She's Come Undone (56 page)

 

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.

“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 Windows 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.