She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  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.

  “Like who, for instance?” I scoffed.

  “Well, like Perry Como.”

  “That old dinosaur?” I snorted.

  “Well, how about the Lennon Sisters then? They can’t be much older than you are.”

  I lied and told her one of her precious Lennon sisters—Diane, the oldest, her favorite—was having an illegitimate baby.

  “Pfft,” she said, flicking away the possibility with the flap of her wrist. But her lip quivered and she left my room making the sign of the cross.

  * * *

  Pierce Street smelled of car exhaust and frying food. Glass shattered, people screamed, kids threw rocks. “Jeepers Christmas,” Grandma would mumble as cars squealed by at emergency speeds. She told me she had warned her husband, my grandfather, that they should follow the doctors and lawyers and schoolteachers who had moved out of the neighborhood after the war. But Grandpa had put it off and put it off and then, in 1948, had died, leaving her with teenage children and a two-family home with a leaky roof. “This house has been my cross to bear,” she was fond of saying. She had come to see her staying on amongst the “riffraff” as the will of God. He had placed her here as a model of clean Catholic living. She was not obliged to speak to any of her neighbors, only to offer them her good example.

  At dusk each evening, Mrs. Tingley, Grandma’s third-floor tenant, clip-clopped down the side steps with her bug-eyed Chihuahua, Cutie Pie. “Come on, Cutie Pie, go poopy,” Mrs. Tingley always said, while the dog circled nervously on his tether. In all the years Mr. and Mrs. Tingley had rented from my grandmother, Grandma had assumed he was the drinker, not her. But after Mr. Tingley’s death, the package-store man had kept pulling up to the curb as usual. My bedroom ceiling was Mrs. Tingley’s bedroom floor. The only sound from above was the click of dog toenails, and I pictured Mrs. Tingley up there lying in bed, sipping in silence.

  Across from Grandma’s was a tin-roofed store divided in two. One half was a barbershop. The barber, a thin, jowly man, sat sadly at the window most of the day, reading his own magazines and waiting for customers. The other half was the Peacock Tattoo Emporium. It was run by a skinny, older woman with dyed black hair and red toreador pants. On my second afternoon at Grandma’s, she waved me over from where I was sitting on the front porch, waiting for the mailman. She introduced herself as Roberta and asked me to run to the store for a pack of Newports. When I returned, she waved away the change and proceeded to dazzle me with her exotic life story. She had once been married to a sword swallower who was now in jail where he belonged. Her second husband, the Canuck, God love him, was dead. Roberta had traveled with the Canuck to both Alaska and Hawaii and liked Alaska better. She’d dreamed President Kennedy’s assassination the week before it happened. She had been a vegetarian since the day in 1959 when she opened up a can of beef stew and found a baby rat.

  When Grandma came outside to sweep the porch, she spotted me through Roberta’s plate-glass window and motioned me home. Back inside, she hit me on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. “Don’t you say another word to that piece of garbage,” she said, her face flushed in anger. “Don’t you listen to another word of her malarkey.”

  “I have a perfect right to make my own friends!” I shouted back.

  “Not with chippies like that one you don’t!”

  The center of activity on Pierce Street was Connie’s Superette, a little market housed on the bottom floor of a large, asbestos-shingled apartment building. Connie, a fat woman with Lucille Ball red hair, sat behind the counter on a webbed porch chair. She kept a whirring electric fan trained on herself and was careful not to risk breaking her two-inch fingernails as she grudgingly rang up people’s stuff. Connie’s nephew, Big Boy, was the butcher. He whistled through his teeth and wore madras shirts and an apron smeared with blood. He looked like Doug McClure on “The Virginian.”

  Grandma traded at Connie’s because she had never learned to drive a car, but she held a grudge against Big Boy, who had said to her one day in front of a whole storeful of customers, “What’ll it be, tootsie?” When I moved in, she was only too happy to make me her errand girl. Daily, she folded money into my palm and sent me down the street for Tums or cornstarch or prune juice. As I headed out the door, she never failed to remind me to steer clear of both Big Boy and the dirty-magazine aisle.

  The Pysyks lived in the apartment above the superette. Their twin daughters, Rosalie and Stacia, were the only two girls my age on Pierce Street. They hung out on the upstairs porch, where they danced and giggled and flicked their middle fingers back to neighborhood boys who shouted vulgar remarks up to them. They had a portable record player with a plastic polka-dot case and one scratchy record, “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” which they played nonstop at top volume. Both girls wore short shorts and frilly midriff blouses and were Q-Tip skinny, although they seemed forever to be eating and drinking something. Their whole day was like a party—a private one. I was both jealous of the twins and petrified of them. Grandma had once thrown a pitcher of water at the girls and called them “dirty DP’s” when she had caught them ringing her bell and hiding behind her catalpa tree. The Pysyk sisters took an imm
ediate dislike to me, and my daily treks to the store became nightmares.

  “Hey kid!” Rosalie shouted down to me on my very first trip to Connie’s. Her sister hung over the railing, smirking and eating from a bag of potato chips. “You stuck-up or something? Got a broom up your ass?” Behind her, the Four Seasons wailed in their scratchy falsettos.

  “Oh, hi,” I called up, smiling stiffly. “Gee, that’s a good record you’re playing. I’m really enjoying it.” Already I could see the three of us walking home from school together, me lending them my 45s.

  “‘That’s a good record you’re playing. I’m really enjoying it,’” Rosalie mimicked back. Both girls brayed like donkeys.

  “What’s your name?” Stacia shouted down.

  “Dolores.” It came out shaky, like a request.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought it was Fucky Face.”

  Her sister squealed in horrified delight, pulling off a candy wrapper with her teeth and spitting it over the rail at me.

  Each day it happened again. “Hi, Pukehead,” one would yell as I approached the store. “Say hello to all them cooties for us,” the other would call as I left minutes later with Grandma’s groceries. My heart raced. My grandmother’s change went sweaty in my fist. I smiled Anne Frank’s brave smile and checked my urge to run. Back in the house, I studied my face in the medicine-cabinet mirror for clues as to why they hated me. I accepted each of their hundred imagined apologies. One night I woke up shaky from a dream in which the twins had lured me up to their porch with offers of friendship and then attempted to hurl me headfirst over the railing.

  “What are DP’s, anyways?” I asked Grandma one night. She was at the kitchen table, mumbling her rosary while I dried the dishes.

  “Displaced persons. People we took in from Europe after the war. You’d think they’d be grateful, wouldn’t you?”

  I understood why they weren’t. A displaced person myself, I was not so much grateful to Grandma for her charity as disgusted by her liver spots and quiet belches, the way she could reach into her mouth and, with a gurgle, remove her top teeth. Dolores Price, DP: we even had the same initials. Still, the Pysyks gave no sign of wanting to meet me on common ground.

  * * *

  Jeanette’s correspondence was spotty and filled with hurtful proof that her life was proceeding without me. Two ex-friends never wrote back at all. Every Saturday a letter arrived faithfully from my mother at the state hospital. Her thoughts were hard to follow. In one sentence she’d be telling me about all the nice people in her art class. In the next, she’d be worrying about the flatiron she was sure had been left on when we closed up our house. “I can smell the heat from here,” she insisted. “The house will burn to the ground before anyone recognizes the g.d. truth.”

  One rainy afternoon Grandma ran out of eggs. I reluctantly agreed to get her some, reasoning that not even the cold-blooded Pysyk sisters were likely to be out in a downpour. To my relief, their upstairs porch was empty, a burning yellow light bulb the only sign of life. But in the store, rounding the corner by the ice cream freezer, I ran head-on into the twins. My stomach felt the way it does on elevators. It was the first time I had seen them up close and I studied them in horror. Rosalie was eating onion rings out of a can. Stacia was thumbing through a movie magazine. Both girls had white-blond eyebrows and lots of moles. Stacia’s ear was deformed. Two tiny flaps stuck out from the left side of her head as if some powerful vacuum had sucked the rest of her ear back inside her skull.

  “Oh, hi, Dolores,” Rosalie smirked. “You look even uglier when you’re wet.” I beat it to the front counter.

  “Hey Connie!” Stacia shouted from the back of the store. “Wait on her quick. She’s got bugs.”

  Big Boy was cleaning out his butcher case, holding a necklace of franks in one hand. He stopped and, for the first time that summer, considered my existence. Connie squinted suspiciously, her chubby fingers clicking rapidly over the register keys.

  My face was hot. I felt tears coming. “I don’t have bugs,” I croaked. “They just hate my guts.”

  Connie looked at me and then to the twins in aisle one. “Don’t you girls touch them magazines if your hands are greasy,” was all she said.

  Stacia and Rosalie approached the counter, giggling and scratching wildly. Stacia held up a large can of Raid. “Help! Get her out of here!” she laughed.

  “Shut up,” I said. “You dirty DP . . . you flipper ear.”

  There was some scratching and hair pulling and cans of vegetables rattled off the shelves. I can’t remember which twin knocked me down. Big Boy and Connie were over us, pulling us apart. “Goddamnit! They broke one of my good fingernails!” Connie bellowed. “Out of the store, the three of youse!”

  In the version of the incident I told Grandma, I hadn’t fought back. If I didn’t watch it, I reasoned, I’d end up in New Jersey having to be polite to that whore Donna.

  The following afternoon while Grandma and I were watching “Art Linkletter’s House Party,” a present arrived for me from the hospital. I ripped off the brown paper wrapping and Grandma and I stared dumbly. It was one of my mother’s art-therapy paintings. In a clear blue sky amongst neatly organized clouds, a woman’s leg was floating. On the foot was a red high-heeled shoe and from the thigh grew parakeet-green wings, strong ones, of a size that might keep an angel airborne.

  It was Grandma who first broke the spell. She sat down in her big parlor chair and folded her arms around herself. There were tears in the cracks of skin around her eyes.

  “I sure love it here in Easterly,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.

  She reached up and patted my arm. “Never mind about those foolish DP girls,” she said. “You just stay in the house with decent people like us.” She nodded her head toward the TV to include Art Linkletter.

  Up in my room I spread all of Ma’s letters on the bed, trying to find some trace of sanity in her penmanship. Then I wedged the painting behind the dresser.

  In August, Grandma enrolled me in the seventh-grade class at my mother’s old school, St. Anthony’s. I had heard horror stories about parochial schools. Jeanette Nord’s cousin knew someone who’d been whacked so often in the head with her own arithmetic book that she’d suffered brain damage and permanent baldness, according to Jeanette. Still, I was itchy to meet kids my own age. Grandma said rough girls like the Pysyks attended public school. It was Ingrid Bergman who finally won me over. Her sad, brave death in The Bells of St. Mary’s on “Channel Ten Sunday Matinee Theatre” shot straight to my heart. We registered the next day.

  On the first day of school, Grandma yanked repeatedly at the waist of my plaid uniform and handed me a thermos of grape Zarex and an egg-salad sandwich she said she hoped wouldn’t go bad by noon. Walking along Pierce Street, I studied myself in the storefront windows. “Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way,” I told myself. “I bet she’s had a very sad life.”

  In the school yard, I leaned against the cool brick building and rigged a tight smile on my face to show everyone how perfectly happy I was not to have anyone to talk to. When a dodgeball thunked me in the shoulder, I mistook it for an invitation of friendship, but two boys half my height were waving impatiently, yelling, “Hey, kid!” I picked up the ball, and, in mid-throw, saw something that sucked the breath out of me.

  Leaning against a Cyclone fence, elbowing a small cluster of shrieky girls, were Stacia and Rosalie Pysyk, wearing plaid woolen uniforms identical to my own. Things began to move too fast. A bell blared. Nuns appeared, clapping their hands and calling orders. Neither Pysyk had spotted me. I trailed into the building a safe distance behind them.

  The corridors smelled of fresh paint and had creaky floors. The dim green walls were lined with framed pictures of past graduating classes and, despite my panic, I tried to locate my mother’s portrait as I passed. Up ahead, Stacia took a turn down another corridor behind the sixth-grade nun. But Rosalie, apparently the smarter of the two, ambled amids
t the seventh-grade group with the lethal cool of a mountain lion.

  Our classroom was on the second floor at the top of the stairs. Outside the door on a gray pedestal was a plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin, her arms extended. I tramped in behind the others, addressing an emergency prayer to the statue that she’d help me discover some clever way to dodge Rosalie Pysyk for the next 180 school days. Luckily, I was assigned the last desk in the row next to the windows. Just outside was the fire escape. If worse came to worst, I thought.

  Our teacher, Miss Lilly, was new to the school like me. She was a tall, frail woman and had dry, dusty-looking hair that had been teased up in front and more or less forgotten in back. She spent a large portion of the morning opening desk drawers and slamming them shut again in little bursts of temper she quickly covered over with a brief, squinty smile. I studied Miss Lilly intensely, with shriveling confidence in her ability to keep me safe from Rosalie. The fire escape looked rusty and rickety. I imagined it pulling away from the building against my weight, Rosalie laughing at the window as I fell in an arc toward the blacktop.

  By late morning, each of us had been issued a pile of mildewy-smelling textbooks: Adventures in World History, Arithmetic for Modern Youth, Science and Health for Catholic Schoolchildren, and a religious text illustrated with black-and-white photos of the same boy and girl participating in a variety of holy activities. They were joyous or solemn as the event demanded and both were stupidly old-fashioned looking. I wondered if, by some odd quirk, I hadn’t been assigned the exact same book my mother had used. I took an immediate dislike to the boy and girl in the pictures—sunny, wholesome goody-goody types, the kind of kid Grandma favored. It was she who had gotten me into this, the old bag.

  At lunchtime I followed the others down to the maze of Formica tables and metal folding chairs in the basement of the school. The Pysyk twins, reunited, lunched from a large cellophane bag of cheese popcorn. Their friends began to stretch and gawk at me and the noisy lunchroom rang with whoops of laughter aimed in my direction. “Who?” someone yelled, rising from her seat for a better look. “That thing?”