by Meg Wolitzer
Opal had all the makings of a good-looking girl; she knew this about herself, could tell the way her looks were headed, the features sharp, the skin hairless and pale, the neck and wrists long. She would eventually grow into these looks, the way a puppy grows into its oversized paws. However she ended up, it would all be fine, and soon she would be loved by older brothers and lifeguards, and would sit on a blond boy’s lap atop a high wooden chair, overlooking lanes of light blue water.
Opal found herself suddenly nervous with the deejay so close to her now, leaning over her shoulder and watching as she made her selection. Then, with no warning, she felt his hand cupping the nape of her neck. He was not really touching her skin at all; his fingers were barely grazing the fine baby hair that sprouted there. She could only feel presence, not pressure—similar to the way you somehow know when someone is standing over you while you sleep. The deejay’s hand gave off a slight, gauzy heat. Opal took in a hard breath, and moved to look. But by the time she had turned her head, his arms were relaxed at his sides. Opal didn’t know what to say, and he gave her no help.
“Pick a record,” he said, his voice flat.
So she chose quickly and stupidly, fishing out a record she didn’t particularly like. She chose “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a song that had probably been played hundreds of times in this room, but he took the record from her hands without a word and put it on the turntable, and soon one song faded and the next one bled in, and Opal stood with him inside this little cocoon of sound.
She did not want to leave; she just kept watching as he fiddled with the knobs, looking as attentive and serious as a navigator in a control tower. All around them the music surged and the lights blinked and the teenagers kept dancing, rolling their heads and arms in little epileptic thrusts, staying in a small, designated area of space on the dance floor, never venturing outside that proscribed circle. Opal saw that the deejay was what was called “well-built,” with a strong line that bisected his back even through his shirt. She was so pleased with herself, so happy to be here with him alone, that she could think of nothing better. She would tell no one about this.
But then, looking across the room, Opal saw a figure in the doorway, hovering uncertainly. She knew at once that it was Erica, and her spirit suddenly dropped, as if through a trap door inside herself. Erica had come looking for her, come to bring her back; she must have been looking everywhere. At first, Opal thought to hide, to kneel back down behind the deejay, where she would never be found. She could even sleep here tonight, on this patch of orange carpeting, curled up like an old dog. But now there didn’t seem to be a choice, and so Opal stepped down from the booth.
Walking back along the edge of the room, she raised a hand in salute to Erica, who stood in her poncho, waiting. There wasn’t any anger on Erica’s features. Her face bore a look of resignation, like a chaperone at a dance who senses how much fun everyone is having, and for whom there is no access to that fun.
It was in this manner that Erica retrieved her, and Opal went, pliant and wordless. She did not even say good night to her deejay, her boyfriend in a future life. She just left him with his hands sliding over the controls, palming records easily onto spinning surfaces.
Six
The Junior Peace Corps was conducting interviews at the Stanhope Hotel one Saturday in February. Erica sat alone on a couch in the lobby, a brochure open in her lap. “Helping Friends Around the World,” read the caption on the first page, and above it was an illustration of a white girl and a black boy shaking hands in what appeared to be a field of wheat. The illustration conjured up images of plantation life, more than anything else. It reminded Erica of the illustrations in the biographies she used to read in elementary school, books with names like George Washington Carver and His Magic Legume. Her school had certainly encouraged a real fascination for black history, even though there were only a handful of black students. George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass—Erica couldn’t think of a single biography she had ever read of anybody white.
According to the brochure, the purpose of the Junior Peace Corps, or JPC, as it was informally called, was to “foster harmony and understanding between our world and the Third World.” The JPC was a new organization, with no real affiliation to the Peace Corps proper. You were required to be between the ages of fifteen and twenty, and it cost a sizeable amount of money to join. If you were accepted, you were sent to one of a variety of Third World nations, where you lived with a family and labored at an assigned job for the summer. It seemed peculiar that there were no photographs in the brochure, only illustrations, as in the rendering of a courtroom trial.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Dottie had said when Erica initially proposed the idea of joining. “If you’re unhappy there, or sick, or need me, how can you reach me? You say there aren’t any telephones where you’ll be; I don’t like the sound of it at all.”
But it wasn’t much easier reaching Dottie now, Erica thought. Whenever she and Opal had to call her, they had to leave a message with the clerk at the hotel, and it was usually hours before Dottie picked up the message and called back. She was always “running around” Los Angeles; that was the way she described her life there. She went from one engagement to the next, and wherever she went people stopped and smiled at her, or reached out to touch her. They loved the fact that she really did wear dotted clothing offstage. Children reached up at her; they loved her big, accessible face, and the way she clowned around. Dottie never grew tired of the affection of strangers. This was so peculiar, Erica thought—to actually want to be touched by someone you didn’t know.
“Do you really like that?” she had once asked her mother after Dottie hugged a child who had come up to her at the Russian Tea Room. The child’s parents stood smiling behind him, urging him forward.
“Honey, it’s just another part of what I do,” Dottie told Erica. “I put myself right out there, and I have to take what comes.”
“But do you like it?” Erica persisted.
Dottie looked uncomfortable. “I don’t mind the touching,” she said. “Although I’d frankly rather it came from my own girls.” This comment was directed at Erica alone; Opal was extremely physical. But Erica didn’t want to make contact with her mother; Dottie’s touch contained too many components, and they couldn’t be sorted through quickly enough.
Now Dottie was in California, and Erica couldn’t see the children her mother hugged in stores or on the street, or backstage after a show. Erica could only imagine what went on. And Dottie, for that matter, could only imagine what went on in Erica’s life. She knew nothing about Jordan, about what he and Erica did together.
“I want to join the Junior Peace Corps,” Erica had said long distance. “You don’t know anything about it, only that they don’t have telephones. Please let me at least be interviewed.”
Dottie had finally agreed, but she was wary. “I want to hear all about it when I get home,” she said. “In detail, miss.”
So Erica went to the interview, and she was the only one there without a parent. She sat waiting on the deep couch, in a dress and pantyhose, which felt as though they were actively straining to contain her. She kept looking off into space and surreptitiously plucking at the crotch, where all the nylon gathered.
Erica had prepared her responses in advance. “Why do you want to join?” a soft-spoken young man or woman would ask, leaning in close, and Erica would look down at her hands and reply that she had always wanted to make herself useful. She wasn’t afraid of roughing it; the elements didn’t frighten her. In fact she wanted to put herself right out there, on the edge of a continent, out in that wheat field with that black boy, shaking hands under the African sun, which would surely bake her like a piece of pottery by the time the summer was through.
But no one asked her any such question, and the interview seemed almost a formality. When it was Erica’s turn t
o go upstairs, she was ushered into the elevator in a group of four, and she found herself in the middle of a dauntingly athletic crowd. The two boys were as thin and lanky as whippets, and the one other girl was tall and strapping, and looked as though she uprooted trees from the ground after school. Erica was the only heavy one here, and she knew it made her stand out from the group.
It had never occurred to her to wonder what kind of person, other than herself, might join the Junior Peace Corps. Up until now, she had only pictured herself alone in the world, and in everything she did. No matter how she envisioned herself, she could not take the leap of imagination that was required to further populate the image. Even the most dramatic of scenes—herself lying in bed with Jordan Strang, for instance—contained just Erica, her mouth twisted in striving, her legs fallen open. It was as though her boyfriend was Topper or something. But it wasn’t just her boyfriend who was absent, if indeed that was the right word for Jordan. It was everyone in the universe; she could not see a soul. It was as though there had been a nuclear holocaust, and everyone had been swallowed up into a big barbecue pit, and Erica was left wandering the earth’s surface all by herself. Did this make her an egomaniac, the fact that she saw herself alone on the continent of Africa, hoeing rows under a sky wavy with extraordinary heat and light? She didn’t even like what she saw, she didn’t like that fat girl out there in the field, stripped down to khaki fatigues, pumping away with those thick arms and legs.
But all of a sudden her vision of Africa had become densely populated, colonized by other teenagers who attended private school in New York, members of the President’s Fitness Team who joked and flirted with each other and would probably sneak off on a hot night in Upper Volta to smoke dope and listen to Fleetwood Mac tapes. Erica didn’t want that at all; if she had wanted that, she would have stayed home.
I am here to make myself useful. I am here because I want to try something new. This is what she would tell them. But all they asked, when finally Erica and the three others were sitting in a suite on the ninth floor, was whether or not she had any allergies. “No,” she said, her voice small and disappointed.
“I’m allergic to cats,” the tall girl offered.
“Well, there won’t be too many cats where you’re going,” the interviewer said. He was a middle-aged man, not young at all, no beard and mustache, small round glasses. He looked tired, like someone’s father at the end of the day.
“Only big cats,” said one of the athletic boys. “Lions.”
Everyone laughed politely.
“I’m afraid that that’s a romanticized view of Africa,” the interviewer said. “At least the parts of Africa that we send our students to. You’re more likely to stumble across a McDonald’s than a lion this summer.”
Everyone laughed again. All this artificial laughter, this nervous little exchange, and what he wanted to know was did they have any allergies. He explained a few details about the program, and asked them the kind of work they would be most interested in, but never once did he question why they were here. He passed around some forms, which listed the different work categories.
Field labor was the first choice. Erica quickly glanced around and saw that no one was jumping to blacken the box next to that category. Food service. Forget that one; she could just picture herself standing behind a steam table under a tent, her nostrils dilating as the steam rose into her face and she repeatedly dipped a ladle deep into a bottomless tureen. She would be able to think of little else but food all summer; the smell would stay with her at night as she lay under mosquito netting. It would fold around her in her sleep. She would eat like an animal and return home larger than ever. They would allow her one fewer piece of luggage on the airplane.
Hygiene. Now that was a possibility. Erica had always been very clean; this was something no one could argue. Her room, though dense with small objects, had an internal logic to it. She knew where everything was, and could locate things easily. She washed her hair every night, and spent a long time drying it, standing with the blow-dryer pointed at her head like a pistol. She could teach people how to be clean; she was certain of that. Being clean was the one thing you could take control of; dirt didn’t overwhelm you, the way weight did. Your body was always ballooning, erupting, talking back at you, and you had no way to stop it. But at night, when the day was over, you could lock the bathroom door and fill the tub with Strawberry Blossom Bath Jewels. Then you could immerse your big self and slide on in, making that underwater bump and squeal as your body touched bottom.
Erica blackened the box next to Hygiene. After they had all handed back the forms, the interviewer asked them a few more superficial questions: What was their favorite subject in school? Had they thought long and hard about joining, and did they know that the summer would entail serious work? Were they ready for that challenge? Every head bobbed in synchrony.
“You’re the kind of young people we like to see,” the interviewer said. And they all congratulated themselves for nothing.
Who else but a group of “young people” would spend money to work in a field all summer? Who else would have enough energy to put in such long hours? There was a boy at school named Martin Wolf who had spent the summer at Outward Bound. He had written an essay about it for class, and it was filled with details about being shaken awake at four A.M. every day and forced to scale a mountain, barehanded and whimpering. If you were afraid, the others humiliated you, jeering at you in the darkness. You didn’t know who your friends were anymore, and you had to grab onto handfuls of crumbling mountain wall, thinking only of ways to make it to the top. Once on top, of course, everyone liked you again, and you all jumped around and hugged each other, and poured cold canteen water down each other’s throats. There was nothing as exhilarating as that day, Martin Wolf had written.
But Erica was not Martin Wolf. She had no desire to make it to the top of anything at all, and she felt she had very little in common with other “young people.” At Lincoln Center there were always Young People’s Concerts, and her class had once gone to one on a Saturday field trip. She had been to concerts before, of course, but it had always been at night, and with her mother. This matinee had a very different feeling to it. The audience was composed almost entirely of children, as though they ruled the world. They were all dressed up, the girls holding little white purses (“clutches,” her mother called them), the boys standing self-consciously on the balcony at intermission, leaning down over the burnished rail, hands shoved deep into pockets. It was a big joke, Erica had thought. And when the performance started (something blending Aaron Copland with Moog synthesizer) and the lights went down, Erica couldn’t see anyone anymore, but she still felt the presence of the children all around her. It was wintertime, and the flu was swirling through the coatrooms of all the private schools of New York. In the darkness a child coughed from time to time, and another child coughed back in echoing response, like two dogs tied in separate yards, barking to each other to keep company throughout the night.
—
She was not a part of any whole. Not even with Jordan, she was reminded, as they lay together in bed after school. Winter was hanging on, and steam knocked through the pipes of the Strangs’ old apartment, and snow fell outside the window by the bed. Occasionally Erica sat up, looking out. She had established that in winter the streetlights in New York were illuminated at exactly five-thirty each day, and she liked to watch for that moment, when suddenly, before falling into shadow, the sky was sharply lit. It reminded her of television shows, when the light is shut off in the bedroom, but the ensuing “darkness” is just as bright as it was when the lights were on. It’s a different kind of light, one meant to illumine the face of the character as he or she lies in bed, twisting and turning before sleep. Perhaps it’s one of the Brady kids, troubled over a lie told during the day, or perhaps it’s Lucy Ricardo closing her eyes and dropping off, the screen misting and whirling to let us kn
ow there’s about to be a dream sequence.
Erica watched the lights pop on at once on Central Park West, and Jordan pulled her back from the window. “You don’t have anything on, for God’s sake,” he said.
“Oh yes, I’m sure everyone’s looking,” said Erica. For certainly no one could see up to this darkened window on the eleventh floor, where she leaned forward, her breasts resting on the cold sill. After the lights came on, Erica knew it would soon be time for her to leave. In apartments all over the city, smells were rising up from kitchens. In Jordan’s building, mothers on each floor were beginning to prepare the same exact dinner. This was the Year of the Wok, the year that everyone’s mother had gone out and purchased one. The wok was treated as reverentially as a piece of art, rubbed each day with a cloth dipped in imported oil. Families ate with chopsticks every night, and the fragrance of ginger and scallions stayed in the air for hours after the dishes were washed. Only Jordan’s apartment remained odorless. His mother was working late at the office tonight, and he would have to fend for himself.
Now here is something we have in common, Erica thought about telling him. Neither of our homes has any smell to it. It’s as though we live in libraries, in office buildings. But he would only stare blandly at her, as he always did, drumming his fingers on the bed. He didn’t care if she left or stayed, just as long as she was certain to leave before his parents arrived. This pattern would probably go on until the end of the school year, when they would separate for the summer. Jordan would go off to a computer camp in the Berkshires, and Erica would join the Junior Peace Corps and be stationed out on the veldt. But for now, here in this room, something held them fast.