Surrender, Dorothy (11 page)

“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 for 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.

“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.

A
S 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.