Surrender, Dorothy (8 page)

“Was that awful of me to mention the money?” Peter asked Maddy when they climbed into bed at dawn. Across the room, the baby now breathed softly in the downy depths of his Portacrib.

“No,” said Maddy. “It’s not awful. But I don’t want to talk about money anymore.” She lay against the stiff, camphorous pillow. In other summers, this room had felt both terrible and comfortable, and she had always loved it; being here offered a kind of sameness, a suspension in what was familiar. But without Sara, suddenly everything felt strangely unknown.

The two women had known each other as children, attending the same all-girls summer camp in the Adirondacks, where they sat around a bonfire at night and sang the lyrics to the Camp Ojibway song: “We will always be true to Ojibway / No matter if we’re young or old / We will always be true to Ojibway / No matter if we’re meek or bold …” There, among a sea of cunning, slightly nasty campers who competed to the death during color war, they recognized a similarity, a shared type of intelligence.

“You read all the time,” Sara had said to her in the bunk one afternoon, and what had seemed to be an accusation was in fact a compliment. “I do, too,” she added.

“Really?” said Maddy.

“Yes,” said Sara. Then she said proudly, “Right now, I’m reading Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet”

Maddy was suitably impressed; Sara was not only popular, she was smart too, a combination that was unusual. Whenever Sara walked across the lawn at camp, other girls stopped her to discuss their problems. From a distance, you could see another girl looking pinched with unhappiness, and Sara leaning close to her in concern.

Under trees and by the darkening lake at dusk, the two girls talked about the other campers in exhaustive detail, making lists of those they liked and those they despised. “Erica Engels,” said Sara, “is fat on the outside, and extremely pathetic at first glance, but I think we should pay special attention to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day she became a neurosurgeon, or even Secretary of State.” Maddy nodded, impressed by Sara’s powers of observation.

“And what about Susan Lottman?” she asked Sara. “Evil incarnate, right?”

“Right,” said Sara. “Just because she can dive well, and her father practically owns Clinique, she thinks she’s so special. But keep an eye on her. I think she’s big trouble; I can sense it in my bones. She’ll probably end up in prison for grand larceny, or worse.” Maddy nodded, contented at the knowing intimacy of these conversations.

Camp Ojibway was filled with rich girls from Manhattan, children of divorce who flounced around the bunk, speaking either in code or in perfect conversational French. Maddy was part of a group of semi-outcasts, a handful of city girls whose families lived in identical high-rise rental apartments with porous walls and low, stippled ceilings. Girls who understood, through the haze of pain native to girlhood, that eventually all this would
pass, and that if they waited long enough, the rich, stupid girls would falter and topple, and the brainy, off-kilter girls would inherit the earth. Sara was not in Maddy’s social group; she was too pretty for that, but she truly liked Maddy and admired her. The attention was flattering and unnerving. When you were with Sara, boys from Camp Iroquois across the lake stopped and hung around you, angling to engage in pointless, arch conversations. Friendship with Sara gave Maddy great pleasure but also instilled in her a budding feeling of despair. Getting dressed for a swim at camp, she would catch a flash of Sara’s smooth, white back that arched as gracefully as a seahorse, and she would think:
I hate myself.

Over the years, Sara and Maddy attempted to top each other’s intimate accounts of self-loathing. There was a requisite, mutual flirtation with bulimia in the late teens, and a period devoted to reading Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath exclusively. And always, along the way, there were excruciating tales of boys. Later, both of them wound up at Wesleyan, where they met the two men who would become central to their lives: Adam and Peter. It had surprised Maddy when Peter showed a real interest in her; he was better-looking than the men who usually liked her. He was better-looking than she was, a shirtless campus Frisbee player with tanned, hairy legs, someone who flirted easily with women. He was handsome yet slightly lost—almost homeless-seeming, in a way—and so he wasn’t intimidating in the way of many good-looking men. Sara had encouraged Maddy, telling her she clearly had an esteem problem and that Peter would be
lucky
to go out with her. So Maddy had been bolder than usual, surprising him by looking him over in a way that was more than playful. He responded by looking back, his eyebrows lifting, setting off something lightly percussive inside her: a quick pulse, a drumbeat signifying some strange and improbable pleasure ahead. Soon they were a campus couple, the whole transaction having taken place as quietly and discreetly as a drug deal. She didn’t really know
what he saw in her, although Sara said there was much to see. “You’re lovely!” Sara had said. “Don’t you know that by now?” Actually, Maddy thought of herself as an extremely
decent
person, and pretty in a somewhat dull, wildflower-patterned-dress-wearing way. But she was devoted to Peter, even when he seemed distracted, inattentive, off in a nebula of abstract thoughts that didn’t include her. Maddy, Peter, Adam, and Sara hung around a pizza place near campus late at night, and spent hours on the deep, springless couches of the library lounge during the reading period before exams.

After college, Maddy and Peter lived in a terrible railroad apartment in New York City—she starting law school, he teaching ninth grade at a public high school—and Sara began what would be a long chain of unfulfilling relationships with men. The men were of the sort that had usually been unavailable to Maddy—handsome in a sculptural way, or perhaps very powerful.

What was sex with these men like? Maddy knew she would never get the answer from personal experience. She and Peter had settled into a pattern of frequent and mostly ordinary sex; they had their gasping orgasms: first her, then him, each of them skittering across the finishing line, and then someone would wash up or get a glass of water, and then they would lie in bed for a while, perhaps picking up the remote control to see what was on television, perhaps not. It was pleasurable but not thrilling. Somewhere else, Maddy knew, Sara was probably wrapping her long and enveloping legs around a brooding, worldly man, practically bringing him to tears with pleasure. Now Sara would never have a baby, would never even get married, would never experience the natural arc of life that everyone assumed was their birthright.

Maddy and Peter rustled and turned in bed, and across the room, as if in synchrony, so did the baby. Down the hall, Adam and Shawn rustled and turned too. Despite the tragedy, the entire household was moving softly in preparation for sleep; there was no choice. Finally, before morning arrived, everyone slept. The
house fell silent for a while until suddenly there was a series of creaks and oddly heavy, stumbling footsteps that seemed close by. Maddy and Peter woke at the same time and lay listening, puzzled and a little scared. Then Peter got up and opened the door, and there in the hall they saw Adam, wandering around in the dark and trying doorknobs. First he opened the bathroom and peered in, then he went into the linen closet. It was as though he was looking for something, but he seemed strange, clumsier than usual.

“Adam?” said Peter. “Are you okay?” But Adam barely heard him. He had pulled open the door of Sara’s room and was walking right in. “Adam?” Peter said again, but it was pointless. Behind Peter came Maddy and Shawn, who was naked to the waist, the hair on his head standing up in sleep-clumps.

“What’s going on?” Shawn asked nervously. “I woke up and he was gone. Then I heard this weird stomping around.”

“He’s sleepwalking,” said Peter. They all looked at Adam, who was now yawning the open-mouthed yawn of a child, then climbing up onto the bed Sara Swerdlow had slept in every August, his head on her pillow.

4
With Sara

Mrs. Hope Moyles spent every August in Virginia, visiting her sister Verna. Both women had long been widowed, and their children never came around anymore, so once again, as it had been in childhood, they had each other.

That had always been the thing about Hope’s house: although it wasn’t very nice, she could rent it out in August and make enough money to help her get through the winter. Who would have predicted this, so many years ago when she and her husband had bought the place? The island had always been rigidly stratified: Rich summering families had their mansions on the water, and everyone else—lobstermen, policemen, plumbers—had their small houses and neat quarter-acres of land. The summer people fled on Labor Day, packing up their cars and leaving behind nothing
but the occasional abandoned inner tube. Everyone else stayed on all year, the regular local folk and a few eccentric types, writers and painters and the like, who decided that the beach was the place to be all winter. The children all attended the public school with its unvarying line-up of teachers: Miss Hill, Mrs. Cullen, and Miss Manzino. For the rest of the year the wind blew hard across the island, and the sky darkened early. In summer, though, the children were set free, and they swam and ran and crabbed and came home with sudden blond, beach-baked heads of hair. One summer, the island no longer seemed to belong to them; it belonged to the rich people with their big houses and their own children, who came to the beach with snorkels and expensive sound systems and suntan lotions that smelled of coconut and vanilla. Then other people followed, less rich but still privileged, renting anything they could grab, and soon all of the Moyles’s friends were letting strangers stay in their unexceptional houses for shocking sums of money, and taking their own families off to Jersey until Labor Day, struck dumb by this new good luck. So Hope and Jack Moyles did the same, and the money was so good each year that they came to count on it.

When Jack died, Hope continued to rent out the house with more urgency than ever. As a widow she had taken up the hobby of drinking, and she liked to spend her money on good vodka and gin that she purchased at Springs Liquors. Every year the same group came to the house: odd young people from the city who paid through the nose for use of her appalling little home. Why they wanted the house she couldn’t imagine; she just hoped they were decent. Decency was important to her. But money, that was the main thing.

So when one of them, the girl with the halting voice, called Hope at her sister’s house a few days into the month to tell her a horrible story about how the other girl in the house had been killed, and that they were all an emotional wreck, and was there any way they could have their money back, Hope was stunned.
She had been drinking before the call, and her response was slow and suspicious. She wondered if such a terrible story could really be true. How low would they stoop to get their money back? Had they finally decided that her house was too disgusting, even for them? Maybe the waterbugs were back, with their delicate cilia, appearing out of nowhere against the porcelain of the bathtub, like someone’s misplaced false eyelashes. Or maybe it was the septic tank backing up, making the house smell like a bathroom in a bus station; it had to be something bad to make them tell such an outrageous tale.

“It’s the waterbugs, am I right?” she asked, her voice rising. “Or maybe you saw a bat. A waterbug won’t kill you, neither will a bat. Bats may look ugly as heck with those ears and pointy teeth, but they’re perfectly harmless.”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Moyles,” said the girl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You can’t have your money back,” said Hope. “You just can’t. We have an agreement. It’s all legal. I can’t just rent the house to someone else at this late date. I’m down here with my sister until Labor Day. I’m sorry; I can’t give you back your money.”

There was silence, and then the girl quietly said good-bye, and Hope returned to her drink. She drank throughout the hot afternoon, and at some point she began wondering uneasily if perhaps it might be true about that car accident after all, but she didn’t do anything about it. Those kids had the house until Labor Day, and nothing would change that.

M
ADDY AND
Peter went out to the beach early the following Monday morning, hoping that the sunlight might make them feel partly human again. Maddy sat quietly and rubbed lotion into Peter’s back; he never used actual sun block like you were supposed to, just some sweet-smelling, unprotective cream. As a result, he tanned beautifully, and by Labor Day he would always
return to the city with dark skin and a head of golden hair, and the female teachers at his school and even some of the students would flirt with him openly.

His wife was moving her hands in concentric circles across his back, and he felt safe with her hands on him. He had always felt safe around a certain kind of woman. When he had first met Maddy at Wesleyan, she lived off-campus in a feminist cooperative often referred to as “Dyke House,” and so he assumed she was not interested in men. But then, one night at a party, it seemed to him that she was flirting, being provocative, fingering the sleeve of his shirt and saying she needed to buy a Christmas present for her father, and where had he bought this shirt? The next day he took her to the sad, faded men’s store in Middletown where he had bought it. She wasn’t a lesbian at all, had never even dabbled with a female friend to the late-night strains of k.d. lang during the stress of final exams. She was a feminist who volunteered at the local rape hotline, and clearly she was interested in men. In
him.
So they went back to Dyke House together later that day, walking past the authentic lesbians who sat playing poker and reading Jacques Derrida in the living room, and they went upstairs to Maddy’s room, where she removed her onyx earrings and placed them on a square of cotton in a little box like tiny dolls being put to sleep, then she climbed into bed. The removal of the earrings made Peter think of the ways in which women were so tender, so heartbreaking, and why men needed them so badly. A woman would remove her earrings for you, and she would spread suntan lotion across your back in tiny, feathery circles for the rest of your life.