She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  * * *

  He got in on schedule at seven o’clock on Monday night, so windburned and healthy-looking that eye contact was impossible. He dropped his soft luggage in the middle of the floor, sat down on the bed, and hugged me tight for over a minute. I hated him.

  “How did you make out?” he said, finally.

  “All right.”

  “Did you have it?”

  “Have what? Say it.”

  “Did you?”

  “Say it.”

  “The abortion?”

  “Yes.”

  He took my chin in his hand and turned my head so that I’d look at him. “I’m in mourning, too, you know,” he told me. But later he forgot himself, whistling as he unpacked.

  We spent New Year’s Day napping and playing Scrabble. Dante made us a vegetable broth and sourdough bread and got the dirty clothes ready for the laundromat. “What’s this?” he said. He was holding up the cold duck.

  We drank it from the bottle while we sat out in the car, watching our clothes tumble inside. Over the sound of the heater and defrost, the radio counted down the year’s top songs.

  “Hey, Home Ec?” Dante said. “Happy 1977.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You, too.”

  He took another swig of wine. “You know what I was just thinking?”

  “What?”

  “That we shouldn’t wait. That we should get married as soon as possible. What do you think?”

  “Why do you call me that, Dante?” I said.

  “Call you what?”

  “Home Ec?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, just to tease you. Why?”

  “Is that what you and me are all about?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Me scrubbing your toilet for you. Me keeping you in clean sheets.”

  He sighed and took another swig. And another. I went inside to fold the clothes.

  When I got back out, the radio was playing Rod Stewart, number one for the past year. Spread your wings and let me come inside . . . Dante had finished the bottle.

  “Love is what you and I are all about,” Dante said.

  That was the answer I’d wanted from him, been fishing for. All the way home, I sat and tried to figure out why it wasn’t enough.

  * * *

  We set the date for George Washington’s birthday and booked a justice of the peace and the back room at the Lobster Pot restaurant downtown. Paula from the high school dance said sure, she and Boomer would be thrilled to stand up for us; she’d even throw in Ashley as flower girl. I decided to wear my blue-and-silver dress and ordered a corsage of yellow roses to cover up that punch stain.

  I spent January preparing for the wedding and trying to convince myself I had done the right thing. Sometimes on the worst days, the call-in-sick ones, I let myself pretend that Vita Marie was invincible—that she’d somehow tricked all of us and existed, still, inside of me. An overwhelming pregnant-woman’s fatigue took me over, resided in me. Sometimes on my fifteen-minute break at work, I’d fall asleep on the plastic sofa with a lit Merit between my fingers. (I’d gone back to smoking, but only at work.) Walking the hill back home required an effort so total that I’d flop down on the daybed, not waking up until I heard Dante in the kitchen, rattling the pots and pans in a huff, making the supper I’d promised to make.

  “You’re smoking again,” he said one night in bed. “Aren’t you?”

  “I had one cigarette at work today.”

  “Well, your hair stinks of it. It’s a turnoff.”

  Which was just as well; I’d managed to avoid sex since the abortion, except for once. That time, his penis had felt like a vacuum cleaner up inside me, looking to suck out life. “I’m not ready for this,” I’d told him. He said he understood and was willing to be patient, that he would pour all his passion into his poetry and wait for a signal from me. But a few days later he got his first literary magazine rejection slip for “Love/Us” and started slamming things around the apartment and shaking his head at me. “Here we lie,” he said that night in bed. “Monsignor Frustration and Sister Mary Chastity, America’s most abnormal fiancés.”

  But Dante indulged me in his own way, buying me flowers and herb teas and books I could never quite get myself to read. At the end of January, he sat in the dark with me for eight straight nights, watching “Roots.”

  I ached to tell him how I felt, but how I felt was all tangled up in other babies: my brother Anthony Jr. and Rita Speight’s baby and my own fetal self in the pool at Gracewood. . . . Secrets were the way to go with Dante, I was absolutely sure. The one secret I had let him in on—“Dante, I’m pregnant”—had lost me Vita Marie.

  Somewhere during that time, he wrote a new poem, about a woman who shrank her husband and put him in a bird cage. “What’s this supposed to mean?” I asked him.

  “It’s allegorical. I guess I’m trying to say I feel diminished.”

  Not as diminished as Vita Marie, I thought. But to his face, all I said was that he’d promised to be patient with me.

  “I have been patient,” he said. “But I’m getting goddamned sick of this pity party every night.”

  I put my hands over my wet face. “I can’t help it, Dante. She was growing inside me. I even named her.”

  “Named it,” he said. “Not her. It. Why are you doing this to us?”

  “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been awful. I’m going to try to be better.”

  He rubbed my back to stop the shaking. When he pulled up my sweatshirt and licked at my nipples, I managed not to scream. Later, between his orgasm and his falling asleep, he murmured, “You see? You see how good getting on with our life makes you feel?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

  I had managed not to tell him her name. After that night, I kept my grief a secret, too, focusing as best I could on my new role: bride-to-be.

  * * *

  His parents arrived in their Winnebago two mornings before the wedding. Dante and his father hefted our present, a La-Z-Boy recliner, out of the camper and into the middle of our apartment where it sat, parked like a Buick. I avoided sitting in it; it reminded me of the recliner in Dr. Shaw’s office where I’d had to sit and tell the truth.

  The Davises were a ruddy, meat-and-potatoes couple who wore his’n’hers nylon jackets and gave no clue that their marriage had once been plagued by Mr. Davis’s “womanizing.” Dante looked like his mother, not his father, which somehow relieved me. Mrs. Davis kept smiling hard at me, flashing her gold bridgework and stretching her shiny vinyl cheeks. She told Dante I was “an absolute jewel” and reminded him what an excellent judge of character she had always been. Dante’s parents called him “Chipper.”

  Geneva Sweet had sent us Lenox dishes and her regrets, so the only wedding guests on my side were Grandma and two of the checkout girls from Grand Union. I’d invited Grandma over the phone, reminding her not to mention anything about Gracewood or my fat days. Despite her initial grumblings about a justice-of-the-peace service not being a true wedding in God’s eyes—or hers—she got herself on a Trailways bus in Providence and arrived in town the afternoon before the ceremony.

  She looked pale and fragile as she clasped the bus driver’s hand and allowed him to lead her down the steps and I wondered for a second if she’d somehow found out about my abortion—if the disclosure had withered her. Easing down into the front seat of Dante’s Volkswagen, she said it was the first time she’d ever been to Vermont and now, the first time she’d ever ridden in a soup can.

  The trip up had shaken her. To start with, a crazy woman in a filthy coat had sat next to her on the bench during a stopover in Willimantic, Connecticut, and accused Grandma of having, years before, stolen her umbrella. Then, in Springfield, Massachusetts, a slew of colored people had gotten on, all of them wearing those big balloon hairstyles so that she couldn’t see a thing around her.

  “They’re called ‘naturals,’ Mrs. Holland.” Dante smiled.

  “Hair bigg
er than your head—you call that natural? Sheesh.”

  The young colored man who sat right plop down next to her wore clothing so bright, it gave Grandma a headache. “I told him right off the bat, I said, ‘Listen here, if you try to take this purse, I’ll put up a fight, no matter how little’s in there.’ ’Course, I probably wouldn’t of. The bus driver was a colored, too. Told him that to call his bluff, see?”

  Grandma said her seatmate told her he had rechristened himself with the name “Love” and had founded a new religion based on, of all things, forgiveness—turning the other cheek. Turning the other cheek hadn’t helped Grandma, though. He kept talking whether she looked at him or not. She’d had to listen to his malarkey all the way to White River Junction.

  Because of her ordeal, Grandma felt justified, she told Dante’s parents, in saying yes to the glass of cranberry liqueur they offered her, though she wasn’t a drinker and never had been. The alcohol and attention bewitched her. Within half an hour, she was so charmed and spirited that she’d begun to tell stories from her childhood: how her older brother Bill had run away to join the navy and sent her a pet monkey from Madagascar, which had arrived precisely on her birthday, except dead. How a rooster had had it in for her and chased her all the way down to the Preston bridge on her way to fourth grade. (Her father later paid the owner seventy-five cents for the pleasure of wringing its neck. They had it for Sunday dinner and it was tough as shoe leather.)

  “Your little granny’s as cute as a bug in a rug,” Mrs. Davis told me, squeezing my arm.

  I sipped the liqueur, too, hoping it would make me as lighthearted as the rest of them. It put me in a slump instead, and I sat and watched Grandma, trying to read from her face if she could ever forgive abortion.

  “I think I’m acquiring a taste for the old gal,” Dante whispered about Grandma during the dishes that night. She and Dante’s parents were in front of the TV, watching “The Jeffersons.” “She’s got a certain feisty charm for a racist. Not to mention all those great dead-animal stories.”

  At ten o’clock, Dante returned to his apartment and his parents went back to their room at the Brown Derby Motel. I was making up the sheets when Grandma came out of the bathroom in her housecoat and slippers and gave me two wedding presents: a cameo locket on a delicate gold chain and two thousand two hundred dollars cash—twenty-two hundred-dollar bills.

  “Grandma,” I said. “We can’t accept this much money. And you should never have been carrying this cash with you all the way up here.”

  She wanted to talk about the locket instead. She suggested I might like to wear it during the ceremony. “Your grandfather gave it to me on our second wedding anniversary. I can still see the wrapping paper it came in. ’Course, I gave him the rats for spending the money. ‘Grouchy Gertie’ he used to call me. I was the serious one, you know; he was always full of the dickens.”

  I reached over and kissed the soft creases in her cheek. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Thank you for coming all this way.”

  She shooed away the kiss, a distraction. “Grouchie Gertie,” she said, softly. “I’d forgotten that.”

  Later, in the dark, we lay side by side together, not sleeping. “Grandma,” I said, “I wish Ma could be alive right now. Here with us. Here for my wedding. . . . I never told you this, Grandma, but one of the things I had to work on when I was at the hospital was my feelings about Ma. Her death. And the breakdown she had. And . . . the fact that she and Jack had been . . . before he did what he did to me.”

  She reached over and touched my wrist. Neither of us spoke for the next several minutes.

  “I was just thinking,” she finally said. “Maybe that colored fella really wasn’t such a big kook. The one who sat next to me on the bus. Him and his forgiveness religion . . . I didn’t realize you knew about that business that was going on between them, Dolores. Your mother and that one upstairs—Speight . . . I knew, of course. She was never a very good liar around me. One night right in the middle of it, I surprised her at the back door. Sat on a kitchen chair in the dark until she came downstairs. She was on her way up there, see, sneaking up to see him while little Rita was at work. You were fast asleep, of course. ‘He’s a married man,’ I told her. ‘You walk out this door, young lady, and I’ll never forgive you.’ That’s what I said to her. ‘I’ll never forgive you.’ I was scared for her, you see. Thought to myself, She’ll burn in hell for a month of Sundays because of what she’s doing. But she went anyway. Poor thing—couldn’t help herself. She always had a certain weakness. Even as a girl—all those asthma attacks . . .”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes I love Dante so much that it scares me. I feel out of control. Is that normal?”

  “Of course it’s normal. I was scared skinny when I married Ernest—didn’t know what the deuce to expect beyond cooking and keeping a house.”

  “Do you think it’s wrong that I never told Dante about the hospital or Jack or anything?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s for the best. Men scare too easily. And all that business happened a long time ago, anyway. It makes me sad, though.”

  “What does?”

  “Oh, that Bernice couldn’t be alive for your wedding . . . That she never heard me say I forgave her.”

  She was hesitating in the dark; I could tell she wasn’t through yet. “What is it, Grandma?”

  “Well, I can’t get that cuckoo bus trip out of my mind, that’s all. At one point I got up out of my seat—stood up to get something from the rack overhead—a tangerine, it was. I had packed a tangerine and some Fig Newtons, you see, so my stomach wouldn’t be empty when I took my pill. Then we went over a bump and I lost my balance. Went to steady myself and my hand landed in that hair of his. Well, I apologized of course—it was very embarrassing—my hand disappeared right up to the wrist. He was very nice about it, really. Took out this funny comb he had and said he was just glad I didn’t fall . . . But the funny part—the part I was just lying here thinking about—was what that hair felt like.”

  “What did it feel like, Grandma?”

  “Well, I always imagined their hair would be bristly. You know, steely—like SOS. But it doesn’t feel like that at all. I mean, it’s stiff, yes. Of course it’s stiff. But it’s soft, too. That’s the part that surprised me. The softness.”

  23

  In spring of 1978, Boomer and Paula put a down payment on a house going up at Granite Acres Estates. “I get to pick out my own light fixtures and kitchen countertops and everything!” Paula told me, loudly enough so that other Grand Union shoppers took notice. “You guys should come over this weekend! We’ll show you our lot!”

  That Sunday afternoon Dante and I drove up their makeshift road. Holes and dirt piles covered the hillside, as far as you could look. The finished houses still had their window decals on. “Look at these cheap-shit things,” Dante said, navigating around the potholes. “You can see the middle seam where they put the two halves together.”

  Boomer and Paula waved to us from the half of their prefab house that had been delivered. It sat bundled in plastic on a flatbed truck.

  “Now see, we’re going to bisect the basement—” Boomer began.

  “Right down the middle!” Paula interrupted. “Half for my laundry room and the other half for my crafts studio. Now that I have the space, I’m going to take on some students, have a minischool. Just decoupage and macramé at first, but I might branch out later.”

  We’d been to Boomer and Paula’s apartment once for Friday-night pizza. Their downstairs was an obstacle course of hanging plants in Velveeta-colored macramé holders that Paula had woven. Decoupaged greeting cards and studio portraits of Ashley covered the walls. Back at our place that evening, I had turned their home—their life—into a cartoon for Dante’s entertainment, had even gotten out of bed to imitate Paula’s walk. “Jut Butt,” I nicknamed her. Dante laughed so hard, he couldn’t breathe. Then he fell asleep while I sat up in bed, horrified at how vicious I could be towa
rd a woman who’d just fed us.

  “We get wall-to-wall shag carpet throughout the whole main floor,” Paula continued. “It’s part of Package B. I’m leaning toward avocado for the color. Boomer bought one of those handyman magazines and guess what was in it? These plans for a bar that would fit just perfect in the family room! It’s got a sink and a brass rail and a knickknack shelf. It even shows you how to upholster your own barstools.”

  “Incredible,” Dante said, smiling over at me.

  “Just think, you guys! One of these days, you’ll be sitting around at our bar, sipping whiskey sours and saying, ‘Pass the pretzels.’ Right, Pooh-Bear?”

  ‘That bar is a wet bar,” Boomer said. “It’s got a sink.”

  “I already said that, hon. I just told them. You should take that class of mine, Dolores. My own school—pinch me, I can’t believe it!”

  Ashley pulled at her mother’s pant leg and Paula bent down to hear the secret. “Well, Ashley, maybe next time you’ll listen to Mommy about drinking too much pineapple juice. Come on, we’ll just have to tinkle behind the car.”

  “But I don’t have to tinkle. I have to make a stinky.”

  Dante turned his smirk to the hillside.

  When Paula came back, she thanked God for Wet Wipes and poured us coffee from a thermos. The men had gone off to look at a stump. In the cold air, Paula’s talk burst out in white puffs.

  “If you were a prude, I couldn’t tell you this, Dolores. But between you and me and this whoozie-whatsis,” she said, clicking her wedding ring against the flatbed, “I was this close to calling up a marriage counselor. About Boomer and me. Got as far as circling a number in the yellow pages. But buying this house really woke my Pooh-Bear up out of hibernation. If you catch my drift.”

  Ashley sat down on top of her mother’s shoes and began humming a pretty song I couldn’t quite recognize.