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

the kitchen sink to rinse shit from the swollen petals of her infant slit—a hole she may fall down if she opens it too early, a dark Wonderland of teeth and bones and crushing force. The hole in life, a hole we cannot see into, no matter how closely we look.
    I had had too much to drink and too little to eat, and for a drunken instant the hall became a courtroom, the authors and journalists members of a jury overspilling the box to cry out: Now hold on a minute! Are you completely out of your mind? It is one thing to express disdain for this so-called feminist, who may deserve it. Even the muddled atavism about rotten wombs full of baby teeth—well, it is loony and gross, but in the locked closet of our inmost heart, we can see how you might feel that way. But your daughter? What kind of mother are you? Leave her out of this grotesquerie, please!
    And of course the imaginary jury was right. I would love Kira no matter how many boys she did what with, or girls, for that matter. Things are not like they once were. Sex and the City is on TV. Still, when I think of her as she will be—dripping with hormones and feelings, nursing the secret hurt of a seed about to burst into flower—it makes me uneasy. To think of her opening her warm spring darkness to any lout who wants it makes me feel sadness, followed by a surprising surge of anger (anger that includes an even more surprising burst of sympathy for my mother’s anger, sympathy even for the time she slapped my face after she caught me and Donald Parker doing it in the rec room). But even as I feel the anger, even with my mother’s anger crowding behind it—my mother, also single, now a mild alcoholic in old age, calling me to give me a piece of her mind about the latest nonsense on the news—even as I feel the anger, love rises up to enclose it. Inside love, anger still secretly burns—but it is a tiny flame. I can hold it like I once held my daughter in my body, a world within a world.
    But just now I allowed myself to enter the little flame and feel it all the way. I did it in the spirit of the feminist author—and to show her up, too. So, she can be the innocent girl and the prostitute and the author, eh? Well, imagine a full deck of cards, each card painted with symbols of woman—the waif, the harlot, the mother, the warrior, the queen—until the last card, on which we see Medea, a knife in her raised, implacable hand. Yes, there I am and there any woman can be, even though we don’t stand up on stages and make a fuss about it. And we can skip lightly back through the deck, carelessly touching each card as we do, before returning to the card of the good mother, or the lover, or, in my case at this moment, the stolid female worker in my brown skirt and flat shoes. Every woman knows all about everything on those cards, even if her knowledge is wordless and half-conscious. It is wordless knowledge because it is too big for words. Sometimes, it is too big for us. Stand up onstage and put words on it and you make it small—and then you say it’s sexist when people don’t like it.
    Except that, if I am going to be honest, I have to admit something that weighs in on the side of the feminist author just slightly. The anger and upset that I let myself feel, that mere hot pinprick in the ardent wetness of love—when you let yourself feel it, when I let myself feel it, it is, was, very strong. Strong and primitive. Enter in through that tiny spot of fire and come out in a hell of shape-shifting and destruction. In that hell lives a beast that will devour anything in front of it, and that beast is especially partial to woman. Why not split her open all the way, just for the pure animal joy of rending and tearing? For a woman even to skirt this place is dangerous because she has the open part. She needs rules, structures, intact shapes to make sure the openness doesn’t get too open. For a man, it is different—he can align his strength with the monster and tear the