She's Come Undone

  She was breathing hard through her nose, her lips pressed together. “Don’t!” she said when I stopped. Then I continued and she swore and bucked, clamping my hand between her legs. Her body shook us both, shook the bed. Relaxed. Shook it again.

  I pulled my hand away. It felt numb and oversized, a paw.

  She leaned over and kissed my arm, passed her fingers through my hair. Then she got up off the bed and knelt on the floor in front of me, like someone about to pray.

  Her fingertips skidded along my legs. Her tongue poked against my knee. “This is going to feel so nice,” she said. “So gentle . . .”

  It was wrong and dirty—what her hands, her mouth, were doing to me down there. But gentle, too, like she promised—a little silly. Nobody cared.

  I let my head flop back over the edge of the bed, let myself fall into the feeling of it. Her fish swam upside down. One was yellow, the other silvery. Dolores. They calmed me, gliding past each other in a sort of liquid dance. . . . Nobody cared about us. Why was it wrong? Why shouldn’t I feel what I was feeling? . . . The bed and Dottie dropped away. Her touch became Larry’s touch. Dante’s. I was at peace, afloat and weightless. I was Ruth, blossoming with the pleasure of Larry. The sensations rose and rose within me, a series of sweet explosions that there was no stopping, that I didn’t want to stop . . .

  Dottie crashed down onto the mattress and wiped her face in the sheets. She fumbled and turned over onto her back so that we were side by side, belly up on the bed.

  We lay on our backs, quiet, watching the ceiling. “Dottie?” I said.

  Her fingers skidded against my arm. “Hmm?”

  “The baby’s father. Was he somebody you loved?”

  She laughed. “He was one of the guys down at the field where I hung around. They used to let me play football with them sometimes if I let them screw me. Or gave ’em blow jobs. Me and two or three of them would go out in the woods. They were older than me. Always chicken-shit to go by themselves. Used to stand around and watch each other. Tell jokes about me right in the middle of it.”

  I wanted her to stop.

  “What did I care? I used to laugh at them, see? Sometimes I made them buy me a soda or something before I’d do it.” She nuzzled her head against my shoulder. Then she reached up and turned off her lamp. Her body was restless at first, then still. Her breathing turned predictable. We both seemed to rise and fall with every breath she drew.

  “We’re whales,” I said, out loud.

  I waited for her answer but she had none.

  In the dark, in the midst of her sleeping, my clear mind revved. “I’ll fix her good,” I heard Eric say again. I pictured him up in our room, yanking Ma’s painting out of my closet, ripping it, kicking it with his foot. Over and over he did it; he wouldn’t stop.

  I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t just lie there and listen to her snoring. I held out my hand, the one that had done it to her. It felt numb still. It smelled of her sex. She’d tricked me. Now I was what she was.

  In Dottie’s kitchen, in the cutlery drawer, I found a serrated knife. Pain would be better than not feeling anything, I thought. Pain would be a relief. I’d lost Ma’s painting, I had nowhere to go. If Kippy ever got like me, she’d take a gun and . . .

  I held the scalloped blade against my wrist and passed it across. Once, twice—but lightly. The third time, it made a scratch. I saw it more than felt it. The thin red line of blood took me by surprise.

  Then I saw something else, something poking out from behind her toaster. The snapshot she’d hidden. Her little boy, Buster. His smile was sweet and mysterious. I lost my nerve.

  I killed her fish instead. Two glug-glugs’ worth of Clorox per tank. The deaths were quick. They passed the poisoned water through their gills, then rested on their sides.

  * * *

  Downstairs and across the street, I tapped my fingers and sipped coffee while the Portuguese family held their private conference about what I was proposing. Four-hundred-dollars’ worth of Arthur Music’s money lay across the counter, like a game of solitaire.

  Now the three of them approached me again—jury members with their verdict. “You could wait until tomorrow and take a bus there, lady. Get a transfer in New York,” the taxi driver said. “It would be a lot cheaper.”

  “I want to leave right now,” I said. “That’s the point.”

  “It’s gonna take us thirteen, fourteen hours. We won’t get there till middle of tomorrow afternoon.”

  I nodded.

  “And that ain’t counting any stops either. Or any naps I might need.”

  I nodded again.

  The other two shook their worried heads, but the driver shrugged and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  He was looking at me, not the money.

  16

  I sat in the dark of the cab’s backseat, watching the double necklace of highway lamps we were constantly approaching. The tires whined steadily beneath us. The driver didn’t speak.

  Stations drifted in and out on the car radio. Gospel, rock, a woman who advocated self-hypnosis. Somewhere near Harrisburg, a minister promised us salvation in a voice so sharp and reliable, it rattled the cab, then went off on a tangent and became static, returning as Spanish music. When the driver made a highway stop near Philadelphia, I had him leave the motor running while I waited inside with the doors locked, the radio on. I didn’t want to think about where I’d been or where I was going. I just wanted to stay in the dark like this, to doze and listen.

  By dawn we had ridden out of Pennsylvania.

  The morning light was weak and gray. Dottie would be waking up soon, discovering what I’d done. . . . I hoped Eric was too sore to walk—hoped I’d made him childless.

  “So what you going all the way up to Cape Cod for, anyways, lady?” His voice came out of nowhere and made me jump.

  I didn’t know why, exactly, but caught myself looking at the scratch on my wrist. “It’s personal,” I said. “I’m meeting friends.”

  “Whereabouts on the Cape we goin’, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He reached over and turned off the radio. “How far up?”

  “Oh . . . near the ocean.”

  His laugh was insulting. “Lady, the whole place is near the ocean. Cape Cod is, you know, towns. Ain’t you ever been up there?”

  “Of course I’ve been there. Sheesh.”

  “Well, where are your friends at?”

  “I’m—we haven’t decided where we’re going to stay yet.”

  “Well, how you gonna know where to meet them then?”

  “Look, I just forgot the name of the place. It’ll come to me. Don’t have kittens over it, okay?”

  He smiled back at me in his rearview mirror. “Okay, lady,” he said. “Take your time. You got about another nine hours to think of it.”

  Mist silvered the highway pavement—miles and miles of mirror. I didn’t want to think.

  “My friend told me you delivered a baby in this cab once,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he laughed. “Don’t remind me.”

  Pictures of saints decorated his visors. He’d stuck a magnetized plastic Mary to the dashboard and double-looped a set of rosary beads around the rearview mirror. Its tethered crucifix rocked back and forth, back and forth, with the cab’s motion. It lulled me to look.

  “So I suppose you believe in God, right?” I said.

  He braked and looked back suspiciously. “Of course I believe in God,” he said. “Geez, what do you think I am? Don’t you?”

  “Yeah, right. God and the Tooth Fairy and Jiminy Cricket.”

  He frowned into the mirror and shook a scolding finger. “You shouldn’t talk like that, lady. God takes care of you and me both.”

  In the silence, we both lit up cigarettes. He smoked Trues. Dottie had said his name but I couldn’t remember it. It was a pattern with me, really, I thought: Dottie’s fish, Rita Speight’s baby. I killed off whatever peop
le loved. It was entirely possible I’d driven Ma to it, too—better off dead than living with a monster daughter.

  “Your good friend God really took great care of my mother,” I said. “She got killed last summer.”

  He looked at me in his rearview mirror; I looked away, out. “Well,” he said, “God has his reasons that you and me don’t understand. But I’m sorry for you, though. For your suffering.”

  “You know all these religious doodads you have hanging up in here? My grandmother has these things all over the place, too. Her whole house is like a shrine. Says her rosary every night—prays her head off. She had two kids: a boy and a girl. One drowned and the other got killed by a truck. God had her go to both their funerals. What do you think of that?”

  In the silence, I thought of Grandma’s frayed prayer book, limp and soft from constant use, held together with a rubber band. Her turning and turning of the pages had transformed the paper into a kind of delicate cloth.

  “In one way, it’s sad,” he said. “But in another way, it ain’t. Both her children are probably up in heaven, waitin’ for her.”

  I rolled down the window and chucked my cigarette butt out, held my face to the cold inrush of air. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Polishing their little halos. Practicing their harp music.”

  I closed my eyes and saw, intact, Ma’s flying-leg painting—the way it managed to be both airy and powerful. Maybe that picture was Ma’s heaven. I stuck my hand inside the knapsack, fingered the swatch of canvas I’d managed to save.

  He said something I didn’t catch. “What?”

  “I said, would you mind closing the window? I’m freezing to death.” The cab strayed a little over the center line. “The thing is,” he continued, “you and me ain’t ever been there, right? So neither of us can really say what heaven’s like. Or ain’t like. ’Cause we ain’t dead. See?”

  Maybe that was why I was driving up there: to kill myself. Rid the world of Fat Girl Monster.

  “I tell you what. I’ll say a little prayer for your mother.”

  “Don’t waste your breath,” I muttered.

  “I ain’t wasting it. I guess I better say one for you, too.”

  I shifted my weight. My legs and bladder ached. I’d been cramped in this cab for five hours. “You want to pray so much, pray that a gas station shows up soon, will you? I need to go to the bathroom.”

  More miles of grimy road went by. “I been up there once,” he said.

  “Where? Heaven?”

  “Cape Cod. One summer when I was a kid. I got a cousin lives up there, my cousin Augusto. His mother and my mother came over from the Cape Verde Islands together. Two young girls—didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’. Can you imagine that? Couldn’t even speak the language.”

  I would have preferred radio talk. I couldn’t have cared less about his stupid family tree. . . . If I killed myself, who would they call? Grandma? My father? Dead or alive, I didn’t want Daddy anywhere near me.

  “Augusto runs a fishing boat out of Provincetown. I tell you, lady, that’s work, commercial fishing is! I was about fourteen, fifteen that summer I was up there. Pulling nets, pulling lobster pots.”

  Everyone at Merton would be talking about me. My blood would be on Eric’s hands. On Kippy’s, too.

  He put on his blinker.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I thought you had to go to the toilet.”

  “I do. Where are we?”

  “Perth Amboy.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “New Jersey. We’re gettin’ there, lady.”

  The ladies’ room was bubble-gum pink, littered with used paper towels. I scowled at my reflection in the smeary mirror. “Fat monster face,” I said. “Fish killer.”

  Sitting in the stall, I looked again at the scratch across my wrist—studied it—then felt down there, to where I’d let her touch me and put her mouth. I should have stolen that scallop-edged knife, brought it along with me. I closed my eyes and imagined myself bleeding—collapsing on that sticky pink floor, dying justifiably in the stink of shit and disinfectant . . . She had loved those fish. Had said she loved me. “Do me first,” she’d said, then come so hard, it shook the bed. Was that love? What was that?

  The coffee shop had racks and racks of plump, glossy doughnuts. I’d gone in only for a map but got into the bakery line. After all I’d gone through, I didn’t deserve a couple of stupid doughnuts?

  “Next?” the counter girl said. Her eyes widened at my fat.

  “Large coffee, cream, no sugar. And a dozen doughnuts.”

  “What kind?” She snatched a tissue paper and waited.

  “Let’s see. Ten lemon-filled and . . . uh . . . two cinnamon.”

  She shot the doughnuts into a bag and rang up my total. “Dollar ninety-five,” she said.

  “Hold on. Make that two large coffees.” I grabbed a newspaper and a map of the northeastern states from the rack. “Plus these.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. I kept wrecking her cash-register math.

  When I got back to the cab, he was dozing, head back, mouth open. I had a perfect right to wake him. I wasn’t paying Pedro here four hundred dollars to take a siesta.

  I stood there holding his coffee and staring at his sleeping head as if it was a piece of sculpture in a museum. I hadn’t realized before that he was handsome—hadn’t paid any attention to that sort of thing. I imagined myself touching the tips of his feathery eyelashes, his bristly, unshaven cheek. I reached in and placed his coffee on the dashboard. The steam clouded the windshield, the air around his plastic Blessed Virgin.

  Back inside the coffee shop, I ignored people’s second round of gawking and walked to the empty end of the counter. I’d bought the newspaper hoping for something about those whales I’d seen on TV. The article was buried on an inner page. Humpbacks, they were. Beaching themselves off some place called Wellfleet.

  The folded-open road map took up three counter spaces, counting mine. What did I care? I was a paying customer.

  Cape Cod began near Plymouth, Massachusetts, and stuck out into the Atlantic Ocean like an old lady’s bony finger. We’d studied Plymouth with Mrs. Nelkin, my old teacher from Connecticut, who scared me—we’d made construction-paper Pilgrims’ hats and marched around the school. It was the Indians who taught the Pilgrims to plant corn, she’d said, so they could survive. Planted one whole dead fish for every scoop of seed. . . . Dottie would have done something with those fish by now. Flushed them down the toilet? Buried them in the backyard? Her big mistake was loving me, the monster. I should have spared the fish. Drunk the Clorox myself.

  Buzzards Bay, Barnstable . . . I’d waited and waited for Daddy that afternoon in Mrs. Nelkin’s class, but it was Grandma who finally came to pick me up. Anthony Jr.: strangled by his own cord. . . . I tried to imagine what Grandma would say if I killed myself—what she’d feel. A mortal sin: that’s what she’d call it. For the rest of her life, she’d pray for me, imagine me roasting in hell like a rotisserie chicken at First National. Only I wouldn’t be in hell. I’d be in dirt, rotting away like Ma, because God was something people made up—a lie people told themselves. I looked inside the bag. Two of the lemon ones were already gone. My mouth burned with sweetness.

  I traced my finger out to the tip—Provincetown, where that relative of his lived—then drew back a little and found it: Wellfleet. I folded up the map. Augusto: I knew his cousin’s name but not his.

  In the newspaper article, a scientist said any number of conditions could be causing them to do it: scrambled sonar, parasites in their inner ears, some primal instinct to seek land. Or some reason nobody really understood—a scientific mystery. There were two pictures, one of that expert and one of three dead whales lying on the shore in a row. The paper said eleven had killed themselves so far.

  The snippy woman who’d waited on me came out from behind the counter carrying an English muffin and a Pepsi. She sat down two stools away, sighed to herself, and lit a ci
garette. Someone else was at the register.

  Outside, my cab driver was up, awake, talking to a gas-station attendant who was filling the tank. I hated the way he called me “lady,” like I was somebody Grandma’s age, but it seemed stupid to introduce myself at this point. We’d traveled together all night. In a way, having those saints in the car was a kind of comfort—no matter what I did or didn’t believe.

  I caught the waitress looking at him through the window, checking him out. She was skinny and harried-looking, with limp, pinned-back hair—unimportant in every way. But the lie swam in my head. Her believing it became crucial.

  “I see my sleepyhead husband’s finally awake,” I said, nudging my chin in the direction of the cab. “That’s him out there, the guy in the red jacket. We’re going to Cape Cod on our honeymoon. He’ll have kittens if I don’t get out there with his cinnamon doughnuts.”

  She looked down at the size of my leg. Then she looked out again.

  “You wouldn’t think someone like me would end up with someone like him, would you? But it happened. He’s a cutie, isn’t he? We’re very much in love.”

  She sat there, blank-faced. I had upended everything she knew.

  “He prefers me just this way,” I said. “Says there’s more of me to love. And love me he does. Phew!”

  I dipped my finger into some lemon filling that had plopped onto the counter, brought it to my mouth, and sucked. She got up off the stool, leaving her cigarette burning in the ashtray, her Pepsi and muffin untouched. “You have a nice day now,” I said. “Nice talking to you.”

  Outside, the air felt cool and clean. He smiled when he saw me coming. “Was you the good fairy?” he said. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Here’s some breakfast, too.” I held open the bag of doughnuts.

  “Nah, that’s okay.”

  “Go ahead. I don’t have leprosy or anything. Oh, by the way, my name is Dolores.”

  “Well, you’re a nice lady, Dolores.” He looked in, chose a cinnamon.

  “So what’s your name, anyway?”