The Position Read online

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  Praise for The Position

  “Savagely witty . . . a seething but ultimately accepting portrait of a family. . . . Wolitzer skillfully traverses time and perspectives, alighting long enough on each family member to illuminate how each is stuck but how almost all manage to move on in spite of themselves.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Wolitzer engagingly sketches the family members attempts at . . . finding closeness with others. As this clan learns, the most satisfying position is a permanent-ink place in someone’s heart.”

  —People

  “The Position is that rare book that announces itself in the first few sentences as something to savor, like the initial moments of a chance meeting that blossoms into a torrid love affair. Wolitzer’s dead-on observations about sex, marriage, and the family ties that strangle and bind are darkly funny and poignant.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Wolitzer’s smart new novel . . . examines how sex is inevitably intertwined with all the moments of life that happen outside the bedroom.”

  —BookPage

  “Meg Wolitzer is that all too rare joy, a writer who gets better and better with each succeeding book. Wolitzer is willing to tackle bigger issues and isn’t afraid to infringe on the territories of Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody. The Position movingly probes the difficult transition to adulthood, here exacerbated by thoughtlessly flagrant behavior.”

  —Newsday

  “A fluid narrator and keen social satirist, Wolitzer . . . not only helps trace the complex human dynamics shaped by the quaking ’70s, she also nudges us toward some larger, lingering questions: How important is sex? How much can it define and bind us, or estrange us from one another?”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A snappy, intelligent writer, Wolitzer cultivates precise, revealing language with a tone that always suits her scenes. At the end, you’ll wish that the charmingly neurotic Mellows would invite you to their next family reunion.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Funny, wise, and full of the richness and sadness of family life . . . hilarious and humane.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Goes from laugh-out-loud funny to something deeper without leaving visible panty lines. I loved it.”

  —The Herald (U.K.)

  “Mischievously funny . . . what sets and keeps you reading is not the high concept about the sex book but the beautifully developed deeper story of what parents owe children, what kind of intimacy is desirable, and how adult offspring cope with histories of unmet needs.”

  —The Guardian (U.K.)

  ALSO BY MEG WOLITZER

  The Wife

  Surrender, Dorothy

  Friends for Life

  This Is Your Life

  Hidden Pictures

  Sleepwalking

  SCRIBNER

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

  and incidents either 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.

  Copyright © 2005 by Meg Wolitzer

  All rights reserved, including the right of

  reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner trade paperback edition 2006

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of

  Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license

  by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales:

  1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  Designed by Kyoko Watanabe

  Text set in Aldus

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2004056577

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6178-4

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-6178-X

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6180-7 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-6180-1 (Pbk)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0365-4

  A portion of this novel, in a different form, appeared in

  Ploughshares and Best American Short Stories 1998.

  for Richard

  THE POSITION

  Chapter One

  THE BOOK was placed on a high shelf in the den, as though it were the only copy in the world and if the children didn’t find it they would be forever unaware of the sexual lives of their parents, forever ignorant of the press of hot skin, the overlapping voices, the stir and scrape of the brass headboard as it lightly battered the plaster, creating twin finial-shaped depressions over the years in the wall of the bedroom in which the parents slept, or didn’t sleep, depending on the night.

  The book sat among a collection of unrelated and mostly ignored volumes: Watership Down, Diet for a Small Planet, Building a Deck for Your Home, Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr., The Big Anthology of Golden Retrievers, and on and on and on. It was casually slipped in, this one copy of the book that the parents brought into the house, for if they’d stored all their copies, including the various foreign editions, in taped-up boxes in the basement marked “Kitchenware” or “Odds and Ends,” that would have sent a message to the children: Sex is filth. Or at least, if not exactly filth, then something unacceptable to think about anywhere except beneath a blanket, in pitch darkness, between two consenting, loving, lusty, faithful, married adults.

  This, of course, was not the view of the parents, who for a very long time had loved sex and most of its aspects—loved it so dearly that they’d found the nerve and arrogance to write a book about it. When they thought of their four children reading that book, though, they brooded about what kind of effect it would have on them over time. Would it simply bounce off their sturdy, sprouting bodies, or else be absorbed along with the fractions and canned spaghetti and skating lessons—the things that wouldn’t last, wouldn’t matter, or perhaps would matter, coalescing into some unimaginable shape and gathering meaning inside them?

  But the parents’ concern was mostly overshadowed by confidence, so why not put the book on a shelf in the den, a high but reachable shelf where the children could get to it if they wanted to, and the chances were good that they would want to, and that no one would be struck dead by it, and life would just go on, as it always had.

  Michael Mellow, age thirteen and the second oldest of the Mellow children, was the one to find it. It was a late Friday afternoon in November 1975. He had wandered into the den of the house only moments after his father had stuck the book into the opening on the shelf and then retreated back upstairs. Michael was hunting for his Swingline mini-stapler in order to join together the many sheets of paper that constituted his essay on egg osmosis. Why his little red stapler should have found its way there, into the den, could not be answered. Things levitated and floated from room to room in this house: A stapler, which ordinarily was kept in a boy’s desk, might inexplicably turn up open-jawed under the coffee table in the den; a box of Triscuits, empty or full, might make its temporary home on a bathroom counter. Objects moved and shifted and traded places, seemingly as restless as the people who owned them.

  Walking through the den, Michael became aware
of the presence of something new. It was as though he possessed one of those freakish photographic memories and could feel that something was here that should not have been, that had not, in fact, been here earlier in the day. He experienced a fee fie fo fum moment, smelling human blood—or more to the point, inhuman blood, something not quite earthly. The stapler, which was nowhere to be found, did not call out to him, but the book did, and he stood blinking and casting his eyes farther and farther upward, onto the shelves, moving among the familiar titles, the comforting ones that together over time defined his family life, just the way the UNICEF wall calendar tacked up inside the broom closet did, or the kitchen drawer filled with nothing but batteries that rolled freely when you opened it.

  The Mellows’ family life was also defined by a song, which had often been sung on vacations. For years, as they barreled along expressways toward Colonial Williamsburg with its candle-dippers and loom-sitters, or else toward a sleepy, shabby resort in the Poconos called the Roaring Fire Lodge, with everyone and their stuff packed tight into the Volvo station wagon, they would sing it:

  “Oh we’re the Mellows,” they sang, “Some girls and some fellows . . .” And then they would continue in such a vein, using names of other families from the neighborhood: “We’re not the Gambles/’cause we’d be covered with brambles.” Or: “We’re not the Dreyers/’cause we’d be liars.” Or: “We’re not the Rinzlers/’cause we’d be . . .” A stumped silence descended upon the car, while everyone tried to think their way out of this one.

  “. . . Pinzlers!” shrieked Claudia, the youngest, and though this made no sense, the whole family paused for a moment, the older children making derisive groans that were quickly evil-eyed by the parents, and then they all gave in and sang Claudia’s rhyme.

  Every family in the world had its own corny, pointless song, or a set of ignored books, or a wall calendar, or a rolling battery drawer, all of which resembled, but only in part, those of other families. These details had been introduced into the Mellow household long ago and they were there for good. Here in the den, Michael Mellow leaped onto the couch barefoot, summoned silently, and there, second shelf from the top, he found it.

  The book was white-spined, hard-backed, thick, sizzling, with a colophon of a mermaid gracing the spine, hand on hip, bifurcated tail flipped up in insouciance; it was this mermaid herself who seemed to be speaking to him. What she said was this: Pick it up, Michael. Go on. Don’t be afraid. You have nothing to fear but fear itself. This last line was one that he had learned in social studies that very week.

  Pulling hard, he yanked the book from its vacuum, glanced at his spoils briefly in terror, and then tucked it under his shirt, feeling its glossy surface against his bare, matte skin, forgetting the mini-stapler forever, forgetting the step-by-step progression of egg osmosis. Then he clambered up two flights of stairs and disappeared into the murk of his bedroom for one solid hour.

  What he saw in the book was something that, Michael Mellow began to realize during that hour, he could not tolerate alone. He would have to bring Holly in on it, for he often brought her in when something was simply too difficult or perplexing or exciting or opaque to process on his own. She was older, she knew things, she had a worldly, cynical perspective that he lacked. But then he thought, no, it can’t be just Holly, for she would think it was strange, even perverse, for her brother to invite her to sit with him and look at this thing. So he would have to invite the two others to look at it too, and it could become an important moment of sibling closeness, an eternal bond. That was what he would do. For if your parents write a book like this, one that’s just burst out into the world, there’s no way you can read it on your own and not discuss it, just as there’s no way you can snub it entirely, act cool and indifferent in its presence. There’s no way you can exist in the same house with that book, walking by it in the den while it’s up there burning on the shelf, and tell yourself: I’m not ready for this.

  Michael sat on the bed in his room, the book open on his lap. Sweat had formed in the notch above his upper lip, and he licked it quickly away, but already this innocent gesture seemed somehow sexual, and so did the taste of human broth in which bodies were basted. His own sweat had taken on a new quality, and so had his tongue, which seemed thick and alive. What would be next, his thumb-pad? The knob of his knee? Was everything that belonged to the body up for grabs and reinterpretation?

  A little while later he returned the book to its proper place and said nothing to anyone. But already he had set his plan in motion, and now he waited. The following day, early in the afternoon, Michael said to the others, “They’re gone. I heard the car.”

  It was a wet Saturday, and they were all corralled inside the house. The whole suburb of Wontauket seemed to be in an early hibernation, with children from other families trapped and stunned in their own homes, everyone inexplicably made helpless in the face of rain or a falling thermometer. In summer this town knew how to react, knew how to break out the timed sprinklers and sparklers and domed backyard grills and show a little spirit, but on a day like today it always seemed to plunge into a regional clinical depression. Nothing moved. Shades stayed down. Inside various white or avocado or copper-tiled kitchens, bread was dropped listlessly into the slots of toasters, dogs were fed from cans, newspapers were spread wide in front of faces, forming individual cubicles that neatly divided members of a family sitting together at one oval table. Things that had long been broken would perhaps today be fixed, at least partially. There was initiative, followed by boredom and then abandonment.

  Such inertia seemed, at first look, to exist here in the large redwood house on Swarthmore Circle. Out front, leftover rain plopped rhythmically from paper birch trees, rendering the brick walkway leaf-slick, while inside, the Mellow children sat or lay on paisley throw pillows on the floor of their older sister Holly’s hot-pink room. Long stretches of time passed during which no one spoke, though within the room, specifically within Michael, there was a covert stirring of energy and direction.

  Dashiell, eight years old and the second-youngest of the four, sang to himself a song of his own design, something about an electric can opener that came to life and danced, while the three others played a somnolent round of the game Life, with its elaborate menu of choices: go to college, pick a career, buy a car, get married. (Why did you have to do things all the time? one or another of the children wondered sometimes. What did the world want from you? Why couldn’t you just be left alone to exist?)

  Michael Mellow, the cunning planner and decider of his siblings’ fates, was thin and dark, good-looking though slightly adenoidal, destined to be considered bookish his entire life even if he were to become a forklift operator. He glanced across the game board at his older sister Holly, the person who occupied many of his thoughts, though this was not something that could ever be spoken. He would have to bury it like a bone. At fifteen, Holly fascinated everyone with her metallic blonde hair and aggregate of freckles that had collected on her face and arms and chest during many summers of sitting on a folding chair at Jones Beach with an unlistenable record album (Mitch Miller’s Stars and Stripes Sing-Along) covered in Reynolds Wrap and splayed open before her. The sun connected with the sheet of aluminum and bounced back off onto the fair, vulnerable face of the girl who lay there. This was long before SPFs or melanoma death-warnings, and the sun created such a wall of light that even with her eyes closed, she seemed to be looking at something silvery white: falling snow, an enormous wave.

  Now, in cold late fall, with the summer long done with, the reflector closed and put away in a third-floor closet among deflated inner tubes and thin, punishingly rough beach towels, Holly Mellow sat on the floor of her room, yawning, thinking not at all of her brother, or of anyone in the family except herself. Her feet were encased in spongy lime green socks. She was always cold, like many girls at age fifteen. It was as though female skin thinned out with the advent of puberty, leaving girls open to every stray thought and fear and desire
, and in need of layers. Suddenly Holly had to have crocheted shawls wrapped around her, and ponchos with long fringe. Lately she had begun to feel she needed the draping of the warm, hairy arm of a boy, the pressure of which would create a contentment inside her that she couldn’t find on her own up here in her pink room, which she’d long ago chosen for its frilly, undiluted girliness, but that lately seemed more like the color of inflamed desperation.

  Adolescence had arrived recently and separately for both Holly and Michael, accompanied by the usual complement of sebum production and wild moods. Without consulting each other, they had taken on the roles of junior father and mother to their younger siblings Dashiell and Claudia, who sported giant new teeth dwarfing their baby ones, a series of untucked shirts, and vitamin breath each morning. Michael and Holly jointly ruled the third-floor duchy where the children all lived, coexisting with an assortment of animals that no one could really love: a ferret, a gecko, a tank of sea monkeys (technically brine shrimp, though the ad from the mail-order place had depicted the sea monkeys with mouths and eyes and even long, curling eyelashes), and an iridescent blue fighting fish with a decomposing tail that left fragments behind as it swiped like a blade through the rapidly clouding water.

  The parents, always loving to their children but lately preoccupied by the sudden, massive success of their book, almost never came up to the third floor of the house, and as a result the place had become a kind of anarchic menagerie, dense with the dark stink and wall-fingerprints and equipment of child-life and animal-life, so different from the floor below, the parents’ floor, which was a Danish-modern oasis. To a visitor, the parents’ floor of the Mellow household seemed to suggest sex, or at least to suggest a sophisticated medium in which sex could grow unimpeded, a quivering, translucent agar where a man and woman could lie down together on any surface, blond wood or brass bed, and begin the overture of willing, playful, goal-free fucking.