She's Come Undone (19 page)

“Any trouble with your period?” he asked.

“No.”

“What?”

“No trouble,” I managed, louder.

He nodded in the direction of his stand-up scale. The backs of my legs made little sucking sounds as they unglued themselves from the plastic upholstery. He brought the sliding metal bar down tight against my scalp and fiddled with the cylinder in front of my face. “Five-five and a half,” he said. “Two hundred . . . fifty-seven.”

The tears leaking from my eyes made stains on the paper gown. I nodded or shook my head abruptly at each of his questions, coughed on command for his stethoscope, and took his pamphlets on diet, smoking, heart murmur. He signed the form.

At the door, his hand on the knob, he turned back and waited until I met his eye. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “My wife died four Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you—you don't want to do this to yourself.”

“Eat shit,” I said.

He paused for a moment, as if considering my comment. Then he opened the door to the waiting room and announced to my mother and someone else who'd arrived that at the rate I was going, I could expect to die before I was forty years old. “She's too fat and she smokes,” I heard him say just before the hall rang out with the sound of my slamming his office door. I was wheezing wildly by the time I reached the final landing.

On the turnpike on the way home, Ma said, “I could stand to cut down, too, you know. It wouldn't hurt me one bit. We could go on a diet together? Do they still sell that Metrecal stuff?”

“I've been humiliated enough for one fucking decade,” I said. “You say one more thing to me and I'll jump out of this car and smash my head under someone's wheels.”

*   *   *

The repairman from Eli's TV was parked in front of the house when we pulled into the alley. I waited in the parked car, watching his head move back and forth up in my bedroom window. When he finally drove away, whistling, I pounded up the stairs past Grandma and locked the door. I snapped the “on” button and held my breath. Suddenly, “The Newlywed Game” lit up on the big screen.

“Does your husband kiss you with his eyes opened or closed?” Bob Eubanks asked one of the new wives.

Still unable to relax, I rifled through my various bags and packages. I started with Mallomars, stuffing them whole into my mouth. That old man's voice wouldn't go away. “You're too goddamned fat,” he kept saying.

“She'll say I keep them closed but I really keep them open,” a newlywed husband said.

“You do?” his wife said, worried.

“Eat shit,” I'd told him, and he hadn't even blinked. I slugged down a mugful of Pepsi, trying to calm myself. The week before, Ma had bought me a new product to try: Swiss cheese in a squirt can. I'd made a face when she'd shown me, but now I decorated crackers and chips with ribbons and ribbons of the stuff. I found some stale Lorna Doones and concocted little Swiss cheese and Lorna Doone sandwiches. I squirted dabs on each fingertip, like nail polish, and licked them off one by one, repeating the process until the can hissed air. Calmer, I opened a bag of M&M's. I was able to eat them in their normal sequence: red, green, yellow, yellow, brown.

*   *   *

My plan to end the impasse concerning my future was so beautifully simple, I was amazed I hadn't thought of it earlier. No high school diploma, no college. I would simply fail my finals.

During exam week, the corridors were a wall of noise. My classmates had secured their futures, their prom dates, and had gotten an early start on their summer tans. I passed among them, invisible, like a brief shadow over their excitement.

In world-history class, I filled in the blue-book test pages with cross-hatching so intricate it looked like weaving. I ran a brand-new Bic pen dry.

“To what extent does Hamlet's dilemma mirror that of modern man?” my English teacher wanted to know. In front of me, the other kids coughed and sighed, pausing only to shake out their writing hands. I knew what she wanted: she wanted us to talk about alienation—about how it felt to be left out in the cold. She wanted me to pity Hamlet from my seat at the back of the room at a special table because I was too fat to fit at the regular desks. All year long her eyes had skidded over me as if I didn't exist. The invisible freak. Well, I
didn't
feel sorry for stupid Hamlet and his stupid indecision. I felt sorry for the
old
king, the ghost, the one who has the poison crammed up inside him and dies while everyone else gets to go on with their lives. “Don't know—didn't read it,” I scrawled across the mimeographed test paper.

In physiology I borrowed Mr. Frechette's laminated lavatory pass and got home with it in time to catch the second half of “Search for Tomorrow.”

“Mail, Dolores,” Grandma said when I came downstairs later that afternoon. Her voice dropped. “Your father,” she whispered.

On the outside of the card was a chimpanzee wearing a mortarboard. When I opened it, a hundred-dollar bill fluttered to the floor. “Wish I could be there for your big day. Use for luggage. Love, Daddy,” the note said.

I imagined the thank-you note I'd dare to write him. “Dear Daddy, Thank you so much for wrecking my whole life. Did you
know that I am now a fat elephant and am not having any big day because I flunked my exams? I'm returning your money. Tape it to a brick and shove it up your ass sideways. Love, Dolores.”

I cried my way through a bag of cheese popcorn and a can of Ma's butterscotch Metrecal. While I did, Mr. Pucci, bent still on being my pal, was at school convincing my teachers to look the other way. He drove over the next afternoon to deliver both the good news and the cap and gown I was to wear in the graduation procession. I hadn't bothered to show up for the rehearsal.

“Dolores, please!” Grandma stood over my bed, her cheeks pinkened with exasperation. The graduation gown was draped over her arm. “That poor man has driven here specially to deliver this. He's waiting downstairs to see you. What am I supposed to say?”

I stared at the TV screen in a counterfeit trance. “Tell that homo to mind his own business,” I said.

He waited another fifteen minutes for me to change my mind. At the window, I watched his yellow Volkswagen drive away from the curb. I pulled the wet, dusty curtain from inside my mouth, belatedly aware I'd been chewing the fabric. I placed the mortarboard on my head and walked back and forth in front of the mirror, watching the way it sat foolishly uncommitted to my skull, the way it called cruel attention to my plump cheeks, the hopeless wobble of my concentric chins.

Two nights later, Ma and Grandma stood before me in their new flower-print dresses and stiff beauty-parlor hair. “I'm not going,” I said. “It's a farce. I told you that already.”

“Why, I can't understand why a young lady would purposely miss her own commencement exercises,” Grandma said.

“Oh, honey, come on,” Ma goaded. “I thought maybe we could go out to China Paradise afterwards and celebrate.”

“There's nothing
to
celebrate,” I said.

“Or someplace else. Even someplace ritzy, what the hell.”

I flopped back on my bed and clamped my eyes tight. “For the
last time,” I said, “I am going to watch ‘Laugh-In.' Then I am taking a bath. I am
not
going to put on that retarded hat and walk across the stage with all those hypocrites.”

“Well, Mr. Pucci will certainly be disappointed in you,” Ma tried.

My eyes sprang open. “Speaking of hypocrites!” I said.

Grandma put her hands on her hips. “Well, so what, Bernice?” she said. “Miss Party Pooper can just stay here. We'll go anyway. I'll even try that chinky-Chinaman food. Who needs
her
to have a good time?”

“Great bluff, Grandma,” I said. “Brilliant. Very convincing.”

When they actually did pull out of the driveway, I was outraged. “Traitors,” I said aloud. In retaliation I grabbed my father's hundred-dollar bill and slammed out the front door.

I hadn't stepped inside Connie's Superette in three years. Breathlessly, I filled my cart with boxed desserts, canned potato sticks, whatever crossed my path. Wheeling past the delicatessen counter, the red center of a roast beef caught my eye. “I'll take that,” I said.

Big Boy sucked his cigar without interest. “Quarter pound? Half?”

“I mean I'll take the whole thing.”

His eyes widened. “Lady,” he said, “this piece of beef runs a good eighteen, nineteen pounds. It'll cost you about forty bucks.”

To Big Boy, I was some anonymous eccentric fat lady. I felt buoyed by my new identity. “That's my business, isn't it?” I snapped.

He shrugged. “Sliced or unsliced?”

“Unsliced.”

At the counter I handed Connie the hundred, ignoring the way she studied the bill front and back. The total came to $79.79. Connie counted soft, limp fives and ones onto my palm and I was instantly sorry I'd forfeited the hundred.

Back at home, I hacked the beef into several odd-sized pieces, using Grandma's most brutal knife. The deeper I cut, the more purply raw the meat became. I gagged and choked, swallowing whole the cool, rubbery hunks I couldn't manage to chew through. When my jaws ached, I wrapped the rest of the meat back up in its butcher
paper and hid it in the bottom of the garbage can outside. Ma had probably written Daddy to get that card out of him. Luggage for college was probably her idea, too. She couldn't wait to get rid of me—only she wasn't going to.

Grandma kept a bottle of Mogen David wine in her night table. “That stuff,” she called it. She used it on nights she couldn't sleep. The cork made a wet sucking sound as I extracted it. The sour, syrupy liquid dribbled down my chin as I drank. Back in my room, I filled my mouth with potato chips and pastries, crunching and chewing until my cheeks filled out with sweet, salty pulp.

The toilet swung back and forth like a pendulum. I couldn't make it stop. Then I threw up quarts of purple mush. I made the bathwater as hot as it would go—as scalding as the night he'd done it to me—and eased myself in. Not that it worked. Not that it ever washed away.

*   *   *

I was sitting naked at the edge of my bed, ironing my wet hair, listening intently to the sizzle. I watched my fingers reach over my big belly and disappear. They stroked the insides of my legs, the tuft of hair I couldn't see. “Just a little,” I told myself. “What else do I have? Why not?”

My fingers became Mr. Pucci's small hands, moving lightly, in little, understanding half circles. He knew. He knew. . . . Jack Speight's face interrupted briefly, threatening as always to wreck things, but the strokes empowered me and I banished Jack. Then I was lying back on the bed, my body light and freed of fat, my fingers bold and faithful to the rhythm.

My stomach pulled in. My back arched. The sensations kept lasting and lasting.

The bed shook.

The doorknob shook.

“Hi, honey,” Ma called from behind the door. “Can I come in?”

“No!” I said, struggling for my underpants. “I'm sleeping.”

“Graduation was nice. Kind of long. Mr. Pucci gave me your diploma. You want to see it?”

“Nope.”

“Grandma and I went to China Paradise after all. Mr. Pucci came with us. I got you a number sixteen—shrimp lo mein and spareribs. Are you hungry?”

“I'm sleepy. Put it in the refrigerator.” I was pulling on my sweatshirt, yanking covers around myself.

I woke up later—abruptly—from a leaden sleep. Outside it was dawn, raining. I thought about what my body had done for me, what I'd let it do. But sleep had stolen the power I'd felt and Jack's face was tangled up in my headache. “You pig,” he said. “You slutty cocktease.”

On TV, there were only religious shows and test patterns. I remembered the lo mein and tiptoed downstairs, carefully avoiding the creaky step near the bottom. If either one of them gets up now and talks to me, I thought, it will kill me. I will die.

Their curled-up graduation programs were on the kitchen counter. I located my name, then ripped them up and threw them in the garbage pail. Back in my room, a black-and-white “My Little Margie” rerun had begun. I watched it without sound, eating strands of congealed noodles, biting into cold, sticky shrimps curled tightly into their fetal positions. When I looked out, the sky had lightened to pearl gray. A wet breeze was stirring the catalpa tree.

I
n early July a seven-page letter arrived from a girl in Edison, New Jersey, who mistakenly thought I was going to be her college roommate. It was written in pink felt pen, the
i
's and exclamation marks circled instead of dotted. Her name was Katherine Strednicki, she wrote, but everyone called her Kippy. She liked the Cowsills and Sly and the Family Stone. Her boyfriend, Dante, had taken her to see the play
Hair
in New York but had made her look away at the naked parts. They were serious, but not pinned or anything. She wondered what clubs I'd been in in high school and if I'd like to go in halvsies on matching Indian-print curtains and bedspreads. Her mother would sew the curtains; I could pay them back in September, no sweat. Kippy was hoping to become a pharmacist, but she didn't approve of doing drugs for pleasure. She preferred to get high on life and hoped I did, too.

My mother was in her room, slipping into her khaki uniform slacks. “I decided I like third shift after all,” she said. “Nighttime travelers need you more than people in the day. All those paper coffee cups on the dashboard. You'd be surprised how many of them want to stay and chat.”

I handed her the letter. “Ma,” I said. “I just can't do it. I'm too fat. I'm too afraid.”