She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  My intention was to shock, or at least entertain, the bloated dog, but when I looked back, she was staring still at the cookies with such intensity that I forgot, for a second, the flame, and burned my thumb and finger.

  * * *

  Mine is a story of craving: an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered. Many times each week memory makes me a child again. Just last night I was, once more, in Mrs. Masicotte’s kitchen, turning from the flaming paper doll to learn from the fat dog Zahra my first lesson in the awful strength of coveting, the power of want.

  “Look, Zahra! I’m dying!” I moan. “Help me! Please!”

  The dog—riveted, unblinking—sees only the sugar-crusted cookies.

  2

  When I was ten and a half, my family moved to Treetop Acres, a flat, freshly paved neighborhood, good for bike riding.

  Our yellow ranch house, 26 Bobolink Drive, had a garage and a bathroom shower with sliding glass doors. Outside my bedroom window, a weeping willow tree tossed and switched its branches against the shingles on windy nights. We owned, not rented, this house.

  Mrs. Masicotte was part owner of Treetop Acres and had finagled us a double lot. By this time, she’d bought a new silver Cadillac and given Daddy her old peach one and a set of golf clubs and a membership to her country club. Part of my father’s work now included golfing with Mrs. Masicotte on weekends.

  When he wasn’t with the old lady, Daddy was out in back working on his lawn—leveling and seeding it, whistling as he wheelbarrowed dirt from one end of our lot to the other. He was proud of the fact that we had twice as much yard as any of our neighbors. He worked every night until dark—until he faded from himself to a dusky silhouette, then a glowing white undershirt moving of its own will, then just whistling.

  Ma pressed and hung curtains and planted a small bed of pink dahlias out back, but the flowers only made her briefly happy. The new house gave her allergies, she complained; she began squirting her nose with nasal spray several times a day. The toddlers that played unsupervised on our quiet street made her jumpy. All her nerves needed, she said, was to back that goddamned Cadillac out of the driveway some day and run over someone’s small child.

  Jeanette Nord, my new best friend, lived at 10 Skylark Place, eight-tenths of a mile from our house, according to the odometer on my pink Schwinn. I met Jeanette on my very first spin around the neighborhood. Spotting a girl my approximate age hula-hooping on a patio, I decided to impress her with my cycling skills, then miscalculated a curb, landing, mortified, under my still-spinning wheels. “Guess what?” Jeanette said as she hula-hooped toward me, oblivious to my bleeding knees. “One of my Siamese cats is going to have kittens.”

  Jeanette and I marveled at the similarities between us: we were both born in October, one year apart; we were both left-handed only children with twelve letters in our names; each of us favored Dr. Kildare over Ben Casey; our favorite dessert was Whip-and-Chill; our favorite record “Johnny Angel.” We differed significantly in only two respects: Jeanette had gotten her period and had permission to shave her legs. I was still waiting for both. That spring and summer, Jeanette and I watched soap operas, swapped 45s, and planned out a shared life. After high school, we’d get an apartment together in New York and be either secretaries or Rockettes. Then Jeanette would marry a veterinarian named Ross and I’d marry an actor named either Scott or Todd. Our five children apiece would all be best friends. We’d live in next-door mansions and be rich enough for air-conditioning and color TV.

  The Nords owned both the father and mother Siamese cats, Samson and Delilah. Mr. Nord, bald and boring, sold equipment to hospitals and was gone a lot on overnight trips. Mrs. Nord wore eye shadow and headbands that matched her shell tops and Bermudas. For lunch she made us foods she’d seen in the pages of her women’s magazines: baked hot dogs coated in crushed Special K; English muffin pizzas; Telstar coolers (lemonade and club soda afloat with a toothpick-speared maraschino cherry—a sort of edible satellite that jabbed your lip as you drank). Mrs. Nord knew the words to Jeanette’s and my favorite songs. She taught first herself, then us, how to do the twist. (“Look! Just put your foot forward and pretend you’re crushing out a cigarette from the hips. That’s right!”) If you squinted while looking at her from across a room, you would swear Mrs. Nord was Jackie Kennedy. My own mother sat alone on Bobolink Drive all day, talking to her parakeet, Petey, and worrying about dead children.

  Around the time of our move to Bobolink Drive, I stopped kissing my mother on the lips. It had been over four years since she’d lost the baby. Daddy had tried everything to snap her out of it: cha-cha lessons, “head shrinkers,” a trip to the Poconos, Petey. But something about Anthony Jr.’s life and death inside Ma had changed her in some unfixable way. She’d grown herself a big rear end and developed an unpredictable facial twitch. When we grocery shopped, I ran to get items in the aisles ahead rather than be seen with her. When PTA notices were passed out at school, I folded and folded them until they were chubby little one-inch packets, easily crammed between the school-bus seats. “Oh, my mother works,” I told Jeanette when she suggested we go over to my house instead of hers. “She doesn’t like me having company when she’s not home.” But she was at home, practicing her series of curious domestic habits. She needed, for instance, to let the phone ring three and a half times before answering it. She needed the stove timer to be constantly ticking off seconds. (Whenever the dial reached zero and dinged, she reset it for sixty minutes, then smiled with some inner, secret relief.) Petey was Ma’s weirdest need of all.

  Daddy had bought her the lime-green parakeet at the suggestion of the doctor Ma went to for her nerves; he said a distraction might help. At first Ma didn’t like Petey and complained about the mess he made. Then she liked him. Then she began loving him beyond reason. She sang to him, talked to him, and rigged his cage open with a rubber band so he could flutter freely around the house whenever Daddy wasn’t home. Ma was happiest when Petey was perched on her shoulder during the day. I would sit at the kitchen table eating my lunch or drawing and watch her crane her neck to the right or left, stroking Petey with the underside of her chin. She was most miserable at night after supper when she and Daddy and I sat in the living room watching TV and Petey sat out in the kitchen, his cage covered over with a bath towel. “Jesus H. Christ, would you just sit still,” Daddy would complain as she got up to check Petey one more time. Then Ma would slump back into the sofa cushions, teary-eyed and distracted. I hated Petey—fantasized about his flying accidentally out a window or into the electric fan so that his spell over Ma would be broken. My not kissing Ma anymore was a conscious decision reached one night at bedtime with the purpose of hurting her.

  “Well, you’re stingy tonight,” she said when I turned my face away from her good-night kiss.

  “I’m not kissing you anymore, period,” I told her. “All day long you kiss that bird right on its filthy beak.”

  “I do not.”

  “You do so. Maybe you want to catch bird diseases, but I don’t.”

  “Petey’s mouth is probably cleaner than my mouth and yours put together, Dolores” was her argument.

  “That’s a laugh.”

  “Well, it’s true. I read it in my bird book.”

  “Next thing you know, you’ll be French-kissing it.”

  “Never mind French-kissing. What do you know about that kind of stuff? You watch that mouth of yours, young lady.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing,” I said. I clamped my hand over my mouth and stuffed my whole face into the pillow.

  * * *

  It was Jeanette who had defined French-kissing for me, voluntarily appointing herself my mentor the day we watched her cat Samson licking his erect penis on the Nords’ living-room rug.

  “Love of Life” was on TV. Mrs. Nord was upstairs running her sewing machine, making static lines across the picture. Jeanette was reentering the ro
om with two Telstar drinks on a tray. “Oh my God,” I said.

  “What?”

  She followed my gaze to Samson, who lapped casually at himself.

  Jeanette handed me my drink. “Aren’t boys disgusting?” She laughed. We both stared at the licking.

  “Maybe you should call a vet,” I suggested.

  “What for? He’s just giving his hoo-hoo a hard-on.”

  “What?”

  She laughed again and took a long sip of her drink. “Can I ask you a personal question?” she said.

  “What?”

  “How much do you know?”

  “Enough,” I said. I wasn’t sure, exactly, what we were talking about but sensed the vicinity.

  “I don’t mean how much you know in general. I mean about sex.”

  “You writing a book?” I said. “Make that chapter a mystery.”

  “Okay, fine,” she said. “Pardon me for living.”

  We turned our attention back to “Love of Life.” Vanessa Sterling was arguing with her stepdaughter, Barbara, who was secretly pregnant with Tony Vento’s baby. I took a quick peek at Samson, still at it. “I just thought,” Jeanette said, her eyes on the screen, “that if you had any questions, I could probably answer them for you.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I said.

  “Well, good. Fine with me.”

  After a commercial, Barbara and Tony were sitting in a park with fake-looking scenery. Neither of them knew what to do about the baby, but marriage was out of the question. Tony was only a mechanic. His mother was Barbara’s family’s maid.

  “Do you think Tony’s cute?” Jeanette asked.

  “Sort of. Do you?”

  “I wouldn’t throw him out of bed.”

  I reached into my Telstar drink and fished out the cherry, determined not to betray a reaction.

  “Can you imagine them actually doing it?” Jeanette said.

  Samson rose and stretched, ambled out of the room.

  “Who?”

  “Them. Barbara and Tony. Maybe they do it in real life after the show. Maybe it’s not acting.”

  I felt heat in my face; I felt her watching me.

  “You don’t know how women get pregnant, do you?”

  “I do so.” On the screen, Barbara covered her face with her hands and cried. Tony punched the trunk of one of the fake trees.

  My information about sex was a mosaic of eavesdropping, process of elimination, and filling in the blanks. In third grade I’d heard the term “sleeping together” and spent time worrying that accidental fatigue could make an unwanted child—that male and female strangers sharing a seat together on an overnight train might innocently doze off and wake up as parents. For a while I’d believed that people got pregnant by rubbing their chests together. Men used their you-know-whats to go to the bathroom, I reasoned; it was their nipples that had no other useful function. (My teacher that year, Mrs. Hatheway, was pregnant. As she talked, I’d imagine her engaged with some blank-faced husband in the required nipple friction that had put a baby inside her.) Currently I knew the basics about periods and virginity. But Samson’s licking had shown both me and Jeanette the incompleteness of my knowledge.

  “This show is boring today,” she said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  Our bikes ticked and whirred through Treetop Acres and Jeanette told me what happened the day she woke up with her period. First Mrs. Nord had taken Jeanette shopping and bought her a skirt and a circle pin. Then they’d gone to a restaurant and had club sandwiches and Mrs. Nord had said, “Look at us, two women having lunch together.” Then she’d just come out with it: a man and a woman got naked and French-kissed until the man’s hoo-hoo got hard. Then he put it in the woman’s hoo-hoo and squirted something liquidy into her. Not pee; something that looked like White Rain shampoo, according to her mother. Then she was pregnant.

  The restaurant wasn’t that crowded, Jeanette said, and they were in a booth way in back. Her mother stopped talking whenever the waitress came over.

  Back in her bedroom, Jeanette kept talking about sex.

  “True or false,” she said. “The woman can still get pregnant if she and the man both keep their underpants on.”

  “False.”

  “True! It happened to this girl in Dear Abby.”

  Jeanette slapped her arms around herself, then turned her back to me. Her hands ran themselves through her hair, stroked her shoulders, pawed all over. “Check this out!” she giggled. “My husband and I are French-kissing. Oh, Ross, you make me feel so passionate.”

  “You’re a pig,” I said. “I’m never letting anyone do that to me.”

  “Not even Dr. Kildare?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Then how are you and your husband going to have five kids then?”

  I thought hard for a second. “We’re adopting them. We’re adopting crippled children.”

  She bounced past me and reached for her Eight Ball. She shook it hard and tipped it upside down, her palm covering the prediction. “Would Dolores Price let Richard Chamberlain stick his hoo-hoo inside her?”

  I sucked my teeth at her. “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.”

  She lifted up her hand, smiling triumphantly at what she read.

  “What? What’s it say?”

  “‘It is decidedly so.’”

  * * *

  One night in July, Daddy turned to me at supper and asked if I thought I’d like to have an in-ground swimming pool in our backyard.

  “For real?” I asked.

  “Why not? We got enough yard to play with out there.”

  “When?”

  “Well, I got a backhoe coming in first of August. The concrete has to set first. Then it takes a while to fill. Middle of the month you’ll be swimming.”

  I jumped up and hugged him. “Where are we putting it? Do we have to cut down the willow tree?”

  “Nope. It’s going in on the other side. Where her flowers are.”

  We both looked at Ma. I could tell her nerves were bothering her.

  Daddy’s smile slid away. “Now what’s that puss for?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just wish you had said something to me before you made all your big plans.”

  “Oh, don’t listen to her,” I said.

  She got up from the table and moved to the sink. Daddy sighed disgustedly. “If it’s money you’re pouting about, I got a bonus last week from the old lady.”

  She made us wait for her response. “What for?” she said, finally.

  “Played golf Sunday with the guy who owns Cabana Pools. He’s an old friend of LuAnn’s. Me and him hit it off. Says he’ll put it in at cost.”

  “It’s not the money.”

  “What is it then? Your goddamned pink dahlias? You afraid someone around here might have a little fun?”

  She turned and faced us, then pointed a shaking finger at the window over the sink. “The last thing I need, Tony, is to look out into that yard one day and see somebody’s two-year-old floating facedown in a swimming pool.”

  Daddy’s laugh was snotty. He answered her slowly, as if Ma were two years old herself. “There’s a fence,” he said. “The whole thing is surrounded by chain-link fence.”

  “Kids climb fences.”

  “A two-year-old kid is going to climb a six-foot fence?”

  She washed the plates hard and fast, banging them against the dish drainer. “I can just imagine what that bonus was for.”

  Daddy looked quickly at me, then took a slow sip of his iced coffee. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “No, what? Tell me.”

  She spun around and faced him, suds flying away from her hands. A dish smashed against the floor. “It means what you think it means,” she said. “That you’re an old lady’s whore.”

  Daddy told me to go outside and play.

  “It’s too hot,” I said. “Mosquitoes are out.”

  “Go.”

&nbs
p; I walked across the kitchen on jelly legs.

  Out in the garage, I poked my finger into one of the rust spots on the Cadillac. Cancer, my father called it. Mr. and Mrs. Douville, our next-door neighbors, were sitting on lawn chairs on their front porch, a citronella candle lit on a table between them.

  Inside, I heard him slapping her, kitchen chairs knocking over. “Maybe this’ll cheer you up,” he said. “Or this. How about this? Don’t you ever—”

  The Douvilles blew out their candle and went inside.

  “Blame her all you want to . . . puts bread and butter on the table . . . sick and tired of your goddamned moods!”

  The back door banged open and Daddy was rushing into the backyard, his hands cupped in front of him. Ma was running after him.

  “Tony, don’t!” Ma begged, snatching at his hands. “I’m sorry! Please! I’m sorry!”

  He flung his hands upward and let go. The small fluttering silhouette he released was Petey, who hovered in the air for a second above my mother, then headed across the yard and into the weeping willow.

  “Goddamn you!” my mother screamed. “Goddamn you to hell!” Her voice carried across the lawns.

  I got on my bike and drove, fast and recklessly. The humid air pushed thick against my face; if a child had walked in front of my path, I might have killed it. I sped past Jeanette’s street and past the Treetop Acres sign and onto Route 118. I squeezed the rubber handlebar caps, squeezed the shaking out of myself. I hated both of them. The harder I pedaled—the more I risked—the better it felt.

  It was after dark when I got back.

  As I walked toward the back door, Daddy’s disembodied voice scared me. “I was just about to go looking for you,” he said.

  “Are you all right?” Ma’s voice wanted to know.

  “Yes.”

  Squinting, I made out both their shapes. They were sitting together on the step, sharing a cigarette.

  “Did you have to go off like that?” Ma said. “I was worried sick.” The tip of the cigarette glowed briefly and I heard her exhale.