This Is My Life

by Meg Wolitzer

  Walt and Opal managed to clear out a small circle for themselves on the floor. The circle got smaller and smaller, and soon Walt was flush against her. He was working now, she saw, dancing just for her—his eyes near-closed, points of sweat above his upper lip. He brought his mouth down to her neck and skidded there for a second, then settled. They stayed like that, Walt’s face buried deep in her neck, her arms wrapping him. She stared out across the room, thrilled and wild-eyed.

  Opal imagined her mother walking in here and looking around in wonder, shaking her head at this new world, everyone young and nervy and stripped-down and gleaming. All about the room, huge-screen televisions broadcast a series of disjointed images: a black woman walking a big white Afghan, a man in leather following another man down a narrow alley, an airplane cutting through a sky the color of blood. Even here, in the middle of all this, you could watch television if you wanted. Without a second thought, Opal closed her eyes.

  Twenty-four

  Because she now loved the apartment—loved its assortment of rooms, and the soft furniture planted beneath windows in slants of sun, loved its glowing chrome kitchen stocked for eternity with good things—Erica knew she would soon have to leave. It was amazing the way you could be lured back and held; sometimes you had to slap yourself awake to remember this was only a stopping place, a watering hole. Erica had once read a magazine article about grown children who move back into their parents’ apartments, and the idea of it had been unthinkable. But this wasn’t quite the same; she was in her mother’s apartment, but her mother wasn’t, although Dottie’s ghost seemed present at times, especially late at night, when Erica went to fix herself something to eat in the dark kitchen. She would feel a hesitating ripple in the air, and would whip around to look. Everything was in order: The pilot lights kept vigil under the burners on the stove, and the refrigerator did its usual ice-making song and dance. Is it me? she wondered, holding her plate and pausing for a moment in the middle of the room.

  What had happened was this: Erica had suddenly become seized with loneliness. It struck her in the way that hunger sometimes did—in great, unpredictable gusts. When it did, she would walk around the apartment like someone who has been dealt a blow to the head, and who is trying to gather her wits about her. The apartment was shocking in its silence and its cleanliness—two aspects that Erica had not known, living with Jordan. Opal was around less and less often these days, and lately she had begun staying out all night. She had “met someone,” she announced one night over dinner, and before Erica could respond, Opal was stammering and shredding her napkin and looking pleased in a way that Erica had not seen in a very long time.

  It reminded her of when she had first met Mitchell, and how they would sit at lunch together in the snack bar, separated by the distance of two red plastic trays that were still warm and wet from the dishwasher. She knew, if she saw him now, that he would be full of good advice about how she should conduct her life. He would lean back in his green swivel chair, the unoiled springs groaning beneath the serious weight of him, and he would link his hands together behind his head and say: Let’s see.

  Her loneliness, she knew, was specific to Mitchell. She had always been able to be alone with herself; that had never been a problem. But knowing that he was out there, and that she was still here, was too much for her. It was a simple equation, but each time she thought it through to its conclusion, she was left with an overwhelming despair. Erica was back in the lap of her childhood home; she could stay here forever, she knew, and lie in her big bed all day and night, as she used to, smoking dope and watching the smoke disperse around her. She could start listening to her old records again, slide the orange crate out from under her bed and flip through the collection. She thought about her set of Reva and Jamie albums, and how they had gone untouched for years. These days, she knew, Reva and Jamie had become a lounge act, performing Sixties hits in revolving restaurants at the tops of hotels in lesser cities.

  It was all very tempting, in the way that sometimes the thought of touching the third rail in the subway is tempting: You know what the results will be—the way your finger will beckon death into your body—but you are curious anyhow. Staying in this apartment would be a slow but equally certain death. Erica would fulfill all her old fears about herself. She would eat herself silly in the bedroom of her childhood, and she would never be able to leave.

  What she needed, she realized, was an addition to this life. Living here for a while wouldn’t be damaging if there was somewhere else she could go during the days, if there was another landscape that wouldn’t claim her with the same kind of fierceness, but would instead just shift to allow entry. Erica thought at once of Mitchell, and the psychology building where he worked. She would go see him, talk to him; maybe, she thought, he could help her get a job there. She wanted to work, wanted to do something other than sell her innermost thoughts about being heavy or sad or lost. It wasn’t just Mitchell she wanted, although even now, focusing on the idea of work, she could still picture Mitchell’s face and hands, and then finally his whole body came spinning to the surface.

  Erica found her keys and left the apartment before she could think this over. It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and Mitchell was supposed to be at his office, unless he had changed his schedule since she had seen him last, unless he had packed up and left town with tiny Karen, abandoning his doctoral thesis and all those fat women who relied on him.

  When Erica arrived at the psychology building, the fluorescent lights in Mitchell’s office were humming like mad; she could hear them from outside in the hall. A tall woman in a lab coat walked past, and Erica pretended to be studying the bulletin board next to the door, where stapled-up flyers in jazzy colors tried to persuade you to go to graduate school.

  Mitchell’s door suddenly swung open without warning. He stood yawning in the doorway, the lights humming like a fleet of desperate mosquitoes behind him, and when he saw Erica he stopped with his mouth slack, and took a step backward. “Oh, Erica,” was what he said.

  “Hi,” she said, her voice tentative. She wanted to show him, somehow, that she wasn’t armed, that she wanted nothing from him, but it occurred to her that this wasn’t quite true. She wanted whatever she could get.

  “I was just going to get some water,” he said. “Want to come?”

  They walked upstairs together, and when they reached the fountain on the landing, Mitchell bent over and took a long drink like an animal at a trough. She looked at the curve of his broad back, saw the way his flannel shirt was riding up and escaping the harness of his belt. When he was done he stood up, his beard spattering water, and then Erica took her turn. As she leaned over the low ceramic ledge, she thought that this was nearly a ceremonial rite: the two of them drinking together, as once they had eaten together, and made love together. Everything between them involved the taking in of substances, and she hadn’t let any of it go.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if it was okay.”

  “You stopped coming by,” Mitchell said. “I didn’t know where to reach you. I actually called you at your apartment, but I kept getting him, so I hung up. You never answered the phone.” He paused. “Then I read about your mother,” he said. “I felt really bad, but I didn’t know where you were.”

  They walked back downstairs to his office. When he opened the door, the white lights were loud and hard. “I’ll turn them off,” he said, and he slapped his hand down on a wall switch, and the windowless room went black and quiet. “Here,” his voice said, and in a moment he had pulled the chain of a small green desk lamp. The glow in the office made it look like a bedroom. She thought of Mitchell unbuttoning his shirt, his fingers skittering over a row of buttons.

  “A lot has happened,” she said, sitting in the folding chair by his desk. “My mother, of course. It was terrible; I can’t begin to tell you. We
had a fight and she just took off.” She shook her head. “But it’s not just that,” she said.

  Mitchell sat across from her. He put his hands flat down on the blotter and said, “What else?” She remembered him with a pink index card in his hand, his eyes searching her face. It distracted her now, made her forget what she wanted to say.

  “I left Jordan,” she finally said, as if in afterthought.

  “Oh,” said Mitchell. “Well.” His face was impassive.

  “Not because of you,” she added quickly. “No need to worry.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” Mitchell said. “I just wish I had known what was going on with you,” he said. He looked down at his desk and began to fiddle with his magnet of paper clips, scooping them out of their tight, connecting bundle and letting them rain back down. “I’ve really missed you,” he went on. “I know I probably shouldn’t, but I do. I’m still with Karen, of course, but sometimes I get frustrated about it all. Things get fucked up.”

  “Fucked up how?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing new,” Mitchell said. “Same old patterns. Sometimes I just want to shake her. She won’t eat anything; she’s like a bird. I think she eats in secret, when I leave the room. There’s a lot she keeps from me.” He paused. “I know this is stupid,” he said, “but sometimes I think about what it would be like to get up in the middle of the night with you and have a little feast, like in Tom Jones. You know, spread everything out on a banquet table and just eat. I guess that’s pretty transparent. But I never said I was complex.”

  She thought of the two of them sitting at Mitchell’s table at one in the morning, tearing apart a leftover roast chicken, their faces and fingers streaky with oil. It was easy to take the image farther, to build it into a series of tableaux that, taken together, equaled a whole life. But it was dangerous to even let herself imagine such a life. Erica forced herself back to this moment, to the fact that they were sitting in his office with a desk between them, that she needed to do something with her life—that she needed, in fact, a life.

  “Mitchell,” she said, “I can’t make myself crazy over this. I need something that’s good for me.” She hesitated. “I was wondering if there might be any jobs here,” she said. “Really, I’ll take anything. I’ll sit in a room interviewing fat women, or bulimics. Whatever.”

  “Come on,” Mitchell said. “That’s not why you’re here.”

  “It is,” she said. “It’s part of it.”

  Mitchell’s voice went flat. “Well, there are only lab jobs,” he said. “But you’re overqualified. You would just be working with mice, Erica.”

  “I am not overqualified,” she said. She had no qualifications at all, in fact. She had somehow been able to send a blur across Mitchell’s reasoning so he thought she had some power in the world, some recognizable worth. But just because he saw it didn’t mean that it was true.

  “Oh, I guess I could find you something, if you really want it,” he said. “At least you would be around me.” She didn’t say anything. “Don’t you want to be?” he asked. “I don’t know what it will mean, but still, Erica.” His voice drifted off.

  The overhead lights may have been silenced, but even so, there was a new hum in her head now—a steady, bristling drone. She stood, and in a moment Mitchell was standing too. He edged around in front of the desk and put his large hands on her hair, just touching the top like a halo. They kissed, and without thinking she leaned into him, against the scratch of his sweater and the softer scratch of his beard.

  —

  Out on the street, Erica let herself walk and walk. On the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, she stopped with all the other walkers and waited for the light. She peered down the broad gray street, at the storefronts and outdoor tables of jangly items that made you feel there was no room left in the world: keychains and mugs with wacky sayings and authentic hookahs and Smurf dolls fresh from Taiwan. Clusters of shoppers were scrabbling like crabs across the surfaces of tables. A small fight erupted. Someone was apparently being accused of stealing a Smurf doll, and voices were rising up over the traffic. Erica started to watch. Her eyes drifted slightly to the left, and that was when she saw him.

  She was not positive at first; he was wearing a familiar, ratty overcoat and rummaging among a table of bongs and spoons, lifting them closer to his face for inspection, and he might have been anyone. But when he looked up, Erica saw that he had a woman’s eyebrows. Jordan. What was he doing here? she wondered. Probably waiting to meet a supplier; Jordan went to other neighborhoods to do that occasionally. His coat seemed so insubstantial; she could imagine him catching cold and not knowing how to take care of himself. He would lie feverish in the loft bed for days, sitting up just long enough to cut himself a line or skim another chapter of Steal This Book.

  Erica quickly turned away so he would not recognize her. Jordan was a shaving, a clipping, a filament—anything slight and flyaway. But there would always be girls around to tend to him and cradle him and sing to him the songs that were lodged inside his head forever. She felt bad that he hadn’t gotten what he wanted, that during the weekend of Woodstock he had probably been home making a diorama or learning the New Math. Nobody got a second chance at these things. He was disappearing up the street now, and soon she would think of him less. Other things would replace these thoughts; there was only so much room inside. She was not a deep well, a bottomless pit, as she used to imagine herself. There were limits, she thought, and it was a relief to feel that there were edges around you, a membrane that kept you from spilling out into the world.

  Twenty-five

  They traveled three thousand miles to see their mother, and when they arrived, she was nowhere to be found. Opal and Erica stepped into the clamor of the San Francisco airport and looked around for Dottie. She would be huge and glowing in a dotted caftan, Opal imagined, perhaps just a little less huge than usual. Before they embraced, they would have to exclaim over how well she looked, tell her she was really making progress. But Dottie wasn’t there. Instead, they saw a young man holding a cardboard sign that read “O. and E. Angels,” and Opal realized that this meant them.

  “It sounds like a football team,” she whispered as the man put their luggage in the trunk of a car. She imagined telling her mother the story later. Even now, after not seeing her for six months, she still pictured Dottie rolling her eyes and opening her mouth to laugh.

  It was the heart of summer, and New York had become a difficult city. Both Opal and Erica knew that the apartment would eventually be turned over to their mother; this was their final summer, this was it. In the fall Opal would move back to New Haven, and Erica would start looking for a cheap place downtown, near NYU. In these last days the apartment seemed even more mythical than ever. The air conditioner seemed to put a preserving layer of frost over everything. Nothing changed up here on the twelfth floor; it was like Shangri-La.

  When Dottie called, asking them to come, telling them she would send them airline tickets, Opal had been reluctant. It was a complicated reluctance, she realized; she didn’t want to leave her life, even for a few days, but also, she was afraid. Who knew what Dottie had become? Right now she was just a voice on the telephone, just a stick figure on the back of a postcard.

  “Please, girls,” Dottie said when she called. “It would mean a lot to me. I’m not allowed to leave while I’m on the program; it’s a house rule. But I really want to see you. You can stay at a nice hotel nearby. Come on.”

  It was as if there had been no rift between them. She didn’t mention Norm at all, and apparently wasn’t going to. Obviously, Erica said later, Dottie was trying to apologize in her own oblique way. “We should go,” Erica said. “Among other things, I’m curious.”

  So now they were traveling in the back of an airport limousine down the Pacific Coast to Carmel. The day was unrelentingly clear, the sun slashing in across the backsea
t. Dottie had the ability—the talent, really—to conjure just about any desired response from both her daughters. Come, she said, and they jumped on an airplane and flew all the way across the country to see her, because she was their mother, after all, the biggest mother anyone could have, and she took their breath away.

  But nothing could have prepared them. The woman who met them on the sun deck of the Lexington Clinic bore little resemblance to Dottie Engels. It was like identifying a body in a morgue, Opal thought, like the moment when the filing cabinet is slid open and you are made to look.

  As she stood out in the warm light, observing her mother for the first time, she tried to find something to latch on to; her eyes quickly moved up and down, then side to side. Her head ached from the lack of recognition; everything was familiar, but seemed off. Opal felt as though she were a stroke victim reaching for a word, but the word no longer fit. Chair, she thought. Table. She turned to Erica for guidance, but Erica also looked confused.

  Dottie Engels was no longer fat.

  Nothing bloomed outward; there was no real girth to her. The weight that remained seemed unevenly distributed, hanging on her like loose clothing. For the first time Opal realized that her mother was not tall; it was as though her height had deserted her along with her width. What remained was a small woman with red hair and round shoulders and a round face, who looked out of shape, as if after a long winter of hibernation. She almost looked delicate, Opal thought.