She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  Back in the lounge I ate supper by flashlight. Two Sprites from the machine and a jumbo-sized jar of macadamias. For dessert I had the malted-milk balls and a roll of Oreos. I ate them the way I did back in Easterly: popped off the roof first, then raked two treads through the frosting with my front teeth. Then I filled my mouth with soda and felt the cookie collapse in on itself. The ritual both soothed and disappointed me. You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.

  Friday night. I imagined Grandma sitting alone in the parlor watching “Ironside,” her new scallop-shell wallpaper rising up behind her, the TV screen lighting her face in silver. Even watching TV, Grandma was at attention, scowling her scowl, ready for the worst. From Pennsylvania, Grandma seemed fragile. Mortal. I wondered if she missed me—if she was sitting up in Easterly, worrying. I saw her fretful face like Auntie Em’s inside the witch’s crystal ball. Poor Grandma. Her daughter was boxed in the ground, not in heaven, no matter how many rosaries she sat and mumbled. I thought of dialing her on the pay phone to tell her I was all right. Except I wasn’t all right. . . . Auntie Em would have praised God and accepted the charges. I wasn’t so sure about Grandma.

  I licked my finger and stuck it into the empty nut jar, poking at the salt on the bottom. So far, college wasn’t that bad, if you thought about it. Maybe a fantastic coincidence would occur and each girl at Hooten Hall would independently decide to withdraw, leaving me this entire private dormitory. I wondered where the old smelly hunchback man from the bus ride was now and what his life had been before we traveled together at the back of that burping Greyhound bus. That foreign newspaper he was reading looked Jewish. Maybe he was Anne Frank’s father—the family’s only survivor—and I’d missed an important opportunity because of garlic breath. There was no logic in life whatsoever, that much I saw. Anne Frank had had a loving, protective father and died anyway. I had Daddy, who was dead to me.

  Somewhere after dark, I followed my swooping flashlight ray back up to my room. I thought I heard noises. Rats? Jack Speight? The door locked with a heavy, reassuring thunk.

  My mattress felt like an English muffin. The cinder-block walls glowed in the moonlight. “I’ll never sleep,” I thought. Then, without warning, I was in a dream on the beach, talking to a flatfish.

  He had washed ashore on purpose and come looking for me, flip-flopping himself past other sunbathers until he got to my blanket. Sand covered him like Shake’n’Bake, but his eyes were clear and purposeful. “Follow me,” he said. The water I jumped into became the pool water back on Bobolink Drive. I followed the fish into chilly depths I hadn’t known existed in our pool. Drowning seemed irrelevant. Bells were ringing and I knew it was Ma, calling me, somehow, underwater.

  I sat up. It was this empty dormitory in Pennsylvania again. Down the corridor, the pay phone was ringing off the wall.

  I fumbled with the door lock. The flashlight ray wobbled ahead of me. Too slow, too slow! Maybe Larry and Ruth had gotten my number. Maybe they’d hang up if I didn’t—

  “Hi, it’s me,” the woman said. Someone I couldn’t quite recall.

  “Ruth?”

  “Who’s Ruth? Who’d you let in?”

  “Nobody. I was just dozing.”

  “This is Dottie. I just called to check. And to tell you I’ll be in at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. You like cream cake?”

  “Cream cake? What time is it?”

  “Right now? Quarter of eleven. There’s this bakery on Hazel Street that has day-old stuff at one-third off. I’ll bring you some breakfast tomorrow morning. At eight. Don’t smoke any cigarettes near your mattress, now. I don’t want to have any explaining to do. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “You were lucky I didn’t have any plans for tonight. Or else I couldn’t have called you like this. I’m doing you a big favor. By rights, I should have sent you home.”

  I hung up the phone and hugged myself to stop from shaking.

  Back in my room I located Valley of the Dolls and read. I had an inch and a half of pages left to go. I didn’t know what I’d do if I finished.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night, I made my way down to the basement and sat. The dull chill of the linoleum floor numbed my ass, but the soda machine’s hum soothed me. I read and read by its glow, one hand on the paperback, the other clutching that iron staple. When I looked up from the print, it was morning—the first pink, stingy light.

  * * *

  “You see, everyone thinks they’re too good for day-old pastry, like one-third off is charity or something. The world is full of snobs. Snobs and slobs. I ought to write a book.”

  The room smelled faintly of her sweat. Everything about her repulsed me. I smiled sweetly and finished my second slice of cake.

  “If people want to be snobs, let ’em. Their loss, my gain.”

  We were probably within twenty pounds of each other, but I wouldn’t have been caught dead in the shorts she was wearing. “This is really nice of you,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “Bringing me breakfast on your day off. I mean, God.”

  She waved me away. “Have some more—that’s what it’s here for.”

  I reached for the wedge she’d cut me, cupping my other hand beneath to catch the crumbs.

  “Look at that! See?”

  “See what?”

  “Fat slob this, fat slob that. You hear that all the time. You’re like me: a clean fat. I could tell that right off. Why do you think I let you stay here? . . . I see it all the time. The dirtiest, sloppiest girls are the skinny ones. Year after year, same thing. You can tell who the pigs are going to be just by looking at them. You take Jackie Kennedy. Or Jackie whatever her name is now. I bet in private she’s a very sloppy person. I bet you any amount of money.”

  She looked pleased for having let me know. We both took sips from the Cokes I’d bought us downstairs. Dottie leaned back on Kippy’s mattress and pointed her soda bottle at me.

  “Let me tell you something, see? If you’d come here yesterday with those suitcases and been some skinny little ninety-pounder, I would have turned you right around and sent you back where you came from. But you were a fatty, see, so I knew I could trust you.”

  This was new. For four years I’d been hated or ignored because of my weight. With Dottie, it was an advantage.

  She hooked her foot around the chair leg and scraped it toward her, then hefted up her legs. Marbled with squiggly blue veins, they looked like huge blue cheeses.

  “What’s that supposed to be, anyway?” she said. She was making a face. My eyes followed hers to Ma’s flying-leg painting, leaning against the wall.

  “Just a picture,” I said, blushing.

  “A leg with wings on it? What’s it supposed to mean?”

  I didn’t want this moron even looking at it. “I’m not really sure,” I shrugged. “Tell me about Hooten.”

  Maybe I’d ship Ma’s painting back to Grandma’s, I thought. Come to think of it, I didn’t want Kippy staring at it, either.

  “. . . And there’s this girl Rochelle that’s dorm president this year. Got the rest of them fooled, but I bet you’ll see right through her. Miss Tiny Twat. Lays out there sunbathing on the lawn so everyone coming and going to class can get a good look. One time I caught her spitting a hawker right into the drinking fountain. ‘Excuse me,’ I say to her, ‘but the other girls might like to drink out of that.”

  “‘I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about,’ she says. And there’s her fucking phlegm in the bubbler. Conceited bitch . . . Last year her and this other girl started this petition thing to get me fired. Stare at them in the shower, ha! Who’s got time to stare at them when I’m cleaning up all their messes for them? First she parks herself out there in a bathing suit. Then she accuses me of staring.” There were tears in her eyes; her hands were fists. “‘Just go about your business,’ my foreman says. ‘You’re a good worker. Just keep your nose clean.
’”

  She scared me. Still, she had declared me an ally, a “clean fat.” There was a kind of authority in those dozens of keys on her ring. And she’d let me stay, had brought me food like Ma always had. She was here. She was somebody.

  “You want a cigarette?” I asked her.

  When I lit hers, I noticed strands of gray in her blunt black hair. “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Me? Twenty-nine. Hey, you know what? I got three aquariums at my house. One in the kitchen, one in the parlor, and one in my bedroom. I got piranhas. You feed ’em canned shrimp and they attack it. The angelfish are the ones in my bedroom. They’re my special cuties. Hey, maybe someday you could come see them. My fish. You could come over for supper.”

  She reached for the remaining rectangle of cream cake. “Here, let’s split this,” she said, breaking me a handful. “Open your mouth.”

  Twenty-nine: she was too old to be my friend, too young to be my mother. “So tell me about you,” she said.

  “About me?” I laughed. I told her the plot of Valley of the Dolls instead, rambling on about the three main characters, how their bad choices had wrecked their lives.

  She was smiling at me without listening.

  “What?” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  She leaned toward me. With her finger, she wiped a fleck of frosting off my chin, brought it back to her own mouth, and licked.

  Then her gaze was over my shoulder. “A leg with wings,” she said, shaking her head at Ma’s painting. “That’s wild!”

  13

  The Strednickis tried the lock three times before they got the door open. I listened to the click of metal on metal, relieved that the shades were down, grateful for every extra second Kippy wouldn’t see me. She was the first to enter. I watched her hand pat the wall until she located the light switch. “Something stinks in here,” she said. Then she saw me.

  Her parents stared, light-dazed. No one spoke.

  I’d been ready for her earlier—had braced myself all morning long as strange voices faded in and out of rooms, up and down corridors on the other side of my locked door. I’d skipped both breakfast and lunch, hoping it might make me look more reasonable. But by three o’clock I’d had enough and taken out the day-old unsold birthday cake Dottie had bought for our party the day before. “Happy Birthday to _______.” No one had wanted it but Dottie and me.

  “Hi,” I said. “What do I owe you for the bedspreads?”

  Kippy was wearing a turned-down sailor cap with autographs written on it. “Just a second,” she began. “They told me downstairs that two-fourteen is mine and my roommate’s room.”

  “I’m her.”

  Part of me enjoyed the panic overtaking her facial muscles. Parents, a boyfriend, a peppy little life: she was overdue someone like me.

  “Don’t forget to figure in the tax on those curtains and bedspreads,” I told the three of them. “I don’t want you to cheat yourselves.”

  The whole thing was Dottie’s fault. All week long, we’d worked mornings—scouring shower stalls, waxing floors, distributing laundry packages to the vacant rooms. By midweek, Dottie had brought in her record player and we’d done our cleaning to her soul albums. We both liked the duets best: Sam and Dave, Marvin and Tammi, Ike and Tina. Our favorite was “Mockingbird.” From our respective cleaning areas, we called the lyrics into the empty hallways—called out to each other—our voices echoing off the cinderblock walls.

  Mock-

  Yeah!

  -ing-

  Yeah!

  -bird!

  Yeah!

  Yeah!

  Yeah!

  In the afternoons, exhausted and sweaty from work, we showered on separate floors, then met each other down in the lounge where we ate and watched TV and played Dottie’s favorite card game, Chinese rummy. I was good at it almost immediately. After the first couple of games, we were even-steven.

  Throughout the week, Dottie brought me treats: day-olds and Kentucky Fried, hot fudge sundaes melting from the ride across town. She waved away whatever money I held in front of her. “You don’t owe me anything,” she always insisted. “This was my idea.” She left each evening at dusk. She had to get home to her fish, she said. I’d lie awake in that strange, darkening dormitory, sometimes singing to myself both sides of those soul duets, sometimes reminding myself who I really was: fat Dolores, mother killer, the girl who deserved nothing but shit.

  Our party on the last day before the other girls arrived was Dottie’s idea, too. She wanted, she said, to celebrate the fact that she’d finished her work a whole day ahead of schedule, thanks to me. She wanted to celebrate our friendship. Besides the cake, she bought a bottle of vodka and four pounds of pistachio nuts, gift-wrapped in a cardboard box. The side of the box said “Two Size D Flanges.” We started at noon, cracking those nuts with our teeth and drinking Tang-and-vodkas, giggling and trying to guess what a flange was.

  We sang and danced to Dottie’s records and by midafternoon we were drunk enough to be the singers themselves—the twirling, jiving Temptations, the lovelorn Shirelles. Dottie dropped to her knees as Little Anthony, was up again and strutting as James Brown. When she put on a Supremes record, she insisted we were Flo and Mary, the two nice ones. For scrawny Diana Ross, Dottie stuck a mop into her utility bucket and we snapped our fingers and danced around it, singing that we heard a symphony.

  “You can tell that show-off Diana is a real bitch in her personal life,” Dottie declared between tracks. “And a slob, too.”

  Without premeditation, I yanked the needle off the turntable, hunched up my shoulders, and became Ed Sullivan. “Diana Ross has been fired from our really big shew,” I announced. “She’s been replaced by America’s newest singing sensation, Dolores Price!”

  I lifted my foot and sent the utility bucket clanging across the room, the mop clattering to the floor. Then I dropped the record-player arm onto the opening of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and began a full-out performance. I threw my whole body into it—threw into it, too, my anger, my sense of outrage, all the power of two hundred fifty pounds.

  Dottie sat back on the bed, struck dumb at first by what I was feeling, then hooting and shouting the choruses along with me.

  R-E-S-P-E-C-T

  Find out what it means to me!

  We’d played the song over and over, raising our fists and shouting about respect until we were both hoarse, until we were both somehow avenged.

  * * *

  Now Kippy’s mother’s eyes bounced from my unsnapped pants to the knife I’d stuck diagonally into the remaining half of the birthday cake. The father wore high-water flare pants and orange socks. Kippy had shiny chipmunk cheeks. What right did they have to judge me?

  Her father put down two suitcases and walked through the awkwardness, offering me his hand. “I’m Joe Strednicki . . . heh heh . . . I’m an electrician.” That hand felt solid and sandpapery. I held on to it longer than I should have.

  “I took this side of the room if it’s all right with you,” I said. “But I can switch if you want. It makes no difference. Really.” For some reason, I kept saying it to Kippy’s mother.

  “So wait a minute,” Kippy said. She was shaking her head. “There’s a definite mistake here. There’s a mix-up somewhere because—”

  “You got mail already,” I interrupted. “A letter from Dante. Your boyfriend. I’ll get it for you.”

  Kippy took the letter absentmindedly without noticing the red fingerprints on the envelope. “Open it! Go ahead!” Dottie had kept teasing me at one point during our party, waving the letter near my face. The red pistachio-nut dye wouldn’t erase away. In my wastebasket were five inches’ worth of shells I’d meant to dump. All day long I’d been wrestling with my first hangover and passing gas more foul than I’d thought possible.

  Kippy sat rigidly on the edge of the mattress I’d chosen for her. Her mother’s smile blinked on and off as if it had a short circuit—something Mr. Strednicki might be
required to fix.

  I pushed the top flap back over the birthday cake box, sinking the knife in deeper, and got up off the bed. “So I guess I’ll let you get unpacked. Be back in a little while. Nice to meet you.”

  “Is it your birthday?” Mrs. Strednicki asked vaguely. Come to think of it, she had that chipmunky look, too.

  “Not really,” I said. “Well, sort of.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Strednicki smiled and nodded approvingly, as if what I’d just said made perfect sense.

  From the end bathroom stall, adjacent to mine and Kippy’s room, I listened to their family argument. It was both a sound and a vibration through the cinder block. “. . . Hard-earned money,” I heard her father say. And from Kippy, “Not with that hippopotamus!”

  I was glad I’d brought the cake with me. Detaching a blue sugar rose, I placed it in my mouth, on my tongue, then pushed up, crushing it against the roof of my mouth. It was so sweet, it burned.

  At five P.M. Rochelle, the dorm president that Dottie hated, led the eight of us freshmen girls downstairs to the lounge, where she passed out Styrofoam cups and poured us each two inches of Boone’s Farm apple wine. We watched and waited while she lit herself a Cigarillo, sipped her wine, and flipped apathetically through her paperwork. Dottie had made her sound more beautiful than she was. A willowy redhead, she kept her eyelids at permanent half-mast indifference. It was as if Robert Mitchum had mated with an Irish setter and this bitch was the result.

  Rochelle said her job was to tell us about useful things they didn’t print in the Merton College catalog. Such as which professors were assholes and which boys’ dorms to stay away from. Such as how to outsmart the fire inspector when he checked our rooms for hot plates.

  None of the other freshmen had sat anywhere near me. I sloshed the wine around in my cup and realized I was going to be as powerless and invisible to these girls as I’d been to the girls in my high school. “So, why don’t you just all say who you are and tell a little about yourself,” I heard Rochelle say.