Because They Wanted To: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Page B

“reunited.” The daughter in this family was having suicidal ideation, and Margot scarcely blamed her. Her father beat her up and her mother, a hot-wired piece of bone and muscle with a face-lift, complained constantly that the kid wasn’t happy.
    “I mean, I know he shouldn’t hit her, but just look at her!” She gesticulated at her drooping child, a pale fifteen-year-old with dyed black hair and black lipstick. “I don’t mind the black thing and the tattoos; we did stuff like that too. But we were happy! We did things! The people we knew were cream of the crop, the best and the brightest! She just lumps around with losers and doesn’t care about anything.”
    “I think Lalena cares about her poetry,” said Margot.
    “Yeah—it’s all about suicide!”
    “But I see a lot of intensity in her poems,” said Margot. “Even if they are about suicide, they feel intensely alive and fierce. They aren’t fierce the way you are. But she’s a different person.”
    The mother started and blinked. The girl glanced at Margot. Margot met her eye and held her. With an abrupt emotional cramp, she remembered Patrick sitting in the diner, holding her with his eyes.
    All her morning sessions ran late, and Margot had only ten minutes for lunch. She ate her dried apricots and pecans out of a Baggie in the ladies’ lounge, where she paced before the smeared mirror, furtivelyabusing her clients. “You wonder why she’s writing suicide poems?” she muttered. “Take a look in the mirror, you deranged cow.”
    She looked at herself and remembered something Roberta had said. “You’re a stereotype of a social worker!” she’d yelled. “You go in there like you’re healing the world, and you’re just as screwed up as they are! You’re really trying to heal yourself, and it’s not working, Margot!”
    Near the end of the semester, she’d met an astonishing girl, a freshman named Chiquita. She was a giggly little thing, who painted her fingernails with a different color on each short, chewed nail and who, at the end of orgasm, would reach greedily between her legs with both hands, sighing and twisting her head as Margot’s tongue played over her fingers. Margot would return home with light, bright eyes, and sometimes Patrick would see her and his eyes would light in response. She would talk about her date, and he would listen with an avid regard that felt almost like love. His voice lost the teasing, seductive quality that had so flummoxed her, and he would look at her as if she were an especially honorable enemy soldier meeting with him in an established neutral zone, a place where, unencumbered by the need for strategy, he could see her as a person and have a moment of expansive feeling that was indirectly erotic.
    “When you talk about her, you get this look on your face that’s just exquisite,” he said. “It’s so brittle and tentative. It’s like you think you might be almost happy, but you’re afraid to trust it.”
    “Patrick,” she said, “the girl’s got nipples you could hang shit on; of course I’m scared.”
    They were walking to the Brown Jug. The spring day was an exclamation point of radiant abundance. Vulgar little flowers burst from the ground like bright hiccups. Crabgrass was everywhere. Patrick wore a tan beret at a sideways angle that made his beauty a silly exaggeration.
    “What about you?” she said. “Don’t you ever feel that way about girls?”
    “Oh, all the time. I’m always afraid to trust love and happiness. And that feeling of not quite trusting but at the same time trying to trust is the best.”
    The words had sounded ludicrous in his affected voice, and Margot slapped him on the butt. But now, as she stood in the ladies’ lounge at work, it occurred to her that the first part of it, at least, had been true.
    In mere months, Chiquita had dumped her for a particularly tedious law student. Stupid with grief, she had gone upstairs to Patrick’s room. He sat up and opened