This Is My Life

by Meg Wolitzer

  “I know,” said Opal, and she noticed the way he was holding his wineglass, the fingers curling into a fist around the stem. There was something bluntly made about Walt; he was like a kid, a boy—the boy in the photograph. They were both quiet for a while. Opal picked up the album from the table and looked at the photo again, wanting to see that younger version of him. Walt had been there back then, she thought, and he is here now. Beside her, he leaned closer to get a better look at the photograph, and she could feel the sleeve of his sweater for a second against her wrist, and his breath on her hair.

  “Let me see that,” Walt said, and as he squinted at the picture he began to reconsider. “You know,” he said, holding the album up to the light, “I’m not entirely sure now. I mean, it looks like me, but I think I was heavier. I mean, I was a chunky kid; I wore double-husky clothes for a while. You know, I’m beginning to think it isn’t me.”

  “Are you sure?” Opal asked, and her voice had gone tinny with disappointment.

  Walt shook his head and said no, he wasn’t sure, but he didn’t sound very convincing. It wasn’t him, she thought now; it wasn’t. He placed the album back across Opal’s lap, and it felt suddenly heavy to her. She had drunk too much, she realized; she thought she might start to cry. Walt looked perplexed, even embarrassed, and after a while he stood to leave. She wanted him to go, and felt slightly unmoored, uncertain.

  What was certain, she thought after he was gone, what could never be argued, was that the girl in the picture was indeed Opal. If she were to come across herself in the background of someone else’s photograph, there would be no doubt. Opal looked again at that squinty girl in orange culottes, and was astonished to see that when it came right down to it, she had barely changed at all.

  —

  Winter wore on, and her father still hadn’t written. “Nothing in your mailbox but advertisements,” Tamara told her. “An offer to go to Fort Lauderdale over Spring Break on one of those student trips from hell. An invitation to join the Black Students Alliance. That kind of thing. What is it you’re waiting for?” Tamara asked, but Opal insisted she wasn’t waiting for anything in particular. As soon as she said this she knew it was true. If he hadn’t written by now, he never would. Opal had sent three letters to him, each one more needy than the last. Three letters from his own daughter, and he wouldn’t budge.

  Late at night sometimes, Opal would be awakened by sounds drifting out from the kitchen: the blender, the carving knife, the dishwasher. She could not believe how much Dottie and Sy ate; she didn’t want to know, really, about their excesses. Opal began keeping to herself more, both at home and at work. Walt and Mia called to her from across the studio, but she sometimes pretended she hadn’t heard.

  One afternoon, Opal was sent to buy cocaine for Stevie Confino. He approached her discreetly, when she was on her way to lunch, and said, “Can I count on you for a favor? I have to be in makeup in five minutes, and you’re the only one I would ask. I’ll be indebted to you for life, Opal; I’ll perform sexual services, I’ll give you my firstborn son.”

  Up until this moment, he had almost never said a word to her. She looked at his hopeful face, the hair matted down with water, the towel around his neck, and he seemed young and ridiculous, and so Opal agreed, just to be done with it. Stevie gave her four fifty-dollar bills and cab fare and sent her off downtown.

  Opal got out of the cab on East Seventh Street and double-checked the address that she held in her glove. Then she rang the bell of a cruddy building on the south side of the street, and waited, shivering, on the stoop.

  When the door opened, and the two sisters stood facing each other, Opal felt only a dumb thud of surprise, a big drop of it, painless and silent, like snow sliding off a roof. “Jesus,” she said.

  Erica was staring at her. She was wearing an ancient yellow T-shirt that Opal remembered from years ago. It read: REVA AND JAMIE: FIRST NORTH AMERICAN TOUR. Erica just stood there, leaning against the doorframe, not saying a word. It was early afternoon; the street was freezing. “You want to come up?” Erica finally asked.

  Opal nodded. They walked up a narrow, dark stairwell. On the third floor, Erica opened her apartment door and the hallway was flooded with sound. Heavy-metal music groaned through the apartment like a buzz saw. Jordan Strang, whom Opal had not seen in years, was sitting on the couch in the small, filthy living room. Jordan looked up from whatever he was doing, his eyes slowly focusing as he recognized her. Then he looked imploringly at Erica.

  “It’s okay,” Erica said. “You remember Opal.”

  Jordan nodded and shrugged. “Easy come, easy go,” he said. He got up finally, like an old dog, and ambled into the bedroom. Opal could hear the creak of a ladder.

  “Did someone die?” Erica asked.

  “What?” Opal said.

  “Did someone die,” Erica repeated, and this time she phrased it like a statement. It meant: I assume you are here for a good reason; I assume you have not just dropped in to pay a social call. Opal shook her head. “Look,” said Erica, “we have some people coming over. Business. Maybe we could talk later.”

  “Erica,” said Opal, and she knew her sister still did not understand. Opal reached deep into the pocket of her pants and yanked out the four fifties, which she had folded up tightly. “I’m the one,” she tried. “Business. I’m here to pick it up.”

  Erica finally understood. She let out a long breath and blinked several times.

  “Should I go, Erica?” Opal asked. “Do you want me to go?”

  But Erica shook her head. They sat down on the couch, which was covered with a fall of cat hair. “Can I smoke?” Opal asked, just to be polite, for she would have been shocked if smoke wasn’t permitted here. Smoke would barely be noticed here, she thought. It would just blend in with all the other interference: the music, and the cat hair, and the dampness in the air.

  “Sure,” said Erica.

  Opal lit a cigarette. “This is too weird,” she said. “Too, too weird.”

  “I know,” said Erica. “But I’m used to this. Not with you, with Mom. Everywhere I look, she’s there. It’s like those Venn diagrams in elementary school. Everyone overlaps in this stupid family.”

  “But it’s not as bad as it used to be,” Opal said. “She’s almost never on TV anymore. Just those commercials.”

  “Yeah, those commercials,” said Erica.

  They were silent, thinking. Each of them, Opal knew, had an image in her head of a fat woman endlessly dancing. The woman spun and spun, her dress magically changing colors, dissolving slowly from red to green, like litmus paper.

  “She’s making a living,” Opal said. “It was hard for me to take at first.”

  “Opal,” Erica suddenly said. “I can’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Talk to you. I just can’t,” Erica said. She stood up awkwardly, abruptly. “I can’t think about any of this right now. I have enough on my mind.”

  Opal slowly stood. She hadn’t said anything yet; she had just gotten here. She hadn’t told Erica about Dottie being in love, or about all the letters she had written to her father. Their father. “Things weren’t so bad back then,” Opal tried, her voice high. “We had some fun together, Erica. You used to cook for me, and we’d watch television. We used to hyperventilate. Do you remember? Am I making this up?”

  But Erica was looking away. “I’ll go talk to Jordan,” she said. “I’ll get the coke for you.”

  She disappeared into the bedroom, and returned a moment later with two small paper packets. Paper in exchange for paper, Opal thought, as she handed over the money. It was all so flyaway, so flimsy. She felt a deep sadness as she stuffed the packets into the zippered pocket of her down coat, and then opened the door to let herself out. She walked slowly down the stairs, hoping that Erica would come to the landing and call her back. She could
picture her sister’s head leaning over the rail. “Opal, come back,” Erica would say, and the request would be plaintive and heart-stopping.

  But Erica didn’t want that. Erica wanted to be left alone, in that sad little apartment with Jordan Strang. It would be a good story, Opal thought, nearly elevated to the level of Greek drama: one sister selling, the other buying. And yet, she knew, there was no one she could tell. Opal pushed open the front door, and a slant of snow rushed in.

  Fourteen

  And then my sister was standing on the front steps,” Erica said. “I couldn’t believe it. You’d think, in this huge city, you could have a little privacy, but apparently that’s impossible.”

  “Me, I’m tired of privacy,” Mitchell Block said. “My family lives in Wisconsin; I never see them. I’ve been trying to get my parents to New York for years, but they’re too scared. I think they saw on 60 Minutes that you can’t even walk down the street anymore without carrying a revolver, and that did it.”

  They were sitting in the snack bar of the Loeb Student Center at NYU. She and Mitchell both ate large quantities of food during the meal, and neither of them felt the need to be apologetic about it as they heaped mountains of potato salad onto their plates, or went back to the counter for seconds. They sat in the snack bar for most of the afternoon. The cleaning woman mopped all the other tables until finally theirs was the only dry surface left in the place. When the woman approached with her dripping sponge, they knew it was finally time to leave.

  “Come on,” Mitchell said, ushering Erica out, and they went to his office in the basement of the psychology building. The tiny room was ablaze with fluorescent light, but Mitchell had tacked up some New Yorker cartoons on the walls, and a huge calendar, in an attempt to create an atmosphere of some warmth. On his desk was a big magnet which had a cluster of paper clips clinging to it. Erica sifted the clips between her fingers, unwilling to leave just yet.

  Mitchell finally looked at his wristwatch. “I hate to break this up,” he said, “but I have to get back out there in five minutes. You don’t want to be responsible for halting the progress of science, do you?”

  Erica smiled and stood up. They hadn’t known each other very long. There had been two lunches, at which she had talked expansively, and Mitchell had somehow seemed to listen in an equally expansive way. He was thirty-one years old, she knew, and was halfway done with his doctoral thesis. He had been working on it for years, and it changed every semester or so—became slightly more bizarre, according to his professors. They advised him to take some time off, or else to just finish it, get it over with, get on with the rest of his life.

  Erica had pushed her way into Mitchell Block’s field of vision. That first morning, when she stood waiting for him outside the classroom, he had been cordial to her in a perfunctory way. She had quickly told him that his study interested her, that she had been thinking about it since they had met. It wasn’t a lie; she had thought about that day very often. She had remembered the way Mitchell’s voice had sounded, reciting word after word, and how he had held a pink index card between thick-jointed fingers. Like Erica, Mitchell had a weariness about him. At first she had thought he knew something about her, but then she realized, the more she dwelled on it, that he merely knew the same things that she did, that his perceptions were similar to her own. She had inferred all this just from a little list of words, a defeated light in his eyes, and a body that occupied as much space as her own.

  Over lunch that first day he had told her some basics about himself, and she had responded in kind. Without thinking, she told him that her mother was Dottie Engels; it surprised her even as she said it, for she told almost no one anymore. It wasn’t a fact that she was particularly proud of, but somehow she wanted him to know.

  “Come on,” he said at first. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  But she shook her head.

  “That’s very interesting,” he said. “I can’t even imagine what that would be like.”

  They were both eating Soft-Serv ice cream from the dispenser in the snack bar. They had each filled a plastic dish with a tall turban of ice cream, and Erica felt as if she were on a “date,” a word she could not think of without considerable irony. She suddenly felt very much a part of the boy/girl equation; she thought of the symmetry of Archie and Veronica on either side of a booth in Pop Tate’s Chocklit Shoppe, sipping coyly at matching ice cream sodas. Erica suddenly felt exposed in an odd, sexual way. She deflected this by a sudden burst of candor; she spoke simply and clearly about her mother, and what it had been like growing up around someone famous. She had never even said as much to Jordan, who used to press her for details.

  “Are you and your mother very close?” Mitchell asked, and Erica shook her head quickly.

  “We don’t speak,” she said. The phrase sounded weighty and official.

  “Why not?” he asked. This was the dreaded question, the one that she could not answer.

  Erica hesitated. Finally, all she could say was, “I’m really not sure.”

  Walking home, she dismantled and reassembled the conversation several times. That last part, about not speaking to her mother, still troubled her. Mitchell would think she was filled with a dark sadness, just the sort of thing he expected of heavy women, according to the findings of his study. Erica no longer wanted to please him in that way, to satisfy his clinical expectations. Now she wanted to stand out from the survey in bas-relief, to be the girl with the brightest eyes, the one who had been wounded least. Erica desperately wanted him to know her, and yet she could not bear what there was for him to know.

  All day long Mitchell sat with fat women, many of them deeply unhappy, and they spread their lives out before him like a smorgasbord, and he listened quietly, nodding and smiling encouragement. She would not be one of those women; she would be something entirely different, someone who did not fit into his study, someone who screwed up the beautiful, sloping curves of all his graphs.

  —

  The twelfth-grade girls were back. They were sprawled on the living room rug like courtesans, Erica thought, picking her way over them to get to the bedroom. Jordan was standing in the middle of the room, arms outstretched, balancing a coke spoon on his nose for entertainment. Erica climbed back up into the loft. She lay down, feeling dreamily sated as she always did after a big meal. She was still aware of the milky vanilla taste of the ice cream she had eaten; it made her think of Mitchell, of sex, of things sweet and cold. She idly wondered how he would look undressed; she imagined his massive body shining beneath his winter clothes, as though he rubbed it with oil, like a weight lifter. But there were probably none of those discrete islands of muscle on Mitchell’s body; instead, he was most likely rounded and soft and yet somehow still powerful, like a kettle drum.

  When Jordan came back into the bedroom later and climbed up into the bed, Erica hoped he wouldn’t touch her. She looked over and saw his long arms busy on the surface of the mirror. His hospital bracelet hung loosely on his poor thin wrist. Jordan’s business was going well, she supposed. Customers would come over for the afternoon and Jordan would sit with them, cutting up and sampling what they had already paid for. Somehow, nobody seemed to mind. The apartment was becoming a salon of sorts, and Jordan was the good, benevolent host. He talked about the 1960s with his high-schoolers; this was a hoot, Erica thought. Suddenly Jordan was an expert on something he himself had been too young to take part in. He was only a secondary source, but it was apparently close enough. Just the other day she had heard him conducting a small seminar in the living room on the life and work of Hunter Thompson. Three boys sat transfixed.

  She looked over at Jordan in profile, his head bent above the mirror, a straw perpetually in one nostril like a life-support system. She thought about the last time they had had sex together; it had been just over three weeks before. It was, she realized, right before she had met Mitchell. Mitchell�
�s presence made a difference, she realized; suddenly there were other possibilities. It didn’t have to be Jordan; it didn’t have to be him at all. This was a thrilling revelation.

  “What’s funny?” Jordan asked, and she realized that she had been smiling.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, but she could not get rid of her private little smile. If only he knew, she thought, he would not sit there so calmly, with a Flexi-Straw up his nose, staring at himself like Narcissus leaning into the water.

  —

  That night, she dreamed of Opal’s visit. She dreamed of her sister climbing the stairs, walking into the apartment, the door flying open at her touch.

  Erica woke up in the stark middle of the night, the moment when night hesitates into morning, and when outside, garbage trucks and derricks lift and lower, ruling the earth like dinosaurs. Jordan was asleep beside her with his face pushed into the pillow. Erica sat up in bed, careful not to slam her head against the ceiling.

  Why had she sent Opal away like that? What had been the purpose? I am a cold person, Erica thought, and was ashamed. Opal was the person she had spent the most amount of time with, after all, years and years of it. It was all irretrievable now, something to be relegated to photo albums and drunken, nostalgic evenings.

  And what, she wondered, was Opal doing buying drugs for someone? This made no sense at all. Opal had always been so straight, so clean, so legal. How wrong to think of little monkey-girl Opal buying cocaine in the dead of winter. Erica leaned back down and rolled over, pushing her own face into the pillow.

  Mitchell Block said he loved his family, but it was much easier for him, Erica thought, because he never saw them. They never showed up on television in the middle of the night, or onstage at a gay bar, or on the front step. All of Mitchell’s communications with his family took place over the telephone and in letters. When Mitchell thought of his parents, he felt nothing but a slightly melancholic love, the sort of twinge that was expected after a certain age. Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking. At Bennington, Erica had always been able to tell when someone in her dormitory was talking to her parents on the telephone; the girl’s voice would suddenly go flat and uninflected. You could hear it all the way down the hall.