Part Two Whales VJ.R. PUCCI, MY GUIDANCE COUNSELOR AT EASTERLY HlOH School, was a wispy man with small hands and a discreet toupee. He had been my only friend during my miserable three and a half years at the school. "Hi, pal," he'd call to me between classes as I slouched past his office door, eyes on the linoleum tiles, waiting hungrily for his acknowledgment. I knew his tiny, sunless cubicle almost as well as I knew my own bedroom: the frayed venetian-blind cord, the non-blooming geraniums cramped together on the windowsill, his poster-"I'm High on High School"-which curled away from the yellow cinder-block walls. On his neat desk, he kept a picture cube with his nephews' faces on each surface. "Uncle Fabio," they called him. I knew that, too. I felt both protective and possessive of Mr. Pucci and silently cursed the boys who mimicked his lispy speech as they passed by in the corridor. I hated his other counselees, who took up his time with their trivial issues while I sat fidgeting in the office with my most current personal crisis. Mr. Pucci had seen me through eight smoking suspensions, $230 worth of unreturaed library books, sixty-seven days absent during senior year alone, and four years' worth of unreasonable teachers. He talked the girls' gym instructor into exempting me from communal showers. He personally called the parents of the football players who, for a joke, campaigned for my election as Spirit Week queen. When my Spanish teacher, Senorita O'Brien, insisted on seeing me as a name in her grade book instead of someone with unique and delicate personal problems, it was Mr. Pucci who got my foreign-language requirement waived. We were pals; I had sworn at him, trusted him with minor secrets, and sobbed into his desk blotter after each cruel remark someone hurled. Then, in April of my senior year, he called me out of study hall and sank an ax into my heart.

Ma's Tabu perfume filled up the office. She was wearing her tollbooth-collector's uniform and was seated on an unfamiliar metal folding chair that had been dragged in for the occasion. My school records were fanned out across Mr. Pucci's desk. "Sit down, Dolores, sit down," he began. His palm was extended out toward my regular seat; his smile was unfamiliar. "I've asked your mother to come in today so that the three of us can talk about your future."

It was a setup, an ambush. "Can we do it some other time?" I said. "I have an important quiz to study for. Plus, I think I may be getting a migraine."

Ma was snapping and unsnapping the clasp of her pocket-book. "I've gotten off from work special, Dolores. I think we should both hear what Mr. Pucci has to say." I was suddenly, blatantly, aware of secret telephone conversations between them. The revelation made me limp. I sat.

"After careful consideration of Dolores's needs and her capabilities, Mrs. Price, I'd like to prescribe college- despite what's here before us in black and white." The real story, he told Ma, lay in my love of reading and the potential several of my teachers thought they detected in me. Teachers! There were two types: the ones who treated you like dirt and the ones who were all over you with their Geiger counters of hope. I dropped my face into the impassive look I'd perfected from Julie on "The Mod Squad." With my knees, I buckled and unbuckled the side of his metal desk. I had been in love with Mr. Pucci's gentleness, our rituals. A million times during our talks I'd imagined leaning toward him and placing my hands around his tiny waist, feeling my fingertips touching in the back. "I happen to believe in Dolores's future, Mrs. Price," he said. His frail, anxious face was framed in geranium leaves. "And if she decides not to go to college, you may both regret it for the rest of your lives."

He hit the jackpot with that word: regret. It was regret that had mostly motivated my mother since the night Roberta walked me back across the street. Ma had insisted on driving me to the emergency room, though the emergency was two weeks old. On the way there, her teeth chattered out of control while I sat in stone silence. She saw me not for what I was-an accomplice in the baby's murder-but as Jack's innocent victim. I was able to drop her to her knees with demands. So I did.

Upon my insistence, Ma had withheld our terrible secret from Daddy and chosen not to press charges against Jack, letting him escape down the back stairs with his and Rita's things that next weekend while we visited Grandma's cousins in Pawtucket. "Believe you me, I'd like nothing better than to see that filthy bastard rot behind bars," she told the state-police detective who sat downstairs in our parlor. "But that kid up there is thirteen years old. She just needs to pretend it never happened."

Out of regret, Ma paid for homebound tutoring for the remainder of the school year, though she swore on a stack of Bibles that no one at St. Anthony's School could have possibly found out. My first tutor, Mr. McRae, kept looking at me funny. The second, Mrs. Dunkel, was a retired schoolteacher with a powdered neck and pottery bracelets that clacked against the kitchen table. Mrs. Dunkel dozed while I read her assignments. She was safe and sweet. Dr. Hancock-the psychiatrist they made me talk to-was not. Though Ma regretted doing it, she told Dr. Hancock she was terminating his weekly attempts to force me to discuss Jack Speight. This was at my request, she explained to him, though / had phrased it more in terms of a demand: if she made me go to any more of the psychiatric sessions, I would go up to Grandma's attic with a soupspoon aim a vam* . Drano and kill myself.

The city of Easterly declared me normal enough to attend regular high school the following year. Ma's sick notes always mentioned regret "I regret to inform you that Dolores has been ill with a sore throat... a stomach problem... a bad head cold" she'd write on days when I felt too depressed or keyed-up to attend. She never refused to write the excuses, though she didn't like lying; you could tell from her foreshortened, abrupt penmanship. By then, Ma's regret had ritualized itself into a weekly array of victim's consolation prizes from the grocery store. She returned each week with shopping bags full of goodies for me: packaged cookies, quarts of Pepsi (I preferred it warm), cigarettes, magazines, and fat paperbacks. I kept my treats in the labeled grocery bags on top of the twenty-one-inch color console Motorola TV Ma had bought me for my bedroom on my fifteenth birthday.

"If she decides not to go to college, you may both regret it for the rest of your lives," Mr. Pucci told her. With my college education, he was offering a chance to avoid a life sentence of regret. Ma bit the bait. Hard.

I spent the next several weeks whining and pouting and shrieking. How, I wondered, could she be so cruel to me after all I had gone through? I couldn't stand school now; why should I sign on for four more years of torture?

College catalogs began arriving in the mail with address labels in my mother's handwriting. They were filled with terrifying photographs: students and professors sitting together on lawns holding pleasant conversations; goggled chemistry majors wielding their Bunsen burners; beaming girls brushing their teeth together at a row of dormitory sinks. I tore them up as fast as they arrived. For days I refused to come downstairs for either school or supper, holing up in my room with the goodies Ma still faithfully provided. When I wasn't giving her the silent treatment, I was pleading with Grandma to intervene for me. Colleges were full of drugs! College girls got pregnant! I began ** sobbing about overdoses and nervous breakdowns. When I knew Ma was listening, I'd hustle to the bathroom and stick my fingers down my throat, gagging dramatically. "I can't even keep anything down anymore," I'd whimper as I passed her worried face in the hallway. Then I'd go back to my room and feast on Fritos, Flings, Devil Dogs, Hostess Sno-Balls-unwrapping the cellophane as quietly as possible.

The gray circles under Ma's eyes puffed up and her fingers danced and fidgeted as she filled out applications under my hateful glare. But I could not make her give in. She was determined not to battle regret the rest of her life. I was going to college.

By the end of May, eight schools had rejected me. Ma's last hope was Merton College in Wayland, Pennsylvania, but the application was a sticky one. It required an essay on the one person in the world I'd most like to meet. Ma stewed and paced for a week and then rented a typewriter. She called in sick and started one evening after supper, hunting and pecking her way through the night. The following morning I stood at the kitchen table eating my breakfast- chocolate doughnuts and a mug of Pepsi. Ma's cheek was pressed up against the enamel tabletop and she was snoring out of distorted, pushed-together lips. Around her were dozens of wadded-up paper balls-enough false starts to decorate a float in the Rose Bowl parade. I reached over and rolled her finished product out of the typewriter.

If I could meet one person in this whole wide world, it would be Tricia Nixon, the President's Daughter. She is friendly and her blond hair is very pretty. She also has neatness and good manners. She makes me feel that if your ever in Washington, you could call her up and ask her to go shopping or show you the sights or just sip a soda with you. She is a friend to every girl in this great country-even little old me.

Very truely yours, Dolores Price Ma squinted and woke. She watched me cautiously as I put the paper down in my doughnut crumbs.

"Well?" she said.

"You spelled truly' wrong."

"But besides that. What do you think?"

"Do you want the truth?"

She nodded.

I swallowed a mouthful of doughnut and smiled assuredly. "This wouldn't get me into a school for retards."

Ma's lip poked out and I thought with satisfaction that I'd made her cry. Then, suddenly, she shoved the typewriter off the table. It banged down in front of me, inches away from my bare feet. She was pointing to the typewriter but looking at me. "If that thing is broken, it will have been worth it," she said. "I am not... some piece of dog crap!"

Merton College wished to inform me that I had been accepted. All I needed to do was send them my tuition fee and have the doctor mail back the enclosed physical-examination form. That weekend, the war escalated.

"There are two things in this world I am not about to do!" I shrieked down the stairwell to my mother at the end of a Saturday-night battle that had included three broken dishes and a slapping session. "Number one is go to any college. Number two is put my feet up in those stirrup things and have some pig doctor come walking toward me, snapping his fucking rubber gloves."

Grandma had been in the parlor watching "Mannix" when the fight started. I imagined her stiffening, knees pressed together bone to bone at the sound of the word "fucking." The past four years had changed Grandma, cowered her. She knew how to handle sass, not rape. From the moment I'd returned from the emergency room that night, Grandma had treated me as a stranger, someone exotically dangerous. She spoke only once of "that business with him," sliding her good rosary beads onto my nightstand "in case you need them." Sometimes I'd catch her staring at me with something close to fear. She, too, indulged me-not as a victim, but as someone on whose good side she felt safer. She said nothing about my weight, my erratic attendance at school and Sunday Mass, or about the uniform I'd come to adopt-gray sweatshirt, fatigue jacket, bell-bottom jeans. When, during my junior year, I began to smoke openly throughout the house, Grandma placed a can of Glade on my bureau and held her tongue.

She was right to fear me. I scared myself. I had, after all, indirectly killed Rita's baby-or rather, God had killed it because of the chances I'd taken, the things I'd let myself think, do, have done. Ma didn't realize this; I was sure Grandma did.

But the mention of stirrups and rubber gloves proved to be a tactical mistake. I was seated on my bed, consoling myself with a stack of Pecan Sandies and the very same "Mannix" episode Grandma was watching downstairs when Ma came in-red-eyed, without knocking-and walked over to my television. "Get out of my room!" I screamed. "Get out of my life!" Her back was to me. She pushed aside the bags of groceries and bent behind the set. "Don't you dare touch any of my-"

The TV voices went dead in mid-sentence and Ma turned to face me. A steak knife was in one hand, the hacked-off television plug drooping from its wire in the other. There were tears in her throat as she spoke. "I will get this fixed... When and if you have that physical and get that form signed. I happen to believe in your future."

It took Grandma to locate Dr. Phinny, a tired old GP who, my grandmother had been assured by her church cronies, did little more than hold a stethoscope to you and tap your knee with a rubber mallet before signing whatever you wanted. "None of that other monkey business," she whispered, looking away from me. On the eve of the appointment, she suggested timidly that I might like to wear a blouse and my nice navy skirt to the doctor's but said nothing when I came down the following morning in my sweatshirt and bell-bottoms, armed with my cigarettes and a mug of Pepsi.

Ma gassed and braked through downtown Providence looking for Dr. Phinny's building. She sang along with the radio, trying to act casual. "It's clowns' illusions I recall, I re-ally don't know clowns..."

"It's clouds' illusions." I said it between clenched teeth.

"Whatr "It's clouds' illusions I recall. If you're going to sing it, sing it right."

"I'm sorry," she said. She pulled abruptly to the curb and jerked the brake. We both bucked forward and Pepsi lapped out onto my jeans. "I'm sorry again," she said. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. This is the building."

The pink-a pink-a of the directional signal got louder and we both waited to see what I'd do. I considered running down a side street and not calling her until I was forty years old and she was on her deathbed. But I'd already missed a crucial murder on "Guiding Light," not to mention Betty Jo's wedding on "Petticoat Junction." She hadn't bought me a new paperback in three weeks. It was like starving.

"Why don't you get out here and I'll find a place to park."

she said.

Then I was out of the car, slamming the door with a force gathered from twenty-one days' worth of abstinence.

Dr. Phinny's office building was tall and sooty with brass decorations turned aqua. Next door, the clattering plates and conversations of a coffee shop burst into the street whenever customers emerged, walking past me, stealing sneaky glimpses. A woman hurried by, pulling the arm of a little boy whose inclination was to linger and look. "See that red car!" she said, yanking him past me. "Here's a mailbox!"

Two stores down was an abandoned laundromat. A group of unplugged washing machines huddled in the middle. I studied myself in the plate glass. My long, straight hair was definitely my best feature. I ironed it every morning, whether I was going to school or not, reasoning that split ends were a small price to pay. I hung my head forward then flung it back, watching my hair fly, my hoop earrings sway. I sort of looked like Julie on "The Mod Squad," in a way. I liked her style, the way she seemed bored with everyone. She'd been on Merv Griffin the week before my mother cut the plug. "I don't see it as acting," she'd told Merv. "It's just... being."

I'd pierced my ears that February, during the week I was suspended for smoking in the equipment room when I was supposed to be taking modified gym. "I've got better things to do than whack at Ping-Pong balls," I'd told the vice principal and Mr. Pucci. "I mean, what's the point?" Then I'd gone home and worked Grandma's spare sewing machine needle in and out, around and around, practicing my Julie look while I did it, as if my heart weren't racing. Later, when my ear got infected, I blamed Ma. "What do you expect when you make me live in a house that doesn't even have any stupid peroxide?" I'd said.

Across from the laundromat was a dirty-book store. "Sexational Reading!" a window banner proclaimed. "We carry Luv Gel." I wasn't taking my underwear off" for any doctor, I didn't care if he was 103 years old and blind. I'd get a job somewhere and buy a TV if I had to.

Ma rounded the corner, smiling a hopeful smile. "This won't be anything, honey," she said, squeezing my hand.

"Oh," I said, pulling it back. "You can tell the future now?"

The rickety elevator smelled like urine. Though we were its only passengers, it stopped on each floor, opening its doors to no one while we waited rigidly. As it reached Dr. Phinny's floor, I turned to my mother. "You must really hate me," I said.

Her hand was shaking, crinkling the form the college had sent "I don't hate you," she said.

"But deep down you must. Or else you wouldn't be doing this to me."

"I love you," she said, just loud enough for me to hear.

"Bull crap."

We were his first patients of the day; it had been one of my stipulations. The upholstered waiting-room chairs were patched with electrical tape. There was no receptionist Through a pane of ripply blue glass, I watched him walk back and forth behind the door that led to the inner office, like a person underwater.

Ten silent minutes after we'd arrived, he emerged, looking as old and tired as Grandma had promised. He stared at me briefly, squinted, and handed me a folded paper gown. "She can go into that room on the left and get undressed," he said, addressing my mother. "She can put this thing on and get up on the table."

I rose hesitantly and waited for Ma to do the same. "Aren't you coming?" I hissed.

She shook her head and curled up the magazine she'd been pretending to read. "I'll be out here. You'll be fine."

The walls of the examining room were the color of mustard. Above a drippy sink hung a drugstore calendar: two Technicolor spaniels in a wicker basket. To the left of the examination table was a wastebasket, empty except for a single blood-stained gauze pad.

I took off my sandals and jeans and pulled the sweatshirt over my head. I was still wearing my bra and T-shirt and a pair of underpants that was going to stay on, no matter what. The old pervert could look at his other female patients if anyone else was stupid enough to show up. They couldn't make me go to college. They couldn't drag me there. All I wanted was to get my TV shows back.

The gown rustled and crinkled as I fumbled with the paper tabs at the back of my neck. I tried molding the paper to myself but it fanned out stubbornly, like a giant bib. In the outer office, Ma and the doctor were mumbling. I sat up on the table and fished out a cigarette to calm my nerves. I smoked it fast, watching the ash tumble down the tunnels of the stiff gown.

He was scanning the form when be came into the room. He stood before me, reading.

"Look, I'm not taking anything else off," I said, addressing the spaniels. When I looked back at him, he was staring directly at me.

"You're too goddamned fat," he said. I took a defiant drag on my cigarette and willed myself not to cry. The remark made me dizzy. For the past four years, Ma and Grandma had played by the rule: never to mention my weight. Now my jeans and sweatshirt were folded in a helpless pile beside me and there was only a thin sheet of paper between my rolls of dimply flesh and this detestable old man. My heart raced with fear and nicotine and Pepsi. My whole body shook, dripped sweat.

"Any trouble with your period?" he asked.

"No."

"What?"

"No trouble," I managed, louder.

He nodded in the direction of his stand-up scale. The backs of my legs made little sucking sounds as they unglued themselves from the plastic upholstery. He brought the sliding metal bar down tight against my scalp and fiddled with the cylinder in front of my face. "Five-five and a half," he said. "Two hundred... fifty-seven."

The tears leaking from my eyes made stains on the paper gown. I nodded or shook my head abruptly at each of his questions, coughed on command for his stethoscope, and took his pamphlets on diet, smoking, heart murmur. He signed the form.

At the door, his hand on the knob, he turned back and waited until I met his eye. "Let me tell you something," he said. "My wife died four Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you-you don't want to do this to yourself."

"Eat shit," I said.

He paused for a moment, as if considering my comment. Then he opened the door to the waiting room and announced to my mother and someone else who'd arrived that at the rate I was going, I could expect to die before I was forty years old. "She's too fat and she smokes," I heard him say just before the hall rang out with the sound of my slamming his office door. I was wheezing wildly by the time I reached the final landing.

On the turnpike on the way home, Ma said, "I could stand to cut down, too, you know. It wouldn't hurt me one bit. We could go on a diet together? Do they still sell that Metrecal stuff?"

"I've been humiliated enough for one fucking decade," I said. "You say one more thing to me and I'll jump out of this car and smash my head under someone's wheels."

The repairman from Eli's TV was parked in front of the house when we pulled into the alley. I waited in the parked car, watching his head move back and forth up in my bedroom window. When he finally drove away, whistling, I pounded up the stairs past Grandma and locked the door. I snapped the "on" button and held my breath. Suddenly, "The Newlywed Game" lit up on the big screen.

"Does your husband kiss you with his eyes opened or closed?" Bob Eubanks asked one of the new wives.

Still unable to relax, I rifled through my various bags and packages. I started with Mallomars, stuffing them whole into my mouth. That old man's voice wouldn't go away. "You're too goddamned fat," he kept saying.

"She'll say I keep them closed but I really keep them open," a newlywed husband said.

"You do?" his wife said, worried.

"Eat shit," I'd told him, and he hadn't even blinked. I slugged down a mugful of Pepsi, trying to calm myself. The week before, Ma had bought me a new product to try: Swiss cheese in a squirt can. I'd made a face when she'd shown me, but now I decorated crackers and chips with ribbons and ribbons of the stuff. I found some stale Lorna Doones and concocted little Swiss cheese and Lorna Doone sandwiches. I squirted dabs on each fingertip, like nail polish, and licked them off one by one, repeating the process until the can hissed air. Calmer, I opened a bag of M&M's. I was able to eat them in their normal sequence: red, green, yellow, yellow, brown.

My plan to end the impasse concerning my future was so beautifully simple, I was amazed I hadn't thought of it earlier. No high-school diploma, no college. I would simply fail my finals.

During exam week, the corridors were a wall of noise. My classmates had secured their futures, their prom dates, and had gotten an early start on their summer tans. I passed among them, invisible, like a brief shadow over their excitement In world-history class, I filled in the blue-book test pages with cross-hatching so intricate it looked like weaving. I ran a brand-new Bic pen dry.

"To what extent does Hamlet's dilemma mirror that of modern man?" my English teacher wanted to know. In front of me, the other kids coughed and sighed, pausing only to shake out their writing hands. I knew what she wanted: she wanted us to talk about alienation-about how it felt to be left out in the cold. She wanted me to pity Hamlet from my seat at the back of the room at a special table because I was too fat to fit at the regular desks. All year long her eyes had skidded over me as if I didn't exist. The invisible freak. Well, I didn't feel sorry for stupid Hamlet and his stupid indecision. I felt sorry for the old king, the ghost, the one who has the poison crammed up inside him and dies while everyone else gets to go on with their lives. "Don't know- didn't read it," I scrawled across the mimeographed test paper.

In physiology I borrowed Mr. Frechette's laminated lavatory pass and got home with it in time to catch the second half of "Search for Tomorrow."

"Mail, Dolores," Grandma said when I came downstairs later that afternoon. Her voice dropped. "Your father," she whispered.

On the outside of the card was a chimpanzee wearing a mortarboard. When I opened it, a hundred-dollar bill fluttered to the floor. "Wish I could be there for your big day. Use for luggage. Love, Daddy," the note said.

I imagined the thank-you note I'd dare to write him. "Dear Daddy, Thank you so much for wrecking my whole life. Did you know that I am now a fat elephant and am not having any big day because I flunked my exams? I'm returning your money. Tape it to a brick and shove it up your ass sideways. Love, Dolores."

I cried my way through a bag of cheese popcorn and a can of Ma's butterscotch Metrecal. While I did, Mr. Pucci, bent still on being my pal, was at school convincing my teachers to look the other way. He drove over the next afternoon to deliver both the good news and the cap and gown I was to wear in the graduation procession. I hadn't bothered to show up for the rehearsal.

"Dolores, please!" Grandma stood over my bed, her cheeks pinkened with exasperation. The graduation gown was draped over her arm. "That poor man has driven here specially to deliver this. He's waiting downstairs to see you. What am I supposed to say?"

I stared at the TV screen in a counterfeit trance. "Tell that homo to mind his own business," I said.

He waited another fifteen minutes for me to change my mind. At the window, I watched his yellow Volkswagen drive away from the curb. I pulled the wet, dusty curtain from inside my mouth, belatedly aware I'd been chewing the fabric. I placed the mortarboard on my head and walked back and forth in front of the mirror, watching the way it sat foolishly uncommitted to my skull, the way it called cruel attention to my plump cheeks, the hopeless wobble of my concentric chins.

Two nights later, Ma and Grandma stood before me in their new flower-print dresses and stiff beauty-parlor hair. "I'm not going," I said. "It's a farce. I told you that already."

"Why, I can't understand why a young lady would purposely miss her own commencement exercises," Grandma said.

"Oh, honey, come on," Ma goaded. "I thought maybe we could go out to China Paradise afterwards and celebrate."

"There's nothing to celebrate," I said.

"Or someplace else. Even someplace ritzy, what the hell."

I flopped back on my bed and clamped my eyes tight. "For the last time," I said, "I am going to watch 'Laugh-In.' Then I am taking a bath. I am not going to put on that retarded hat and walk across the stage with all those hypocrites."

"Well, Mr. Pucci will certainly be disappointed in you," Ma tried.

My eyes sprang open. "Speaking of hypocrites!" I said.

Grandma put her hands on her hips. "Well, so what, Bernice?" she said. "Miss Party Pooper can just stay here. We'll go anyway. I'll even try that chinky-Chinaman food. Who needs her to have a good time?"

"Great bluff, Grandma," I said. "Brilliant. Very convincing."

When they actually did pull out of the driveway, I was outraged. "Traitors," I said aloud. In retaliation I grabbed my father's hundred-dollar bill and slammed out the front door.

I hadn't stepped inside Connie's Superette in three years. Breathlessly, I filled my cart with boxed desserts, canned potato sticks, whatever crossed my path. Wheeling past the delicatessen counter, the red center of a roast beef caught my eye. "I'll take that," I said.

Big Boy sucked his cigar without interest. "Quarter pound? Half?"