She's Come Undone (10 page)

“What's
your
problem?” I snapped, when the camera left the group to pan the hysterical studio audience. My hatred for Grandma at that moment was as pure as my love for Paul.

Her problem, she said, was that she couldn't tell the difference between the singing and those screech owl girls in the audience. If people thought
this
was hot stuff, then she guessed she just gave up.

“Fine, give up then,” I told her. “Be my guest.”

Ma intervened, wanting to know which Beatle was which.

“That one's George. He's the quiet one. That's Paul McCartney, the cute one . . .”

“Cute?” Grandma scoffed. “You call that homely beatnik cute?”

Ringo Starr's face suddenly filled up the screen. “And that's Ringo,” I said. “By the way, Grandma, he's the one.”

“The one what?”

“The one who's the father of Diane Lennon's illegitimate baby.”

Her face registered a fleeting look of alarm before she dismissed the comment. “Nuts to you,” she said, then rose from her chair and announced that she was disappointed in me, my mother,
and
Ed Sullivan—the three of us—and that she was so disgusted, she was going to go to bed.

“Fine with me,” I said. “Make like a tree and leave.”

When Grandma's bedroom door slammed, I looked my mother in the eye. “I can't stand her!” I said. “She's so
mental!”
Ma's face twitched and I looked away, down at the rug, at my feet next to her feet. “No offense,” I mumbled.

*   *   *

Each morning after breakfast, Ma sat at the kitchen table, chain-smoking and checking off want ads from the Easterly and Providence newspapers. She told me getting a job scared her, but she was determined not to shy away from risk. “That's what life's all about, Dolores,” she said. “Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.”

My mother's job search miffed Grandma, who had already lined up a position for her as a housekeeper at St. Anthony's rectory.

“Look,” my mother told Grandma. “One thing they taught me out there is that you cook your own goose when you limit yourself.”

“Well what's that supposed to mean?”

Ma made us wait while she lit a fresh Salem. “It means I don't have to clean toilets and fold men's undershorts for a living if I don't feel like it. That was my life for thirteen years and look where it got me.”

Grandma shot me a brief look of alarm, then lowered her voice. “There's a parochial-school student in this room, in case you forgot,”
she said. “I don't see as priests' underclothes are something we need to talk about in front of certain young ladies.”

My mother sighed; smoke streamed out of both her nostrils. “Two sixty-two Pierce Street,” she mumbled. “The house of repression.”

Grandma picked up a dish towel and flapped at Ma's cigarette smoke. “I hate this filthy smell. It's cheap. This whole house smells cheap.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Ma. Just because a woman smokes, it doesn't mean—”

“I see you swear now, too, Miss High and Mighty.”

“Ma, ‘for crying out loud' isn't a swear. You go ask Father Duptulski.”

“Well, in my day, women knew their place.”

My mother rolled her eyes at God or the ceiling and turned her attention to me. “You can be two things if you're a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place—even if it kills you.”

“What makes you such an authority, I'd like to know?” Grandma huffed.

“Ma, where do you think I've been for seven months? Disneyland?”

Grandma and I looked away.

“You take poor Marilyn Monroe, for instance,” Ma continued.

Grandma's eyes widened angrily.
“You
take Marilyn Monroe!” she said. “I certainly don't want her. For instance or otherwise.” Marilyn Monroe's death—how her wickedness had finally caught up with her—was a favorite subject of my grandmother's. To Grandma's way of thinking, Marilyn Monroe resided in the same trash bin as Roberta across the street.

“But, Ma, can't you see it? The poor thing got trapped. Limited by what everyone expected from her. There was this book about her in the hospital library. Deep down she was just a scared little girl.”

Grandma clamped her lips so tightly together they turned white. She got up slowly, walked over to the plastic tray where she kept her medications, and took a blood-pressure pill. When she finally spoke, it was to the stove. “This she says about a sexpot who made
three pictures condemned by the Legion of Decency. This she says about a woman who didn't even have the modesty to kill herself with a bathrobe on.”

Ma and Grandma didn't speak to each other for the next several days. Mostly, Grandma sat scowling in front of her soap operas and westerns or trailing after my mother with a jet spray of Glade. Once, when a Salem commercial was on, Grandma stuck her tongue out and gave the TV the raspberries. If she wanted to say something to Ma, she used me as a transmitter. “Dolores, tell the chimney stack my cousin Florence is having gallbladder problems again.” Or “Dolores, tell Marilyn Monroe's best friend that the doctor says my pressure's sky-high.”

*   *   *

None of the places where Ma filled out job applications called her back. Each evening after supper, she put on her peacoat, wrapped her striped muffler around her neck, positioned her ear muffs, and rigged her pedometer to her sneaker.

“You want to walk with me?” she'd ask. I
didn't
want to. I was a quiet detective, collecting each small sign of weirdness: the way she now made a cup of tea with two teabags, not one; the way she said, “Will do,” when you hadn't even requested anything. She'd be gone over an hour, then come back—red-faced, nose dripping from the cold. The back door opening, the stomping of her boots in the pantry, always surprised me. Each time she went out, I braced myself for the news that Grandma or unemployment had broken her—that she'd hiked back to the hospital to be crazy again. I couldn't walk with her. I couldn't.

*   *   *

Somewhere during the school year, word had circulated that my parents were both dead. I didn't bother to correct the misconception. My mother's condition and my father's girlfriend were my business,
not anyone else's. At St. Anthony's, I was the third student from the top of my class, behind Liam Phipps and Kathy Mahoney. (Miss Lilly rated all thirty-one of us on a section of the blackboard labeled “Do Not Erase.” But whenever Miss Lilly assigned team work, Rosalie Pysyk and pimply Walter Knupp and I were the last kids the captains chose. This was the price you paid for privacy.)

One night Ma knocked at my bedroom door, ashtray in hand.

“Busy?” she asked.

“Studying vocab. Miss Lilly gives us a surprise quiz every Friday.”

“Will do,” she said. She walked over to my Dr. Kildare collage and studied it. “This used to be my room when I was your age, you know.”

“Grandma told me,” I said. I thought of pulling open the bureau drawer and sharing her Alan Ladd graffiti with her but decided against it. “You can ask me my words if you want.”

She took my list and stared at it. There were tears in her eyes. “This place is so bad for my nerves,” she said. “Grandma means well, but . . .”

“Don't ask me them in order. Mix them up.”

“All right,” she said. “‘Blithe.'”

“‘Gay-hearted.'”

“‘Blackguard.'”

“‘Scoundrel.'”

“Okay. ‘Panacea.'”

“‘Cure-all.'”

She put down my notebook. “You and I are getting a place of our own, Dolores, just as soon as I can swing it,” she said. “That's a promise.”

“‘Cure-all,'” I repeated.

“‘Cure-all,' right. . . . It's funny, you know? I spend over half a year down below—straightening myself out, figuring out why my entire marriage was one long apology. So where do I end up? Back here where the whole problem started. Driving Old Lady Masicotte's goddamned Cadillac, no less. The thing is—”

“Are you going to ask me my words or not?”

“I'm sorry. ‘Paradox'?”

“‘Paradox'?”

“‘Paradox.'”

“Skip that one,” I said. “I'll come back to it.”

“I'm a grown woman, aren't I? I can have a cigarette if I want to, can't I? . . . I hated every second he worked for that rich bitch. But I never risked complaining. Knew my place, all right . . .”

She got up and paced, then stopped to smile at her flying-leg painting. “You like this?”

“It's okay,” I said. “It's pretty cool.”

She passed her fingertips over the painting's surface. “They hung another one of my pictures up in the dining room at the hospital. A still life. But I thought this one was better. This was my favorite.”

“What's repression?” I said.

“What?” She scanned my vocab list.

“You said this was the house of repression. What's repression?”

She sat on my bed, flopped back. “Holding everything inside. Feeling guilty about everything. Dr. Markey—this doctor I worked with—told me half my problem was being raised in an unhealthy environment. That it constipated me—emotionally. So that Tony and I . . . Those were his words for it, anyway.”

“Don't tell Grandma,” I said. “She'd go berserk.”

She reached over and stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. Her touch felt cool. “You know what I was afraid of all the while I was in the hospital? I was afraid that by the time I got out, you'd look different. But you don't. You're just the same.”

In her absence I'd defused the Pysyk sisters and begun to write love poems in my key-locked diary. When Grandma got to be too much, I snuck over to Roberta's tattoo shop to smoke and swear about my luck, my life. Ma didn't know, couldn't see that I had changed.

“Just don't ever let it happen to you, Dolores.”

“Let what happen?”

“Let people just shit all over you. Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet the way I did . . . All those flowers she kept sending after I lost the baby. She had crust, all right, I'll give her that much.”

“Who?”

“Old Lady Masicotte. ‘Aren't you going to write her a thank-you note?' he'd say. There I was, trying to hold myself together from one hour to the next, and the two of them . . .” She walked out of the room, blew her nose, and came back.

“But that's all water over the dam, now, isn't it? Where were we? ‘Paradox.'”

“‘A situation . . . A situation which . . . a situation which seems contradictory but is nevertheless true.' Something like that.”

We studied each other for several seconds. I decided to risk it.

I reached over and took the cigarette from her. She watched me inhale deeply, then blow the smoke over her shoulder.

“There's these two girls,” I said. “Rosalie and Stacia Pysyk . . .”

*   *   *

One afternoon in early spring, Sister Margaret Frances cut into our lessons to announce over the PA that an opinion book had been confiscated. Such things were mean-spirited and unchristian, Sister informed us, and were strictly forbidden at St. Anthony's School. Any student found circulating one would wish she hadn't.

For the next several days I watched the red spiral notebook move up and down the rows whenever Miss Lilly turned her back. Outside at recess and after lunch, girls milled shoulder to shoulder around the shrine of St. Anthony, passing the book and turning every few seconds to locate the whereabouts of the nun on playground duty. From the sidelines, I was unsure exactly what an opinion book was but guessed it had something to do with either sex or popularity.

“Dolores, do me a
giant
favor?” Kathy Mahoney begged me at the close of school on Friday. Her face was flushed; it was the first
time she'd spoken my name. From the other end of the corridor, Sister Margaret approached us.
“Please?
As a friend?”

All weekend long, I leafed through the opinion book Kathy had managed to wedge into my schoolbag. At the top of each page, a classmate's name was written in Magic Marker capitals. In the space below, kids scrawled their anonymous assessments. Kathy's page, the notebook's first, was filled with glowing entries: “2 Good 2 Be 4gotten.” “Love Me Do!” “Friends to the end!” “Wish I had that swing in my backyard.” The Dolores Price page was an afterthought written in plain ink on the book's inside back cover. “Don't Know Her” was the first entry, followed by a column of DKHs and one “Ugly Isn't the Word” in Rosalie Pysyk's handwriting.

The ballpoint felt strange in my opposite hand; my penmanship came out sufficiently wobbly and disguised. “Quiet but Cute,” I added to the comments about me. “Worth getting to know.”

*   *   *

In March, Ma had a job interview: secretary for a pest control company. I sat behind her on her bed as she arranged herself in front of the mirror, frowning. “Well, this ought to be great,” she said. “I hate talking on the phone, I haven't typed since I was in high school, I'm scared to death of bugs, and I'm mousy-looking.”

“Your hair looks better grown out like that,” I said. “You'll get it.”

She wasn't back by suppertime.

She's run away, I thought. Abandoned me here in the house of repression.

Grandma and I ate our supper in near silence. “Maybe she got the job and they needed her right away,” I suggested.

Grandma said she certainly hoped she didn't. There was no telling what kinds of things Ma might carry back to the house from a place like that.

As I finished up the dishes, the idea that my mother might have committed suicide came flying at me. I pictured her up in the cold
night sky, walking insanely onto an airplane wing and laughing at risk I saw her jump.