She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “I was just out riding,” I said. “I had to get out of here.”

  “Did you go over to Jeanette’s?” my father asked.

  “No.”

  “What happens in this house stays in this house. It’s no one else’s business.”

  “I know that.”

  He rose and stretched. “I’m going to bed,” he said.

  Ma and I sat, leg to leg, listening to the crickets. “Take me inside,” she said, finally. “Make me a cup of tea.”

  The kitchen light made us squint. Ma’s top lip was purple and puffy. When the tea was ready, I put it down in front of her. “Sit down,” she said, patting the chair next to her.

  Instead, I walked across the kitchen and sat on the counter. “What’s a whore?” I said.

  She told me she didn’t want to talk about anything right now. “All I can picture is some cat sneaking up behind Petey. Tomorrow I’m—”

  Something about my pink shorts made her stop.

  “What?” I said.

  She was staring down there at me.

  I saw and felt it at the same time: the dark wet blotch of blood.

  “That’s great, Dolores. Thanks a lot,” Ma said, her face crumpling in tears. “That’s just what I need right now.”

  * * *

  The backhoe rattled our whole street.

  Somewhere in the middle of that week’s excavating and cement mixing, Jeanette’s cat Delilah retreated to the Nords’ linen closet and gave birth to six kittens. All morning, Jeanette and I watched the slow, strained business of Delilah pushing babies from her rump; all afternoon we studied the tiny blind things as they cried without sound and writhed in a mound against their mother. Just before I left to go home, I asked Jeanette the question I’d been trying to ask all day long.

  “Do you know what a whore is?”

  “A prostitute,” she said. She watched my blank look. “A woman who does sex with men for money. Mommy says there aren’t any around here. They’re only in big cities. You can tell if a woman’s one when—”

  “Is it always a woman?”

  The question stopped Jeanette and she shrugged. “I think so. Why?”

  * * *

  The pool men kept swearing and laughing and asking to use our bathroom. Ma’s nerves were so bad she decided to take a bus to Rhode Island and visit Grandma. “You can either come with me or stay with Daddy,” she said.

  “Stay with Daddy.”

  All that week I rode my bike to Jeanette’s and held the warm kittens to my chest, two at a time. At home I watched our pool fill up with water.

  On the weekend, Daddy didn’t go golfing with Mrs. Masicotte but stayed home with me instead, sloshing and sunbathing and running to the house to answer the phone. His voice inside was a murmur, undetectable over the murmur of the pool filter.

  On Monday morning I woke up late to the sound of his swimming. From my bedroom window I watched him catch air and dive deep, then break the surface again in some surprise place.

  “How come you’re home?” I called. “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “Can’t a guy take a little vacation with his daughter?” he said. “Get your suit on. Come on out with me.”

  By mid-morning we were lying on towels on the pool apron, working on our tans. “By the way,” he said, leaning on his elbow and smiling. “I been meaning to ask you something.”

  “Then ask,” I said.

  “What are those things?”

  He was looking at the front of my bathing suit in a way that made me blush. “What?” I said.

  He reached over and tweaked one of my bumps, then cuffed me on the chin. “You hiding walnuts in there or something?”

  “Shut up,” I said. I jumped in and swam the length of the pool, hiding my smile underwater. He was a flirt, that was all. What was wrong with that? If Mrs. Masicotte was stupid enough to buy us a pool because he flirted a little, that was her problem, not ours.

  It rained on Tuesday. We went off on errands like the old days, but these tasks we performed for us, not the old lady. From a thick wad of bills in his pants pocket, Daddy laid down money for poolside chairs, air mattresses, my new two-piece bathing suit. We were at the hardware-store counter with our pool supplies when it suddenly occurred to him that a girl my age should have her own house key. “Hold everything,” he told the clerk who was ringing up our order. “We forgot something.”

  For lunch we ate at a Chinese restaurant: egg rolls and lo mein and fortune cookies. “What’s it say?” Daddy asked, when I snapped open my cookie and uncurled the strip of paper.

  “‘The smile you send out returns to you.’ How about yours?”

  “‘Idle pleasure disguises itself as permanent happiness.’” He tossed his fortune into the ashtray. “Whatever the hell that means.”

  All that week, we played and swam without mentioning Petey or the fight or Ma. I began to appreciate his anger, to see how someone like my mother could drive you to it—the way she crabbed and worried all day and squirted that spray up her nose. Rising and falling gently on my air mattress during a quiet moment, I looked over at Daddy and then down into the wobbly pool water and thought that, if life had been fair, he would have met Mrs. Nord instead of my mother and married her. They’d be living happily together now with their pool and their two daughters, Jeanette and me.

  By the end of the week, Daddy was swimming a hundred laps and I was up to sixty. We sat on the pool’s edge, dangling our tan legs over the sides, our eyes pink and burning from chlorine.

  “Do you remember way back,” he asked, “when I had my own painting business? Before I went to work for LuAnn?”

  “You had a green pickup truck,” I said. “And Ma and I used to bring you your lunch.”

  “That’s right,” he smiled.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

  I didn’t want our time together to end. I didn’t want our conversation to turn sad in any way. “Then what do you think of this?” I said. I reached down and splashed him with cold water. He growled like a lion and chased me around and around the pool.

  * * *

  Daddy called Ma on Sunday night. When he got off the phone, he told me Ma wanted him to drive me to Rhode Island so I could spend a couple of days with Grandma.

  “What for?” I complained.

  “Because you haven’t seen her since Christmas,” he said.

  “Big loss. Can’t I just stay here with you?”

  He looked away from me. “What’ll we have for supper?” he said. “Let’s order a pizza.”

  * * *

  The bruise on Ma’s lip had faded to a yellowy green. “I missed you, honey,” she said. We both waited out the response I was supposed to give but didn’t. “So what’s new?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Not a thing.”

  “In a whole week, nothing?”

  “Jeanette’s having a back-to-school slumber party next week. Me and her and six other girls.”

  “How was the rest of your week? Did you and Daddy have a talk?”

  “We had lots of talks. We had a blast. Not one second was boring.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “About what?”

  “Never mind.”

  Grandma’s house had a camphor smell and was cluttered with religious knickknacks. Her whole downstairs had the same ugly pink-flamingo wallpaper. A series of family pictures hung on the stairway wall, one framed photograph for each step. There was one of my mother and her girlfriend Geneva Sweet wearing white dresses and 1940s hairdos, their arms hooked around each other’s waists. A high-school graduation picture of Eddie, my mother’s younger brother, who’d drowned at age nineteen. Wedding portraits of both my parents and grandparents. You almost had to feel sorry for Grandma in her wedding picture, standing solemnly next to her bridegroom in her shiny gown, unaware of the deaths of her husband, and her son, and her grandson, Anthony Jr.

  “Old pictures are fascinati
ng, aren’t they?” Ma said, when she caught me studying them.

  “Not really.” I shrugged.

  I spent the remainder of the visit staring stupidly at the TV, answering Grandma’s questions in single syllables and making faces at her cooking.

  On the bus back home, Ma began rambling on about what being a girl had been like for her—how if she could have changed one thing about herself, it would be her shyness. Grandma had meant well, but . . . “So when Tony came along and started calling me on the telephone, showing me all of his attention, well, I just couldn’t—”

  “Does any of this have a point?” I sighed.

  “He was supposed to tell you. That was the purpose of the whole week. Your father wants a divorce. He’s leaving us.”

  The bus hummed along the interstate. My head felt too numb to think. “That’s stupid,” I said, finally. “Why would he put in a brand-new pool if he was leaving?”

  She reached over and took my hand.

  “Do we have to move?” I asked.

  “No. He’s moving. Moved.”

  “Where?”

  “To New Jersey.”

  “What about his job? Is Masicotte moving there, too?” “Mrs. Masicotte? She fired him. He’s been having a fling with one of her tenants and she caught them. She’s furious.”

  For five minutes, neither of us spoke. I stared ahead and watched the seat upholstery go blurry from my tears. “It’s funny, in a way,” Ma finally said. “She didn’t mind him having a wife and daughter. He just couldn’t have another girlfriend. . . . Do you have any questions?”

  “Who gets to keep the Cadillac?” I said.

  “We do. You and me. Isn’t that hilarious?”

  “Can I still go to Jeanette’s slumber party?” I asked.

  * * *

  I spent the week swimming laps, looking up from the water at every little noise. Whenever Jeanette called, I thought it would be Daddy.

  On Friday Ma came timidly out to the pool wearing her beach robe. In her hands she held her equipment: cup of tea, cigarettes, nasal spray. She struggled with the gate, walked up to the water, and dunked her big toe. “Cold,” she said. Then she slipped off her robe and sat down stiffly on a webbed chair.

  “It’s nice here,” she said. “Come out of the water and talk to me.”

  I sat on the pool’s edge, dripping and impatient. “I was just about to start my routine,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just your company. Can I ask you a question?”

  “What?”

  “It’s silly, really. I’m just curious. . . . If you didn’t know me at all—if you just looked up and there I was, some woman on the street, a stranger—would you think I was pretty or ugly?”

  Her bathing suit was the same corny two-piece she’d worn ever since she’d gotten fat: flowered top, white skirt bottom, roll of bluish white flab in the middle. “I don’t know,” I said. “Pretty, I guess.”

  She was searching my face for the truth. The truth, as I saw it, was that Daddy wouldn’t have left if she hadn’t always been Miss Doom and Gloom. “Pretty?” she said. “Really?”

  “Yeah, pretty ugly.”

  Her lip shook. She reached for her spray.

  “God, I was only kidding,” I said. “Can’t you even take a joke?”

  * * *

  Daddy’s letter came postmarked from New Jersey: a single page of notebook paper that promised continuing love and child-support checks but failed to explain why he’d swum with me all week without telling me the truth, how he could want some woman bad enough to give us up. I’d never bothered to notice his penmanship before: fragile, tentative strokes—nothing like Daddy himself. “Donna really wants to meet you,” the writing said. “Just as soon as the time is right.”

  At Jeanette’s slumber party, I told Kitty Coffey she smelled like a hamper and was delighted when she cried. I ate greedily, danced myself into a sweat, and laughed so loud that Mrs. Nord had to come in and speak to me. “Keep it down, honey, will you? I can hear you all over the house,” she said. “Shut up, you whore,” I thought of saying, but only made a face. I dared each girl there to stay awake as long as I could—to match my energy. When the last of them faded off to sleep, I started shaking so hard that I couldn’t stop myself. Maybe he’d left because I was a bad person. Because I’d wished he’d married Mrs. Nord instead of Ma. Because I told Ma she was ugly.

  By dawn, my eyes burned from no sleep. I tiptoed amongst my girlfriends in the blanketed clumps on Jeanette’s floor, pretending they were all dead from some horrible explosion. Because I had stayed awake, I was the only survivor.

  Birds chirped outside in the Nords’ graying yard. I got dressed, walked down the hall, and pedaled barefoot back to Bobolink Drive.

  * * *

  Out in back, the pool filter hummed. The water was silvery and smooth. Petey was sitting on the fencepost.

  I clicked my tongue and approached him, repeating his name. Then my hand descended, was over him. His beak pecked lightly at my finger. I could feel his fragile bones.

  I unlocked the front door with my new shiny key.

  Ma was in their bedroom, awake, naked. She was standing in front of the full-length mirror, holding her breasts—gently, lovingly, the exact same way Jeanette and I held the baby kittens.

  Here we are, I thought: two women. “Look!” I said.

  She reeled around, startled at my voice. I let go of her bird. It fluttered around and around the room, in circles between us.

  3

  I was on the brown plaid sofa, watching TV and Scotch-taping my bangs to my forehead because Jeanette said that kept them from drying frizzy. Across the room on the Barcalounger, my mother was having her nervous breakdown.

  Ma sat hunched over one of our fold-out TV trays, working constantly on a religious jigsaw puzzle without making any progress. She wore her knee socks and her quilted pink bathrobe, despite the early summer heat. She ate nothing but cubes of Kraft caramels. For two weeks, I had been reaching over and turning up the volume, trying as best I could to ignore the private curse words she’d begun chuckling to herself, trying not to see the litter of caramel cellophane that was accumulating around her chair in a kind of half circle.

  It wasn’t that Ma hadn’t put up a fight. In Daddy’s absence, she’d repainted the downstairs hallway and exercised in front of the TV with Jack LaLanne and cried and kicked the lawn mower until it eventually started. Her efforts at going it alone led her back to Sunday Mass and through a succession of brief jobs: convalescent-home cook, bank teller, notions-department clerk at Mr. Big’s discount store. When winter cold burst one of our pipes, Ma called and called until she located the random yellow-pages plumber who got out of bed to come fix it.

  But we’d done nothing about maintaining the pool the previous fall. Leaves had fluttered down onto the surface, then sunk and rotted; by springtime, the pool water was brown soup.

  One morning in May, Ma went downstairs and found Petey dead at the bottom of his cage. “Why me? Why always me?” she was still sobbing when I got home from school. She hadn’t gone to work that day and didn’t go the next day either. At the end of the week, Mr. Big’s called to say they were letting her go. By then she’d already begun living in her robe.

  It was Ma’s hair that finally got to me. At school I sucked breath mints and carried a small bottle of Tussy deodorant in my purse for whenever I could get my hands on the lavatory pass. Ma’s unwashed hair, matted and crazy, alarmed me enough to suspend the cold war against my father and contact directory assistance in Tenafly, New Jersey.

  It had been almost a year since my father’s move to Tenafly, where he’d opened a flower shop with his girlfriend, Donna.

  “Good afternoon, Garden of Eden,” Donna said. I had spoken to her only once before, phoning the day my parents’ divorce became final to call her a whore. The two prevailing mysteries in my life were: what Donna looked like and why, exactly, my father had traded us for her.

&
nbsp; “May I speak to Tony,” I said icily. “This is his daughter, Miss Dolores Price.”

  When my father got on, I cut through his nervous chitchat. “It’s Ma,” I said. “She’s acting funny.”

  He coughed, paused, coughed again. “Funny how?” he asked.

  “You know. Funny peculiar.”

  Neither Donna nor I wished to live under the same roof, and neither the Nords nor my father would entertain my proposal that Jeanette and I live at our house for the summer and Mrs. Nord drive over with our meals and clean laundry. It was decided I would move to my grandmother’s house on Pierce Street in Easterly, Rhode Island, until Ma got right again.

  On the one-hour drive to Grandma Holland’s, I clutched my notebook filled with addresses of girls from whom I’d forced promises to write me regularly. Daddy kept sneaking nervous peeks at me and at the rearview mirror. Behind us, the U-Haul trailer wobbled and swayed from side to side. In silence I waited impatiently for the tragic highway accident that would paralyze me but wrench both my parents back to their senses. I pictured the three of us back home on Bobolink Drive, Daddy pushing my wheelchair solemnly up the front walk, eternally grateful for my forgiveness. At the doorway, Ma would smile sadly, her hair as clean and lustrous as a Breck-shampoo girl’s.

  Daddy didn’t say much to Grandma. He deposited my bike and suitcases and cartons in the front foyer, kissed me on the forehead, and left.

  Grandma and I were cautiously polite to each other. “Make yourself at home, Dolores,” she said hesitantly as she opened the door to what had once been my mother’s bedroom. The room smelled dry and dusty. The windows were stuck closed and there were little rows of insect carcasses along the sill. When I sat down on the hard mattress, it crackled under me. I tried to picture my mother in this room as a twelve-year-old girl like me, but all I could see was Anne Frank on the cover of her paperback diary.

  With each trip up or down the front staircase, I watched the portrait of Eddie, my dead uncle. His blond hair was pushed up into a spiky crew cut. His eyes peeked out from beneath two bushy brows and followed my steps with eerie cheerfulness. His smile was almost a smirk, as if he might reach out from the frame and jab me in the ribs as I passed.