Surrender, Dorothy

by Meg Wolitzer

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, a “devastatingly on target” ( Elle) novel about a young woman's accidental death and its effect on her family and friends. For years, Sara Swerdlow was transported by an unfettered sense of immortality. Floating along on loving friendships and the adoration of her mother, Natalie, Sara's notion of death was entirely alien to her existence. But when a summer night's drive out for ice cream ends in tragedy, thirty-year-old Sara—"held aloft and shimmering for years"—finally lands. Mining the intricate relationship between love and mourning, acclaimed novelist Meg Wolitzer explores a single, overriding question: who, finally, "owns" the excruciating loss of this young woman—her mother or her closest friends? Depicting the aftermath of Sara's shocking death with piercing humor and shattering realism, Surrender, Dorothy is the luminously thoughtful, deeply moving exploration of what it is to be a mother and a friend, and, above all, what it takes to heal from unthinkable loss.

Release date: July 1, 2000

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 240

Sample

Chapter 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 in 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 mushrooms 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.

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 year, 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 carful 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.