by Meg Wolitzer
“And now she’s doing fat women’s clothing,” Opal said. Her voice surprised her, resounding in the room as though she had suddenly started shouting in a museum.
“That upsets you?” Lynn asked.
Opal looked at her. “No,” she qualified, “it embarrasses me.”
“But she’s hanging on,” Mia said. She leaned across the table, arms folded. “I’ve been hanging on forever. In these nine years since you’ve seen me, I’ve been a waitress at four different restaurants—in one of them I had to wear a bonnet and carry a basket of warm popovers—and I’ve word-processed at three in the morning for a law firm, and sold moisturizer at the Clinique counter at Bloomingdale’s, and I used to come home on the subway to Brooklyn every night, so exhausted I felt sick, and I’d have to get my energy up so I could turn around and go back into the city three hours later to play at a club where maybe ten people would see me.” She paused. “And now I’m going to be on TV, and I’m supposed to pretend that I’m still fresh-scrubbed and excited about it, that I’m not already exhausted by life. I wouldn’t be so quick to criticize that mother of yours. She’s a wonderful woman; I guess because of her you don’t have to worry about money. You’re not going to be living in a trailer park eating olive loaf. You go to Yale, and that’s terrific, but you should be a little more grateful, Opal; I mean, look at your life. Look around you.”
When she had finished, Mia seemed self-conscious. “I’m sorry to go on like this, but I feel so strongly about it,” she said. “I feel bad too when I see Dottie up there on TV with that rack of balloon-dresses, but what are you going to do? I think anybody’s life, if you put it on display, would look like a commercial for fat women’s clothing. It’s your mother at her most extreme, the worst that can be made of the fact that she’s big. So maybe someday I’ll be on TV with Lynn and we’ll be doing a commercial for gay women’s clothing.” Mia patted out a little beat on the table. “Gals!” she began. “We’ve got the biggest collection of designer overalls and work boots! Wear them home for Christmas and make your parents miserable!”
Opal leaned back in her chair and laughed easily. She could have stayed here for hours, she knew; she could have sat and listened to Mia Jablon talk about almost anything. Mia would be a success on the show; Opal was sure of it. Her appeal would be very different from Dottie’s; Mia wouldn’t fill up the whole screen. She would occupy one small part of it, ignite it like a match, so your eye was forced toward the point of light. You wanted to look at Mia; her face was intelligent and asymmetrical. Opal glanced across the table for a second at Lynn, who was watching Mia also. Lynn’s smile was broad and full and Opal was suddenly envious of their love, of any married love that could sustain itself like this. She herself had never had it, had never known it was possible.
At the end of dinner, Opal was reluctant to go. She took time to pull on her jacket, slowly drawing the zipper closed. Lynn was stacking dishes in the kitchen, and Opal and Mia stood in the doorway together.
“You know, I’d like to see Dottie,” Mia said. “Do you think she’d be interested in hearing from me? We sort of fell out of touch when you got too old to need babysitting. She had so many people in her life.”
“I’m sure she would,” Opal said, and this was true; her mother always expressed pleasure at seeing people she had not seen in a long time, or even at meeting people who claimed to be big fans.
“I wish I could help her,” Mia went on. “Maybe we could get her an appearance on the show. Not that I have any power there. I’ve only just arrived, but maybe when I settle in more—if they still like me—I could suggest it.”
“She hates the show,” Opal said. “She doesn’t think it’s funny at all.”
Mia shook her head. “Don’t be so sure,” she said. “Dottie hates being left out, I think. I’ve seen that happen. When I found out that I had gotten this job, everyone in Synchronous Menses acted really weird toward me, sort of nasty. They told me I wouldn’t be able to do the kind of humor I was used to, that I was selling out as a feminist, blah blah. I mean, I’d heard all that a dozen years ago, when I shaved my legs for my cousin Judy’s wedding. But I know that most of them would have taken this job in a second if it was offered to them. They’re all living on food stamps, and they want to be seen, they want to be out there. Everybody feels left behind; you have to take that into account. Dottie feels like the whole world has changed, and maybe it has, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just hard, when you’ve made a living out of certain kinds of attitudes. Lucky for me, I never had any success before, so I’m perfectly happy to ring in the new, to leave things behind.”
“Just don’t leave me behind,” Lynn called from the kitchen.
“Never,” Mia called back.
Opal rode the freight elevator down to the street. The world had coupled up, it seemed, overnight. But the coupling wasn’t all that new, she realized; what was new was the fact that she had noticed it, and that it now troubled her. Mia and Lynn, she thought, Erica and Jordan, Dottie and Sy. She wondered again if her father was coupled, too. Maybe he lived alone on Coconut Court, and was one of those people who said he was “married” to his work. Opal had written to him a second time, had asked if he had received her first letter, but he still did not respond. Tamara, who checked Opal’s mailbox at Yale Station every few days, said that nothing of importance had arrived. Opal would have to start thinking of other things.
But it was hard to think of other things on a night like this, heading alone out of the warm light of someone else’s home into the street. Lower Manhattan was perfectly still, and the streets were lined with shallow craters that shone with rain. Opal glanced up at Mia and Lynn’s window, and could see a shadow elongate, then compress, behind the paper shade. Everyone had made their choices, had settled in for the long run. This was it, she thought, and yet she knew that she herself was still in suspension. All around her, women chose to be with men, wanting the complement of bodies, or, like Mia, they chose to be with women, wanting something else that Opal didn’t even attempt to imagine. It was too much of a cliché to say that a woman wanted the sameness that another woman offered. Mia and Lynn were nothing alike: Mia so spritely, and Lynn with her lupine face and deliberate, ironic stance. In truth, Opal knew nothing about coupling of any sort. All she knew was that humans were supposed to gravitate toward one another, the way plants bend into the light.
At college, freshman year, Opal had gone to bed with Tom Kennerly, a slightly undernourished, handsome boy she had met one morning in the dining hall. In the beginning, she told him scraps of information about herself, but he already knew who her mother was. She went about the relationship with a kind of clinical enthusiasm; it felt good to be one of the sexually active women in the dormitory who sat around at night with a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves open on a table, like members of a Bible study group.
“Cystitis,” a knowledgeable senior would say, diagnosing an underclasswoman who sat doubled over in pain. “Definitely cystitis.” And someone would be sent on a run to the Stop and Shop for a jug of cranberry juice and some plain yogurt. It was a secret club, and somehow the clubbiness of it was the aspect of having a lover that Opal liked best. She actually began to read the question and answer columns in women’s magazines; she took the quizzes they offered, and tallied up her score to learn her “intimacy quotient” or her likelihood for divorce. She did well on these quizzes, and somehow this gave her an embarrassing amount of pleasure.
Opal felt far less comfortable actually being with Tom. As she lay in his bed, she looked blankly at her reflection in the high mirror over his dresser, where the arms of sweaters hung out of drawers, like the arms of people waving from a train. She clutched on to Tom’s narrow torso late at night when everyone else was out at a double feature of Harold and Maude and King of Hearts—and he slid himself into her and then out again like a piece of light machinery. It works! she had th
ought with some pleasure, but her pleasure was that of a former disbeliever, not a lover. She had been convinced; her body was desirable and operated properly, and even if at times she felt herself hovering somewhere above the scene, looking down on the small room and the crooked mirror and the pink flesh of this young man from Lyme, Connecticut, it had still worked properly, and he had labored until she finally came, with a long, sibilant release of sound that surprised them both.
But there had been no continuity, for neither of them, they confessed guiltily over dinner at Naples Pizza two weeks later, was in love with the other. They had burst out laughing in relief at the confession; they even toasted it, clicking glasses to the absence of emotion. Then exams came, and they saw less of each other, although sometimes Opal watched Tom play Frisbee on the common, his arm flinging out to execute a throw, his feet lifting him off the ground. She would watch him from across the green and wonder where this need to be “in love” had come from, and why she somehow thought of it as a birthright. Maybe it was pure instinct, she thought. You strove dumbly toward this element that you didn’t understand, and which certainly you hadn’t learned from your parents.
“Your father doesn’t know how to be loving,” Dottie had said. “It’s difficult for him to show emotion.” But it seemed to have been a generation of bad fathers, Opal thought. Back in the Fifties, a husband was presented with a warm, sweet, and sour bundle that kicked. He held it awkwardly, slightly away from his body, like a teenaged boy holding an armload of flowers on a big date. Fathers had changed since then; now the world was crawling with a new breed: bearded young men who doubled over with labor pains, men who leafed through the Old Testament to find a good name for the baby. These men were foreign to Opal, another species entirely.
It was too easy to think of her own father as terrible. It was easy and mindless and she had done it for so long that she didn’t remember any other way to think. But now she wondered; now she had her doubts. It had been a month since she had first written him, a month since she had been waiting. This was her private grief, one which she could not talk about with Dottie or Erica. As far as secrets went, it was a weak one. How much more extraordinary to have had a private correspondence with him, as she had hoped: an intimate, revealing exchange of letters, a body of information that would move and change and trouble her. They would secretly write for years, until finally there was nothing left to say, and then they would agree to let the correspondence die gracefully.
But he refused to write. Once a week, Opal called Tamara up at Yale, who said there still wasn’t any mail of significance in Opal’s box. “Are you definitely coming back in the fall?” Tamara asked, and her voice sounded suspicious, as if she imagined that Opal was in danger of staying like this, as if “suspension” was actually a permanent condition.
Sometimes, alone in the apartment at night, Opal wanted to look at her father’s face, even though the photographs didn’t tell her much. She stood in front of the hall closet and took down the old coat box from B. Altman’s, which contained snapshots from that other life. Most of the photographs had been taken during family vacations, and in each one her father looked nearly the same: bone-white and untouched by the sun, even in the height of summer.
Opal remembered how Walt Green had asked if she looked like her father. She thought of this again one night, when Walt came home with her for supper after work. They sat eating in the kitchen under the yellow table light, which gave Walt’s eyes a certain unusual density every time he tilted his head up. Walt had brought a bottle of red wine with him, and they continued drinking even after the food was done and the dishes had been deposited in the sink. “God, you actually spent your childhood here,” he said. “This room is huge.”
“Do you want to see the rest of it?” Opal asked, and he nodded. They took their glasses with them for the tour of the apartment. “It’s great,” Walt said as they stood in the living room. “You should see where I live, up by Columbia. There are three of us in this tiny rathole on 112th Street. I sleep on a fold-out couch like Mary Tyler Moore. But this is a whole house right in the middle of the city. I’m impressed.”
When they had gone through all the rooms and were heading back to the kitchen, Opal stopped for a second in front of the hall closet. “I’ll show you some other things, if you want,” she said quickly. Walt shrugged and agreed, and Opal opened the closet door. She reached up with both arms and brought down the B. Altman’s box, and then she carried the box into the den. Opal sifted through the contents until she found the photo album, and she opened it across both their laps, like a sleigh blanket. At the front of the album were several pages of Erica as a baby, then two pages of Opal.
“That’s what always happens,” Walt said. “They’re less excited the second time around. There’s much less documentation. Same with my sister and me.” Finally, after all the baby pictures stopped, the family vacation pictures began. “Oh look, the World’s Fair,” Walt said. “My family went there, too.”
“I think everyone did,” said Opal. “Do you remember the Italian Pavilion?”
He nodded, smiling. “Of course,” he said. “It was terrific. And I remember another pavilion where you sat in a chair that lifted you up through a shaft, and showed you the inner workings of the human brain. God, it was great.” He paused. “What I remember most,” he said, “is how hot it was. I always had to go to the bathroom.”
Opal turned the page. There at the top, among the World’s Fair series, was a picture she distinctly recalled posing for. She remembered the day well, and how she had traveled for hours through a series of dark chutes and tunnels, and how at the end of the afternoon, finally out in the wide reaches of sunlight, she could no longer see. She could barely hear, either. The same song was weaving through her: a chorus of cricket-children singing, “It’s a small world, after all,” and then singing it in other languages, each version less identifiable than the last, until finally the children seemed to be chattering, “Gluka brznik faxmilgriv.” What language was this? she wondered. Russian? Greek? She didn’t know, but she couldn’t focus on it any longer because her father was making her pose for a picture. She stood, impatient for him to finish, while all around her, other children posed similarly before domes and arches. Fathers adjusted the lenses on their bulky new cameras, and children sighed and swung their arms out, ruining the shot. Opal could not bear the protracted moment between the focus and the click, but her father had a bad temper, so she didn’t dare complain. Instead she stood in the invisible frame he had squared off around her, jerking and rolling her eyes.
After the shot her father faithfully rubbed the print with a sponge soaked in some chemical that smelled like toxic salad dressing, and later, after the afternoon was over, he sat in the family room in Jericho and pressed it into an album, sealing the image of his younger daughter behind plastic.
Now Opal sat with that same album open before her, staring down at the photograph. “Look at that,” she said.
Walt looked at the picture for a long moment. Suddenly he inhaled sharply, frightening her.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t believe it,” said Walt.
Opal looked again at the picture, looked where he was looking “I don’t understand,” she said, and she glanced back at him, missing the point entirely.
“That’s me,” Walt said.
She looked again. There, behind six-year-old Opal, a small boy was wandering by, sullen-faced and tired. His hair was shaved into a colorless crewcut. His eyes were looking off somewhere into the hot, open distance. He and Opal did not see each other at all; each of them was a prisoner of a separate family. Over the sounds of people talking and laughing, of babies crying and music percolating from different pavilions, a harried mother was calling out, “Walt! Walt Green! You come over here right now! Walt! Walt!” And the boy kept walking.
It was him. She was almost sure of it. Looking b
ack and forth between the photograph and his grown face, she saw that he had the same bones now as then, the same small, sharp eyes and full mouth. Only the hair was wild now, as if he were still punishing his parents for the skinhead they had foisted on him so many summers ago.
Opal and Walt threw their arms around each other and laughed giddily. “To think,” they kept saying. “It’s amazing. To think.”
Walt poured more wine and they both started talking more freely, overlapping sentences, cutting in. He talked about his family, his voice changing tone a little. His older sister, Nissa, he said, had had a nervous breakdown three years before.
“It was terrible,” Walt said. “We were all really thrown, although when I look back on the summer, the clues are right there. She just stopped eating. My parents went to visit her apartment, and Nissa had cleaned out the entire kitchen, and was keeping makeup in the cabinets. So they sent her to this place called Sojourn House, kind of a farm in Vermont for people with eating disorders. You have to do chores there every morning, milk the cows and so on. She lived there for six months and supposedly got better, and now she’s back in her own apartment. It’s just that she’s changed. I mean, she has friends and goes to work, but she’s sort of unresponsive to everyone. I don’t think she’s had a boyfriend since her breakdown. She’s become the kind of woman,” he said, “who is always taking her friends to have abortions.”
“What does that mean?” Opal asked.
“The kind of woman who is never having an abortion herself,” he said. “Who’s never involved with anyone. My parents sometimes call her up and ask if she wants to have dinner, and she says, ‘Oh, I can’t. I’m taking Julie or Andrea to have an abortion.’ My parents say that Nissa is their greatest sorrow.” Walt shook his head. “Every family has their own secret,” he said. “And whether you want to or not, you’re supposed to keep it.” His voice was thick now, and wistful. “No one ever asks for it,” he said, “and yet there it is. It’s like being born into the KGB.”