This Is My Life (3 page)

Opal and Erica laughed again, hesitantly. Their laughter had a familiar, rolling burble to it, like a water cooler. Opal was aware that there were probably some nuances she was missing, certain inflections that seemed to point to the approximate region of humor, although the particular meaning was lost on her. She recognized her own ignorance, her limits in the presence
of this huge, wonderful mother. Opal was a knobby girl, especially small for her age. “My little ectomorph,” her mother sometimes called her, touching the hair on the back of Opal's neck, making her arch and settle like a cat.

She preferred it when her mother did parodies of songs from musicals, which she had expressly rewritten for her act. Onstage she was accompanied by a piano, bass, and drums, but here in the bedroom, her voice had to survive on its own. She didn't have a brassy voice, as one might have imagined, but instead she sang in a girlish soprano, aiming tremulously for the top notes the way someone might reach for a delicate object on a high shelf.

“Okay, girls,” she would say. “Now I'm going to do something from
West Side Story
. This one is to the tune of a song called ‘Maria.' You have to know the song, I guess, but just bear with me.” She paused, pulled at the throat of her turtleneck sweater, and began to sing:

“The most beautiful sound I ever heard/Pastrami/Pastrami, pastrami, pastrami/Say it loud and there's a carving knife carving/Say it soft, because I'm suddenly starving/Pastrami/I've just eaten a
pound
of pastrami . . .” She stopped singing and clutched at her stomach, rolling her eyes around. Opal was the first to laugh, and Erica followed.

“Oh good, you like that one,” said her mother. “I'm glad. Here's another.” She cleared her throat and sang. “There's
no
blintzes like
roe
blintzes, like
no
blintzes I know . . .”

After the songs she began to do characters, starting first with her most popular one, Mrs. Pummelman, then doing Baby Fifi, and finally Isadora Dumpster. She poked fun at her own weight problem, in the hopes, she often said, of having it cease to be a
delicate subject. It was not this way with most overweight people. Opal thought of Debby Nadler at school, whose mother was a large, gentle ceramicist. Mrs. Nadler was constantly at work in her studio, standing over the wavy heat of a kiln, looking flushed and serious in a red smock. Her heaviness was just another part of her, along with her talent and her kindness and her breathy voice. It was a big package that you couldn't split up; it was all or nothing. And then there was Miss Coombs, the school nurse, whose wide, easy presence was welcome when you were throwing up or had strep throat and had to be sent home. Miss Coombs laid you down on a narrow cot and hovered above you, blocking out the stark glare of the room, and she placed a washcloth over your forehead, smoothing its edges with her heavy hands. Both Mrs. Nadler and Miss Coombs carried their weight around without referring to it all the time, and everyone understood that it would have been wrong to make fun of it, or even mention it. You couldn't make fun of someone's fat mother—the mother had to make fun of herself, like Opal's did—but on the other hand you
could
go up to another girl at school and calmly say, “You're ugly, no offense.” The remark would blaze inside that girl forever.

Nobody ever said this kind of thing to Opal. She was popular already, good in gym, and quick at spelling. There was a small amount of cruelty in her, which surfaced at odd times and always surprised everyone, especially her. It sprang from nowhere, painlessly, like a nighttime nosebleed. She found herself occasionally joining in with a few others in the coat room at the end of the day and forming a tight ring around some unfortunate girl. Once they even stooped so low as to gang up on the new exchange student from Seoul, Korea, who couldn't
even begin to imagine what they were saying to her in such mean voices.

Opal stood at the periphery, muttering a few vague insults that no one could hear. She barely had to do anything, and still she was liked. It had really all started the day that she brought her class to watch the taping of a television show her mother was on. It was a morning news show, and all the children sat bleary-eyed on the floor at sunrise among a tangle of wires and cables. They were so well-behaved that a cameraman came over and told them they were welcome back anytime. For the rest of the day Opal was treated with real awe. She found herself at the very heart of the lunch table, being offered sandwich halves and tangerines and an invitation to try Alison Prager's oboe, if she wanted.

After that, Opal had her mother make strategic guest appearances at school. On Carnival Day her mother dressed as a gypsy and sat in a booth, and everyone crowded around. All the other mothers felt snubbed. Mothers in clown suits milled around unhappily, smoking furtive cigarettes in corners. Peter Green's mother sat bone-dry on the plank of a homemade dunking machine, waiting for someone to plunge her into the water, but no one did.

It wasn't that the children particularly wanted Opal's mother to read their fortunes, as she had been prepared to do. Instead, they tore off tickets from a loop, and came up to her booth, shrilling, “Do Mrs. Pummelman!” or “Do Baby Fifi!” and Opal's mother would patiently oblige.

When they got back home at the end of Carnival Day, Opal stood in the doorway and watched her mother take off her gypsy costume. She watched her pull off her pantyhose, holding it
bunched up on her hands for a second, as though about to make a cat's cradle of the nylon. Then she dropped it and reached around to unzip her gypsy dress. After that she unwound the turban from her head, and fished out the bobby pins from their hiding places in her hair. All she wore now was a pale yellow slip and two silver-dollar circles of rouge. She looked like a teenage girl sitting alone after a date that has gone poorly. That happened to girls sometimes, Opal knew; she had just begun reading books from the Young Adult section of the library. The books had titles like
Ready When You Are
or
New Girl at Adams High
or
Seventeen Means Trouble
. Sometimes in the book the boy stands the girl up at first, or else he says something terrible to her, like, “Oh, here come my friends. Let's pretend we're not together, okay?” Now Opal's mother looked so sad and exhausted that Opal had to look away. This was the only time she ever remembered wanting to look away from her.

Most of the time, like now, Opal could not get enough. As she sat in the kitchen watching the show, she laughed easily at all the familiar lines. Her mother torpedoed joke after joke, and everyone was satisfied. Opal could hear the beefsteak laugh of Ed McMahon, louder than anyone's.

When the audience finally quieted down, the camera closed in tight and her mother said, “I'd like to take this moment to send a special message to my daughters back in New York.” No one moved. “If you're watching this, Opal and Erica,” she said, “then you're in big trouble. You're supposed to be asleep now! It's a school night!”

It was like talking to her mother on a television phone, the kind that
My Weekly Reader
had insisted would be installed in every home by 1970. Opal had lived in fear. What if you were
on the toilet and the phone rang? What then? But the threats had proven idle.
My Weekly Reader
also swore that America would go metric within the next few years. Opal had been terrified, knowing her own stupidity with ounces and inches, let alone kilos and meters. But this, too, was just a scare, designed to alarm, then be forgotten. Everything settled down, went on as usual. Her mother showed up on television, sent satellite love messages to the East Coast, and later that night, after the credits rolled and her mother stood as if at a cocktail party with Johnny and Ed and Rita Moreno, Opal drew back the blanket on her bed and slipped inside.

Lying alone in the dark, she could hear the babysitter practicing down the hall, and then the sound of Erica preparing for sleep in the next room. There was the usual banging around, drawers sliding open and shut, and once in a while Erica would open her door and a line of music would drift out: “. . . And when will all the killing stop?/We cry into the rain . . .” Then the door would close again and Opal couldn't hear anything more. Erica's music was so depressing lately, and yet this was the way she liked to fall asleep at night; this was her lullaby of choice.

Opal flipped over onto her side and lay close to the wall. She summoned up an image of her mother onscreen, a pulse of color and motion. She was excited for a while, thinking about the show, but then the excitement shifted into something else. Now in her mind she saw her mother joined by her father, her sister, and finally herself. The whole family was up there, all spread out like the little winking lights of the
Tonight Show
skyline. They blinked at each other from across a great distance.

No, she thought, amending it slightly. She, Erica, and her
father were all little lights, but her mother was something else entirely. She was a zeppelin traveling across the sky, traveling from light to light, and everyone was pointing at her. Cars stopped on the road. “Look!” children cried. “Look! It's Dottie Engels!”

In the next room, her sister was already asleep, but now Opal was wide awake.

A
s a family, they bore the name of their weakest link. They carried it for years without wondering at the irony of this. They were the Engelses, taking the name from the father who had once appeared only at dinner tables and during arguments, and who then disappeared for good. Still they carried his name; it was like living with the child of someone who has left you and whom you now despise. The child begins to take on its father's features: the same impassive eyes, the thin mouth you cannot bear to feed.

Engels was a beautiful name; they had not been saddled with a clunker, as had many children at school, but even so, Erica decided it was time to change it. She announced this to Jordan Strang one day after school as they sat together on a bench by the river. The day was much too cold for them to be sitting outside, but still they sat coatless, trying to keep a pipe lit. It was a tiny pipe, packed full of green marijuana buds, and she
and Jordan passed it quickly back and forth, as though taking part in a relay race. Jordan kept lighting matches, which stayed lit in the wind for barely a second.

“Come on, little guy,” he kept addressing each match, and she watched him concentrate intensely, the way he did in Chemistry class, over a Bunsen burner. They had met in Chemistry, lab partners in an experiment involving calcium chips and Woolite. Soon they began to go down to the East River at the end of the day, where they would sit on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and try to smoke unlit green marijuana.

She and Jordan felt separate from everyone else at Headley—separate from the army of hardworking, wincing tenth-graders who marched through the day with their heads full of S.A.T. words, lips moving as they formed “vernacular” or “sybarite.” They were also separate from the group of mongrel tenth-graders who were always nodding out or laughing inappropriately in class or being excused to attend group sessions with Miss Klingman.

Erica and Jordan inhabited some limbo territory, one that was reserved for those who were homely and bright and liked to take drugs. If you fit into this category, then you wrote haiku in your locked bedroom at night, and you spent every afternoon in the park by the East River, fumbling to stuff little buds into the bowl of a ridiculous pipe, and you inhaled wildly in the wind, waiting for results.

She looked at Jordan's long face, the new wisps of hair growing above and below his lips. She watched him suck furiously at the pipe, then exhale what appeared to be smoke but was more likely vapor from the cold. The pipe was dead; Jordan let it drop into his lap.

“You're really going to change your name?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“What to?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I'm not sure yet.”

“Won't you miss having people know that you're Dottie Engels's daughter?” he asked. He paused. “Was that a stupid question? I just always wondered what it would be like to have famous parents. My parents are both endocrinologists. Now that's
really
exciting.”

She was surprised to hear him speak with any measure of irony; Jordan usually had such a flat voice, and the things he said seemed to suit it. He talked about school, and the books he was reading, and where his family was going for vacation, and usually Erica would stop listening somewhere in the middle of a sentence. She would hook around a single word and run with it;
vacation
, he might say, we're going to New Mexico for
vacation
, and Erica would flash back to her own family vacations: Knott's Berry Farm, or Hershey, Pennsylvania. She saw herself at six, standing in wonder before a giant, gleaming vat of chocolate, and she suddenly had no more use for Jordan's droning voice.

“Do you
like
having a famous mother?” he persisted now.

She nodded and gave him a formulaic response about how it had its ups and downs. There were several children of famous people at the Headley School: offspring of politicians, actors, an occasional athlete. Erica sat next to the daughter of black torch singer Minx Janeway in French class. But somehow having Dottie Engels as your mother was different; it meant having a mother who was large and loud and overexposed, someone who appeared everywhere you looked, and who made you laugh until you felt sick. It was a strain to laugh like that; it was unnatural.

At sixteen, Erica knew she looked like Dottie, already running to fat, settling in to a life of being heavy. Erica had a round face with an absence of cheekbones; there was nothing planar about her at all. She wrapped herself in layers of Indian-print fabric: long skirts and scarves and shirts that looked like college dormitory bedspreads. Her hair was parted in the middle and fell straight to her shoulders. It always smelled edible from the apricot shampoo she used. Every day she looked and smelled exactly the same. She observed herself in the mirror each morning after a shower, and as the steam settled she was startled all over again by how terrible she appeared. In a minute, regaining composure, she forced herself to leave the mirror and head for school.

Occasionally, when her mother had been on television, some-one would mention it the next day in class. “We saw your mom last night on the Bob Hope special,” Meredith Gertz said, mincing up to Erica at the lockers, flanked by two friends.

“Oh, good,” Erica said. She spun the combination lock, but suddenly all the numbers were lost. She spun and spun.

“Do you get to go to L.A. at all?” Meredith asked.

“Not really,” said Erica.

Meredith shot her friends a meaningful look. “Ever meet Johnny Carson?” she asked.

“No,” said Erica.

“Ever meet
anybody
?” Meredith asked.

“No,” Erica said, and her voice had disappeared, sinking back into her big face, the recesses of her throat, the long, hollow column that led down to her heart, her lungs, everything private and beating and desperate.

“Oh, forget it,” said Meredith Gertz, and, as if on a drill
team, she and her two friends wheeled around and walked off, heads close, already talking mean.

After that, Erica found herself left alone. No one was particularly interested in her, the way they were in Senator Peel's son, or the daughter of that astronaut. Still, the fact that Dottie Engels's daughters went to Headley was often mentioned in passing, and even referred to casually by the headmaster for recruitment purposes. Erica was Dottie's child, but she was also a lurking mammoth in the corner of the girls' locker room, doing an awkward little jig as she struggled into her size XL gym suit.

And now she was Jordan Strang's friend, his “girlfriend,” probably, for that was the way everyone figured out the world. The beautiful held hands with the beautiful, the homely with the homely. Erica Engels and Jordan Strang sat together on a bench by the East River, coatless and frozen. It was as if neither of them had a sense of self, she thought—as though their bodies needed nothing—like those people who lived in the Himalayas and ate only air. But it seemed odd to think of herself this way; there was so
much
of her, so there ought to have been so much need.

“I have to leave,” Erica said finally. “I'm supposed to spend more time with my sister.”

“Whatever gets you through the night,” Jordan said. His expressions often made no sense in context, and he spoke as though he were a foreigner clumsily trying to adopt a hip idiom. Perhaps he thought he was being clever in a cryptic way, like the characters in the novels he read. Jordan was obsessed with paperbacks from the Sixties; Hunter Thompson was his hero. He referred to him continually as “Hunter,” as though they were in
homeroom together. Jordan had given Erica a copy of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, and she had stared blankly at it for hours, missing the point. It was all about messy, crazed men driving fast and taking hallucinogens. This side of the counterculture, or what was left of it in the 1970s, seemed to have been designed specifically for
boys
—those boys who liked nothing better than to sit and talk about Hunter Thompson or Carlos Castaneda until even their dreams swam with images of birds and clouds and the desert sun. Jordan had no one else to talk to, and so he talked to Erica, using her as a sounding board to ramble on and on about whatever book he was reading this week.

Erica kept her own obsessions to herself. Lying alone in her room at night she played the music of Reva and Jamie, a male-female duo who sang with exquisite harmonies. She especially loved their song “Cup of Tears,” and always felt a chill at the part about the soldier's ghost coming back to haunt his lover. She would turn the volume up very high, but even so, she could still hear Opal calling her and banging on the locked door.

“What are you doing in there?” Opal called. “You want to hyperventilate?”

Erica paused. “I'm busy!”

“Doing what?”

“Homework!” Erica yelled. She turned over onto her back and lay staring up at the ceiling, listening to the harmonies spiral upward, then fall, thinking of nothing but herself, big and formless, a jellyfish floating on a bed. She might as well give in to it now, she thought—give in to the future that was rolling toward her at an alarming speed. She might as well accept it, and spend the rest of her life out in the open. She would no longer have to squirrel away cartons of Pepperidge Farm Milanos,
leaving the little fluted paper shells scattered around her room like doilies. No more sheepish pining away for food or conversation; all her needs would be wom up front like a badge of some dubious honor. She would be a big, pathetic thing, but everyone would
know
and would grow to accept her. There goes that poor fat girl, the neighbors would think, and maybe they would leave a plate of something outside her apartment door. She would have a place for herself, a specific role. Maybe that would be better than all this pretending that a little smudge of eyeshadow, or a special grapefruit diet, or having her ears pierced might help. The days were relentless, and she huddled behind her desk in school, keeping the desk top up as long as she could, searching for some imaginary pencil.

“Oh, sweetie,” her mother sometimes said, “adolescence is
like
this, but it will get better, I swear it will. Believe me, I know from experience.”

Erica had certainly gathered enough stories about her mother's adolescence, but the picture she was left with was still vague, sepia-toned, involving V-J Day and D-Day, and the stoop of a row house on which a thirteen-year-old girl named Dottie Breitburg sat and ate Pez. In truth, Erica didn't want to think too much about that fat girl; she didn't really want to know her. Erica had heard many times about how her mother, as an unhappy teenager, had been sent off one summer on scholarship to Camp Hatikvah. This was during the height of the war, when Brooklyn was a newsreel of brownouts and victory gardens and grieving mothers. At the end of August, when Dottie returned from camp, she had changed profoundly. She, who had been miserable and sullen and unpopular, was actually
funny
now. A new personality had suddenly revealed itself from beneath the
unpromising surface. Dottie now took it upon herself to entertain the mothers on the block in Flatbush, women whose coffee tables displayed bar mitzvah albums of the dead.

“I simply changed,” Dottie explained. “It didn't happen overnight; it was a slow process. I made some wrong turns here and there, some really big mistakes. But Erica,” she would say, her voice slow and reflective, “you don't have to do that. You can have a good life; you don't have to settle. So you're not Twiggy, so you'll never shop in the Missy Petite department. But you'll get
through
all of this; I personally guarantee it.”

Erica could not respond. Dottie had a formula; she told jokes and sang and made shameless googly-eyes at the camera, and everyone fell for it. But this was something that Erica would never do; she would rather die than get up onstage and show off. She had almost fainted once when she had to do an oral report on “The Fall of the House of Usher.” There was no formula for her, no preordained way to live her life.

Why aren't you tired all the time? she wanted to ask her mother. Erica could barely make it through the afternoon sometimes. She walked from Chemistry to Study Hall to French, and she heard music in her head in time to her step: some deep belching tuba-sounds that might have represented the entrance of a rhinoceros or an elephant in a deleted section of
Peter and the Wolf. Too many animals already
, the composer would think.
Let's stick to the quicker ones, the lighter ones
.

Things will get better, her mother repeated like a litany, and although she probably believed her own words, Erica could not take any comfort from them. She could no longer take comfort from anything her mother said or did, in fact. Her mother had recently betrayed her, and she could not forget it. The betrayal
had happened the day after Erica announced during a telephone call that she was going to change her name.

“Oh?” Dottie had said over the phone. “And what are you going to change it to, may I ask?”

“I don't know,” said Erica. “I haven't decided.”

Her mother laughed gently. “I think we can wait until I get home to discuss it. In the meantime, don't do anything drastic.”

The very next night, on “The Merv Griffin Show,” there was a lull between jokes, and Dottie said, “You know, Merv, my older daughter announced last night that she's planning on changing her last name. She says ‘Engels' is too ugly, too cumbersome. She wants something refined and graceful and ladylike.”

Erica froze. “Oh, really?” Merv was saying. “Engels is a perfectly nice name. What is she thinking of changing it
to
?”

“Shmutznik,” said Dottie, her expression a perfect deadpan.

The audience roared, and Joey diSalvo the babysitter roared, and even Opal, who was sitting about an inch from the set and eating Cheez-its by the handful, opened her mouth and let out a single bark of a laugh. Erica looked at her with disgust. Opal thought it was
funny
; she couldn't take her eyes off the screen. She just sat there watching, her hand lifting and lowering between mouth and bowl. She was like a member of some bizarre cult, her lips ringed in bright cheddar orange.