She's Come Undone (40 page)

After my first couple of months of Etch-a-Sketching—after no one else at the house would even pick it up and fool around with it because I was so much better than everyone—I began to walk to the park and work there. Sometimes people would stand behind the bench where I was creating and watch quietly—strangers at first, then regulars, people who perked up when they saw me coming. They brought me coffee from the store across the street. Everyone was hushed and respectful while I worked. One woman kept saying she was going to write to the “Mike Douglas” show about me, that she could just see me Etch-a-Sketching on “Mike Douglas.”

Sometimes I took requests: Elvis, Jesus, Archie Bunker—people had to supply me with a picture to go on. One day in the park, Al, a regular, put an album cover, Santana's
Abraxas,
next to me on the bench. “Okay, hot shot, draw this,” he said. I resisted at first, but everyone kept begging me. In the middle of it, it began to look so much like the original that I held my breath. When I finished, Al held out a twenty-dollar bill and I handed over his reproduction. The others clapped and cheered. I bought two more Etch-a-Sketches with the twenty.

At the library I found a book called
The Great Artists
and began Etch-a-Sketching works of art: Degas's ballerinas, Modigliani's stretchy-necked women. Most of the people at the outreach house liked my van Goghs the best; ever since that song “Starry, Starry Night,” we all kind of thought of Vincent van Gogh as one of us. Fred Burden even bought the album; we played it over and over. Poor, gentle Fred. He used to like to go with me to the park while I worked, but I just couldn't respond to his crush on me, couldn't separate his gentle nature from that incredible acne—the deep pits and crevices that studded his bluish face.

One time when Fred was thumbing through the great-artists book (I'd bring it back to the library every two weeks on the due date, then sign it out again before I left), he saw a picture of van Gogh's
painting
Starry Night.
He hadn't realized it was a song
and
a painting, he said. I Etch-a-Sketched it and gave it to him for Christmas.

He cried when he saw it and kept it displayed on a TV tray in the rec room with a gooseneck lamp shining on it. “So the whole house can enjoy it,” he announced. Then one evening Mrs. DePolito, off on a rampage, picked up
Starry Night
and shook it free. That made Fred cry again, only this time with a steak knife in his hand. “Let me at her!” he screamed as several of us held him back. “Let that bitch over here so I can hack her fucking ears off and ram this knife in her fucking gullet!”

That night rocked me badly, rocked all of us. We'd all known Fred as such a harmless soul. They took him away for weeks and took away the regular silverware, too. From then on, for the rest of the time I lived at Project Outreach House, we had to eat with those throwaway plastic picnic utensils—the kind where the fork tines snap somewhere around your fifth bite. It had all started over my artwork. Well, mine and van Gogh's. But Dr. Shaw dismissed it as Fred's Christmas-season depression.

*   *   *

“Nadine felt talent right in my fingertips the second time I ever saw her,” I told Dr. Shaw that last day.
“She
was sensitive to it.”

“The
second
time? How many times have you seen her?”

“Three.”

“And how much does she charge you for a visit?”

“How much are you charging Geneva Sweet for me?”

“Mrs. Sweet is billed by the institution, not by me personally, as you know. Do you feel this Nadine person is actually helping you?”

“I don't
feel
she is. I
know
she is.”

“More than I've helped you?” His face was flushed. It was the most powerful I'd ever felt with him.

“As
much
as you have.”

“In three visits?”

“Yup.”

He leaned back in his recliner and closed his eyes. “‘Your children are not your children,'” he said. “‘They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.'”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I lit another Doral.

“It's from
The Prophet.
Kahlil Gibran.”

“Yeah, well, if it's supposed to make me feel better . . .”

“It's supposed to make
me
feel better,” he said.

He opened his eyes. “Dolores,” he said, “as your therapist, it's my obligation to tell you I feel you're making a mistake. May I say why?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Knock yourself out.”

“Because you're not ready. You've come an amazing distance, but we still have some critical issues left to deal with.”

“Such as?”

“Such as your father. Such as your relationships with other people.”

The cigarette quivered in my hand. “My relationships with other people are
fine.”

“Yes, you've done very well with that. You're well-liked at the house, and by your coworkers. But you're a healthy young woman, Dolores, and I imagine that at some time in the future, you'll want to become sexually active. And at the moment, you're still vulnerable because—”

I
already
wanted to become sexually active.
Was
active, up to a point—that's how much he knew. I'd tongue-kissed with both Dion and Little Chuck in the chemical room down at the photo lab—had flirted and lured them in there and then yanked their hands away from anything more than what I felt like doing. What was so vulnerable about that?

“So what are you saying? I'm supposed to come running in here and ask your permission or something if some guy and I decide to—?”

“What I'm saying is that we still have work to do.”

“It's the bicentennial, Dr. Shaw. I want to be independent.”

“I'm trying to teach you how to be.”

“I already
know
how to be. Look, all this talking isn't going to change anything. I've already made up my mind.”

He got up and began dusting those rubber-tree leaves again.

“You just dusted those about two seconds ago,” I pointed out.

He reeled and faced me. “Well, that's
my
prerogative, isn't it?”

“Okay. Pardon me for breathing,” I said. “So when should we stop?”

He sat back down in the recliner and closed his eyes again. “Well, Dolores, I believe we already have.”

“Just like that?” I'd always visualized something more elaborate and ceremonial: a stage or something, people clapping at my accomplishments.

“Apparently you're already out of the nest. So, fly!”

I wished he had said “swim”; he'd put me in a pool, not a tree. I wished, too, that he would look at me. “Okay then. Adios.”

“Adios.”

He was so big into eye contact, you'd have thought he'd want a little during the good-byes. I stood there. “Dr. Shaw?”

“Hmm?” He said it as if he was surprised I was still there—as if I was a calendar page he'd already torn off and thrown away.

“I didn't mean you haven't helped me. You
did
help me. Sometimes I really do think of you as my mother. In a good way, I mean.”

“Good luck,” he said.

I opened the door. Cleared my throat. Waited for him to open his eyes. But Dr. Shaw had already become a corpse. I let myself out.

*   *   *

“Well, what kind of a person are you?” Nadine asked me. “How would you describe yourself?”

I'd gone to her directly from Dr. Shaw's office—gone without an appointment to find out if happiness was a football you caught or something more complicated, something you had to invent.

“What kind of person am I?” I repeated. “I'm . . . a visual person.”

She nodded her head toward the Etch-a-Sketch in my lap. “Create yourself a picture then.”

“Of what?”

“Of whatever might make you happy.”

We were in her kitchen, not the office out front, because I'd surprised her, had just rapped on her back window. I'd expected her house to have a phosphorescent, lava-light atmosphere, but she had mother-of-pearl Formica and café curtains with pom-poms. A little girl with rashy cheeks and big eyebrows like Nadine's sat in a playpen by the stove, chewing on an empty Saltines box.

Nadine and I stared down at the blank gray Etch-a-Sketch screen, waiting for me to begin. I started twisting.

At first it was a whale, my Wellfleet whale—only back in the ocean, her open mouth nosing the upper left corner of the screen. But I realized I was making a mistake and turned the picture into a man. A big man. I was committed to whalelike proportions.

Nadine looked puzzled. “Is it a bear?” she said.

So I covered his head with loops of curly hair and added eyes, a beard, linear eyeglasses—wire rims.

“It's my husband,” I said.

She closed her eyes and smiled.

“Open your eyes, Nadine! Is this him? Is he going to make me happy?”

She blinked and looked at me. “I told you to draw something that
might
make you happy,” she said. “Fate doesn't give warranties like Sears Roebuck. That will be thirty-five for today.”

I walked out of there holding the Etch-a-Sketch horizontally in front of me, like a religious offering. I didn't want that picture to erase itself free before I'd memorized it. I got all the way home with it more or less intact.

DePolito was outside on the porch. “What you got there, Dolores?” she said. “You got a new one? Let me see.”

I took one last look, then shook like hell.

I
t may have been fate that made Eddie Ann Lilipop's rolls of Instamatic shots sail south from Montpelier, Vermont, and land—kerplunk!—at my station at the photo lab. But I took over from there.

Eddie Ann's picture order arrived in the spring of 1976, four rolls' worth of a high school trip to New York City: teenage girls grouped together and giggling on hotel beds and museum steps, teenage boys flipping their middle fingers out the windows of a coach bus. It was impossible to tell which student was Eddie Ann herself, but I recognized her teacher in the very first picture that slid down the chute.

I
should have
recognized him; Dante's letters and naked Polaroids, now seven years old, sat back at the outreach house, stuck secretly—along with the ragged remnant of Ma's flying-leg painting—in my big
Webster's
dictionary between the words “embolden” (to foster boldness in) and “en brochette” (broiled on a skewer). Tucked inside my knapsack pocket, those photos and that small square of canvas had made it up in the cab ride with me from Pennsylvania to Cape Cod, but I'd left them behind in the motel room that night when I left to meet my whale. Grandma, of all people, had returned them to me—in an unopened UPS box the motel had shipped to the Easterly police, who, in turn, had driven over to Pierce Street in the cruiser.
I still visited with the photographs and that swatch sometimes, usually when I needed to look up a word or prop open a window or feel some kind of intimacy with something. Dante's beseeching look still got to me. Those pictures were one of the few secrets I'd managed to keep from Dr. Shaw.

Eddie Ann had it bad for Dante; her camera had stalked him their whole trip. There were shots of him from the front, the back, both sides—pictures of him eating and snoozing and one of him out in a hotel lobby wearing an undershirt and pajama bottoms, looking fed up. He'd filled out some and cut off his muttonchop sideburns. His straight brown hair was longish in back. Even when I squinted, I couldn't see a wedding ring.

I began to think of Eddie Ann as a sort of kid sister in conspiracy—and of Dante as my future. All of Dr. Shaw's speeches about self-actualizing and taking charge began, suddenly, to take on new meaning. Dante looked nothing like the big, curly-headed man I'd Etch-a-Sketched in Nadine's kitchen, but, I reasoned, any number of things could explain the discrepancy. Maybe Dr. Shaw was right and Nadine
was
a quack. Or maybe predicting a future just wasn't as exact a science as I'd presumed. I made myself an extra set of Eddie Ann's prints and sent her order back to her, minus the pajama-bottom shot, which, I decided in a big-sisterly way, was inappropriate for her to have taken. I worked overtime through May, June, and July, saving for my new life.

None of the operators I called would give out his address, but the Providence Public Library had a whole wall of phone books from around the country. Out of those thousands and thousands of pounds of tissue-paper pages, I found him. “Davis, Dante. 177 Bailey St. 229–1951.” In the hush of that library, my own breathing was the loudest sound.

There was a copying machine on the third floor. I intended only to Xerox Dante's telephone-book page as a souvenir, but in the quiet I heard Dr. Shaw challenging me to create my own happiness. I looked around, then ripped out the original. (I tell you, I was
emboldened!
) I
dropped a nickel into the copier anyway, then pushed my face to the glass, and felt for the button. The heat from the flash made me feel like I'd done something permanent to myself, something I wouldn't be allowed to undo—that I'd sizzled myself in some way that was both risky and right.

On the bus back to the outreach house, I took out my growing portfolio: the old stolen letters and Polaroids, Eddie Ann's shots of him, that phone-book page, my Xeroxed face. Jack Speight and my father hadn't been vulnerable men and Dr. Shaw had wielded power in a style all his own. But there Dante still sat, naked and confused—someone to love.

In my Xerox self-portrait, the hair around my face, the cracks in my lips, were clear and razor-etched, lines sharper than any Etch-a-Sketch I'd ever made. But the rest of my face had a vaguer, more foggy look, like something religious—a smiling, closed-eyed Shroud of Turin woman, some mysterious saint Grandma might pray to. “If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.” That was a poster in the kitchen at the outreach house. Maybe I'd peel it off the wall and sneak it with me when I left.