She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “There’s nothing to celebrate,” I said.

  “Or someplace else. Even someplace ritzy, what the hell.”

  I flopped back on my bed and clamped my eyes tight. “For the last time,” I said, “I am going to watch ‘Laugh-In.’ Then I am taking a bath. I am not going to put on that retarded hat and walk across the stage with all those hypocrites.”

  “Well, Mr. Pucci will certainly be disappointed in you,” Ma tried.

  My eyes sprang open. “Speaking of hypocrites!” I said.

  Grandma put her hands on her hips. “Well, so what, Bernice?” she said. “Miss Party Pooper can just stay here. We’ll go anyway. I’ll even try that chinky-Chinaman food. Who needs her to have a good time?”

  “Great bluff, Grandma,” I said. “Brilliant. Very convincing.”

  When they actually did pull out of the driveway, I was outraged. “Traitors,” I said aloud. In retaliation I grabbed my father’s hundred-dollar bill and slammed out the front door.

  I hadn’t stepped inside Connie’s Superette in three years. Breathlessly, I filled my cart with boxed desserts, canned potato sticks, whatever crossed my path. Wheeling past the delicatessen counter, the red center of a roast beef caught my eye. “I’ll take that,” I said.

  Big Boy sucked his cigar without interest. “Quarter pound? Half?”

  “I mean I’ll take the whole thing.”

  His eyes widened. “Lady,” he said, “this piece of beef runs a good eighteen, nineteen pounds. It’ll cost you about forty bucks.”

  To Big Boy, I was some anonymous eccentric fat lady. I felt buoyed by my new identity. “That’s my business, isn’t it?” I snapped.

  He shrugged. “Sliced or unsliced?”

  “Unsliced.”

  At the counter I handed Connie the hundred, ignoring the way she studied the bill front and back. The total came to $79.79. Connie counted soft, limp fives and ones onto my palm and I was instantly sorry I’d forfeited the hundred.

  Back at home, I hacked the beef into several odd-sized pieces, using Grandma’s most brutal knife. The deeper I cut, the more purply raw the meat became. I gagged and choked, swallowing whole the cool, rubbery hunks I couldn’t manage to chew through. When my jaws ached, I wrapped the rest of the meat back up in its butcher paper and hid it in the bottom of the garbage can outside. Ma had probably written Daddy to get that card out of him. Luggage for college was probably her idea, too. She couldn’t wait to get rid of me—only she wasn’t going to.

  Grandma kept a bottle of Mogen David wine in her night table. “That stuff,” she called it. She used it on nights she couldn’t sleep. The cork made a wet sucking sound as I extracted it. The sour, syrupy liquid dribbled down my chin as I drank. Back in my room, I filled my mouth with potato chips and pastries, crunching and chewing until my cheeks filled out with sweet, salty pulp.

  The toilet swung back and forth like a pendulum. I couldn’t make it stop. Then I threw up quarts of purple mush. I made the bathwater as hot as it would go—as scalding as the night he’d done it to me—and eased myself in. Not that it worked. Not that it ever washed away.

  * * *

  I was sitting naked at the edge of my bed, ironing my wet hair, listening intently to the sizzle. I watched my fingers reach over my big belly and disappear. They stroked the insides of my legs, the tuft of hair I couldn’t see. “Just a little,” I told myself. “What else do I have? Why not?”

  My fingers became Mr. Pucci’s small hands, moving lightly, in little, understanding half circles. He knew. He knew. . . . Jack Speight’s face interrupted briefly, threatening as always to wreck things, but the strokes empowered me and I banished Jack. Then I was lying back on the bed, my body light and freed of fat, my fingers bold and faithful to the rhythm.

  My stomach pulled in. My back arched. The sensations kept lasting and lasting.

  The bed shook.

  The doorknob shook.

  “Hi, honey,” Ma called from behind the door. “Can I come in?”

  “No!” I said, struggling for my underpants. “I’m sleeping.”

  “Graduation was nice. Kind of long. Mr. Pucci gave me your diploma. You want to see it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Grandma and I went to China Paradise after all. Mr. Pucci came with us. I got you a number sixteen—shrimp lo mein and spareribs. Are you hungry?”

  “I’m sleepy. Put it in the refrigerator.” I was pulling on my sweatshirt, yanking covers around myself.

  I woke up later—abruptly—from a leaden sleep. Outside it was dawn, raining. I thought about what my body had done for me, what I’d let it do. But sleep had stolen the power I’d felt and Jack’s face was tangled up in my headache. “You pig,” he said. “You slutty cocktease.”

  On TV, there were only religious shows and test patterns. I remembered the lo mein and tiptoed downstairs, carefully avoiding the creaky step near the bottom. If either one of them gets up now and talks to me, I thought, it will kill me. I will die.

  Their curled-up graduation programs were on the kitchen counter. I located my name, then ripped them up and threw them in the garbage pail. Back in my room, a black-and-white “My Little Margie” rerun had begun. I watched it without sound, eating strands of congealed noodles, biting into cold, sticky shrimps curled tightly into their fetal positions. When I looked out, the sky had lightened to pearl gray. A wet breeze was stirring the catalpa tree.

  9

  In early July a seven-page letter arrived from a girl in Edison, New Jersey, who mistakenly thought I was going to be her college roommate. It was written in pink felt pen, the i’s and exclamation marks circled instead of dotted. Her name was Katherine Strednicki, she wrote, but everyone called her Kippy. She liked the Cowsills and Sly and the Family Stone. Her boyfriend, Dante, had taken her to see the play Hair in New York but had made her look away at the naked parts. They were serious, but not pinned or anything. She wondered what clubs I’d been in in high school and if I’d like to go in halvsies on matching Indian-print curtains and bedspreads. Her mother would sew the curtains; I could pay them back in September, no sweat. Kippy was hoping to become a pharmacist, but she didn’t approve of doing drugs for pleasure. She preferred to get high on life and hoped I did, too.

  My mother was in her room, slipping into her khaki uniform slacks. “I decided I like third shift after all,” she said. “Nighttime travelers need you more than people in the day. All those paper coffee cups on the dashboard. You’d be surprised how many of them want to stay and chat.”

  I handed her the letter. “Ma,” I said. “I just can’t do it. I’m too fat. I’m too afraid.”

  She sat back on the bed and we both looked at her in her bureau mirror. “Of what? What are you afraid of?”

  “Of people like her. Normal people.”

  “You’re normal!”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I mumbled.

  “Like hell it is! Like hell!” She sighed, free-falling backward, her head bouncing on the mattress. When she spoke, her voice was pillow-muffled. Her eyes glimmered. “I’m afraid, too,” she said. “Afraid the way you’re going, you’ll end up like me.”

  She was confusing me. This was my tragedy. Why were we talking about her?

  “I’d get there and people would stare at me,” I said. “Look at me!”

  “Look at me!” she shot back. She pointed accusingly at herself in the full-length mirror. Her hair looked wilty. Her bottom lip sagged. “I’m thirty-eight years old and still living with my mother. I’ve wanted to get away from that woman all my life. And here it is, ten-thirty at night. I’m tired, Dolores. I just want to go to bed. But instead, I’m on my way to work, dressed up like . . . one of the goddamned Andrews sisters.”

  In the mirror, we shared a smile. I wanted to reach over and rub her back, tell her I loved her. I opened my mouth to say it, but something else came out. “What if I get so depressed down there that I slit my wrists? They could call here and say they found me in a pool of blood.”


  “Oh for Christ’s sweet sake!” Her hairbrush flew past me and hit the wall. She slammed into the bathroom, banging the medicine-cabinet door once, twice, three times. Tap water ran for several minutes. When she came back, her eyes were red. She bent over and picked up the brush, picked strands of hair from the bristles.

  “You don’t want to go to college? Don’t go. I can’t keep this up. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

  “I’ll get a job,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go on a diet. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry, I’m sorry, everybody’s sorry,” she sighed. “Write that girl a letter. Don’t let her get stuck with those bedspreads.”

  I stopped her as she headed for the stairs. “Ma?” I said.

  She turned and faced me and I saw, in her eyes, the dazed woman she’d been those first days when she’d returned from the mental hospital years before. “Goddamnit, Dolores,” she said. “You’ve made me so goddamned tired.” Then she was down the stairs and out the door.

  That evening, having won my war, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t hungry. On TV, my regular programs were preempted; the stupid moon mission was hogging all the channels. Grandma sat in her big chair, fretting that walking on the moon would cause trouble with the weather, which was bad enough as it was. I dozed and dreamed about the dog-pound dogs. A black Doberman bounded toward me, barking, but then stopped abruptly and began to speak. “We eat secrets,” he said. He began to lick my feet. . . .

  Grandma poked me awake with the capped end of her knitting needle. “Go to bed,” she said. “You’re muttering so loud, I keep dropping stitches.”

  * * *

  I awoke in a jumble of covers to what I first thought was Jack Speight’s voice down in the parlor. “Just a dream . . .” I advised myself, squashing my head back into the pillow.

  I heard him again. Two of them.

  Then Grandma’s voice.

  Out in the alley, radio static crackled. The catalpa tree kept blinking icy blue. The clock said 3:15. Why a police cruiser?

  I tiptoed toward the stairs. It was something bad; I knew it. Grandma was slumped and shrunken on the sofa, rubbing her arm up and down, up and down. Both troopers sat leaning toward her. I gripped the railing and waited.

  “. . . An out-of-state rig from Charlotte, North Carolina. Asleep at the wheel, says he woke up right while it was happening.”

  Who woke up? Daddy?

  Grandma began to cough and then choke. Then she stopped. We all waited.

  “Why was she out of her booth?” she said.

  “They’re not sure, ma’am. She’d just had her break . . . probably never even realized it was happening. Probably never felt a thing.”

  “That’s right,” the other one said. “That’s probably true.”

  A strange tingling went through me, and the troopers’ heads enlarged. I heard shrieking brakes and Ma’s voice: “You’ve made me so goddamned tired” . . . I both saw and felt a kind of glitter. The living room rocked and swooped. My stomach dropped out between my legs. . . .

  Eyes closed, I wondered whose lumpy hands were beneath me.

  My head throbbed. I opened my eyes a crack. I was on the hallway floor. The banister was broken, leaning diagonally against the wall, its broken-off posts as jagged as shark’s teeth.

  Over me, the trooper’s face turned red, a forehead vein bulged. “Jesus, Al, we gotta call in,” he grunted. “I can’t even budge her.”

  There was a groan—mine—and I reached up and touched the pain in my forehead, the blood seeping out of my eyebrow.

  “Hold on,” the man said. “Here she comes. Here she is.”

  * * *

  The night after my mother was killed, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Grandma, tiny and breakable, sat at the hall telephone table calling out-of-state cousins from her address book with the pop-up metal cover, repeating over and over the funeral arrangements she’d made earlier in the day. She fed me tea and her nerve pills, tiny yellow knobs of bitterness I let melt on my tongue like Holy Communion.

  I whimpered and waded through the weekend, muddled by images: my puffy sewn-together face in the mirror—a butterfly bandage stuck over my eyebrow where they’d sewn the stitches; Roberta in the doorway, her mouth moving over words I couldn’t hear; Ma’s clothes still out back on the clothesline; the astronauts bouncing through moondust like lighthearted robots. Someone on TV claimed the moon walk was a hoax, staged by the government to make itself look good. This felt odd: that your mother could be a covered body being loaded, over and over, into an ambulance all weekend long on the Channel Ten news. Was Ma dead if her mail still arrived? If her blouses still fluttered that way outside in the clothesline breeze?

  Mr. Pucci came to the front door with a purple African violet so lush and fleshy it looked edible. He sat next to me on the sofa, squeezing my hand as he talked, his fingers as cool and smooth as beach stones.

  If death meant she was just somewhere else—if heaven existed—then she could, right at that second, be reuniting with her dead baby, Anthony Jr. Rewarded, finally, for her troubles. Rid of me. . . . “You’ve made me so goddamned tired,” she’d said. “I’ve wanted to get away from that woman all my life.” Maybe she’d done it on purpose, run toward that truck. To get some rest. To get away from Grandma and me. That’s what I wanted to ask Mr. Pucci about—if he thought Ma could have done it on purpose, if he believed in some kind of heaven. But I didn’t. We watched TV and smoked cigarettes. President Nixon telephoned outer space.

  The matches in Mr. Pucci’s hand shook whenever he lit our cigarettes. “It’s probably not even real to you yet,” he said. “Does any of it seem like it’s actually happening?” I didn’t know how to answer. I was watching how we’d filled the room with floating smoke, how our slightest movements stirred it. I was back at our old house on Carter Avenue, the night Daddy threw the barbell and Ma soaked herself in the tub, smoking, her brown nipples half in, half out of the water.

  * * *

  Grandma chose a gold-colored coffin. “Champagne mist,” the undertaker called it in his hypnotist’s voice. He suggested a closed casket, smiling an odd smile—fixed and dim-witted, like a porpoise’s. If I had just agreed to go to college, I thought, then she’d be alive. Things would be normal.

  “You’re normal!” she’d said. Maybe in death she finally knew: I killed babies, mothers. I deserved this pain, was owed my misery.

  * * *

  Grandma’s friend Mrs. Mumphy had her daughter drive us to calling hours. Grandma and I sat in the back of the big, rumbly station wagon and I stared out at passing drivers and pedestrians having a regular Monday afternoon. Then, just as we pulled into the driveway of the funeral home, it occurred to me that Daddy might be there. “You didn’t call him, did you?” I asked Grandma.

  She handed me another yellow nerve pill wrapped inside a yellow Kleenex. “Dolores, please, don’t plague me,” was all she said.

  The funeral home had thick carpet the color of windshield frost. In the foyer was an autograph book on a lighted stand and a small stack of souvenir pictures: Jesus, His sacred heart exposed like a biology-book illustration. Ma’s name was printed on the back in fancy, old-fashioned letters: Bernice Marie Price. I’d asked her once if we could go to court and have our last name changed. She’d laughed at the idea. “What do you think we are, movie stars?”

  The room smelled of carnations and candle wax. Grandma knelt before the coffin, her lip quivering in a silent prayer. On soap operas, they resurrected the dead. People disappeared in plane crashes, were gone for years, then fought off amnesia to return. “She’s not in that box,” I told myself. “So it’s not sad. That’s why I’m not crying.”

  On a stand above the coffin was a spray of white and yellow roses with a gold cardboard cutout some florist had stapled to a satin ribbon. “Beloved mother,” it said. They were supposed to be from me, only they weren’t. I’d never once used the word “beloved.” It was fake, part of this deat
h vocabulary. Everything here was fake, except for the flowers. In their own way, they were fake, too. I’d given Ma grief, not flowers, and now I’d gotten grief back. “Get out of my life!” I’d screamed at her the night she cut the cord to my TV.

  The undertaker sat Grandma in a green velvet parlor chair and me on a fancy cushioned bench with the kind of embroidery Grandma sometimes did: crewelwork.

  Cruel work.

  I’d spent the last months of her life making her miserable, using horrible language, hurling four-letter words like rocks. The bench was hard despite the cushion. I attempted a deal with God: one more day with her and you can blind me, amputate a leg, put a truck in front of my life.

  Our seats made a right angle with the coffin. We sat rigidly, waiting for mourners. Grandma said the air conditioner was too cold and buttoned her cardigan sweater to the top button. She reached for my hand, clutched it with her cold, rough fingers. It should have been her in that casket and Ma next to me.

  The undertaker pushed open his front door. I’d imagined only strangers, tollbooth people and St. Anthony’s parishioners, but the first mourner was mine—Mrs. Bronstein, my third-year English teacher at Easterly High. She wore a purple minidress I remembered from class. Her slip showed when she knelt at the coffin. I recalled odd things about Mrs. Bronstein’s class: Lady Macbeth’s blood-stained hands, the day a wasp flew in and interrupted some boy’s oral report. “I can’t say she’s easy to deal with, but there’s a bright girl hiding inside there,” she’d once told Mr. Pucci in front of me. She meant inside my fat. The week before on “Carol Burnett,” Carol and Harvey Korman wore padded costumes and played a fat couple, gnawing on ham bones, crashing into things and bouncing back off walls. After the commercial, Carol had detached her fat and come out in a slinky gown, yanking on her earlobe to tell her family everything was okay. “Here I am at my mother’s wake,” I thought, horrified, “thinking about Carol Burnett.”

  Roberta approached me and kissed my forehead, just above the stitches. “I could love you,” I thought, accepting her wide-armed hug. I sobbed and held on to her, rocking, not wanting to let go.