She's Come Undone (7 page)

“Did he say anything?”

“About what?”

“Never mind.”

Grandma's house had a camphor smell and was cluttered with religious knickknacks. Her whole downstairs had the same ugly pink-flamingo wallpaper. A series of family pictures hung on the stairway wall, one framed photograph for each step. There was one of my mother and her girlfriend Geneva Sweet wearing white dresses and 1940s hairdos, their arms hooked around each other's waists. A high-school graduation picture of Eddie, my mother's younger brother, who'd drowned at age nineteen. Wedding portraits of both my parents and grandparents. You almost had to feel sorry for Grandma in her wedding picture, standing solemnly next to her bridegroom in her shiny gown, unaware of the deaths of her husband, and her son, and her grandson, Anthony Jr.

“Old pictures are fascinating, aren't they?” Ma said, when she caught me studying them.

“Not really.” I shrugged.

I spent the remainder of the visit staring stupidly at the TV, answering
Grandma's questions in single syllables and making faces at her cooking.

On the bus back home, Ma began rambling on about what being a girl had been like for her—how if she could have changed one thing about herself, it would be her shyness. Grandma had meant well, but . . . “So when Tony came along and started calling me on the telephone, showing me all of his attention, well, I just couldn't—”

“Does any of this have a point?” I sighed.

“He was supposed to tell you. That was the purpose of the whole week. Your father wants a divorce. He's leaving us.”

The bus hummed along the interstate. My head felt too numb to think. “That's stupid,” I said, finally. “Why would he put in a brand-new pool if he was leaving?”

She reached over and took my hand.

“Do we have to move?” I asked.

“No. He's moving. Moved.”

“Where?”

“To New Jersey.”

“What about his job? Is Masicotte moving there, too?” “Mrs. Masicotte? She fired him. He's been having a fling with one of her tenants and she caught them. She's furious.”

For five minutes, neither of us spoke. I stared ahead and watched the seat upholstery go blurry from my tears. “It's funny, in a way,” Ma finally said. “She didn't mind him having a wife and daughter. He just couldn't have another girlfriend. . . . Do you have any questions?”

“Who gets to keep the Cadillac?” I said.

“We do. You and me. Isn't that hilarious?”

“Can I still go to Jeanette's slumber party?” I asked.

*   *   *

I spent the week swimming laps, looking up from the water at every little noise. Whenever Jeanette called, I thought it would be Daddy.

On Friday Ma came timidly out to the pool wearing her beach
robe. In her hands she held her equipment: cup of tea, cigarettes, nasal spray. She struggled with the gate, walked up to the water, and dunked her big toe. “Cold,” she said. Then she slipped off her robe and sat down stiffly on a webbed chair.

“It's nice here,” she said. “Come out of the water and talk to me.”

I sat on the pool's edge, dripping and impatient. “I was just about to start my routine,” I said. “What do you want?”

“Oh, nothing. Just your company. Can I ask you a question?”

“What?”

“It's silly, really. I'm just curious. . . . If you didn't know me at all—if you just looked up and there I was, some woman on the street, a stranger—would you think I was pretty or ugly?”

Her bathing suit was the same corny two-piece she'd worn ever since she'd gotten fat: flowered top, white skirt bottom, roll of bluish white flab in the middle. “I don't know,” I said. “Pretty, I guess.”

She was searching my face for the truth. The truth, as I saw it, was that Daddy wouldn't have left if she hadn't always been Miss Doom and Gloom. “Pretty?” she said. “Really?”

“Yeah, pretty ugly.”

Her lip shook. She reached for her spray.

“God, I was only kidding,” I said. “Can't you even take a joke?”

*   *   *

Daddy's letter came postmarked from New Jersey: a single page of notebook paper that promised continuing love and child-support checks but failed to explain why he'd swum with me all week without telling me the truth, how he could want some woman bad enough to give us up. I'd never bothered to notice his penmanship before: fragile, tentative strokes—nothing like Daddy himself. “Donna really wants to meet you,” the writing said. “Just as soon as the time is right.”

At Jeanette's slumber party, I told Kitty Coffey she smelled like a hamper and was delighted when she cried. I ate greedily, danced myself into a sweat, and laughed so loud that Mrs. Nord had to come
in and speak to me. “Keep it down, honey, will you? I can hear you all over the house,” she said. “Shut up, you whore,” I thought of saying, but only made a face. I dared each girl there to stay awake as long as
I
could—to match my energy. When the last of them faded off to sleep, I started shaking so hard that I couldn't stop myself. Maybe he'd left because I was a bad person. Because I'd wished he'd married Mrs. Nord instead of Ma. Because I told Ma she was ugly.

By dawn, my eyes burned from no sleep. I tiptoed amongst my girlfriends in the blanketed clumps on Jeanette's floor, pretending they were all dead from some horrible explosion. Because I had stayed awake, I was the only survivor.

Birds chirped outside in the Nords' graying yard. I got dressed, walked down the hall, and pedaled barefoot back to Bobolink Drive.

*   *   *

Out in back, the pool filter hummed. The water was silvery and smooth. Petey was sitting on the fencepost.

I clicked my tongue and approached him, repeating his name. Then my hand descended, was over him. His beak pecked lightly at my finger. I could feel his fragile bones.

I unlocked the front door with my new shiny key.

Ma was in their bedroom, awake, naked. She was standing in front of the full-length mirror, holding her breasts—gently, lovingly, the exact same way Jeanette and I held the baby kittens.

Here we are, I thought: two women. “Look!” I said.

She reeled around, startled at my voice. I let go of her bird. It fluttered around and around the room, in circles between us.

I
was on the brown plaid sofa, watching TV and Scotch-taping my bangs to my forehead because Jeanette said that kept them from drying frizzy. Across the room on the Barcalounger, my mother was having her nervous breakdown.

Ma sat hunched over one of our fold-out TV trays, working constantly on a religious jigsaw puzzle without making any progress. She wore her knee socks and her quilted pink bathrobe, despite the early summer heat. She ate nothing but cubes of Kraft caramels. For two weeks, I had been reaching over and turning up the volume, trying as best I could to ignore the private curse words she'd begun chuckling to herself, trying not to see the litter of caramel cellophane that was accumulating around her chair in a kind of half circle.

It wasn't that Ma hadn't put up a fight. In Daddy's absence, she'd repainted the downstairs hallway and exercised in front of the TV with Jack LaLanne and cried and kicked the lawn mower until it eventually started. Her efforts at going it alone led her back to Sunday Mass and through a succession of brief jobs: convalescent-home cook, bank teller, notions-department clerk at Mr. Big's discount store. When winter cold burst one of our pipes, Ma called and called until she located the random yellow-pages plumber who got out of bed to come fix it.

But we'd done nothing about maintaining the pool the previous fall. Leaves had fluttered down onto the surface, then sunk and rotted; by springtime, the pool water was brown soup.

One morning in May, Ma went downstairs and found Petey dead at the bottom of his cage. “Why me? Why always me?” she was still sobbing when I got home from school. She hadn't gone to work that day and didn't go the next day either. At the end of the week, Mr. Big's called to say they were letting her go. By then she'd already begun living in her robe.

It was Ma's hair that finally got to me. At school I sucked breath mints and carried a small bottle of Tussy deodorant in my purse for whenever I could get my hands on the lavatory pass. Ma's unwashed hair, matted and crazy, alarmed me enough to suspend the cold war against my father and contact directory assistance in Tenafly, New Jersey.

It had been almost a year since my father's move to Tenafly, where he'd opened a flower shop with his girlfriend, Donna.

“Good afternoon, Garden of Eden,” Donna said. I had spoken to her only once before, phoning the day my parents' divorce became final to call her a whore. The two prevailing mysteries in my life were: what Donna looked like and why, exactly, my father had traded us for her.

“May I speak to Tony,” I said icily. “This is his daughter,
Miss
Dolores Price.”

When my father got on, I cut through his nervous chitchat. “It's Ma,” I said. “She's acting funny.”

He coughed, paused, coughed again. “Funny how?” he asked.

“You know. Funny peculiar.”

Neither Donna nor I wished to live under the same roof, and neither the Nords nor my father would entertain my proposal that Jeanette and I live at our house for the summer and Mrs. Nord drive over with our meals and clean laundry. It was decided I would move to my grandmother's house on Pierce Street in Easterly, Rhode Island, until Ma got right again.

On the one-hour drive to Grandma Holland's, I clutched my notebook filled with addresses of girls from whom I'd forced promises to write me regularly. Daddy kept sneaking nervous peeks at me and at the rearview mirror. Behind us, the U-Haul trailer wobbled and swayed from side to side. In silence I waited impatiently for the tragic highway accident that would paralyze me but wrench both my parents back to their senses. I pictured the three of us back home on Bobolink Drive, Daddy pushing my wheelchair solemnly up the front walk, eternally grateful for my forgiveness. At the doorway, Ma would smile sadly, her hair as clean and lustrous as a Breck-shampoo girl's.

Daddy didn't say much to Grandma. He deposited my bike and suitcases and cartons in the front foyer, kissed me on the forehead, and left.

Grandma and I were cautiously polite to each other. “Make yourself at home, Dolores,” she said hesitantly as she opened the door to what had once been my mother's bedroom. The room smelled dry and dusty. The windows were stuck closed and there were little rows of insect carcasses along the sill. When I sat down on the hard mattress, it crackled under me. I tried to picture my mother in this room as a twelve-year-old girl like me, but all I could see was Anne Frank on the cover of her paperback diary.

With each trip up or down the front staircase, I watched the portrait of Eddie, my dead uncle. His blond hair was pushed up into a spiky crew cut. His eyes peeked out from beneath two bushy brows and followed my steps with eerie cheerfulness. His smile was almost a smirk, as if he might reach out from the frame and jab me in the ribs as I passed.

For supper we ate meat loaf and creamed spinach, the two of us sitting in a silence broken only by the occasional clink of fork against plate or Grandma's clearing her throat. When she got up to make herself some tea, she addressed the stove. “She's not cuckoo, you know,” she said.
“He's
the one with the mortal sin on his soul, not Bernice.”

That evening I thumbtacked my Dr. Kildare collage to the wall
and unpacked my clothes. Grandma had placed little sachet pillows in the dresser drawers. As I yanked each drawer open, the smell of old ladies from church—with their powdered wrinkly necks and quivery singing voices—drifted up toward me. In the bottom bureau drawer I discovered a little red ink message hidden in a back corner, written right into the wood. “I love Bernice Holland,” it said. “Sincerely, Alan Ladd.” Twice during the night I put the light on and got out of bed to make sure it was still there.

*   *   *

Grandma turned her TV to thunderous volume and told me I mumbled. She was still an “Edge of Night” fan. Sometimes I'd grab a Coke from the refrigerator and slump down on the couch with her, slurping intentionally from the bottle.

“I hope you don't sit like that in school,” she said. “It's unladylike.”

I thumbed through the
TV Guide
and reminded her I was on summer vacation.

“When I was your age at the Bishop School, I received a medal for deportment on Class Day. A girl named Lucinda Cote thought
she
was going to get it—told me as much. She was a big piece of cheese, very stuck on herself. But no, they gave it to me. And here is my very own granddaughter who can't even sit correctly on a divan.”

“What's a divan?” I said, swigging my Coke.

“A
sofa!”
she said, exasperated.

She watched in silent horror as I stuck my thumb over the Coke bottle opening and shook, then let the foam erupt into my mouth. “Can I turn the TV down?” I asked. “I'm not deaf, you know.”

Evenings after the dishes, Grandma hobbled around the house with her frayed prayer book which was held together with rubber bands. Then she'd settle in front of the television to watch her westerns—“Bonanza,” “Rawhide”—while I sat out at the kitchen signing corny get-well cards to Ma and pages of complaints to Jeanette.

In our first week together, Grandma told me it was a sin the way
I wasted hot water, toilet paper, my spare time. She said she'd never heard of a girl who had reached my age without learning to crochet. I retaliated by shocking her as best I could. At breakfast, I drowned my scrambled eggs in plugs of ketchup. Evenings, I danced wildly by myself to my 45s while she watched from the doorway. It was mostly for Grandma's benefit that I mouthed the declarations of the girl singers:
My love is like a heat wave! . . . It's my party and I'll cry if I want to!
One night Grandma wondered aloud why I didn't ever listen to singers who could carry a tune.