Because They Wanted To: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Read Free Book Online

Robbie couldn’t help reaching out for the sweetness. He would look up at Rick and then look down and reach for the ice cream cone and politely eat at it with the shy tip of his tongue. Rick would look at him, and tenderness would shimmer under his eyes, trying to get out. But then he would go back to being mean again.
    Their mother would yell when Rick was mean, but she loved him too much to really punish him. She loved his boyish arrogance and his radiance. When he bragged about winning in sports or outsmarting somebody or even being mean, she would look at him as if he had something she needed more than anything in the world. And he would bathe in her look. She would come up behind him and stroke his hair, and he would act like he wasn’t paying attention, but really he would lean into his mother, welcoming her. She would ask him to do things: Open a can, carry a bag of groceries, kill a big bug, rub her feet with oil. And he would do it with an air of chivalry, even though she was the bigger and stronger one. Maybe their mother had been afraid that if she lost the meanness, she’d lose the chivalry, and she couldn’t bear to lose that. But she loved Robbie too, and she was frightened by the way Rick treated him.
    So she got cheap state psychiatrists to look at Rick and Robbie. Once a week they would go to a clinic to be examined, while Elise sat in the waiting room with her mother. Elise didn’t mind going to the clinic. She kind of liked sitting on the orange furniture in the lounge, eating candy out of the machine at the end of the hall and observing the mentally ill people who went in and out. She liked her mother’s certainty that, finally, she was accomplishing something.
    But the psychiatrists didn’t find anything wrong, and things went back to normal. Then Rick hung Robbie upside down in a neighbor’s barn and made him swing back and forth until Robbie’s head hit the wall and his forehead cracked open. When their mother saw, she screamed and put her hand over her mouth; then she turned and hit Rick in the face. She bundled Robbie up and carried him to the house,his forehead bleeding onto her pink blouse, one leg hanging limp off to the side. She didn’t cry; she made choking, struggling noises that were terrible and female. Elise ran after her; Rick just stood there.
    That night Elise had a dream about Robbie. She was in the fifth grade, and had just learned about how Mount Vesuvius had erupted. In her dream, a volcano had erupted in San Anselmo, and their father came in the car to save them. While they were driving to safety, Elise looked back and saw that they had forgotten Robbie. He was running after the car, screaming for their father to stop. Elise held her hand out the window for him to grab, but their father wouldn’t slow down.
    Her dream came true, sort of. Their father married a woman who owned and operated a salon where she tattooed color onto women’s faces so that they would look like they had makeup on all the time. It was decided that Rick and Elise should go live with their father and his new wife and her daughter, Becky, while Robbie stayed behind with their mother. It wasn’t until years later that it had occurred to Elise that the barn incident had something to do with this arrangement.
    “I’m cutting his head off! I’m cutting his head off!” yelled Andy.
    “No!” Eric’s voice had a shrill, stubborn push.
    Swiftly, Elise crossed the room. “Don’t cut off his head!” she said.
    There was a burst of silence. Elise felt the boys shrink deeper into their privacy. Stiffly, they moved their toys. She felt embarrassed. She thought of saying, “Be nice to Eric,” but she was too embarrassed. She stood over them, feeling she couldn’t move until something else happened.
    “What are you playing?” she asked.
    Andy looked up. “The turtle is trying to cut off the mermaid’s friend’s head and Jago is coming to help,” he explained patiently.
    “Oh.” She relaxed. They