Because They Wanted To: Stories by Mary Gaitskill

Isn’t that awful? We haven’t had much contact over the last five years. I know she’s living in some slum in Miami, probably working as a waitress. She’s a total alcoholic. Last time I talked to her she was having an affair, if you could call it that, with this fourteen-year-old Latin kid who couldn’t speak English. She rear-ended somebody because she was driving around drunk with her pants down and the kid’s face between her legs, and I mean so drunk that when she got out of the car, she forgot to pull her pants up and she fell and broke a tooth. That was the last time I talked to her. Since she stopped speaking to my dad, I’m not even sure where she lives. It was just too much, you know? It was painful.”
    Margot remembered Dolores sitting at the table, affixing her false fingernails, holding her hand at a distance and appraising it with an arched, theatrical brow. She remembered Patrick’s attention on her, a drop of traveling light. “Could you get her number for me?” she asked. “Could you try? I don’t know what I’d say to her at this point, but. . .”
    “Of course.” The loyalty in Patrick’s voice was like a muscle that’s gone flabby but is still strong; it was loyalty for her, not Dolores, and it both flattered and troubled her. “It’s probably time for me to check in anyway. Who knows where she is now. Spiritually and emotionally, I mean.”
    Margot thought of something Dolores had once told her. They had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet coffee and smoking. “When Patrick was a baby, I used to do this really mean thing to him,” said Dolores. “He was just learning how to walk. All by himself, he’d struggle to his feet with this earnest frown and start slowly fighting his way forward with his little hands balled. He’d be in this nightgown our mom used to put him in, and it would trail out behind him. I’d follow along and I’d let him get so far and then I’d step on his gown and he’d fall over with this cute little ‘oof.’” Dolores drew on her cigarette and left a wet red lipstick mark on it. “The funny thing is, he never cried. He’d just set his little face and slowly get up and toddle on. Sometimes I did it just ‘cause it was so cool to see him get up again.”
    Patrick was saying that while he had enjoyed being a psychopharm, he was tired of it now and was looking for a way out. With this end in mind, he was working on a CD-ROM about depression, in which psychiatrists would appear on a tiny screen to explain to viewers what depression is and how to get treatment. “It’s going to be complex and layered,” he said. “Like performance art.”
    Margot agreed to meet him for dinner that weekend, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Their conversation had made her feel passive and nonplussed. When they hung up, she sat for a while and stared at the spray of greasy salt scattered across her plate, at the tidy little snarl of chicken bones and the minute pistil of broccoli. Her tabletop was red Formica. On the table she had a salt shaker in the shape of a mournful sheep and Magic Markers in a row and a dish of colored rocks mixed with cheap jewelry she’d worn when she was a kid. She liked her things, but now the sight of them made her sad. She always had arrangements of bright little things on her walls and furniture. Roberta had made fun of them, mildly at first.
    Late one night, a woman Patrick didn’t know had called him and asked if she could come over. He told her that she could, but when she got there he didn’t like the way she looked, so he made her tea, conversed for as long as he felt etiquette required, and then asked her to leave. Margot had been asleep and, to her regret, had not seen the girl. She was fascinated by this story and by the casual way Patrick told it at breakfast; without knowing why, she found herself imagining, repeatedly and in varying ways, the girl’s face when Patrick told her to leave. She could not