She's Come Undone (27 page)

We sang and danced to Dottie's records and by midafternoon we were drunk enough to be the singers themselves—the twirling, jiving Temptations, the lovelorn Shirelles. Dottie dropped to her knees as Little Anthony, was up again and strutting as James Brown. When she put on a Supremes record, she insisted we were Flo and Mary, the two nice ones. For scrawny Diana Ross, Dottie stuck a mop into her utility bucket and we snapped our fingers and danced around it, singing that we heard a symphony.

“You can tell that show-off Diana is a real bitch in her personal life,” Dottie declared between tracks. “And a slob, too.”

Without premeditation, I yanked the needle off the turntable, hunched up my shoulders, and became Ed Sullivan. “Diana Ross has been fired from our really big shew,” I announced. “She's been replaced by America's newest singing sensation, Dolores Price!”

I lifted my foot and sent the utility bucket clanging across the room, the mop clattering to the floor. Then I dropped the record-player arm onto the opening of Aretha Franklin's “Respect” and began a full-out performance. I threw my whole body into it—threw into it, too, my anger, my sense of outrage, all the power of two hundred fifty pounds.

Dottie sat back on the bed, struck dumb at first by what I was feeling, then hooting and shouting the choruses along with me.

 

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Find out what it means to me!

 

We'd played the song over and over, raising our fists and shouting about respect until we were both hoarse, until we were both somehow avenged.

*   *   *

Now Kippy's mother's eyes bounced from my unsnapped pants to the knife I'd stuck diagonally into the remaining half of the birthday cake. The father wore high-water flare pants and orange socks. Kippy had shiny chipmunk cheeks. What right did
they
have to judge
me?

Her father put down two suitcases and walked through the awkwardness, offering me his hand. “I'm Joe Strednicki . . . heh heh . . . I'm an electrician.” That hand felt solid and sandpapery. I held on to it longer than I should have.

“I took this side of the room if it's all right with you,” I said. “But I can switch if you want. It makes no difference. Really.” For some reason, I kept saying it to Kippy's mother.

“So wait a minute,” Kippy said. She was shaking her head. “There's a definite mistake here. There's a mix-up somewhere because—”

“You got mail already,” I interrupted. “A letter from Dante. Your boyfriend. I'll get it for you.”

Kippy took the letter absentmindedly without noticing the red fingerprints on the envelope. “Open it! Go ahead!” Dottie had kept teasing me at one point during our party, waving the letter near my face. The red pistachio-nut dye wouldn't erase away. In my wastebasket were five inches' worth of shells I'd meant to dump. All day long I'd been wrestling with my first hangover and passing gas more foul than I'd thought possible.

Kippy sat rigidly on the edge of the mattress I'd chosen for her. Her mother's smile blinked on and off as if it had a short circuit—something Mr. Strednicki might be required to fix.

I pushed the top flap back over the birthday cake box, sinking the knife in deeper, and got up off the bed. “So I guess I'll let you get unpacked. Be back in a little while. Nice to meet you.”

“Is it your birthday?” Mrs. Strednicki asked vaguely. Come to think of it, she had that chipmunky look, too.

“Not really,” I said. “Well, sort of.”

Mr. and Mrs. Strednicki smiled and nodded approvingly, as if what I'd just said made perfect sense.

From the end bathroom stall, adjacent to mine and Kippy's room, I listened to their family argument. It was both a sound and a vibration through the cinder block. “. . . Hard-earned money,” I heard her father say. And from Kippy,
“Not with that hippopotamus!”

I was glad I'd brought the cake with me. Detaching a blue sugar rose, I placed it in my mouth, on my tongue, then pushed up, crushing it against the roof of my mouth. It was so sweet, it burned.

At five
P.M
. Rochelle, the dorm president that Dottie hated, led the eight of us freshmen girls downstairs to the lounge, where she passed out Styrofoam cups and poured us each two inches of Boone's Farm apple wine. We watched and waited while she lit herself a Cigarillo, sipped her wine, and flipped apathetically through her paperwork. Dottie had made her sound more beautiful than she was. A willowy redhead, she kept her eyelids at permanent half-mast indifference. It was as if Robert Mitchum had mated with an Irish setter and this bitch was the result.

Rochelle said her job was to tell us about useful things they didn't print in the Merton College catalog. Such as which professors were assholes and which boys' dorms to stay away from. Such as how to outsmart the fire inspector when he checked our rooms for hot plates.

None of the other freshmen had sat anywhere near me. I sloshed the wine around in my cup and realized I was going to be as powerless and invisible to these girls as I'd been to the girls in my high school. “So, why don't you just all say who you are and tell a little about yourself,” I heard Rochelle say.

They started at the opposite end of the room. Bambi, Kippy, Tammy: each girl up front had a cute and sunny personality to
match her Walt Disney cartoon name. Each seemed thrilled to have landed at cruddy Merton.

The girls nearest me were plainer, frumpier. Someone named Veronica had a noticeable twitch. She said she was enrolled in the honors program and took her studies seriously. Naomi, frail and nervous as a parakeet, said she'd been at Woodstock over the summer and the experience had woken her up. Then she veered onto the subjects of Vietnam and civil rights and the mercury content in swordfish. Kippy and Bambi exchanged uncomfortable looks. Rochelle rolled her eyes and interrupted. “And last but not least?”

I had been chewing on the edge of my cup, dreading my turn. The squeak of my teeth on the Styrofoam was the loudest sound in the room. Everyone waited. “Oh, me?” I finally said. “Dolores.”

“And?”

What was I supposed to tell them? That I'd been stupid enough to arrive a week earlier than the rest of them? That I'd been raped at thirteen?

“I'm wicked glad to be here,” I mumbled to the coffee table.

It occurred to me as Rochelle read dormitory rules from her clipboard that you could tell a lot more about people from watching their behavior with Styrofoam cups than you could by what they told you. Kippy had stopped taking notes and was poking holes into the side of hers with her pencil point. Naomi dismantled her cup into small chips. I had gnawed mine into one long spiral

“And a word to the wise,” Rochelle said. “Don't get involved with any of the guys in Culinary Arts. You have to be horny and a jerk just to get into that program. It's a prerequisite.” Kippy and Tammy widened their eyes at each other and giggled. “Their whole dorm is on academic probation this semester. You'll see them at supper tonight. They're putting on a barbecue for our dorm. Don't say I didn't warn you. And then, of course, there's ten-ton Dottie.”

My breathing stopped. At the mention of weight, several girls glanced instinctively toward me, then immediately away.

“Dottie,” Rochelle continued, “our famous lezzie cleaning woman.”

Kippy looked lost. “Famous what?” she asked.

“Lezzie,” Rochelle repeated. “As in lesbian. As in girl loves girl.”

“Oh, ick,” Kippy said. “Don't make me chuck my cookies.”

The drunken night before came pounding back. In the midst of the vodka and confusion and singing—right after my performance of “Respect”—Dottie had stood up, orbited close to me, and kissed me on the lips. A single kiss, followed by laughter. At the time it had struck me as odd and silly and then I had dismissed it. Now it scared me—not so much the kiss itself, but what someone like Rochelle or Kippy might make of it. The gas from all those pistachio nuts rumbled inside me and mixed itself up with a fear of each one of them in that room. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but on that frigging frayed sofa.

“I'm sick,” I said. “Can I go?”

“Just a sec,” Rochelle said. “Are there any questions?”

“I have one,” Kippy said.

“Uh-huh?”

“Well, never mind. I'll talk to you after the meeting's over.”

“It
is
over,” Rochelle said.

*   *   *

Kippy's mother had hung the Indian-print curtains before she left. A breeze from outside billowed them, the cloth rolling in toward me like surf. That entire week, it hadn't once occurred to me to open the windows.

Kippy's high school yearbook was on the bed. In her picture, she had longer hair and a warm smile.

 

Junior Red Cross Volunteer I, II; Majorettes II, III, IV; Class Secretary III . . . Pastime: Talking during study hall. Weakness: Juicy Fruit gum. Quote: “Today is the first day of the rest ofyour life.”

 

She had unpacked a framed picture of a dark-haired boy and put it on her bureau. I found the same picture in the yearbook; sure enough, it was Dante.
“Saint Dante.” Pastimes: Milk and Cookies, praying for sinners. Quote: “I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.”

I got off the bed and walked over to Kippy's bureau for a better look. His bushy eyebrows were crimped up in a sad, sympathetic way. There was a struggle in his eyes.

When Kippy got back to our room, she banged shut her suitcases and shoved them under her bed. I could tell Rochelle had vetoed her escape.

“Your parents seem nice,” I said. “You look like your mother.” She slammed cosmetics and perfume bottles onto the shelf above her bed. Her fingers tweezed nervously at a knot in the speaker wire of her stereo. She jumped from chore to chore without accomplishing anything.

She had loved me in my letters, I wanted to remind her—had trusted me with volunteered intimacies. It was my fat that made her hate me.

I walked over to her bureau and picked up her boyfriend's picture. “Dante's cute,” I said. “If you don't mind my asking, whatever happened between the two of you?”

That's when she finally looked at me.

“You wrote that he was pressuring you, remember? I was just wondering, well . . . Not that it's any of my business.”

She walked over, took the picture, and slammed his face down against the bureau top. “I wrote
nothing
to you!” she said. “Understand?”

Down the hall, two girls whooped back-from-vacation hellos.

“I didn't write a
thing
to you, okay? I wrote to someone else. Someone you
said
you were. Okay?”

I lit myself a Salem, the match shaking in my hand. Pistachio-nut gas bubbled up from my insides. “Well, can I help it if I have a
gland problem?” I said. “It's something I was born with. Go ahead and shoot me.”

She was the first to look away.

*   *   *

At the picnic supper I took tiny spoonfuls of the various salads, arranging them like small islands against the white space of the heavy china plate. It was an act of good faith for Kippy's sake: I would lose weight and be normal for her. But Kippy didn't notice. She and Bambi were busy trying to distance themselves from me. I had shadowed them from the dorm to the food line.

The barbecue was an oil drum cut in half and covered with wire. Sauce-slopped chicken pieces sizzled between us Hooten girls and the boys from Culinary Arts. The barbecue guy was soap-opera handsome, with his straight white teeth and wilty chef's hat. He wore a red bandanna around his neck and smiled from behind a veil of blue barbecue smoke.

“This one wants you,” he told Kippy, spearing her a dripping chicken breast. He pushed it off the fork and onto her plate. If you could believe his name tag, his name was Eric. “Where you girls from?” he asked. A plump chicken leg hovered above Bambi's plate.

“Edison, New Jersey.”

“Stoughton, Massachusetts.”

Eric licked his greasy finger. “Oh, yeah? Well, where's that at?”

“It's near Boston,” Bambi said.

“Boston? I hear they're a bunch of old farts up in Boston. I hear they ban everything.”

Kippy laughed so hard, someone might have been tickling her.

“Not everything,” Bambi said.

“She's a wiseass,” he told Kippy. The three of them laughed. He turned to me. “Which one?” he said, nodding businesslike at the chicken pieces. I couldn't decide. The other two were escaping down the line. I pointed to the ugliest, most shriveled leg.

When I turned to look for them, I saw Kippy and Bambi sitting across the lawn on a stone bench. Both were bent over the plates in their laps, laughing at something. Me. I didn't know where else to go.

I stood waiting for them to push over, but they didn't. There was no place to sit but the ground. I lowered myself partway down and let myself fall the rest of the way. I hadn't meant to grunt. The chicken leg rolled off my plate and onto the lawn. I could feel the two of them stop eating to watch. I could hear them listening to my heavy breathing.

Their conversation turned from boys to hair. I wanted to tell them about Ruth's peppermint shampoo, to point out that Ruth had thought my hair was beautiful. Why hadn't my fat mattered to Larry and Ruth?

After dessert, the Culinary Arts boys began pulling off their floppy chef's hats, unbuttoning their white jackets. Two of them spit watermelon seeds at each other, looking around to see which girls were watching. A Frisbee sailed across the lawn.

Some of the Hooten girls got coaxed onto boys' shoulders and a kind of wrestling contest began. The girls laughed unsurely, grabbing each other's wrists and pushing with halfhearted swipes. Below them, the boys slammed into each other, more in earnest.