I am not even hungry; I am not a stupid girl. I know what stupid girls look like. I had a loudly anorexic roommate in boarding school who drooled over her homepage, the Coldstone Creamery website. (Kate Moss was her desktop.) She and her anorexic posse would parade around campus trading starvation tips and gnawing dried seaweed: she was a stupid girl. We would laugh at her. I would laugh, before excusing myself to go shimmy my fingers down to heave up Diet Peach Snapple Iced Tea. Whatever. I went to college. I discovered Philosophy. Well... I met truly intelligent girls who were super into higher, intelligent things; they were beautiful, and thin, but their bodies seemed the design of the luck of the draw.
Itchy. It feels itchy, like there are ants making an anthill out of the inside of my skull, their infinite tiny pricklish little legs tickling the tender bits of my mind. I see insects where there are none: jumping back at a nonexistent speck on the floor; nightmares of roaches tumbling onto my naked self when I turn on the shower faucet; close my eyes and there is a giant bedbug like a crest stuck on the wall in front of me. I feel like a hysterical woman; I feel like I cannot go on: voices and voices and voices breaking apart and doubling back and shouting and whimpering and apologizing and for every voice there is a new one yanking the other back from behind. They are digging a grave: scratching into the place where the mind should be a giant... deep... hole...
Fat Ugly Naked Girl
Perhaps it is the sorry plight of the privileged girl who gets thrown into a scene hung-up on intellectualism: we are too privileged to have explored the feminist bit; we, like proper intellectuals-in-training, eagerly pick apart every feeling or fleeting thought that sifts into the mind; we enjoy being spread out onto the chaise lounge so he can practice psycho-analysis. As a result, we know to scorn all the shallow and weak feminine marks that were intaglioed into our bodies some time long, long ago; scorn but have yet to erase these marks; we feel the secrecy of our shame, then we, internally, question why we scorn and are shamed and question that and question questioning questioning and question questioning questioning questioning questioning and so on and so forth until the weight of the emptiness of the hole that anxiety bores into our being is enough to make us _____________.
It is for this reason that I would like to end with a nod to Mary Gaitskill, who is the first reputable contemporary female author that I have come across who enters into the brutal, painstakingly female psychologies of her subjects and refuses to leave. Her Two Girls, Fat and Thin mimics The Second Sex in this regard: following her women from childhood to adulthood; and the women do not get to cast off all their ugly feelings just because they learn that these feelings are ugly and weak. There is no distance: reading Gaitskill is unbearable; it makes a girl explode.
SINCE Midsummer Day not a drop of rain had fallen, and now August was nearing its end. The road looked like a trail of spilled flour winding through bare fields. The stubble land was cracked with drought. The fallow fields gleamed yellow against crumbling grayish white soil. The low ditches were lined with ugly dusty grass, like long tangled wisps of hair. All growing things were drying up in an abandonment of despair. The light blue cloudless sky had tortured them too long. The sun, with its self-complacent smile, had scorched them so mercilessly, so continuously, that now, in spite of their burning thirst, they had grown too listless to implore the heavens for a drop of water. In all the dazzling whiteness of the landscape there was not a spot of deeper color to rest the weary eye.
Stina's progress along the dusty road was very slow, just barely noticeable. One or two vehicles passed her. The first was a light cabriolet, on the back seat of which a fat country gentleman was sprawling, pulling at his cigar. On the front seat the coachman cracked his whip as the carriage whizzed by. Stina came near being struck by the tip of the lash. She even blinked a little at the threatening possibility. The dust stirred up by the wheels whirled around her like the steam from an engine and made her sneeze. Although there was plenty of room in the carriage, it would never occur to a "gentleman farmer" to give a peasant girl a lift, nor would she ever ask him to do so.
From a distance she heard the noise of a third vehicle, but did not turn to look. It was a long time coming, and, judging by the sound, the horses were ambling. At last it overtook her. It was a small two-horse spring-cart with only one seat. This seat was occupied by a middle-aged man who looked well fed without being exactly stout. He wore a coat of thick black broadcloth with pockets and edges bound in wide wool braid. His head was covered by a light gray cloth cap, trimmed with numerous small buttons which were faded yellow and displayed their wooden skeletons under the threadbare cloth covering. A short pipe with a big wooden head lay thrust in a corner of the seat. After spitting in the opposite direction from Stina, the man stopped his horses with a soft "Whoa!" and said slowly in the broadest Zealand dialect, "Maybe that girl would like a lift?" "Many thanks," answered Stina.
The owner of the spring-cart was roused from his drowsiness by a motion of the girl beside him. Again he glanced sideways at her, and saw her untie the knot in the red and white dotted cotton kerchief which was covering the bundle in her lap. Inside was a parcel wrapped in a newspaper. She opened it, took out a big round of rye bread covered with smoked sausage, and broke the bread in two parts. With a nod she offered her host one of these, without, however, looking at him.
The girl was even more than usually taciturn that afternoon. As on former occasions, she played with her child in the little yard. Their game consisted of the little girl's catching hold of her mother's dress behind, while both of them jogged back and forth at a slow trot, repeating ad infinitum in a half singing, half reciting tone:
Stina stood at the kitchen table eating her meat and potatoes with the absent-minded, apparentlythoughtful air with which servant girls consume their lonesome and cheerless repasts. When hermistress entered, Stina turned away quickly and raised her kitchen apron to her nose and eyes. "Do you understand, Stina, what has come over Per Larsen in Orslovlille?" "No-o," answered Stina, still turning her headaway.
Toward Christmas Stina received a visit from her little girl's foster-mother. Before leaving, the woman asked permission to speak to Stina's mistress. This was granted her. Mrs. Aaby was drinking her ten-o'clock coffee, and thought it behooved her to be on her dignity.
"Well, Matty," she said, sitting in the middle of her sofa, with the bright-polished, steaming brass samovar on the table before her, "I hear that the little girl is doing well at school." "Yes, she's smart enough at readin'," answered the peasant woman.
Mrs. Aaby called Stina, who was supposed to be in the kitchen. Nobody answered. She opened the door. The kitchen was empty. The girl had chosen to take to her heels, finding it too embarrassing to overhear the proceedings. When her mistress expressed her displeasure at Stina's absence, Per Larsen said with an approving nod and smile, "That's the way I want it! No talking and fooling. Then things'll come out all right."
Mrs. Tulliver was out of the room superintending a choice supper-dish, and Mr. Tulliver's heart was touched; so Maggie was not scolded about the book. Mr. Riley quietly picked it up and looked at it, while the father laughed, with a certain tenderness in his hard-lined face, and patted his little girl on the back, and then held her hands and kept her between his knees.
It was a heavy disappointment to Maggie that she was not allowed to go with her father in the gig when he went to fetch Tom home from the academy; but the morning was too wet, Mrs. Tulliver said, for a little girl to go out in her best bonnet. Maggie took the opposite view very strongly, and it was a direct consequence of this difference of opinion that when her mother was in the act of brushing out the reluctant black crop Maggie suddenly rushed from under her hands and dipped her head in a basin of water standing near, in the vindictive determination that there should be no more chance of curls that day.
"What for?" said Tom. "I don't want your money, you silly thing. I've got a great deal more money than you, because I'm a boy. I always have half-sovereigns and sovereigns for my Christmas boxes because I shall be a man, and you only have five-shilling pieces, because you're only a girl."
"But you're a naughty girl. Last holidays you licked the paint off my lozenge-box, and the holidays before that you let the boat drag my fish-line down when I'd set you to watch it, and you pushed your head through my kite, all for nothing."
Moreover, the preparation for a visit being always a serious affair in the Dodson family, Martha was enjoined to have Mrs. Tulliver's room ready an hour earlier than usual, that the laying out of the best clothes might not be deferred till the last moment, as was sometimes the case in families of lax views, where the ribbon-strings were never rolled up, where there was little or no wrapping in silver paper, and where the sense that the Sunday clothes could be got at quite easily produced no shock to the mind. Already, at twelve o'clock, Mrs. Tulliver had on her visiting costume, with a protective apparatus of brown holland, as if she had been a piece of satin furniture in danger of flies; Maggie was frowning and twisting her shoulders, that she might if possible shrink away from the prickliest of tuckers, while her mother was remonstrating, "Don't, Maggie, my dear; don't make yourself so ugly!" and Tom's cheeks were looking particularly brilliant as a relief to his best blue suit, which he wore with becoming calmness, having, after a little wrangling, effected what was always the one point of interest to him in his toilet: he had transferred all the contents of his every-day pockets to those actually in wear. 2ff7e9595c
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