by Meg Wolitzer
It was getting late already, Dr. Hammer had said. The hospital could do only so much for a recovering heart patient. Just that morning Hammer had shown up with a flock of medical students. The students peered anxiously over the doctor’s shoulder, hands poised on their beepers. They were just a little older than Opal, the men with new beards and wire-rimmed glasses, the women with worried, intelligent expressions and hair pulled back in barrettes. All of them were dressed in tablecloth white, and when they examined Dottie a couple of them made clicking sounds with their tongues and shook their heads.
There was not much to do; there was only Opal and Erica and Sy, and this planned bombardment of visitors. Opal pictured the Wednesday procession into Dottie’s room, as grand as “The March of the Siamese Children” in The King and I. In the center was Dottie, washed and powdered on her bed, waiting to be convinced, waiting to be startled back to life. Then Opal had an idea. It was certainly a bad idea. she thought as she let it form slowly, a terrible idea, but still she seized it, because she didn’t know what else to do.
“I’ll be back,” Opal said, standing up from the table and pushing in her chair.
“Okay,” said Erica, looking up in half-surprise.
Opal walked down the hall to her mother’s bedroom and sat down on the bed. She picked up the receiver of the telephone and dialed Miami information. The number was delivered to her by a robot.
He wasn’t home, of course; that would have been too much. What she got was a recording of a woman’s neutral voice, saying that Norm and Ellen were out right now, but a message might be left after the tone. When the tone came, it was loud and prolonged, and Opal had a moment to wonder if she really wanted to do this. The tone seemed to go on and on.
“Yes,” she said, when the line went quiet, “this is a message for Norm Engels. This is Opal Engels calling.” Her voice had only a slight quaver to it at first. “It’s about Dottie,” Opal continued. “She’s in the hospital and she’s very sick. I guess you’ve read about it. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.” Opal paused and laughed a slightly hysterical, mortifying laugh. “God, I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m a little nervous right now. Well, anyway,” she went on, “I just wanted to say that we’re going to be at the hospital on Wednesday night. A bunch of people. Roosevelt Hospital, that is, in New York City. Look,” she said, “you can just ignore this call if you want. I’m sorry; I’ve been really upset. I just wanted to tell you. Maybe you could do something; I don’t know. Oh, just ignore this message.”
And then there was another tone and Opal’s time was up, and she was left to sit there and realize what it was she had done.
Twenty-two
Party” was Dottie’s word for it, and she said it over and over, even after they told her it wasn’t a party at all. “This ‘party’ you girls have arranged,” she said, “will it be black tie or casual?”
“Oh, stop it,” Opal said. “Aren’t you tired of this?”
“I am only going through with the party,” Dottie said, “because you’re my daughters and I love you. But I hope no one expects me to be a thousand laughs tonight.”
“Don’t worry,” Erica said.“No one’s coming for the atmosphere.”
But that evening, when visiting hours began, Erica found herself taking notice of the atmosphere. She saw the way visitors of the dying clutched flowers and wandered the halls like jilted suitors. From a radio behind the nurses’ station, Erica could hear an all-night talk show murmuring like water. Everything here felt as though it had been slowed down, lowered a pitch.
She walked back to Dottie’s room and found Sy sitting in the corner, hunched over a puzzle, and Opal on the windowsill, swinging her legs like a kid, her heels banging against the radiator.
“Where’s the dip?” Dottie asked from the bed. “Has anyone made the dip yet?” No one even answered. Dottie took a lipstick out of her night table drawer and streaked its blunt tip across her pale lips. When Erica approached, she could see the new blur of orange on her mother’s face, and even she—who understood nothing about fashion—knew that it looked all wrong. Tonight Dottie resembled several of the other women who lay in rooms along the hall. Each day Erica peered into the open doorways, noting the similar look to these women, the way many of them lay open and broken but still somehow adorned: ribbon threading through thin hair, a slash of lipstick across the mouth, like patients in a doll hospital.
“You look nice,” Erica said flatly, then she turned away and settled herself in a chair by the door. Down the wide, quiet hall, an orderly bumped a gurney through a set of double doors, and somewhere in the distance the elevators lightly chimed. The first to arrive were Mia and Lynn. They poked their heads into the room and Mia said, “Someone call for a babysitter?”
Dottie smiled and waved them in. “Just don’t look at me,” Dottie said. “That’s all I ask. Keep your eyes closed. I look like garbage.”
“You’ve been ill,” said Mia. “What do you expect?”
“Well, you two look great,” Dottie said. “Both of you, so stylish. I bet you have to keep the men away with sticks.”
Everyone hugged and kissed hello, and Erica stood for a moment while Mia exclaimed over her. The past was brought out and examined; Mia told babysitting stories, anecdotes from years before. “There was one time you were on Merv,” Mia said, “and I was sitting for the girls. I made a tape of your monologue and listened to it over and over, trying to see what you were doing. And how I could maybe do it.”
“I remember that,” Opal said. “You borrowed my tape recorder.”
“So you figured it out,” said Dottie. “How I did it.”
Mia shrugged. “Took me long enough,” she said.
“But it’s wonderful, what’s happened to you,” Dottie said. “I want to hear about it, about both of you. The show, the new apartment. What it’s like having this whole new career.”
Dottie began to ask questions, and her interest seemed genuine. She didn’t sound bitter at all, Erica realized, and the evening actually seemed to be working. Dottie was warm and inquisitive and generous tonight. There was no envy here, or even wistfulness. When Ross Needler and his wife showed up a little while later, Dottie told them to pull up chairs. “And, Erica,” Dottie said, “keep on the lookout for that mean night nurse. She may try to break this up.”
Erica gave her chair to Anne Needler, a small, nervous woman who seemed far removed from anything to do with television, and she stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame. From here Erica could view the whole room, could watch the way everyone circled Dottie, as if trying to levitate her. Dottie was suddenly so cheerful, that probably no one here would even believe the dire stories that Opal had told them on the phone. Oh, you’re exaggerating, Ross would say tomorrow. Dottie seemed terrific, better than she’s been in a long time. And Dottie did seem that way, certainly; even the muscles of her face looked relaxed.
Maybe, Erica kept thinking, the worst is over, the storm has passed. But this sudden shift didn’t feel quite right; it was too quick and artfully done. Erica kept watching from the doorway, and after a while she began to understand. Dottie was relaxed, Erica knew, in the way of someone who has accepted the inevitable. Dottie had already removed herself from the race; she wasn’t a part of the scene at all. She should have been the one standing out in the doorway, watching all the fuss inside. No, she should have been farther away: outside the window, up in the sky, looking down at the whole skyline from a great, benevolent distance.
Erica’s mouth suddenly seemed to suck itself dry; she ran her tongue over her lips, watching the scene around the bed. She couldn’t speak; she couldn’t plunge in and accuse her mother of anything. For once, the atmosphere in this room was tranquil. More people arrived: ancient Aunt Harriet, and a cameraman named Lou whom Dottie had always liked. Everyone looked relieved when Dottie made an effort to sit up and emb
race them.
How strange, Erica thought, to lie in bed and watch your life just flood into the room. Maybe dying would be like this. Erica had seen interviews with people who spoke of such experiences—women who swore that while in a coma they saw high-school gym teachers, pieces of birthday cake eaten in 1943, episodes of My Little Margie. What if this visit expanded, and everybody from Dottie’s life suddenly showed up at the hospital?
“Dottie Engels, this is your life!” an offstage voice would say in a thrill of bass and vibrato. And Dottie, lying in her high, railed bed, would watch as one after another her visitors appeared in the spotlit doorway.
“Dottie,” an ancient voice begins. “Dottie, do you know who I am?”
Dottie pauses in the bed, blinking. “No,” she answers. “I’m not sure . . . It sounds familiar.”
“I was the first person in the family to ever think you were funny,” the voice continues. “Think hard now.”
Dottie inclines her head very slightly toward the voice, remembering. She thinks of the summer, over forty years before, which she had spent at Camp Hatikvah, and how, when she had returned, everyone thought there must have been something in the water, for Dottie Breitburg had become funny. She had won first prize at Talent Night, doing impressions of Hitler and Mussolini and Carole Lombard, and then, buoyed up by her improbable good luck, she who had been first in nothing returned to Brooklyn somehow changed.
At first they thought it was only that she was louder; it seemed as though Dottie shouted when a normal speaking voice would have been sufficient. They had her hearing tested; she sat in a small room hooked up to a box while a technician fiddled with dials and instructed Dottie to raise a hand each time she heard a tone. Sounds came at her from both sides: calliope-swoops in first her left ear, then her right. Her hearing was declared perfectly fine. After a few weeks it became clear that not only was Dottie loud, she was also amusing. Even Aunt Pigeon, still in mourning since the telegram about her son, looked up from her station at the window where she sat gazing sadly at traffic all day, and laughed.
At the seder that year, Dottie made little puns about the affikomen. “What a clown,” Aunt Pigeon said, and as if this were a cue, all the uncles unloaded their pockets of change. Suddenly Dottie was being paid for telling jokes; it was astonishing.
At night, even after she was sent off to sleep, she stayed awake in her room and listened to everyone talk about her. She liked nothing better than to hear her name, no matter what was said. The women carried in the crystal, washing it gently in the sink, and over the hiss of water Dottie’s name occasionally rose and rose like a creature of purpose, finding its way to the top.
But This Is Your Life has only begun. Next a voice in the hospital room booms, “Dottie, I always thought you were swell.” It is a voice that everyone recognizes from night after night of television. Ed’s voice is more familiar than his face, actually, for usually he is off-camera. When Ed looks into the monitor sometimes, all he can see of himself is one ankle, crossed over his left leg and poking out into the frame that houses Johnny and the guest of the moment. Ed has become just an ankle and an infectious laugh; nothing more. Sometimes he lets himself laugh on and on, knowing the mikes will pick it up, because he wants to be sure he exists, to have something better than a mere Cartesian proof of it.
But the night Dottie Engels was on the show, Ed hadn’t had to force himself to laugh congenially. Everything she said was just so damn funny, he couldn’t help himself. He was having a good time for once, really loosening up, until Johnny shot him a sidelong glance, meaning Enough, Ed, and he was forced to end his laughter with a forlorn little cough, his fist to his mouth.
Now the guests come faster, one after the next: men Dottie dated when she was on the road, waitresses from the clubs she played, next-door neighbors from Jericho. Everyone is swarming her, pushing their way through the flowers to touch her and sing her praises. Her whole life is here; how can she turn it down? How, Erica thinks, can she possibly say no?
—
Yes,” Dottie was saying, “oh, yes. But then I took one look at the dressing room and said, ‘It’s one thing to fit into that costume, but how do you expect me to fit through this door?’”
Everyone was laughing, even Aunt Harriet. “Dottie, you should do a whole routine like this,” Ross was saying. “Something about the old days, about being on the road. I think it could be very funny.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Dottie said, but she seemed pleased.
When the telephone call came, Dottie was telling a story about the day she auditioned for Ed Sullivan. The phone rang three times before she seemed to notice it. “Could you hand that to me, Sy?” Dottie asked, and Sy picked up the phone and said into the receiver. “Miss Engels’s dressing room, hold the wire,” and then stretched the cord across the bed to hand it to her. Everyone kept talking during the call and Erica couldn’t hear what was being said, but from across the room she could see her mother’s face rapidly change, as though something terrible had been revealed. Someone had died, Erica thought. But who? Everyone was here; there was no one left who would upset Dottie so much. Now Dottie’s voice was lifting above the laughter.
“Well, I really don’t know what to say,” she said. “Yes, that’s all well and good, but really.” Her voice was shrill and a little wild; it reminded Erica of the Mrs. Pummelman voice, which she had not heard in years. The room became quiet. Erica looked over at Opal, who was back on the windowsill now. Opal was staring fixedly at Dottie, and her mouth was slightly open, in wonder or fear. Opal seemed to understand what Erica did not.
“Goodbye,” Dottie said. The telephone was handed back to Sy and replaced on its cradle. Dottie raked her fingers through her hair and said, “Look, everybody, I’m feeling a little worn out now. I hate to cut this short, but I think I should. Please, no offense. Promise me you’ll come back another time.” Her lips were tight, and she was staring hard first at Erica, then at Opal, with something that bore a close resemblance to rage. Erica’s heart began to pound; she felt that old generic guilt, the kind you feel even when you can’t think of what in the world you are supposed to have done. She often felt this way walking through the electronic gates at the exit of a store, positive the alarm was going to scream and she was going to be apprehended, even though she had stolen nothing.
The visitors exited quickly, embarrassed, and Erica watched as they headed for the elevators in a bewildered flock. Now it was only Erica, Opal, Sy, and Dottie left in the room. There was an electrical whir as Dottie lifted the head of her bed until she was sitting straight up, the mattress supporting her like a wall.
“What’s the matter?” Erica finally asked. “What happened?”
“You know what happened,” said Dottie.
“No,” Erica went on, “I really don’t.”
“Well, your sister does,” Dottie said.
Opal stayed on the window, hugging her knees. “I was just trying to help,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything bad by it. I just thought he ought to know, that’s all.” She stood up quickly. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she began to cry, her voice splitting. “You were married to him; I thought he had a right to know. I thought at least he could say something to you.”
It was too much to absorb so quickly; it was like walking into a whodunit right in the middle, when you’ve missed the murder but are left to watch the detached intensity. Meaningless emotion, form without content, like listening to two people make love in the next room. Dottie’s rage was obvious and full-blown; her face had darkened, and Erica wouldn’t have been surprised if her heartbeats were leapfrogging across the monitor.
“I’m not dead yet,” Dottie said, “and you’re already replacing me. One foot in the grave, and you girls just jump over to your father’s side. At least you might have waited, out of courtesy.” She paused. “Am I that easy to replace?” she asked. “Do yo
u think of your father and me as interchangeable? After all these years, after the life I’ve made for us, no thanks to him.”
“Dottie,” said Sy. “Would you tell me what’s going on? Would you just slow down for a minute?”
Dottie turned to him. “All right, I’ll tell you what’s going on,” she said. “Now that I’m dying, these girls here have been contacting their father behind my back. That was him on the phone, supposedly calling just to see how I was feeling. He said that Opal told him where I was.” She shook her head. “It kills me, it really does,” she said. “Never in my life have I felt so betrayed. I just can’t get over it.”
“If you’ll just listen to me,” Opal began, but Dottie waved her to stop.
“Oh, I’m tired of listening to everybody,” Dottie said. “I’ve been doing nothing but listening. Everybody waltzes in here and gives me their opinion, and I’m trapped here listening. Right now I just want quiet. Is that too much to ask?” Then she slowly lowered the head of the bed back down until she was lying flat on her back, staring at the ceiling. No one moved. “Good night, girls,” she said pointedly. “Good night, Sy.”
Before leaving, Erica and Opal stood miserably above the bed one last time, both of them clutching the railing as though afraid they might pitch over the edge and drown.
—
The next morning, Dottie was silent when they came to visit. She sat upright in her bed, her eyes fixed on the television that hung suspended above her.
“Can we at least talk about this?” Opal asked.
“Not now,” said Dottie, not looking away from the set.
Erica watched as Opal stood in agony by the bedside. “You don’t understand,” Opal started, but Dottie stopped her.
“Look,” said Dottie, “I’ve asked very few things of you girls. Obviously, what I asked for was too much.”