This Is My Life

by Meg Wolitzer

  Dottie observed her fully, head tilted. “Honey,” she said, “maybe it’s too hard for you. Could that be it? I mean, maybe you’re pushing yourself. I’m hardly an expert, not having gone to college—having received my degree from the school of hard knocks—but maybe this is too much. I’ve looked at some of your textbooks, and God knows they’re way over my head.”

  “It’s not that it’s too hard,” Opal started, but she had no idea of where she might possibly go from here. “I think about other things,” she said, “and I start worrying.” She paused. “Like about you,” she said.

  Dottie looked puzzled. “What’s all this?” she asked. “Why should you worry about me? You’re a twenty-year-old girl; you’ve got your whole life up there in college. You’ve got better things to think about than me. Really, Opal, I don’t know what you’re saying.” But Dottie seemed thrown suddenly, unnerved.

  Opal came to the counter and slipped a cigarette from her mother’s pack. “I hate that you smoke,” Dottie muttered.

  Opal ignored this. They sat with the oven preheating and the smoke lifting, and outside the sky looked dark, even though it was daytime. The sky often looked dark from the kitchen window, which granted a narrow view between buildings. Opal could just make out the skull of the planetarium across the way.

  “Look,” said Dottie, “I appreciate your concern. It’s not as though I haven’t stayed awake at night obsessing about this myself, worrying whether or not it’s career suicide.” She poked her cigarette out in a saucer. “But you know,” she went on, “my career is already as good as dead. In a way, I have nothing to lose.” She shook her head. “Comedy isn’t where it used to be,” she said. “Turn on the television; have you seen that man, the one who calls himself the Unidentified Flying Comic? You know, the one who comes onstage with that cape and that accent? That’s what people pay money to hear. Gone are the days when I was getting famous—the nightclubs, and the real excitement in the air.”

  “Well, doesn’t that depress you?” asked Opal.

  “Sure it does,” Dottie said. “Sometimes, if I really start to dwell on it, I get blue. When I first started out, everyone said it was so wonderful how far I’d come, what a good role model I was for other women, and now they’re saying that my humor is insulting to women. So comedy has changed, so I’m making a living with a line of women’s clothing. Is that so bad?” She looked at Opal as though she really wanted an answer. “It’s a good cause,” Dottie went on. “These women need to wear something other than potato sacks.” Suddenly Dottie stood. “Come on,” she said. “Enough of this depressing talk. We’ve got to get this show on the road, if we want to eat dinner tonight.”

  But a real gravity had already set in, and nothing could change it. Later, Dottie pulled the turkey pan from the oven and extracted the meat thermometer from the shining flesh of the bird. When she stood up, her face was pink with heat and worried, and Opal felt miserable for having brought anything up.

  She compared this with the year before, when Dottie had been in L.A. for the holiday, taping a sixty-second spot for something called “Kaleidoscope of Stars,” and Opal had been invited to Tamara’s house in Vermont. There were three good-natured, attractive brothers present, all of whom had nouns for names: Clay, Hull, and something else bucolic that Opal didn’t quite remember, either Forest or Park. Both of Tamara’s parents were hale and angular and cheerful. There was no subtext to the weekend, no hidden rage or regret. They had all sat around a large parsons table and drunk a lot of wine, and after dinner they went for a night ski through the trails out back.

  She could not imagine what Tamara’s childhood had been like, living there, singing madrigals with her family at night, having three brothers to jostle and goad at the dinner table. Every year Tamara invited friends home for various vacations, even the unimportant vacations, like Columbus Day, so that no one should have to stay alone at school in an echoing dormitory. She seemed to take for granted the pleasant agitation that thrummed through her house all weekend. Everyone in her family slept late, and staggered from bed in the morning at their leisure. The three brothers drank long slugs of milk right from the container, and came to the table in only their pajama bottoms. Their chests were broad and hairless and beautiful, Opal thought, looking away.

  But now, a full year later, Opal and her mother sat alone in a darkening kitchen, slicing meat into parchment with an electric knife, and Opal found herself grateful for the hum of the blade. “You know,” Dottie said, “before you start feeling too sorry for me, I’d like you to see some things for yourself. I’d like you to see a little more of what this is all about.”

  “What do you mean?” Opal asked.

  “Well, I’d like to take you to the factory where they make the clothes for my line,” Dottie said. “I just want you to see.”

  So the following Monday, two hours before the caravan of students was due to take her back to New Haven, Opal went with her mother to the Amwoolco factory on Chrystie Street in lower Manhattan. The limousine cruised through the unfamiliar streets, and Opal realized that in all her years in New York, she had never once been to this neighborhood; she didn’t even know what it was called. Dottie had the driver stop in front of a factory. Opal looked up and could see yellow light shining behind some of the large, smeary windows on the third floor. Higher up in the building, most of the windows had been punched out, and all that was left was a map of glass, with no light behind it. Opal was seized with a crazy fear of this place. There was nothing familiar about it, nothing she could grasp on to, except the bizarre fact that this was her mother’s factory, her mother’s line of clothing.

  A guard let them in, and they traveled upstairs together in an ancient elevator. When they arrived at the third floor, Dottie pulled back the grate and opened the door of a large room that was chattering with machinery. On the far wall was a banner that read: DOTTIE ENGELS FASHIONS FOR LARGE WOMEN . . . SAY IT LOUD, I’M BIG AND PROUD!

  Opal sucked in a hard breath. Was this shame she felt, in its purest form, or did it have something else stirred in? She couldn’t be sure.

  Then the noise slowed and lessened, as word went around that Dottie was here. Machines were abandoned and several operators, mostly women, gathered around. Opal realized that her mother was the only island of color among this crowd of people. Everyone else was wearing dark gray aprons, and their hair was pulled back in netting, away from their faces and the machinery. Dottie was clothed in an orange dress from her line. The dress hadn’t actually been released yet; this was only a prototype.

  “Miss Engels, we’re so glad to see you,” an old woman said, coming up to Dottie and embracing her with chicken-bone arms. Opal turned away; she felt as though she were witnessing a scene from Dickens. But her mother was calling Opal back, wanting to introduce her.

  “This is my daughter Opal,” Dottie announced.

  “You have two girls, is that right?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Dottie said, and then her face closed up and went peculiar for just a moment, the way it always did when someone mentioned Erica.

  “She’s so streamlined,” said a young woman, herself overweight and wearing a Dottie Engels dress under her apron.

  At twenty, Opal did not feel streamlined. Instead, she felt that she looked strange, with her round face jutting off a tall, lanky body with breasts. It was an odd hybrid: the presence of both child and adult when the two halves were supposed to meld. It reminded her of the way Shirley Temple had looked as an adolescent, at the end of her career.

  Now Opal followed her mother around the factory, peering down at the tops of women’s netted heads that were nodding over small machines. When the tour had ended and they were back downstairs, Dottie said, “See?” but Opal wasn’t at all sure of what she was supposed to have seen.

  “See what?” Opal asked.

  “See that this is so
mething real, something worthwhile,” said Dottie.

  “Real isn’t the same as worthwhile,” Opal said, and she immediately regretted it. This sounded like some stupid comment uttered in a freshman logic tutorial.

  “Forget it, then,” said Dottie. “Just forget it.”

  She pulled open the elevator grate and walked out ahead of Opal, nodding to the guard but not stopping. Opal trailed behind, struggling to keep up as she had done as a little girl. They walked across the street, where the limousine was double-parked, and Dottie got in first. “Look, I’m sorry,” Opal said as she ducked into the car. “Please, I’m just not sure of what I was supposed to see.”

  Dottie didn’t answer. She unzipped her purse and fished around inside for a pack of cigarettes. Because no one would laugh at a fat woman anymore, the silence had spiraled all the way downward to a factory at the bottom of Manhattan. Opal watched her mother smoke, saw the way Dottie inhaled as though she were hungry. It was just the two of them now, traveling together in this car that Dottie could no longer afford and would soon be selling. Opal remembered how she and her mother used to sing duets together, and how Erica would storm past, her hands over her ears, not wanting to listen. They had sung “Happy Talk” and “Dites-Moi.” The music traveled back to her now, unbidden, and it brought with it a trail of other things. Opal thought of the way her mother used to look in a full-length gown, and the way the babysitters used to sound as they practiced all night. There had been so much going on back then; now it all seemed whittled-down and disappointing. This was the result of those years of excess, she thought, leaning back as the car bumped lightly across a few potholes. Then, for some reason which she did not entirely understand, Opal thought of her father.

  In thinking of him, she suddenly wanted to see him.

  The desire struck with an astonishing simplicity, but there it was: Opal wanted to talk to him, to write to him, to ask him questions. Years before, after the divorce was official, Dottie had often said, “Your father doesn’t know how to show love, and I see no reason for him to have your love, girls. I’m afraid he’d only hurt you. Better to let the whole thing drop.”

  So they had dropped it, dropped him, and it had been a painless release, with very few echoes. Opal thought about him occasionally over the years, but always with a kind of distracted curiosity that had a short half-life. Once in a while she would be reminded that she had a father living in Florida, and for a moment she would close her eyes and summon up an image of a tall, reedy man in a business suit, loosening a striped tie under the Miami sun. That image would satisfy her, and she would not pursue it. Back when she and Erica were both still living at home, they would occasionally discuss him, but it always felt wrong, as though they were holding underground meetings of a subversive political organization and might be discovered at any time. Soon their voices would grow frail and hesitant and the discussion would end.

  But now Opal felt herself swell with longing; it seemed as real to her as matter, as real as muscle and bone and lipid. It might have filled her clothes and ballooned her up to size forty-six. In her head, she began to compose a letter.

  Ten

  Erica lay back on the table while the girl attached two electrodes to her temples. They seemed to spring from her head like branches, she thought, peering at herself in the mirror on the wall. She had thought she would look like a vivisection victim, wired and stunned on a slab, but instead there was something mythological about this whole thing: a tree growing from a woman. Erica vaguely remembered reading a story like that in the Bullfinch book, years before.

  “I’m going to sit on the other side of the glass, where you can’t see me,” the girl was saying, “and I’m going to ask you a few questions. The machine will monitor your brain waves as you respond. So just relax, okay? Think of something peaceful; think of your favorite place.”

  The girl disappeared into the next room. Erica shifted slightly on the papered table, as the first of the questions began. “In your mind,” came the girl’s voice, “do you use food as a replacement for love?” She was young, about Erica’s age, and had not sloughed off certain childhood cadences. She spoke as though reciting a nursery rhyme.

  “No,” Erica answered. Jordan had suggested she tell lies during the test; it would be interesting to throw off a whole study, he said, to screw up whatever theory was being proposed.

  They had been making a living from this sort of thing for months now. It had originally been Jordan’s idea; he kept seeing advertisements in the back of the Village Voice—graduate students wanting guinea pigs for psychological studies—and he and Erica began making the rounds. It was like selling blood, Erica thought: a slightly sleazy thing to do, and yet she actually enjoyed herself. The graduate students always treated you very well, and you were paid as soon as the tests were done. Sometimes they were looking for overweight people, like today, and Erica was always accepted into the study right away. During one such test, she had to eat a bag of cookies while a young blond man told her jokes. He wanted to see what sort of correlation there was between humor and the enjoyment of food. But the cookies were dry and uninteresting—Stella D’Oro—and the jokes strictly knock-knock. Erica never doubted the worth of the studies; she obediently answered the questions and left with her money. Today, when she left, her temples were still damp with conducting grease.

  She walked out into Washington Square in the late afternoon, clutching the twenty-five dollars she had earned, and decided to go visit Jordan. He had left for NYU Hospital the night before, where he was participating in a two-week study of young, healthy males with a family history of heart disease. He wouldn’t be able to falsify any information there, Erica thought, because all they wanted of him were blood and urine and his recorded heart rate. She pictured him lounging on a high bed in a warm, pastel room, and she envied him. Back in the apartment they shared, the heat was erratic and the street below was alive with drug deals throughout the night. Erica was often kept awake by the sound of arguments—somebody being cheated, or cheating someone else.

  It was an early winter; December had barely begun, and already the wind was fierce. Erica walked through Washington Square, passing the usual assortment of dealers and homeless people and a bevy of well-bundled NYU film students shooting a scene. Over the years, Erica had watched dozens of such movies being shot in Washington Square Park. Sometimes film students advertised in the Village Voice for actors, but since there was no money involved, neither she nor Jordan ever responded. Today a woman in black was sitting on a bench with a parrot on her shoulder; the camera stayed trained on her for minutes.

  She walked on. A young man at the fountain said, “Hey, baby, I like them fat. More to hold on to,” but Erica didn’t even flinch, the way she would have a few years before. A few years before, that sort of remark would have been enough to send her to bed for the day. But now she just kept walking, not even stopping to give him the evil eye.

  Erica was the kind of woman who was never sprayed with perfume in department stores. She would step off the escalator and watch as the grimly smiling models turned from her and aimed their atomizers elsewhere. All around her were clouds of fragrance, but she walked right between those clouds, untouched. She had become nearly invisible at twenty-four, which was interesting, since there was even more of her now than ever. In the past few years Erica had made a conscious decision to “let herself go.” Her body had swelled outward in all directions, the ankles thickening, the neck disappearing into her shoulders. She had to dig like an archaeologist to even locate the outline of her bones beneath the skin. The clavicle was several inches under; her fingers found it like a prize.

  Jordan didn’t care that she had gotten so enormous; in some way, she thought, he liked it, because now the two of them were even more of a perverse couple than they had been, more of a contrast, he with his skinny hips and long, deadpan face, she with all that excess baggage.

 
“I find the two of you very, very sad,” Jordan’s mother had said on the telephone. “Something went wrong somewhere.” Now Jordan refused to talk to his mother. Occasionally she left messages on the answering machine, but Jordan never returned them. He just listened, unmoved, to his mother’s recorded voice, and then he fast-forwarded the message until her voice was distorted into a high-pitched animal squeal, like a Chipmunk Christmas record, urgent and meaningless.

  Soon Erica stopped talking to her own mother. It started the first day that Dottie came to visit. “My God,” Dottie had said, picking her way across the cluttered living room. “How can you two live like this?” She had brought with her a little potted fern, and she held it tightly between both hands, suddenly unwilling to relinquish it to this new environment.

  Was there anything sadder, Erica thought, than grown children being descended upon by their parents? This is it, you said to each other. This is what I’ve become. Dottie sat on the ratty futon couch in a bright blue dress, and when she got up to leave twenty minutes later, her entire back was coated with white cat hair. They had no cat; the couch had belonged to Jordan’s brother, who kept a houseful of pets. When Dottie stood to put on her coat, Erica and Jordan stared at her back, not saying a word. It was a private moment, a mean joke shared between them. Dottie would go to lunch at the Four Seasons covered in cat hair. No one there would say a word either, not even the maitre d’.

  “Please, Erica,” Dottie said again at the door. “Think about what I said. And it wouldn’t hurt if you spruced yourself up, too. If it’s money . . .” she said, and her voice trailed off as she opened the clasp of her purse.

  “It’s not money,” Erica said, but she accepted fifty dollars anyway, and then felt regretful about it all night. She lay in bed with Jordan, thinking about the strained afternoon and how her mother’s critical eye had roamed the apartment, looking for a good place to land.