She's Come Undone (31 page)

Naomi tapped me on the arm. “Hey!” she said. “Watch this!”

She lay back on the ground and wrapped her arms around herself, then began rolling down the hill—slowly at first, then faster, then
fast.
At the bottom she rose drunkenly, laughing and calling for me to join her.

“I can't,” I said.

“Bullshit you can't.”

“No, really.”

“Come on!”

Then I was doing it, rolling crookedly toward her applause, whooping and laughing and traveling in a blur. I closed my eyes, amazed and horrified at my own momentum.

We sat at the bottom of the hill, straw-strewn and giggling in the bright sun. “Are you wrecked?” Naomi asked.

“Probably,” I said. “Who knows?”

A
n aluminum-foil spaceman walked by, two rubber-faced Nixons. Howdy Doody was dancing with Marilyn Monroe.

“There's nothing like the Four Tops to get everybody hopping around like they were colored people,” Marcia sighed. She had strong-armed Veronica and me for the Halloween-dance refreshment committee; Marcia herself was chairman. We stood in the glare of fluorescent lighting and stainless steel, mixing jugs of screwdriver punch and tubs of onion dip. Marcia had assigned Veronica deviled eggs. She stood at the sink, peeling her shells at close range, picking and worrying over each egg as if it were a midterm exam. Naomi was there, too, seated on the counter, watching us work.

“Colored people at milky-white Merton College, Marcia?” she gasped.

Marcia shooed at her with a dish towel. “Now don't you start that prejudice business with me, Naomi Slosberg. Who owns three Dionne Warwick albums—you or me?”

Naomi was spending Moratorium Weekend at U Penn with “real people,” but she'd come downstairs to make fun of the party until her ride got there. At Kippy's request, I was spending the weekend in Naomi's vacant room. Eric had bought a nickel bag of marijuana and borrowed a special hookup from someone in his
dorm. He and Kippy were planning to get high and make love by strobe light after the party.

“I mean, black, colored. I don't see what people get so huffy about,” Marcia continued. She had called me “an old party pooper” when I'd shown up in the kitchen without a costume. She was dressed in a Raggedy Ann outfit she'd sewn from a kit. All week long, she'd hunched over the rec-room sewing machine, preparing herself to look adorable. Eric was dressed as the Jolly Green Giant and Kippy was a New York Met. Kippy had confided to me about the strobe light that afternoon as she cut out leaves from a piece of green felt material and stapled them to a pair of Eric's underpants. After supper that evening, I'd had to leave our room while Kippy painted Eric's body green.

“You know, Naomi, this free love and peacenik business of yours is probably just a stage you happen to be passing through.”

Naomi shot her cigarette butt into the big kitchen sink. “I was a majorette my first year in high school.” She laughed. “Used to curl my hair in a flip like Marlo Thomas and wear those watch-plaid kilts with the fringe and the giant safety pins. Had a whole closet of them.”

“And if you were smart,” Marcia said, “you would have had those skirts dry-cleaned and saved them. Styles come back, you know.”

“I saved the safety pins,” Naomi said. “Use 'em for roach clips.”

“Oh, shush,” Marcia said. “Why don't you just slide yourself off that counter and transfer some dip into these bowls for us?”

“Marcia,” Naomi sighed. “People all over the country are trying to stop America the Beautiful from detonating the Third World. And what are the wing nuts at this school doing? Eating onion dip and dancing the fucking shing-a-ling.”

“Now that's enough,” Marcia said. “You're hurting my virgin ears.”

“Do you even know where Cambodia
is,
Marcia? How many Billie Holiday albums do you own?”

“None,” Marcia said. “I haven't even heard of the gentleman, Naomi. So I suppose that makes me a terrible person, doesn't it?”

“Billie Holiday?” I said. I saw Mr. Pucci's boyfriend's face, heard that sad, soothing voice that had come out of their jukebox.

“Anyhow, I've just about given up on that shing-a-ling dance,” Marcia said. She was gurgling and blopping vodka over an ice ring studded with frozen cherries. “Audrey and Rochelle tried to teach me, but they said I was hopeless. My dancing muscles must be mentally retarded.”

I had assumed she was talking to the group of us, but when I looked up, she was saying it specifically to me, smiling her big, hard smile, her teeth wet and yellow against her white-powdered Raggedy Ann face. It was depressing to see how far off the mark from adorable she had landed.

“I'm only putting half of this vodka in the punch,” she whispered to me in confidence, as if we were two mothers putting something over on our children. “The last thing I want to do is spend all tomorrow morning scraping dried upchuck off the lounge rug with a butter knife.”

She hefted the punch bowl and walked cautiously toward the door. “Now, Naomi and Dolores, you walk in front of me. I don't want anyone bumping into me and making me spill this. If we have to wet-mop the dance floor, everybody'll be doing the shing-a-ling whether they want to or not!”

Out in the lounge, they were slow-dancing to “Cherish.”

“Oh, Christ,” Naomi said. “Do I have to go out there? This song makes me gag.” But she did as Marcia told her.

Kippy and Eric danced by, crotch to crotch. Kippy's baseball hat was turned backward and her cheek rested against Eric's green chest.

Out on the floor, Marcia asked some guy to dance but he refused. Back in the kitchen, Naomi shook her head. “All this dancing and drinking while Nixon's president. It's hypocritical. What's there to celebrate?”

Marcia put her hands on her wide hips. Inside the cheeriness of her costume, she seemed to have wilted some. “Well what about
Woodstock? They were dancing plenty at your precious Woodstock, weren't they?”

Naomi blinked. “That was different. That was political. This party is just a motherfucking embarrassment.”

“Now you just watch your language and I mean it,” Marcia said.

“Oh, yeah, your virgin ears,” Naomi laughed. “That's probably your trouble, Marcia. Virginity.”

A tremor passed over Marcia's face. “You know, Naomi, I try hard to love a little something about every gal in this dormitory. But you can just go fry ice!”

“Ding-dong,” Naomi said. “Avon calling.”

“If you are insinuating by that remark that there is something wrong with Avon products, then—”

Three disheveled, tie-dyed strangers appeared at the kitchen doorway, and Marcia's smile blinked back on. “May I help you?” she said.

“Zach!” Naomi screamed. “Babe!” She ran to the tallest of the three and gave him an open-mouthed kiss. Then she reached for her duffel bag and led them through the crowd. “Adios, pod people,” she called back to us.

Marcia rubbed the sides of her hips and readjusted her sailor cap. “I hate it when a Hooten girl just won't pitch in,” she mumbled.

Suddenly, I realized I'd forgotten to get Naomi's room key. “Hey, hold on a second,” I yelled out. “Wait!” I ran into the lounge after them.

The music was shouting. Naomi and her friends were making their way through the crowd. Someone grabbed my wrist. Eric.

“Cut it out!” I said. “I have to catch her.” Over his shoulder, I saw Naomi's friend's head go out the front door.

“I'm hot for you, baby. Let's you and me have a dance.” He yelled it over the music, for the others' sake. People laughed and hooted.

“Shut up,” I said. “You're drunk. Let go of me!”

The others closed in. Eric tightened his grip and began a kind of dance around me. I looked to Kippy for help, but she was saying something in Bambi's ear. The two of them laughed and nodded.

 

What you want, baby, I got it

What you need, you know I got it

All I'm askin' is for a little respect—

 

There was a smear of green on my arm where he was yanking. “Stop it!” I shouted. “Let the fuck go!”

The crowd whooped their encouragement to him and he laughed his beer breath into my face and rubbed up against me. “I love it when she plays hard to get,” he shouted.

“He's hard and she gets it,” someone shouted back. He pushed closer, danced right up against me. People laughed and yelled. Now that he'd made me visible, I was their target.

“More bounce to the ounce!”

“Suzie Creamcheese!”

 

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

Find out what it means to me!

 

They closed in on us, chanting. Alone, with Dottie, that had been
my
song. He had no right. I never once . . .

Eric let go of my wrists but grabbed me by the hips before I could pull away. He latched his legs around my leg and rocked up and down. The others barked like dogs.

“Dry fuck!”

“Hump time!”

“Give her what she wants!”

 

Sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me

 

“You pig!” I screamed, then jerked my knee up into him.

Surprise and pain stopped his dancing. Stopped all of them. The music stopped. I did it again.

Eric grunted and fell forward to the floor. His body curled up on itself; he was writhing and grunting.

I parted them with my elbows and my crazy screaming. I ran.

“Wait'll you see my fish,” Dottie said. “I just got some new neons last night. You know anything about tropical fish?”

“Not really,” I said.

Her brother's station wagon hit a pothole and went into a shimmy that traveled from the front of the car up my legs and throat. I had called her from the pay phone in the all-night study room. She said she could tell it was me calling before she even picked up.

A cardboard air freshener swung back and forth from the radio knob: a topless woman fondling her breasts. After I'd kneed Eric, I'd hidden at the edge of the parking lot, behind the dumpster. Over an hour I must have sat there on that cold ground—shaking, calming down, shaking again. There was an oil spot next to me, wet and bright, with the moon shining in it. And a dime. I rolled the coin between my thumb and finger, considering. Calling her had been the only thing I could think of.

“Moe, Larry, and Curly—that's my three piranhas. I named one of my angelfish after you. The silver one. Dolores. She's a real beauty. . . . God, I was so happy when you called. When the phone rang, I knew right away it was you. This is so perfect. My rat's-ass brother's at National Guard until Sunday. This place we're gettin' our supper at has the best fried clams.”

At the party, after the music started up again, Marcia had come outside and walked to the edge of the lawn. She'd called my name three times, pronouncing it like a question.

“Do you like strips or whole bellies?” Dottie asked. “They got both.”

“What?”

“Clams.”

I turned toward her. The cigarette smoke we'd made swirled around her head. “I don't really care,” I said.

The restaurant's window was smeared and steamy. She sat at the counter with her back toward me, her rear hanging over both sides of the stool. Two men in a booth by the window drank coffee and watched her, smiling. In the restaurant light, the green paint Eric had left on my wrists and hands looked gray. “Get even with that fat cunt—” he'd said when they'd walked him out of the party, each of his arms locked around a friend's shoulder. They stopped only a half dozen cars away from me. “I'll fix her good,” Eric promised. Then he coughed and spat and let them ease him back inside.

I'd waited and waited, staring up at the pulled shade in Kippy's and my room. Then I'd risked the rear entrance to the dorm, walking up the stairs past half-empty cups of beer and discarded parts of costumes. My heart thumped like the bass from the music downstairs. People were laughing and yelling, far away.

Our floor was vacant. I walked down the long corridor, expecting him to jump out from behind every door I passed. But I had to chance it. Had to get my things and get out of there, get somewhere else.

Our door was wide open.

On the floor in the middle of the room was a mound of my stuff that he'd pulled out of my closet and destroyed. Ripped-up clothes, kicked-in suitcases, pages torn away from the bindings of my books. My mother's flying-leg painting sat at a cockeyed angle on top of the pile—the wooden frame snapped and broken, the canvas split down the middle. If I started crying, I warned myself, I wouldn't be able to stop.

He hadn't touched my bureau. I grabbed my knapsack from the bottom drawer where I kept Dante's stolen letters and pictures. I threw in underwear, toothbrush, and the money Arthur Music had
sent me for killing my mother—twenty-five untouched $20 bills, still in their bank envelope.

I looked again at the ruined painting. “Ma!” I called out loud—a single syllable of pain that scared me. If I gave myself away, he might come back. Might hate me enough to do what Jack had done.

I grabbed Kippy's scissors. Hands shaking, I cut myself a zigzag square of Ma's painting: green tip of the wing against the cool blue sky. I stuffed it into the knapsack and ran like hell, down the corridor, down the stairs, away.

Outside, I ran, walked, ran again to the mailbox at the edge of campus where Dottie had said to go. She was waiting, the motor running, her blinker winking the mailbox on and off. The door swung open. “Come on,” she said. “Get in.”

*   *   *

The car filled up with the reassuring smell of grease; the brown bags of clams warmed my lap. “Sorry it took so long,” Dottie said. “One of their fryolators is on the blink. I got bellies.” The front windshield steamed up. She flicked a switch and the defrosters roared to life, fluttering the ends of her blunt Dutch-boy hair.