Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Read Free Book Online Page B

regular. She had never had any sexual partners. Laura blinked.
    “Never?”
    “No,” said Alice. “Never.” She looked at Laura as if she was watching for a reaction, and maybe holding back a smile.
    Her blood pressure was excellent. Her pulse rate was average.
    Laura handled her wrist and arm with unusual care. A forty-three-year-old virgin. It was like looking at an ancient sacred artifact, a primitive icon with its face rubbed off It had no function or beauty, but it still felt powerful when you touched it. Laura pictured Alice walking around with a tiny red flame in the pit of her body, protecting it with her fat and muscle, carefully dyeing her hair, exercising three times a week, and not smoking.
    When the doctor examined Alice, Laura felt tense as she watched, especially when he did the gynecological exam. She noticed that Alice gripped her paper gown in the fingers of one hand when the doctor sat between her legs. He had to tell her to open her legs wider three times. She said, “Wait, I need to breathe,” and he waited a second or two. Alice breathed with her head sharply turned, so that she stared at a corner of the ceiling. There Was a light sweat on her forehead.
    When she changed back into her clothes, though, she moved like she was in a womens locker room. She got up from the table and took off the paper gown before the doctor was even out of the room.
    “She’s probably really religious, or maybe she’s crazy.” That’s what Sharon, the secretary, thought. “In this day and age? She was probably molested when she was little.”
    “I don’t know” said Laura. “I respected it.”
    Sharon shrugged. “It takes all kinds.”
    She imagined her father looking at the middle-aged virgin and then looking away with an embarrassed smile on his face. He m ight think about protecting her, about waving at her from across the street, saying, "Hi, how are you?” sending protection with his words. He could protect her and still keep walking, smiling to himself with embarrassed tenderness. He would have a feeling of honor and frailty, but there would be something sad in it, too,
    because she wasn’t young. Laura remembered a minor incident in a novel she had read by a French writer, in which a teenage boy knocked an old nun off a bridge. Her habit was heavy and so she drowned, and the writer wondered, with a stupid sort of meanness, Laura thought, if the nun had felt shocked to have her genitals touched by the cold water. She remembered a recent news story about a nut job who had kidnapped a little girl so that he could tie her to a tree and set a fire around the tree. Then he went to his house to watch through binoculars as she burned. Fortunately, a neighbor called the police and they got there in time.
    Instead of going back to the waiting room, she went to the public bathroom and leaned against the small windowsill with her head in her hands. She was forty, she tried to imagine what it would be like to be a virgin. She imagined walking through the supermarket, encased in an invisible membrane that was fluid but also impenetrable, her eyes wide and staring like a doll’s. Then she imagined her virginity like a strong muscle between her legs, making all her other muscles strong, making everything in her extra alive, all the way up through her brain and into her bones.
    She lifted her head and looked out the small window. She saw green grass and the tops of trees, cylindrical apartment buildings and traffic. She had not wanted her virginity. She’d had to lose it with three separate people; her hymen had been stubborn and hard to break.
    She brushed the dust and particles from the windowsill off her elbows. “I was a rebellious girl,” she said, “and I went in a stupid direction.”
    She thought of the Narcotics Anonymous meetings she had attended some years ago. People talked about the things that had happened to them, the things they had done on drugs. Nothing was too degrading or too pathetic or too