She's Come Undone (23 page)

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.”

“I'm sorry.
Boyfriends,
not homos. I didn't mean . . .”

“Gary's my
roommate.”

“Well, whatever. It's no business of mine, right?”

“I mean, what an assumption!”

“I'm sorry. Are you mad at me? Pal?”

“No, I'm not
mad
at you but . . . Jesus Christ, Dolores!”

I waited past two traffic lights' worth of silence. “I'm sorry I went to your house, okay? It's just . . . I don't think I can go to college. I know it would have made her happy, but I'm too scared.”

“Look at me,” he said. “Within one month you'll be writing me a letter saying how happy you are—how glad you are you decided to go. How you've met this friend and that friend. I'll bet you any amount of money.”

“I won't make friends,” I said. “Everybody hates you if you're fat.”

“No, they don't. That's an excuse you use. Don't be hypocritical.”

“Well if you ask me,
you're
the hypocrite.
Buddy!”

“Stop it,” he snapped. “Cut it out!”

*   *   *

I sat on the front step where he'd dropped me off, composing the letter of apology I'd write. I'd write both him and Gary letters—in separate envelopes with separate stamps. Maybe they
were
just roommates. What did I care? I'd remind him that pals forgave pals—that my mother's death was still messing up my head. I'd meant to tell him about that check I'd gotten from Arthur Music—that photograph of his
Watchtower
magazine family—but he'd rushed me out of there so fast. He'd tricked me all along with that word of his: pal. Some friendship! His white apartment—that sad singing—already seemed tunneled and distant, one more thing I'd lost.

Inside, the stairway wall had turned white and blank, with a network of veinlike cracks. Strips and pieces of the old paper littered the stairway and foyer, rustling like dead leaves under my feet.

The radio was off. “Hey?” I called. “Mister?”

I reached inside the telephone table, took out the corkscrew I'd hidden there and walked slowly toward the kitchen. If he jumped out at me from somewhere, I'd blind him.

He was sitting cross-legged like Buddha in the backyard sun. His eyes were closed; his lips moved slightly. If he was having a drug trip on our time, I'd just rip up Grandma's check and call the cops.

Keeping an eye on him, I tiptoed around the kitchen, making myself a salami sandwich, blaming the three-quarter-inch wad of meat slices on everything I'd put up with: Mr. Pucci's hypocrisy, the letter from Arthur Music, this freak in the backyard. I was on my second sandwich and a napkinful of Cheetos when he walked inside, bleary-eyed, without bothering to knock.

“Oh, hi,” he said. He looked at my sandwich, not me. “You got any
peanut butter and a couple more slices of that bread? I been out there for fifteen minutes trying to meditate with my stomach growling.”

“How come you stopped working?” I snapped. “We're not
paying
you to meditate.”

“You're paying me by the job, not the hour,” he said, smiling. “The plaster's got to dry before I can size it.”

I handed over the peanut-butter jar.

He ate his sandwich in the parlor, flipping the stations on Grandma's TV. Then he came back in the kitchen and asked if he could make another one. He sang while he did it. “By the way, my name's Larry Rosenfarb in case you're interested.” A quarter of his new sandwich disappeared with the first bite. He chewed, smiled, swallowed. His hand disappeared inside the Cheeto bag. “Tell me your name and I'll stop calling you ‘Yoo-hoo' and ‘Excuse me.'”

I paused long enough for it to be uncomfortable for him. “Dolores,” I finally said.

He stopped chewing. “Like the mouthwash?”

“Do-
lor
-es.”

“Oh, okay. Thought you said Lavoris.” He laughed and whacked the side of his head, as if it were a broken TV.

He was irritating-weird, not psycho-weird, that much I could tell; I could pretty much see I needn't have bothered with the knives.

The noontime news was about the Woodstock festival. Rock music had closed down the interstate. A helicopter view showed people's heads, milling and clustering, like molecules in a science movie.

“Far fucking out!” Larry shouted. He flopped into Grandma's parlor chair so hard it sent cushion dust flying. He leaned toward the television as he watched. “Me and my old lady were thinking of going up there, only our kid got an ear infection two nights ago and we missed our ride. The brakes on my truck are for shit or else I'd still try it. I could just see me rear-ending half of America—everyone under thirty walking around with one of those neck-brace things.”

The newscaster said Woodstock had been proclaimed a disaster area—that nothing quite like this had ever happened before.

“And here you and me sit in the living room in Rhode Island,” Larry said. “It figures. Fuck a duck.”

“You and me,” he'd said—as if we were a twosome. When I'd answered the door that morning, my fat hadn't even shocked him.

“Is your kid a boy or a girl?” I asked.

“A girl. Tia. Tia the Terrible.”

“How old is she?”

“Year and four months. She just learned how to walk. Got into my eight-tracks the other day and yanked out about nine yards' worth of
Disraeli Gears.
Lucky for her she's cute, the little shit. Looks just like Ruthie—my wife.”

I saw his wife as Yoko Ono: floppy hat, hair in her eyes, lying in bed for peace. “I wanted to name her Free! Check it out: F-R-E-E-exclamation mark. Like the punctuation is part of the name, right? Ruthie didn't like it, though. Said all's she could think of was like ‘Free Sample.' That's not what I meant, though. I meant, you know—unencumbered. Only after she said it, all
I
could think of was free sample, too.”

He went out to the hallway to check the drying. “Nope,” he said. Then he was back at the television, flipping channels. “Mind if we watch ‘Jeopardy'?” he asked. The show was on the screen before I could answer.

He sat on the rug and shouted correct answers to the contestants. His wild hair blocked off a corner of the screen.

“You're pretty smart,” I said during a commercial.

“And you thought all I could do was hang wallpaper.” He laughed. “You're just catching me during one of my fallow periods, that's all. One of my compost years. I'm expecting a creative leap pretty soon now.” He turned to the TV screen. “What is a cygnet, asshole?” he shouted at a floundering contestant.

“What is a cygnet?” Art Fleming repeated.

“Can I use your phone?”

I watched him through the doorway. He paced back and forth, stretching the cord further than I thought it would go. “Hi,” he said. “How's the fleas?”

Grandma talked secrets into the telephone; Larry shouted. “Okay, okay, calm down. Call the vet. We'll get the fucker dipped again and we'll spray the shit out of the house and camp down at Burlingame. . . . I should be through by noon tomorrow. Then, fuck it, we'll just drive up there with our shitty brakes and see what's cooking.”

When he returned, he said, “We've been dog-sitting for this ugly mutt named Chuck for these friends of ours who are going cross-country? So two days ago our whole apartment starts breaking out with fleas? I'm talking zillions, man—Poppy Seed City all over your feet. Ruthie's good and freaked—afraid if we spray, the grandchildren will mutate or something. You should see how ugly this dog is, man. Chuck. Old Chucker the Fucker.”