She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

“Yes,” I lied.

  He let go of my hand and stroked my cheek with his smooth hand. “One more question? You on the pill?”

  “Yes,” I lied again. I hoped he hadn’t felt me flinch.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “All systems go.”

  My mind floated in and out of what he was doing. I watched the way the flickering reflection from the candle swayed against the wall. Heard his voice speaking the words of his old letters to Kippy. I reached behind his neck, pulled him closer, kissing and kissing him.

  He slid his body down the side of me and I felt his lips against my hip bone, his fingers feathering the inside of my leg. His touch was relaxing and exciting both. I closed my eyes and thought: I made this happen. I absolutely deserve the way he’s making me feel . . .

  His hand reached down and touched my foot.

  I bolted up straight in bed. “Stop it!” I told him. “Don’t.”

  He sat up. “What?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  The candlelight caught his face, flickered against his worried eyes. He was himself again, not Jack. “My feet,” I said. “It’s just—I just . . . I don’t like anyone touching my feet.” I began to breathe hard. To panic. Then I was crying.

  He put his arm around me and waited. My sobbing quieted and the room filled up with the music he’d put on: Jim Morrison’s doomed voice.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just being stupid, I know.”

  He took my hand in his. “Hey, relax. I forgot something, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Dessert. Be right back.”

  He slipped out of bed and into his jeans. The outside door banged. I reached over and took a gulp of wine. I didn’t want to be by myself. I wanted those feelings back, the way he’d started to make me feel.

  He came back with two small yellow marigolds from his garden. He took his jeans back off and got into bed. Holding both flowers out to me, he twirled them in his fingers so that they spun and blurred.

  “Pretty,” I said. “Where’s the dessert?”

  He passed the blossoms lightly against my face, then down to my breasts. “This is it,” he said. “Marigolds. They’re edible.”

  “They are? Marigolds?”

  He pulled petals from one of the flowers, put them in his mouth, and chewed. Then he plucked some for me and held them to my lips. Hesitantly, I opened my mouth. Their sweet taste surprised me.

  “Do you still believe in God?” I said.

  The word “still” hung in the air: I’d blown it—given away my knowing Kippy, his Lutheran-school dilemma, everything.

  But then he grinned, oblivious. “Isn’t ‘Do you believe in God?’ a little heavy-duty for our first date? I think you’re supposed to hold the line at, ‘Do you believe in astrology?’ or ‘Do you believe Jim Morrison is still alive?’”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t, though, no—since you asked. Used to. When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a minister. Can you believe that one?”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “Oh, it’s a long story. Basically, I realized it was something I was doing for my mother, not me. Then, let’s see . . . lost my virginity, got involved in the antiwar movement for a while, enrolled in a teaching program. Figured it made more sense to save people for the here and now rather than the hereafter, you know?”

  I reached for him, questioning. He was and wasn’t the boy in the letters. “How about you?” he asked. “What do you believe in?”

  A shiver passed through me. “Me?” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “No fair keeping secrets. You cold or something? Want a blanket?”

  “Whales,” I said. “That’s what I believe in.”

  “Whales? You mean like ocean whales?”

  I nodded.

  He nodded back. “Yeah,” he said. “They’re cool, aren’t they? Sort of mysterious. Come to think of it, I could believe in whales.”

  His arm hair felt silky against my fingertips.

  “Could you . . .” I began. “Do you . . . do you think you’d like to try making love again?”

  His mouth kissed my mouth, his tongue my tongue. I felt him go hard against my leg. “It appears I would,” he whispered.

  He guided me back down onto the bed and began kissing my shoulder, my breasts—not kisses, really, but a brushing of his lips against my skin, the kiss of the marigolds against my nipples.

  He entered me gently, tentatively, waiting. “Yes?” he asked. I nodded and he began to rock his hips slowly—smooth, sexy figure eights, from side to side. He watched me as he did it. “Okay?” he said. “You like?” I kissed him and reached down past the curve of his buttocks, felt for the backs of his legs, pressed my hands against them. He closed his eyes and smiled and drew himself deeper inside of me.

  “Oh, yeah, nice,” he whispered. “Very nice.” Nothing about him was desperate or angry. Tears fell from the sides of my eyes, but I was smiling, too. I deserve this, I reminded myself. I’d worked long and hard to feel what he was helping me feel.

  He wasn’t the boy in the letters. He was. Wasn’t. Was. My decision changed with each drawing back, each new thrust. . . . I closed my eyes and saw Ruth’s and Larry’s white bodies against the dark on Grandma’s floor—saw them sharing each other. Saw Ruth, her shirt pulled up, her full breasts dripping with milk for Tia. I rose and rose, arching my back, pushing up to meet Dante. His sighs were soft and distant. He could believe in whales.

  His movement quickened and I caught his rhythm, matched it, over and over. “Oh, God,” he said, stopping abruptly. Then he tensed and sighed and I felt that part of him begin to spill and rush into me. Milk, I thought. Men’s milk—the milk Larry had let go into Ruth to make Tia, the milk that made Ruth’s breasts fill up with milk.

  My mind spun, my muscles tightened themselves around him. We bucked and gasped and came together.

  21

  Dante’s vacuum cleaner had yards and yards of cord. By plugging it into the outlet just inside my apartment door, I could vacuum three quarters of both our places.

  Coins wouldn’t stay in his pants pockets. I harvested the quarters from between his couch cushions and used them at the laundromat, marrying our loads. It wasn’t that he liked looking disheveled, he said; it was that he hated ironing. I set up the board at my place, in front of my TV. (Dante wouldn’t own a television on principle.) Sometimes he’d sneak up from behind and hug me as I ironed. I’d feel his tongue against my neck and hear the sizzle of the hot iron as a single experience. One evening, as I stood ungnarling the pocket flaps on his blue shirt, the steam between us, he told me my ironing was a metaphor—that I was pressing chaos out of his life. “I’ve never loved anyone domestic before,” he said. He nicknamed me “Home Ec.”

  They gave me first shift at the Grand Union, Monday through Thursday. Checking out people’s groceries proved less interesting than developing their photographs. “It’s a paycheck,” I shrugged when Mrs. Wing asked me about my job. There was a lot of infighting amongst my coworkers, women who hadn’t created happiness for themselves the way I had. You were always expected to be on someone or another’s side. “Honest to God, Dante—you can’t even keep track of who’s not speaking to who.”

  “Who’s not speaking to whom,” he corrected me.

  “Well, whatever. I keep my distance.”

  We ate our meals in my kitchen and slept in Dante’s bed. Each morning, I chose a recipe from his Vegetarian Epicure cookbook and each afternoon I trudged back up the hill with the needed ingredients. Dante had been a vegetarian since 1974 when, chewing through a gristly piece of steak, he’d suddenly seen beef for what it was, decaying flesh, and his throat muscles had constricted. Dante called his spitting that mouthful of meat into a napkin an “epiphany.” When I went to look the word up, his naked pictures—his younger religious self—slid out of the dictionary. For security’s sake, I put the photos and the remains of Ma’s painting in a s
hoebox, labeled it “Insurance Papers,” and stuck it on the top closet shelf.

  He’d done nothing less than transform me, I thought. By the time frost zapped the last of his tomato plants out back, I could go a whole weekend without a cigarette, grill sweet-and-sour acorn squash on the hibachi, drive a car, and regulate my orgasms so they’d arrive approximately when I wanted them to. “A spiritual event in which the essence of a given object is manifested, as in a sudden flash of recognition” is what the dictionary said under “epiphany.” Each night we spent together seemed like a kind of spiritual event. It was funny, in a way. Dante had stopped believing but started me up again. He was a gift, a nod, finally, from God, whose hand I thought I recognized in this. And if God was up in heaven, then so, maybe, was Ma—wearing those billowy wings and red high-heeled shoes, smiling down on what Dante and I were creating.

  Dante kept his home phone number on the school blackboard for any student who needed to use it. Girls called, mostly, with crises involving their friends or boyfriends. They were snippy when they got me instead of him. Two years in a row, the senior class had dedicated the yearbook to him, a fact that Dante said made other teachers jealous. Given the choice, he said, he preferred his students to the bunch of old farts in the teachers’ room who could only talk about life insurance, not life.

  Just watching Dante type a ditto in his underwear or hearing his soft, reasonable voice with one of those jilted sophomores was enough to fill me up. He corrected his students’ papers at the kitchen table, writing page-long reactions in green ink. (Red correction marks, he said, were too stultifying.) Dante’s teaching used him up. Each night he’d set his alarm, fall naked into bed, and ask for a back rub.

  “Ah . . . you missed your calling,” he said one night.

  “What?”

  “Your medium. Watercolor. You should work in clay with that touch of yours. What are you stopping for?”

  It had slipped my mind that I was supposed to be a frustrated painter. I kneaded his spine bumps and made a mental list of the lies I’d told him: birth control, ex-boyfriend, watercolors. Omissions like Kippy and my breakdown weren’t exactly the same as lies, I reasoned. Everyone in the world kept secrets.

  The back rubs never failed to bring Dante back to life. Everything we did, every place he touched, he asked first. “Okay? . . . this? . . . how about here?” A play in two acts, Dante called our lovemaking. Me first and him second was the way we both liked it best, so that I could relax, happy and satisfied, and kiss his eyelids, his mouth, during the in and out, the slow circles his hips made. Sometimes he laughed as he came; sometimes he winced and grabbed handfuls of sheet.

  “Wait, stay in!” I’d say sometimes, holding my hand against the small of his back. I was scared of both the truth and the lies. I feared even the name of it: withdrawal.

  Sex and love gave me insomnia. After he fell asleep, I’d get up and pace in the dark, convincing myself as I navigated around the silhouettes of furniture that I wouldn’t lose him—that I’d turned the corner on my old life, on loss. One night during the pacing and nail biting, I tripped over a chair leg—whacked my toe a good one. I got back in bed, ignoring my pain, feeling in the dark for proof he was real: the hair on his chest, his breath against my fingertips, the wet spot we had made.

  “Is it broken?” I asked the doctor who looked at my toe two afternoons later.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  Nothing was what I was doing about birth control, too. If you waited and called Planned Parenthood after hours, you didn’t have to talk to anybody—you got pretaped advice from some woman’s know-it-all voice. “And of course,” the voice said, “when you take no precautions, you are making a decision as well.”

  My shift at the supermarket ended at three P.M. and Dante was usually finished by four. By October, we’d begun the habit of meeting at the library downtown and hiking the hill together.

  One afternoon, waiting for him, I spotted an oversized paperback, Our Bodies, Ourselves. It was the black-and-white cover photo that drew me to it. Two happy protestors holding up a sign, “Women Unite.” One woman was my age, the other seventy or so. That day at the grocery store, there’d been a big fight amongst the cashiers. Tandy, who was getting married that spring, had, in the midst of the battle, uninvited two of the others to be her bridesmaids. “Bitch!” they shouted at each other from their respective registers. “Bitch!” All through the first chapter of Our Bodies, Ourselves, I kept closing the book and looking at those united women.

  I sat back in the chair, missing Grandma. We took turns writing or calling each other every other week, but our letters and conversations were polite and constipated. For Grandma, my bad past was “water under the bridge” or “that business a while back.” Listening to us talk, you’d have no indication death or sex or craziness existed. The women in the book hugged each other, played clarinets, made love to their balding boyfriends. I was twenty-five years old, sitting in the Montpelier library waiting for the man I loved and who loved me back—but I was also my obese self pouting up in my bedroom at Grandma’s. My six-year-old self in dungarees, riding with my father through the wet blur of a car wash. An eighth grader in Jack Speight’s MG, my hair whipping in the wind on the way to that dog pound to be destroyed . . . Except he hadn’t destroyed me after all. Dante had come along and un raped me. There seemed no good way to tell Grandma that. Who was Grandma beyond arthritis and rosary beads, anyway? Who had she been in bed with her husband? “Women, unite!” That idea shook me up.

  “Boo,” Dante whispered.

  He grabbed my hand and led me toward the door. “Hold on,” I said. “I want to check this book out.”

  At the circulation desk, he gave me a quick kiss. “Oh and just for the record,” he said, “it’s ‘I want to check out this book.’ You don’t split your verb phrase.”

  * * *

  On my day off, I read Our Bodies, Ourselves, cover to cover. I had no other woman to discuss Dante with, no one to tell me if keeping all my secrets from him was wise or dangerous. I ached for a woman friend.

  “Hello?” It was Tandy’s fiancé, Rusty; they were living together, same as Dante and me. One time in the store, Rusty had ripped open a bag of M&M’s at my register and started shooting them at Tandy while she checked out customers. She thought it was funny. According to another cashier, Tandy had had an abortion.

  “Is Tandy there?” I asked. “This is Dolores. From work.”

  “Just a second.”

  His hand squashed against the receiver, making a sound like farting.

  “She’s not here right now,” he said.

  * * *

  “Dear Grandma,” I began. The letter came out nonstop.

  I’m not sure where to begin this, but I have some news. I’ll just come out with it. I’m in love! His name is Dante and he’s a high school teacher here in Montpelier. We don’t have any plans yet, but I’m hoping it will come to that. You put up with a lot from me when I was so sad and sick and I wanted you to share my happiness with me, too. We’re planning to visit you for Christmas if that’s okay. I hope that you’ll learn to love him. He’s kind to me—and so much fun!

  Grandma, how did you and Grandpa fall in love? Were you sure about him when you married him or did you have doubts? When we visit, I’d like to sit down with you and ask you about your life.

  I hope these questions don’t make you uncomfortable. I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t feel so strongly about these things. If you would like to answer any of my questions, please write back. Or call me on the phone collect. Being in love with Dante is scary and wonderful. I love you very much.

  In the next few weeks, Dante kept picking up Our Bodies, Ourselves but it didn’t hold his interest.

  At work, Tandy and the other cashiers made up; the bridesmaids were reinstated. From their stations, they discussed wedding preparations, calling past me as I straightened up the already-nea
t rows of Life Savers and tabloids, waiting for customers.

  Overdue notices from the library began to appear in the mail, and bills and circulars, but no word from Grandma. One afternoon at work I forgot Grandma’s face; when I tried to picture her, all I could see was Mrs. Wing. I kept promising myself I’d return the book as soon as I heard from Grandma. Maybe my letter had gotten lost in the mail, I reasoned. Maybe someone like me had stolen it before it got to her.

  “Are we on for Christmas at your grandmother’s or not?” Dante asked one morning at breakfast.

  “She hasn’t let me know yet.”

  “Find out, will you? If we’re not going, I was thinking it’d be nice to spend the holiday at Sugarbush. Teach you how to ski.”

  It took me until late afternoon to dial. Listening to the ringing, I saw Pierce Street outside, the front foyer, Grandma approaching the telephone. I closed my eyes and willed myself not to hang up.

  “Grandma? It’s me.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  There were voices in the background. “Do you have company or something? I can call back.”

  “That’s the television,” she said.

  “Oh. How are you?”

  “As good as someone with my arthritis can expect to be, I suppose.”

  “I was wondering . . . if you got a letter I sent you?”

  Those television voices. Then, “I did. Yes.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  “Well, would it be all right for Dante and me to come for Christmas?”

  “Of course it would be all right.”

  “Okay, great. I’ve been kind of waiting for you to get back to me.”

  “You’re my granddaughter, aren’t you? Why wouldn’t it be all right? I don’t want to bother with any tree, though. Haven’t put up a Christmas tree since your mother passed on.”

  “I can understand that, Grandma. It’s not important.”

  “Those needles stick in the carpet. They’re there all year round, no matter how careful you are. You think you’ve gotten them all and then in July, there some still are. Sticking like burrs.”