Surrender, Dorothy (7 page)

Adam had been largely unhurt in the accident, and so had the young vacationing investment banker who had backed out of the driveway. They had stood in the road together with the police lights spinning and Sara in the car. Adam was sobbing and the banker clumsily tried to comfort him, but he was inconsolable. At the local hospital, a nurse asked if Adam “wanted something,” and he swallowed a tiny orange pill gratefully. He cracked his knuckles and paced the small room they had put him in, waiting for the pill to take effect and his friends to arrive.

“Remember her voice,” said Adam softly now, not a question. Sara’s voice had been unusual, a smoky, laughing voice; she was much smarter than the voice might let you believe. Hers was the voice of a beautiful waitress in cutoffs at a cowboy bar, someone you would always have a good time with.

“And remember the song?” said Maddy. “Her backwards song? She sang it that first night at college, as we lay there in that little room in the dark. It was so weird, and I loved her immediately.” Now Maddy began to sing the backwards version of “Tears on My Pillow” that Sara used to sing: “Uoy t’nod rebmemer em / Tub I rebmemer uoy / Ti t’nsaw gnol oga / uoy ekorb ym traeh ni owt…

Adam closed his eyes. The bruises on his arm had already faded from the dark plum color of a fresh accident to a paler, less alarming denim. He had been spared in the accident, “miraculously,” people tended to say, although if he had been on the drivers side
she
would have been spared, not him. If he had been driving it would be his voice that would be missed, not that sweet, reedy voice of Sara’s, remembered for having sung a backwards song in the middle of the night.

“I know that life will simply
go on
without her,” Maddy said, “but I also know that I am going to be different now. I’m not sure how, but it’s already happened.” She reached into her pocket and took out a crush-proof pack of cigarettes, aware, as she did, that there was a total absence of wind up there on the roof. The morning was calm, utterly still, as if poised on the edge of something. She handed a cigarette to Adam and he took it, even though he had never been known to smoke. It didn’t matter; identifying traits were no longer reliable. Anyone could do anything now, and no one would be surprised.

They sat on the roof and smoked for a while. “Why didn’t her mother let us come?” said Adam suddenly. “That’s the thing I don’t understand. I know there’ll be a memorial service eventually, but I wanted to go to the cemetery.”

“On the phone her friend said it was private, just for family,” said Maddy. “Apparently, Sara’s mother is having some sort of nervous breakdown, and she didn’t want anyone else around to see. I can understand that, can’t you?”

Adam shrugged. “She never liked me,” he said lightly. “She thought I was preventing Sara from falling madly in love with some straight guy. But that’s not what prevented her.”

“No,” said Maddy. “She just hadn’t met that perfect straight man yet.”

“I don’t even know if she wanted that,” said Adam. “Anyway, you’re the only woman in North America with the perfect straight man,” said Adam. “Other than Peter, it’s slim pickings. Look at who she went out with—that record-label lawyer, and that creepy professor, and that guy
Sloan.”
They both sneered slightly at the idea of Sloan, and Maddy became aware that no man would have gotten past their sarcasm and contempt; in their
minds, no one was acceptable for Sara. “We were talking about men right before the crash,” Adam went on. “How we’d both probably be dissatisfied with them for our entire lives.”

“You’ve got Shawn here with you,” said Maddy. “Isn’t he at all satisfying?”

“Oh, Shawn,” said Adam. “What we have with each other, it’s not love. I invited him out here for the weekend, and the whole thing was like a game of musical chairs in which he happened to be here when Sara was killed. So now he’s simply
here
in the middle of everything.” He shrugged, letting some ash flutter from his cigarette over the side of the house. “He’s very handsome,” he said. “But I don’t want handsome anymore. I don’t want anything. Sara and I were laughing, both of us, and listening to the radio. Van Morrison was playing,” he continued, “and we were happy because here it was the start of another August.” Suddenly Adam tossed his cigarette over the side of the house and stood up, wobbly on the incline.

“Sit down,” said Maddy, “you’re scaring me.”

“Oh, what’s the point?” said Adam. “I don’t even like anyone else. No offense,” he added quickly. “She was my best friend in the world, Maddy. You don’t generally get any new best friends after thirty. This is it; it’s over now.” They looked at each other in the morning light, these two rumpled people who had never felt great affection for each other, these two people whose connective tissue was Sara Swerdlow.

“She was my best friend too,” Maddy said. “But I’m not going to break my neck falling off the roof for her. Sit the fuck down, Adam.” And obediently, he did.

L
ATER, BACK
inside the house, Duncan fussed in Maddy’s arms and opened and closed his mouth like a chick’s. It was astonishing to Maddy that even now, the baby still needed food. She took a swig of vodka from a mug, then opened her blouse and let her
breast spring out like a jack-in-the-box. While he drank milk, she drank vodka; it was the only way they could get through this terrible time. Her breasts still filled and emptied, even though Sara was dead; this fact was astonishing, but it was also a relief. As she looked down at the top of Duncan’s head, the place where the bones didn’t quite join, she thought of how fragile he was, and what a mistake it had been to bring him into the world. She was now terrified of something happening to him; when he slept in his Portacrib, she started at the receiver of the infant monitor, hypnotized by watching the red lights rise and fall with his breathing.

She remembered how, the moment Duncan was born, Peter had turned to her, his expression clearly overwhelmed and inconsolable, although he later claimed he had been merely happy. “This is my
son!”
he’d explained, and he’d gone on to insist that apparently all men felt a particular sensation of being overcome when their wives delivered a boy.

Lately Peter hovered over her again, as much a useless appendage as he had been during labor, when he had lurked in the background of the delivery room, a stooping, somewhat useless figure in green scrubs and silly paper clown shoes. He seemed useless right now, too, for although he had been crying and drinking constantly since the crash, he hadn’t been terribly close to Sara; she was Maddy’s friend, not his, and Peter had never even seemed to like her. But still, Peter was drinking along with everyone and crying and shaking his head in somber, inarticulate shock. So, for that matter, was Shawn, who had had no relationship with Sara at all—having only just met her the night she was killed. It became a house of drunks, the air itself taking on that familiar bad-breath stink of drinking.

The only thing that saved them from falling into total disaster, Maddy thought now, as Duncan tugged rhythmically and gratingly at her left nipple, was the fact that there was a baby in the house. Duncan had his clockwork needs, regardless of anything that was going on around him, and he forced you to turn away from your sorrow and pay attention to him.

“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
QE
2
.
He bored me to death, comparing the
QE
2
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.