She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  I waited.

  “Are you two shacking up?” she said.

  “Grandma!”

  “Well, I may be old-fashioned, but I’m not a nincompoop. Isn’t that your young man who answered the telephone two different times when I called? Said he was a friend of yours or some such?”

  “We live in the same house, Grandma, in separate apartments.”

  There was a pause. Then she said, “Well, you’re a grown woman now. I suppose if they can do it on ‘The Young and the Restless’ . . .”

  “Grandma, do you remember those things I asked about in that letter? Do you think we’d be able to talk about some of them when I see you?”

  “It’s not an easy thing, you know, planning a holiday dinner. Pies, potatoes. You have to start the turkey first thing in the morning. Do the stuffing the night before, of course.”

  “Well, don’t worry about that, Grandma. I can help you. Besides, Dante’s a vegetarian.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He doesn’t eat meat. You don’t even have to bother with a turkey.”

  “I thought you said he was a schoolteacher.”

  “He is.”

  “Well, am I wrong or are those vegetarian people all hippies and some such? You know, young lady, if you’re fooling around with drugs up there after all that other business you’ve been through, then you’d better think long and hard about what you’re doing. You know what happened to poor Art Linkletter’s daughter, don’t you? Smoked some of that LSD business and took a bad trip—jumped right out the window and killed herself.”

  “Grandma, my apartment’s in the basement. . . . What I was trying to say in that letter is that sometimes I don’t feel like I really know you. It’s my fault as much as yours. We withhold ourselves from each other.”

  “Don’t know me? Of course you know me. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t know things like—well—things like how you and Grandpa fell in love. Or what your life together was like.”

  She sighed, disgusted. “Now I know all this psychology stuff or psychiatry stuff or whatever the dickens you call it—I know it did some good with you. Straightened out what that one upstairs did to you. And your mother’s death . . . But your grandfather and I just worked hard all our lives, that’s all. People didn’t have time back then to stop and worry about things all the time. Pick things apart and such. It’s water under the bridge. I’ve forgotten half of that business.”

  “How did you first fall in love?”

  “Now, really, Dolores—stop all this badgering. I’m a private person. Why stir up a hornet’s nest?”

  “Grandma, you can get private with me. I’m your flesh and blood.”

  She cleared her throat. “Now, I can give you a wedding if you and this fellow would like. Nothing too fancy, but I have some money put aside.”

  “His name is Dante, Grandma.”

  “Of course, you’ll have to decide whether you want to invite your father or not. That’s your business.”

  “Grandma, we haven’t even discussed anything like marriage.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised he hasn’t. There’s an old saying, you know: Why should a man buy a cow when he can get the milk for free?”

  “Grandma? Are you happy for me? Are you glad I’m in love?”

  “Well of course I’m happy for you. What a thing to ask.”

  “Grandma? . . .” I said.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m putting the phone down now to check something.”

  When she got back, her voice sounded different—harder. “I’ll say one more thing, Dolores Elizabeth, and then, as far as I’m concerned, the subject is closed. I’ve buried a husband and two children—a nineteen-year-old son and a daughter who was only thirty-eight. . . .” She paused, cleared her throat twice, and I suddenly realized she was crying. “If you want to love someone, then go right ahead. I know what love feels like; you and this young man didn’t invent love. But the Lord Almighty doesn’t give out any promises just because you love someone. Love only gets you so far.”

  I listened to the labor of her breathing. “I’ll see you at Christmas, Grandma. I love you very much, if that’s okay?”

  “What a thing to ask,” she sputtered. “Sheesh.”

  I hung up and began that night’s dinner, Lentil Loaf Supreme. Poor Grandma was wrong: Dante and I had invented love—a kind she knew nothing about. If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy like Grandma. “Two sixty-two Pierce Street, the house of repression,” Ma had once said. And Dr. Shaw: “Repression doesn’t make it any easier, Dolores. It just wastes energy.”

  I decided to tell Dante everything that night: my parents, Jack Speight, Kippy’s letters, Dr. Shaw. I heard him reacting to the unburdening of my secrets in the same soothing voice he used on the phone with his crisis students, who he didn’t even love the way he loved me. Whom he didn’t love. Objective, not nominative, case. The thought of telling the truth filled me with an enormous, exhausting calm and I left the supper preparations and lay back on the daybed. “You’re triumphant!” I heard Dr. Shaw say, that night at the pool when I’d let out the truth.

  When Dante got home, he flung his briefcase so hard against the wall that it flew back at him. “Tell me something,” he said. “Am I intense?”

  “Uh . . . what do you mean?” I said. It felt like a stranger had barged in.

  “Just what I said. Am I intense? You’ve heard of the word before, haven’t you? That one’s in your expansive vocabulary, isn’t it?”

  There was a vein in his forehead. His whole body leaned toward me, waiting for my answer. I scrapped my planned confession. “Intense? No, you’re not intense. Why?”

  “Because my vice principal thinks I am. Asshole Ev. I got my evaluation today—three ‘needs improvements.’ He says I’m too intense.”

  He threw open the refrigerator door and grabbed a beer. Then he went to his own apartment and slammed the door. In another fifteen minutes, he came back for the rest of the six-pack. He pretended I was invisible.

  “Do you want a back rub?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Do you feel like talking about it?”

  “It’s like—their whole philosophy of education at that school is fucked up.” He looked over at me, accusingly.

  “It certainly sounds like it is,” I said.

  “I mean, Ev Downs has sat on his ass parked in neutral for twenty-five years. I’m the only one at that whole goddamn school the kids can relate to and I’m going to sit there and listen to him make it sound like I’ve got a fucking personality disorder?” He overexaggerated the word “fucking”—took extra pains with its pronunciation.

  “Well,” I said. “Try to forget it. I made lentil loaf for supper and maybe afterward we can—”

  “That’s it? ‘Try to forget it, I made lentil loaf’? Gee, I’m overwhelmed by your loyalty, Dolores. Thanks so much for your support.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that, well, you’re kind of scaring me and . . . and I don’t know what to say.” I began to cry. He watched me, curious, like a scientist.

  For the next two nights, I slept alone in my apartment, nursing my nervous stomach with Tums. Then on Thursday a dozen yellow roses arrived for me at work with a card that said, only, “LOVE/US.” I put the flowers in a coffee can on top of my register. All day long, customers told me they were beautiful. When I’d catch the other cashiers looking at them, they’d jerk their heads away.

  That night, Dante wanted sex on the floor, not in the bed. He was rough and urgent; it hurt. But I kept my mouth shut, grateful for his love, no matter how he delivered it.

  “Hey, Home Ec,” he asked me later. “On a scale of one to five, how would you rate me as a lover?” He had walked me over to the mirror and made us look at ourselves. He pawed me while he waited.

  “Five and a half,” I said. “Six, Dante.”<
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  He looked at himself, then closed his eyes and smiled.

  In bed that night, I lay awake shaking because I’d come so close to telling him the truth. I’d lose him if I did. Those two nights without him had rocked me back to my senses. “Home Ec” was the person he loved—not fat, crazy Dolores. Liar, letter thief. Beached whale.

  * * *

  He was his summer self again for a while, gentle and teasing.

  “What would I have to do? I don’t know anything about being a chaperone,” I told him the night he said he’d volunteered us. A roomful of high school students was not something I was looking forward to.

  “Oh, you know. Patrol the lavatory like a prison matron. Breathalyzer tests at the front entrance. That sort of thing.”

  “Come on, Dante. I mean it.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” he said, kissing me. “You’re eminently qualified.”

  The closest thing I had to a fancy dress was my flower-print muumuu. I borrowed Dante’s Volkswagen and drove to Burlington to shop. In a way, it was funny, I thought: me finally getting to go to a high school formal.

  I found the dress I wanted in a store run by two elderly sisters. Both wore their eyeglasses suspended on gold chains. The dress was an unpredictable choice for me—risky and overpriced—and it took me a whole afternoon’s worth of shopping elsewhere before I finally returned to the store and surrendered to it.

  The gauzy material was smoky blue with silver thread running through it; the beadwork sewn into the bodice gave me a gypsyish look. The sisters made me try it on. Size ten fit me better than size twelve.

  “Fanny, look at this on her!” one said to the other when I emerged from the dressing room.

  Fanny reached down for her glasses. “Stunning!” she said. “I use that word all the time with customers. But this time I really mean it.”

  “And it falls beautifully on you,” her sister said. “Twirl.”

  I laughed and looked away from the full-length mirror.

  “I mean it,” she said. “Twirl!”

  I twirled. Slowly at first, then faster. The gathers of the dress unfolded themselves and the material lifted up and outward—I opened up like a morning glory. “You’re a beautiful young woman,” Dr. Shaw’s voice said. He was finally right.

  The sisters both applauded me. The three of us laughed. I wanted Ma.

  Back in the dressing room, I lifted the dress up over me, hung it on the hanger, and stopped. Some awareness was hovering on the surface, something that made the giddy feeling keep coming. My mind kept twirling. I reached beneath the elastic of my bra and felt my breasts. They were sensitive to my touch in a way that was both sexy and painful—a new feeling. The knowledge hit me so hard that I slumped to the floor, my shoulder blades skidding along the dressing room wall on the way down.

  “We were beginning to wonder if you’d fainted in there,” Fanny joked.

  “Guess what?” I said. “I think I might be pregnant.”

  Both women applauded again. Fanny took out her wallet and showed me her grandchildren’s pictures. I don’t recall the ride back to Montpelier.

  * * *

  The nausea started about a week later. “We can give you Bendectin for the queasiness,” the doctor at the clinic told me. Instead, I kept nibbling from my perpetual stack of Saltines, swallowing tiny bits of banana I hoped my stomach wouldn’t notice. I told Dante a bad stomach flu was going around at the store. At work I tried not to look head-on at the food that passed by my conveyor belt; on break, I opened the window to let out people’s cigarette smoke, then sat by the fresh air with my feet up. I’d hidden a bottle of cold duck in my clothes hamper for when I finally broke the news to Dante. By my sixth week, I had already let several deadlines slip by.

  On prom night, Dante dressed in his regular school clothes: Levi’s, blue work shirt, brown corduroy jacket, incongruous tie. I made him go sit in his apartment before I took my new dress out of the plastic bag. I was withholding myself from him, like a bride. I hadn’t thrown up once that day. The cold duck was in the refrigerator for after the dance.

  “Oh, wow,” was what he said when he saw me. I had splurged and bought matching jeweled barrettes for my hair and a makeup job at Chez Jolie.

  “Am I really beautiful in this dress?” I asked him. Three whole futures rode on his answer.

  “On a scale of one to five,” he said, “I’d give you a six. In the dress or out of it.”

  * * *

  The dance had a theme: “Time in a Bottle.” Girls began running toward Dante before we’d even crossed the length of the gym. He assigned me to a math teacher named Boomer and his wife Paula and then let students sweep him off to the dance floor.

  The decorations were fishnets hung from the basketball hoops and filled with balloons and papier-mâché seashells. In the center of the gym, cordoned off by a three-foot-high picket fence, were a giant cellophane bottle with a wall clock in its stomach and a mermaid propped up in a peacock chair. I recognized the mermaid as one of those life-sized rubber mouth-to-mouth-breathing dummies. The decorators had stripped her of her sweat suit and outfitted her with a paisley bra and a papier-mâché fish fin. Someone had pinned a hibiscus in her stiff nylon hair.

  Boomer talked only in monosyllables but Paula made up for him, yelling chitchat over the blare of the band. “You sure aren’t like Dante’s last girlfriend,” she shouted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. You just seem more like us—a faculty wife.” Which meant frumpy, I guessed. Dress shields or no dress shields, it was too late to return the dress.

  I spent the first hour sitting on a metal folding chair in back of the punch table, collecting students’ silent appraisals, a smile stretched across my face like a rubber band. Paula explained her life: how she was different from her three sisters, why she’d bothered to get braces at age thirty-three, the gory details of the C-section that had produced her and Boomer’s three-year-old, Ashley. No one seemed to notice how beautiful I looked.

  I was surprised at how well-developed the high school girls were; I hadn’t remembered those ripe-fruit bodies when I was dodging everyone at Easterly High. But even at two hundred and forty pounds, high school had been a disembodying experience for me. I’d floated those four years of my life—had looked down at the linoleum and not returned a single stare.

  In another couple of months, my pregnancy would shape me like one of Dante’s eggplants. Our Bodies, Ourselves said some men were turned on by pregnant bodies, but I doubted that. I figured I knew more about the way men reacted to swollen women than that writer did.

  The students’ filthy language shocked me. One girl done up in banana curls and carrying a parasol called her boyfriend a “fuckin’ douche bag” right as I was passing them their cups of Neptune’s Nectar. The foam and the smell of it and the way she talked all made my stomach heave.

  Since my life with Dante, I’d stopped swearing as much. Not consciously, really; it had just happened. “Foul language is part of your armor of defense,” Dr. Shaw was always fond of pointing out. Dante only swore when he was angry, hurling the words like sharpened spears.

  From the dance floor, he managed a wave from time to time. A line of girls kept cutting in on each other to dance with him. I watched him make each dancer laugh and beam. He seemed like a celebrity actor making a guest appearance—someone you could see and admire but not talk to. He kept to the center of the room.

  During the band’s break, I hooked my chin over his shoulder and collapsed against him. “Having a good time?” he asked.

  “You sure are popular,” I said.

  He kissed me on the ear amidst the gaping. “Dante, don’t,” I whispered. “I feel like I’m under a microscope or something.”

  “Well,” he laughed, “you are.” Then the music started up again and some girl tapped his shoulder.

  Back at the punch bowl, I asked Paula what Dante’s last girlfriend was like.

  She reac
hed inside her dress, fiddling with her bra strap. “Well, her name was Rafaela—that should tell you something. Had a good idea of herself. At the end-of-the-year banquet last spring, she wore this white jersey dress and you could see her nipples plain as day. I hate when they do that. You’re supposed to be too sophisticated to look, so the pressure’s on everyone but her. She was that type—you know.”

  Paula changed the subject to zucchini bread, but by that time I was panicky. Turning to check on Dante, I knocked smack into a passing student carrying three cups. Punch splashed down the front of my new dress.

  “Oh, cheese whiz,” Paula said. “Cold water! It’s the best thing for it. It was in ‘Hints from Heloise’ last week. March right into that bathroom before it sets and get some cold water on it, icy as possible.”

  The long row of bathroom sinks reminded me of Hooten Hall; so did the stares. Two girls were standing in a cloud of cigarette smoke. They each had the same hairstyle: long in back, parted in the middle, bangs hot-combed into curls as tight as playing-card jacks. I wet down the stain, then scratched at it with my fingernails and a wad of sopping paper towels. I recognized one of the smokers.

  “Mr. Davis is a fox and a half,” one of them began. I looked up in the mirror at their staring.

  “Really,” the other said. “I wouldn’t throw him out of bed.”

  “Eddie Ann!” the other shrieked in mock horror. “Shut your fuckin’ mouth, girl.”

  “He could have sex with any girl at this school,” she continued. “He doesn’t need to visit the dog pound.”

  Her mirror image held my gaze as if we were dueling—as if the one who looked away second would win Dante. I didn’t feel angry; I felt maternal. In another seven months I’d be somebody’s mother. Besides, her photo order had landed me here. Women, unite! I thought.

  I walked over to her. “I want to tell you something,” I said. “You can consider it a gift.”

  Her mouth was smirking but her eyes looked scared. She blinked.

  “High school is like a sickness. Trust me, the fever breaks. Then you get over it.”