She's Come Undone (49 page)

“Mim says a mortgage payment won't be that much more than
monthly rent, and plus, we'll keep building equity. Just think of it, honey. We could have a nice big yard for your garden. And a room for you to write your poems in—your own little study instead of you having to drag the typewriter out to the kitchen table all the time.” I skipped the part about the baby's room.

“Equity?” he said.

“Yeah, something to fall back on. Mim explained it to me. Kind of like we're paying rent to ourselves instead of to Mrs. Wing.”

He shook his head. “I've been thinking of taking an extended leave of absence so I can write full-time,” he said. “In which case, a house would be out of the question.”

“Dante, be realistic. We couldn't live on just my salary—even if we didn't buy a house.”

“Well, now that you're one of the movers and shakers down at the supermarket, how long could it be before they line you up for a corporate vice president's salary?” He raised his arms into a long sleepless stretch that knocked our wedding photo off the wall and into bed with us. He looked at it and smiled. “Here we are,” he said. “Stuck to a board. Shellacked for life.”

I got up, yanked on my bathrobe, and went outside. I walked around and around the house, listening to the crickets and thinking of the things I
should
have said to him. Then I went back in and said them.

“Look, I'm getting sick of your sarcasm all the time.”

“Sarcasm?” He said it sarcastically.

“That shellacked-on-a-board stuff. And my work may not be as important as yours, but people say I'm doing a good job. Yesterday, Shirley brought in a plate of blond brownies and said I'd made it fun for her to come in to work, the first time in twelve years.”

“That reminds me,” Dante said. “Your Nobel Prize came in the mail today.”

“Last week, when I asked you if you wanted to go to that cookout at Tandy and Rusty's house, you could have just said no. You didn't have to say what you said—be mean about it.”

He sighed. “What did I say? It's so significant, I've forgotten.”

“You said you'd rather spend the afternoon coughing up blood. How do you think I felt—having to make three-bean salad and drop it off and lie to every one of my friends.”

“Your
friends?” he said. He pretended to look under the bed.

But early the next morning, he woke me up, patting and stroking me, asking for my patience. “I'm going through a rough time right now,” he whispered.

But you're on
vacation!
I wanted to scream. Instead, I told him to just forget it. His apology turned into sex and I clung tightly to him, my eyes on the candlestick across the room. When he was through, I burst out crying.

“Hey?” he said. “What are the tears for?”

“Nothing,” I said. They were for my mother—for what her banged-up face had looked like the night she'd called my father a whore and he'd given her that swollen purple lip, that Chinese eye. I'd been lying there reliving that night during Dante's grunt and thrust.

“Hey, babe,” he whispered. “You and me.”

He's nothing like Daddy, I told myself. No couple is happy all the time. He's nothing like him at all.

*   *   *

All that next week, Dante drove me to work so he could have the Volkswagen. One afternoon, I walked back up the hill, happily unaware. The thick orange extension cord was what I noticed first, not the harsh sound of the drill someone was running out back. I followed the cord from our kitchen window out to where the noise was painful. What I saw was painful, too. The cord ended at Dante, who was wearing plastic goggles and standing on our stool, armed with a power tool. He was drilling a hole into a shiny green van that still had its price sheet stuck to the window.

“Well,” he said. “What do you think?”

I said I hoped he had permission to cut into whoever's van it was.

He laughed. “It's ours, babe. I'm putting in a teardrop window.”

“What do you mean it's ours? Where's our bug?”

“Traded her in. Don't worry. I got this
below
-sale price—super deal. Bought it three days ago but there was some paperwork. Surprise!”

“You bought this thing without even telling me?”

“They install these windows for you at the dealership, but it's a rip-off. I'm saving us a good hundred and a half. You like it?”

I couldn't think of anything to say.

“You and I are going on a belated cross-country honeymoon trip. First three weeks in August.”

“Dante, I . . . I can't just pick up and go on a three-week vacation. I only get a
one
-week vacation.”

“All taken care of. I called what's-his-face, your boss. He finally agreed to give you your week with pay, plus two weeks off without pay.”

“You planned my vacation without even asking me?”

“I'm putting shag carpet down on the floor. Boomer's got a remnant left over from their place. All the comforts of home, huh?”

His using the word “home” was what woke me. I ran into the house.

He'd found which drawer the bankbook was in, all right. The balance said $671.

He came inside. Wearing those safety goggles, he looked like a giant insect. “I wanted to leave some in there for the trip. The payments are only one fifty-five a month. . . . I figure we can camp out right on the van floor in sleeping bags, save some money. Maybe splurge once or twice and get a motel room.”

He walked over and put his hand on my rear end—cautiously, like he was testing the flatiron. “Well,” he said.
“Say
something.”

“I thought you were going to write poems all summer. You said that's what you
needed
to do.”

“Travel will feed my writing. I figured you can take the wheel when I want to write.”

“You never even
asked
me!”

His fist whacked down against the mattress; dust specks zoomed
around us. “I thought you'd be excited about it. You think it was easy putting all this together?”

“But a lot of that was money my grandmother gave us.”

“Oh, I get it. Hands off the wedding stash because she's
my
grandmother, not yours? I never realized you were such a fucking materialist before. Little Miss Equity.”

“That's not the point. Making decisions without me is the point.”

“How about Mim whatever the fuck her name is? Doesn't she get her usual vote in this, too? Look, I wanted to surprise you with the honeymoon we never got to have. Not that our marriage needs a jump start or anything. Not that we have room for any more wedded bliss.”

 

Dear Grandma,

Exciting news! Dante and I decided to use your wedding money to buy a van. We're taking a cross-country trip in August. (I'll buy you a pair of Mickey Mouse ears when we get to Disneyland!) We don't know our exact route yet, but we're either planning to drive down and see you the first part of the trip or the last part. I had to give up my head-cashier position because the trip will take three weeks, but I'll still have a job there when I get back. People are always coming and going at that place, so who knows? I might be head cashier again before too long.

Sorry to hear about Mrs. Mumphy breaking her hip. I sent her a card at the hospital. Maybe you should go on that bus trip anyway. I'm sure there'll be other people you know. Take a risk! That's what Ma always used to say.

I really WASN'T crying the other morning when you called. I had a cold. (It's better now.) I'm very happy.

Love, Dolores

 

Dante got the carpeting in smoothly enough, but he'd cut too wide a hole for the teardrop window. On and off all one afternoon, I was required to train the garden hose at the error while Dante sat inside
the van and studied the leak. Somewhere near dark, he hopped out the back, let loose a string of curses, and kicked a dent into the passenger's-side door.

“You happy now?” he shouted, forcing my hand against the dent. “You like the feel of that? Well, you can thank all your bitching and moaning for the last several days.”

I pried my hand away. I thought he might hit me.

“That's your tactic, isn't it? Chip away at me little by little? I should jump into this thing and leave you rotting in the driveway—good fucking riddance.”

“Don't say things like that, okay? I
know
the trip will be good for us. It's just that I thought if we bought a house, then . . .”

“You're not going to be satisfied until we're in one of those prefab coffin things over there at Granite Acres. Until we have some tiny little life we can predict right up to the funeral.”

The abortion had been a choice between Dante and Vita. If he left me, I had neither of them. I had my old self back. “You're right,” I told him. “I felt a little disappointed at first, but it was just temporary. Don't say that about leaving, okay? I love you, Dante.”

That night he did anal sex on me out in the van. I pressed my face against the new carpet, inhaling the chemical smell and reciting things I'd memorized in school.
“Seven times eight is fifty-six, seven times nine is sixty-three
. . .
This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks
. . .” I winced and waited for it to be over. It was nothing like what Jack did, I told myself. This is my husband, our van. We're two consenting adults.

“Being open to new experiences is what will keep us alive,” he murmured to me afterwards, on the verge of his sleep. “I could tell you liked that just now, felt the exact second you relaxed and went with it. You
telegraphed
your enjoyment right to me—put me on fire!”

His whispering voice was moist against my ear.

The next day I drove the van for the first time. The ride was smoother than our Volkswagen and the seats were up so high, I felt
like I was levitating. The body-shop man said the dent would cost $375 to fix; I told him we needed it done before we left. I walked to the bank and withdrew two hundred more dollars. For Dante, I bought two pairs of shorts, two T-shirts, all seven volumes of the
Mobil Travel Guide,
and a leather-bound journal for his poems. I got myself a new pair of clogs and, at the drugstore, renewed my birth-control prescription.

“Anything else?” the register clerk said.

I slid the tube of first-aid cream across the counter at her. I'd had rectal bleeding that morning.

*   *   *

If you looked quickly at our three-inch stack of cross-country pictures (ten rolls' worth, developed free of charge at the photo lab back in Rhode Island), you'd swear Dante and I had had a wonderful time—that his plan to ignite our marriage like a camp stove had worked.

Most of the shots are of Dante, posed in the lower right half of the picture with Mt. Rushmore or the Wall Drug sign or the Magic Kingdom just over his shoulder. Even when he was in one of his moods, he transformed himself for pictures, breaking into a self-assured, Robert Wagner kind of half smile, so that what got developed was the illusion that he was content. Out of the hundreds of shots, there was one truthful picture: one of me by myself, standing in the hot-springs steam at Yellowstone Park, leaning my arm against a wooden sign that says “Dangerous Thermal Area” and looking weary and scared. All the other photos Dante took of me were ambushes: one of me getting surprised inside the camp shower, another where I'm sleeping on the van floor with my tongue out, vulnerable as a dead woman. “Bam! I got you!” Dante would say whenever he took a shot. If I was going to take
his
picture, he'd borrow my hairbrush first.

The photographs don't say how lonely I was, sitting up front, driving the van through whole states while Dante sat cross-legged, snickering at some book, some private joke between him and an author.
Or writing out his private thoughts, his black Flair pen squeaking along on the oversized pages of the leather-bound journal. It was thinking about distances that made me so lonely—how Nebraska went on forever one day, how far away I was from Grandma and from Grandma's idea of what my life was like. Looking from a distance at those purple Bighorn Mountains made me wonder about God again: if he was real, if he was too far away to matter. For whole days on that trip, Dante, sitting beside me, was as distant as those mountains.

“You're trapped by your own lies is what it is,” I told myself in the rearview mirror one twilight. “Gracewood, Kippy, how you got pregnant with Vita Marie—that whole rat's nest of secrets.” We were parked in a supermarket lot someplace in California and Dante was on his way inside for groceries. I watched the automatic doors close behind him. “You've got all that distance because you've never been honest with him—not once, not since before you even met him.”

He usually slid his journal under the seat when he wasn't writing in it, but this time he'd forgotten to put it away. There it sat, within easy reaching distance. Between the leather covers might be his real thoughts: why he got so angry, why he'd married me, what he felt. I could see him in the store, wheeling his cart. It would be easy.

I shook with the choice I gave myself: I could be the same girl sitting in that empty classroom back at St. Anthony's School, undoing the clasp on Miss Lilly's pocketbook—the fat, wrecked girl locked in the toilet stall at Hooten Hall, prying the flap off Dante's stolen letters. Or somebody else. Somebody better. The person Dr. Shaw and I had started but never finished.

I looked in at Dante, fourth or fifth back in a line of customers, two thicknesses of plate glass away. I scraped an emery board across my fingernails. Listened to my breathing. Left the journal unread.