She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “What you should do is start car shoppin’, ” Roberta said.

  I sipped the last of the drink just as my second one arrived at the table. “Why? So I can spend the rest of my life being your chauffeur?”

  The Wayfarer was showing Body Heat that night. Woozy from rum, I sat sulking in the dark, watching William Hurt and Kathleen Turner enjoy all that sweaty sex. He’d been so good with me in bed at the beginning, so interested in what pleased me. I looked around at the silhouettes of other movie watchers, wondering how many of them had made love that week, how many of them would go home that night and make some more of it. Roberta slumped toward my shoulder, snoring, her mouth wide open.

  Dante’s father sounded groggy on the phone when I called that night. He said they hadn’t heard from Dante in a month or so—not since he started law school—but that he’d give him my message about the TV.

  I held off making a decision about the $3,100 and got a second part-time job instead, weekend mornings at Gutwax’s Bakery. The busier, the better, I reasoned.

  “What’s good today?” people would ask me.

  “Everything!” I’d answer, and mean it. Sometimes customers would time it just right, buy up muffins and doughnuts and breads that were still warm. “Ahh,” they’d sigh, feeling the warmth, the freshness, right through their bags.

  Mrs. Gutwax loved her baked goods, her customers, her son Ronnie, and me. She told me she swung her feet out of bed and onto the floor each morning at 3:00 A.M. in the belief that the whole world would work right if people just tried being an inch and a half nicer to each other. She had loved her husband until the day he died, she told me, and she still loved him, nine years later. What she wanted more than anything in the whole wide world—what she prayed for every night—was that her Ronnie would find a good wife that loved him and took good care of him. Sometimes in her dreams, she said, she played with future grandchildren.

  The second weekend I worked there, I suggested she brush our flaky crescent rolls with egg yolk and call them croissants instead. We sold out by mid-morning. “You’re a genius!” Mrs. Gutwax said. “I’ll have to just see that you don’t get away.”

  “I don’t believe in marriage, Mrs. Gutwax, if that’s what that means.” You could be as blunt as you wanted with Mrs. Gutwax and know she’d keep loving you anyway.

  “Sure you believe in it,” she told me.

  “No, I don’t. I was married almost four years. It was a big disaster.”

  “He just wasn’t the right one.”

  Ronnie Gutwax baked for his mother. He didn’t talk much but went around the back room smiling at everything he made, moving with a kind of plodding consistency that I began to regard as slow-motion choreography.

  Whenever he caught me watching, we both blushed. At thirty-three, he was flabby and three-quarters bald. His main passion was the Boston Red Sox, his most prized possessions the thick scrapbooks on the team he’d kept since his childhood when his father took him regularly to Fenway Park. “He’s not retarded,” Mrs. Gutwax whispered one afternoon while Ronnie was out in back at the dumpster. “He’s just a little slow. But he’s sweet as sugar, Dolores, as sweet as his father was. Sweeter.”

  * * *

  I made my decision: a big-screen TV and one of those satellite dishes that pulled in hundreds of stations. I arranged to have it installed on the weekend Roberta was scheduled for tests at the hospital in Providence. It took three men a whole morning to get it bolted to Grandma’s roof and rotating. Drivers and pedestrians on Pierce Street kept stopping to stare.

  I was lying back on the water bed, watching “The Dukes of Hazzard”—Beau and Luke Duke as big as a drive-in movie!—when the phone rang. Twice. Roberta’s signal she wanted to talk. Or, lecture, more likely. I ignored it. It rang twice again. I’m sick of that mobility speech of hers, I told myself. I had a perfect right to spend my divorce money any way I saw fit. Who had suffered through a life with Dante: her or me?

  The phone rang once.

  I turned down the volume and waited. If it was a real emergency, she’d call back. Out front, the walker thumped against the porch floor.

  “What the hell is that astronaut thing on the roof?” she said.

  “Just watch this,” I said, aiming the remote control at the screen. I flashed past “Hollywood Squares,” otters swimming in a nature show, “Hawaii Five-O” in Spanish. The screen took up half of one wall.

  “How much did you waste on this junk?” Roberta said.

  “Look! ‘The Patty Duke Show’! I haven’t seen this since high school. They’re identical cousins, see. One’s an egghead and the other—”

  “Get this thing out of here! Get yourself that car!” Her whole face was contorted. Spit flew from her mouth as she yelled.

  “Shut up,” I said. “Just get out of my house! Just leave me alone!”

  She fell from the very top porch step. Her face was skinned and bleeding, her skinny legs splayed both on and off the stairs beneath her. She lost consciousness just before the ambulance got there.

  * * *

  The Buchbinders huddled shoulder to shoulder and asked me if anything was wrong. “Not a thing,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because this whole store hez dust,” Mr. Buchbinder said. “Because the rug needs vicuuming.”

  “And she’s pale,” Mrs. Buchbinder reminded him. “Don’t forget about the pale part.”

  I’d stayed up half the night before, watching my big TV and thinking endlessly about Roberta’s fall—how I might just as well have placed my hands on her back and shoved. How, if she had died, it would have been me who’d killed her. In the sixteen days she’d been in the hospital, I’d sent her two twenty-dollar bouquets but hadn’t gotten up the guts to visit her. As the Buchbinders stood there waiting for their explanation, a lie about terminal illness—a brain tumor growing inside my head—created itself. But I chased it away again. The Buchbinders were worriers; I was pretty sure they loved me whether I did the vacuuming or not. “Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Really.”

  All that afternoon, I dusted begrudgingly, haphazardly. Whenever customers walked to the counter, I ignored them—made them wait for Mr. or Mrs. Buchbinder to take their money and bag their crap. Life was such a pointless joke. The Buchbinders had survived a death camp only to end up in this claustrophobic little hole-in-the-wall, selling rubber vomit and stuffed Smurfs and “Fuck the Ayatollah” license plates. No wonder I felt like quitting. What was the point?

  Just before closing time, I backed into a display of “Who Shot J.R.” commemorative plates, sending them clattering and smashing to the floor with a sound as ugly as Roberta’s fall.

  “Thet’s it, Dolores!” Mr. Buchbinder shouted. “I’m fid up.”

  “So am I!” I yelled back. “You two are the sorriest people I know!”

  “You’re fired! You don’t work here. I don’t even know your face.”

  “Nice way to treat a person who’s got a brain tumor!” I screamed.

  * * *

  I celebrated my freedom from the Buchbinders by buying a microwave oven and two goldfish, whom I named William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. I visited them in short bursts whenever I rushed away from the big-screen TV to microwave myself a snack. I noticed this coincidence: that if I spread my palm a half-inch or so from either the TV screen or the microwave, I could feel a low-grade static. I wondered vaguely if radiation molecules weren’t bouncing off at me, if I wasn’t poisoning myself slowly with all that television and speed-cooked food. I’d bought the goldfish impulsively, remembering a container of food flakes but not a bowl. They lived in Grandma’s kitchen sink, swimming contentedly enough so that, for a while, I half convinced myself I could love something without damaging it. Except I didn’t love them. I loved Roberta. Worried about her. Wondered if she hated me now. Her radio station replaced her with some oldies-but-goodies disc jockey canned out in Hollywood. I hadn’t seen her in over a month; the hospital told me she’d been transferred to the Sunny W
indows Convalescent Home.

  “Sure I’d like you to work full-time!” Mrs. Gutwax said, hugging me. “That makes you more like one of the family.” I let her misread whatever she wanted to, look out whatever sunny window she pleased.

  All the next week Mrs. Gutwax—Bea, she wanted me to start calling her—hummed and smiled and invented a million errands that required her to put on her coat and leave me and her sweet son alone together.

  One afternoon Ronnie stopped working and walked over to me while I was frosting an anniversary cake. He smiled his gummy smile and blushed.

  “What?” I said. “What is it, Ronnie?”

  “Who do you like better on the Red Sox? Jim Rice or Dewey Evans?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Who do you like?”

  “Rice,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “My mother says I should kiss you. Can I?”

  I put down the icing knife and looked at him. Nodded. He rested his floury hands against my cheeks and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath as if he were about to take a dive underwater.

  I analyzed the kiss objectively as it was going on—firm and fleshy, neither a pleasant experience nor an unpleasant one.

  He smiled when it was over. I smiled back. “Do you mind if I do it again?” he said.

  “Ronnie,” I said. “I’m in no position to—I don’t have any . . . Well, all right. Go ahead.”

  This time I kissed him back. I wasn’t kissing Ronnie, exactly. I was kissing the smell of cinnamon-raisin bread in the oven, and that warm room with its creaky floorboards, and Mrs. Gutwax’s dreams of grandchildren. Kissing him to show myself I could be tender—loving—no matter how I’d mistreated poor Roberta. Then I was kissing Dante, rubbing Dante’s thigh. The kissing was as much a lie as my brain tumor . . . as much of a lie as my marriage had been. We kissed and kissed until Ronnie got an erection.

  Mrs. Gutwax still hadn’t come back by the end of my shift. I wrote my resignation on an overring slip and left it in the register. I didn’t answer the ringing telephone for three days. Whenever it started up, I lay back on the water bed and aimed my remote control box. “The Twilight Zone.” “Three’s Company.” Johnny Carson. “M*A*S*H.” I absorbed myself in whatever was in front of me.

  * * *

  At the end of the summer I got a letter from a woman I didn’t know, a Jacqueline Price, my father’s third wife. “PLEASE FORWARD” it said on the envelope, addressed to me by way of Grandma. She was writing, she said, because she thought I had a right to know my father had died the week before, after a six-month illness. When he’d gone into the hospital in February for an operation, they’d found so much cancer that they’d closed him right up again. It was his choice not to get ahold of me until after the funeral, she explained. His wish to be cremated, to leave what he had to her children by a previous marriage. “He was a loving man,” she wrote.

  “Battlestar Galactica.” Roller derby. “Joanie Loves Chachi.” “Bewitched.”

  What was scariest of all was the absence of grief—the way all day long his death kept slipping my mind in the midst of the shows I watched. “Can I just let go of him?” I had asked Dr. Shaw one time during therapy. I had let go. And now his death showed me the emptiness of my choice. “He was a loving man,” his third wife wrote. Had she turned him into one? Had he been one all along? Who, exactly, had I missed? Sitting in front of the big TV, I had to close my eyes to picture Daddy, and when I did see him, he was sitting at the edge of our new pool on Bobolink Drive, laughing at something I’d said, some joke we shared. I cried then, and at first I thought that was a good sign: those tears made me human, made me a loving person after all. But that was a lie. The tears weren’t for him; they were for myself—the unsuspecting girl swimming laps and thinking her father would stay forever, would be there as long as she needed him. I turned off the TV and sat in the uncomfortable quiet. “Daddy?” I said.

  * * *

  On “Good Morning America” the next morning, the new Miss America demonstrated how to make sour-cream-and-banana pancakes. I copied down the steps and walked over to the superette for ingredients. They puffed up beautifully, exactly like the TV pancakes. I sat down at the kitchen table, poured syrup, cut my first bite. William and Kathleen swam circles in the sink. I’d let the dishes pile up since they’d arrived. I got up, left the pancakes uneaten, and went back to my TV.

  I kept the television going for the next two weeks, afraid that if I shut it off, it wouldn’t come back on again. I slept on the water bed instead of upstairs—in nervous naps and near comas, startling awake to “As the World Turns,” “That’s Incredible,” “Dr. Who.” My lack of energy fascinated me, I’d sit for hours, trying to convince myself to take a bath or pull up the shades. I felt like those people I’d seen on “Donahue”—the ones who floated above their own bodies in operating rooms, trying to decide whether to stay or go.

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Buchbinder, really . . .” I lied into the receiver, scanning the empty potato-chip bags and soda cans the way she might have. I was down to my last hundred dollars. The goldfish water in the sink began to tint. My banana pancakes still sat on the kitchen table, sprouting whiskers of mold. Real mold, not the kind I’d imagined at Gracewood when I’d lost all my weight. I was gaining again—unbuttoning the top button of my jeans, staying all day in my muumuu. Obesity had been part of my pattern of repression, Dr. Shaw taught me. Except now I was getting fat without repressing a thing. What was I repressing? The fact that I couldn’t even hold a job? That an old woman had depended on me and I’d practically shoved her down the stairs?

  I took the phone off the hook and threw mail away unopened. I began to look at daytime as an invasion of my privacy. The superette closed at 10:00 P.M., so I food-shopped at the convenience store over on River Street. That neon-lit store never failed to surprise me when it emerged like a mirage from the middle-of-the-night darkness. The clerk, a chubby red-haired man, never saw me floating toward him. Lulled, I suppose, by the hum of his various coolers and freezers, he’d startle and fling his dirty magazines beneath the counter each time I entered the store. He stood at attention while I browsed, then rang up my purchases—onion dip, Milky Ways, Ruffles, Pepsi. I watched him count change into a hand I willed not to shake. Though we never spoke, I began to suspect he had a crush on me, that he was courting me in his own shy way, enclosing little gifts in my paper bag—sale leaflets, matches, complimentary contest-entry blanks. One week he started including with my purchases pairs of cardboard glasses with red cellophane lenses. “SEE THE GILL WOMAN IN BLOOD-THIRSTY 3-D” each said along the sidepiece. “WATCH YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS.” In what seemed like no time, I had collected half a dozen pairs. I began to wear them around the house, day and night. I imagined myself glowing radioactively from the inside out. I liked the way the glasses turned my vision infrared.

  Lights came on across the street at Roberta’s. I put the phone back on the hook. Kept my ear cocked for the honking of taxis. None came. She kept the curtains closed—curtains I’d sewn for her, shut, now, against me. I wanted to call her—to offer an apology. Offer help . . . To ask her for help, the way I had that long-ago night when I’d walked across the street barefoot, knocked on her side door, and told her I’d been raped. “The fat girl’s coming back again,” I wanted to tell her now. “I think she may get me.” But I didn’t call. Couldn’t.

  The Gill Woman turned up two Friday nights later on Channel 38 but the 3-D effects were disappointing. The Gill Woman herself, a large-breasted woman in a scaly wet suit and a 1950s hairdo, was part mermaid and part shark. A hurricane had disoriented her. She was being studied by scientists who had captured her but misunderstood her intentions. They kept her chained underwater in a pool and swam down daily to prod her with long poles, then marveled and cringed at what I saw as her perfectly justifiable anger.

  There was a knock on the front door. Roberta.

  I figured I’d let her in if she wanted to come in—I wasn’t tha
t much of a cold fish—but I wasn’t going to listen to one syllable about the way I was running my life. Not one word about TV or mobility.

  Except it wasn’t Roberta. It was Dante.

  With my black-and-white TV. And some woman. A girl, really—someone barely in her twenties. “I tried to call several times,” he said, “but the line was always busy. We were driving through. You wanted this?”

  I stood there, wishing I wasn’t wearing the 3-D glasses or the frayed Disneyland sweatshirt I’d bought on our cross-country trip. My hair was pulled back in an oily ponytail; my legs were hairy. “Well, thanks,” I said, when he put the set down just inside the foyer. “See you.” I started to close the door on them.

  “Janice really has to use the bathroom.”

  His calling her by name somehow gave me permission to look. She had a frizzy triangular hairstyle and reddish-black lipstick. She wore a T-shirt with the word “innuendo” stretched across her junior-high-school breasts and a pair of those stretchy Lycra pants I had seen reborn women, former fatties, modeling on “Richard Simmons” that same morning. “Top of the stairs,” I said.

  Dante looked past me and at the screen. “Holy shit, look at the size of that thing,” he said. He walked inside.

  He was wearing a ragg-wool sweater and matching ragg-wool socks. He seemed to have gotten more handsome.

  “I hear you’re going to law school,” I said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “And I see you got yourself a perm.”

  “Janice did it. She’s a cosmetologist.”

  “How old is she, anyway?”

  He smiled patiently. “I don’t really think that’s a fair question.”

  “Oh, sorry. By the way, you packed a pair of your shoes in one of those boxes you sent me. By mistake. Wingtips.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “I was looking for those. I could use them.”