Surrender, Dorothy (3 page)

“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?

When she and Ed had first met one summer at a hotel in the Catskills, she had asked him this. It was a challenge, a put-down, she knew, but he did not seem offended. Instead, he seemed to enjoy the chance to explain to her the inner workings of the mouth.

She had sat with him at the bar of the Concord Hotel, while he drew a picture of the upper jaw for her on a cocktail napkin. God, I’m bored, she thought at the time, but it did not stop her from
seeing him again. In fact, her boredom with Ed Swerdlow became a constant, pleasurable topic of conversation she could have with her friends. “That man is so boring!” Natalie would say to a girlfriend on the phone after an evening spent with Ed. But in an odd way she liked him—his single-mindedness about becoming a dentist, his straightforwardness, and even the shape of his head.

Ed looked in her mouth on one of their early dates, sitting her under a strong light and tilting her head up. “Not bad,” he said, referring to the fillings that other dentists had packed into the hollows over the years. Sitting with her head thrown back like that, she understood that she would never really love him. Her friends spoke of undying love for men, and Natalie pretended to know what they meant, but she was an unabashed narcissist at heart, and her interests did not stray far from herself. Until there was Sara.

Sometimes, in August at the beach house, other members of the house casually eavesdropped on Sara’s telephone conversations with Natalie, because the way Sara and her mother spoke to each other was compelling. First came the inevitable “Surrender, Dorothy” salutation, then an odd, colloquial banter laced with affection and tension. The others in the house had by now let their own parents drop away from their lives to a certain extent, becoming entwined with them mostly when there was a cashflow problem that only a parent could solve, or a family scandal worth discussing, or a holiday arrangement to be made. This summer, the bond between Natalie and Sara was more complicated than usual, because Natalie had lent her daughter her second, slightly rundown car, also a Toyota. The car was a simple loan for August, yet it came with warnings attached. “If you bang it up, I’ll kill you,” Natalie had said. “And don’t let any of your friends take it for a joy ride.”
Joy ride.
Her mother saw them as irresponsible teenagers, instead of this crew of careful, faithful friends hurtling in a pack toward the middle of their lives.

Natalie hadn’t been to the house in Springs, and Sara wanted to leave this the one place her mother would never see. When she was thirteen, Sara had told her mother everything, because she assumed that was what all girls did. She had told Natalie about how she had cheated on her geography test, and she had told her about stealing a nugget of hashish from Alison Bikel’s father’s nighttable drawer. And when, during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, Neil Grolier had put his hand inside Sara’s underpants, the feelings that hand had engendered were so wild and peculiar that she had needed to tell her mother about them, too.

But her mother had simply looked at Sara and said, “Yes, a man’s hands can be a wonderful thing.” Then she went on to describe for Sara all that awaited her in the combustible universe of sex. It was terrifying and disgusting to hear the details, but somehow still exciting. “When the time comes,” Natalie had said, stroking her daughter’s head like a dog and gazing off, “you’ll know what I mean.”

Two years later, she learned what her mother had meant. Because she was a beautiful girl of a certain type (long, shining fair hair parted in the middle, astonishingly clear skin, turquoise beads ringing her slender neck), a certain type of soulful boy liked her. The boys actually resembled Sara; their own hair was shining and parted in the middle, too. One of them wrote out the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven” for her in painstaking calligraphy on parchment paper. She had sex with him in her white canopy bed while her mother was at her desk at the Seven Seas Travel Agency in the city, arranging a whirlwind Spain-Portugal itinerary for a honeymoon couple. Neither Sara nor this boy knew exactly what they were doing; they both fumbled around on the bed and made a few inadvertent mewing noises, then a reservoir-tip Trojan was produced with much fanfare and there was a great deal of pain and a little blood, and suddenly what had been awkward and joyless became serious, sublime.

Over the years, both mother and daughter became involved
with an assortment of men, and the big house in New Jersey became a place to bring them. Natalie dated amiable, divorced businessmen with middle-aged waistlines and a predilection for no-iron slacks. It amazed Sara that her mother could be attracted to these men, yet Natalie felt the same way about Sara’s boyfriends, whose mouths vacantly hung open, and whose hands smelled of all things fried. During Sara’s adolescence, sex was an open secret in the house; the teenaged daughter’s diaphragm was hidden under a stack of inorganic chemistry homework in her top dresser drawer, and the mother’s older, more weatherbeaten version was hidden under an Anne Klein scarf in her bottom dresser drawer.

Off at Wesleyan freshman year, Sara called Natalie at seven in the morning while a boy lay beside her in her narrow dormitory bed. She put the phone up to his sleeping lips. “Listen,” she whispered to her mother. “He’s breathing.”