have a moral right or obligation to oversee this responsibility? This question is overlaid with an almost pornographic fascination with money and people who have it . . .”

I had to concede it was interesting; if it hadn’t been in the service of trashing Granite, I might’ve enjoyed it. Why, I thought in anguish, did intelligent people always try to undermine Granite, even now? “Anna Granite’s novels not only shadow the back-and-forth, one-or-the-other nature of this struggle, they purport to resolve it.” This was followed by an unfair caricature of Granite’s theories concluding with “she reduced the complex dilemma of the individual in society down to either/or moralistic terms couched in the dramatic devices and gestural glitz of a soap opera.”

“Cunt,” I said.

“Excuse me,” said a female wearing purple contact lenses. “Would you mind watching your language?”

“Mind your own business,” I snarled.

She reared back and clicked her tongue.

“The irony is that, like the wicked liberals in her books, Granite’s rational answers are based on illusions. She stood for rationality, yet her novels shamelessly (and what’s worse, unknowingly) use emotional manipulation, melodrama, jargon, and sexual fantasy to make her points. While claiming to exalt the individual, she plugged into a mass psyche, using archetypal characters devoid of real individuality, with the same vulgar emotional power as the Wicked Witch. . . . Granite’s work is a phenomenon worth looking at as a fun-house mirror for a society that is one part sober puritan and one part capitalist sex fiend. . . . It’s an odd thing to watch a culture start to look like the plot of a bad novel.”

“Goddamn it!” I yelled.

There was a rustling sound around me as the commuters strained their bodies to put a token of space between themselves and the crazy person. I the crazy person! When obviously demented people got paid to write stuff like this! I felt and stopped the approach of tears. From that point I only scanned the piece for particularly telling and offensive passages, of which there were many.

“She succeeded because she was, however clumsily, onto something
much bigger than a first glance at her silly novels would reveal. Her writing was like the broad slashes and gaudy colors of the cheapest comic strip—but it was a comic strip about life and death and everybody knew it.”

I inhaled deeply and looked up to be sure I hadn’t missed my stop. The doors were rattling open, people were moving in and out, wiping their noses, securing their purses, locking their blank stares into place. I was okay. I looked back down and saw “She was repeatedly molested by her father during what sounds like a horrific childhood, and she says Granite’s books were what enabled her to see that life could be other than hideous.”

My anger suspended itself as I experienced the strange sensation of seeing my life rendered publicly. It was on one hand a demeaning experience, like seeing myself as a paper cut-out doll, marched by a huge hand through the toy landscape of somebody else’s opinions and purposes, unable to register my distaste because my words had been cut into dolly balloons and frozen before my mouth. But it was at the same time aggrandizing. It was only a small part of me, but so enlarged, so magnified, on a national scale, that it was like having a gross image of myself inflated into a giant parade balloon, floating above the crowd, my stubby arms helplessly extended, my face crudely painted in some fiendish expression designed for maximum impact. I watched myself, fascinated, entertained, waving and cheering at the balloon with the rest of the crowd.

I had to admit Justine had quoted me more or less fairly. Of course, my words were taken out of context and distorted as is always the case with such articles, but the quotes were fairly accurate, and I didn’t sound like a fool or a maniac, unlike most of the other people she’d skewered on paper. She couldn’t resist putting in snide parentheticals in which she suggested that my opinions were not well-founded, but there was still room for the intelligent reader to make a decision. Gingerly I moved from reaction to myself as public item and into my life again, unscathed, safe, still me.