She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  I had sometimes loved Mrs. Bronstein for her efforts, could have volunteered just the sort of response that would have thrilled her. None of us spoke. Mrs. Bronstein watched us and waited. Finally, Stormy LaTerra raised her hand and said she thought George Chakiris had a cute ass. Mrs. Bronstein left the room in tears and the kid from audiovisual played the movie in reverse for us: Maria leaping backward away from Tony’s slumped body, Tony undying, the Sharks jerking their knives back out of him. Maybe you could come back to life after you’d been dead to it. Or pick a new person to become—just shuck your old self, let who you used to be die a quiet death. It was funny how my high school education was turning out to be more useful after the fact than while they were putting me through it.

  I cast Eric from Culinary Arts as Kippy’s Romeo. Kippy liked it when I called him that. He appeared at our door—off and on at first, then on a kind of schedule, sipping his Miller High Lifes, pacing, slowing for his own reflection each time he passed our mirror. In the name of Kippy’s honor, Eric had fixed the assailant who had sent her flying and broken her collarbone by flattening his tires and signing him up for memberships in three different record clubs.

  Eric nodded acknowledgment to me but never spoke. His arrival was my cue to wait three minutes, then go. The waiting was Kippy’s idea. “It’s not like we’re—you know—animals or anything,” she told me. Grabbing my Salems and some miscellaneous magazine, I always went to the same place—the bathroom stall closest to the wall and adjacent to our room. He usually stayed for two or three beers’ worth of time. Kippy’s moans and giggles sometimes made their way through the cinder block. There was an occasional shriek of pain as well. “My shoulder! You’re leaning on my shoulder!”

  By the first of October, Kippy had gotten seven letters from Dante at Lutheran college. Since Eric, she had put Dante’s picture in her sweater drawer and written him back only once. “Would you mail this for me?” she’d asked, affixing a stamp and sighing. I’d mailed it, all right: mailed it into the storm drain outside Hooten Hall. It wasn’t that I hated her, exactly; she just didn’t deserve someone as sensitive as Dante.

  Which is why I began stealing his letters, instead of waiting and reading them after she opened them.

  Passing the mail slots at mealtime and going to and from the soda machine for her Orange Crushes, I’d pluck the now-familiar beige envelopes with their clipper-ship insignia from Kippy’s pigeonhole and slide them into my fatigue-jacket pocket. I read and reread them while I sat on the hard toilet seat, waiting for Eric and Kippy to finish fucking. Poor Dante. Lutheran college wasn’t going well. Even his tissue-paper stationery was fragile. “Sometimes I think I may be going crazy . . . sexual thoughts right in the middle of Tuesday-night prayer service . . .” I began to fret over the deterioration of his penmanship—the way the words slanted first one way and then the other, sometimes in the same line. “. . . That manager’s-training offer back at my old job . . . an important question to ask you at Thanksgiving . . . would NEVER do to my wife what my father did to my mother.” That handwriting swayed like the beach grass on Fisherman’s Cove, those banks below Mrs. Masicotte’s mansion. I hadn’t thought of that spot in years. I was struck suddenly with where I was. Where I wasn’t. Wayland, Pennsylvania: the farthest from the ocean I’d ever been.

  Whenever I was sure Eric had left, I’d return to our room to cluck at Kippy like Old Nurse and throw away the Miller empties. I wasn’t actually stealing the letters, I told myself. I was withholding them for the good of someone whose suffering I felt I understood—committing a federal offense only in some narrower sense. “Everything’s relative,” Mr. Pucci used to be fond of reminding me. “Look at the big picture.”

  * * *

  Dottie’s mop handle rested against her shoulder, riflelike, her fist white from the grip. I was halfway upstairs with a piece of lemon-meringue pie and a glass of milk for Kippy. For three weeks I had managed to nod covertly at Dottie and pretend I didn’t hear her calling me from the opposite end of the corridor. Pretend we had no history.

  “You ain’t supposed to bring dishes out of the dining room,” she said. “That’s the rule.”

  “It’s for my roommate. Her collarbone is throbbing. Don’t worry—I’ll make sure I bring them back at suppertime. I won’t forget.”

  “I’m supposed to report anyone I see with dining-room property.” She walked down the stairs toward me.

  I flinched as she reached out to me and pulled a loose thread from my sweatshirt. “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  Three girls from the dorm had said hello to me that day. Being Kippy’s errand girl had given me a kind of authority through the corridors. I was making headway. Talking to Dottie was suicide.

  “Are you mad at me or something?” Pink blotches blossomed on her cheeks; her eyes squinted as she waited for my answer.

  “Me? No. Why should I be mad?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  That kiss: weird and unreal, delivered drunk.

  “I better get this food up to Kippy now,” I said. “She missed breakfast and when she takes her medication on an empty—”

  “Dolores?”

  “Phew, I sure have been busy. Those teachers assign reading like their class is the only one you’ve got.”

  The truth was, all the books I’d bought sat like a small untouched monument on my desk. The felt-tipped yellow Hi-lighter pens I’d purchased the first day of classes still had all their sharp corners.

  “So how do you like that roommate of yours—that Krippy or Crappy?”

  “Kippy? She’s supernice. We get along great.” I glanced down at the meringue pie quivering in my hand. “She broke her collarbone the first night, see, so I’ve been helping her out with stuff.”

  “I hate her guts,” Dottie said.

  My eyes kept jumping to the fire door. Any second, someone was liable to come out and catch us. “You don’t even know her,” I said.

  “I know she makes fun of you behind your back.”

  The pie plate went heavy in my hand. “No, she doesn’t,” I said. “Why? What did she say?”

  “I go on break at two-thirty. I could meet you down in the utility room.”

  “Oh, gee, I can’t because—”

  The fire door banged open. Veronica walked down the stairs past us.

  “You’re waitin’ on her hand and foot and then she goes and says that about you. It’s sickening.”

  “Maybe she was talking about someone else,” I said. “Or maybe—”

  Dottie shook her head. “Oh, it was about you, all right. That twat.”

  I wasn’t any ten-ton lezzie if that’s what Kippy had said. I wasn’t anything. Fat girls didn’t have to be anything!

  Back in the room, I handed Kippy her pie and milk. She held out a quarter and smiled. “Dee, I don’t feel like milk right now. Could you do me a big favor and get me an Orange Crush?”

  “I’m busy,” I said. “Get it yourself.”

  * * *

  I didn’t mean to stop going to my eight o’clock history class. I didn’t have anything personal against Dr. Lu; it wasn’t her fault she limped. But before I could take my shower, I had to wait until the whole dorm was asleep—until the only thing I could hear was the hum of the hallway lights. Two A.M. Three. Three-thirty. Nobody was going to accuse me of staring at them. Or see me naked, either. I was nobody’s freak!

  In the middle of the night, the dorm was mine again, just like that first week. I’d undo my bathrobe and step into those cumulus clouds of steam, into water so hot and forceful, I imagined it purifying me, liquefying my fat and sending it swirling down the drain. Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.—relaxation such a well-deserved reward that I began not to have the heart to set the alarm on myself for early-morning class. I’d wake up groggy, long after the kitchen had stopped serving breakfast, and thank God for
Pop-Tarts. Most of the other girls were midway through their classes.

  On TV, in the downstairs lounge, a woman from Rhode Island named Hattie became the “Jeopardy” champion. (For some reason, I liked holding on to that iron staple in the wall while I watched.) I promised myself I’d start going to my 12:30 biology class as soon as Hattie lost, only she kept faking everybody out—coming back from the dead on the strength of her Daily Doubles. I was planning to drop Introduction to Biology anyway. It wasn’t as if euglenas and paramecia were going to change my life. And where else but stupid Merton College would they hire an art-history teacher that laughed like Jethro from “The Beverly Hillbillies”? Every third slide he’d put in upside down or backwards, then laugh that laugh. It made me a nervous wreck just listening for it. How could you take notes from someone like that? I didn’t see cutting his class as entirely my fault.

  Kippy had begun borrowing my yellow Hi-lighters without even asking first. Why didn’t she just color in every page yellow? Squeak squeak all afternoon long while I chewed the inside of my cheek and tried to nap. Broken collarbone my fat ass. She was such a hypocrite. “Dear Dante,” I felt like writing. “You don’t know me, but I’m telling you this in friendship . . .”

  By mid-October, the dean of women had sent two while-you-were-out phone messages asking me to call her back about my “attendance issue.” I balled up the notes and threw them into Kippy’s Snoopy wastebasket. Did Dean What’s-Her-Face have to wait until three A.M. for her shower? Tiptoe around a cleaning lady’s schedule?

  I had just started a bag of dried apricots one afternoon when someone knocked at our door. “Kippy’s at class,” I yelled out.

  “I don’t want her. I want you. Dolores.”

  It wasn’t Dottie, that much I knew. I slid my snack under the pillow and pushed myself off the mattress.

  Marcia, a round, motherly senior, stood smiling at me. She’d risen from her chair during dinner one night to inform us she was an Avon representative and would be happy to order us whatever we needed.

  “Hi,” she said. “Mind if I take a moment of your time?” She had a wide, shiny forehead. She wedged herself inside before I could answer.

  “Dolores,” she began, “as recording secretary for Hooten and the head of the Sunshine Committee—”

  “Plus you’re the Avon lady,” I said.

  Her laugh was fake. “Righty-o, but that’s not the reason for my visit today. How are things going?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Super.”

  “Super,” she repeated. “Now one of my jobs as recording secretary is to take attendance at house meetings. We’ve had four so far and my records say you haven’t shown up once.” Her smile bordered on squinting.

  “I could use some perfume,” I said. “Sign me up for ten dollars’ worth of whatever. I’m not really fussy. Our own Avon lady. Wow.”

  “Is there any reason in particular?” she asked.

  “I’m just no good at picking out stuff. What’s that kind you’re wearing? Order me a bottle of that.”

  “Any reason why you haven’t been coming to the meetings, I mean?”

  “Oh, well . . . I get these migraines.” I pinched the skin between my eyebrows and made a face like the woman on the Anacin commercial.

  “So are you and—” she stopped and checked her records. “Are you and Katherine getting along? Is it roomie problems?”

  I shook my head.

  “Homesick?”

  You could show a drive-in movie on that forehead of hers, I thought. “Kippy and I get along fine,” I said. “Why? Did she say something to you?”

  “Oh, good golly, no. We were just wondering, the other officers and me. If there’s a problem, we want to know about it. My first semester, I was so homesick, I used to upchuck before class.”

  I had called Grandma only once on the pay phone. She’d been on her way to bingo. Ruth and Larry never even answered their phone.

  “Everything’s really great,” I said. I smiled hard enough to see my cheeks in my peripheral vision. “Really super.”

  “Terrific!” she said. “Then we’ll see you tonight at the meeting after supper. It’s important you’re there because we’re discussing the big Halloween party. Can I pencil you in for a committee?”

  “Well,” I said, “as long as my migraines cooperate.” I made a fist and tapped my head for emphasis. Migraines had always made Mr. Pucci back off, but Marcia acted as though she’d never heard of them.

  “Fantabulous!” she said. “See you then. And I’ll put your cologne order in, immediately if not sooner. Do you need any sachet?”

  “I guess I’m all set on that,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “You’re entirely welcome.”

  Pushy bitch.

  * * *

  That night I skipped downstairs supper and ate the rest of my apricots and a package of Mallomars. But just as I dozed in the quiet of the deserted floor, Marcia’s voice boomed from the PA box in the hallway. “Dolores Price! Dolores Price! We’re holding up the meeting for you. We need you downstairs to make it one hundred percent perfect attendance.”

  I unlocked the door and spoke to the box. “My head is pounding,” I said in a quivery voice. “I don’t think I can make it.”

  “I can’t hear you, but I’m clicking off now,” she said. The cheeriness dropped suddenly out of her tone. “Get down here quick!”

  The meeting had already begun by the time I sat down at the outskirts, on the piano bench. From up front, Marcia looked up from her reading of the minutes and gave me a wink. The truth was, I sat as far away from other people as they sat away from me. The closest person to me was little Naomi, the girl who had been to Woodstock and made a speech that first day. I watched her tap her knuckles against her knees. Her skin was pale and scaly, her chewed-up fingernails rimmed with dried blood.

  As Marcia had promised, the key item on Rochelle’s agenda was the upcoming Hooten Hall Halloween party. She said she was against a costume-party theme. Hadn’t last semester’s luau made them the laughingstock of the campus? She, for one, was tired of the guys from Delta Chi making pigs-on-a-spit jokes every time they passed Hooten on their way to class.

  After some discussion, Marcia took the floor. She said that since it was a Halloween party, she, personally, felt costumes would be cute, though she was happy to go along with whatever we gals decided democratically.

  In the spirit of cooperation, with Marcia beaming proudly at us, we voted in costumes (Rochelle rolled her eyes but abstained), keg beer, vodka punch, and a $2.50 cover charge for girls from other dorms.

  Rochelle invited new business.

  “Right here!” Naomi called, loud enough to make me jump. She rushed to the front of the room.

  “For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Naomi, okay? And I feel it’s real important for our dorm to take a stand on Cambodia.”

  She hopped nervously from one side of the room to the other. There couldn’t have been much more than eighty pounds inside those bib overalls.

  “I’ve drafted this petition”—she waved a clipboard at us—“and if we all sign it, then it’s a start. See, we need to get organized. If hundreds of thousands of college kids across the country unite, then how can even a cocksucker like Nixon not hear us?”

  “Excuse me,” Marcia said, smiling her Avon lady smile at Naomi. “You have a perfect right to your opinion, but, personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to refer to the President of the United States as . . . as . . .”

  “Nixon himself is the obscenity,” Naomi snapped back. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is My Lai.”

  I wasn’t unsympathetic to her argument. Those My Lai pictures in Life magazine had made my stomach heave. My mother’s Tricia Nixon essay was what had gotten me stuck at this cruddy school in the first place.

  Naomi’s petition passed unsigned from girl to girl as she spoke. Kippy’s hands didn’t even touch the clipboard. Up front Naomi hopscotched from one world problem
to another. Private conversations broke out around the lounge. They were treating her like a joke.

  “Well,” Rochelle finally interrupted, “we apologize if Merton isn’t radical enough for you, but some of us have studying to do.”

  “Okay, okay,” Naomi nodded. “I just want to say one more thing, okay? I was at Woodstock this summer. That was re-al-ity, you guys! We owe it to our generation to get political!”

  Rochelle wielded her gavel and declared the meeting over. Someone handed Naomi’s clipboard back to her. No one had thought to pass it to me.

  “Just a second! Just a second!” Naomi protested. She ran from one exiting girl to the next. “Why aren’t there more names on this thing? Innocent women and children, you guys! Wake the fuck up!”

  She and I were the last two people left in the room, slumped at opposite ends.

  “Let me see that thing,” I said.

  Counting Naomi’s, mine was the fourth signature.

  “Do you get it?” she asked. “I just don’t get it.”

  Her eyes were wet and jumpy. The best I could manage was a shrug.

  * * *

  That night, Kippy and some others were playing rummy in our room. I was lying in bed on my side, watching the wall.

  Bambi came in without knocking, her face bloodless. She was clutching an album jacket. “Something awful has happened, you guys,” she said. “Something really horrible. Paul McCartney is dead.”

  “No sir,” Kippy said.

  “It was just on the radio. He’s been dead for months.” She thrust the Abbey Road album at us. “Look! His eyes are closed and he’s barefoot. It’s all symbolic. George is the gravedigger. John Lennon is God.”

  Other Hooten girls entered, asking if we’d heard. Mine and Kippy’s room was becoming some sort of headquarters. Was it an assassination? No, a disease, someone said. A tropical disease he had had for over a year. The other Beatles were in mourning and couldn’t be reached.