She's Come Undone (3 page)

Way back in 1981, the year I became a father and began writing
fiction, I could never have predicted all that has come to pass, good and bad: 9/11 and Columbine; the rise of the ebook and the decline of the printed one; the demise of both the typewriter and its successor, the dot matrix printer; the deaths of my parents and the births of Jared's two younger brothers, Justin and Teddy. Today, that toddler I tossed into the air upon learning that my short story was good enough to be published is the same age I was back then. Jared is now the thirty-one-year-old principal of the New Orleans Leadership Academy, a KIPP charter school he established for inner-city kids in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

As I could not have imagined all of the above, neither could I have predicted what happened one winter evening in 2008, shortly before my third novel,
The Hour I First Believed,
was published. I was reading from the book in front of a large and affable crowd at the Mermaid Bar, a downtown New Haven watering hole. When I finished the Q and A and was getting ready to leave, a handsome, healthy-looking guy in his early forties came up to me and said, “Hey, Wally. It's me. I wanted you to know that I finally took your advice. I've just enrolled in an MFA in writing program at Fairfield University so that I can tell my story.” Standing before me was my pen pal of the past sixteen years, David F—David Fitzpatrick. Miraculously, the right combination of therapy and psychotropic meds had allowed him to emerge, at long last, from the mental illness that had oppressed him and taken him out of the world. “I've met a wonderful woman,” he told me that night. “Amy and I are engaged.” Last October, Chris and I attended David and Amy's wedding, a joyous and triumphant celebration if ever there was one. A few months after that, I read the galleys of David's memoir about his harrowing journey into madness and his subsequent return to sanity. Harper-Collins will publish
Sharp
at about the same time Atria Books releases this spiffy new twentieth-anniversary edition of
She's Come Undone
. I like to imagine the two sitting side by side on bookstore shelves, keeping each other company.

*   *   *

I'm glad I didn't kill off Dolores Price, as my dad had assumed I would do, and I'm grateful that the passage of time hasn't killed her off, either. At appearances, I'm still told by readers of
Undone
that they had to keep looking back at my book jacket photo, and that they couldn't believe that a man could have gotten so convincingly into the head of a woman. (Once, at a tony black-tie fund-raiser at Lincoln Center, columnist Liz Smith introduced me by saying that I had caused quite a stir by getting into the head of a woman, and that although a lot of other fellows were interested in getting into women, it wasn't necessarily their heads they were aiming for. Try walking up to a podium after an intro like
that
!) The gender comments and questions no longer bother me. My soon-to-be-published fifth novel,
We Are Water,
is told in eight different voices, four of them male, four of them female. Who knows? If it's true that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then I guess I'm just lucky to be an intergalactic traveler.

Sometimes when I'm browsing at my local bookstore, I wave to my moonfaced heroine on the cover of
She's Come Undone
—my fictional daughter whose story by now has been translated into sixteen or seventeen different languages. I'm grateful that she's still out there and, for that matter, that I'm still here, too.

—Wally Lamb
Connecticut, 2012

PART ONE
Our Lady of Sorrow

I
n one of my earliest memories, my mother and I are on the front porch of our rented Carter Avenue house watching two delivery men carry our brand-new television set up the steps. I'm excited because I've heard about but never seen television. The men are wearing work clothes the same color as the box they're hefting between them. Like the crabs at Fisherman's Cove, they ascend the cement stairs sideways. Here's the undependable part: my visual memory stubbornly insists that these men are President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon.

Inside the house, the glass-fronted cube is uncrated and lifted high onto its pedestal. “Careful, now,” my mother says, in spite of herself; she is not the type to tell other people their business, men particularly. We stand watching as the two delivery men do things to the set. Then President Eisenhower says to me, “Okay, girlie, twist this button here.” My mother nods permission and I approach. “Like this,” he says, and I feel, simultaneously, his calloused hand on my hand and, between my fingers, the turning plastic knob, like one of the checkers in my father's checker set. (Sometimes when my father's voice gets too loud at my mother, I go out to the parlor and put a checker in my mouth—suck it, passing my tongue over the grooved edge.) Now, I hear and feel the machine snap on. There's a hissing
sound, voices inside the box. “Dolores, look!” my mother says. A star appears at the center of the green glass face. It grows outward and becomes two women at a kitchen table, the owners of the voices. I begin to cry. Who shrank these women? Are they alive? Real? It's 1956; I'm four years old. This isn't what I've expected. The two men and my mother smile at my fright, delight in it. Or else, they're sympathetic and consoling. My memory of that day is, like television itself, sharp and clear but unreliable.

We hadn't bought the set; it was a gift from Mrs. Masicotte, the rich widow who was my father's boss. My father and Mrs. Masicotte's relationship had started the previous spring, when she'd hired him to spray-paint several of her huge apartment houses and then wooed him into repainting his own pickup truck in her favorite color, peach, and stenciling the words “Masicotte Properties, General Manager” on the doors. The gift of the television celebrated my father's decision.

If I reach far back, I can see my father waving to my mother and me and climbing down from his ladder, spray gun in hand, as we arrive with his lunch in our turquoise-and-white car. Daddy reaches the ground and pulls off his face mask. The noise of his chugging orange air compressor is in my throat and legs, the sudden silence when he unplugs it delicious. There are speckles of paint in his hair and ears and eyebrows, but the mask has protected the rest of his face. I look away when his clean mouth talks.

We lunch in the grass. My father eats sandwiches stuffed with smelly foods Ma and I refuse to eat: liverwurst, vinegar peppers, Limburger cheese. He drinks hot coffee right from the thermos and his Adam's apple moves up and down when he swallows. He talks about “she” in a way that confuses me; “she” is either this half-white house of Mrs. Masicotte's or the old woman herself.

Old. I'm almost forty, probably as close now to Mrs. Masicotte's age as I am to the age of my parents as they sat on that lawn, laughing and blowing dandelion puffs at me, smoking their shared Pall Mall cigarettes and thinking Mrs. Masicotte was the answer to
their future—that that black-and-white Emerson television set was a gift free and clear of the strings that would begin our family's unraveling.

*   *   *

Television watching became my habit, my day. “Go out back and play, Dolores. You'll burn that thing up,” my mother would warn, passing through the parlor. But my palm against the box felt warm, not hot; soothing, not dangerous like the boy across the street who threw rocks. Sometimes I turned the checker knob as far as it would go and let the volume shake my hand.

Ma always stopped her housework for our favorite program, “Queen for a Day.” We sat together on the sofa, my leg hooked around Ma's, and listened to the women whose children were crippled by polio, whose houses had been struck by lightning and death and divorce. The one with the saddest life, the loudest applause, got to trade her troubles for a velvet cape and roses and modern appliances. I clapped along with the studio audience—longest and hardest for the women who broke down and cried in the middle of their stories. I made my hands sting for these women.

My father's duties as Mrs. Masicotte's manager, in addition to painting the outsides and insides of her properties, included answering tenants' complaints and collecting their monthly rents. The latter he did on the first Saturday of every month, driving from house to house in Mrs. Masicotte's peach-colored Cadillac. By the time I was a first grader, I was declared old enough to accompany him. My job was to ring tenants' bells. None seemed happy to see my father and most failed to notice me at all as I peeked past them into their shadowy rooms, inhaling their cooking smells, eavesdropping on their talking TVs.

Mrs. Masicotte was a beer drinker who loved to laugh and dance; the package store was one of our regular Saturday afternoon errands. “Case o' Rheingold, bottles,” my father would tell the clerk, an old man whose name, Cookie, struck me funny. Cookie always offered
me a cellophane-wrapped butterscotch candy and, by virtue of Mrs. Masicotte's order, a chance to vote for Miss Rheingold at the cardboard ballot box next to his cash register. (Time after time I voted for the same Rheingold girl, whose dark brown hair and red-lipped smile reminded me both of Gisele MacKenzie from “Your Hit Parade” and my own mother, the best looking of the three.)

My father was proud and protective of his own dark good looks. I remember having sometimes to hop around and hold my pee until he was finished with his long grooming behind the pink bathroom door on Carter Avenue. When he emerged, I'd stand on the stool amidst the steam and the aroma of uncapped Old Spice, watching my face wobble and drip in the medicine cabinet mirror. Daddy lifted barbells in the cellar—barefoot, wearing his undershirt and yellow bathing suit. Sometimes he'd strut around the kitchen afterward, popping his muscle at Ma or picking up the toaster to give his reflection a kiss. “You're not conceited, you're
convinced!”
Ma would joke. “Convinced
you,
all right, didn't I?” he'd answer, then chase her around the kitchen, snapping the dish towel at her fanny and mine. Ma and I whooped and protested, delighted with his play.

After the television came, Daddy brought his barbells upstairs and exercised in front of his favorite programs. Quiz shows were what he liked: “The $64,000 Question,” “Tic Tac Dough,” “Winner Take All.” Sometimes in the middle of his grunting and thrusting he'd call out the answers to losing players or, if they blew their chances, swear at them. “Well,” he'd tell my mother, “another poor bastard bites the dust, another poor slob gets to stay a working stiff like the rest of us.” He hated returning champions and rooted for their defeat. His contempt for them seemed somehow connected to his ability to lift the weights.

According to my father,
we
should have been rich. Money was, in his mind, somehow due us and would have been ours had his simple parents not sold their thirty acres on Fisherman's Cove for $3,000 to a Mr. Weiss the month before drowning in the Great Hurricane of
1938. During the Depression, when my father was coming of age, Fisherman's Cove had been just marsh grass, wild blueberry bushes, and cabins with outhouses; by the time he went to work for Mrs. Masicotte, it was the cozy residence of millionaires. These included Mr. Weiss's son, who lived two driveways down from Mrs. Masicotte and golfed for a living.

My father forgave Mrs. Masicotte her wealth because she was generous with it—“spread it around,” as he put it. In those early years, the television was only the first in a stream of presents that included a swing set for me, kitcheny things for my mother (a set of maroon-colored juice glasses, a black ice bucket with brass claw feet), and, for my father, gifts he wore home from the big house on the cove: a houndstooth sports jacket, leather gloves lined in genuine rabbit's fur, and my favorite—a wristwatch with a Twist-O-Flex band you could bend but not break.

“That's it, Jewboy, add another couple thousand to your stash,” my father shouted at the TV one night, in the middle of his exercise routine. “The $64,000 Question” was on; a champion with round eyeglasses and shiny cheeks had just emerged victorious from the Revlon isolation booth.

“Don't say that, Tony,” my mother protested.

His eyes jumped from the screen to her. The weights wavered above his head. “Don't say
what?”

Ma pointed her chin toward me. “I don't want her hearing things like that,” she said.

“Don't say
what?”
he repeated.

“All right, nothing. Just forget it.” Ma left the room. The barbell clanged to the floor, so loudly and surprisingly that my heart heaved in my chest. He followed her into the bedroom.

Earlier that week he'd brought home from Mrs. Masicotte's a thick art tablet and a tiered box of Crayola crayons. Now I opened the clean pad to a middle page and drew the face of a beautiful woman. I gave her long curling eyelashes, red lipstick, “burnt sienna”–colored
hair, a crown. “Hello,” the woman said to me. “My name is Peggy. My favorite color is magenta.”

“Don't you ever—
ever!
—tell me what I can and cannot say in the privacy of my own home,” my father shouted from behind their door.

Ma kept crying and apologizing.

Later, after he'd stomped past me and driven away, Ma soaked herself in the tub—long past my bedtime, long enough for me to fill up half the pad with Peggy's life.

She usually shooed me out when I caught her naked, but Daddy's anger had left her far away and careless. The ashtray sat on the edge of the tub, filled with stubbed-out Pall Malls; the bathroom was thick with smoke that moved when I moved.

“See my lady?” I said. I meant the drawings as a sort of comfort, but she told me they were nice without really looking.

“Is Daddy mean?” I asked.

She took so long to answer that I thought she might not have heard. “Sometimes,” she said, finally.