by Meg Wolitzer
“Opal,” Erica said softly. “Let’s go. This isn’t the time.” She led her sister from the room, putting an arm around her shoulders, smelling the smoke in her hair.
There was nothing to be done. Dottie did not want to talk, and she was cold whenever they visited. “I’ll be in touch with you,” she said. “In the meantime, please let me be. I need to think.”
So they stopped visiting. They stayed at home and cooked extensive meals and watched large amounts of television, and they alluded to their mother in only the vaguest of terms. But both of them were uneasy, and would remain that way until Dottie called. They were still under her influence, Erica realized; even now, Dottie had the power to hold them fast.
On Sunday morning at seven the telephone woke them from their sleep, and Erica knew who it was as she staggered into the kitchen to answer. She picked up the receiver and held it for a moment before saying hello.
“This will be brief,” Dottie said, and Erica heard a click as Opal picked up another extension down the hall. “Are you both on?” Dottie asked.
“Yes,” they chorused in untried morning voices.
“Good,” said their mother. “I’m sorry if I woke you, but I needed to tell you my plans.” She paused. “I thought you should know that I’ll be leaving the hospital Tuesday,” she said. “There’s just been too much stress here, too many cooks. It’s time for me to get away.”
“Are you still angry?” Opal asked.
Erica could hear their mother exhale. “What do you think?” Dottie asked.
“I don’t really know,” said Opal. “I didn’t even do anything. I just called him because I didn’t know what else to do. You’re not being replaced.”
“Opal,” said Dottie. “Please. I don’t want to fight. I think you already know my position, and there isn’t anything more to say. I just wanted to tell you my plans.”
“So where are you going?” Erica asked. She imagined her mother wandering the globe in a fugue state, still wearing her hospital gown and slippers.
Dottie was silent. “I am going,” she finally said, “to that place. That fat farm in California, for lack of anything better to do.”
Erica was stunned. This should have been a moment of triumph. They had somehow done it, and now Dottie would be flying off to the Lexington Clinic, but it had happened in such a startling and joyless way, that no pleasure could be taken.
“Well,” Erica said, “that’s great.”
“Great,” Opal echoed.
“I will be in touch with you,” Dottie said. “I just need a while to be alone. If you could pack some clothes for me, and dump everything from my makeup table into a bag, I’d appreciate it. I’ll send someone over tomorrow to pick it all up.” In the background, Erica could hear the sound effects of the hospital starting its day. “Will you girls be okay?” Dottie asked, and Erica thought back to years before, when Dottie would call them from across the country to make sure they were all right. Yes, they had screeched over the wire, we’re fine, we’re fine.
Now neither of them would give her that reassurance. “Will you girls be okay?” Dottie asked again.
Let her panic, Erica thought. Let her get a little bit worried.
But Opal broke the moment. “We’ll manage,” she said.
It was the benediction that Dottie needed, and now she could be released. They said awkward goodbyes, and Dottie hung up. Erica held on for a moment more, and she heard breathing and realized that Opal was still on the line as well.
“Opal?” Erica asked tentatively.
“Hi.”
“You’re still here,” Erica said.
“So it seems,” said Opal.
Twenty-three
The postcards told them nothing. “Doing fine,” she would write, or “Getting along.” On the back of one there was a photograph of the Lexington Clinic, and Dottie had drawn a stick figure leaning out the window of the main building, shouting “Feed me!!!” That was the extent of what they knew.
In the beginning Opal thought of little else but her mother. She would come into the living room at night and expect to see the glow of Dottie’s cigarette punctuating the dark. She would expect to hear the blender whipping up a milkshake, or the distorted thunder of applause from one of Dottie’s old concert albums. The stillness repeatedly surprised her.
One afternoon Sy came over to pick up his clothes. “I’ve left a few things here,” he said, “and I think it’s time I got them. Who knows when I’ll be here again.” Opal sat on the bed as Sy shuffled through the rack of the bedroom closet, searching for what was his.
“This evening gown doesn’t seem to be mine,” he said. “No, red isn’t my color; this must be your mother’s.” Opal watched as he carefully laid three dark suits across his arm. Sy treated clothing tenderly, solicitously. “Your mother’s been dropping me a few postcards,” he said with his back to Opal. “She says she’s doing okay. I’m leaving her alone, as she’s asked,” he went on. “What else can I do?” He shook his head and turned around. “Well, I think I’ve got everything,” he said, and then he paused. “You and your sister doing okay over here?” he asked. “Rattling around in this big place?”
“We’re fine,” Opal said. “We’re getting along.”
“If you need anything,” said Sy, “I hope you’ll call me. I mean it, Opal.” He lifted the suits off his arm and slung them over his shoulder. “Well, I’ll be seeing you sometime soon, I hope,” he said, and he stepped forward to kiss her awkwardly on the cheek.
That was the way things had always been in this fractured family: People left, and you had no indication of when they would be back. Soon, soon, everyone said, and after their departure you had to trust that their sense of soon was the same as yours. Everyone took off, but somehow they all came back, in one form or another. You had to trust that this would happen, and that eventually you would get a sign. If you waited long enough, Dottie would wave to you from the stage of The Tonight Show, and Erica would miraculously appear behind the front door of a tenement building in the East Village. And finally, Norm Engels would get up the nerve to lock himself in his den on Coconut Court, away from his wife Ellen and all the trappings of his current life, and hesitantly pick up the phone.
But there were limits to what people could do, and what you could ask of them. For now, this was enough. Her father had actually made contact, had given her a sign, and because of it everything had been set into motion. It was like a Rube Goldberg cartoon: The daughter calls the father, which in turn makes the father call the mother, which finally sends the mother hurtling across the country.
Dottie had been gone three weeks now. For three weeks Opal wondered about her, felt slightly afraid of her, even from such a distance. But then winter began to loosen its hold on the city, and Opal felt herself growing distracted, itchy to be outside. All along Central Park West, fingers of ice were cracking off awnings and the branches of trees. Opal and Erica pushed open the windows of the apartment and let air travel through the rooms. One day Walt called and asked Opal to meet him in the park. “Come on,” he said. “I never see you anymore. You can’t hide out forever.”
So she went for a walk with him along the reservoir, while the first crop of springtime joggers ran by, snow cracking in puzzle pieces beneath their feet. “When are you coming back to the show?” Walt asked. “Joel has hired—get this—his daughter to do busywork. Her name’s Holly, spelled with a ‘y,’ although it should be an ‘i,’ and she’s supposedly studying Literature at a junior college. Her favorite writer is Charles M. Schulz. You better come back soon, Opal.”
Opal smiled. “I will,” she said. “I’m getting restless.”
“Too much family,” said Walt. They had stopped on the path for a moment. “You need a break from them,” he said. “I used to get all wrapped up in my parents’ lives. Once I actually tape-reco
rded one of their fights—I hid my cassette player under the couch—and later I played it back to them so they could hear how they sounded. They were furious, of course. But then I eventually realized it was their business, not mine. They would have fights, and I just wouldn’t listen.” He paused. “You’ve been in that apartment too much,” he said. “You need to get out of there for a while, I think.”
“How do you know what I need?” Opal asked lightly.
Walt tilted his head. “Just a guess,” he said. “That’s all.” He lifted the edge of her scarf and held it between his fingers; Opal didn’t breathe. They stood like that for a moment, until a jogger approached, and they automatically separated, letting him pass between them. Opal could hear the tinny scratch of music wafting from his headphones. “Sometime,” said Walt, “you’ll have to come uptown. See the way the other half lives. Three guys in a roach motel.”
She couldn’t say a word, but just nodded to everything he said. They continued to walk, their gloved hands linked now. So this was the way it began, Opal thought. First comfort, then tension, then comfort again. Like a creature waking up from a deep sleep and arching, then settling back down to sleep some more. You were with someone because you wanted to be—not because it was arranged, or because, like your mother and father, you were desperate. She thought of her parents getting married in a synagogue in Brooklyn. In the middle of the ceremony, they must certainly have looked at each other in disbelief. This is what it comes down to, Dottie must have thought, as the cantor sang and the ring was yoked onto her finger.
—
Opal returned to Rush Hour the following week, and fell quickly and gratefully back into her old routine. The only difference was Walt. When he passed her in the hall now, he let his hand bang dully, almost accidentally, against her hip, and they shared a follow-up glance. She and Walt had both been invited to the Friday-night wrap party—Mia’s doing, Opal was certain—and until Friday, it seemed that they were going to maintain a certain tense distance. Walt’s hand rested lightly on the plane of her hip, and then he moved on, calling to someone farther down the hall.
It was a relief to leave the apartment in the morning, to have a mission every day. Opal once again found herself stationed in front of the Xerox machine; sometimes she didn’t even close the flap on top, but instead let the stark green light bathe her hands and face, temporarily blinding her. In the background she could hear props being wheeled onto the soundstage, and doors slamming up and down a corridor, and one of the comedians practicing a Tarzan yell for Friday’s show. Her first day back, Joel Macklin and one of the casting agents had asked after Dottie’s health, had said they had heard Dottie was out of the hospital, and wondered how she was getting along. Opal had nodded and muttered that Dottie was progressing well; she couldn’t tell them that she really didn’t know, that the only information she had came from three brief and cryptic postcards.
They had held her place for her on the show, and although she was pleased, Walt told her not to be too thankful. “They don’t even pay us,” he said. “They’re lucky to have you.” But she couldn’t get over the fact that there had been a great upheaval—a hurricane, almost—and everything that had been mercilessly slammed around had somehow settled back down to earth, with little visible damage. Her job was waiting, and Walt was waiting, and in September there would be a room for her up at Yale. All she had to do was write a letter to the Dean, asking to be readmitted, and tell him that she now understood the error of her ways.
But she wouldn’t have spent last semester any other way; she still would have sat up late at night, monitoring her mother’s commercials. Back then, Dottie needed a guardian, or at least a willing audience: someone to observe her as she flew by in that final burst of color. The commercials were still on the air, although much less frequently now. Sometimes Opal and Erica would come across one late at night, and they would watch it silently, neither commenting nor turning away. The commercials were a reminder, telling them that even if Dottie wasn’t here, she was still somewhere out there in the world.
“Do you think she’s still angry?” Opal asked one night. She and Erica were lying across Dottie’s bed, watching. Their mother waltzed by in pink chiffon.
Erica shrugged. “Oh, she always jumps to extremes,” she said. “That’s the way she lives. God,” she said. “Look at that.”
“The thing is,” Opal said, “I don’t even think I did anything wrong. I just started writing to him because I was curious.” She paused. “Haven’t you ever been?” she asked.
“I’ve been curious,” Erica said slowly, “but it was never a pressing need. Families always seem to me like this weird accident.”
“What do you mean?” Opal asked.
“I don’t know,” said Erica. She gestured with both hands, fingers splayed. “It’s almost as if a bunch of people who have absolutely no reason to be together all drew straws and somehow wound up on the same commune.” On the screen, Dottie twirled in slow motion, her dress belling out around her waist. “It was sort of like that with Jordan,” Erica said. “Sometimes I would look over at him and he would have a nosebleed from doing coke. There would be a little piece of tissue hanging out of his nose, and I would think: Who is this person?”
“So that’s why you left, because you couldn’t take it anymore?” Opal asked, and Erica nodded. “Like Mom,” Opal added.
Erica didn’t answer. Opal tried to imagine how her mother had finally gathered the nerve to leave. Maybe Dottie had looked around at the furnishings of the life she had painstakingly set up with Norm Engels, and wondered how she had arrived here, and how she might possibly get out. “Do you remember the last time we saw him?” Opal asked.
“Yes, but I can’t believe you do,” Erica said. “You were so little.”
Opal nodded. “We went to that park near Aunt Harriet’s, and we were really restless and wouldn’t sit still. He told us we would grow up to be fidgety women. Do you remember?”
A slow smile formed on Erica’s face. “Oh, Opal,” she said, her voice subdued, “was that what you thought?” She clapped her hands together. “You heard it wrong,” she said. “He said we would grow up to be frigid women, not fidgety women.”
Opal flushed. He had actually said that? She had remembered it wrong all these years, and now she was stunned. “But that’s even worse,” Opal finally said. “I mean, what a thing to say. Who would say something like that?”
Erica looked at her. “Anyone,” she said simply. “People will say anything.” As she spoke, her face was calm as a Buddha, as though she herself had never been angry, had never stormed through the apartment with her hair lashing her face, smelling of pot and patchouli and strawberry shampoo, hating the terrible commune she had been born into.
But now Erica was back, and she moved easily among all the things she had once hated; now she actually lay across her mother’s bed. She and Opal talked of their father as though he were not a terrible man, but instead someone who had been overwhelmed by everything around him: his huge wife who filled most of the bed at night, and his two girls who carried their Barbie Dreamhouses with them everywhere, like businessmen clutching attachés. It was too much, too much, and Norm Engels was not one for excess. He was Mr. Sprat, he was the Hollow Man, and he belonged somewhere else: down in Florida with his wife Ellen, lost in whatever life he had chosen for himself. She remembered that she had not even spoken to him, had not heard his voice.
“Opal,” Erica said. “Are you all right?”
On the television now, Dottie Engels paused for a moment and directed a long wink at her daughters.
—
The wrap party was held at the Tet Offensive, a new club in Tribeca that in all likelihood would have the life span of a butterfly. The evening’s show had not been one of the season’s strongest; the guest stars were a duo of aging, skeletal British rock stars who doubled over their guitars
as though in severe abdominal pain. The whole cast and some of the staff headed downtown in waiting limousines. Opal and Walt took the subway together, slipping tokens into adjacent turnstiles and walking out onto the brightly lit platform.
“Look,” Walt said, “there’s almost no one here.”
Opal looked around the station. Two women sat motionless all the way down at the other end, and a man lay sleeping across a bench. The only real sign of life came from behind the blue glass of the token booth, where a man nodded his head over a pile of money. She and Walt stood bundled up in the middle of the platform, and there was an awkwardness suddenly; Opal prayed for the train to come. When it did, they stepped into a nearly empty car and sat with their legs lightly touching. Walt, she saw, was smiling and looking away.
“What kind of people,” he asked, “would agree to put their names on ads in subway cars as hemorrhoid sufferers?” He pointed. “If I were Mrs. Rita Velásquez, I would be embarrassed to show my face in public ever again. I mean, now everyone knows.”
“Maybe she’s an exhibitionist,” Opal said.
“Are you?” Walt asked.
Opal shook her head, embarrassed. They sat in silence for the rest of the ride. Over the loudspeaker, the conductor spoke some garbled words with a certain amount of urgency, and the train came to a resolute stop between stations. Walt slipped his arm through hers and continued to read and deconstruct the ads across the way.
When they finally arrived at the Tet, as everyone seemed to call it, they flashed their invitations at the door and walked past an eager and self-conscious crowd of hopefuls straining behind rope. Walt walked slightly ahead of Opal, still holding her hand, and he led her down an aggressively dark hallway lined with a tangle of jungle foliage.
The club itself was the size of a small stadium, with a lacquered dance floor lit by revolving lights. “Come on,” Walt said, and they descended a set of shallow steps until they arrived at the dance floor, where the music began to encircle them, percussive and overwhelming. Across the room she could see Stevie Confino dancing with a young blond woman in a checkerboard dress, and nearby Mia and Lynn were doing precise Egyptian-style steps, heads and arms moving side to side, both of them concentrating on each other without ever touching. In the corner of the floor the two legendary rock stars were standing spindle-tall and motionless. The party was just gearing up; in` an hour it would burst open into something else entirely.
