by Meg Wolitzer
Sometimes at night she and Mia would go for long walks down Broadway. Summer was just settling in, and the crowds were out. Sidewalk vendors sold electric yo-yos and phosphorescent jewelry, and the night seemed lit with hundreds of fireflies. One night, Opal and Mia walked to Lincoln Center and sat on the lip of the fountain, feeling the water dust their hair.
“If I ever make any money,” Mia said, “I’m going to live in Manhattan.”
“Brooklyn’s not Manhattan?” Opal asked. She could never quite keep this straight.
Mia explained to her about the different boroughs. “Brooklyn is for grandparents, and for starving uncompromised types like me,” she said. “You’re a lucky kid, growing up in the city. I grew up in Brooklyn, and I’ll probably die there too; I’ll be found dead on the N train. There but for the grace of your mother go I. She’s a very generous woman, you know.”
It was true; Dottie was tireless. She did her clown act at the Headley carnival each year, she helped young comics get a start in the business, gave them money and food and introduced them to talent agents, and she personally wrote back to as many of her fans as she could manage.
Erica would have been the only one to disagree. “She’s a monster,” Erica had taken to saying lately. “You don’t see it, but it’s true.”
“You’re so nasty,” Opal had said. “What did she ever do to you that was so bad?”
“It’s what she didn’t do,” said Erica. “But you’re too young to understand that.”
Erica liked to make Opal feel as though she was a little bit retarded—not enough so she had to attend a special school, but just dense enough to miss the critical point of most conversations. Erica wrote sheaves of poems, some of which had been published in Insight, the Headley literary magazine, and to Opal they made no sense. It was like trying to read the cryptogram in the newspaper; everything needed to be translated before you could proceed.
One of the poems was called “The Nadir”; Opal remembered that this had been among Erica’s S.A.T. words:
The Nadir
How can I reach the top
When I am ever slipping downward
Life is a big mountain
Whose bottom looms before us
Oh catch me please
Before I fall
Down the spiral
Into nothingness . . .
The poem was signed E. J. Engels, and it was printed on a page opposite a woodcut of a bag lady sleeping in a doorway. Many of the poems in the magazine were as meaningless as Erica’s, and all of the illustrations were of old people or deserted beaches in winter. And now Erica was off in the farthest place she could find: Rwanda, which Opal had never even heard of, and about which Dottie had sung a little song before Erica left. “Help me, Rwanda,” Dottie sang. “Help, help me, Rwanda . . .”
Now, sitting on the edge of the fountain outside Lincoln Center, a chill touched Opal’s shoulders and lifted the edges of her hair. She wondered what her sister was doing then, wondered it with the same profound longing she used to have for Mickey Dolenz. This surprised her, for Erica had been so unfriendly to her. Erica didn’t really deserve Opal’s longing, and yet that didn’t seem to matter. Longing was something you owned, like a birthmark; it was there, and you couldn’t do anything about it except live with it. But she suddenly hoped Erica was all right. There had been no postcards from her yet.
Now it was just Opal and Mia. They were like two runaways sitting outside Lincoln Center, two lost girls waiting to be claimed by their parents when the concert was over. Mia Jablon looked like a kid in her Keds high-top sneakers, and she swung her feet as she sat on the fountain. What they had in common, Opal and Mia, was one important thing: They both loved Dottie Engels. They both needed her to watch over them, and Dottie always did. She was their guardian angel; she called them from wherever she was, and over the sputtering connection she asked how they were, and whether everything was going well.
We’re fine! Opal screeched back, her voice tightening like a screw. We had pizza and watched Get Smart! As though these were the significant details, as though Dottie really needed to hear about Get Smart long distance. And yet somehow she did need to hear this; she always asked Opal about the small things: How was lunch? Did you finish Harriet the Spy yet? Dottie wanted to know the answers, for this was what their love consisted of.
Erica no longer wanted to take part in this ritual; Erica was beyond the reach of telephone lines now, in a place where you needed to be inoculated before you could enter, a place halfway around the spinning world. This staggered Opal. It had always been peculiar enough when her mother went to California and moved into a different time zone, but the other side of the world was unfathomable. When Opal fell asleep at night now, Erica would just be waking up.
—
In a week Dottie came home and Mia returned to Brooklyn, her knapsack on her back and Mystery Date tucked under her arm. Dottie was planning on staying home for much of July, and no babysitters would be necessary. The guest room was cleaned out, the bed stripped bare, and the adjoining bathroom no longer had a box of Tampax on the shelf, or a shaving kit on the windowsill. All of the babysitters’ eight-by-ten head shots, which had been left scattered strategically around, were now relegated to a drawer in the den. The apartment, Opal realized, had grown completely silent.
For her entire first day back, Dottie stayed in bed. Opal walked gingerly through the rooms, trying desperately to entertain herself. Occasionally she peered in through the doorway. How could anybody sleep that much? she wondered as the morning dissolved into afternoon, and all the good television shows were replaced by bad ones. Game shows became soap operas, and Opal was bored. She missed Mia; she wanted to play a game, go for a walk, do a card trick, learn to do an impression of President Nixon, anything.
In a moment of boldness, Opal walked right into Dottie’s room and stood over the bed, staring down. She picked up a pink feather that had fallen from a costume boa, and she dangled it over her mother’s head, letting the point brush against her hair. Dottie swatted at the air in her sleep, and burrowed in deeper under the covers.
In desperation, Opal went to the thermostat in the hall and turned the central air conditioning way up. Then she waited, hoping to freeze her mother out, but that didn’t work either, and so she went back into the bedroom and slipped into the bed beside her. Opal was so lightweight and unnoticeable that there was no movement to the mattress as she climbed in, no stir as she slipped under the comforter. She felt like a bug jumping onto the back of a dog. Oh, please wake up, Opal said silently, but there wasn’t a sound except for Dottie’s steady, peaceful breathing. Listening to that sound, Opal herself began to drift off.
When she woke up, or rather, when Dottie shook her awake hours later, Opal felt as though she were in a meat locker. The room was an alarming temperature.
“Why is it so cold in here?” Dottie was asking, standing over the bed. “Did you touch the AC?”
Opal could only nod, embarrassed. “Jesus,” Dottie said. “We could have gotten frostbite!”
But she wasn’t angry very long. She adjusted the controls and returned the apartment to a more reasonable climate. Then she came back to the bedroom. “I’m sorry I’ve been asleep so long,” she said, “but that tour really knocked the wind out of me. Tell me what I’ve missed since I’ve been gone.”
“Nothing,” Opal said, shy at first, but as the evening wore on she gradually began to take objects from drawers and tabletops and present them to her mother: a diorama she had done, a spin-art painting, a beaded necklace she had strung. And she felt that pull of love once again, the real luxury of being alone with her mother. This would go on for all of July, she thought. Opal never wanted to go outside; who needed it? She would much rather stay in and listen to Dottie’s new jokes, sit in the kitchen while her mother talked on the telephone, her head tipped
to the side, cradling the receiver so that her hands could be free to sift through Opal’s thick head of hair, making braids.
But on Dottie’s third day back, the telephone rang while she was in the shower, and Opal answered it.
“Is your mother there?” a hesitant female voice asked.
“No, she can’t come to the phone,” Opal said. “Can I take a message?”
She grabbed a pen and pad and wrote down everything the woman said: that there had been a coup in Rwanda, and no one was hurt or in any danger whatsoever, but the Junior Peace Corps program was terminated indefinitely. Opal understood very little of this at first, and yet after a few seconds what was important made itself known, coming into focus slowly, like a photograph gently shaken in a tray of chemicals.
In the background the shower churned, and she could hear her mother singing to herself under the spray. Opal hung up the phone and listened as the glass door slid open and Dottie stepped down. Now she would be drying off and coming out, and Opal would have to tell her the disappointing news: Erica was coming home.
Eight
She had been in Rwanda barely a day when the government was overthrown. Erica had just moved in with the Baptiste family, who lived in a small apartment house on the outskirts of Kigali. She was supposed to stay with them for three days, and would then be shipped out to the uplands to begin work. But as it turned out, she would see little of the country, except what could be viewed from the living room window that overlooked the crowded street below. Everyone’s clothes looked slightly floured, as if caught in a dust storm. The heat was astonishing, and men and women held handkerchiefs up to their brows and walked dazed, as though suffering from concussions.
On the first night, the Baptiste family served dinner in their cramped kitchen, and there was painfully little to say. Finally the mother, a tired woman in a floral housecoat, turned on a transistor radio that hung from a hook above the sink, and an announcer spat out the evening news in French in a desperate voice. Everyone stopped eating and listened.
The father turned to Erica. There was political unrest in the country, he said in slow, careful English; surely she knew that. This was a difficult time for Rwanda; the government was on shaky footing. Hadn’t the people from the Junior Peace Corps warned her? Erica shook her head, embarrassed. Everyone kept looking at her, their faces expressionless. No one else in the family spoke English. Even the daughter, Juvenale, who was exactly Erica’s age, observed her with bland disinterest.
After dinner they all stayed poised around the radio, and Erica was startled to hear songs by Helen Reddy and Gladys Knight and the Pips. It was an American top-ten show, she realized. She looked around the room at this circle of black faces. Everyone was intently listening; no one said a word. A fan turned slowly in the window, and outside Erica could hear random, occasional noises. She was in Africa, exactly where she had wanted to be, and yet she could not give this scene any meaning. It felt more like an apartment in a housing project in Queens.
Late that night, looking into the mirror in the tiny bathroom down the hall, which the Baptistes shared with another family, Erica’s own face looked different to her—flushed already from one day under the sun, and collapsed in on itself from travel. When she finally got to bed, climbing onto the cot that the father had set up for her in the doorway of Juvenale’s room, Erica’s eyes stung with fatigue. It was much too hot in the apartment, and her body felt peculiarly moist under the sheets. Across the room, she could hear turning and sighing. Juvenale was a thin girl with deeply black skin and hair that was twisted into dozens of braids the size of fingers.
In the dark, Juvenale asked, “Z’êtes fatiguée?”
Erica was so relieved to be spoken to, that she gave a long, rambling answer in painful high-school French about how, yes, she was extremely tired, due to the days of rigorous training at a campground in Maine, then the all-day plane trip, and then the bus ride. But then she abruptly stopped, realizing that she probably wasn’t making much sense.
There was nowhere to go from there; the conversation had been hurled along to its finish already. The two girls lay in that dark room flat on their backs. This was only a way station; Erica would soon be living out near a chain of volcanoes, demonstrating dental care to villagers. She would be passing out spools of dental floss to women and men, and holding up giant placards that had illustrations of teeth painted in cheerful colors. But for now, resting in the home of this family who had for some reason agreed to take her in, Erica felt as though she had lost her sense of gravity. She gave in to it finally, letting herself drop. Juvenale seemed to be asleep already. Erica tried to follow her, pretending that this warm, close air was the water of a bath, surrounding Erica, calming her. It almost worked. She was nearly asleep moments later, when three gunshots cracked in the street outside. Erica’s eyes snapped open.
Suddenly voices called from down the hall. Juvenale’s father appeared in the doorway; he bumped right into Erica’s cot and stubbed his foot against its metal frame, shouting something in rapid French. Erica had no time to grab her Rousseau pocket dictionary from her luggage; she barely had time to pull a robe around her. Within seconds the father was ushering everyone out into the hallway of the building. The neighbors were gathered there, and they were all talking at once. Erica could not understand a word. A single bulb swung like a pendulum from a chain, and as the light moved across the line of faces, she felt as though she were at some strange new discotheque, or had taken some strange new drug. Her tongue was thick and wouldn’t work. She could only remember the simplest things in French. Un, deux, trois, she whispered to herself. Un, deux, trois. Then she crouched against the wall between Juvenale and an ancient man who lived next door, and waited for instructions.
And so Erica found herself returning home, without ever seeing the volcanoes or the Kagera River, or anything else that sounded at all foreign to her. Her arm still ached from where she had been inoculated weeks earlier, but the inoculation had been for nothing. She hadn’t drunk any water, hadn’t gone near any native food. The Baptiste family had served her macaroni from a can, and then she had fallen asleep, and that was it. Now, still exhausted from the first plane trip, Erica was headed back to the States. She felt somehow personally responsible for the coup, as though her presence had thrown off the equilibrium of an entire African nation. The fat girl had arrived, and it was as if the other side of a seesaw had swung way up in the air. Bodies went flying; a government fell.
—
Dottie was waiting at the gate when she landed. Erica allowed herself to be hugged, and was then ushered into the limousine. Opal was there too, of course, leaping about in the backseat, watching television and pouring herself one Coke after another from the miniature bar, but Erica was so exhausted that she barely paid attention. She leaned back against the crushed velvet seat, and slept hard for the entire ride back to the city.
Her mother told her that she could go to summer camp if she wanted, that perhaps it wasn’t too late to get her into a good one. She named a few—they were popular places that were always being advertised in the back of the New York Times, camps with euphonious names like Golden Lake and Iroquois Valley. And then, of course, there were programs for fat girls, which had names like Belle Rêve Camp for Overweight Teens. That was where Erica really belonged, not out on the veldt with strong, able teenagers, but in a tent with others like herself, shunted off to the farthest region and starved for six weeks. But Erica didn’t want to go anywhere; she would stay home, she decided, and seal herself back up in her bedroom, which she never should have left in the first place.
Opal and Dottie were real pals these days; lately they had taken to sitting on the piano bench side by side and singing show songs. This was a truly disturbing development, and Erica couldn’t bear to listen. She turned the volume of her stereo up as high as it would go, until the voices of Reva and Jamie were thoroughly distorted, but at least
nothing else could be heard underneath, no jaunty chords leading into a reprise of “Happy Talk.” Erica was swallowed up by sound, and even though it hurt her ears to listen, she lay on her bed and let the sound roll over her, the way that, when a subway train rushes past, you stand on the platform and tolerate the intolerable: the great wall of noise that seems to take you in as it sweeps by, only to drop you at the last minute. Once again there is silence in the station—the groan of turnstiles, and little else.
She didn’t enjoy the music so loud, but enjoyment had very little to do with any of this. She didn’t enjoy smoking dope with Jordan Strang, either; she never liked the way her hands and feet felt loose, as though they had been unscrewed halfway at the wrists and ankles, nor did she like the way her usual desire for food was magnified to a comical degree, so that she had visions of specific dessert items floating in cartoon bubbles over her head. Twinkies appeared, and Yodels: anything that was soft and sealed in plastic—anything that had no resistance, no crust, nothing to come up against. The best food was as pliant as flesh.
The syllogism worked, too: The best flesh was as pliant as food. At least Jordan seemed to feel that way when his hands rambled along the edges of her body, stopping occasionally to feel something. Sex with Jordan, in which nothing was at stake, allowed you to swim through it to its resolution. Nobody asked you to enjoy it; nobody even asked if you were enjoying it. Erica was certain that Jordan felt as she did: that their lovemaking was both necessary and fulfilling, although neither of them would ever admit this aloud. Their needs were freakish, as though they had both discovered that their bodies were missing the same rare enzyme.
Erica lay alone in bed, with the music steamrolling over her, and she realized, to her astonishment, that she actually missed Jordan Strang. Not him, exactly, but sex with him. It was yet another act that she did not exactly enjoy, but that didn’t matter at all. When you became lovers with somebody, you gave up all resistance. Erica felt as though she had let herself become exposed to a thousand new elements, some of them toxic, some not. She would need to be put in a plastic bubble for the rest of her life, like the boy in that TV movie. Only Jordan’s touch was safe. How peculiar that she actually required the touch of this boy who did not love her: Jordan Strang, who loved no one but himself and, possibly, Hunter Thompson.