She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  As I began to drop weight, I began, as well, to drop my cattle prod of hostility whenever Dr. Shaw closed his office door. Our first major project was my night at Dottie’s apartment. I took him through the particulars, then asked him outright. “It means I’m gay, right?”

  Dr. Shaw made his face a question. “Tell me again what you were thinking about during the encounter.”

  “Do you mean the part about me looking at the fish or the part about Larry and Ruth?”

  “I mean, what was going through your mind as she was bringing you to climax? It was starting to feel very good to you and you were thinking about . . .”

  “Larry and Ruth. I was thinking about that night when I woke up and they were doing it on the floor at Grandma’s. I might have been moaning a little, like Ruth did. I was kind of . . . imagining I was Ruth and that Larry was . . . What are you saying? I’m not gay?”

  He gave me a speech about how homosexuality was an orientation, not a life-style choice, and that I should “perhaps consider” whether or not my being angry at Dottie or Mr. Pucci for who they were was an appropriate response. Dr. Shaw was a big “perhaps” man; it was one of his favorite words. “No, Dolores, your patterns as I see them show a clear attraction to men. Perhaps all that food bingeing you and Dottie did temporarily depressed your anger, made you numb. And in that passive state, you . . . ?”

  He was always doing that, too: turning his statements into little fill-in-the-blank quizzes for me.

  “I just let her go ahead and do it?”

  “That’s right. You merely gave yourself permission to dally.”

  “Yeah, but I . . .”

  “You what?”

  “I had . . . I felt . . . you know.”

  “Say it. Say the word. You experienced—”

  “I don’t want to say it.”

  “Why not, Dolores?”

  “Because I don’t feel like saying it, okay? Aren’t you always telling me to be honest about what I feel?”

  “Well, I’m just curious. I hear you using the word ‘fuck’ all the time. Which is an angry word when you think about it, isn’t it? You usually say that word in anger. I guess I’m just wondering why ‘fuck’ slips out so easily but you can’t seem to say the word ‘orgasm.’”

  “I can say it. ‘Orgasm.’ There. You happy now?”

  “I am, yes. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Sheesh.”

  “Anyway, to get back to your question, I’d say no, your orgasm that night doesn’t make you a lesbian. Stimulation feels good, even to the clinically depressed. A finger, a tongue. Friction isn’t specifically male or female. It’s—well, it’s just friction.”

  He smiled and hitched a strand of his golden hair behind his ear. “But of course your sexual climax is what energized you, jolted you out of your passivity. And then you felt . . . ?”

  “Fucked over!” I said. In the silence, I listened to the way I’d just said it as Dr. Shaw watched the discovery on my face.

  “Fucked over,” he repeated. “By whom?”

  “By her, I guess. But mostly by him.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Eric! Who else would I mean? What right did that shithead have to make a joke out of me? I kept telling him to stop, but he . . .”

  “What? What is it you’re thinking?”

  “Is that why I killed the fish? To get back at Eric?”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, of course it is.”

  I stood up and walked to the window. Watched the distant whitecaps, the slanted, icy drizzle pelt against Building B. Let my tears fall.

  I turned back and faced him again. “Could you stop saying ‘of course’ after everything, please? All this is new to me. All those ‘of courses’ make me feel kind of stupid.”

  “Certainly,” he said. “Of course. Who else fucked you over, Dolores? Over the years, I mean. Make us a list.”

  Blood banged inside my head. “You know who.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Jack Speight!”

  He nodded solemnly. “Anyone else?”

  “You name it. Kids at school, my father, my . . .”

  “Who were you going to say just then?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  * * *

  I’ll admit this, too: part of the reason I cooperated with Dr. Shaw at first was because I had a crush on him. On the ward after lights out, I used to visualize myself unlacing those Earth shoes, unbuttoning and unzipping him. Lying in my bed trying not to hear DePolito’s gurgly snoring one room down, I’d conjure up his bare chest and let my fingers do the walking. They kept our rooms so hot—not humid heat, the sexy kind, but oven heat—the kind that collapses your sinuses and makes your head ache. It used to rise up at me from the register between my bed and the wall while I lay there quietly, my fingers turning into Dr. Shaw. “Friction is friction,” I used to reason. “What the fuck?”

  * * *

  Sometimes I could figure out what Dr. Shaw was up to and deny him. That felt good: when had men with power over me ever made my life better?

  “Can you name one thing during that whole Cape Cod business that put you at ease?” he asked me at the end of one unproductive session. We’d spent our whole hour on my suicide trip.

  “Those lemon doughnuts I bought on the way,” I said. “They were pretty excellent.”

  He sighed and looked up at his ceiling. “This is work I thought we’d already accomplished. Where did your impulse to overeat come from? What was the pattern there?”

  I sighed impatiently, reciting what he wanted like a bratty child. “I ate because I was angry.”

  “So did eating the doughnuts really make you feel good?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No.”

  “Then would you please answer my question seriously?”

  I knew what he was after: he wanted me to lift up my rotting whale to see if Ma was under it. He was always looking for Ma. “What was the question again?” I said. “I forgot what you even asked me.”

  “I asked you to identify a moment up there on Cape Cod when you felt at ease. Felt good. Felt freed.”

  “Freed?” The word interested me, in spite of myself.

  He nodded. “Freed.”

  “In the water, I guess . . . out in the ocean.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Go on.”

  “Go on what? I just liked the way it felt out there.”

  “What did you like about it?” He leaned closer. I could smell his Listerine.

  “Swimming,” I said. “Feeling weightless. And going underwater. We’re over our time, you know. In case you’re interested.”

  He reached over to his desk and turned the clock to the wall, an act that panicked me. “Why did you like it underwater, Dolores? What was good about it?”

  When what you said excited him, his hair boinged a little. “How should I know? It was like you just said . . . it freed me or something.”

  Dr. Shaw took both my hands in his. “Let’s suppose,” he said, “that we’re at some crucial place right now, right at this second. I want you to visualize it for me. Let’s say for example’s sake that it has to do with the ocean. With swimming. With our work together. Picture it for us, Dolores. Are we about to break the surface, crash through to the daylight? Or are we about to take the plunge—to go under and explore the depths? Which do you see us doing, right here, right now?”

  He waited. He wouldn’t look away.

  I figured it was safer to give him whatever answer he wasn’t looking for, but I miscalculated—thought he wanted sunlight and breakthroughs.

  “We’re going under,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yup. We’re taking the plunge.”

  He closed his eyes and smiled. “Do you feel what I feel?”

  His pleasure made me twitch. “How should I know? What do you feel?”

  “That we’
re at the beginning of our real work together?”

  “The beginning? What’s all this other stuff been—jumping jacks?”

  But sarcasm was a broken tool when Dr. Shaw got hopped up like that. “Do you know, Dolores, why you felt the urge to swim underwater—why that came first to mind just now when I asked about feeling good?”

  “It didn’t come first. I thought about the doughnuts first.” He looked disapproving. “Well, technically, I mean.”

  “The water, your submergence: weren’t you perhaps recreating . . . ?”

  I shrugged.

  “The womb?”

  “The womb?”

  He smiled and nodded. “Trying, perhaps, to reenter the safety of your mother—to return to the warm, wet protection of the person who hadn’t yet failed you.”

  “Failed me how?”

  “By leaving you those times she was sick? By dying?”

  “The womb?”

  “It was instinctive.”

  “It was?”

  “Primal, really. Atavistic.”

  He looked so satisfied with me.

  “Look, just leave my mother out of it, okay? Besides, it wasn’t warm. It was fucking freezing. When I got out of the water, I turned blue. I was crying it was so cold!”

  “Exactly!” he said, slapping the arm of his recliner. “Why does a baby cry at birth?” Now he was up and pacing.

  “I don’t know. Because the doctor smacks it?”

  “The baby cries because of the drop in temperature. From ninety-eight point six to room temp, a good twenty-five degrees colder. It’s a shock. The shock of becoming! The chill of the life force. On a symbolic level, we could say you were midwifing yourself out in that water, couldn’t we?”

  I shrugged my fake indifference. “You’re the boss,” I said.

  “I’m not the boss. You’re the boss. The incredible thing we just learned here is that you didn’t begin your recovery here at Gracewood. You began it that morning out there in the ocean—long before I entered the picture. I’m just along with you for the ride.”

  “For the swim, you mean.”

  Dr. Shaw’s infrequent laughter was an alarming snort of cheer that distorted his handsome face, turned him into Francis the Talking Mule. “For the swim,” he repeated with a hearty guffaw. “Yes, that’s right. The swim! Let’s close now, Dolores. There are some calls I want to make—there’s a doctor on the West Coast I want very much to talk to. I think we’ve covered some valuable ground here today. I think we’ve found some real direction. Don’t you?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. He didn’t get the joke.

  * * *

  The next day he told me he was going to take his cue from me and reparent me—start from scratch because of all the inadvertent damage my real parents had done. “Together,” he said, closing his eyes to visualize it, “together, we are going to rewind your childhood and record over it.” He was always doing that: making my life seem like electronic equipment.

  “Look, I told you before. Whatever this has to do with my mother, I’d just as soon we keep her out of it,” I said. “My mother was a saint!”

  He cocked his head to the side, slightly. “A saint?”

  One of the things I’d withheld from him was Ma’s flying-leg painting. That lost picture was the closest I came to believing in anything like heaven—in some kind of world that was calm and right. I didn’t want him going anywhere near my mother.

  “She’s dead, okay?” I said. “Just leave her alone.”

  “In my opinion, it’s a mistake to keep playing hide-and-seek with this, Dolores. It’s counterproductive.”

  “Last time you said I was the boss. What was that happy horseshit about?”

  He sighed and nodded. “All right,” he said, “all right, I’ll try as best I can to respect your ground rules until you’re ready to step over them yourself. Now I want you to go back to your room and relax. Tomorrow we’re going on a rather amazing trip together.”

  “Yeah, well, if it’s Mystic Seaport again, forget it. I spent that whole last field trip bored out of my skull.”

  “It’s not the seaport, no. But it will be one of the most mystic experiences of your life. That much I promise you. Tomorrow I become your surrogate mother. You and I are going back to the womb.”

  “Maybe you are,” I said. “Send me a postcard.”

  He leaned toward me, close enough so that our knees touched. “I know it sounds a bit unconventional, Dolores, but I spent much of yesterday afternoon on the phone with a doctor in California who’s had very good results with this approach. And I’ve spent half this morning battling the Freudians at this staid institution to gain permission . . . well, that’s not the point. The point is that I believe what I’m proposing can really help you. But if you have misgivings—if you don’t trust me enough to let me take you to where I think we need to go—then stop me now. Let me know right away and we’ll travel a different path.”

  He waited, his eyes pleading in some eerily familiar way. His face looked flushed with fever. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Fine. Don’t have a bird over it.”

  * * *

  His excitement that session—the aroma of his mouthwash, the kiss of his knees as we sat recliner to recliner—made me catch a kind of fever, too. But in the dark of my room that night, I wasn’t exactly thinking of Dr. Shaw as my mother. It suddenly occurred to me why his expression—that look in his eyes—had seemed familiar. It was that same vulnerable, pleading look of Dante’s in the Polaroid pictures. (Another of my secrets.) Dr. Shaw had spent all yesterday afternoon, half that morning, on my case, on me. I lay awake, transferring his head to Dante’s body . . . I must have been groaning when I came because Evelyn, the night supervisor, was there with her flashlight in my face before I was even through.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing. I just had a dream. About my mother.”

  I smiled hard at her. Under the blanket I was still bucking.

  * * *

  You had to give Dr. Shaw credit for enthusiasm. The next night at the pool in Building B he almost killed himself on my behalf.

  He came for me in the ward just before lights out, like it was a date (that really rattled old DePolito!), and drove us to the other end of the grounds. I had to unlock and open all the gymnasium doors with Dr. Shaw’s keys while he lugged a big reel-to-reel tape recorder and a jumble of extension cords.

  He told me his plan as we sat at the pool’s edge. I was going to start over pretty much as a fetus, he said, and grow up all over again, this time getting my life right. It might take six months; it might take six years. The process would be unpredictable; the rhythm would be more or less up to me.

  As he spoke, I dipped my finger in the water and traced my initial on the pool apron. I kept doing it. By the time he was through, all the D’s I’d made had become a puddle.

  “Any questions?” Dr. Shaw asked.

  I stared at the shiny water in front of us, scared of whatever might emerge. “Nope,” I said.

  “All right then. Let’s go.”

  He hypnotized me first. “You are on an elevator, traveling down to the level of your subconscious,” he said. “I’ll call out the floors and when I get to the basement, you’ll quietly slip off your clothes and get into the water.”

  We were somewhere around the fourth floor when I told him to hold it. “Can’t we just do this with my clothes on?” I asked.

  At Gracewood, nakedness wasn’t such a big deal. You were always seeing somebody’s ugly body or vice versa. Still, parading my flab and broken capillaries in front of Dr. Shaw wasn’t exactly the same as having DePolito or Mrs. Ropiek check me out.

  Dr. Shaw gave me one of his disappointed looks. “Do you not understand this, after all we’ve gone over? What are you, Dolores?”

  “I’m a fetus.”

  “And what’s this?” His arm extended out to the pool.

  “The womb.”

  “And who am I?”


  I was too embarrassed to look him in the face. “My mother,” I said.

  “Right. Mother, womb, fetus. Do you trust me?”

  I looked out at the still water. “Do you trust me?” he repeated.

  I nodded.

  “And does a fetus have an aversion to her own body? Does a fetus have any expectations whatsoever?”

  I shook my head.

  “Does a fetus wear clothes?”

  I shook it again.

  “Our elevator has reached the basement floor, an environment of trust. Take your clothes off, please.”

  I eased bare-assed into the shallow end and waded out.

  The bathwater temperature matched Dr. Shaw’s tone of voice. When I was over my head, I closed my eyes and began floating.

  It sort of half worked, for a while. I didn’t seem to be in quite the same dingy pool with the missing wall tiles where they forced us to do calisthenics every Wednesday and Saturday morning. With my ears under water, with Dr. Shaw’s voice blurring away, I did mislay my expectations. Fell back. Felt fetal.

  It was his enthusiasm that wrecked it. “Ah, I’m quickening,” he called down to me. “My baby must be testing her little arm buds.” I would have preferred him to keep quiet. I was under two hundred pounds by then, but not that much under. My arms were still twin hams, not “little buds.”

  “I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment,” he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual.

  “There’s something very special about the bond between a mother and her baby,” Dr. Shaw called out over the water. All this stuff about mothers made me think suddenly of Grandma. I imagined her walking in on Dr. Shaw and me. “It’s not what you think, Grandma,” I’d explain. “I’m a fetus. He’s Ma.” I knew just how she’d react: her jaw would unhinge itself; she’d clutch that purse of hers. Getting caught by Grandma made me slosh the water.

  “My baby is very active this evening,” Dr. Shaw called down. “She’s flailing inside me.”

  He’d flail, too, if she was his grandmother. Now I was strictly myself again: fat Dolores floating in chlorine.