She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  “Grandma, not going would be like taking twenty-five dollars and throwing it down the sewer.”

  She frowned at that. “Judy Mumphy thinks I’m foolish not to go. What if that wallpaper man is unreliable? He sounded sleepy over the telephone.”

  “He’s probably overworked. Exhausted because he’s so good. I can handle things.” To prove my point, I grabbed the Electrolux and started vacuuming the stairs. I was sweating and panting by the time I reached the top, in a lust for her absence. From the bottom, Grandma watched me distrustfully, her hands on her hips, searching for the catch.

  Later on, dusting the living room, Grandma kept pausing absentmindedly on objects. “What is it?” I asked her. “What’s the matter? Are you getting a dizzy spell?”

  “Dizzy spell? Of course not.” She sat down in her big chair, her bony hands curving around the stuffed chair arms. “I was just thinking,” she finally said, “about Bernice. About how she always loved a trip. She and Eddie both, but Bernice especially. When she was a little girl, we used to have our big meal at noontime on Sunday. Then their father would take us all out in the sedan for a drive. Bernice used to close her eyes and stick her whole face out the window to catch the breeze. By the time we got to where we were going, her hair would be a nest of snarls.”

  I held my breath; if she took notice of me, she might stop talking, and her talking about Ma was like salve on a wound. Grandma’s smile was far away.

  “When Eddie was a baby, she used to follow me around like a shadow—used to beg me for jobs to do. ’Course, later on she got so moody. You’d ask her to do something for you and she’d put on a face like you insulted her . . .” She turned and looked at me, puzzled. “It’s peculiar, though, isn’t it?” she said. “The fact that I’ve lived longer than them both—that baby and that helpful little girl.”

  For a quick moment, I saw Grandma as she saw herself: a decent woman whom God, for unfathomable reasons, had chosen to punish. I almost loved her for her bewilderment. I almost touched her.

  “No kidding, Grandma,” I said. “You deserve a little fun.”

  “Those Amish people don’t even let you take their picture,” she said. “You have to hide somewhere and trick them. They’re odd ducks.” Her eyes narrowed back to normal. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I’m not about to use one of those bus toilets. They’ll just have to stop and wait for me whether they like it or not.”

  * * *

  At eight A.M. on Thursday, Grandma stood waiting at the front door, armed with an ancient brown suitcase. She had written a check for the wallpaper man and hidden it in the bread box beneath the milk crackers. “If he looks shifty, just don’t let him in,” she said. “To hell with it.” She nodded at her own curse, pleased with herself for having added it. Then the familiar honk of Mrs. Mumphy’s daughter’s station wagon sent her hobbling down the walk. Abruptly, I was alone.

  * * *

  I had intended to start investigating right then, to begin in the attic and work my way down through Ma’s things, but instead, I drew the shades, flopped back on the couch, and turned on “Morning Matinee Theatre.” The movie was black and white: The Miracle of Marcelino. People’s lips moved separately from their translated voices, finished ahead of time. A mysterious orphan boy was found in the desert and taken to a monastery to live. After a series of events that were either miracles or coincidences, the boy was bitten by a scorpion and then touched by God, who spoke down from heaven, reclaiming him. Marcelino ascended through the monastery ceiling on a ray of bright light. “Bullshit,” I reassured myself, switching the station, even as God’s dubbed voice explained the logic of the boy’s death to the dumbstruck monks.

  With Grandma gone, lunch could be any time you felt like having it. In the kitchen I set the oven at 425 and read the directions on one of the Hungry Man TV dinners I’d chosen. You had to remember to peel back the foil fifteen minutes before the end if you wanted the chicken to come out crispy. Things were never as carefree as commercials led you to believe.

  Mike Douglas’s cohosts were the has-been Kingston Trio. I had all day to get to Ma’s stuff. There was no hurry whatsoever.

  The mail came: circulars, a letter from Kippy, a large manila envelope addressed to “Miss?Price.” Kippy wrote that Dante wanted to make love as a way of sealing their future, of making sure they’d stick together. I thought of Jack’s sticky slime on my legs that day. “Should I or shouldn’t I?” Kippy asked.

  I ate my way down a tube of Ritz crackers without relief and imagined Kippy and her boyfriend heavy-petting, his hands poking and fumbling with the snap on her jeans. “Playing with fire,” Dear Abby called it.

  Met her on a mountain

  There I took her life

  Met her on a mountain

  As the Kingston Trio sang in their choirboy voices, it abruptly occurred to me that the wallpaper man could turn out to be Jack Speight with a different name. Or someone like him. Some man just as bad.

  There were enough hazardous knives and ice picks and sharp-tipped meat thermometers for every room in the house. It took me half an hour to get them all planted. He was due at eight the following morning. If he touched me, I’d plunge first and ask questions later. I wondered how far Grandma had gotten. By now she must be in a different state.

  I opened the big envelope last: “Miss?Price,” in handwriting painstaking and oversized.

  Inside was the front cardboard panel of a cereal box. On the back, Scotch-taped to the gray cardboard, was a bank check for $500 and a family photograph of people I had never seen. “Pay to the order of Miss?Price” the check said.

  When I shook the envelope, a loose-leaf-paper letter dropped out. The handwriting was the same as the outside address:

  . . . have sold a piece of his Daddy’s property on Hickory Lake. . . . a little something for all your troubles . . . and if he could write I’M SORRY on every single grain of sand in the ocean, it wouldn’t show one tenth of his sorrow . . . has not been able to sleep through the night since it happened . . . am sending this picture so you can see he is a CHRISTIAN FAMILY MAN, not some crazy alcoholic. Sincerely your’s, Mrs. Arthur Music.

  It was one of those discount-store portraits with a fake hearth in the background and everyone’s hand resting unnaturally on someone else’s sleeve. She had written their names in ballpoint pen on each shoulder. “Earlene (me)” she wrote against her turquoise sleeveless shell. The boys had wide crew-cut heads and looked like the kind of children who got beaten.

  I looked at him last. He wore heavy black glasses, white shirt, oily Elvis hair. He was so skinny, his pants crimped up beneath his belt buckle. I wanted to keep believing some driverless truck had killed her, not a person with a face and a family.

  By the time I could get up and walk to the kitchen, the TV-dinner foil had blackened. The room was thick with heat, the food ruined. I put the check in my pants pocket and walked over to the stove.

  The family browned and curled at the edges, then caught the gas-jet fire—like the screaming paper-doll girl in Mrs. Masicotte’s kitchen. Mrs. Masicotte had paid us off, too: with presents, a pool.

  The yellow flame licked and shriveled Arthur Music’s serious smile, but I knew as I watched him go that it was no good—that the burden of his face was mine now, like the burden of Ma’s death. Mine to carry, mine forever.

  The face of my mother’s killer. Jack’s face.

  My partner in crime.

  All the dead bolts and pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn’t protect you from the truth. And I sat there and closed my eyes and felt Jack again, ramming himself into me—felt that blind, never-ending pain, over and over, on the afternoon we’d killed Rita’s baby.

  When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.

  11

  Guess who?” the wallpaper man said, holding up a basket of paint-splattered tools. He had curly, shoulder-length hair and bib overalls with no shirt underneath. One of his eyelids drooped. His smile w
as gap-toothed: Howdy Doody on drugs.

  He kept walking in and out the door, up and down the stairs, whistling “Lady Madonna.” Grandma was probably somewhere in a roadside coffee shop, nibbling a corn muffin and receiving bad vibrations.

  “Yoo-hoo,” he called up the stairs. “You guys got a radio or something I could listen to? I work better with tunes.”

  “In the parlor,” I said, calling down the directions to Grandma’s old cabinet-model radio.

  “Whoa—a golden oldie,” I heard him say. “Dig it.”

  “Plug it in first. It has to warm up.”

  Static crackled, stations whizzed by at top volume. He settled on a screamy song I didn’t recognize, one I didn’t think Grandma’s radio was even capable of playing.

  “Yoo-hoo again,” he called up over the music. “I’m going to be putting up staging, so I don’t want to trap you in up there.”

  “There’s a butcher knife waiting for your heart if you try,” I almost shouted back.

  The cuffs of his overalls were frayed; the seat was embroidered with mushrooms. I watched from the doorway as he bathed the old flamingo wallpaper with a sponge, staining it with big, swooping strokes, and making little rips in it with a can opener. The hallway smelled of vinegar. I was supposed to pay him for this vandalism?

  “You know how flamingos get pink?” he said as I tiptoed past. He peeled off a long shred of paper, like sunburned skin. “Shrimp. They eat shrimp. It turns them pink.”

  He smiled broadly at me. That droopy eyelid threw his whole face out of balance. If it was a joke about the shrimp, I didn’t get it.

  I went out to the kitchen and chain-smoked, filling the drain trap with butts the way Grandma hated—waiting for the nicotine to rev up my blood. I’d lived in this house for five years and never whistled like that.

  “Pucci, F.,” the phone book said. “102B Marion Court.” He’d offered to talk any time. Leaving the house open to this hippie would horrify Grandma, I thought, with some satisfaction.

  He sang along with every single song that came on. I had to wait for a commercial just to get a word in. “Excuse me. Do you happen to know where Marion Court is?”

  “Marion Court? Marion Court? Oh, yeah . . . those brick apartments off Penny Avenue. Past Burger Chef and Schiavone Chevrolet.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Five miles? Six?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I have an appointment there.”

  I was not about to take a bus—walk down a narrow aisle while people looked up from their laps for the free show. In the yellow pages I found the number for the taxi station and stared at it until my eyesight blurred. I imagined getting in the back and not noticing until we’d sped up that the driver was Arthur Music, come back from North Carolina to beg my forgiveness. Or kill me. I saw myself throwing open the door at sixty miles an hour, leaning toward the rushing pavement as he pleaded into the rearview mirror.

  “ ’Scuse me,” he said.

  I took in a sharp breath. My hands flew into the air.

  “Oops, sorry. Hey, look, I gotta go pick up some more sizing on Fountain Street. You need a lift over to Marion Court? What time’s your appointment?”

  “Well, it’s flexible,” I said. “They’re expecting me whenever.”

  * * *

  Someone had spray-painted “Que pasa?” on the passenger’s-side door of his truck. The question-mark dot was a peace sign. I stepped up and in, lowering myself amongst the seat debris. Cardboard coffee cups rolled around at my feet. I wondered if he’d ever driven up to Ma’s tollbooth—if coins had ever passed between them.

  My weight slanted his whole truck; the ride through Easterly felt lopsided. Luckily, he played the radio at a volume that ruled out conversation. The truck rattled and creaked and reeked of gasoline.

  “Here’s Burger Chef,” I said. “I’ll walk from here.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll take you the rest of the way.”

  “No, thanks. I’d like to get some fresh air.”

  “Suit yourself,” he shrugged. “That one’s Penny Avenue across the street there. Follow it all the way down. Marion’s the first or second left.”

  It was the fourth left—a good mile down the road—that jerk! Grandma and I would be lucky if that hippie-dippie didn’t hang the wallpaper upside down. My feet burned and I was winded. Mr. Pucci would probably answer the door and there I’d be, having a heart attack. He had started this whole college thing. If I died, it was his fault!

  There was a flower box in his window. Marigolds. “I’m the only kid at school who’s seen these,” I thought. His doorbell looked like a miniature breast. I pushed the nipple and waited.

  A man as slight as Mr. Pucci answered the door. He was wearing cutoffs and a blue-and-white striped tank top and holding a spatula. He took in my size. “Yes?” his little mouth said.

  “Is Mr. Pucci home?”

  Now he was looking at my sweat. He had Julius Caesar bangs. “Uh, no, he’s not.”

  “When will he be back?”

  He patted at his hair, the spatula waving over his head. “Um, God, I’m not sure. He went shopping.”

  “I went to some trouble to get here. Do you mind if I wait for him out on the steps? And can I have a glass of water?”

  “Well, sure . . . come on in.”

  The apartment had a kitchenette with swinging saloon doors. I stepped down into a sunken living room filled with plants. On the wall was a framed poster of Rudolph Nureyev frozen in midair, his body curved like a parenthesis. I sat back on the white sofa. That’s when I saw the jukebox.

  It glowed purple and pink across the room. Above it was a glittering poster close-up of Dorothy’s powder-blue ankle socks and red ruby slippers. “I like Mr. Pucci’s jukebox,” I said.

  He was lifting cookies off a cookie sheet. “Play something,” he said. “Can I get you a glass of wine? A Fresca or something? You’re Ingrid, right?”

  “No!” I said, more huffily than I’d meant to.

  “Oh. I thought you were a friend of his from school.”

  “I am.” It dawned on me who he’d mistaken me for: Miss Culp, a middle-aged history teacher at Easterly who was fat like me. Bertha Butt, the kids called her. She sometimes ate lunch with Mr. Pucci in the teachers’ cafeteria. Her students were always making her cry.

  “Mr. Pucci was my guidance counselor. My name is Dolores.”

  He looked up, enlightened. “Oh, right . . . right,” he said. Then he came down into the living room with iced tea and four cookies on a plate. He placed them on the coffee table next to me. “Buddy’s mentioned you,” he said. “I’m Gary. I’m really sorry about your mother.”

  “It’s okay,” I shrugged. “Is Buddy Mr. Pucci?” He’d never invited me to call him that. I felt our intimacy evaporating.

  Gary went back up to the kitchen, leaving a trail of cologne. He had the beginning of a bald spot at the crown of his head.

  “Are you a relative of his?” I asked.

  He laughed nervously. “Oh, we’re roommates,” he said.

  “Oh. I like your jukebox. Did I already say that?”

  “Go ahead and play something. You don’t need money; it’s jammed. I’ve got to finish these while they’re warm or else they’ll stick. We’re going to a cookout at four o’clock this aft.”

  “You and Buddy?”

  I pressed D-l and the record player glided down its row of options. A dough-faced woman with three chins watched me from inside the glass. She didn’t smile. She blinked when I blinked.

  Don’t know why, but I’m feeling so sad

  I long to try something I’ve never had . . .

  As the tinny, girlish voice sang through the speaker cloth, I pressed my knees against the song, hearing and feeling it both. That voice was far away and beautiful, as sad as Ma. I looked up at Mr. Pucci’s friend, my face asking the question. “Billie Holiday,” he said. “She gets the pain right, doesn’t she? Isn’t she something?”

  That�
�s when I realized: they were homos together. All those snickering remarks about Mr. Pucci from kids at school . . . I imagined the two of them kissing, then made myself stop imagining it. You’re a perverted pig, I told the fat woman in the jukebox glass.

  Mr. Pucci walked in carrying two grocery bags. He stiffened when he saw me. One of the bags slipped but he caught it.

  “Dolores,” he said. “Hi. How are you?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Good,” he repeated. He looked over at Gary. “Good. Great.”

  He drove me home in Gary’s car, sidestepping the fact that I wouldn’t fit into his Volkswagen. Unlike the hippie van, the inside of Gary’s car was uncluttered, sterile. A plastic litter bag hung from the cigarette-lighter knob, flat and empty.

  “I’m so happy for you about college,” Mr. Pucci said. His voice had relaxed to normal; it was my being in his house that had given it its nervous edge. “Your mother . . . she’d be very happy about it.”

  “How long has Gary lived in your apartment?”

  His foot tapped the brake for no reason. “Oh, I don’t know. A while.”

  “Is he a teacher?”

  “He’s a travel agent.”

  “Oh.”

  What I was picturing was myself, living there with those two thin, safe men instead of going off to college. Doing their housework, playing that jukebox. “Do you mind if I just come right out and say something?” I said.

  “That depends,” he said. I didn’t recognize his laugh. “What?”

  “What I wanted to say was, if you and Gary are homos, it’s fine with me. It doesn’t bother me in the least.”

  His hands squeezed the steering wheel; his ear turned pink. “God, what a thing to say to me! Sometimes you just go over the line.”