This Is My Life

  “Your father doesn’t like television,” Dottie had once whispered to them, and this fact had been astounding. Not like television? That warm flood of light, that endless stream of fun? Opal could not get over it. But there was a whole catalog of things her father did not like: chocolate, any kind of fish, carpeting, restaurants, among others.

  “You girls help set the table,” their mother whispered. “Hurry now.”

  After a long dinner of studious eating, there would often be a terrible fight. It would start from nothing, but fairly soon their mother and father would be at odds, spitting words back and forth. Opal and Erica would try not to listen. They would go into Erica’s room and say their special code words again and again, placing a spell over the argument.

  Fishka fishka foon, they said a dozen times, bobbing up and down like the old men in the synagogue. Fishka fishka foon. But it went on every night, and began to get worse, and finally Dottie took Opal and Erica away, first to Dottie’s aunt Harriet’s house in Queens, and eight months later to Manhattan, where they found an apartment, the three of them. When they moved to Aunt Harriet’s, Dottie was nothing—not yet famous, not even a comedienne at all. In the past she had entered a few local talent contests and usually came in second, but it hadn’t occurred to her that she could make a living from it. That would come later: the idea of actually putting herself out there, up on a stage alone. Dottie would learn quickly about the Open Mike nights at comedy clubs, the smoke that stayed in your hair and on your clothes forever, and how you had to sit for hours in dubious waiting rooms of buildings in the West 40s of Manhattan to find a manager. But for now, all she knew was that she had to leave her marriage.

  “I want you girls to think back on your childhood when you’re older,” she said, “and not remember it as having been miserable. There’s no reason for two little girls to have such a childhood.”

  What did they know? Opal was going into the second grade at the time, Erica the sixth. Their mother took them away one night without asking their opinion. She packed up the white Rambler station wagon with all their clothes and belongings and left before their father came home. It was July, and she rolled all the windows down. As they drove along the road, she shouted to them over the wind about their new life. “Think of it as an adventure, girls!” she said.

  Opal looked out at the rush-hour traffic traveling in the opposite direction. Their father might have been in one of those cars on the other side of the divider, heading home, and he would pass the station wagon on the way. For one terrible instant, the two cars would be side by side and her eyes would meet his. Opal quickly looked away; she didn’t want to see. She leaned forward against the front seat, her head resting near her mother’s.

  “. . . he took me out on a sled,” the Cruellest Month girl had said in Opal’s play, “and I was frightened. He said, ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight.’ And down we went.” Down they went, Opal and Erica and Dottie, driving off to Aunt Harriet’s house and having no idea of what would happen to them. The car had been like a sled, swerving and speeding and finally landing them at the bottom. When they pulled up in front of the house in Flushing, Queens, it was eight o’clock at night. The porch light was blazing, and the poor old German shepherd was barking in the yard. Aunt Harriet peered out through the blinds at them, but for a little while nobody could bear to get out of the car.

  Later that night, settled unèasily into the bedroom that had once belonged to Cousin Kenneth, Opal looked around her at the athletic trophies on the shelves, the map of the world on the wall. This was a real boy’s room, dark and paneled and long ago abandoned. Cousin Kenneth hadn’t lived here in many years.

  Opal switched on her walkie-talkie to speak with Erica, who lay on the other side of the wall. Over the spray of static, Opal said, “Do you think we’ll be okay?”

  “Yes,” said Erica. “She knows what to do.”

  “But it’s weird here,” said Opal.

  “I know,” said Erica. “You should go to sleep now, Opal. It’s getting really late.”

  “All right,” Opal said. She didn’t want to let go of her sister’s voice. The voice was so human, so real, contained in a plastic handset, held close against her ear; she could have listened to it forever. “Well, good night then,” Opal said, signing off. “Over and over.”

  Erica laughed. “Over and what?” she said. “You’ve got it wrong. It’s ‘over and out.’”

  “Oh,” said Opal, embarrassed. “Well, over and out, then.”

  She clicked off her walkie-talkie and placed it on Cousin Kenneth’s nightstand. Over and out. That was so definite. How much better was her own version, which meant: This will never end. Always we will listen to each other’s voice, blanketed in static, before sleep. Always we will talk like this, across walls or states or continents. Even years from now, when we are both married and living far apart, I will say to you before we click off for the night: Over and over.

  Four

  She had never gone through horses. She had skipped over that stage entirely, declining to be one of the many who sat in their rooms at night, making lists of potential horse names:

  Velvet

  Prancer

  Windy

  Charcoal

  Silver

  Cinnamon

  She didn’t take down an ancient copy of Misty of Chincoteague from her bookshelf each night and read for hours, then close her eyes to seal up the vision of this island where horses ran loose. She didn’t pray for a foal for her birthday, fingers crossed into knots, making herself sick with want. She didn’t need a horse; her longing was already there for her, laid out plainly. It wasn’t attached to any animal or object; it hovered over her like a cartoon cloud. One day Erica woke up feeling it so deeply that she decided she had to do something. The following week, she and Jordan Strang began to change the nature of their relationship.

  After school she and Jordan no longer went to the park. Instead they got right on the bus and headed crosstown to his family’s apartment. First he would feed the schnauzer, then leaf through his parents’ mail, then drop a dozen Nilla Wafers onto a plate and carry it into his bedroom. Erica followed silently behind like a Japanese wife.

  Sometimes, in the bedroom, Jordan turned on his black light, and everything took on a purple hue and what seemed to be a dusting of lunar lint, and Erica and Jordan’s teeth stood out like bright little game tiles. They examined their bodies in the light, holding out arms and legs for self-inspection, and then they examined each other. Soon it became something else, something that required the tenting of a blanket.

  Jordan was as smooth as any boy in the tenth grade, his hips narrow, his muscles untried. He moved differently here, as though the air under the blanket contained all the properties of water. Slow, cautious, he pushed away at space as if it were a burden to him. Anyone could do this, popular or not; it was the great equalizer. Erica was amazed at the way her own want could be so easily poured into him, given shape. He could have been any boy in the tenth grade; it wouldn’t have mattered. Not every boy in the tenth grade would have been willing, though. Most of them would have let out a sharp, incredulous little laugh at just the idea of touching such a fat girl. But somehow Jordan knew he had no real choice, and when he kissed her for the first time it was punctuated with resignation more than desire.

  Jordan’s long face peered down at her from a new angle; the whole perspective had shifted. They were not coatless in the park; no wind lifted their hair or snuffed out a tiny light between them. Jordan looked sidelong at her breasts, then looked away, then looked back once again. She felt a shiver watching him do this. Her breasts, suddenly, were no longer just the ledge she pressed her school books against as she walked the halls of Headley, nor were they a reason for turning away in the girls’ locker room to make a quick, furtive scoop into the cups of a bra. Now they were something to be looked at, then turned
away from, then looked at once again. Her whole body was meant for looking at now, and this was astonishing. She was so big compared with him; she was all broad expanses of skin and breast and hair. How could he want this?

  It made her think, inevitably, of her parents in bed together. Years before, Erica had been aware of their lovemaking, because they made such a big show of it in their desire for privacy. Her father had installed a chain latch on the master bedroom door of the house in Jericho, and his carpentry skills were poor. The latch had to be toyed with in order for the little knob to slide correctly into place. Scritch, scritch, scritch, Erica would hear, the scrape of metal much more audible than the lovemaking would ever be. Why did they feel the need to lock the door? she used to wonder. It was humiliating, as though they thought she or Opal might run into their room in the middle of the night, unbidden, seeking refuge from a dream. She and Opal knew better than that; they knew what went on in there. Opal occasionally did need to have things explained, however, for not all of her facts were right. She had assumed, for instance, that a man’s penis looked just like that of the neighbor’s dog Triscuit: crayon-bright and retractable into its casing. Erica showed Opal some color plates from the book Treasures of the Renaissance, which lay on the coffee table in the den, and set her straight.

  But there were more complicated ideas about sex that Opal would not be able to grasp for years, and that Erica would not even try to explain. There wasn’t much to say about the way in which two people, even in the throes of unhappiness, after days of screaming and days of not speaking, could suddenly approach each other with their warm mammal bodies and declare a truce until morning.

  Erica knew very little about her parents’ marriage, and even less about their divorce. Her father had been extricated permanently from their lives. Erica knew only that he had moved to Miami several years before.

  “I don’t like to talk about your father,” Dottie would say when pressed. “He did enough damage to our family. It was a mistake for me to have married him, but what can I do? You girls are the only good things to have come from that marriage. I just don’t want you to have to deal with him; there’s no reason for him to be in your lives. Just forget about it.”

  So Erica and Opal stopped asking questions. In the beginning, after Dottie had moved them to Aunt Harriet’s house, Norm had come to visit them a few times. The visits were awkward, though, and finally, after a particularly bad afternoon, he stopped visiting altogether. He called on the phone every few weeks in the beginning, keeping the girls on the line for ten excruciating minutes, trying to pull scraps of conversation from them, but it was no good; they were afraid of him, and what he might say or do. After a while Norm stopped calling, and they were deeply relieved. He sent Dottie child-support money each month, but there was no other communication. Erica imagined him down in Florida, with a new wife and new accounting job. She wondered if he thought about his first marriage and his daughters every time he turned on the television and saw Dottie’s face shining out at him from behind the glass. He could never really forget; in this family, television kept everyone bound together for life.

  Erica remembered how, the afternoon of his last visit, he had shown up at Aunt Harriet’s door in a heavy overcoat. “I don’t want to see him,” Dottie had said, and she had stayed hidden in the upstairs bathroom until he took the girls out of the house. They walked around the neighborhood, which was nearly city, nearly suburb. In one direction there was a park, in another direction an expressway. You could sit on a park bench and listen to the sound of cars sweeping by in the distance.

  “Are you girls doing okay?” he asked them.

  They both nodded elaborately, like toy dogs in the back windows of cars, whose heads are forever bobbing.

  “Look, your mother and I,” he began, “we weren’t made for each other. It wasn’t a marriage made in heaven.” At this point, Opal grew restless and started to walk around, plucking at bushes, snapping off low branches of trees. “Opal,” her father said, “could you come here? Could you just listen a little longer?”

  Opal wandered back, and he continued, telling them that he knew he had a problem with his temper, that he was trying to keep it under control, that he was sorry they were frightened of him. “I’m not so bad,” he said. “Just look at me. There’s nothing scary here.” He pulled down his collar so his whole head was revealed: the skeletal face, the narrow eyes. Opal and Erica said nothing, just continued to stare.

  “You know, you’re both very cold,” he said quietly. “You’re both going to grow up to be frigid women.”

  The words meant nothing then, but Erica held tightly to the phrase, the way one holds on to nonsense words from childhood until they can be deciphered at a later date. There had been a commercial on television for the Campfire Girls, she remembered, and it had depicted a group of beaming campers around a blazing fire. “Sing wo-he-lo,” they sang. “Sing wo-he-lo . . .” Erica had loved the authentic American Indian sound to the syllables; she pictured two squaws meeting in a clearing, touching palms and saying “wo-he-lo” to each other in somber tones. But years later she had learned that “wo-he-lo” wasn’t an Indian phrase at all, and that in fact it was shorthand for “work, health, love.” Everything seemed to be in code; nothing in the world was simple.

  “You’re both going to grow up to be frigid women,” her father had said, and Erica thought of this again now, as she lay in bed with Jordan Strang.

  Her father had been wrong. She felt many things; she was alive with nerve bundles, alert to Jordan’s careless touch. There was no fury between Erica and Jordan, as there must have been between Dottie and Norm. Instead, there was just the inevitability of going ahead with what they had begun. They no longer needed to say, “Meet you at the end of school.” Instead, one of them was always waiting under the Exit sign at three o’clock. Finally the other one would show up, and together they would push through the double doors, not saying a word. They would walk through the school yard, she struggling to keep up with him, and he loping along quickly, not even checking to see if she was by his side. Sometimes, in her hurry, Erica would drop a few papers or books in the snow, and have to call, “Jordan, wait!” He would stop on the path and sigh heavily, as if thinking: This is what girls are like. All my life I will have to wait for them. His own books and papers were always fastened into place by a thick rubber strap, whereas Erica clutched hers against her. Something inevitably got separated from her pile and flew away—some note to bring to her mother or a failed quiz—something she didn’t really want anyway.

  They were both doing poorly in school. Erica had recently been called down to the guidance counselor’s office and given a serious lecture.

  “I’m going to do something I’ve never done before, Erica,” Mrs. Shub had said. She had her hand pressed down on a piece of paper, fingers splayed. “I’m going to show you your I.Q.,” she said. “It’s probably unethical of me, and maybe I’ll lose my job, but I just want you to see how very bright you are.” Then Mrs. Shub started to lift her hand off the page, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on Erica. It was like a magic act; Erica expected a flock of doves to thunder up from under Mrs. Shub’s palm. “Look at that,” said the guidance counselor, and Erica peered down to where the number “160” was typed. “That means genius,” said Mrs. Shub. “Now maybe you can explain to me why you are failing Math and French and Gym.”

  Erica had only shrugged and muttered a promise to try harder, and finally she was let go. But she knew that she couldn’t focus on school any longer; she was too far behind in everything to even think about catching up. She and Jordan began to try new drugs. He had an older brother at M.I.T. who spent a lot of extracurricular time in the laboratory, mixing together hallucinogens and amphetamines. Neil’s latest discovery was a new drug called Bali. It had been christened Bali, he had explained, because it was a place everyone wanted to visit. Bali was a small translucent capsule fil
led with an amber liquid. There was a story going around M.I.T. about somebody’s mother finding a capsule on her son’s dresser and mistaking it for vitamin E. Supposedly she broke it open and spread the contents on the lines around her eyes and mouth. No one seemed to know what, if anything, had happened.

  Now Jordan held two capsules in his hand and instructed Erica to take one. She plucked it up and swallowed it quickly, and then they both waited like expectant fathers. They sat on the floor of Jordan’s room, looking through his vast record collection, and finally Erica felt something buzzing around the back of her head. She swatted at it absently before she realized it was the drug taking hold. Jordan was sprawled across the floor, and at just that moment he jerked his head up sharply. “Erica,” he said, “I feel very strange.”

  This began, for her, what was to be five hours of taking care of Jordan Strang. Luckily, it was a Saturday afternoon and Erica didn’t need to be home until the evening. Opal was off at somebody’s birthday party on the East Side. Jordan stood up and began to walk around unsteadily. He lifted small objects and put them back down.

  “I’m not used to this,” he said. “It’s usually not so strong. Something must be wrong here. I think we’ve been poisoned.”

  “Could you sit down?” she said. “You’re making me nervous.” Jordan came and sat down on the edge of the bed, twisting his hands together in anxiety. Erica was aware of little waves of color rimming her vision, but she ignored them, put them on a back burner. She knew that she had to keep an eye on Jordan. This drug seemed to be a souped-up version of all the drugs people had done back in the Sixties, all the drugs that Jordan spent his days reading about.

  “Hunter would approve,” Jordan said finally, nodding his head and smiling. “I want to write him a letter. Please, Erica, let me dictate it to you, okay?”

  Reluctantly she agreed, and they sat there like an executive and his private secretary. Erica wrote down what he was saying as fast as she could, although later, when she tried to read back what she had written, much of it was indecipherable. The words jerked across the page like the lines on an EKG: