by Meg Wolitzer
In that moment, Erica made an easy leap onto her mother’s side of the fence. Maybe it hadn’t entirely happened in that moment; maybe, if she thought about it hard, she might have seen it coming. After all, she had not been able to look at Jordan very much lately. The change had started the day Erica went to bed with Mitchell Block. She had come home and found Jordan sitting up in bed, his hair hanging in strings, his restless hands dancing on a mirror like figure skaters. It was as though she had gone directly from the Bed of Heaven to the Bed of Hell. But she climbed in with him anyway, because she didn’t know what else to do, hadn’t yet worked out a plan.
In the waiting room, Erica fantasized everyone would have a chance to talk about their particular tragedies. The middle-aged man in the corner might suddenly say, “My wife had a stroke,” and as he spoke he would claw at his tie, struggling to loosen the knot.
After each statement, everyone would murmur in sympathy. It was like being at a group therapy meeting, at which everyone was revealing their problem, their addiction, their own personal pattern of self-destruction.
“Our mother had a heart attack,” Opal would say, and Erica would be touched and startled by the use of “our.” She suddenly remembered the two of them back in childhood, eating macaroni and watching television.
But Opal said nothing; no one did. The waiting room possessed the logic of dreams: You find yourself in a strange place and you’re not sure why, and yet you do not question it. You simply move among the other people with grim purpose. Erica kept watching the sad eyes of the young couple and their son. Erica envied the boy. Imagine: to be absolutely lost in the world of the A-Team, to be thinking of nothing but victory and defeat, of good and bad. Imagine: to be sitting on the floor with your mother’s hand warm on your head.
When they had been there for what might have been hours, Erica went out into the hall, fishing for change in her pockets. Neither she nor Opal was wearing a wristwatch, and she couldn’t even guess what time it was. There were no windows in the waiting room outside the ICU; it might have been any hour of day or night. The only thing Erica had to mark time by was the fact that suddenly she was hungry. The method may have been more primitive than a sundial, but it was also flawed. Erica’s hunger pains could occur at any time, whether or not she had recently eaten. Sometimes she felt her stomach scoop itself hollow just from fear, or boredom, or because she had seen an ad for McDonald’s in the newspaper. Occasionally she woke up in the middle of the night and found herself flinging open the kitchen cabinets without knowing why.
Now the row of vending machines was overwhelming, and Erica pressed buttons randomly. She started with black coffee, and followed it with a Danish that had dropped from the machine for fifty cents. There were other, more bizarre items offered for sale here—old-lady rainhats, vials of cologne, Scottie-dog magnets—but all Erica wanted now was food. She wanted to eat, sitting under the waiting room lights, on the green vinyl couch, with the other exhausted people all around her. She carried an armload of food back down the hall, but when she returned to the waiting room, Opal was gone.
Erica panicked. A small hiss escaped her throat, like air from a tire.
“You looking for your sister?” the young mother asked, and then she pointed.
Across the room, behind the glass of the nurses’ station, Erica could see Opal engaged in a pantomime conversation with a young doctor. Both of their hands were fluttering rapidly as they talked. Erica hurried across the room, and several packets of sugar went flying out of her grasp. She knocked on the glass, and a nurse buzzed her in.
Dr. Hammer was talking in a clipped tone. He was young and red-haired and unblinking, and he explained that Dottie’s heart hadn’t been able to sustain her massive weight, and that she had suffered a massive myocardial infarction.
“Wasn’t she under the care of a physician?” he asked. Opal and Erica looked at each other blankly; neither of them had the vaguest idea. “I find it just astonishing that no one has ever put your mother on a diet,” he said. “Really, it’s unconscionable. How has she gone on so long like this?” he asked.
“Because she made her living from it,” Opal said simply.
“Well, it may well kill her,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can on our end, of course, but I just want to prepare you. If your mother pulls through, she’s going to be a very sick woman. She will need a lot of care, but we’ll talk about that later. For now, we’re just trying to stabilize her. I’m afraid that all I can tell you now is to hang around and wait.”
Erica glanced at Dr. Hammer’s wristwatch, but it was one of those stingy digital jobs that gave nothing away. The square face of the watch was darkly blank, like a television set at rest.
“I’ll be checking on your mother periodically,” Hammer said. “If there is any change, someone will let you know.”
Erica and Opal went back to their post in the waiting room. Opal tapped a cigarette from a pack and lit it, sucking deeply. Erica watched her, observing the long, delicate arms and the round face, all of it at once familiar and not. Everything was like that today. Erica wasn’t sure what was required of her; she had returned in the middle of a crisis, but there were no parents present, no instructions. They were two grown women with a dying mother, and that was all it was. The disenfranchised, the alienated, the lost: No matter what you were, you returned home at times like these, because if you didn’t, your mother’s face would loom like a dark angel above your bed forever.
Opal smoked for a while, and they both sat in silence, with everyone whispering and rustling all around them. Every once in a while, one of the reporters drifted over to the couch, but Erica and Opal had nothing to say. Erica closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she realized that she must have fallen asleep. One of the reporters was gone; the other one was reading a magazine in the corner. The young couple and their son were gone too, had been spirited away while Erica slept. There were a few new replacement faces in the room. One of them, a woman in a waitress uniform, sat on the other end of the couch with her head in her hands.
“Opal,” said Erica. “Do you know what time it is?”
“I have no idea,” Opal said.
“Do you want to talk or something?” Erica asked.
“I don’t know what there is to talk about,” Opal said.
“Well,” said Erica, “I want you to know that I’m not going to disappear again.” Her voice, she heard, was coming out louder than she had expected. The waitress lifted her head to listen. “That’s all,” said Erica. “I just want you to know this.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Opal said. She shifted away from Erica on the couch and closed her eyes, trying to look convincingly asleep. So Opal didn’t want to talk; that was her choice, and there was nothing Erica could do about it. In her mind, she unscrolled the day that had just passed: the subway ride uptown, and the long wait, and the face of the redheaded doctor. Erica thought about the fact that Dottie might die, but then she could not give that thought any real meaning. She didn’t know what to do with it; she couldn’t reconcile herself to it, or in any way start to grapple with it. Instead, the thought slapped up against her and then simply dropped, like a baseball lobbed by a father to a dazed and hopeless child.
Nineteen
The doorman had lit a votive candle for Dottie Engels. “We’re all thinking about your mother,” he announced as Opal walked across the lobby, and all she could do was nod and thank him and hurry out into the street to flag a cab. She could not talk about Dottie yet; it was too soon, too much. Walt Green had left three messages on the answering machine, asking Opal to please contact him, but she hadn’t returned his calls. She hadn’t returned any of the calls on the machine yet, although the tape was thick with frantic messages.
Opal didn’t know what she would tell anyone. Her mother was out of Intensive Care, momentarily out of “the woods,” a nurse had said, but
she still lay doped-up and sick, tethered to a monitor and an oxygen tank and I.V. drip. A private nurse named Mrs. Ramsay sat beside the bed and knitted an afghan with bundles of bright, unraveling wool.
At first Dottie didn’t talk very much, and her voice, when she used it, was rusted and slow. “You girls still here?” she asked, and Opal and Erica piped up from the windowsill that they were indeed right here. “Did anyone call Sy?” Dottie asked. “Did anyone take in the mail?” Opal assured her that everything had been seen to, that Sy was on his way home, and that all Dottie had to do was lie still. “I don’t feel anything,” Dottie said. “No pain. Just a little nausea. Nothing.” After a while she sank back into a chemical sleep.
Opal thought of Sal the doorman in his brown uniform with gold braid, kneeling down to place a votive candle on the altar of a church somewhere in Brooklyn. The trappings of serious illness were so bewildering: rows of candles and tanks of oxygen and all those flowers. Dottie’s room was choked with huge arrangements of peonies and gardenias that friends had sent, and a vine that spidered wildly across the windowsill and trailed like a comet to the floor.
In the evening, Sy returned from Hong Kong. He swept into Dottie’s room directly from the airport, and Opal and Erica watched as he leaned over her bed to kiss her hello. “I got on a plane immediately,” Opal heard him say.
“Sy, I had a heart attack,” Dottie said, her voice tiny.
“No kidding,” said Sy. “I thought it was an ingrown toenail.”
“Please,” said Dottie. “Don’t.”
Before Sy had even had a chance to take off his coat, Dr. Hammer swung into the room. “I’m going to examine her,” he said, “but you people should stick around outside, because I’ll want to talk to you afterward.”
They walked out into the hall as the doctor was whisking a curtain around Dottie’s bed. Opal quickly introduced Sy to Erica, who looked confused. Sy leaned against the wall and shut his eyes. She noticed that he hadn’t shaved, and that his tweed suit was lined with creases. “You must be exhausted,” Opal said.
“Ah,” he said, “who knows. I’m still on Hong Kong time. It’ll catch up with me later. For now, I’m not thinking about it. I have other things to worry about.” The three of them stood stiffly together in the dim hallway, while in the background bells lightly rang and elevator doors slid open and closed. After a few minutes Dr. Hammer beckoned them back inside.
“I want everybody to hear this,” he said. “It’s very important.” He adjusted his collar and positioned himself beside the head of Dottie’s bed, looking pointedly at Opal and Erica. “As you know, your mother is very sick,” he said. “But she has a choice. She can change her life and get well, or she can remain the way she is and soon die.” He spoke with a kind of hushed intensity, and Opal imagined that he might have been a member of some cult religion before turning to medicine. “And when I say change, I mean seriously,” he said. “I’m not talking about some piddling, half-assed diet.” He turned to Dottie. “Your blood pressure is sky-high,” he said, “and your heart is the size of a ham. It’s actually amazing that you’ve survived this long; it says something about your strength. But in your present state, you are a walking time bomb.”
Opal looked over at Erica, who stood clawing at a fingernail and at Sy, who was nervously smoothing down the creases on his suit. Finally she looked at Dottie, who was lying perfectly still.
“What do you mean, ‘change’?” Dottie said.
“For one thing,” said Hammer, “you have to stop smoking. Cold turkey. And you must lose weight. Not just some small amount, but over a hundred pounds. Exercise. This isn’t a joke. You’ve got to change.”
“I thought you said I had a choice,” Dottie said.
“Maybe you didn’t understand,” said Hammer. “I’ll say it again: If you don’t lose weight, you will certainly die. Another heart attack very soon, I would guess. More severe, and probably fatal. Your heart is huge.”
“Yes, I’ve heard,” said Dottie. “Like a ham.”
When he was gone, no one moved. Everyone stood where they were, until finally Sy said, “So, what do you think, Dot?”
“I think it’s lousy,” she said, her voice trembling. “Change myself. Nobody can really change.”
“They’re not asking you to change your inner self,” Opal said. “Just your weight.”
“Maybe that is my inner self,” said Dottie. “You don’t know what it’s like being fat.” She turned to Erica suddenly. “Erica,” she said, “you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know what it’s like. Tell them.”
But Erica wouldn’t answer. She just shrugged and looked away.
“All right then,” said Dottie. “I see I’m on my own here.”
“Dottie, you’re not on your own,” said Sy. “You have all our support. Whatever you need to do, you’ll do. And we’ll all help you.”
“Forget it,” said Dottie, and she began to cry. “I’m not up to it,” she said. “I just don’t have it in me.” Erica reached over to the night table and pulled up a fistful of tissues for her. Everyone kept standing there while Dottie cried noisily. At one point, Mrs. Ramsay looked up from her knitting and suddenly said, “It’s the drugs, you know. They make you depressed. I had one heart patient, a priest, who cried like a baby.”
“I feel terrible,” said Dottie, when she could speak again. “I don’t want to be here in the first place, and now they come in and tell me I have to change. I’ve spent a lifetime a certain way; I’m not about to suddenly become someone else. The public knows me this way; it’s who I am.” She gestured loosely. “This is it,” she said. “What you see is what you get.”
“Maybe not,” Opal tried. “Maybe there’s more.”
Dottie shook her head, twisting the tissues between her hands. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to live if it means becoming something I’m not.”
“What is this?” said Sy. “You sound like that license plate, ‘Live Free or Die.’”
“That’s how I feel,” said Dottie. “I appreciate all your concern, but it’s my choice. Hammer said so himself. And I choose not to change my life. I’d rather just let go, just not fight it.”
“What do you mean?” Opal said. “You’re talking like a real nut case.”
“No, I’m making perfect sense,” said Dottie. “It’s my life, and you’ve got to trust me. Anyway, you girls will do fine by yourselves; you always have. Please,” she said. “Don’t argue with me; I’m not up to it. I feel sick. I need to sleep.”
And with that, Dottie pressed a button and her motorized bed slowly changed position, buckling like a wave.
—
Late that night, back in the apartment, Opal padded into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Faced with the solid wall of food, she was overwhelmed and could not choose. This was the way Dottie Engels ate; this was why she was so huge. Opal remembered one of Dottie’s oldest jokes: “I do have a weight problem; I just can’t wait for dinner!” She found herself smiling, thinking about it now, but then suddenly the humor was lost, and she leaned into the bright cold light of the refrigerator and began to cry.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to do; she hadn’t in any way prepared herself for this. To be orphaned at twenty had never seemed a possibility. And Erica would be no help at all; Erica kept herself at an arm’s length from civilization, so she was untouched by disaster. What was to come? Opal wondered. What frightened her most was that she couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Maybe she would become one of those nervous, lost women you sometimes saw in the city, prowling Columbus Avenue after work. The kind of woman who will probably spend the night watching cable TV at home, stabbing a finger up and down the row of channel buttons. Dozens of choices haunted the nighttime airwaves: phone-in psychics, nude talk shows, ancient black-and-white sitcoms that evo
ke a world of meddlesome neighbors and separate beds. It doesn’t matter what is watched, finally, because all of it is interchangeable. What matters are the voices that expand to fill the room.
Opal thought of how Walt had walked around the apartment and marveled at the space, seeing it in a way that Opal no longer could. The ceilings seemed too high to her now, the walls too far apart. How strange that the temper of rooms could shift like the seasons. Years before, the apartment had been a perfect size; the rooms had spilled into each other endlessly, and it didn’t seem impossible that a new wing or passageway might be discovered behind a closed door, like an apartment in a dream. Nothing had seemed impossible then. You could feel the presence of real life in those rooms, with the babysitters practicing and Erica’s incense infusing the air with its sweet stink. Dottie had barely been home then, but it almost hadn’t mattered. Whenever her mother was away, Opal prepared for her return. She waited under the awning with the doorman, and when the limousine pulled up at the curb she skidded out onto the sidewalk, pressing her face to the square of smoked glass.
Now Opal went into her mother’s bedroom and sat down on the large bed. She lit a cigarette, and the snap of the lighter, the friction of her thumb against the little wheel, was peculiarly satisfying. If Dottie listened to Dr. Hammer, she would never be able to smoke again. Imagine, Opal thought, never letting a cigarette take its time to burn between two fingers, never pulling in smoke and feeling it roll like water down your throat. This would be difficult for Dottie, she knew. But what would be much worse, of course, would be the food. Dottie would have to give up the important items: anything with a crust, or filling, anything glutinous or dense or set afloat in butter. No salt, either. When Dottie salted food, Opal remembered, her hand moved as rapidly as someone shaking a maraca.
But it wasn’t just the food. It was something else that Opal couldn’t really imagine: this notion of losing yourself for good, giving up the reflection in the full-length mirror. Giving up the known, the given, the thing that you had never really liked, but which you knew would always be there. If you couldn’t recognize yourself anymore, how could you expect anyone else to? Even the idea of you would disappear. In a way, it was worse than a death.