She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “The abortion is what made me a true vegetarian,” I said.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Every bite you take, it’s like you’re eating her up. Which is what we did, in a way, Dante. First we made her; then we ate her up.”

  “All right, that’s enough,” he said. “Shut up.”

  “Here’s something else I never told you: I got raped when I was thirteen,” I said. “By my grandmother’s tenant. He lived upstairs.”

  A worker pushed a broom past us. The silence lasted so long that I began to wonder if I’d said it out loud or just thought I had.

  “I never painted any watercolors, either. It was Etch-a-Sketch pictures I did—copies of masterpieces. I was pretty good at it, actually. But I saw through your eyes that it was tacky, so I shut up about it. Oh, and my father isn’t dead. He lives in New Jersey, I think, same as your parents. You just assumed he was dead, so I let you. You and he are a lot alike in some ways. That never even really occurred to me until that New Year’s Day you slapped me and then—wham!—it was like, ‘Dolores, how could you have missed it,’ you know? But anyway, I used to do the Etch-a-Sketches when I lived at this halfway house after I got out of Gracewood. That was the mental hospital. I was there for years.”

  He swallowed hard; he wouldn’t look at me.

  “When I went into the hospital, I weighed two hundred and sixty-three pounds—a real mess. This is how unhappy I was back then: just before my breakdown, I took this taxi from Pennsylvania to Cape Cod? To be honest with you, I was trying to kill myself. See, I was all confused—I had just had sex with this woman who—well, that’s a whole other story. Anyway, on the way there, we stopped at this doughnut place? I sat there in the backseat of that cab and ate eight or nine lemon-filled doughnuts in a row. Crying all the way, but still eating them. That’s how bad I was.”

  He looked at me, a quick, scared glimpse. “Stop it!” he said. I couldn’t stop. I felt wonderful—as free as Ma’s flying leg.

  “You see, Dante, people don’t fall so neatly into the categories you put them in—heroes and villains, unfettered and—what?—fettered? In some ways, Dante, you’re the one who’s uncomplicated.”

  “Look, if this is some sort of sick joke you’re—”

  “My roommate at college was Kippy Strednicki.”

  “What?”

  “Kippy. Your old girlfriend from high school. I used to steal the letters you sent her, then lock myself in the bathroom and read them.”

  He sat there, staring and blinking, dumb-faced as Gomer Pyle.

  “That was when you were going to be a Lutheran minister. Remember? I was so surprised that first night we met in the driveway at Mrs. Wing’s. Well, not surprised we met; I planned out that whole part. I mean I was surprised when you said you didn’t believe in God anymore. You seemed so religious in those letters—the way you used to torture over whether or not you and Kippy should do it before you got married. Excuse me, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to smile. But do you see what I mean? About Sheila? People don’t know anything when they’re seventeen or eighteen years old. Back then you thought God was in heaven getting ready to hurl a thunderbolt at you if you and Kippy had sex. It’s funny, in a way, isn’t it? Funny peculiar, I mean. How you were so uptight and moral back then—the boy who promised his mother he wouldn’t be a womanizer. Remember that? You just shouldn’t make promises you don’t intend to keep, Dante. Love, honor, and cherish. Ha!”

  He wouldn’t stop blinking up at the ceiling. “We’ve been married almost four years and in all that time . . . ? You knew Kippy?”

  “Remember the time you sent her those Polaroid pictures you took of yourself, naked? On your bed in your dorm room out there in Minnesota?”

  He curled his fist around his uneaten order of french fries and squeezed. His face turned a kind of purple color. “What . . . what was she doing? Passing them around so everyone could have a good laugh?”

  “It wasn’t like that. She never even got them. I didn’t think she deserved you, so I kept them from her. Thought I was protecting you.”

  I looked around us. The restaurant was starting to fill up.

  “I used to steal your letters before she got back from her twelve o’clock class. See, they put the mail out at lunchtime and I always got it first because I never went to my classes. I only lasted one semester. Well, less than that. The funny thing was, whenever I looked at those pictures—all the time I was at the hospital and everything—all I could ever see was this poor, sensitive, vulnerable boy. That’s who I thought I was marrying down at the Lobster Pot—someone vulnerable like me. That’s who I kept waiting for to show up. I just had this incredible blind spot. I was like Helen Keller when it came to you.”

  He slammed his uneaten food into the bag and twisted the neck. “Shut the fuck up,” he said. “Don’t say one more fucking word.”

  “It wasn’t until last night that I put the whole thing together. That foolish whatever-it-is, that epic thing you’re writing—that’s what finally helped me figure it out. Freed me, like you put it.”

  “Freed you to do what? Crack up in the middle of Burger King?”

  “To see what I should have seen before. I kept waiting for you to turn back into the person you were in your letters and in those pictures. I guess you were right—I was pretty stupid, at least in that way. I mean, letting all those high school girls stroke your ego and calling it teaching. Wanting us to move to Rhode Island so you could stay in the house all day and jerk off in front of my grandmother’s holy statues. Even way back then. Even posing yourself for those Polaroid pictures. It’s all just been masturbating, hasn’t it, Dante?”

  “I can’t believe . . . those pictures . . . You violated me!”

  “Oh, I know I did. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I’m proud I stole your letters. I’ve always felt awful about doing that. See, that’s what you don’t get about Sheila: how you violated her with your ‘pleasant muscle spasm’ business. I mean, what it amounted to was you just jerking off into her. And me, too. Which is why you didn’t even want to consider having a baby. Right? You’re like that guy in the myth—the one who fell in love with his own reflection? What’s his name, Dante? You know all that kind of stuff. But anyway, this is what it feels like to get violated. What you’re feeling now. It’s awful, isn’t it? I mean, it makes you feel so powerless.”

  For a second I thought he was going to hit me. But I couldn’t stop. I’d propelled myself in some way that felt both scary and right.

  “Those pictures of you are back at our apartment in a shoe box marked ‘Important Papers’ or something. In the bedroom closet, top shelf. You can have them back now if you want. I’m through with them. Oh, but I do want something else in there. A painting. Well, part of a painting, actually. This little zigzaggy square of canvas. It’s something my mother—”

  His fist sent our food and packaging flying. “Why are you fucking with my head like this?” he shouted. The couple next to us looked over, openmouthed.

  “I’m not fucking with your head,” I said. “I’ve been doing it all these years, but now I’m not anymore. You see, I thought keeping secrets was the only way I could get you. Keep you. All these years, I kept wanting to tell you the truth. It just wouldn’t come out. It was just like Dr. Shaw warned me. He was my shrink at Gracewood. He told me when I quit that I still had issues left to—”

  “You cunt!” he screamed.

  “Hey,” someone yelled over. “You want to watch your language?”

  “You want your jaw wired?” Dante shot back.

  The manager scurried over to our booth, a paunchy man with wide sideburns and a paper hat. In my nervousness, he struck me funny. “Hi, folks,” he said.

  I smiled. “Hello.”

  “Anything I can help you with here? Anything I can get you?”

  Dante turned to him. “Yeah, you can get out of my way, ass-wipe.” He stood up and shoved the manager back against a booth.

  Out in the parki
ng lot, he opened and slammed the car door shut five or six times, then got in and sped away. We all watched him through the plate glass.

  I helped the manager back onto his feet, straightened his hat for him. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “you can get me something.”

  “What’s that, ma’am?”

  “A ride to Rhode Island?”

  26

  Our lawyers handled the division of property in a single long-distance phone call. “Yup,” I kept saying. “Whatever.” Dante got the Vega, the La-Z-Boy, our air conditioner, and the TV; I got a shipping carton addressed in Dante’s handwriting to “Dolores Davis, Certified Lunatic.” Inside were my wadded-up clothes, Ma and Daddy’s candlestick holder, my Grand Union Employee of the Month plaque, and that box marked “Insurance Papers.” He’d taken his Polaroids out but sent back the swatch of Ma’s painting: green wingtip against blue sky. I got that back. That was home.

  He’d put all my shoes in a plastic garbage bag, mistakenly including a pair of his own: brown wingtips coated with dust. With fanfare and satisfaction, I chucked them in the trash. Then, early next morning, listening to the rumble of the garbage truck on the other end of Pierce Street, I panicked and got out of bed—retrieved Dante’s shoes from the can, in my bare feet.

  Roberta said divorcing Dante was the right thing to do—that life was too short—but that I was stupid not to have held out for the Vega.

  “That car was just a piece of junk,” I said. “There were rust holes you could put your hand through. The engine sounded like it had emphysema.”

  “That ain’t the point,” she said, rapping the legs of her walker against the kitchen floor. “The point is wheels. It moved, didn’t it?”

  She hated the thought of the Parkinson’s disease grounding her and fought against it. She’d probably made the owner of Easterly Taxi a millionaire in the two years since the disease had gotten bad, she joked. She told me I needed to get out more, too. “Engage outwardly,” Dr. Shaw was always telling me. Sometimes Roberta’s and Dr. Shaw’s advice were remarkably similar.

  That first Friday night I got back to Easterly, Roberta and I took a cab to China Paradise for supper to celebrate my independence—she and I in the backseat and her aluminum walker riding up front with the driver. “Here you go, Teddy, you goddamned robber,” she laughed as she handed up her money. “Listen to my show on Sunday and I’ll dedicatecha a polka. Now get my boyfriend out of the front seat for me, will ya?”

  After we ate, we crossed the street to a Mel Brooks film festival at the Wayfarer Movie Cafe. Roberta had never heard of Mel Brooks before, but her big laugh was full-out and contagious; between her and Mel Brooks, the whole room was whooping it up. Here I am, I thought, sitting in the dark with strangers, laughing out loud at cowboys farting around a campfire. My whole life has flopped and I can still do this. Roberta’s eyeglasses and walker glinted in the movie-screen light. I reached over and touched her arm.

  In those days after I moved back, I raked and bagged leaves, washed storm windows, shampooed rugs, took five-mile afternoon walks. I had the remains of Ma’s painting framed at a fancy art shop for $45 and hung it on the stairway wall where my and Dante’s wedding picture had been. A nice place: in late afternoon, the sun coming through the front door window cast a ray, a kind of spotlight, right on it.

  In November, I got a part-time job at Buchbinder’s Gift and Novelty Shop. Mr. and Mrs. Buchbinder were Holocaust survivors, a scowling, gray-haired couple with thick accents that required me to make them repeat whatever they’d just asked. All day long, they heckled-and-jeckled each other and pointed out nitpicky little places I’d missed while dusting. That was my job: dusting and watching out for shoplifters and “stupit-heads” that might break something. They’d hired me for the holiday season, the day after Ronald Reagan was elected president.

  “Did you vote for the peanut man or the ecduh?” Mr. Buchbinder asked me during my job interview.

  “I’m sorry? The what?”

  “The ecduh. The ecduh: thet schmuck from Hollywood.”

  “Oh. Well, actually, I didn’t get a chance to vote.”

  “Smut thinkin’, ” he said. “You’re hired.”

  Joe Wisniewski over at the Pulaski Hall says to remindjas there’s a meetin’ this Tuesday night at seven. They’re electin’ officers, so getcha dupkas over there, fellas, if you know what’s good for ya. Now here’s Walt Skiba and the Vice Versa Band with “Perk-Up Polka.”

  During the week, Roberta wore her jogging suit, but she liked to dress up for our Friday-night China Paradise-and-a-movie outings. “Deck out” she called it. She wore a shiny rayon pantsuit and made her face up with orangy lipstick and iridescent eye shadow. Her twitching hand sometimes gave her a crooked, clownish line or a lavender-dusted eyebrow. I was forever wanting to reach over my vegetarian lo mein and straighten that awful wig.

  It never occurred to Roberta to lower her voice in public or to check that she’d buttoned her blouse buttons correctly. “They probably recognize my voice,” she’d tell me whenever I made note that people were staring. “Must be polka fans.”

  Roberta rejected most of my attempts to be her nurse. No, she wouldn’t give up smoking, no matter what the doctor or I said. No, she wouldn’t let me cook her meals for her; the migraines and dizzy spells had nothing to do with her forgetting to eat once in a while. The only reason she let me do her laundry was because she had a hard time getting quarters into the slots down at the laundromat. She blamed the slots, not her shaking hands. I told her I’d be glad to walk over and help with her bath and makeup. She said she’d appreciate it if she was an invalid, which she wasn’t.

  I did manage to convince her to buy some curtains and let me strip the black paint off her front window. Sometimes she’d wave to me from across the street while we talked to each other on the phone. This was the signal I devised: one ring if it was an emergency, two rings if she wanted company. She was forever mixing up the two, causing me to barrel over there, breathless, taking her by surprise. “Loosen up,” she’d say, sitting in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Life’s too short.”

  * * *

  The Buchbinders nagged me to smile more at customers and to watch more closely the ones with big coat pockets; they were reluctant to teach me the register. It was my energy level that won them over. When I wasn’t up front vacuuming or dusting the merchandise, I was out in back assembling gift boxes or consolidating the stock. At the end of January inventory, Mr. Buchbinder finally smiled. He told me I could have a 15 percent discount on anything in the store. I was the first girl, he said, who’d gone three months without breaking anything.

  That was Walt Wojciechowski and his Accordiotones with “Who Stole the Kishka?” Now, Eddie Woodka down at the newsstand says he wants me to say hello to him over the air, so hiya, Eddie. How they hangin’?

  One Sunday morning while I was folding Roberta’s laundry and listening to her program, a record ended and there was silence. I waited, frozen, her warm bedsheets in my hands. A bunch of public-service announcements. The same polka she’d played before. The same recorded announcements again.

  Then she was back on. “You miss me, folks?” she asked her listeners. “I had to go in the back room and stir the golumpkes.” But the cheeriness in her voice was fake; behind it I heard fear.

  It took her until midweek to finally admit to me what had happened: she’d gotten dizzy and passed out while her engineer was downstairs in the foyer talking to his girlfriend. She’d come to in a heap on the floor with the chair flipped over onto her.

  A fat medical manual in the library suggested fresh fruits and vegetables, supplements of B vitamins. She ate them like a cranky child. I began riding the cab with her to the station—pressing the controls and switches she pointed at with her jumping finger, sometimes guessing wrong. She insisted she could still do it all herself—that she was just letting me come along because she thought I should get out and have some fun instead of staying home with the laundry.
I drew the line at working her cigarette lighter and looked away while she fumbled and swore, trying to bring the spark to life as happy accordion music turned on reel-to-reel tape behind her.

  Next half hour’s brought to you by Dropo’s Funeral Home. They’re real nice people, the Dropos. They take their work serious. Next song goes out to Pete and Bunny Biziewski, honeymoonin’ forty-three years tomorrow—ooh, Pete, your achin’ kielbasa!

  In February of 1982, the Rhode Island probate court declared me the official owner of Grandma’s house, and the following month, the State of Vermont sent me a registered letter saying they would dissolve my marriage if I signed the enclosed papers. Dante’s smooth signature was already all over them.

  Roberta and I went that night to China Paradise to celebrate my freedom, but halfway through my Island Passion drink, I turned gloomy. “Dissolve,” I mumbled. “Throw four years of your life in a glass of water and watch it fizz away like Alka-Seltzer.”

  Roberta was picking something out of her teeth; she brushed away my remark with a flap of her wrist. “I say good riddance to that stick-in-the-mud. Life’s too short. What are you going to do with the money?”

  Between the settlement check and Grandma’s savings account, I had gotten $3,100. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking of getting one of those VCR things. Or maybe one of those big-screen TVs. I shouldn’t have let him have my old black-and-white set. I got that for a present before I even knew Dante.”

  “You’re a dumb bunny if you waste your bundle on that kind of junk. What you need is a car. Wheels.”

  “I should just call up his parents’ house and have them tell him I want that television back,” I said. I couldn’t really tell which percentage of me wanted the TV back and which just wanted to see him again, to hear his voice. Sometimes, half-asleep in bed, I still reached over for him. I wondered if I hadn’t made up some of that selfishness of his. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d lied to myself. To say nothing of all the lies I’d told him.