This Is My Life

by Meg Wolitzer

  Opal sat smoking in the bedroom, and she realized that she was actually talking herself into agreeing with her mother’s decision, giving Dottie permission to let go. But this was all wrong; Opal needed to calm down a little, get her bearings. She reached across the bed to where the remote control lay, and she hit the power.

  Immediately a medical drama sprang to the screen. “Is Rick going to be all right, Doctor?” a young woman was asking. She was dressed in elephant bell bottoms and a headband; this was clearly a Sixties rerun.

  The doctor opened the door and let Katrina into the hospital room, where her boyfriend lay on a bed, his arms and legs restrained by leather cuffs. He had apparently wigged out on LSD, and was now talking like a madman, or a mystic.

  Even in the midst of everything, television still went on. What had Opal expected, that all the channels would have a day of silence out of respect for Dottie Engels? That they would all broadcast the static pattern that came onscreen at the end of a programming day, and all you would be able to hear was the flat, steady hum that told you there was nothing on, that the world was asleep, and that you ought to be, too?

  This was what death did to you, or the possibility of death: It made you long for some stasis, for maybe just a measly fifteen minutes’ worth, in which the whole world might slow to a wobbly standstill like a child’s top.

  Opal opened the drawer of her mother’s night table. She found random, unconnected items inside: emery boards, a checkbook, a spool of dental floss. The smallest, most benign items were the worst to look at now; they hammered home the reminder that this person’s life was made up entirely of daily acts: a life strung together on dental floss as much as anything else. Opal climbed off the bed and went to her mother’s closet. She flung open the door and snapped on the overhead light, then she began rooting around as though she were looking for one particular item, when in fact she was looking for nothing at all. She let herself forage through Dottie’s clothing, and all of it smelled shockingly familiar, as though Dottie herself were still inside each dress, her body warming and filling it.

  Opal buried her head in the rack. Down below, she saw, were the shoes, lined up in a homely row. Her mother had extremely wide feet, EEE width; her shoes looked as though they were straining at the sides, gaping open like the mouths of baby birds. Dottie had tottered around onstage on wide women’s pumps with narrow spiked heels, all her weight resting on two skinny pivots. Dr. Hammer had not gotten over how much Dottie weighed, and how no one had done anything about it.

  Suddenly Opal was ashamed. But what should she have done? Put one of those horrible gag tape recorders in the refrigerator, so when Dottie pulled open the door, the refrigerator would seem to be speaking to her, saying: You eat too much, fatso! Close me, I’m freezing! Or maybe she could have sat her mother down in the den and said, “We’re all worried about you, Mom. You simply must lose weight.” This would have been reasonable, and yet it had never once occurred to Opal. Her mother was simply what she was, the sum of all those pounds, and always had been. Opal remembered the way Dottie used to hold her, years ago, taking her up on her wide lap, and how Opal had felt a flood of pleasure every time.

  Once, a long time ago, when Opal was ten or eleven, she had sat on her mother’s lap on network television, in front of millions of viewers. It was a Christmas special, and at the very end of the show, Opal, dressed in a white dress with crackling crinoline beneath, had been instructed to walk across the stage, into the hard gloss of the television lights.

  Dottie was dressed as Santa Claus, and Opal walked right toward her, moving stiffly. She was aware of each careful, measured step—straight-legged as a palace guard, making sure that she would not skid in her buffed patent leathers. All the way across the stage Dottie waited, dressed in a red flannel Santa outfit and authentic-looking beard. Opal went to her and climbed onto her lap, as they had rehearsed twice that afternoon. Even from under the thick flannel she could smell her mother’s perfume.

  Opal had one line of dialogue to say; the director had instructed her to wait until all the applause died down, until even the stray wintertime coughers were quiet. “Just take your time,” the director had said. “We have all the time in the world.”

  So when everyone was silent, Opal gathered a breath, looked into Dottie’s eyes, and said her one line: “Mom, when are you going to help me with my homework?”

  At this, the audience broke into tremendous laughter. “Well,” Dottie called out, “as you can see, I’m needed at home, but I hope you’ve had as much fun tonight as I have! Thank you, everybody, for making this a holiday to remember. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

  Then the orchestra began to play, and a bevy of Santa’s Helpers did cartwheels across the stage, and Opal gripped the edges of her mother’s flowing white beard, holding on for dear life.

  Twenty

  The first thing Erica noticed was his eyebrows. “What have you done?” she asked when she walked in. “You look like Catwoman.” Jordan’s eyebrows had for some reason been tweezed down to scraggly, arching lines. It was early evening, the night of Dottie’s heart attack, and Erica had just gotten home from the hospital. All she wanted now was dinner—a plate of something steaming and aromatic, which hadn’t come out of a machine—but she was startled when she saw Jordan. He was sitting on the living room couch, rolling a joint, and he looked a bit like a transvestite. Erica took off her coat, still staring at him.

  Jordan shrugged. “I had a little accident,” he said, and he looked embarrased. “You know yesterday I was freebasing for the first time, and I cooked the baking soda with the cocaine, like you’re supposed to—I mean, I had a detailed recipe—and then when it was all dried and ready, I lit a pipe of it, and it sort of exploded in my face. It’s a miracle I wasn’t hurt; the flame just jumped up and burned my eyebrows, but the skin was barely touched. I mean it hurt a little, but not really bad. So I tried to even them out with a tweezer, and they came out like this.”

  Erica stood looking at him, shaking her head slowly. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “A little witch hazel feels good,” Jordan said. “Maybe you could pick some more up when you go out.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Erica said, but she was too tired to elaborate. She went into the kitchen and opened a package of pasta, and she set a pot of water to boil. She was looking for simple tasks to occupy her, so she would not have to think. The hands could move and the mind could rest.

  From the living room, Jordan called, “So what’s with your mother?”

  The question pierced her. She didn’t want to answer; she didn’t even know that she could. If Erica suddenly started to cry, Jordan would be shocked. He had never seen her cry, and he would not get it. “You never see her, as it is,” he would say, in an attempt at solace. But Erica didn’t cry, and instead she just sat listening to the hiss of the gas jets. Finally she called back to Jordan, “She’s alive, my mother’s alive, but she’s still very sick.” Then Erica dropped a fistful of spaghetti into the pot, and she waited until the sticks bent in the heat of the water. She wanted to eat her dinner alone, to find a quiet place in the apartment where she could sit and eat and not think about Jordan and their life together. She didn’t want to look at his arched, Tallulah Bankhead eyebrows, or hear him recite selections from Brautigan or Vonnegut.

  Erica carried her bowl of spaghetti up into the loft, and sat there with the lights off. The air was close up there, and smelled slightly medicinal. If she were a normal person, she knew, then there would be someone she could call to talk to about Dottie. She could even let her voice go all weak and then split with emotion down the middle. The friend would listen and respond appropriately, and then say, “Look, Erica, I’m getting into a cab and coming over to see you now. We’ll go out for coffee; we’ll do something. Don’t argue.”

  She realized that she had never had any real
women friends. Maybe there was a book in this: Women Who Hate Women, it could be called, and Erica could go on television talk shows to publicize it. Of course, she would have to change her image, sort of tone it up a bit. Very few of those women who wrote self-help bestsellers were actually glamorous; instead, they were sometimes plain, homely, or overweight women who had been treated badly their entire lives, and who finally gathered enough courage to write about it with a vengeance. And then they went on a diet, got an expensive Egyptian-style haircut, bought big hoop earrings and an electric-blue dress with a big bow at the throat, and went on national television.

  I could do that, Erica thought, twirling her fork in her dish. Women, she would say to the audience, I grew up in a household of women, and I lacked a father figure, so when it came time for me to choose a mate, I selected one who treated me badly, who didn’t appreciate my womanhood.

  But that was nonsense. She didn’t think that Jordan treated her badly because she was a woman; he didn’t treat anyone well; he didn’t know how to talk to adults, or listen to them, and he couldn’t look anyone straight in the eye. It was as though Jordan possessed a little boy’s filthy, snickering secret, but had long ago forgotten what the secret was, and only the mannerisms remained. He was happiest when he was around his teenage customers; only then did he seem to come awake.

  Every day now Erica and Opal went to the hospital and took turns sitting in their mother’s room, watching her shift and sigh in the bed. On the third day, after Dr. Hammer told Dottie that she would die unless she lost a drastic amount of weight, Erica went home and wanted nothing more than to be left alone. She hoped that Jordan would be occupied with his chopping and cutting all night, so that she wouldn’t have to talk to him. But at seven o’clock the buzzer rang and the teenagers returned. They made a few mocking comments about his eyebrows, but when they realized he was truly upset, they let up. Erica heard all of this from the loft, where she lay drowsing. She didn’t even need to see the scene to know what was going on. It was Mandy and Parker and a friend of theirs named Frodo, who had recently been kicked out of Headley when quaaludes were found in his paintbox in art class.

  “They’re sending me off to New Hampshire to a school where there are ‘other people like me,’” she heard Frodo say. “Little do they know there are ‘other people like me’ right here at Headley.”

  “Here’s to Headley,” Jordan said, and Erica imagined that they must be lifting up cut pieces of Flexi-Straws to make a toast. Then they broke into the Headley School song, which Erica hadn’t heard in years. Jordan’s voice was the strongest, and he led the chorus of voices:

  “As the years go by and our life marches on

  There is one place that we’ll remember

  As we gaze ahead to our future bright and bold,

  We think back to each September . . .”

  Erica listened as they all hurried through the phrase “future bright and bold,” which never quite fit into the line. She could actually hear emotion in Jordan’s voice; there seemed to be a slight tremolo as he sang. She saw him transforming, before everybody’s eyes, into a chanteuse; he already had the eyebrows, he just needed the dress, something off the shoulder. Jordan and his customers were sitting in the living room around the coffee table, where the old, scratched mirror was having a razor drawn along its surface. They would be there for hours, she knew, endlessly talking. What did they even talk about? she wondered, for she hadn’t been able to talk to Jordan for months. The last good conversation she had had, she realized, was with Mitchell Block, whom she missed terribly.

  Erica rolled over in the bed, drew herself up with her legs tucked into her chest, a position she used to assume during bomb drills at school. If she could see Mitchell now, she would tell him many things: She would describe the day and night at the hospital, down to all the smallest details—how the hallway had smelled of death and ammonia and something that was supposed to be chicken française. She would talk about how it had been, seeing Opal, and finally how Dottie had looked in that room full of flowers. She would tell him how her mother wanted to die.

  Mitchell, who had been reading all day in the library, would nod slowly, his intelligent eyes taking everything in. He would hold her and rock her, and tell her there was hope still, that it was possible to think this through. Then he would tell her hopeful stories about his family in Wisconsin. Every fall, he would tell her, they went to a big Cheesefest, and during the ride back, the trunk packed with cheddars in varying degrees of sharpness, they would all sing songs and lean against each other and renew their familial love. Love could regenerate, he would say; it could grow like the arm of a starfish.

  But she couldn’t call him, she knew. It would only start things up again, and that was the last thing she needed. Erica felt a clean whistle of pain inside her. She had always imagined herself to be greedy, a constant consumer who took up too much space in the universe, but now it seemed possible that all along she had been denied so much: Could both versions be true? It was like stuffing yourself with carbohydrates; some urges were satisfied, but even when you could eat no more, you still felt hollow in some basic way. She thought of those Ethiopian babies who die even after they’re rescued and given nutrients, because their bellies can’t take it, it’s too late, it’s all wrong. They swell up and burst; they spontaneously combust.

  My mother has spontaneously combusted, Erica thought. Dottie had been filled with so much, but most of it was garbage: all those acres of layered desserts, those pots of oleaginous eye makeup and lip gloss, those garish hotel rooms with their sunken tubs and round beds and room service, and, finally, all those hours of terrible, self-hating jokes. Night after night in the dark Dottie had stood under a spotlight and reeled off a catalog of grotesqueries, and the audience had egged her on.

  “If you’re fat and you’re a woman,” Dottie had often said, “then you’d better be funny.” But Erica hadn’t been funny; instead she’d been one of those moony, serious, do-gooder girls, although she secretly knew she possessed a cold heart. Erica had read somewhere that Florence Nightingale was supposed to have been a terrible person, a really compassionless nurse who went about her work efficiently, but who instilled fear in the hearts of her charges. It wasn’t that Erica lacked the capacity to love; she loved Mitchell, she realized, in some deep, unyielding way, but it did her no good.

  From the next room came the sound of voices again, rising up in an unsteady medley of Sixties hits. Jordan and Mandy were singing that song about the carpenter and the lady. His voice seemed to get lost under Mandy’s wispy, delicate soprano. Suddenly the song ended because they had run out of words. There was some discussion, and then they broke into a version of “Both Sides Now.” Suddenly the others joined in, and they were tonelessly singing the one song that all of them knew, slogging their way through the lyrics, as though it were a college fight song.

  The singing would go on all night, if she let it. She could just lie up here in the loft, utterly forgotten, and wait until the others finally went home and Jordan reluctantly climbed the ladder. Erica sat up in bed, her head slightly grazing the ceiling. She peered out into the living room, and could see the tops of everybody’s heads. They were all sitting on the floor, and Jordan, she saw, had his arm looped around one of the girls, and she was leaning against him companionably. It was Parker, Erica saw, leaning forward to get a better look, and she knew that they must have sat like this before. It seemed probable that they had a sexual relationship, although she couldn’t imagine Jordan working himself up anymore into a real state of passion. Over the past winter, his attention span had been considerably shortened, snapped off sharply at the end.

  Watching them, Erica felt a dull wave of surprise, but it transformed quickly into something resembling relief. She thought of Dottie, alone in her hospital room, sleeping uneasily in that strange place. Then she thought of Opal, alone in the apartment they had once shared. Erica was
tired, but she climbed down from the bed and got dressed in the darkness, leaning against the ladder as she laced up her shoes. She had to stand self-consciously in the living room for a few seconds before anyone noticed her. When they did, they all looked up impassively.

  Jordan let his arm drop casually from Parker’s shoulder. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Can I talk to you?” Erica said.

  Jordan rose slowly, like an old man, and followed her into the kitchen. “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  “You don’t know what I think,” Erica said. “I’m leaving. And don’t flatter yourself why. It has nothing to do with that girl in there.”

  “Then what?” he demanded. “Are you upset about your mother? Is that it?”

  Erica paused; she wanted to laugh. How could he miss everything that went on? How could he not know a thing about the world? “Yes, I’m upset about my mother,” she said, “but that’s not it.” She felt herself growing giddy. “It’s because of your eyebrows,” she said. “That’s it. I’m afraid you’re prettier than I am now.”

  “Oh, very funny,” Jordan said. He looked beyond her into the living room, where someone must have been signaling to him. “Do what you want, Erica,” was all he said, and it was enough of a send-off; it was all she needed to leave.

  When she had slammed out the door, she stood in the hall for a second, listening. She should have made a clean exit, she knew, and just kept going down to the bottom and out the front door, but she was much too curious. She stood for a moment with her ear against the apartment door. First there were mumbled voices, nothing she could make out, and then silence. And then apparently the discussion about her had ended, for Jordan burst forth with the opening lines of “Teach Your Children,” and everyone joined in.