by Meg Wolitzer
“It’s not a contest.” But of course it was, a heated, furious competition, and the theme of it was: Who owned this broken girl now, her mother or her closest friends? There were no rules, no reference book in which to look up the answer. “We all loved her,” he said. “And I think that it’s made us a little insane.”
“Are you just about done?” said Natalie.
“Yes,” said Adam. “I am.”
“All right then,” she said in a prim voice, and then Natalie strode across the porch and walked out onto the lawn, going around the side of the house. In a moment they heard her car ignition starting. Everyone stared at each other; no one knew what to say.
“What’s this about?” said Shawn after a moment. He looked at Maddy and Peter. “Why are you so angry at each other? What is going on that I should know about?”
“No offense, but there’s nothing you should know about,” said Peter. “This is private. You don’t even know us.”
“No, I don’t,” said Shawn. “And it’s just as well.” He was tired of them, tired of their wearying solipsism, their unhappiness. He was also tired of their disappointing house, and tired of Adam, who had a connection to a dead girl who still wouldn’t die. He was tired of all the talk that went on here; in this crowd, talk was such a big deal. For them, conversation was a form of high entertainment. But he was done with the talk, the late nights in the kitchen with the sunburst clock, and all the dawns in the narrow bed next to Adam, that mouth-breathing, sleepwalking boy genius. Shawn shouldn’t have come here at all; right now, he should have been in his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with his two roommates, the actor/waiter and the weight trainer/musician, complaining about the heat and the grime, going to Sunday tea dances at Kimo Sabe and meeting men with good bodies, men who were fun to be with.
“Just tell me one thing,” Shawn said to Adam when the others had gone inside. “How come you get everything?”
“I don’t get everything.”
“How come,” Shawn went on, “there are some people who just know how to get things in life? It’s like there’s this whole breed of people who can’t win enough prizes. Other people want to keep giving them stuff, making dinners in their honor, handing them fucking plaques with their names engraved on them. Really, how come everyone is interested in what you have to say? Why should that be? It’s not as though you’re exactly a man of experience. Although I suppose you’d say that Sara’s death has given you experience, has opened you up or something. But you haven’t been around the world, or worked on a tramp steamer, or spent a year living in a ghetto. It’s not as though you have life experience, Adam. I mean, almost anyone has more of that than you. Even I do! I’ve gone to bed with more people, and I’ve worked at jobs you wouldn’t dream of doing, and I’ve been places that would give you a heart attack. I’ve been down by the docks in the city, and to a coke deal in Harlem with my fucked-up actor friend who had just gotten his first commercial—that margarine thing where he had to dress up like cholesterol—and he spent his entire paycheck on coke. I’ve done all these things, and I’m not stupid, either. So why can’t I have what you have? I know I’m not the greatest writer in the world, but do I really have to be? Is that what it takes? Is that what makes it happen, this golden thing that happened to you?”
“Two writers,” Adam said, helplessly. “It never works. We’ll always be looking over each other’s shoulder. It’s a mistake, it really is.”
Shawn nodded. After a moment he said, “I’m going to go now.”
“Go where?” asked Adam.
“Home. I’ll take the Jitney back to the city,” said Shawn, and he turned and walked into the house. He climbed the stairs slowly, waiting for the sound of the screen door opening, and Adam rushing in. But it didn’t happen; the house was silent and hot and as claustrophobic as ever. He hated Adam for wanting to hold him back, and he hated Melville Wolf for not liking his music. And he hated himself for not being able to make something happen, for not being able to charm everyone into giving him what he wanted. He needed to leave. He would miss Natalie; she was the only one. She would be puzzled when she returned and found him gone, but there was no other way. It had been a great relief to have a mother for a while. He wanted nothing more, right now, than to be in the dressing room of that men’s store with her again, dressed in finery and singing show tunes.
Shawn went into the bedroom, where his belongings mingled with Adam’s in haphazard maleness: waterproof watches with thick black straps; Jockey shorts; a stick of Arrid for Men, unscented; a box, largely untouched, of Trojans; and the beautiful clothes Natalie had bought him. Shawn shoved all his things into his shoulder bag and hurried back downstairs. By the telephone in the kitchen was a list of numbers: Fire, Hospital, the Police, and, finally, a number that was to be saved for emergencies. “Mrs. Hope Moyles,” Shawn read, and then suddenly, impulsively, he picked up the receiver on the wall phone and dialed the number.
The landlady’s sister answered and put Mrs. Moyles on; Shawn had heard plenty about her, that she was an old drunk, and bitter. She sounded a little slurred now, but still she seemed to listen with attention when he spoke. “Mrs. Moyles,” he said in a clear, slow voice, “I am currently visiting your house at 17 Diller Way, and I feel it is my duty to report what has been going on here.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean,” he said, “they’ve trashed your house. Totally. The place is a disgusting wreck.” He paused, then added, “And they’ve taken drugs here, too. Ask your next-door neighbor, he’ll tell you. Actually,” he said, “I think you should get here as soon as you can.” And before she could say anything, Shawn hung up. He was gone from the house within minutes, pausing to stand out front briefly to remind himself once again how ugly this place was, and how he wouldn’t miss it. The only thing he left behind was the gift he had brought that first day: the bayberry candle that flickered out on the back porch, in the kind of chilly breeze that always signifies the end of summer.
WITH SHAWN GONE and Natalie off in her car, the house was quiet. Maddy sat with Duncan on the grass, listening attentively for the sound of Natalie’s car pulling up out front. Hours went by; no car came. It was astonishing to realize that she loved Sara’s mother; she loved her like a mother. After everything that had happened, she couldn’t hate Natalie Swerdlow, just as she couldn’t hate Sara. All the hatred had been dismantled piece by piece, and Maddy felt only very tired now. Duncan was crawling in pursuit of a butterfly—one of those small, pale yellow ones that fluttered especially quickly and desperately. She loved being with her baby, ever since her late-night talk with Natalie. She loved Duncan in a way that took her by surprise. She knew that even if she and Peter broke up, she would have Duncan, and she would be okay. She would bury herself into him, devoting all her thoughts and energy to him. What else was there, after all? She had no best friend anymore, and she could not trust her husband. If Peter moved out, she would be as lonely as Natalie, lying alone in the center of the bed at night and pacing the rooms she lived in, forever.
Now Maddy went upstairs and made her way onto the roof, which seemed the right place to be. Out there, smoking again, she leaned against the warm shingles and thought of how much she wanted her life back. She wanted to be just meeting Sara by the lake, just falling in love with Peter in college, just starting the hopeful rise instead of the premature descent. Nearby, a window squeaked open and Peter stepped outside.
“Hey,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”
“Smoking,” she said.
“Come inside.”
“No,” she said, although she wanted to come inside more than anything.
“I love you, Maddy,” he tried.
“More than you love Sara? Or her mother?”
“What?” he said. “I don’t love them. You know I don’t. You’re the one; that’s the total truth. It’s very simple.”
She looked at him warily. “I guess you do love me,” she said. “But it’s
not simple, and it’s not good enough. It doesn’t take care of everything.” She imagined letting herself simply slide down off the roof as if on a flume ride at a water park, her arms at her sides, her legs straight out in front of her, closing her eyes as she was shunted off into the end of her life. It would be so easy to do that now.
“I don’t know what you know,” he said. “Or where you heard it, or whether it’s true, but—”
“It is true,” she cut him off. “But I don’t want to hear about it. Not a single word, ever. And as far as how I know—” She broke off. “I don’t feel like telling you,” she said. “And maybe I never will. It will keep you on your toes.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ve fucked up, I know that. I’m a big fuck-up.” She nodded; at last they agreed on something. “For God’s sake,” he said. “You want to have this conversation out here? You’re too close to the edge; are you trying to prove something?” She didn’t say anything. “Don’t do this,” he said. “Please don’t. Look, can we at least go inside?”
She thought for a moment, bits of ash drifting into the air. Did she want to stay out here, suspended in some haze of nostalgia, fantasizing about dying, about sliding neatly down onto the lawn, or did she want to go with Peter, who was imperfect and unfaithful and full of regret? Despite all the reasons not to, she loved him still, had loved him since the day they first slept together at Dyke House at Wesleyan, when she was so happy to have something—someone—that was her own. He was hers, he was, despite everything. He wasn’t Sara’s. That knowledge gave comfort now. She was sleepy; she thought she could sleep against him tonight, thought she could almost imagine a time when touching him would not be a burden. She remembered her earlier self, shy at first and then thrilled to be in bed with him, noting, early on, the way one of her shaved legs was thrown over one of his hairy legs—the peculiar, complementary nature of it. There was the quiet of being in bed with him, and the noise too, unabashed and ordinary, and very much theirs. She didn’t want to lose that, to let it turn into something else, a calcified marriage, a tacit hostile arrangement, or even a phlegmatic if cheerful partnership in which husband and wife lay side by side reading their complementary male-female magazines every night. She just wanted it to go back to what it had been before: before Sara died, before Duncan was born, before all the shifting and resettling. Maddy crushed the cigarette against the roof and took the hand that Peter offered, letting him help her into the window, as though it were a threshold and he were swiftly carrying her through.
NATALIE’S CAR pounded down the narrow roads, roads she had driven with extra care since she had been here, thinking of Sara in her car during the accident. Now Natalie was driving much faster than usual. She was reckless, thinking that she wanted to die, reaching over to light a cigarette with the little circle of heat on the end of the car lighter, her hand shaking as she increased the speed and inhaled a full throatful of rolling smoke.
It didn’t matter if she were killed in her own car accident now; why should she preserve herself, what for? Did the world care if Natalie Swerdlow went on and on? She had spent weeks in the house of her daughter’s friends, doing everything she could to stay in motion, to connect, to take care of these children, to find life bearable, to both believe the terrible truth and somehow not have to believe it at all, and finally she was tired of these tasks, which seemed to her both Herculean and absurd.
Out on the road, cars were honking at Natalie. Still she went faster, trying to remember exactly how to get to the place where Sara had been killed. Maybe there would be no traffic there; maybe she could just apply more and more pressure on the gas pedal, feeling a surge as the car dumbly responded to her command. Natalie drove and drove, and for some reason she could not find the spot. She saw only the same safe, slow curvature of road.
Then, several yards up ahead, Natalie suddenly came upon the huge neon Fro-Z-Cone sign. She remembered that this was where Sara had gone for ice cream the night she died; this was the last place Sara had ever been. Natalie quickly pulled the car into the parking lot and stepped out. There were a few other cars parked here; teenagers lounged on the hood of someone’s father’s expensive car, and a family sat at a picnic table eating ice cream in speechless, sybaritic pleasure. Behind the glass of the ice cream stand stood an old man with a beard, wiping the counter with a rag. From this distance he looked effeminate and odd, like a gay Rip Van Winkle. Natalie walked closer toward the counter and saw, with shock, that this wasn’t an old man at all, but an old woman with a vague beard.
“You want to order?” the bearded woman asked. She’d probably seen everything from her post behind this sliding glass. She’d seen teenagers come and go, and she’d pumped sauce onto ice cream, spooned out countless servings of a viscous walnut and syrup mixture, dipped a pair of tongs repeatedly into a tub to fetch out cherries saturated in red dye #2. She’d seen Sara here every summer, too, although she’d never known her name, and she’d even given Sara ice cream on her last night.
“A cup of chocolate soft-serve,” Natalie said, although she wasn’t at all hungry, but felt she ought to order just to be polite. “Small, please.”
“Ninety-eight cents,” said the bearded woman, and Natalie gave her a handful of coins. The woman went over to a large, silver ice cream machine that was as primitive-looking as a Univac.
“My daughter used to come here,” said Natalie, poking her head inside the partition. “She came here with her best friend. She came here the night she died. There was a car accident. Earlier this summer, down the road; maybe you remember. She was very pretty. She had long hair.” The bearded woman was holding a cup under the nozzle, and now she squinted out through the partition, not saying anything. “She was my little girl,” said Natalie in a voice that was almost a whisper, “and this was the last place she went to. This was it. She bought ice cream here and started to drive home with her friend, and she was killed.” Natalie choked on the last words and began to cry.
The bearded woman appeared startled. “Oh, my, well… well, here,” she said to Natalie. “Take these.” She thrust a sheaf of napkins at Natalie from the dispenser, and Natalie gratefully blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes. She kept crying for a little while longer and the bearded woman looked on helplessly.
“I’m very sorry,” said Natalie. She leaned on the counter, her hands against its cool, dented metal surface. She stayed like that for several seconds, and the bearded woman stayed on the other side, both of them silent and thoughtful. “Well,” said Natalie finally, gathering her composure, “I guess I should go. Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m sorry I cried like this. I couldn’t help myself.”
“Wait,” said the bearded woman, and she suddenly thrust a hand out through the opening in the glass and took Natalie’s dish of ice cream back. “Here,” she said. Then she fiddled around behind the counter and produced a plastic teaspoon. She tipped it into Natalie’s dish of ice cream, letting loose a spill of jimmies that rained down in a small storm of many colors.
NATALIE DROVE and drove, driving just to drive, and up ahead she suddenly saw a familiar set of well-tended bushes, and a long gravel road that wound its way up to a house she knew. As if returning to a place visited in a dream, she pulled the car into the driveway, and hoped very hard that her childhood friend Sheila Normandy was home. Sheila Normandy, of immense wealth, deep boredom, and an even deeper tan, was a perfect companion for a mourning mother. Sheila was all about distraction, someone devoted to making her own life remotely compelling, or at least amusing. Natalie arrived at the house uninvited, and a maid answered the door, took one look at this woman with wind-swept hair, a look of anguish on her face, and a cup of ice cream in her hand, and knew that here was another one of Mrs. Normandy’s troubled friends. Sheila was home, having her nails done somewhere in the recesses of the house, and she came out to see Natalie, smelling of ketones and waving her drying fingers in the air.
“My God, Natalie, are you all right?” Sheila asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Natalie said.
“Well, you came to the right place,” said Sheila. “Inez, por favor,” she said, turning to the maid, “would you tell Scooter that Mrs. Swerdlow and I would like to go up?”
“Go up?” Natalie repeated.
Going up turned out to mean up in the helicopter, which was waiting on the back lawn, its rotors spinning slowly, a handsome young pilot named Scooter sitting inside. He helped the women inside, and within seconds the big thing had lifted up off the ground, and Natalie stared, slightly open-mouthed, as the gigantic Normandy house became smaller and the vast greenery of the island in summer revealed itself. Scooter gave them headsets so they could hear each other when they talked, and he patiently showed both women what all the different switches on the control panel were for. Mostly, though, Natalie and Sheila sat in the deep seats, drank wine, and gazed out at the acreage that once was made up of potato farms.
Here at the beach, Sheila often found herself feeling melancholic in the middle of another endless afternoon on someone’s bleached-wood deck, and so she found herself oddly comforted by Natalie, the only person out here who knew her as the daughter of a poultry man. Together, the two women discovered that in middle age they both enjoyed a good, serious drink. Several drinks. Up in the helicopter they looked down over the tiny houses and stretches of beach, and the alcohol enriched their blood, making them forget why, on land, they both felt so sad.
“I used to get dizzy when I came up here,” Sheila said. “But Paul loved it. Boys need their toys, right?” Back in their house, Paul Normandy paced the floor of their living room, his electronic manacle digging its teeth into his ankle, a cellular phone perenially pressed against his ear.
“I have no idea what boys need,” said Natalie.
“You don’t see anybody?” asked Sheila. “I mean socially?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been out with a lot of men,” said Natalie. “And I just met someone out here.”
