This Is My Life (17 page)

—

L
et me
look
at you,” Mia Jablon said. She spoke with the inflections of a mother who has been separated from her child for a long time. If the child knows what is good for her, she will stand back, arms at her sides, and let herself be appraised. A wrist will be lifted and dropped, strands of hair swept from left to right. A shirt will be tucked in hard, hands digging down the way only a mother would dare. But Mia simply wanted to look, and Opal didn't mind. Mia had been her babysitter, after all: someone who had cooked for her, and put her to bed, and sat drowsing all night in a tiny white rocking chair during croup
season. Opal stood still now while Mia observed her for a long moment, and then they embraced.

“You're a beauty,” Mia whispered. “I knew that would happen; I could see it even then.”

Opal had been working at
Rush Hour
for three weeks, and Mia Jablon had just been brought in, mid-season, as the newest cast member. Mia had been discovered by one of the show's producers at a small club in Tribeca, where she was performing with Synchronous Menses, the women's musical comedy troupe she had founded. She did characters: Her best one was an old black blues singer who had worked as a dishwasher her whole life, named Soapy Waters. Mia's humor had a deliberate edge; she stood onstage and said, “Sure, I'd like to have children one day. I think
one day
would be long enough.”

It had been nine years since she and Opal had seen each other, they calculated that first night over dinner at Mia and Lynn's loft. In those nine years Mia Jablon had barely changed at all, except to take on a kind of definition around the edges, as though she had been outlined in magic marker. Her body had stayed tight and small, her red hair only slightly threaded with something darker and less felicitous than it had been. The braid, Opal was pleased to see, was still intact.

“Television,
finally,
” said Mia, leaning over the table to gather plates. “I was always told I didn't have the face for it. Too scrunched up, they said; it won't hold up under the camera, it'll collapse like a soufflé. Now your mother, she's got a face. The camera used to eat her up.”

“If she didn't eat the camera first,” Opal said, and was immediately ashamed.

No one dared laugh. “How's Dottie doing?” Lynn quickly asked. She and Mia had recently moved from their old apartment in Brooklyn to this large loft in a warehouse on Franklin Street. They had very little furniture, and Opal wasn't sure if this was because they had moved in so recently, or whether it was the desired aesthetic. Either way, she liked the feel of this big, spare gymnasium of a room. Mia and Lynn moved about the space like two cats, Opal thought, watching them as they cleared the table. There was a balletic, married rhythm to their actions, and Opal realized, for the first time, that Mia and Lynn were lovers. It had probably always been common knowledge, and Opal was suddenly embarrassed about her ignorant child-self, that skipping, yammering
other
that she had been. Adulthood put a new spin on things, gave them a certain clarity. Mia scraped crumbs from the tablecloth with the side of a knife; Lynn snuffed out the fat candles in the center of the table. Everything was familiar, and tacitly coordinated.

“My mother's fine,” Opal said. “She's got a boyfriend. His name is Sy, and they seem happy together. They're together all the time.” Nobody said anything in response; they all observed an extended silence, as though speaking of the dead.

Mia plucked at a cluster of green grapes from her plate until she had pulled them all off, and the knobbed stems looked like a pile of jacks. “I've thought about your mother a lot,” she finally said. “I've followed her career pretty closely.” She shifted in her chair, settling in. “In the beginning, before I'd ever met her, it was so amazing to me that a woman had made it like that in comedy. And she was original, too; in those early shows, if you watch them now, you can see that she's really got her own voice. It's not so much that she was hilarious; she was just so outrageous,
so nervy. Sometimes I didn't even think she was funny, but I never minded.”

Opal nodded. “When Erica and I were little, we never really got it,” she said.

“Well, I
got
it, I think,” Mia said. “She was very much her own performer, and warm too, unlike some of the women who came later and made a big thing out of being bitter. You know, that kind of whiney humor that became popular. I remember watching her on Mike Douglas. It was exciting to see—like the beginning of something important, where there's still all this anticipation, but you're not sure what's going to happen. She was this huge, wacky
mother
figure let loose onstage. And then later on you can see that she's really in charge there, doing those weird songs and all those characters, and everybody is crazy about her. And then, finally, everything just
stops
. I couldn't understand why your mother wasn't on any of those comedy specials anymore. Lynn and I used to spend hours looking for her name in
TV Guide
. But then I realized that it had less to do with
her
than with what else was going on at the time. I mean, look at how the women's movement changed everything. Suddenly everybody got a little embarrassed if women made jokes about their bodies, but Dottie wouldn't stop; she was like a machine. God, all those jokes about breasts.”

“Boobs,” Lynn interrupted. “I believe the word here is ‘boobs.' If you're going into television, you'd better get your terms straight.”

Mia laughed. “Right,” she said. “I'll remember that. Range wasn't her big thing,” she went on. “It was consistency. If you wanted a certain kind of comedy, you could get it from Dottie. She satisfied your expectations.”

“And now she's doing fat women's clothing,” Opal said. Her voice surprised her, resounding in the room as though she had suddenly started shouting in a museum.

“That upsets you?” Lynn asked.

Opal looked at her. “No,” she qualified, “it embarrasses me.”

“But she's hanging on,” Mia said. She leaned across the table, arms folded. “I've been hanging on forever. In these nine years since you've seen me, I've been a waitress at four different restaurants—in one of them I had to wear a bonnet and carry a basket of warm popovers—and I've word-processed at three in the morning for a law firm, and sold moisturizer at the Clinique counter at Bloomingdale's, and I used to come home on the subway to Brooklyn every night, so exhausted I felt sick, and I'd have to get my energy up so I could turn around and go back into the city three hours later to play at a club where maybe ten people would see me.” She paused. “And now I'm going to be on TV, and I'm supposed to pretend that I'm still fresh-scrubbed and excited about it, that I'm not already exhausted by life. I wouldn't be so quick to criticize that mother of yours. She's a wonderful woman; I guess because of her you don't have to worry about money. You're not going to be living in a trailer park eating olive loaf. You go to Yale, and that's terrific, but you should be a little more grateful, Opal; I mean,
look
at your life. Look around you.”

When she had finished, Mia seemed self-conscious. “I'm sorry to go on like this, but I feel so strongly about it,” she said. “I feel bad too when I see Dottie up there on TV with that rack of balloon-dresses, but what are you going to do? I think
anybody's
life, if you put it on display, would look like a commercial for fat women's clothing. It's your mother at her most extreme,
the worst that can be made of the fact that she's big. So maybe someday I'll be on TV with Lynn and we'll be doing a commercial for
gay
women's clothing.” Mia patted out a little beat on the table. “Gals!” she began. “We've got the biggest collection of designer overalls and work boots! Wear them home for Christmas and make your parents
miserable
!”

Opal leaned back in her chair and laughed easily. She could have stayed here for hours, she knew; she could have sat and listened to Mia Jablon talk about almost anything. Mia would be a success on the show; Opal was sure of it. Her appeal would be very different from Dottie's; Mia wouldn't fill up the whole screen. She would occupy one small part of it, ignite it like a match, so your eye was forced toward the point of light. You
wanted
to look at Mia; her face was intelligent and asymmetrical. Opal glanced across the table for a second at Lynn, who was watching Mia also. Lynn's smile was broad and full and Opal was suddenly envious of their love, of any married love that could sustain itself like this. She herself had never had it, had never known it was possible.

At the end of dinner, Opal was reluctant to go. She took time to pull on her jacket, slowly drawing the zipper closed. Lynn was stacking dishes in the kitchen, and Opal and Mia stood in the doorway together.

“You know, I'd like to see Dottie,” Mia said. “Do you think she'd be interested in hearing from me? We sort of fell out of touch when you got too old to need babysitting. She had so many people in her life.”

“I'm sure she would,” Opal said, and this was true; her mother always expressed pleasure at seeing people she had not seen in a long time, or even at meeting people who claimed to be big fans.

“I wish I could help her,” Mia went on. “Maybe we could get her an appearance on the show. Not that I have any power there. I've only just
arrived
, but maybe when I settle in more—if they still like me—I could suggest it.”

“She hates the show,” Opal said. “She doesn't think it's funny at all.”

Mia shook her head. “Don't be so sure,” she said. “Dottie hates being left out, I think. I've seen that happen. When I found out that I had gotten this job, everyone in Synchronous Menses acted really weird toward me, sort of nasty. They told me I wouldn't be able to do the kind of humor I was used to, that I was selling out as a feminist, blah blah. I mean, I'd heard all that a dozen years ago, when I shaved my legs for my cousin Judy's wedding. But I know that most of them would have taken this job in a
second
if it was offered to them. They're all living on food stamps, and they want to be seen, they want to be out there. Everybody feels left behind; you have to take that into account. Dottie feels like the whole world has changed, and maybe it has, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just hard, when you've made a living out of certain kinds of attitudes. Lucky for me, I never had any success before, so I'm perfectly happy to ring in the new, to leave things behind.”

“Just don't leave
me
behind,” Lynn called from the kitchen.

“Never,” Mia called back.

Opal rode the freight elevator down to the street. The world had coupled up, it seemed, overnight. But the coupling wasn't all that new, she realized; what
was
new was the fact that she had noticed it, and that it now troubled her. Mia and Lynn, she thought, Erica and Jordan, Dottie and Sy. She wondered again if her father was coupled, too. Maybe he lived alone on Coconut
Court, and was one of those people who said he was “married” to his work. Opal had written to him a second time, had asked if he had received her first letter, but he still did not respond. Tamara, who checked Opal's mailbox at Yale Station every few days, said that nothing of importance had arrived. Opal would have to start thinking of other things.

But it was hard to think of other things on a night like this, heading alone out of the warm light of someone else's home into the street. Lower Manhattan was perfectly still, and the streets were lined with shallow craters that shone with rain. Opal glanced up at Mia and Lynn's window, and could see a shadow elongate, then compress, behind the paper shade. Everyone had made their choices, had settled in for the long run. This was it, she thought, and yet she knew that she herself was still in suspension. All around her, women chose to be with men, wanting the complement of bodies, or, like Mia, they chose to be with women, wanting something else that Opal didn't even attempt to imagine. It was too much of a cliché to say that a woman wanted the sameness that another woman offered. Mia and Lynn were nothing alike: Mia so spritely, and Lynn with her lupine face and deliberate, ironic stance. In truth, Opal knew nothing about coupling of any sort. All she knew was that humans were supposed to gravitate toward one another, the way plants bend into the light.

At college, freshman year, Opal had gone to bed with Tom Kennerly, a slightly undernourished, handsome boy she had met one morning in the dining hall. In the beginning, she told him scraps of information about herself, but he already knew who her mother was. She went about the relationship with a kind of clinical enthusiasm; it felt good to be one of the sexually active women in
the dormitory who sat around at night with a copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
open on a table, like members of a Bible study group.

“Cystitis,” a knowledgeable senior would say, diagnosing an underclasswoman who sat doubled over in pain. “
Definitely
cystitis.” And someone would be sent on a run to the Stop and Shop for a jug of cranberry juice and some plain yogurt. It was a secret club, and somehow the clubbiness of it was the aspect of having a lover that Opal liked best. She actually began to read the question and answer columns in women's magazines; she took the quizzes they offered, and tallied up her score to learn her “intimacy quotient” or her likelihood for divorce. She did well on these quizzes, and somehow this gave her an embarrassing amount of pleasure.

Opal felt far less comfortable actually being with Tom. As she lay in his bed, she looked blankly at her reflection in the high mirror over his dresser, where the arms of sweaters hung out of drawers, like the arms of people waving from a train. She clutched on to Tom's narrow torso late at night when everyone else was out at a double feature of
Harold and Maude
and
King of Hearts
—and he slid himself into her and then out again like a piece of light machinery. It works! she had thought with some pleasure, but her pleasure was that of a former disbeliever, not a lover. She had been convinced; her body was desirable and operated properly, and even if at times she felt herself hovering somewhere above the scene, looking down on the small room and the crooked mirror and the pink flesh of this young man from Lyme, Connecticut, it had still worked properly, and he had labored until she finally came, with a long, sibilant release of sound that surprised them both.