This Is My Life

by Meg Wolitzer

  Tonight Danny Bloom, who was doing a three-day baby-sitting stint, came out of the den and asked if they needed anything. He was a thin man in his late twenties, with a body like a piece of bent wire. His humor, said their mother, was very physical. He moved around a lot onstage at the Laff House, where she had discovered him.

  “You two doing okay out there?” Danny asked them.

  “Yes,” Opal and Erica chorused. “We’re fine.”

  “Well then, I think I’ll keep practicing,” he said. “I’ll come out again in time for the show. She said she’s doing all new material tonight.”

  When he had disappeared down the hall, Erica and Opal boiled water for wagon-wheel pasta and slathered Fluff on crackers. They ate in silence, and when they were through they flipped through their homework for a while, dreamily shuffling pages. Illustrations of colonial life drifted by; women in long dresses sat at butter churns, backs straight, hands busy. Erica and Opal looked up from their homework every few minutes, checking the clock. At eleven-twenty Erica carried in the television set, and Opal pulled the swivel chairs up close to the screen. Together in the kitchen with the heat from the stove and the soft, granular light of the television, they waited for their mother to appear.

  Opal watched the long loop of commercials as though it were an opening act. It was strange; you barely had to focus on the commercials, and yet you still knew what they wanted you to buy. Opal loved television and watched as much of it as she could. You had to watch the shows closely, but during the commercials you could just let your thoughts fall around you while the music jumped and the coffee spilled and the bottle of detergent came to life and danced.

  Opal swiveled her chair in time to the music and thought of all the things that crowded around her. She thought of the people she worshipped in the world: her mother, and her sister, and the new art teacher, Miss Hong. A few years before, she had worshipped Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees. She thought she had been shrewd about loving Mickey; everyone else loved Davy Jones, and the chances of ever getting him were slim, at best. More realistic to go for Mickey, she reasoned, with his elastic face and squinting eyes. No one else took Mickey seriously; they all went for the easy charms of Davy: the soft British accent, the tender skin. Opal remained patient, did not make a big issue out of her theory. She thought of Mickey constantly, wondered what time of day it was in California and whether he grew discouraged by all the letters Davy received. But as the months passed, and the flurry died down, Opal thought of him less, and somehow her love for him was unmoored. It had been her decision; she had not had to be forcibly restrained, like some older girls at school who tried to sneak into hotel rooms or backstage at the Westbury Music Fair. She had restrained herself, and suddenly she was way past the whole thing.

  Everything kept changing as quickly as a film strip, frame after choppy frame. You loved someone and then you didn’t, and then you loved someone else. You wept over a spider’s death when you were eight, and a few years later you read that same death scene again with a cool, critical eye. You thought of ways in which E. B. White might have made the scene more true to life; you thought of writing to tell him.

  There were very few things in the world that stayed hinged to you for too long. Each year there was a new teacher at the front of the room, a new arrangement of chairs and desks, a new pale color slapped over the walls around you. Every class had a classroom pet: a guinea pig that drowsed in its window cage while you traced the outlines of the seven continents. You spent a whole year of your life caring for this animal, stroking its nervous fur and sliding in trays of pellets, and when the end of the year came, the animal was left back in the second grade while you kept moving up. You all knew that there would be another animal awaiting you in the third grade: a parallel rodent needing stroking and holding and water and food.

  Now the commercials ended, and the theme music began, and suddenly Danny Bloom raced into the kitchen and perched on the countertop behind Opal. First there was the monologue, and a little joking around, and then Opal’s mother was brought onstage. Sitting between Johnny and Ed, with the skyline tableau stretched out behind her, she gestured broadly and flooded the entire screen. In that moment the men disappeared, were swallowed up, and even the skyline was eclipsed. All that remained was an ocean of dotted fabric—her mother’s fashion trademark—and the helpless laughter of the studio audience. They kept laughing and didn’t show signs of ever stopping. This is what is meant by “convulsive laughter,” Opal thought.

  “I’m glad she’s on first tonight,” Erica said. “Not like last time when that woman from Sea World was on with her animals, and Mom got four minutes.”

  Things had changed since then, they acknowledged. Their mother was now allowed to come on first and ease into the still-cold chair by the desk. She was frantic tonight; she was huge and luminous. My mother the moon, Opal thought. My mother the explosion. Opal could not take her eyes off her mother. She was madly in love with her, as was half the country. Everyone wanted to meet her, talk to her, somehow nudge up against her.

  “It’s worse in California,” Opal’s mother had said. “Out there, everyone’s lying in wait with their autograph books. They expect to see celebrities. They come right up and touch you; it’s like a petting zoo.” But Opal knew her mother wasn’t significantly upset by this; it was clear that in some ways she took pleasure from the touch of strangers. Opal imagined her mother gliding down a street in Los Angeles under an archway of palm trees, while all around her, hands reached out to brush her cheek, her hair, the edge of a dotted sleeve.

  Opal had not yet been to California. “I want you girls to stay in New York for now,” her mother said, “and have as normal a life as possible. I don’t want you to start missing a lot of school and falling behind. I know the situation isn’t ideal, but the babysitters take good care of you, and I’m only a phone call away.”

  Opal begged to be allowed to go with her, but the answer was always the same. “Soon,” she was told. “I promise you, soon.”

  But when, exactly, was “soon”? The word was used to represent any given period of time; it was fluid and could change shape freely.

  “I will be back from L.A. soon,” her mother would say as she stood before her closet, selecting dresses from the rack with the help of her assistant, Cynthia, who always leaned toward the loudest, most spangle-dipped items. Then a week or two might go by, during which Opal had her hair braided systematically each morning and her lunch packed by a live-in baby-sitter. Soon, soon, came the voice, this time over the telephone, but even long-distance it was as soothing and persuasive as a hypnotist’s.

  Finally her mother would return. It might be winter in New York City, with snow gathered in ragged drifts, but the limousine would pull up at the curb and the doorman would fly out to greet her, and she would emerge a dusty, mottled, coastal pink, her nose peeling, her suitcase swollen with citrus fruit. California seemed a remote, tropical island, having little to do with anything that went on here, in New York City, where the snow fell for days, and the world seemed locked permanently into winter. In California, Opal imagined, you were served crescents of papaya on a terrace overlooking the water, and speed-shutter cameras were always hissing at you like locusts. Opal would go there soon, she knew. But “soon” kept unraveling with no end in sight.

  There were times, during that first year of fame, when her mother was home for weeks on end, either resting or playing a series of club dates in the city. “I really prefer it here,” she would say as she got ready to go out for an evening in New York. “The audiences are much more savvy. They laugh with discrimination. Out in L.A., you get the feeling that there’s a laugh track going. Everyone’s so desperate to have a good time; you could get up there and read a manual about oral hygiene and they would laugh. No, this is where I want you girls to live, not out there in Disneyland.”

  Sometimes she would sit down for a moment on the
bed between her two daughters. “I hope I’m doing the right thing,” she would say. “Who knows? Maybe if God had really wanted me to be a comedienne, He would have named me Shecky.”

  Opal and Erica looked at each other and laughed politely. They had reached a point at which they usually understood when their mother was making a joke and were able to respond fairly quickly. But sometimes Opal wasn’t even sure whether her mother was really funny or not; she’d heard her jokes too many times. At home her mother practiced in the bedroom.

  “You girls be my audience,” she said. Opal and Erica sat solemnly on the edge of the bed and listened as she ran through her act. She usually opened with some rueful comments about her size. “I do have a weight problem,” she said, looking down at herself and shaking her head. Then she looked up suddenly. “I just can’t wait for dinner!”

  Opal thought about this, and understood that her mother was making a little pun. She chuckled politely.

  “Women’s lib isn’t so easy on large women,” her mother went on. “I mean, I tried to burn my bra, and the neighbors called the fire department. It took hours to put it out. One of the firemen said to me, ‘I don’t know what kind of campfire you were making, lady, but those are the biggest marshmallows I’ve ever seen!’”

  Opal and Erica laughed again, hesitantly. Their laughter had a familiar, rolling burble to it, like a water cooler. Opal was aware that there were probably some nuances she was missing, certain inflections that seemed to point to the approximate region of humor, although the particular meaning was lost on her. She recognized her own ignorance, her limits in the presence of this huge, wonderful mother. Opal was a knobby girl, especially small for her age. “My little ectomorph,” her mother sometimes called her, touching the hair on the back of Opal’s neck, making her arch and settle like a cat.

  She preferred it when her mother did parodies of songs from musicals, which she had expressly rewritten for her act. Onstage she was accompanied by a piano, bass, and drums, but here in the bedroom, her voice had to survive on its own. She didn’t have a brassy voice, as one might have imagined, but instead she sang in a girlish soprano, aiming tremulously for the top notes the way someone might reach for a delicate object on a high shelf.

  “Okay, girls,” she would say. “Now I’m going to do something from West Side Story. This one is to the tune of a song called ‘Maria.’ You have to know the song, I guess, but just bear with me.” She paused, pulled at the throat of her turtleneck sweater, and began to sing:

  “The most beautiful sound I ever heard/Pastrami/Pastrami, pastrami, pastrami/Say it loud and there’s a carving knife carving/Say it soft, because I’m suddenly starving/Pastrami/I’ve just eaten a pound of pastrami . . .” She stopped singing and clutched at her stomach, rolling her eyes around. Opal was the first to laugh, and Erica followed.

  “Oh good, you like that one,” said her mother. “I’m glad. Here’s another.” She cleared her throat and sang. “There’s no blintzes like roe blintzes, like no blintzes I know . . .”

  After the songs she began to do characters, starting first with her most popular one, Mrs. Pummelman, then doing Baby Fifi, and finally Isadora Dumpster. She poked fun at her own weight problem, in the hopes, she often said, of having it cease to be a delicate subject. It was not this way with most overweight people. Opal thought of Debby Nadler at school, whose mother was a large, gentle ceramicist. Mrs. Nadler was constantly at work in her studio, standing over the wavy heat of a kiln, looking flushed and serious in a red smock. Her heaviness was just another part of her, along with her talent and her kindness and her breathy voice. It was a big package that you couldn’t split up; it was all or nothing. And then there was Miss Coombs, the school nurse, whose wide, easy presence was welcome when you were throwing up or had strep throat and had to be sent home. Miss Coombs laid you down on a narrow cot and hovered above you, blocking out the stark glare of the room, and she placed a washcloth over your forehead, smoothing its edges with her heavy hands. Both Mrs. Nadler and Miss Coombs carried their weight around without referring to it all the time, and everyone understood that it would have been wrong to make fun of it, or even mention it. You couldn’t make fun of someone’s fat mother—the mother had to make fun of herself, like Opal’s did—but on the other hand you could go up to another girl at school and calmly say, “You’re ugly, no offense.” The remark would blaze inside that girl forever.

  Nobody ever said this kind of thing to Opal. She was popular already, good in gym, and quick at spelling. There was a small amount of cruelty in her, which surfaced at odd times and always surprised everyone, especially her. It sprang from nowhere, painlessly, like a nighttime nosebleed. She found herself occasionally joining in with a few others in the coat room at the end of the day and forming a tight ring around some unfortunate girl. Once they even stooped so low as to gang up on the new exchange student from Seoul, Korea, who couldn’t even begin to imagine what they were saying to her in such mean voices.

  Opal stood at the periphery, muttering a few vague insults that no one could hear. She barely had to do anything, and still she was liked. It had really all started the day that she brought her class to watch the taping of a television show her mother was on. It was a morning news show, and all the children sat bleary-eyed on the floor at sunrise among a tangle of wires and cables. They were so well-behaved that a cameraman came over and told them they were welcome back anytime. For the rest of the day Opal was treated with real awe. She found herself at the very heart of the lunch table, being offered sandwich halves and tangerines and an invitation to try Alison Prager’s oboe, if she wanted.

  After that, Opal had her mother make strategic guest appearances at school. On Carnival Day her mother dressed as a gypsy and sat in a booth, and everyone crowded around. All the other mothers felt snubbed. Mothers in clown suits milled around unhappily, smoking furtive cigarettes in corners. Peter Green’s mother sat bone-dry on the plank of a homemade dunking machine, waiting for someone to plunge her into the water, but no one did.

  It wasn’t that the children particularly wanted Opal’s mother to read their fortunes, as she had been prepared to do. Instead, they tore off tickets from a loop, and came up to her booth, shrilling, “Do Mrs. Pummelman!” or “Do Baby Fifi!” and Opal’s mother would patiently oblige.

  When they got back home at the end of Carnival Day, Opal stood in the doorway and watched her mother take off her gypsy costume. She watched her pull off her pantyhose, holding it bunched up on her hands for a second, as though about to make a cat’s cradle of the nylon. Then she dropped it and reached around to unzip her gypsy dress. After that she unwound the turban from her head, and fished out the bobby pins from their hiding places in her hair. All she wore now was a pale yellow slip and two silver-dollar circles of rouge. She looked like a teenage girl sitting alone after a date that has gone poorly. That happened to girls sometimes, Opal knew; she had just begun reading books from the Young Adult section of the library. The books had titles like Ready When You Are or New Girl at Adams High or Seventeen Means Trouble. Sometimes in the book the boy stands the girl up at first, or else he says something terrible to her, like, “Oh, here come my friends. Let’s pretend we’re not together, okay?” Now Opal’s mother looked so sad and exhausted that Opal had to look away. This was the only time she ever remembered wanting to look away from her.

  Most of the time, like now, Opal could not get enough. As she sat in the kitchen watching the show, she laughed easily at all the familiar lines. Her mother torpedoed joke after joke, and everyone was satisfied. Opal could hear the beefsteak laugh of Ed McMahon, louder than anyone’s.

  When the audience finally quieted down, the camera closed in tight and her mother said, “I’d like to take this moment to send a special message to my daughters back in New York.” No one moved. “If you’re watching this, Opal and Erica,” she said, “then you’re in big trouble. You’re supposed to be aslee
p now! It’s a school night!”

  It was like talking to her mother on a television phone, the kind that My Weekly Reader had insisted would be installed in every home by 1970. Opal had lived in fear. What if you were on the toilet and the phone rang? What then? But the threats had proven idle. My Weekly Reader also swore that America would go metric within the next few years. Opal had been terrified, knowing her own stupidity with ounces and inches, let alone kilos and meters. But this, too, was just a scare, designed to alarm, then be forgotten. Everything settled down, went on as usual. Her mother showed up on television, sent satellite love messages to the East Coast, and later that night, after the credits rolled and her mother stood as if at a cocktail party with Johnny and Ed and Rita Moreno, Opal drew back the blanket on her bed and slipped inside.

  Lying alone in the dark, she could hear the babysitter practicing down the hall, and then the sound of Erica preparing for sleep in the next room. There was the usual banging around, drawers sliding open and shut, and once in a while Erica would open her door and a line of music would drift out: “. . . And when will all the killing stop?/We cry into the rain . . .” Then the door would close again and Opal couldn’t hear anything more. Erica’s music was so depressing lately, and yet this was the way she liked to fall asleep at night; this was her lullaby of choice.

  Opal flipped over onto her side and lay close to the wall. She summoned up an image of her mother onscreen, a pulse of color and motion. She was excited for a while, thinking about the show, but then the excitement shifted into something else. Now in her mind she saw her mother joined by her father, her sister, and finally herself. The whole family was up there, all spread out like the little winking lights of the Tonight Show skyline. They blinked at each other from across a great distance.