She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “Just like that?” I’d always visualized something more elaborate and ceremonial: a stage or something, people clapping at my accomplishments.

  “Apparently you’re already out of the nest. So, fly!”

  I wished he had said “swim”; he’d put me in a pool, not a tree. I wished, too, that he would look at me. “Okay then. Adios.”

  “Adios.”

  He was so big into eye contact, you’d have thought he’d want a little during the good-byes. I stood there. “Dr. Shaw?”

  “Hmm?” He said it as if he was surprised I was still there—as if I was a calendar page he’d already torn off and thrown away.

  “I didn’t mean you haven’t helped me. You did help me. Sometimes I really do think of you as my mother. In a good way, I mean.”

  “Good luck,” he said.

  I opened the door. Cleared my throat. Waited for him to open his eyes. But Dr. Shaw had already become a corpse. I let myself out.

  * * *

  “Well, what kind of a person are you?” Nadine asked me. “How would you describe yourself?”

  I’d gone to her directly from Dr. Shaw’s office—gone without an appointment to find out if happiness was a football you caught or something more complicated, something you had to invent.

  “What kind of person am I?” I repeated. “I’m . . . a visual person.”

  She nodded her head toward the Etch-a-Sketch in my lap. “Create yourself a picture then.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of whatever might make you happy.”

  We were in her kitchen, not the office out front, because I’d surprised her, had just rapped on her back window. I’d expected her house to have a phosphorescent, lava-light atmosphere, but she had mother-of-pearl Formica and café curtains with pom-poms. A little girl with rashy cheeks and big eyebrows like Nadine’s sat in a playpen by the stove, chewing on an empty Saltines box.

  Nadine and I stared down at the blank gray Etch-a-Sketch screen, waiting for me to begin. I started twisting.

  At first it was a whale, my Wellfleet whale—only back in the ocean, her open mouth nosing the upper left corner of the screen. But I realized I was making a mistake and turned the picture into a man. A big man. I was committed to whalelike proportions.

  Nadine looked puzzled. “Is it a bear?” she said.

  So I covered his head with loops of curly hair and added eyes, a beard, linear eyeglasses—wire rims.

  “It’s my husband,” I said.

  She closed her eyes and smiled.

  “Open your eyes, Nadine! Is this him? Is he going to make me happy?”

  She blinked and looked at me. “I told you to draw something that might make you happy,” she said. “Fate doesn’t give warranties like Sears Roebuck. That will be thirty-five for today.”

  I walked out of there holding the Etch-a-Sketch horizontally in front of me, like a religious offering. I didn’t want that picture to erase itself free before I’d memorized it. I got all the way home with it more or less intact.

  DePolito was outside on the porch. “What you got there, Dolores?” she said. “You got a new one? Let me see.”

  I took one last look, then shook like hell.

  20

  It may have been fate that made Eddie Ann Lilipop’s rolls of Instamatic shots sail south from Montpelier, Vermont, and land—kerplunk!—at my station at the photo lab. But I took over from there.

  Eddie Ann’s picture order arrived in the spring of 1976, four rolls’ worth of a high school trip to New York City: teenage girls grouped together and giggling on hotel beds and museum steps, teenage boys flipping their middle fingers out the windows of a coach bus. It was impossible to tell which student was Eddie Ann herself, but I recognized her teacher in the very first picture that slid down the chute.

  I should have recognized him; Dante’s letters and naked Polaroids, now seven years old, sat back at the outreach house, stuck secretly—along with the ragged remnant of Ma’s flying-leg painting—in my big Webster’s dictionary between the words “embolden” (to foster boldness in) and “en brochette” (broiled on a skewer). Tucked inside my knapsack pocket, those photos and that small square of canvas had made it up in the cab ride with me from Pennsylvania to Cape Cod, but I’d left them behind in the motel room that night when I left to meet my whale. Grandma, of all people, had returned them to me—in an unopened UPS box the motel had shipped to the Easterly police, who, in turn, had driven over to Pierce Street in the cruiser. I still visited with the photographs and that swatch sometimes, usually when I needed to look up a word or prop open a window or feel some kind of intimacy with something. Dante’s beseeching look still got to me. Those pictures were one of the few secrets I’d managed to keep from Dr. Shaw.

  Eddie Ann had it bad for Dante; her camera had stalked him their whole trip. There were shots of him from the front, the back, both sides—pictures of him eating and snoozing and one of him out in a hotel lobby wearing an undershirt and pajama bottoms, looking fed up. He’d filled out some and cut off his muttonchop sideburns. His straight brown hair was longish in back. Even when I squinted, I couldn’t see a wedding ring.

  I began to think of Eddie Ann as a sort of kid sister in conspiracy—and of Dante as my future. All of Dr. Shaw’s speeches about self-actualizing and taking charge began, suddenly, to take on new meaning. Dante looked nothing like the big, curly-headed man I’d Etch-a-Sketched in Nadine’s kitchen, but, I reasoned, any number of things could explain the discrepancy. Maybe Dr. Shaw was right and Nadine was a quack. Or maybe predicting a future just wasn’t as exact a science as I’d presumed. I made myself an extra set of Eddie Ann’s prints and sent her order back to her, minus the pajama-bottom shot, which, I decided in a big-sisterly way, was inappropriate for her to have taken. I worked overtime through May, June, and July, saving for my new life.

  None of the operators I called would give out his address, but the Providence Public Library had a whole wall of phone books from around the country. Out of those thousands and thousands of pounds of tissue-paper pages, I found him. “Davis, Dante. 177 Bailey St. 229–1951.” In the hush of that library, my own breathing was the loudest sound.

  There was a copying machine on the third floor. I intended only to Xerox Dante’s telephone-book page as a souvenir, but in the quiet I heard Dr. Shaw challenging me to create my own happiness. I looked around, then ripped out the original. (I tell you, I was emboldened!) I dropped a nickel into the copier anyway, then pushed my face to the glass, and felt for the button. The heat from the flash made me feel like I’d done something permanent to myself, something I wouldn’t be allowed to undo—that I’d sizzled myself in some way that was both risky and right.

  On the bus back to the outreach house, I took out my growing portfolio: the old stolen letters and Polaroids, Eddie Ann’s shots of him, that phone-book page, my Xeroxed face. Jack Speight and my father hadn’t been vulnerable men and Dr. Shaw had wielded power in a style all his own. But there Dante still sat, naked and confused—someone to love.

  In my Xerox self-portrait, the hair around my face, the cracks in my lips, were clear and razor-etched, lines sharper than any Etch-a-Sketch I’d ever made. But the rest of my face had a vaguer, more foggy look, like something religious—a smiling, closed-eyed Shroud of Turin woman, some mysterious saint Grandma might pray to. “If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.” That was a poster in the kitchen at the outreach house. Maybe I’d peel it off the wall and sneak it with me when I left.

  What had derailed Dante from his Lutheran-school education and made him go north to Vermont? His voice, more baritone than I’d expected, wouldn’t say. “Hello? . . . Who is this?” he kept asking. “Be patient,” I’d answer, but never out loud.

  I made up lies about mountain air and back-to-nature to explain to my coworkers at the lab why I’d chosen Montpelier. On my last night at the halfway house, Mrs. DePolito made manicotti and meatballs and hugged me so tight
ly that I half wondered if I’d imagined all her meanness. There were crepe-paper streamers and dancing and, at the end, Fred Burden made a speech about me and gave me my going-away present, a twelve-inch black-and-white portable TV they’d all chipped in to buy me. I hugged Fred and whispered that my Etch-a-Sketches up in the attic were his.

  In mid-August, Fred and his sister Jolene drove me to the Providence bus station. The bus was late, the humidity a killer, and Fred looked pale as a mushroom. “Is it scary?” he asked me.

  “Is what scary?”

  “Doing this. Moving where you’ll be all alone.”

  For the first time, it occurred to me that, with or without a wedding band, Dante might be married. Or engaged. Until Fred’s question, I’d imagined Dante in a sort of Lutheran sleep, lulled into inertia by his subconscious instinct to wait for me. “Not at all,” I sniffed.

  When the bus driver announced we were ready, I squeezed Fred’s hand and kissed him on that rocky road of a cheek. It wasn’t nearly as awful as I’d imagined: my lips against those ruts and eruptions. When the bus pulled out into the traffic, I waved to Fred, who was crying, and wondered if I hadn’t made a crucial mistake, obvious to everyone but me.

  * * *

  I had rented my basement apartment by letter: 177 Bailey Street, Apartment 1-B. The landlady, Mrs. Wing, had described the house’s Victorian features but failed to mention anything about its being located at the top of a hill so steep that you practically needed mountain-climber boots. My suitcase and shoulder bag took on weight with every step. The palm of my other hand ached from the handle of my portable TV. I thought about that first day at Merton College, climbing the steps to Hooten Hall. About getting out of the cab and climbing that sand dune at Cape Cod. I set the suitcase down on the sidewalk and sat on it, looking back down at the town. It was dusk; lights were going on all over the place. “You’re a whole different person now, reparented and everything,” I reminded myself. “Dante’s waiting for you. Not that dead whale.”

  The key and a note were Scotch-taped to the door. “Welcome, Miss Price. Please join us upstairs for cocktails at 4:00 tomorrow. Sincerely, M. Wing and C. Massey.” Real smart, I thought to myself: I’d given up a perfectly good life to drink sherry with old ladies.

  Apartment 1-B was two dampish, furnished rooms—kitchen and bedroom/sitting room—both illuminated by bare bulbs that stuck out of porcelain necks in the ceiling. The bathroom had a cracked toilet and a shower head closed up in a kind of narrow tin closet. The floor of that shower stall looked cruddy enough to grow a disease.

  The closets were roomy; the phone was already connected. An oval window above the kitchen sink looked out to the tenants’ parking spaces like a two-foot eyeball.

  I unpacked and had my supper: a cigarette and a travel-dented Milky Way I’d bought out of a machine at White River Junction. I set up the TV on the bureau across from the studio bed, hooking a coat-hanger antenna off the back the way Fred had shown me. “Charlie’s Angels” was on: Farrah Fawcett snooping around some crook’s hotel room, wearing just a camisole. “Ten-thirty,” I said out loud. I’d been in Vermont almost three hours without any physical proof that I was living in the same place as Dante. On TV, there was a close-up of a turning doorknob. Farrah sprinted toward the closet, her breasts bobbing.

  In the kitchen I pinned a towel up over the eyeball window and boiled water for a cup of instant coffee. Some occupant before me had stuck “Keep on Truckin’” decals on the cabinets and left, in the refrigerator, a half-empty jar of Maxwell House, three Pabst Blue Ribbons, and an unopened jar of Spanish olives. The oven was thick with grease.

  In the cupboard was a single ceramic cup with a Hawaiian hula girl built into the side, Mt. Rushmore style. They’d dug out her chest area and put a wire across and a pair of free-swinging ceramic breasts. “Shake ’Em, Don’t Break ’Em” the cup said. “Honolulu Lulu’s Novelty Shoppe.”

  I went back to the bedroom and flopped down on the scratchy daybed. Back home at the photo lab, third shift would be just getting started—doing their address labels, checking their chemical levels. I picked up the phone to call, to just say hi, then hung up. You didn’t telephone people if your new life was working out.

  You’re a dumb asshole for drinking coffee at eleven P.M., I thought to myself. Now you’ll be up all night long. I thought I heard my doorknob click—imagined Dante opening it without even knocking, smiling, entering my apartment on the power of his intuition. Did I like that or didn’t I? I faded off to sleep trying to decide.

  * * *

  By next morning I was up early, watching tenants’ feet pass by my round window: nurse shoes and orthopedic scuffies. Teachers travel in summer, I reminded myself. He was probably visiting family or off somewhere on a religious retreat, praying for a girlfriend who’d love him unconditionally.

  I walked out into the crisp, sunny day and down the hill to Montpelier. Red geraniums bloomed in storefront windowboxes; clerks whistled and swept the sidewalks. “He’ll show up,” I told myself. “This place is Happily Ever After.”

  The Grand Union was nearly empty. A row of checkout girls stood at their stations, chatting to one another in their matching red smocks and Farrah Fawcett hairstyles. I bought a bag of low-calorie groceries, a TV Guide, and a can of Easy-Off for that mucky stove. At the drugstore, I treated myself to a “Mount Peculiar” T-shirt and some rubber shower flip-flops. The purchases relaxed me, made me feel like a part of the town, some ordinary shopper.

  Just before trudging back up the hill, I spotted a second-story beauty parlor on State Street: Chez Jolie House of Elle. There were two banners in the plate-glass window. “Walk In’s WELCOME!!” and “Hey LOOK! The FARRAH LOOK!”

  In the stylist’s chair, I faced myself—drab, pouchy-faced Dolores with long hair the color of dirt. I chose ash blond from the color wheel. My stylist smelled like coconut. Over the snip of her scissors, the whir of her blow dryer, she talked a monologue. She was voting for Ford, not Carter, she said, because at least Ford was used to the job. She’d gotten six Crockpots for bridal-shower presents and had had to give up jogging after her daughter was born because she just kept peeing her pants. “If Jimmy Carter wants to be president so bad,” she said, “he should have had those whitish lips of his surgically reduced. Or pigment-tinted at the very least.”

  When I left three hours later, I didn’t look like Farrah Fawcett, but I didn’t look like myself, either; I figured it was a draw. On impulse I turned into a ladies’ shop and bought a $25 salmon-colored camisole without once making eye contact with the saleslady. I went back to the drugstore for some pink lipstick and a blow-dryer of my own. At the top of the hill, my panting made me dizzy.

  * * *

  Figuring Mrs. Wing and C. Massey were widow-companions, I dressed in my white oxford blouse and calico skirt. But when I knocked on the door of their main-floor apartment that afternoon, I was surprised to find a bony old man on the other side. He was wearing a blue kimono, pajamas, and those scuffy slippers I’d spied. “Ah, you must be the new renter,” he said. “Come in, come in.” His eyes bounced off my Farrah hairdo and landed on the front of my blouse. “I’m Chadley Massey,” he told my chest.

  Inside, chubby little Mrs. Wing sat surrounded by embroidered pillows and Chinese antiques. Her kimono was in blood-and-egg-yolk colors and her hair was a black pageboy wig. “How wonderful to meet you in person,” she said, smiling. She had white-powdered skin and yellow teeth.

  Mrs. Wing assigned me a love seat across from her. It had carved wooden dragons for arms. Roving Eye squeezed in next to me.

  I figured talking might quiet my shaky lip. “Nice decorations,” I said. “I’m getting a craving for egg rolls just sitting here.”

  Mrs. Wing didn’t seem to get the joke. She asked me if I was returning to the area or if Montpelier was new to me.

  “New,” I said. Mrs. Wing nodded. Without looking over, I could tell old Roving Eye was checking me out.

  “So are yo
u two brother and sister or something?” I said.

  The two of them shared a laugh. “Mr. Massey and I are close personal friends,” Mrs. Wing said.

  “Live-in,” he added.

  “Oh,” I said. “Different strokes for different folks, right?”

  “Different strokes for different folks,” Mrs. Wing repeated, clapping her hands. “That’s delightful. We’ll have to write that down in our book, Honeydew.”

  Honeydew touched me on the wrist. “Marguerite and I keep a notebook of the interesting colloquialisms we hear,” he explained.

  “I didn’t make it up or anything. It’s from a song. Sly and the Family Stone.”

  Mrs. Wing got up off her sofa. “Now if I don’t write it down, I’ll forget it.” Chadley slipped his hand into the space between our legs.

  “You sure must love China,” I called to Mrs. Wing across the room.

  “Oh, yes. Our passion for Orientalia was what brought Chadley and I together initially. Now what was it . . . ‘A different stroke for a different sort of folk’?”

  “Marguerite and I are compatible in every way,” Chadley said. His knuckles skidded against my thigh. “As a ‘for instance,’ we enjoy sexual intercourse nightly.”

  My smile twitched. “Imagine that,” I said. Mrs. Wing sat back down and Chadley’s hand went back to his lap.

  “How old would you say we were?” he said. “Take a guess.”

  They both had skin like wrinkled-up paper bags, but I figured it was in my best interest to aim low. “Uh . . . sixty-three? Sixty-four?”

  “Ha! Not even close! I’m seventy-seven and she’s eighty-one.”

  “Really?” I said. “You don’t look it. What’s your secret?”

  “I believe I’ve already mentioned it,” he said, winking. Then an oven buzzer went off in another room and he shuffled out to get us our drinks and snacks.

  “So what brings you to Vermont, dear?” Mrs. Wing wanted to know. “Your letters were written with such a sense of urgency.”

  I fed her my line about fresh air and nature.