This Is My Life (2 page)

I
t was her sister who taught her how to hyperventilate. They sat facing each other on the bed, and they panted together like a husband and wife in a Lamaze workshop. When they could just about take no more, they felt that identifying swoon, the oxygen leaving their brains for good, the cells dying en masse. One day Erica put an end to it. She couldn't be bothered anymore, she said; she had other things to think about. Suddenly her walls were lined with posters; huge, disembodied heads of folksingers loomed down from above the bed and the dresser. Voices started coming from the stereo speakers: trembly underwater sopranos singing about medieval wood-nymphs and slain labor leaders. But the 1960s had already ended, and the records were strictly from the remainder bin. Buffy Sainte-Marie had a big orange 99¢ sticker slapped over her face.

Erica's room grew lush with things to touch, and fiddle with, and smell. Something was always burning in a dish. Once she
bought a wand of incense from a man in a white robe on the subway and was later appalled by the literature he had sweetly handed her with her purchase:

Thank-you for Buying “Lovely” Patchouli Incense. You're contributions will Go to help FIGHT the Rise of worldwide Judaism.

Still the incense burned, and now Opal stood and breathed in the bad air of her sister's room and thought longingly of how they used to hyperventilate together, and how all of that was finished. In the past, sitting cross-legged on Erica's bed, the two sisters would allow their breathing to quicken. It was those first moments that Opal liked best. Erica had made a rule that they must keep their eyes closed, but sometimes Opal would crack open an eye and watch her sister heaving for breath, her shoulders moving up and down. It was embarrassing to see this, but somehow necessary. Erica was like a big sea creature that had washed up onto a rock, and Opal was the sea creature's diminutive sister. If someone had burst into the room then, it would have seemed crazy: two girls gasping for oxygen when there was certainly enough of it to go around. But no one
would
burst into the room; even the babysitters knew enough to keep their distance. Sometimes Opal could hear one of them practicing a routine in the den. She grew used to hearing the distant swoop and mutter of a voice, the rise and fall of words out of context. She rarely paid much attention, preferring the company of her sister. In Erica's bedroom it was just the two of them, breathing and falling.

One evening when they were hyperventilating, Opal actually
thought she had died. She thought she had slipped into some narrow, dark province where she would be held forever. It was like all the hiding places she had ever found in the apartment: like the alley behind the refrigerator, where you wedged your body in and stood flush against the humming coils and wires until you were discovered. And you always were discovered; that was a given. But now Opal felt as though she might never get out, might never come to. She could not move, she could not open her eyes.

Goodbye, she thought, goodbye. She remembered Charlotte's babies at the end of
Charlotte's Web
, and the way they had parachuted off into new, separate spider-lives, calling goodbye to Wilbur even as a current carried them along. She had wept then, as she had wept pages earlier during Charlotte's death. It made sense to cry at someone else's departure, someone else's death. But this now, this was worse; Opal was mourning only herself. She would be found in her culottes and headband and knee socks. She saw herself being lifted gently, held in some anonymous adult arms and carried from the room.

That was when Erica reached out and shook her.

“Earth to Opal,” Erica said, and Opal's eyes flew open like a doll's. “You should have seen yourself,” Erica said, but her voice was kind.

No more was said about it. Together the two sisters caught their breath and went into the kitchen to hunt for supper. There was always a babysitter around to serve as a vague supervisor. Their mother had hired a string of young comedians to take care of Opal and Erica when she herself was away—men and women whom she had discovered at various comedy clubs around the city. She paid them decently and gave them a place
to stay and a telephone to use and a pantry stocked with interesting food. The apartment was never empty; there was always the sound of one of the babysitters in the background, obsessively practicing a routine. The babysitters were like extremely lenient, youthful parents who let you do what you want and eat what you want.

Tonight Danny Bloom, who was doing a three-day baby-sitting stint, came out of the den and asked if they needed anything. He was a thin man in his late twenties, with a body like a piece of bent wire. His humor, said their mother, was very physical. He moved around a lot onstage at the Laff House, where she had discovered him.

“You two doing okay out there?” Danny asked them.

“Yes,” Opal and Erica chorused. “We're fine.”

“Well then, I think I'll keep practicing,” he said. “I'll come out again in time for the show. She said she's doing all new material tonight.”

When he had disappeared down the hall, Erica and Opal boiled water for wagon-wheel pasta and slathered Fluff on crackers. They ate in silence, and when they were through they flipped through their homework for a while, dreamily shuffling pages. Illustrations of colonial life drifted by; women in long dresses sat at butter churns, backs straight, hands busy. Erica and Opal looked up from their homework every few minutes, checking the clock. At eleven-twenty Erica carried in the television set, and Opal pulled the swivel chairs up close to the screen. Together in the kitchen with the heat from the stove and the soft, granular light of the television, they waited for their mother to appear.

Opal watched the long loop of commercials as though it were an opening act. It was strange; you barely had to focus on the
commercials, and yet you still knew what they wanted you to buy. Opal loved television and watched as much of it as she could. You had to watch the shows closely, but during the commercials you could just let your thoughts fall around you while the music jumped and the coffee spilled and the bottle of detergent came to life and danced.

Opal swiveled her chair in time to the music and thought of all the things that crowded around her. She thought of the people she worshipped in the world: her mother, and her sister, and the new art teacher, Miss Hong. A few years before, she had worshipped Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees. She thought she had been shrewd about loving Mickey; everyone else loved Davy Jones, and the chances of ever getting
him
were slim, at best. More realistic to go for Mickey, she reasoned, with his elastic face and squinting eyes. No one else took Mickey seriously; they all went for the easy charms of Davy: the soft British accent, the tender skin. Opal remained patient, did not make a big issue out of her theory. She thought of Mickey constantly, wondered what time of day it was in California and whether he grew discouraged by all the letters Davy received. But as the months passed, and the flurry died down, Opal thought of him less, and somehow her love for him was unmoored. It had been her decision; she had not had to be forcibly restrained, like some older girls at school who tried to sneak into hotel rooms or backstage at the Westbury Music Fair. She had restrained
herself
, and suddenly she was way past the whole thing.

Everything kept changing as quickly as a film strip, frame after choppy frame. You loved someone and then you didn't, and then you loved someone else. You wept over a spider's death when you were eight, and a few years later you read that same
death scene again with a cool, critical eye. You thought of ways in which E. B. White might have made the scene more true to life; you thought of writing to tell him.

There were very few things in the world that stayed hinged to you for too long. Each year there was a new teacher at the front of the room, a new arrangement of chairs and desks, a new pale color slapped over the walls around you. Every class had a classroom pet: a guinea pig that drowsed in its window cage while you traced the outlines of the seven continents. You spent a whole year of your life caring for this animal, stroking its nervous fur and sliding in trays of pellets, and when the end of the year came, the animal was left back in the second grade while you kept moving up. You all knew that there would be another animal awaiting you in the third grade: a parallel rodent needing stroking and holding and water and food.

Now the commercials ended, and the theme music began, and suddenly Danny Bloom raced into the kitchen and perched on the countertop behind Opal. First there was the monologue, and a little joking around, and then Opal's mother was brought onstage. Sitting between Johnny and Ed, with the skyline tableau stretched out behind her, she gestured broadly and flooded the entire screen. In that moment the men disappeared, were swallowed up, and even the skyline was eclipsed. All that remained was an ocean of dotted fabric—her mother's fashion trademark—and the helpless laughter of the studio audience. They kept laughing and didn't show signs of ever stopping.
This is what is meant by “convulsive laughter,”
Opal thought.

“I'm glad she's on first tonight,” Erica said. “Not like last time when that woman from Sea World was on with her animals, and Mom got four minutes.”

Things had changed since then, they acknowledged. Their mother was now allowed to come on first and ease into the still-cold chair by the desk. She was frantic tonight; she was huge and luminous.
My mother the moon
, Opal thought.
My mother the explosion
. Opal could not take her eyes off her mother. She was madly in love with her, as was half the country. Everyone wanted to meet her, talk to her, somehow nudge up against her.

“It's worse in California,” Opal's mother had said. “Out there, everyone's lying in wait with their autograph books. They
expect
to see celebrities. They come right up and touch you; it's like a petting zoo.” But Opal knew her mother wasn't significantly upset by this; it was clear that in some ways she took pleasure from the touch of strangers. Opal imagined her mother gliding down a street in Los Angeles under an archway of palm trees, while all around her, hands reached out to brush her cheek, her hair, the edge of a dotted sleeve.

Opal had not yet been to California. “I want you girls to stay in New York for now,” her mother said, “and have as normal a life as possible. I don't want you to start missing a lot of school and falling behind. I know the situation isn't ideal, but the babysitters take good care of you, and I'm only a phone call away.”

Opal begged to be allowed to go with her, but the answer was always the same. “Soon,” she was told. “I promise you, soon.”

But when, exactly, was “soon”? The word was used to represent any given period of time; it was fluid and could change shape freely.

“I will be back from L.A. soon,” her mother would say as she stood before her closet, selecting dresses from the rack with
the help of her assistant, Cynthia, who always leaned toward the loudest, most spangle-dipped items. Then a week or two might go by, during which Opal had her hair braided systematically each morning and her lunch packed by a live-in baby-sitter.
Soon, soon
, came the voice, this time over the telephone, but even long-distance it was as soothing and persuasive as a hypnotist's.

Finally her mother would return. It might be winter in New York City, with snow gathered in ragged drifts, but the limousine would pull up at the curb and the doorman would fly out to greet her, and she would emerge a dusty, mottled, coastal pink, her nose peeling, her suitcase swollen with citrus fruit. California seemed a remote, tropical island, having little to do with anything that went on here, in New York City, where the snow fell for days, and the world seemed locked permanently into winter. In California, Opal imagined, you were served crescents of papaya on a terrace overlooking the water, and speed-shutter cameras were always hissing at you like locusts. Opal would go there soon, she knew. But “soon” kept unraveling with no end in sight.

There were times, during that first year of fame, when her mother was home for weeks on end, either resting or playing a series of club dates in the city. “I really prefer it here,” she would say as she got ready to go out for an evening in New York. “The audiences are much more savvy. They laugh with discrimination. Out in L.A., you get the feeling that there's a laugh track going. Everyone's so desperate to have a good time; you could get up there and read a manual about oral hygiene and they would laugh. No, this is where I want you girls to live, not out there in Disneyland.”

Sometimes she would sit down for a moment on the bed between her two daughters. “I hope I'm doing the right thing,” she would say. “Who knows? Maybe if God had really wanted me to be a comedienne, He would have named me Shecky.”

Opal and Erica looked at each other and laughed politely. They had reached a point at which they usually understood when their mother was making a joke and were able to respond fairly quickly. But sometimes Opal wasn't even sure whether her mother was really funny or not; she'd heard her jokes too many times. At home her mother practiced in the bedroom.

“You girls be my audience,” she said. Opal and Erica sat solemnly on the edge of the bed and listened as she ran through her act. She usually opened with some rueful comments about her size. “I do have a weight problem,” she said, looking down at herself and shaking her head. Then she looked up suddenly. “I just can't
wait
for dinner!”

Opal thought about this, and understood that her mother was making a little pun. She chuckled politely.

“Women's lib isn't so easy on large women,” her mother went on. “I mean, I tried to burn my bra, and the neighbors called the fire department. It took hours to put it out. One of the firemen said to me, ‘I don't know what kind of campfire you were making, lady, but those are the biggest marshmallows I've ever seen!'”