She's Come Undone

Dolores receives a letter from her apparent future college roommate and tells her mother once more that she doesn’t want to attend college. She fears being stared at due to her size or having to socialize with other students. When Dolores threatens to cut her wrists if her mother makes her go, Bernice flies into a rage and leaves for work, blaming Dolores for her exhaustion. That night, Bernice is hit by a truck and killed. Dolores overhears the news from upstairs as a state trooper talks to her grandma, and then she faints.

The next day, Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, and Dolores gets a visit from her school counselor. She thinks about asking him if her mother might have intentionally ended her life to get away from her, but refrains. The funeral is tense and awkward, and Dolores sees several people from her old life, including Jeanette, who doesn’t seem to have any idea how to approach her. Dolores also sees her father and immediately wishes it was him who had died instead, and simultaneously, she wishes that he had never left. Dolores tells her father to leave repeatedly until he does so. The next day, Dolores stares at a picture of her mother and her mother’s best friend when she was young and thinks about how little Bernice knew of her own future. Dolores wonders why her mother’s life ended up so miserable while her best friend’s seemed to turn out fine. Dolores burns herself with her flat iron on purpose. To make up for some of the pain she caused her mother, she decides to write back to the college roommate.

Dolores’s grandma has the house thoroughly cleaned to rid herself of grief. When Dolores tells her that she plans to go to college, Dolores’s grandma reacts with anger and confusion, questioning why Dolores had to put her mother through so much stress. She gives Dolores the college fund her mother set up for her years before, and Dolores continues writing to her future roommate, Kippy, inventing stories about a boyfriend from England and her various hobbies. Kippy talks about her boyfriend Dante, whom she notes has been pressuring her into sex.

Grandma is pressured by both her friends and Dolores to take a short trip, and Dolores gets to spend three days alone. She burns her microwave dinner, and then receives a letter in the mail from the man who hit her mother with his truck. With it is a check for $500, a photo of him and his family, and several apologies, and Dolores feels as though she has just been burdened with the fact that this man was a normal person. She decides to burn the photograph the same way she burned the paper doll. Suddenly, she starts having flashbacks of the pain of being raped and feels as though she deserves the pain that ensues.

While Dolores’s grandmother is still away, a man named Larry shows up to put in new wallpaper. He is friendly and outgoing and offers to give Dolores a ride when she mentions having to go a few miles down the road. Dolores is dropped off at Mr. Pucci’s house and greeted by his roommate, Gary. She sits inside and waits for Mr. Pucci to return, admiring his jukebox and wondering if Mr. Pucci is gay. When Mr. Pucci finally arrives, he is shocked to see Dolores in his house and drives her home. In the car, she asks him if Gary is his boyfriend, and Mr. Pucci is offended by Dolores’s brash question.

Back at home, Larry tells Dolores about a flea problem he and his family are having, and she offers to have them spend the night. Larry obliges and brings his wife Ruth and baby daughter Tia for the night. Together, they cook and watch television, and Larry offers Dolores her first joint. Dolores feels comfortable enough to tell Ruth and Larry about what happened to her mother and enjoys the night she has with them, not wanting it to end. In the middle of the night, she awakes to the sound of Larry and Ruth having sex and wonders how Ruth could want such a thing. When Ruth hears that Dolores is questioning the idea of college, she urges her to go, even if she might hate it. The next day, the wallpaper is finished, and Larry and Ruth leave for Woodstock.

Dolores takes a long bus ride to Philadelphia and arrives at the doors of Merton College. There is nobody around, and the doors are locked. When she taps on the glass, a woman appears and lets her inside. She explains that the dorms don’t open until next week, and Dolores realizes she mixed up the dates. Having nowhere else to go in the meantime, Dolores voices her predicament to the woman, who tells her to go home, calling her “fatty.” Dolores considers suicide for a moment, and then the woman returns, introducing herself as Dottie. Dottie agrees to let Dolores stay in her dorm if she doesn’t turn on any lights or the television and provides Dolores with a flashlight. The next morning, Dottie brings Dolores some day-old cake and they sit and chat together. Dolores feels disgusted by Dottie at first, but when Dottie compliments Dolores, calling her a “clean fat” that Dottie can trust, it occurs to Dolores that nobody has ever framed her size in a positive way before. She finds out that Dottie is 29 and suddenly regrets their age difference. When Dottie starts flirting with Dolores and tells her about past accusations from others that she used to stare at other girls in the shower, Dolores is unsure what to think.

For the next week, Dolores and Dottie clean the dorm buildings together, listening to records, dancing, drinking, and working out their emotions through mops and brooms. When the dorms open and Kippy arrives, she and her parents walk in to see Dolores and fall into shock. Kippy thinks it must be a mistake and comments on the room’s foul smell, which Dolores explains to the reader was due to the gas she had been passing all morning. Dolores leaves the room to let the shock settle and hears Kippy arguing with her parents.

A mandatory orientation meeting is held for the freshmen, and a group of girls circles around the dorm president, Rochelle. She tells the girls all about the social life at the school, and Dolores looks around, noticing how unimpressive each of them seem to be. When Rochelle refers to Dottie as “Ten-Ton Dottie” (191) and notes that she’s a lesbian, Dolores recalls the night before, when Dottie had kissed her once while they were drinking. Suddenly, she is struck with horror at the thought of the other girls judging her.

Back in the dorm, Kippy angrily unpacks her things, and Dolores realizes that the only reason Kippy hates her is because of her size. Kippy is angry that Dolores seems different from her letters. When Kippy goes to hang out with some boys from the school, Dolores sneaks a look at Kippy’s letter from Dante, which clearly indicates that Kippy was the one pressuring him, rather than the reverse.

When Kippy fractures her collarbone in a wrestling match with some boys, Dolores helps her, despite the way Kippy treated her. Kippy accuses Dolores of being dishonest, and Dolores insists she is the same person Kippy liked in the letters. Kippy adds that she and Dante made love over the summer, acting with hypocrisy though she just accused Dolores of dishonesty.

Dolores begins waiting on Kippy as she recovers from her injury, even going to classes and collecting assignments for her. Kippy has a new boyfriend and makes Dolores leave whenever he visits. Dolores takes it upon herself to start intercepting letters from Kippy’s old boyfriend, whom she pities and feels deserves better than Kippy. Still, Dolores finds that doing everything for Kippy has allowed her some small entrance into the social world of the school. Dolores starts ignoring Dottie in the hopes that she can make some friends, and Dottie tells Dolores that Kippy gossips about her when she isn’t around.

Dolores starts dropping and skipping classes, and when she is confronted by the leader of the house committee meetings, Naomi, and urged to attend, she sits and listens as the group discusses what they can do about issues around the world, like the Cambodian genocide. Only four people, including Dolores, sign a petition to act. Naomi talks about her experiences at Woodstock and how it changed her perspective on politics, but nobody seems to notice.

One night, a group of girls comes into the dorm, announcing that Paul McCartney is dead and sharing several clues to indicate the truth of the claim. Dolores listens for a while before expressing her doubt and becomes angry at the girls for treating death like some sort of fun mystery to solve. Dottie calls and invites Dolores over for supper, but Dolores tries to make excuses as to why she can’t make it. Dottie pushes Dolores, telling her she loves her, that Kippy hates her, and referring to their week together as the best of her life. Dolores hangs up on Dottie and runs to the bathroom, shaking and reminded of Jack. When she returns to her dorm later, Kippy senses that Dolores was upset about her mother’s death, and Dolores feels confused about whether to trust Kippy.

Later, Dolores opens another letter from Dante and discovers several naked Polaroids of him. She notes his candidness and apparent humbleness as he stands bashfully. While looking at the photos, Naomi finds Dolores in the laundry room and offers to smoke a joint together. Naomi jokes that “Paul McCartney came back from the dead” (217), and Dolores thinks about what her life would be like if she could reverse all of the horrible things that have happened. Dolores feels carefree and comfortable with Naomi and alternates between these more serious thoughts and the joy she feels in the moment.

Dolores is signed up for a refreshment committee at the Halloween party and stands listening to the other women argue about music, politics, and what qualifies as racism. Naomi complains that the students at the school spend their time dancing and worrying about trivial matters while the world is being destroyed. As the night goes on, the students get more and more inebriated, and Kippy’s boyfriend grabs Dolores and begins rubbing against her as she demands that he stop. As the song “Respect” ironically plays, the crowd eggs Kippy’s boyfriend on and yells insults at Dolores. When she finally frees herself by kneeing him in the groin, Dolores runs to the parking lot and sits outside, shaking.

When Dolores returns to her dorm, she finds almost all of her belongings destroyed, including her mother’s painting. Dolores packs a bag and takes a piece of the painting’s canvas with her. She calls Dottie to pick her up but doesn’t tell her what happened, and Dottie soon arrives, excited to have Dolores’s company. She orders a clam dinner and shows Dolores all of her different fish. Dolores notices a photograph of a baby boy on the wall. She questions Dottie, who explains she had a son who died at 14 months with a host of medical and genetic complications. She was 15 when she had him.

On television, a report discusses a strange phenomenon in which whales are intentionally beaching themselves in Cape Cod. Dottie pressures Dolores to drink several beers and then tries to seduce her. Dolores declines at first, but Dottie persists, and soon Dolores is caught up in the physical feelings of the moment. Dottie reminds her over and over that they don’t matter; they are just “two fatties,” and nobody will care what they do. Afterward, Dolores comments on how they are both “whales.” She then comes back to herself and feels disgusted, betrayed, and angry. She starts to cut her wrists but stops when she sees the photo of Dottie’s son. She poisons Dottie’s fish instead and leaves to find someone to take her away from there.

Dolores convinces a cab driver who lives across the street to take her all the way to Cape Cod, a 13-hour drive. Along the ride, she notices he has a rosary, a Virgin Mary figurine, and several photographs of Mary in his cab, and asks if he believes in God. The cab driver lectures Dolores when she scoffs at the idea of God caring for humans, but she points out that her grandmother is a devout Catholic and that both her children died, her mother recently.

When they pull up to a gas station, Dolores goes to the bathroom and stares at her reflection, calling herself a “Fat monster face” and a “fish killer” (237). She thinks of ending her life when she reaches Cape Cod, believing nobody would care. She buys a dozen doughnuts for herself, a newspaper, and a map. After studying the map, Dolores reads the newspaper and finds the same story of the whales who are beaching themselves for an unknown reason. The cab passes through Connecticut, and Dolores painfully remembers growing up there. Dolores drifts off and awakes to the cab driver telling her about a time he had to deliver a woman’s baby in his cab. She drifts off again soon after, and when she awakes again, she is in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, and the cab driver alerts her to a nearby beached whale. Dolores feels instantly uncomfortable and shocked upon seeing the massive humpback lying on the beach with its head in the water. Everyone assumes it is dead until it begins thrashing and crying out violently. Dolores screams and demands to leave, and the cab driver drops her off at a nearby motel.

The room is dreary, the television only has two channels, and Dolores feels bored and thinks about how she has lost everything and everyone she cared about. She finds that most of the money she paid the cab driver was returned to her and thinks about how the decent people she has known have always been in and out of her life in an instant. Dolores starts composing suicide notes but throws each one away, deciding to instead call an old friend of her mother’s. The woman picks up and kindly talks to Dolores, telling her about her mother when she was young, how much Bernice loved her daughter, and more. Dolores finds it moving at first, but soon becomes irritated and angry and hangs up on the woman. She walks down to the beach and sits by the whale all night.

In the morning, Dolores strips down and gets in the water, swimming beside the whale, staring into its dead eyes and touching them, kissing its coarse skin. She swims down to the ocean bottom, thinking that this would be a suitable way to die, but forces herself back up to the surface and out. After dressing, she is approached by a man who takes her to a psychiatric hospital after Bernice’s friend called for help.