IN THE MAGAZINE

Illustration by Milano Chow

COLLEGE TOWN - PART 3

By Mary Gaitskill

Was strength the ability to make someone leave a restaurant, mostly because they couldn’t bear to be in your presence anymore? Was it being big and loud and going to a bar with other big loud people and making more noise than anyone else there? Insulting someone? People insulted Lily often and though she pretended not to be affected, Janet knew she was hurt by it. But she couldn’t stop them from doing it. Did that mean she was weak? On the other hand, Janet sometimes pushed Daniel around and all he did was say, “Janet!” But he was a successful musician and she was a flop.

She sweated wonderfully as she ran around the gym. Every day there were lots of other people sweating around the track with her, in headbands and sweatsuits. They were all trying to be strong. The day before, in the checkout line at Kresge’s, Janet had overheard a girl with pounds of wavy blond hair and bulging calf muscles say to her friend, “And I’m getting up every day and running!” like it was best thing ever.

Anyone would do anything to be stronger. In the gym next to the track, college students took karate classes. Little teenaged girls padded out of the dressing rooms in their white karate uniforms, some of them wearing small gold chains and nail polish. She could hear the instructor yelling at them. “Everyone wants to have control!” he shouted. “And to have control you have to fight for it, work for it!”

Lily and Daniel were obsessed with working. Whenever you asked Lily how she was, she would either say that she was good, she’d been very productive, or that she was awful, she’d been so unproductive. All night they would sit at the kitchen table eating toast and working on their projects. Lily had her work for school and her articles for local papers and magazines, and Daniel had his music to write. Lily worked with her long legs drawn up under her and her shoulders in a curl; Daniel sat on his tailbone, his legs spread and his cotton shirt open, his head hanging from his neck like a heavy flower.

After she ran, she stopped by Majik Market to shoplift several eyeliner pencils and a box of peanut brittle. Then she went home to share the candy with Lily. They sat at the kitchen table and ate big slabs of it out of the open box.

“People have told me that my sexuality is death-oriented,” said Janet, crunching her mouthful of candy.

“People have nutty ideas about sex,” said Lily. “How long have you been having sex?”

“Twelve years.”

“If your sexuality was death-oriented, you’d be dead by now.” She was picking through the candy; it looked funny to see her serious face bent over it.

“Well, they didn’t mean literal death. They meant death in the abstract.”

“There’s no such thing as death in the abstract. You’re dead or you’re not.” Lily’s hand dove into the box and emerged with a nut-encrusted chunk. “You can’t have a facsimile of death.” She leaned back in her chair like Daniel and popped the candy into her mouth. She sucked on it, her face slowly becoming tranquil.

“How do you know that if you don’t know what death is like?” Janet ran her tongue over her molars and found them coated with gnawed candy.

Janet often wanted to die, even though she didn’t know what it was like either. Allan used to tell her about the recurring nightmares he had, in which his father humiliated him sexually. He said it was the same thing as dreaming about death. Janet thought that if to be humiliated was to be dead, she would be decomposed beyond recognition. But she was crazily alive, stuffed with blood and muscles, going to the bathroom regularly, having conversations.

If she were dead, her blood wouldn’t suffer the pain of struggling to sing while life’s constant attack made it hurt to move in her veins at all. Why couldn’t people be nice? Why did you go into a restaurant and get attacked by a bitch who hated you for no reason? Why did Allan’s friends, when they saw her, look at her with that vague leer and the concern they thought they should have for a disturbed older woman, the expression that felt like a razor across her face? Allan’s friends were young and loud, their bodies hideously forceful in the occupation of space. Even though he was in art school, most of them were law students, always apparently happy and grabbing. Just the sight of them, with their rough, healthy skin and big legs and heavy, porous head hair, made her feel horrible, especially when one of them cornered her and tried to be nice. Sometimes she encouraged it, and she was always sorry later.

She remembered a time she met one of them at a student party. She and Allan had broken up a few days before. She was fairly drunk and slumped on a couch with a few kids whom she could not remember except as a mass of t-shirts and long hair. She was staring at a group of people stomping their way through a dance in the middle of the room. Harvey approached her and shouted through the music that he wanted to walk her home. She chattered to him all the way to her apartment, some grim inner monitor manipulating her shrill babble to impress him with her normality, her happiness. She told him about her projects, her courses at school. He made his voice go gentle, he touched her elbow, put a hand on her shoulder. They sat on her front-porch steps, watching ants run in and out of their grainy little nest in the crack of the second step. He was very careful with the way he talked to her; he wanted to show that he respected her. He talked about books and art. He asked her, “But seriously, what is your favorite Faulkner novel?”

Allan had said, “I don’t like people who feel sorry for themselves. In the past I have had the patience of Job with weak and neurotic women. But not anymore.”

But he was neurotic, he was weak. Once when they were arguing she said, “And everyone in the art department hates you,” even though she had no idea if that were true.

They were sitting on her front porch in the dark of night; she could not see his reaction, but she could feel it: He withdrew into himself and almost began to quiver with emotion. For a moment, she thought he would cry. She said, “Not all of them. Just a few.” And he said, “Who? Who are they?”

And still he held her and said, “I want you to be a strong woman. I know you can be. I want you to be productive.” He held her and she talked about her adulterous, alcoholic father as if he were a character on TV. “He ruined my mother financially and mentally. I don’t even know where he is now. Somewhere in South America trying to set up a tropical fish business and fucking some fat eighteen-year-old who’s in the Peace Corps. He’s been through five failed businesses in the last eight years. He ruins everything he touches. Everybody said my mother was crazy when she went after him with the scissors. But I didn’t think so.”

Her mother was putting her life back together, even though she was murderously unhappy. Right after Janet got out of the hospital, her mother invited her over for sandwiches cut up into four pieces. Her mother sat on the very edge of the couch and Janet sat on the edge of a chair with the sandwiches on a table between them. Her mother gripped her cream cheese and olive nut morsel like she had tweezers for hands. “The problem is that I just never asked, ‘What about me?’” she said furiously. “And now it’s time for me. Me!”

Janet had pitied her terribly.

But her mother was tough in her way. She ran her travel business and went to a yoga club and was even having an affair. She was strong, even if her face looked as if it were a mask held in place with staples.

Janet lay in the dark of her room and said, “And now it’s time for me! Me!” She said it as vehemently as she could, but she knew she had nothing but the dozens of eyebrow pencils and nail polish and face cream she’d stolen and piled up on her dresser.


Lily and Daniel were having a fight. Janet looked on with interest, although there wasn’t much to watch. They were only eating breakfast, but they were doing it furiously. “You don’t have to pretend that anything’s normal,” said Lily.

“I’m not.” Daniel held up his slice of rye bread and spread it with apple butter evenly and meticulously. Lily was angry at Daniel for not telling off his friends who were mean to her. Maybe they would break up and then Lily and Janet could spend more time at the bar talking about how awful men were.

Lily got up in the middle of eating her soft-boiled egg and began sweeping the floor like a robot. “This place is fucking filthy,” she said.

It was. Lily had already swept up a huge pile of dirt and dust and papers and food, and she hadn’t even come close to finishing.

“You don’t have to act like we’re living in a nuthouse,” said Daniel.

“We are.” Lily threw the broom on the floor and went back to her egg, which sat in its rose cup. “It’s not surprising that your friends treat me like shit when it’s obvious you don’t have any respect for me. You let them do it. If I had friends who called me up and invited me to parties and wouldn’t invite you, I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t treat you like that.”

“You could’ve gone.”

“I wasn’t invited. You and Janet were. She’s always nasty to me anyway. You saw how she was last week.”

Daniel put down his bread, picked up the knife and began re-smoothing the apple butter. “I saw how you were too. You didn’t extend yourself at all.”

“Whenever I say anything she ignores me or pretends to misunderstand. I’m tired of your dumb friends anyway, especially that dumb bitch Sasha. I’m tired of hearing these middle-class bitches who’ve never worked in their life, whose parents pay their rent and buy them college degrees, sit around and talk about how depressed they are. I don’t have any parents and I don’t have any friends and I’ve had to work for everything I ever got, which hasn’t been much.”

She was yelling now. Daniel’s eyes had become very soft.

What a mess I live in, thought Janet. Isn’t it interesting, even though she could be talking about me.

Mark walked into the room with his hair on end and his shoulders knit together, his eyes flickering at Lily. “Oh God,” spat Lily. She grabbed her egg cup, tossed the egg in the garbage, and left the room.

“It’s so horrible living with two people who are involved in a relationship,” hissed Mark at Janet. “Especially when one of them is mentally ill.” He raised his voice. “Who threw the broom on the floor?”


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.