Chapter 3
I was on the brown plaid sofa,
watching TV and scotch-taping my bangs to my forehead because Jeanette
said that kept them from drying frizzy. Across the room on the Barcalounger,
my mother was having her nervous breakdown.
Ma sat hunched over one of
our fold-out TV trays, working constantly on a religious jigsaw puzzle
without making any progress. She wore her knee socks and her quilted pink
bathrobe, despite the early summer heat. She ate nothing but cubes of
Kraft caramels. For two weeks, I had been reaching over and turning up
the volume, trying as best I could to ignore the private curse words she'd
begun chuckling to herself, trying not to see the litter of caramel cellophane
that was accumulating around her chair in a kind of half circle.
It wasn't that Ma hadn't put
up a fight. In Daddy's absence, she'd repainted the downstairs hallway
and exercised in front of the TV with Jack LaLanne and cried and kicked
the lawn mower until it eventually started. Her efforts at going it alone
led her back to Sunday Mass and through a succession of brief jobs: convalescent-home
cook, bank teller, notions-department cleric at Mr. Big's discount store.
When winter cold burst one of our pipes, Ma called and called until she
located the random yellow-pages plumber who got out of bed to come fix
it.
But we'd done nothing about
maintaining the pool the previous fall. Leaves had fluttered down onto
the surface then sunk and rotted; by springtime, the pool water was brown
soup.
One morning in May, Ma went
downstairs and found Petey dead at the bottom of his cage. "Why me? Why
always me?'' she was still sobbing when I got home from school. She hadn't
gone to work that day and didn't go the next day either. At the end of
the week Mr. Big's called to say they were letting her go. By then she'd
already begun living in her robe.
It was Ma's hair that finally
got to me. At school I sucked breath mints and carried a small bottle
of Tussy deodorant in my purse for whenever I could get my hands on the
lavatory pass. Ma's unwashed hair, matted and crazy, alarmed me enough
to suspend the cold war against my father and contact directory assistance
in Tenafly, New Jersey.
It had been almost a year
since my father's move to Tenafly where he'd opened a dower shop with
his girlfriend, Donna.
"Good afternoon, Garden of
Eden," Donna said. I had spoken to her only once before, phoning the day
my parents' divorce became final to call her a whore. The two prevailing
mysteries in my life were: what Donna looked like and why, exactly, my
father had traded us for her.
"May I speak to Tony," I said
icily. "This is his daughter, Miss Dolores Price."
When my father got on, I cut
through his nervous chitchat. "It's Ma," I said. "She's acting funny."
He coughed, paused, coughed
again. "Funny how?" he asked.
"You know. Funny peculiar."
Neither Donna nor I wished
to live under the same roof, and neither the Nords nor my father would
entertain my proposal that Jeanette and I live at our house for the summer
and Mrs. Nord drive over with our meals and clean laundry. It was decided
I would move to my grandmother's house on Pierce Street in Easterly, Rhode
Island, until Ma got right again.
On the one-hour drive to Grandma
Holland's, I clutched my notebook filled with addresses of girls from
whom I'd forced promises to write me regularly. Daddy kept sneaking nervous
peeks at me and at the rearview mirror. Behind us, the U-Haul trailer
wobbled and swayed frost side to side. In silence I waited impatiently
for the tragic highway accident that would paralyze me but wrench both
my parents back to their senses. I pictured the three of us back home
on Bobolink Drive, Daddy pushing my wheelchair solemnly up the front walk,
eternally grateful for my forgiveness. At the doorway, Ma would smile
sadly, her hair as clean and lustrous as a Breck-shampoo girl's.
Daddy didn't say much to Grandma.
He deposited my bike and suitcases and cartons in the front foyer, kissed
me on the forehead, and left.
Grandma and I were cautiously
polite to each other. "Make yourself at home, Dolores," she said hesitantly
as she opened the door to what had once been my mother's bedroom. The
room smelled dry and dusty. The windows were stuck closed and there were
little rows of insect carcasses along the sill. When I sat down on the
hard mattress, it crackled under me. I tried to picture my mother in this
room as a twelve-year-old girl like me, but all I could see was Anne Frank
on the cover of her paperback diary.
With each trip up or down
the front staircase, I watched the portrait of Eddie, my dead uncle. His
blond hair was pushed up into a spiky crew cut. His eyes peeked out from
beneath two bushy brows and followed my steps with eerie cheerfulness.
His smile was almost a smirk, as if he might reach out from the frame
and jab me in the ribs as I passed.
For supper we ate meat loaf
and creamed spinach, the two of us sitting in a silence broken only by
the occasional clink of fork against plate or Grandma's clearing her throat.
When she got up to make herself some tea, she addressed the stove. "She's
not cuckoo, you know," she said. "He's the one with the mortal sin on
his soul, not Bernice."
That evening I thumbtacked
my Dr. Kildare collage to the wall and unpacked my clothes. Grandma had
placed little sachet pillows in the dresser drawers. As I yanked each
drawer open, the smell of old ladies from church -- with their powdered
wrinkly necks and quivery singing voices -- drifted up toward me. In the
bottom bureau drawer I discovered a little red ink message hidden in a
back corner, written right into the wood. "I love Bernice Holland," it
said. "Sincerely, Alan Ladd." Twice during the night I put the light on
and got out of bed to make sure it was still there.
Grandma turned her TV to thunderous
volume and told me I mumbled. She was still an "Edge of Night" fan. Sometimes
I'd grab a Coke from the refrigerator and slump down on the couch with
her, slurping intentionally from the bottle.
"I hope you don't sit like
that in school," she said. "It's unladylike."
I thumbed through the TV
Guide and reminded her I was on summer vacation.
"When I was your age at the
Bishop School, I received a medal for deportment on Class Day. A girl
named Lucinda Cote thought she was going to get it -- told me as much.
She was a big piece of cheese, very stuck on herself. But no, they gave
it to me. And here is my very own granddaughter who can't even sit correctly
on a divan."
"What's a divan?" I said,
swigging my Coke.
"A sofa!" she said,
exasperated.
She watched in silent horror
as I stuck my thumb over the Coke bottle opening and shook, then let the
foam erupt into my mouth. "Can I turn the TV down?" I asked. "I'm not
deaf, you know."
Evenings after the dishes,
Grandma hobbled around the house with her frayed prayer book which was
held together with rubber bands. Then she'd settle in front of the television
to watch her westerns -- "Bonanza," "Rawhide" -- while I sat out at the
kitchen signing corny get-well cards to Ma and pages of complaints to
Jeanette.
In our first week together,
Grandma told me it was a sin the way I wasted hot water, toilet paper,
my spare time. She said she'd never heard of a girl who had reached my
age without learning to crochet. I retaliated by shocking her as best
I could. At breakfast, I drowned my scrambled eggs in plugs of ketchup.
Evenings, I danced wildly by myself to my 45s while she watched from the
doorway. It was mostly for Grandma's benefit that I mouthed the declarations
of the girl singers: My love is like a heat wave . . . It's my party
and I'll cry if I want to! One night Grandma wondered aloud why I
didn't ever listen to singers who could carry a tune.
"Like who, for instance?"
I scoffed.
"Well, like Perry Como."
"That old dinosaur?" I snorted.
"Well, how about the Lennon
Sisters then? They can't be much older than you are."
I lied and told her one of
her precious Lennon sisters -- Diane, the oldest, her favorite -- was
having an illegitimate baby.
"Pfft," she said, flicking
away the possibility with the flap of her wrist. But her lip quivered
and she left my room making the sign of the cross.
Pierce Street smelled of car
exhaust and frying food. Glass shattered, people screamed, kids threw
rocks. "Jeepers Christmas," Grandma would mumble as cars squealed by at
emergency speeds. She told me she had warned her husband, my grandfather,
that they should follow the doctors and lawyers and schoolteachers who
had moved out of the neighborhood after the war. But Grandpa had put it
off and put it off and then, in 1948, had died, leaving her with teenage
children and a two-family home with a leaky roof. "This house has been
my cross to bear," she was fond of saying. She had come to see her staying
on amongst the "riffraff" as the will of God. He had placed her here as
a model of clean Catholic living. She was not obliged to speak to any
of her neighbors, only to offer them her good example.
At dusk each evening, Mrs.
Tingley, Grandma's third-floor tenant, clip-clopped down the side steps
with her bug-eyed Chihuahua, Cutie Pie. "Come on, Cutie Pie, go poopy,"
Mrs. Tingley always said, while the dog circled nervously on his tether.
In all the years Mr. and Mrs. Tingley had rented from my grandmother,
Grandma had assumed he was the drinker, not her. But after
Mr. Tingley's death, the package-store man had kept pulling up to the
curb as usual. My bedroom ceiling was Mrs. Tingley's bedroom floor. The
only sound from above was the click of dog toenails, and I pictured Mrs.
Tingley up there lying in bed, sipping in silence.
Across from Grandma's was
a tin-roofed store divided in two. One half was a barbershop. The barber,
a thin, jowly man, sat sadly at the window most of the day, reading his
own magazines and waiting for customers. The other half was the Peacock
Tattoo Emporium. It was run by a skinny, older woman with dyed black hair
and red toreador pants. On my second afternoon at Grandma's, she waved
me over from where I was sitting on the front porch, waiting for the mailman.
She introduced herself as Roberta and asked me to run to the store for
a pack of Newports. When I returned, she waved away the change and proceeded
to dazzle me with her exotic life story. She had once been married to
a sword swallower who was now in jail where he belonged. Her second husband,
the Canuck, God love him, was dead. Roberta had traveled with the Canuck
to both Alaska and Hawaii and liked Alaska better. She'd dreamed President
Kennedy's assassination the week before it happened. She had been a vegetarian
since the day in 1959 when she opened up a can of beef stew and found
a baby rat.
When Grandma came outside
to sweep the porch, she spotted me through Roberta's plate-glass window
and motioned me home. Back inside, she hit me on the head with a rolled-up
newspaper. "Don't you say another word to that piece of garbage," she
said, her face flushed in anger. "Don't you listen to another word of
her malarkey."
"I have a perfect right to
make my own friends!" I shouted back.
"Not with chippies like that
one you don't!"
The center of activity on
Pierce Street was Connie's Superette, a little market housed on the bottom
floor of a large, asbestos-shingled apartment building. Connie, a fat
woman with Lucille Ball red hair, sat behind the counter on a webbed porch
chair. She kept a whirring electric fan trained on herself and was careful
not to risk breaking her two-inch fingernails as she grudgingly rang up
people's stuff. Connie's nephew, Big Boy, was the butcher. He whistled
through his teeth and wore madras shirts and an apron smeared with blood.
He looked like Doug McClure on "The Virginian."
Grandma traded at Connie's
because she had never learned to drive a car, but she held a grudge against
Big Boy, who had said to her one day in front of a whole storeful of customers,
"What'll it be, tootsie?" When I moved in, she was only too happy to make
me her errand girl. Daily, she folded money into my palm and sent me down
the street for Tums or cornstarch or prune juice. As I headed out the
door, she never failed to remind me to steer clear of both Big Boy and
the dirty-magazine aisle.
The Pysyks lived in the apartment
above the superette. Their twin daughters, Rosalie and Stacia, were the
only two girls my age on Pierce Street. They hung out on the upstairs
porch, where they danced and giggled and flicked their middle fingers
back to neighborhood boys who shouted vulgar remarks up to them. They
had a portable record player with a plastic polka-dot case and one scratchy
record, "Big Girls Don't Cry," which they played nonstop at top volume.
Both girls wore short shorts and frilly midriff blouses and were Q-Tip
skinny, although they seemed forever to be eating and drinking something.
Their whole day was like a party -- a private one. I was both jealous
of the twins and petrified of them. Grandma had once thrown a pitcher
of water at the girls and called them "dirty DP's" when she had caught
them ringing her bell and hiding behind her catalpa tree. The Pysyk sisters
took an immediate dislike to me, and my daily treks to the store became
nightmares.
"Hey kid!" Rosalie shouted
down to me on my very first trip to Connie's. Her sister hung over the
railing, smirking and eating from a bag of potato chips. "You stuck-up
or something? Got a broom up your ass?" Behind her, the Four Seasons wailed
in their scratchy falsettos.
"Oh, hi," I called up, smiling
stiffly. "Gee, that's a good record you're playing. I'm really enjoying
it." Already I could see the three of us walking home from school together,
me lending them my 45s.
"'That's a good record
you're playing. I'm really enjoying it,'" Rosalie mimicked back. Both
girls brayed like donkeys.
"What's your name?" Stacia
shouted down.
"Dolores." It came out shaky,
like a request.
"Oh," she said. "I thought
it was Fucky Face."
Her sister squealed in horrified
delight, pulling off a candy wrapper with her teeth and spitting it over
the rail at me.
Each day it happened again.
"Hi, Pukehead," one would yell as I approached the store. "Say hello to
all them cooties for us," the other would call as I left minutes later
with Grandma's groceries. My heart raced. My grandmother's change went
sweaty in my fist. I smiled Anne Frank's brave smile and checked my urge
to run. Back in the house, I studied my face in the medicine-cabinet mirror
for clues as to why they hated me. I accepted each of their hundred imagined
apologies. One night I woke up shaky from a dream in which the twins had
lured me up to their porch with offers of friendship and then attempted
to hurl me headfirst over the railing.
"What are DP's, anyways?"
I asked Grandma one night. She was at the kitchen table, mumbling her
rosary while I dried the dishes.
"Displaced persons. People
we took in from Europe after the war. You'd think they'd be grateful,
wouldn't you?"
I understood why they weren't.
A displaced person myself, I was not so much grateful to Grandma for her
charity as disgusted by her liver spots and quiet belches, the way she
could reach into her mouth and, with a gurgle, remove her top teeth. Dolores
Price, DP: we even had the same initials. Still, the Pysyks gave no sign
of wanting to meet me on common ground.
Copyright ©
1992 by Wally Lamb
Excerpted from She's Come Undone © Copyright 2008 by Wally Lamb. Reprinted with permission by Pocket Books. All rights reserved.
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