by Meg Wolitzer
“Oh, look at this,” Natalie murmured, running her hand across the surface, and she couldn’t resist finding a sponge and wiping the offending spot of tomato sauce away. Then the table was clean and damp and shining, and Maddy spread out the Ouija board, which looked somehow cheaper and flimsier than the way she remembered it from childhood. Back then, she and her brothers had asked the board ridiculous questions, such as: Will I get a good grade on my book report? Or: Will Dad let me go to Steve Belletti’s party this weekend, even though his parents are away? And once, when she was alone with the board, she asked it in a whisper: Will I ever get breasts?
The Ouija board was fashioned out of wood pulp, and had the alphabet written out in an appealing style, graced by a little sun and moon. Natalie and Sara sat across from each other, resting their fingertips on the marker that was shaped like a teardrop. The marker was plastic, and it too seemed cheaper than the way she remembered it, but everything in the world had been scaled down since her childhood: all toys, diversions, expectations. It made sense that the secret line of communication to the afterlife would be made of wood pulp and plastic and probably manufactured by abused, underage workers in Taiwan. Life continued to disappoint, but you took what you could get. These two grown women, who did not believe in the afterlife, who did not believe in the spirit-world or in the presence of ghosts, now sat with their fingers lightly and reverently touching plastic.
“So what are we supposed to do here?” Natalie asked nervously.
“My brothers and I used to do this all the time,” explained Maddy. “You can ask it anything you like.”
“Like what?”
“Like … well, ‘Who am I talking to?’ “said Maddy.
“All right,” said Natalie. Then, in a loud, self-conscious voice, she said, “Who am I talking to?”
The women waited. They heard the minute hand on the sunburst clock click quietly, and Maddy felt her pulse jump lightly in her neck. At first, there was nothing, just the clock, just the pulse. They waited, and no one spoke. Natalie cleared her throat. Then, slowly, the plastic marker began to shift, sluggishly at first, then with more persistence, scraping silently across the board, inching itself over to the letter S.
“Yes,” Natalie said softly, under her breath, as the marker moved with divine obedience to each of the remaining letters in Sara’s first name. Then, for good measure, it added “JANE,” which had been Sara’s middle name. Maddy felt a quickening, her breathing becoming more exerted, the same excitement that she had felt in childhood in front of her family’s older, sturdier version of a Ouija board. If she looked in the mirror right now, she thought, most likely her pupils would have been dilated.
“Now you ask it something,” said Natalie.
“All right,” said Maddy. She felt oddly anxious. “Sara,” Maddy said aloud, “how are you?”
For a short while, there was again nothing. Then, finally, “OK.” But the marker was moving on its own now, skidding like a puck on ice over to the letter D.
“DONT WORRY,” spelled the marker, with painful deliberation. Then it added, “I AM YOURS FOREVER.”
Natalie and Maddy lifted their fingers at the same moment, stunned, pleased, knowing this game was finished. It was wonderful to think that they might have Sara forever, to think that somehow she would be there in the atmosphere, and that even though no one else would know she was there, they both would. They had willed these words, but they had willed them together; they had jointly approved of them, had had them somehow spiritually notarized, Maddy thought, remembering the conversation about Notary Publics that first evening at the house, that final evening with Sara.
Natalie’s eyes were flooded, shining. She and Maddy held hands across the board, while the rest of the house slept, and somewhere above them all, Sara stirred.
NEITHER WOMAN could sleep for the rest of the night, so they settled in at the kitchen table, the baby monitor perched like an essential icon on the counter, even though Peter was still upstairs asleep a few feet from Duncan. In some way, Maddy trusted only herself with the baby, saw herself as the only one who could take care of him. Maddy poured herself a drink, and Natalie brewed some coffee. They had just eased into conversation when loud squawking sounds came from the monitor, and the row of red lights flashed. “Oh, well,” Maddy said, pushing back her chair. “I’m being summoned.”
“Why don’t you go get him and bring him down here?” said Natalie. “I’d love to see him.”
Natalie loved Duncan, responded to him deeply. In part, this was because she knew she would never have her own grandchildren. There had been no baby for Sara, but there had been an abortion, performed at seven weeks. This had taken place over a year earlier, and the circumstances surrounding the procedure had caused Sara to make her mother swear never to tell anyone. It had begun with a phone call from Sara to Natalie late one night. It had seemed typical enough at first; they’d done their “Surrender, Dorothy” bit, and had laughed together. Then Sara’s voice suddenly changed. “Listen, I have to talk to you, Mom,” she said. “You know Maddy’s husband?”
“Of course I do. That cute boy Peter, with the nice eyes.”
“Right. Well, you know Maddy is in London, working with that barrister, whatever that means. It sounds like something on public TV,” said Sara. “So I invited Peter over—we all take turns with him—and I made him this entire Japanese dinner, but we never got around to it because, well, because we ended up in bed. Actually,” she corrected, “we ended up in couch. On the couch, I mean.”
Natalie took in a breath. “And?” she said.
“And, well, things sort of happened. Maddy is my oldest friend. What was I thinking of? Oh, Mom, I must be a terrible person, the kind of woman who hates other women, a total piece of shit.”
“That is not true,” Natalie had said. “You’re a wonderful girl. Now listen to me. You must never tell your friend Maddy. Don’t think that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do, the morally correct thing, because it’s not. It will only make everyone’s life worse. Trust me on this one, sweetie; I’ve been alive for a long time.”
So Sara was silent about it; she never confessed to Maddy, and she didn’t talk much about it with her mother until weeks later when she called Natalie again, and in another despairing voice told her that as a result of her one encounter with Peter, she had become pregnant.
“And you’re absolutely sure about this?”
“I took the test,” said Sara. “A pink cross is supposed to show up if you’re pregnant. Mine turned into a red crucifix.”
“I meant,” said Natalie, “you’re absolutely sure it’s from him?”
“There was no one else then,” said Sara, full of sorrow.
Three days later, Natalie took her daughter for an abortion at her gynecological group practice in New Jersey. The procedure was performed by the avuncular Dr. Myron Bronstein. Everyone in the office was sympathetic and discreet; it wasn’t like going to a clinic and lying on a cot among knocked-up ninth-graders, which, God knew, Sara would have done in the city if Natalie hadn’t offered to pay for the abortion. The procedure itself was surprisingly painful, and afterward Natalie took Sara home, letting her sprawl out in the back of the car, dazed from the IV Valium they had given her. Sara lay down in her childhood canopy bed, sleeping soundly under the bed’s white arching roof. Natalie walked past the room and heard her daughter’s breathing, steady and slow.
That night they watched The Wizard of Oz again, for what must have been the twentieth time. With Sara beside her on the couch, the two of them methodically cracking open pistachio nuts with their teeth as they watched, Natalie realized how much she longed to have her daughter living with her again in the house. The music swelled, and poor, doomed, big-girl Judy Garland sang her song of longing, and mother and daughter sat very close, knowing that while the world was difficult, this moment between them was pure, complete. To sit together in total ease, watching this movie—their movie—was there anything better? Natalie f
elt useful with Sara back in the house; the only times she was able to feel useful lately were when she found a dirt-cheap fare for a nice couple to get to Aruba for their silver wedding anniversary. That was useful, but it wasn’t essential. There were other travel agents in the world, but there were no other mothers, at least not yours.
Now, long past those events, long past a pregnancy, an abortion, a violent death, Natalie watched as Maddy brought Duncan downstairs and proceeded to nurse him. The baby kept one hand grasping the edges of his mother’s hair, tugging lightly as though her hair was a tassel you would pull to get a butler to come. Natalie noticed the way Maddy looked peaceful only during nursing; as soon as the baby was done and wanted to stand and bounce in his mother’s lap, Maddy seemed to become worried, and her grip on Duncan grew excessive, agitated.
“Why don’t you let him play a little bit?” Natalie asked. “He seems to want to jump around. They all do.”
Maddy gazed at Duncan. “It’s late,” she said. “I don’t want to get him all worked up. He needs to go back to sleep.”
“That’s true,” said Natalie. “But couldn’t he play for a minute? I mean, just look at him.” The baby’s legs were pumping excitedly; the milk, rather than calming him, seemed to have whipped him into a frenzy. “Could I take him for a minute?” Natalie asked, and Maddy handed her child over, although Natalie could see her reluctance. “Hello, there,” Natalie said, standing him up in her lap and moving her knees up and down. The baby immediately began to laugh, a simple, crowing noise. “Oh, this is so gratifying,” said Natalie.
“You’re very natural with him,” observed Maddy.
“Well, I’ve done it before,” Natalie said. “It was very long ago, but I remember. You never forget.”
“I can’t be natural like that,” said Maddy. “I worry all the time that something will happen to him. That I’ll drop him on his head and he’ll become brain-dead, or that he’ll be hit by a car, or that he’ll suddenly stop developing. That happened to the baby of someone I know. He was perfectly fine until he was ten months old, and then suddenly everything stopped. Now he’s three, and in an institution. He never learned to walk or talk. He’s going to wear diapers his entire life.”
“Duncan is a wonderful baby,” said Natalie. “Nothing’s going to happen to him.”
“No one knows things like that,” said Maddy.
“Well, of course that’s true,” said Natalie. “But you have to pretend things are always going to be fine. And you have to go easy.”
“No offense, Mrs. Swerdlow, but I don’t know how you can say that,” said Maddy. “You, of all people.”
Natalie shrugged. “You have children and you watch them grow,” she said quietly. “When they’re teenagers and they go out for the night, you sit up in bed waiting for the key in the lock. You sit there, hour after hour, just to hear their footsteps.”
“It’s so unfair,” Maddy suddenly blurted out. “She was only thirty. Dr. Blandish says you should never let your child out of your sight, that the world is too unpredictable.”
“Dr. who?” asked Natalie.
Maddy proceeded to tell her about a book that had apparently sold millions of copies by sending susceptible, hormone-charged new mothers into paroxysms of guilt about their failed parenting skills. Maddy was in tears now, relaying all the details that, according to Dr. Blandish, she had done wrong.
“I’ve been reading this book every day,” said Maddy, “and I feel like I should practically give Duncan away to foster parents, people who are very relaxed around children. Something awful’s going to happen, I just know it is.”
“Let me see this bible of motherhood,” said Natalie, and Maddy obediently went upstairs and scrabbled around in the drawer until she’d found it. She brought it down and Natalie flipped through the pages, making little grunting sounds and clucks of disapproval. “Oh, this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever read,” said Natalie, and she closed the book and tossed it onto the table. From the photograph on the back of the jacket, Dr. Blandish smiled coldly, flanked by her two small, perenially upbeat children. “It’s so controlling,” said Natalie. “She’s trying to scare the shit out of young mothers, and frankly, it’s working. Dr. Melanie Blandish can screw herself. You want to know how to relax?” Maddy looked at her with desperate eyes, nodding. “Just enjoy him,” said Natalie. Then Natalie held Duncan out to his mother. “Here, take him,” she said. “For God’s sake, enjoy him. This is the fun part. Let him fool around more. Swing him in the air.”
“I heard they can get baby whiplash,” said Maddy in nearly a whisper.
“Not if you’re gentle.”
Natalie looked at the baby, who was unfinished, blurry, the soft spot on his head apparent under the pale layer of down. Natalie thought of Sara at this age; she remembered a particular sundress, and shining patent leather Mary Janes, and glass bottles that had to be sterilized and filled with warm beige formula poured from a can. The doctor had discouraged Natalie from nursing Sara. “You’ll be overwhelmed,” he had said. But she had been overwhelmed anyway, and wasn’t that the point?
“You don’t think I’ve screwed him up for life?” Maddy asked.
“Not yet,” said Natalie. “But I’d say you’ve still got plenty of time.”
Maddy pressed her face to Duncan’s head and inhaled hard. The scent of Johnson & Johnson products coupled with something caramelized was all over that head, Natalie knew; he was like a tarte tatin sprinkled with baby powder. He wasn’t edible, although he seemed it, but he was knowable, he was a person. Natalie watched as Maddy tentatively swung Duncan in her arms. Then, becoming more sure of herself, Maddy swung him again. His little sprig of hair flew up, and his eyes caught onto hers, startled and wide.
10
Golden Boy
Melville Wolf came to take Adam to dinner one night, which really meant that Melville Wolf came to spy. He was staying in the area all week, and he took Adam out to determine whether Adam was writing, and whether what he was writing was any good. Not that he would know. Melville Wolf wasn’t an artist or a critic but a theatrical producer, a thick-chested, sweating man whose shirts were made of striped cotton and were invariably dripping at the end of one of his long, emotional days at the office. He was well-dressed, with the purplish-blue complexion of underlying heart disease, and he loved the theater in a big, wrenching way. He loved comedy—tragedy was great, too. Make him laugh, make him cry; it didn’t matter which.
The producer had taken a chance a few years earlier with Take Us to Your Leader, and Adam’s play had made him lots of money. Whenever he saw Adam now, he reached out and messed up his hair, as though to say: Oh, you kid. Mel Wolf had produced many hits, and had been attached to productions of great importance and lesser ones which generated immense revenues. If there was money in it, he was your best friend, and would reach out and mess up your hair forever. If it failed but the reviews were favorable, he was gently philosophical about the situation, touching your shoulder lightly, sadly, giving you another chance to prove yourself to him. If the whole enterprise was a disaster, then his entire persona turned as cold and crass as that of a businessman on a bad day—a vinyl flooring manufacturer who has lost millions. This was what Adam feared most from Mel. He wanted the producer to love him forever, to take him out to dinner so they could plot future productions, the boy wonder and his rich, jovial uncle.
This evening Mel was coming to take Adam out to a nearby expensive restaurant called Shoes of the Fisherman, where you could look dreamily out over the bay as you ate lobster with a tiny fork. Shawn wanted to join them, was openly asking to do so, but Adam put him off. “I’m sorry, it’s not appropriate,” Adam said as he got dressed for dinner. Shawn lay across the bed in the small room, fretting and studying something on his arm.
“If you were straight, and I was your girlfriend, then I guarantee you’d bring me in a second,” said Shawn.
“That’s not it,” said Adam. “This isn’t some self-hating h
omophobia at work.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s not about you,” said Adam. “And it’s not about us. It’s just about me.”
“Like everything else,” said Shawn.
“I thought you liked that I’m successful,” said Adam. “I thought you actually liked that fact about me. You certainly liked it when we met, when you came up to me at that playwrights’ thing, and when you sent me your tape.”
“Well, I don’t like it when you flaunt it,” said Shawn. “When you show off about it, and make it seem like it’s the most important thing in the world.”
“I’m hardly sitting in this house thinking about being famous,” said Adam. “I’m thinking about Sara. You didn’t know her, and you didn’t know anything about my friendship with her, but I am suffering, okay? So don’t make me out to be this spoiled person.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Shawn said after a moment. “I know things aren’t good. I just feel that you get to do pretty much whatever you want, and that I always have to hold myself back.”
Adam turned to him in irritation. “What is it you want?” he asked. “You want to make contact with Melville Wolf, is that it? So you can play him your tape?”
“Yes,” said Shawn. “Would that be so bad?”
“Actually, yes, it would be inappropriate,” said Adam. “I’d rather you didn’t mention it to him. I don’t have this cozy relationship with Mel. Maybe later on, in a year or so.”
There was a silence; both of them knew they might not know each other in a year. “It would be nice,” said Shawn, “if you could demonstrate a little interest in my work occasionally.”
“I do,” said Adam.
“You never ask me how the musical’s going,” said Shawn.