Surrender, Dorothy: A Novel Read online

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Washington Square Press Publication of

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1999 by Meg Wolitzer

  Originally published in hardcover in 1999 by Scribner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Scribner, 1230 Avenue of

  the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-04254-8

  ISBN: 978-0-6710-4254-7

  eISBN: 978-1-4391-2574-8

  First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing July 2000

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover design by Honi Werner; front cover photo by

  Sally Gall/TIB-Swanstock

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  critical acclaim for meg wolitzer and

  Surrender, Dorothy

  “Wolitzer shares her characters’ knack for wry comedy; her comfort with gay-straight friendships brings to mind the affable novels of Stephen McCauley…. Buried within this affecting novel is the troubling question of whether close friendships and close family ties can keep a person from finding romantic intimacy. Wolitzer’s Sara didn’t live long enough to explore that possibility; perhaps her survivors will be luckier.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Wolitzer’s voice is intimate, at once ruthless and tender, an old friend telling the unvarnished truth.”

  -Elle

  “Wolitzer places familiar characters—they are perpetually in grad school and got hooked on Sylvia Plath at puberty—in a subtly unique situation while expertly managing to skirt clichés. Her speedy, serpentine sentences convey with skill and wit the shameful, proprietary issue that attends Sara’s death: who has claim to the greatest grief?”

  —Time Out New York

  “Compassionate…. With witty, unsparing, yet deeply humane insight, Wolitzer delicately excavates the ties that bind her characters’ bruised inner lives to that of the dead woman, and concludes that the transactions between the living and the dead are long and complex. … In attempts by turns sorrowful and farcical, Sara’s survivors carve out an epitaph for her that provides both comfort and chill: Here. Gone. Here.”

  —Mirabella

  “Wolitzer deftly combines the humorous with the sad.”

  —USA Today

  “The intricate, powerful, and emotionally complicated bond between a mother and daughter is at the heart of a touching new novel by Pushcart Prize-winning New York writer Meg Wolitzer. SURRENDER, DOROTHY is Wolitzer’s fifth in a prolific string of beautifully realized books that interweave family ties and intense friendships, creating narratives with equal parts eloquence and wit.”

  —Metrowest Daily News (Boston)

  “Wolitzer’s seamless prose and light touch animate an exquisitely wrought story…. Despite the tragic situation, readers will be intrigued, even delighted, with the unfettered honesty and wry humor pervading the grieving process that Wolitzer describes … She enchants with wholly realized characters and a sly narrative voice that floats just above the angst and searing grief of Sara’s loved ones…. The password phrase ‘Surrender, Dorothy’ takes on new meaning for the bereft mother in a fitting, radiantly understated conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Wolitzer writes well, and with as much wit as skill. You’d like to have lunch with her characters.”

  —New York Daily News

  “There’s plenty that’s funny and wise in this book … and it’s a pleasure to surrender to its charm.”

  —Hartford Courant (CT)

  ALSO BY MEG WOLITZER

  Friends for Life

  This Is Your Life

  Hidden Pictures

  Sleepwalking

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  For Mary Gordon

  With many thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts,

  whose generosity made this book possible.

  Prologue

  Immortality was the vehicle that transported me, every summer, to the squalid little house we called our own. Immortality was the thing I rode in, barely noticing. I was like a member of the ruling class being held in the spindly arms of a rickshaw, never once looking down at the long bamboo joints, or thinking to observe the nape of the neck of the bent who bent to hold the conveyance aloft.

  I was content merely to stay aloft, imagining that the ride would go on and on like one of the lengthy dinners we used to have in the house. I was held aloft for so many summers that I took the ride for granted. Death was for others: the imperfect, or the far too perfect, whose goldenness would be remarked upon forever by the survivors in fits of wonder and loss. Death was the province of parents, grandparents, and the valiant young men who walked in soldierly groups, the weak supporting the weaker. Death was not for us, certainly not for me.

  I bristled with sorrow for those who had died; it lived within me, nestled side by side with the sensation of immortality. I was held aloft and shimmering for years, never knowing that this in itself was an impressive feat, an anomaly, until one day, at age thirty, I landed.

  1

  Brown-Eyed Girl

  What a couple they made, the heterosexual woman and the homosexual man! Not just this particular couple, but all others like them, men and women freed from the netting of sexual love, from the calamities that regularly plagued their more predictably coupled-up friends. They felt sorry for those friends, who always seemed to tangle together in unhappy beds and who fought viciously in the dead of night, the men clattering down flights of stairs, Nikes still unlaced, belts still lolling unbuckled, the women standing at the top in tears, calling out vaguely, “Wait!”

  Sex led to crying; this was a universal truth. There were tears in the beginning, when you were young and frightened by desire, and then there were tears at the point of impact, when you realized you had irrevocably begun a life of sex and all its complications. And much later there were tears after you had grown accustomed to sex and understood that it might someday be taken from you. People left each other all the time; people who swore they couldn’t live without each other left each other. They managed; they survived. They ate nuts and berries in the wilderness, lived among wolves and crouched by streams to wash. They took classes, adult education workshops in car repair, pottery, perhaps a Romance language. Some of them fled their echoing apartments, the places where he had been and was no longer, cashed in their frequent-flier mileage, upgraded to business-class, and flew somewhere madcap, like Italy. They were i
n the process of frantically forgetting, and could do what they liked.

  Once in Italy, they stared at Titians and Tintorettos with a kind of zeal that would have won them good grades in their college art survey class, although during that class they had mostly slept, for the room was dark and the chair was soft, and life at age twenty held other interests, mostly sexual ones. But now they tried to fall in love with the nonsexual parts of the world, the details that they had never noticed before. They attempted to adjust; they called their friends late at night, and the other newly single ones were grateful for the distraction, taking the cordless phone across the apartment to grab a spoon and a jar of Nutella from the kitchen cabinet (for this would be a long, leisurely, sugar-and-shortening-propelled conversation), while the married friends were magnanimous, silently signaling to the husbands beside them, with whom they had probably just been clashing: Our depressed friend is needy tonight. I’ll be quick.

  But the heterosexual woman and the homosexual man would be forever exempt from lovers’ woes. No lust snapped in the air between them, making them behave like odd, shifty teenagers who have just had sex for the first time and can’t believe their good luck. Nothing could ruin what these two had, because what they had was built on a simple foundation of allegiance and relief.

  When Sara Swerdlow and Adam Langer rode in the car side by side, they were as contented as twin babies in a double stroller. They listened to tapes and they made themselves right at home. Hanging from the rearview mirror was a little plastic smiling Buddha that Adam had bought for Sara for good luck, and it swung on its silk rope as the car moved. They talked about men, how disappointing they were as a group, agreeing that neither of them liked the floral stink of aftershave, or the puzzlingly popular aesthetic of boxer shorts, which transformed all men into their uncles. They were great friends and had been for many years, during which time his hairline had retreated coastally, and her whippet-thin body had thickened at the hips, as though to ready her for the inevitable task of childbirth.

  Everyone who knew Sara and Adam understood that their friendship was something to be envied, something lofty and sacred. They would never fall into a heap in bed, although they had, on occasion, accidentally seen each other naked. He thought she had startling but beautiful breasts; she thought he had the whitest legs in the universe. Friendship was a thing of extraordinary value, ever since it had become clear to both of them that lovers never lasted, and that families were the traps you walked into on major holidays and emerged from the next day, stuffed with carbohydrates and seething. But friendship, at least a friendship such as this, stayed put. It didn’t matter whether one person was more successful than the other; what they had seemed outside the arena of mean little jealousies.

  Everyone but Sara was jealous of Adam, who had become famous at age twenty-six for his play Take Us to Your Leader, a light comedy about a Jewish family on Mars. When the play moved to Broadway, several of the other students in his playwrights’ workshop developed unexplained intestinal ailments and sleep disorders, and tacked on extra sessions with their therapists. The huge and wildly positive review in the Times opened with the line “What if Neil Simon were gay?” and as a result the play ran and ran. Busloads of theater groups and temple sisterhoods rolled in from the suburbs to see it, leaving matinees clutching scrolled Playbills and muttering favorite lines, still weepy with laughter.

  The other workshop members despised Adam’s flagrant display of commercialism, yet cursed their own bargain-basement Sam Shepard noodling. They would never have expected this to happen to Adam Langer, of all people; he was the shy, forgettable person hunched in the corner of the classroom, the one with the nails bitten down to tiny smiles. Why hadn’t fame tapped someone else among them, such as the thin man whose plays were all set in cruel British reform schools, or the pale, freckle-chested redhead from Keetersville, Georgia, who gave her Southern characters colorful names like Jehovah Biggins and Lady Fandango?

  As it turned out, Adam was the perfect receptacle for fame. With his boyish unease and long, studious face, he seemed modest and he photographed surprisingly well. He became a popular and natural interview subject, speaking easily and at length about everything from the changing shape of the American family to the role of the gay person in society, casually referring to Rimbaud and Verlaine and Oscar Wilde as if they had all worked on the high school literary magazine together. Adam represented a certain mainstream brand of gay culture that was bookish and appealing and highly presentable. People were always asking him questions—in print and in person—and Adam Langer loved to answer.

  He had been an awkward adolescent, unloved by anyone but his mother and father. Adam’s ears were perpetually red-hot, like someone who seems to have just come back from the barbershop, and he was a jiggler; a crossed leg often went flapping like a wing, and if a pencil happened to make its way into his hand, it would soon be put into service tapping out a rhythm that no one in the otherwise silent coffee shop or classroom wanted to hear. But after his play reached Broadway and stayed there, Adam developed an instantaneous and nearly alarming sexual popularity. Suddenly, other men wanted to sleep with him, he who had been turned down often throughout college, managing only a few brief liaisons, including one with a mutely shy exchange student from Nepal. Now he had a handsome boyfriend named Shawn Best, who would be riding out to the beach house this very afternoon on the bus line whose young female attendants gave all passengers little bottles of Squaw Creek spring water when they got on board.

  Sara had had a series of disappointing lovers. Most recently, there had been an environmental lawyer named Sloan, who came around a few nights a week, folding his pants over the back of her chair and letting a spill of coins hit the floor; Sloan was affable and shaggy and was, as her mother, Natalie, might have said, “fun in the sack.” But then he had gone up to British Columbia for some complex logging legislation, and that had been that, which was just as well, since after several weeks of sleeping with him Sara still hadn’t been able to imagine what this overflow of sex might lead to. And besides, there were details about him that she didn’t like; he had admitted to her that he had changed his name from something more ordinary—either Steven or John, she couldn’t remember which—and Adam pointed out that this was a suspect and pretentious thing to do.

  Sara was a graduate student at Columbia, and had made her peace with the fact that she might be in school forever, a program in Japanese history ambling slowly toward a doctoral dissertation that would grow to become biblical in length, with footnotes jamming up the bottom third of each page. She didn’t mind the prospect of being an eternal student, although she pretended to; school offered a familiar swaddling, and Sara wasn’t really sure if she would ever be good enough at what she did to snag one of the very few academic positions available. A friend of hers from Columbia who had completed the program a year earlier had given up looking for a teaching post and had taken a job translating the instructions for the assembly of Japanese-made toys sold in the States (“Your new Turbo Robot-Pak is easy to play with, and will delight you and your friends for hours!!!”). Sara was terrified of winding up with such a job. If she tried to imagine herself somewhere ten years from now, she was unable to picture herself doing anything at all. The screen was simply blank and unrevealing. When Sara was deeply immersed in the text of a Japanese book, she loved the intricacy of the language, the thrill of the chase as she tracked down the meanings of unusual phrases. But when she objectified what she was doing, she understood that the world would not welcome a scholar of Japan with open arms. She would probably have to translate the folded instructions inside toys someday, or else marry well.

  Sara and Adam continued to take the house in Springs every August along with Maddy, who was a lawyer, and her husband, Peter, a teacher in a public high school, even though there were better deals to be found, bigger houses with wider lawns and higher ceilings. Even though, after anyone took a shower in the downstairs bathroom, a few slender, bobbing mushr
ooms often pushed their snub noses up between the aqua tiles. They continued to take the house even though Adam, for one, could have certainly afforded his own place by now. The house made them feel unhurried, dumbly caught in that vague nebula of the late twenties/early thirties, when you don’t yet feel frantic to own property or to breed, when you can lie around smoking cigarettes and eating an alternation of heavily salted snack foods and sweet, spongy packaged cupcakes, and no one cares.

  In previous summers, they had all slept until noon every day of the vacation, but the shape of this summer would be somewhat different. Seven months earlier, Maddy had given birth to a baby named Duncan, who would certainly change the atmosphere this month. The baby, with its endless, insatiable needs—and with its own portable infant monitor that its parents toted from room to room, lest they miss a single coo or explosion of gas—was both an advertisement for fertility and a deterrent. Sara wasn’t remotely ready to have a baby; she hadn’t even started to scale the walls of awareness of her unreadiness, yet was vaguely worried that an abortion she’d had a few years earlier had rendered her infertile. Although she’d had almost no ambivalence about the abortion at the time, she had still known that an older, more mature and focused version of herself would probably want children someday. But the actual thought of being a mother was still so unpleasant that she held her diaphragm up to the light before sex for an extended moment of squinting inspection. No pinholes, no apertures. She had no idea of what kind of mother she’d be: Would she behave the way her own mother had—overinvolved, frenetic, or would she find her own style? There was no way to know. She couldn’t tell if it would be worse having a baby now, like Maddy, or never being able to. At this point in her life, sex was for energetic body-slamming and the kind of yowling, cats-in-an-alley orgasms that made the neighbors long to be young again.