This Is My Life (9 page)

Now here is something we have in common, Erica thought about telling him. Neither of our homes has any smell to it. It's as though we live in libraries, in office buildings. But he would
only stare blandly at her, as he always did, drumming his fingers on the bed. He didn't care if she left or stayed, just as long as she was certain to leave before his parents arrived. This pattern would probably go on until the end of the school year, when they would separate for the summer. Jordan would go off to a computer camp in the Berkshires, and Erica would join the Junior Peace Corps and be stationed out on the veldt. But for now, here in this room, something held them fast.

She found herself wanting to go home soon, yet the thought of pulling her clothes back on right now was unbearable. She didn't want to step back into the clothes that lay formless on the floor. Her naked skin was warm from the dry heat that poured in through a vent above the door. Only her breasts were cold, from where she had pressed them against the windowsill. Erica crossed her hands over them, warming herself.

“Oh, you're suddenly shy?” Jordan said. “After what we've done? Isn't it kind of late for that?” He was smiling a little meanly.

“I wasn't hiding myself,” she said. “I just got cold, is all.”

He shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. He lay on his back, arms folded beneath his head. His hair fanned out on the pillow like a woman's. He looked so gentle, his elbows jutting out like that, his features delicate, and yet he was loveless, a fact that repeatedly surprised her.

You only end up with what you feel you deserve, she had once heard someone say on a talk show. A psychologist was talking about women whose husbands beat them, and who still stay married.
He needs me
, they said, or
He's promised to change
. But Jordan didn't abuse Erica, certainly. He just showed her a kind of perverse, studied disregard. Erica was like a giant
billboard, a big, screaming Day-Glo girl, the biggest girl in the tenth grade, and he seemed not to see her at all. Which was just fine, since she didn't see him, either. She never thought about him, never lay in bed at night, her mind fading to a dream sequence in which Jordan hovered above her, his body patiently working.

Suddenly there was the sound of a door opening in the distance. Someone upstairs, she thought, a family joining forces for the night. But then Jordan shot up in bed. “Fucking shit cock!” he said. Even his cursing was a little disjointed. “Someone's home!” he said, frantic, and he leaped off the bed and shimmied into his jeans. He had no hips; he slid right in. He threw Erica's clothes at her. “Here!” he said, and she grappled with her mohair sweater, forcing her head into one of the armholes three times before getting it right.

“Oh God, oh God,” he was muttering, buttoning up his plaid flannel shirt. “Comb your hair or something,” he said.

He handed her a broken comb from the dresser, and she pulled it dutifully through the top layer of her hair. She didn't feel nervous, oddly enough; there seemed to be very little at stake here for her. What was the worst that could happen?

Then the bedroom door swung wide. Dr. Strang stood there, her coat on, saying, “Honey?”

Jordan turned to her. He and Erica were both fully dressed now. Only the bed was twisted up and practically bore full-body imprints of where they had lain. “Hi, Mom,” Jordan said, his voice revealing nothing. And then, with some bitterness, he said, “This is Erica.”

He blamed her. For many things: for being here when his mother came home, for being herself, for being fat, for making
him have to admit her existence in his life. The whole beauty of what they had was in never having to admit to any of it. It was all unspoken, just an act done in darkness, just something that satisfied them both in a peculiar, unhappy way.

“Nice to meet you, Erica,” Jordan's mother said, smiling a little. There was a strong resemblance, except Dr. Strang's hair was red, the color that many mothers had gravitated toward over the years, a sort of dark, unflashy, acceptable red. “You kids want something to eat?” she asked. “I came home early, two cancellations back to back. Hope I'm not disturbing anything.”

“No,” Jordan said. “Erica was just leaving.”

“Oh,” said his mother. “Well, come talk to me a minute, will you?” she said. “I never see you, Jordan. You too, Erica. It's a rare treat to meet your friends. I feel honored.”

They followed Dr. Strang down the hall to her study, an impressive room in which diplomas and Ben Shahn prints were given equal wall space. Dr. Strang sat down behind her desk and took off her coat and shoes. “Oh, my aching dogs,” she said. She paused. “Why do you suppose they call them dogs?” she asked. “Do either of you have any idea? No? That's the kind of thing Jordan always seems to know.”

“I do not,” he said.

Dr. Strang leaned back in her chair. She was quite pretty, Erica thought; the delicacy of Jordan's features was more appropriate in a woman. And yet, like Jordan, there was still something brittle there, something that had grown spoiled. She had gone to medical school late, Jordan had told Erica, had been a young mother at home with small children first. And perhaps she had waited too long, for there was no generosity in her voice, no warm expansiveness.

“I'd like to offer a bit of unsolicited advice, if I may,” Dr. Strang said.

From behind her great desk she rummaged around for a while. Finally she found what she wanted and hoisted it up in both arms onto the desktop. “Oh, not this,” Jordan said.

“Yes, this,” said his mother.

The object was made of plaster, a large, blank, modern sculpture of some sort. Abruptly, Dr. Strang swiveled it around on its base, and Erica and Jordan were staring closely at a hideous rendering of a woman's reproductive organs. This side had been painted as carefully as a model ship.

“You know how strongly I feel about protection,” Dr. Strang was saying. “Do you need me to run down the basics, perhaps remind you both of a few things?”

Erica closed her eyes. “I have to go home,” she said faintly, but nobody seemed to have heard. When she opened her eyes again, Dr. Strang was pointing to the ovaries, two small orbs that had been painted a bright but inappropriate robin's egg blue. “And so it's very easy for a woman to become pregnant,” she was saying, “the most natural thing in the world, unless you do something to prevent it. Do you get my drift?”

They both nodded, stunned and mortified. They sat and listened as she went through her lecture with as much confidence and general good nature as a museum tour guide in front of the Pietà.

The lecture somehow changed things between them. Erica and Jordan still spent afternoons together, still took off their clothes and fumbled with each other, and Erica continued to make Jordan cry out in a distinctive, strangled voice. But there was a difference now, one that she couldn't name. It struck her
sometimes when they were lying quietly, still panting, staring up at the ceiling and not touching each other at all. Suddenly Erica would think back to Dr. Strang's lecture. She pictured that plaster model forever swiveling on its base, the pelvis moving back and forth in gentle, persuasive suggestion.

I
n the summer the babysitters were back in full force. Erica was off to Rwanda and Dottie was on a seven-city tour, and so Opal was home alone with a babysitter. Danny Bloom showed up on Tuesday and Thursday, while Wednesday brought Lyman Huddle, who was just a ghost of a presence in the apartment, with his headphones clamped on. On Friday Joey diSalvo the impressionist came, and the weekend was spent with Opal's favorite of them all, Mia Jablon.

“Poor girl,” Dottie said about Mia. “She's so talented, but unless she finds some new material, she'll never get any work. She's too
angry
; I keep telling her to soften things up. I send her out on auditions, and she hears the same thing again and again: great delivery, but change the act. At this rate, she's going to spend her entire life babysitting.”

Opal secretly wouldn't have minded that. She liked all of the babysitters, and waited by the door like a dog as they let
themselves in with their duplicate keys, but Mia was by far the best. Once, in an unusual burst of emotion, Opal informed Mia that if anything were to happen to Dottie, she would want Mia to adopt her.

“I'm very flattered,” Mia had answered. “But nothing's going to happen to your mama. She's indestructible.”

This was a common view, and it had mostly to do with Dottie's size, as though a woman so large could never be downed. But the people who thought that never got to see Dottie after a night of shows, when she took off her clothes and sat smoking in her bedroom at dawn. They never got to see her sitting in a slip on the edge of the queen-sized bed, a cigarette hanging unattended from her mouth, her stockings bunched up on her fists like hand puppets.

Mia Jablon worshiped Dottie Engels, for it had been Dottie who had come up to Mia at Open Mike Night at the Laff House, after Mia had just bombed onstage with her jokes about the catcalls construction workers yell to women on the street, and had taken her aside and told her she had real promise. Dottie had shaken the hand of the younger comedienne and asked her if she wanted a few pointers. Over coffee the following week, Dottie had gone over Mia's routine line by line, helping her iron out the inconsistencies and gently suggesting where she might want to lighten the act up a bit. Mia had been wildly grateful. Dottie was her idol, a woman who had actually made it in this terrible business.

Dottie's story had become public knowledge; she was unusual, a woman with two kids, a divorced mother who had dragged her girls with her to every audition in the beginning, because she could not afford a babysitter and because she did not want to burden Aunt Harriet with them all the time. Opal
vaguely remembered sitting with Erica in the waiting rooms of office buildings, reading
Highlights for Children
, while behind a frosted-glass door, her mother's silhouette loomed. Opal sat on a plastic chair, listening, bored to death by the same puzzling jokes, and then the same expression on her mother's face when finally she burst through the door. Dottie's color had always risen by that point; she was red and exhausted, and she called out to the agent, “Thanks for your time!” in a cheerful voice, and then she fetched Opal and Erica and walked swiftly out with them, hand in hand. There had been many offices like this, all of them equally depressing. Occasionally Opal would look up at the photographs on the walls of the waiting room; there were a few faces she recognized, but most of them were obscure: men and women with names like Frankie Vincent, The Hollis Twins, April Wells. And always Dottie would emerge from the inner office, trying to look triumphant even after she had been refused.

When Dottie was given her first job, serving as emcee at the Four Aces Club in East Brunswick, New Jersey, she took the girls with her on the bus. Opal remembered the ride—the Jersey Turnpike in the rain—and how she and Erica had stayed backstage in the dressing room. Their mother had instructed them not to move, not to go anywhere without her, because you never knew what kind of oddballs might be lurking in the wings of the Four Aces. From her post in the dressing room, Opal could hear Dottie's voice onstage; it resonated even from far away. Opal was comforted as she sat among the strange, feathered costumes, inhaling the smells of talc and oil-based makeup. Erica sat on a cracked plastic couch, her legs up, reading a book entitled
Susie Belvedere, High School Sleuth
.

Dottie started getting more work, and Opal and Erica traveled with her on weekends to New Jersey or up to Massachusetts. They stayed in cramped, bad motels, some with numbers for names. Motel 12, she remembered, had plaid wallpaper and a waterless pool congested with leaves.

“Think of it as an adventure, girls!” Dottie continued to tell them. She never let them stay in the motel room alone when she wasn't there—not back then, when the motels were so seedy. She brought them with her to the clubs at night, and came backstage to visit between shows, making sure that dinner had been sent out to them from the kitchen, as she had requested.

One night at the Third Rail in Springfield, Massachusetts, Dottie met Ross Needler, a talent agent who was having a drink by himself. Ross was sitting in the bar, drinking Scotch and water, when Dottie Engels came onstage, a massive, brassy woman who somehow seemed maternal as well. He put down his drink and listened. When he learned that she had two young daughters sitting backstage, he was even more curious. Most of the female comics he saw were much younger, he explained later: dissipated Barnard girls in black turtlenecks doing beatnik jokes. But this woman was shamelessly overweight, and a delight to watch. He came back to the dressing room after the show, and Opal looked up from her connect-the-dots book just long enough to say hello, and then he sat there and talked to Dottie for an hour. They talked and talked, and soon Opal fell asleep against her mother's shoulder. The next morning, Ross Needler sped them all back to Queens in his big green Pontiac.

Ross booked Dottie into better places, clubs closer to the city, ever circling it, until finally he got her work right in Manhattan. She appeared at the Laff House, and from there he sent
her to California, where she was booked onto a talk show as part of an undiscovered-talent segment.

“I don't know where she gets the courage,” Aunt Harriet said to Opal and Erica as they sat up late in her living room waiting for the show. “She amazes me. First leaving your father, and now this.” Aunt Harriet did not move from her easy chair. She sat, a thinner version of her niece Dottie, but definitely a Breitburg—lips pursed, hair arranged in a pile on top of her head—and waited. Opal and Erica sat on the floor at her feet.

Dottie was on during the final three-minute segment, which in the profession was nicknamed the Death Slot. When she came onscreen, Opal got so excited she started grabbing at the brown shag carpeting in her hands, almost pulling up clumps of it, like weeds. The excitement couldn't be contained in her great-aunt's tiny living room. Even the television set, an old black and white Zenith, couldn't possibly contain all of it. They had probably had to
stuff
Dottie in there, Opal remembered thinking, but Dottie fairly shrieked her way out, bursting through the glass. Opal lay on the tortured carpet in front of the set, gazing up, gasping with love.

After that night, it never stopped. Opal was forever gazing up, forever staying up half the night to watch. Her mother moved them into Manhattan, to a big apartment on the Upper West Side, which she could barely afford, but whose huge mortgage she would pay off all at once in just a few months. In this apartment, the television was given its own shrine in the den. It was a large, oiled rosewood color set, with a built-in stereo and wet bar. The day after one of Dottie's late-night television performances, Opal and Erica were allowed to go to school late, equipped with bogus excuse notes that mentioned “a slight
cold,” notes that Dottie had pre-written and pre-signed before she left for California.

It was understandable that Mia Jablon would worship Dottie Engels. This worship brought Opal closer to Mia; there was a shared understanding at work between them. Now Mia Jablon babysat all the time, and she and Opal had developed a real rapport. Mia was small and tightly constructed, with wispy red hair that she wore pulled back in a short braid like Pippi Longstocking, and a mouth that was always twisting into exaggerated expressions. She was new to stand-up comedy, having gone to clown college first, which she had quit after a few months because the other students depressed her too much. There was so much false mirth in the classrooms of clown college; when you walked down the halls, she said, all you would hear was laughing and screeching, as though you were in a monkey house. If you had a bad day—a fight with your lover or menstrual cramps—then the whole thing seemed a mockery, and the laughter rang out at you as if in reproach.

Mia didn't seem to mind that she wasn't having any luck at comedy, and she actually seemed to enjoy sitting for Opal. She would get down on the floor with her and play Trouble or Candyland for hours. Occasionally she showed up with her friend Lynn, a graphics designer with whom she shared an apartment in Brooklyn. Lynn was older and somber and smoked even more than Mia, but she too seemed to enjoy playing Opal's board games. Once the three of them played Mystery Date, which Ross Needler had given Opal for her last birthday. The rules of the game were very simple; the board came equipped with a plastic door, and you turned the knob and flung the door open, finding yourself face-to-face with an illustration of your “date”
for the evening. There were three different possibilities lurking behind the door, three men waiting on the porch. The one you were supposed to like best was “The Dream Date,” a man in a white dinner jacket, holding a bouquet. His hair was slicked back and gleamed like wet paint. The second choice was “The Beachcomber,” who was dressed casually, in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, and who offered you a less ostentatious bouquet. The third choice, referred to on the lid of the game, in no uncertain terms, as “The Dud,” wore a ratty T-shirt and bore no gift. Mia and Lynn were fascinated with the game.

“Oh my God, I've gotten ‘The Dud' again,” Mia shrieked, and she and Lynn poked each other and rolled around howling.

“I don't think it's so funny,” Opal said. She took the game quite seriously; she felt sorry that Mia kept drawing “The Dud.” It seemed ominous, as though this was Mia's fate spelled out in front of her on a Ouija board, and yet Mia refused to understand.

“
I
, on the other hand, am going out with ‘The Dream Date,'” Lynn said.

“Make me jealous,” said Mia. “Where's he taking you?”

“Oh, we thought we'd stay home,” said Lynn. “You know, sort of cozy up around the fireplace, listening to old romantic love ballads by Jerry Vale or something. Then I'll woo him with a tempting dinner, and we'll spend the night doing the most beautiful thing a man and woman can do together.”

“Their taxes?” asked Mia, and then she and Lynn broke out laughing again. “What a hoot this is!” Mia said. “Opal, I love this game! Can I borrow it some time? Some of our friends would love it.”

Opal agreed, but she was uneasy. She could imagine Mia
and Lynn and their friends, a group of wisecracking women crowded into a tiny Brooklyn kitchen, smoking pot and hunching around this poor, worn Milton Bradley game, turning the knob and making smart, snappy jokes that Opal would never understand. But still she said yes, because she loved Mia and didn't want to disappoint.

Sometimes at night she and Mia would go for long walks down Broadway. Summer was just settling in, and the crowds were out. Sidewalk vendors sold electric yo-yos and phosphorescent jewelry, and the night seemed lit with hundreds of fireflies. One night, Opal and Mia walked to Lincoln Center and sat on the lip of the fountain, feeling the water dust their hair.

“If I ever make any money,” Mia said, “I'm going to live in Manhattan.”

“Brooklyn's not Manhattan?” Opal asked. She could never quite keep this straight.

Mia explained to her about the different boroughs. “Brooklyn is for grandparents, and for starving uncompromised types like me,” she said. “You're a lucky kid, growing up in the city. I grew up in Brooklyn, and I'll probably die there too; I'll be found dead on the N train. There but for the grace of your mother go I. She's a very generous woman, you know.”

It was true; Dottie was tireless. She did her clown act at the Headley carnival each year, she helped young comics get a start in the business, gave them money and food and introduced them to talent agents, and she personally wrote back to as many of her fans as she could manage.

Erica would have been the only one to disagree. “She's a monster,” Erica had taken to saying lately. “You don't see it, but it's true.”

“You're so nasty,” Opal had said. “What did she ever do to you that was so bad?”

“It's what she didn't do,” said Erica. “But you're too young to understand that.”

Erica liked to make Opal feel as though she was a little bit retarded—not enough so she had to attend a special school, but just dense enough to miss the critical point of most conversations. Erica wrote sheaves of poems, some of which had been published in
Insight
, the Headley literary magazine, and to Opal they made no sense. It was like trying to read the cryptogram in the newspaper; everything needed to be translated before you could proceed.

One of the poems was called “The Nadir”; Opal remembered that this had been among Erica's S.A.T. words:

The Nadir

How can I reach the top

When I am ever slipping downward

Life is a big mountain

Whose bottom looms before us

Oh catch me please

Before I fall

Down the spiral

Into nothingness . . .

The poem was signed E. J. Engels, and it was printed on a page opposite a woodcut of a bag lady sleeping in a doorway. Many of the poems in the magazine were as meaningless as Erica's, and all of the illustrations were of old people or deserted
beaches in winter. And now Erica was off in the farthest place she could find: Rwanda, which Opal had never even heard of, and about which Dottie had sung a little song before Erica left. “Help me, Rwanda,” Dottie sang. “Help, help me, Rwanda . . .”