She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “Yeah, I bet. Lawyer shoes. They’re in the kitchen. I’ll get them.”

  “No,” he said. “Stay and watch your program. I’ll get them.”

  “They’re on the floor in the closet. Way in back, I think.”

  It wasn’t until he was out there that I remembered the moldy pancakes, the goldfish in the sink, the stacks of unwashed dishes that sat balanced all over the counter and kitchen chairs. I closed my eyes tight to clamp off the tears.

  Upstairs the toilet flushed and then I heard her footsteps. “Oh, wow,” she said. “3-D?” I handed her a pair of glasses.

  There was some clatter in the kitchen. A commercial came on. “Watch out for Dante,” I said. “He bites.”

  She looked over at me, her reaction concealed behind the red cellophane lenses.

  Dante came back out, each hand curled inside a shoe. His face looked pale. “Come on, babe,” he said to her. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait a sec. I just want to see if the sharks get this chick.”

  “I said let’s get going.”

  She took off the glasses. “Okay,” she shrugged. “No biggie.”

  As she was getting in the car, Dante turned unexpectedly and walked back up the porch steps. ‘This whole house smells of body odor and dead fish,” he said. “Wash those dishes in there! Get yourself under control!”

  “Mind your own business,” I shouted. “Fuck off!”

  I watched him drive away in their apple-green Le Car—hers, I figured. Across the street, Roberta was at the window, watching, too.

  He’d wrapped my TV in an air-pillow bunting. I sat back down, absentmindedly popping the tiny balloons with my fingernail and watching the Gill Woman ooze blood from where they’d torn her.

  I looked up “innuendo” in the dictionary. “A hint or insinuation, usually derogatory,” it said. I thought his “dead fish” remark was some kind of sarcastic comment about The Gill Woman. But when I went out into the kitchen, I saw what he’d really meant. William and Kathleen were floating at the top of the sink, dead from their own muck.

  * * *

  Roberta had lost weight. There was a pink scar on her forehead and dried egg yolk on the collar of her sweatshirt jacket.

  “Don’t stare at me like that! I’m not crazy!” I shouted.

  “Of course you’re not. But we’ll both be crazy unless you get us the hell out of here! Now can I come inside before January gets here and my ass freezes and falls off?”

  I started with the pancakes and cleaned all night, scouring, scraping, vacuuming, bathing. “I’m so sorry,” I told the fish when I finally got the courage to flush them down the toilet. “Honest to God, this is all my fault.” In the morning, I snuck behind the superette with my black-and-white portable and threw it in their dumpster. Then I called the satellite-dish company. They balked at a full refund, but I shouted them up to 75 percent.

  * * *

  The car we bought—a gas-guzzling ’67 Biscayne—had a steering wheel that shimmied wildly at speeds over thirty-five and an oil leak that tattooed the road wherever you parked. But it had, as well, a tape player and a trunk big enough to hold Roberta’s collapsible wheelchair. “This Car’s Climbed Pike’s Peak!” a peeling bumper sticker claimed.

  I found the unlabeled tapes one afternoon while searching for the seat-adjustment lever. The three of them, eight-tracks, were stuffed underneath the driver’s seat amidst the beer bottles and rolling papers and fast-food Styrofoam, stacked in an odd-shaped gray box that said “Keep in a cool, dry place.” I had saved the classified ad, but when I called to ask the former owner if he meant to give me the tapes, too, all I got was that recorded operator—the one who tells you in her chilly voice that the person you wanted has disconnected and gotten away.

  I shoved one of the tapes in later that week, during one of Roberta’s and my morning drives. I’d expected country music—the man who’d sold me the car had worn cowboy boots. But I knew immediately what they were. Nor was I surprised. They had followed me all my life.

  “Whales,” I said.

  Roberta lit a cigarette. “Humpbacks,” she nodded. “Heard ’em in person once. The Canuck beat the shit out of me, then took me on a ferry trip to Nova Scotia to say he was sorry.” She chuckled softly. “Went on that trip with two black eyes,” she said. “Looked just like a raccoon.”

  We drove until I’d played each tape through twice, until our heads were filled with the laments of humpbacks. “Whataya suppose they’re doin’, Dolores?” Roberta asked. “Singin’ or cryin’?”

  She moved into the house the next day.

  It wasn’t until November of the following year—she’d had a good couple of months—that we attempted the trip up. We hadn’t planned it; we’d just kept driving one sunny morning until Route One turned into Interstate 95, and then there was the “Welcome to Maine” sign. We got to Canada—Campobello Island—by mid-afternoon.

  “Them humpbacks?” an old man at the dock said. “Nope. They head due south come September, early October. Missed ’em by a couple of months.”

  The drive back was long and hard. Our plans had been so spontaneous that we hadn’t thought about Roberta’s medication until halfway up there.

  “We just got too ambitious, that’s all,” I said. “You’re all right. We can still have adventures—as long as we pace ourselves.”

  But Roberta was snoring by then. I was talking to the rearview mirror.

  27

  In September of 1984, the roof fell in.

  By then I was back at Buchbinder’s as assistant manager, selling Cabbage Patch dolls and porcelain Michael Jackson figurines as fast as we could stock them. It was my idea to have the store wired for a stereo system and turn us into a Ticketron outlet. Mr. Buchbinder shrugged and put up with the thumping beat. Customers were clogging the aisles. “Smut girl,” he shouted over the music one afternoon, squeezing my arm. “You belonk in cullege.”

  The roof fell in figuratively, not literally. Literally, it was the ceiling that gave way. My English 101 teacher down at Ocean Point Community College was the one who finally taught me the difference between “literal” and “figurative”—a simple concept, once you were ready for someone’s explanation. English 101 was the first class I took. Though I kept pushing Mr. Buchbinder’s tuition money back at him, it kept showing up in my coat pocket at the end of the work day.

  He seemed to want my college education as badly as Ma had.

  * * *

  “Well, how was it?” Roberta asked me after my first night class.

  “I’m quitting. That’s how it was.”

  She took the nail polish from the drawer and sat down in the chair next to me. I shook the bottle and uncapped it. “Why?”

  “Hot pink, hot pink,” I said. “I’m sick of this color.”

  “Why you quittin’ after one night?”

  “Because I hate it. I’m not cut out for it. First we had to sit around in a circle and tell people about ourselves.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Jerky stuff. Like where we’d like to travel and why we were taking the class—what we hoped to get out of it. I was the last one he called on and by that time my whole throat was paralyzed.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Roberta said. She was looking at her toes, flexing them. “Next time I’ll get red. Paint ’em up like a hooker.”

  “. . . So I started to tell them about our trip up to Canada and how we always mean to get back there and never do. But then I stopped halfway through. Everyone was looking at me funny.”

  “First-night jitters,” Roberta said.

  I put her foot in my lap and dipped the toenail brush. It always amazed me: the way she could let me touch her feet without screaming, the way anyone could.

  “The teacher wants us to call him by his first name—as if he’s our friend instead of someone who could flunk us.”

  “You know what I would’ve said if I was there? I would’ve told ’em, ‘You name the place and I’
ll go there.’”

  I sucked my teeth. “There’s this punk-rock woman in the class with her head shaved up the back. Six or seven months pregnant, minimum. And this guy who’s so huge, he couldn’t even fit in the desks. He sat on the floor during the whole class. All I could think of was when I was so fat in high school. It was depressing.”

  “You’re going to let one fat guy chase you away?”

  “He wasn’t fat. Huge like a giant, I mean. I bet he’s almost seven feet tall. The punk-rock woman said she’s taking the class because she wants to write this science-fiction screenplay where astronauts get lost in space and by the time they get back, there’s been a nuclear war. And everyone’s primitive again and worshiping statues of Boy George . . . People are killing each other for meat and Boy George is god.”

  Roberta threw her head back and laughed.

  “I haven’t done homework in over fifteen years and this woman’s writing a screenplay. She paints her toenails black.”

  “Black?” Roberta said. She looked down at her own feet, considering.

  “Takes her shoes off during class, puts her feet all over the furniture. Had this bumper sticker stuck to the back of her jean jacket. ‘Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?’ Whatever that means.”

  Roberta’s laugh turned into a cough. The brush wobbled. I put her foot back down on the floor and got her a glass of water.

  “The stupid textbook cost me twenty-four ninety-five. If I keep taking courses at this rate, I’ll be forty-two before I even graduate.”

  “How old will you be by then if you don’t graduate?”

  “Easy for you to sit there and make jokes,” I snapped. “You didn’t have to sit for an hour and fifteen minutes having to go to the bathroom. We have this essay due next week. ‘Write about an everyday task you perform and your emotional attachment to that task.’ What am I supposed to do—put down how wonderful it feels to make toast for breakfast? What a bang I get out of painting your toenails pink?”

  Roberta didn’t say anything. I could feel, rather than see, her smile. I lifted her foot off my lap and started up the stairs.

  “Hey, I got three painted toenails and seven regular ones.”

  “Yeah, well, life’s a shit sandwich,” I said. “Deal with it.”

  The ceiling fell that night. Well, the next morning, actually—somewhere around three A.M. It sounded like guns at first. Caught in that place between dreams and waking, I thought, Oh my God! Someone’s downstairs shooting Roberta! Then there was dust up my nose, more gunshot blasts, her voice yelling up the stairwell.

  “Get me the hell out of here before I get clobbered!”

  I put the stairway light on just in time to see another plaster chunk let go. It smashed on the floor near the bed, scattering in a thousand directions. I ducked-and-covered and ran in to get her up off the bed. Another slab fell. I felt like a soldier at war.

  There were six home-repair companies listed in the phone book. From the hallway phone, I pleaded my case to wives and answering machines. Whenever they put me on hold, I eyed the exposed wooden slats where the plaster had let go, a kind of ceiling skeleton.

  Mike of Mike’s Home Repair gave free estimates. “Nine hundred fifty dollars,” he said.

  Roberta banged her walker against the floor. “Jesus H. Christ! Why don’t you just shove a gun in her ribs?”

  “Okay, eight seventy-five, but no finish work. Take it or leave it.”

  “Leave it!” Roberta shouted, at the exact second I mumbled, “Take it.” She was the one he heard.

  The guy from Superior Homes wanted $1,050. He told me he’d noticed on the way in that I needed a new roof, too—that if roofs had alarm systems, mine would be ringing.

  “A new roof? How much would that cost?”

  “El dinero grande.”

  “How much in American money?” I said.

  “Big bucks. I got this cousin who—”

  “Aw, get outa here,” Roberta shouted.

  Later that afternoon, she supervised while I stood on the top rung of the swaying stepladder and pulled out the sagging plaster chunks that threatened to fall next. We decided we’d live awhile with the holes.

  * * *

  It was Roberta’s idea to approach Johnny Wu, the owner of China Paradise, about part-time jobs.

  I sat across from her at the restaurant, stirring my vegetarian egg-drop soup and rolling my eyes. “Look,” I said. “I already have a job and go to night school. I don’t have the time.”

  “You can make the time,” she said. “What you can’t make is enough money for a new ceiling.” When Johnny passed by our table, she grabbed him by the tail of his tropical shirt. For someone with Parkinson’s disease, she could manage a pretty quick snatch.

  “You Chinese guys are smart cookies,” she told him. “What’s your slowest night of the week here?”

  “Monday,” Johnny said. “Why?”

  “Because my brain’s working overtime, that’s why. Have a seat.” Her idea was for Johnny to declare every Monday “Polish Night,” hiring her as the master of ceremonies and me as the disc jockey. “You could give Polacks a ten-percent discount—check their driver’s license if you didn’t believe them. Half this town would turn out—especially if they heard I was here. Believe you me, we could throw a party!”

  Johnny kept smiling and shaking his head no. “This Chinese restaurant. Would ruin the . . .”

  “. . . the ambience,” I said. My teacher had used the word in class that week; I’d looked it up.

  “Okay then,” Roberta said, “how about this? Her and me running a weekend delivery service for you.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean people call in an order and we drive it out to them.”

  “Roberta—” I said.

  It was like I wasn’t at the table. “See, I’m a people-watcher, Johnny Boy. And every week I come in here and watch the same thing. People out there by the register, rushing in for their takeout in their sloppy clothes, afraid they’re going to see someone they know. Or if their food ain’t ready yet, they sit in them squashy little chairs by the coatrack, trying not to touch knees with the person sitting next to them. Home delivery. You’re throwing away a gold mine. Ain’t he, Dolores?”

  Without waiting for my answer, Johnny reached in back of him and drew up a vacant chair. “Keep going,” he said.

  * * *

  We worked Friday and Saturday nights till eleven, Sundays till six. Johnny got us a desk and a separate phone line and paid for the auto-body people to yank out the Biscayne’s backseat and install a warming box. We paid for the CB radio ourselves; it helped us save on gas. Roberta said dispatching made her feel like she was back in show business. For her CB handle, she resurrected her old radio name.

  “Polka Princess to Sweet’n’Sour. Got your ears on? Over.”

  The jargon embarrassed me but she wouldn’t answer if I just said, “What do you want, Roberta?” and I couldn’t afford stubbornness. The Biscayne was getting nine miles to the gallon.

  “Ten-four, Princess. What gives? Over.”

  “If y’ain’t been out to Hillcrest yet, come back to Paradise for a pupu and an Eight Immortals Crossin’ the Sea. Over.”

  “I hear you, Princess. Over.”

  * * *

  “Now we can certainly understand the step-by-step process of your storm-window-washing system,” Roy told one of my classmates. By about the third class, it got easier to call him by his first name. He was sitting Indian-style on top of his desk, reading excerpts from some of the class’s “problem” papers. “You see, the exposition is clear. But as yet, there’s no emotional quality invested in this piece. There’s no feeling there—none that I can detect, at any rate.”

  The student handbook mentioned partial refunds for early withdrawals; I decided I’d quit as soon as we got to our eight forty-five break, hopefully before he got to my paper. But when the others got up and headed for the snack bar, the punk-rock woman—Allyson, her
name was—said, “Hey, feel this.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Quick. You’ll miss it.” She lifted up her sweatshirt and put my hand on her belly. Something bulged out, poking me.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “First three months she had me puking my guts out. Now she’s into gymnastics.”

  “She?”

  “Yeah, I’m ninety-nine percent positive. I’m naming her Isis. Like it?”

  “Isis? Yeah, it’s pretty.”

  “My boyfriend’s in a band. Wants to name her Cacophony, but I said uh-uh. ‘I’ll name the ones I carry, and you name the ones you carry,’ I told him.” A bump moved across her big belly—a foot, clearly.

  After break, Roy read aloud what he said were the two best papers in the class. The first one was mine. I’d written about painting Roberta’s toenails after all—about how holding down those foot tremors in my hand as I worked gave me some sort of power over her disease. In Roy’s voice, the idea didn’t sound quite so stupid. The other paper belonged to the huge guy who sat on the floor during class. “My whole life used to throb like a toothache.” That was the first sentence. It told about how he cured middle-of-the-night insomnia by tiptoeing into his son’s room and watching him sleep—how he regulated his own breathing to his son’s, how the son would kill him if he knew.

  “Let’s have a hand for Dolores and Thayer,” Roy suggested. The applause rattled my heart. I couldn’t look up, so I looked over at Thayer.

  He was hard to figure, sitting back there in his own outskirts, those sequoia legs bent up at the knee. I snuck peeks for the rest of that class and the next one, gradually noticing things about him other than his size. His hair, for instance: a mopful of blond curls so tight you could stack coins in them. His beard was reddish brown. Going in and out of the classroom, he had to duck to miss whacking his head. His step had a bounce; those curls rose and fell as he walked.

  “Thayer?” I said.

  We were in the corridor on our way out to the parking lot. Hearing his name spoken seemed to alarm him. “I just wanted to say I really liked your paper. The one Roy read last time.”

  “Sounded pretty ridiculous next to yours,” he said. But his face made me glad I’d risked the compliment.