She's Come Undone (11 page)

I turned to Grandma, who was Saran-wrapping Ma's supper. I hadn't planned it. I whacked a glass casserole cover against the counter, breaking it in half. “You shouldn't have bugged her so much,” I shouted. “If she cracked up again, it's
your
fault.”

Grandma reeled around. “You just mind your own p's and q's, Dolores Elizabeth,” she snapped. “Don't you dare give me the rats!” Her shaky voice told me that she was scared, too.

But at quarter of nine, the Cadillac rumbled into Grandma's alley and Ma burst through the back door. “Sorry I'm so late!” she announced. “Guess what? I bought a car!”

She was wearing a brand-new orange coat. Her arms cradled crinkling bags and packages. “Can you believe it? A 1962 Buick Skylark! It'll be ready on Tuesday. It's white. A white convertible. And the best part is, we get to trade in that goddamned Cadillac. Good riddance! It'll be ready next Tuesday. Did I already say that? I got them to lower the price by a hundred and seventy-five dollars. Did all the talking myself.”

“Did you get that job?” I asked.

“Didn't even go to the interview. Who wants to work for a bunch of bug killers? What a day I've had! Look!”

She yanked off her knit hat. Her hair was platinum blond.

“What do you think?” she asked, tossing her head from side to side.

“Is it a wig?”

“Nope. It's all me!”

Grandma appeared at the doorway. “Well?” Ma said. Her laugh was nervous. “Somebody say something.”

Grandma shook her head and addressed me instead of Ma. “Next thing you know, she'll be marching across the street and having that other one give her a tattoo.”

*   *   *

The Peacock Tattoo Emporium's waiting area was a row of kitchen chairs, standing ashtrays, dirty magazines. You could pick the tattoo you wanted from a fat loose-leaf with plastic-covered sample illustrations.

“They're
both
crazy,” I told Roberta, looking out the plate glass to make sure my grandmother couldn't see me. “Ma
and
Grandma. They're just crazy in different ways.”

A beaded curtain was drawn between us. On the other side, Roberta was tattooing a customer. “Well, get used to it, hon,” she cackled back. “The whole world's nuts. Ain't it, Leon?”

“That's right, Roby,” her customer said.

I sighed and smoked and passed the time thumbing through the dog-eared magazines. In one old
Coronet,
Lana Turner's daughter gave an interview from prison about why she'd stabbed Lana's muscleman boyfriend to death. The article had pictures of the victim, Johnny Stompanato, and Lana's mansion with an arrow pointing to the bedroom window where the murder had occurred. There was a close-up of Lana's daughter, taken in her baggy prison dress. Her eerie, squashed-in face reminded me of mine and Jeanette's faces one afternoon when we'd pulled her mother's old nylons over our heads. Maybe you inherited craziness like you did brown eyes or frizzy hair, I thought. Maybe you just went nuts and did that sort of thing if your mother got a divorce and a new boyfriend.

Roberta pulled the beads aside for Leon and reminded him about the rubbing-alcohol treatment. The week before I'd watched him get a bumblebee tattooed to his shoulder. (If it was okay with the customer, it was okay with Roberta for me to watch the above-the-waist jobs. I could force myself to look at the needles once they were in, but not while they were
going
in.) Leon paid Roberta. Then he shook her hand and left.

“What'd he get this time?”

She thumbed through her loose-leaf and showed me the cobra.

“Where?”

She patted her behind. “Left cheek. He's coming back next week for the right one. Wants a mongoose getting ready to attack. I told him, I said, if it ain't in my catalog, I ain't guaranteein' nothin'. Freehand comes out good sometimes; sometimes it don't. Says he believes in me. ‘Besides,' he says, ‘who's gonna see it except me?' He's a bachelor, see? This one today was his twenty-second tat. Like I said, the whole world's crazy.”

“Sometimes I think Grandma's worse off than my mother,” I said.

Roberta laughed and sat down beside me. She lit her cigarette with the end of mine. “Thelma's a tough old bird, like me. It's funny, though. Her and me moved into this neighborhood about the same time—1940, it was, before the war—but she never gave me the time of day. Lost her boy Eddie in that drowning the same year I lost my hubby. When the Canuck died, she sent over this yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Had a piece of tape stuck on the bottom of the pan with her name on it. So's I wouldn't keep it on her, I guess. Been living across from each other twenty-five years and I don't think we spoke more than twenty-five words.”

“She hates your guts,” I said. “No offense.”

“Thing is, I'm probably a little scary to Thelma. See, she ain't seen the world like I have. Me and my first hubby used to go all over the place when we were with the carnival, got to know all kinds of different people. Me and the Canuck, too. When the Canuck and I went to Hawaii, we even climbed partway inside a volcano—a dried-up one, you know. You see, Thelma never had none of that. She's sort of like a scared little girl.”

My head felt light from smoke and coincidence. She'd just described Grandma the way Ma's book described Marilyn Monroe. Paradox, I thought: a situation or statement that is contradictory, yet true. I'd gotten it wrong on the vocabulary test but suddenly understood.

I stubbed out my butt. “What was my uncle like?” I asked.

“Eddie? Good-lookin' kid—and full o' piss and vinegar. Used
to stand over on that porch and throw snowballs. Had the cruiser parked out front once or twice. But he was a good kid. Used to shovel my sidewalk free of charge. Terrible thing when he died—a regular tragedy.”

Then she laughed and told me about the time Uncle Eddie snuck across the street with a five-dollar bill. “Said he wanted a tattoo. A rose if I remember right,” Roberta said. “Had me put it right in his armpit so's Thelma wouldn't see it. Then one hot summer day he had his shirt off and he forgot and stretched his arms. She marched right over here and said she was going to call the police and have me shut down. Said it was hard enough raising a scamp like him by herself without me making it harder.”

“How old was he?”

“Oh, fifteen or so. Antsy, he was. Used to come over here and complain about her just the way you do. Told me and the Canuck he couldn't wait to leave home and join the navy.”

I wanted her to keep talking about Uncle Eddie, but she got up and told me she felt like closing for the day. “Yup,” she said. “Me and the Canuck. One day he'd love me right and the next day he'd slam me against the wall.” She smiled sadly, shaking her head. “And I'd let him, too. How's that for crazy?”

*   *   *

Shortly after we got our new car, Ma landed a job as a tollbooth collector on the Newport Bridge, a thirty-minute commute from Easterly. Her hair looked even blonder set against her khaki uniform. She rode back and forth to work with the top down. Within a week, she had her first date.

I watched her eyelid twitch when she announced the news one morning at breakfast. “He seems like a sweetheart,” she said. “Hands me a Hershey's kiss with his money every morning. Take a chance, I told myself.”

“What does he look like?” I asked.

“Kind of cute. At least from inside his car he is.”

Grandma put down her fork. She said she was getting fed up with all of this girlish nonsense from someone who was thirty-two years old. She wanted to remind my mother that in the eyes of the Church she was still a married woman and said she hoped Ma wasn't reserving herself a room in hell for the sake of one little night of whoop-de-do.

I had never thought of Ma as someone capable of whoop-de-do. All that week I nervously pictured her with cleavage at some nightclub, dancing cheek to cheek with Johnny Stompanato.

On her big night, Ma rushed excitedly around her room getting ready. She squirted herself with the Tabu perfume I'd sent to the hospital the Christmas before, daubed on her lipstick, and hummed “Blame It on the Bossa Nova.” Her date owned a store on Edson Street, she told me. He sold newspapers, tobacco, and mixed nuts. I was relieved to learn they were only going to the movies.

Grandma had taken the official position that she just plain gave up. Still, it was she who sent me into Ma's room that evening, a spy armed with a holy trinity of questions: What nationality was he? What religion was he? What was his last name?

His last name was Zito. Mario Zito. “But all my buddies call me Iggy, Miz Holland,” he explained to Grandma, who gripped the arms of her chair and refused to look at him directly.

Iggy Zito was nothing like hoody Johnny Stompanato. He was short and had ripply red hair and freckles and wore a corduroy car coat. He was somewhere between the kind of man Jeanette and I would have ignored and the kind we would have made fun of.

“And this is my daughter, Dolores,” Ma said. I gave him a one-second acknowledgment and then concentrated on the living-room rug.

“Your mother mentioned she had a little girl. These are for you, sweetheart. Just a little something, heh heh.” He handed me a wrinkled paper bag with a grease spot on it. I hated it when you could hear a person's saliva right in their laugh.

Ma bent over and kissed Grandma, who sat ramrod straight in her chair and didn't respond.

“Don't wait up for me, now,” Ma laughed.

“Do-on't worry,” Grandma answered, rolling her eyes at the TV.

From the unlit front room we watched them get into Iggy's black station wagon. To my relief, Ma didn't slide in next to him like a teenager but stuck close to the passenger's-side door.

“Zito. That's Eye-talian,” my grandmother said as we stood together in the semidarkness. Back in the other room I opened the bag he'd given me. Inside were two
Little Lotta
comic books, a box of Good'n'Plenty, and several handfuls of pistachio nuts.

Grandma made me throw out the nuts because they weren't packaged and who knew who had touched them, where they'd been? We spent the evening playing Crazy Eights and watching television. Grandma kept referring to Ma's date as Mario Pepperoni. “Of course, years ago,” she told me, “you wouldn't even play with the Eyetalians. They were dirty, my father said. One step up from the coloreds.”

*   *   *

At the beginning of summer vacation, Jeanette Nord sent me a letter inviting me to come and stay at her house for a week. She had enclosed a snapshot of her and the kittens, now cats. Ma said she couldn't understand why I didn't take the Nords up on their offer. I couldn't quite understand it, either; I just didn't want to. I preferred to spend my summer days watching TV or sitting out on the porch reading movie magazines and thick paperback romances with the top of my shorts unsnapped for comfort.

My afternoon ritual included walking down to Connie's at four o'clock each afternoon for an ice-cream sandwich. I was licking the melting edges off of one when Ma drove her Skylark into the alley, two hours early, and sat slumped in the car. She'd put the roof up. Her blond hair looked wilty.

“What's the matter?” I called.

“Nothing. I just left early, that's all. Felt kind of sick.”

She got out of the car and sat down next to me on the porch step.

“Lot of traffic today?”

“The usual.” She pried off her wedgies and began to knead her feet. “I'm not sure I should tell you this,” she said. “Guess who I saw today?”

“I don't know. Jeanette?”

“Your father.”

The two words felt like a sensitive tooth I'd bitten down hard on, forgotten to favor.

“What's he doing up here? Why isn't he in New Jersey?”

“He moved back a month ago. From the sound of things, I guess his little fling didn't pan out.”

“Is he working for Masicotte again?”

Ma shook her head. “He's working on some remodeling job out at Newport. Part of a crew or something. I told him, I said, ‘You still have a daughter who might like to see you. You didn't divorce her, too.'”

“I
don't
want to see him! I just want him to leave me alone.”

“Well, still. He hasn't sent money in over . . . Not that that's any concern of yours, Dolores . . . What's new with you?”

“Nothing really.”

“Nothing? All day long?”

If I talked, I might cry. Why should he pay for someone he forgot even existed? “Julie on ‘Guiding Light' lost her baby,” I finally said.

She sighed and chuckled. “He was so surprised to see me, he dropped his change and had to get out of the car to pick it up.”

“What kind of car does he have?”

“I don't know. Some gray thing.”

“Old or new?”

“Old. You should have heard him apologize. How do you like that? The shit he gave me all those years and what's he sorry for? Dropping a couple of quarters.”

*   *   *

Daddy called the next evening during “Hollywood Palace.” Ma and Iggy were on another date. His voice on the phone sounded tinny and far away. I pictured him flat and small but alive, a talking postage stamp.

“I'm kind of busy,” I told him, trying to keep the shaking out of my voice. “What do you want?”

“Just called to see how it's going, honey. Can't a guy call up his daughter? How's Easterly treating you?”

“Fair,” I said.

“So do you miss me or what?”

My whole body shook. But before I could phrase an answer, he interrupted. “Didn't even notice I was gone, right? Gee, thanks a lot.” His laugh was fake.

“So I guess your mother has that tollbooth job, huh? She tell you I saw her the other day? Jesus, I almost passed out when I pulled up to that booth. How does she like it?”