She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  She brought me to the couch and we both sat. First I talked. Then she did. It was her touch, not her words, that mattered: her leg against my leg, her hand at the back of my head, drawing me to her. Her other hand cupped my shoulder, squeezing it at the worst of what I told.

  When Larry got back, he knelt before me, rubbing my cheek while Ruth told him about Ma. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he kept saying, and his touch, too, comforted me—those warm, rough-skinned knuckles brushing away my tears, skidding gently against my fat face.

  * * *

  Somewhere in the middle of the night, I woke up on the parlor floor, stiff and tingly-headed. “They’ve left me,” I thought.

  Across the room by the window there was a sigh.

  A milky shape moved up and down, folding and unfolding like a flower in a time-lapse movie. In my gathering consciousness, I stared at their marriage, their wholeness. I saw, for a second, my parents—the things Ma and Daddy must have done, the kind of wholeness they must have had.

  Then lost. Losing that was what had made Ma crazy.

  “I want, I want . . .” Ruth kept saying. Then Larry’s breath caught and they whimpered and clung together, their bodies rocking as one. I lay there, shaking and staring and wondering how the poison Jack Speight had let go inside of me could be what Larry let go in Ruth—what Ruth wanted.

  * * *

  By the time I woke up again, it was bright morning. Larry had put up the first two strips of seashell wallpaper. He was wearing cutoffs and his dashiki, black socks on his chalky legs. He mumbled measurements in his head and moved businesslike along his staging.

  “Hiya,” he said.

  I looked away. “Where’s Ruth?”

  “She went to the store for orange juice. We wiped out your whole supply this morning. Well, Tia did. She got real curious about what the bottom of the carton looked like.”

  “I don’t care about that. You sure are working fast. God.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m kinda hot to finish by this afternoon. We’re going to try to make it up there. To the festival.”

  I knew it was hopeless: the possibility of their taking me with them.

  The back screen door slapped shut. “Good morning,” Ruth said. “How are you doing?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Do you know you have mint growing in your backyard?”

  “I do?”

  She held a leafy bouquet to my nose. “You picked that here?” I said.

  “Uh-huh. I think I’ll make a shampoo for Tia if it’s all right with you. You want one, too?”

  She half filled their soup pot and brought the water to a boil. Stalk by stalk, she dropped in the mint. The kitchen air turned moist and sharp. With Grandma’s paring knife, she shaved curls of soap into the liquid.

  “This is so great,” I said as Ruth massaged the sweet suds into my scalp. Tia walked over my toes with her tiny bare feet. “How did you learn to make shampoo?”

  “In the Appalachians. I learned it from the old woman whose house I was staying at. Ida Brock. You should have seen her: two brown teeth, potbelly, the same checkered dress every single day. But she had these liquid black eyes that you could hone the truth on. And long, wavy white hair. She kept it in a ponytail during the day, but first thing in the morning, it would be down and flowing—like yours. It was beautiful hair.”

  “How come you left law school? Did you flunk out?”

  “Oh, God, no. I was doing fine academically—studied my head off, knew just how to play the game. The faculty loved me. Especially my advisor, who I made the mistake of sleeping with. ‘We have great things in store for you, Ruth,’ he kept whispering. Never had the nerve to ask who ‘we’ was. Just kept chalking up those A’s because I knew that’s what he liked. He and my parents, both. Good little obedient Ruthie.”

  The lather was cool and fragrant. Her fingers massaging my scalp felt wonderful.

  “One afternoon, we were in bed together at his house—his wife was away—and he goes to the closet and pulls out a suitcase. All that was in it was this pornographic joke magazine—these close-up pictures of genitals—male and female—all fixed up to look like faces. Pubic-hair Afros, penis noses, vagina mouths: pages and pages of this stuff. ‘Look at this one,’ he kept saying. I mean, this guy publishes in the Yale Law Review, for Christ’s sake. So, right there, I just got so tired of the whole thing. Angry, too. He was sitting up in the bed, naked, and I reached over and took hold of his limp little prick. ‘And look at this tiny little garden slug,’ I said. ‘This one’s the biggest joke of all.’ I withdrew the next morning. . . . I mean, it was more than just that one thing, my leaving, but that’s the one that sticks in my mind: him sitting there getting off on pictures of genitals fixed up like Mr. Potato Head.”

  “All men are pigs,” I said.

  Her hands stopped the shampooing. “No they’re not. Larry’s not.”

  I thought of their flowering the night before.

  “Well, anyway, I’m probably not even going to go to college,” I said. “It’s what my mother wanted, not me.”

  “Oh, go!” she said. “Try it at least. Think of it as an adventure.”

  She rinsed my hair with warm water and toweled it dry, then wrapped it in a turban. “What if I don’t like adventure?” I said.

  Ruth dragged over a kitchen chair and sat down facing me. “Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.”

  “Look at me,” I said.

  “I’m looking. What?”

  “My size.”

  “What about your size?”

  “Growth isn’t exactly something I need.”

  She didn’t laugh or look away. “If I didn’t go into VISTA,” she said, “I never would have met Larry. Tia wouldn’t exist.”

  Tia had the cabinet open and was crawling in with Grandma’s pots and pans. Larry’s singing carried in to us from the stairwell. Ruth’s gaze made me shiver.

  Then pans clattered to the floor and she was out of her chair and running to stop the damage.

  * * *

  When they were ready to leave, I handed Larry his check. “Here you go,” I said. “Have fun at Woodstock. Drive carefully.”

  “Have fun at school,” Ruth said.

  The dog was barking. Everyone was hugging and thanking everyone. From the truck window, Ruth held up Tia’s hand and made it blow kisses. Larry honked all the way down Pierce Street.

  I might have made them up, I thought, only they’d left evidence: the new wallpaper, a flea on my leg, dried orange juice sticking to my sneaker bottoms when I crossed the kitchen floor.

  * * *

  Grandma got home late in the afternoon, hours after I’d gotten back from the bank where I’d cashed in Arthur Music’s check for a thick stack of twenty-dollar bills. “The new wallpaper looks pretty,” she called out to me. The back-door screen made a veil for her face. “What are you doing out there by the ash can?”

  “Nothing,” I told her. Bees were in the grass and the afternoon sun warmed my face and arms. I had just found the mint.

  12

  On the second page of the Merton College catalog was a photograph of Hooten Hall, its parking lot full of gaping trunks and smiling freshmen, cars clogging the lawns, fathers hefting footlockers. Here, in person, was the same parking lot, the same crisscrossed white birch trees—only deserted and still. I put down my suitcases and Ma’s wrapped-up painting on the front step and tried the door-knob again. A car drove by, so singular that it roared. I walked from window to window, listening to the clack of my own Dr. Scholl’s.

  It was just as well. Things had gone sharply downhill from the Port Authority bus terminal in New York when a hunchbacked old man had hobbled down the entire aisle, coming to rest with a sigh on the backseat next to me. From New York to Philadelphia, I sat yanking Ma’s trench coat around me as he blew and blew his nose and nibbled food from an oil-spotted paper bag. I spent three hours on the same chapter of Valley of the Dolls
, worrying that his garlic breath would seep into the fabric of Ma’s coat—that Kippy would smell his smell and think it was me.

  One of two things was happening. Either Merton College had folded over the summer and been too cheap to spend a stamp to tell me, or the other girls had seen me struggling up the long flight of steps and locked the door. I imagined them huddling on all fours beneath the windowsill, giggling like Munchkins. Either way, I reasoned, I’d given college a fair chance and was now free to trudge back to the station and purchase another streamer of those purple tickets that would land me back in Easterly, my obligation to Ma fulfilled.

  What if you don’t even like adventure?

  Then you cultivate a taste for it.

  Easy for Ruth to say. She didn’t have to be standing here, looking at herself mirrored back in locked glass doors. She didn’t have to suffer sore hands from suitcase handles and bruises from those heavy bags banging against her legs. She apparently didn’t even have to answer their fucking phone, no matter how many millions of times I’d let it ring that last week. I wouldn’t hang up for fifteen or twenty minutes. The sound of the ringing put me in a kind of trance—became a kind of companion, even—so that once I got mixed up and thought I was calling my mother, was scared someone would pick up and it would be Ma.

  I took a quarter out of the trenchcoat pocket and tapped it against the glass. “Hey?” I said, barely louder than a speaking voice. “Excuse me?”

  To my horror, someone appeared.

  A fat woman, lumbering behind the double doors. She stopped, squinted out, then walked toward me with a jumble of keys. My breath caught. Locks unsnapped. The door yawned open. This would end badly, I knew.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m new,” I answered. “A new freshman.”

  “Yeah?”

  Her eyes were pale blue, her hair a black bowl cut.

  “Dolores Price? This is my dorm. Are you the house mother or something?”

  She let go a snort of laughter. “I’m the ‘or something.’ You’re a little early, ain’t you?”

  “I got this letter that said we should arrive somewhere between ten and four. It’s ten after four . . .”

  “Between ten and four next Thursday.”

  “I’m sure I have the right date.” I hadn’t gotten the dry heaves over September 7 for nothing. I was surer of that date than anything else in my whole life.

  “You can come in and put your stuff down for a minute, but you ain’t supposed to be here until next week. I got my orders. There’s no linens or nothing. Buildings and Grounds ain’t even sent over my new mattresses yet.”

  “Look, I have the right day. I can prove it.”

  “You do that then,” she said. “But hurry up. I got work to do.”

  Once you left Easterly, you saw the world was full of these people: ticket sellers, snack-bar clerks. They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routines.

  She led me into a shabby lounge area that smelled of dead cigarettes and something else—something sickening sweet, like rotting fruit or spilled drinks. She clicked a pole-lamp switch and four ruby-colored megaphones lit us in watery red.

  On the long bus trip down, I’d hunched my shoulder to the gawkers and counseled myself on the dignity of remaining a private person. Now here I was, sweat-drenched, heart thumping, displaying the entire contents of my opened suitcases, forced to prove that I was right and they were wrong. I made little hills of underpants on the threadbare sofa. She looked over my shoulder. I imagined her smirking, but when she spoke, her attention was somewhere else.

  “Look at this,” she said, pointing to a circular brown stain on the top of an end table. “Burning-hot popcorn popper on knotty pine and varnish. This is how smart you college girls are.”

  “I’m sure I’ve got that letter here,” I insisted. A handful of bras dangled from my fist.

  The Merton College literature was in a side pocket, curled around a can of malted-milk balls and held in place with an elastic band. Though the date on the page kept jumping, kept blurring from my tears, I saw that she was right. For a month and a half, I’d mistakenly fixed every fucking stomachache on the wrong date—on the date the late-tuition charge began. I was supposed to be safe at home in Easterly.

  “Oh, this is just great!” I said. I stared up hard at the ceiling, tears dripping behind my ears. “I’m such a stupid asshole. Now what am I supposed to do?”

  “Go home,” she said. “Come back in a week.”

  “Where do you suppose I live—down the street?”

  The pole lamp flickered.

  “You paid too much for this.”

  She was holding a jar of Tang. “Down at the Big Bunny this week they got the large size on special for seventy-nine.”

  My eyes met hers. That smug look was gone.

  “Ordinarily I’d say call campus security and see what he says, but he’s on vacation this week. Gone fishin’ in the Smokies, him and his wife. Somebody could break in here at night and take every single stick of furniture. But that’s between you and me and the lamppost.” She nodded at the pole lamp.

  “Oh, terrific,” I said. “I’ve just been on a bus for ten hours. Now I have to turn around and go back. If I’m lucky. If they even have a bus going back to Rhode Island tonight.”

  “Is that where you’re from—Rhode Island? A fatty like you in that little bitty state?”

  “Fuck you!” I said. She wouldn’t have fit into that bus seat much better than I did.

  The Tang clunked back into my suitcase.

  “Like I said, I got work. I’m lockin’ up at five-thirty.” She thumped down the hall, eyes to the floor.

  * * *

  For half an hour I sat in the lounge, trying unsuccessfully to think of ways to kill myself in Wayland, Pennsylvania. You couldn’t just ring some stranger’s doorbell and ask to borrow their car keys and their garage. I considered capitalizing on my heart murmur—going outside and galloping around the dormitory until my heart burst. But the long bus ride had exhausted me. I couldn’t even manage to get off the sofa.

  When she came back, she was wearing a white nylon windbreaker with “Dahlia” embroidered on the pocket. She was carrying a flashlight.

  “I been thinkin’, ” she said. “For the time being, just for tonight because it’s gettin’ late and hoozy-whatsis is up in the Smokies someplace, I guess I could let you stay here. Just don’t put any lights on. Use this instead.” She handed me the flashlight. “I looked you up. Dolores, right? You’re in two-fourteen. There’s mattresses there, but there ain’t any sheets. If the town cops see lights, they’ll stop and look. I don’t want any trouble.”

  I wasn’t crazy about this idea, but it seemed less complicated than suicide. All I’d have to do was sit in the dark and breathe.

  “Is there a TV or anything?”

  “No watching TV! They’d be up here in about two seconds.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s what I’ll do. Thanks.”

  I pictured Ma’s row of pink dahlias that had grown briefly out back on Bobolink Drive. The weekend before the men had come to install our pool, Ma had transplanted them to the shady side of the house. They’d drooped and shriveled—hadn’t survived the move.

  “I’d let you stay at my house,” she said, “but my shithead brother’s home this weekend. Here.” She wrote her telephone number on my Merton letter. “Pay phone’s around the corner across from the john. If you have any trouble, you can call me. I ain’t goin’ out tonight.”

  “Dahlia?” I said.

  She looked puzzled, then held a finger up to the embroidered name. “This was somebody else’s,” she said. “Someone who used to live here. Left half her stuff here when she graduated. My loss, her gain. I’m Dottie. So, if you want to give me a ring, I’ll be there. Just call. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay then. See you tomorrow. I don’t have to come in on Saturday, but I will.”

&n
bsp; She locked the door from inside, walked out, and tested it. Then she trudged down the stairs without looking back. I stood there, watching the fat wobble on her big ass.

  The maze of corridors grew logical on my third walk through the building. The rooms were opened, anonymous except for personalized vandalism: a strip of missing ceiling tiles in room 107, a peace sign painted on the door of 202. My room was at the end of the second floor.

  At first, Kippy’s and my beds looked identical. Graciously, I chose the side with the chipped bureau top and the stained mattress.

  “Kippy! Finally!” I said to the mirror. “Kippy, it’s me!”

  My chin rested in a beard of fat. My eyes were small and piggy-looking. “I’m sorry I look like this, Kippy. I’ve had a bad life and—”

  I switched bureaus, picked up my suitcases and slammed them down on the other side of the room. I flopped down on the unstained mattress. Hadn’t she ever told a lie to anyone? What made her so infallible?

  Just outside my room was a battered filing cabinet with old tests and term papers. “Rebirth Symbolism in Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies. . . . Trace the effects of New Deal legislation from its inception through present times. . . . If Tom, who had one blue-eyed blond grandparent and three brown-eyed, brown-haired grandparents, married Barbara, a brown-eyed blond whose grandmothers . . .”

  I slammed the drawer shut; the ringing metal sound shot down the long corridor and I wondered if it had alerted the town police. Back in my room, I peeled the brown paper wrapping off of my mother’s flying-leg painting. “Are you happy now?” I shouted. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  At dusk I took the flashlight and explored the basement floor. There was a laundry room with washers, dryers, an ironing board, and a soda machine. In the next room, a cabinet-model television sat on top of an enamel kitchen table. Metal folding chairs were grouped around it in a semicircle. It looked like a kind of altar. A heavy chain was wrapped around the legs of the set and fastened to a thick iron staple embedded in the wall. I gave that staple several good yanks, then grabbed it tight and leaned back with all my weight. Kippy could disown me, a flood could happen, they could drop the bomb, and still that thing would hold.