She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
“Proposing what?”
“You and me. Marriage.”
I looked up, saw the tears in his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Yes.”
29
Have you ever noticed,” Thayer asks me, “that we always take the same chairs when we’re in this office? That we never switch seats?”
I give him a quick nod, a half smile. My arms are strapped around myself, straitjacket style. You’re not pregnant, I tell myself. But it’s a tactic. If I think I’m pregnant, I won’t be; if I think I’m not, I’ll be surprised. I’m not sure who I’m trying to fool.
“What color is this, anyway?”
“What?”
“These chairs. The curtains.”
“Oh,” I say. “Mauve.”
“They just redid the McDonald’s out in Warwick this color. And that dentist’s office I renovated. Mauve.” This is one of the patterns of our three-year-old marriage: when we’re both nervous, I straitjacket myself and Thayer talks about nothing. “Half the walls I paint these days. It’s—what’s that word that means something’s everywhere?”
“Ubiquitous?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Mauve. It’s u-frickin’-biquitous.”
“I hate this waiting,” I say. “I wish he’d get here so we’d know.”
He reaches over, rubs tension out of my shoulder. “Take it easy,” he says. “If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, well . . .”
“I think I read somewhere that it’s psychological.”
“What is?”
“The way they use mauve. It’s got a numbing quality. Dulls your resistance or something. So that you’ll buy another Big Mac.”
Dr. Bulanhagui’s voice is outside the door; then the door opens, closes with a hushing sound against the carpet. He hangs up his sports coat and puts on his white lab coat, pulling at the sleeves. The manila folder he’s carrying has our life in it.
He says it as soon as he sits down. “I’m sorry. The procedure was not successful.”
I don’t listen to his explanation of estrogen levels and cell life. Six eggs, six deaths. Everything’s mauve: I’m numb.
“Well what about the other ones?” Thayer says. “Those eggs you froze?” His voice is thin with disappointment. Somewhere during our second year of trying, Thayer caught my obsession.
Dr. Bulanhagui smiles and apologizes. He tells us now isn’t the time to make a decision about trying the procedure again. But we’ve made that decision already, weeks ago. Our savings account made it for us.
Back in the car, we buckle our seat belts at the exact same second, so that I hear only one click, not two. We both look straight ahead.
Thayer starts the engine, then flops his head back against the headrest, blows out air. “You know what we need?” he says. “We need a vacation.”
I remind him we can’t afford a vacation. We’ve just taken a four-thousand-dollar medical gamble. Four thousand dollars down the tubes.
“Who gives a shit about the money?” he says. “You want to try again, we’ll try again.”
I shake my head no. “I just need home,” I say. “Take me home.”
When we pull into the alley, Jemal stops dribbling. He’s wearing shorts I don’t recognize—baggy knee-length jobs with dinosaurs in blinding colors. He holds the basketball against his shoulder bone. His look asks the question.
“Nope,” Thayer says.
“Shhheee-it,” Jemal says, stretching out the curse for full use. The ball smashes against the blacktop and flies high over his head, clattering the rain gutter.
Inside there’s the smell of coffee. Here’s what’s on the kitchen counter: a stack of mail, Mrs. Buchbinder’s Saran-wrapped kugel, and the Styrofoam head that holds Roberta’s wig. Laundry is clicking and tossing in the dryer. The chaos I’ve been visualizing all week in the hospital evaporates.
Roberta is in the front room, napping on the water bed. The radio is next to her, on the seat of her wheelchair, broadcasting a baseball game. She’ll wake up mad she’s missed it; late in life, she’s become a Red Sox zealot. The cat’s sleeping, too, draped across Roberta’s hip. Outside, clouds shift and sudden afternoon sun illuminates the cat and half of Roberta’s face. On the radio, I hear the crack of the bat, the crowd’s roar, the announcer’s unchecked joy.
Thayer places my suitcase on the floor next to me and curves his arms into huge, inviting brackets. We stand there, watching Roberta, studying her nap. “Kind of cute when she’s sleeping, isn’t she?” he whispers.
* * *
In the car on the way there, he’s too quiet and respectful; it’s creepy. “Say something!” I command.
“What?”
“Anything.”
“This car has good shock absorbers.”
Against all my protests about duty and finances, Allyson and Jemal are taking shifts with Roberta for the next three days while Thayer and I are on vacation. “How am I supposed to know what to pack if you won’t even tell me where we’re going?” I complained the night before.
“Pack everything,” he said. “Little of this, little of that.”
Thayer turns on the radio news. A poll says the women Americans most respect are Oprah Winfrey, Nancy Reagan, Mother Teresa, and Cher. The royal couple may be separating. In a Florida town, neighbors have firebombed the home of a family down with AIDS.
I know it now, accept it: I’ll never give birth. I pull out my journal from under the bucket seat; I started it at the hospital six days earlier, as I lay in my hospital bed thinking about my life and waiting for the fertilized eggs to cleave. I uncap the Bic, meaning to rail about negatives: unfairness, infertility. But something different comes out, something I hadn’t planned. I write: Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.
The highway’s dips and rises sway my handwriting across the page so that the penmanship both is and isn’t mine. He was right—we do need this trip. A shock absorber.
Now there’s a string of oldies from the sixties and seventies. Each song carries faces with it—Ma, Dante, Dottie, the Pysyk twins—and I think how strange it is I’ve ended up with this life, this six-foot-eight-inch husband and his mystery trip. Interstate 95 can lead anywhere. “Niagara Falls, right?” I say. “Some corny honeymoon suite with a hot tub?” But Thayer only smiles.
Traffic up ahead slows, crawls, then stops altogether. The bald-headed businessman in the lane next to us has air-conditioning and rolled-up windows. His white shirt cuff looks as crisp and clean as the Communion wafers priests used to place on my tongue.
“She’s Come Undone,” Thayer says, turning up the radio. He sings along with the record.
She didn’t know what she was headed for
And when she found what she was headed for . . .
“Hey, look!” I tell Thayer. The businessman is tuned to the same station—is singing along, too. You can read his lips.
“Harmony,” Thayer says. “How ’bout that?” He honks the horn and the man looks over, laughs. The two of them lip-sync to each other. Or to me, the person between them.
“Undone,” I write in the journal—stare at that word, turn it over. Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I’ve undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love . . .
We inch closer to the green highway sign, close enough so that I can squint and read it. “Cape Cod and East.”
“We’re going to the Cape?”
He nods and smiles. “Certain old broad we know says you always wanted to see a whale in action. I’m taking us on a whale watch.”
* * *
He springs for The Seaview Inn—cable TV, stereo radio, a restaurant with twenty-five-dollar entrées. “Cup of coffee?” I call in to Thayer above the shower’s hiss. We’ve got Mr. Coffees, too—built right into our wall.
His head pushes out through the shower fog. “Nah, keep me up all night. We gotta be on board that boat by eight A.M.”
In bed with his wet curly hair, he aims the remote co
My hand finds his. “A little low. Not wiped out. How are you doing?”
“Me? I don’t know—ache a little, I guess. It’s tough after years of this to just say, ‘Okay, we give up. We quit.’”
“Thanks for this trip.”
He smiles and kisses me. “Thanks for asking me how I’m doing.” His hand slides under my nightgown, up my leg. “So what do you think?” he says. “Red light? Green light?”
“I guess yellow light,” I tell him. “Proceed with caution.”
* * *
He was smart about the coffee. My nerves are jangled; I can’t sleep.
I get out of bed and put the TV on low, channel-flipping. I don’t really see what’s on; I see Ma’s puffed-out face the second she cut the cord on my big console TV. She turns toward me—toward my old fat self—with that steak knife in her hand. Ma, in her best and strongest moment.
One of the public TV stations is showing the movie Woodstock. Woodstock: old enough to be a late movie!
Back on the bed, Thayer sighs, deep in his sleep. On the screen, John Sebastian in raggedy tie-dye is singing about a dream.
The cameras pan the crowd and there, for one quick second, I see them, unmistakably. Larry and Ruth and Tia. They’ve made it. They’re there!
In the morning, the sky is dark and we’ve both overslept. On the rushed ride to the pier, Thayer denies the rain, resists putting on the wipers against the dribble. He’s too distracted to listen to what I saw on TV last night. Lightning cuts the sky.
“Look,” I tell him, “maybe we just shouldn’t go. That fancy hotel is plenty. I don’t need to see a whale.”
He waits for the thunder to finish. “We’re going,” he says.
* * *
Inside the cabin, an hour and a half out into open sea, a hundred of us huddle on benches. The air smells of wet hair and wet sweatshirts and some seasick woman’s vomit; hard rain pelts the top of the ocean.
Thayer holds me against him. We’ve both dressed too lightly; we’re freezing. “Disappointed?” he asks.
“Yeah . . . It’s okay.”
The marine biologist clicks on her microphone and offers theories on why we’ve seen no whales. She says the snack bar will be open during the trip back to port, which will be starting in ten minutes. “For your convenience, beer and cocktails—”
I feel the rumble of the boat’s engines in my legs and stomach. “The rain stopped,” I tell Thayer. “I think I’ll go out back for a minute.”
“It’s cold out there,” he says.
“I’m fidgety. I can’t stand just sitting.”
“Want company?”
“No, thanks.”
Up in the lookout, the young crew members in their orange rain ponchos are laughing. Their binoculars rock back and forth against their chests. I can’t look at their happy indifference.
But I think this: that whatever prices I’ve paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others—the ones who have died: Ma and Grandma, Mr. Pucci, Vita Marie. They’re with me still. They’re here. . . .
Just beyond the boat, the gray ocean turns green. Effervesces—a twenty-foot circle of bubbles.
I’m the closest one to it; the crew doesn’t see.
Then the water darkens back to normal and, though it’s quiet, something is happening—something private only I can feel. I look quickly through the rain-dribbled window for Thayer, but I don’t have time to get him. I’m trembling. I can’t afford to look away.
She breaches.
Nose first, her grooved body heads straight for the sky. Her muscular tail clears the water; her fins are black wings. The fall back is slower—grace instead of power. She cracks the ocean and, in a white explosion of foam, reenters.
I’ve seen her, swimming and flying both. I’m soaked in her spray. Christened. I laugh and cry and lick my salty lips.
People run from the cabin now, pushing past me, hooting and aiming their cameras and beer bottles at the afterimage. Thayer’s head is above the crowd. He’s shouting for me. I’m shouting, too, shoving back against the others toward him.
“Thayer, I saw her!” I yell. “I saw!”
©ELENA SEIBERT
WALLY LAMB’s novels, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, were #1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Book Review “Notable Books of the Year,” and Oprah’s Book Club selections. He is also the author of the bestseller The Hour I First Believed, and We Are Water, coming in 2013. Lamb edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution. Lamb lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine. They are the parents of three sons.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by Wally Lamb
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This Washington Square Press trade paperback edition July 2012
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Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone
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