Surrender, Dorothy: A Novel Read online

  Now Sara stopped the car in front of a lunch stand, and she and Adam ate at a picnic table. “This taste,” Adam said as he swallowed the first bite of a crab roll, “is like Proust’s madeleine. When I’m not young anymore, this taste will bring every sensation back to me.”

  “No offense, but you’re already not young anymore,” said Sara. “Young was two summers ago. Last summer was the cusp. This summer it’s all over.”

  “Then I guess I should get on with my life,” said Adam, as a clump of crabmeat tumbled down the front of his shirt. “I should start writing about different things. Not set all my plays in my parents’ paneled rec room. I should write a play called Bosnia. I should write about oppression, or cruelty.” They both laughed, because he was no good with such material; it would have been a huge stretch. Instead, he sat here wiping a mess of crab off his shirt, leaving an oblong stain behind. His clothes were full of old, faded stains. “Shawn is cruel,” Adam added. “At least, he has a cruel mouth; you’ll see what I mean. Do I get extra credit for that?”

  Shawn Best had recently pushed his way across a crowded reception in the city to get to Adam at a meet-the-playwrights evening. In a clutch of admirers, Shawn stood out as particularly striking and aggressive, inquiring whether Adam would listen to a cassette tape of songs from his play, and then, even though Adam politely declined, sending it to him by messenger the next morning. The tape, as far as Adam could tell—having listened to only a few songs and not particularly liking musicals—wasn’t good, but at least it wasn’t truly terrible; he remembered that it had to do with the plight of two American spinsters in Rome. There was a passport mix-up in the second act, and one of the spinsters fell into a fountain and sang a long ballad about all the missed opportunities in her life. A few days after he had sent over the tape, Shawn telephoned for Adam’s response, and arranged to pick up the cassette in person. Adam, dazed and passive, had let this stranger into his apartment, where he made himself instantly at home, wandering into the kitchen, where he took a peach Snapple out of the refrigerator without asking, popped it open and drank. When he was done, he sat on the couch in the living room, put the bottle down on the coffee table, then suddenly produced a condom from his wallet.

  “What are you doing?” Adam asked, slightly frightened.

  “Oh, you don’t want to?” said Shawn.

  “Well, I don’t know …,” said Adam. “I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t even know you. This is very confusing.” Actually, he had thought about it; he’d imagined being wrapped in Shawn’s arms, inhaling the vaguely brothy sweat-smell of him. Shawn seemed to know all of this without being told; he took it for granted that other men had these thoughts about him.

  Shawn tore the packet open with his teeth, then stood up and led Adam to the bedroom. “Wait. Wait. No,” Adam had said on the way, because his knee-jerk reaction to sex was always “No.” But now there was no reason for “No.” It wasn’t as though he was a teenager with an impending curfew, frantically making out with someone in the azaleas beside his house, while nearby his parents lay in bed as innocent as children, lulled by the gentle tedium of The Tonight Show. With Shawn, who was a complete stranger, there was the question of safety, of HIV status, but he held a condom in his hand like a peace offering. “Are you, are you … you know …,” Adam whispered a little later in bed, cringing at his own question.

  “Am I what?”

  “Healthy,” said Adam. “Clean. Negative.”

  “Well, to be honest, I don’t know,” Shawn said.

  “You don’t know?” said Adam, incredulous—he who had already been tested several times.

  “I’m not ready to take the test,” said Shawn. “The idea of it freaks me out. The abolute black or white quality. The yes or no.” He paused. “But look,” he added, “this will be totally safe. I’ve got this little latex raincoat here.” So Adam closed his eyes and let himself fall back against the bed.

  That night, seconds after Shawn was gone, Adam had called Sara up and babbled details to her: the line of hair running down Shawn’s stomach like an arrow leading the eye to its destination; the way Adam had felt frightened at the idea of having sex in daylight, where his own body and all its pores and imperfections would be on display, but how Shawn had made him feel at ease; and how, after the sex was through and Adam’s heart was still beating as fast as a hamster’s, the two men had lain on the bed and played Twenty Questions, which Adam had played during every long car ride of his childhood. Lying in bed with a lover after sex was almost like a long car ride. Times stood still; you didn’t know how long you would be there, inert bodies stuck together in this small space, limbs bumping, but you didn’t really care.

  This had all happened only a few weeks earlier, and somehow it had led to Adam inviting Shawn out to the beach house in Springs for the first weekend of August. He would be arriving in a few hours.

  Now Adam and Sara finished their lunch and climbed back into her mother’s Toyota, which was already hot from sitting in a parking lot in the sun. They drove a few miles more until Sara noticed a stand by the side of the road with a sign that read “PIES.” Sara thought they ought to buy one for their landlady, Mrs. Moyles, and so they did. She hopped out and returned with a fresh raspberry pie with a latticework crust. As they drove on toward the house, the pie box slid around on the seat between them, and Adam steadied it with his hand, feeling an intense swell of contentment.

  He could have driven with Sara forever; this was so much better than almost everything else in his life, certainly better than the writing that lately seemed to go nowhere. He knew that the follow-up to his first success would be closely watched. Everyone would want to know if he could do it again; could he make those matinee audiences weep with laughter? Oh, he thought, probably not. This summer he would finish his second play, and in the fall he would show it to Melville Wolf, his producer. “Make it funny,” Mel had warned. “Make it really, really funny. Make me bite my tongue, it’s so funny. Make the inside of my mouth bleed.”

  Adam constantly dwelled on the burden of his early success, and on the futility of even vaguely approximating the experience again. He had seen a TV talk show recently that featured a panel of ex—child stars; clips of their early work were shown, and in each case it was extremely painful to observe the long-gone purity of skin, silkiness of hair, and open-faced hopefulness of those children, and then have to compare that with the lumpy plainness of their fully formed, adult selves. Adam thought of his own father, a businessman who had enjoyed a big success very early in his career when he invested in an electric fan company called, dully, FanCo, and how, when air-conditioning blew across the parched American landscape, his father had lost all his money.

  There was one aspect of Adam’s life that was removed from all anxiety. Sara was that aspect, as good and loyal a friend as he had ever known. He thought that women understood the world in a way that men did not. A woman could lead you, could take you by the hand and show you which of your shirts to wear, and which to destroy. His love for her was so great that when they were apart for too long he felt as unbalanced as a newlywed and almost lightheaded. During the year they saw each other at least once a week for a cheap Tandoori meal at an Indian restaurant draped to resemble a caravan, and they usually talked on the phone a few times a day. They even watched television together on the phone late at night—explicit nature documentaries and peeks into celebrity palazzos—lying in their separate beds in separate apartments, laughing softly across miles of telephone wire.

  Now August had arrived and they would be living in the same house for a month. Adam wanted to live with Sara forever. His fantasies often placed them both in Europe; he saw them living in the South of France and having children, a boy and a girl who could romp in a vineyard and be effortlessly bilingual. The idea of marrying Sara excited him, then always burned away in the gas of its own foolishness. He didn’t want her, and she certainly didn’t want him. They would spend August together, the high point of the ye
ar, and when Labor Day came they would part, as they always did.

  When they pulled into the driveway of the house now, Adam was asleep against her shoulder, his head big and heavy and damp. She woke him up, and they carried their belongings up the weedy path, noticing that each year the small mustard-colored house looked a little worse upon approach, and that one year it would look so awful that they would back away without entering, and never return again. Sara lifted the stiff brass knocker on the front door and let it drop; the sound it made seemed tinny and insignificant, yet from inside they heard immediate footsteps, as though the landlady had been huddling by the door, awaiting their arrival.

  Mrs. Moyles looked the same as last year, only a little worse, not unlike her house. She was a pudding-faced woman whom they suspected of alcoholism or dementia, or both, and who had a head of hair that looked as though she cut it herself while blindfolded. There was nothing charming about her house, either, no details that you could point out to guests, such as a secret passageway, or a set of fireplace pokers with handles shaped like mermaids. It was a no-frills house, a place to stay if you wanted to spend a month in the vicinity of a fancy beach resort and didn’t mind the presence of linoleum and a hive of tiny, hot rooms.

  “So you made it,” she said to Sara and Adam, the same words she said every year when they arrived.

  “Yes,” they invariably said in return, nodding their heads in an attempt at politeness in the face of her indifference. Now Adam held out the pie box, but she didn’t make any attempt to lift her hands up and take it. “This is for you,” he prompted. “Raspberry.”

  Mrs. Moyles peered down at the box in his arms and said, “What am I supposed to do with that? I have diabetes!” As though they should have known. But they knew nothing about her, other than the fact that she owned this cheerless little house at 17 Diller Way, which she agreed to rent to them each summer for an uncommonly low price.

  So they kept the pie for themselves, and Mrs. Moyles handed Sara the key to the house, muttered a few things about the gas jets on the stove, the sprinkler on the back lawn, and the list of emergency telephone numbers on the refrigerator. And then, to their relief, she was gone, driving south to her sister’s house for the rest of the summer in her ancient, boat-sized Chevrolet. Adam and Sara turned to each other, giddy with expectation, and took a look around, observing the warped, upright piano, a Stüttland, an ancient Bavarian brand no one had ever heard of, and the unmatched living room chairs, one with illustrations of Paul Revere and Betsy Ross all over it, and the windows with their ill-fitting screens. Then, accepting their fate with a shrug and a laugh, feeling the filth and gloom of the house steal over them, they went upstairs to unpack in their separate bedrooms.

  Adam stood in the small, sloping room that he inhabited every August, opening the drawers of a bureau and putting away his clothing. The room was furnished with a collection of badly painted pieces, now flaking in a paint-chip snowfall to the splintery floor. He slid a drawer closed, or tried to, for it had no runner, and needed to be worked into its slot. Finally he put a palm against it and slammed it the final inch shut.

  Across the hall, Sara opened a drawer of her own small bureau to put away her underpants and her red leather notebook that she wrote in exclusively in Japanese, and found inside an old copy of Heidi, by Johanna Spyri, and a single, filthy gardening glove. The drawer smelled of earth, and when she looked around the room she saw that the paisley wallpaper was the color of mud, and buckling. How many more years would they take this house? she wondered. How many more years could they tolerate living like teenagers? She sat down on the small bed, feeling it groan even under her delicate weight. This summer would be different from the others, she thought. This summer she would become less flighty, more substantial. She would engage with people her own age, people other than Adam, and she would try to disengage from her mother.

  Everyone who knew Sara Swerdlow well also knew her mother, Natalie Swerdlow, a travel agent who lived in suburban New Jersey. Natalie could be a demanding, edgy, overbearing mother, and while Sara sometimes spoke against her to her friends (“She’s too nosy,” she’d say, or “I wish she’d get a life”), she always felt guilty afterward, and would telephone her mother for a long, purgative session of girl talk. Mother and daughter had been virtually inseparable since Natalie’s divorce when Sara was small. The marriage had frayed and Sara’s father had shrugged off to Dayton, Ohio. He was an alarmingly passive man who had never been expressive with his daughter, and Sara found that she didn’t really miss him as much as she missed the idea of him: a father. Someone like all the other girls had, who picked you up after band practice, or who drove a careful of you and your hysterically giggling friends to the mall, sitting up front alone like a poker-faced chauffeur in a pea jacket. A father who spent a lot of time examining his new leaf-blower from Sears, apparently fascinated by the force with which the leaves were sucked into the bag. A father you could not know, because you were a girl and he was a man, and there was a vast, awkward gulf between you. Everything you would do together would be difficult, and it would only grow worse. When Sara’s father left home, she consoled herself with the idea that she would be spared the discomfort of spending so much time with a man she could not talk to, and who could not, or would not, talk to her.

  She would spend much more time with her mother, she decided, and apparently her mother had the same idea, for in the face of their newfound aloneness, the mother had clung to her only daughter. They looked alike, these two fine-boned Swerdlow women. Natalie still spoke to Sara on the telephone every day. It was she, in fact, who made the first call to the house that summer. Sara and Adam had been inside for less than twenty minutes, when the telephone rang. “Sara!” Adam called. “It’s for you!” She knew who it was; who else would think to call her here, so soon after she had arrived?

  “Hello?” she said into the telephone.

  “Surrender, Dorothy,” said her mother.

  “Hey, Mom,” said Sara. “What took you so long?”

  “Oh,” said her mother, “I thought I’d give you a little space.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Sara. She rolled her eyes at Adam, as if to signal, My crazy mother, but in truth she enjoyed these conversations. Her mother, though an extremely intrusive person, was also a source of comfort. Sara had been a shy girl who drew pictures of small woodland animals and read books about blind or orphaned children. Her mother thought of her as sensitive and tender, which was so different from the way everyone thought of her mother. Natalie Swerdlow had a hard laugh and great good looks, with a body that appeared more elastic than it had reason to at her age. She also had a sense of fun that was often drummed out under the dull, quotidian beats of suburban life. How had Natalie wound up in New Jersey, she used to ask herself, living in a big house and married to a dentist? (“A periodontist,” Ed would correct, and she would say, “Pardon me.”) Her daughter, Sara, was the saving grace, the small, swaying plant that had resulted from this unlikely union. As the marriage to Ed Swerdlow, D.D.S., turned into a festival of bickering at home and in various restaurants, Natalie swiveled her attentions and hopes onto her daughter.

  Sara loved receiving such a flood of attention from her overwhelming, wonderful mother, and together mother and daughter developed an alliance: the big and the small, the formed and the unformed. They sang songs, they paged through fashion magazines, they once even bleached their hair with temporary dye, transforming themselves into mother-daughter platinum-blond starlets for one night only. Each received a borrowed burst of voltage from the other, the appropriation of qualities that would otherwise never be available.

  Natalie understood early on that her daughter would one day be more beautiful than she herself had ever been; Sara’s neck and fingers were longer, her eyes larger, her hair perfectly straight. Sara attracted everyone—men, women, children, pets—through her gentle elegance and hints of melancholy darkness. You wanted to be near her because she smelled woodsily good and had
a simple, easy laugh. You knew that Sara would always remember your birthday with an interesting little gift, and that she also had an inner life that you didn’t fully comprehend. She was pretty, but not vacant. She wasn’t merely one of those uncomplicated girls who invest everything in the boys in their midst, stringing necklaces for them made of shells and attending every dull lacrosse game, sitting on the bleachers in the grassy air, hugging themselves in the cold, while the boys ran with their big, strange, netted sticks. Sara, it was clear, was different.

  But so, too, was Natalie, although in other ways. Natalie had been very sexy back in the sixties—slightly brazen in swept-up hairdos and a series of very short dresses the color of Necco wafers. Now Necco wafers didn’t exist (or did they—in the back of some dusty candy store?) and those hairstyles and dresses had long been retired, but Natalie had made a graceful transition to the styles of the seventies and then the eighties and the nineties, emerging fully intact: a slim travel agent who looked far younger than she was. She was freer than her daughter, louder and more assertive. She was the mother who appeared at PTA meetings looking so good that the assistant principal hovered solicitously and flirtatiously all evening. She was the jazzy mother who was creative in everything she did. When she made salads for Sara, she arranged the iceberg lettuce leaves, carrots, tomatoes, and olives into the approximate shape of a girl. Natalie threw herself into Sara because this gave her a pleasure greater than any other.

  There were actually very few pleasures elsewhere in her life back then. Her marriage was over and for a while she was celibate, uninterested in starting up anything new. Sex with Ed had mostly been pathetic; sometimes, during the marriage, he came home from the office still wearing his papery white dental tunic, looking vaguely futuristic. She thought of his hands, imagined them exploring the intricacies of some stranger’s teeth and gums. Why, she wondered, would anyone want to be a dentist?