“I can’t see her anymore,” Erica announced.
“Why not?” said Jordan. “At least she gives you money; that’s better than my parents. Mine just want to talk, no cash involved.”
But whenever Dottie called now and asked Erica to come visit, to at least come talk things over, Erica said no. “If I’ve offended you in some way,” Dottie said, “then I apologize. But you do live in squalor, Erica, and I couldn’t help but say so. You know I always speak my mind.”
Erica wanted to be disowned; she wanted to be cut loose, legitimately disenfranchised. “Please,” Dottie said. “I know we haven’t been close. I know I haven’t been the best mother, but I feel as though you’re punishing me, Erica.”
“I’m not punishing you,” Erica said, and she knew she had to get off the telephone quickly, for she was afraid she might say things she hadn’t prepared. Sometimes words tumbled out against your will, but you were responsible for them anyway. “I need to be alone with Jordan,” Erica said. “For now, it’s what I need.”
“All right, if you insist,” said Dottie, her voice cold. After that day, Dottie began sending Erica letters. In each one, she asked Erica to reconsider, to at least call and talk. “If you want,” Dottie wrote, “we can go into mother-daughter therapy. I’m sure such a thing exists; everything else does these days.” Erica didn’t answer any of the letters, and after a while they just stopped coming. Slowly, Dottie began to fade from view.
Sometimes at night, Erica looked out the window and thought about her mother, imagined her sitting in the window of the apartment on Central Park West. “I’m home, kids!” Dottie would say, flinging open the door, but it was a few years too late. One daughter was off at Yale, of all places, and the other one was living “in squalor,” in Alphabet City.
Nobody had thought that Erica and Jordan would stay together so long. Erica herself had thought they were through after she had gone to visit him that summer, many years before, at computer camp. But Jordan had returned to Headley in the fall and found that he was powerless again. He had had a brief summer of popularity among other outcasts, but at the end of August all the outcasts were sent back to their cringing lives. Jordan approached Erica at the water fountain one day in September of their junior year at Headley and asked if she wanted to come home with him again. He did not plead; he spoke simply, and she nodded in response.
That afternoon, lying once again in his bed, she knew that they would stay together for the long run. Perhaps it was by default, but she didn’t dwell on this point. Jordan was back, his body still hard and brown from summer, but soon he would soften again, and the color would drain from him, and the equation would once again make sense.
Even when high school ended and they separated for college, Erica was not worried. She somehow knew that neither of them would do too well on their own, and that they would return to each other when the four years were done. She had discouraged Jordan from applying to schools where he might once again wield some offbeat, microchip-generated power.
“Why go to MIT and live under your brother’s shadow?” she said, and he finally agreed. The MIT application lay untouched beneath his bed for months. Jordan ended up at Michigan, which was such a vast metropolis of a university that no one ruled, no one was in power. Erica ended up at Bennington, mostly because they agreed to take her. Her high-school grades were bad and her S.A.T. scores disappointing, but she had written her admissions essay from the point of view of herself at ninety looking back on her entire life, and Bennington went for that sort of thing.
What Erica remembered most from college was the relentless snow that fell all winter, and the string of parties held in the Carriage Barn: big, noisy mixers with tropical themes, and blue drinks sloshing in coconut shells. All around her, great quantities of dope were smoked, and the air in dorm rooms never really had a chance to clear. Tentatively, girls slept with boys, or with each other, mixing and matching all the time, so you could never be sure what would walk out of someone’s room in a towel in the early morning. Erica had no interest in any of this. It wasn’t that her body didn’t cry out for attention; it certainly did, sometimes with a fierceness that she was positive could be heard across the room at night by her slumbering roommate, Nilda Guy. But still Nilda slept, undisturbed. She was a Hispanic scholarship student from the Bronx. Erica was grateful for the lack of attention Nilda paid her; it allowed her to be left alone, and not have to lie in bed at night unburdening herself from across the room. It had occurred to Erica that what people consisted of, really—or at least what she herself consisted of—was a big, rolling mixture of solid and liquid. Perhaps, she thought, it was in her best interest to expand rather than unburden. She would hold on to everything—all of herself, and all of Jordan—gathering it to her the way a mother gathers her children to her in the shopping mall, so no one gets lost. Nothing would slip away now, Erica thought. None of her strength would dwindle. Not a single calorie would burn.
Over Christmas vacation freshman year, Erica returned to the city and went right from the Port Authority to the Strangs’ apartment. She and Jordan retreated to his bedroom, which looked the same except for the absence of posters. All that was left behind on the walls were tiny tack marks.
“So what are you taking?” Jordan asked.
Erica was confused. What drugs was she taking? No, he meant what courses. She dutifully recited, “Anthro, Macro, Death and the Twentieth-Century Novel, Japanese.”
Jordan nodded and reeled off his own list, which consisted of science and math courses. Then he sighed and lay down on the bed. He looked too big for this room, too lanky and sprawling, too old.
“Are you going to stay in Ann Arbor?” Erica asked.
Jordan shrugged. “It sucks,” he said, “but I’ll probably stay. I can’t think of anything else to do. You?”
She nodded. “Me too,” she said.
“Same difference,” said Jordan, and Erica remembered that this was the way he spoke, sometimes making little sense, and it moved her, the familiarity of it, the comforting rhythm. She straddled Jordan, leaning down over him so her hair was in his face. She still smelled of Greyhound—smoke and disinfectant—but she didn’t care. You had to rope men in like steer, Erica knew. You had to find little ways to trick them into loving you, because it might not occur to them otherwise. When Jordan was with her, he remembered what he had forgotten he needed. Now her hands worked the planes of his chest, and he sighed and let his mouth go slack.
—
They had somehow gotten from there to here, so that now, at twenty-four, she found it difficult to be without him. She visited him in the hospital every day that December, although he always seemed slightly annoyed when she showed up. He was usually sitting up in bed watching television or playing cards with his roommate, a bus driver with emphysema. In the evening the hospital was as lulling as a department store, with its resounding chimes that might have summoned doctors to surgery, or saleswomen to lingerie. Erica arrived just as the dinner trays were being stacked and carted out.
Tonight Jordan was watching a game show and eating canned peaches. His roommate, Ray, was asleep, his breathing a long, slow rasp. Erica whispered at first, but Jordan waved his hand impatiently. “Old Ray here can sleep through everything,” he said. “His breathing drowns out all other sounds. He’s like a white noise machine.”
Jordan looked happier than Erica remembered ever seeing him. His life was pacific here; he floated through the day in his open-backed gown, hair streaming, paper shoes on his shuffling feet. She watched him eat the last of his peaches, and when he was done he lifted the little fluted cup to his lips to swallow a drizzle of syrup.
“They treating you okay?” she asked.
“Just great,” he said. “This drug they’re giving us, it has interesting side effects. Makes you feel kind of dreamy. We have to describe the way it feels, and I swear, they write d
own everything you say. If I said to the nurse, ‘It makes me feel like my heart is an elevator whooshing through the shaft of life,’ she would write it down and it would appear word for word in The Physician’s Desk Reference in a year.”
“When are you coming home?” Erica asked. She hadn’t meant to say this, because she knew fully well when he would be back, but somehow it got out. As she expected, Jordan was annoyed.
“We’ve been through it,” he said. “Two weeks minimum, or else I don’t get paid; you know that. You can be alone in the apartment for two weeks, can’t you, Erica?”
She nodded and looked down. Of course she could be alone; she always had been, and it hadn’t ever bothered her before. Erica had never thought there was really a choice. You were alone, and that was that; without knowing it, she had adopted a rudimentary existentialist attitude sometime around puberty, and it had stuck.
“You’re very dependent on me,” Jordan said, and although he pretended to dislike this, his voice sounded boastful.
“We’re dependent on each other,” Erica tried, and Jordan almost flinched.
“That’s your interpretation,” he said, turning the television back on. “Think what you want.”
What was it, she wondered when visiting hours were over and she was walking back through the dim and gleaming halls, that had made him like this? And what was it, also, that had made her accept it, even need it? Maybe it was because she knew nothing else, and could only guess at what was involved in the love between men and women. She could mimic it pretty well, and sometimes the mimicry cracked open, revealing a tender center. During those times she would forget herself, and say something to Jordan in a hushed, surprising tone, and he would look at her as if she were mad. “What are you doing?” he would say, disengaging, and she would find that her arms had been wrapped around him like ivy.
—
When Erica got back to the apartment, she stood in the darkened doorway for a moment. This went beyond loneliness; she was actually frightened without Jordan there. “Hello?” Erica called out, just to make sure, as if a burglar or murderer would actually answer when called to. But she couldn’t stop. “Anybody here?” she went on, in a voice thready and high. They had lived together in three different apartments in the East Village since college. This one was the most inhabitable of the three, but still she was frightened.
Now Erica snapped on the overhead light and watched the roaches zip into the seams where the walls joined the floor. Then she climbed the ladder up into the loft bed. Almost everyone she knew slept up at the ceiling in a loft bed, and the ones who didn’t slept close to the floor, on futons. The real sign of adulthood, she thought, would be having a bed of normal height. But everyone’s apartment was too small, and a bed was a thing to be hidden from view during daytime hours, away from eye-level. A bed was something you needed to climb up to, or kneel down onto. Erica peered down at the apartment. From this angle, the room looked out of whack; if she stared long enough, it seemed to tilt and list like van Gogh’s room at Arles.
There was a shelf up in the loft where she and Jordan stored cookies and a bent tube of spermicide and a television. This last item was a small black and white set that Jordan had purchased on the street. Surprisingly, it worked fine, as long as you didn’t want to watch CBS. Erica almost never watched television; it was Jordan who did, and he favored strange shows: relics of the Sixties like Hawaii Five-O and The Mod Squad.
“Oh, oh, look at this!” he would call out. “Peggy Lipton’s in a Nehru jacket tonight!” But Erica always ignored him.
Now, alone, she listened to the agonized street-opera outside, and when she had had enough of all the shouting, she turned on the television to drown the sounds out. Erica lay back against the pillows and began to eat from the bag of cookies on the shelf. Mallomars were perfect, as round and smooth as doorknobs. She wolfed them down happily and watched a talk show on which all the guests appeared to be losers. Maybe she could rush over to the studio in a cab and be allowed on the air to tell her own story.
The first guests tonight were the most terrifying couple Erica had ever seen. It seemed that twenty years before, when they were dating, the woman had decided to break up with the man. In a rage, he bought some lye, poured it in a Dixie cup, and threw it in the woman’s face. If he couldn’t have her, he reasoned, then no one could. The woman was blinded and disfigured, and the man, in his intense guilt and continuing passion, took care of her and soon they were in love again, and eventually they got married. Now they had written a book explaining their story. “We have been virtual pariahs,” the woman was saying. She wore dark glasses and had a high head of jet-black hair. “No one will be friends with us,” she said. “As soon as they hear our story, they don’t want anything to do with us. But they just don’t understand.”
Her husband squeezed her hand and moved closer. “That’s right,” he said. “I love this lady very much. She means the world to me, and always has.”
Erica could not turn away from the set. She imagined them at night, getting ready to make love, Mr. Lye gingerly removing Mrs. Lye’s dark glasses, revealing a set of eyes as empty as a statue’s. He had rendered her blind, and now they would be together always—she with her neediness and he with his overwhelming burden of guilt. That was enough, it seemed, to keep people bonded for life.
The television show dissolved to a commercial. Erica couldn’t move; she was groggy from sugar, dazed by the testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Lye. And then something happened: An old dog whistle went off, silent to the world but audible to her. Erica leaned closer to the screen. She had heard a voice, a familiar summons. “Are you a large woman?” the voice asked, and Erica dutifully answered, “Yes,” as though she were being administered a psychological exam by a graduate student. “Do you hide inside unfashionable fashions, embarrassed to show your body?” the voice went on.
“Yes,” Erica said again, “oh, yes,” and then the screen was filled with Dottie Engels.
Eleven
Her father lived at Sixteen Coconut Court. All day Opal conjured up images of that street: its small, pastel houses shaded by exotic foliage, its automatic sprinklers turning on in the morning and off at night. Finally, she saw her father walking out onto the porch of number sixteen, reaching his hand into the mailbox, his fingers curling around the edges of what would soon prove to be her letter.
She wished she had never written him. It wasn’t that her letter revealed anything personal; in fact, it was brief and unremarkable:
Dear Norm Engels,
I am not sure why I am writing you, but you have been on my mind lately, which I suppose is normal, considering. To make a long story short, I was wondering if you have any interest in corresponding with me. It wouldn’t have to be on a regular basis or anything; I’m just curious to know some details about your life, and maybe tell you some details about mine. I’ll leave it at that for now. Please write, if you’re so inclined.
Opal
Opal remembered the kinds of letters Dottie used to send back to her fans, how they were trimmed with extravagant punctuation. “Dear Susan,” Dottie would write. “Thanks very much for your kind words!!! I’m so glad I make you laugh. That’s my job!!! Love & polka dots, Dottie Engels.”
Opal had gotten her father’s address from a Miami telephone directory in the reference room of the library. He was the only Norman Engels listed, and as she sat with her finger poised beneath his name, it struck her as peculiar that she had never looked him up before, that she had never really been curious. But Dottie had eclipsed that curiosity, had stood directly in its light.
Opal wondered what her father’s reply would be like. Certainly he would be surprised to hear from her, but not too surprised. In all probability, Norm still thought about her, about all of them, fairly often. He couldn’t simply have erased an ex-wife and two daughters. Or maybe he could have. It was impossible for her to gu
ess what Norm Engels would think when he went out onto his porch and opened his mailbox. He might stare quizzically at the letter for a while, letting the facts settle. Once I had another family, he would remember. But then his new wife would call to him from inside the house, where a ceiling fan spun slowly above her as she lay in bed. “Norm, any mail?” she would ask in a sleepy voice, and he would have to call back no, there was nothing important, just a circular, just a throwaway.
You could never predict anyone else’s response, Opal knew. Most people had hidden itineraries, and the surface never matched what rolled around beneath. Weeks passed and her father did not write back. She checked her mailbox at Yale Station each morning, but all she ever received were notices of academic warning, each one more threatening than the last.
When the dean finally telephoned and insisted she come talk to him immediately, Opal felt a surprising wave of relief. “Come in, come in,” he called when she arrived, and Opal walked past his secretary and into the bright office. Dean Marsden was springing up and down in his chair like a baby in a bouncer.
“It’s one of these Scandinavian kneeling chairs,” he explained. “Ever seen them? Very good for the back.” He kept springing as he talked. He asked Opal if she was happy at Yale, and she admitted that lately she was not, that she couldn’t focus on her work. She had “personal problems,” she said, knowing that this was the kind of vague term that kept you immune to further probing. Opal sat in Dean Marsden’s office for twenty minutes, and by the end of the meeting she had agreed to his suggestion that she take next semester off. This was not a punishment, the dean said; it was important to him that she understood as much. It was merely a helpful measure designed to give her some time to “rethink” her commitment to undergraduate life. She could definitely come back to school in September; there would be a room waiting for her on campus. He spoke in a decent, careful voice, and Opal felt like Julie Andrews being sent away from the convent in The Sound of Music.