She's Come Undone (52 page)

Dante took my hand again. “Speaking of forgiveness,” he said. “I'm not saying I deserve it, just that I'm applying. I need you, babe.”

His words had burned me more times than they'd soothed me. I cautioned myself not to be taken in by this verbal Noxzema. “Why is that, Dante?” I said. “For as long as we've been together, all you've done is criticize and correct the way I pronounce things.
Am I your personal dumping ground or something? Is that what you need me for?”

His smile was patient. “I was rereading Thoreau last week.
Walden.
It's amazing how Henry can remind you of what's sublime and what's—”

“Answer the question,” I said.

“I need you because you're you,” he said. “With Sheila it was just sex. A conquest—a type of materialism, really. Pleasurable only until the muscle spasm was over, then—boom!—the same quiet desperation. I was a fool to jeopardize what we've built together. Mea culpa.”

“Oh, mea culpa! Mia Farrow!” I made my hand a fist and snatched it away. “That sounds real fancy, Dante. What about that poor girl? For you it was a muscle spasm. What was it for her?”

“Babe, kids today are nihilists—that's what you're not understanding here. They're not like us. For one thing, they're brain dead politically. Party hardy: nothing beyond that. And I stupidly bought into it. Temporary insanity, Dolores—
temporary.
For Sheila it was an afternoon fuck, something to do instead of watching ‘General Hospital.' I doubt she attached anything more to it than that.”

“So that would make
your
guilt illogical, too, just like mine about my grandmother, right? Gee, Dante, this is all pretty convenient.” I rolled down the window and threw his book out.

He braked instinctively, then stepped on the gas again. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I'll allow you the extravagance of that overreaction.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. “Babe.”

“Just remember one thing,” he said. “
You
called
me
for help and I came. I'm sitting in this car next to you. I'm here.”

*   *   *

At the funeral home I came face-to-face with the same smiling, bug-eyed undertaker who had slid along the walls at my mother's wake eleven years before. Seeing him ripped the scab right off Ma's death. Dante and Bug Eyes did the talking; I nodded and signed forms.

Calling hours were that night from seven to nine, her funeral mass the next morning at eleven. “Would you like me to step forward at the grave site and invite people back to the house after the burial?”

I looked at Dante. “What do you think?”

He rubbed my arm. “It's up to you, babe,” he said.

“No, then.”

“The service will be over just before lunchtime,” Bug Eyes said.

“Okay, fine. Whatever you say.”

“Fine. Now, would you like to see the body while you're here? We received it yesterday afternoon. It's been prepared.”

“Do me a favor, will you?” I said. “Stop talking about my grandmother like she's an order of Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

Bug Eyes told Dante there was absolutely no need to apologize, that death angered loved ones because it made them feel powerless.

Everything was gray in the room where he'd put her: the rug, the wallpaper, the coffin he'd pushed me to select over the phone from Vermont. It looked like Grandma was lying in some cold twilight place. The whole room seemed covered with frost.

The rosary beads they'd twisted and looped around her knotty hands were her everyday amber ones, not the good wine-red ones she took out of their velvet case at Easter and Christmas—the ones Grandma herself would have chosen for this occasion. Mrs. Mumphy and her daughter had gone to Grandma's house to pick out her clothes. She had on the green print dress she'd worn to our wedding. I forced my eyes up to her wax-museum face. Death or the undertaker had relaxed her facial muscles. She was and wasn't Grandma.

*   *   *

During the ride from the funeral parlor to the house on Pierce Street, I pointed lefts and rights without speaking. “This one,” I told him. “This gray house.” He eased the car into the alley and I felt my stomach heave.

It was suddenly obvious to me why I'd resisted visiting: Easterly
made me, once again, who I had been. Erased all my work at Gracewood and the life I'd made in Vermont. Dante carrying my overnight bag was Daddy carrying my suitcases up the front-porch steps and abandoning me. I walked behind him with the odd sensation that Dante and I were pretend people, Barbie and Ken, and that the real Dolores—the raped fat girl—hadn't gotten away after all. Was watching us from behind the curtain.

“Phone!” Dante said as I pushed the key into the lock. “Hurry!” He ran toward its ringing. Hesitantly, I stepped inside.

At first I thought burglars had been there.

My steps clattered through the nearly empty downstairs rooms, Dante's telephone voice echoing in the background. The dining-room set was missing, and the mahogany china closet that had taken up half the hallway, and Grandma's cabinet-model TV. Afternoon sun lit up the living room and its two remaining articles of furniture: her overstuffed maroon chair and something new—a water bed. Disoriented, I sat down on it and waited for the swaying to subside.

In her very last letter, Grandma had mentioned something about a church tag sale and a truck coming to take away some of her old things, but I hadn't pictured this full-scale emptiness. Cars passing by outside vibrated the walls. Dante's steps thundered into the room.

“That was the lawyer,” he said. “She wants to touch down with us while we're here. I set it up for nine tomorrow morning.”

“If people are coming back here, we'll have to get food ready. Call back and cancel.”

“She says it'll take less than half an hour. We can squeeze it all in. Didn't I see a deli across the street? There must be a bakery around here, right? I don't imagine there'll be a cast of thousands coming.”

He sat down next to me on the bed. We rose and fell, rose and fell, with the shifting water.

“Why did she buy this bed?” I said. “I don't get it.”

“Maybe it was for her back or something. By the way, I like this place. Spartan. It's got definite possibilities.”

“It used to be more cluttered,” I said. “She must have known she was going to die.”

He flopped backward. “What do we have, about three and a half, four hours before the wake? Maybe I'll take a nap. I'm beat.” He reached up and started massaging the small of my back. “You okay?”

I looked back at his smile. “Thank you for helping,” I said. “Driving me down and everything.”

“You don't have to thank me, babe. I'm your husband.”

“I'm not sleeping with you tonight,” I said.

The massaging stopped. “Okay, fine. I can be patient. We have all the time in the world. Only I think, if we're going to ever . . .”

“I'll be upstairs,” I said. “Take your nap.”

*   *   *

Ma's bedroom had blank, bald walls, empty bureau drawers, empty closets. Anger rose in me, filled me up. What harm would it have done to let her stuff wait up here until I was ready to claim it? The emptiness was a betrayal, a slap in the face. “Goddamnit, Grandma,” I said.

She had left my old room intact. Console television, green plaid bedspread, chair by the window. I'd sat up here for six years, looking angrily out at life and trying to eat away pain. I saw it clearly now: why Ma had fought so hard for me to go to college—had let my awful words bloody her up during those battles about my going off to school. Ma had understood the danger of Grandma's house—how heavy furniture and drapes drawn on the world could absorb a person until she was freakish and mean and trapped. Ma had wanted college to set me free. However badly I'd messed up down in Pennsylvania, going there had launched me, had gotten me away. I saw my mother standing there, steak knife in hand after she'd cut the cord on my TV. Ma, a warrior of love.

I walked over to the bureau. Holding my breath, I pulled out the bottom bureau drawer and removed the folded sheets. “I love Bernice
Holland. Sincerely, Alan Ladd,” it still said. Happy, relieved, I sat down on the bed and cried.

The truth was, Grandma
had
given me enough time to get down here and claim what I wanted. I imagined her struggling down the stairs with those heavy cartons, defying her bad heart because she'd needed to get her business in order. She'd had a
right
to empty rooms. She had loved me the way she could.

I slid the bolt and opened the door to the landing, walking the six stairs to the third-floor apartment. Grandma had kept it locked and vacant since the afternoon Jack and Rita snuck away. Like a graveyard-shift policeman, I checked the knob, then walked back down.

If Dante was sleeping soundly, I decided, I'd write a note and go to the funeral parlor myself. The people at the wake would be the same white-haired St. Anthony's women who knew what a mess I'd made of myself, who'd sat at Ma's wake and watched me scream Daddy out of my life for good. That funeral-parlor room was the last place I'd seen him. Dante thought my father was dead.

He hadn't fallen asleep. I found him at the bottom of the stairs, studying the photograph of Ma and Geneva, teenagers in their white dresses. “They're beautiful,” he said. “Who are they?”

“One of them's my mother.”

He pointed to Geneva and I shook my head. “Oh, right,” he nodded. “Now I see the resemblance. You have her beauty.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“You
do.
You just don't see it.” He leaned the back of his head against the wall so that it looked like he was balancing family pictures on each of his shoulders. “I don't know if you've given it any thought yet, Dolores, but I imagine this house is yours now. Any idea what you're going to do with it?”

“Get rid of it,” I said. “I don't want it.”

“I thought having a house was your dream.”

“Not this house.”

He wrapped an arm around me and kissed my forehead. He'd touched me more in the past six hours than he had in six months.

“I love you, Dolores,” he whispered, kissing my neck, my ear.

“Then there's my job,” I said. “Could you please stop doing that?”

He let go and walked up two more stairs, looking at more pictures. “Here's what I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe we could start over again down here—this could be exactly the chance we need. I could get another teaching job. There's nothing on my record.”

“What about me?”

He reached down and traced my eyebrow with his thumb. “Every grocery store in the world needs clerks, babe.”

I sat on a stair, looking down at Grandma's front door. Late-afternoon sun was coming through the oval of glass, creating an oblong patch of light on the hallway runner. “Did you marry me because of the abortion?” I said. “Were you just being noble?”

“I married you because I loved you.
Love
you. Present tense.”

“How can you love me if you think of me as just some stupid checkout girl?”

“You're not stupid. You're . . . unfettered. Want to hear a secret?”

I didn't want to. It might make my own secrets start coming out—make the fat girl throw open her bedroom door and start blurting.

“The truth is,” he continued, “I envy you sometimes. I wish I could shed some of my own complexity. It's like a heavy weight I carry around, a burden. Your simplicity is . . . well, it's Thoreau-like. Which is why you're so good for me.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You keep me in touch. You keep me honest.”

“You're
not
honest,” I said. “You told me you hadn't done what they accused you of and I believed you. Then you brought her home and did it with her in our bed. Having nothing on your record is a
lie!”

He bent his head down against his knees and rubbed the back of his neck. Then he straightened up again and lifted our wedding picture off the wall. He looked at it while he spoke. “Believe me,
Dolores, you're not accusing me of anything I haven't accused myself of. If anything, you're being easier on me than I'm being on myself.”

“Yeah, right,” I said.

He came up to where I was sitting and squeezed next to me on the stair. He closed his eyes and kissed the picture. “Love/Us,” he said.

He sat there and watched me cry.

*   *   *

I didn't want to touch what was in the refrigerator; the perishables were too close to Grandma, food she would have bought only days ago. While Dante was out running—“blowing off negative energy” as he put it—I heated up canned food in the old, familiar pans. All my Vermont letters to her were in the phone-book drawer, held together by a rubber band. I kept looking up from my handwriting—the Cinderella accounts I'd given her of my marriage—afraid I'd see her watching me from the doorway, peeking at me the way she used to after the rape. If there
was
some sort of all-knowing afterlife, then Grandma knew by now that those letters were lies, that Dante and I had nothing like the life I'd invented for her. For myself. In a way, I deserved Dante's dishonesty. Dolores Price: the biggest fat liar on earth.

“I feel a hundred percent better,” Dante said when he burst back inside in a swirl of cool air. His face was flushed and healthy, covered with a glaze of sweat. He looked almost trustworthy.

*   *   *

We stood up each time pairs and trios of churchwomen struggled up from the casket kneeler and hobbled over to shake our hands.

“Honestly, she looked so good at bingo two weeks ago. When I picked up the paper that morning and read it . . .”

“This fella of yours is a doll, ain't he? My husband's people were from Vermont. Rutland.”