by Meg Wolitzer
Opal had found nothing wrong with their mother’s jokes on The Merv Griffin Show; she had just laughed along with the audience. My mother is a charlatan, Erica thought; this was an S.A.T. word that seemed particularly applicable. She loved the word, and repeated it aloud sometimes when she was having trouble falling asleep. Charlatan. She imagined approaching her mother and saying, “Mom, I’ve come up with a new character I think you should do. It’s this woman named Charlotte Ann, and she’s a pathological liar.” Dottie would look a little confused, not getting the secret joke, and she would thank Erica for trying to be helpful.
After the night of The Merv Griffin Show, Erica did not watch her mother on television again for years, until college began and it was unavoidable. Occasionally Dottie’s face would sneak up on her during the flipping of channels, but Erica would never deliberately choose to watch. It was hard to avoid; Dottie Engels was ubiquitous, between the glut of talk shows and seasonal comedy specials. There was always a holiday coming up in the near future, and Dottie could usually be found onscreen dressed as Santa, or the Easter Bunny, or a turkey being chased around the stage by Bob Hope, who was dressed as a Pilgrim. Opal could not understand why Erica would not watch these shows, and this was the beginning of the split.
Erica no longer had the patience she used to have, the energy required to spend big blocks of time with her sister. She came home after school and went directly to her room, where she lay on her bed and tried to keep out all distractions, but something was always in her way: some light in her eyes or interference in the background. Opal occasionally hammered at the door, begging Erica to hyperventilate, saying she would even pay her. It was like the slow failing of a marriage, in which everything begins to rust piece by piece. Erica remembered her own parents’ marriage, and how in the middle of the night she used to hear the two of them stalking different parts of the house: Dottie in the kitchen, opening and shutting cabinets, and Norm in the den, doing who knew what.
Maybe this was bound to happen if you lived with someone long enough; maybe there was no such thing as extended harmony. Certainly Erica had never witnessed it. Peaceful times seemed to be on loan; you experienced them only briefly, and then you spent the rest of your life remembering: the perfect summer, the perfect meal, the perfect night’s sleep. Erica remembered a time when she and Opal had been close, the big and the little. They had roamed the apartment together, talked on walkie-talkies from different rooms, set up obstacle courses, built a spookhouse in the hallway.
Sometimes at night Erica used to hand Opal a piece of paper on which the words ADMIT ONE were written in Magic Marker. This meant that there would be a floor show soon. Opal would come sit in the darkness of Erica’s room, her leg jiggling with anticipation.
“Good evening, audience,” Erica would say. “I am Erica Engels.” Then she flicked on her flashlight and made guttural crowd-sounds low in her throat. “Tonight,” she said, “we are going to take a trip around . . . my . . . room!” She swung the flashlight beam across to the bureau, the desk, the depleted beanbag chair, and finally let it land on Opal.
Opal shrieked, blinded. “Erica, Erica, don’t!” she cried, but she didn’t move away. In that moment she was like an animal trapped in the high beams of a car. Erica switched off the light, and her sister’s cries died away. Opal was not really trapped; Opal would do fine. She was a limber little girl who could walk a balance beam or do a bird’s nest on the rings. She floured her hands with rosin and swung expertly from the uneven parallels. She was a monkey of a sister, resilient, not yet damaged. She hadn’t been weighed down by a large box of a body, or by a steady ration of melancholy. Unlike Erica, Opal would not have to settle. There would be men for Opal, with angular features and expensive camping gear and vows of fidelity. The word “settle” was odd; Erica pictured Opal never settling, always circling above the ground like a plane that can’t see its way clear to land.
These days Erica kept to herself. She had to admit that the situation was much better than when they all lived in the tiny house in Jericho, with constant arguments at dinner and a father who paced the hall like a warden, clearly uneasy in that house of females. He expected treachery from them, abandonment, and finally he got both. But that was history now; it had all been resolved legally, financially. Now they had a new life, a peaceful one.
But still, Erica thought, there was no way to truly be alone. Opal was always somewhere in the background, banging on doors, wanting company. And elsewhere in the apartment, a babysitter was usually practicing a comedy routine. Something was inevitably going on; even when Erica shut herself away in her room, with the wonderful music of Reva and Jamie playing, and the odor of patchouli rising up and fanning out, she was always aware of one or two stray thoughts. She didn’t know what their purpose was; it was like finding an old key in a drawer and having no idea of what it might ever have opened. You hold the slip of metal between your fingers and try to recall the chain it once hung from, the door that flew open day after day. But nothing comes to you, because the key clearly belonged to someone else.
What you were left with, Erica thought, what did belong to you, were all the tangibles of daily life: the sweater folded over the chair, the warm Thermos snapped into its tin lunchbox, the bench by the side of the river after school. And always, finally, there would be Jordan Strang waiting for you on that bench, Jordan whom you knew you could never love, but might eventually have to.
Three
Ithink we are in rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones,” the three girls chanted, practicing one more time before the mirror, while Mrs. Fabricant fastened their arms together with rubber bands.
“Okay, Hollow Men,” the teacher said. “You’re on soon.”
They walked sideways like crabs down the hall to the stage door. Oh, the school at night! Opal thought. What a place it was; the floors shimmered in the dark, and you could hear the heating system breathing in the walls. The school at night was like a sleeping animal. Opal followed the others down the hallway, her wrists attached to theirs.
Someone opened the stage door for them, and they silently waited in the wings for their cue. Opal watched the actors onstage; the fifth-grader playing Madame Sosostris was talking to Sweeney. “Those were pearls that were his eyes,” she was saying. And then that tiny redheaded boy, the one who had missed so many rehearsals, piped up from stage left in a surprisingly sure voice: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess . . .”
Everyone in the audience was quiet. This fragile boy, with hair like fire, spoke the words almost as if he understood them. All the children listened. Even Madame Sosostris, who usually played with her crystal ball and looked bored when someone else was speaking, turned to watch.
Then the three Hollow Men staggered out. Dressed in burlap, their faces blackened from the cork that Mrs. Fabricant had held over a match, they stood center stage, swaying against each other, as they had practiced for weeks, speaking in the carefully articulated voices of the old and tired.
“We are the Hollow Men,” they said. “We are the stuffed men, leaning together. Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” They paused, swaying more severely. “Our dried voices, when we whisper together, are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass, or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.” Their voices grew hard on the phrase “rats’ feet,” snarling as they had been instructed.
There was a murmur in the audience. Opal looked out, squinting. Someone had left one of the auditorium doors partly open, letting in light. She could see members of the audience rustle and turn to each other. And somehow, in that moment, she managed to catch sight of her mother, sitting way in the back, on the aisle. Her mother was laughing. Holding herself and laughing as though she might split apart. Had something gone wrong? Opal worried. Had they messed up their lines? Was someone’s headpiece on backwards?
&
nbsp; There was no time to wonder, for their brief part was done, and they shuffled offstage together. That dull girl began her speech now, the girl who always spoke in such a dead voice. She should have been a Hollow Man, Opal thought. Let me be the Cruellest Month girl.
“And when we were children,” the girl was saying, as though reciting the Pledge, “staying at the arch-duke’s, my cousin, he took me out on a sled, and I was frightened. He said, ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight.’ And down we went.”
The Hollow Men sat together on folding chairs. They were not allowed to untie themselves from each other because they still had to do curtain calls.
“Move in closer,” Susan whispered to Opal. “You’re hurting me.”
So they sat there listening as the play wound down, and finally there was the line about the world ending in a whimper. On “whimper,” the three Hollow Men shot up; this was their cue. Out front there was tremendous applause. Soon they were onstage again with the others, raising their bound arms up in salute.
Afterwards, riding home in a taxi, Opal asked, “Did we bomb in some way? Was that why everyone was laughing?”
“Oh, God no,” said Dottie. “You were just so dear. That’s what that was all about.”
They were in a Checker cab, and Opal and Erica sat on the jump seats. Dottie and Ross Needler sat facing them. “You were wonderful, Opal,” Ross said. “Maybe I should sign you on. Need a manager?”
“Har har,” said Opal.
It had been an Evening of Eliot at the Headley Middle School. Each year the theater department attempted something ambitious.
“You were wonderful,” said Dottie. “I mean it.”
As a treat, they stopped off to celebrate at an ice cream parlor on the East Side. The parlor was bright and busy, and Opal noticed several people staring at her mother and poking each other as they walked in. As usual, Dottie seemed oblivious. She was saying something to Ross and laughing. Her earrings were huge silver disks that swung wildly when she turned her head even slightly. Everything was festive, and Opal kept thinking of herself onstage, swaying and chanting. “. . . where the dead men lost their bones,” she thought, and it was a line that made absolutely no sense to her, and yet thrilled her all the same. Dead men losing bones—what did that mean? Could dead people lose bones the way regular people lost gloves? During rehearsals, they had never really talked about what the words meant; instead, they had spent time on what Mrs. Fabricant called “motivation.”
“You’re like scarecrows,” Mrs. Fabricant had said. “You have no muscles or blood or anything. You’re not human. You’re just dried-out pieces of straw. Now what would that feel like?”
“Kind of bad and scary?” Susan Berwell said.
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
Susan paused. “Telling you,” she decided.
“Good,” said Mrs. Fabricant, smiling. “I want you to feel bad and scary. I want you to pretend your bodies are like old newspaper.”
They stood up and walked in circles around the empty stage, pretending their arms and legs were crackling as they walked. Opal began to feel light, as though she might fly away. It was like hyperventilating! she realized. Letting yourself disappear for a little while, because you knew you could come back later on. I have no bones, she thought; I have no skin or blood or muscle. She walked around and around, until Mrs. Fabricant put a strong hand on her shoulder and told her, “Enough.”
But tonight, at the performance, the audience had laughed at the Hollow Men. They had been dear, dressed up as though it were Halloween. They might have come onstage clutching UNICEF cartons, they were that dear. But it was better, Opal knew, to be dear than embarrassing. Embarrassing was when you came onstage and forgot all your lines, and had to run off weeping, which had happened to Connie Delman the year before, in the sixth-grade production of Summer and Smoke.
Opal had the sense that no matter what she did in her life, she would probably never be embarrassing. She might fail at things, or annoy people, but probably no one would look away in shame. It relieved her to know this; it freed her up somehow. She swung just a little harder from the uneven parallels in gym class, and even the time she missed the upper bar entirely and fell with a whump to the mat, no one had made fun of her. Instead, the gym teacher had swiveled her gaze over to Alison Merkin and shouted, “Alison, why aren’t you spotting Opal?”
Opal had stood up shakily and dusted herself off. No one was snickering. All the other girls stood against the wall in their gym suits, waiting their turn. Opal walked back to the end of the line, and there was a new spring to her step. “Too bad you fell,” Karen Lewis whispered. “Are you all right?” Opal nodded. Alison Merkin, on the other hand, was walking toward the line with her head down.
This was the way it was; at the very beginning of school, everyone’s role had been cast in stone, and they all spent the next several years living up to what was expected of them. Rude kids made obscene noises in front of substitute teachers, slow kids moved their lips when they read, and popular ones fell off the uneven parallel bars and walked back to rejoin the line with a certain cocky grace.
Opal ruled at school, with her tight cluster of friends and their elaborate projects and secrets. On her report card the year before, her teacher had written, “Opal is a joy to have around, always cheerful. It’s been a pleasure to have her in my class!”
It was only when she went home each day that everything changed. At home, no one ruled. Opal and Erica shared the responsibilities, and none of the babysitters had much experience, or even interest, in asserting authority. When their mother was in town she tried to make their lives conventional. She insisted, for instance, in looking over their homework with them, and nothing made her happier than having the chance to sign a permission slip to go on a class trip. She also liked to cook breakfast for Opal and Erica, even if she had been out playing a late club date the night before. She would walk into the kitchen at seven A.M. and say, “How would you two like a big stack of flapjacks?”
Flapjacks; the word itself had a false hominess to it. They let her cook for them, watched her pour pale batter onto a griddle even if they had already finished eating. They didn’t want to disappoint her; she seemed to take great pleasure from cooking them breakfast. Opal would gaze sleepily across the room at her mother. Even in a housecoat she looked beautiful, glamorous in quilted aqua.
When she was in town she often took them out at night for ice cream, like tonight. Every evening spent with her was special, and yet Opal always worried about something going wrong. Usually something did, and lately it was Erica who caused the problems.
Tonight, across the marble table, Erica was hunched over her sundae, eating quickly, as though afraid it might be taken away.
“Something wrong, honey?” Dottie asked.
“Nothing,” said Erica. “Everything’s great.” Her voice was sour.
“Are you sure?”
Erica looked up, letting her spoon drop into the glass. “You really want to know?” she asked.
“Of course,” said Dottie.
Opal rubbed her wrists nervously; they still bore indentations from where the rubber bands had been.
“Okay,” said Erica. “Last year, when the Upper School did that Lorraine Hansberry Night, you didn’t come. But you can conveniently make it to Opal’s show.”
Dottie looked stricken. “Honey,” she said, “now let me think. Hold on. I must have been working; why else wouldn’t I have come? There must have been something I couldn’t get out of . . . oh, I know, it was the Sands! I was opening at the Sands! I wanted to see your play, Erica; we had a big talk about it.”
“She wasn’t even in the play,” Opal cut in, the meanness piping into her from outer space. “She was in the lighting booth, remember?”
Erica stared for a minute, then burst into tears. The evening was ruine
d completely, and Opal began crying too. She wasn’t sure exactly why, and yet she was unable to stop. Ross Needler looked around nervously. Two waitresses, who had begun to approach the table for an autograph, were now discreetly backing away.
“My girls,” said Dottie, when they were finally calmer, “have I really hurt you so much? Don’t you know that I only try to do what I can? That I can’t be two places at once? I hate traveling so much, but what can I do? If I thought you’d be happier in L.A., then we’d move in a minute. But you’d hate it there; it’s so awful, all swimming pools and valet parking. Oh, please bear with me, girls. Don’t I always try to do something special for you? Aren’t you happier now than when we were in the suburbs with your father? Isn’t it a little better, a little more peaceful?”
And the two girls, ending their crying fit in phlegmy little sobs, nodded finally and admitted that they were happier now. Opal thought of her father; she dragged out the stock image she had of him: a bony man, the boniest father anyone ever had, coming through the door in the evening. He was the real Hollow Man, she thought; he would lose his bones someday.
It had always seemed wrong to her that he had a key to the house in Jericho, that he had access to their lives, when they were much happier without him. He would come into the front hallway, bringing with him the cold night air and his raincoat folded over his arm, and as soon as he walked in, everything changed. Opal and Erica, who were leaping around the house, stood frozen in their places as though playing Statues. The television, which had been yammering unnoticed in the den, was quickly shut off.