by Meg Wolitzer
But it wasn’t breasts that disturbed him, or even the thought of female genitals, with their complex, blanketing creases, which reminded him of having to fold the flag at school, and how flummoxed he had been with all that soft cloth in his unskilled hands. What would he do with a woman in his hands? Embarrass himself, probably. And the idea of Natalie Swerdlow in his hands was particularly disturbing, because he would embarrass himself more than ever.
Now she had the ability to tower over him in the monstrous bloom of her grief, could in fact kill him if she wanted to, and he would let her. He would simply give in, the way his father had often given in to his mother in moments of domestic conflict, and his grandfather had given in to his grandmother. The Langer men seemed to be under the control of the Langer women, generation after generation, the women strong-willed and outspoken, the men somewhat shrugging and indifferent, their heads buried in a home repair manual, or, in Adam’s case, a Playbill. Adam had never wanted to go head-to-head with a woman; he and Sara had had a kind of ease that kept them from arguing very often. There was no one else with whom he had such ease; certainly he didn’t have it with Shawn, for sex created its own set of complications. And certainly he didn’t have it with Sara’s mother. But he wasn’t sure what he did have with her; sitting here beside her now, eating her over-sweet offerings, he realized that he felt slightly better than he had since the accident.
Natalie was smoking a cigarette and crying quietly, steadily. “I might just as well walk into the water,” she said. “What’s the difference? My child is dead, and that is the worst thing that can happen to a person. You spend your whole life saying to yourself: Don’t let that happen, and now it has. Now I’m one of them, those mothers. The ones you can’t even make eye contact with, because it’s just too sad.” She sighed. “Carol says I should join one of those groups. I knew this woman whose husband died and she threw herself into this organization; it was actually called ‘Lost My Partner, What’ll I Do?’ And it became her life. I don’t want some awful group to become my life. I don’t want to meet other people and hear their sob stories. I couldn’t bear it, I swear I couldn’t.” She put her head down. “But I can’t bear this either,” she said. “So I don’t know what’s next.” She paused. “Our ‘Surrender, Dorothy’ thing—we’ll never do it again.”
Adam knew that their “Surrender, Dorothy” thing was a telephone routine that she and Sara had been doing for years. After Natalie’s marriage had ended, Sara had developed a sudden, odd fear that her mother might be taken from her and replaced with an impostor. She and Natalie decided that whenever one of them telephoned the other, she would have to say, “Surrender, Dorothy,” to prove authenticity. They considered The Wizard of Oz their movie, for they had watched it together repeatedly over the years. It was an adventure tale that both of them could relate to; poor Dorothy, Sara had always thought—lost in the world. What would Sara have done if she had lost her mother? Would she have even survived? It seemed doubtful. When Dorothy gazed into the crystal ball and saw the face of her beloved Auntie Em, Sara had wept and wept. And when Natalie watched the movie with Sara, she remembered watching it as a little girl in the Bronx, and so she wept for the loss of her own youth. She was a middle-aged woman whose marriage had become undone. Who would love her, and how could she manage? Mother and daughter hitched their stars to each other, for there was no one else.
“Surrender, Dorothy,” they said back and forth on the telephone. After a while, the catchphrase stuck, becoming a tender in-joke, a reflex that began all calls. Adam had always thought this little routine was strange, and did not really understand Sara’s intimacy with Natalie, forged in the roomy, manless house so many years earlier.
“I just want to die,” Natalie said now. “I’ll walk into the water, that’s what I’ll do.”
“Don’t walk into the water,” said Adam. “Please don’t do anything like that. It would be really stupid, and really sad.”
“I’ll do what I want,” she said. “Back in New Jersey, I have a houseful of pills, you know. The medicine cabinets are packed: old tranquilizers, antihistamines, although they probably expired in 1968, and even the pin worm medicine our cocker spaniel Triscuit used to take. I’m sure I could do it with them.”
“Look,” said Adam, “I don’t know what you should do, but I know you definitely shouldn’t go back to New Jersey.” He paused, as an idea formed. It was a bad idea, certainly, but it was now too late, for he had started to say it: “You could stay here,” he said. “In Sara’s room.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” Natalie said.
“Yes, you could,” he said dutifully, continuing what he had begun.
“I guess,” she said, “maybe you’re right. Maybe I could. I have no clothes with me, but I could wear Sara’s. We wore the same size.
At first he thought his suggestion had sprung purely from a well of altruism, but now he realized he was also looking out for himself and his friends. In some way the idea excited him too, as though having Sara’s mother in the house might save them all. But how could she save them? She was in worse shape than they were. Since the accident there was a sluggishness to the household, which Adam thought must be what old age feels like. In past summers, they would all stand in the kitchen cooking big, sloppy dinners, smoking and drinking and listening to loud music. They would wash lettuce and chop carrots and get nicely buzzed on bottled beer. Sara would cook a big Japanese meal for them once a summer, spending hours in the kitchen by herself, occasionally drafting someone to help her unroll the fragile, vaguely smelly sheets of seaweed. They would drink sake with dinner, which had a surprising potency to it, so that by the end of the evening they were all helplessly drunk and no one could bear to clean up the kitchen until the morning. Late at night Sara would come to Adam’s room and sit at the foot of his bed while he read aloud to her from his work. Adam had loved those nights, those summers; they had been a predictable part of his life that he craved during the rest of the year. Now here he was, without her, and it was just misery and sorrow. They had agreed to stay in the house for the rest of the month, but at times he was sorry. How did they think it could be manageable? How could they find a way to live with this?
“I think it’s a good idea,” he told Natalie. “You can stay until you’re back on your feet.”
But he knew that this was a meaningless nod toward her childless future. Grieving parents never found their footing, never found their feet, never even found their shoes, but simply stayed in bed forever. In junior high, his best friend, Seth McCandless, had died of leukemia. It was a long, slow slippage, with hair loss and transfusions and a seventh-grade benefit performance of The King and I, and in the end the McCandlesses had emptied their son’s locker, weeping as they knelt in front of the gun metal gray compartment, retrieving the stuff of youth: gym shoes, a Spanish textbook called Usted Y Yo, and the smelly remains of what had once been a turkey roll sandwich. The McCandlesses had, by all accounts, turned weird after Seth died, keeping their house shuttered and the yard unshorn. Seth’s room had remained a shrine to the dead boy; on the windowsill, his once-busy ant farm had been left untouched, the ants eventually transmogrifying into a snaking, fossilized traffic jam. Mrs. McCandless had “let herself go,” according to Adam’s mother, which really only meant that she stopped dyeing her hair and sometimes spent whole days in her nightgown, so that on Halloween the neighborhood children called the McCandless home “the witch’s house,” and egged the porch with a vengeance. Eventually the house was sold and the couple disappeared from the neighborhood, perhaps from the edge of the world.
Anything was possible when a child died. Poor Seth had a head of chick-fuzz in his final days, and he had joked with the nurses and orderlies that he should only be charged half of the daily rate for the TV rental, because he was now blind in one eye. All the kids from the drama club came to visit, gathering in a sober circle around his bed and trying to cheer him up with stories of what plays the club might be performing in the f
all.
“Well,” said Beth Gershon, serious and homely, “we’re trying to get Mr. Lavery to agree to The Bald Soprano, but you know how conventional he is. We’ll probably end up doing The Crucible for the umpteenth time. And I’ll have to be Goody Proctor again.” Seth had listened attentively, hanging on to these last details of what had once been his world, his life, until it had been so unceremoniously snapped away.
After Seth’s funeral, Adam became quiet and stayed in his room reading a mortality doubleheader of Death Be Not Proud and A Separate Peace. He also, at that time, began writing, scrawling agonized adolescent free-associations in a spiral notebook. Later, these became fragments of dialogue and, later still, plays. So maybe poor Seth McCandless, now long dead, had turned Adam into a writer.
But Sara’s death wouldn’t make him turn into anything; he was almost thirty years old, and had already turned. Her mother was another story; a mother could change, could transform into the witch in the witch’s house, or go wild with grief and lose her job, her property, her hold on the world. Adam was frightened for Natalie, and he thought that if he let her go back to her house and her dead dog’s pinworm medicine, he would never see her again.
“Listen, I can’t stay with you and your friends,” said Natalie vaguely. “You young people. I’m sure you all want to be alone.”
“No, we don’t,” he said quickly. “Everything changed when Sara was killed. We don’t really know what to do with ourselves. We’re completely fucked up.”
Sara’s mother studied him, and he let himself be watched. In the distance he saw the small fires of people with less on their minds, and he wished he could join them, unpeel the silver foil from a roasted potato and eat it among friends, laughing. A Frisbee would be flung, the kind that glowed in the dark, and it would sail freely across the sky. Wine would be drunk, nostalgic, stirring folk songs sung. Instead, he was sitting on a dune with the mother of his dead best friend, inviting her to move in. And somehow, she was saying yes.
6
Smiling Buddha
For days and days Natalie slept like a baby, while the real baby in the house almost never slept at all. Real babies wanted to take it all in, they didn’t want to miss a minute, whereas a woman whose child has died can afford a long absence from life.
Natalie lay in Sara’s bed, having no idea what time of day it was, and not particularly wanting to get up and walk across the room to consult her watch, which lay quietly ticking on Sara’s bureau. Occasionally she glanced through Sara’s red leather notebook, which Sara had filled with Japanese characters, probably notes for her dissertation, Natalie thought. She had a fantasy of someday being able to translate these words, being able to read what her daughter had written. There were Berlitz tapes in the drawer, and when Natalie could bear to get up and move around more, she planned on listening to them in order to learn Sara’s second language. For now, she comforted herself with the tiny, delicate Japanese characters that Sara had painstakingly written. She kept the notebook beside her in bed as she moved in and out of sleep, holding it against her like a pillow or a stuffed animal.
Why not sleep all day and night? At the house in New Jersey after the funeral, Natalie had been continually wired and awake. But the house in the Hamptons had a distinctly soporific effect. Dr. Chatterjee would have diagnosed clinical depression, no doubt, and would have prescribed some drug that would have monkeyed with the serotonin levels in her brain. Yes, she was alarmingly depressed, but she knew it wasn’t depression that was causing all this sleep.
No: it was comfort. The bed, with all its associations, and the room that contained that bed, provided a sense of follow-the-dot continuity. She could picture Sara here, could see her standing before the warped mirror brushing her hair, and lying down in bed, folding up her long limbs. Natalie wasn’t sure how many days she had been lying here in Sara’s room—one, two—when there was a sharp knocking on the flimsy door. “Mrs. Swerdlow?” came a worried female voice. “It’s Maddy.”
Natalie did not know what to say; she would have liked to simply draw the thin blanket up around her shoulders and not reply, but the knocking came again. “May I come in?” the girl asked. And then, because there was no lock on the door, the knob turned and the door swung open and there stood Sara’s friend Maddy Wernick, looking terribly worried.
“What’s the matter?” was all Natalie could say.
“We were getting a little concerned,” Maddy said, “because you haven’t come downstairs to eat. I mean, we heard you going across the hall to use the bathroom, so we knew you weren’t swinging from the rafters up here, ha ha, but we were getting spooked. So we chose someone to come up here and check. And I was the one.”
“Oh,” said Natalie. “Well, you can tell your friends I’m just very sleepy, if that’s all right.” She thought that that would be that, and in anticipation of Maddy’s departure she lay her head back against the pillow.
But Sara’s friend simply stood in the doorway, unwilling to leave. “Mrs. Swerdlow,” she said softly, “I’d really rather that you didn’t go back to sleep, if that’s okay with you.” Her voice threaded into vagueness and an absence of nerve.
“Pardon?” said Natalie, sitting up once again.
“Well,” said Maddy, “I’m not just here to make sure you’re okay. We also decided that maybe somehow we could get you out of bed, too. You’ve just been sleeping and sleeping, and not eating at all. That can’t be very good for you.”
This young woman was practically poking Natalie with a cattle prod, ordering her to move, when all she wanted to do was lie here and stew in the soft nearness of her daughter’s presence. “Whether it’s good for me or not,” Natalie said evenly, “I’m twenty years older than you, and I don’t think it’s any of your business.”
Maddy blushed. “We promised your friend,” she said.
“My friend?” said Natalie. “Carol? You promised her what?”
Maddy shifted unhappily from foot to foot. “We promised her that we would take care of you. Right before you sent her off on the bus, she took us aside and basically told us that you were in bad shape and needed to be watched. Which,” Maddy added quickly, “is totally understandable, considering.”
Natalie sat looking at her, realizing how uncomfortable she was making this girl, and how it would be possible to make her much more uncomfortable, to even make her cry, if the standoff went on much longer. She didn’t want to do that; Maddy Wernick had been Sara’s best female friend, someone Sara had relied on over the years. Natalie had never known Maddy well, but Sara had loved her. Wasn’t that enough? Natalie sighed once, deeply, and then she swung her legs over the side of the bed, planting her bare feet on the floor. “All right,” she said. “I’ll get up.”
The others were all sitting downstairs in the kitchen; it appeared to be dinnertime, because a big pot of water was boiling on the filthy stove, and a box of Ronzoni spaghetti lay on the counter beside a jar of sauce. The electric sunburst clock over the stove showed the time to be 5:30. That would be P.M., Natalie thought, marveling at how she’d drifted in and out of sleep for over a day. Natalie walked into the middle of the kitchen. “Good morning,” she said, and she saw them exchange troubled glances.
“It’s evening, actually, Mrs. Swerdlow,” said Adam calmly.
“I know that,” said Natalie. “It was just an expression.” She was aware of how awful she must look in this bathrobe, her body so thin and worn, no makeup rescuing her face.
“We’re glad you’ve joined us,” said Peter. “Do you want some dinner? It’s nothing much, but we haven’t really shopped or anything. In fact, we’ve barely eaten, either, since we’ve been here.”
Natalie nodded, suddenly grateful, and she sank into a Naugahyde chair at the table and waited like everyone else for the water to boil. The baby babbled, clanging a spoon against the plastic tray of his high chair, and the voices in the room all rose up and joined together in some peculiar, soothing song. Natalie put out a finger fo
r the baby to hold, and he agreeably grabbed it.
“When Sara was a baby she used to sit in her high chair looking out the window for the longest time,” Natalie said.
“Oh?” said Adam.
“Yes,” said Natalie. “I worried that she was autistic, she was so quiet. The food would get cold while Sara sat and looked outside. But she was just taking her time, because that was the way she was.”
“It never stopped,” said Adam. “At Wesleyan we’d all be cramming for exams and we’d be hysterical, pulling out our hair, drinking Jolt Cola. And Sara would be sort of above it all, looking over her Japanese books and then gazing out the window.”
“I wish I could have been as bright as Sara,” said Maddy wistfully.
“You know, I had her tested when she was seven,” said Natalie. “She had a 160 I.Q. That’s genius. But I never felt she’d really put it to good use. And now she never will.” There was a pained, respectful silence. “I don’t know how to think about her anymore,” Natalie continued. “I feel as though I need more information, more details.” She looked from face to face. “I’ve told you some things,” she said. “Now you tell me some.”
Adam and Peter and Maddy looked at one another, as if wondering what sorts of things they could tell Sara’s mother. What sorts of things, they seemed to be asking silently, were okay to divulge? “I don’t know what you want to hear about, Mrs. Swerdlow,” said Maddy. “I mean, I don’t really know what you knew or didn’t know. And I also don’t know what would even interest you.”
“It all interests me,” said Natalie. “Please, fire away. Anything that occurs to you about Sara, anything I might not know.”
There was a long silence. “I’m sorry,” said Adam, shrugging lightly. “Nothing’s occurring to us, I guess. If you could be more specific, that would be helpful.”
“Well,” said Natalie after a moment, “what about men?”
Men. The friends looked at one another. What was there to say about Sara and men? Or, rather, what was there to say about Sara and men that they could tell her mother? “She told me a great deal, as you may already know,” Natalie said. “We weren’t shy with each other that way. But I’m certain that there were things she could only tell her friends, things that she wouldn’t tell me. And I want to know why her life was the way it was. Her love life. Why she never settled down.” Her gaze shifted to Adam.
