She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  They started at the opposite end of the room. Bambi, Kippy, Tammy: each girl up front had a cute and sunny personality to match her Walt Disney cartoon name. Each seemed thrilled to have landed at cruddy Merton.

  The girls nearest me were plainer, frumpier. Someone named Veronica had a noticeable twitch. She said she was enrolled in the honors program and took her studies seriously. Naomi, frail and nervous as a parakeet, said she’d been at Woodstock over the summer and the experience had woken her up. Then she veered onto the subjects of Vietnam and civil rights and the mercury content in swordfish. Kippy and Bambi exchanged uncomfortable looks. Rochelle rolled her eyes and interrupted. “And last but not least?”

  I had been chewing on the edge of my cup, dreading my turn. The squeak of my teeth on the Styrofoam was the loudest sound in the room. Everyone waited. “Oh, me?” I finally said. “Dolores.”

  “And?”

  What was I supposed to tell them? That I’d been stupid enough to arrive a week earlier than the rest of them? That I’d been raped at thirteen?

  “I’m wicked glad to be here,” I mumbled to the coffee table.

  It occurred to me as Rochelle read dormitory rules from her clipboard that you could tell a lot more about people from watching their behavior with Styrofoam cups than you could by what they told you. Kippy had stopped taking notes and was poking holes into the side of hers with her pencil point. Naomi dismantled her cup into small chips. I had gnawed mine into one long spiral

  “And a word to the wise,” Rochelle said. “Don’t get involved with any of the guys in Culinary Arts. You have to be horny and a jerk just to get into that program. It’s a prerequisite.” Kippy and Tammy widened their eyes at each other and giggled. “Their whole dorm is on academic probation this semester. You’ll see them at supper tonight. They’re putting on a barbecue for our dorm. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And then, of course, there’s ten-ton Dottie.”

  My breathing stopped. At the mention of weight, several girls glanced instinctively toward me, then immediately away.

  “Dottie,” Rochelle continued, “our famous lezzie cleaning woman.”

  Kippy looked lost. “Famous what?” she asked.

  “Lezzie,” Rochelle repeated. “As in lesbian. As in girl loves girl.”

  “Oh, ick,” Kippy said. “Don’t make me chuck my cookies.”

  The drunken night before came pounding back. In the midst of the vodka and confusion and singing—right after my performance of “Respect”—Dottie had stood up, orbited close to me, and kissed me on the lips. A single kiss, followed by laughter. At the time it had struck me as odd and silly and then I had dismissed it. Now it scared me—not so much the kiss itself, but what someone like Rochelle or Kippy might make of it. The gas from all those pistachio nuts rumbled inside me and mixed itself up with a fear of each one of them in that room. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but on that frigging frayed sofa.

  “I’m sick,” I said. “Can I go?”

  “Just a sec,” Rochelle said. “Are there any questions?”

  “I have one,” Kippy said.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Well, never mind. I’ll talk to you after the meeting’s over.”

  “It is over,” Rochelle said.

  * * *

  Kippy’s mother had hung the Indian-print curtains before she left. A breeze from outside billowed them, the cloth rolling in toward me like surf. That entire week, it hadn’t once occurred to me to open the windows.

  Kippy’s high school yearbook was on the bed. In her picture, she had longer hair and a warm smile.

  Junior Red Cross Volunteer I, II; Majorettes II, III, IV; Class Secretary III . . . Pastime: Talking during study hall. Weakness: Juicy Fruit gum. Quote: “Today is the first day of the rest ofyour life.”

  She had unpacked a framed picture of a dark-haired boy and put it on her bureau. I found the same picture in the yearbook; sure enough, it was Dante. “Saint Dante.” Pastimes: Milk and Cookies, praying for sinners. Quote: “I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.”

  I got off the bed and walked over to Kippy’s bureau for a better look. His bushy eyebrows were crimped up in a sad, sympathetic way. There was a struggle in his eyes.

  When Kippy got back to our room, she banged shut her suitcases and shoved them under her bed. I could tell Rochelle had vetoed her escape.

  “Your parents seem nice,” I said. “You look like your mother.” She slammed cosmetics and perfume bottles onto the shelf above her bed. Her fingers tweezed nervously at a knot in the speaker wire of her stereo. She jumped from chore to chore without accomplishing anything.

  She had loved me in my letters, I wanted to remind her—had trusted me with volunteered intimacies. It was my fat that made her hate me.

  I walked over to her bureau and picked up her boyfriend’s picture. “Dante’s cute,” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking, whatever happened between the two of you?”

  That’s when she finally looked at me.

  “You wrote that he was pressuring you, remember? I was just wondering, well . . . Not that it’s any of my business.”

  She walked over, took the picture, and slammed his face down against the bureau top. “I wrote nothing to you!” she said. “Understand?”

  Down the hall, two girls whooped back-from-vacation hellos.

  “I didn’t write a thing to you, okay? I wrote to someone else. Someone you said you were. Okay?”

  I lit myself a Salem, the match shaking in my hand. Pistachio-nut gas bubbled up from my insides. “Well, can I help it if I have a gland problem?” I said. “It’s something I was born with. Go ahead and shoot me.”

  She was the first to look away.

  * * *

  At the picnic supper I took tiny spoonfuls of the various salads, arranging them like small islands against the white space of the heavy china plate. It was an act of good faith for Kippy’s sake: I would lose weight and be normal for her. But Kippy didn’t notice. She and Bambi were busy trying to distance themselves from me. I had shadowed them from the dorm to the food line.

  The barbecue was an oil drum cut in half and covered with wire. Sauce-slopped chicken pieces sizzled between us Hooten girls and the boys from Culinary Arts. The barbecue guy was soap-opera handsome, with his straight white teeth and wilty chef’s hat. He wore a red bandanna around his neck and smiled from behind a veil of blue barbecue smoke.

  “This one wants you,” he told Kippy, spearing her a dripping chicken breast. He pushed it off the fork and onto her plate. If you could believe his name tag, his name was Eric. “Where you girls from?” he asked. A plump chicken leg hovered above Bambi’s plate.

  “Edison, New Jersey.”

  “Stoughton, Massachusetts.”

  Eric licked his greasy finger. “Oh, yeah? Well, where’s that at?”

  “It’s near Boston,” Bambi said.

  “Boston? I hear they’re a bunch of old farts up in Boston. I hear they ban everything.”

  Kippy laughed so hard, someone might have been tickling her.

  “Not everything,” Bambi said.

  “She’s a wiseass,” he told Kippy. The three of them laughed. He turned to me. “Which one?” he said, nodding businesslike at the chicken pieces. I couldn’t decide. The other two were escaping down the line. I pointed to the ugliest, most shriveled leg.

  When I turned to look for them, I saw Kippy and Bambi sitting across the lawn on a stone bench. Both were bent over the plates in their laps, laughing at something. Me. I didn’t know where else to go.

  I stood waiting for them to push over, but they didn’t. There was no place to sit but the ground. I lowered myself partway down and let myself fall the rest of the way. I hadn’t meant to grunt. The chicken leg rolled off my plate and onto the lawn. I could feel the two of them stop eating to watch. I could hear them listening to my heavy breathing.

  Their conversation turned from boys to hair. I wanted to tell them about Ruth’s p
eppermint shampoo, to point out that Ruth had thought my hair was beautiful. Why hadn’t my fat mattered to Larry and Ruth?

  After dessert, the Culinary Arts boys began pulling off their floppy chef’s hats, unbuttoning their white jackets. Two of them spit watermelon seeds at each other, looking around to see which girls were watching. A Frisbee sailed across the lawn.

  Some of the Hooten girls got coaxed onto boys’ shoulders and a kind of wrestling contest began. The girls laughed unsurely, grabbing each other’s wrists and pushing with halfhearted swipes. Below them, the boys slammed into each other, more in earnest.

  “Come on, New Jersey,” someone said. That barbecue guy, that Eric. He knelt down on the ground next to me, close enough so that I smelled cooked meat. Kippy giggled and refused, then climbed up onto his shoulders. They rose, swaying, and galloped toward the others.

  “I couldn’t decide between you or the fat one,” I heard him say. Kippy’s laugh was a shriek.

  Joined together, they made a kind of centaur—half bastard, half bitch. Dottie would have laughed out loud at that. She wasn’t due back to work for two more days. I could make her hate Kippy; I knew just the kind of thing to say. Rochelle had said that thing about Dottie just because she was fat. They needed some excuse to hate her. That stupid kiss had meant nothing. That kiss was nothing at all.

  Kippy hooked one arm around Eric’s neck and began to fight the girl opposite her like she meant it, pulling hair and whacking at her ear. Below her, Eric whooped encouragement. He hooked his leg around the other boy’s, toppling the duo.

  Eric and Kippy ambled in circles, fanning out the hesitant competition. Neither saw the burly boy coming at them from the side. He had served Jell-O mold slices in the buffet line—delicately, I remembered. Now he lowered his head like a bull and charged.

  When they collided, Eric faltered slightly but maintained his upright position. Kippy went flying backward, landing with a thud on her shoulder. “Oh, God!” she screamed. “It hurts! It Jesus fucking hurts!”

  A circle of people blocked my view. I tried to get up and go to her, but no matter which way I attempted to raise myself, I seemed anchored to the ground. Kippy’s voice rose up over everything. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” She kept yelling her pain until it became a sort of chant.

  Rochelle took charge. Dispensing her physical-therapist’s wisdom, she prodded and poked, then decided Kippy needed to go to Wayland Hospital’s emergency room. By the time they got her off the ground and into the back of somebody’s station wagon, it was dusk. I thought of phoning her parents. Or Dante at his Lutheran school. Instead, I sat and smoked.

  After everyone else had gone inside, a man in a Buildings and Grounds truck arrived and hissed water onto the barbecue coals. He collapsed the buffet tables (one blunt, efficient whack to each leg), loaded them into the truck, and drove them away. Mosquitoes were out and biting.

  I managed to get onto my hands and knees and over to the stone bench. By the third try I was standing, puffing, my heart jackhammering. I walked unsteadily on pins-and-needles feet.

  In the room again, I locked the door. My mumbling to myself turned into a silent conversation to Dante’s picture. “Look out for her,” I told him. “I wouldn’t trust her farther than I could throw her.” Saying it made me think of the way she’d looked flying backwards, mid-fall. I felt giddy.

  I wanted Dante to talk back.

  She’d read his letter without expression, then put it in a paisley box in her dresser. Second drawer. I walked over to it. Hesitated. Slid it out of the envelope.

  . . . goes back to the time when my mother found out about my father and made me promise her that I would never be a WOMANIZER like him. But now I wish we made love like you wanted us to, Kathy. Maybe God doesn’t even think it’s wrong, who knows? I don’t know anything anymore. I’m sorry I made you cry that night at the Ridge when I refused. I wanted to so badly but I was confused. I love you more than I can take.

  The letter shook between my hands. Instantly, I loved him—for his confusion, for the promise he’d made to his mother. It was Dante who’d resisted, Kippy who had wanted them to play with fire.

  I was playing with fire myself. What if I didn’t hear her coming? How could I explain his framed picture in bed with me, the letter in my lap? I kept begging myself to get up and put everything back.

  I needn’t have worried. When they got back, somewhere after ten, you could hear them from as far away as the parking lot—a big fanfare with Kippy in the middle. I lay in bed in the dark with my eyes clenched shut and a blanket over my head.

  The door banged open and the light snapped on. There were at least three or four of them, guys and girls both, everyone whispering. Rochelle’s voice was still in charge. “Thanks so much, you guys,” Kippy kept saying sweetly. Someone whispered a wisecrack I couldn’t hear. The others laughed through their noses. People left.

  It wasn’t fair. Being fat was a handicap, too, but people ran the fuck the other way. Or shit their nasty wisecracks all over you. Or both. I could have been born with a gland problem for all any of them knew. She had climbed up onto his shoulders of her own free will. If you played with fire, you were going to get burned.

  The quiet was so absolute, neither of us might have existed. Someone might rush in, snap on the light, and find our room as empty as July.

  The clock from downtown struck once. Kippy began to whimper. I counted my heartbeats past two hundred, daring myself to speak.

  “Are you in pain?” I finally said.

  She kept me waiting. Then a bedside lamp snapped on and Kippy was squinting at her clock. “My first day at college,” she said. “Shit!”

  I grabbed for my Salems before the light went out.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked again. “If there’s anything I can do—”

  She put the light on again. “I fractured my collarbone,” she said. “They gave me something for the pain at the hospital. I’m supposed to wait another two hours before I take the next one. Can I have one of your cigarettes?”

  I struggled out of bed, put it to her mouth, and lit it.

  “Menthol,” she said. “Ick.”

  “There’s a machine in the basement. I can get you some regular ones tomorrow. Or if you want, I could go down and get them now.” I sat on the edge of the bed waiting for her to decide.

  “A broken collarbone,” she repeated. “I have to wear this asshole Ace bandage thing for at least three weeks.”

  She had been warned about those Culinary Arts idiots. What did she expect? “Why don’t you just take that other pill now? Where are they? I’ll get you some water.”

  “Maybe I should,” she said. “They’re in a little envelope in my purse. Thanks.”

  I recognized the pills, the same kind Grandma fed me the weekend of Ma’s death. She put two in her mouth and took the glass of water.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said. “Really.”

  She swallowed hard. “Oh, right. like I’m supposed to believe anything you tell me!” She handed me back the glass. “You seemed so nice in those letters. And funny, too. I thought you were going to be so cool. Then I get here and you’re . . .”

  “I’m the same person,” I said. “I wrote the letters.”

  “Bullshit you’re the same person. Just because you have a gland problem or whatever, it doesn’t give you the right to pretend to be something you’re not. Is the truth too much to ask from someone who’s going to be your roommate? Ow! Shit! My shoulder!”

  I turned off the light. “I thought you’d like me better if you didn’t know what I looked like,” I said. She didn’t answer. “And you did, right?”

  I could tell she was looking over at me, staring at me in the dark.

  “Kippy?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have a gland problem. I’m just fat. And I—” I was about to confess I’d opened Dante’s letter, then stopped short of it.

  “And you what?”

  “And my mother died th
is summer.”

  The room was quiet for the next several seconds. “How?” she said.

  “In an accident.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “If it’s true.”

  I lay there in the dark, aching, crying in silence. When I was finally close to sleep, she spoke again. “Dolores, guess what? The pain’s not there.” Her voice sounded calm and foggy. “Oh, by the way—you know what you asked me this afternoon?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “About Dante? About him pressuring me? We did make love. Just before he left for school. Out at this place called the Ridge.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It was so beautiful,” she said. “It was unreal.”

  14

  Kippy’s broken collarbone provided the inroad I needed. I was allowed to become her loyal, devoted servant, carrying her tray at supper, buying her textbooks, doing her laundry, rapping on Rochelle’s door whenever Kippy needed to borrow the heating pad. She had forgotten to pack her soap dish; I gave her mine. “Mucus green, Dee?” she said. (By the second week, she’d started calling me Dee instead of Dolores.) I went back to the bookstore and bought her a shell-pink one like she’d left in New Jersey. Her medication made her thirsty. I’d wave away the change she offered whenever I returned from the basement soda machine with her Orange Crushes. “Oh, go on—it’s on me!” I’d insist, pushing away her quarters, trying as best I could to swallow back the panting and huffing that climbing those flights of stairs left me with. Instinct told me to hurry on these errands. If I gave her enough time, she might move out.

  That first week, I went to more of Kippy’s classes than my own, collecting semester schedules and first impressions. I reported back in the wisecracking way she had liked about my summer letters. For a role model, I used Juliet’s old nurse in Romeo and Juliet: a good-hearted fussbudget, a woman who spoke her piece but knew her place.

  In junior year at Easterly High School, Mrs. Bronstein had made us read Romeo and Juliet, then see West Side Story, her favorite movie, for comparison. Sharks and Jets, Montagues and Capulets. The class had laughed at the singing parts—people interrupting the crises of their lives to belt out a tune. At the end of the film, Mrs. Bronstein snapped on the classroom lights. “Well, what did you think?” she asked, hopefully.