This Is My Life (23 page)

T
he doorman had lit a votive candle for Dottie Engels. “We're all thinking about your mother,” he announced as Opal walked across the lobby, and all she could do was nod and thank him and hurry out into the street to flag a cab. She could not talk about Dottie yet; it was too soon, too much. Walt Green had left three messages on the answering machine, asking Opal to please contact him, but she hadn't returned his calls. She hadn't returned
any
of the calls on the machine yet, although the tape was thick with frantic messages.

Opal didn't know what she would tell anyone. Her mother was out of Intensive Care, momentarily out of “the woods,” a nurse had said, but she still lay doped-up and sick, tethered to a monitor and an oxygen tank and I.V. drip. A private nurse named Mrs. Ramsay sat beside the bed and knitted an afghan with bundles of bright, unraveling wool.

At first Dottie didn't talk very much, and her voice, when
she used it, was rusted and slow. “You girls still here?” she asked, and Opal and Erica piped up from the windowsill that they were indeed right here. “Did anyone call Sy?” Dottie asked. “Did anyone take in the mail?” Opal assured her that everything had been seen to, that Sy was on his way home, and that all Dottie had to do was lie still. “I don't feel anything,” Dottie said. “No pain. Just a little nausea. Nothing.” After a while she sank back into a chemical sleep.

Opal thought of Sal the doorman in his brown uniform with gold braid, kneeling down to place a votive candle on the altar of a church somewhere in Brooklyn. The trappings of serious illness were so bewildering: rows of candles and tanks of oxygen and all those
flowers
. Dottie's room was choked with huge arrangements of peonies and gardenias that friends had sent, and a vine that spidered wildly across the windowsill and trailed like a comet to the floor.

In the evening, Sy returned from Hong Kong. He swept into Dottie's room directly from the airport, and Opal and Erica watched as he leaned over her bed to kiss her hello. “I got on a plane immediately,” Opal heard him say.

“Sy, I had a heart attack,” Dottie said, her voice tiny.

“No kidding,” said Sy. “I thought it was an ingrown toenail.”

“Please,” said Dottie. “Don't.”

Before Sy had even had a chance to take off his coat, Dr. Hammer swung into the room. “I'm going to examine her,” he said, “but you people should stick around outside, because I'll want to talk to you afterward.”

They walked out into the hall as the doctor was whisking a curtain around Dottie's bed. Opal quickly introduced Sy to Erica, who looked confused. Sy leaned against the wall and shut
his eyes. She noticed that he hadn't shaved, and that his tweed suit was lined with creases. “You must be exhausted,” Opal said.

“Ah,” he said, “who knows. I'm still on Hong Kong time. It'll catch up with me later. For now, I'm not thinking about it. I have other things to worry about.” The three of them stood stiffly together in the dim hallway, while in the background bells lightly rang and elevator doors slid open and closed. After a few minutes Dr. Hammer beckoned them back inside.

“I want everybody to hear this,” he said. “It's very important.” He adjusted his collar and positioned himself beside the head of Dottie's bed, looking pointedly at Opal and Erica. “As you know, your mother is very sick,” he said. “But she has a choice. She can change her life and get well, or she can remain the way she is and soon die.” He spoke with a kind of hushed intensity, and Opal imagined that he might have been a member of some cult religion before turning to medicine. “And when I say change, I mean seriously,” he said. “I'm not talking about some piddling, half-assed diet.” He turned to Dottie. “Your blood pressure is sky-high,” he said, “and your heart is the size of a ham. It's actually amazing that you've survived this long; it says something about your strength. But in your present state, you are a walking time bomb.”

Opal looked over at Erica, who stood clawing at a fingernail and at Sy, who was nervously smoothing down the creases on his suit. Finally she looked at Dottie, who was lying perfectly still.

“What do you mean, ‘change'?” Dottie said.

“For one thing,” said Hammer, “you have to stop smoking. Cold turkey. And you must lose weight. Not just some small amount, but over a hundred pounds. Exercise. This isn't a joke. You've got to change.”

“I thought you said I had a choice,” Dottie said.

“Maybe you didn't understand,” said Hammer. “I'll say it again: If you don't lose weight, you will certainly die. Another heart attack very soon, I would guess. More severe, and probably fatal. Your heart is
huge
.”

“Yes, I've heard,” said Dottie. “Like a ham.”

When he was gone, no one moved. Everyone stood where they were, until finally Sy said, “So, what do you think, Dot?”

“I think it's lousy,” she said, her voice trembling. “
Change
myself. Nobody can really change.”

“They're not asking you to change your inner self,” Opal said. “Just your weight.”

“Maybe that is my inner self,” said Dottie. “You don't know what it's like being fat.” She turned to Erica suddenly. “Erica,” she said, “you know what I'm talking about, don't you? You know what it's like. Tell them.”

But Erica wouldn't answer. She just shrugged and looked away.

“All right then,” said Dottie. “I see I'm on my own here.”

“Dottie, you're not on your own,” said Sy. “You have all our support. Whatever you need to do, you'll
do
. And we'll all help you.”

“Forget it,” said Dottie, and she began to cry. “I'm not up to it,” she said. “I just don't have it in me.” Erica reached over to the night table and pulled up a fistful of tissues for her. Everyone kept standing there while Dottie cried noisily. At one point, Mrs. Ramsay looked up from her knitting and suddenly said, “It's the drugs, you know. They make you depressed. I had one heart patient, a priest, who cried like a baby.”

“I feel terrible,” said Dottie, when she could speak again. “I
don't want to be here in the first place, and now they come in and tell me I have to
change
. I've spent a lifetime a certain way; I'm not about to suddenly become someone else. The public knows me this way; it's who I am.” She gestured loosely. “This
is it
,” she said. “What you see is what you get.”

“Maybe not,” Opal tried. “Maybe there's more.”

Dottie shook her head, twisting the tissues between her hands. “No,” she said. “I don't want to live if it means becoming something I'm not.”

“What is this?” said Sy. “You sound like that license plate, ‘Live Free or Die.'”

“That's how I feel,” said Dottie. “I appreciate all your concern, but it's my choice. Hammer said so himself. And I choose
not
to change my life. I'd rather just let go, just not fight it.”

“What do you mean?” Opal said. “You're talking like a real nut case.”

“No, I'm making perfect sense,” said Dottie. “It's my life, and you've got to trust me. Anyway, you girls will do fine by yourselves; you always have. Please,” she said. “Don't argue with me; I'm not up to it. I feel sick. I need to sleep.”

And with that, Dottie pressed a button and her motorized bed slowly changed position, buckling like a wave.

—

L
ate that night, back in the apartment, Opal padded into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Faced with the solid wall of food, she was overwhelmed and could not choose. This was the way Dottie Engels ate; this was why she was so huge. Opal remembered one of Dottie's oldest jokes: “I do have a weight problem; I just can't
wait
for dinner!” She found herself
smiling, thinking about it now, but then suddenly the humor was lost, and she leaned into the bright cold light of the refrigerator and began to cry.

She didn't know what she was supposed to do; she hadn't in any way prepared herself for this. To be orphaned at twenty had never seemed a possibility. And Erica would be no help at all; Erica kept herself at an arm's length from civilization, so she was untouched by disaster. What was to come? Opal wondered. What frightened her most was that she couldn't even begin to imagine.

Maybe she would become one of those nervous, lost women you sometimes saw in the city, prowling Columbus Avenue after work. The kind of woman who will probably spend the night watching cable TV at home, stabbing a finger up and down the row of channel buttons. Dozens of choices haunted the nighttime airwaves: phone-in psychics, nude talk shows, ancient black-and-white sitcoms that evoke a world of meddlesome neighbors and separate beds. It doesn't matter what is watched, finally, because
all
of it is interchangeable. What matters are the voices that expand to fill the room.

Opal thought of how Walt had walked around the apartment and marveled at the space, seeing it in a way that Opal no longer could. The ceilings seemed too high to her now, the walls too far apart. How strange that the temper of rooms could shift like the seasons. Years before, the apartment had been a perfect size; the rooms had spilled into each other endlessly, and it didn't seem impossible that a new wing or passageway might be discovered behind a closed door, like an apartment in a dream. Nothing had seemed impossible then. You could feel the presence of real life in those rooms, with the babysitters practicing
and Erica's incense infusing the air with its sweet stink. Dottie had barely been home then, but it almost hadn't mattered. Whenever her mother was away, Opal prepared for her return. She waited under the awning with the doorman, and when the limousine pulled up at the curb she skidded out onto the sidewalk, pressing her face to the square of smoked glass.

Now Opal went into her mother's bedroom and sat down on the large bed. She lit a cigarette, and the snap of the lighter, the friction of her thumb against the little wheel, was peculiarly satisfying. If Dottie listened to Dr. Hammer, she would never be able to smoke again. Imagine, Opal thought, never letting a cigarette take its time to burn between two fingers, never pulling in smoke and feeling it roll like water down your throat. This would be difficult for Dottie, she knew. But what would be much worse, of course, would be the food. Dottie would have to give up the important items: anything with a crust, or filling, anything glutinous or dense or set afloat in butter. No salt, either. When Dottie salted food, Opal remembered, her hand moved as rapidly as someone shaking a maraca.

But it wasn't just the food. It was something else that Opal couldn't really imagine: this notion of
losing
yourself for good, giving up the reflection in the full-length mirror. Giving up the known, the given, the thing that you had never really liked, but which you knew would always be there. If
you
couldn't recognize yourself anymore, how could you expect anyone else to? Even the idea of you would disappear. In a way, it was worse than a death.

Opal sat smoking in the bedroom, and she realized that she was actually talking herself into agreeing with her mother's decision, giving Dottie permission to let go. But this was all wrong;
Opal needed to calm down a little, get her bearings. She reached across the bed to where the remote control lay, and she hit the power.

Immediately a medical drama sprang to the screen. “Is Rick going to be all right, Doctor?” a young woman was asking. She was dressed in elephant bell bottoms and a headband; this was clearly a Sixties rerun.

The doctor opened the door and let Katrina into the hospital room, where her boyfriend lay on a bed, his arms and legs restrained by leather cuffs. He had apparently wigged out on LSD, and was now talking like a madman, or a mystic.

Even in the midst of everything, television still went on. What had Opal expected, that all the channels would have a day of silence out of respect for Dottie Engels? That they would all broadcast the static pattern that came onscreen at the end of a programming day, and all you would be able to hear was the flat, steady hum that told you there was nothing on, that the world was asleep, and that you ought to be, too?

This was what death did to you, or the possibility of death: It made you long for some stasis, for maybe just a measly fifteen minutes' worth, in which the whole world might slow to a wobbly standstill like a child's top.

Opal opened the drawer of her mother's night table. She found random, unconnected items inside: emery boards, a checkbook, a spool of dental floss. The smallest, most benign items were the worst to look at now; they hammered home the reminder that this person's life was made up entirely of daily acts: a life strung together on
dental floss
as much as anything else. Opal climbed off the bed and went to her mother's closet. She flung open the door and snapped on the overhead light,
then she began rooting around as though she were looking for one particular item, when in fact she was looking for nothing at all. She let herself forage through Dottie's clothing, and all of it smelled shockingly familiar, as though Dottie herself were still inside each dress, her body warming and filling it.

Opal buried her head in the rack. Down below, she saw, were the shoes, lined up in a homely row. Her mother had extremely wide feet, EEE width; her shoes looked as though they were straining at the sides, gaping open like the mouths of baby birds. Dottie had tottered around onstage on wide women's pumps with narrow spiked heels, all her weight resting on two skinny pivots. Dr. Hammer had not gotten over how much Dottie weighed, and how no one had done anything about it.

Suddenly Opal was ashamed. But what
should
she have done? Put one of those horrible gag tape recorders in the refrigerator, so when Dottie pulled open the door, the refrigerator would seem to be speaking to her, saying:
You eat too much, fatso! Close me, I'm freezing!
Or maybe she could have sat her mother down in the den and said, “We're all worried about you, Mom. You simply must lose weight.” This would have been reasonable, and yet it had never once occurred to Opal. Her mother was simply what she was, the sum of all those pounds, and always had been. Opal remembered the way Dottie used to hold her, years ago, taking her up on her wide lap, and how Opal had felt a flood of pleasure every time.