She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  It was suddenly obvious to me why I’d resisted visiting: Easterly made me, once again, who I had been. Erased all my work at Gracewood and the life I’d made in Vermont. Dante carrying my overnight bag was Daddy carrying my suitcases up the front-porch steps and abandoning me. I walked behind him with the odd sensation that Dante and I were pretend people, Barbie and Ken, and that the real Dolores—the raped fat girl—hadn’t gotten away after all. Was watching us from behind the curtain.

  “Phone!” Dante said as I pushed the key into the lock. “Hurry!” He ran toward its ringing. Hesitantly, I stepped inside.

  At first I thought burglars had been there.

  My steps clattered through the nearly empty downstairs rooms, Dante’s telephone voice echoing in the background. The dining-room set was missing, and the mahogany china closet that had taken up half the hallway, and Grandma’s cabinet-model TV. Afternoon sun lit up the living room and its two remaining articles of furniture: her overstuffed maroon chair and something new—a water bed. Disoriented, I sat down on it and waited for the swaying to subside.

  In her very last letter, Grandma had mentioned something about a church tag sale and a truck coming to take away some of her old things, but I hadn’t pictured this full-scale emptiness. Cars passing by outside vibrated the walls. Dante’s steps thundered into the room.

  “That was the lawyer,” he said. “She wants to touch down with us while we’re here. I set it up for nine tomorrow morning.”

  “If people are coming back here, we’ll have to get food ready. Call back and cancel.”

  “She says it’ll take less than half an hour. We can squeeze it all in. Didn’t I see a deli across the street? There must be a bakery around here, right? I don’t imagine there’ll be a cast of thousands coming.”

  He sat down next to me on the bed. We rose and fell, rose and fell, with the shifting water.

  “Why did she buy this bed?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

  “Maybe it was for her back or something. By the way, I like this place. Spartan. It’s got definite possibilities.”

  “It used to be more cluttered,” I said. “She must have known she was going to die.”

  He flopped backward. “What do we have, about three and a half, four hours before the wake? Maybe I’ll take a nap. I’m beat.” He reached up and started massaging the small of my back. “You okay?”

  I looked back at his smile. “Thank you for helping,” I said. “Driving me down and everything.”

  “You don’t have to thank me, babe. I’m your husband.”

  “I’m not sleeping with you tonight,” I said.

  The massaging stopped. “Okay, fine. I can be patient. We have all the time in the world. Only I think, if we’re going to ever . . .”

  “I’ll be upstairs,” I said. “Take your nap.”

  * * *

  Ma’s bedroom had blank, bald walls, empty bureau drawers, empty closets. Anger rose in me, filled me up. What harm would it have done to let her stuff wait up here until I was ready to claim it? The emptiness was a betrayal, a slap in the face. “Goddamnit, Grandma,” I said.

  She had left my old room intact. Console television, green plaid bedspread, chair by the window. I’d sat up here for six years, looking angrily out at life and trying to eat away pain. I saw it clearly now: why Ma had fought so hard for me to go to college—had let my awful words bloody her up during those battles about my going off to school. Ma had understood the danger of Grandma’s house—how heavy furniture and drapes drawn on the world could absorb a person until she was freakish and mean and trapped. Ma had wanted college to set me free. However badly I’d messed up down in Pennsylvania, going there had launched me, had gotten me away. I saw my mother standing there, steak knife in hand after she’d cut the cord on my TV. Ma, a warrior of love.

  I walked over to the bureau. Holding my breath, I pulled out the bottom bureau drawer and removed the folded sheets. “I love Bernice Holland. Sincerely, Alan Ladd,” it still said. Happy, relieved, I sat down on the bed and cried.

  The truth was, Grandma had given me enough time to get down here and claim what I wanted. I imagined her struggling down the stairs with those heavy cartons, defying her bad heart because she’d needed to get her business in order. She’d had a right to empty rooms. She had loved me the way she could.

  I slid the bolt and opened the door to the landing, walking the six stairs to the third-floor apartment. Grandma had kept it locked and vacant since the afternoon Jack and Rita snuck away. Like a graveyard-shift policeman, I checked the knob, then walked back down.

  If Dante was sleeping soundly, I decided, I’d write a note and go to the funeral parlor myself. The people at the wake would be the same white-haired St. Anthony’s women who knew what a mess I’d made of myself, who’d sat at Ma’s wake and watched me scream Daddy out of my life for good. That funeral-parlor room was the last place I’d seen him. Dante thought my father was dead.

  He hadn’t fallen asleep. I found him at the bottom of the stairs, studying the photograph of Ma and Geneva, teenagers in their white dresses. “They’re beautiful,” he said. “Who are they?”

  “One of them’s my mother.”

  He pointed to Geneva and I shook my head. “Oh, right,” he nodded. “Now I see the resemblance. You have her beauty.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  “You do. You just don’t see it.” He leaned the back of his head against the wall so that it looked like he was balancing family pictures on each of his shoulders. “I don’t know if you’ve given it any thought yet, Dolores, but I imagine this house is yours now. Any idea what you’re going to do with it?”

  “Get rid of it,” I said. “I don’t want it.”

  “I thought having a house was your dream.”

  “Not this house.”

  He wrapped an arm around me and kissed my forehead. He’d touched me more in the past six hours than he had in six months.

  “I love you, Dolores,” he whispered, kissing my neck, my ear.

  “Then there’s my job,” I said. “Could you please stop doing that?”

  He let go and walked up two more stairs, looking at more pictures. “Here’s what I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe we could start over again down here—this could be exactly the chance we need. I could get another teaching job. There’s nothing on my record.”

  “What about me?”

  He reached down and traced my eyebrow with his thumb. “Every grocery store in the world needs clerks, babe.”

  I sat on a stair, looking down at Grandma’s front door. Late-afternoon sun was coming through the oval of glass, creating an oblong patch of light on the hallway runner. “Did you marry me because of the abortion?” I said. “Were you just being noble?”

  “I married you because I loved you. Love you. Present tense.”

  “How can you love me if you think of me as just some stupid checkout girl?”

  “You’re not stupid. You’re . . . unfettered. Want to hear a secret?”

  I didn’t want to. It might make my own secrets start coming out—make the fat girl throw open her bedroom door and start blurting.

  “The truth is,” he continued, “I envy you sometimes. I wish I could shed some of my own complexity. It’s like a heavy weight I carry around, a burden. Your simplicity is . . . well, it’s Thoreau-like. Which is why you’re so good for me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You keep me in touch. You keep me honest.”

  “You’re not honest,” I said. “You told me you hadn’t done what they accused you of and I believed you. Then you brought her home and did it with her in our bed. Having nothing on your record is a lie!”

  He bent his head down against his knees and rubbed the back of his neck. Then he straightened up again and lifted our wedding picture off the wall. He looked at it while he spoke. “Believe me, Dolores, you’re not accusing me of anything I haven’t accused myself of. If anything, you’re being easier o
n me than I’m being on myself.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  He came up to where I was sitting and squeezed next to me on the stair. He closed his eyes and kissed the picture. “Love/Us,” he said.

  He sat there and watched me cry.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to touch what was in the refrigerator; the perishables were too close to Grandma, food she would have bought only days ago. While Dante was out running—“blowing off negative energy” as he put it—I heated up canned food in the old, familiar pans. All my Vermont letters to her were in the phone-book drawer, held together by a rubber band. I kept looking up from my handwriting—the Cinderella accounts I’d given her of my marriage—afraid I’d see her watching me from the doorway, peeking at me the way she used to after the rape. If there was some sort of all-knowing afterlife, then Grandma knew by now that those letters were lies, that Dante and I had nothing like the life I’d invented for her. For myself. In a way, I deserved Dante’s dishonesty. Dolores Price: the biggest fat liar on earth.

  “I feel a hundred percent better,” Dante said when he burst back inside in a swirl of cool air. His face was flushed and healthy, covered with a glaze of sweat. He looked almost trustworthy.

  * * *

  We stood up each time pairs and trios of churchwomen struggled up from the casket kneeler and hobbled over to shake our hands.

  “Honestly, she looked so good at bingo two weeks ago. When I picked up the paper that morning and read it . . .”

  “This fella of yours is a doll, ain’t he? My husband’s people were from Vermont. Rutland.”

  They sat in their chairs, visiting with each other, occasionally smiling at Dante and me. They spoke loudly for the ones who were hard of hearing. No one said anything mean. No one gave me away.

  Near the end, I looked away from a whispered conversation with Dante and saw, at the coffin, a small man in a belted trench coat. His plaid fedora sat on the kneeler next to him while he prayed. Then he made the sign of the cross and walked over toward us.

  Dante and I stood up. “I’m Dante Davis and this is my wife, Dolores,” Dante said, extending his hand. “We appreciate your coming. Dolores is Mrs. Holland’s granddaughter.”

  “Dolores?” the man said. “How are you?”

  He’d shrunk some and had given up wearing the toupee. It was his worried brown eyes I recognized. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Mr. Pucci!”

  I hugged him harder than I should have; his bones felt as light as a bird’s.

  He examined me at arm’s length. “You look wonderful,” he said.

  I brushed away the idea. “How’s school?”

  “Oh, it’s still there,” he said, smiling. “I’m sorry about your grandmother. I’ll miss her Christmas card this year.”

  “What Christmas card?”

  “Oh, she sent me one faithfully every year since you graduated. Kept me posted on your various activities.” He smiled at Dante. “Vermont’s a beautiful state. A friend of mine and I drive up for the foliage every year.”

  “Gary?” I said. “Do you and Gary still live together?” Mr. Pucci blushed and nodded.

  His lover’s face came back to me—and their apartment—the guilty way Mr. Pucci had looked that afternoon I’d gone over without calling.

  “Yes. Well . . .” Mr. Pucci shook Dante’s hand and told me again how sorry he was.

  I watched his exit into the foyer. “Former teacher?” Dante asked.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  Bug Eyes was holding open the door for him. “Mr. Pucci, wait!” I said. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  We talked for five minutes about nothing. It was the sound of his car engine that scared me enough to begin.

  “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you in there about Gary just now.”

  “No, no—don’t be silly.”

  “He was so sweet to me that day I showed up at your apartment. God, what nerve of me to barge over there like that. He played me Billie Holiday records before you got there. Do you still have your jukebox?”

  He nodded.

  “Mr. Pucci? The thing is—through this whole wake, I’ve been sitting in there watching Grandma on one side of the room and her church friends on the other side, wanting to apologize to someone. Except I couldn’t. Dante doesn’t even know about— What I’m trying to say is, it means a lot to me that you came tonight. And that you were my friend—my pal—when I was so messed up. I’m just so sorry that—”

  “Let me ask you something, pal,” he said. “Where were you the afternoon President Kennedy got shot?”

  “Uh . . . I was at St. Anthony’s. Miss Lilly stopped a spelling test to tell us.”

  “And I was at my mother’s kitchen table with my cousin Dominick when it happened. Eating lunch—pasta e fagioli.”

  I stood there looking at him, waiting for it to make sense.

  “And where were you when you saw Neil Armstrong land on the moon?”

  “You know where. With you, sitting on the couch at Grandma’s. It was the night after Ma got killed. You brought me an African violet.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly right. So whenever anyone mentions the Kennedy assassination, I think of my cousin Dominick. And whenever anyone talks about that moon landing, I think of you. You and I are locked together for life, kiddo. It’s fate; not a damn thing either of us can do about it. Apology accepted.”

  Then he drove away.

  * * *

  Dante slept that night on the water bed. Upstairs in Grandma’s room, I closed the door and got into my nightgown. Popes and saints covered the walls. The statues of Jesus and John the Baptist seemed to stare back.

  In her top dresser drawer were a small vial of holy water, handkerchiefs, nitroglycerin for her heart. In the back I found an envelope with childhood pictures of me. No pictures from my fat days—Grandma hadn’t wanted evidence either. Her good red rosary beads were in their velvet case.

  Without warning, a moment I’d shared with Grandma came back so powerfully and unexpectedly that it hurt me behind the eyes. It was right after she’d found out about the rape. Ma was at work and I was home from school. The shades were drawn against the sun. Grandma put on the table light and said she wanted to show me something about her rosary beads, her special ones. “They’ve got a little secret,” she said. “I use it when things are bad.” She slid up the back of the hollow metal crucifix and brought my hand up to it. When she tipped the cross, a tiny, rust-colored nugget fell out and into my palm.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A pebble from the road Jesus walked when they crucified Him. You just put it between your fingers and play with it—roll it back and forth, like this. Makes you feel better. I’ll leave the beads here for you for a couple of days. In case you want to say the rosary or feel the pebble. On account of that business—what he did to you.”

  I’d gone out of my way not to pick them up. Then, a few days later, they were gone again. My memory always insisted that Grandma had been remote and unforgiving about me and Jack. But there, back again without warning, was that moment.

  I listened for Dante, then got up and locked the door anyway. I sat back on the bed and, with my fingernail, pushed open the back of the crucifix. It was there—that pebble, the hard red nugget.

  * * *

  “The estate should take about nine months to get through probate,” the lawyer said. “It’s pretty cut-and-dried. Your wife is sole heir.” She was someone I remembered from high school, Penny something, a popular kid. Now she had a hyphenated name and a puffed-out baseball glove of a face. There was a baby in a frame on her desk. She had no recognition that I was the fat girl at the back table in her English class. “The Pierce Street property and a smallish bank account. That’s basically it.”

  “How small is smallish?” Dante laughed.

  The night before I’d dreamt I was swimming in ocean water as warm as a bath. Grandma, Ma, Vita Marie, and me. The water was jade
green. Breathing was optional.

  “Honey?” Dante said.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “Ms. Marx-Chapman just asked if we were planning to sell the property or occupy it ourselves.”

  “You mean the house? Move there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No. Sell it.”

  Dante put his hand on my knee. “Well,” he smiled. “It’s still up in the air at this point. We haven’t made a definite decision just yet.”

  “Not totally definite,” I told her. “Pretty definite.”

  “Let me ask you something, Ms. Marx-Chapman,” he said.

  “Please,” she said. “Penny.”

  “Penny. Would it be possible for us to live there at the house temporarily—while it’s still hung up in probate?”

  “Sure, that can be arranged.” They both took sips of their coffee.

  “Good,” Dante said, smiling at me. “Great.”

  * * *

  Connie’s Superette had gas pumps now and called itself Kwik-Stop Food Xpress. Inside the store, the ceiling sagged the same way and the air still smelled damp and garlicky. Connie had been replaced at the register by a teenage girl in tight jeans and a glitter-front sweater. There was a “Coffee and Microwave Centre” where the Pysyks and I had roughed each other up that day I’d called Stacia a “dirty DP.” I recognized Big Boy’s whistling before I recognized the rest of him. His hair had turned yellowy gray and he’d grown himself a Grover Cleveland body. Dante ordered a pound each of provolone cheese, boiled ham, and roast beef. (I looked away when Big Boy sliced the beef.) “Don’t forget about the bakery,” I said. “Old ladies are sugar addicts.”

  On the walk back, we passed Roberta’s forbidden tattoo parlor. The storefront glass had been painted over with black paint, but the peacock sign—faded and chipped—still hung over the door.

  “This woman named Roberta Jaskiewicz used to live there,” I said. “She gave tattoos and sold hand-painted girlie neckties. One time my grandmother saw me over there and she—”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Dante said. He locked his eyes closed and stood frozen on the sidewalk. I waited.