Surrender, Dorothy (28 page)

In Sara’s room, Natalie tossed Sara’s belongings into a suitcase. In her haste, the items lost their special meaning; she didn’t treat them reverently, but lobbed them into the bag without ceremony. In went the beach hat, the bathing suit, the Japanese notebook, and assorted books and papers. When she was all packed, she convened with Peter, Maddy, and Adam in the upstairs hallway, all of them holding luggage and standing as stunned as tourists getting off a transatlantic flight.

“What exactly is it we’re supposed to have done again?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know,” said Maddy. “Terrible things, I guess. Orgies; freebasing crack cocaine; human sacrifices.”

Sara had been the first sacrifice of the summer, the first ever in their relatively short and uneventful lives. They all knew they would not come back to the house anymore. Next summer they would be living elsewhere, and apart. They thought of Sara across a table, Sara explaining how to make perfect sushi, Sara rolling seaweed as carefully as she used to roll a joint in college. If she had
lived, would they still be staying in this house next summer, and the summer after that? Would time stop for them, the way people often wished it would? Her clothes and her cassette player and her books were all packed, and her mother was carrying them out of the house for good.

They took turns embracing Natalie, as in a receiving line, and they made plans to speak to her very soon. They would all meet in the city to help clear out Sara’s apartment, and Peter would bring his truck. Even Peter hugged Natalie how, and she felt a small, leftover pulse of feeling toward him, and then it was gone. “I will miss all of you kids,” Natalie said in a voice that was pointedly parental. “I want to thank you for letting me stay. It’s meant a lot to me; I can’t tell you how much.”

“What will you do now?” Maddy asked. “This fall, I mean. Will you just go back to your job at the travel agency? Will you be all right on your own?”

“Oh, maybe I’ll take a trip,” said Natalie. “I can get myself a dirt-cheap fare to Japan.” They nodded knowingly, imagining her among the rush-hour crowds in Tokyo, this intense, pretty Westerner, searching for what her daughter had once searched for, and had eventually found.

They said a round of intense and endless good-byes. Standing on the front porch in a small circle, Natalie looked at the others.
“Owakare ni narimasu,
” she said, with a decent accent in her pronunciation, and the words meant:
This is the parting.
It was a formal phrase she had learned on the Berlitz tape, used only in farewells of real importance. They hugged lightly, formally, then separated. Peter, Maddy, Adam, and Duncan would be riding home in the truck, and Natalie would be taking her car.

As they drove away from the house for good, they left Mrs. Moyles to glare at them from the front window, indicting them for infractions both imaginary and real. The lawn still bore vague helicopter prints, but everything else was intact. The house was amazingly clean, as clean as it had ever been, although despite
Natalie’s efforts, a tiny cluster of mushrooms was shooting up from an ungrouted spot between the bathroom tiles. The outside world always managed to find its blind way in. You kept yourself clean, safe, organized, but eventually there it was, the disorder of the natural world, finding its way inside your home. A young woman could die; people were routinely stolen from earth, as though by UFOs. Ascending in the Normandy helicopter the other day, Natalie had felt as though she was leaving the earth for good, rising up and getting a last glimpse before the details spun away and left her vision, which was perhaps the way you felt at the end of your life. Everything grew smaller, experiences more remote, left in fragments: the taste of a particularly good dinner eaten a long time ago; a favorite novel; the pale blue comforter used on winter nights. There had been men, her husband and others, and she remembered them, the gratification of their weight on her. But they had not registered in exactly the way that other experiences had. Her daughter had left a deeper mark; daughters did.

Sitting beside Natalie and watching
The Wizard of Oz
so many years ago, Sara had buried her head under her mother’s arm during the frightening moment when the witch wrote “
SURRENDER DOROTHY
” in the sky. But now the idea of surrender did not seem so terrible. Natalie thought of a young girl wandering through a strange land among trees that spoke and reached out their knobby arms to touch and warn her. Perhaps it was better to surrender, to collapse into the inevitable. That was what a mother wanted for her children; life was frightening, but if you gave in you could somehow be pushed through it all, and perhaps it would not be so painful. You wanted to think of a wide and easy path for your children. Of course it always led to death; it had to, even when you saw them for the first time in all their wet and slick and misshapen-headedness at birth. You were always saying good-bye, starting then, when an anonymous nurse took the baby away to be cleaned, drops put in her eyes, the white, protective curds of birth
sponged from her body. You wanted the baby not to struggle, not to shriek; if she did, it made it so much harder for you to let her go. If she went quietly, let herself be wheeled down the hall as passive as a room-service dinner, then maybe you could rest.

Now Natalie drove and drove, the sparse landscape of the country slowly turning to city. Trees appeared less frequently, their branches starting to thin out and lose their green. There were signs advertising cigarettes and Goya canned pineapple and Jockey shorts; there were buildings being erected, highways under repair. Traffic blossomed. She imagined herself in Japan, wandering lost, searching for the places Sara had studied. Suddenly she was embarrassed at this image. She would not go to Japan this winter; she would go somewhere new, perhaps with her best friend, Carol, or even with Melville Wolf. She would go to Cancún, or maybe St. Bart’s. She would go someplace her daughter had never been.

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for discussion for Meg Wolitzer’s
Surrender, Dorothy.
We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

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A Conversation with Meg Wolitzer

Q: Your books all offer highly detailed depictions of day-to-day life as many of us live it today. In this sense, your work follows the prescriptions of Jane Austen—who saw fiction as a mirror held up to reality—and Sir Walter Scott, who defined the novel as just a reflection of the everyday doings of ordinary people. Do you see your novels as mirrors of reality? What sorts of novels do you imagine Jane Austen would be writing today?

A:
Trends in novels have changed a great deal since Jane Austen’s time, and the big, realistic, “mirror” novel is only one kind out of many being written today. But it happens to be the kind that I’m drawn to again and again, both as a writer and a reader. I’m not sure fiction “should” do anything in particular, but when I read a book that really shows me the inner mechanics of peoples lives—the moments of tedium and epiphany—I feel extremely grateful. It’s not that I consciously set out to provide a mirror of reality when I write fiction, but because I myself am so curious about other people—the way they think and talk and the complexities of the world they’ve constructed for themselves—I always end up putting some of this into my books. If I hadn’t been a writer, I think I would have enjoyed being a psychoanalyst, just so I could have these stories told to me all day. If Jane Austen were writing today, I think her novels would be as wry and knowing as ever, and would provide a guide to the customs and intimacies of an increasingly strange and difficult world.

Q: How do you feel about the popular critical practice today of sorting contemporary novels into neat categories: women’s fiction, men’s fiction, gay fiction, romantic comedy, literary fiction, etc? To what categories have you most often found your books assigned?

A:
Sorting novels into categories can be a reductive act, because it keeps readers away from certain books. My books have sometimes been classified as “women’s fiction” and while I don’t mind this classification, I don’t want to put off male readers. I’ve also been shelved in bookstores under “literary fiction,” and that’s fine with me, though lately it seems that “literary fiction” basically means anything that’s not written by Danielle Steel.

Q: Who are your favorite novelists? What book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing?

A:
My favorite novelists are Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Evelyn Waugh, Colette, and Philip Roth. As for shorter fiction, I’m a fan of James Joyce, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov and a contemporary of mine who’s also a friend, Lorrie Moore. It’s not that the influence of any of these writers can really be seen in my writing, but each of them has made me so excited about fiction that I just want to go write. I would say that Virginia Woolf has exerted the strongest influence on me in terms of language and memory;
Mrs. Dalloway
is one of my favorite books ever. It’s a perfect novel.

Q: Your previous hooks have been called “seriously funny.” But
Surrender, Dorothy,
which begins with the sudden death of its central character, clearly emphasizes the tragic over the comic. What inspired you to make such a major thematic departure?

A:
Perhaps it’s a by-product of getting older, but I’ve been giving a certain emphasis to the darker aspect of my characters’ lives. A close friend of mine died suddenly some years ago, though under different circumstances, and I think the experience was so overwhelming to me that I simply needed to turn it into something, to try to understand it better. So I wrote about the first death among a group of friends, though the actual story of
Surrender, Dorothy
is completely invented.

Q: Woody Allen has said, “Comedy writers sit at the children’s table.” But many authors feel it is harder to write comedy than tragedy. Do you agree? What are the challenges of blending humor and drama? Why do you suppose “comic” and “slice-of-life” novels, no matter how well-crafted and accomplished, are generally perceived as separate from the “serious” literary canon?

A:
Written comedy is tremendously hard because, for one reason, you can’t rely on “shtick”—the funny voices, the facial expressions, the physical stuff—that stand-up comics or comic actors do to heighten the effect. It’s just your words, left on their own to live or die. Voice becomes central in comedic fiction. I agree with Woody Allen’s comment, but I also happen to think that a lot of comedy writers are secretly glad to be banished to the children’s table, because they know that’s where the action is. Blending humor and drama is a great challenge, because you run the risk of readers saying,
“Well, I liked the funny parts, but not the sad parts,” or vice versa. You can’t please everyone when you write, so you shouldn’t try to please anyone. Ideally, the humor and pathos will come out all in one burst. I’m not sure why funny writers aren’t taken as seriously as their more highbrow counterparts, because I know they’ve contributed a great deal to literature. There are exceptions, of course, although generally these serious writers who are given credit and recognition for writing in a wildly funny way tend to be men (think Roth, Pynchon, Waugh). When wit is absent from a book, I worry. I like books to be deeply observant, and often those observations will end up having a slightly hilarious edge to them, like life itself.

Q: How did you begin writing? Did your parents play a role in your aspirations?

A:
My mother, Hilma Wolitzer, is a novelist, and I grew up watching her sit in her nightgown at her Smith-Corona typewriter all day. In the beginning, I was slightly embarrassed by her “job”—actually, it didn’t seem like a job at all—and I kind of wished at the time that she’d do something more normal, like be a travel agent. But gradually I began talking about writing with her, and she was a great influence and supporter of my earliest efforts, encouraging me to think that I could become a writer someday too. And now I am, and I suppose my children are equally embarrassed by my pseudo-job.

Q: Adam, Natalie, and Maddy are all wonderfully developed and consistently surprising characters. Are they based on any real-life models?

A:
None of my characters are ever really based on actual people, although I do borrow certain traits and idiosyncrasies from people I know. But I tend to mix them together to make a more interesting hybrid. While I don’t “know” any of my characters in real life, per se, I do sometimes know their “type”—the kind of men and women they are, who live certain kinds of lives that I’ve tried to understand.