Free Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill

full and it hurt. She looked at Dr. Norris’s face. He was looking between her legs with his numb eyes, and she saw that he knew there was something wrong but that he was going to do it anyway. He rubbed her briskly and numbly, and he talked to her, his voice coated more and more thickly with an expression she had never heard before. A strange and horribly powerful sensation flexed its claws in her body.
    Many years later, when she told a man about this incident, he said he believed that child molestation was bad only because of the negative social rules that made the child feel sullied. Otherwise, he said, it would be good because it could only give the child pleasure, and children didn’t have reservations about pleasure until they were taught to. Another man told her it was good that she’d had the experience because “that man taught you something.” She didn’t argue with either of them because she didn’t know how to explain that this uncomprehended attack of invasive sensation had not felt like pleasure at all but rather like the long claws of some unknown aggression that had gripped her organs and her bones and never quite let go.
    Dr. Norris and his son and she went to the park after that, she doesn’t remember how many times. Once she told her mother that “Dr. Norris touches me here,” and pointed to show her. Her mother was standing in the kitchen making dinner. She didn’t stop what she was doing. She said, “He just doesn’t know that little girls don’t like to be touched there.”

My family moved to Ohio when I was seven. We lived in a large, cool, damp house outside Cincinnati. I couldn’t walk to school anymore and instead rode a bus with other children who sang, “The worms go in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.” There were lots of tornado warnings. Sometimes they would be followed by local news footage of some neighboring town that had been devastated. These broadcasts thrilled me; I loved to look at the destroyed houses and ripped up trees, the dazed, unkempt victims standing around in overcoats, mumbling for the spruce newscaster who asked them how they felt.
    Once there was a tornado warning when I was at school, and the teachers led us all down the hall into the bomb shelter and kept us there an hour after school, talking about what to do in case of nuclear attack and singing about bottles of beer on the wall until the warning was over. We rode home in the twilight, exhilarated by our brush with death, loudly bawling the worm song. When I got home, my mother said, “I didn’t know they’d held you at school. I waited at the bus stop for half an hour. The wind whipped my legs until they were red and sore. I was terrified when you didn’t come.” She said this in the same girlish voice that she used to tell stories of Motherdear and Joedaddy, punctuating certain wordswith a tight, uplifted voice, as if she were describing a tasty dessert. Her voice wasn’t angry at all, which made me feel uneasy; it seemed as though she should be angry. I asked her why she hadn’t gone home. “Because I had to be sure you were safe. I stood there and stood there and my legs just burned.”
    I hastily constructed a fantasy in which I came sailing through a full-blown tornado on the bus. (They’d tried to hold me at school, but I’d faced the principal with tears in my eyes and pleaded to be allowed to go home and be with my mother. He understood; gruffly he allowed me to go, and the bus driver, the old salt, was so overcome by the spirit of this brave, lone child that he volunteered to take me. “You’re mad!” cried my teacher, Miss Clutch. “Well maybe I am, and maybe I ain’t,” he said. “All’s I know is, I gotta kid, too, an’ if there was a tornado, I’d want ’er to be with ’er ma.”) In one version of this fantasy, he and I leapt from the bus together, he scooping my swooning mother into his arms and carrying her home, me clinging to his pant leg