She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  I got in the habit of hand washing whatever I’d worn to work that day and Dante cut down his laundry by wearing the same thing every day: khaki pants, gray sweatshirt, and no underwear. His housework had whittled itself down to just dusting and baking—braided breads and cream-rich desserts that he ate most of himself. He was usually too exhausted to tackle the dishes after supper, so that I had to soap and scour the dried-on batter and stack towers of bowls and pans onto the drainboard while he listened to National Public Radio or played with his Rubik’s cube.

  One afternoon I got home from work just as he was coming out of the shower. I watched in amazement as he jiggled naked across the room.

  “What are you staring at?” he said. My eyes shot away from the overhang around his waist, the puckers in his rear end.

  I knew what fat and isolation could do, how they could turn you into a person you hated. “Nothing,” I said.

  “No, what? Tell me.”

  “Well,” I said, “it just looks like you’re putting on a little weight, that’s all.”

  He didn’t speak to me for a week.

  Dear Grandma,

  Thanks for the support stockings you sent me and for the Christmas-shopping $$$. I’m planning to use it for one of those down-filled maxi-coats that everyone’s wearing now. It gets COLD up here in winter. The stockings really help! A woman I know at work had varicose veins so bad that she had to have an operation. They pull them right out of you and it’s real painful, she says. Maybe someday I’ll get a job where I can sit down at a desk all day with my shoes off and my feet up. I wish!

  We sold our van two weeks ago and bought a used Vega. It’s got ripped-up seats but the engine is good. We got $2,100 for the van. The dealer said we would have gotten more if Dante hadn’t had an accident—this guy cut right out in front of him but, for some reason, the stupid cop gave Dante the summons. I put the difference ($1,375) in the bank. It’s light green. (The Vega, not the bank—ha-ha.)

  I guess our visit will have to wait until after the holidays, Grandma, because there are a zillion Christmas parties booked at the restaurant and I can’t really say no to the overtime. January looks like a possibility. When I come down, can we go through the attic and look at some of Ma’s and your old things? I’ll let you try on my new maxi-coat! I miss you and love you, Grandma. I think about you every day.

  Love, Dolores

  We rang in 1980 sitting on barstools in Boomer and Paula’s living room, but left shortly after midnight, after Dante, drunk on Harvey Wallbangers, told Paula she reminded him of a car horn that had gotten stuck and she told him she’d rather be a car horn than a child molester. Boomer and I got the coats.

  Mrs. Wing and Chadley were understanding about the hole Dante punched in our bedroom wall that night. On the ride home from the emergency room, Dante sobbed and told me I was the best thing that ever happened to him and from that point on, he was going to prove it to me. The following afternoon, I took the ornaments off our little fake tree while Dante sat at the kitchen table scrawling his New Year’s resolutions with his left hand since his right one was in the cast. The penmanship wobbled diagonally down the page. “1. Think positive. 2. Lose weight. 3. Write at least one new poem a week. 4. Exercise. 5. Prove my love to D.”

  “What do you think?” he asked me.

  “Maybe you put down too many. Why don’t you just work on one or two?”

  His face hardened against me while he stared. “Do you always have to defeat me?” he said.

  “Dante, I—”

  He balled up his list and bounced the paper ball against my face.

  “I’m not the one who fired you,” I said. “Stop it.” He picked the paper ball off the floor and did it again.

  “You do that one more time and I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” he said. He slapped me softly on the face.

  He was my father, after all—doing to me what Daddy had done to Ma. I slapped him back, hard as I could.

  “Get this straight,” I said, “I’m not your goddamned whipping girl. Don’t you ever lay your hand on me like that again!”

  * * *

  By springtime, Dante’s energy level suddenly, unexpectedly, increased. He decided to revive both his garden out in the backyard and his reading of great books. He reorganized the kitchen cabinets, waxed the floors, and, with his spare energy, began a daily jogging regimen. A literary magazine called Zirconia wrote him that they were publishing one of his poems, “Reawakening.” That night he reached for me in bed. “Now let’s see if we can remember what goes where,” he said.

  He was as kind and slow with me as he’d been that first summer and I pushed away all my anger and hurt and distrust because he owed me love. The worst of it’s over, I thought, if we can lie together and be this way again. The warm gentleness began to collect itself around his slow fingers and his kisses lost their feeling to that other, better feeling and then I was there, releasing, released.

  I reached down and guided him in. He started slowly, easily, and I wrapped my legs around him and hooked my ankles together against his back. He pumped faster and faster; his warm breath was in my face, his eyes open and looking at me. I reached out for his arm. “Honey?” I said. “Maybe we better . . . I haven’t been renewing my prescription . . .”

  “This feels too good to stop,” he said. “This feels like we’re breaking a curse.”

  “I know, Dante, but if we don’t . . .”

  “If we don’t . . .” he panted.

  “Stop . . .” I muttered. He pulled out, groaning. His penis bounced and jerked against my belly and he laughed and watched his semen ooze and trickle down my side. He kissed my neck and eyelids. He wiped my belly with his frayed gray sweatshirt.

  “George if it’s a girl and Martha if it’s a boy,” he said. “Jody if it’s a hermaphrodite.”

  “Don’t joke about babies, Dante, okay?”

  “I may not be joking,” he said. “It’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately. Babies and work.”

  We’ve outlasted it! I thought. But when I spoke, I was cautious. “What do you mean?”

  “I took this book out of the library: What Color Is Your Parachute? It’s about career change. How would you like to be married to a social worker?”

  I’d wanted him to talk about the babies part. “What’s a hermaprodite?” I said.

  “Her maph rodite, not her map rodite. It’s one of life’s ambiguities.”

  “Oh.”

  That weekend I lied and told the Lobster Pot I was sick. By Sunday morning, I felt so frisky and sure we were out of trouble that I decided to go with Dante on his daily jog. I lasted through warm-ups and the downhill swoop out our driveway toward town. But by the first incline, my lungs burned and a stitch pulled at my side. “Go on ahead,” I panted. “I can’t make it.” I watched him get smaller and smaller all the way down State Street.

  * * *

  On Monday mornings down at Grand Union, Tandy and I did the magazine racks together. One week that fall, Elvis Presley—dead over three years already—was suddenly on the covers of People and all the tabloids. The fat-faced Elvis, Elvis in white and spangles.

  “What have they dug up on poor old Porky Pig now?” Tandy said.

  I thumbed through the first paragraphs. “They arrested that doctor who supplied him all his drugs. It says Elvis was a pill addict.”

  “Big whoop,” Tandy said.

  All that morning, the fruit in aisle one seemed to vibrate with color. The fluorescent light on those shiny Elvis magazine covers made my head hurt. Something felt wrong.

  On my lunch break I took copies of those magazines to the lounge. One article said Elvis’s pigging out and pills was a kind of suicide, but that no one had read the signs, his calls for help. Two weeks before he died, all the stories agreed, Elvis had swum up from a deep depression and begun a frenzy of racquetball and promises to his fiancée. Some psychiatrist in another article said it was a pattern—that people committe
d suicide just when their lives started on an upswing and you thought their problems were licked. Suicide required an enormous amount of energy, that doctor said.

  “What’s the matter?” Tandy asked. “You’re all white.”

  “Tell Mr. Lamoreaux I had to go home.”

  I ran down Main Street, the very worst pictures flashing in my head: Dante lying in the bathtub in red water, Dante blue and hanging from the closet door. “Oh, please . . .” I kept saying. “Please, God.” By the time I reached the top of our hill, I knew every mistake I’d made with him—every single sign I’d missed.

  My key kept missing the lock, skidding off the metal. With both hands, I finally got it in and twisted. I ran through the apartment.

  They were sitting on the bed watching TV. Dante was eating a hot dog.

  “Hey!” he said, choking on a mouthful. “What are you—?”

  She had long strawberry-blond hair, a roof of bangs that ended just over her big, scared eyes. She was sitting cross-legged, wearing a sweater, Dante’s red down vest, underpants, and knee socks. Dante had his shirt off.

  “If . . . if you’re wondering why I’m eating meat,” he said. “It’s an experiment. Runner’s World says two or three days before a race you should superproteinize your system.”

  I looked from him back to her. “You’re Sheila?”

  But she wouldn’t answer.

  “She’s having a hard time at home. She needed to talk, Dolores.”

  “With her pants off? How long have you two been doing this here?”

  Dante closed his eyes. “To whom are you speaking?” he said.

  “Whom schmoom!” I screamed. “Get her the fuck out of here!”

  She hopped toward the door, pulling on her jeans. When I heard the car doors slam, I ran out after them. Dante was backing out of the driveway, his head twisted around; she was staring at me, wide-eyed. I slung fistfuls of driveway gravel at them. The stones clicked and bounced off the windshield.

  “Son of a bitch,” I kept screaming. “You son of a bitch!”

  * * *

  For the next few days, whenever the phone rang, I picked it up and slammed it back down again before he had a chance to speak.

  But he wouldn’t stop trying.

  “What do you want?” I finally screamed into the receiver one night. “Say it fast and then stop bothering me!”

  “We have to talk.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t plan on talking to you for the rest of my life.”

  I kept that promise for six days, then located him at his parents’ house in New Jersey. There was a long wait before he got to the phone.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Uh, it’s me,” I said. “Could you come back? I really need you.”

  He didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said, “Look, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. Maybe for the time being, we should—”

  “I just got a call. My grandmother died. I don’t know what to do.”

  25

  Dante drove all night to get back to me. I met him out in the driveway and he squeezed me hard, let up, then tightened his hold again.

  We were polite and formal with each other while he drank his coffee and assembled some funeral clothes on a wire hanger.

  He carried my overnight bag to the car. “You must be exhausted,” I said. “I can drive.”

  He touched my shoulder and opened the passenger’s-side door for me. “Let me take care of you, babe. I want to do that.”

  All the way down and out of Vermont, he kept reaching over for my hand. His hand felt heavy and numbing. I didn’t consciously keep letting go, but I must have, because he kept reaching.

  An hour or so into the ride, he turned off the radio. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “Oh, nothing much.” What I was thinking was that maybe it was a blessing Vita Marie didn’t exist—that if I had allowed her to become a person, I would have failed her. I’d failed both Ma and Grandma—most likely Dante, too, though in ways less obvious. Things always cleared up for me once the person I loved was dead.

  “Nothing?”

  “I was just thinking what a shitty granddaughter I was to her.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I never visited her. She was lonesome.”

  He explained to me why my guilt was illogical in a lecture that lasted past several turnpike exits; it was a lot less comforting than Casey Kasem had been. I asked him if I could turn the radio back on.

  “I know what you need,” he said.

  He took his eyes off the road and reached amidst the backseat clutter for something. With no particular sense of panic, I watched our car swerve and weave toward the shoulder, a rock ledge, and then back again. What he was hunting for landed in my lap: a thick brown book with a grease-stained cover.

  “Des-cartes?”

  “Day-cart. He’s French; the s’s are silent. What he says is directly relevant to what you’re feeling. It invalidates your guilt. Read it.”

  “I don’t want to read it.”

  His smile was the one I imagined him using with slow learners at school. “Because you’d prefer to flagellate yourself?”

  “Because reading in a moving car makes me puke.”

  “You wrote or called her every week, Dolores. I must have heard you tell her a hundred times to take a bus up and see us.”

  “Yeah, because I knew she wouldn’t do it,” I argued. “I knew she was scared to travel by herself after that time she came up for the wedding.” I began to make a case for Grandma’s fear, but lost track of my point and ended up describing that black man with his dashiki and his religion of forgiveness—how Grandma’s hand had gotten tangled in his hair, how the feeling had left her with a sense of wonder.

  Dante took my hand again. “Speaking of forgiveness,” he said. “I’m not saying I deserve it, just that I’m applying. I need you, babe.”

  His words had burned me more times than they’d soothed me. I cautioned myself not to be taken in by this verbal Noxzema. “Why is that, Dante?” I said. “For as long as we’ve been together, all you’ve done is criticize and correct the way I pronounce things. Am I your personal dumping ground or something? Is that what you need me for?”

  His smile was patient. “I was rereading Thoreau last week. Walden. It’s amazing how Henry can remind you of what’s sublime and what’s—”

  “Answer the question,” I said.

  “I need you because you’re you,” he said. “With Sheila it was just sex. A conquest—a type of materialism, really. Pleasurable only until the muscle spasm was over, then—boom!—the same quiet desperation. I was a fool to jeopardize what we’ve built together. Mea culpa.”

  “Oh, mea culpa! Mia Farrow!” I made my hand a fist and snatched it away. “That sounds real fancy, Dante. What about that poor girl? For you it was a muscle spasm. What was it for her?”

  “Babe, kids today are nihilists—that’s what you’re not understanding here. They’re not like us. For one thing, they’re brain dead politically. Party hardy: nothing beyond that. And I stupidly bought into it. Temporary insanity, Dolores—temporary. For Sheila it was an afternoon fuck, something to do instead of watching ‘General Hospital.’ I doubt she attached anything more to it than that.”

  “So that would make your guilt illogical, too, just like mine about my grandmother, right? Gee, Dante, this is all pretty convenient.” I rolled down the window and threw his book out.

  He braked instinctively, then stepped on the gas again. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’ll allow you the extravagance of that overreaction.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said. “Babe.”

  “Just remember one thing,” he said. “You called me for help and I came. I’m sitting in this car next to you. I’m here.”

  * * *

  At the funeral home I came face-to-face with the same smiling, bug-eyed undertaker who had slid along the walls at my mother’s wake eleven years before. Seeing him ripped the scab right of
f Ma’s death. Dante and Bug Eyes did the talking; I nodded and signed forms.

  Calling hours were that night from seven to nine, her funeral mass the next morning at eleven. “Would you like me to step forward at the grave site and invite people back to the house after the burial?”

  I looked at Dante. “What do you think?”

  He rubbed my arm. “It’s up to you, babe,” he said.

  “No, then.”

  “The service will be over just before lunchtime,” Bug Eyes said.

  “Okay, fine. Whatever you say.”

  “Fine. Now, would you like to see the body while you’re here? We received it yesterday afternoon. It’s been prepared.”

  “Do me a favor, will you?” I said. “Stop talking about my grandmother like she’s an order of Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  Bug Eyes told Dante there was absolutely no need to apologize, that death angered loved ones because it made them feel powerless.

  Everything was gray in the room where he’d put her: the rug, the wallpaper, the coffin he’d pushed me to select over the phone from Vermont. It looked like Grandma was lying in some cold twilight place. The whole room seemed covered with frost.

  The rosary beads they’d twisted and looped around her knotty hands were her everyday amber ones, not the good wine-red ones she took out of their velvet case at Easter and Christmas—the ones Grandma herself would have chosen for this occasion. Mrs. Mumphy and her daughter had gone to Grandma’s house to pick out her clothes. She had on the green print dress she’d worn to our wedding. I forced my eyes up to her wax-museum face. Death or the undertaker had relaxed her facial muscles. She was and wasn’t Grandma.

  * * *

  During the ride from the funeral parlor to the house on Pierce Street, I pointed lefts and rights without speaking. “This one,” I told him. “This gray house.” He eased the car into the alley and I felt my stomach heave.