She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “Those clothes you were going to take off the line yesterday are still there,” Grandma said, passing through the kitchen. I picked a random chapter and began reading. She yapped on about housework, girls in her day, how fortunate it was that school was starting up again in two weeks.

  After lunch, I listened to Jack’s program on the radio. I half expected to hear a song dedication to Dolores Del Rio or some reference to our Mexican meal, but the closest he came was playing a record by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

  Later, Grandma stood between me and “As the World Turns,” her hands on her hips. I was slumped sideways in one of the parlor chairs, blowing under a ball of lint in a halfhearted attempt to keep it afloat.

  “Those clothes are still waiting out there, Miss Itchy Britches,” she said. “And your breakfast and lunch dishes are still in the sink. In my day, a lazy girl got a licking.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Stick out your tongue and lick me.”

  She walked over and slapped me on the arm—harder than I’d expected, hard enough for it to sting. “And they didn’t sass their elders, either!”

  “What are you tickling me for?” I said.

  At four o’clock, I heard Jack’s MG in the alley, his footsteps up, then back down the stairs. The water pipes groaned and I knew he was out in back washing his car. On my way up the staircase, Uncle Eddie’s picture smirked at me from behind glass.

  From my vantage point behind the bathroom curtains, I watched him appear and disappear behind the sheets and towels that waved and fluttered on the line. Ma’s and my personal stuff was out there, too: two of Ma’s black bras and several pairs of my gnarled-up underpants, including the one with the rippy waist.

  Jack was wearing cutoffs and a faded inside-out sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, no shoes or socks. He whistled and sudsed the little car. I thought of the way Rita’s lip curled unattractively against her gum when she laughed. She was cute, not pretty. She should do something with that short, flat hair. As she was, she just didn’t deserve him.

  He squatted and scrubbed his wire wheels. His legs were muscly, more furry than I’d imagined.

  At the dinner the night before, Ma had acted so . . . that word kids had written in the opinion book. Leaning over and giving him those little slaps whenever he teased her. Horny: that was the word. Ma and her stupid risks, her black-lace bras.

  The green garden hose snaked between his legs; he sloshed and sprayed and wiped down the chrome. On his way past the clothesline, he looked right at my underpants. Then he went up the stairs, inside.

  Audrey Hepburn on the cover of The Nun’s Story was staring up at me from my unmade bed. Her hair was hidden by her snow-white wimple; her big eyes looked frightened. “What are you looking at?” I said. “Fuck you.” It was the first time I’d ever said the word. I felt a brief shiver of power.

  Then I sat back on the bed and sobbed. Dolores Price: Lady of Sorrow.

  When Ma got home from work, I stood at the top of the stairs and eavesdropped on Grandma’s complaints. “If you didn’t just let her . . . As long as she’s living in this house . . .”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Ma said. “I’ll take the clothes in.”

  When she came upstairs and knocked, I had my defense—my punch line—ready to go. “Why don’t you stop acting like a teenager?” I’d say. “Why don’t you just grow up and stop embarrassing everyone?”

  But instead of criticizing, Ma sat down and put her arm around me. “Let’s you and me go to the show tomorrow,” she suggested. “Or shopping or something.”

  * * *

  The top of the Skylark was up, the afternoon gray and rainy. My mother and I were on our way back from our day in Providence.

  We’d left in the morning and bought breakfast, then two new school uniforms for me and mohair sweaters for both of us. We’d waited half an hour in line, as well, to see a matinee of A Hard Day’s Night. But girls in front and back of us were screaming at the glassed-in movie posters; Ma had forgotten her medication and didn’t think her nerves could take it. I pouted briefly, then settled for Mary Poppins.

  “What’s your idea of a cute guy?” I asked Ma.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Someone tall, dark, and loaded. How about Vic Damone—is he available?”

  “Seriously,” I said. “Do you think someone like, say, Jack is handsome?”

  She tapped the brake for no reason I could see. Then she laughed. “Jack who? Jack Frost? Jack Benny?”

  “Our Jack. Jack from upstairs.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I never really thought about it. He and Rita make a cute couple, don’t they? She’s a living doll.” She reached over and turned on the radio.

  “She has an ugly mouth.”

  “You’re too critical sometimes. I think she’s cute.”

  “Do you think Jack looks anything like your brother? That picture of him on the stairs reminds me of Jack.”

  “Eddie? Not really. . . . Well, now that you mention it. Eddie was darker than Jack, though. Shorter, too.”

  She turned the radio off. The windshield wipers made little squeaks.

  “I wish it wasn’t almost September,” I said. “I hate that school. I don’t have any friends.”

  “This year will be different,” she said. “God, eighth grade—I can’t believe it.”

  “If I still hate it, can I switch schools?”

  “You won’t hate it,” she said. “I’m not even answering that. Light me a cigarette, will you?”

  I struck the match, sucked in, passed it to her. Then I lit one for myself. We smoked in silence, the Skylark’s tires hissing through the wet streets.

  “How come you and Grandma will never talk about Uncle Eddie?” I said.

  “Who said I won’t talk about him? What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. . . . Did you cry when you found out he drowned?”

  “Yeah, sure I cried.”

  “Did he ever see me before he died?”

  “Oh, plenty of times. You were about a year old. He used to tease me because you weren’t a boy. Used to hold you and call you Fred . . . Oh, God, that funeral. It was awful. He was always so full of life.”

  “Did Grandma cry?”

  Ma flicked off the wipers. “I don’t know, maybe. Not in front of me.”

  “She didn’t even cry for her own kid?”

  “She was angry about it—did a lot of slamming, I remember. Pot lids, kitchen cabinets. Eddie was kind of wild. He always took chances.”

  “Risks,” I said. I hated Grandma, that cold bitch.

  “Julie Andrews played a good part in that movie today, didn’t she?” Ma said. “She seems so sweet.”

  “She’s probably a big spoiled snot in real life.” I clicked the radio back on and twisted the knob until I found W-EAS. A song ended and Jack came on. I turned it up loud; his voice filled the car.

  “The eyebrows, maybe,” Ma said.

  “What?”

  “He resembles Eddie a little around the eyebrows. Those blue eyes that look like they’re cooking up trouble.”

  * * *

  When we got home, I took the radio upstairs to my bedroom rather than look at Grandma. I tried on one of the new uniforms. Even the next biggest size was snug.

  Jack told an elephant joke. Then I heard the organ beginning of “Our Day Will Come.” I’d given Jeanette the 45 for a birthday present. We used to sing it together in harmony in the Nords’ backseat. Jeanette hadn’t written back in months.

  I got up and locked my bedroom door.

  My hairbrush was a microphone. I sang to the mirror, to Jack’s mischievous blue eyes.

  Our day will come

  If we just wait awhile . . .

  My lips moving around the words of the song made me feel sexy and sad. With my free hand, I reached up under the uniform.

  So what? I told myself. If Rita—Grandma’s little china doll—can do it . . .

  I closed my eyes and t
he hairbrush dropped to the floor. My hands wandered the insides of my thighs, back and forth against my wet underpants. Eddie’s hands. Jack’s.

  6

  It was already in the eighties when I slumped into the kitchen in my itchy woolen uniform on the first day of school.

  “Ta-da,” my mother said. I gave her a dirty look.

  It had occurred to me that Jack and I would be starting out of the house at the same time each morning and that St. Anthony’s School was on his way to work. From that, I had perfected my fantasy: I would arrive in the MG amidst the confusion of buses, share a private laugh with Jack, then swing the door open to my newfound popularity. My hair would have come out as sleek and straight as Marianne Faithfull’s. By lunchtime, I’d be class president.

  But Jack had left early that sticky morning. Grandma placed a bowl of Cream of Wheat in front of me and turned on the portable table fan. My mother said she refused to think of the end of summer vacation as a tragedy and gabbed on and on about the Powder Puffs, a ladies’ bowling league she’d just joined. They both saw me off at the front door; Ma squeezed my hand and told me I was pretty. By the time I trudged the half mile to school, my hair had frizzed and my sweaty hand had stained the cover of my new blue loose-leaf.

  St. Anthony’s saved Sister Presentation for the eighth graders. A hard little nugget of a woman seemingly unbothered by heat or humidity, she began our year with a review of the school’s code of conduct, delivering several major tenets by rapping her hooked pointer against the chalkboard. She commissioned us, the eighth-grade class, to set an impeccable example for the younger grades and hinted that horrible things might happen to the imprudent student—here she established eye contact with Rosalie Pysyk—who chose not to take her seriously.

  We spent the morning filling out forms and copying Sister’s classroom rules and policies into our notebooks. I ate lunch surrounded by the usual empty folding chairs.

  In the afternoon our class studied “democracy in action” by electing Kathy Mahoney class president for the third year in a row. By the end of the school day, only two of my classmates had spoken to me.

  During supper, Ma repeated her same drab line: give it time. She and Grandma were both abandoning me for the evening—Grandma heading to bingo and Ma to the duckpin alleys with the Powder Puffs. Sister had assigned us science and religion, about a zillion pages.

  In the mirror, I watched my mother’s reflection blot lipstick on a tissue pressed between her lips. She was preparing herself for bowling in the same intense way she got ready for dates. “Don’t get upset or anything,” I said. “But I think I may have cancer of the stomach.”

  “Oh, Dolores, it’s just your nerves. . . . Grandma says Rita started working second shift this week. Poor thing, she hates it.”

  “Stop changing the subject. You should take me to see a doctor tomorrow. It feels like there’s a tumor or something growing down there.”

  She bent over and began to brush her upside-down blond hair. “Gee,” she said, “you’re not pregnant, are you?”

  Through the V neck of her blouse I saw the black-lace bra, her bouncing breasts. “Are you? You’re the one with all the boyfriends.”

  She straightened up and pointed the brush at me. “Don’t be fresh,” she said.

  Grandma stood in the doorway, clutching her purse and scowling. “I told Judy Mumphy a quarter to seven, Bernice. Last time you drove us, we got stuck way in back with those noisy fans blowing a draft on us. We were chilly all night. Poor Judy couldn’t even hear the numbers.”

  “Get in the car, Ma. I’ll be right there.”

  She leaned over and kissed me. “Just give it time, sweetheart. I’ve got to run. That stomach stuff is just nerves or greasy food or something. You take my word for it, Sister Mary Potato Chips.”

  “Next time you go crazy again, I’ll tell you it’s greasy food. See how you like it.”

  Ma’s face fell. She walked out of the room and down the stairs, slamming the front door on her way out

  I picked the tissue off her bureau and studied the three interlocking coral O’s her lipstick prints had made. They reminded me of a Chinese ring puzzle my father had bought me once, a long time ago. For days I had sat at the picnic table out back on Carter Avenue and tried unsuccessfully to undo it. Daddy hadn’t called me since the beginning of summer. When I’d asked Ma if he’d been sending my child-support money, she told me we were getting by fine—that if I needed anything, all I had to do was ask her. Grandma answered me more directly: no, he hadn’t.

  The tattoo parlor across the street was dark but Roberta’s light was on in back. There was a motorcycle parked by the side entrance, the same one I’d seen there all week. In the quiet, I heard Roberta’s laugh. The streetlamps along Pierce Street came on.

  I sat down at the hallway phone table and began dialing Jeanette Nord’s number, then hung up. It took me a whole minute’s worth of concentrating to remember our old phone number on Bobolink Drive. I got out my homework and flopped down at the kitchen table.

  “Yoo-hoo.”

  His hands were cupped over his eyebrows, his outline blurred by the back screen door. “What’d I do, Del Rio?” he laughed. “Scare you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I was just studying.”

  “Sorry to bother you, but our stupid fan conked out and I can’t find our Phillips screwdriver. Granny have one I could borrow?”

  “You can look,” I said. “Come on in.”

  He had on his cutoffs and nothing else. I looked away. “Man, this heat, huh? You could fry a steak up there on our kitchen linoleum.”

  I yanked open the cabinet drawer where Grandma kept tools. “Is it in there?”

  His hands fished among the tools, held fistfuls of them. I slid my flip-flops on and off my feet as I watched him. “Everything but,” he said.

  “Oh. Well, sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Motor’s probably shot anyway. Just thought I’d crack her open and take a look since I don’t have anything better to do.”

  “My mother said Rita switched shifts.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks. Oh, by the way. Let me know if you ever want a ride to school. I passed you this morning. I go right by there.”

  “You did? You do? Okay, thanks.”

  The screen door slapped shut again. The side stairs creaked. I went back to my science chapter.

  He was up there on their tiny porch. I heard him whistling.

  I washed my face in the kitchen sink, then went up to my room and changed into my pink seersucker blouse. Back downstairs I yanked the fan cord so hard, I thought for a second it was going to snap off. I coiled it around my wrist, slid on my flip-flops, and headed up to him.

  He was on the porch floor, his legs dangling over the edge. The only clear thing was the burning end of his cigarette. “You can borrow this one if you want,” I said, holding out the fan. “I’m not really using it.”

  “Oh, that’s okay . . . unless you’re sure?”

  “Here.”

  There was an unfinished pyramid of beer cans next to him. He balanced his cigarette out over the edge of the floor and reached for the fan. “You’re a sweetheart,” he said. “How about a Coke? Dish of ice cream?”

  “No thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  “Well . . .” I laughed. “Ice cream, maybe.”

  He got up and went inside. I turned and watched his bare back as he moved around the kitchen.

  “How’s school treating you?” he called out. “All we got is vanilla.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  I hung my legs over the edge of the porch and shook off my flip-flops. They fell, without a sound, to the ground below. Across the street, Roberta’s light went out. I picked up Jack’s cigarette and rolled it between my thumb and finger. An inch of ash fell away.

  He came out holding my ice cream in one hand and Grandma’s whirring fan in the other, a new can of beer in the crook of his arm. He’d plugged the fan into a
n extension cord that ran back inside. I pushed over and made room for him, sitting cross-legged with the beer cans in front of me.

  “How can you tell when you’ve got an elephant hiding out in your refrigerator?” he said. He sat down next to me and took a swig of beer. His furry leg brushed my leg.

  I shrugged.

  “There’s a set of tracks through the butter.”

  My laugh wasn’t my natural one. “You crack me up,” I said. “I love listening to your show.”

  He gave me a wide smile but said nothing. He sipped more beer. The fan sounded incredibly loud.

  “I’m glad somebody out there does,” he finally said. “Station manager says my humor’s too—what was his word? Fanciful. Says I’ve got to get a better understanding of the middle-aged New England audience.”

  He took several long drinks from his beer can, then reached in front of me and added it to his pyramid. “If he doesn’t renew my contract, I’m fucked.”

  The word made me flinch.

  “You should be on a station that plays decent music,” I said. “You’re too good for those old farts.”

  “Now what would your grandmother say if she heard that?” he said.

  “Speaking of old farts,” I said.

  He let go a laugh. “Aw, come on. She’s a nice old lady.”

  “That’s what you think. My mother had this brother who died when he was nineteen? Grandma didn’t even cry or anything. Her own son!”

  “Maybe she cried in private. People do lots of things in private. How’d he die?”

  “He drowned. It’s sort of weird, really, because my grandparents—my father’s mother and father—they drowned, too. In a hurricane. It was a real long time ago, way before I was born. So, I had relatives on both sides of my family who drowned.”

  “Well this conversation sure is cheerful, isn’t it?” Jack laughed.

  I felt the heat in my face. I shut up and ate my ice cream.

  Pierce Street looked different from up here—smaller, more organized. “Well,” I said. “I better get back to my homework.”

  But it was Jack who got up. “Don’t go yet,” he said. “You’re good company. I’ll be right back.”