This Is My Life

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Don’t your parents criticize you?” she had asked Mitchell. “Don’t they make you self-conscious? I never heard of parents who didn’t.”

  After giving this a little thought, he shook his head. “Not really,” he said. “No, not that I can think of.”

  “But what about for being fat?” Erica said, and this was the first time she had used the word in his presence. She suddenly was terrified that he would be offended.

  “I was hoping you hadn’t noticed,” Mitchell said, his voice light and amused. Erica waited for him to go on. “It’s strange,” he said, “but I never thought of myself as fat when I was growing up. My parents stressed the fact that I was healthy. I weighed in at ten pounds when I was born, and this was something they were really proud of—as if I was a prize heifer in a 4-H show. There was never even a hint of criticism about my weight, I don’t think. Maybe there should have been,” he said. “It might have been a good idea for me to have been put on a diet. But my parents were true innocents. They still are. They believe that it’s healthy to eat clotted cream and big wedges of cheese and a lot of red meat. Just raise the cholesterol right up; create massive gridlock in the arteries. That’s their credo.”

  “I always thought that being fat was terrible, but sort of inevitable,” Erica said. “I just sat around waiting until the day I could wear my mother’s hand-me-downs: Capri pants with Spandex waistbands, blouses with darts. My sister Opal is thin. She’s like our father; he was painfully thin, I think. I can’t even imagine what that would be like. It’s like trying to imagine being the opposite sex.”

  “You really can’t imagine that—being male?” Mitchell asked.

  Erica shrugged. “Well, I can think to myself: Oh, this is what it would feel like to have hair all over my chest and this organ dangling between my legs, but beyond that—no, I can’t imagine it.” She looked at him. “Why?” she said. “Can you?”

  Mitchell thought for a moment. “All those interviews I do,” he said. “They really put you in another person’s life for a little while. I’ve been hearing women’s stories for months now; after a while something catches. Like the day you came in.”

  “What about it?” she asked, embarrassed but curious.

  “Well, I thought you were interesting, of course,” Mitchell said, “but not just as a specimen. I tried to imagine what your life was like. How you lived. What it was like being you.”

  “And?” she asked.

  “And,” Mitchell said slowly, “I wasn’t sure.” He became quiet now. “I’m still not,” he said. “I think you must have had some extraordinary experiences growing up. Not just with your mother being famous, although I’m sure that’s a part of it.” He paused. “I’m curious to know what that was like,” he said.

  She thought of how Jordan used to ask her questions like that, back in high school, and how she had never wanted to tell him anything. But now Erica didn’t mind Mitchell’s questions; in fact, it pleased her that he wanted to know more. She tried to arrange her words before speaking. What was there to say? she wondered. She could tell him about the walks she used to take with her mother down Central Park West, and the way people would point to Dottie every couple of blocks. She could tell him about the way you get used to sharing your mother with the world, because you have no choice. Mitchell would nod and listen carefully, but finally, she knew, he would not get it. People couldn’t just be opened up, window by window, like an Advent calendar. Suddenly, she didn’t know what to tell him.

  There ought to have been a club, Erica thought, for children of the famous. They could call themselves SOFA—the Society for the Offspring of Famous Adults—and they could all meet once a week in someone’s apartment and have long, cathartic rebirthing sessions. She imagined herself part of a circle, swaying back and forth, her arms around the two Kennedy children.

  Yes, let it all out, Caroline, everyone says. We know it’s been hard, we know it’s been rough. All those photographers around you like flies, and all those terrible collectible plates and calendars and beer steins with your father’s face on them. Let it out, Caroline, go back to your earliest memories, back to that green-velvet lawn with the fence all around, and your pony—Macaroni, wasn’t it?—and the way you ran in a little tulle dress across the lawn toward those great bending knees, those powerful waiting arms.

  Erica’s own problems would seem insignificant compared with these. When it is Erica’s turn to be rebirthed, Caroline and her brother stand up and stretch a bit, wander in boredom over to the bowl of nacho chips on the table, check the time, whisper in the hallway. But Erica perseveres; the others hold her, cradle her in their arms, and take her back as far as she can go.

  Imagine you are very small; Harry Belafonte’s daughter says, her voice low and soothing.

  Erica pictures herself at twelve, watching her mother on television. Dottie is telling a joke about raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night. Everyone in the audience is laughing so loud, it seems as though they may never stop. Now Erica starts to thrash, but they hold her down.

  Go with it, Erica, says one of the Truffaut brood.

  So she goes back even further, and now she is seven. Her mother isn’t famous yet, only fat; she is stepping daintily into a swimming pool, dipping one toe in first. How is it that she manages to be so big and still look dainty when she chooses? Dottie tucks her hair into a bathing cap: one of those caps exclusive to mothers, with huge, floppy rubber flowers clinging to it like lichen. Then she plunges into the water, parting it evenly with her big body. She swims with her head above the surface, like a sea elephant. As she moves, pool water flies out everywhere, and now Erica recoils.

  Keep going! shouts Margaret Mead’s daughter, her voice excited. Go back as far as you can!

  Finally Erica is back inside her mother’s great body, floating somewhere in the birth canal, pushing herself against the walls, her own body vibrating in time to the heartbeat. Now Erica starts to flail around more violently, and everyone moves in closer to help her. Even Caroline and John grow a little interested, and amble back over to the circle. I’m coming out! Erica cries, and then, as though she’s on a water slide at an amusement park, out she comes.

  Fifteen

  So it’s the eighties and everybody’s getting into shape,” Dottie began. “All you hear about are these Jane Fonda Workout videos. Well, I’ve decided to make my own video, and I’m calling it the Dottie Engels Pigout video.” She paused, looking around her. “There will be three different levels of difficulty,” she continued. “Piglet, Porker, and Porker Plus. The video will show you my very own technique for mastering the fine art of gluttony. All you need is a comfortable leotard, a floor mat, and an invitation to a bar mitzvah where there’s guaranteed to be smorgasbord and a Viennese table.”

  She went on for ten minutes more, and when the routine was finished, Dottie stood still for a moment in the middle of the large office. “Well, that’s it,” she said, twisting her hands together. “Just a few things I’ve been putting together.”

  Opal glanced to the side without turning her head. No one was moving or whispering or even scribbling notes on a pad. Everyone was just sitting still. Finally Joel Macklin stood up slowly, his swivel chair creaking. “All right then,” he said, and the effort in his voice was perceptible. “Thank you, Dottie. It’s a treat to hear you again. Ross, we’ll talk in a few days. Things are crazy around here. We’ve got the whole season lined up, and we’re swamped. But I’ll call you this week.”

  In the elevator going down, no one said a word. Opal felt terrible for having encouraged Dottie to audition for Rush Hour in the first place. Mia had made the preliminary overtures to the director, and then Ross had put in a few calls. Dottie had been extremely skeptical from the start. “Oh, what would they want with me?” she asked. “That show is for young people; they wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Don’t
you want to perform again?” Opal said. “Don’t you want to work before a live audience?” And finally Dottie had agreed, and had put together an entirely new routine. As soon as Dottie stood up there and started talking, Opal knew it would not work. She had been allowed into the audition, but within minutes she wished she had been banned from the room, and would not have to witness the living enactment of her mother’s failure.

  Now the elevator opened at the white lobby, and they all stepped out. “Look,” Ross tried, “let’s all go get some coffee and talk about this.” He leaned against the wall beside the bank of elevators. “I’m sure they would be willing to audition you again, Dottie. We can think about ways to make the routine crisper.”

  “A crisper is for lettuce,” Dottie said. “Please don’t patronize me.” She shook her head slowly. “It was one of life’s embarrassing moments,” she went on. “I wish you’d never encouraged me. God knows what they’re up there saying right now. I can just hear it: ‘She’s too campy. Too shticky. She’s better known for those late-night TV commercials; we might as well have on the guy who sells the Ginsu Knife, or that other guy from Wall Unit World.’”

  “Oh, fuck them,” Ross said quietly, and Opal and Dottie looked at him in mild surprise. “What I mean,” he said quickly, “is that I will get you something, Dottie. So they weren’t particularly impressed; so what? They don’t have a monopoly on comedy. I’ll make sure you get work somewhere; it’s been too long, and I want to see you back on TV. I promise you, I will find you something.”

  One of the elevator doors opened then and a new crowd flooded out and dispersed. “I should go,” Dottie said. “It’s going to be murder getting a cab. I forgot what it’s like, not having a car.”

  “No coffee?” Ross said, and Dottie shook her head. She leaned in and kissed him lightly. “I’ll find you something, Dottie,” he said again. “You’ll be in the city for a while?”

  She nodded. “Sy is going to Hong Kong tomorrow on business,” she said. “I’ll be home all the time. A war widow. Where else would I go? Dinner at the Rockefellers’? No, you know where to find me.”

  Back in the apartment, Dottie went immediately into her bedroom and sat down at the vanity. “I’ve got to get this garbage off my face,” she said. “I wasted all this Lancôme makeup on those rude people.” She saturated a cotton ball in witch hazel and ran it along her cheeks. The cotton came away a startling bright orange. “This is really hell on my skin,” she muttered.

  Opal looked at the makeup table. It was covered with a variety of bright bottles and jars and powders, but everything was lying in disarray, as though someone had broken in, and searched frantically for a certain rare shade of lip gloss.

  Dottie suddenly turned to her. “You never wear makeup, do you?” she asked.

  Opal shook her head.

  “You’d look nice,” Dottie said. She opened a paintbox of colors. “Do you want to try some on?” she asked.

  Opal had no interest in this, but somehow her mother seemed so depressed that Opal agreed. She sat down on the bench beside her.

  “Here,” Dottie said, and she tipped Opal’s face up toward her, as though they were about to kiss. “I’ll just use a light foundation, nothing heavy.” She seemed to be talking to herself. “Your skin is young; it doesn’t need to be steamrolled over, like mine does.”

  “Your skin is nice,” Opal murmured.

  “Yeah, yeah, as nice as the smoke of a thousand nightclubs,” said Dottie. She turned Opal’s head to the side. “That’s what being on the road does to you. And the lights; I wouldn’t be surprised if they cause sterility. I’ve read about that with fluorescent lights, anyway. Lucky for me I already had you girls before I went into the business.”

  “Oh, so lucky,” said Opal.

  “Don’t you think I’m happy I had you?” Dottie asked.

  “I guess,” said Opal. “Happier with me than Erica, anyway.”

  “I love your sister just as much,” Dottie said quickly. “It’s just that things are more problematic with her. She hasn’t been easy; she never was. Even as a baby, she was so colicky she kept us up all night.”

  “Was I an easy baby?” Opal asked, but she knew the answer and was just fishing.

  Dottie’s voice became soft and reflective and pleased. “Oh, yes,” she said. “The best.”

  The pads of her fingers pressed down gently onto Opal’s closed eyes as she applied smoke-gray eyeshadow. Dottie moved in close, and her breath came in soft releases against Opal’s neck. “I’m just going to even this out, nice and smooth,” Dottie was saying to herself.

  When she finished, Opal opened her eyes and stared into the big mirror, which was ringed with lights like a marquee. She saw herself and her mother at once, took them both in at the same moment, and for the first time in her life, she thought they looked alike. Makeup could steer you in any direction; Dottie had steered Opal right into her own arms, practically into her own image. Opal’s face had filled out; rose blusher brought her cheeks into rounded relief, and a light orange lipstick made her mouth look somehow alive and sort of frightening, like those puppets you make by curling your fist and painting lips on the side of your hand. Not quite human, but still somehow of the flesh. And she held herself like Dottie, she saw. They were both peering into the mirror anxiously now, heads leaning forward like two turtles waking up and looking around.

  “Do you like it?” Dottie asked.

  Opal thought of the first time she had seen Persona, in a Friday-night crowd at Yale, and how excited she had been by the big scene in which Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersen’s faces merge onscreen. “Yes,” she finally answered, but her voice sounded different; was it her mother’s voice now? Did she hear a laugh track somewhere in the back of her head, an audience prepared to laugh faithfully no matter what?

  “You know, men like makeup,” Dottie said.

  “What?” Opal pictured a public restroom full of businessmen, each of them dressed in a suit and leaning over a mirror at the sink, painstakingly applying eye shadow.

  “Yes,” Dottie went on. “It can look very sexy on a woman. I think you look terrific with a little color in your face.” She paused. “Do you ever think about dating?” she asked. “Is this an appropriate question for me to ask? We never talk about this; I just wondered. You don’t have to answer.”

  Opal and Dottie were still looking in the mirror, addressing each other’s reflection. It was hard to stop, to look away from the mirror at the real thing. Opal strained closer to gaze at her own face. The makeup base had been applied so thickly that she couldn’t see her pores; she seemed to have been cast in some kind of durable plastic. She ran a hand across her face and felt an involuntary shiver. What kind of man would want to touch such a surface? she wondered. What kind of man wanted to feel polyethylene instead of skin? She thought of her mother’s lovers over the years, men who waited for her in hotel rooms after a performance. Did Dottie take off all her makeup before she went to them? Did she come up to the room smelling freshly of cold cream and witch hazel, her face raw and clean and open? Or did she leave it on, because the men who liked Dottie liked the image of her they knew from television: the clown makeup, the bouffant sprayed stiff as doll hair? Opal had an unpleasant vision of her mother lying in a big hotel bed with one of these nameless men; the man was lapping at her face as though it were a plate of milk. Makeup tasted good, Opal realized. Her own lips, she thought, pressing them together, gave off a warm hint of fruit gum.

  “I’ve told you about Walt, the other intern,” Opal tried, her voice breaking a little in the middle. “He’s very nice, but I just don’t know. I can’t decide if he likes me or not.”

  “What’s not to like?” Dottie asked. “You’re a beautiful girl, Opal, and you’ve got brains, too. Maybe he’s threatened by you; that could be it. Sometimes men are threatened by accomplished women; believe me, I
know.”

  Opal paused. “You mean Dad?” she tried.

  Dottie turned to her. “No,” she said, “I wasn’t thinking of your father in particular, but he certainly fits the bill.”

  Opal remembered the way her father used to act—how whenever Dottie entered a local talent contest at a school gym, Norm would wait in the car. It was too much for him; he couldn’t take it. And it wasn’t just Dottie, either; it was Opal and Erica as well. She thought of the last day they had seen him, and how he had taken them to a nearby park for the afternoon. He hadn’t known what to do with them that day. Both girls were restless, and finally Norm had gotten angry, and said something about how they were both going to grow up to be fidgety.

  Now Dottie was looking at her. “I don’t think anyone is threatened by me,” Opal said. “You should see the people I go to school with: women with double-800s on their S.A.T.s, women who have already been flown to Sweden for physics festivals or something. There’s this one woman I know—Jeanette Kovelman—who just had her first novel accepted. Actually, it’s a trilogy; they’re going to publish it in a boxed set. She’s supposed to write like Virginia Woolf or something. And she’s nineteen, and beautiful, too. Believe me,” Opal said, “no one is threatened by me.”

  “Well,” said Dottie, “you know more about it than I do. But really, Opal, if any romance should happen to crop up, I’d love to be informed.” She paused. “I try not to be nosy,” she said, “but you never tell me anything about your life. I want to know things about you.”