This Is My Life

by Meg Wolitzer

  Jordan hadn’t been able to find any more work through the back of the Village Voice, and so he began to spend the days at home. Erica had no trouble finding surveys of overweight women; these seemed boundless. Between the two of them, though, they had very little money, and Jordan was down to cashing the last of his bar mitzvah savings bonds. He decided, at the end of December, that he would try to sell drugs—nothing serious or scary, he said, just a small-fry operation—and so he got several names from his brother, a chemist who used to supply everyone at MIT.

  Erica objected at first; she stood over him in the kitchen as he sat at the table, sifting and separating. “It’s dangerous,” she said. “You could get arrested. I could get arrested.” Jordan didn’t respond; he just kept working. Finally she gave in and watched; there was something gradually mesmerizing about the quick movements of his hands. He folded pages out of magazines into little origami packages that held half-grams of cocaine. Erica watched as he measured out the powder and poured it onto a color photograph of Miss Clairol, and she understood then how a pioneer wife must have felt watching her husband clean and load a gun.

  Jordan’s first customers would be coming over in half an hour. Erica found herself walking about the apartment before they arrived, taking little swipes at the furniture with a cloth; this was the closest thing to company they had ever had. When the downstairs buzzer rang, she flew down to open the outside door. Two teenage girls stood on the stoop bundled up in bright ski parkas. “We’re looking for Jordan,” one said.

  Erica stared, then let them in. She flattened herself against the wall and let them go up ahead of her. The girls were about sixteen, she guessed. They smelled of snow and shampoo, and they took the stairs two at a time. “Cute apartment,” one said when they were inside. They opened their jackets and shook their long dark hair free.

  Jordan came out of the kitchen then, holding a large mirror as though it were a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “You’re Mandy and Parker?” he said, and they nodded. “Want to try some of the sniff before you go?”

  Erica cringed. As usual, Jordan had his terminology wrong, but the girls didn’t know. They sat on the ratty couch while Jordan opened the little packet and sliced up a few thin lines on the mirror he had taken down from over the dresser. Erica had had to use guesswork to make a part in her hair that morning. Now she stood in the doorway and watched as two shining heads bobbed down over the round mirror. The girls inhaled loudly, like truffle pigs.

  They stayed for hours, doing lines and talking happily. Both of them, it turned out, were seniors at Headley. Jordan seemed thrilled to have them here, and Erica realized, with true surprise, that he was actually flirting with them. He was sitting up straighter than usual, his voice lively, and he was in no great hurry to have them leave.

  “Is Mr. Catapano still teaching math?” Jordan asked.

  Parker rolled her eyes. “What an old ass,” she said.

  “Exactly!” said Jordan, his voice rising. “He’d be drawing a rhombus at the blackboard and he’d nod off.” Jordan sliced out another set of lines, more vigorously than before; his hand shook, and the lines came out streaky and thick as skywriting. “Is that awful mural still up?” he asked. “The one with Susan B. Anthony and Helen Keller and everybody?”

  From the way he was speaking, Erica thought, you would think he had been president of the student body. Jordan was suddenly infused with nostalgia for a place he had despised, a place that had despised him. And now he was chumming around with two girls who thought he was something because he could get them what they wanted.

  Erica felt like an old fishwife standing in the background. She walked through the small rooms aimlessly. Next time, she thought, she ought to wear a housecoat and pink scuffs on her feet; that would complete the picture. As it was, the two girls weren’t paying her any attention. They were doing imitations for Jordan of one of the English teachers. Mandy was standing up and saying, “People. Pee-pull! Remember, it’s your time you’re wasting, not just mine.”

  When the sky darkened and they were finally about to leave, Jordan was bouncing up and down a little on his heels. “Any time,” he said. “Call any time, day or night.” Then he carried the mirror back into the bedroom.

  The two girls pulled on their coats, and Erica was suddenly seized with need. She opened the door to let them out, then spoke quickly. “Look,” she whispered in the hallway, “he was very unpopular in high school. We both were. You would have hated him, really. You would have made fun of him.”

  The two girls stared at each other, their faces suddenly emptied of expression, a trick they must have taught themselves to keep from cracking up at moments like this. Without saying a word, they were gone. Within seconds, Erica could hear them howling in the stairwell.

  After that day, Jordan put all his energy into the business. Erica would walk into the apartment and find the stereo blasting, and Jordan sitting in the kitchen, bent over what looked like a small city of anthills. Erica didn’t really like cocaine, and didn’t understand what all the excitement was about, all those articles she had read about white mice mangling each other to get at a dropper of spiked water. Sometimes at night Jordan would bring the mirror up into the loft and slice out a few careful lines. What startled Erica most was seeing her own reflection, big and wavy and florid in the glass. It was too close, too much; how were you supposed to relax when you were practically touching foreheads with yourself? And the sensation itself was nothing more than a kind of thready anxiety followed by a viscous, bitter drip down the back of the throat. For some reason, everyone in the world wanted to be anxious, wanted to be hopped up. Erica was the exception, the mouse that stayed curled in the corner, ignoring the shadow of the dropper overhead.

  She wondered if Jordan was really interested in cocaine, either; what he liked best, she thought, was the company. People suddenly came to him—called on the phone and showed up night after night. Mandy and Parker returned, and they sent some of their friends as well. Jordan began playing host to every twelfth-grader in New York. The apartment had a steady hum to it, the buzzer going, the stereo playing. “Put on an album; whatever you like,” Jordan would say magnanimously to sixteen-year-old boys, because he knew it was their idea of heaven.

  Boys with transparent mustaches would crouch down over the records, or stand at the bookshelf going through Jordan’s science-fiction collection. “Oh, God!” they would say, slapping their heads. “You have a first edition of Alpha State Centurions!”

  Erica was the housemother of them all; she brewed sun tea on the kitchen window and stocked the cabinets with extra Pepperidge Farm cookies, even though the bugs got to them within hours. There were bugs everywhere in the apartment, and they didn’t care if you watched them or not, that was how nervy they were. In the morning they staggered off Erica’s toothbrush, drunk on fluoride.

  She had to get out; everything was too close, too much. One morning she went over to NYU to take part in another study. The graduate student running it was obese himself, which surprised her. His name was Mitchell Block, and he had a large, intelligent face smothered in a beard. Everything about him was drawn on a much larger scale than ordinary; he looked like one of those plaster lumberjack statues that stand outside pancake houses off interstate highways.

  Scale was always a source of fascination; Erica still remembered looking at a Diane Arbus photograph in high school called “Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents,” and how she had cried out softly when she first saw it. The young giant had towered above his bewildered, shrunken parents, ducking so as not to go through their ceiling. When you were big, whether it was tall or wide, you worried that no place could contain you, that you were taking up too much space in the universe, swallowing too much air.

  “Erica,” Mitchell Block said, his voice soft. “Erica, listen closely.”

  When he spoke her name, she felt a chill ripple across her forearm
s; it was as though he somehow knew things about her. But her name was typed plainly on the index card he held between his fingers. He had probably sat there all morning, saying, “Susan, Susan, listen closely; Michelle, Michelle, listen closely.” And those overweight women, peering out from inside their caves, had suddenly become alert, because no one had called them by name in years, and no one’s voice had ever carried so far inside the cave.

  Mitchell said they were going to play word association, and Erica wanted very much to do well; perhaps, she thought, she could respond in a way that would make him think he was really onto something significant here. He would say “food,” and without skipping a beat she would return with “love.” He would say “body,” and she would answer “hate.” His eyes would widen, and the list of words would come quicker; the two of them would volley for minutes.

  But the words he gave her had no logical connection to one another. There was not a single food reference, unless you counted “table,” but that was stretching it. When Mitchell had gone down the entire list, he put his pencil down and smiled.

  “Thank you, that was fine,” he said. “Now comes the time for me to confess something. I wasn’t really paying attention to your responses at all. I was just looking at your eye movements; that’s what the study is all about. I’m curious to see if very overweight people really feel connected to the world, or whether, even when they’re engaged in conversation, they’re somewhere else entirely. Hiding in their own world.”

  “And what did you find?” Erica asked.

  Mitchell Block smiled again. “I’m not supposed to go into it,” he said. “But let’s just say I think you’re still living in the real world.”

  “Oh, I try to drop in whenever I can,” said Erica.

  He laughed, and she felt herself flush. “Well,” he said, pushing back his chair and standing up. “I’ve got to get on with more of these. But thank you, Erica; I’ve enjoyed talking to you.” He held out his hand, and she felt as though she were grasping a big catcher’s mitt, one that was humanly warm.

  —

  That night Jordan was jumpy—itchy with the static of winter, and wanting to move around. He stuffed a little lump of cocaine into his nose and let it melt there; he didn’t have the patience to go through the whole chopping ceremony. “Let’s go out,” he said. “Anywhere.”

  They walked through the lightly falling snow to a bar in the West Village that Jordan said he knew well. He had an embarrassing habit of trying to engage old bartenders in conversation at the end of the night. He would hang around while a bartender ran a rag across the wood. Jordan would sit and swivel on his stool, gnawing a swizzle stick, talking compulsively about anything, nothing. It excited him to be in the company of old men, men whom he thought of as having lived. In the spring it was worse; Jordan liked to sit in Washington Square Park, talking to the old chess players who sat concentrating at stone tables. Erica sometimes had to pull him away so the men could finish their game. He was a joke, she thought, although none of the old men ever laughed at him. They just seemed to tolerate him, looking up at him with slow, surprised eyes every time Jordan said something that made no sense.

  When Erica and Jordan walked into the bar, it was apparent that it had changed management since Jordan had been there last. Several men stood milling around, a few of them in leather, and others sat by themselves at tables, chairs tilted back against the wall, beers in hand, eyes closing sleepily. On the wall, a television with a screen the size of a picture window showed Joan Collins in close-up, but the sound was turned off. It was a slow night at a gay bar, Erica realized.

  Jordan looked perplexed. “It used to be called Paddy’s,” he whispered. “I’m sure of it. Just a little neighborhood place with a pool table.” He walked back outside to peer at the sign over the door. “The Grist Mill,” he said. He plucked at the knees of his corduroys. “We can go if you want; you might feel uncomfortable here, being a woman.”

  “You might feel uncomfortable here, being a man,” she said.

  At that moment the overhead lights clicked out, and a spotlight was pointed on the small platform in the back. Erica quickly sat down to duck the light, and Jordan followed. It was a drag show; the opening number was a decent lip-synch version of “New York, New York.” A man was dressed as Liza Minelli, with a black wig plastered to his head, and false eyelashes as big as starfish. “This one’s for Mama!” he was saying.

  “Do you want to go?” Jordan whispered. “We could sneak out when he’s done.”

  But something made Erica want to stay. Maybe she saw it coming, maybe in some way she knew. She settled in, ordered a Scotch, and watched the show. The man onstage was now doing a medley of Barbra Streisand numbers, crossing his eyes on every other line, saying, “Oh, Mr. Arnstein,” straining for laughs. The Wednesday-night audience was small and scattered but polite. They clapped when each song was over, and no one left the bar.

  It was right after the requisite Diana Ross number that the man came back onstage in a huge, billowing dress with a polka-dot pattern. The imitation was dead-on: the big spheres of rouge, the fleshy orange lips, the hair piled up like hay. And all the movements were right, too; the man traveled the stage the way Dottie used to—arms flailing, describing circles in the air. “Look, look, is it what I think?” Jordan said. “Is it? Is it?”

  She didn’t even answer him. She just kept watching as the man launched into one of Dottie’s oldest routines. “I went to the circus recently,” he was saying, “and I offered to buy the tent. They said fine, and asked if I wanted it wrapped. I said no, I’d wear it home!”

  Erica’s heart was thudding furiously. She swallowed what was left of her drink, and kept the ice in her mouth, biting down hard; it felt as though she were breaking rocks in a quarry inside her head. Most people were able to shake themselves free of their parents; most people could just get on a bus one day and disappear. But it was as though her mother was writing in the sky, sending Erica messages that she would see every time she tipped her face up to the sun. First there had been that awful commercial for women’s clothing, and now this. Her mother had ceased being actively famous, and Erica had thought it was all over, but apparently Dottie Engels had a half-life—she stayed in the blood forever, you could not get her out. She was always there, with that wide, familiar face, and all those jokes that made you hate yourself because you were big too, made you feel that if you were fat you had better be funny.

  “Honey, you’re so serious,” Dottie used to say to Erica. “Lighten up a little, okay?” But Erica would shrug her mother off. At Bennington there had been a group of very heavy, purposeful women who spent all their time hunched around a table in a corner of the dining hall. They were deeply involved in the Women’s Task Force and the Rape Crisis Hotline; they were what Dottie would have called “humorless.” Once, one of them approached Erica at the salad bar and thrust a petition at her. Erica scrawled her name quickly and slid her tray along the slats. She didn’t want to be identified with them, not at all, and she hated herself for it. But just because she looked like them they thought she was like them: moon-faced and wounded and well-intentioned.

  “Do you want to go?” Jordan whispered now, and they slipped from the bar just as the man onstage was pulling off his Dottie Engels wig and taking a bow.

  —

  The next day, something woke Erica up, lifted her from sleep. She was up before Jordan was awake, and before the first of his customers started arriving. She peered at him as she climbed from the loft; Jordan was a mouth breather, and when he slept he often looked as though he were pausing in the middle of a sentence.

  Erica zipped up her old green ski jacket and walked downstairs. The morning was exceptionally cold, but she didn’t mind. The wind rearranged her hair, blew some of it across her eyes. She marched across town to NYU and headed right for the psychology building. It had become as familiar to her as her
own apartment building. She liked the sulphur smell here and the perceptible overlay of animal smell. Erica walked along the hall, peering into the small square windows. In one window a fist of light blossomed from a slide projector, then closed in on itself as the frame changed. Students sat in the dark, heads tilted upward at a screen which Erica could not see.

  Several windows down she found Mitchell Block. He was sitting in a small room, and his broad back was to the door. Erica could see the young woman who faced him; she was definitely overweight, too, and sat with her hands in her lap. Her eyes, Erica noticed, never once raised up to meet his.

  Thirteen

  It stinks,” said the voice.

  “What?”

  “It stinks. No offense to you, of course, but it’s just not funny.”

  Opal had come home late one night, after a taping of Rush Hour, and found that her mother was waiting up for her. In the dark living room, all Opal could see was the orange point of a cigarette, but Dottie’s voice was clear and surprising.

  Opal slid her palm along the wall to turn on a light. Her mother was sitting on the couch in a kimono that Sy had given her, with a full ashtray before her on the coffee table. “I just find it a little sophomoric,” Dottie went on. “I may not be up on today’s trends, granted, but I still know when something doesn’t work. Did any of those writers ever see Your Show of Shows? Did any of them ever hear of Sid Caesar?” She paused. “Did any of them ever hear of me?”

  Something stirred in Opal then, made her feel an uncoiling of despair. The show was good; there was no question about that. The humor was uneven, and sometimes a joke was run into the ground, but most of the time there was a rhythm that kept the audience excited. The first sketch tonight had been about a support group for men with inadequacy problems, and the patients consisted of actors playing Sonny Bono, Ike Turner, and Tom Hayden. Later in the show there was a mini-musical called “Long Day’s Journey into a Hard Day’s Night,” in which the entire Tyrone family wore mop-head wigs and spoke O’Neill’s lines in Liverpool accents. Sitting in the wings with Walt Green, the other college intern, Opal had realized how different this was from watching her mother perform. There wasn’t so much at stake now; Opal wanted the show to do well, but her whole life wasn’t standing onstage, and she didn’t need to hold her breath when the houselights lowered.