She's Come Undone (15 page)

Outside, birds chirped and Pierce Street was shiny from rain water. My flip-flops sat neatly, side by side, just outside the door. Had my mother placed them there? Had Jack?

“Forgot to put the top up last night,” he said. He had draped towels over the seats of the MG.

I sat down on the dampness, slammed the door, locked it, then unlocked it again. I stared away from him and out the side. When he reached over for the stick shift, I pressed my knees together.

“How come you bought us doughnuts?”

“Oh, I don't know . . . guess I just like to talk to people at breakfast. Don't forget, I spend the rest of the day talking to a microphone and a bunch of sound equipment.”

I started shaking. Stopped. Started again. There was a hole in his dashboard where a radio was supposed to be. He smiled at nothing, zipping down Pierce Street. “Nasty DP sisters?” he said.

“Rosalie and Stacia Pysyk,” I said. “These two girls who used to bug me last year. That's them right there!”

Like audiovisual aids, the Pysyk sisters appeared ahead, trudging up Division Street. Jack beeped the horn and waved. The two of them looked up at us, amazed, and I stared right back at them.

“Why did they bug you?”

“Who knows? They just did.”

“Jealous of your looks,” he said.

My mouth scrunched to the side. “Yeah, right.”

“No, I mean it. You put yourself next to those scrawny things, Del Rio, and it's like Miss Universe at the dog pound. Here, look at yourself!”

He twisted the rearview mirror for me to see. My hair was blowing out behind me. I looked carefree, 75 percent pretty.

I pushed the mirror back in place. “Yuck,” I said.

He watched the road and me, in glimpses. “Oh, by the way, I almost forgot. About that thing last night? I didn't mean to scare you or anything. You know—the beer, the heat, whatever. It was just one of those things. We're still friends, right?”

My cuticles went white against the edge of my notebook. “Sure.”

“I tried to call you after you went in. I knew you were upset.”

“I guess I didn't hear you. I was taking a bath.”

“No big deal. So let's just forget it, okay?”

“Fine.”

He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. He wouldn't stop smiling. “Not to beat a dead horse or anything,” he said, “but did you say anything to them?”

“About Rita having a baby?”

“Yeah, that. About anything.”

I shook my head. “Why should I?”

“Right. Exactly.”

He pulled up in front of the school. “Well, you have a good day, now. And don't let those two mutt faces bother you. Because you're a special person.” Looking straight ahead, he reached over and took my hand, squeezing it softly. He held it for several seconds. I let him.

Two mulish boys in uniform shirts and ties ran down to the curb as Jack pulled away. “Check it out,” one of them said.

“How fast does that roller skate of your father's go?” the other one asked me. He smiled dopily, exposing a mouthful of surfboard teeth.

“He's not my father,” I said. “He's a close personal friend.”

*   *   *

“Miss Price?” Sister Presentation said, mid-morning.

I felt a pulse in my neck. I knew she'd caught me.

“Yes?”

“Can you tell us what they are? The remaining sacraments?” The others craned their necks to watch.

“Baptism, confession . . .” Sister prompted. A dozen hands flew into the air; the question was a cinch if you'd been listening.

“Holy orders?” I said.

“Eric has already said holy orders.” Hope evaporated from Sister's face; I saw her harden against me. “Did you do your homework last night?”

“Some of it.”

“Well,” Sister said. “‘Some of it' is unacceptable. A girl who can't be bothered to do the very first homework assignment of the school year is a girl who has a poor attitude, in my book. Do you recall what my policy is on incomplete homework?”

“I'm not sure,” I said.

“Then you'd better take out your notebook and look it up. We'll wait for you.”

Panic-stricken, I flipped and flipped the pages, but couldn't find it.

“Number fourteen,” Sister said, impatiently. “Read it aloud.”

“‘A student who has not completed his homework assignment will automatically stay after school on that day.'”

“That's correct,” Sister told me. “And a girl who refuses to do her homework often enough may find herself on the sidelines instead of the graduation line come June. Isn't that right, class?”

They nodded collectively.

*   *   *

At noon I avoided the lunchroom and went, instead, to the school yard. Kids chattered and screamed; jump ropes slapped the asphalt. A large group of third graders were squabbling over a game of Red Light. I hated this school—would rather drown than go here.

At the periphery of the school yard, past the swings, the white plaster statue of St. Anthony stood surrounded by a semicircle of yellow chrysanthemums. I wandered over to the shrine, drawn by the presence of a solitary girl who appeared to be praying. I studied her from the back. Her legs were long and bony—praying-mantis legs. The waist of her uniform buckled in several places beneath her belt. I approached quietly. “Hi,” I said.

She turned abruptly, gasping, slapping her flat chest. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she said. “You trying to give me a heart attack?”

She was a seventh grader. That morning I'd watched her pick her nose during an assembly. “Excuse me,” I said. I started to walk away.

“Are you new here?” she said.

“Not really. I moved here last year. From Connecticut.”

“I been there. It's stupid. What made you come to this shitty school?” Her wide black eyes were sunk deep into her face and roofed by a single bushy eyebrow. Smoke was leaking between the fingers of her cupped hand and I wondered momentarily if she was
somehow on fire before it occurred to me she was having herself a cigarette, an act emphatically forbidden by the St. Anthony's School Code of Conduct. I tried to relax my facial muscles of any visible signs of shock.

“Or should I say this
prison?”
she continued. “Any school that don't even let you wear nylons—”

She took an angry little drag off her cigarette in a way that managed somehow to be both defiant and covert. “Homework, tests—I ain't their slave. Kenny and me got better things to do. You got a boyfriend?”

“No,” I said. “Not exactly.”

“Me and Kenny been going out for seven and a half months. Since I was in sixth grade.”

“Wow,” I said. “Is he someone in your class?”

She snorted. “Don't make me bust a gut. I ain't got time for baby-sittin'. He's in high school. Except he may quit next year when he turns sixteen. On account of all his teachers are out to get him. Plus, he seen this truck deliverin' stuff to their cafeteria one morning and it had a dog-food sign right on the side. Kenny says he ain't eatin' Gravy Train for anybody—they can keep their friggin' diploma. Have you ever French-kissed a guy?”

I looked away, then back. “I'd rather not say.”

“That's my name, French. Except I ain't.”

“What?”

“French. My name is Norma French, but I'm one-quarter Cherokee Indian. Someone told me French-kissin's a mortal sin but that's nuts. Who decided that—the Pope? I'm sure he never tried it, that skinny guinea.” She held out her cigarette to me. “Drag?”

I glimpsed Sister Presentation's classroom windows. “No, thanks.”

“Kenny looks like Elvis. Who do you like—Elvis or the Beatles?”

I knew she was a loser. I knew exactly the kinds of things Jeanette Nord and I would have said about her behind her back. But I was suddenly filled with the fear she'd stop talking to me.

“Oh . . . Elvis,” I said.

“Damn right.” She took another sip off her cigarette. “King of rock'n'roll and don't you forget it.”

“Plus I like the Beatles,” I said.

The skin around her eyes stretched as she laughed. One of her front teeth was gray. “Those friggin' weirdos?” she said. “Cut the comedy!”

She could see I needed straightening out, she said. The Beatles were all queers; you could tell that just by looking at them. Girls who made out in the indoor show were pretty hard up. When she was two years old, she'd swallowed a nail and to this day still remembered the ambulance ride. In 1963, she shook hands at the stock-car races with Miss America, who was ugly up close, whose makeup was thicker than the phone book.

“I have a friend who's a disc jockey,” I ventured.

“Oh, yeah? I call those guys disc
jerk
eys. They should just shut their traps and play the music. Watch this!”

She put her lit cigarette in her mouth and closed it. When she opened it again, the cigarette was sticking out from beneath her tongue, still burning.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“Kenny taught me that. Me and him might get engaged this year. He's thinking about it.”

The school bell gave three short blasts. “Aw, crap,” Norma said. “Here!”

She handed me the wet cigarette and ambled back toward the building.

I stood frozen, holding it vertically and staring. Then I threw it on the ground and scuffed it out like Lassie.

The school day ended in church for First Wednesday confession. Most of the eighth graders were pew monitors for the younger grades and the last to confess. I was one of the six in our class who had not been selected.

Above me, a pious stained-glass angel hovered before the kneeling Blessed Virgin. The angel, as blond as Marilyn Monroe and my mother, looked heavenward. Thick white smoke billowed at her feet and I thought of the rocket launchings on TV that had made Daddy so excited. “Someday we'll drive down to Florida and see one in person,” he had promised me. He was always full of promises. He had wrecked my whole life.

Students' confessions drifted out from behind the curtain. “Yeah, but Father,
he
started it is what I'm telling you . . .” one boy kept insisting. Stacia Pysyk, sitting amongst the seventh graders, kept looking back to make faces at her sister, Rosalie. Norma French, a bit apart from the others, had apparently forgotten her head covering. Amidst the row of mantillas and floral hats and velvet-netted headbands, she sat with a bright red sweater on her head, the collar button fastened under her chin, the sleeves hanging down the sides of her face like beagle ears. Norma represented my sole inroad at St. Anthony's, and I cringed at my pitiful lack of progress.

In the confessional, I listed my sins for Father Duptulski: pride, swearing, disrespect for Ma. I omitted impure thoughts and deeds and began the act of contrition.

My detention lasted an hour. On Division Street, Jack's MG rolled along the curb, following me. I pretended not to notice. It was a kind of game: if I turned around and looked, I'd lose.

“Hey!” he finally called. “Want a ride?”

“Oh, hi!” I said, faking surprise. “All right. Sure.”

The top was down. He squealed his tires taking off.

His cigarette was burning in the ashtray. I reached over and took a puff without asking permission. He shook his head and smiled at me. “Naughty naughty,” he said.

“You should get a radio for this car,” I answered back.

He smiled. “Oh, yeah? Says who?”

“Says me. Dolores Del Rio.”

J
ack began showing up after school two or three times a week. In my notebook I recorded the days he came but could see no real pattern in them. He waited on the Chestnut Avenue side of the church parking lot. Each afternoon I held my breath and rounded the corner past the rectory.

His moods changed from ride to ride. One day he'd buy us ice-cream cones and tease me, calling me beautiful, reaching over to stroke my hair. The next time, he'd be sulky, mumbling complaints about Rita or his job. It was the
format
of the show that straitjacketed him, he said; that's what the station manager didn't understand. He was wasting his peak years, squandering himself—he almost
welcomed
nonrenewal. He'd be in New York right now at double—triple!—his salary if it wasn't for her and her goddamned baby making. Living with Rita was like walking on eggs. He seemed to talk more to himself than to me, laughing sarcastically, or snapping his fist against the dashboard.

Whenever he got that way, I felt embarrassed and fidgety—didn't know what to say. Once I told him that in my opinion he should just try not to let things bother him so much. “And just who in the hell do you think you are, Hot Pants?” he said, his nostrils flaring. “Your best policy might be to just shut the fuck up.”

Some days he took different ways home. “Mystery detours” he
called them. Once we rode past his radio station. Another time we idled in the rear parking lot of an abandoned grammar school—a brick building with plywood windows and tall weeds growing through the blacktop cracks. Most of
his
teachers were probably dead by now, he said—good riddance. He told me how he'd once been benched during some long-ago basketball play-off game because he played the same position as somebody's son. “They're out to get us, kiddo,” he said, taking my hand, studying it. “We've got to be on our guard, you and me.”

I told Grandma I'd joined the Bulletin Board Club at school—that I stayed after with other girls to decorate classrooms and hall showcases. Jack always let me off at Connie's Superette instead of at Grandma's. Inside, Connie watched me from behind the counter, her face impassive, her arms folded under her huge breasts. Sometimes one of the Pysyk sisters was out on the porch or in front of the store, watching, trying to figure us out. Jack's rides made their staring unimportant. “Take a picture,” I called up one time to Stacia. “It lasts longer.”