She's Come Undone (26 page)

I slammed the drawer shut; the ringing metal sound shot down the long corridor and I wondered if it had alerted the town police. Back in my room, I peeled the brown paper wrapping off of my
mother's flying-leg painting. “Are you happy now?” I shouted. “I'm here, aren't I?”

At dusk I took the flashlight and explored the basement floor. There was a laundry room with washers, dryers, an ironing board, and a soda machine. In the next room, a cabinet-model television sat on top of an enamel kitchen table. Metal folding chairs were grouped around it in a semicircle. It looked like a kind of altar. A heavy chain was wrapped around the legs of the set and fastened to a thick iron staple embedded in the wall. I gave that staple several good yanks, then grabbed it tight and leaned back with all my weight. Kippy could disown me, a flood could happen, they could drop the bomb, and still that thing would hold.

Back in the lounge I ate supper by flashlight. Two Sprites from the machine and a jumbo-sized jar of macadamias. For dessert I had the malted-milk balls and a roll of Oreos. I ate them the way I did back in Easterly: popped off the roof first, then raked two treads through the frosting with my front teeth. Then I filled my mouth with soda and felt the cookie collapse in on itself. The ritual both soothed and disappointed me. You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.

Friday night. I imagined Grandma sitting alone in the parlor watching “Ironside,” her new scallop-shell wallpaper rising up behind her, the TV screen lighting her face in silver. Even watching TV, Grandma was at attention, scowling her scowl, ready for the worst. From Pennsylvania, Grandma seemed fragile. Mortal. I wondered if she missed me—if she was sitting up in Easterly, worrying. I saw her fretful face like Auntie Em's inside the witch's crystal ball. Poor Grandma. Her daughter was boxed in the ground, not in heaven, no matter how many rosaries she sat and mumbled. I thought of dialing her on the pay phone to tell her I was all right. Except I
wasn't
all right. . . . Auntie Em would have praised God and accepted the charges. I wasn't so sure about Grandma.

I licked my finger and stuck it into the empty nut jar, poking at
the salt on the bottom. So far, college wasn't
that
bad, if you thought about it. Maybe a fantastic coincidence would occur and each girl at Hooten Hall would independently decide to withdraw, leaving me this entire private dormitory. I wondered where the old smelly hunchback man from the bus ride was now and what his life had been before we traveled together at the back of that burping Greyhound bus. That foreign newspaper he was reading looked Jewish. Maybe he was Anne Frank's father—the family's only survivor—and I'd missed an important opportunity because of garlic breath. There was no logic in life whatsoever, that much I saw. Anne Frank had had a loving, protective father and died anyway. I had Daddy, who was dead to me.

Somewhere after dark, I followed my swooping flashlight ray back up to my room. I thought I heard noises. Rats? Jack Speight? The door locked with a heavy, reassuring thunk.

My mattress felt like an English muffin. The cinder-block walls glowed in the moonlight. “I'll never sleep,” I thought. Then, without warning, I was in a dream on the beach, talking to a flatfish.

He had washed ashore on purpose and come looking for me, flip-flopping himself past other sunbathers until he got to my blanket. Sand covered him like Shake'n'Bake, but his eyes were clear and purposeful. “Follow me,” he said. The water I jumped into became the pool water back on Bobolink Drive. I followed the fish into chilly depths I hadn't known existed in our pool. Drowning seemed irrelevant. Bells were ringing and I knew it was Ma, calling me, somehow, underwater.

I sat up. It was this empty dormitory in Pennsylvania again. Down the corridor, the pay phone was ringing off the wall.

I fumbled with the door lock. The flashlight ray wobbled ahead of me. Too slow, too slow! Maybe Larry and Ruth had gotten my number. Maybe they'd hang up if I didn't—

“Hi, it's me,” the woman said. Someone I couldn't quite recall.

“Ruth?”

“Who's Ruth? Who'd you let in?”

“Nobody. I was just dozing.”

“This is Dottie. I just called to check. And to tell you I'll be in at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. You like cream cake?”

“Cream cake? What time is it?”

“Right now? Quarter of eleven. There's this bakery on Hazel Street that has day-old stuff at one-third off. I'll bring you some breakfast tomorrow morning. At eight. Don't smoke any cigarettes near your mattress, now. I don't want to have any explaining to do. All right?”

“All right.”

“You were lucky I didn't have any plans for tonight. Or else I couldn't have called you like this. I'm doing you a big favor. By rights, I should have sent you home.”

I hung up the phone and hugged myself to stop from shaking.

Back in my room I located
Valley of the Dolls
and read. I had an inch and a half of pages left to go. I didn't know what I'd do if I finished.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, I made my way down to the basement and sat. The dull chill of the linoleum floor numbed my ass, but the soda machine's hum soothed me. I read and read by its glow, one hand on the paperback, the other clutching that iron staple. When I looked up from the print, it was morning—the first pink, stingy light.

*   *   *

“You see, everyone thinks they're too good for day-old pastry, like one-third off is charity or something. The world is full of snobs. Snobs and slobs. I ought to write a book.”

The room smelled faintly of her sweat. Everything about her repulsed me. I smiled sweetly and finished my second slice of cake.

“If people want to be snobs, let 'em. Their loss, my gain.”

We were probably within twenty pounds of each other, but I
wouldn't have been caught dead in the shorts she was wearing. “This is really nice of you,” I said.

“What is?”

“Bringing me breakfast on your day off. I mean, God.”

She waved me away. “Have some more—that's what it's here for.”

I reached for the wedge she'd cut me, cupping my other hand beneath to catch the crumbs.

“Look at that! See?”

“See what?”

“Fat slob this, fat slob that. You hear that all the time. You're like me: a
clean
fat. I could tell that right off. Why do you think I let you stay here? . . . I see it all the time. The dirtiest, sloppiest girls are the
skinny
ones. Year after year, same thing. You can tell who the pigs are going to be just by looking at them. You take Jackie Kennedy. Or Jackie whatever her name is now. I bet in private she's a very sloppy person. I bet you any amount of money.”

She looked pleased for having let me know. We both took sips from the Cokes I'd bought us downstairs. Dottie leaned back on Kippy's mattress and pointed her soda bottle at me.

“Let me tell you something, see? If you'd come here yesterday with those suitcases and been some skinny little ninety-pounder, I would have turned you right around and sent you back where you came from. But you were a fatty, see, so I knew I could trust you.”

This was new. For four years I'd been hated or ignored because of my weight. With Dottie, it was an advantage.

She hooked her foot around the chair leg and scraped it toward her, then hefted up her legs. Marbled with squiggly blue veins, they looked like huge blue cheeses.

“What's that supposed to be, anyway?” she said. She was making a face. My eyes followed hers to Ma's flying-leg painting, leaning against the wall.

“Just a picture,” I said, blushing.

“A leg with wings on it? What's it supposed to
mean
?”

I didn't want this moron even looking at it. “I'm not really sure,” I shrugged. “Tell me about Hooten.”

Maybe I'd ship Ma's painting back to Grandma's, I thought. Come to think of it, I didn't want Kippy staring at it, either.

“. . . And there's this girl Rochelle that's dorm president this year. Got the rest of them fooled, but I bet you'll see right through her. Miss Tiny Twat. Lays out there sunbathing on the lawn so everyone coming and going to class can get a good look. One time I caught her spitting a hawker right into the drinking fountain. ‘Excuse me,' I say to her, ‘but the other girls might like to drink out of that.”

“‘I haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about,' she says. And there's her fucking phlegm in the bubbler. Conceited bitch . . . Last year her and this other girl started this petition thing to get me fired. Stare at them in the shower, ha! Who's got time to stare at them when I'm cleaning up all their messes for them? First she parks herself out there in a bathing suit. Then she accuses
me
of staring.” There were tears in her eyes; her hands were fists. “‘Just go about your business,' my foreman says. ‘You're a good worker. Just keep your nose clean.'”

She scared me. Still, she had declared me an ally, a “clean fat.” There was a kind of authority in those dozens of keys on her ring. And she'd let me stay, had brought me food like Ma always had. She was here. She was somebody.

“You want a cigarette?” I asked her.

When I lit hers, I noticed strands of gray in her blunt black hair. “How old are you?” I asked.

“Me? Twenty-nine. Hey, you know what? I got three aquariums at my house. One in the kitchen, one in the parlor, and one in my bedroom. I got piranhas. You feed 'em canned shrimp and they attack it. The angelfish are the ones in my bedroom. They're my special cuties. Hey, maybe someday you could come see them. My fish. You could come over for supper.”

She reached for the remaining rectangle of cream cake. “Here, let's split this,” she said, breaking me a handful. “Open your mouth.”

Twenty-nine: she was too old to be my friend, too young to be my mother. “So tell me about you,” she said.

“About me?” I laughed. I told her the plot of
Valley of the Dolls
instead, rambling on about the three main characters, how their bad choices had wrecked their lives.

She was smiling at me without listening.

“What?” I said. “What's the matter?”

She leaned toward me. With her finger, she wiped a fleck of frosting off my chin, brought it back to her own mouth, and licked.

Then her gaze was over my shoulder. “A leg with wings,” she said, shaking her head at Ma's painting. “That's wild!”

T
he Strednickis tried the lock three times before they got the door open. I listened to the click of metal on metal, relieved that the shades were down, grateful for every extra second Kippy wouldn't see me. She was the first to enter. I watched her hand pat the wall until she located the light switch. “Something stinks in here,” she said. Then she saw me.

Her parents stared, light-dazed. No one spoke.

I'd been ready for her earlier—had braced myself all morning long as strange voices faded in and out of rooms, up and down corridors on the other side of my locked door. I'd skipped both breakfast and lunch, hoping it might make me look more reasonable. But by three o'clock I'd had enough and taken out the day-old unsold birthday cake Dottie had bought for our party the day before. “Happy Birthday to _______.” No one had wanted it but Dottie and me.

“Hi,” I said. “What do I owe you for the bedspreads?”

Kippy was wearing a turned-down sailor cap with autographs written on it. “Just a second,” she began. “They told me downstairs that two-fourteen is mine and my roommate's room.”

“I'm her.”

Part of me enjoyed the panic overtaking her facial muscles. Parents, a boyfriend, a peppy little life: she was overdue someone like me.

“Don't forget to figure in the tax on those curtains and bedspreads,” I told the three of them. “I don't want you to cheat yourselves.”

The whole thing was Dottie's fault. All week long, we'd worked mornings—scouring shower stalls, waxing floors, distributing laundry packages to the vacant rooms. By midweek, Dottie had brought in her record player and we'd done our cleaning to her soul albums. We both liked the duets best: Sam and Dave, Marvin and Tammi, Ike and Tina. Our favorite was “Mockingbird.” From our respective cleaning areas, we called the lyrics into the empty hallways—called out to each other—our voices echoing off the cinderblock walls.

 

Mock-

Yeah!

-ing-

Yeah!

-bird!

Yeah!

Yeah!

Yeah!

 

In the afternoons, exhausted and sweaty from work, we showered on separate floors, then met each other down in the lounge where we ate and watched TV and played Dottie's favorite card game, Chinese rummy. I was good at it almost immediately. After the first couple of games, we were even-steven.

Throughout the week, Dottie brought me treats: day-olds and Kentucky Fried, hot fudge sundaes melting from the ride across town. She waved away whatever money I held in front of her. “You don't owe me anything,” she always insisted. “This was my idea.” She left each evening at dusk. She had to get home to her fish, she said. I'd lie awake in that strange, darkening dormitory, sometimes singing to myself both sides of those soul duets, sometimes reminding myself who I really was: fat Dolores, mother killer, the girl who deserved nothing but shit.

Our party on the last day before the other girls arrived was Dottie's idea, too. She wanted, she said, to celebrate the fact that she'd finished her work a whole day ahead of schedule, thanks to me. She wanted to celebrate our friendship. Besides the cake, she bought a bottle of vodka and four pounds of pistachio nuts, gift-wrapped in a cardboard box. The side of the box said “Two Size D Flanges.” We started at noon, cracking those nuts with our teeth and drinking Tang-and-vodkas, giggling and trying to guess what a flange was.