by Meg Wolitzer
“Mrs. Swerdlow,” he began, “I know you think she was so attached to me that it somehow kept the men from sticking around. But that’s not true at all.”
“I didn’t say it was,” said Natalie.
“We were best friends,” he went on, “and I wanted her to be in love, if that was what she wanted.”
“Was it what she wanted?” Natalie asked.
“Sometimes,” he said.
The pasta was brought to the table by Shawn in a glossy heap; wine was poured from one of those inexpensive jugs with a sprightly label that showed a busty Italian signorina carrying a basket of grapes. Everyone sat and ate, even Natalie. At first she was aware only of texture: the surprising and even appealing glutinosity of each strand and the lubrication of the sauce, but finally she was aware of taste, too. The food actually had a good taste, and nothing she had eaten in a long time had seemed at all edible to her. The wine, too, cheap though it was, slipped right down her throat, leaving behind an acidity one associated with the kind of wine served at gallery openings in urine sample—sized cups.
“So I guess,” said Maddy, “you knew about Sloan.”
“Sloan?” said Natalie, and she suddenly recalled that this had been the name of the last man that Sara had been involved with—the environmental lawyer who had eventually gone up to British Columbia. “Oh, right, Sloan. I don’t really know that much about him, actually.”
“Well,” said Maddy, who was herself high on wine and feeling a bit loose, “the first thing about him that Sara told me was that he was a good fuck.” There was a shocked silence. “Oh, God,” Maddy quickly said. “I kind of forgot who I was talking to here. You’ll pardon the expression. I only meant,” she hastily went on, “that he was extremely … handsome. Handsome in ways that were completely alien to me. I recognized that he was handsome, and I could appreciate that fact, but his handsomeness was totally out of my realm. He was one of those men,” she said, “who looks like a brontosaurus. A really big head and teeth. You got the feeling, looking at him, that he could have ripped you apart, totally snacked on you. His muscles were huge, kind of bursting through his shirt, and yet he acted as though he never worked out, as if God had planted those muscles there like seeds, under the skin, and watched them grow.” She shook her head. “But you just knew he started his day at five A.M. at the gym, pumping himself up, and went straight from there downtown on his bike, to his dogooding environmental law office.”
Natalie could picture Sara’s lover better now; he appeared before her in the light of the kitchen, preening and naked except for a bicycle helmet and knee pads. Of course Sara had wanted that; what was not to want? “How did they meet again?” Natalie asked. “I’m sure she told me, but I forgot.”
“They met,” Adam said, “at a party I took Sara to. It was in somebody’s loft—one of those huge spaces that you stand around in and just feel like your own apartment is inferior the whole night. At least, that was the way it was for me. I forgot that I was supposed to talk to people, or at least pretend to be interested in them. Instead, I kept kneeling down and examining the parquet floors, and looking up at the painted tin ceilings. I was thinking about how I’d never have anything like this loft, and Sara was standing right beside me, like always, and next thing I knew I turned to her and she wasn’t there.”
Natalie felt as though she was hearing a wondrous adventure tale, in which the heroine was whisked off to a magical land. It struck her, again and again, that she could search the entire earth for Sara and never find her. The magical land was elsewhere, inaccessible to the living. Surely Sara was somewhere, if you looked hard enough. But no, she was nowhere.
The night that she had disappeared in that loft, though, she had merely gone out onto the fire escape to have a smoke with a man who had smiled at her while Adam was examining the intricacies of the woodwork. The man said his name was Sloan, and he and Sara stood on the rusted fire escape looking over the Hudson River, the lit points of their cigarettes punctuating the night. The attraction between them was strong and a little sickening, for it brought with it a knowledge that eventually, perhaps soon, they would be in bed together. There was an innate embarrassment to this fact, Sara had told Adam, because it presupposed even the possibility of modesty. Sloan sucked in the last bits of his cigarette, seeming to smile at the inevitability of a sexual future with this woman he had just met. Sara felt naked already, as though a strong wind had whipped her clothes off and left her undressed beside this imposing man.
They exchanged the usuals: I’m an environmental lawyer. Oh, really? I’m a graduate student in Japanese. They talked about how they each hoped to live downtown someday, but how both of them lived on the Upper West Side, a mere four blocks from each other. They frequented the same Szechuan restaurant; probably, Sara commented, they had sat with their separate sets of friends in that brightly lit box of a restaurant wolfing down Double Happiness Chicken at the same moment, but somehow they had never noticed each other.
No, that’s not possible, Sloan said. I would have noticed you.
To which Sara felt her face heat quickly, the warmth climbing all the way up to the hairline. She didn’t know what to say, and she half-turned and saw Adam through the window of the loft. He was watching her with that look on his face that people had when they knew they had been left out of something good.
Sara told Sloan she had to go, and he asked for her telephone number, inquiring whether he could take her out to their “shared Szechuan stomping grounds,” as he put it. She said yes, that sounded nice. In a week they had dinner, and soon they were having sex.
Sara’s friends didn’t use the word “sex” when describing this to Natalie; what they said was this: “In a week they had dinner, and soon she was seeing him all the time.” But Natalie knew what it meant. As she sat at the kitchen table and listened and ate spaghetti, she realized she felt jealous of her sexy, charming daughter. Inappropriately jealous of her daughter who now lay in a grave in Queens. Natalie’s jealousy brewed inside her like a dirty little secret, but regardless of the jealousy, she wanted to know more. She wanted to know it all. Perhaps, if she stayed here all month, she would uncover everything about Sara that was possible to know. She would become her daughter’s hagiographer, and number one fan.
AS THE DAYS passed, everyone noticed that Natalie was sleeping less and eating more. She showed up at meals, and even began to cook for the rest of the household. When a meal was through she enjoyed cleaning up the kitchen, spending an hour alone in the grimy room, wiping all surfaces hard with a sponge, creating some semblance of order. “Can we help?” Maddy and the others would ask, but she always said no, shooing them out of the room so she could clean up by herself. The place hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned in decades, and she announced that she was determined to put an end to the indifferent summer-share squalor. They tried to stop her, insisting that she ought to rest, ought to take it easy while she was here, but she wouldn’t listen.
One morning, they were all awakened early to the sound of the Dustbuster and one of Sara’s Japanese language tapes booming through the house. “Where is the bus stop?” the voice on the tape asked, blaring first in English, then translated into Japanese: “Basu tei wa doko desuka?” Then the voice said, “Do you know what time it is?” The translation followed: “Ima wa nanji desuka?” Sara had kept these tapes for colloquial emergency purposes, but she’d never needed them.
“I wish she would just cool out already,” Peter said to Maddy one morning later that week, as they awakened yet again to the sound of the robotic Japanese instructor and the accompaniment of the Dustbuster. “She’s in constant motion suddenly. She’s acting like a maniac, like Hazel the maid on speed.”
“It’s therapy for her. And the place needs it anyway,” said Maddy, looking around at the vaguely unclean room. The entire house was a study in indifference; Mrs. Moyles didn’t ever seem to mop or dust or use a sponge. When Maddy and her friends arrived each August, they weren’t about to start
cleaning. Maddy recalled that Natalie’s own house in New Jersey was a clean acreage of beige rugs, sectional couches, and art posters from Galerie Maeght. The carpeting was pale too, and so were the furniture and the walls. Dirt would have shown itself easily in that house; it would have had no camouflage.
Dirt went against a mother’s natural instinct. Some hormone must kick in when you give birth, Maddy thought; no longer can you enjoy the sloth and brazen filth of your childless days. You can’t open a bottle of Advil and carelessly leave a few pills scattered on the night table surface, or let a pack of matches fall to the floor unnoticed. Now you have to keep the dirt and dust away from your child, to wipe clean all the windowsills, to vacuum the small, potentially edible thumbtacks and paper clips from their hiding places in the carpeting. When everything finally had the appearance of order, there was always a moment of irrational joy.
Maddy felt this herself whenever she cleaned Duncan’s nursery back in the city. She had gone on maternity leave from the law firm, a job she didn’t like anyway, in order to be able to stay at home with him. Sometimes she cleaned his room, with its duckling nightshade and its calm, yellow walls, just to cheer herself up. It was easy to see why Sara’s mother was cleaning like a dervish, trying to set everything right.
The insanity of the situation, the thing that made no sense, was that although Natalie had lost a child, she was still a mother. Where could she deposit her maternal energy now? Maddy wondered. It was aimless but potent, looking for a place to express itself, like a dog that humps human ankles or the legs of tables. Maddy imagined Sara’s mother becoming a peppy volunteer at an orphanage, standing in the middle of a ward with hand puppets jammed onto her hands, making the puppets speak to each other in high-pitched voices that might possibly amuse these thrown-away children.
But here, in this falling-apart summer house, Natalie needed to do something, and it wasn’t hard for her to figure out what to do: She would clean, clean, clean, restoring the place to a more presentable state. Each day, she could look forward to taking another crack at cleaning Sara’s house, the way people look forward to reading another chapter of an exciting but bad novel they have begun, a book in which secret missile siloes are discovered in rustic outposts, and treachery from the wildcard leader of a tiny Middle Eastern nation shakes the Pentagon.
“I think it’s good that she’s cleaning,” Maddy said to Peter, as they lay in bed and listened to the early-morning sounds of Natalie at work. “She can take her mania, as you call it, and put it to use. People need something to do with themselves when a terrible thing happens to them.”
“I know what we need,” he said, and suddenly he put his warm hand on her thigh, as though sex could somehow cure death. But the idea of Sara actually being dead was still foreign and invasive. She couldn’t have sex with him now, and in fact had begun to find it intolerable long before Sara had died.
Sex had become problematic shortly after Maddy had become pregnant; there had been little lightning-bolts of pain in her nipples, so the idea of being touched there had been unpleasant. Then the morning sickness rose up in a big wave (a tsunami, Sara had called it), and the closest Maddy let Peter get was to bring her ice chips in the bathroom as she knelt at the toilet.
Later, during the second trimester, when, according to a pregnancy advice book she’d read, “with morning sickness gone, and a new sense of well-being firmly in place, the sex drive may return, in spades. And remember—you still don’t need to worry about contraception!” Maddy had felt even more troubled by the idea of sex with Peter. While the book assured her that sex was completely safe, she worried that the tip of his long penis would poke against the soft skull of the baby, causing brain damage. She knew this was ridiculous, and she was too embarrassed to tell Peter or to mention it to her chic female obstetrician, Denise. Instead, she simply put up with sex for a while, letting him blindly thrust inside of her. But she felt no pleasure, simply spirals of worry. She also didn’t want to have an orgasm, because it was known to bring about mini-contractions—harmless though they were, according to the book. But Maddy didn’t want to risk even the remote possibility of going into premature labor, and all for what? So Peter could have fun? She didn’t know what to do, and so, in advance, she discussed the matter with Sara.
They were in a Starbucks at the time, sitting on tall, spindly stools. “I think,” said Sara, stirring her latte slowly, dreamily, “you should have sex, but you should fake it.”
“I have never done that in my life,” said Maddy. “That’s from another era—our mothers’ era. Nobody has to fake it anymore.”
Sara shrugged. “All right, then don’t fake it,” she said. “Tell him you just don’t want to come, that you don’t feel like it.”
“It will hurt his feelings,” said Maddy.
“You have to take care of yourself, of what you want,” said Sara. “Just do what you have to do.”
And so, with Sara as her invisible guide, Maddy went to bed with her husband that night, and as soon as she touched him she felt the corresponding pulse and blossom under her hand, like a sponge thrust into water. When he was inside her, there was a hot, sharp streak, and she imagined the baby’s head receiving the repeated blows, its tiny eyes closing to withstand the pain. Peter shuddered out his own orgasm. After he had recovered, he moved his hand predictably down under the blanket, the fingers splayed, and tried his usual maneuvers to bring her to orgasm.
Just do what you have to do, she heard Sara saying, and Maddy closed her own eyes and began to utter some small sounds in her throat, letting them build in an operatic fashion, actually beginning to enjoy the craft of the deceit. She closed her legs and scissored them, nearly crushing Peter’s caught hand, and then after a couple of small pulsations, her feet flexed, her jaw set in the particular way that it usually did when all this was authentic, she relaxed her entire body. They lay together for a while, Peter stroking her head, the baby safe from uterine contractions, and Maddy thought to herself: I must call Sara.
Now, Maddy took Peter’s hand off her thigh and uncurled it. “I can’t do this,” she said. She motioned in the vague direction of the Portacrib, where Duncan lay asleep. “The baby,” she added.
“The baby’s in dreamland,” said Peter.
“Right now he is,” Maddy said. “But he could wake up.” She paused. “And actually,” she went on, “I just don’t feel like it. I mean, Sara’s dead, Peter. It’s so recent.”
His sex drive was intact, but certainly it had undergone some sort of transformation after witnessing Maddy in labor, when he had seen her howling like a she-wolf on a hilltop. It had been her great mistake to refuse the epidural offered to her by the anesthesiologist, who’d actually seemed disappointed when she turned it down. Then, during pushing, that two-hour period of time during which Maddy began to hallucinate a roll of theater tickets unspooling from her vagina, Peter had seen her cervix open wide, so wide it might destroy him, might swallow him whole, like in some grade-B movie called Attach of the 10-Centimeter Vagina. She had shrieked and contorted her face, and although Peter held her hand and whispered to her that she was his beloved, and popped a tape of those singing monks into the cassette player so she could visualize the cool of a church and people in cowls lighting candles, she knew that Peter would always possess an image of her when she appeared before him in their bed: that of a screaming, Munch-like figure with a vagina as vast as a state wildlife preserve. But still, somehow, it did not deter him.
She was vaguely disgusted by his sexual fealty; it seemed excessive to her, even a bit unnatural. In part, this was because she knew she wasn’t beautiful. As a teenager with Sara, Maddy had taken on the role of the less attractive but wryly good-natured sister (a role that, in the movies of her parents’ era, would have been played by Eve Arden), and it occasionally occurred to her, over the years, that she hated this role. Why didn’t some boy write a love letter to her about the way her eyes looked in the moonlight or the way her skin was “as smooth
as ‘abalaster’ “? But the roles were firmly established, and there was nothing to do about it except not be Sara’s friend. And because Maddy loved Sara, that wasn’t a possibility.
An ambient competition encircled the two friends even though they never acknowledged it openly. But it wasn’t just competition; it was a slowly revolving, rotisseried rage, at least as far as Maddy was concerned. She was humiliated by her own secret reserve of unkind feeling toward Sara. Whenever they went shopping for clothes they would casually strip together in a dressing room, and Sara would be sure to murmur something like, “God, Maddy, you have such perfect legs. Mine are stumps.” Because neither part of that observation was remotely true, Maddy would be forced to accept the remark in unhappy silence, or else beg to differ, which then forced Sara to murmur her dissent and continue the lie.
Rejected now, Peter turned away from Maddy, stepping into pants, and then he slipped silently from the room. When he was gone, Maddy reached into her bottom dresser drawer and pulled out a small, flat bottle of Mrs. Moyles’s peach schnapps that she had begun drinking after the accident. This was such a girl’s drink, as sweet as any children’s medicine, but it still provided a familiar ribbon of heat as it went down the gullet, vaguely reminding her of a lunchbox dessert of canned peaches in heavy syrup. Maddy drank only when Peter wasn’t looking. Now she tossed her head back and swallowed a warm, clear ounce or so, then she capped the bottle and thrust it back under her shirts in the drawer and stood over the Portacrib, staring down at Duncan.
