She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  * * *

  Somewhere during the school year, word had circulated that my parents were both dead. I didn’t bother to correct the misconception. My mother’s condition and my father’s girlfriend were my business, not anyone else’s. At St. Anthony’s, I was the third student from the top of my class, behind Liam Phipps and Kathy Mahoney. (Miss Lilly rated all thirty-one of us on a section of the blackboard labeled “Do Not Erase.” But whenever Miss Lilly assigned team work, Rosalie Pysyk and pimply Walter Knupp and I were the last kids the captains chose. This was the price you paid for privacy.)

  One night Ma knocked at my bedroom door, ashtray in hand.

  “Busy?” she asked.

  “Studying vocab. Miss Lilly gives us a surprise quiz every Friday.”

  “Will do,” she said. She walked over to my Dr. Kildare collage and studied it. “This used to be my room when I was your age, you know.”

  “Grandma told me,” I said. I thought of pulling open the bureau drawer and sharing her Alan Ladd graffiti with her but decided against it. “You can ask me my words if you want.”

  She took my list and stared at it. There were tears in her eyes. “This place is so bad for my nerves,” she said. “Grandma means well, but . . .”

  “Don’t ask me them in order. Mix them up.”

  “All right,” she said. “‘Blithe.’”

  “‘Gay-hearted.’”

  “‘Blackguard.’”

  “‘Scoundrel.’”

  “Okay. ‘Panacea.’”

  “‘Cure-all.’”

  She put down my notebook. “You and I are getting a place of our own, Dolores, just as soon as I can swing it,” she said. “That’s a promise.”

  “‘Cure-all,’” I repeated.

  “‘Cure-all,’ right. . . . It’s funny, you know? I spend over half a year down below—straightening myself out, figuring out why my entire marriage was one long apology. So where do I end up? Back here where the whole problem started. Driving Old Lady Masicotte’s goddamned Cadillac, no less. The thing is—”

  “Are you going to ask me my words or not?”

  “I’m sorry. ‘Paradox’?”

  “‘Paradox’?”

  “‘Paradox.’”

  “Skip that one,” I said. “I’ll come back to it.”

  “I’m a grown woman, aren’t I? I can have a cigarette if I want to, can’t I? . . . I hated every second he worked for that rich bitch. But I never risked complaining. Knew my place, all right . . .”

  She got up and paced, then stopped to smile at her flying-leg painting. “You like this?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s pretty cool.”

  She passed her fingertips over the painting’s surface. “They hung another one of my pictures up in the dining room at the hospital. A still life. But I thought this one was better. This was my favorite.”

  “What’s repression?” I said.

  “What?” She scanned my vocab list.

  “You said this was the house of repression. What’s repression?”

  She sat on my bed, flopped back. “Holding everything inside. Feeling guilty about everything. Dr. Markey—this doctor I worked with—told me half my problem was being raised in an unhealthy environment. That it constipated me—emotionally. So that Tony and I . . . Those were his words for it, anyway.”

  “Don’t tell Grandma,” I said. “She’d go berserk.”

  She reached over and stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. Her touch felt cool. “You know what I was afraid of all the while I was in the hospital? I was afraid that by the time I got out, you’d look different. But you don’t. You’re just the same.”

  In her absence I’d defused the Pysyk sisters and begun to write love poems in my key-locked diary. When Grandma got to be too much, I snuck over to Roberta’s tattoo shop to smoke and swear about my luck, my life. Ma didn’t know, couldn’t see that I had changed.

  “Just don’t ever let it happen to you, Dolores.”

  “Let what happen?”

  “Let people just shit all over you. Don’t you ever become some man’s personal toilet the way I did . . . All those flowers she kept sending after I lost the baby. She had crust, all right, I’ll give her that much.”

  “Who?”

  “Old Lady Masicotte. ‘Aren’t you going to write her a thank-you note?’ he’d say. There I was, trying to hold myself together from one hour to the next, and the two of them . . .” She walked out of the room, blew her nose, and came back.

  “But that’s all water over the dam, now, isn’t it? Where were we? ‘Paradox.’”

  “‘A situation . . . A situation which . . . a situation which seems contradictory but is nevertheless true.’ Something like that.”

  We studied each other for several seconds. I decided to risk it.

  I reached over and took the cigarette from her. She watched me inhale deeply, then blow the smoke over her shoulder.

  “There’s these two girls,” I said. “Rosalie and Stacia Pysyk . . .”

  * * *

  One afternoon in early spring, Sister Margaret Frances cut into our lessons to announce over the PA that an opinion book had been confiscated. Such things were mean-spirited and unchristian, Sister informed us, and were strictly forbidden at St. Anthony’s School. Any student found circulating one would wish she hadn’t.

  For the next several days I watched the red spiral notebook move up and down the rows whenever Miss Lilly turned her back. Outside at recess and after lunch, girls milled shoulder to shoulder around the shrine of St. Anthony, passing the book and turning every few seconds to locate the whereabouts of the nun on playground duty. From the sidelines, I was unsure exactly what an opinion book was but guessed it had something to do with either sex or popularity.

  “Dolores, do me a giant favor?” Kathy Mahoney begged me at the close of school on Friday. Her face was flushed; it was the first time she’d spoken my name. From the other end of the corridor, Sister Margaret approached us. “Please? As a friend?”

  All weekend long, I leafed through the opinion book Kathy had managed to wedge into my schoolbag. At the top of each page, a classmate’s name was written in Magic Marker capitals. In the space below, kids scrawled their anonymous assessments. Kathy’s page, the notebook’s first, was filled with glowing entries: “2 Good 2 Be 4gotten.” “Love Me Do!” “Friends to the end!” “Wish I had that swing in my backyard.” The Dolores Price page was an afterthought written in plain ink on the book’s inside back cover. “Don’t Know Her” was the first entry, followed by a column of DKHs and one “Ugly Isn’t the Word” in Rosalie Pysyk’s handwriting.

  The ballpoint felt strange in my opposite hand; my penmanship came out sufficiently wobbly and disguised. “Quiet but Cute,” I added to the comments about me. “Worth getting to know.”

  * * *

  In March, Ma had a job interview: secretary for a pest control company. I sat behind her on her bed as she arranged herself in front of the mirror, frowning. “Well, this ought to be great,” she said. “I hate talking on the phone, I haven’t typed since I was in high school, I’m scared to death of bugs, and I’m mousy-looking.”

  “Your hair looks better grown out like that,” I said. “You’ll get it.”

  She wasn’t back by suppertime.

  She’s run away, I thought. Abandoned me here in the house of repression.

  Grandma and I ate our supper in near silence. “Maybe she got the job and they needed her right away,” I suggested.

  Grandma said she certainly hoped she didn’t. There was no telling what kinds of things Ma might carry back to the house from a place like that.

  As I finished up the dishes, the idea that my mother might have committed suicide came flying at me. I pictured her up in the cold night sky, walking insanely onto an airplane wing and laughing at risk I saw her jump.

  I turned to Grandma, who was Saran-wrapping Ma’s supper. I hadn’t planned it. I whacked a glass casserole cover against the
counter, breaking it in half. “You shouldn’t have bugged her so much,” I shouted. “If she cracked up again, it’s your fault.”

  Grandma reeled around. “You just mind your own p’s and q’s, Dolores Elizabeth,” she snapped. “Don’t you dare give me the rats!” Her shaky voice told me that she was scared, too.

  But at quarter of nine, the Cadillac rumbled into Grandma’s alley and Ma burst through the back door. “Sorry I’m so late!” she announced. “Guess what? I bought a car!”

  She was wearing a brand-new orange coat. Her arms cradled crinkling bags and packages. “Can you believe it? A 1962 Buick Skylark! It’ll be ready on Tuesday. It’s white. A white convertible. And the best part is, we get to trade in that goddamned Cadillac. Good riddance! It’ll be ready next Tuesday. Did I already say that? I got them to lower the price by a hundred and seventy-five dollars. Did all the talking myself.”

  “Did you get that job?” I asked.

  “Didn’t even go to the interview. Who wants to work for a bunch of bug killers? What a day I’ve had! Look!”

  She yanked off her knit hat. Her hair was platinum blond.

  “What do you think?” she asked, tossing her head from side to side.

  “Is it a wig?”

  “Nope. It’s all me!”

  Grandma appeared at the doorway. “Well?” Ma said. Her laugh was nervous. “Somebody say something.”

  Grandma shook her head and addressed me instead of Ma. “Next thing you know, she’ll be marching across the street and having that other one give her a tattoo.”

  * * *

  The Peacock Tattoo Emporium’s waiting area was a row of kitchen chairs, standing ashtrays, dirty magazines. You could pick the tattoo you wanted from a fat loose-leaf with plastic-covered sample illustrations.

  “They’re both crazy,” I told Roberta, looking out the plate glass to make sure my grandmother couldn’t see me. “Ma and Grandma. They’re just crazy in different ways.”

  A beaded curtain was drawn between us. On the other side, Roberta was tattooing a customer. “Well, get used to it, hon,” she cackled back. “The whole world’s nuts. Ain’t it, Leon?”

  “That’s right, Roby,” her customer said.

  I sighed and smoked and passed the time thumbing through the dog-eared magazines. In one old Coronet, Lana Turner’s daughter gave an interview from prison about why she’d stabbed Lana’s muscleman boyfriend to death. The article had pictures of the victim, Johnny Stompanato, and Lana’s mansion with an arrow pointing to the bedroom window where the murder had occurred. There was a close-up of Lana’s daughter, taken in her baggy prison dress. Her eerie, squashed-in face reminded me of mine and Jeanette’s faces one afternoon when we’d pulled her mother’s old nylons over our heads. Maybe you inherited craziness like you did brown eyes or frizzy hair, I thought. Maybe you just went nuts and did that sort of thing if your mother got a divorce and a new boyfriend.

  Roberta pulled the beads aside for Leon and reminded him about the rubbing-alcohol treatment. The week before I’d watched him get a bumblebee tattooed to his shoulder. (If it was okay with the customer, it was okay with Roberta for me to watch the above-the-waist jobs. I could force myself to look at the needles once they were in, but not while they were going in.) Leon paid Roberta. Then he shook her hand and left.

  “What’d he get this time?”

  She thumbed through her loose-leaf and showed me the cobra.

  “Where?”

  She patted her behind. “Left cheek. He’s coming back next week for the right one. Wants a mongoose getting ready to attack. I told him, I said, if it ain’t in my catalog, I ain’t guaranteein’ nothin’. Freehand comes out good sometimes; sometimes it don’t. Says he believes in me. ‘Besides,’ he says, ‘who’s gonna see it except me?’ He’s a bachelor, see? This one today was his twenty-second tat. Like I said, the whole world’s crazy.”

  “Sometimes I think Grandma’s worse off than my mother,” I said.

  Roberta laughed and sat down beside me. She lit her cigarette with the end of mine. “Thelma’s a tough old bird, like me. It’s funny, though. Her and me moved into this neighborhood about the same time—1940, it was, before the war—but she never gave me the time of day. Lost her boy Eddie in that drowning the same year I lost my hubby. When the Canuck died, she sent over this yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Had a piece of tape stuck on the bottom of the pan with her name on it. So’s I wouldn’t keep it on her, I guess. Been living across from each other twenty-five years and I don’t think we spoke more than twenty-five words.”

  “She hates your guts,” I said. “No offense.”

  “Thing is, I’m probably a little scary to Thelma. See, she ain’t seen the world like I have. Me and my first hubby used to go all over the place when we were with the carnival, got to know all kinds of different people. Me and the Canuck, too. When the Canuck and I went to Hawaii, we even climbed partway inside a volcano—a dried-up one, you know. You see, Thelma never had none of that. She’s sort of like a scared little girl.”

  My head felt light from smoke and coincidence. She’d just described Grandma the way Ma’s book described Marilyn Monroe. Paradox, I thought: a situation or statement that is contradictory, yet true. I’d gotten it wrong on the vocabulary test but suddenly understood.

  I stubbed out my butt. “What was my uncle like?” I asked.

  “Eddie? Good-lookin’ kid—and full o’ piss and vinegar. Used to stand over on that porch and throw snowballs. Had the cruiser parked out front once or twice. But he was a good kid. Used to shovel my sidewalk free of charge. Terrible thing when he died—a regular tragedy.”

  Then she laughed and told me about the time Uncle Eddie snuck across the street with a five-dollar bill. “Said he wanted a tattoo. A rose if I remember right,” Roberta said. “Had me put it right in his armpit so’s Thelma wouldn’t see it. Then one hot summer day he had his shirt off and he forgot and stretched his arms. She marched right over here and said she was going to call the police and have me shut down. Said it was hard enough raising a scamp like him by herself without me making it harder.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Oh, fifteen or so. Antsy, he was. Used to come over here and complain about her just the way you do. Told me and the Canuck he couldn’t wait to leave home and join the navy.”

  I wanted her to keep talking about Uncle Eddie, but she got up and told me she felt like closing for the day. “Yup,” she said. “Me and the Canuck. One day he’d love me right and the next day he’d slam me against the wall.” She smiled sadly, shaking her head. “And I’d let him, too. How’s that for crazy?”

  * * *

  Shortly after we got our new car, Ma landed a job as a tollbooth collector on the Newport Bridge, a thirty-minute commute from Easterly. Her hair looked even blonder set against her khaki uniform. She rode back and forth to work with the top down. Within a week, she had her first date.

  I watched her eyelid twitch when she announced the news one morning at breakfast. “He seems like a sweetheart,” she said. “Hands me a Hershey’s kiss with his money every morning. Take a chance, I told myself.”

  “What does he look like?” I asked.

  “Kind of cute. At least from inside his car he is.”

  Grandma put down her fork. She said she was getting fed up with all of this girlish nonsense from someone who was thirty-two years old. She wanted to remind my mother that in the eyes of the Church she was still a married woman and said she hoped Ma wasn’t reserving herself a room in hell for the sake of one little night of whoop-de-do.

  I had never thought of Ma as someone capable of whoop-de-do. All that week I nervously pictured her with cleavage at some nightclub, dancing cheek to cheek with Johnny Stompanato.

  On her big night, Ma rushed excitedly around her room getting ready. She squirted herself with the Tabu perfume I’d sent to the hospital the Christmas before, daubed on her lipstick, and hummed “Blame It on the Bossa Nova.” Her date owned a sto
re on Edson Street, she told me. He sold newspapers, tobacco, and mixed nuts. I was relieved to learn they were only going to the movies.

  Grandma had taken the official position that she just plain gave up. Still, it was she who sent me into Ma’s room that evening, a spy armed with a holy trinity of questions: What nationality was he? What religion was he? What was his last name?

  His last name was Zito. Mario Zito. “But all my buddies call me Iggy, Miz Holland,” he explained to Grandma, who gripped the arms of her chair and refused to look at him directly.

  Iggy Zito was nothing like hoody Johnny Stompanato. He was short and had ripply red hair and freckles and wore a corduroy car coat. He was somewhere between the kind of man Jeanette and I would have ignored and the kind we would have made fun of.

  “And this is my daughter, Dolores,” Ma said. I gave him a one-second acknowledgment and then concentrated on the living-room rug.

  “Your mother mentioned she had a little girl. These are for you, sweetheart. Just a little something, heh heh.” He handed me a wrinkled paper bag with a grease spot on it. I hated it when you could hear a person’s saliva right in their laugh.

  Ma bent over and kissed Grandma, who sat ramrod straight in her chair and didn’t respond.

  “Don’t wait up for me, now,” Ma laughed.

  “Do-on’t worry,” Grandma answered, rolling her eyes at the TV.

  From the unlit front room we watched them get into Iggy’s black station wagon. To my relief, Ma didn’t slide in next to him like a teenager but stuck close to the passenger’s-side door.

  “Zito. That’s Eye-talian,” my grandmother said as we stood together in the semidarkness. Back in the other room I opened the bag he’d given me. Inside were two Little Lotta comic books, a box of Good’n’Plenty, and several handfuls of pistachio nuts.

  Grandma made me throw out the nuts because they weren’t packaged and who knew who had touched them, where they’d been? We spent the evening playing Crazy Eights and watching television. Grandma kept referring to Ma’s date as Mario Pepperoni. “Of course, years ago,” she told me, “you wouldn’t even play with the Eyetalians. They were dirty, my father said. One step up from the coloreds.”