This Is My Life (22 page)

And now she was starving, longing for something sweet again. Erica was standing on West Fourth Street, and she saw that she was directly in front of a bakery, as though she had landed there divinely. She blinked a few times, then peered in the window. It was filled with tiers of pastry: petits fours iced in pink and white, with little silver balls peppering the top, and a round chocolate birthday cake, the frosting so thick and scalloped that it seemed to have been applied with a putty knife.

She opened the bakery door and a little bell trembled overhead. Inside, the fragrance was surprisingly strong. Erica knew exactly what she wanted. She hesitated before the slanted glass counter for just a second, and then ordered a single eclair.

D
ottie was in the isolation booth. She had headphones on and was blithely listening to Pachelbel's “Canon in D,” while outside the booth the double bonus answer was being revealed. “It's a hard one,” confided the host of the show, a slender, giggling man named Jack Waring. “But if I know Dottie Engels, she'll be able to figure it out.” He paused. “Especially if we tell her there's a free meal in it for her!” He put his hand to his chest and bent over at his own joke, and the laugh light blinked. The audience dutifully complied, although their laughter came in an unstable wave. It could be filled in later, Opal knew; it could be sweetened until everyone seemed to be roaring.

Ross Needler had found work for Dottie. It was a game show, and originally she had been depressed by the prospect and had said no, but after a while she changed her mind and called him back. Something was better than nothing, she had rationalized.
It was work; there would be an audience, and a live set, and she would be back on the air.

“Think of the exposure,” Ross had said.

“You can
die
of exposure,” Dottie answered, but still she agreed.

Run for the Money
was one of those game shows that relied on physical exertion as much as what Jack Waring termed “brain power.” It was a fairly complicated show, Opal thought; if you answered a series of questions right, you made it into the isolation booth for the double bonus question, and if you answered that correctly as well, then you went on a chase for a large sum of money, which was strategically hidden along an extravagant obstacle course. Dottie wouldn't be allowed to keep any of the money, of course. It would all go to her teammate, a law student from Fordham named Darren Helper.

Dottie had to pretend that she didn't need the money at all. This was the great irony, and everyone involved with the show's production understood it well. It wasn't just Dottie; most of the celebrities who appeared on
Run for the Money
were experiencing hard times. Alcoholic actors or desperate ex–child stars with faces puffed up and ruined by adolescence—all of them flocked to the show. This week, the other guest was Melanie Sweet, a young dark-haired British actress who had portrayed a villain on a nighttime soap opera before it was canceled. Neither Dottie nor Melanie was appearing anywhere else, but the host treated them as though their careers were blooming madly, and at the beginning of the show he thanked them both for taking time out of their busy schedules. “Of course,” he said to Melanie, “viewers remember you best as Tempest Blaine on
Sutter's Cove
, but I understand you're working on some new projects.”

“Oh, yes,” Melanie answered in her clipped, distinctive voice, and she went on to explain that she was reading screenplays and searching for the right part. She was afraid, she said, of being typecast as a villainess.

“You know,” Dottie offered, “I have similar fears; I'm afraid of being typecast as an overweight woman!”

Again the host doubled over, his laughter exploding like thunder into his little clip-on microphone.

Opal sat in the third row. She had been given the morning off from work. Now she glanced up at the ceiling, which was speckled with recessed lights like a planetarium, as though the universe could be contained within the confines of a theater. Maybe it couldn't be contained, Opal thought, but it could be approximated. The full set of
Run for the Money
was as elaborate and distracting as much of life: all those bright colors, loud noises, and either elation or despair waiting at the end.

When people won big on game shows, their families piled onstage, hugging them and hugging the host. But when they lost, their families stayed safely in their seats, unwilling to be identified. Nine-year-old kids looked away from fathers who had just mistakenly answered the pivotal question. Images of what
might
have been flashed through the kids' eyes: a Winnebago, a trip to Disneyland, a gleaming Jaguar. All of it wasted, tossed easily into the lap of the opponent. In the car on the way home from the taping, the kids sit sullen in the backseat of the old station wagon, trying to decide whether or not ever to speak to their father again.

At
least it's something
, Dottie had said all week, as the day of the taping grew closer. Just last night Opal had set up an obstacle course in the living room, at Dottie's request. Opal had held
a stopwatch, and Dottie had made her way over the minefield of cushions and upturned chairs. Opal watched as her mother struggled through the clutter. It
was
“something,” true, and “something” was given full credit merely because it existed, because it got Dottie out of the house. You had to look for gratification, Dottie often said; it wasn't going to miraculously appear before you. She found gratification in small ways: when her face appeared somewhere, or her name. It made her feel connected to the rest of the world.

Opal had read
Howards End
in her English class the year before, and for weeks afterward everyone had gone around campus murmuring, “Only connect,” as though this were the only thing worth remembering from the novel. And what, even, did it
mean
? It had such an easy surface to it; of
course
, you thought to yourself, Forster is saying that we should all connect with each other! And you sat up in bed in the middle of the night, flicking on the lamp and waking your roommate to tell her how important it was that you two ”connected.” Your roommate lay there squinting at you in her Lanz nightgown, begging you to turn off the light.

So Dottie Engels only wanted to connect; what was wrong with that? You couldn't tell your mother
how
to connect; she had to decide that for herself. No one had told Dottie to be a comedian in the first place; that had been her own decision. It was, people had said in articles early on, her “gift.”

During a break, Opal peered down at her mother and waved, but Dottie didn't see her; she was having her hair fluffed by a woman in a smock, and her eyes were closed, as though she were momentarily dozing. The hairstylist gently shook her, and Dottie's eyes opened. The woman disappeared offstage, the light
went on again, and everyone was silent. The important round was about to begin, the part of the show that some viewers tuned in for exclusively.

Dottie was going to run the obstacle course. Melanie Sweet hadn't been able to hit the buzzer quickly enough, and she just kept shaking her glossy head of black-Labrador hair. Melanie Sweet's partner, a computer programmer named Suzanne, was given various sad parting gifts, and then her chair and desk began to move on their track, until she had floated offstage, waving forlornly, as though set adrift on an iceberg.

Now the obstacle course was ready. There would be small tasks for Dottie to carry out: “Nothing herculean,” the producers had assured her. This was the part that Opal didn't want to watch. She thought about going out into the lobby for a cigarette. She could come back in when it was all over, when Darren Helper had won enough money to pay back his student loans, or else had gone back to the Bronx empty-handed. Her mother's failure shimmered back at Opal like a reflection: herself in the mirror, wearing full makeup. Dottie had started off so big and wide and powerful, and now she was going to run along a snaking track in her red-dotted dress while the audience watched and roared. But it wasn't just Dottie; it was Opal, too, who had started off so small and wiry and clever, and had ended up at this uncertain place. How did we get like this? Opal wondered. She gazed back up at the pinpoint lights on the ceiling. She thought of Erica, standing in the doorway of that lousy building, staring out at her.

Dottie stood at the entry of the obstacle course. Then a loud bell rang and she was off. First to the archery range, where she had to shoot at a target whose colors represented different dollar
amounts. Dottie tried two arrows, and both missed the target completely. The third arrow hit the second-lowest amount, $250. The audience loved it. They screamed at her, urging her along. Dottie smiled up at the camera, her face a little crazed with triumph. Next Dottie went on to the pile of Buried Treasure. Somewhere underneath a big mound of dirt was a gold coin in there, which had nothing written on it at all. Whichever coin Dottie found first was the one Darren would keep. Dottie paused, panting, holding the shovel in one hand. The clock overhead was ticking away, and the audience was quiet once again.

Then she started digging. She went at it with a vengeance, and dirt flew around the stage. Opal watched her mother lift and lower rhythmically; she was like a dog digging up a bone in a yard. Now she was slowing down. The shovel came up, stayed in the air, came down. The camera did a close-up; Dottie's face was a high color, shining with sweat and radiant, as though a light had been left on somewhere underneath the surface. Dottie reached slowly down. Her hand curled around something, but the camera hadn't left her face. Suddenly her expression changed; in close-up it was terrible.

“Oh, help me,” Dottie said. She fell to the stage, and the shovel dropped too, with a resilient metallic clang. Opal sprang up, a small cry caged in her throat. The audience turned and murmured. Dottie Engels was flat on her back, a gold coin blazing in her hand.

W
hen the call came, all her clothes seemed to fly into her hands. Suddenly Erica found herself holding a blouse by the collar, a crushed pair of jeans, two socks. The telephone had shaken her from one of those strong afternoon naps, and now she was quickly dressing, stepping into her jeans and jerking the zipper closed.

On the phone, Opal's voice had been flat but frightened: She wasn't calling to buy coke, Erica knew at once. “It's about Mom,” Opal had said. “She's had a heart attack.”

Erica felt her own chest suddenly compress. She didn't know what in the world to say; finally she found a voice, but it sounded strangely hollow, as if she were speaking on an overseas call. “Where is she?” Erica asked.

“Roosevelt Hospital,” said Opal.

What next
? Something responsible, supportive. Erica picked
at a ragged fingernail. She was breathing faster now, through her nose, like a bull gathering steam. “Well,” Erica said, “I'll come there.”

There really wasn't a choice, she knew, as she pulled the blanket back and swung her legs over the side of the loft. Crisis did not leave
room
for choice. All your conflicted feelings were supposed to fly out the window, making way for action. But even as you geared up for it, you weren't thinking:
Oh, I'm so humane; I'm such a decent human being
. You weren't thinking at all, you were just responding dumbly, from the porous human marrow inside you. Erica dressed quickly, then hurried into the kitchen for her coat. Jordan was at the table with a box of Arm and Hammer baking soda and a box of safety matches in front of him. He was trying to figure out how to freebase.

“My mother's had a heart attack,” Erica said.

Jordan looked up slowly, distracted. “You going there?” he asked, but he did not ask where “there” was. It might have been anywhere; New York was certainly filled with hospitals. Jordan himself had been a patient at several of them. Erica nodded and slipped on her coat, and then she was outside.

During the subway ride uptown, the enclosed space as damp and hot as a Swedish sauna, Erica felt her body rock with the movement of the train, and she wondered if her mother would die, and if she did, what that would mean. She could not even begin to imagine. The train stopped at Fourteenth Street, and the doors slid open. A couple of people hobbled on, and the doors slid shut. At every stop, the train admitted more and more human tragedy, or maybe this was just the way she viewed the world today. Everyone looked specially beaten down by the ferocious cold weather, and the subway's warmth seemed to make
it worse, almost highlighting the misery. The lights blinked and went out for a few moments, and they all traveled in merciful darkness.

Erica thought: If my mother dies, I will be lost.

She wasn't sure why this should be so, and yet it felt absolutely true. In some way she took comfort from the fact that Dottie was
out
there. She felt like a child lying in bed while her parents' dinner party rages in the other room. The child does not have to take part, but is somehow soothed by the fact that all night, as she sleeps, the voices will continue, the low murmur of jazz, the gathering of plates.

When Erica arrived at the hospital, she had to follow a labyrinth of colored tape to find the Intensive Care Unit. All she could think of, as she followed the yellow lines at her feet, was the Freedom Trail in Boston, which her family had gone on years and years before. They had followed the brightly colored footprints all over the city, past Faneuil Hall, and the Commons, and Boston Harbor where the tea had been dumped. Now Erica was passing terrible sights: stick figures strapped to stretchers so they wouldn't blow off, nervous families clustered in anticipation around a doctor, an old man trying to wheel himself to the water fountain. She kept going until the yellow tape abruptly ended.

A nurse placed a cool hand on Erica's shoulder. “Do you have a pass?” she asked, her voice wafting straight from the Islands.

Erica shook her head. She tried to explain who she was, and her words came in a rush. The nurse led her into a crowded waiting room. It took her only a second to locate Opal. After an awkward moment of silence, Opal began to talk, giving a short, stuttering summary of how Dottie had collapsed onstage.

“It was really terrible,” she said. “There were all these people
everywhere, and one of the stagehands said he knew CPR, but it turned out he really didn't. I could barely get into the ambulance with her. And then when I did, I couldn't believe it; this paramedic took out this big pair of shears, like
garden
shears, and cut her dress right off her.”

“So what did they say?” Erica asked.

“Nothing,” said Opal. “Heart attack, that's all I know. They said to wait here, and somebody would come out and talk to us when they knew something.” She gestured toward a pair of windowless doors. “She's in there,” she said. “They don't let visitors in. We just have to wait.” Opal glanced up. “There are two reporters here,” she said. “I told them I didn't want to talk to them. If I
did
talk to them, I'd probably ask them where they've been for the past few years, when Mom needed the publicity. Now they're here when she doesn't need it.”

Erica glanced up and saw two young men walking restlessly around the room, picking up old magazines and putting them down. They stood out from the crowd; everyone else was sitting with their families in anxious huddles. On the floor a young boy played with a set of plastic
A-Team
dolls. He sat at his mother's and father's feet and talked to himself quietly, while his mother absently stroked his head.

If you brought a blind man in here, Erica thought giddily, he might think he was in a room full of people making love. All these
quiet
sounds, the hushed, agonized noises these desperate families made. It was just like the subway. Why wasn't anyone talking to each other? Erica wondered. If there ever was a time to commiserate, this was it. She could imagine everyone turning from their separate family constellations and beginning to speak as a group. It would all happen at once, like a pivotal
step in a folk dance, in which all the couples acknowledge each other and everyone steps back in a giant ring and links hands.

The mother of the little boy would look up and say, “Our daughter swallowed Comet.”

Comet, the
cleanser
, Erica would realize, and she would picture the scene: a child clutching the shiny green cylinder, tilting her head back to receive the full flow of powder. Erica shivered. Right now, she thought, Jordan was at the kitchen table with a yellow box of baking soda in front of him. She felt an inexplicable rage toward him—the way he continued to wear his hospital bracelet when nothing in the world was wrong with him, the way he had lounged in his hospital bed for two full weeks, following the soaps and eating canned peaches.

In that moment, Erica made an easy leap onto her mother's side of the fence. Maybe it hadn't entirely happened in that moment; maybe, if she thought about it hard, she might have seen it coming. After all, she had not been able to look at Jordan very much lately. The change had started the day Erica went to bed with Mitchell Block. She had come home and found Jordan sitting up in bed, his hair hanging in strings, his restless hands dancing on a mirror like figure skaters. It was as though she had gone directly from the Bed of Heaven to the Bed of Hell. But she climbed in with him anyway, because she didn't know what else to do, hadn't yet worked out a plan.

In the waiting room, Erica fantasized everyone would have a chance to talk about their particular tragedies. The middle-aged man in the corner might suddenly say, “My wife had a stroke,” and as he spoke he would claw at his tie, struggling to loosen the knot.

After each statement, everyone would murmur in sympathy.
It was like being at a group therapy meeting, at which everyone was revealing their problem, their addiction, their own personal pattern of self-destruction.

“Our mother had a heart attack,” Opal would say, and Erica would be touched and startled by the use of “our.” She suddenly remembered the two of them back in childhood, eating macaroni and watching television.

But Opal said nothing; no one did. The waiting room possessed the logic of dreams: You find yourself in a strange place and you're not sure why, and yet you do not question it. You simply move among the other people with grim purpose. Erica kept watching the sad eyes of the young couple and their son. Erica envied the boy. Imagine: to be absolutely lost in the world of the A-Team, to be thinking of nothing but victory and defeat, of good and bad. Imagine: to be sitting on the floor with your mother's hand warm on your head.

When they had been there for what might have been hours, Erica went out into the hall, fishing for change in her pockets. Neither she nor Opal was wearing a wristwatch, and she couldn't even guess what time it was. There were no windows in the waiting room outside the ICU; it might have been any hour of day or night. The only thing Erica had to mark time by was the fact that suddenly she was
hungry
. The method may have been more primitive than a sundial, but it was also flawed. Erica's hunger pains could occur at any time, whether or not she had recently eaten. Sometimes she felt her stomach scoop itself hollow just from fear, or boredom, or because she had seen an ad for McDonald's in the newspaper. Occasionally she woke up in the middle of the night and found herself flinging open the kitchen cabinets without knowing why.

Now the row of vending machines was overwhelming, and Erica pressed buttons randomly. She started with black coffee, and followed it with a Danish that had dropped from the machine for fifty cents. There were other, more bizarre items offered for sale here—old-lady rainhats, vials of cologne, Scottie-dog magnets—but all Erica wanted now was food. She wanted to eat, sitting under the waiting room lights, on the green vinyl couch, with the other exhausted people all around her. She carried an armload of food back down the hall, but when she returned to the waiting room, Opal was gone.

Erica panicked. A small hiss escaped her throat, like air from a tire.

“You looking for your sister?” the young mother asked, and then she pointed.

Across the room, behind the glass of the nurses' station, Erica could see Opal engaged in a pantomime conversation with a young doctor. Both of their hands were fluttering rapidly as they talked. Erica hurried across the room, and several packets of sugar went flying out of her grasp. She knocked on the glass, and a nurse buzzed her in.

Dr. Hammer was talking in a clipped tone. He was young and red-haired and unblinking, and he explained that Dottie's heart hadn't been able to sustain her massive weight, and that she had suffered a massive myocardial infarction.

“Wasn't she under the care of a physician?” he asked. Opal and Erica looked at each other blankly; neither of them had the vaguest idea. “I find it just
astonishing
that no one has ever put your mother on a diet,” he said. “Really, it's unconscionable. How has she gone on so long like this?” he asked.

“Because she made her living from it,” Opal said simply.

“Well, it may well kill her,” he said. “We'll do everything we can on our end, of course, but I just want to prepare you. If your mother pulls through, she's going to be a very sick woman. She will need a lot of care, but we'll talk about that later. For now, we're just trying to stabilize her. I'm afraid that all I can tell you now is to hang around and wait.”

Erica glanced at Dr. Hammer's wristwatch, but it was one of those stingy digital jobs that gave nothing away. The square face of the watch was darkly blank, like a television set at rest.

“I'll be checking on your mother periodically,” Hammer said. “If there is any change, someone will let you know.”

Erica and Opal went back to their post in the waiting room. Opal tapped a cigarette from a pack and lit it, sucking deeply. Erica watched her, observing the long, delicate arms and the round face, all of it at once familiar and
not
. Everything was like that today. Erica wasn't sure what was required of her; she had returned in the middle of a crisis, but there were no parents present, no instructions. They were two grown women with a dying mother, and that was all it was. The disenfranchised, the alienated, the lost: No matter what you were, you returned home at times like these, because if you didn't, your mother's face would loom like a dark angel above your bed forever.

Opal smoked for a while, and they both sat in silence, with everyone whispering and rustling all around them. Every once in a while, one of the reporters drifted over to the couch, but Erica and Opal had nothing to say. Erica closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she realized that she must have fallen asleep. One of the reporters was gone; the other one was reading a magazine in the corner. The young couple and their son were gone too, had been spirited away while Erica slept. There were
a few new replacement faces in the room. One of them, a woman in a waitress uniform, sat on the other end of the couch with her head in her hands.

“Opal,” said Erica. “Do you know what time it is?”

“I have no idea,” Opal said.

“Do you want to talk or something?” Erica asked.

“I don't know what there is to talk about,” Opal said.

“Well,” said Erica, “I want you to know that I'm not going to disappear again.” Her voice, she heard, was coming out louder than she had expected. The waitress lifted her head to listen. “That's all,” said Erica. “I just want you to know this.”

“It doesn't matter,” Opal said. She shifted away from Erica on the couch and closed her eyes, trying to look convincingly asleep. So Opal didn't want to talk; that was her choice, and there was nothing Erica could do about it. In her mind, she unscrolled the day that had just passed: the subway ride uptown, and the long wait, and the face of the redheaded doctor. Erica thought about the fact that Dottie might die, but then she could not give that thought any real meaning. She didn't know what to do with it; she couldn't reconcile herself to it, or in any way start to grapple with it. Instead, the thought slapped up against her and then simply
dropped
, like a baseball lobbed by a father to a dazed and hopeless child.