by Meg Wolitzer
Elsewhere in the neighborhood, children splashed and tormented each other in a backyard pool. The bell of an ice cream truck jangled quaintly, a lone bird sang. Adam realized, listening to the individual sounds, that he had crossed over the threshold and was now genuinely tripping. It had really begun. His eyes narrowed, adjusting to the new brightness of the day. He rubbed at his forehead, for it itched as though he were pollen-sensitive. He turned to Maddy to say something, but instead of speaking, he collapsed into unexpected laughter.
Then the door to the house opened, and Natalie emerged. Oh shit, he thought, for it was as though they had been busted, or as though they were all teenagers and she was the mother of one of them who would call all the other mothers, and they would be grounded until the millennium. Back when they were adolescents, there had actually been mothers who purchased special spy kits to make sure their children weren’t using drugs, mothers who dusted the surfaces of their teenagers’ dressers with a special powder that would show whether traces of pot or cocaine or even heroin had graced the premises. There were mothers who dunked little dipsticks in the unflushed toilets that their adolescent sons had recently peed into, the toilet seats still thoughtlessly left up. There were spying, lying, hyper-vigilant mothers with magnifying glasses and deerstalkers’ hats. But Natalie was smiling benignly, her arms spread wide. “This is wonderful,” she said to everyone. “Just wonderful!”
Adam and Maddy and Peter stared at her. “What’s wonderful?” Adam asked in a quiet voice.
“I ate a mushroom,” she said. “Shawn gave it to me.” They all stared in horror.
“You what?” Adam said.
“I ate a mushroom.”
“Natalie,” said Adam, and he stood and put his hands on her shoulders, as if preparing her for more bad news. “I have to tell you something. Those weren’t normal mushrooms. They weren’t shiitake, or even portobello.”
“They weren’t?” she said.
“No, they were hallucinogens,” said Adam. “You start to … trip on these. You know, to see things. Like with LSD.”
“No, no! I can’t believe it,” she said, and then she broke into a smile and began to laugh. Everyone stared. “Oh, Adam, how dumb do you think I am?” Natalie said. “Of course I know what these are. I ate the last one on the plate. Shawn said I should try it, and you know, usually I’m against drugs. I’ve been on a Mothers Against Drugs steering committee, and I helped decorate their fundraiser, and my travel agency even donated a trip to Bermuda for the raffle, but that was then. Now I’m … I guess I’m …” She giggled. “I guess I’m tripping,” she said.
“I guess you are,” said Adam.
“I was scared at first,” she continued. “But then I thought, maybe I can hallucinate and see Sara. I hate drugs; I don’t even like extra-strength Tylenol. But I would do anything in the world to see her again.”
“It’s not like that,” said Peter. “You don’t just see things that aren’t there. You don’t suddenly see an object that doesn’t exist.”
Natalie went and sat in the sun with a drink in her hand, peering upward into the light. She didn’t know what she was getting herself into, but then again, neither did Adam. And now, looking at her, seeing the good bones of her face, the ascendant thrust of her neck, the vulnerable clavicle below, he felt afraid.
What had possessed Shawn to give a mushroom to Natalie? Who wanted to trip with someone’s mother? The idea was shocking, perverse in its own way. To bring a mother along on a drug trip was like bringing a chaperone with you on a hot date. But Natalie’s eyes were already strange; she sat in the sun and stared up at nothing. There was an art show going on in that patch of sunlight; the white, blank sky was filled with scrawls, confusing and urgent as graffiti on a subway car.
Shawn came out of the house now, and Adam collared him.
“What’s wrong with you?” he whispered harshly. “Why did you give mushrooms to that woman?”
“She’s not ‘that woman,’ “said Shawn. “She’s Mrs. Swerdlow, and she was hoping to ‘see’ Sara again, and I thought it was only fair to let her. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Yes, I have a problem with that,” said Adam. “And so do the rest of us. Because she is Sara’s mother, she’s not our friend, she’s a … she’s a grown-up.”
“And so are you,” said Shawn. “At least, you’re supposed to be. If thirty isn’t grown up, then what is? Forty? Ninety? You going to hang on to being young even while you’re collecting Social Security? To being a ‘young’ playwright? ‘Precocious’?”
“No,” said Adam. “But if I had known that Natalie was going to be joining us on this little adventure, I might have—” Suddenly he became quiet, because he had begun to see a series of starbursts. He stood up straight, respectful of their presence. The mushrooms had arrived at the entrance to his brain, at Huxley’s doors of perception, and were exploding there and multiplying.
“Oh, forget it,” he said. “Tell Natalie she can come,” he added, and then he sank back into his chair.
THE AFTERNOON pushed on in equal measures of amazement and annoyance. Adam went inside for a breather and sat in the rocker in the corner, focusing intently on the illustrations on the upholstery. Betsy Ross’s eyes actually seemed to flick toward Paul Revere’s, and the silversmith seemed to smile in response. Perhaps he was smirking at the way her head looked in that bonnet, Adam thought, for in fact Betsy Ross’s head did resemble a pan of Jiffy Pop, filled to bursting. What am I thinking? he wondered to himself, realizing his thoughts were both trivial and bizarre. Betsy Ross and Paul Revere couldn’t talk; they were merely pictures on the fabric of a rocking chair. He stood shakily and went outside again to join the others, feeling an intense need to be among his friends, to find a way to enjoy these odd little miniature hallucinations. Outside, Peter lay on the lawn with his eyes shut. Clouds were moving fast above him, and the sky opened up into its full width. Natalie came and lay beside him; together they stared up at the sky. “That’s Cumulus,” Peter said, “and over there is Nimbus.”
“The narrow ones?” said Natalie. “Yes, I see.” They lay with their arms touching, completely without self-consciousness. There was a heat moving between them and demanding to be noticed, a heat that came with a sparkling edge. All Peter wanted was to kiss and touch her; was there any way to do that and get away with it? He felt a little bit in love with this difficult fifty-year-old woman. He had to remind himself now that it was the drugs talking, and to keep himself from leaning above Natalie and running a single finger along her lips. Peter had to blink several times to dim down his vision. His arm against hers felt alive, pulsing with fibers and cells and a silent swoosh of blood. Natalie’s own arm lay passive but equally alive, and the cells that made up her tissue were genetically responsible for the collection of cells that had made up Sara.
He thought of poor lost Sara on the sofa in her apartment, the way she had opened her blouse and he had pushed himself against her, shocked at the urgency, at the way he could so easily be unfaithful. It had been like a game of “Scissors, Paper, Stone.” His marriage was stone, but Sara was paper, and she could easily cover stone, fluttering over it, eclipsing it completely. The connection to Sara was now overwhelming, and he suddenly felt the need to touch her mother. Bravely, he reached out and held her hand. Beside him, Natalie turned to him, arching an eyebrow.
“Feeling comfortable?” she asked with some irony, and he started to untwine his hand from hers, but she trapped it in her grasp. “No, it’s fine,” she said. “Don’t move. We can watch the clouds.” So they lay there, thrillingly, secretly holding hands, the clouds traveling above them. Nobody cared, nobody saw, everyone was involved in his or her own private screening. Adam was inordinately involved with the weave of the fabric on one of the chaises, while Shawn was running his finger back and forth through the flame on his Druid candle, which had been lit for the occasion. Nearby, Maddy was clear-headed and capable, trying to burp Duncan, holding him over her sh
oulder and rubbing his back in an upward motion. Every once in a while she peered over to see if anyone needed her, which no one did, at least not yet. She’d been feeling much better since that night with Natalie, when she’d swung Duncan in her arms. She’d been less hesitant with the baby, more eager to let him loose, and as a result she too felt looser-limbed, less prone to tears.
Adam was stationed on the chaise now, watching the colors vibrate and thinking about how much he loved these people, and how it might actually be a good idea for them to live together forever; the house no longer looked poor and ratty to him. Natalie had cleaned it furiously, and as a result the place now shone with a new light. Even the outside shone, right through its coat of dismal, mustard-colored paint. A light burned beneath that paint, creating the illusion of a ceramic glaze. It was the light of Sara smiling, Adam thought. And then he felt that they ought to devote this trip to celebrating Sara. He looked at Natalie, who lay beside Peter, the two of them appearing for all the world like a married couple lying easily together. He walked across the soggy grass, for it had rained lightly last night and everything seemed especially damp and soft and pearlescent today. “Natalie,” he said, standing over her. “Natalie, we should perform a ritual for Sara; she would have liked that. Some kind of Japanese thing.”
Sara’s mother looked up at him. “Yes, I think that’s a good idea,” she said.
The celebration took the form of a full-scale, mock Japanese tea party out on the lawn. They spread out a blanket and laid out Mrs. Moyles’s chipped teacups and dishes. Natalie wore Sara’s kimono, and Shawn brought over his Druid candle, and Peter poured the tea. They set out various objects that had belonged to Sara, including her red leather notebook in which she’d written in Japanese, and the Berlitz tape of the man speaking Japanese, and the small gong that she’d bought in Tokyo. Adam banged on the gong and all at once, without rehearsal, they bowed to each other.
“Konnichiwa” the man on the tape said.
“Konnichiwa,” everyone repeated. They sat down in unison and drank the tea brewed from Mrs. Moyles’s teabags. They all sat out on the blanket with the candle lit and the Japanese man droning, and the tea cooling in their cups and Sara’s belongings all around them.
Peter raised a cup of tea and said, “To Sara,” and everyone followed suit.
“To Sara,” they said, and then they drank. The tea was weak and tasteless; Adam had never liked tea, because it seemed to him like drinking a mouthful of bathwater. Now he swallowed it in one long, slow gulp and he imagined Sara sliding down a waterfall, Sara in Tokyo, splashing in a rock pool. Peter banged the gong with its mallet.
On the deck of the house, Maddy stood holding Duncan, and she shook her head and called out, “You guys are so fucked up.” She carried the baby back into the house. The chanting and the gong and the tape recorder were playing so loud that at one point Adam looked up and saw the next-door neighbor, a scraggly, widowed man in his seventies who stood with a spray bottle of weed killer.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you could turn down the noise. This is a family neighborhood.” They stared at him for a few seconds, this man who had no family, and then they began falling against each other and spurting into helpless, collective laughter. “Does Mrs. Moyles know what you’re like?” the old man asked. “Because she ought to. She ought to see who she’s renting to. She ought to know.”
“We’re sorry,” said Maddy, suddenly stepping forward to take charge. “They’ve been in the sun too long,” she said, “and I think they’re a little giddy. I’ll make sure they’re quiet.”
The man shook his head. “Summer people,” he said with contempt, and then he retreated into a narrow space between two bushes.
It was clear that it was time to go somewhere; this always happened at some point during drug trips. In the absence of the ability to crawl out of your skin, you crawled out of the house. There was a pizza place called Sonny’s in town with red booths patched up with electrical tape, and fountain Cokes that tasted syrupy and made you nostalgic for an era that you hadn’t even lived through. Because none of them could possibly drive now, Maddy took them to Sonny’s in the truck, the baby strapped in beside her, and the trippers remanded to the back like convicts or farm animals.
At the restaurant they ate hungrily, jammed into a booth. The waitress eyed them with suspicion, clearly assuming they were drunk, while Maddy primly ordered for everyone and tried to behave as though nothing was strange at all.
The pizza, Adam noticed, was a masterpiece of color and texture. Natalie was staring at her slice too, and so was Peter. Shawn, however, was lost in the Formica grain, which appeared to be swimming like one-celled animals under a microscope.
After the pizza, everyone went back outside, and there in the parking lot behind the restaurant, under the summer sky, Natalie stared upward and said, “Look up there. You can see it, can’t you?” They looked up dutifully; the sky was pale, easing into evening. But as Natalie gazed upward, the clouds seemed to join together and form letters like skywriting, “SURRENDER DOROTHY,” the letters said. She could hear Sara’s voice on the telephone, uttering this familiar phrase, and now she felt the ache of wanting to hear that voice once again. If she closed her eyes she heard it; if she opened them she saw the words.
The others stood and watched Natalie. Maddy walked up to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Listen, Mrs. Swerdlow,” she said. “It’s the drug. That’s what’s going on here.”
Natalie shrugged away. “You were the one with the Ouija board,” she said. “So now here I am, looking up and seeing words there, and you’re telling me it’s the drug?”
“Well, I wanted to think there was some sign of her too,” said Maddy. “Even in a metaphorical way.”
“There is nothing metaphorical when a child dies,” said Natalie. She glanced up at the skywriting again, and saw that the letters had collapsed back into clouds. Suddenly Natalie felt overcome by nausea, and she ran toward a Dumpster and let herself vomit into it. Behind her, Natalie could hear Maddy saying that this often happened on mushrooms, that it was just a disgusting and inconvenient side-effect. Natalie knew that tomorrow she would be embarrassed, that she would try to make a few jokes about what had happened. But really, she told herself, what was the big deal about vomiting in front of other people? It really didn’t matter anymore; they could see her vomit, they could see her do anything; she no longer cared what anyone thought of her. She vomited endlessly, tasting the earthenness of the mushrooms again. Sara had disappeared, was receding into the sky, into the periphery of her mother’s sight, the way children always did, eventually.
Nausea had struck Peter now too, and he was leaning over another Dumpster across the way. “She’s not here anymore,” Natalie said to herself. There were still a few lights twirling on the periphery of her vision, but none of them had anything to do with Sara. A busboy was standing out back having a smoke, and he observed these vomiting people coolly.
They vomited, one by one, like those Baptists in the news who had gone to a church picnic in the Midwest and had all been poisoned by a tainted ham. Afterward now, everyone wiped their faces almost daintily. Then they piled back into the truck and let Maddy drive them home, their mouths still sour, feeling a collective exhaustion they had never known before. Natalie closed her eyes, no longer willing to think about what had happened over the course of the day: the mushrooms that had been swallowed, the tea that had been poured, the gong that had been struck, and the hand of that boy Peter that she had held so tightly in hers.
12
In the Blood
One afternoon while Natalie was mopping the floors, Melville Wolf returned to the house, not to see Adam, not to hear Shawn’s music, but to whisk Natalie off in his Lexus. She didn’t resist, but simply left the mop in its bucket of gray water and went off with him. In the car, he put a tape into the player and said to her, “Tell me what you think of this.”
Music played. It was strangely fa
miliar, both the melody and the plaintive, imperfect male voice that sang. “What is this?” she asked.
“Adam’s friend,” said Mel. “He slipped me his tape last time. I forgot all about it until today, when I was coming over here.”
“And?” said Natalie.
“And,” said Mel, “I’m afraid I don’t think the kid has any talent.” They traveled and listened; Natalie felt particularly protective of Shawn, and for a moment she wanted not to believe that Mel’s words were true. But she agreed; the kid didn’t have any discernible talent. The music was clunky, wooden, a bit shrill. The two spinsters in Rome sang their songs, and when Mel put a finger on the stop button, Natalie was relieved. Poor Shawn, she thought, as Mel ejected the tape. “Would you give it back to him for me?” he asked, not unkindly. “Tell him I said thanks for letting me listen.”
Natalie slipped the cassette into her straw bag, feeling sad for Shawn, embarrassed at his efforts and their unequivocal rejection. But soon she forgot about him and his musical, for Mel drove her out to the tip of the island to an outdoor lunch stand. There, at a table in the shade, he ate fried things heartily, and she picked at steamed things delicately. What did he want from her? She wasn’t sure, and yet she knew that it was a relief to be here with him, away from the house, from Sara’s friends. Since the recent afternoon of the mushrooms, there had been an increased claustrophobia among everyone. With Peter, she felt an odd and inevitable strain. He was extremely handsome, this boy, and this unnerved her. It was comforting now to be away from that, out here with this solid, brooding, blustery man, with whom there was no subtext.
So here she sat, eating lunch with Melville Wolf, who told her theater anecdotes from a past that was long gone. He mentioned all the greats, spoke of calming Chita Rivera’s nerves with a foot rub before a performance of West Side Story, and he even told a touching story about the time that an extremely young and grateful Barbra Streisand had asked him for a lozenge. “You’re not eating,” he noted at one point during the meal. “It’s because the things on your plate have all been steamed. Nothing’s been fried. Nothing on your plate tastes good.”