by Meg Wolitzer
“I know people always say this, and it doesn’t make any sense,” said Maddy as they all lay around the living room, “but the thing I can’t get over is that we just saw her. She was right here, sitting beside me on this couch, and we were discussing what we were going to do tomorrow—and then we were talking about other things, like her work. She showed me all these World War Two propaganda cartoons she’d collected, of buck-toothed, slanty-eyed evil Japanese people. She just knew so much about the war, about history, and it reminded me of how little I know about everything.”
“You know a lot,” Peter said reflexively.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Every dull fact they taught me in law school. And all about breastfeeding. Those are my two pathetic areas of expertise. Sara was the one who knew things,” she said. “And I just can’t believe this has happened to her.” And then her voice broke up once again into a new round of sobs.
Peter rubbed Maddy’s shoulders and clasped her lightly in his arms. “It’s like that joke,” he said after a long moment. “Descartes walks into a bar, and the bartender asks him, Would you like a drink?’ And Descartes says, ‘I think not,’ and then he disappears.” He paused, adding, “She just disappeared.”
No one laughed. Finally Maddy said, “I can’t believe you’re making a joke now.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“Then just say nothing” she said, and the subtext was that Sara had been her close friend, not his, and that he ought to shut up forever. At least I have Duncan, Maddy thought. For she could go to her baby and bury her face in his sweet neck; it was a simple and uncomplicated act. Everything was much more complicated with Peter. Maddy had often discussed her husband intimately with Sara; such talk tempered the whole exclusionary experience of marriage, made it feel less lonely.
“You don’t know what it’s like, living with someone year after year,” Maddy had said one summer, as she and Sara went for a walk along the weedy dunes of the local beach. They were smoking and walking, two best friends, one beautiful, the other less so. “He leaves the toilet seat up,” Maddy went on. “He plays his old obnoxious CDs early in the morning. He lifts these weights and leaves them laying around where I can trip on them. And he’s male. And therefore, I don’t think he understands women. That’s the main thing.”
“You know, it’s too bad that we’re not lesbians,” Sara had said, “because then we could be together all the time and be totally devoted.”
“Yes,” Maddy had agreed, “it’s too bad,” and as she spoke a man ran past on the sand with a dog. His chest was bare, gleaming and hairless. His legs had a golden summer fur on them, and as he and his dog raced by he glanced over at Sara and smiled.
“You see,” said Sara, “we need that around.” She included Maddy in the moment of male appreciation, although what the moment was really about was Sara and this man on the beach, who appreciated her right back. When men were interested in you, they made you feel you had something unique and unbearably exciting. Men winced with pleasure at the sight of a woman undressing. Even Maddy, whose body was imperfect, whose breasts had always seemed to her balloonishly large, had caused several men to wince and moan and nearly seem on the verge of having their eyes roll up in their heads. Peter had been that way the first time they slept together and he still was that way, to a lesser extent.
Sara had been very encouraging when Peter first showed an interest in Maddy back at Wesleyan, and after their first unofficial “date” (no one called it that), Maddy rushed to Sara’s dorm room to provide a blow-by-blow account. When Maddy and Peter moved into an attic apartment with sloping ceilings off-campus, Sara grew closer to Adam by default, turning to him for the late-night companionship and availability that Maddy could no longer provide. Sara and Adam found they loved being together; what had started out as a consolation-prize friendship quickly transformed into something very satisfying. Now Maddy suddenly didn’t know how she could stay married to Peter without having Sara to bounce everything off of. She suddenly didn’t know how she could do much of anything without Sara.
All the reading they had done in college, all the Jung and Thomas Merton and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, all the high holidays spent neatly dressed in synagogues or churches with their families, all the Junior Year Abroad visits to Chartres to see the stained glass and reflect on the passage of time, and all the long, bloated, free-associative conversations they had taken part in over the years about the subjects of death, rebirth, and the nature of the spirit-self—none of it helped now.
No one slept much those first days after the accident; instead, they moved from living room to kitchen, where they sat around the table, opening bottles and pouring drinks. Mrs. Moyles may have been a terrible housekeeper, but she had a cabinet impressively stocked with partially empty scotch and vodka and brandy bottles, the liquids at different levels, like the collection of a musician who taps out tunes on bottles with a spoon. They cried for a long, long time in unbroken, phlegmy sobs, and they muttered and embraced. They cried and drank, except for Shawn, who mostly just drank. Eventually the alcohol seemed to stopper the crying. There were whimpers, and mumbling, and then they actually resumed talking.
“Oh, why did I want ice cream for that raspberry pie?” said Adam at three in the morning, drunk as he hadn’t been since his bar mitzvah reception, when his cousins carried him on their shoulders and he sang “Hava Nagila” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in off-key abandon. “It would have been perfectly fine without it.”
“It’s not your fault,” everyone chorused.
“I always thought,” said Adam after a while, “that Sara and I were going to know each other for a very long time, probably well into our eighties. It seems so ridiculous now, so optimistic, but I never even considered the fact that we might not get old together. At least not after I had my HIV test. Before I got tested, I thought maybe it would be me who would die when I was young, me who would leave her, all because I once got fucked without a condom by some moron named Warren, some exercise instructor who ran a class on the QE2. He bored me to death, comparing the QE2 with the Princess line.” He paused. “Why am I talking about this?” he said. “There’s nothing that’s appropriate to talk about; it all seems indecent.”
They all agreed that talk was indecent, and then they sat in silence for the next hour, the only sounds coming from the play of ice in their glasses, and Duncan gurgling and chirping in his obliviousness. Sometime in the night, it was decided that they would all leave the house. No one wanted to stay there for the summer, continuing their hellish descent in these dingy little rooms. But, as Peter pointed out, there still remained the inevitable, sheepish question of whether they would get their money back if they left.
“Was that awful of me to mention the money?” Peter asked Maddy when they climbed into bed at dawn. Across the room, the baby now breathed softly in the downy depths of his Portacrib.
“No,” said Maddy. “It’s not awful. But I don’t want to talk about money anymore.” She lay against the stiff, camphorous pillow. In other summers, this room had felt both terrible and comfortable, and she had always loved it; being here offered a kind of sameness, a suspension in what was familiar. But without Sara, suddenly everything felt strangely unknown.
The two women had known each other as children, attending the same all-girls summer camp in the Adirondacks, where they sat around a bonfire at night and sang the lyrics to the Camp Ojibway song: “We will always be true to Ojibway / No matter if we’re young or old / We will always be true to Ojibway / No matter if we’re meek or bold …” There, among a sea of cunning, slightly nasty campers who competed to the death during color war, they recognized a similarity, a shared type of intelligence.
“You read all the time,” Sara had said to her in the bunk one afternoon, and what had seemed to be an accusation was in fact a compliment. “I do, too,” she added.
“Really?” said Maddy.
“Yes,”
said Sara. Then she said proudly, “Right now, I’m reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet”
Maddy was suitably impressed; Sara was not only popular, she was smart too, a combination that was unusual. Whenever Sara walked across the lawn at camp, other girls stopped her to discuss their problems. From a distance, you could see another girl looking pinched with unhappiness, and Sara leaning close to her in concern.
Under trees and by the darkening lake at dusk, the two girls talked about the other campers in exhaustive detail, making lists of those they liked and those they despised. “Erica Engels,” said Sara, “is fat on the outside, and extremely pathetic at first glance, but I think we should pay special attention to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day she became a neurosurgeon, or even Secretary of State.” Maddy nodded, impressed by Sara’s powers of observation.
“And what about Susan Lottman?” she asked Sara. “Evil incarnate, right?”
“Right,” said Sara. “Just because she can dive well, and her father practically owns Clinique, she thinks she’s so special. But keep an eye on her. I think she’s big trouble; I can sense it in my bones. She’ll probably end up in prison for grand larceny, or worse.” Maddy nodded, contented at the knowing intimacy of these conversations.
Camp Ojibway was filled with rich girls from Manhattan, children of divorce who flounced around the bunk, speaking either in code or in perfect conversational French. Maddy was part of a group of semi-outcasts, a handful of city girls whose families lived in identical high-rise rental apartments with porous walls and low, stippled ceilings. Girls who understood, through the haze of pain native to girlhood, that eventually all this would pass, and that if they waited long enough, the rich, stupid girls would falter and topple, and the brainy, off-kilter girls would inherit the earth. Sara was not in Maddy’s social group; she was too pretty for that, but she truly liked Maddy and admired her. The attention was flattering and unnerving. When you were with Sara, boys from Camp Iroquois across the lake stopped and hung around you, angling to engage in pointless, arch conversations. Friendship with Sara gave Maddy great pleasure but also instilled in her a budding feeling of despair. Getting dressed for a swim at camp, she would catch a flash of Sara’s smooth, white back that arched as gracefully as a seahorse, and she would think: I hate myself.
Over the years, Sara and Maddy attempted to top each other’s intimate accounts of self-loathing. There was a requisite, mutual flirtation with bulimia in the late teens, and a period devoted to reading Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath exclusively. And always, along the way, there were excruciating tales of boys. Later, both of them wound up at Wesleyan, where they met the two men who would become central to their lives: Adam and Peter. It had surprised Maddy when Peter showed a real interest in her; he was better-looking than the men who usually liked her. He was better-looking than she was, a shirtless campus Frisbee player with tanned, hairy legs, someone who flirted easily with women. He was handsome yet slightly lost—almost homeless-seeming, in a way—and so he wasn’t intimidating in the way of many good-looking men. Sara had encouraged Maddy, telling her she clearly had an esteem problem and that Peter would be lucky to go out with her. So Maddy had been bolder than usual, surprising him by looking him over in a way that was more than playful. He responded by looking back, his eyebrows lifting, setting off something lightly percussive inside her: a quick pulse, a drumbeat signifying some strange and improbable pleasure ahead. Soon they were a campus couple, the whole transaction having taken place as quietly and discreetly as a drug deal. She didn’t really know what he saw in her, although Sara said there was much to see. “You’re lovely!” Sara had said. “Don’t you know that by now?” Actually, Maddy thought of herself as an extremely decent person, and pretty in a somewhat dull, wildflower-patterned-dress-wearing way. But she was devoted to Peter, even when he seemed distracted, inattentive, off in a nebula of abstract thoughts that didn’t include her. Maddy, Peter, Adam, and Sara hung around a pizza place near campus late at night, and spent hours on the deep, springless couches of the library lounge during the reading period before exams.
After college, Maddy and Peter lived in a terrible railroad apartment in New York City—she starting law school, he teaching ninth grade at a public high school—and Sara began what would be a long chain of unfulfilling relationships with men. The men were of the sort that had usually been unavailable to Maddy—handsome in a sculptural way, or perhaps very powerful.
What was sex with these men like? Maddy knew she would never get the answer from personal experience. She and Peter had settled into a pattern of frequent and mostly ordinary sex; they had their gasping orgasms: first her, then him, each of them skittering across the finishing line, and then someone would wash up or get a glass of water, and then they would lie in bed for a while, perhaps picking up the remote control to see what was on television, perhaps not. It was pleasurable but not thrilling. Somewhere else, Maddy knew, Sara was probably wrapping her long and enveloping legs around a brooding, worldly man, practically bringing him to tears with pleasure. Now Sara would never have a baby, would never even get married, would never experience the natural arc of life that everyone assumed was their birthright.
Maddy and Peter rustled and turned in bed, and across the room, as if in synchrony, so did the baby. Down the hall, Adam and Shawn rustled and turned too. Despite the tragedy, the entire household was moving softly in preparation for sleep; there was no choice. Finally, before morning arrived, everyone slept. The house fell silent for a while until suddenly there was a series of creaks and oddly heavy, stumbling footsteps that seemed close by. Maddy and Peter woke at the same time and lay listening, puzzled and a little scared. Then Peter got up and opened the door, and there in the hall they saw Adam, wandering around in the dark and trying doorknobs. First he opened the bathroom and peered in, then he went into the linen closet. It was as though he was looking for something, but he seemed strange, clumsier than usual.
“Adam?” said Peter. “Are you okay?” But Adam barely heard him. He had pulled open the door of Sara’s room and was walking right in. “Adam?” Peter said again, but it was pointless. Behind Peter came Maddy and Shawn, who was naked to the waist, the hair on his head standing up in sleep-clumps.
“What’s going on?” Shawn asked nervously. “I woke up and he was gone. Then I heard this weird stomping around.”
“He’s sleepwalking,” said Peter. They all looked at Adam, who was now yawning the open-mouthed yawn of a child, then climbing up onto the bed Sara Swerdlow had slept in every August, his head on her pillow.
4
With Sara
Mrs. Hope Moyles spent every August in Virginia, visiting her sister Verna. Both women had long been widowed, and their children never came around anymore, so once again, as it had been in childhood, they had each other.
That had always been the thing about Hope’s house: although it wasn’t very nice, she could rent it out in August and make enough money to help her get through the winter. Who would have predicted this, so many years ago when she and her husband had bought the place? The island had always been rigidly stratified: Rich summering families had their mansions on the water, and everyone else—lobstermen, policemen, plumbers—had their small houses and neat quarter-acres of land. The summer people fled on Labor Day, packing up their cars and leaving behind nothing but the occasional abandoned inner tube. Everyone else stayed on all year, the regular local folk and a few eccentric types, writers and painters and the like, who decided that the beach was the place to be all winter. The children all attended the public school with its unvarying line-up of teachers: Miss Hill, Mrs. Cullen, and Miss Manzino. For the rest of the year the wind blew hard across the island, and the sky darkened early. In summer, though, the children were set free, and they swam and ran and crabbed and came home with sudden blond, beach-baked heads of hair. One summer, the island no longer seemed to belong to them; it belonged to the rich people with their big houses and their own children, who came to the
beach with snorkels and expensive sound systems and suntan lotions that smelled of coconut and vanilla. Then other people followed, less rich but still privileged, renting anything they could grab, and soon all of the Moyles’s friends were letting strangers stay in their unexceptional houses for shocking sums of money, and taking their own families off to Jersey until Labor Day, struck dumb by this new good luck. So Hope and Jack Moyles did the same, and the money was so good each year that they came to count on it.
When Jack died, Hope continued to rent out the house with more urgency than ever. As a widow she had taken up the hobby of drinking, and she liked to spend her money on good vodka and gin that she purchased at Springs Liquors. Every year the same group came to the house: odd young people from the city who paid through the nose for use of her appalling little home. Why they wanted the house she couldn’t imagine; she just hoped they were decent. Decency was important to her. But money, that was the main thing.
So when one of them, the girl with the halting voice, called Hope at her sister’s house a few days into the month to tell her a horrible story about how the other girl in the house had been killed, and that they were all an emotional wreck, and was there any way they could have their money back, Hope was stunned. She had been drinking before the call, and her response was slow and suspicious. She wondered if such a terrible story could really be true. How low would they stoop to get their money back? Had they finally decided that her house was too disgusting, even for them? Maybe the waterbugs were back, with their delicate cilia, appearing out of nowhere against the porcelain of the bathtub, like someone’s misplaced false eyelashes. Or maybe it was the septic tank backing up, making the house smell like a bathroom in a bus station; it had to be something bad to make them tell such an outrageous tale.
