She's Come Undone (24 page)

“You could stay here,” I said. “The three of you. Sleep here overnight.” I wanted to see that little girl.

“Yeah?” he said. “Nah.”

“I don't mind. I'd like it.”

“You sure?”

“I'll cook supper.”

He shrugged, smiling. “We'll all cook supper,” he said. “Have us a party.”

*   *   *

When he left at four to pick them up, I wondered if he'd come back. An hour went by. An hour and a half. My fat must have occurred to him belatedly, I thought. I started on a bag of crinkle-cut chips.

Then they were there in the alley, gabbing and slamming doors. Larry's curls were wet and stringy. He'd changed into bell-bottom jeans and a paisley blouse, the kind Linc wore on “Mod Squad.” A dashiki. “You stay here, Flea Bag,” Larry called into the truck.

His wife was short and squat with hoop earrings and brown hair woven into a fat braid. Larry was holding onto soup-pot handles with potholders. His wife was loaded down with bags, packages, the baby on her hip, and a fold-up high chair hooked to her wrist, the legs banging behind her. “Have a kid some day and your traveling days will be over,” she said to me as she entered. Her voice was low and smooth—the kind of voice you don't question.

She dropped her belongings in the middle of Grandma's parlor and began moving knickknacks and breakables to higher ground. “This is so nice of you,” she said. “I've been snapping fleas and crying all day.”

I'm normal, I thought. A normal person meeting new friends.

“By the way, I'm Ruth,” she said, shaking my hand.

Tia had red-painted toenails and pierced ears. Her diaper was a calendar dish towel.

In the kitchen, cabinets opened and pans clattered. “Aw, shit,” Larry said.

“What's the matter?” Ruth called.

“I forgot the coriander.”

“In the diaper bag,” Ruth said. She had a wide, shiny forehead and a big rear end that stuck out from her granny dress.

Tia slapped Ruth's leg and whined.

“How did you guys meet, anyway?” I asked.

“Larry and me? We were in VISTA together—assigned as partners.” Something snapped, and, suddenly, there was Ruth's whole shoulder, her fat breast. I looked away, then back again. “Blackroot, West Virginia. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you,' et cetera, et cetera.”

Ruth's breast, laced with veins, was dripping milk; I could tell it had a heaviness to it from the way she lifted it to Tia, who opened her mouth and latched on to the purple nipple. Ruth pressed her lips together in pain, then relaxed and smiled and kissed the top of Tia's head.

They always ran the VISTA ads on middle-of-the-night television: blond all-American types in khaki shorts, yucking it up with grateful Navajos. No one in those ads looked like Ruth or Larry.

“Did you like it there?” I asked.

“Blackroot?
Loved
it for a while. We were organizing a Head Start program for preschoolers. You know, shrink a little of the disadvantage, give them a better shot. The locals thought it was kind of silly, but they were pretty polite. We were a novelty. The women liked Larry. The men liked my boobs. I could get them to do anything for me, except look up.” She passed her fingers through Tia's curly hair, hunting for fleas.

Her eyes met mine. “Your hair is gorgeous,” she said.

I tried not to smile. “No it isn't. How long were you in West Virginia?”

“Eleven months. Then the bottom fell out.”

“Do you guys own a vegetable peeler?” Larry yelled in.

“It's in the metal cabinet, middle drawer,” I called back to him. “What do you mean, the bottom fell out?”

“First I got pregnant with Tia. Then some of the local kids got drunk and beat up Larry.”

“How come?”

“Well, to begin with, he made the mistake of telling someone he was opposed to hunting. Therefore, he was queer.”

I pictured Mr. Pucci and Gary, sitting together on their white sofa.

“Then they saw how much he liked playing with the four-year-olds in our program—full-out, down-on-the-floor-with-them
enjoyed
himself. So someone got the idea he was probably molesting them—‘diddling' them, they called it. He almost lost his left eye in that fight. Not to mention his idealism. It was pretty awful. We got married in a hospital in Baltimore. Kazoo music, Popsicles. Larry wore an eye patch and yellow pajamas. A male nurse sang ‘Chapel of Love.' My parents were horrified.”

“Because you were pregnant?”

“Oh, they didn't know I was pregnant yet. They were just freaked about the ceremony. Not exactly something you'd invite the Lenox and ‘Oh Promise Me' crowd to, you know? Tia, hold on a second,” Ruth said, changing breasts. “Who do you think I am—Elsie the Cow?”

Too much was happening! I wanted to watch him cook. I wanted her to keep talking.

“Plus I had dropped out of law school less than a year before. Mother and Daddy hadn't trusted VISTA from the beginning. You should have seen them both the day of the wedding: the I-told-you-so looks were flying around like spears. Poor Mother.”

“I'm going to college in three weeks,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Why maybe?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. I'll probably hate it.”

“Oh, go anyway. I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love, you know?”

Larry came in with a bottle of wine and three of Grandma's china cups. The wine tasted sour and exciting.

“I tell you,” Larry said, “I've spent one day here and I've seen enough flamingos to last me a decade. How did you folks manage to live with that wallpaper so long?”

“Don't blame me. This is my grandmother's house.” I took another sip of the wine. “She's a real bitch.”

Saying it made me blush, but no one seemed to notice. Larry was making faces at Tia, coaxing giggles out of her. “I think I'll take a stroll out to the glove compartment,” he said.

Ruth rolled her eyes. “Don't you think you'd better ask first?”

He turned to me. “What do you say, Dolores? Want to engage in a little predinner reefer madness? Double your pleasure, double your fun?”

“What?”

“Do a number? Get high?”

I couldn't recall Grandma's face. “Go ahead,” I told him. “It's fine with me.”

Larry rolled the joints in little tissue-paper squares, then lit one, taking a series of weird little drags. It popped and glowed and a spark flew to the rug. The four of us watched it die beneath Ruth's big toe.

He took the joint out of his mouth and stared at it so closely that his eyes crossed. “This stuff is cosmic,” he said. “Dolores?”

I shook my head. “Maybe later,” I said. “How about Ruth?”

“Oh, I can't,” she said. “The breast-feeding. So how come your grandmother's a bitch?”

I took another gulp of wine. “She just is. She's had a shitty life.”

Tia's head flopped back and her whole body went limp against Ruth. I sat there aching for Ma, wondering if she had ever breast-fed me.

“Is it just the two of you who live here?” Ruth asked.

“Yup,” I said. I reached for the joint, surprising myself. “Maybe I
will
try this.”

“My grandmother's cool,” Ruth said. She smiled down at Tia, tracing a finger against her eyebrow. “Eighty-three and she still runs her own farm, does all the canning, everything.”

I imitated Larry's sipping of the joint, but exhaled the sweet smoke too quickly. “Hold it in, hold it in!” Larry coaxed. “We got us a novice here, Ruthie.” When I got it right, he smiled and pointed a thumb at Ruth. “Her grandmother's real Zen. It's her mother who's the bitch.”

Ruth frowned. “She is not.”

“All those polite little notes at holiday time. All those Neiman Marcus stuffed animals for Tia. But that's okay. I forgive you.”

He leaned over and kissed her. They kissed for so long, I stopped looking away. I took another drag. Held it in. Let it out.

“I can be a bitch sometimes,” I said softly, but neither of them heard. They were still kissing.

*   *   *

“Are you high?” Larry asked, stirring his soup.

“No,” I said. Then the stove warped. Ruth's shiny forehead struck me as hilarious. “A little, maybe. I'm not sure.”

Ruth frowned. “Larry, that isn't the zombie stuff you got from Steve, is it? I don't trust that guy.”

“Ruthie, give it a rest,” Larry smiled. “It's Woodstock weekend.” He reached up under his dashiki and scratched himself. A fleck of ash floated from his beard into the soup.

Ruth shook her head and sighed.

Supper was a feast: honeydew melon, Ruth's molasses bread, funeral meatballs from the freezer, Larry's creole eggplant stew. I ate slowly, letting the new tastes explode in my mouth. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, Larry got up from the table and did a flamingo imitation so funny I couldn't breathe. This is all really happening! I thought. I dunked another slice of Ruth's sweet bread into my stew.

“Look at that shit-eatin' grin,” Larry said. I looked around for it, then realized they were both staring at me, smiling in approval. “Who,
me?”
I asked, delighted.

Then the radio was on and we were at the sink doing dishes, Ruth's big rear end swaying to the music as she washed.

 

I'm a man, yes I am

And I can't help but love you so

 

Larry grabbed two of Grandma's prescription vials and shook them like castanets. He was rolling his hips to the rhythm in a way I couldn't stop watching. “You know what?” I said.

“No, what?”

“You're sexy.” Then I blushed and covered my face with a dish towel.

Ruth closed her eyes when she danced, and rocked in a private,
sexy way. Then
I
was dancing! They insisted. Timid at first, I risked nothing more than a few tentative steps, a swinging of arms. Larry took my wrists, guiding me, and then the music was inside of me, coaxing my body into the dancing. I felt free—a weightless astronaut, Carol Burnett without her fat suit. My long, gorgeous hair rocked from side to side.

Larry went out somewhere for ice cream. That dog had gotten into the house, was licking spilled wine off the kitchen floor. I thought of the dog-pound dogs the day Jack had raped me. Felt his ramming. That truck ramming Ma.

“My mother got killed last month,” I said.

Ruth looked up and waited, confused.

“In an accident. There was this truck.”

She brought me to the couch and we both sat. First I talked. Then she did. It was her touch, not her words, that mattered: her leg against my leg, her hand at the back of my head, drawing me to her. Her other hand cupped my shoulder, squeezing it at the worst of what I told.

When Larry got back, he knelt before me, rubbing my cheek while Ruth told him about Ma. “It's all right, it's all right,” he kept saying, and his touch, too, comforted me—those warm, rough-skinned knuckles brushing away my tears, skidding gently against my fat face.

*   *   *

Somewhere in the middle of the night, I woke up on the parlor floor, stiff and tingly-headed. “They've left me,” I thought.

Across the room by the window there was a sigh.

A milky shape moved up and down, folding and unfolding like a flower in a time-lapse movie. In my gathering consciousness, I stared at their marriage, their wholeness. I saw, for a second, my parents—the things Ma and Daddy must have done, the kind of wholeness
they
must have had.

Then lost. Losing that was what had made Ma crazy.

“I want, I want . . .” Ruth kept saying. Then Larry's breath caught and they whimpered and clung together, their bodies rocking as one. I lay there, shaking and staring and wondering how the poison Jack Speight had let go inside of me could be what Larry let go in Ruth—what Ruth wanted.

*   *   *

By the time I woke up again, it was bright morning. Larry had put up the first two strips of seashell wallpaper. He was wearing cutoffs and his dashiki, black socks on his chalky legs. He mumbled measurements in his head and moved businesslike along his staging.

“Hiya,” he said.

I looked away. “Where's Ruth?”

“She went to the store for orange juice. We wiped out your whole supply this morning. Well, Tia did. She got real curious about what the bottom of the carton looked like.”

“I don't care about that. You sure are working fast. God.”

“Yeah, well, I'm kinda hot to finish by this afternoon. We're going to try to make it up there. To the festival.”

I knew it was hopeless: the possibility of their taking me with them.

The back screen door slapped shut. “Good morning,” Ruth said. “How are you doing?”

“All right,” I said.

“Do you know you have mint growing in your backyard?”

“I do?”

She held a leafy bouquet to my nose. “You picked that
here?
” I said.

“Uh-huh. I think I'll make a shampoo for Tia if it's all right with you. You want one, too?”

She half filled their soup pot and brought the water to a boil. Stalk by stalk, she dropped in the mint. The kitchen air turned moist and sharp. With Grandma's paring knife, she shaved curls of soap into the liquid.

“This is so great,” I said as Ruth massaged the sweet suds into my scalp. Tia walked over my toes with her tiny bare feet. “How did you learn to make shampoo?”

“In the Appalachians. I learned it from the old woman whose house I was staying at. Ida Brock. You should have seen her: two brown teeth, potbelly, the same checkered dress every single day. But she had these liquid black eyes that you could hone the truth on. And long, wavy white hair. She kept it in a ponytail during the day, but first thing in the morning, it would be down and flowing—like yours. It was beautiful hair.”