by Meg Wolitzer
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.”
And her mother held the phone up to the lips of the systems analyst lying in her own bed. “Listen,” Natalie whispered back. He’s snoring.
This summer, neither woman had a man in her bed, at least not yet. There was time; August had barely begun.
SHAWN BEST arrived in Springs at six o’clock, his arms and legs freezing from the aggressive air conditioner of the luxury bus. He had brought a bayberry-scented candle as a housegift, in a spun-glass vessel made to resemble a Druid. It looked like a prop from a stage version of The Hobbit. Shawn did have a cruel mouth, Sara thought, but his eyes looked too innocent to contain anything that could truly be described as sadistic.
The men were formal around each other, careful not to touch or betray any intimacy. Shawn seemed disappointed in the summer house; he had probably imagined something palatial, even though Adam had warned him the place was nothing special.
“Well,” said Sara, “I’m going to take a rest before Maddy and Peter and the baby get here.” She extricated herself, her smile tight.
In the late afternoon, Maddy and Peter arrived in the red Ford pickup that Peter had been driving since college, their baby trapped into a rear-facing car seat between them. There were hurried, excited greetings, and exclamations over the baby, who had a head of spiky hair and questioning, dark eyes. Then everyone found their rooms and began to unpack their bags, working open the old dresser drawers and settling in. They could hear Duncan crying, his sobs rhythmic and cartoonish.
Later, Peter went out and bought lobsters and beer, and another haphazard dinner got under way. Shawn brought out matches and lit his ugly bayberry candle. They all talked about the year, their jobs, the news of the world. They somehow began a discussion of the genital mutilation of girls in Africa, which had Maddy and Sara speaking in quiet, angry voices. Maddy had been independently researching the topic from a legal standpoint and hoped to publish an article about it in a law journal, even though it had nothing to do with her area of expertise, which was torts. But it had all been put on hold after her baby was born and she went on leave from the law firm.
At dinner, the serious discussion about genital mutilation led to some silly talk about Notary Publics. “What is a Notary Public, anyway?” Peter asked. “I know everyone has to use them once in a while, and sometimes you can find them in the weirdest places, like the back of a hardware store, just sitting there under a display of Phillips head screwdrivers or something, and you pay them to stamp your papers, but who are they? And how did they get to be who they are?”
“I think they have to go to school for it,” said Maddy.
“But what do they learn in Notary Public school?” asked Sara. “What’s on the final exam?”
“And why,” said Peter, “would someone want to be a Notary Public? This is the great mystery of the universe; forget about why the dinosaurs disappeared. There are a million jobs to choo
se from out there, and this is the one they pick.” They were laughing now, enjoying the familiar cadences of their conversation.
The group had come together freshman year at Wesleyan, when they had lived together on the third floor of a dormitory. Their humor, and many of their references, were often inaccessible to anyone else. Their entire view of the world was tilted and limited, a fact that they recognized. In earlier years they had considered themselves ageless, their bodies unlined and resilient, their experiences somehow meaningless.
But that was their twenties; now they were thirty. Everything was different at thirty; nothing was taken lightly or carelessly. Now they talked and talked, these thirty-year-olds, in the kitchen they sat in every August. The kitchen chairs were uncomfortable in a 1950s suburban way—coral vinyl bolted down with metal studs—and the tablecloth was shiny oilcloth, but the company (except for Shawn, the unknown presence) was so welcome and comforting, that everyone seemed on the verge of nostalgic tears. This day, after all, served as the letting-go of the held breath of all the months, the release from a year in New York that had been particularly grim, locking them into their fluorescent cubicles at work, and the small apartments they called home. They had barely gone outside all winter; they had ordered movies from the video store, and a rotation of take-out dinners (Chinese, Thai, barbecue), waiting for it to become bearable outdoors, and for the world to once again seem approachable. The newspapers reported that people had frozen on the streets that January in record numbers, the alcohol in their blood quickening death. But then spring arrived, transforming seamlessly into summer. Now here they were again, wearing shorts and gathering to eat the tender meat of local lobsters, and it seemed as though winter had never even taken place.
Later that first evening, after the sun set and they were all sitting on the deck that looked out over the scrubby yard, Adam announced that he wanted to drive to town to buy ice cream to go atop the raspberry pie. Sara agreed to take him in the car. Shawn went inside and planted himself in front of the awful old piano, lightly playing one of the songs from his musical. Adam climbed back into the car with Sara and they headed out to the Fro-Z-Cone on the edge of town. The sky was still pale, and even though you couldn’t see the ocean from this road, you knew it was around here somewhere. Your hair felt damp; you thought you smelled salt, although you weren’t sure if salt really had a smell.
“You hate him,” said Adam, as the car pulled out of the driveway. “Shawn, I mean.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s all right. I hate him a little bit too,” said Adam. “He’s kind of an opportunist. He’s very nervy. But he really likes me. And there’s actually something sweet about him.”
“I don’t know him well enough to hate him,” said Sara. “I’m sure he’s perfectly fine.”
“He’s good in bed,” Adam said, sheepishly.
“Well, good for you,” said Sara.
“You know, you could at least pretend to like him,” said Adam. “God knows I’ve pretended to like some of the losers you’ve brought to the house over the years.”
“Losers? Who?” demanded Sara.
“The gem guy, for one,” said Adam.
The gem guy had been a man a few summers earlier who dealt in rare stones and the occasional coin. He was from Bahrain and was quite handsome, yet it turned out that he maintained archaic, obnoxious notions about sex roles, and was uncomfortable around Adam because Adam was, as the gem guy had phrased it, “an unrepentant sodomite.”
“The gem guy was a long time ago. And he was about sex, pure and simple,” said Sara. “He was a pig, and he insisted on scrubbing his penis with scalding water, a loofah sponge, and Lava soap after he was done. He would have used turpentine if we’d had it in the house.”
“You know what I wish?” Adam suddenly said.
“Yes,” said Sara, sighing. “What you always wish.”
“Well, is that so bad?” said Adam. “Wishing that we loved each other, you and I? That way?”
“You mean,” said Sara, “that lovely, intimate, fluid-exchanging way.”
“You’re such a fucking romantic,” said Adam.
“Actually, I am.”
“But not with me,” said Adam softly. “Oh, well. So it goes.” The Fro-Z-Cone came into view, its immense neon ice cream cone icon buzzing and sputtering in the twilight. “Look at that thing,” said Adam. “It’s so phallic. It just looms over everyone, and we all head toward it. We’re all making a mecca toward the giant penis in the sky.” Sara laughed, and he continued. “Oh help us, giant Fro-Z-Cone,” he said. “Help us distinguish right from wrong, and good from evil. Pleasure us, giant Fro-Z-Cone, with your giant frozen … cone.”
Sara parked the car in the lot beside a BMW that belonged to a bunch of teenagers clustered around the counter of the ice cream stand. “Look,” she said. “The bearded woman still works here.”
“Poor bearded woman,” said Adam. “Why doesn’t she at least trim it? It wouldn’t be so prominent.”
“Maybe it’s a political statement,” said Sara, and they both laughed meanly. “God, we’re terrible,” she said. The bearded woman was elderly, with a milky eye and long strands running from her chin like a witch in a fairy tale. She had been here for years and years, “since ice cream had been invented,” according to Adam. Now they ordered a tub of vanilla, watching as the woman held a container under the nozzle of the soft-serve machine, the ice cream being extruded in a long turban. In the distance, the teenagers smoked and howled and broke bottles, the glass cracking almost musically against the blacktop of the parking lot, while bugs jumped all around them in the neon light.
Sara and Adam paid for the ice cream and then ducked back into the car. As Sara started the engine, she saw that one of the headlights no longer worked. Adam got out and stepped around to the front. She craned through the open car window. “Busted,” he said, shaking his head. “We can take it in tomorrow. There’s an auto shop in town.”
“How would you know?” asked Sara. “That’s like the last thing in the world you would ever know about. Transmissions. Carburetors. It’s kind of outside the Adam Langer Sphere of Knowledge.”
“Well, ha-ha to you, missy,” he said. “I guess I’m full of surprises.” He paused, smiling. “Actually,” he said, “the only reason I know about it is because there’s this guy who works out front, and he never wears a shirt, just a bandanna around his neck. I call him the Hairless Mechanic.”
“I thought it was something like that,” said Sara.
They saw that the teenagers had scattered; one of them must have casually smashed the light with a bottle. Adam got back inside and they headed off. The single working headlight swung its solo beam onto the half of the road under its watch. How strange it felt to be driving like this; it was like having one eye open. The sky was turning truly dark; back at the house, everyone would already have gone inside, waiting for their plates of pie and ice cream. Sara felt that the house was where she belonged, and yet she knew that as a life it was imperfect, makeshift, good for summers only.
Had she been doing the kinds of things that would eventually lead to a life she wanted to live year-round? Her friends were like bodyguards who kept one another from the perils and disappointments of the larger world, and yet she wondered if she was prepared for her life. She should set her expectations lower, she thought, finding some fairly ordinary job that involved a mastery of the Japanese language, which she had become skilled at but not brilliant.
Adam was brilliant, she thought, in a way that came to him naturally and effortlessly. But Sara continually tried hard and she could almost feel the tug of all that trying. Inevitably, she was someone who meant well. In graduate school, she had known students who simply blazed their way through seminars. One woman, Adrian Pomerantz, was so intelligent that the professors always lit up when Adrian spoke; her eloquent, cogent analyses forced them not to be lazy, not to repeat themselves. Adrian was small and dark, wi
th a fine film of hair above her upper lip and a wardrobe made up of odd little dresses that she purchased from an antique store in the Village, but which looked as though they should be worn by Shakers. She was a sturdy little chestnut of a woman who had probably been winning academic prizes her entire life, but somehow, no matter what she did or how much she dazzled, Adrian Pomerantz would only be admired, never loved.
Sara would be loved. Sara Swerdlow would get away with it; she would float through everything she undertook, and no one would mind.
There was a young assistant professor at Columbia named Ron Getman, who had been particularly helpful to Sara when she was trying to decide upon a dissertation topic. He had sat with her in coffee shops on Broadway, and in his gloomy little office, and he had gazed at her steadily as they discussed her thesis, which was to be about propagandistic images of the Japanese people during World War II. He was virtuous and would not kiss her without some sort of sign of encouragement on her part. She considered giving him such a sign but rejected the idea, knowing that it might have been possible to find love with this man who had fair, fading hair and spoke Japanese with a rapidity that amazed her. She didn’t deserve Ron Getman; no, she didn’t really want him. She didn’t know what she wanted. Not him, not Sloan the environmental lawyer who had changed his name, and not even Adam, whom she loved so deeply. That was the problem, and it informed almost everything she did. What did she want? What could she get out of studying Japanese—a pathetic nowhere job with a toy company? What could she get from men? A litany of orgasms, babies, a mortgage, a future? And then there was the question of her mother; lately she thought she had been deprived of oxygen during all these years they had spent together. It was all too much—Natalie wanting to know everything, and Sara willingly telling her. In some ways, she even hated her mother.
The only arena in which she was secure, and fully herself, was at the beach house every August. She almost felt as though she wanted to hurry back to the house now, and so she stepped more firmly on the gas pedal. The car radio played a song that was riveting in its associations: Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl,” an oldie which had played throughout much of Sara and Adam’s adolescence. Boys had sung it to Sara: a sexy, durable summer song, her own brown eyes wide with pleasure. And Adam, she knew, had sung it to himself in his bedroom along with a clock radio, wondering why he wasn’t attracted to girls, girls with brown eyes, with blue eyes, with long, constantly shampooed hair, and whether he ever would be.