Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill

Author:Mary Gaitskill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

When I was eighteen, my father paid for me to go to college in Blythetown, Pennsylvania. His decision to do so evolved over a period of months, during which he would sit at the dining room table with all his bills related to me spread before him, along with my high school report cards. Finally he announced that he would pay my tuition but that I would have to pay my other expenses.

Headley Cramer College was the benign experiment of a wealthy liberal nut who wanted to create an inexpensive two-year school for the working class with all the amenities of a university, including a dormitory, and without the tedious practical bent of the average community college. It enjoyed brief prestige as a uniquely cheap and high-quality institution and it attracted a number of enthusiastic MA’s and PhD’s with esoteric predispositions, as well as hordes of snobby working-class kids with boxes of art-rock records. Unfortunately Cramer went broke or lost his mind, I don’t recall which, and the school deteriorated into a squalid teen slum which occasionally made the papers when there was another stabbing in the special Male Bonding dormitory or something. But that wasn’t until much later, and anyway the main virtue of the place from my point of view was that it was a two-hour drive from Painesville.

Immediately after registering, I took a job in a restaurant owned by a stunted creature who sat in the back office with a bottle of whiskey, paralyzed before a color TV for most of the day. I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea. I walked to my classes on cold concrete paths surrounded by yards of snow upon which lay frozen piles of dog shit. There were always other students walking all around me, in groups or alone, a continuous flow of movement in crisscrossing directions. I would close my eyes at night and see a facsimile of this moving grid in the form of endless trails of light ticking on in the dark. I ate alone in a cafeteria filled with lively students who expended more energy in gobbling their ice cream sandwiches than I discharged all day. Their voices echoed in the dormitory halls as I walked back to my room at night to be greeted with a ritual “Hi” by my roommate.

I hadn’t thought college would be so like my previous life; there was an awful thematic sameness under the deceptive novelty of the experience. I had so wanted to do well and in a way I did; my passionate papers always came back with A’s on them. But something was wrong. Despite my relief at being away from home, I think I missed the dark, rank security of it, the reliability of having it to crouch in, feeling the huge violent energies of my parents encircling me like a fortress of thorns. Walking the concrete paths, I felt the world stretch out before me with sickening boundlessness.

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