She's Come Undone (16 page)

When I got back to Grandma's—usually in the middle of “Edge of Night”—I was always hungry. I'd stuff down cookies, potato chips, overripe bananas—urgently, without noticing the tastes. Grandma sat with the shades drawn, mesmerized by her story, oblivious to my wild, risky rides.

One afternoon when Jack didn't show up, I walked downtown with Norma French. Her boyfriend Kenny met us at Lou's Luncheonette. He called me “Dolly” instead of Dolores and blew straw wrappers in Norma's face. I sat poker-faced, forcing myself to listen to the way he laughed from the back of his throat. Dozens of blackheads studded his oily forehead. “Wanna see something?” he asked me. He yanked up his yellowy undershirt, exposing two passion marks Norma had given him on the stomach. I got up and left rather than sit across from them in the booth and watch them kiss.

Sister Presentation assigned us science reports, due the week after Halloween. From her list of mimeographed topics, I selected “The Miracle
of Human Birth.” For over a month, I had kept Jack's secret, waiting patiently for his and Rita's announcement. Whenever I saw Rita, I studied her face, her middle, even the way she looked and laughed, for visible signs. She gave none. She was as good at secrets as I was.

I had already appointed myself the Speights' sole babysitter and picked out names: Christopher Scott for a boy and Lisa Dolores for a girl. In a recurring vision, Rita sat up weakly in her canopied deathbed and handed me the pink infant. “I'm sorry you have to leave school,” she whispered, barely audible. “Take good care of both of them. They need you more than I can say.”

*   *   *

“Cup of coffee?” Jack asked.

He had taken a detour all the way down Chestnut and pulled abruptly into a doughnut-shop parking lot.

“Okay,” I said.

I studied him through the store window. He was wearing his wheat jeans and brown plaid sweater. The waitress patted her hair and laughed at something he said. She watched him from the back as he walked out.

The coffee against my lips was too hot and I blew on it, watching the oily surface that swirled on the top. “Guess what I have to write a report on?” I said.

“What?”

“Babies. How they grow inside their mother before they're born.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said. He took a cautious sip of coffee and looked straight ahead. “Well, whoopee.”

“When are you and Rita going to start telling people about the baby, anyways?”

“Why?” he said, looking over at me. “Did you say anything?”

“No. I was just wondering.”

“Oh. Well, like I told you, she's a little gun-shy after what happened before. There's no hurry.”

“Grandma will probably crochet it a whole wardrobe. When is it due?”

“April. Middle of April.”

“Really? I have a
Life
magazine here that I took out of the school library for my report. It's got pictures of what babies look like as they're developing. It's weird. You want to see them?”

“See that waitress in there? Her name is Dolores, too.” He started the car up, rolled back out onto the street. “It's on her tag. Right over her fat tit.”

I tried not to hear it. “So do you want to look at the article?”

“I don't like to look at that kind of thing. Rita's medical books have all that stuff in them.”

“Can I just tell my mother about the baby? She won't say anything to Grandma. Or can I at least tell Rita I know?”

I knew he was mad from the way he shifted the car. “Look,” he snapped. “Either I can trust you or I can't.”

“You can,” I said. “I was just asking.” I took a large gulp of coffee. The hot bitterness of it choked me. I coughed and coughed. Coffee jumped out of the cup, spilling in my lap and onto the floor.

Jack pulled to the side of the road. He reached down with a napkin and wiped the floor. “I'm sorry,” he said. “It's just that I'm under a lot of pressure lately.”

“Forget it. I shouldn't bug you. I'm the one who's sorry.”

His hand touched my ankle. He slid his fingers inside my sock and moved them up and down. I pressed my foot hard against the floor so it wouldn't jump. I didn't want him to tickle me. I didn't want to make him mad. “You and me,” he said. “We're special people.” Then he straightened up, put the MG in gear, and drove me back to Pierce Street.

I started the report that night, lying belly down on my bed, copying facts onto index cards in the manner Sister had ordered. I counted backward from April fifteenth, then forward again to the current date. She had to be at least two months pregnant.
Limb buds
are quite discernible and the primitive heart beats rapidly,
the article said.
The embryo is the size of a peanut in a shell.

Jack walked across the floor upstairs. He was just nervous about it; all expectant fathers were like that. On “My Three Sons,” Robbie Douglas had driven all the way to the hospital without even realizing he'd forgotten his wife. We were good friends, Jack and me. I'd help him through it.

The fetus pictures took up several whole pages. Some of them reminded me of the sea monkeys I'd once seen advertised on the back of a comic book and sent away for. I'd waited weeks and weeks for them to arrive. “Place in a glass of ordinary tap water and watch them come to life!” the instructions said. But they remained brittle and lifeless, floating at the top for days until my mother made me flush them down the toilet.

The following day in school, Kathy Mahoney placed a small box of party invitations on top of her desk. All morning long, I watched her walk back and forth to the pencil sharpener, dropping envelopes on desktops whenever Sister Presentation wasn't looking. Just before lunch, she took her final trip, tossing the empty stationery box in Sister's wastebasket.

Norma ran up to me at the end of the day, calling my name loudly enough for others to turn and smirk.

“What are you, deaf or something? You want to walk down to Lou's?”

“Look,” I said, loudly enough for Kathy and the others to overhear. “Stop bothering me, okay?”

She looked more curious than hurt.

“I just don't want to be friends with you anymore. That boyfriend of yours gives me the creeps.”

Norma sucked her teeth. “Look who's jealous,” she said.

“That's a laugh and a half!” I said, with as much contempt as I could manufacture. “Maybe if he used a vat of Clearasil, I could look at him without puking.”

Her lower lip protruded. She socked me in the stomach.

“Girl fight!” someone shouted. People rushed around us in a circle.

I swallowed vomit back down my throat. In tears, I screamed at Kathy Mahoney, at all of them. “I'm not
your
free show!” Then I ran past the rectory and onto Chestnut Avenue, their staring and laughing following me.

“Drive fast!” I ordered Jack. “Get me away from this fucking school!”

*   *   *

That night, my father called. Ma held out the receiver, exasperated. “Then
you
tell him you don't want to see him,” she whispered. “I'm sick of him accusing me of everything in the book.”

I snatched the phone. “What?” I said.

I listened to more of his promises: miniature golf, restaurant food, movies.

“Do me a favor?” I said. “Just pretend I died.”

I heard him draw a breath. Then he told me he had just about had it with my busting his agates, that it was about time I got off my high horse and realized—

I hung up on his big speech.

Jack showed up after school the next day. “Well, well, well, if it isn't the Queen of Sheba,” he said as I climbed into the car. “I was about to take off if her highness kept me waiting any longer.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I snapped. “Just get up and leave early?”

He pulled away and down the street. There was a small brown liquor bottle between his legs. “Well, it's over,” he said. “They're shit-canning me. One more month and I'm out of there.”

“Your job? Oh, my God . . . What are you going to do?”

“Right now I'm going to take me and you on a little adventure,” he said. He lifted the bottle and took a quick, sneaky drink.

“Where? I sort of have a lot of homework tonight. I'm still working
on that report.” I didn't like it when he was drinking. I didn't want him touching my feet.

“Fine. Forget I mentioned it.” His laugh was bitter.

“You'll get a job at a
better
station, Jack. W-PRO, maybe. Any station would be lucky to get you.”

He shook his head and snickered.

“I guess a ride would be okay. As long as it's not too long.”

“Forget it. Don't do me any fucking favors.”

“No, please. I want to. Really. Where should we go?”

He turned to me and smiled. “If I told you,” he said, “it wouldn't be an adventure.”

He drove out on Route 6 until the stores became houses, then woods. The autumn air smelled of apples and wood smoke. Nothing looked familiar. I stuck my arm out the window and let it go limp. Pockets of cold wind kept pushing it up. Canada geese made an arrowhead in the sky.

“My mother's got this thing about flying,” I said. “In my room I've got this picture she did of a flying leg. When we lived at our other house, she used to have a parakeet who—”

“I don't want to talk about your mother,” he said. “Just shut up. I'm not in the mood.”

“You'll get a better job. Things will be all right.”

He chuckled and sipped from his bottle. “Want some?”

I shook my head, shocked that he'd ask.

“That's a good little pussy,” he mumbled.

“Look, I don't think that—”

“You don't think
what?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just forget it.”

We rode and rode. When we were nowhere in particular, he turned his blinker on. A hand-lettered sign said “Animal Shelter—Town of Westwick.” Then we were on a bumpy road lined with pine trees.

“I don't get it,” I said.

“I haven't been out here for a while. There's a reservoir off thataway. And a waterfall somewhere around here. Listen for it.”

The road dipped and rose and Jack swerved his way around the ruts and puddles. I thought of the wild rides with my father in Mrs. Masicotte's car. “So why are you taking us here?” I asked.

“I was thinking about this place today while I was on the air. Thinking about you, too. You'd be surprised how many times a day I think about you. I want to show you something. This will break your heart.”

“What?”

“Don't be impatient,” he said. He had on his teasing smile.

“Has Rita ever seen it?”

He took another sip without answering me.

“Are you drunk or something?”

“Hey,” he said. “Didn't I tell you a while back to shut up?”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Just remember, I have homework.”

I listened for that waterfall but heard, instead, the sound of barking dogs up in the trees. It got louder, came down to the ground. Up ahead was a cement building.

Jack slowed, pulled onto a crunchy gravel driveway, and cut the engine. “There,” he said.

The dogs were behind chain-link pens that ran the length of one side of the building. Their angry barking filled up the air. A big white one kept lunging at us, buckling the fence with each charge.

Jack got out of the car. He tried the doorknob of the building, called hello, knocked on the metal door. “Guy I know's the dog warden but it looks like no one's home,” he called back to me over the barking. “Come on out and see the pups.”

I approached hesitantly. One had a cloudy eye; another had scratched his back raw. The white dog bared his pinky-gray gums at us and bit at the wire of the cage. “Why are they out here?” I said.

“These are the poor fuckers nobody wants. Keep them here a couple of weeks. Then they gas 'em.”

He reached out and placed his hand on the small of my back, drawing me in next to him. “Don't they have sad eyes?” he said. “Makes you want to sit down and cry.”

I couldn't see it. They were riled and dangerous-looking and I felt no sympathy. Their claws clicked against the concrete floor as they paced, dodging their turds and their slimy water bowls.

Jack started rubbing my back. The dogs seemed to calm. “The world is a lonely place, all right,” he said. “Just look at these guys.”

“Yup. So where's this waterfall?”

“We're friends, right?” he said. “Can I ask you for a favor?”

“I don't know. What is it?”

“You promise you won't take it the wrong way?”

“I won't,” I said.

“Could I give you a kiss—just a friendly one?”

My stomach pulled in; blood pounded in my head. “I don't think so.”

“Some friend.”

Then he bent toward me and kissed me anyway—softly, on the mouth. His breath was smelly and sweet from the liquor. His fingers dug into my back. The dogs were barking again.

“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.