She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “I’m only putting half of this vodka in the punch,” she whispered to me in confidence, as if we were two mothers putting something over on our children. “The last thing I want to do is spend all tomorrow morning scraping dried upchuck off the lounge rug with a butter knife.”

  She hefted the punch bowl and walked cautiously toward the door. “Now, Naomi and Dolores, you walk in front of me. I don’t want anyone bumping into me and making me spill this. If we have to wet-mop the dance floor, everybody’ll be doing the shing-a-ling whether they want to or not!”

  Out in the lounge, they were slow-dancing to “Cherish.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Naomi said. “Do I have to go out there? This song makes me gag.” But she did as Marcia told her.

  Kippy and Eric danced by, crotch to crotch. Kippy’s baseball hat was turned backward and her cheek rested against Eric’s green chest.

  Out on the floor, Marcia asked some guy to dance but he refused. Back in the kitchen, Naomi shook her head. “All this dancing and drinking while Nixon’s president. It’s hypocritical. What’s there to celebrate?”

  Marcia put her hands on her wide hips. Inside the cheeriness of her costume, she seemed to have wilted some. “Well what about Woodstock? They were dancing plenty at your precious Woodstock, weren’t they?”

  Naomi blinked. “That was different. That was political. This party is just a motherfucking embarrassment.”

  “Now you just watch your language and I mean it,” Marcia said.

  “Oh, yeah, your virgin ears,” Naomi laughed. “That’s probably your trouble, Marcia. Virginity.”

  A tremor passed over Marcia’s face. “You know, Naomi, I try hard to love a little something about every gal in this dormitory. But you can just go fry ice!”

  “Ding-dong,” Naomi said. “Avon calling.”

  “If you are insinuating by that remark that there is something wrong with Avon products, then—”

  Three disheveled, tie-dyed strangers appeared at the kitchen doorway, and Marcia’s smile blinked back on. “May I help you?” she said.

  “Zach!” Naomi screamed. “Babe!” She ran to the tallest of the three and gave him an open-mouthed kiss. Then she reached for her duffel bag and led them through the crowd. “Adios, pod people,” she called back to us.

  Marcia rubbed the sides of her hips and readjusted her sailor cap. “I hate it when a Hooten girl just won’t pitch in,” she mumbled.

  Suddenly, I realized I’d forgotten to get Naomi’s room key. “Hey, hold on a second,” I yelled out. “Wait!” I ran into the lounge after them.

  The music was shouting. Naomi and her friends were making their way through the crowd. Someone grabbed my wrist. Eric.

  “Cut it out!” I said. “I have to catch her.” Over his shoulder, I saw Naomi’s friend’s head go out the front door.

  “I’m hot for you, baby. Let’s you and me have a dance.” He yelled it over the music, for the others’ sake. People laughed and hooted.

  “Shut up,” I said. “You’re drunk. Let go of me!”

  The others closed in. Eric tightened his grip and began a kind of dance around me. I looked to Kippy for help, but she was saying something in Bambi’s ear. The two of them laughed and nodded.

  What you want, baby, I got it

  What you need, you know I got it

  All I’m askin’ is for a little respect—

  There was a smear of green on my arm where he was yanking. “Stop it!” I shouted. “Let the fuck go!”

  The crowd whooped their encouragement to him and he laughed his beer breath into my face and rubbed up against me. “I love it when she plays hard to get,” he shouted.

  “He’s hard and she gets it,” someone shouted back. He pushed closer, danced right up against me. People laughed and yelled. Now that he’d made me visible, I was their target.

  “More bounce to the ounce!”

  “Suzie Creamcheese!”

  R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

  Find out what it means to me!

  They closed in on us, chanting. Alone, with Dottie, that had been my song. He had no right. I never once . . .

  Eric let go of my wrists but grabbed me by the hips before I could pull away. He latched his legs around my leg and rocked up and down. The others barked like dogs.

  “Dry fuck!”

  “Hump time!”

  “Give her what she wants!”

  Sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me

  “You pig!” I screamed, then jerked my knee up into him.

  Surprise and pain stopped his dancing. Stopped all of them. The music stopped. I did it again.

  Eric grunted and fell forward to the floor. His body curled up on itself; he was writhing and grunting.

  I parted them with my elbows and my crazy screaming. I ran.

  “Wait’ll you see my fish,” Dottie said. “I just got some new neons last night. You know anything about tropical fish?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  Her brother’s station wagon hit a pothole and went into a shimmy that traveled from the front of the car up my legs and throat. I had called her from the pay phone in the all-night study room. She said she could tell it was me calling before she even picked up.

  A cardboard air freshener swung back and forth from the radio knob: a topless woman fondling her breasts. After I’d kneed Eric, I’d hidden at the edge of the parking lot, behind the dumpster. Over an hour I must have sat there on that cold ground—shaking, calming down, shaking again. There was an oil spot next to me, wet and bright, with the moon shining in it. And a dime. I rolled the coin between my thumb and finger, considering. Calling her had been the only thing I could think of.

  “Moe, Larry, and Curly—that’s my three piranhas. I named one of my angelfish after you. The silver one. Dolores. She’s a real beauty. . . . God, I was so happy when you called. When the phone rang, I knew right away it was you. This is so perfect. My rat’s-ass brother’s at National Guard until Sunday. This place we’re gettin’ our supper at has the best fried clams.”

  At the party, after the music started up again, Marcia had come outside and walked to the edge of the lawn. She’d called my name three times, pronouncing it like a question.

  “Do you like strips or whole bellies?” Dottie asked. “They got both.”

  “What?”

  “Clams.”

  I turned toward her. The cigarette smoke we’d made swirled around her head. “I don’t really care,” I said.

  The restaurant’s window was smeared and steamy. She sat at the counter with her back toward me, her rear hanging over both sides of the stool. Two men in a booth by the window drank coffee and watched her, smiling. In the restaurant light, the green paint Eric had left on my wrists and hands looked gray. “Get even with that fat cunt—” he’d said when they’d walked him out of the party, each of his arms locked around a friend’s shoulder. They stopped only a half dozen cars away from me. “I’ll fix her good,” Eric promised. Then he coughed and spat and let them ease him back inside.

  I’d waited and waited, staring up at the pulled shade in Kippy’s and my room. Then I’d risked the rear entrance to the dorm, walking up the stairs past half-empty cups of beer and discarded parts of costumes. My heart thumped like the bass from the music downstairs. People were laughing and yelling, far away.

  Our floor was vacant. I walked down the long corridor, expecting him to jump out from behind every door I passed. But I had to chance it. Had to get my things and get out of there, get somewhere else.

  Our door was wide open.

  On the floor in the middle of the room was a mound of my stuff that he’d pulled out of my closet and destroyed. Ripped-up clothes, kicked-in suitcases, pages torn away from the bindings of my books. My mother’s flying-leg painting sat at a cockeyed angle on top of the pile—the wooden frame snapped and broken, the canvas split down the middle. If I started crying, I warned myself, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  He hadn’t touched
my bureau. I grabbed my knapsack from the bottom drawer where I kept Dante’s stolen letters and pictures. I threw in underwear, toothbrush, and the money Arthur Music had sent me for killing my mother—twenty-five untouched $20 bills, still in their bank envelope.

  I looked again at the ruined painting. “Ma!” I called out loud—a single syllable of pain that scared me. If I gave myself away, he might come back. Might hate me enough to do what Jack had done.

  I grabbed Kippy’s scissors. Hands shaking, I cut myself a zigzag square of Ma’s painting: green tip of the wing against the cool blue sky. I stuffed it into the knapsack and ran like hell, down the corridor, down the stairs, away.

  Outside, I ran, walked, ran again to the mailbox at the edge of campus where Dottie had said to go. She was waiting, the motor running, her blinker winking the mailbox on and off. The door swung open. “Come on,” she said. “Get in.”

  * * *

  The car filled up with the reassuring smell of grease; the brown bags of clams warmed my lap. “Sorry it took so long,” Dottie said. “One of their fryolators is on the blink. I got bellies.” The front windshield steamed up. She flicked a switch and the defrosters roared to life, fluttering the ends of her blunt Dutch-boy hair.

  She drove down Wayland’s main street, slowed, and parked just past the bus depot where I’d arrived that first day. “Why are you stopping here?” I asked.

  “This is where I live. Across the street.” She nudged her head in the direction of a dry-cleaning store. “Upstairs,” she said.

  Three dark-skinned people—a woman and two men—were sitting inside the depot. The slamming of our car doors attracted their attention and they looked out. Dottie waved. They waved back.

  “That’s the DeAndrades,” she said. “They’re Portuguese. Come from some island over there. They keep that store spotless.”

  “The guy in the orange shirt is the taxi driver who drove me to Merton the first day I got here,” I said. My voice sounded numb and flat. I hadn’t told Dottie anything about what Eric had done.

  “Oh yeah, Domingos. The wife’s brother. He delivered a baby last winter, right in his taxi. They had his picture in the paper.”

  We crossed the street and entered a side door. At the top of the stairs, she unlocked another door and I followed her in. I heard the bubbling before I could see anything. Then Dottie was in the center of the kitchen, her hand still on the pull chain.

  “This is so great,” she said. “You want a beer?”

  I shook my head.

  “These are my piranhas.” The tank was on the counter, next to a small TV. “Watch this,” she said.

  She opened a tin and sprinkled tiny shrimp into the tank. The piranhas swam to the surface, ate the food in quick, angry jerks. “Put your finger in there,” Dottie laughed. “No, don’t really. Come on, let’s eat while our clams are still warm. For drinks I got Rolling Rock, cream soda, milk, and blackberry brandy.”

  “Cream soda.”

  “Oh, have a beer. I’m having one.”

  “All right.”

  “Me and her are just alike, ain’t we, Moe?” For a second, I looked for Dottie’s brother, then realized she was talking to the fish tank.

  We ate the clams and fries right out of the cardboard containers with our fingers. Silently, we slid the food back and forth across the table to each other. Dottie pulled out several interlocked clams and leaned her head back, dropping the clump into her mouth. My fingers were smeared with grease and ketchup. I ate faster and faster. We drank two beers apiece.

  She let go a loud beer belch and laughed. “I got fudge-ripple ice cream for dessert,” she said. “You want it now or later?”

  “Show me your other fish,” I said.

  There was a bigger TV in the living room, and heavy green furniture. “These are my neons,” Dottie said. “Ain’t they cuties?”

  They swam in beelines around the tank, nervous dots and dashes of color. Above them was a paint-by-number picture of sailboats. A photograph was stuck in the plastic frame—a snapshot of a baby wearing a vest, a bow tie, a mongoloid’s smile. Dottie caught me looking.

  “So which one of these neons is your favorite?” she said. “Pick.”

  I looked inside the tank and tried to give an answer. “I don’t know. This one, I guess.” When I looked up again, the snapshot was missing.

  “I can’t believe you’re really here at my house,” Dottie said.

  She mounded the ice cream into wooden salad bowls and poured blackberry brandy on top. She left the carton on the table and we dug out seconds with our spoons.

  “Dottie?” I said. “What was that thing that Kippy said? That bad thing you heard her say about me? You said you’d tell me.”

  She didn’t answer at first. Then she told me to just forget it.

  “Was it nothing? Did you make it up?”

  “She said if she ever got like you, she’d get a gun and shoot herself.”

  My eyes teared over. “Who did she say it to?”

  “Don’t think about her. Think about us.”

  She got up and turned on the TV, then went over to her piranhas and fed them more shrimp. “You want another beer?” she asked, her hand on the refrigerator-door handle. “I got plenty.”

  Kippy had just stood there, laughing, watching Eric’s rape dance. Had she been in the room with him when he destroyed my things?

  “I’m having another one. Here.”

  I took the beer.

  The news was on. Nixon, the war, the moon.

  “Who was that little boy in the picture?” I asked.

  “What picture?” she said. “Nobody you know.”

  “Is he a relative or something?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Your nephew?”

  “My kid.”

  “You have . . . oh, my God. Where is he?”

  “Nowhere. He died.”

  She got up and switched the channel. She wouldn’t look at me. “Do you want anything else? You want to listen to the radio or something? There’s never anything good on TV on Saturday.”

  “Were you married?” I said.

  She turned and faced me. “Don’t wreck things, okay? This could be so perfect.”

  “What?”

  “The fact you’re here. The fact you called me.”

  “But what did he die of?” I said.

  She ignored me, staring at TV. A reporter was standing on a Cape Cod beach with two dead whales behind him. Whales were killing themselves for no reason, or for some reason scientists couldn’t understand. Experts were baffled.

  “It was better he died,” she said. “I was fifteen when I had him. He had all these problems I couldn’t even pronounce. The state took him.”

  “What was his name?” I said.

  “Michael. Except I called him Buster.” She turned off her television. Outside, a car door slammed. All over the apartment, the fish tanks percolated.

  “I knew right away something was wrong with him. All the time I was pregnant. I didn’t know much, but I knew that.”

  I lit her one of my cigarettes and passed it over. Her whole face sagged. “He lived longer than they said he would, though—outsmarted them. They said he’d die when he was about six months old but he was over a year. Fourteen months. Sometimes I used to take the bus and go out to see him. They used to let me hold him.”

  I went to the sink and began to rinse the ice-cream bowls. I was thinking about Anthony Jr.—how his death had changed Ma, had changed the three of us. That painting had been the last real part of Ma I had.

  Dottie came up behind me and placed her hands on my hips. She rested her chin between my neck and shoulder. “Hi,” she said. I felt the word against my neck.

  I dunked the bowls into the dishpan.

  “Did you like the supper?”

  “Yes. Thank you. Let me pay you for half.”

  “My treat,” she said. She reached around and ran her fingertips up and down my stomach. My hands shook, shi
mmying the dishwater.

  “I love you, Dolores,” she whispered.

  I laughed. “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do.”

  I swallowed and tried to concentrate on the row of bright windowsill containers: Pine-Sol, Clorox, All, Joy.

  She rubbed her belly against my back and buttocks, soft and questioning, nothing like Eric’s dancing. Nothing like Jack. Her fingers moved down to my thighs.

  “Look, I don’t want you to—”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?” she said. Her fingers kept moving. “Two fatties like us. What’s the difference? . . . You and me are just alike. I can make you feel so good—I know how to touch you. Where.”

  “No, really. You see—”

  She turned me around and brought her lips slowly against mine. Her hair smelled of french fries and cigarette smoke. It was such a soft kiss, I let it happen.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Two big fat mamas. Nobody cares.”

  She was right. We didn’t matter. People hated us anyway.

  I kissed her back. Kissed her loneliness and my own fear. Kissed the part of her that had come out as that small, imperfect boy.

  Her tongue was inside my mouth. Her fingers pulled at the top of my jeans. She got the snap undone. “Come on,” she said. “No one’s here. Nobody cares. This will be nice.”

  Her bedroom was neat and sparse. The aquarium sat on an end table next to her bed: angelfish gliding through a cube of water. I stared at them over her shoulder while she undressed us, first me and then herself. She pressed her hands against my shoulders and I sat down on the bed. She sat down next to me. The bed creaked from our double weight.

  “Do me first,” she said.

  She reached over for my hand and guided my knuckles back and forth against her thighs. Undid my fist. Her pubic hair was silky bristle.

  She spread her legs. Her fingers moved my fingers up and down, up and down, against the edge of herself. Her hand dropped away and I continued. She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. It didn’t matter. It was just motion, wet and warm, over and over.