by Meg Wolitzer
It shamed her to admit it, but her son made her happiest when he slept. That way, she could be certain nothing bad would befall him; he had moved beyond the frightening window of crib death, and now sleep seemed such a lovely harbor for a baby. When he slept, she could move about the house freely, carrying the monitor receiver with her like a cell phone, glancing at the row of red lights for constant reassurance. It was only when Duncan was awake that she doubted her own skills as a mother, worrying that she would drop him or that he would spike a fever so high it would be unmanageable.
There was a book that Maddy had taken with her to the house this summer and which now convinced her that she was a bad mother. The book was a best-seller written by one Dr. Melanie Blandish, Ed.D., an Australian child development expert. It was called The Upbeat Baby, and it had made Maddy feel that her depression over Sara had caused her to be a terrible mother, and that her baby would grow up to be pessimistic and probably even insane. He would develop a classic young-adult onset schizophrenia, in which he would go from being an adorable undergraduate majoring in Semiotics at Brown to a terrified, unshaven beast cowering in his childhood bedroom jabbering in other tongues.
Maddy kept the Melanie Blandish book in her drawer, right beside the peach schnapps, reading surreptitiously when Peter wasn’t around. She was like someone poking at a tender, recent injury, causing herself a kind of low-level pain that in its intensity offered a singular pleasure. “Your baby needs your love all the time,” wrote Dr. Blandish. “You ought to make yourself available to him, like an all-night chemist’s dispensing love. If you seem particularly distracted, believe me, he will /(now it.” This passage haunted Maddy; how often had she seemed this way, how often had the baby seen her cry over Sara, and simply stared at her in utter, helpless perplexity? Dr. Blandish didn’t tell you what to do if your best friend had just been killed in a car accident and you were trying to raise a baby; she gave no advice on managing your life, but simply offered premonitions of doom.
Why, Maddy asked herself lately, had she ever decided to have a baby? She wasn’t ready for this, and neither was Peter. Very recently, it seemed, they had been staying up late and having lots of sex and eating in a variety of cheap restaurants and going to many movies, and once even going to a tiny jewelry store on Avenue A on a Saturday night to have Maddy’s nose pierced. Then, on a whim almost as casual as the nose-piercing decision, they had decided to stop using birth control. She had taken her circular packet of pills one night, put them in an ash tray, and ceremonially burned them, although the plastic had only curled and smoked and stank up the apartment, leaving the pills themselves intact behind their transparent bubble windows.
Sara had been envious at first when Maddy became pregnant so quickly. “You’re so lucky,” she’d said. “You’re like a fertility goddess. Now you get to drink malteds for nine months, and then people give you all those presents, and then you end up with this tiny baby all your own. You get to continue yourself, to make a bid for immortality.” Sara’s envy was an important element to Maddy; she’d welcomed it in a secretive, somewhat triumphant way.
But Sara had really only envied the theoretical baby, not the actual, demanding one. When Duncan was born, Sara brought yellow roses to the apartment and a “family size” bar of chocolate, and then she’d hovered for a few hours, folding doll-sized laundry and screening Maddy’s phone calls. Then, when things became too tedious, Sara slipped off to a late showing of an arty, violent Hong Kong action picture at Columbia with some man she’d recently met in a seminar. “Oh, are you sure you don’t mind?” she’d asked before she left, and Maddy had answered no, no, of course I don’t mind, there’s nothing for you to do here anyway, I’m perfectly fine. As Sara watched the movie at midnight while snuggling against the leather-jacketed shoulder of her date, Maddy disappeared into the quicksand of motherhood. Her nose hole became infected, and the doctor scolded her for not having had it pierced under his supervision and for not taking care of it now, and said she had to let it close over. She nursed the baby for hours and sometimes was so weary afterward—her nipples a hotheaded red, her eyes barely open—that she went to bed at eight, while in the meantime Sara kept sleeping with a number of interesting, difficult men. Sara dated and dated, and eventually she met the powerfully handsome Sloan, who kept her occupied for a while. Meanwhile, Maddy nursed her baby around the clock, feeling isolated and alone in a surreal way, even with Peter beside her. Sometimes she felt like a lost astronaut spinning into infinity. Once, at 3 A.M., Maddy ate Sara’s chocolate bar by herself, polishing off the entire, formidable block in one sitting.
At night lately, when she nursed the baby in this terrible but familiar summer house, she thought of the people she loved: Sara, who lay dead in a cemetery, and Peter, who slumbered on in their uncomfortable bed, protected from the true tragedy of the situation because he had not been close to Sara. His grief seemed stiff, a little phony. Now, with the sound of Japanese phrases hurling through the air, and with the alcohol making its way down inside her throat and fanning out, Maddy carefully descended the stairs, carrying her baby in her arms.
IN THE KITCHEN, Sara’s mother had taken it upon herself to scrub a cabinetful of pots that still bore traces of ancient chicken dinners. She was working with deep, humming concentration, focusing on the pan she held under a blast of hot water, and Maddy thought she looked the way Sara would have eventually looked in middle age, beautiful and melancholic and having seen a little too much sun. She turned to Maddy now, holding the dripping pan in one hand.
“Good morning,” said Natalie. “And good morning to you too, Duncan,” she added, coming forward to get a good look at the baby, whom Maddy was tucking into his high chair. The baby squirmed and squealed impressively, his little tongue pushing through his lips as though he were trying to taste a falling snowflake. “Just look at him,” said Natalie. “He’s so tender. May I?” She put down the pan, held out her arms, and Maddy nodded.
Natalie lifted the baby and held him against her, smelling the top of his head, inhaling deeply. “Oh, that smell, it’s heaven,” she said. “Simply heaven. Baby juice; they ought to bottle it.” She paused. “Would you possibly consider letting me take him out in the carriage later?”
“Be my guest,” said Maddy.
“We’ll go for a stroll,” said Natalie, “and take in the sights.” She placed the baby back in his chair and picked up another pan to clean. “Oh, I loved having a baby around,” she said. “I was so young when Sara was born and God knows I did everything wrong, but who knew back then? I smoked throughout my entire pregnancy, can you believe that? In one hand I held a glass of milk, in the other hand I held a Camel unfiltered. And no one told me not to. No one said a word. I used to smoke in the waiting room of my obstetrician’s office; they even had ashtrays there.” She shook her head. “Well, the world has changed,” she said. “Nothing is the same, nothing at all.” Then something caught in her throat and she turned on the water full force and resumed scrubbing.
Maddy went to her then, touching the edge of her sleeve. “Mrs. Swerdlow,” she said, “please stop cleaning. Please just take it easy. Give yourself a break.”
“Thank you,” Natalie said, “but this is what I want to be doing. I’ll be fine.” She turned back and continued to work, her arm moving rapidly against the pan, grinding a little piece of steel wool into a mush of fibers. Maddy stood watching for a moment, exasperated and helpless, and now Adam and Shawn entered the room, having heard the exchange.
“Mrs. Swerdlow,” Adam began. “I think what Maddy’s trying to say is—”
Natalie tossed the pan down into the sink and wheeled around. “Look, guys,” she said, “I’m doing what makes me feel better. If you really can’t stand it, then I’ll leave, all right? I’ll take a job cleaning rooms at a Holiday Inn. I’ll get it out of my system. But to think of sitting in this place all day, this horrible little house, no offense, and thinking about my Sara and going slowly mad—”
; “Nobody wants you to leave,” Adam said quickly. “We just want you to slow down a little. You should … well, I know it’s a cliché, but you should heal”
“I thought it would be a good idea to be here,” said Natalie, “with Sara’s friends, with Sara’s things, in the place she lived when she died. My friend Carol thinks I’m crazy, says I should see a bereavement counselor. So I said, Carol, what exactly is this bereavement counselor supposed to tell me: This is going to be a rough time? No. The only place to go was here. And I thought it might help if I made the place nicer, if I spruced it up, made it livable. It keeps me busy; it keeps me from becoming a bag lady wearing three coats in August, okay? And if you can’t stand the sight of a middle-aged lady walking around your house doing what she needs to do, well then, this isn’t going to work.”
“We’ll just have to make it work,” Maddy said in the soft cadences of someone talking a person down from a bad drug experience. Now Adam and Shawn joined in like a Greek chorus, telling Natalie how much they wanted her here, how they hoped she felt welcome, how she could stay here until Labor Day.
But they were all thinking about what it would really be like having Natalie here for the month, imagining it in a way they had not been able to do when Adam first invited her earlier in the week. They had thought she would languish in Sara’s old room under the moth-bitten summer quilt, as she had done at the beginning, crying quietly and being about as demanding as the cactus in the house that no one paid attention to or cared for. But instead she was suddenly everywhere all at once, and the prospect of being indoors with her all month seemed unbearable. They had to get out; they had to leave the confines of this little house.
“Why don’t we go to the beach?” Shawn said suddenly, and the rest of them, relieved, readily agreed, dividing up to gather belongings: suits, towels, the old umbrella which had made a big circle of shade for them every August for years. Sara had sat in the weave of that shade, leaning against Adam, laughing, singing backwards, reading one of her Japanese novels that looked as beautiful and elegant as a bento box.
Now, after they had moved through the house rounding up their things, and Peter had joined them, they all congregated downstairs to leave for the beach. Natalie planned to follow behind the truck in her own car. “All set,” Natalie said, coming downstairs, and Maddy turned and looked at her as she descended the steps. Maddy inhaled hard, startled.
Natalie was wearing Sara’s blue beach hat, the one that Sara had worn every summer for years. With the hat on her head Natalie looked so much like Sara that the eye was almost fooled, and the heart leapt in response. There would be many small episodes like this one: moments in which people averted tears by running out of the house, putting a hand over the mouth, or a hand across the eyes, or even both hands over the entire face.
“Oh, the hat,” Natalie said, lifting a hand up to her head and touching the edge of the crinkled brim. “I’m sorry, I’ll take it off.”
“No, don’t,” said Peter. “Leave it on. It’s yours now.” Then he hoisted a cooler full of beer and sandwiches, and headed out to the truck.
“I’ll go with you in the car, Natalie. You shouldn’t ride alone,” Maddy offered. “We’ll meet you at the beach!” she called out to the others.
This was how it would be, too; someone would accompany Natalie everywhere, like a child in need of a chaperone. Maddy moved the baby seat into the back of Natalie’s car, set Duncan in place, and they were off. They drove along the main road in silence. Outside, a muted haze of greenery scrolled past, punctuated by the bright colors of people on vacation. Women wore white T-shirts with hot pink writing across the front, and cars carried surfboards on their roofs, lime green and purple. The sky here was wide and unstreaked, one big, clean window. The car went past million-dollar homes with broad porches and candy-striped awnings and croquet mallets lying, forgotten, in damp grass. Who owned these homes? West Coast movie stars on vacation, Wall Street robber barons, Queen Noor and her husband, the king of wherever it was he was from. Everything here seemed to be about leisure. It would have been idyllic if you were young and unencumbered, as Maddy used to be. If that were the case, you might actually spend the summer here in luxury, sitting on a chaise reading thrillers, or just painting and repainting your nails, both finger and toe. But the beauty of the area was unsettling to Maddy now, and the perfection of the day seemed overbearing and relentless.
“Tell me,” Natalie said as the two women drove. “There’s something I guess I forgot to ask at the time, for obvious reasons. Sara died, so who cares about a goddamn car, right? But what did they do with it, anyway?”
“With what?” asked Maddy.
“The car. That she was driving,” said Natalie. “My car.”
“Good question. I’m not sure,” said Maddy. “There’s a place out here where a lot of cars that don’t work anymore, and cars that have been in accidents, are taken to. It’s over at the edge of town; you can’t miss it. I don’t know for a fact that they took your car there, but that’s what I’d guess.”
“Well, I’d like to go there now,” said Natalie. “Before the beach, if that’s okay.”
“Mrs. Swerdlow,” said Maddy, “I know it’s none of my business, but why torture yourself?”
“Because it comes naturally to me,” Natalie said quickly. “Always has. When I was little, and I’d just seen a horror movie, I used to force myself to think about it at night before I went to sleep. That way, I’d totally lose myself in it, and then eventually it wouldn’t be so bad. Eventually I’d be sick of all the gory details, and they’d go away.”
“So you’re going to do that this summer?” said Maddy. “Think about Sara until you go insane? And then hope you come back out the other side?”
“Oh, something like that,” said Natalie.
“Actually, I’d like to do that too,” said Maddy. “Because I think about her all the time, and it’s not as though I can really discuss it with Peter in a way that he’d understand. He and Sara weren’t that close.” She paused and added, “Sometimes I get this desire to see her, and it’s so strong that I think I will die.”
“Would you say,” said Natalie, “that Sara was a generally happy person? After all, she was alone in the world. She didn’t have a man, the way you have Peter.”
“She had Adam.”
“Well, hardly,” said Natalie.
“I know you think it’s not the same,” Maddy said, “but she took great comfort from him.” She paused, smiling slightly, then she added, “She told me that he even passed the vomit test.”
“The what?”
“A long time ago Sara and I both decided,” said Maddy, “that the true measure of how comfortable you are with a person is whether or not you could let them be in the room while you’re vomiting. Whether you’d let them hold your hair out of your face and pat your back, and just generally be right there, watching you heave and go through the whole horrible process. Or whether you’d never want them to see you that way, whether it would be too humiliating. You’d be feeling really nauseated, but you’d want them out of the room, out of earshot. Sara felt that Adam could be right there beside her, no matter what happened.”
“Well, that’s because there wasn’t any sexual tension between them,” said Natalie. “If he had been a man she was involved with, a straight man, then she would have wanted him far, far away. Believe me, that’s the way it always is.”
“But why should it have to be that way?” said Maddy. “Why should we have to hide from the men we sleep with? Isn’t it possible to have sexual tension with someone and total comfort?”
“Do you and Peter have that?” asked Natalie.
“Well, no,” said Maddy. “When I was pregnant with Duncan, I threw up every morning in the beginning, and I was very embarrassed that when Peter kissed me he’d start to think of how I looked when I was throwing up. But now,” she said, with a hard little laugh, “it’s not as though it matters, really. We don’t kiss very much anymore.�
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“Oh, you’re young,” said Natalie vaguely. “You’re both young people. You have no idea of what will happen to either of you. Everything will change.”
On impulse, Maddy directed Natalie to turn the car to the left, away from the beach and in the direction of the heap of abandoned cars. They drove to the edge of town, to a place that bore no resemblance to the rest of this area. No beaches, no fruitstands, no seductive smells of coconut oil or barbecues. Maddy had Natalie drive toward the mountainous junk heap of cars she had seen summer after summer on the fringe of town. Natalie turned off the main strip and followed along a single-lane road that went past a warehouse filled with snorkeling gear, a factory where tuna fish was canned, an industrial park that indiscreetly belched out a dark roll of fumes, and, finally, the cross-hatching of the railroad tracks.
The train that took passengers all the way here from the city was a long, slow, outdated one. You had to change in Jamaica and stand out on the platform in the stink and heat until another train was ready to take you the rest of the distance, rocking in airless-ness the whole way, so that when you arrived you were breathless and weary, with half-moons of perspiration beneath your arms. But still you were here; still you’d made it.
The road suddenly fell into shadow, and Natalie and Maddy could see that a huge hill loomed ahead, wavy as an oasis in the open heat. Natalie slowed the car and squinted to see; the hill was not a natural occurrence, but a vivid and multicolored mountain of amputated car parts and abandoned, crashed, collapsed, and long-dead cars. Everything that made up the mountain had once been in motion. Natalie slowed her own car and pulled it to a stop beside the fence.
“I don’t think we can go any farther,” said Maddy. “There’s no way in.”
“Well, we can try,” said Natalie. “Who’s going to stop us?” She got out of the car and walked toward the fence.
“Mrs. Swerdlow,” said Maddy, following behind, “please wait up.” She unhitched the baby and slipped him into the carrier that she wore, his big head bobbing like one of those ridiculous toy dogs people put in the rear windows of cars. The baby didn’t complain, but simply made small lip-smacking sounds, which meant that he would need to nurse again soon. Oh, shit, she thought, and followed Natalie. With the hill of cars so close, Natalie felt compelled to find Sara’s totaled Toyota, as if its remnants might prove something important, some little-known theory, some conspiracy thing. But there was nothing to prove, and she knew it. Still, Natalie placed a tentative foot upon a rung of barbed wire, and started to scale the fence in her open-toed sandals. “Please, Mrs. Swerdlow!” Maddy called. “This is an incredibly dumb thing to do. You’ll hurt yourself!”