Later that night, sitting in the backseat of the car, once again flanked by lawn furniture and the picnic hamper, Erica waited until Jordan’s mother was done speaking to her, done talking about Moccasin Hill and how well Jordan seemed to be doing, and then she discreetly took the handful of aspirin from her pocket and put them into her mouth all at once. The taste was surprisingly familiar and resonant; it burned her throat, crumbling like chalk dust. It made her think of things she hadn’t thought of in years: SweeTarts, Chocks vitamins, tossing feverishly in her bed; it almost made her choke. This was the right thing to do, and a gentle way to do it. If, by some chance, she were to live, she would wake up in a psychiatric hospital like the one in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. That wouldn’t be so bad, she thought. The Strangs’ car swung onto the highway heading south, and Erica settled in for the duration.
—
Three hours later they were shaking her awake.
“You slept the whole way,” Jordan’s mother was saying. The overhead light was on inside the car, and Erica was now fully conscious. She didn’t even feel woozy in any way. She automatically gathered up her book and her purse, and the night doorman came to the car and helped move the lawn chairs so she could get out.
“Well, thanks a lot,” she said.
“Our pleasure,” said Jordan’s mother. “You’re a wonderful traveling companion,” she added. “We hope to see more of you, Erica.” Her husband nodded and gave a small wave.
After the car pulled away, Erica stayed at the curb for a few seconds. The doorman stood looking at her quizzically, his hands behind his back, but he didn’t say a word. She would go upstairs now, where her mother and sister were probably singing duets, or painting each other’s toenails pebble pink. Opal would be sitting with her foot in Dottie’s lap, and Erica would breeze right past them. She had to live with them; she had to be there because there was nowhere else for her—not Rwanda, not Jordan Strang’s bedroom, not death. The taste of baby aspirin was still thick in her throat, the sweet sting of it, and probably would be for years.
PART TWO
Nine
Suddenly, no one would laugh at a fat woman. When Dottie stood up and told those jokes now, she was met with a wall of silence that was wider and denser than her own body. Actually, the decline wasn’t sudden, or even dramatic, although Dottie liked to tell it this way. She liked to say that her audience had fled one day like lemmings, when in fact they had been diminishing slowly over a period of years.
“Everyone has their season,” Dottie said. “What am I supposed to do, move to the Fanny Brice Retirement Home?” She was keeping it in perspective, she said, and trying not to grow too depressed. Opal was the one who was depressed. From a safe distance, she watched as her mother was offered fewer television spots, fewer club dates. Often Dottie was forced to share billing with an illusionist or a hypnotist. There were cages of doves backstage now, and young, leggy women smoking and waiting to be sawed in two.
“Ross and I are going to brainstorm,” Dottie said over the phone. “We’re going to put our heads together and come up with a master plan, a way to get me back on my feet. He’s not worried, so I’m not, either.”
But she seemed vague when she telephoned, Opal noticed. Sometimes in the background, Opal could hear the slap of cards as her mother laid down a hand of solitaire. Lately the conversations lasted only a few minutes. “Listen, honey, I’ve got to go,” Dottie would suddenly say. “There are a million things I have to take care of.” Opal could imagine her mother hanging up and restlessly scavenging the apartment for food, cigarettes, distractions of any kind.
Soon, Opal knew, something would have to give; either Dottie would find decent work, or else she would lose herself. Opal imagined her mother simply collapsing in a great heap in a restaurant or on the street, mourning the death of what had been, and no longer was.
“If it was me, I would die,” Opal told her friend Tamara Best over dinner one night in the dining hall. “I mean, I wouldn’t be able to go on.”
“Well, that’s you,” said Tamara. “That’s not her. I think performers have a different outlook.” Tamara was a Theater major; she had just been given the lead in St. Joan, and had cut her shoulder-length spray of hair for the occasion. “I don’t know your mother,” Tamara said, “but she sounds like she’s doing something right. Like she’s surviving.” She paused. “Why are you so involved?” Tamara asked. “I’m concerned about my parents’ lives, too, but only up to a point.”
Opal didn’t know how to answer. They sat in a corner of the large room, and all around them she could hear the hiss of the steam table and the mumble of adolescent voices. Opal tried to picture what her mother was doing for dinner tonight. Chances were, Dottie was standing in front of the refrigerator right this minute, poised in its light. Opal could see her holding a bloody packet of steak in one hand and a frozen pizza in the other, weighing the possibilities. For a moment Opal imagined inviting Dottie to come live with her at Yale; they could be roommates, she thought, and enroll in all the same classes. Dottie would crack jokes during seminars, would shout and whoop in the middle of lectures.
Finally it wasn’t just a question of aimlessness or pride; Dottie needed to find work because she was going through her money at an alarming rate. One afternoon she called Opal in New Haven and made an announcement.
“I found a job,” she said.
“That’s terrific,” said Opal. “Out in L.A.?”
“No,” said her mother. “Right here.” She paused. “This is a little different.” And then she began to explain that she had agreed to lend her name and image to a line of clothing. “It’s going to be called the Dottie Engels Collection for Large Women,” she said. “That’s what it will say on all the labels. And there will be three little dots sewn on to every garment, either on a pocket or sleeve. Kind of a trademark.”
Opal held her breath for a moment, wondering how to respond. “Is this definite?” she finally asked.
“Why? Do you think it’s a mistake?” Dottie asked.
“I don’t know,” Opal said. “I don’t know what to tell you.” She paused. “What does Ross say?”
“Oh, what can he say?” Dottie said. “He says he wants what’s in my best interest. He knows I need money; he knows things are getting tight, what with your tuition and my extravagant ways. He didn’t push me into this; we both talked about it for a long time. I don’t know, honey, I think I’m just going to have to do it. There really isn’t anything else.”
Opal remembered her mother drifting across a stage to kiss the host of a talk show. Back then, her gowns came all the way down to the floor so you couldn’t see her feet, which gave the illusion of one swift movement, as though Dottie were on wheels.
“You’ve agreed to do it?” Opal asked, and her mother softly said yes, she had, and all Opal could do was congratulate her. But as she did, she could feel something within herself shift position and drop. She wanted to tell her mother not to do it, to stop now before it was too late. Don’t look back, Eurydice, she thought, and she imagined Dottie disobeying and turning to look, finding only this new image of herself: someone huge and overripe and desperate, with three dots marking her sleeve.
The commercials were released during October of Opal’s junior year at Yale. She closed the door of her single room in Silliman, turned on her television set, and kept a private vigil for hours. She watched several new sitcoms and a few old standards, until finally the first commercial appeared.
Her mother swung into camera range, while on the soundtrack a heavy disco beat kept time as clearly as a metronome. “Sizes fourteen to forty-six!” Dottie was saying, her voice agitated but buoyant. The camera crawled across a wall of dresses behind her. The clothes themselves were not terrible, Opal thought, just big and formless and light, like maternity clothes for angels.
She kept an eye on her mother a
s though Dottie were a child performing in a school play—a child who was somehow managing to strike out in a small, miserable role: a forest animal during Fire Prevention Week, or one of the lesser von Trapp girls in the fall musical. It was painful for Opal to watch her mother onscreen, but Dottie held herself with dignity. She never flinched or gave one of those clenched, ironic little smiles that try to let the home viewer in on a secret.
Dottie had claimed that she didn’t entirely see this venture as a sign of failure. “Of course, I’d rather be opening at Caesar’s,” she said, “but in the scheme of things, it’s somewhere between death and a few of the clubs I used to play.” She paused. “I have to make my peace with it,” she said. “I thought to myself: It’s a decent project. It’s moral. Why should large women have to look like Sicilian widows? If I got anything from those years on tour, it was the confidence to dress bright. Other women should be encouraged to show themselves off, too; they shouldn’t have to wear dark colors and vertical stripes their whole lives. They shouldn’t have to be ashamed.”
But Opal told no one about the commercials. Eventually, everyone at school would find out on their own, she knew, but for now she didn’t want to talk about it. She sat in bed and watched her mother drift by in first a peach dress, then a sky-blue blazer, and finally a long, pale green chiffon number with little fluted ruffles that looked like leaves of Bibb lettuce. Then Opal lit a cigarette and closed her eyes as the commercial faded to its conclusion.
She would have to call Dottie that night and tell her she had seen it. “So what’s the verdict?” Dottie would ask, her voice bright but nervous, and Opal would tell her the commercial was impressive, that the clothes looked good, and the music was catchy. Her instinct now was to protect Dottie in a way that she had never done before. But there had simply never been a need before; Dottie had always been a kind of Brunhilde figure, armored and huge and fearless.
Opal glanced at the clock; one-fifteen, and Dottie would probably still be waiting up. She decided not to call. Tomorrow she would call; tonight Opal just wanted to be left alone. From outside in the hall, she could hear various noises: two anorexic roommates were studying aloud for a Latin exam, tossing declensions back and forth. Someone else was taking a shower, and Opal could hear the water smacking tile. Finally Opal heard Andrea, her next-door neighbor, coming home with her boyfriend. First there was a thud of books dropping, and then a lighter thud of bodies dropping. Then there was whispering, and low, knowing laughter, and finally the unmistakable sound of two people making love. None of it really interested her, she realized. After a while it was just noise, and barely human.
Opal could not get over the idea that her mother had fallen. “You mean you never thought about this before?” Tamara had said. “It seems so inevitable.”
But Opal just shook her head. There was no way to explain the fact that Dottie had always been a fixture, a given. Opal thought of the way she used to sit in front of the television’s gentle light, and how every once in a while she would look up, smiling and blinking, as her mother’s voice called to her as if from above water. Dottie Engels was always somewhere nearby. Finding her—and you usually could, if you looked hard enough, whether on television or in a newspaper or in the pages of a magazine—was like finding the North Star in an unfamiliar sky. A new location disoriented you, but you had to be patient, and look and look until finally the star made its presence known behind a stand of trees, or over a darkened lake.
Now, whenever Opal looked for Dottie, she felt as though she were searching for her mother among footage of the war dead—intently looking for something she just as intently hoped she wouldn’t find. But still Dottie turned up, a bright, swirling, unmistakable tornado of readywear fabric.
Opal began staying up late at night looking for her mother’s commercials, and sleeping through most of her morning classes. She had recently declared herself an Art History major, and there were sheaves of prints she needed to examine in the slide room, and hours worth of reading to be done each day, but suddenly it all ceased to hold interest; suddenly she could think of little else but her mother’s decline. Opal remembered how, the year before, she had loved standing before a painting at the Yale Art Museum, notebook open to a clean page, watching as the image went from static to fluid. She had felt held there, much the way she used to feel as a child, centered in front of the big TV.
Now Opal spent most of her time in front of the television once again. She scouted the airwaves for her mother, cringing her way through each ad, praying that it would fly by swiftly and silently. Before midterms, when the library was packed and everyone on campus stayed up all night, drinking gallons of potent coffee and living in terror of failure, when everyone suspected they weren’t as smart as they had been told all their lives, and now the moment of judgment had finally arrived, Opal stayed alone in her room, a bar of blue light shining steadily beneath her door as she watched television in the dark.
In November, Opal received two notices of academic warning, and her advisor urged her to come see him, but Opal didn’t know what in the world she would say. Thoughts of Yale became more remote; she felt a surprisingly small amount of guilt about how little time she was spending on her work. Tamara had agreed to tape the nine A.M. lecture each day, but the recordings were poor, and the professor’s thin voice was usually swallowed up by the coughs and rustling of one hundred students who were waking up for the day.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Tamara asked. “I’ve seen people fall apart here. Remember that girl, Julie Litman, who got the lead in The Belle of Amherst last year, and got so wrapped up in it that she stopped going to all her classes?”
Opal nodded. She remembered Julie well, with her long Emily Dickinson dresses and bun and fishy glances. “This is nothing like that,” Opal said.
“Well, be careful,” said Tamara. “Really, I’m worried about you. And it’s not just me. Peter told me that he walked past your door at four in the morning the other day—who knows what he was doing, prowling around—and he said you were up watching TV. He heard The Love Boat theme song coming from your room.”
“It’s for a project I’m doing,” Opal said. “Sort of a deconstruction of popular culture. I’m comparing and contrasting the aesthetics of Aaron Spelling and Quinn Martin.”
Tamara laughed and shook her head. “Just watch yourself,” she said. “This isn’t like you.”
Opal had always been a good, if obsessive, student—never a genius, but consistently neat. Somewhere along the way it became clear that neatness really did count, or at least the adult version of neatness, which seemed to be scrupulousness. She wasn’t innately gifted; nothing slid by with oiled ease, as it seemed to do for so many people around her. When she walked past the practice rooms of the music building at school, down that narrow corridor of vacuum-sealed glass cells, she was overwhelmed by the explosion of chords. And in the microbiology lab one afternoon, waiting for her friend Peter to finish for the afternoon, Opal had stared in awe at the line of students, all of them with heads tipped down, squinting into microscopes for hidden colonies of life. There was nothing in the world that Opal could do with any particular brilliance. She had been Dottie Engels’s daughter; that was what she had done best of all.
On the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving break, Opal traveled down to the city in Shelley Carper’s dented Pontiac packed with students. The ride quickly turned into a party on wheels; someone lit a joint, which immediately stank up the enclosed space, and Shelley popped in a tape of some new band that sang like androids. Up front, Debbie Flynn opened a bag of trail mix and everyone held out their hands.
“Are we there yet?” Peter Lipman asked when they had been traveling for ten minutes.
Everyone was jokey and easy and able to unwind; only Opal stayed slightly apart. She rolled the window down an inch and leaned upward toward the small jet of air.
“As soon as I g
et home,” said Peter, “I’m going to open good old Panofsky. He’s the only art critic in the world who says, ‘As you can see from the following quote in Latin . . .’ and then doesn’t bother to translate. Shit, I’m not even going to have time to eat the turkey.”
Everyone clucked and murmured in agreement. When they reached the city, Opal was let out first, right in front of her mother’s building. She thanked Shelley, and waved as the car pulled out into the quiet, wide street. Opal stepped onto the curb, clutching her knapsack, and she realized, as she hefted its light weight, that she had entirely forgotten to bring any of her notebooks or texts home with her. She would not be able to work at all during break. It astonished her that she had lost hold of herself in this way, and that she felt no grief at all.
The next day, as she and Dottie stood in the kitchen preparing dinner, Opal suddenly said, “I’m failing.” She spoke without drama. She was at the sink, running warm water over the frozen dome of turkey.
“What’s that?” Dottie asked, and Opal turned off the faucet.
“I’m failing. I got two probation notices,” said Opal.
Dottie didn’t say anything at first. She shook her head slowly, and sat down at the island in the middle of the room, lighting a cigarette. “Well, honey, is something wrong?” she finally asked. Opal shrugged. “Is it personal?” Dottie tried. “Something love-related, if I may ask?”
Opal shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s definitely not that.”
“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” asked Dottie. “Come on, Opal, I hope you know that you can talk to me. It would take a lot to shock me.”
“I know,” said Opal. She found a towel and wiped her hands dry. “I’ve just sort of lost interest,” she said.