She's Come Undone (28 page)

“Come on, New Jersey,” someone said. That barbecue guy, that Eric. He knelt down on the ground next to me, close enough so that I smelled cooked meat. Kippy giggled and refused, then climbed up onto his shoulders. They rose, swaying, and galloped toward the others.

“I couldn't decide between you or the fat one,” I heard him say. Kippy's laugh was a shriek.

Joined together, they made a kind of centaur—half bastard, half bitch. Dottie would have laughed out loud at that. She wasn't due back to work for two more days. I could make her hate Kippy; I knew just the kind of thing to say. Rochelle had said that thing about Dottie just because she was fat. They needed some excuse to hate her. That stupid kiss had meant nothing. That kiss was nothing at all.

Kippy hooked one arm around Eric's neck and began to fight
the girl opposite her like she meant it, pulling hair and whacking at her ear. Below her, Eric whooped encouragement. He hooked his leg around the other boy's, toppling the duo.

Eric and Kippy ambled in circles, fanning out the hesitant competition. Neither saw the burly boy coming at them from the side. He had served Jell-O mold slices in the buffet line—delicately, I remembered. Now he lowered his head like a bull and charged.

When they collided, Eric faltered slightly but maintained his upright position. Kippy went flying backward, landing with a thud on her shoulder. “Oh, God!” she screamed. “It hurts! It Jesus fucking hurts!”

A circle of people blocked my view. I tried to get up and go to her, but no matter which way I attempted to raise myself, I seemed anchored to the ground. Kippy's voice rose up over everything. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” She kept yelling her pain until it became a sort of chant.

Rochelle took charge. Dispensing her physical-therapist's wisdom, she prodded and poked, then decided Kippy needed to go to Wayland Hospital's emergency room. By the time they got her off the ground and into the back of somebody's station wagon, it was dusk. I thought of phoning her parents. Or Dante at his Lutheran school. Instead, I sat and smoked.

After everyone else had gone inside, a man in a Buildings and Grounds truck arrived and hissed water onto the barbecue coals. He collapsed the buffet tables (one blunt, efficient whack to each leg), loaded them into the truck, and drove them away. Mosquitoes were out and biting.

I managed to get onto my hands and knees and over to the stone bench. By the third try I was standing, puffing, my heart jackhammering. I walked unsteadily on pins-and-needles feet.

In the room again, I locked the door. My mumbling to myself turned into a silent conversation to Dante's picture. “Look out for her,” I told him. “I wouldn't trust her farther than I could throw her.” Saying it made me think of the way she'd looked flying backwards, mid-fall. I felt giddy.

I wanted Dante to talk back.

She'd read his letter without expression, then put it in a paisley box in her dresser. Second drawer. I walked over to it. Hesitated. Slid it out of the envelope.

 

. . . goes back to the time when my mother found out about my father and made me promise her that I would never be a WOMANIZER like him. But now I wish we made love like you wanted us to, Kathy. Maybe God doesn't even think it's wrong, who knows? I don't know anything anymore. I'm sorry I made you cry that night at the Ridge when I refused. I wanted to so badly but I was confused. I love you more than I can take.

 

The letter shook between my hands. Instantly, I loved him—for his confusion, for the promise he'd made to his mother. It was
Dante
who'd resisted,
Kippy
who had wanted them to play with fire.

I was playing with fire myself. What if I didn't hear her coming? How could I explain his framed picture in bed with me, the letter in my lap? I kept begging myself to get up and put everything back.

I needn't have worried. When they got back, somewhere after ten, you could hear them from as far away as the parking lot—a big fanfare with Kippy in the middle. I lay in bed in the dark with my eyes clenched shut and a blanket over my head.

The door banged open and the light snapped on. There were at least three or four of them, guys and girls both, everyone whispering. Rochelle's voice was still in charge. “Thanks so much, you guys,” Kippy kept saying sweetly. Someone whispered a wisecrack I couldn't hear. The others laughed through their noses. People left.

It wasn't fair. Being fat was a handicap, too, but people ran the fuck the other way. Or shit their nasty wisecracks all over you. Or both. I
could
have been born with a gland problem for all any of them knew. She had climbed up onto his shoulders of her own free will. If you played with fire, you were going to get burned.

The quiet was so absolute, neither of us might have existed. Someone might rush in, snap on the light, and find our room as empty as July.

The clock from downtown struck once. Kippy began to whimper. I counted my heartbeats past two hundred, daring myself to speak.

“Are you in pain?” I finally said.

She kept me waiting. Then a bedside lamp snapped on and Kippy was squinting at her clock. “My first day at college,” she said. “Shit!”

I grabbed for my Salems before the light went out.

“Does it hurt?” I asked again. “If there's anything I can do—”

She put the light on again. “I fractured my collarbone,” she said. “They gave me something for the pain at the hospital. I'm supposed to wait another two hours before I take the next one. Can I have one of your cigarettes?”

I struggled out of bed, put it to her mouth, and lit it.

“Menthol,” she said. “Ick.”

“There's a machine in the basement. I can get you some regular ones tomorrow. Or if you want, I could go down and get them now.” I sat on the edge of the bed waiting for her to decide.

“A broken collarbone,” she repeated. “I have to wear this asshole Ace bandage thing for at least three weeks.”

She had been warned about those Culinary Arts idiots. What did she expect? “Why don't you just take that other pill now? Where are they? I'll get you some water.”

“Maybe I should,” she said. “They're in a little envelope in my purse. Thanks.”

I recognized the pills, the same kind Grandma fed me the weekend of Ma's death. She put two in her mouth and took the glass of water.

“It'll be okay,” I said. “Really.”

She swallowed hard. “Oh, right. like I'm supposed to believe anything
you
tell me!” She handed me back the glass. “You seemed so nice in those letters. And funny, too. I thought you were going to be so cool. Then I get here and you're . . .”

“I'm the same person,” I said. “I wrote the letters.”

“Bullshit you're the same person. Just because you have a gland problem or whatever, it doesn't give you the right to pretend to be something you're not. Is the truth too much to ask from someone who's going to be your roommate? Ow! Shit! My shoulder!”

I turned off the light. “I thought you'd like me better if you didn't know what I looked like,” I said. She didn't answer. “And you
did,
right?”

I could tell she was looking over at me, staring at me in the dark.

“Kippy?”

“What?”

“I don't have a gland problem. I'm just fat. And I—” I was about to confess I'd opened Dante's letter, then stopped short of it.

“And you what?”

“And my mother died this summer.”

The room was quiet for the next several seconds. “How?” she said.

“In an accident.”

“Well, I'm sorry,” she said. “
If
it's true.”

I lay there in the dark, aching, crying in silence. When I was finally close to sleep, she spoke again. “Dolores, guess what? The pain's not there.” Her voice sounded calm and foggy. “Oh, by the way—you know what you asked me this afternoon?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“About Dante? About him pressuring me? We
did
make love. Just before he left for school. Out at this place called the Ridge.”

I didn't say anything.

“It was so beautiful,” she said. “It was unreal.”

K
ippy's broken collarbone provided the inroad I needed. I was allowed to become her loyal, devoted servant, carrying her tray at supper, buying her textbooks, doing her laundry, rapping on Rochelle's door whenever Kippy needed to borrow the heating pad. She had forgotten to pack her soap dish; I gave her mine. “Mucus green, Dee?” she said. (By the second week, she'd started calling me Dee instead of Dolores.) I went back to the bookstore and bought her a shell-pink one like she'd left in New Jersey. Her medication made her thirsty. I'd wave away the change she offered whenever I returned from the basement soda machine with her Orange Crushes. “Oh, go on—it's on me!” I'd insist, pushing away her quarters, trying as best I could to swallow back the panting and huffing that climbing those flights of stairs left me with. Instinct told me to hurry on these errands. If I gave her enough time, she might move out.

That first week, I went to more of Kippy's classes than my own, collecting semester schedules and first impressions. I reported back in the wisecracking way she had liked about my summer letters. For a role model, I used Juliet's old nurse in
Romeo and Juliet:
a good-hearted fussbudget, a woman who spoke her piece but knew her place.

In junior year at Easterly High School, Mrs. Bronstein had made us read
Romeo and Juliet,
then see
West Side Story,
her favorite movie,
for comparison. Sharks and Jets, Montagues and Capulets. The class had laughed at the singing parts—people interrupting the crises of their lives to belt out a tune. At the end of the film, Mrs. Bronstein snapped on the classroom lights. “Well, what did you think?” she asked, hopefully.

I had sometimes loved Mrs. Bronstein for her efforts, could have volunteered just the sort of response that would have thrilled her. None of us spoke. Mrs. Bronstein watched us and waited. Finally, Stormy LaTerra raised her hand and said she thought George Chakiris had a cute ass. Mrs. Bronstein left the room in tears and the kid from audiovisual played the movie in reverse for us: Maria leaping backward away from Tony's slumped body, Tony undying, the Sharks jerking their knives back out of him. Maybe you
could
come back to life after you'd been dead to it. Or pick a new person to become—just shuck your old self, let who you used to be die a quiet death. It was funny how my high school education was turning out to be more useful after the fact than while they were putting me through it.

I cast Eric from Culinary Arts as Kippy's Romeo. Kippy liked it when I called him that. He appeared at our door—off and on at first, then on a kind of schedule, sipping his Miller High Lifes, pacing, slowing for his own reflection each time he passed our mirror. In the name of Kippy's honor, Eric had fixed the assailant who had sent her flying and broken her collarbone by flattening his tires and signing him up for memberships in three different record clubs.

Eric nodded acknowledgment to me but never spoke. His arrival was my cue to wait three minutes, then go. The waiting was Kippy's idea. “It's not like we're—you know—animals or anything,” she told me. Grabbing my Salems and some miscellaneous magazine, I always went to the same place—the bathroom stall closest to the wall and adjacent to our room. He usually stayed for two or three beers' worth of time. Kippy's moans and giggles sometimes made their way through the cinder block. There was an occasional shriek of pain as well. “My shoulder! You're leaning on my shoulder!”

By the first of October, Kippy had gotten seven letters from Dante at Lutheran college. Since Eric, she had put Dante's picture in her sweater drawer and written him back only once. “Would you mail this for me?” she'd asked, affixing a stamp and sighing. I'd mailed it, all right: mailed it into the storm drain outside Hooten Hall. It wasn't that I
hated
her, exactly; she just didn't deserve someone as sensitive as Dante.

Which is why I began stealing his letters, instead of waiting and reading them after she opened them.

Passing the mail slots at mealtime and going to and from the soda machine for her Orange Crushes, I'd pluck the now-familiar beige envelopes with their clipper-ship insignia from Kippy's pigeonhole and slide them into my fatigue-jacket pocket. I read and reread them while I sat on the hard toilet seat, waiting for Eric and Kippy to finish fucking. Poor Dante. Lutheran college wasn't going well. Even his tissue-paper stationery was fragile.
“Sometimes I think I may be going crazy
. . .
sexual thoughts right in the middle of Tuesday-night prayer service
. . .” I began to fret over the deterioration of his penmanship—the way the words slanted first one way and then the other, sometimes in the same line. “. . .
That manager's-training offer back at my old job
. . .
an important question to ask you at Thanksgiving
. . .
would NEVER do to my wife what my father did to my mother.
” That handwriting swayed like the beach grass on Fisherman's Cove, those banks below Mrs. Masicotte's mansion. I hadn't thought of that spot in years. I was struck suddenly with where I was. Where I wasn't. Wayland, Pennsylvania: the farthest from the ocean I'd ever been.

Whenever I was sure Eric had left, I'd return to our room to cluck at Kippy like Old Nurse and throw away the Miller empties. I wasn't actually
stealing
the letters, I told myself. I was withholding them for the good of someone whose suffering I felt I understood—committing a federal offense only in some narrower sense. “Everything's relative,” Mr. Pucci used to be fond of reminding me. “Look at the
big
picture.”