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

relaxed. She stood there a minute in the new atmosphere. Then she went to check on Penny. The baby was still just lying there. Elise sat on the bed, feeling that everything was okay. She had shown authority and made contact. She thought about picking the baby up and walking back and forth with her, but she’d never picked a baby up before. Instead, she put her hand on Penny’s stomach and rubbed her. The baby smiled and made sounds that were like light, tumbling bubbles. Nervously, Elise stroked theexquisite little forehead. The baby looked at Elise solemnly and then drew her gaze back inward as she returned to the business of creating a person who could survive in the world. Elise looked out the window. Two shabby old women wearing brimmed hats stood on the pavement, talking. They touched each other and smiled and nodded vigorously.
    It was funny, thought Elise, that she had told the children “we have a cat” when she wasn’t with her family anymore. He wasn’t her cat now. They hadn’t discovered Blue under a porch with an orphaned litter, either. And he had never faced down a dog. He was an expensive Persian cat from a breeder. Their father had bought him as a special gift for their stepmother, Sandy.
    When she and Rick moved in with their father and Sandy, their father had said to her, “Now you’ll have a sister,” as if she had always wanted one. But she had not wanted, at the age of eleven, to have a nine-year-old stranger dropped into the middle of her life. It was like suddenly having to live with somebody who sat across the room from her at school.
    But Becky was nice. She was diffident and she always shared. She was also weird, or, as her own mother said, “neurotic.” She picked the fur off her stuffed animals. All her animals were bald. Her mother said it was because she needed to “act out her anger” at her parents’ divorce. It didn’t look like anger to Elise. Becky would sit with an animal and suck her thumb and pick the fur off it with two fingers, collecting it in her palm until she had a handful. Then she’d put it in a blue plastic bucket called “the picky bucket.” If you wanted to torture Becky, and Rick and Elise sometimes did, you could threaten to dump the pickies in the toilet or throw handfuls about the room while Becky screamed and ran around trying to catch them. Even when she got older and stopped picking the animals, Becky kept the overflowing picky bucket under her bed. Then her mother found them and threw them away, because she said it was “over the top” for Becky to have them. For a while after that, Becky defiantly picked the stuffing out of the mattress and dropped it on the floor, but she was really too old by then, so she didn’t do it long.
    Elise came to like Becky and to feel protective of her shy peculiarity. But she was more impressed by her stepmother. Rick had hatedSandy from the beginning, but Elise found her too strange and fascinating to hate. Sandy was a little younger than their mother, but she had a bright, bristling competence that made her seem older. She was thin and her stomach was hard and she’d had her face tattooed so that she appeared to be wearing full makeup all the time. Even when she got up in the morning, her lips were bright red, her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were outlined in black. “I fixed it so I wouldn’t have to wash my face off at night,” she said. She said it with brisk self-deprecation, as if her face, everybody’s face, was a vaguely ridiculous thing that could come off at any moment. She also said it with pride that she’d acknowledged the problem and then gone right in there to fix it. Her whole being seemed to be bursting with self-deprecation and pride and the need to fix things.
    Their father may have gotten Blue as a present for Sandy, but he had grown to like the cat more than anybody did. He thought it was soulful and beautiful. He brought Blue special treats and talked to him, even sang to him. Blue