She's Come Undone (18 page)

The city of Easterly declared me normal enough to attend regular high school the following year. Ma's sick notes always mentioned regret. “I regret to inform you that Dolores has been ill with a sore throat . . . a stomach problem . . . a bad head cold” she'd write on days when I felt too depressed or keyed-up to attend. She never refused to write the excuses, though she didn't like lying; you could tell from her foreshortened, abrupt penmanship. By then, Ma's regret had ritualized itself into a weekly array of victim's consolation prizes from the grocery store. She returned each week with shopping bags full of goodies for me: packaged cookies, quarts of Pepsi (I preferred it warm), cigarettes, magazines, and fat paperbacks. I kept my treats in the labeled grocery bags on top of the twenty-one-inch color console Motorola TV Ma had bought me for my bedroom on my fifteenth birthday.

“If she decides not to go to college, you may both regret it for the rest of your lives,” Mr. Pucci told her. With my college education, he was offering a chance to avoid a life sentence of regret. Ma bit the bait. Hard.

I spent the next several weeks whining and pouting and shrieking. How, I wondered, could she be so cruel to me after all I had gone through? I couldn't stand school
now;
why should I sign on for four more years of torture?

College catalogs began arriving in the mail with address labels in my mother's handwriting. They were filled with
terrifying
photographs: students and professors sitting together on lawns holding pleasant conversations; goggled chemistry majors wielding their Bunsen burners; beaming girls brushing their teeth together at a row of dormitory sinks. I tore them up as fast as they arrived. For days I refused to come downstairs for either school or supper, holing up in my room with the goodies Ma still faithfully provided. When I wasn't giving her the silent treatment, I was pleading with Grandma to intervene
for me. Colleges were full of drugs! College girls got pregnant! I began sobbing about overdoses and nervous breakdowns. When I knew Ma was listening, I'd hustle to the bathroom and stick my fingers down my throat, gagging dramatically. “I can't even keep anything down anymore,” I'd whimper as I passed her worried face in the hallway. Then I'd go back to my room and feast on Fritos, Flings, Devil Dogs, Hostess Sno-Balls—unwrapping the cellophane as quietly as possible.

The gray circles under Ma's eyes puffed up and her fingers danced and fidgeted as she filled out applications under my hateful glare. But I could not make her give in. She was determined not to battle regret the rest of her life. I was going to college.

By the end of May, eight schools had rejected me. Ma's last hope was Merton College in Wayland, Pennsylvania, but the application was a sticky one. It required an essay on the one person in the world I'd most like to meet. Ma stewed and paced for a week and then rented a typewriter. She called in sick and started one evening after supper, hunting and pecking her way through the night. The following morning I stood at the kitchen table eating my breakfast—chocolate doughnuts and a mug of Pepsi. Ma's cheek was pressed up against the enamel tabletop and she was snoring out of distorted, pushed-together lips. Around her were dozens of wadded-up paper balls—enough false starts to decorate a float in the Rose Bowl parade. I reached over and rolled her finished product out of the typewriter.

 

If I could meet one person in this whole wide world, it would be Tricia Nixon, the President's Daughter. She is friendly and her blond hair is very pretty. She also has neatness and good manners. She makes me feel that if your ever in Washington, you could call her up and ask her to go shopping or show you the sights or just sip a soda with you. She is a friend to every girl in this great country—even little old me.

 

Very truely yours,
Dolores Price

Ma squinted and woke. She watched me cautiously as I put the paper down in my doughnut crumbs.

“Well?” she said.

“You spelled ‘truly' wrong.”

“But besides that. What do you think?”

“Do you want the truth?”

She nodded.

I swallowed a mouthful of doughnut and smiled assuredly. “This wouldn't get me into a school for retards.”

Ma's lip poked out and I thought with satisfaction that I'd made her cry. Then, suddenly, she shoved the typewriter off the table. It banged down in front of me, inches away from my bare feet. She was pointing to the typewriter but looking at me. “If that thing is broken, it will have been worth it,” she said. “I am
not
. . . some piece of dog crap!”

*   *   *

Merton College wished to inform me that I had been accepted. All I needed to do was send them my tuition fee and have the doctor mail back the enclosed physical-examination form. That weekend, the war escalated.

“There are two things in this world I am not about to do!” I shrieked down the stairwell to my mother at the end of a Saturday-night battle that had included three broken dishes and a slapping session. “Number one is go to any college. Number two is put my feet up in those stirrup things and have some pig doctor come walking toward me, snapping his fucking rubber gloves.”

Grandma had been in the parlor watching “Mannix” when the fight started. I imagined her stiffening, knees pressed together bone to bone at the sound of the word “fucking.” The past four years had changed Grandma, cowered her. She knew how to handle sass, not rape. From the moment I'd returned from the emergency room that night, Grandma had treated me as a stranger, someone exotically dangerous. She spoke only once of “that business with him,” sliding
her good rosary beads onto my nightstand “in case you need them.” Sometimes I'd catch her staring at me with something close to fear. She, too, indulged me—not as a victim, but as someone on whose good side she felt safer. She said nothing about my weight, my erratic attendance at school and Sunday Mass, or about the uniform I'd come to adopt—gray sweatshirt, fatigue jacket, bell-bottom jeans. When, during my junior year, I began to smoke openly throughout the house, Grandma placed a can of Glade on my bureau and held her tongue.

She was right to fear me. I scared myself. I had, after all, indirectly killed Rita's baby—or rather, God had killed it because of the chances I'd taken, the things I'd let myself think, do, have done. Ma didn't realize this; I was sure Grandma did.

But the mention of stirrups and rubber gloves proved to be a tactical mistake. I was seated on my bed, consoling myself with a stack of Pecan Sandies and the very same “Mannix” episode Grandma was watching downstairs when Ma came in—red-eyed, without knocking—and walked over to my television. “Get out of my room!” I screamed. “Get out of my life!” Her back was to me. She pushed aside the bags of groceries and bent behind the set. “Don't you dare touch any of my—”

The TV voices went dead in mid-sentence and Ma turned to face me. A steak knife was in one hand, the hacked-off television plug drooping from its wire in the other. There were tears in her throat as she spoke. “I will get this fixed . . . when and if you have that physical and get that form signed. I happen to believe in your future.”

It took Grandma to locate Dr. Phinny, a tired old GP who, my grandmother had been assured by her church cronies, did little more than hold a stethoscope to you and tap your knee with a rubber mallet before signing whatever you wanted. “None of that other monkey business,” she whispered, looking away from me. On the eve of the appointment, she suggested timidly that I might like to wear a blouse and my nice navy skirt to the doctor's but said nothing when I came down the following morning in my sweatshirt and bell-bottoms, armed with my cigarettes and a mug of Pepsi.

Ma gassed and braked through downtown Providence looking for Dr. Phinny's building. She sang along with the radio, trying to act casual. “It's clowns' illusions I recall, I really don't know clowns . . .”

“It's
clouds'
illusions.” I said it between clenched teeth.

“What?”

“It's
clouds'
illusions I recall. If you're going to sing it, sing it right.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. She pulled abruptly to the curb and jerked the brake. We both bucked forward and Pepsi lapped out onto my jeans.

“I'm sorry again,” she said. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. This is the building.”

The
pink-a pink-a
of the directional signal got louder and we both waited to see what I'd do. I considered running down a side street and not calling her until I was forty years old and she was on her deathbed. But I'd already missed a crucial murder on “Guiding Light,” not to mention Betty Jo's wedding on “Petticoat Junction.” She hadn't bought me a new paperback in three weeks. It was like starving.

“Why don't you get out here and I'll find a place to park,” she said.

Then I was out of the car, slamming the door with a force gathered from twenty-one days' worth of abstinence.

Dr. Phinny's office building was tall and sooty with brass decorations turned aqua. Next door, the clattering plates and conversations of a coffee shop burst into the street whenever customers emerged, walking past me, stealing sneaky glimpses. A woman hurried by, pulling the arm of a little boy whose inclination was to linger and look. “See that red car!” she said, yanking him past me. “Here's a mailbox!”

Two stores down was an abandoned laundromat. A group of unplugged washing machines huddled in the middle. I studied myself in the plate glass. My long, straight hair was definitely my best feature. I ironed it every morning, whether I was going to school or not, reasoning that split ends were a small price to pay. I hung my head forward then flung it back, watching my hair fly, my hoop earrings sway. I
sort
of
looked like Julie on “The Mod Squad,” in a way. I liked her style, the way she seemed bored with everyone. She'd been on
Merv Griffin the week before my mother cut the plug. “I don't see it as acting,” she'd told Merv. “It's just . . . being.”

I'd pierced my ears that February, during the week I was suspended for smoking in the equipment room when I was supposed to be taking modified gym. “I've got better things to do than whack at Ping-Pong balls,” I'd told the vice principal and Mr. Pucci. “I mean, what's the point?” Then I'd gone home and worked Grandma's spare sewing machine needle in and out, around and around, practicing my Julie look while I did it, as if my heart weren't racing. Later, when my ear got infected, I blamed Ma. “What do you expect when you make me live in a house that doesn't even have any stupid peroxide?” I'd said.

Across from the laundromat was a dirty-book store. “Sexational Reading!” a window banner proclaimed. “We carry Luv Gel.” I wasn't taking my underwear off for
any
doctor, I didn't care if he was 103 years old and blind. I'd get a job somewhere and
buy
a TV if I had to.

Ma rounded the corner, smiling a hopeful smile. “This won't be anything, honey,” she said, squeezing my hand.

“Oh,” I said, pulling it back. “You can tell the future now?”

The rickety elevator smelled like urine. Though we were its only passengers, it stopped on each floor, opening its doors to no one while we waited rigidly. As it reached Dr. Phinny's floor, I turned to my mother. “You must really hate me,” I said.

Her hand was shaking, crinkling the form the college had sent. “I don't hate you,” she said.

“But deep down you must. Or else you wouldn't be doing this to me.”

“I love you,” she said, just loud enough for me to hear.

“Bull crap.”

We were his first patients of the day; it had been one of my stipulations. The upholstered waiting-room chairs were patched with electrical tape. There was no receptionist. Through a pane of ripply blue glass, I watched him walk back and forth behind the door that led to the inner office, like a person underwater.

Ten silent minutes after we'd arrived, he emerged, looking as old and tired as Grandma had promised. He stared at me briefly, squinted, and handed me a folded paper gown. “She can go into that room on the left and get undressed,” he said, addressing my mother. “She can put this thing on and get up on the table.”

I rose hesitantly and waited for Ma to do the same. “Aren't you coming?” I hissed.

She shook her head and curled up the magazine she'd been pretending to read. “I'll be out here. You'll be fine.”

The walls of the examining room were the color of mustard. Above a drippy sink hung a drugstore calendar: two Technicolor spaniels in a wicker basket. To the left of the examination table was a wastebasket, empty except for a single blood-stained gauze pad.

I took off my sandals and jeans and pulled the sweatshirt over my head. I was still wearing my bra and T-shirt and a pair of underpants that was going to stay on, no matter
what.
The old pervert could look at his other female patients if anyone else was stupid enough to show up. They couldn't make me go to college. They couldn't drag me there. All I wanted was to get my TV shows back.

The gown rustled and crinkled as I fumbled with the paper tabs at the back of my neck. I tried molding the paper to myself but it fanned out stubbornly, like a giant bib. In the outer office, Ma and the doctor were mumbling. I sat up on the table and fished out a cigarette to calm my nerves. I smoked it fast, watching the ash tumble down the tunnels of the stiff gown.

He was scanning the form when he came into the room. He stood before me, reading.

“Look, I'm not taking anything else off,” I said, addressing the spaniels. When I looked back at him, he was staring directly at me.

“You're too goddamned fat,” he said.

I took a defiant drag on my cigarette and willed myself not to cry. The remark made me dizzy. For the past four years, Ma and Grandma had played by the rule: never to mention my weight. Now
my jeans and sweatshirt were folded in a helpless pile beside me and there was only a thin sheet of paper between my rolls of dimply flesh and this detestable old man. My heart raced with fear and nicotine and Pepsi. My whole body shook, dripped sweat.