She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  Walking out, I heard their indignant laughter, louder than it needed to be. “Some gift!” Eddie Ann shouted. “What’s her fucking problem?”

  * * *

  That night in bed, Dante came and I couldn’t. When he fell asleep, I got up out of bed and crossed the hall to my apartment. My dress was hanging against the door. You had to go looking for the stain to find it. I could get married in that dress.

  I went back across the hall and climbed into Dante’s bed. Our bed. That Rafaela could come back into his life tomorrow. I wanted him and the baby both—permanently.

  “Dante,” I said. “Wake up.”

  He squinted into the glare of the bedside light. “What?” he said. “What’s the matter?” His eyelids were slits.

  “I think I’m pregnant,” I said.

  “Come on.” He smiled.

  “I’m serious.”

  “How?” he said.

  I told him I’d been careful about taking the pills. “Religious” was the word I used. “It just happened,” I shrugged.

  “Then we have to do something. I don’t want any kids.”

  I waited before I answered. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t, that’s all.”

  “That’s not a reason.”

  “Because they shit their diapers and spill their milk at supper. I just don’t want the fucking responsibility.”

  I lay on my back, rigid, tears dropping fast down the sides of my face. My mind was revving. I got out of bed to vomit.

  When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting up in bed, arms across his chest, staring at the ceiling.

  “But you love kids, Dante,” I said. “You call your students your kids. You act very paternal.” At least I thought he had, up until I’d seen him dancing with all of them.

  “They’ll probably blow up the planet in another ten years. Having a child is irresponsible. . . . We’d have to buy one of those stroller things. Life-insurance men would start calling up.”

  “No they wouldn’t.”

  “Yes they would. We’d have to push the bureau in front of the bedroom door whenever we wanted to fuck. Couldn’t even say the word ‘fuck’ anymore. ‘Dolores, would you like to go make nice-nice?’”

  “We just wouldn’t let those things happen.”

  “Sure we would. This friend of mine, Nick? Perfectly intelligent mind, philosophy major in college, and now he knows all those dumb-ass Sesame Street puppets by their names—Bert and Bernie or whoever the fuck they are. Acts like they’re friends of the family, for Christ’s sake.”

  “We can’t decide anything right now,” I said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Yippee, kiddies, it’s time for Captain Kangaroo!”

  “Okay, okay. I’m tired. I get your point.”

  “You get it or you agree with it?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Goddamnit, Dolores. Now you’ve got me all riled up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve got to calm down. Let’s fuck again.”

  “Stop calling it that!” I hadn’t meant to scream.

  “See?” he said. “It’s happening already!”

  After ten minutes of silence, I reached for him.

  This time I did come—hard and fast, painfully.

  In the silence, afterward, he got out of bed and dressed.

  “Dante, where are you going? It’s the middle of the night.”

  At the door, he pushed me aside. I listened to the Volkswagen go down the hill and across town, keeping track of the sound for well over a mile.

  * * *

  He kept his apartment door closed for a week. When he came home afternoons from school, he played music so loud it vibrated the walls.

  I couldn’t tell if my vomiting was from being pregnant or being abandoned. “Your test is positive,” the woman from the clinic had told me over the phone the day I called in for results. “If that’s good news, you should come in for an appointment within the next week. If it isn’t, there are options we can discuss, the sooner the better.”

  I called in sick the entire week, spending the days crying, throwing up, and wishing I had never written to Grandma about love. I pictured myself living back in Easterly—in the House of Repression—with a small daughter who never saw her father. Having each day to get up and face Grandma, who knew love only got you so far.

  Our Bodies, Ourselves said the preferred abortion procedure for someone at my stage was aspiration—that they would vacuum-suction the fetus away from the wall of my uterus. Vacuuming, I thought. I’d be doing Dante’s vacuuming.

  Later, when the phone rang, I was standing at the mirror, marveling at how greasy hair could get if you didn’t wash it for five days. Everything was like that, I thought. Ready to fall apart the second you looked away.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Can I come over? I have something for you.”

  I flew around the apartment picking banana peels off the chair arms, whisking Saltine crumbs to the floor. I smeared some blush onto my greenish cheeks. There was nothing I could do about the hair.

  He looked handsome and well rested. “Don’t look at me,” I said.

  He handed me a sheet of paper. “Here,” he said. “For you.”

  I stared at his handwriting but couldn’t quite manage reading. “It’s a poem,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “I didn’t know you wrote poetry.”

  “I didn’t, until last night. I had this sort of heavy-duty epiphany about how much you needed me and it just came out. It’s a love poem.”

  It was titled “Love/Us,” like the card with my roses. It made no sense to me. My name was in it, but I couldn’t find the baby. I started to cry.

  “You’re moved by it,” he said, smiling. “I thought it was pretty good, too. I think it’s publishable.”

  “Dante,” I said. “We have to talk about the future.” But he would only talk about his future as a poet.

  “What about the baby?” I said.

  He reached behind me and pulled me closer. He shook his head no.

  22

  Pregnancy termination” was what the clinic lady called it. During our ten-minute conversation, she gave me the details: four hours from start to finish, a counselor assigned to me throughout the procedure, $175. Answering her questions, I heard my voice go higher and thinner until it sounded like the high-pitched whine of a mosquito. The woman didn’t seem to notice. “So we’ll see you on Saturday afternoon at one,” she said.

  Positive the baby was a girl, I couldn’t help naming her, and naming her made her real. My alternate plan was to tell Dante I’d miscarried, then go off somewhere, have Vita Marie, and sign the adoption papers. I could make the story foolproof; telling lies to Dante was what I did best.

  But the world was full of terrible parents. I saw them at Grand Union all the time, hitting their children on the head, calling them idiots while you stood by in silence, ringing up their bad nutrition. Besides, I was scared to tamper with a nine- or ten-month absence. Rafaela might slip back in through the opening I made. Anyone might.

  Maybe Dante would love Vita Marie once he saw her, I thought. Maybe he was only opposed to babies in theory. Maybe subconsciously he wanted to be a father. What if the world didn’t blow itself up in ten years?

  But what if he didn’t love her? What if her birth caused me to lose him? “Child-free” he called marriages without babies.

  “You’ll be in your ninth week by Saturday,” the clinic woman said. “We don’t like to aspirate much after the tenth—it gets complicated. The process we’ll use detaches the fetal tissue from the uterine wall by vacuum suction. It passes out of your body through a flexible tube.”

  “You’re being inflexible,” Dante insisted when I told him I really didn’t think I could have the abortion. “This is the nineteen-seventies, not the Dark Ages. Women have fought long and hard for you to exercise this option—go back and read that precious book of yours.”

  I did
. But I avoided the chapter on abortion and stuck to the ones on childbearing and parenting instead. I checked out other books on pregnancy, too, but hid them from Dante, in the hamper with the unopened bottle of cold duck. If I hadn’t put off that call to the clinic—if I’d acted right away—she would have only been an anonymous little ball of tissue “no larger than a pearl.” She’d been pearl-sized the day I’d bought my blue-and-silver dress and twirled for those two salesladies. If I drove to Burlington and asked them what I should do, I thought, they’d tell me to keep her. Vita Marie was nine weeks old now, a one-inch baby floating in fluid, with fingers and eye bumps, but no detectable heartbeat.

  I wrote my grandmother to tell her we couldn’t drive down for Christmas after all. “But I miss you, Grandma. I really want to see you.” The line filled up with truth as I wrote it and I had to stop and cry.

  * * *

  “I made the appointment,” I told Dante that night. “I’m having it done the day after Christmas.”

  He had stir-fried our supper: bok choy, tofu, and pea pods. Rather than eating, I was separating ingredients back into categories with my fork—the kind of behavior Dr. Shaw called “passive aggressive.” Dante deserved it, and more, I figured. “Baby killer!” I thought silently, watching him eat.

  “Nick called me today. Wanted to get away, go skiing that weekend. But that’s okay. It was tentative. I’ll call and tell him I can’t.”

  “Go,” I told him.

  “I should be there with you. I should help you through it.”

  “I don’t want you there. I’d rather be alone that weekend.”

  He reached across the table and took my hand. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said.

  “Yeah? Tell her that.”

  “Who?”

  I kept him waiting. “Nobody,” I finally said.

  * * *

  In my dream that night, Dante helped me deliver her in the backseat of a car. He cut the cord with rusty scissors as strangers looked in, their faces pushed flat against the car windows. Vita Marie was a talking little blond girl. I loved her immediately, but even in my dream, love only got me so far. Before my eyes, she shrank and crusted over until she was a maple-sugar candy. “Eat her,” Dante urged. I did.

  But when I woke and snapped on the night light, he looked handsome and gentle in his sleep. He’d asked about birth control that very first night—made his position clear from the start, no matter what kind of villain I was trying to turn him into. It was my lies that got me into this mess, not Dante. But I wouldn’t even be here without lies. If I wasn’t a disillusioned watercolor artist with a Farrah Fawcett hairstyle, then I was myself, Dolores, the person everyone left

  I got out of bed and paced. Back in my apartment, I made two lists:

  What I Love About Dante

  What I would love about

  Vita Marie

  1. his hands

  ????????

  2. his voice

  3. sex

  4. his dedication to his work

  5. he loves me back

  6. he made me someone new

  Seeing it in black pen on a legal pad made it clear. I couldn’t leave him, not even for her. As long as he loved me, I was my new self: Cinderella, Farrah—living with the guy a whole gymful of girls wanted to dance with. I had a job, monthly bills, a normal sex life. I was weak at the knees with love. I was weak.

  * * *

  Our Bodies, Ourselves said some women found it helpful to bring a friend along for support.

  “Hello, Tandy?” I said. “This is Dolores. From work.”

  “Oh, hi.” I heard her exhale her cigarette smoke.

  “You’re not busy, are you?”

  “If this is about switching shifts, I can’t.”

  “It’s not. I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, nothing special. Maybe we could go shopping or something.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t care. Burlington? It’s just, well . . . it’s always so hectic down at the store, you know? I just thought it would be fun to get together and talk. I bet you and I have a lot in common.”

  “I’m eatin’ lunch,” she said.

  “Oh. I’ll let you go then. See you at work.”

  “Yup.”

  * * *

  The morning after Christmas, Dante loaded up the Volkswagen and tied his skis to the roof. The day before had been quiet, endless. My presents from him were a pair of cloisonné earrings, a three-inch porcelain whale, and a new love poem he had written.

  I had meant to get him a thousand wonderful gifts, but in the midst of all the confusion and resentment, I’d managed only one: a down-filled ski parka, red as blood. It seemed to inflate as he took it out of the box and unfolded it. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What are you sorry for? It’s great. Are you kidding me? Look, I can still cancel out, stay here.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t call me, either. I don’t want to have to think about when the phone is going to ring.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be home Monday then—early evening, probably. Depending on traffic and weather.”

  “If you change your mind or have any doubts about it or anything, then you should call me,” I said. “Don’t not call if you think you might want the baby after all.”

  “Look,” he said. “You’re not thinking too clearly right now. You have to trust me. We’re doing the right thing. It’s nobody’s fault it happened, but it would be immoral to give life to a random mistake just because—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “You don’t need to say all this again.”

  He pulled me over to him. “Hey, you know what I’ve been thinking? That we should get married somewhere on the coast. Maine, maybe. How does this summer sound? June, maybe—or early July.” I watched his chin move up and down with the words.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything right now.”

  Chadley had flown to Florida to spend Christmas with his daughter’s family. All day long, I lay in bed listening to Mrs. Wing’s footsteps above my head. I knew if I thought about it long enough, I wouldn’t do it.

  Her near baldness scared me; I’d never seen her without her black wig. “I was just about to have a cup of Earl Grey, dear. Come in and join me.”

  We drank the tea out on her sun porch. In the late afternoon light, her scalp shone through the white frizzy hair, pink as the inside of a seashell. “Mrs. Wing?” I said.

  She waited for my tears to stop, covering my hands with her hands.

  * * *

  Mrs. Wing squeezed my hand in the waiting room, too. We were the only ones there.

  “I thought I was pregnant once,” she said. I stared down into my chrome chair arm, watching my warped reflection as she spoke. “But it turned out to be a false alarm. Mr. Wing always wore a prophylactic. He was meticulous about it. Of course, back then you didn’t dare tell people you didn’t want children. Everyone just assumed you’d tried and failed.”

  The counselor assigned to me wore her hair in a bouncing ponytail. “It might be better if you wait out here,” she told Mrs. Wing. “But I’ll take good care of her for you.”

  The doctor was the woman whose taped voice I’d listened to, the one who’d said not using birth control was a decision to have a baby. I looked at her big chapped hands as she spoke, not at her face. She told me it was best to have her explain the procedure as it was happening, that it took away fear of the unknown. “Any questions before we start?”

  “No,” I said. “I hate myself for doing this.”

  “Do you feel you’re not ready to continue?”

  “I’m ready to continue. I just wanted you to know I love her very much. Even though I’m doing this to her.”

  She just looked at me.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m ready. I am.”

  * * *

  “I’m going to insert the speculum now. Would you like to see wh
at it looks like first?”

  I shook my head.

  “Questions?”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “You shouldn’t feel any pain but there’ll be some pressure,” the counselor told me. Her eyes looked sympathetic, but when she wrapped her hands around my fists, they felt as cold as the equipment.

  “I’m going to anesthetize your cervix with Novocain now,” the doctor said. I pictured myself screaming and wailing, halting the procedure. But I just lay, my emotions mislaid, and let it happen. I saw Dante high up on his mountain, his shiny red parka against white snow, blue sky. Once, in bed after we’d made love, he told me what he got out of skiing. “Pure, distilled silence,” he’d said. “Except for the hushing sound of your skis.” Then he’d touched my arm and made the sound. “Husshh. Husshh.”

  I was up on that slope, watching him fall and unfall through the snow, enjoying the hush.

  “Carol has started the aspiration now. This should take about five minutes.” It hummed louder than I wanted it to. It drowned out Dante’s skiing. My body itself felt nothing—not even the pressure they’d promised.

  Whales made good mothers, I had read. Their babies came out tail first and the mothers nudged them up to the surface for air. They carried stillborns around on their backs until they dissolved back into the ocean. I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or resting. I saw my whale’s big dead eye, close up, on the day I’d swum down to it. What did the clinic do with the tissue that went up the tube? Where did Vita Marie end up?

  “How you doing?” the counselor asked. “You feeling strong enough to sit up and rejoin the world?”

  The doctor wrote me two prescriptions, one for birth-control pills, the other for tetracycline to prevent infection. I sat out in Mrs. Wing’s lavender Cadillac while she had them filled, pressing down on the gray leather upholstery to get through each cramp. “This is as hard as life gets,” I told myself. “And you’re living through it.” A man walked by wheeling a baby in a stroller. I slumped down in the seat, hid my face from him, and took the next spasm.

  When she got back in the car, Mrs. Wing handed me the bag. Inside were the pills and a present, too: a bag of licorice whips. I put one of the ropes in my mouth and chewed, amazed at how good something could taste in the midst of life’s being this bad. I chewed and chewed, swallowing back my own sweet licoricy saliva, unable to turn off the undeserved taste.