This Is My Life (18 page)

But there had been no continuity, for neither of them, they
confessed guiltily over dinner at Naples Pizza two weeks later, was in love with the other. They had burst out laughing in relief at the confession; they even toasted it, clicking glasses to the absence of emotion. Then exams came, and they saw less of each other, although sometimes Opal watched Tom play Frisbee on the common, his arm flinging out to execute a throw, his feet lifting him off the ground. She would watch him from across the green and wonder where this need to be “in love” had come from, and why she somehow thought of it as a birthright. Maybe it was pure instinct, she thought. You strove dumbly toward this element that you didn't understand, and which certainly you hadn't learned from your parents.

“Your father doesn't know how to be loving,” Dottie had said. “It's difficult for him to show emotion.” But it seemed to have been a generation of bad fathers, Opal thought. Back in the Fifties, a husband was presented with a warm, sweet, and sour bundle that kicked. He held it awkwardly, slightly away from his body, like a teenaged boy holding an armload of flowers on a big date. Fathers had changed since then; now the world was crawling with a new breed: bearded young men who doubled over with labor pains, men who leafed through the Old Testament to find a good name for the baby. These men were foreign to Opal, another species entirely.

It was too easy to think of her own father as terrible. It was easy and mindless and she had done it for so long that she didn't remember any other way to think. But now she wondered; now she had her doubts. It had been a month since she had first written him, a month since she had been waiting. This was her private grief, one which she could not talk about with Dottie or Erica. As far as secrets went, it was a weak one. How much more
extraordinary to have had a private correspondence with him, as she had hoped: an intimate, revealing exchange of letters, a body of information that would move and change and trouble her. They would secretly write for years, until finally there was nothing left to say, and then they would agree to let the correspondence die gracefully.

But he refused to write. Once a week, Opal called Tamara up at Yale, who said there still wasn't any mail of significance in Opal's box. “Are you definitely coming back in the fall?” Tamara asked, and her voice sounded suspicious, as if she imagined that Opal was in danger of staying like this, as if “suspension” was actually a permanent condition.

Sometimes, alone in the apartment at night, Opal wanted to look at her father's face, even though the photographs didn't tell her much. She stood in front of the hall closet and took down the old coat box from B. Altman's, which contained snapshots from that other life. Most of the photographs had been taken during family vacations, and in each one her father looked nearly the same: bone-white and untouched by the sun, even in the height of summer.

Opal remembered how Walt Green had asked if she looked like her father. She thought of this again one night, when Walt came home with her for supper after work. They sat eating in the kitchen under the yellow table light, which gave Walt's eyes a certain unusual density every time he tilted his head up. Walt had brought a bottle of red wine with him, and they continued drinking even after the food was done and the dishes had been deposited in the sink. “God, you actually spent your childhood here,” he said. “This room is huge.”

“Do you want to see the rest of it?” Opal asked, and he nodded. They took their glasses with them for the tour of the
apartment. “It's great,” Walt said as they stood in the living room. “You should see where I live, up by Columbia. There are three of us in this tiny rathole on 112th Street. I sleep on a fold-out couch like Mary Tyler Moore. But this is a whole
house
right in the middle of the city. I'm impressed.”

When they had gone through all the rooms and were heading back to the kitchen, Opal stopped for a second in front of the hall closet. “I'll show you some other things, if you want,” she said quickly. Walt shrugged and agreed, and Opal opened the closet door. She reached up with both arms and brought down the B. Altman's box, and then she carried the box into the den. Opal sifted through the contents until she found the photo album, and she opened it across both their laps, like a sleigh blanket. At the front of the album were several pages of Erica as a baby, then two pages of Opal.

“That's what always happens,” Walt said. “They're less excited the second time around. There's much less documentation. Same with my sister and me.” Finally, after all the baby pictures stopped, the family vacation pictures began. “Oh look, the World's Fair,” Walt said. “My family went there, too.”

“I think everyone did,” said Opal. “Do you remember the Italian Pavilion?”

He nodded, smiling. “Of course,” he said. “It was terrific. And I remember another pavilion where you sat in a chair that lifted you up through a shaft, and showed you the inner workings of the human brain. God, it was great.” He paused. “What I remember most,” he said, “is how hot it was. I always had to go to the bathroom.”

Opal turned the page. There at the top, among the World's Fair series, was a picture she distinctly recalled posing for. She
remembered the day well, and how she had traveled for hours through a series of dark chutes and tunnels, and how at the end of the afternoon, finally out in the wide reaches of sunlight, she could no longer see. She could barely hear, either. The same song was weaving through her: a chorus of cricket-children singing, “It's a small world, after all,” and then singing it in other languages, each version less identifiable than the last, until finally the children seemed to be chattering, “Gluka brznik faxmilgriv.” What language
was
this? she wondered. Russian? Greek? She didn't know, but she couldn't focus on it any longer because her father was making her pose for a picture. She stood, impatient for him to finish, while all around her, other children posed similarly before domes and arches. Fathers adjusted the lenses on their bulky new cameras, and children sighed and swung their arms out, ruining the shot. Opal could not bear the protracted moment between the focus and the click, but her father had a bad temper, so she didn't dare complain. Instead she stood in the invisible frame he had squared off around her, jerking and rolling her eyes.

After the shot her father faithfully rubbed the print with a sponge soaked in some chemical that smelled like toxic salad dressing, and later, after the afternoon was over, he sat in the family room in Jericho and pressed it into an album, sealing the image of his younger daughter behind plastic.

Now Opal sat with that same album open before her, staring down at the photograph. “Look at that,” she said.

Walt looked at the picture for a long moment. Suddenly he inhaled sharply, frightening her.

“What?” she said.

“I don't believe it,” said Walt.

Opal looked again at the picture, looked where he was looking “I don't understand,” she said, and she glanced back at him, missing the point entirely.

“That's
me
,” Walt said.

She looked again. There, behind six-year-old Opal, a small boy was wandering by, sullen-faced and tired. His hair was shaved into a colorless crewcut. His eyes were looking off somewhere into the hot, open distance. He and Opal did not see each other at all; each of them was a prisoner of a separate family. Over the sounds of people talking and laughing, of babies crying and music percolating from different pavilions, a harried mother was calling out, “Walt! Walt Green! You come over here right now! Walt! Walt!” And the boy kept walking.

It was him. She was almost sure of it. Looking back and forth between the photograph and his grown face, she saw that he had the same bones now as then, the same small, sharp eyes and full mouth. Only the hair was wild now, as if he were still punishing his parents for the skinhead they had foisted on him so many summers ago.

Opal and Walt threw their arms around each other and laughed giddily. “To think,” they kept saying. “It's
amazing
. To think.”

Walt poured more wine and they both started talking more freely, overlapping sentences, cutting in. He talked about his family, his voice changing tone a little. His older sister, Nissa, he said, had had a nervous breakdown three years before.

“It was terrible,” Walt said. “We were all really thrown, although when I look back on the summer, the clues are right there. She just stopped eating. My parents went to visit her apartment, and Nissa had cleaned out the entire kitchen, and was keeping
makeup
in the cabinets. So they sent her to this place
called Sojourn House, kind of a farm in Vermont for people with eating disorders. You have to do chores there every morning, milk the cows and so on. She lived there for six months and supposedly got better, and now she's back in her own apartment. It's just that she's
changed
. I mean, she has friends and goes to work, but she's sort of unresponsive to everyone. I don't think she's had a boyfriend since her breakdown. She's become the kind of woman,” he said, “who is always taking her friends to have abortions.”

“What does that mean?” Opal asked.

“The kind of woman who is never having an abortion herself,” he said. “Who's never
involved
with anyone. My parents sometimes call her up and ask if she wants to have dinner, and she says, ‘Oh, I can't. I'm taking Julie or Andrea to have an abortion.' My parents say that Nissa is their greatest sorrow.” Walt shook his head. “Every family has their own secret,” he said. “And whether you want to or not, you're supposed to
keep
it.” His voice was thick now, and wistful. “No one ever asks for it,” he said, “and yet there it is. It's like being born into the KGB.”

“I know,” said Opal, and she noticed the way he was holding his wineglass, the fingers curling into a fist around the stem. There was something bluntly made about Walt; he was like a kid, a boy—the boy in the photograph. They were both quiet for a while. Opal picked up the album from the table and looked at the photo again, wanting to see that younger version of him. Walt had
been
there back then, she thought, and he is here now. Beside her, he leaned closer to get a better look at the photograph, and she could feel the sleeve of his sweater for a second against her wrist, and his breath on her hair.

“Let me see that,” Walt said, and as he squinted at the picture he began to reconsider. “You know,” he said, holding the album
up to the light, “I'm not entirely sure now. I mean, it
looks
like me, but I think I was heavier. I mean, I was a chunky kid; I wore double-husky clothes for a while. You know, I'm beginning to think it isn't me.”

“Are you sure?” Opal asked, and her voice had gone tinny with disappointment.

Walt shook his head and said no, he wasn't sure, but he didn't sound very convincing. It wasn't him, she thought now; it wasn't. He placed the album back across Opal's lap, and it felt suddenly heavy to her. She had drunk too much, she realized; she thought she might start to cry. Walt looked perplexed, even embarrassed, and after a while he stood to leave. She wanted him to go, and felt slightly unmoored, uncertain.

What
was
certain, she thought after he was gone, what could never be argued, was that the girl in the picture was indeed Opal. If she were to come across herself in the background of someone else's photograph, there would be no doubt. Opal looked again at that squinty girl in orange culottes, and was astonished to see that when it came right down to it, she had barely changed at all.

—

W
inter wore on, and her father still hadn't written. “Nothing in your mailbox but advertisements,” Tamara told her. “An offer to go to Fort Lauderdale over Spring Break on one of those student trips from hell. An invitation to join the Black Students Alliance. That kind of thing. What is it you're
waiting
for?” Tamara asked, but Opal insisted she wasn't waiting for anything in particular. As soon as she said this she knew it was true. If he hadn't written by now, he never would. Opal had
sent three letters to him, each one more needy than the last. Three letters from his own daughter, and he wouldn't budge.

Late at night sometimes, Opal would be awakened by sounds drifting out from the kitchen: the blender, the carving knife, the dishwasher. She could not believe how much Dottie and Sy ate; she didn't
want
to know, really, about their excesses. Opal began keeping to herself more, both at home and at work. Walt and Mia called to her from across the studio, but she sometimes pretended she hadn't heard.

One afternoon, Opal was sent to buy cocaine for Stevie Confino. He approached her discreetly, when she was on her way to lunch, and said, “Can I count on you for a favor? I have to be in makeup in five minutes, and you're the only one I would ask. I'll be indebted to you for life, Opal; I'll perform sexual services, I'll give you my firstborn son.”

Up until this moment, he had almost never said a word to her. She looked at his hopeful face, the hair matted down with water, the towel around his neck, and he seemed young and ridiculous, and so Opal agreed, just to be
done
with it. Stevie gave her four fifty-dollar bills and cab fare and sent her off downtown.

Opal got out of the cab on East Seventh Street and double-checked the address that she held in her glove. Then she rang the bell of a cruddy building on the south side of the street, and waited, shivering, on the stoop.

When the door opened, and the two sisters stood facing each other, Opal felt only a dumb thud of surprise, a big drop of it, painless and silent, like snow sliding off a roof. “Jesus,” she said.

Erica was staring at her. She was wearing an ancient yellow T-shirt that Opal remembered from years ago. It read:
REVA
AND JAMIE: FIRST NORTH AMERICAN TOUR.
Erica just stood there, leaning against the doorframe, not saying a word. It was early afternoon; the street was freezing. “You want to come up?” Erica finally asked.