This Is My Life (19 page)

Opal nodded. They walked up a narrow, dark stairwell. On the third floor, Erica opened her apartment door and the hallway was flooded with sound. Heavy-metal music groaned through the apartment like a buzz saw. Jordan Strang, whom Opal had not seen in years, was sitting on the couch in the small, filthy living room. Jordan looked up from whatever he was doing, his eyes slowly focusing as he recognized her. Then he looked imploringly at Erica.

“It's okay,” Erica said. “You remember Opal.”

Jordan nodded and shrugged. “Easy come, easy go,” he said. He got up finally, like an old dog, and ambled into the bedroom. Opal could hear the creak of a ladder.

“Did someone die?” Erica asked.

“What?” Opal said.

“Did someone
die
,” Erica repeated, and this time she phrased it like a statement. It meant: I assume you are here for a good reason; I assume you have not just dropped in to pay a social call. Opal shook her head. “Look,” said Erica, “we have some people coming over. Business. Maybe we could talk later.”

“
Erica
,” said Opal, and she knew her sister still did not understand. Opal reached deep into the pocket of her pants and yanked out the four fifties, which she had folded up tightly. “I'm the one,” she tried. “
Business
. I'm here to pick it up.”

Erica finally understood. She let out a long breath and blinked several times.

“Should I go, Erica?” Opal asked. “Do you want me to go?”

But Erica shook her head. They sat down on the couch, which was covered with a fall of cat hair. “Can I smoke?” Opal asked, just to be polite, for she would have been shocked if smoke wasn't permitted here. Smoke would barely be
noticed
here, she thought. It would just blend in with all the other interference: the music, and the cat hair, and the dampness in the air.

“Sure,” said Erica.

Opal lit a cigarette. “This is too weird,” she said. “Too, too weird.”

“I know,” said Erica. “But I'm used to this. Not with you, with Mom. Everywhere I look, she's there. It's like those Venn diagrams in elementary school. Everyone overlaps in this stupid family.”

“But it's not as bad as it used to be,” Opal said. “She's almost never on TV anymore. Just those commercials.”

“Yeah, those commercials,” said Erica.

They were silent, thinking. Each of them, Opal knew, had an image in her head of a fat woman endlessly dancing. The woman spun and spun, her dress magically changing colors, dissolving slowly from red to green, like litmus paper.

“She's making a living,” Opal said. “It was hard for me to take at first.”

“Opal,” Erica suddenly said. “I can't do this.”

“Do what?”

“Talk to you. I just can't,” Erica said. She stood up awkwardly, abruptly. “I can't think about any of this right now. I have enough on my mind.”

Opal slowly stood. She hadn't said anything yet; she had just
gotten
here. She hadn't told Erica about Dottie being in love, or about all the letters she had written to her father.
Their
father. “Things weren't so bad back then,” Opal tried, her voice high. “We had some fun together, Erica. You used to cook for me, and we'd watch television. We used to hyperventilate. Do you remember? Am I making this up?”

But Erica was looking away. “I'll go talk to Jordan,” she said. “I'll get the coke for you.”

She disappeared into the bedroom, and returned a moment later with two small paper packets. Paper in exchange for paper, Opal thought, as she handed over the money. It was all so flyaway, so flimsy. She felt a deep sadness as she stuffed the packets into the zippered pocket of her down coat, and then opened the door to let herself out. She walked slowly down the stairs, hoping that Erica would come to the landing and call her back. She could picture her sister's head leaning over the rail. “
Opal, come back,
” Erica would say, and the request would be plaintive and heart-stopping.

But Erica didn't want that. Erica wanted to be left alone, in that sad little apartment with Jordan Strang. It would be a good story, Opal thought, nearly elevated to the level of Greek drama: one sister selling, the other buying. And yet, she knew, there was no one she could tell. Opal pushed open the front door, and a slant of snow rushed in.

A
nd then my
sister
was standing on the front steps,” Erica said. “I couldn't believe it. You'd think, in this huge city, you could have a little privacy, but apparently that's impossible.”

“Me, I'm tired of privacy,” Mitchell Block said. “My family lives in Wisconsin; I never see them. I've been trying to get my parents to New York for years, but they're too scared. I think they saw on
60 Minutes
that you can't even walk down the street anymore without carrying a revolver, and that did it.”

They were sitting in the snack bar of the Loeb Student Center at NYU. She and Mitchell both ate large quantities of food during the meal, and neither of them felt the need to be apologetic about it as they heaped mountains of potato salad onto their plates, or went back to the counter for seconds. They sat in the snack bar for most of the afternoon. The cleaning woman mopped all the other tables until finally theirs was the only dry
surface left in the place. When the woman approached with her dripping sponge, they knew it was finally time to leave.

“Come on,” Mitchell said, ushering Erica out, and they went to his office in the basement of the psychology building. The tiny room was ablaze with fluorescent light, but Mitchell had tacked up some
New Yorker
cartoons on the walls, and a huge calendar, in an attempt to create an atmosphere of some warmth. On his desk was a big magnet which had a cluster of paper clips clinging to it. Erica sifted the clips between her fingers, unwilling to leave just yet.

Mitchell finally looked at his wristwatch. “I hate to break this up,” he said, “but I have to get back out there in five minutes. You don't want to be responsible for halting the progress of science, do you?”

Erica smiled and stood up. They hadn't known each other very long. There had been two lunches, at which she had talked expansively, and Mitchell had somehow seemed to listen in an equally expansive way. He was thirty-one years old, she knew, and was halfway done with his doctoral thesis. He had been working on it for years, and it changed every semester or so—became slightly more bizarre, according to his professors. They advised him to take some time off, or else to just
finish
it, get it over with, get on with the rest of his life.

Erica had pushed her way into Mitchell Block's field of vision. That first morning, when she stood waiting for him outside the classroom, he had been cordial to her in a perfunctory way. She had quickly told him that his study interested her, that she had been thinking about it since they had met. It wasn't a lie; she
had
thought about that day very often. She had remembered the way
Mitchell's voice had sounded, reciting word after word, and how he had held a pink index card between thick-jointed fingers. Like Erica, Mitchell had a weariness about him. At first she had thought he knew something about her, but then she realized, the more she dwelled on it, that he merely knew the same
things
that she did, that his perceptions were similar to her own. She had inferred all this just from a little list of words, a defeated light in his eyes, and a body that occupied as much space as her own.

Over lunch that first day he had told her some basics about himself, and she had responded in kind. Without thinking, she told him that her mother was Dottie Engels; it surprised her even as she said it, for she told almost no one anymore. It wasn't a fact that she was particularly proud of, but somehow she wanted him to know.

“Come on,” he said at first. “You're pulling my leg.”

But she shook her head.

“That's very interesting,” he said. “I can't even imagine what that would be like.”

They were both eating Soft-Serv ice cream from the dispenser in the snack bar. They had each filled a plastic dish with a tall turban of ice cream, and Erica felt as if she were on a “date,” a word she could not think of without considerable irony. She suddenly felt very much a part of the boy/girl equation; she thought of the symmetry of Archie and Veronica on either side of a booth in Pop Tate's Chocklit Shoppe, sipping coyly at matching ice cream sodas. Erica suddenly felt exposed in an odd, sexual way. She deflected this by a sudden burst of candor; she spoke simply and clearly about her mother, and what it had been like growing up around someone famous. She had never even said as much to Jordan, who used to press her for details.

“Are you and your mother very close?” Mitchell asked, and Erica shook her head quickly.

“We don't speak,” she said. The phrase sounded weighty and official.

“Why not?” he asked. This was the dreaded question, the one that she could not answer.

Erica hesitated. Finally, all she could say was, “I'm really not sure.”

Walking home, she dismantled and reassembled the conversation several times. That last part, about not speaking to her mother, still troubled her. Mitchell would think she was filled with a dark sadness, just the sort of thing he expected of heavy women, according to the findings of his study. Erica no longer wanted to please him in that way, to satisfy his clinical expectations. Now she wanted to stand out from the survey in bas-relief, to be the girl with the brightest eyes, the one who had been wounded least. Erica desperately wanted him to know her, and yet she could not bear what there was for him to know.

All day long Mitchell sat with fat women, many of them deeply unhappy, and they spread their lives out before him like a smorgasbord, and he listened quietly, nodding and smiling encouragement. She would not be one of those women; she would be something entirely different, someone who did not fit into his study, someone who screwed up the beautiful, sloping curves of all his graphs.

—

T
he twelfth-grade girls were back. They were sprawled on the living room rug like courtesans, Erica thought, picking her way over them to get to the bedroom. Jordan was standing
in the middle of the room, arms outstretched, balancing a coke spoon on his nose for entertainment. Erica climbed back up into the loft. She lay down, feeling dreamily sated as she always did after a big meal. She was still aware of the milky vanilla taste of the ice cream she had eaten; it made her think of Mitchell, of sex, of things sweet and cold. She idly wondered how he would look undressed; she imagined his massive body shining beneath his winter clothes, as though he rubbed it with oil, like a weight lifter. But there were probably none of those discrete islands of muscle on Mitchell's body; instead, he was most likely rounded and soft and yet somehow still powerful, like a kettle drum.

When Jordan came back into the bedroom later and climbed up into the bed, Erica hoped he wouldn't touch her. She looked over and saw his long arms busy on the surface of the mirror. His hospital bracelet hung loosely on his poor thin wrist. Jordan's business was going well, she supposed. Customers would come over for the afternoon and Jordan would sit with them, cutting up and sampling what they had already paid for. Somehow, nobody seemed to mind. The apartment was becoming a salon of sorts, and Jordan was the good, benevolent host. He talked about the 1960s with his high-schoolers; this was a hoot, Erica thought. Suddenly Jordan was an expert on something he himself had been too young to take part in. He was only a secondary source, but it was apparently close enough. Just the other day she had heard him conducting a small seminar in the living room on the life and work of Hunter Thompson. Three boys sat transfixed.

She looked over at Jordan in profile, his head bent above the mirror, a straw perpetually in one nostril like a life-support
system. She thought about the last time they had had sex together; it had been just over three weeks before. It was, she realized, right before she had met Mitchell. Mitchell's presence made a difference, she realized; suddenly there were other possibilities. It didn't
have
to be Jordan; it didn't have to be him at all. This was a thrilling revelation.

“What's funny?” Jordan asked, and she realized that she had been smiling.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, but she could not get rid of her private little smile. If only he knew, she thought, he would not sit there so calmly, with a Flexi-Straw up his nose, staring at himself like Narcissus leaning into the water.

—

T
hat night, she dreamed of Opal's visit. She dreamed of her sister climbing the stairs, walking into the apartment, the door flying open at her touch.

Erica woke up in the stark middle of the night, the moment when night hesitates into morning, and when outside, garbage trucks and derricks lift and lower, ruling the earth like dinosaurs. Jordan was asleep beside her with his face pushed into the pillow. Erica sat up in bed, careful not to slam her head against the ceiling.

Why had she sent Opal away like that? What had been the purpose? I am a cold person, Erica thought, and was ashamed. Opal was the person she had spent the most amount of time with, after all, years and years of it. It was all irretrievable now, something to be relegated to photo albums and drunken, nostalgic evenings.

And what, she wondered, was Opal doing buying
drugs
for someone? This made no sense at all. Opal had always been so straight, so clean, so
legal
. How wrong to think of little monkey-girl Opal buying cocaine in the dead of winter. Erica leaned back down and rolled over, pushing her own face into the pillow.

Mitchell Block said he loved his family, but it was much easier for him, Erica thought, because he never
saw
them. They never showed up on television in the middle of the night, or onstage at a gay bar, or on the front step. All of Mitchell's communications with his family took place over the telephone and in letters. When Mitchell thought of his parents, he felt nothing but a slightly melancholic love, the sort of twinge that was expected after a certain age. Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to
nothing
. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking. At Bennington, Erica had always been able to tell when someone in her dormitory was talking to her parents on the telephone; the girl's voice would suddenly go flat and uninflected. You could hear it all the way down the hall.

“Don't your parents
criticize
you?” she had asked Mitchell. “Don't they make you self-conscious? I never heard of parents who didn't.”

After giving this a little thought, he shook his head. “Not really,” he said. “No, not that I can think of.”

“But what about for being
fat
?” Erica said, and this was the first time she had used the word in his presence. She suddenly was terrified that he would be offended.

“I was hoping you hadn't noticed,” Mitchell said, his voice light and amused. Erica waited for him to go on. “It's strange,” he said, “but I never thought of myself as fat when I was growing up. My parents stressed the fact that I was
healthy
. I weighed in at ten pounds when I was born, and this was something they were really proud of—as if I was a prize heifer in a 4-H show. There was never even a hint of criticism about my weight, I don't think. Maybe there should have been,” he said. “It might have been a good idea for me to have been put on a diet. But my parents were true innocents. They still are. They believe that it's healthy to eat clotted cream and big wedges of cheese and a
lot
of red meat. Just raise the cholesterol right up; create massive gridlock in the arteries. That's their credo.”

“I always thought that being fat was terrible, but sort of inevitable,” Erica said. “I just sat around waiting until the day I could wear my mother's hand-me-downs: Capri pants with Spandex waistbands, blouses with
darts
. My sister Opal is
thin
. She's like our father; he was
painfully
thin, I think. I can't even imagine what that would be like. It's like trying to imagine being the opposite sex.”

“You really can't imagine that—being male?” Mitchell asked.

Erica shrugged. “Well, I can think to myself: Oh, this is what it would feel like to have hair all over my chest and this
organ
dangling between my legs, but beyond that—no, I can't imagine it.” She looked at him. “Why?” she said. “Can you?”

Mitchell thought for a moment. “All those interviews I do,” he said. “They really put you in another person's life for a little while. I've been hearing women's stories for months now; after a while something catches. Like the day
you
came in.”

“What about it?” she asked, embarrassed but curious.

“Well, I thought you were interesting, of course,” Mitchell said, “but not just as a specimen. I tried to imagine what your life was like. How you lived. What it was like being you.”

“And?” she asked.

“And,” Mitchell said slowly, “I wasn't sure.” He became quiet now. “I'm still not,” he said. “I think you must have had some extraordinary experiences growing up. Not just with your mother being famous, although I'm sure that's a part of it.” He paused. “I'm curious to know what that was like,” he said.

She thought of how Jordan used to ask her questions like that, back in high school, and how she had never wanted to tell him anything. But now Erica didn't mind Mitchell's questions; in fact, it pleased her that he wanted to know more. She tried to arrange her words before speaking. What was there to say? she wondered. She could tell him about the walks she used to take with her mother down Central Park West, and the way people would point to Dottie every couple of blocks. She could tell him about the way you get used to sharing your mother with the world, because you have no choice. Mitchell would nod and listen carefully, but finally, she knew, he would not
get
it. People couldn't just be opened up, window by window, like an Advent calendar. Suddenly, she didn't know what to tell him.