Because They Wanted To: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Page A

imagine calling anyone and asking if she could come over late at night, no matter how much she wanted them, nor could she imagine letting a person who made such a call come to her home.
    She and Dolores had analyzed the incident at length, sitting on Dolores’s big bed in a flood of sunlight, eating from a box of dime-store chocolates. “Patrick has always had these things with women,” said Dolores moodily. “And being a guy, he can’t help but take advantage of them. Like, that girl put herself in a situation where he might tell her to go home, you know? What do you expect if you call up strangers in the middle of the night?”
    Margot supposed it was true. “But still, something seems grossabout it. Like, maybe he could’ve told her that he might ask her to leave.”
    “Oh, come on, how could he have done that? That would really have been gross.” Dolores took an open package of cigarettes and a silver lighter from her bedside table; she manipulated the small objects with the grand, suppressed languor of a person moving underwater. “In his own way, Patrick is an old-fashioned gentleman,” she said. “He likes things to have a certain decorum, a certain . . . gracious style. He’s a romantic.”
    Dolores’s hands were crossed at the wrist, a fresh cigarette inserted between two slightly puffy fingers. Margot wondered if the medication she took made her hands puffy. “But it doesn’t seem gentlemanly to let a stranger come over,” Margot persisted. “I mean, he was allowing a situation that would probably not be very gracious, whether she stayed or left. Don’t you think?”
    “But the thing is, she probably really wanted to come over. She probably had extremity in her voice, and any extremity is potentially very romantic.” She brought the cigarette to her lips and Margot noticed that her hand trembled. “People often want something from Patrick, and he has a hard time saying no. It’s our family and this awful boundary crap. Our mom was all over Patrick, physically and every other way. She let him get away with anything because he was beautiful, but then there were all these other ways she had him by the balls. She was obsessed with him. The sick old bitch. She called him ‘my orchid.’” Dolores imitated her mother with fine, slippery malice. “My orchid.”
    They sat in silence for a moment. Dolores’s bed was covered with an old quilt made of meticulously color-coordinated shapes sewn together with the pretty humor of a child. A strip of pink cloth decorated with abstract roses was sewn next to a triangle of blue and white stripes next to a lavender oblong with green and yellow polka dots on it. At the head of the bed were Dolores’s pillows, in faded yellow slipcovers. She had lace curtains on her windows. Her room did not look like the room of someone who had recently torn the hair from her head.
    “People get fixated on Patrick,” said Dolores. “When he was in high school he actually had a female fan club. It was embarrassing. Heencourages stuff like that because it flatters him, but in another way, he knows it’s not about him at all. I think he’s pretty lonely, actually.”
    “Yeah,” said Margot. “I can see that.” Thoughtfully, she ate a caramel; it was slightly, sensuously stale, and she chewed it with contented vigor.
    Work the next day was like running a relay race through a rabbit warren while pranksters blew horns, banged cymbals, and set off sirens. The morning began with the arrival of a mother and son who had come in on an emergency basis because the son, a sixteen-year-old who attended a school for the gifted, had pierced his nose and inserted a ring through it. His father had committed suicide when the kid was ten, and his mother was convinced that the nose piercing was an indication of “suicidal ideation.” It took an hour to convince her otherwise, which made Margot an hour late for her appointment with a family that had just been successfully