She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  If I could meet one person in this whole wide world, it would be Tricia Nixon, the President’s Daughter. She is friendly and her blond hair is very pretty. She also has neatness and good manners. She makes me feel that if your ever in Washington, you could call her up and ask her to go shopping or show you the sights or just sip a soda with you. She is a friend to every girl in this great country—even little old me.

  Very truely yours,

  Dolores Price

  Ma squinted and woke. She watched me cautiously as I put the paper down in my doughnut crumbs.

  “Well?” she said.

  “You spelled ‘truly’ wrong.”

  “But besides that. What do you think?”

  “Do you want the truth?”

  She nodded.

  I swallowed a mouthful of doughnut and smiled assuredly. “This wouldn’t get me into a school for retards.”

  Ma’s lip poked out and I thought with satisfaction that I’d made her cry. Then, suddenly, she shoved the typewriter off the table. It banged down in front of me, inches away from my bare feet. She was pointing to the typewriter but looking at me. “If that thing is broken, it will have been worth it,” she said. “I am not . . . some piece of dog crap!”

  * * *

  Merton College wished to inform me that I had been accepted. All I needed to do was send them my tuition fee and have the doctor mail back the enclosed physical-examination form. That weekend, the war escalated.

  “There are two things in this world I am not about to do!” I shrieked down the stairwell to my mother at the end of a Saturday-night battle that had included three broken dishes and a slapping session. “Number one is go to any college. Number two is put my feet up in those stirrup things and have some pig doctor come walking toward me, snapping his fucking rubber gloves.”

  Grandma had been in the parlor watching “Mannix” when the fight started. I imagined her stiffening, knees pressed together bone to bone at the sound of the word “fucking.” The past four years had changed Grandma, cowered her. She knew how to handle sass, not rape. From the moment I’d returned from the emergency room that night, Grandma had treated me as a stranger, someone exotically dangerous. She spoke only once of “that business with him,” sliding her good rosary beads onto my nightstand “in case you need them.” Sometimes I’d catch her staring at me with something close to fear. She, too, indulged me—not as a victim, but as someone on whose good side she felt safer. She said nothing about my weight, my erratic attendance at school and Sunday Mass, or about the uniform I’d come to adopt—gray sweatshirt, fatigue jacket, bell-bottom jeans. When, during my junior year, I began to smoke openly throughout the house, Grandma placed a can of Glade on my bureau and held her tongue.

  She was right to fear me. I scared myself. I had, after all, indirectly killed Rita’s baby—or rather, God had killed it because of the chances I’d taken, the things I’d let myself think, do, have done. Ma didn’t realize this; I was sure Grandma did.

  But the mention of stirrups and rubber gloves proved to be a tactical mistake. I was seated on my bed, consoling myself with a stack of Pecan Sandies and the very same “Mannix” episode Grandma was watching downstairs when Ma came in—red-eyed, without knocking—and walked over to my television. “Get out of my room!” I screamed. “Get out of my life!” Her back was to me. She pushed aside the bags of groceries and bent behind the set. “Don’t you dare touch any of my—”

  The TV voices went dead in mid-sentence and Ma turned to face me. A steak knife was in one hand, the hacked-off television plug drooping from its wire in the other. There were tears in her throat as she spoke. “I will get this fixed . . . when and if you have that physical and get that form signed. I happen to believe in your future.”

  It took Grandma to locate Dr. Phinny, a tired old GP who, my grandmother had been assured by her church cronies, did little more than hold a stethoscope to you and tap your knee with a rubber mallet before signing whatever you wanted. “None of that other monkey business,” she whispered, looking away from me. On the eve of the appointment, she suggested timidly that I might like to wear a blouse and my nice navy skirt to the doctor’s but said nothing when I came down the following morning in my sweatshirt and bell-bottoms, armed with my cigarettes and a mug of Pepsi.

  Ma gassed and braked through downtown Providence looking for Dr. Phinny’s building. She sang along with the radio, trying to act casual. “It’s clowns’ illusions I recall, I really don’t know clowns . . .”

  “It’s clouds’ illusions.” I said it between clenched teeth.

  “What?”

  “It’s clouds’ illusions I recall. If you’re going to sing it, sing it right.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled abruptly to the curb and jerked the brake. We both bucked forward and Pepsi lapped out onto my jeans.

  “I’m sorry again,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This is the building.”

  The pink-a pink-a of the directional signal got louder and we both waited to see what I’d do. I considered running down a side street and not calling her until I was forty years old and she was on her deathbed. But I’d already missed a crucial murder on “Guiding Light,” not to mention Betty Jo’s wedding on “Petticoat Junction.” She hadn’t bought me a new paperback in three weeks. It was like starving.

  “Why don’t you get out here and I’ll find a place to park,” she said.

  Then I was out of the car, slamming the door with a force gathered from twenty-one days’ worth of abstinence.

  Dr. Phinny’s office building was tall and sooty with brass decorations turned aqua. Next door, the clattering plates and conversations of a coffee shop burst into the street whenever customers emerged, walking past me, stealing sneaky glimpses. A woman hurried by, pulling the arm of a little boy whose inclination was to linger and look. “See that red car!” she said, yanking him past me. “Here’s a mailbox!”

  Two stores down was an abandoned laundromat. A group of unplugged washing machines huddled in the middle. I studied myself in the plate glass. My long, straight hair was definitely my best feature. I ironed it every morning, whether I was going to school or not, reasoning that split ends were a small price to pay. I hung my head forward then flung it back, watching my hair fly, my hoop earrings sway. I sort of looked like Julie on “The Mod Squad,” in a way. I liked her style, the way she seemed bored with everyone. She’d been on Merv Griffin the week before my mother cut the plug. “I don’t see it as acting,” she’d told Merv. “It’s just . . . being.”

  I’d pierced my ears that February, during the week I was suspended for smoking in the equipment room when I was supposed to be taking modified gym. “I’ve got better things to do than whack at Ping-Pong balls,” I’d told the vice principal and Mr. Pucci. “I mean, what’s the point?” Then I’d gone home and worked Grandma’s spare sewing machine needle in and out, around and around, practicing my Julie look while I did it, as if my heart weren’t racing. Later, when my ear got infected, I blamed Ma. “What do you expect when you make me live in a house that doesn’t even have any stupid peroxide?” I’d said.

  Across from the laundromat was a dirty-book store. “Sexational Reading!” a window banner proclaimed. “We carry Luv Gel.” I wasn’t taking my underwear off for any doctor, I didn’t care if he was 103 years old and blind. I’d get a job somewhere and buy a TV if I had to.

  Ma rounded the corner, smiling a hopeful smile. “This won’t be anything, honey,” she said, squeezing my hand.

  “Oh,” I said, pulling it back. “You can tell the future now?”

  The rickety elevator smelled like urine. Though we were its only passengers, it stopped on each floor, opening its doors to no one while we waited rigidly. As it reached Dr. Phinny’s floor, I turned to my mother. “You must really hate me,” I said.

  Her hand was shaking, crinkling the form the college had sent. “I don’t hate you,” she said.

  “But deep down you must. Or else
you wouldn’t be doing this to me.”

  “I love you,” she said, just loud enough for me to hear.

  “Bull crap.”

  We were his first patients of the day; it had been one of my stipulations. The upholstered waiting-room chairs were patched with electrical tape. There was no receptionist. Through a pane of ripply blue glass, I watched him walk back and forth behind the door that led to the inner office, like a person underwater.

  Ten silent minutes after we’d arrived, he emerged, looking as old and tired as Grandma had promised. He stared at me briefly, squinted, and handed me a folded paper gown. “She can go into that room on the left and get undressed,” he said, addressing my mother. “She can put this thing on and get up on the table.”

  I rose hesitantly and waited for Ma to do the same. “Aren’t you coming?” I hissed.

  She shook her head and curled up the magazine she’d been pretending to read. “I’ll be out here. You’ll be fine.”

  The walls of the examining room were the color of mustard. Above a drippy sink hung a drugstore calendar: two Technicolor spaniels in a wicker basket. To the left of the examination table was a wastebasket, empty except for a single blood-stained gauze pad.

  I took off my sandals and jeans and pulled the sweatshirt over my head. I was still wearing my bra and T-shirt and a pair of underpants that was going to stay on, no matter what. The old pervert could look at his other female patients if anyone else was stupid enough to show up. They couldn’t make me go to college. They couldn’t drag me there. All I wanted was to get my TV shows back.

  The gown rustled and crinkled as I fumbled with the paper tabs at the back of my neck. I tried molding the paper to myself but it fanned out stubbornly, like a giant bib. In the outer office, Ma and the doctor were mumbling. I sat up on the table and fished out a cigarette to calm my nerves. I smoked it fast, watching the ash tumble down the tunnels of the stiff gown.

  He was scanning the form when he came into the room. He stood before me, reading.

  “Look, I’m not taking anything else off,” I said, addressing the spaniels. When I looked back at him, he was staring directly at me.

  “You’re too goddamned fat,” he said.

  I took a defiant drag on my cigarette and willed myself not to cry. The remark made me dizzy. For the past four years, Ma and Grandma had played by the rule: never to mention my weight. Now my jeans and sweatshirt were folded in a helpless pile beside me and there was only a thin sheet of paper between my rolls of dimply flesh and this detestable old man. My heart raced with fear and nicotine and Pepsi. My whole body shook, dripped sweat.

  “Any trouble with your period?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No trouble,” I managed, louder.

  He nodded in the direction of his stand-up scale. The backs of my legs made little sucking sounds as they unglued themselves from the plastic upholstery. He brought the sliding metal bar down tight against my scalp and fiddled with the cylinder in front of my face. “Five-five and a half,” he said. “Two hundred . . . fifty-seven.”

  The tears leaking from my eyes made stains on the paper gown. I nodded or shook my head abruptly at each of his questions, coughed on command for his stethoscope, and took his pamphlets on diet, smoking, heart murmur. He signed the form.

  At the door, his hand on the knob, he turned back and waited until I met his eye. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “My wife died four Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you—you don’t want to do this to yourself.”

  “Eat shit,” I said.

  He paused for a moment, as if considering my comment. Then he opened the door to the waiting room and announced to my mother and someone else who’d arrived that at the rate I was going, I could expect to die before I was forty years old. “She’s too fat and she smokes,” I heard him say just before the hall rang out with the sound of my slamming his office door. I was wheezing wildly by the time I reached the final landing.

  On the turnpike on the way home, Ma said, “I could stand to cut down, too, you know. It wouldn’t hurt me one bit. We could go on a diet together? Do they still sell that Metrecal stuff?”

  “I’ve been humiliated enough for one fucking decade,” I said. “You say one more thing to me and I’ll jump out of this car and smash my head under someone’s wheels.”

  * * *

  The repairman from Eli’s TV was parked in front of the house when we pulled into the alley. I waited in the parked car, watching his head move back and forth up in my bedroom window. When he finally drove away, whistling, I pounded up the stairs past Grandma and locked the door. I snapped the “on” button and held my breath. Suddenly, “The Newlywed Game” lit up on the big screen.

  “Does your husband kiss you with his eyes opened or closed?” Bob Eubanks asked one of the new wives.

  Still unable to relax, I rifled through my various bags and packages. I started with Mallomars, stuffing them whole into my mouth. That old man’s voice wouldn’t go away. “You’re too goddamned fat,” he kept saying.

  “She’ll say I keep them closed but I really keep them open,” a newlywed husband said.

  “You do?” his wife said, worried.

  “Eat shit,” I’d told him, and he hadn’t even blinked. I slugged down a mugful of Pepsi, trying to calm myself. The week before, Ma had bought me a new product to try: Swiss cheese in a squirt can. I’d made a face when she’d shown me, but now I decorated crackers and chips with ribbons and ribbons of the stuff. I found some stale Lorna Doones and concocted little Swiss cheese and Lorna Doone sandwiches. I squirted dabs on each fingertip, like nail polish, and licked them off one by one, repeating the process until the can hissed air. Calmer, I opened a bag of M&M’s. I was able to eat them in their normal sequence: red, green, yellow, yellow, brown.

  * * *

  My plan to end the impasse concerning my future was so beautifully simple, I was amazed I hadn’t thought of it earlier. No high school diploma, no college. I would simply fail my finals.

  During exam week, the corridors were a wall of noise. My classmates had secured their futures, their prom dates, and had gotten an early start on their summer tans. I passed among them, invisible, like a brief shadow over their excitement.

  In world-history class, I filled in the blue-book test pages with cross-hatching so intricate it looked like weaving. I ran a brand-new Bic pen dry.

  “To what extent does Hamlet’s dilemma mirror that of modern man?” my English teacher wanted to know. In front of me, the other kids coughed and sighed, pausing only to shake out their writing hands. I knew what she wanted: she wanted us to talk about alienation—about how it felt to be left out in the cold. She wanted me to pity Hamlet from my seat at the back of the room at a special table because I was too fat to fit at the regular desks. All year long her eyes had skidded over me as if I didn’t exist. The invisible freak. Well, I didn’t feel sorry for stupid Hamlet and his stupid indecision. I felt sorry for the old king, the ghost, the one who has the poison crammed up inside him and dies while everyone else gets to go on with their lives. “Don’t know—didn’t read it,” I scrawled across the mimeographed test paper.

  In physiology I borrowed Mr. Frechette’s laminated lavatory pass and got home with it in time to catch the second half of “Search for Tomorrow.”

  “Mail, Dolores,” Grandma said when I came downstairs later that afternoon. Her voice dropped. “Your father,” she whispered.

  On the outside of the card was a chimpanzee wearing a mortarboard. When I opened it, a hundred-dollar bill fluttered to the floor. “Wish I could be there for your big day. Use for luggage. Love, Daddy,” the note said.

  I imagined the thank-you note I’d dare to write him. “Dear Daddy, Thank you so much for wrecking my whole life. Did you know that I am now a fat elephant and am not having any big day because I flunked
my exams? I’m returning your money. Tape it to a brick and shove it up your ass sideways. Love, Dolores.”

  I cried my way through a bag of cheese popcorn and a can of Ma’s butterscotch Metrecal. While I did, Mr. Pucci, bent still on being my pal, was at school convincing my teachers to look the other way. He drove over the next afternoon to deliver both the good news and the cap and gown I was to wear in the graduation procession. I hadn’t bothered to show up for the rehearsal.

  “Dolores, please!” Grandma stood over my bed, her cheeks pinkened with exasperation. The graduation gown was draped over her arm. “That poor man has driven here specially to deliver this. He’s waiting downstairs to see you. What am I supposed to say?”

  I stared at the TV screen in a counterfeit trance. “Tell that homo to mind his own business,” I said.

  He waited another fifteen minutes for me to change my mind. At the window, I watched his yellow Volkswagen drive away from the curb. I pulled the wet, dusty curtain from inside my mouth, belatedly aware I’d been chewing the fabric. I placed the mortarboard on my head and walked back and forth in front of the mirror, watching the way it sat foolishly uncommitted to my skull, the way it called cruel attention to my plump cheeks, the hopeless wobble of my concentric chins.

  Two nights later, Ma and Grandma stood before me in their new flower-print dresses and stiff beauty-parlor hair. “I’m not going,” I said. “It’s a farce. I told you that already.”

  “Why, I can’t understand why a young lady would purposely miss her own commencement exercises,” Grandma said.

  “Oh, honey, come on,” Ma goaded. “I thought maybe we could go out to China Paradise afterwards and celebrate.”