Don't Cry Stories Part 1

Don't Cry Stories.

Mary Gaitskill.

College Town, 1980.

Dolores did not look good in a scarf. Her face was fleshy, her nose had a bulby tip, and her forehead was low. Her skin was coa.r.s.e and heavy for a woman under thirty, and the tension in her face was such that a quick glance gave the impression that she was grinding her teeth, although she was not. She was attractive anyway because of her expressive, thick-lashed eyes and full mouth. When her hair was worn long, it was thick enough to draw attention from the fles.h.i.+ness of her face, so that her eyes and mouth were more striking. Thus, it was not a good idea to pull her hair back with a scarf.

Dolores knew this. She hated wearing the scarf, but she'd recently pulled huge chunks of her hair out, and her head looked so weird that a scarf was necessary. It was the second episode of its kind in her life, and yet, now as then, she couldn't remember why it had ever been satisfying to pull her hair out, or even how it had felt, although you'd think it would have hurt. As if to remind herself, she'd actually kept the removed hair in a little box, until the sight of it sickened her one day. When she was in public, she was sometimes torn between the fear that the scarf had slipped and part of her head was showing and the urge to take it off and see what people did. Although, of course, she knew they'd only stare when they thought she wasn't looking.

She sat in the Oasis Cafe, before the picture window, next to a box of overwatered, crowded plants. She came to the Oasis every morning, sat down, and waited like a brute for coffee. She'd never had trouble getting it before. Now when Dolores raised her hand, the waitress looked at her and looked away.

Dolores knew the waitress. Her name was Teresa. She was a young, ungainly woman whose stomach seemed to be leading her around. She had a funny way of holding her forearms out in front of her at the waist, elbows bent, large hands dangling like flippers. Dolores knew that she had a snotty boyfriend, that she'd just graduated from the School of Public Health, and that she wanted to open an abortion clinic. She barely knew Dolores, and had no reason to dislike her.

Dolores glared at Teresa. It didn't work. She got two antidepressants from her bag and put them on the table so the waitress could see she needed something to swallow medicine with. Teresa sailed by imperiously, a full pot of coffee in her grip, nonacknowledging Dolores's "Excuse me" with an aggressive whap of her hip against the table, causing Dolores's antidepressants to roll off onto the floor. As Dolores bent to pick them up, Teresa ran back and yelled, "Are you ready?"

Dolores jerked up too quickly, dropped the pills, then had to reach for them again. She laughed nervously as she emerged from under the table a second time. "Are you ready to order?" asked Teresa.

"h.e.l.lo," said Dolores.

Teresa stood there silently, one large hand dangling.

"I'd like a black coffee with-"

"What?" snapped Teresa.

"I said I'd like a black coffee with an apricot roll."

"We don't have any more rolls "

"All right. Just coffee."

When Teresa poured the coffee, she spilled some on Dolores* mulberry-colored gloves and didn't say she was sorry. A few minutes later, Dolores saw her traveling across the floor with a little plate of apricot rolls for another table, dangling hand wagging. Everyone else in the restaurant continued to smoke cigarettes, eat, and talk as if nothing had happened. Dolores began to feel depressed.

Teresa's friend Lindsay walked into the restaurant. Teresa cried "Linnnnn!" as if she hadn't seen Lindsay for months; they kissed and touched each other's arms. Teresa had incredibly thick, dark arm hair. Dolores remembered a girl from high school who, because of her thick body hair, shaved her arms. It had looked awful. Teresa and Lindsay walked to the counter with their arms around each other. They stood there giggling and whispering. Lindsay was a small, pretty girl who wanted to be a writer. She wore a black leather jacket and large black sungla.s.ses. She came to the Oasis almost every day. She could sit there all day talking about how depressed she was to the various friends and acquaintances who would occupy the empty place beside her as the day went on. Dolores despised Lindsay for wearing ridiculous sungla.s.ses and for letting her father support her. This, although Dolores's father had supported her until he went bankrupt.

Teresa and Lindsay turned to lean against the counter and stared at Dolores. They looked right at her, whispering and giggling. Dolores tried to think about how one of them was ugly and the other stupid. It didn't help. Under their eyes, she felt swollen and hideous at her little table in the sun. At least they were young and had boyfriends to get depressed about. She was an overweight twenty-nine-year-old in stretch pants and a scarf that hid her debased head, mentally ill, and unable to have o.r.g.a.s.ms, not even with herself, sitting in a college town with nothing to do but run around the phys ed building. She felt like the kind of r.e.t.a.r.ded person who's smart enough to know she's r.e.t.a.r.ded. Teresa and Lindsay looked and giggled; Dolores swelled, until she felt like a giantess barely able to hold the delicate little cup and utensils in her horrible fingers.

She no longer wanted to run around the track after her coffee. She drove back home, got in bed, and lay there while the sun gamboled over her body. She thought, This wouldn't be happening to me if Allan hadn't dumped me. She turned her head and her eyeb.a.l.l.s took a rolling tour of the room. It had bright yellow wallpaper and plants in it. Baby pictures of her and her younger brother Patrick hung on the walls, Patrick looking dark and tiny and very solemn for a three-year-old. She had lots of pretty things-lacy lamp shades, linen dustcovers, vases and literature on the bookshelves. It would've been nice if someone else had lived in it.

When her father came to visit her in the mental hospital, right after Allan had dumped her, she'd said, "Daddy, I want you to beat me." He'd turned away and licked his lips. Dolores didn't see why he should balk at that; he'd been beating her mother for years, although it was true that it had never been a physical beating. Besides, the first time she'd been in a mental hospital, she'd asked him to kill her; this second request seemed reasonable in comparison.

She lived in a communal house with her younger brother, Patrick, his girlfriend, Lily, and Mark, a twenty-one-year-old philosophy student. Patrick was an acting student and a drummer in a local band that actually made a living; Lily was a journalism student. They were supposed to buy food together, but Dolores didn't like what Patrick and Lily bought, and n.o.body liked what Mark ate. They were supposed to split the bills four ways, but somehow bills got paid only after Patrick received a shutofF 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.

Dolores had never lived like this before. She'd never wanted to. But when Patrick came to visit her in the mental hospital, he'd 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.

Dolores 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 s.h.i.+ed 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 Dolores, she had no friends in Ann Arbor. She actually had enemies; Patrick's female friends were appalled when he first started to go out with her. Dolores was surprised to find herself a.s.sociating with outcasts at such a late time in life.

On weekends, Patrick 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 eggcups with roses on them. Patrick would always finish his breakfast by peeling an orange or a grapefruit until every bit of white rind had been picked off it, then meticulously stripping the membrane off of each section with 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 Dolores scornfully.

"Wash my dishes, slave," said Patrick. Since Dolores couldn't stand the idea of work yet, Patrick 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 a 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, s.h.i.+fted his slender hips, and dug into his pocket. He handed Dolores ten dollars. She s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 coa.r.s.e hair that stood up on his head, giving his pale face a shocked expression. He went to the counter and began preparing his breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, and toast with mint jelly.

"Bernie Gahan called me last night," said Dolores. "You know, from high school?"

"I remember," said Patrick. "He was sort of a geek, wasn't he?"

"Who's he?" asked Lily, smearing slabs of b.u.t.ter over her hot toast.

"That guy I saw just before I went into the hospital. That store clerk, the one who f.u.c.ked me in the a.s.s."

"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 Dolores. "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.

Dolores shrugged. "I don't know. He was cool in high school, but now he's getting fat."

"He was never cool," said Patrick.

Lily looked at Dolores over her toast, munching solemnly. Dolores 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!' G.o.d. 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 paused over his eggs. "I think it's the ultimate hypocrisy, Pat, for a vegetarian to smoke."

"Squeedle-de-bop," said Patrick. 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 Dolores. "A s.e.xually frustrated grandmother."

"Just because s.e.x isn't the be-all and end-all for me, Dolores." "If you ever had it, it would be the end-all," said Lily.

"Why don't you try to seduce me, Dolores? 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, Dolores."

Dolores doubted it. It would've made her feel better if she'd 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.

"Which one? I actually have more than one friend."

"The one who's going bald. The one who walks like a dinosaur." She found a prune and began eating it.

"Was she mean to you again?" asked Lily.

Dolores nodded. "Yes. She was mean to me."

"I'm sorry" said Mark. "I don't know why she does that."

"She's a b.i.t.c.h " said Dolores. "Maybe she knows Allan and he told her something about me."

"Do you sit in the Oasis and put on your false nails?" asked Patrick. He tipped his chair back until it stood on its hind legs. His T-s.h.i.+rt slid up and exposed his stomach, which he scratched.

"No. I don't put them on that early. Why?" v "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 botdes 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 h.e.l.l 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 Dolores 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 s.e.xually potent woman, thought Dolores. 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 s.e.x in you. s.e.x is light and fertility and life and communication} "Vou only have this ... p.o.r.nography and submission and blackness and death! You're like a f.a.ggot!"

"You a.s.s-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 Dolores's table. She was a fat girl, and her fat was lil* 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. Of Patrick's friends, she was chief among the Lily haters. "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 Dolores found absurd but exciting. "I don't know where the h.e.l.l 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 anyplace 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 do?' 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 s.h.i.+rt. See you, Dolores. My life's in a shambles."

Dolores 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 Dolores.

Sasha was sitting at the counter now, fondling the thin blond cook through his faded s.h.i.+rt, 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-but then she'd dropped out. Since then, she had been mulling around Ann Arbor in garish skirts and boots, sitting in bars and cafes gossiping all day.

Dolores was the same way, except that the degree she almost had was in history, and rather than gossiping in bars and cafes, she merely sat in them.

Teresa coursed by like a shark, her low forehead predominant as a snout. Dolores felt impotent detestation. Teresa saw the false fingernails, now standing out from Dolores's hands like evil thoughts. Dolores 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 get back into the water. Teresa sneered and began scribbling on her little gray pad. She ripped off Dolores's check and threw it at her, mumbling something about needing more table s.p.a.ce.

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, Dolores 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, Dolores sometimes pushed Patrick around and all he did was say "Dolores!" But he was a promising actor and 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, Dolores 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 the best thing ever.

Anyone would do anything to be stronger. In the gym next to the track, college students took karate cla.s.ses. Little teenage 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 Patrick 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 Patrick had his rehearsals and homework, plus his music to write. Lily worked with her long legs drawn up under her and her shoulders in a curl; Patrick sat on his tailbone, his legs spread and his cotton s.h.i.+rt 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 s.e.xuality is death-oriented," said Dolores, crunching her mouthful of candy.

"People have dumb ideas about s.e.x," said Lily. "How long have you been having s.e.x?"

"Twelve years."

"If your s.e.xuality 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.