by Meg Wolitzer
Now she looked at her mother sitting on the couch, wrapped in a green kimono, her eyes small with exhaustion, and she wanted to lead her to bed like a drowsy child.
“Why don’t you sit down awhile?” Dottie said, and Opal reluctantly agreed.
“Is it just me?” Dottie asked.
“Is what you?”
Dottie gestured. “Oh, this whole humor thing,” she said. “Not getting it. I feel as though I’m from another country—no, another planet—and I’m learning about the local customs. Opal, I just don’t see. What happened to the old kind of comedy, where you stand on a stage and you talk to the audience conversationally? None of these pyrotechnics. Just a simple routine, maybe a little music to go along with it, a couple of impressions. Now the simplicity is lost.”
“I guess,” Opal said, “there are other things now. A variety.” But her voice was soft and not very believable. Dottie wasn’t looking for consolation, she realized; tonight, Dottie just wanted to talk. Opal watched as her mother lit another cigarette and then held out the pack to Opal, which she had never done before. Usually Dottie complained terribly about the fact that Opal smoked. “Just because I have a disgusting habit doesn’t mean that you should,” Dottie sometimes said. But now she was actually striking a match for Opal and holding it out to her, as if to say, Oh, well; we’re all going down. Opal hesitated, then took a cigarette and leaned forward to meet the light.
“The first time I was on Carson,” Dottie began, “I was so nervous, the way everyone is their first time.”
Opal nodded, remembering how her mother had called from California the day of the show, and had run through her monologue long-distance while both girls listened on separate extensions.
“The hairstylist backstage was telling me little anecdotes about other people who had been on,” Dottie said, “except she kept calling them ‘antidotes.’ When you finally get onstage, the lights are so hot that you sweat like a pig, but you’re supposed to pretend that you’re at this wonderful cocktail party. If that was really a party, I would have left in five minutes and hosed myself down. But I just had to sit there, and after a while I got used to it, and they liked me, as you know. I was funny,” she said. “Not to blow my own horn, but I really think I was pretty funny.”
There was a sound from across the room. Opal looked up to find Sy standing in the doorway in his matching kimono. “I thought you were funny,” said Sy. “You certainly made me laugh back then.” He yawned, struggling to wake up.
“Where’s that record?” Dottie suddenly asked. “You know, the one we were listening to just the other day.” She stood up slowly, steadying herself, and walked across the room to the shelf of record albums. She flipped through them for a minute until she found what she wanted; it was the first record Dottie had ever made, a live concert album entitled Everything’s Coming Up Dottie. She slipped the record from its sleeve. The record was deeply scarred from use, but it was unmistakably Dottie’s voice that blazed through the rooms.
“Dot, the neighbors will call the police,” Sy said, but he sat down to listen.
Opal watched her mother’s face, saw the pleasure Dottie was taking from this, her lips moving silently to accompany each spoken word.
“You know,” Dottie was saying on the record, “I’ve been asked to be on Hollywood Squares. I only hope they don’t put me on the top row, because the whole thing would collapse!” There was a wave of laughter. When it ended, Dottie went on. “The bags under my eyes are so heavy,” she said, “I even had the delivery boy carry them home for me the other day!” Another wave, and then some applause. “You like that?” the younger Dottie said. “I’m glad, because there’s plenty more where that came from.”
When the record ended, Dottie’s eyes were shining. “Well, ladies, I guess we should turn in,” Sy quickly said. “I’ve enjoyed this trip down memory lane, but I, for one, need my beauty sleep.”
Opal watched as Sy held out his hand to Dottie. After they had gone, Opal stayed up for a while. She picked up Everything’s Coming Up Dottie. The cover art depicted a field of huge sunflowers, but in the center of each flower was a photograph of her mother’s face. Opal wondered what it would be like to go from being everywhere—from populating an entire field—to occupying one small space. Her mother was physically larger than ever, but there were no longer multiple images of her wherever Opal looked. Right now Dottie and Sy were getting ready for sleep—taking off their kimonos and climbing into bed. Opal imagined them sleeping together—sleeping, not making love—their bodies shifting to accommodate each other, changing shape throughout the night like sand dunes.
Next to Opal on the couch was the crossword puzzle Sy had been working on that day; she picked it up and saw that all the squares had been filled in. When she looked more closely, though, she realized that several answers made no sense. Sy had filled in words just to have the satisfaction of completing the grid. She glanced up at the clues. Author Anaïs, read 24 Across, and Sy had filled in Pin. Anaïs Pin; it almost made Opal cry out. Sy was a decent man, and right now he was lying next to Dottie. “You make do with what you’re given in this life,” Dottie used to say. “I’m no Twiggy, so I use my weight; I throw it around a little. Is that so bad?”
It was better, wasn’t it, than what most people had? Back when they all lived in Jericho, Opal and Erica had had a code phrase for the times their mother cried. “Pink eyeshadow alert,” Erica would whisper, poking her head into the doorway of Opal’s room. With Sy, there would be very little crying. Instead, there would only be peaceful sleeping, and Chinese meals that went on and on in a parade of silver dishes. Maybe it was sheer companionship that Dottie wanted; maybe after a certain point in life, that was enough.
Opal took for granted the fact that she would always have a knot of people around her. At Yale, she woke up to the sound of voices in the morning, and fell asleep to those same voices at night. But now, back in the apartment, the pitch had lowered, the voices were fewer; you had to fend for yourself here, make your own noise.
She realized that every day at work she inordinately looked forward to spending time with Walt Green. He had become her companion, her sidekick, the only person there she really spoke to. Opal spent much of her time at work at the Xerox machine or picking up props from a manufacturer downtown. She was treated well by Joel Macklin, the assistant director who had hired her, and largely ignored by most everyone else. A couple of the writers occasionally asked her how she was getting along, but there was a nervous, dislocated atmosphere in the studio that made extended interaction unlikely. The cast members kept away from everyone else and remained in quarantine down the hallway where their dressing rooms were. Sometimes Opal would see them slip back and forth between each other’s rooms, like characters in a bedroom farce.
On Friday nights Opal sat in the wings with Walt, while all around them men and women in headphones cued each other for sound and lights. Once Opal watched one of the cast members, a wiseguy named Stevie Confino, preparing to go onstage. He stood only a foot away from her, and she watched as he exhaled a few hard, short breaths and faked a small feint to the left, like a boxer about to duck through the ropes and into the ring. Opal thought of her mother, pictured her standing backstage, blotting her lipstick and waiting anxiously for a cue.
At lunch hour, she and Walt went off by themselves to a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue. Walt was a junior at Columbia who had taken a year off from school to work at the show. He spoke freely about the job in a way that impressed Opal, made her relax. He also asked her questions about herself, seemed to want her to talk. When he told a joke, she laughed without the self-consciousness she usually felt when she was being set up.
“What do you get,” Walt asked, “when you cross a Mafioso with a semiotics expert?”
“What?” said Opal.
Walt smiled. “An offer you can’t understand.”
Opal laughed and lit a cigarette. “That’s great,” she said.
“Too arcane for the show, though,” said Walt. “I tried it out on the writers. No go.” He shook his head. “So, have you figured out the way things are around the set?” he asked. “I’ll steer you in the direction of the people who are worth knowing, and keep you away from the ones who will make your life a living hell.”
Opal smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “You like it here, though, right?” she asked.
“Well, yes,” said Walt. “Depends who’s asking. You and I are strictly serf material, of course, but you really get to see a lot of things. It’s kind of an education.”
“What kinds of things?” Opal asked.
“Well, for one thing,” said Walt, “have you noticed the way some of the cast take five-minute breaks about every fifteen minutes? Guess what’s going on in the bathroom? But they make a lot of money; they can afford it. Unlike some of us, they have salaries.” He paused. “Not that I would spend my salary on cocaine. I don’t know,” he went on. “My parents think I’m crazy to want to work in comedy. They think it’s a really depressing world. It’s gotten so I don’t tell them things. It’s like that Billie Holiday song goes: ‘Don’t explain.’ But I’ve always wanted to work in comedy.”
“What do you mean, always?” Opal asked.
“Ever since The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Walt said. “I used to fantasize about sitting around that office all day, goofing around and coming up with ideas. Having lunch every day with Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie.”
“Poor Rose Marie,” Opal said. “Unable to find a man. Forever single!” she said.
Walt smiled. He was attractive; there was something persistent and fierce about him. He was like a little muscle, Opal thought.
“What about you?” he asked. “Do you actually want to do something in this ‘depressing line of work,’ as my father would say?”
“I don’t know what I want to do,” Opal said. “I’ve grown up around all this; my mother’s a comedian.”
“Oh?” said Walt. “Anyone I’d know?”
She told him, and realized that as she spoke, her face was quickly heating up, as though she had confessed something intensely private.
Walt squinted. “Really,” he said. “That’s amazing. But you’re so . . . petite. I didn’t make the connection.”
“We don’t look alike,” Opal said quickly.
“Do you look like your father?” he asked.
Opal shrugged. “I’m not sure,” she said, and her voice dropped away.
“I’m sorry,” said Walt. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
“You didn’t,” said Opal. “I’m just weird about certain things.”
“Everybody is,” said Walt. “Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that’s about it.” He shook his head. There was a protracted silence, and Opal became tense, wondering what he would say next.
But all he did was lift his wrist to look at the time. “We’d better go,” he said. “They may not pay us anything, but they want us back in time.” They walked back to Rockefeller Center, where flags were flicking and slapping in a strong wind, and Walt took her arm. For a moment Opal felt as though she and Walt had important jobs, as though they were U.N. delegates returning from lunch. She thought of her father and wondered if her face had given too much away when Walt asked her about him. Was her father her “theme”? She really couldn’t be sure. It seemed impossible to extricate Norm Engels from this whirling family. She thought about turning to Walt and trying to explain further, but suddenly they were pushing through the heavy glass of the revolving door, and the time had passed.
—
Let me look at you,” Mia Jablon said. She spoke with the inflections of a mother who has been separated from her child for a long time. If the child knows what is good for her, she will stand back, arms at her sides, and let herself be appraised. A wrist will be lifted and dropped, strands of hair swept from left to right. A shirt will be tucked in hard, hands digging down the way only a mother would dare. But Mia simply wanted to look, and Opal didn’t mind. Mia had been her babysitter, after all: someone who had cooked for her, and put her to bed, and sat drowsing all night in a tiny white rocking chair during croup season. Opal stood still now while Mia observed her for a long moment, and then they embraced.
“You’re a beauty,” Mia whispered. “I knew that would happen; I could see it even then.”
Opal had been working at Rush Hour for three weeks, and Mia Jablon had just been brought in, mid-season, as the newest cast member. Mia had been discovered by one of the show’s producers at a small club in Tribeca, where she was performing with Synchronous Menses, the women’s musical comedy troupe she had founded. She did characters: Her best one was an old black blues singer who had worked as a dishwasher her whole life, named Soapy Waters. Mia’s humor had a deliberate edge; she stood onstage and said, “Sure, I’d like to have children one day. I think one day would be long enough.”
It had been nine years since she and Opal had seen each other, they calculated that first night over dinner at Mia and Lynn’s loft. In those nine years Mia Jablon had barely changed at all, except to take on a kind of definition around the edges, as though she had been outlined in magic marker. Her body had stayed tight and small, her red hair only slightly threaded with something darker and less felicitous than it had been. The braid, Opal was pleased to see, was still intact.
“Television, finally,” said Mia, leaning over the table to gather plates. “I was always told I didn’t have the face for it. Too scrunched up, they said; it won’t hold up under the camera, it’ll collapse like a soufflé. Now your mother, she’s got a face. The camera used to eat her up.”
“If she didn’t eat the camera first,” Opal said, and was immediately ashamed.
No one dared laugh. “How’s Dottie doing?” Lynn quickly asked. She and Mia had recently moved from their old apartment in Brooklyn to this large loft in a warehouse on Franklin Street. They had very little furniture, and Opal wasn’t sure if this was because they had moved in so recently, or whether it was the desired aesthetic. Either way, she liked the feel of this big, spare gymnasium of a room. Mia and Lynn moved about the space like two cats, Opal thought, watching them as they cleared the table. There was a balletic, married rhythm to their actions, and Opal realized, for the first time, that Mia and Lynn were lovers. It had probably always been common knowledge, and Opal was suddenly embarrassed about her ignorant child-self, that skipping, yammering other that she had been. Adulthood put a new spin on things, gave them a certain clarity. Mia scraped crumbs from the tablecloth with the side of a knife; Lynn snuffed out the fat candles in the center of the table. Everything was familiar, and tacitly coordinated.
“My mother’s fine,” Opal said. “She’s got a boyfriend. His name is Sy, and they seem happy together. They’re together all the time.” Nobody said anything in response; they all observed an extended silence, as though speaking of the dead.
Mia plucked at a cluster of green grapes from her plate until she had pulled them all off, and the knobbed stems looked like a pile of jacks. “I’ve thought about your mother a lot,” she finally said. “I’ve followed her career pretty closely.” She shifted in her chair, settling in. “In the beginning, before I’d ever met her, it was so amazing to me that a woman had made it like that in comedy. And she was original, too; in those early shows, if you watch them now, you can see that she’s really got her own voice. It’s not so much that she was hilarious; she was just so outrageous, so nervy. Sometimes I didn’t even think she was funny, but I never minded.”
Opal nodded. “When Erica and I were little, we never really got it,” she said.
“Well, I got it, I think,” Mia said. “She was very much h
er own performer, and warm too, unlike some of the women who came later and made a big thing out of being bitter. You know, that kind of whiney humor that became popular. I remember watching her on Mike Douglas. It was exciting to see—like the beginning of something important, where there’s still all this anticipation, but you’re not sure what’s going to happen. She was this huge, wacky mother figure let loose onstage. And then later on you can see that she’s really in charge there, doing those weird songs and all those characters, and everybody is crazy about her. And then, finally, everything just stops. I couldn’t understand why your mother wasn’t on any of those comedy specials anymore. Lynn and I used to spend hours looking for her name in TV Guide. But then I realized that it had less to do with her than with what else was going on at the time. I mean, look at how the women’s movement changed everything. Suddenly everybody got a little embarrassed if women made jokes about their bodies, but Dottie wouldn’t stop; she was like a machine. God, all those jokes about breasts.”
“Boobs,” Lynn interrupted. “I believe the word here is ‘boobs.’ If you’re going into television, you’d better get your terms straight.”
Mia laughed. “Right,” she said. “I’ll remember that. Range wasn’t her big thing,” she went on. “It was consistency. If you wanted a certain kind of comedy, you could get it from Dottie. She satisfied your expectations.”