This Is My Life (7 page)

Tonight Joey diSalvo talked on and on; who knew how long he would make Opal sit there? Erica continued down the hall and went into her bedroom. In darkness, the room was cool and blank but still familiar. Erica sat on her bed for a moment, letting her eyes adjust. She thought of her mother in a hotel room across the country, coming in alone after a late performance. Or perhaps Dottie wasn't alone; maybe there was a man with her. It sometimes seemed to Erica that her mother must have a secret life that involved men. Once in a while Erica could hear a man's voice in the background when Dottie called from California. “Oh, that's just a friend of mine,” Dottie would explain. Erica wondered if her mother sometimes lay in a broad bed with one of these men and made love all night, Dottie's stage makeup sliding off onto the man's face and chest like war paint.

But there was probably nothing warlike about Dottie's love life. All the fire, all the bristle and scratch, had most likely left with the marriage. “I am leaving your father so I can have some peace,” Dottie had said. “So we can all have a new life.” But still Erica couldn't forget, still she tried to imagine what had gone
on between her mother and father all those years they had stayed together.

There was no window into the intimacy of parents. And even if there was, would you really want to
look
? When Erica tried to imagine her parents making love, all she could summon up were two darkly angry faces, mouths open in criticism, yet the bodies were soldered together, as though her parents were two earthworms cut in half, and the halves had their separate needs and plans. The heads were furious, but the bodies, astoundingly, were liking it.

A
ll vacation they told everyone their names were Betty and Veronica. Nobody thought there was anything fishy about this. “Good morning, Betty. Good morning, Veronica,” the stewards at the hotel would say when Opal and Erica came down to breakfast. “How are you girls doing today?”

Fine, fine, they would answer, and Opal could barely contain herself. She thought she would explode with laughter, but Erica remained cool. They sat in the ornate dining room, drinking thimbles of tomato juice, while all around them the air churned with sluggish conversation. It was still very early, and most of the guests at the hotel stayed up very late at night gambling and didn't come out of their rooms until well into the day. There were plenty of other children in the dining room, Opal noticed—children who had been sent downstairs by mothers who lay in bed until noon with eye masks on. Opal's own mother was at
this very moment slumbering in the round bed of the Queen Victoria Suite, where special guests of the hotel stayed.

It was winter break from school, and Dottie had decided to take them with her to the Royale in Las Vegas, where she was opening for Tony Bennett. “You girls need some sun,” she had said the last time she returned from the West Coast. “You're as white as milk.”

“Will we get to go swimming?” Opal asked.

“Every day,” said her mother. “They have an indoor and an outdoor pool. Rain or shine.”

This practically sent Opal into convulsions; she ran in circles around the apartment, moving her arms as though she were doing the Crawl. Erica observed her coolly.

“I'm not going,” Erica announced. She was sitting on Dottie's bed with a large book open in her lap.

“What do you mean, honey?” Dottie asked.

“I mean, I'm not going,” said Erica. “Plain English. I have to study for the S.A.T.s.”

“You can do that anytime,” said Dottie. “I want you to get out a little, have some fun. You're only a sophomore; the S.A.T.s aren't for a long time. And since when are you such a conscientious student?”

And so they left for Las Vegas, Erica's suitcase loaded down with S.A.T. study guides. Opal packed lightly, choosing clothes she hadn't seen all year and which she had forgotten about. She loved delving into the summer closet, where her culottes and bathing suits were stored for the winter. Everything was densely smothered in camphor, but the smell was somehow pleasing. She held her one-piece bathing suit, with its starfish pattern and layer of ruffles, up to her face and inhaled deeply. It was as
though certain articles of clothing had actual
lives
; in hibernation, a bathing suit smelled woody and medicinal, but in the sunlight it would once again smell jubilantly of coconut oil and chlorine: rich, affirmative summer smells.

On the airplane to Las Vegas, Opal and Erica sat together, while their mother took up two seats across the aisle; she had had written into all her contracts that the seat next to her on airplanes would always be free. “I'm a large woman,” she had explained to Ross Needler. “I need to spread out.”

A few of the stewardesses cooed discreetly over her before the airplane took off, and she was as gracious as ever. “May I ask what you're working on now, Miss Engels?” one stewardess asked. In her hand she held a demonstration oxygen mask.

“Well, I'm on my way to play at the Royale,” said Dottie. “I'll be there for five nights, and then I'm coming to New York for a little break, and then it's back out to the West Coast again, for a CBS comedy special.”

“We all just love you,” said the stewardess. “I watch you whenever I'm on the ground. I think you're the funniest lady in comedy today, and I'm not just saying that.” She paused. “I've got to begin,” she said, gesturing in annoyance, before bringing the oxygen mask up to her face.

The airplane lifted over New York, and Opal pressed her forehead against the tiny window. They hadn't gone anywhere as a family in a long time; vacations were more common in families that were still intact. Usually there had to be a mother and father who could split the driving, a mother and father who could close their motel door for a little privacy while the kids jackknifed into the pool only a few feet from the window. That was what it had been like when they were all together, or at least
that was the way Opal remembered it. Her memories all centered around miles of early-morning road, and waking up crabby in an unnatural sleep position in the back of the station wagon, a strange, raised ridge-pattern worked into the left side of her face from where she had been pressing it against the seat. In her memory, they were always going off
somewhere
, for that was what unhappy families did; they roped suitcases to the roofs of their cars and hit the road.

Opal never remembered the actual vacations themselves; she only remembered the ends of days, when she and Erica lay in their motel beds, the air conditioner mumbling across the room. Maybe that would be all she would remember of this trip to Las Vegas: the end of each day, when they were confined to their expensive suite at the Royale, while Dottie performed in the gigantic nightclub downstairs.

She did two shows a night, and between them she would pop upstairs to say hello, dressed in her blazing black and gold floor-length gown. “I can only stay a minute, you two,” she would say, but even for that minute she would kick off her pumps and climb onto one of the twin beds. “Tell me what you're up to,” she would say. “What have you girls been doing tonight?”

The answer was evident, for here they were, trapped in the suite, the television booming in the corner. Spread across one of the beds was an array of picked-at room-service food: jumbo shrimp in iced silver bowls, tall glasses of chocolate milk, wicker baskets of fried chicken.

“How did it go?” Opal asked.

“Not bad,” said Dottie, “if I do say so myself. They really
seemed to go for that new material. I was a little unsure of it, but they ate it up.”

Opal had gone with her mother, the day they arrived, to inspect the sound system at the hotel. Opal sat in the last row of the huge, empty nightclub while Dottie stood on the dark stage, saying, “Testing, shmesting,” into a microphone. “I'll just do a little of my routine,” Dottie had said. “Is that okay?”

Opal settled herself in at the table. A barmaid appeared out of the darkness and silently handed her a drink. It was a Shirley Temple, Opal saw, and she brought the straw up to her lips in what seemed a polite and restrained fashion. The barmaid stood against the curving wall, and Opal realized, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, that there were several other people in the nightclub: four waiters, and three cleaning women, and a busboy. They had stopped what they were doing and were now lingering quietly, excited at the idea of getting a private performance. They leaned against walls, perched awkwardly at the crooked little tables, waiting. As Opal's eyes continued to become accustomed to the dark, she could make out all the separate figures standing and sitting, like spirits gathering after a long absence.

Dottie seemed aware of their presence. She was speaking now not just to Opal, but was looking around the room, making eye contact in all directions. “You know,” she began, “I'm not ashamed to tell you that I married for money. My father said, ‘Here's fifty bucks, Dottie, now get out of my sight.'”

From the darkness came a long, fluted column of laughter.

“You hear so much about girls giving themselves away on their honeymoon night,” Dottie went on. “But I had to
pay
him
before he'd even let me take off my dress.” She paused, waiting for the response. “Finally,” she said, “I get all undressed and lie down, and he's still standing by the door. I said, ‘Norm, Norm, why don't you come over here and climb on top of me so we can make a little whoopee.' He said, ‘Climb on
top
of you? Dottie, you know I'm afraid of heights!'” At this the barmaid and the waiters and the three elderly cleaning women really started laughing. The busboy in the left corner of the darkness began to applaud.

“The marriage was off to a bad start right away,” Dottie said. “We went to Mexico on our honeymoon, had a lousy time. You know, Trotsky was liquidated in Mexico; I guess that's why you can't drink the water.” There was puzzled, polite laughter.

“One night my husband told me he was into S and M. I thought he meant Stiller and Meara.” Someone began to clap again. Dottie shaded her eyes and peered out into the room. “You're a great audience,” she said. “I'm feeling kind of loose, kind of relaxed. I had three shrimp cocktails before the show; maybe I shouldn't drive home. Maybe I should
swim
home. But I'll tell you one thing,” she went on. “On nights like this, I'm glad I'm not married anymore. My husband always hated it when I ate a huge meal before coming to bed. He said he had trouble falling asleep on a full stomach.”

The audience laughed again, and Dottie smiled, waiting for them to grow quiet. “I remember when I was a young bride,” she said. “I used to beg my husband for a floor-length fur coat. Finally he said to me, ‘Dottie, you know we can't afford that. But I've got a solution—just don't shave your legs for a week!'”

At this the scattered audience joined together in applause. Opal chewed hard on her straw for a minute, and then she
clapped her hands along with everyone else. But she felt disoriented; the jokes didn't make sense, and the ones about her father were so peculiar. They made her feel uneasy, as though she were eavesdropping on something extremely private.

She watched her mother from across the nightclub, and was startled by how small Dottie looked at this distance, how
wrong
, somehow. It seemed so much more natural to see Dottie Engels from up close, where she could fill an entire screen, rather than from far away, where she took on ordinary dimensions. On the stage of the nightclub at the Royale, she could have been any fat woman impersonating Dottie Engels, and no one would have known the difference. From her cocktail table at the back of the dank room, Opal felt a small stirring inside her, and the desire to leap up and run down the aisle to verify that this was indeed her mother onstage, and not an impersonator.

Now, between shows, her mother lay flat on her back in the hotel room, as if captured and landed. “Erica,” she called out, her eyes closed, “what are you doing, honey?”

Erica was in the bathroom, sitting under the infrared lamp, studying for the S.A.T.s.

“I am trying to work,” Erica called. “Is that permitted?”

“Of course,” Dottie said. “Who am I to stop you? Although I've heard that there
are
child labor laws in this country.”

“Did you talk to Tony Bennett?” Opal asked, propping herself up on her elbows on the other bed.

“Yes, he's a very nice man,” said her mother. “Extremely gracious. The women are knocking down the stage door trying to get his autograph. It's different when men perform.” She shook her head. “Well, enough of this,” she said. “I've got to get downstairs again. For the late show, I'm going to spend ten minutes
on that parody of
Oklahoma
, and it strains my throat to sing that much, so I'd better not tire it out.” She walked over to where Opal lay, and bent down to kiss her. Opal inhaled what she thought of as her mother's nightclub smell: a mix of smoke and flowers, as though someone had set fire to a garden. The odor seemed dangerous, completely beyond Opal's frame of reference. After children went to sleep at night, the whole world changed.

“Don't go,” Opal suddenly said, clutching onto the knot of pearls around her mother's neck.

“Why not?” asked Dottie. “What's the matter? Don't you feel well?”

“Yes,” she said, but she was unable to explain the sudden urgency. She turned her head away, embarrassed. Dottie sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, stroking Opal's hair. And soon it was all right again, and Dottie slowly got up, straightening her gown, and started to leave. She stopped in the bathroom on the way out and said a few words to Erica. Opal perked up, listening to the conversation.

“Well yes, I know, Erica, but you could spend just a
little
time with her,” Dottie was saying in a low voice. When she was gone, Opal went and stood in the bathroom doorway. Erica was sitting on the bathmat, reading, the orange light beating down from above. It was the kind of light that was always shining on rotisserie chickens as they turned slowly in delicatessen windows.

“She wants me to play with you,” said Erica, looking up briefly, “but I don't think you need to be entertained, do you, Opal? You can entertain yourself, can't you?”

“Yes,” Opal muttered. “But it's boring here.”

“We're on vacation,” Erica said. “Remember? You were the one who wanted to come here.” She turned back to her book.

“I like it during the day,” said Opal, “when you can swim. It's just different at night. At night we have to stay in. And all we do is eat.”

“‘Flower' is to ‘artificial,'” Erica read aloud, “as ‘death' is to blank.”

“What?” said Opal. “What are you talking about?”

“‘Rain' is to ‘torrential,'” Erica went on, “as ‘hunger' is to blank.”

“You're weird,” said Opal. “I have a weird sister. I have a big, fat, weird sister.”

Erica looked up. “Why don't you find something to do?” she said. “Why don't you go downstairs and maybe Mom will put you in her act. She could use you as a footstool or something.”

“Oh, that's so funny I forgot to laugh,” said Opal. This line was enjoying a current vogue among Opal's classmates, but it was usually reserved for desperate moments when you were looking to stall for time, and no other words would come.

This was another one of their standstill fights, a little circular argument that kept spinning and spinning like a hamster wheel. It could be called off at any time, simply by one person suddenly speaking civilly to the other. Whichever of them bored of it more quickly would just change her tone, and that would be that. Opal was unsure of how to proceed now. She paused in the doorway, looking down at the top of her sister's head, at the even part that divided a field of flyaway hair.