She's Come Undone (6 page)

“This show is boring today,” she said. “Let's go for a ride.”

Our bikes ticked and whirred through Treetop Acres and Jeanette told me what happened the day she woke up with her period. First Mrs. Nord had taken Jeanette shopping and bought her a skirt and a circle pin. Then they'd gone to a restaurant and had club sandwiches and Mrs. Nord had said, “Look at us, two women having lunch together.” Then she'd just come out with it: a man and a woman got naked and French-kissed until the man's hoo-hoo got hard. Then he put it in the woman's hoo-hoo and squirted something liquidy into
her. Not pee; something that looked like White Rain shampoo, according to her mother. Then she was pregnant.

The restaurant wasn't that crowded, Jeanette said, and they were in a booth way in back. Her mother stopped talking whenever the waitress came over.

Back in her bedroom, Jeanette kept talking about sex.

“True or false,” she said. “The woman can still get pregnant if she and the man both keep their underpants on.”

“False.”

“True!
It happened to this girl in Dear Abby.”

Jeanette slapped her arms around herself, then turned her back to me. Her hands ran themselves through her hair, stroked her shoulders, pawed all over. “Check this out!” she giggled. “My husband and I are French-kissing. Oh, Ross, you make me feel so passionate.”

“You're a pig,” I said. “I'm never letting anyone do that to me.”

“Not even Dr. Kildare?”

“Nobody.”

“Then how are you and your husband going to have five kids then?”

I thought hard for a second. “We're adopting them. We're adopting crippled children.”

She bounced past me and reached for her Eight Ball. She shook it hard and tipped it upside down, her palm covering the prediction. “Would Dolores Price let Richard Chamberlain stick his hoo-hoo inside her?”

I sucked my teeth at her. “That's so funny I forgot to laugh.”

She lifted up her hand, smiling triumphantly at what she read.

“What? What's it say?”

“‘It is decidedly so.'”

*   *   *

One night in July, Daddy turned to me at supper and asked if I thought I'd like to have an in-ground swimming pool in our backyard.

“For real?” I asked.

“Why not? We got enough yard to play with out there.”

“When?”

“Well, I got a backhoe coming in first of August. The concrete has to set first. Then it takes a while to fill. Middle of the month you'll be swimming.”

I jumped up and hugged him. “Where are we putting it? Do we have to cut down the willow tree?”

“Nope. It's going in on the other side. Where her flowers are.”

We both looked at Ma. I could tell her nerves were bothering her.

Daddy's smile slid away. “Now what's
that
puss for?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just wish you had said something to me before you made all your big plans.”

“Oh, don't listen to her,” I said.

She got up from the table and moved to the sink. Daddy sighed disgustedly. “If it's money you're pouting about, I got a bonus last week from the old lady.”

She made us wait for her response. “What for?” she said, finally.

“Played golf Sunday with the guy who owns Cabana Pools. He's an old friend of LuAnn's. Me and him hit it off. Says he'll put it in at cost.”

“It's not the money.”

“What is it then? Your goddamned pink dahlias? You afraid someone around here might have a little fun?”

She turned and faced us, then pointed a shaking finger at the window over the sink. “The last thing I need, Tony, is to look out into that yard one day and see somebody's two-year-old floating facedown in a swimming pool.”

Daddy's laugh was snotty. He answered her slowly, as if Ma were two years old herself. “There's a
fence,”
he said. “The whole thing is surrounded by chain-link
fence.”

“Kids climb fences.”

“A two-year-old kid is going to climb a six-foot fence?”

She washed the plates hard and fast, banging them against the dish drainer. “I can just imagine what that bonus was for.”

Daddy looked quickly at me, then took a slow sip of his iced coffee. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“No, what? Tell me.”

She spun around and faced him, suds flying away from her hands. A dish smashed against the floor. “It means what you think it means,” she said. “That you're an old lady's whore.”

Daddy told me to go outside and play.

“It's too hot,” I said. “Mosquitoes are out.”

“Go.”

I walked across the kitchen on jelly legs.

Out in the garage, I poked my finger into one of the rust spots on the Cadillac. Cancer, my father called it. Mr. and Mrs. Douville, our next-door neighbors, were sitting on lawn chairs on their front porch, a citronella candle lit on a table between them.

Inside, I heard him slapping her, kitchen chairs knocking over. “Maybe this'll cheer you up,” he said. “Or this. How about this? Don't you ever—”

The Douvilles blew out their candle and went inside.

“Blame her all you want to . . . puts bread and butter on the table . . . sick and tired of your goddamned moods!”

The back door banged open and Daddy was rushing into the backyard, his hands cupped in front of him. Ma was running after him.

“Tony,
don't!”
Ma begged, snatching at his hands. “I'm sorry! Please! I'm sorry!”

He flung his hands upward and let go. The small fluttering silhouette he released was Petey, who hovered in the air for a second above my mother, then headed across the yard and into the weeping willow.

“Goddamn you!” my mother screamed. “Goddamn you to hell!” Her voice carried across the lawns.

I got on my bike and drove, fast and recklessly. The humid air pushed thick against my face; if a child had walked in front of my
path, I might have killed it. I sped past Jeanette's street and past the Treetop Acres sign and onto Route 118. I squeezed the rubber handlebar caps, squeezed the shaking out of myself. I hated both of them. The harder I pedaled—the more I risked—the better it felt.

It was after dark when I got back.

As I walked toward the back door, Daddy's disembodied voice scared me. “I was just about to go looking for you,” he said.

“Are you all right?” Ma's voice wanted to know.

“Yes.”

Squinting, I made out both their shapes. They were sitting together on the step, sharing a cigarette.

“Did you have to go off like that?” Ma said. “I was worried sick.” The tip of the cigarette glowed briefly and I heard her exhale.

“I was just out riding,” I said. “I had to get out of here.”

“Did you go over to Jeanette's?” my father asked.

“No.”

“What happens in this house stays in this house. It's no one else's business.”

“I know that.”

He rose and stretched. “I'm going to bed,” he said.

Ma and I sat, leg to leg, listening to the crickets. “Take me inside,” she said, finally. “Make me a cup of tea.”

The kitchen light made us squint. Ma's top lip was purple and puffy. When the tea was ready, I put it down in front of her. “Sit down,” she said, patting the chair next to her.

Instead, I walked across the kitchen and sat on the counter. “What's a whore?” I said.

She told me she didn't want to talk about anything right now. “All I can picture is some cat sneaking up behind Petey. Tomorrow I'm—”

Something about my pink shorts made her stop.

“What?” I said.

She was staring down there at me.

I saw and felt it at the same time: the dark wet blotch of blood.

“That's great, Dolores. Thanks a lot,” Ma said, her face crumpling in tears. “That's just what I need right now.”

*   *   *

The backhoe rattled our whole street.

Somewhere in the middle of that week's excavating and cement mixing, Jeanette's cat Delilah retreated to the Nords' linen closet and gave birth to six kittens. All morning, Jeanette and I watched the slow, strained business of Delilah pushing babies from her rump; all afternoon we studied the tiny blind things as they cried without sound and writhed in a mound against their mother. Just before I left to go home, I asked Jeanette the question I'd been trying to ask all day long.

“Do you know what a whore is?”

“A prostitute,” she said. She watched my blank look. “A woman who does sex with men for money. Mommy says there aren't any around here. They're only in big cities. You can tell if a woman's one when—”

“Is it always a woman?”

The question stopped Jeanette and she shrugged. “I think so. Why?”

*   *   *

The pool men kept swearing and laughing and asking to use our bathroom. Ma's nerves were so bad she decided to take a bus to Rhode Island and visit Grandma. “You can either come with me or stay with Daddy,” she said.

“Stay with Daddy.”

All that week I rode my bike to Jeanette's and held the warm kittens to my chest, two at a time. At home I watched our pool fill up with water.

On the weekend, Daddy didn't go golfing with Mrs. Masicotte but stayed home with me instead, sloshing and sunbathing and running
to the house to answer the phone. His voice inside was a murmur, undetectable over the murmur of the pool filter.

On Monday morning I woke up late to the sound of his swimming. From my bedroom window I watched him catch air and dive deep, then break the surface again in some surprise place.

“How come you're home?” I called. “Why aren't you at work?”

“Can't a guy take a little vacation with his daughter?” he said. “Get your suit on. Come on out with me.”

By mid-morning we were lying on towels on the pool apron, working on our tans. “By the way,” he said, leaning on his elbow and smiling. “I been meaning to ask you something.”

“Then ask,” I said.

“What are those things?”

He was looking at the front of my bathing suit in a way that made me blush. “What?” I said.

He reached over and tweaked one of my bumps, then cuffed me on the chin. “You hiding walnuts in there or something?”

“Shut up,” I said. I jumped in and swam the length of the pool, hiding my smile underwater. He was a flirt, that was all. What was wrong with that? If Mrs. Masicotte was stupid enough to buy us a pool because he flirted a little, that was her problem, not ours.

It rained on Tuesday. We went off on errands like the old days, but these tasks we performed for
us,
not the old lady. From a thick wad of bills in his pants pocket, Daddy laid down money for poolside chairs, air mattresses, my new two-piece bathing suit. We were at the hardware-store counter with our pool supplies when it suddenly occurred to him that a girl my age should have her own house key. “Hold everything,” he told the clerk who was ringing up our order. “We forgot something.”

For lunch we ate at a Chinese restaurant: egg rolls and lo mein and fortune cookies. “What's it say?” Daddy asked, when I snapped open my cookie and uncurled the strip of paper.

“‘
The smile you send out returns to you.'
How about yours?”

“‘Idle pleasure disguises itself as permanent happiness.'” He tossed his fortune into the ashtray. “Whatever the hell that means.”

All that week, we played and swam without mentioning Petey or the fight or Ma. I began to appreciate his anger, to see how someone like my mother could drive you to it—the way she crabbed and worried all day and squirted that spray up her nose. Rising and falling gently on my air mattress during a quiet moment, I looked over at Daddy and then down into the wobbly pool water and thought that, if life had been fair, he would have met Mrs. Nord instead of my mother and married
her.
They'd be living happily together now with their pool and their two daughters, Jeanette and me.

By the end of the week, Daddy was swimming a hundred laps and I was up to sixty. We sat on the pool's edge, dangling our tan legs over the sides, our eyes pink and burning from chlorine.

“Do you remember way back,” he asked, “when I had my own painting business? Before I went to work for LuAnn?”

“You had a green pickup truck,” I said. “And Ma and I used to bring you your lunch.”

“That's right,” he smiled.

“Why?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

I didn't want our time together to end. I didn't want our conversation to turn sad in any way. “Then what do you think of this?” I said. I reached down and splashed him with cold water. He growled like a lion and chased me around and around the pool.

*   *   *

Daddy called Ma on Sunday night. When he got off the phone, he told me Ma wanted him to drive me to Rhode Island so I could spend a couple of days with Grandma.

“What for?” I complained.

“Because you haven't seen her since Christmas,” he said.

“Big loss. Can't I just stay here with you?”

He looked away from me. “What'll we have for supper?” he said. “Let's order a pizza.”

*   *   *

The bruise on Ma's lip had faded to a yellowy green. “I missed you, honey,” she said. We both waited out the response I was supposed to give but didn't. “So what's new?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Not a thing.”

“In a whole week, nothing?”

“Jeanette's having a back-to-school slumber party next week. Me and her and six other girls.”

“How was the rest of your week? Did you and Daddy have a talk?”

“We had lots of talks. We had a blast. Not one second was boring.”