She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “That felt nice,” he said. “Nicest kiss I ever had. Don’t be afraid.”

  He tried to do it again but I pulled away and stood by the car. “And you said there’s a reservoir?” I said. My voice was quivery.

  He laughed and got back in the car, shaking his head. I got in, too. Our door slamming echoed in the trees. His hand moved to the ignition switch, then stopped.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Do you think much about sex?”

  “No,” I said. “Can we go?”

  “Because I think you’re very, very sexy—as if you didn’t know already. Sometimes when she and I are . . .”

  I wanted to be back at Grandma’s, in the bathroom with the door locked, figuring everything out. “Can we just go?” I said.

  He reached in front of my knees and flopped down his glove compartment. I was surprised to see his hand shaking a little. He pulled out a rolled-up magazine.

  “See this,” he said.

  It took me a second to figure it out: a woman on the cover had her mouth on a man’s penis. I flung it back at him. “Here,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to take a look? Aren’t you curious?”

  I started to cry. “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Shut up.”

  He chuckled. “They’re doing a great job with you over at that school. You’re going to make a terrific nun.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “Stop shaking. It’s just a magazine.” He was trying to sound calm and cool, but his words came out tight and his breathing was quick and jerky. I could tell he was losing his temper. “Sometimes I forget what a little kid you really are,” he said. “What a little baby . . .”

  I jammed my hands under my legs. “I’m not a little kid. I just don’t feel like looking at dirty pictures,” I said. “So shoot me.”

  “Maybe I will,” he laughed. “The thing is . . . the way I look at it, anyway, is that love isn’t dirty. And neither are pictures of it. But some people’s minds are.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Besides, it’s not even mine. I borrowed it from someone for a joke. But I guess I made a big mistake. . . . Either that or I was misled by a little cocktease who’s probably going to run back and tell Mommy.”

  “Look, I don’t tell her stuff, okay? And I’m not that thing you just said, either.”

  “What thing?”

  “You think I’m such a baby, but I’m not.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. He reached over and began playing with my hair. “Because we’re good friends, you and me, and I hate to think I couldn’t trust you.”

  “Well, you can, all right? Can we just go home now?”

  He rolled the magazine back up and ran the edge of it against my leg, down to my foot, over and over. “I’ll probably have this for a while. Before I have to give it back to that guy. You tell me if you ever want to look at it. We’ll look at it together.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “‘No thanks,’” he mimicked. He slid it under the seat.

  A few of the dogs were lying down. One paced his cage. “Dolores,” he whispered. “Look.” His hand was between his legs. He was rubbing his lump, watching me.

  I turned away and stared hard out the window, tears falling fast. “Would you please stop that?” I said. He didn’t even seem to be the same person. A sudden thought slammed into me: I might not get home.

  “Stop what?” I could hear him still doing it.

  “That!” I said, flailing my hand back at him. Then I flung the door open, was out of the car, running past the dog pens. The animals barked and leapt. None of it seemed real.

  He caught me behind the building. I lost my balance and he fell down onto me. He twisted my arm back, yanking and pulling. “Don’t tickle me!” I cried. “This isn’t funny. What are you doing?”

  He didn’t seem to hear. “Little Miss Innocence . . . fucking fed up with your bullshit. Give you what you been looking for.” The words spit out of him. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” he shouted. “Bitch!”

  His knee jabbed against my leg, pinching the skin against the ground. I looked.

  “Now, say it: say ‘Fuck me, Jack.’ Tell me to fuck it into you.”

  When I swung, he reached out and caught my wrist, pressing the bone against the ground. He gave my arm another painful yank. This isn’t Jack, I told myself. Somebody—Daddy, the real Jack—will come and save me.

  With his free hand, he yanked my skirt up and I heard something tear. “If you rip this uniform, you’re paying for it!” I screamed. “Honest to God!”

  “Shut up,” he whispered. Begged. “Listen. It’s nicer if you don’t fight it. We’re friends, you and me. Don’t wreck it. I can’t . . . It won’t hurt if you don’t fight. I promise . . .”

  He kept fumbling and poking at me. I tried to pull my head up, to punch and spit, but my fists wouldn’t land. The drool fell back against my chin. His elbow swung out and jabbed against my throat, gagging me.

  His rubbing was rough and mean. His pants were down. “I hate you!” I shouted. “You pig!”

  I stopped fighting, cut off by the pain of it. The sound of the barking dogs fell away so that all I could hear was his cursing and grunting, over and over, in rhythm with each thrust, each rupture. He’s splitting me open, I thought. He’ll break me and then I’ll die.

  I turned my head away and watched my fingers rake the dirt. My hand opened and closed, opened and closed. I couldn’t feel myself controlling it. “Just pretend I died,” I had told my father—and I knew no one was coming for me, that I was by myself.

  Jack’s anger shook us both. Then he stopped altogether, his dead weight on top of me. He was whimpering, catching his breath. When he got up, he kicked me hard on the leg and walked back out in front.

  I heard him talking softly to the dogs, soothing them.

  * * *

  On the drive back home, he sobbed and talked. He wouldn’t shut up. “We’re awful people, you and me. Don’t think this was all my show. We did what we did together.”

  My mind was numb; my insides burned. He seemed to drive so slowly.

  He was talking about some gun. “You don’t think I’d use it. But I would. What would she want to live for, anyway, if she found out what we just did. . . . You want to call my bluff and tell, you just do it . . . I’ll leave a note. Think of all the questions they’d have for you.”

  When he pulled up near Connie’s, he reached over and brushed dead grass off my uniform. I was scared not to let him. “I feel so much closer to you now,” he said. “You and I are together in this. If you tell anyone, I’ll do it. You’ll probably hear the shots. Her and me will be lying up there with half our heads blown away. Two deaths, thanks to you.”

  Three, I thought. The baby. I got out of the car. I looked only at my shoes, one in front of the other, getting me home.

  Inside, the table was set for supper. Ma’s mail was waiting for her on the counter. Potatoes were peeled and cut up in water on the stove.

  The TV blared in the parlor. I walked past Grandma and up the stairs. My blouse had a dirt smudge on the sleeve. My underpants and legs were filthy with blood and him.

  I looked at myself in the medicine-cabinet mirror. What had happened was going to be always on me, in me, as permanent as one of Roberta’s tattoos. “Dolores,” I said. I repeated my name over and over until it sounded warped and unreal. I was never going to be myself again.

  I eased down into the bath. I’d made it hotter than I thought I could ever stand. Through the clear, steaming water I watched my skin redden, studied the swollen place on my leg where he’d kicked me. A thin streamer of blood floated on the surface near my knee. I opened my sore legs wide to the scalding water.

  I was afraid to stay in my room, afraid to be alone. I could hear him up there.

  Grandma looked up from her story. “How was school today?” she as
ked.

  “All right.”

  “You say that exact same thing every afternoon. Don’t you ever have a day that’s swell?”

  “No.”

  I wanted Ma—to see her face, hear her voice. Know she was real, know I was inside the house with her and not out there. But when she got home, I saw it wasn’t enough. Her mouth talked about her supervisor, her aching feet, her bowling average. The thing that had happened ached up inside me but was invisible.

  * * *

  Rita miscarried on a Sunday afternoon in November, the week after she’d sat at our kitchen table and told us the good news. Grandma called me to the dining-room window and whispered in my ear about the spotting. We watched Jack walk her to the car and ease her down into the passenger’s seat, then drive her away. At bedtime, they still weren’t back.

  I awoke in the dark, drawn out of a troubled sleep where dogs chased me, cornered me, licked at my feet. I sat up and told myself to admit it: we had killed that baby, Jack and me—destroyed it with the filthy thing we did. I wasn’t Little Miss Innocence. Hadn’t I gotten into the car with him all those afternoons? Touched myself thinking about him that time? Baby-killer Dolores, guilty as sin.

  Downstairs it was shadowy and still. Steam seeped from the radiators. The front door handle was cold. The cold sidewalk against my bare feet kept me going.

  Roberta’s back light was on.

  “Dolores?” she said. She was in pin curlers, pajamas. My knocking had scared her. “What’s the trouble, honey? What?”

  I leaned into her shoulder and sobbed.

  Told.

  She hugged me and rocked me against her and made me a cup of tea. The comfort of it, the warmth I swallowed, was the first thing I’d felt in weeks.

  At dawn, we walked back across the street to wake up Ma.

  PART TWO

  Whales

  8

  Mr. Pucci, my guidance counselor at Easterly High School, was a wispy man with small hands and a discreet toupee. He had been my only friend during my miserable three and a half years at the school. “Hi, pal,” he’d call to me between classes as I slouched past his office door, eyes on the linoleum tiles, waiting hungrily for his acknowledgment. I knew his tiny, sunless cubicle almost as well as I knew my own bedroom: the frayed venetian-blind cord, the non-blooming geraniums cramped together on the windowsill, his poster—“I’m High on High School”—which curled away from the yellow cinder-block walls. On his neat desk, he kept a picture cube with his nephews’ faces on each surface. “Uncle Fabio,” they called him. I knew that, too.

  I felt both protective and possessive of Mr. Pucci and silently cursed the boys who mimicked his lispy speech as they passed by in the corridor. I hated his other counselees, who took up his time with their trivial issues while I sat fidgeting in the office with my most current personal crisis. Mr. Pucci had seen me through eight smoking suspensions, $230 worth of unreturned library books, sixty-seven days absent during senior year alone, and four years’ worth of unreasonable teachers. He talked the girls’ gym instructor into exempting me from communal showers. He personally called the parents of the football players who, for a joke, campaigned for my election as Spirit Week queen. When my Spanish teacher, Senorita O’Brien, insisted on seeing me as a name in her grade book instead of someone with unique and delicate personal problems, it was Mr. Pucci who got my foreign-language requirement waived. We were pals; I had sworn at him, trusted him with minor secrets, and sobbed into his desk blotter after each cruel remark someone hurled. Then, in April of my senior year, he called me out of study hall and sank an ax into my heart.

  Ma’s Tabu perfume filled up the office. She was wearing her tollbooth-collector’s uniform and was seated on an unfamiliar metal folding chair that had been dragged in for the occasion. My school records were fanned out across Mr. Pucci’s desk. “Sit down, Dolores, sit down,” he began. His palm was extended out toward my regular seat; his smile was unfamiliar. “I’ve asked your mother to come in today so that the three of us can talk about your future.”

  It was a setup, an ambush. “Can we do it some other time?” I said. “I have an important quiz to study for. Plus, I think I may be getting a migraine.”

  Ma was snapping and unsnapping the clasp of her pocketbook. “I’ve gotten off from work special, Dolores. I think we should both hear what Mr. Pucci has to say.” I was suddenly, blatantly, aware of secret telephone conversations between them. The revelation made me limp. I sat.

  “After careful consideration of Dolores’s needs and her capabilities, Mrs. Price, I’d like to prescribe college—despite what’s here before us in black and white.” The real story, he told Ma, lay in my love of reading and the potential several of my teachers thought they detected in me. Teachers! There were two types: the ones who treated you like dirt and the ones who were all over you with their Geiger counters of hope. I dropped my face into the impassive look I’d perfected from Julie on “The Mod Squad.” With my knees, I buckled and unbuckled the side of his metal desk. I had been in love with Mr. Pucci’s gentleness, our rituals. A million times during our talks I’d imagined leaning toward him and placing my hands around his tiny waist, feeling my fingertips touching in the back. “I happen to believe in Dolores’s future, Mrs. Price,” he said. His frail, anxious face was framed in geranium leaves. “And if she decides not to go to college, you may both regret it for the rest of your lives.”

  * * *

  He hit the jackpot with that word: regret. It was regret that had mostly motivated my mother since the night Roberta walked me back across the street. Ma had insisted on driving me to the emergency room, though the emergency was two weeks old. On the way there, her teeth chattered out of control while I sat in stone silence. She saw me not for what I was—an accomplice in the baby’s murder—but as Jack’s innocent victim. I was able to drop her to her knees with demands. So I did.

  Upon my insistence, Ma had withheld our terrible secret from Daddy and chosen not to press charges against Jack, letting him escape down the back stairs with his and Rita’s things that next weekend while we visited Grandma’s cousins in Pawtucket. “Believe you me, I’d like nothing better than to see that filthy bastard rot behind bars,” she told the state-police detective who sat downstairs in our parlor. “But that kid up there is thirteen years old. She just needs to pretend it never happened.”

  Out of regret, Ma paid for homebound tutoring for the remainder of the school year, though she swore on a stack of Bibles that no one at St. Anthony’s School could have possibly found out. My first tutor, Mr. McRae, kept looking at me funny. The second, Mrs. Dunkel, was a retired schoolteacher with a powdered neck and pottery bracelets that clacked against the kitchen table. Mrs. Dunkel dozed while I read her assignments. She was safe and sweet. Dr. Hancock—the psychiatrist they made me talk to—was not. Though Ma regretted doing it, she told Dr. Hancock she was terminating his weekly attempts to force me to discuss Jack Speight. This was at my request, she explained to him, though I had phrased it more in terms of a demand: if she made me go to any more of the psychiatric sessions, I would go up to Grandma’s attic with a soupspoon and a can of Drano and kill myself.

  The city of Easterly declared me normal enough to attend regular high school the following year. Ma’s sick notes always mentioned regret. “I regret to inform you that Dolores has been ill with a sore throat . . . a stomach problem . . . a bad head cold” she’d write on days when I felt too depressed or keyed-up to attend. She never refused to write the excuses, though she didn’t like lying; you could tell from her foreshortened, abrupt penmanship. By then, Ma’s regret had ritualized itself into a weekly array of victim’s consolation prizes from the grocery store. She returned each week with shopping bags full of goodies for me: packaged cookies, quarts of Pepsi (I preferred it warm), cigarettes, magazines, and fat paperbacks. I kept my treats in the labeled grocery bags on top of the twenty-one-inch color console Motorola TV Ma had bought me for my bedroom on my fifteenth birthday.


  “If she decides not to go to college, you may both regret it for the rest of your lives,” Mr. Pucci told her. With my college education, he was offering a chance to avoid a life sentence of regret. Ma bit the bait. Hard.

  I spent the next several weeks whining and pouting and shrieking. How, I wondered, could she be so cruel to me after all I had gone through? I couldn’t stand school now; why should I sign on for four more years of torture?

  College catalogs began arriving in the mail with address labels in my mother’s handwriting. They were filled with terrifying photographs: students and professors sitting together on lawns holding pleasant conversations; goggled chemistry majors wielding their Bunsen burners; beaming girls brushing their teeth together at a row of dormitory sinks. I tore them up as fast as they arrived. For days I refused to come downstairs for either school or supper, holing up in my room with the goodies Ma still faithfully provided. When I wasn’t giving her the silent treatment, I was pleading with Grandma to intervene for me. Colleges were full of drugs! College girls got pregnant! I began sobbing about overdoses and nervous breakdowns. When I knew Ma was listening, I’d hustle to the bathroom and stick my fingers down my throat, gagging dramatically. “I can’t even keep anything down anymore,” I’d whimper as I passed her worried face in the hallway. Then I’d go back to my room and feast on Fritos, Flings, Devil Dogs, Hostess Sno-Balls—unwrapping the cellophane as quietly as possible.

  The gray circles under Ma’s eyes puffed up and her fingers danced and fidgeted as she filled out applications under my hateful glare. But I could not make her give in. She was determined not to battle regret the rest of her life. I was going to college.

  By the end of May, eight schools had rejected me. Ma’s last hope was Merton College in Wayland, Pennsylvania, but the application was a sticky one. It required an essay on the one person in the world I’d most like to meet. Ma stewed and paced for a week and then rented a typewriter. She called in sick and started one evening after supper, hunting and pecking her way through the night. The following morning I stood at the kitchen table eating my breakfast—chocolate doughnuts and a mug of Pepsi. Ma’s cheek was pressed up against the enamel tabletop and she was snoring out of distorted, pushed-together lips. Around her were dozens of wadded-up paper balls—enough false starts to decorate a float in the Rose Bowl parade. I reached over and rolled her finished product out of the typewriter.