by Meg Wolitzer
No, she thought, amending it slightly. She, Erica, and her father were all little lights, but her mother was something else entirely. She was a zeppelin traveling across the sky, traveling from light to light, and everyone was pointing at her. Cars stopped on the road. “Look!” children cried. “Look! It’s Dottie Engels!”
In the next room, her sister was already asleep, but now Opal was wide awake.
Two
As a family, they bore the name of their weakest link. They carried it for years without wondering at the irony of this. They were the Engelses, taking the name from the father who had once appeared only at dinner tables and during arguments, and who then disappeared for good. Still they carried his name; it was like living with the child of someone who has left you and whom you now despise. The child begins to take on its father’s features: the same impassive eyes, the thin mouth you cannot bear to feed.
Engels was a beautiful name; they had not been saddled with a clunker, as had many children at school, but even so, Erica decided it was time to change it. She announced this to Jordan Strang one day after school as they sat together on a bench by the river. The day was much too cold for them to be sitting outside, but still they sat coatless, trying to keep a pipe lit. It was a tiny pipe, packed full of green marijuana buds, and she and Jordan passed it quickly back and forth, as though taking part in a relay race. Jordan kept lighting matches, which stayed lit in the wind for barely a second.
“Come on, little guy,” he kept addressing each match, and she watched him concentrate intensely, the way he did in Chemistry class, over a Bunsen burner. They had met in Chemistry, lab partners in an experiment involving calcium chips and Woolite. Soon they began to go down to the East River at the end of the day, where they would sit on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and try to smoke unlit green marijuana.
She and Jordan felt separate from everyone else at Headley—separate from the army of hardworking, wincing tenth-graders who marched through the day with their heads full of S.A.T. words, lips moving as they formed “vernacular” or “sybarite.” They were also separate from the group of mongrel tenth-graders who were always nodding out or laughing inappropriately in class or being excused to attend group sessions with Miss Klingman.
Erica and Jordan inhabited some limbo territory, one that was reserved for those who were homely and bright and liked to take drugs. If you fit into this category, then you wrote haiku in your locked bedroom at night, and you spent every afternoon in the park by the East River, fumbling to stuff little buds into the bowl of a ridiculous pipe, and you inhaled wildly in the wind, waiting for results.
She looked at Jordan’s long face, the new wisps of hair growing above and below his lips. She watched him suck furiously at the pipe, then exhale what appeared to be smoke but was more likely vapor from the cold. The pipe was dead; Jordan let it drop into his lap.
“You’re really going to change your name?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“What to?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Won’t you miss having people know that you’re Dottie Engels’s daughter?” he asked. He paused. “Was that a stupid question? I just always wondered what it would be like to have famous parents. My parents are both endocrinologists. Now that’s really exciting.”
She was surprised to hear him speak with any measure of irony; Jordan usually had such a flat voice, and the things he said seemed to suit it. He talked about school, and the books he was reading, and where his family was going for vacation, and usually Erica would stop listening somewhere in the middle of a sentence. She would hook around a single word and run with it; vacation, he might say, we’re going to New Mexico for vacation, and Erica would flash back to her own family vacations: Knott’s Berry Farm, or Hershey, Pennsylvania. She saw herself at six, standing in wonder before a giant, gleaming vat of chocolate, and she suddenly had no more use for Jordan’s droning voice.
“Do you like having a famous mother?” he persisted now.
She nodded and gave him a formulaic response about how it had its ups and downs. There were several children of famous people at the Headley School: offspring of politicians, actors, an occasional athlete. Erica sat next to the daughter of black torch singer Minx Janeway in French class. But somehow having Dottie Engels as your mother was different; it meant having a mother who was large and loud and overexposed, someone who appeared everywhere you looked, and who made you laugh until you felt sick. It was a strain to laugh like that; it was unnatural.
At sixteen, Erica knew she looked like Dottie, already running to fat, settling in to a life of being heavy. Erica had a round face with an absence of cheekbones; there was nothing planar about her at all. She wrapped herself in layers of Indian-print fabric: long skirts and scarves and shirts that looked like college dormitory bedspreads. Her hair was parted in the middle and fell straight to her shoulders. It always smelled edible from the apricot shampoo she used. Every day she looked and smelled exactly the same. She observed herself in the mirror each morning after a shower, and as the steam settled she was startled all over again by how terrible she appeared. In a minute, regaining composure, she forced herself to leave the mirror and head for school.
Occasionally, when her mother had been on television, some-one would mention it the next day in class. “We saw your mom last night on the Bob Hope special,” Meredith Gertz said, mincing up to Erica at the lockers, flanked by two friends.
“Oh, good,” Erica said. She spun the combination lock, but suddenly all the numbers were lost. She spun and spun.
“Do you get to go to L.A. at all?” Meredith asked.
“Not really,” said Erica.
Meredith shot her friends a meaningful look. “Ever meet Johnny Carson?” she asked.
“No,” said Erica.
“Ever meet anybody?” Meredith asked.
“No,” Erica said, and her voice had disappeared, sinking back into her big face, the recesses of her throat, the long, hollow column that led down to her heart, her lungs, everything private and beating and desperate.
“Oh, forget it,” said Meredith Gertz, and, as if on a drill team, she and her two friends wheeled around and walked off, heads close, already talking mean.
After that, Erica found herself left alone. No one was particularly interested in her, the way they were in Senator Peel’s son, or the daughter of that astronaut. Still, the fact that Dottie Engels’s daughters went to Headley was often mentioned in passing, and even referred to casually by the headmaster for recruitment purposes. Erica was Dottie’s child, but she was also a lurking mammoth in the corner of the girls’ locker room, doing an awkward little jig as she struggled into her size XL gym suit.
And now she was Jordan Strang’s friend, his “girlfriend,” probably, for that was the way everyone figured out the world. The beautiful held hands with the beautiful, the homely with the homely. Erica Engels and Jordan Strang sat together on a bench by the East River, coatless and frozen. It was as if neither of them had a sense of self, she thought—as though their bodies needed nothing—like those people who lived in the Himalayas and ate only air. But it seemed odd to think of herself this way; there was so much of her, so there ought to have been so much need.
“I have to leave,” Erica said finally. “I’m supposed to spend more time with my sister.”
“Whatever gets you through the night,” Jordan said. His expressions often made no sense in context, and he spoke as though he were a foreigner clumsily trying to adopt a hip idiom. Perhaps he thought he was being clever in a cryptic way, like the characters in the novels he read. Jordan was obsessed with paperbacks from the Sixties; Hunter Thompson was his hero. He referred to him continually as “Hunter,” as though they were in homeroom together. Jordan had given Erica a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and she had stared blankly at it for
hours, missing the point. It was all about messy, crazed men driving fast and taking hallucinogens. This side of the counterculture, or what was left of it in the 1970s, seemed to have been designed specifically for boys—those boys who liked nothing better than to sit and talk about Hunter Thompson or Carlos Castaneda until even their dreams swam with images of birds and clouds and the desert sun. Jordan had no one else to talk to, and so he talked to Erica, using her as a sounding board to ramble on and on about whatever book he was reading this week.
Erica kept her own obsessions to herself. Lying alone in her room at night she played the music of Reva and Jamie, a male-female duo who sang with exquisite harmonies. She especially loved their song “Cup of Tears,” and always felt a chill at the part about the soldier’s ghost coming back to haunt his lover. She would turn the volume up very high, but even so, she could still hear Opal calling her and banging on the locked door.
“What are you doing in there?” Opal called. “You want to hyperventilate?”
Erica paused. “I’m busy!”
“Doing what?”
“Homework!” Erica yelled. She turned over onto her back and lay staring up at the ceiling, listening to the harmonies spiral upward, then fall, thinking of nothing but herself, big and formless, a jellyfish floating on a bed. She might as well give in to it now, she thought—give in to the future that was rolling toward her at an alarming speed. She might as well accept it, and spend the rest of her life out in the open. She would no longer have to squirrel away cartons of Pepperidge Farm Milanos, leaving the little fluted paper shells scattered around her room like doilies. No more sheepish pining away for food or conversation; all her needs would be wom up front like a badge of some dubious honor. She would be a big, pathetic thing, but everyone would know and would grow to accept her. There goes that poor fat girl, the neighbors would think, and maybe they would leave a plate of something outside her apartment door. She would have a place for herself, a specific role. Maybe that would be better than all this pretending that a little smudge of eyeshadow, or a special grapefruit diet, or having her ears pierced might help. The days were relentless, and she huddled behind her desk in school, keeping the desk top up as long as she could, searching for some imaginary pencil.
“Oh, sweetie,” her mother sometimes said, “adolescence is like this, but it will get better, I swear it will. Believe me, I know from experience.”
Erica had certainly gathered enough stories about her mother’s adolescence, but the picture she was left with was still vague, sepia-toned, involving V-J Day and D-Day, and the stoop of a row house on which a thirteen-year-old girl named Dottie Breitburg sat and ate Pez. In truth, Erica didn’t want to think too much about that fat girl; she didn’t really want to know her. Erica had heard many times about how her mother, as an unhappy teenager, had been sent off one summer on scholarship to Camp Hatikvah. This was during the height of the war, when Brooklyn was a newsreel of brownouts and victory gardens and grieving mothers. At the end of August, when Dottie returned from camp, she had changed profoundly. She, who had been miserable and sullen and unpopular, was actually funny now. A new personality had suddenly revealed itself from beneath the unpromising surface. Dottie now took it upon herself to entertain the mothers on the block in Flatbush, women whose coffee tables displayed bar mitzvah albums of the dead.
“I simply changed,” Dottie explained. “It didn’t happen overnight; it was a slow process. I made some wrong turns here and there, some really big mistakes. But Erica,” she would say, her voice slow and reflective, “you don’t have to do that. You can have a good life; you don’t have to settle. So you’re not Twiggy, so you’ll never shop in the Missy Petite department. But you’ll get through all of this; I personally guarantee it.”
Erica could not respond. Dottie had a formula; she told jokes and sang and made shameless googly-eyes at the camera, and everyone fell for it. But this was something that Erica would never do; she would rather die than get up onstage and show off. She had almost fainted once when she had to do an oral report on “The Fall of the House of Usher.” There was no formula for her, no preordained way to live her life.
Why aren’t you tired all the time? she wanted to ask her mother. Erica could barely make it through the afternoon sometimes. She walked from Chemistry to Study Hall to French, and she heard music in her head in time to her step: some deep belching tuba-sounds that might have represented the entrance of a rhinoceros or an elephant in a deleted section of Peter and the Wolf. Too many animals already, the composer would think. Let’s stick to the quicker ones, the lighter ones.
Things will get better, her mother repeated like a litany, and although she probably believed her own words, Erica could not take any comfort from them. She could no longer take comfort from anything her mother said or did, in fact. Her mother had recently betrayed her, and she could not forget it. The betrayal had happened the day after Erica announced during a telephone call that she was going to change her name.
“Oh?” Dottie had said over the phone. “And what are you going to change it to, may I ask?”
“I don’t know,” said Erica. “I haven’t decided.”
Her mother laughed gently. “I think we can wait until I get home to discuss it. In the meantime, don’t do anything drastic.”
The very next night, on “The Merv Griffin Show,” there was a lull between jokes, and Dottie said, “You know, Merv, my older daughter announced last night that she’s planning on changing her last name. She says ‘Engels’ is too ugly, too cumbersome. She wants something refined and graceful and ladylike.”
Erica froze. “Oh, really?” Merv was saying. “Engels is a perfectly nice name. What is she thinking of changing it to?”
“Shmutznik,” said Dottie, her expression a perfect deadpan.
The audience roared, and Joey diSalvo the babysitter roared, and even Opal, who was sitting about an inch from the set and eating Cheez-its by the handful, opened her mouth and let out a single bark of a laugh. Erica looked at her with disgust. Opal thought it was funny; she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. She just sat there watching, her hand lifting and lowering between mouth and bowl. She was like a member of some bizarre cult, her lips ringed in bright cheddar orange.
Erica slammed the heel of her hand against the television, and the picture went to a quick dissolve.
“What are you doing?” cried Opal. “I was watching, you know.”
“Hey, hey, come on, you two,” Joey diSalvo said. “What’s going on here? You sound like little babies.”
“I can’t believe she would lie like that,” Erica said.
“It’s just a joke,” said Opal. “Turn it on. She’s going to do Mrs. Pummelman; she promised me.”
“Let her tell true jokes,” said Erica, “and not use me to lie about. As if I would really change my last name to something stupid like that. Oh, that’s likely. If I change my name, I’m going to do it with no help from anybody else.” She snapped the TV back on, and a commercial filled the screen.
“If you get married someday,” Opal pointed out, still not looking up, “then you’ll have to change your name.”
“I’m not planning on getting married,” said Erica. As soon as she said it she knew it was true; saying it made it so. She would not marry, ever. She suddenly understood this fact about herself, as deeply and simply as the way in which anyone understood the basic information they had about themselves—the way women said, “Yes, I have a small frame,” or “Yes, I tend to be very emotional.”
Instead of marrying she would go away somewhere. She had seen a series of commercials for the Peace Corps lately and had begun to fantasize about joining. Erica had written down the toll-free number, which you could call any time of day or night to get more information, and she dialed it one night at three A.M. when she had insomnia. A woman answered, and her voice sounded very far away. It seemed odd tha
t you could call twenty-four hours a day; maybe, Erica thought, the woman was speaking to her from another time zone, maybe even another continent. For one flickering instant she imagined a group of operators “standing by” in grass huts in Nigeria.
“I would like some information about joining the Peace Corps,” Erica said from the kitchen phone, whispering so Opal wouldn’t wake up.
There was a pause. “May I ask how old you are?” the woman asked.
“Sixteen,” Erica said. It had not occurred to her to lie.
“Well, I’m afraid you have to be eighteen to apply,” the woman said. “But you can call back in two years. We’ll still be here.”
“I may not be,” Erica said, and she hung up the telephone before the woman could respond.
In the dark kitchen the automatic ice maker in the refrigerator made a few whirring and thumping sounds, as new ice cubes dropped. Erica was too young for the Peace Corps now, but if she waited two years, she could make her useless self useful. She pictured herself teaching village women how to read or tie a tourniquet. But even when she turned eighteen, there was a chance that they still wouldn’t take her. You’re too large, they might say during the interview, wrapping a tape measure around her middle. You’re too slow. You’re too sad. Maybe she would be left here in the city forever; maybe she would eventually be forced to marry.
Suddenly Erica was depressed again. There were very few options left, she realized; nobody offered you a smorgasbord of possibilities anymore. By the time you turned sixteen, all your abilities had been fully tested and charted, and it was clear as day what you could and could not do. Opal, only eleven, still had a range of choices left. She didn’t have to start thinking about any of this for years. That was why Opal could sit happily in front of the television all day, eating Cheez-its and thinking the world was swell. She could watch the show with her head cocked slightly to the side, the way a squirrel sometimes looks at things; there was that same robotic curiosity to her movements.