She's Come Undone (57 page)

*   *   *

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 that 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.”

“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.

I
n 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.”