Read Two Girls Fat and Thin for Free Online Page A

plush swivel chair. “Do you know what I have to say to those who don’t agree with me? Fine, don’t agree. But don’t come on my show and ruin it for everybody else.” The audience laughed.
    I viewed the exercisers sadly. Justine followed my gaze. They were bending in unison in solemn, balletic toe-touches. We could faintly hear the sonorous thump of the disco music that bore them along.
    “Do you see a contradiction in the sexual behavior of her characters—the pattern of dominance and submission that she says is, in other spheres, irrational? Do you find that the behavior of her female characters is a denial of themselves in reality—for example, when Skip beats up Solitaire and she likes it?”
    The stupid and self-righteous nature of this question cast a grim shadow on my hopes for the quality of Justine’s article. The sight of the joyful exercisers soured, as did the awful green of the instructor’s sweatsuit. “Solitaire likes it, not because she’s hit, but because it’s Skip. It’s totally different from the kind of neurotic masochism you’re implying.”
    “Well, then, there’s the rape thing with Asia Maconda and Frank Golanka.”
    “Look, I’m a sex abuse victim and so are you, and you ought to be able to understand. Asia is presented as having a problem, for one thing. She’s neurotic and she needs this kind of crushing force to act upon her because she needs to be broken in a way, but it’s got nothing to do with masochism. Asia is exalted when Frank Golanka takes possession of her. She is not demeaned. A masochist is somebodylike my mother who was demeaned by her subservience to a cruel, dishonest, contemptible man. When the women in Granite’s books submit, they do it out of strength, out of choice, as a gift. That’s the difference between masochism and love, and if you don’t see that, then you’re crazy.”
    Justine’s jaw muscles flinched spasmodically as she scribbled; her fingers were tight on her pen. She was skewed by a renewed blast of sunlight. Minute cinders of light darted and vanished in the air between us, the hallucinated discharge of my wrath. My head felt separated from my body; I floated, stretched out, calm and naked in a soothing space above our ugly disconnected conversation. Below, my intestines contracted into a malign snake. A large gas bubble solemnly floated up from my abdomen. The exercisers jogged gaily in place, hands flopping at their sides.
    “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
    In the placid enclosure of aqua tiling, my intestines warred, suffered, and subsided. The fierce cylindrical lights on either side of the mirror above the basin revealed a surprising face; instead of the angry, adamant woman I had expected to meet, there was the porous, puffy, pink-splotched face of an exhausted person on the verge of tears. Only my bright eyes, shining bravely and a little too enthusiastically above dark and heavy skin revealed my fighting spirit. But who was I fighting? The collegiate mouse in my living room? I finished my ablutions in the aqua basin, opened the window a crack, and sat on the edge of the tub for a moment.
    I returned to the living room to find Justine contemplatively eating an egg roll.
    “I think you’re misunderstanding me,” she said. “I’m not asking these questions because I think those things about Granite’s work. It’s just that these accusations have been made against her, and if I’m going to write an article, I have to address them.”
    “But do you understand what I’m saying? I wouldn’t consider it demeaning to worship at the feet of a hero.”
    “I know what you mean. I even know what you mean when you say that Asia needed to have something taken from her by force for it to mean anything. I’ve had an experience like that myself.”
    All my eagerness to like Justine frolicked in the air between us. “Really?”
    “It wasn’t that I was raped or anything. Just that about three years ago I had a relationship