She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  Marcia said he probably caught it down in India when they were studying with that greasy old maharishi. She said she’d read someplace that in India people just squatted down and pooped right in the street.

  There were girls on the beds, girls on the floor. Someone listening to a different radio station said if you played the White Album backwards, it said, “Turn me on, dead man.” Kippy put the record on her turntable and spun with her finger. People moved closer to the eerie gibberish.

  They were treating death like some kind of game. I wished all of their mothers dead.

  “This is bullshit!” I said.

  They turned and looked.

  “It’s all just some stupid practical joke the radio is playing. Can’t you tell that? Real death isn’t fun, it’s painful. She was right tonight—what she said about Vietnam. Naomi. About poor women and children.”

  The record on the turntable spun in silence. Nobody spoke.

  Then the door opened again, allowing in a wedge of hallway light.

  “Phone,” Veronica said.

  Kippy sighed. “Is it Eric? Tell him I’m too upset to talk.”

  “It’s for her.” Veronica pointed at me.

  The hallway made me squint. If it was that busybody dean of women, I’d hang up in her face.

  “I was wondering,” Dottie said, “if you’d like to come eat supper next Saturday. And see my fish.”

  “Next Saturday? I can’t.”

  “I’m making pork. And this string-bean casserole. You make it with cream of mushroom soup and a can of onion rings. You put the onion rings on top. Like a crust. I’m not sure what I’m having for dessert yet.”

  “I can’t go,” I repeated. “I’ll be studying all that weekend.”

  “I thought they were having that Halloween-party thing. You won’t be able to study with a party going on. It’ll be quieter over here.”

  “Well, thanks, but—”

  “Please. My brother’s not going to be here. He’s got National Guard that weekend. If you don’t like pork, we can have something else.”

  Rochelle walked past. If any of them knew she had called me . . .

  “Maybe some other time,” I whispered. “I have to go now. See you.”

  “When?”

  “When what?”

  “You said some other time. So, when?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s hard to say.”

  “He’s going to be gone that whole weekend. I already bought some of the stuff. You can’t freeze pork, you know. It gets some kind of germ.”

  “I can’t. Honest. I have to go.”

  “You know what she said about you?”

  I gripped the phone so hard, it hurt. “What?”

  “Well, I was going to tell you on Saturday. It’s not something I want to go into over the phone. But believe me, she’s no friend of yours.”

  Suddenly, I was crying. About my poor attendance in class. About that lecture I’d just given them. It wasn’t as if my mother’s death was their fault. . . . They never once asked me to play cards with them. My being at college was one big joke.

  “You won’t even want to sleep in the same room with her when I tell you. It was really rotten.”

  “I can’t.”

  “That first week you were here was so much fun. I could pick you up in my brother’s car. He always leaves it here when he’s got National Guard. If you’d rather, we could go out somewheres and eat. Some restaurant. Don’t say yes or no. Say maybe.”

  I waited.

  “Dolores,” she said. “I love you.”

  It scared me. Jack Speight’s tickling me up there on that porch.

  “I love you so much.”

  “I have to go now. See you tomorrow.” Only I wouldn’t see her. I’d stay in my room all day long with the doors locked. If she tried to come in, I’d report her.

  “Why are you treating me like this? That week was the best week of my life. I really miss dancing with you.”

  “Did you hear the news?” I said. “Paul McCartney is dead.”

  “Honest to Christ, Dolores, I keep thinking and thinking about you.” There were some funny popping noises: crying. “I just meant I love you as a friend, that’s all. Don’t get the wrong idea. We’re so much alike, you and me. Who cares about us couple of fatties?”

  I hung up.

  The bathroom was empty. I locked myself in the stall, shaking so hard that the toilet seat rattled beneath me.

  * * *

  By the time I returned to my room, the others had left. Kippy stood in the dark, playing with the flickering candle flame.

  I expected her to be angry, but when I flopped onto my mattress, she came over and sat down next to me, the first time she’d ever done that.

  “You were thinking about your mother before, weren’t you?” she said. “Is that what got you so upset?”

  I’d kept Ma’s flying-leg painting in my closet. I didn’t trust Kippy with the subject of my mother.

  “You said she died in an accident. Tell me about it.”

  “A car accident. . . . Well, a truck. I don’t really want to—”

  “It must be hard,” she sighed. She put her arm around me. “I feel real close to you tonight, Dee.”

  Dottie had lied about her—I was convinced Kippy hadn’t said anything terrible at all.

  “I’m not really a bad person,” I said. I was thinking of all the letters I’d stolen—how I might reglue the envelopes, return them to her. I could blame it on the post office.

  “I know you’re not,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What?”

  “Could you wash us a load of darks tomorrow?”

  * * *

  The next day there was a new letter from Dante, thicker than usual and in a bigger envelope, marked “Fragile/Do Not Bend.” I stuck it in my laundry basket with Kippy’s and my dirty clothes and headed down to the basement. (It was safe to go to the basement at noontime; Dottie always cleaned the third floor then.)

  Art Fleming leaned toward the camera and announced the Final Jeopardy category: human anatomy. “It is the small groove between your nose and your top lip,” he said.

  The champion frowned. You could tell she’d bet her wad and didn’t know the answer—that they’d be packing her off with a round of applause and a set of Grolier’s encyclopedias. I walked over to the set and changed the channel.

  On the news, Paul McCartney smirked and held up the front page of that day’s newspaper. Then he pinched himself and told the reporters it still hurt, so he guessed he was still alive. I turned off the TV.

  Kippy had promised to give me the laundry money this time but she’d spent all her quarters on soda. Between us we had two loads. I put our dark colors and some detergent into the first washer and started it up.

  Dante’s envelope sat in the laundry basket amongst the whites. I picked it up and peeled back the flap as carefully as possible.

  The Polaroid pictures were in a separate, smaller envelope paper-clipped to the back of his letter—five snapshots of him, standing and sitting, completely naked.

  Their starkness immobilized me. His hands were on his hips in one. In another, they reached up behind his neck so that his arms, bent at the elbow, formed wings. His pubic hair, the hair beneath his arms, looked black and blunt against the whiteness of his body—a glowing whiteness, as if he had somehow been lit from within.

  The letter explained how he’d locked the door while his roommate was at class and placed the camera on a pile of books on a chair. “Not making love to you that night was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. It’s all I can think about. I’m hoping these pictures deepen our commitment to each other. I TRULY TRULY love you.”

  I recalled that altered picture I’d come upon in my seventh-grade religion book at St. Anthony’s School—how that surprise dirty picture had both shocked and informed me. Yet there was nothing pornographic about Dante’s Polaroids. His face, cut off at the f
orehead in some of the shots, had the same struggling expression as his graduation portrait—almost a holy look. It was clear from the way he’d posed that he was offering his body, requesting—not pushing and ripping like Pig Jack Speight. “All men are pigs,” I’d said to Ruth that morning. “No they’re not,” she’d replied. In one of the pictures, Dante was seated on the edge of the bed, holding himself down there, offering it, somehow politely.

  That struggling face: I thought of another picture—the one hanging in the parlor at Grandma’s: Jesus, his sad eyes looking out into your eyes, his sacred heart exposed. Beseeching: a word from a prayer I’d once memorized. Dante’s face beseeched me.

  “You know, you don’t have to keep feeding your hard-earned money to big business.”

  I reeled around, stuffing the Polaroids into my jacket pocket. Little Naomi was wedged between the wall and the whirring clothes dryer.

  She stood up and took a book of matches from her bib overalls. “Here,” she said. “I’ll show you.” Ripping off a strip of cardboard, she wedged it into the washing machine’s coin slot and pushed gently. There was a soft click, a humming sound. Water gushed into the tub.

  “Thanks,” I said. She couldn’t have seen the pictures from where she’d sat, I told myself.

  “Well, we don’t have to choose to be victims of General Electric and the power company.”

  She sat back down and continued her reading.

  I wanted to think. To look again. But I wanted to keep talking.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “You were at Woodstock this summer, right?”

  She put down her book. “Yeah. It was so far-fucking-out. Incredible.”

  “Did you by any chance happen to see this couple when you were there? With a little girl about two years old. She has curly, curly Shirley Temple hair. The guy is tall and skinny.”

  Naomi laughed. “That was the thing about Woodstock. You didn’t think of people as individuals. We were all this . . . mass entity.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  She must have seen my disappointment. “I was two people back from Joni Mitchell in the portable toilet line, though,” she said.

  “Joni Mitchell used the public toilets?”

  “Well, yeah. See, the whole point was that we’re all one, you know? You and me and Joni and your tall, skinny friend: a bunch of equals sharing the same small planet. It was a rush—very political!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You bet your bippy.”

  She looked at me funny, then smiled. “Hey, you going to be down here for a while? I want to get something up in my room. Don’t go anywhere.”

  She clomped out the door and up the stairs.

  I took out Dante’s pictures again. I was closer to him now than Kippy was, though neither of them knew. The photos linked us together, somehow, brought the two of us to some new place. I was at the verge of a mystery I’d held inside me since Jack: how women might love men back, how women could love men’s bodies. Ruth had moaned with pleasure that night on the floor with Larry. I thought of Ma, standing naked at her mirror after Daddy had left her—holding her breasts and aching for Daddy. Thought about the foolish way she’d acted around her dates . . .

  Naomi returned with a lavender-colored joint. “You feel like doing a number?” she asked.

  Things sped too fast. I was making a potential friend! Dante was naked in my pocket!

  Naomi teased the joint in front of my nose, back and forth like a windshield wiper. “I think my biology teacher said something about canceling class today, anyway,” I said.

  “Come on, then. It’s too nice a day to sit in here and watch lint.”

  I had never been out behind the dorm before. Past the dumpsters and the kitchen helpers smoking their parking-lot cigarettes, we climbed a long, sloping hill. The copper meadow grass, dead from frost, crackled under our feet. Maple trees were maroon and yolky-colored in the noon sun.

  The joint was tighter, more streamlined, than Larry’s had been. I imitated Naomi, taking several short, jerky sips, and a buoyancy passed over me so completely, I half suspected a breeze might blow me skimming along the edge of the dead grass.

  Naomi leaned back into the straw. The wind flapped her pant legs.

  “Paul McCartney came back from the dead,” I said. “He was on the news just now. It was all a stupid joke.”

  “You know the trouble with the Beatles? Capitalism bit them in the heart. They are dead, the four of them. The joke’s on them.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “It’s a pretty far-out concept, though,” Naomi said. She looked over and smiled.

  “Death?”

  “Resurrection.” We were both quiet for a second. Then she started talking about socialism.

  I wasn’t listening. If resurrection were possible, then so was God. God might be someone unpredictable. Dante, maybe, or John Lennon with his freaky ways. Or even someone with an average, forgettable face: a lady customer in pin curls at the superette, that old garlic-breath man on the bus ride down to Merton. God could even be the audiovisual boy at Easterly High School—a person who could flick a button and run your life in reverse. . . .

  I imagined Dottie unkissing me. Me traveling backward up the interstate in that Greyhound bus. . . . Ma jumping back to the safety of her tollbooth. Arthur Music’s truck speeding away from us in reverse.

  I reached into my pocket and fingered the edges of the secret Polaroids, the answer to that scary riddle: how women might love men, how men might not be bullies. Resurrection: the word made a pretty sound.

  Naomi tapped me on the arm. “Hey!” she said. “Watch this!”

  She lay back on the ground and wrapped her arms around herself, then began rolling down the hill—slowly at first, then faster, then fast. At the bottom she rose drunkenly, laughing and calling for me to join her.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Bullshit you can’t.”

  “No, really.”

  “Come on!”

  Then I was doing it, rolling crookedly toward her applause, whooping and laughing and traveling in a blur. I closed my eyes, amazed and horrified at my own momentum.

  We sat at the bottom of the hill, straw-strewn and giggling in the bright sun. “Are you wrecked?” Naomi asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “Who knows?”

  15

  An aluminum-foil spaceman walked by, two rubber-faced Nixons. Howdy Doody was dancing with Marilyn Monroe.

  “There’s nothing like the Four Tops to get everybody hopping around like they were colored people,” Marcia sighed. She had strong-armed Veronica and me for the Halloween-dance refreshment committee; Marcia herself was chairman. We stood in the glare of fluorescent lighting and stainless steel, mixing jugs of screwdriver punch and tubs of onion dip. Marcia had assigned Veronica deviled eggs. She stood at the sink, peeling her shells at close range, picking and worrying over each egg as if it were a midterm exam. Naomi was there, too, seated on the counter, watching us work.

  “Colored people at milky-white Merton College, Marcia?” she gasped.

  Marcia shooed at her with a dish towel. “Now don’t you start that prejudice business with me, Naomi Slosberg. Who owns three Dionne Warwick albums—you or me?”

  Naomi was spending Moratorium Weekend at U Penn with “real people,” but she’d come downstairs to make fun of the party until her ride got there. At Kippy’s request, I was spending the weekend in Naomi’s vacant room. Eric had bought a nickel bag of marijuana and borrowed a special hookup from someone in his dorm. He and Kippy were planning to get high and make love by strobe light after the party.

  “I mean, black, colored. I don’t see what people get so huffy about,” Marcia continued. She had called me “an old party pooper” when I’d shown up in the kitchen without a costume. She was dressed in a Raggedy Ann outfit she’d sewn from a kit. All week long, she’d hunched over the rec-room sewing machine, preparing herself to look adorable. Eric was dressed as the Jolly Green Giant an
d Kippy was a New York Met. Kippy had confided to me about the strobe light that afternoon as she cut out leaves from a piece of green felt material and stapled them to a pair of Eric’s underpants. After supper that evening, I’d had to leave our room while Kippy painted Eric’s body green.

  “You know, Naomi, this free love and peacenik business of yours is probably just a stage you happen to be passing through.”

  Naomi shot her cigarette butt into the big kitchen sink. “I was a majorette my first year in high school.” She laughed. “Used to curl my hair in a flip like Marlo Thomas and wear those watch-plaid kilts with the fringe and the giant safety pins. Had a whole closet of them.”

  “And if you were smart,” Marcia said, “you would have had those skirts dry-cleaned and saved them. Styles come back, you know.”

  “I saved the safety pins,” Naomi said. “Use ’em for roach clips.”

  “Oh, shush,” Marcia said. “Why don’t you just slide yourself off that counter and transfer some dip into these bowls for us?”

  “Marcia,” Naomi sighed. “People all over the country are trying to stop America the Beautiful from detonating the Third World. And what are the wing nuts at this school doing? Eating onion dip and dancing the fucking shing-a-ling.”

  “Now that’s enough,” Marcia said. “You’re hurting my virgin ears.”

  “Do you even know where Cambodia is, Marcia? How many Billie Holiday albums do you own?”

  “None,” Marcia said. “I haven’t even heard of the gentleman, Naomi. So I suppose that makes me a terrible person, doesn’t it?”

  “Billie Holiday?” I said. I saw Mr. Pucci’s boyfriend’s face, heard that sad, soothing voice that had come out of their jukebox.

  “Anyhow, I’ve just about given up on that shing-a-ling dance,” Marcia said. She was gurgling and blopping vodka over an ice ring studded with frozen cherries. “Audrey and Rochelle tried to teach me, but they said I was hopeless. My dancing muscles must be mentally retarded.”

  I had assumed she was talking to the group of us, but when I looked up, she was saying it specifically to me, smiling her big, hard smile, her teeth wet and yellow against her white-powdered Raggedy Ann face. It was depressing to see how far off the mark from adorable she had landed.