Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill. I took a break from reading Doris Lessing's massive "The Four-Gated City" to read this short-story collection by Mary Gaitskill, who has recently become one of my favorite authors. Alas, she's only written five books and this will be the third one I've read. The book is due back to the library on May 12th, so I figured I'd better get to it. Here's what these ten stories are about in bursts of 275 words or less:
1. Dolores is depressed, fat, and half-bald because she obsessively tears the hair from her head. She was recently released from a short stay in a hospital psychiatric ward. She is trying to live a "normal" life, but the way that's done, which seems to come so easily to others, somehow eludes her. She goes to the diner, for instance, and the waitress, friendly to everyone else, ignores her. Her boyfriend dumped her and she suspects he told everyone all kinds of unflattering things about her. She has no money. She shoplifts. She lives in a house with her brother, his girlfriend, and an aloof, testy philosophy student. Dolores is a student, too, but she can't motivate herself to finish her history degree. She can't have an orgasm. She wonders what's the matter with her. Why is she so weak? Why does she tear the hair from her head? By the end of the story she realizes that maybe she thought being weak would be a survival strategy; that maybe it was some sort of virtue; that it would inspire someone to pity her, even rescue her. But no, that's not the case at all. When you're weak, you've failed the human race. When you don't even try, it's disgusting to everyone. They disdain you. Dolores realizes that she isn't as weak as she thinks. Oh, she's a wreck, alright, but she's like one of those bombed out buildings after a war whose steel frame still stands. She's still here, in spite of everything, and she can build on that. Build what? Well....the first thing is to stop pulling out her own hair.
2. Next, there's a story that isn't really a story, but a kind of free-form meditation on three sensational items supposedly found on the same page of a newspaper. One story is about a televised interview that brings together a killer-rapist and his victim's survivors. The second item is about a woman who wants to beat the world fuck record; she proposes to take on a thousand men one after another. The last article is about a pair of endangered turtles that have gone missing from a zoo. Gaitskill weaves these three apparently disparate items together in a convoluted, but ultimately powerful narrative, offering startling, unconventional insights into—among other things—sex , violence, science, love, the difference between animal and human nature and our endless fascination with evil.
3. Laura is forty, lives alone, and words as a medical assistant in a Houston clinic. Her father has just died after a long, wasting illness. She talks to herself a lot. Lately, she's given to muttering the phrase "ugly cunt" for reasons that aren't entirely clear even to her. At work one day she gives a preliminary examination to a 43-year-old woman who claims to still be a virgin. The woman has clearly taken good care of herself—weight, blood-pressure, unlined skin, dyed hair, etc; there's even an innocent open look in her eyes more suited to someone decades younger. But she's still a middle-aged woman. What the hell has she been preserving herself for anyway, Laura wonders. By contrast, Laura has been around the block more than a few times. She lost her virginity early and never looked back. She's been battered and beaten by life. On break, she takes a walk down the street. She sees a car full of Hispanic youth stuck in traffic. The driver, an angelically handsome teenager is leaning on the horn, impatient and aggressive. Laura admires him from the curb. Their eyes meet for an instant; there's a moment of communication. She can see the life in him, the passion, potentially destructive and tragic though it may be. He can see it in her. She may be a physical and emotional wreck, may have lost her virginity, may have gotten fucked and fucked over, but what else is a life for but to use up what we've been given? At least Laura has lived.
4. A journalist attends a literary conference where a controversial neo-feminist author is in attendance. The neo-feminist author is notorious for her past as a prostitute, her stint in a mental hospital, and a half-assed attempt to kill her father. But she's most controversial for her blithe acceptance of the darker aspects of sexuality; she has put what seems to be a "cheerful" face on even her most harrowing experiences. At least it seems that way to the journalist, who both admires the courage this attitude requires and yet also feels compelled to condemn it as falsifying some truly terrible truths about sexuality, victimization, and the ultimate vulnerability of women. This is another story that isn't exactly a "story," but more an essay/meditation that is very superficially dramatized by Gaitskill. Most of the "narration" consists of the journalist's interior thoughts about sexuality with reference to her own experiences as a woman, (ex)wife, and mother. In the end, she attacks the neo-feminist author in the review she writes because there are some "truths" just too subtle for words and in the semantics of public discourse only the most brutally simplistic of viewpoints can be effectively expressed. So to defend women, she must attack this particular author. The journalist acknowledges that it's not fair, but fair or not, the mystery of a woman's paradoxical strength/vulnerability must be protected from those who would attempt to diminish the darker side of that mystery, even with the best of intentions, as she feels the neo-feminist author has done. The “agonized face,” as the journalist calls it, must be remembered and honored, "even if someone must on occasion be 'stoned.'"
5. A woman has a one-night stand and unexpectedly falls in love. The man, however, never calls her back. What follows is a kind of metaphysical fairy tale. The woman hasn't just lost her heart in a metaphoric sense; she's quite literally lost a piece of her soul. The man she loves has it, but doesn't realize it. He's a kind of unwitting soul-snatcher, holding captive the souls of several other women heartbroken he's left in his erotic wake. It's not entirely his fault. He learned to hold himself back from full engagement with others through his mother's example. Gaitskill spins out what is otherwise a rather simple story with astonishing complexity and psychological sophistication. Not only are the two ex-lovers unaware that they have souls, (because, after all, in this age of reason, who still believes in souls? ) they are equally unaware that their souls are acting independently on another plane of existence. The imprisoned portion of the woman's soul is trying to escape; the man who holds it captive must be convinced to let it go free. Eventually, the woman gets over her broken heart, as do we all, in time. But Gaitskill's unique spin on this old story offers a new explanation as to how the mysterious process of healing might actually occur.
6. A bisexual writer recounts her decades-long affair with the lesbian editor of a small avant garde press. Over the years, they meet at book fairs, in sleazy clubs, in the stairwells of halls at writer's conferences. They hook up while single, while in committed relationships with others. Their long-standing affair is like a series of erotic oases in the long-trek of their otherwise separate lives. Could they ever have been primary partners, or was temporality the necessary precondition of their relationship? Gaitskill leads you to believe the latter. The writer-narrator gets married; the lesbian-editor, now older and more settled, declares that she's found the woman she wants to commit to fully. The two ex-lovers now meet as friends but at the same time they are and always will something more than friends. The potential for love, dangerous, unpredictable, and explosive will always be there between them, never fully released, as if it were some invaluable natural resource held in reserve until the end of their lives. Each of them will always exist just out of reach of the other. Could anything ever be more desirable than that?
7. Bea Davis is flying home from a visit with one of her adult daughters. She crosses paths with a harried single mother and her somewhat oddball young son. Bea feels sorry for the boy, who, acting out, is clearly seeking attention, feeling neglected as he does by his preoccupied and short-tempered mom. Bea attempts to provide the boy with an audience. Meanwhile, the airport serves as a point of transit into Bea's past. She recalls her relationships with her daughters, her ex-husband, and her own parents. Her memories begin to weave into the present, leaving her alternately exhilarated and depressed. She is wiser now, but also older; too old, perhaps, for her wisdom to do her or anyone any good, to be the cause for anything but regret. Then, up in the air, Bea is "visited" by the boy again, and she has an unexpected chance to make a difference after all. He needs a moment of unconditional love and acceptance; and Bea, at last, has it to give.
8. On a train to Syracuse, Gaitskill gets into the heads of several characters, principle among them: two Iraqi war veterans, an elderly WWII vet, and a middle-aged white editor, who could easily be a stand-in for Gaitskill herself. One of the Iraqi vets, a black man who grew up in a foster care, is clearly mentally unbalanced, possibly mildly retarded, most likely from before the war. The well-meaning, sympathetic editor wonders how he was ever accepted by the army in the first place. He strikes up a slightly demented conversation with her. The second Iraqi vet is unfriendly, taciturn, and far more deranged, clearly from his experiences in Iraq, but you wouldn't know it if you weren't privy to the disturbing chatter in his head. Quietly watching from a few seats away, the aged WWII vet recalls his own war experience, compares and contrasts it to that of today's soldiers, and the know-nothing, if conscientious efforts of people like the well-meaning editor to sympathize and understand the transcendent illogic of war. There's some drama when the semi-retarded vet touches a woman commuter's breast and gets into an altercation with her huge irate boyfriend, but mainly the story is a meditation on war the way many of Gaitskill's "stories" are meditations on sex.
9. Kevin and Joseph are two MFA graduates on a hike through the woods. Kevin has already had an essay accepted with a prestigious magazine. Joseph is still laboring unsuccessfully over his short stories. Everything comes easy to Kevin; for Joseph, not so much. For Joseph, this situation is mirrored in his relationship with his brother Caleb, who is his mother's favorite, no matter what Joseph does, and what Caleb fails to do. Most recently, Joseph returned home when his mother contracted breast cancer; Caleb was busy with his acting career. Still, Caleb is the favorite; it's just the way it is. Kevin and Joseph had the same writing teacher, a woman in her forties, attractive, smart, successful. Joseph was the teacher's pet, but it was Kevin who petted the teacher. Through the woods they walk, talking literature, speculating on their futures. There's some discussion about description in fiction, whether it should proceed primarily through things or character. There's some talk about John Ruskin and his infamous divorce from a woman he lusted after until he married her and then never touched. In the end, Joseph faces the fact that some people simply live charmed lives without any effort. People like Kevin and Caleb. Others, like Joseph, can give up a kidney and a good chunk of their liver and never be their equal. There's no reason for it; that's the mystery.
10. The title story, "Don't Cry", surprisingly picks up the character of Janice from the last story, a creative writing professor. She is in Ethiopia helping a friend adopt a baby. Her husband Thomas died several months earlier of Alzheimer's disease. It's a lot more complicated to adopt an Ethiopian baby than either Janice or her friend thought. Plus there's some civil unrest breaking out. In helping to care for the baby, Janice is reminded of the last days of her Thomas, who became totally dependent on her. The past, as it so often does in Gaitskill's fiction, bleeds into the present. Janice recalls the one-night stand she had with one of her students at a post-graduation party—the "Kevin" from the previous story. She feels a great deal of guilt about her unfaithfulness. It occurred right before her husband's diagnosis, but, already, without knowing what was wrong, she already felt him slipping away. She wears their wedding rings around her neck. They get snatched by a boy on the street. They get returned by a little old man. "Don't cry," says the little old man. How can you not? Perhaps, in a place like Ethiopia, where people are scratching the dust at their feet just to survive, Janice's sentimentality, and ours as readers, over such symbolic trifles as a pair of lost wedding rings is nothing but a silly, self-indulgent luxury.
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