Free Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Page A

grandfather, though, does not want the mother on the street during the escalating civil unrest. “Leave her to me ” he counsels; “there is, after all, something unfinished between us.” He goes to the sons house to lie in . wait, and sure enough, the slut comes calling. She’s looking for the son, but when she finds grandpa, it doesn’t matter; she wants his baby, too. He pretends to be asleep while she masturbates him She thinks, How beautiful his penis is! She longs for his children! She mounts him, and the grandfather reports, with a certain gentlemanly discretion, that he and the slut “went somewhere together.” But nonetheless, almost as soon as they are done, the girl is mystically stricken with discharge and gross vaginal itching; she runs down the road, scratching her crotch as she screams, “I itch! I smell!” The son is happily reunited with his fiancee, and the wife, his mother, finds new tenderness with her husband. The grandfather meditates on history.
    If he had been an American or a Canadian man saying these things, he might’ve been booed as a misogynist. But an African man—no. It was wonderful, especially the way he read it—with the earned hauteur of a man who has seen war, persecution, and the two sides of the agonized face: the mother who is poignant in her open-legged vulnerability, and the visage of the female predator. Because for all its elegance, his voice—unlike the voice of the feminist author—did not try to hide reality: the pain and anger of the unsatisfied womb grown ill from lack of wholesome use, a fungal vector of want, thick with tumors, baby’s teeth, and bits of hair inside each fibrous mass. Pitiful, yes, but also nasty, though we in the antiseptic West don’t say so.
    “Motherhood is the off-and-on light in the darkness of night,” concluded the author, “a firefly of joy and rejoicing, now here, now there, and everywhere. In fact, the crisis that is coming to a head in the shape of civil strife would not be breaking in on us if we’d offered women as mothers their due worth, respect, and affection; a brightness celebrating motherhood, a monument erected in worship of women.”
    The audience went wild.
    In the big reception hall, we celebrated the Somali author with more drinks, and I caught up with the American novelist whose son actually had been nearly killed by a drunk driver. She was a good egg, hawk-nosed and plainly dressed, and she was having a stiff one. When I asked her, she said she’d disliked writing about the accident, but that if she hadn’t written about it, she never would’ve been able to pay the medical expenses. We gossiped; we admired the Somali author. “I can’t imagine an American writer saying something like that,” she said. IA monument erected in worship of women.’ ”
    "I know,” I said, “it was lovely.” As long as you’re the right kind of woman, I didn’t say. I glimpsed the feminist author across the room from us, standing by herself, eating a fistful of grapes. The American writer was saying something about how irony is the most human of artistic methods, but I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of a girl I had known in high school named Linda Phoenix. She was a thin girl with a stark, downy back, who fucked every boy, plus some girls. Jeff Lyer, an angry fat kid, brought pictures to school of her drunk and sucking someone’s penis, and people passed them around the cafeteria, laughing or feeling sorry or just looking.
    Across the room, two reporters approached the feminist author, with their tape recorders. I thought of the blurred pictures of Linda Phoenix. I thought of my daughter, standing before the mirror, pushing her lower lip out, making seductive eyes. I thought of her sitting at the kitchen table, drawing scenes from her favorite book, Magic by the Lake. I thought of her frightened awake from a nightmare, crying, “Mommy, Mommy!” I remembered washing her as a baby, using the spray hose from