IN THE MAGAZINE

Illustration by Milano Chow

COLLEGE TOWN - PART 2

By Mary Gaitskill

She lived in a communal house with her younger brother, Daniel, his girlfriend, Lily, and Mark, a twenty-one-year-old philosophy student. Daniel was a drummer in a local band that actually made a living, and Lily was a journalism student. They were supposed to buy food together, but Janet didn’t like what Daniel and Lily bought and nobody liked what Mark ate. They were supposed to split the bills four ways, but somehow bills only got paid after Daniel received a shut-off notice; then it took him months to collect from the others. The kitchen table was always covered with months’ worth of bills, as well as papers scrawled with phone messages, cigarettes, ashtrays, pencils, and fruit, especially blackening bananas pulled apart from their bunch and ranging all through the mess in singular curves.

Janet had never lived like this before. She’d never wanted to. But when Daniel came to visit her in the mental hospital, he said she could move in with him when he found a house, that he would take care of her. His large, petal-shaped eyes were full of concern and puzzlement, and she was seized with a need to be near her brother, even though they did not get along, mostly because his gentle nature made her want to bully him.

Janet liked Lily. Lily was a very pretty, very unpopular girl with a strange light-headed demeanor. She was very thin, and gave the impression that she walked on her toes. She had very black shoulder-length hair, narrow gray eyes, and a thin, severe mouth. She shied away from people, softly and indifferently as a cat. She had grown up in a foster home and had lived on her own since she was seventeen. Except for Janet, she had no friends in Ann Arbor. She actually had enemies; Daniel’s female friends were appalled when he first started to go out with her. Janet was surprised to find herself associating with outcasts at such a late time in life.

On weekends, Daniel and Lily would sit around the kitchen for hours into the morning, cutting slices of rye bread for toast. After toast they’d have tea and soft-boiled eggs, which Lily served in tiny porcelain egg cups with roses on them. Daniel would always finish his breakfast by peeling an orange or a grapefruit until every bit of white rind had been picked off it, and meticulously stripping the membrane off of each section with the very edges of his teeth before eating it.

“You look like a kitten when you do that,” said Lily. “A kitten playing with something.”

“He is a kitten,” said Janet scornfully.

“Wash my dishes, slave,” said Daniel. Since Janet couldn’t stand the idea of work yet, Daniel paid her rent. Because of this he tried to push her around a little. “Slave? The dishes.” He stretched his long neck out and grinned like a donkey.

“Give me some money, goon. I need cigarettes and medicine.”

“I gave you twenty dollars yesterday.”

“I need twenty more at least, fool.”

But she was as touched by his beauty as anyone. He was tall, but girlishly slim and narrow-built, with the sensitive, angular face of a greyhound, a face heightened piercingly by large, transparent eyes and a full, emotional lower lip. When he played the drums, he sat straight and earnest behind the set, his eyebrows furrowed, listening terribly hard to something only he could hear, and hitting with thrilling fierceness that seemed to come from the center of his small chest. Girls loved him, which was why they were outraged to see him with a creep like Lily.

He twisted his pliant neck to one side, shifted his slender hips, and dug into his pocket. He handed Janet ten dollars. She snatched it and stuck it in her pocket.

Mark lumbered into the room and, without turning his head, flickered his flat gray eyes at the three of them. He was a tall boy with wide, heavy hips and long, inept fingers that were so stiff they seemed stuck together. His coarse hair stood up on his head and grew every which way, giving his pale face a shocked expression. He went to the counter and began preparing his breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, toast, and mint jelly.

“Bernie Gahan called me last night,” said Janet. “You know, from high school?”

“I remember,” said Daniel. “He was sort of a geek, wasn’t he?”

“Who’s he?” asked Lily, smearing slabs of butter over her hot toast.

“That guy I saw just before I went into the hospital. That store clerk, the one who fucked me in the ass.”

“I can’t believe some of the things I hear in this house,” said Mark. He violently mixed his eggs around in their frying pan.

“He’s crazy,” said Janet. “The next morning he had a fit when I put my coffee cup on his Village Voice. He said it proved how sick I was.”

“Why did you go out with him?” asked Lily.

Janet shrugged. “I don’t know. He was cool in high school, but now he’s getting fat.”

“He was never cool,” said Daniel.

Lily looked at Janet over her toast, munching solemnly. Janet could tell she wanted to hear more about Bernie Gahan.

“When he dropped me off at home he put his finger on my nose and said, ‘Catch ya later, kid!’ God. I mean, I’m not a kid.”

“It’s too bad for you that you’re not,” said Mark. “The prognosis would be a lot better.” He sat on the edge of a chair with his feet together and quickly began to eat his fried eggs. His long white hands were so flat and stiff that Janet marveled at his dexterity with the fork. In midbite he pushed a full ashtray across the table. “I think it’s the ultimate hypocrisy, Dan, for a vegetarian to smoke.”

“Squeedle-de-bop,” said Daniel. He tipped his head back and blew a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling.

“Don’t give me that. You may be a great drummer but you’re a slob.”

“And you’re a grandmother,” said Janet. “A sexually frustrated grandmother.”

“Just because sex isn’t the be-all and end-all, Janet.”

“If you ever had it, it would be the end-all,” said Lily.

“Why don’t you try to seduce me, Janet? Just try. I’ll hurt your feelings.”

“The only thing you’d hurt is your reputation—wait, do you have one?”

“I could really hurt you, Janet.”

Janet doubted it. It would’ve made her feel better if she thought he could, but she knew he couldn’t. She pushed through the papers and breakfast dishes and found her plastic bag of dried prunes. She picked through the prunes to find a soft one. “I saw your friend again,” she said to Mark.

“Who?”

“The one that’s going bald. The one that walks like a dinosaur.” She found a prune and began eating it.

“Was she mean to you again?” asked Lily.

Janet nodded. “Yes. She was mean to me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mark. “I don’t know why she does that.”

“She’s a bitch,” said Janet. “Maybe she knows Allan and he told her something about me.”

“Do you sit in the Oasis and put on your false nails?” asked Daniel. He tipped his chair back until it stood on its hind legs. His t-shirt slid up and exposed his stomach, which he scratched.

“No. I don’t put them on that early. Why?”

“A waitress might think they were disgusting. I wouldn’t want to sit next to them. The glue stinks.”


The next time she went into the Oasis, she brought a box of Dragon Lady fingernails, and two bottles of red polish. After she got her coffee and rolls, with the usual trouble, she took out the box and laid the flesh-colored spears on the table so Teresa would notice them and wonder what the hell was going on. She got the glue and began working, periodically stopping to hold the claws up to dry.

Teresa didn’t notice, but the guy at the next table did. “I didn’t know anybody wore those things anymore,” he said.

“I do,” trilled Janet in a hideously affected voice. “I’m naked without them.” Lily told her that she sometimes sounded like Blanche DuBois. She held up her taloned hands to her face and leered daintily.

“Oh, Dragon Lady,” he said, “have mercy.”

His friend laughed and scratched his beard.

I am a sexually potent woman, thought Janet. Even if I am partially bald. During one of their last fights, Allan had said, “There’s no love in you because there’s no sex in you. Sex is light and fertility and life and communication! You only have this… pornography and submission and blackness and death! You’re like a faggot!”

“You ass-wipe,” she muttered. She couldn’t help it if fertility didn’t interest her in the abstract. It did interest her in the real. “Do you want to have children?” she asked the man next to her.

“Yeah, one day. Why?”

“Because I like to hear people say they want children. That’s what would make me happy, I think, to have children. My roommate is beautiful and she’s not interested in having children.”

“Your roommate is an idiot, that’s why.”

Sasha thumped against Janet’s table. She was a fat girl, and her fat was like the fur of a Persian cat. Her eyes were arrogantly flat and brown-gold, rimmed with black kohl. She wore a purple skirt with a gold hem and long green stockings with ducks on them. She was one of the Lily-hating group of Daniel’s friends. “How are you, darling?” she said.

“Bothering somebody. How are you?”

“I’m eating. I’m going from house to house eating my brains out. Now I’m here to get some home fries off the cook. It’s the first day I’ve eaten in two weeks and I’m going to make the most of it.”

“Where’s George?”

“I don’t know, getting chemotherapy.” She sneered in an affected way that Janet found nonetheless exciting. “I don’t know where the hell he is and I’m tired of people asking me. That’s all I hear everywhere I go; is she the one who’s having an affair with George Hammond? Are they still together? Are there any home fries, Eddie baby? With catsup and mayonnaise? Come sit by me and let me play with the hair on your chest. Only don’t talk to me about George Hammond. I don’t have any place to live. I lost my job at the art school and I couldn’t pay my rent. I’d come stay with you except for your creepy roommate.”

“Lily’s not so creepy. You’d like her if you actually knew her.”

“Is it true she bangs her head on the wall?”

“She might.”

“Do you know what she said to me the last time I saw her? She was talking to John Francis about how, when she was fourteen, she used to want plastic surgery to change her lips and her eyebrows and she turned to me and said, ‘If you could get plastic surgery, what would you have done?’ Jesus Christ!”

“She didn’t mean you should get plastic surgery.”

“What are you doing to your nails?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, here’s my home fries, thanks honey. Open your shirt. See you, Janet. My life’s in a shambles.”

Janet drank her coffee with even more sobriety. Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny too, and that was what had proved too much for Janet.

Sasha was sitting at the counter now, fondling the thin blond cook through his faded shirt, and skillfully nipping up mayonnaise- and catsup-drenched fries, three fries at a time with her pinkie extended. She was yelling about George Hammond. What would happen to Sasha? She almost had a degree in Russian, specializing in literature, and then she dropped out. Since then she had been mulling around Ann Arbor in garish skirts and boots, sitting in bars and cafés gossiping all day.

Janet was almost the same way, except that the degree she almost had was in History, and that she just sat in bars and cafes, rather than gossiping in them.

Teresa coursed by like a shark, her low forehead predominant as a snout. Janet felt impotent detestation. Teresa saw the false fingernails, now standing out from Janet’s hands like evil thoughts. Janet stared at her nails, like a sea blob heaved up on a hot beach, dimly realizing that its soft, flat flippers won’t help it walk back into the water. Teresa sneered and began scribbling in her little gray pad. She ripped off Janet’s check and threw it at her, mumbling something about needing more table space.


TO BE CONTINUED
COLLEGE TOWN | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

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Comments

	Jere Dangerous, on Aug 15, 2008 wrote: This was a good story, very realistic in my opinion. This kind of people are everywhere, actually this could be about my ex-girlfriends roommate.