She's Come Undone (32 page)

She drove down Wayland's main street, slowed, and parked just past the bus depot where I'd arrived that first day. “Why are you stopping here?” I asked.

“This is where I live. Across the street.” She nudged her head in the direction of a dry-cleaning store. “Upstairs,” she said.

Three dark-skinned people—a woman and two men—were sitting inside the depot. The slamming of our car doors attracted their attention and they looked out. Dottie waved. They waved back.

“That's the DeAndrades,” she said. “They're Portuguese. Come from some island over there. They keep that store spotless.”

“The guy in the orange shirt is the taxi driver who drove me to Merton the first day I got here,” I said. My voice sounded numb and flat. I hadn't told Dottie anything about what Eric had done.

“Oh yeah, Domingos. The wife's brother. He delivered a baby last winter, right in his taxi. They had his picture in the paper.”

We crossed the street and entered a side door. At the top of the stairs, she unlocked another door and I followed her in. I heard the bubbling before I could see anything. Then Dottie was in the center of the kitchen, her hand still on the pull chain.

“This is so great,” she said. “You want a beer?”

I shook my head.

“These are my piranhas.” The tank was on the counter, next to a small TV. “Watch this,” she said.

She opened a tin and sprinkled tiny shrimp into the tank. The piranhas swam to the surface, ate the food in quick, angry jerks. “Put your finger in there,” Dottie laughed. “No, don't really. Come on, let's eat while our clams are still warm. For drinks I got Rolling Rock, cream soda, milk, and blackberry brandy.”

“Cream soda.”

“Oh, have a beer. I'm having one.”

“All right.”

“Me and her are just alike, ain't we, Moe?” For a second, I looked for Dottie's brother, then realized she was talking to the fish tank.

We ate the clams and fries right out of the cardboard containers with our fingers. Silently, we slid the food back and forth across the table to each other. Dottie pulled out several interlocked clams and leaned her head back, dropping the clump into her mouth. My fingers were smeared with grease and ketchup. I ate faster and faster. We drank two beers apiece.

She let go a loud beer belch and laughed. “I got fudge-ripple ice cream for dessert,” she said. “You want it now or later?”

“Show me your other fish,” I said.

There was a bigger TV in the living room, and heavy green furniture. “These are my neons,” Dottie said. “Ain't they cuties?”

They swam in beelines around the tank, nervous dots and dashes of color. Above them was a paint-by-number picture of sailboats. A
photograph was stuck in the plastic frame—a snapshot of a baby wearing a vest, a bow tie, a mongoloid's smile. Dottie caught me looking.

“So which one of these neons is your favorite?” she said. “Pick.”

I looked inside the tank and tried to give an answer. “I don't know. This one, I guess.” When I looked up again, the snapshot was missing.

“I can't believe you're really here at my house,” Dottie said.

She mounded the ice cream into wooden salad bowls and poured blackberry brandy on top. She left the carton on the table and we dug out seconds with our spoons.

“Dottie?” I said. “What was that thing that Kippy said? That bad thing you heard her say about me? You said you'd tell me.”

She didn't answer at first. Then she told me to just forget it.

“Was it nothing? Did you make it up?”

“She said if she ever got like you, she'd get a gun and shoot herself.”

My eyes teared over. “Who did she say it to?”

“Don't think about her. Think about us.”

She got up and turned on the TV, then went over to her piranhas and fed them more shrimp. “You want another beer?” she asked, her hand on the refrigerator-door handle. “I got plenty.”

Kippy had just stood there, laughing, watching Eric's rape dance. Had she been in the room with him when he destroyed my things?

“I'm having another one. Here.”

I took the beer.

The news was on. Nixon, the war, the moon.

“Who was that little boy in the picture?” I asked.

“What picture?” she said. “Nobody you know.”

“Is he a relative or something?”

“You could say that.”

“Your nephew?”

“My kid.”

“You have . . . oh, my God. Where is he?”

“Nowhere. He died.”

She got up and switched the channel. She wouldn't look at me. “Do you want anything else? You want to listen to the radio or something? There's never anything good on TV on Saturday.”

“Were you married?” I said.

She turned and faced me. “Don't wreck things, okay? This could be so perfect.”

“What?”

“The fact you're here. The fact you called me.”

“But what did he die of?” I said.

She ignored me, staring at TV. A reporter was standing on a Cape Cod beach with two dead whales behind him. Whales were killing themselves for no reason, or for some reason scientists couldn't understand. Experts were baffled.

“It was better he died,” she said. “I was fifteen when I had him. He had all these problems I couldn't even pronounce. The state took him.”

“What was his name?” I said.

“Michael. Except I called him Buster.” She turned off her television. Outside, a car door slammed. All over the apartment, the fish tanks percolated.

“I knew right away something was wrong with him. All the time I was pregnant. I didn't know much, but I knew that.”

I lit her one of my cigarettes and passed it over. Her whole face sagged. “He lived longer than they said he would, though—outsmarted them. They said he'd die when he was about six months old but he was over a year. Fourteen months. Sometimes I used to take the bus and go out to see him. They used to let me hold him.”

I went to the sink and began to rinse the ice-cream bowls. I was thinking about Anthony Jr.—how his death had changed Ma, had changed the three of us. That painting had been the last real part of Ma I had.

Dottie came up behind me and placed her hands on my hips. She rested her chin between my neck and shoulder. “Hi,” she said. I felt the word against my neck.

I dunked the bowls into the dishpan.

“Did you like the supper?”

“Yes. Thank you. Let me pay you for half.”

“My treat,” she said. She reached around and ran her fingertips up and down my stomach. My hands shook, shimmying the dishwater.

“I love you, Dolores,” she whispered.

I laughed. “No you don't.”

“Yes I do.”

I swallowed and tried to concentrate on the row of bright windowsill containers: Pine-Sol, Clorox, All, Joy.

She rubbed her belly against my back and buttocks, soft and questioning, nothing like Eric's dancing. Nothing like Jack. Her fingers moved down to my thighs.

“Look, I don't want you to—”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don't.”

“Why not?” she said. Her fingers kept moving. “Two fatties like us. What's the difference? . . . You and me are just alike. I can make you feel so good—I know how to touch you. Where.”

“No, really. You see—”

She turned me around and brought her lips slowly against mine. Her hair smelled of french fries and cigarette smoke. It was such a soft kiss, I let it happen.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “Two big fat mamas. Nobody cares.”

She was right. We didn't matter. People hated us anyway.

I kissed her back. Kissed her loneliness and my own fear. Kissed the part of her that had come out as that small, imperfect boy.

Her tongue was inside my mouth. Her fingers pulled at the top of my jeans. She got the snap undone. “Come on,” she said. “No one's here. Nobody cares. This will be nice.”

Her bedroom was neat and sparse. The aquarium sat on an end table next to her bed: angelfish gliding through a cube of water. I stared at them over her shoulder while she undressed us, first me
and then herself. She pressed her hands against my shoulders and I sat down on the bed. She sat down next to me. The bed creaked from our double weight.

“Do me first,” she said.

She reached over for my hand and guided my knuckles back and forth against her thighs. Undid my fist. Her pubic hair was silky bristle.

She spread her legs. Her fingers moved my fingers up and down, up and down, against the edge of herself. Her hand dropped away and I continued. She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. It didn't matter. It was just motion, wet and warm, over and over.

She was breathing hard through her nose, her lips pressed together. “Don't!” she said when I stopped. Then I continued and she swore and bucked, clamping my hand between her legs. Her body shook us both, shook the bed. Relaxed. Shook it again.

I pulled my hand away. It felt numb and oversized, a paw.

She leaned over and kissed my arm, passed her fingers through my hair. Then she got up off the bed and knelt on the floor in front of me, like someone about to pray.

Her fingertips skidded along my legs. Her tongue poked against my knee. “This is going to feel so nice,” she said. “So gentle . . .”

It was wrong and dirty—what her hands, her mouth, were doing to me down there. But gentle, too, like she promised—a little silly. Nobody cared.

I let my head flop back over the edge of the bed, let myself fall into the feeling of it. Her fish swam upside down. One was yellow, the other silvery. Dolores. They calmed me, gliding past each other in a sort of liquid dance. . . . Nobody cared about us.
Why
was it wrong? Why
shouldn't
I feel what I was feeling? . . . The bed and Dottie dropped away. Her touch became Larry's touch. Dante's. I was at peace, afloat and weightless. I was Ruth, blossoming with the pleasure of Larry. The sensations rose and rose within me, a series of sweet explosions that there was no stopping, that I didn't want to stop . . .

Dottie crashed down onto the mattress and wiped her face in the sheets. She fumbled and turned over onto her back so that we were side by side, belly up on the bed.

We lay on our backs, quiet, watching the ceiling. “Dottie?” I said.

Her fingers skidded against my arm. “Hmm?”

“The baby's father. Was he somebody you loved?”

She laughed. “He was one of the guys down at the field where I hung around. They used to let me play football with them sometimes if I let them screw me. Or gave 'em blow jobs. Me and two or three of them would go out in the woods. They were older than me. Always chicken-shit to go by themselves. Used to stand around and watch each other. Tell jokes about me right in the middle of it.”

I wanted her to stop.

“What did I care? I used to laugh at
them,
see? Sometimes I made them buy me a soda or something before I'd do it.” She nuzzled her head against my shoulder. Then she reached up and turned off her lamp. Her body was restless at first, then still. Her breathing turned predictable. We both seemed to rise and fall with every breath she drew.

“We're whales,” I said, out loud.

I waited for her answer but she had none.

In the dark, in the midst of her sleeping, my clear mind revved. “I'll fix her good,” I heard Eric say again. I pictured him up in our room, yanking Ma's painting out of my closet, ripping it, kicking it with his foot. Over and over he did it; he wouldn't stop.

I couldn't sleep. I couldn't just lie there and listen to her snoring. I held out my hand, the one that had done it to her. It felt numb still. It smelled of her sex. She'd tricked me. Now I was what she was.

In Dottie's kitchen, in the cutlery drawer, I found a serrated knife. Pain would be better than not feeling anything, I thought. Pain would be a relief. I'd lost Ma's painting, I had nowhere to go. If Kippy ever got like me, she'd take a gun and . . .

I held the scalloped blade against my wrist and passed it across.
Once, twice—but lightly. The third time, it made a scratch. I saw it more than felt it. The thin red line of blood took me by surprise.

Then I saw something else, something poking out from behind her toaster. The snapshot she'd hidden. Her little boy, Buster. His smile was sweet and mysterious. I lost my nerve.

I killed her fish instead. Two glug-glugs' worth of Clorox per tank. The deaths were quick. They passed the poisoned water through their gills, then rested on their sides.

*   *   *

Downstairs and across the street, I tapped my fingers and sipped coffee while the Portuguese family held their private conference about what I was proposing. Four-hundred-dollars' worth of Arthur Music's money lay across the counter, like a game of solitaire.

Now the three of them approached me again—jury members with their verdict. “You could wait until tomorrow and take a bus there, lady. Get a transfer in New York,” the taxi driver said. “It would be a lot cheaper.”

“I want to leave
right now,”
I said. “That's the point.”

“It's gonna take us thirteen, fourteen hours. We won't get there till middle of tomorrow afternoon.”

I nodded.

“And that ain't counting any stops either. Or any naps I might need.”

I nodded again.

The other two shook their worried heads, but the driver shrugged and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Let's go.”

He was looking at me, not the money.

I
sat in the dark of the cab's backseat, watching the double necklace of highway lamps we were constantly approaching. The tires whined steadily beneath us. The driver didn't speak.

Stations drifted in and out on the car radio. Gospel, rock, a woman who advocated self-hypnosis. Somewhere near Harrisburg, a minister promised us salvation in a voice so sharp and reliable, it rattled the cab, then went off on a tangent and became static, returning as Spanish music. When the driver made a highway stop near Philadelphia, I had him leave the motor running while I waited inside with the doors locked, the radio on. I didn't want to think about where I'd been or where I was going. I just wanted to stay in the dark like this, to doze and listen.