by Meg Wolitzer
The Mellow children, at the urging of Michael, who’d said to them that it was time they all saw it, time they “grew up, myself included,” emerged from the bedroom and all went downstairs, clump-clump, down the groaning oak steps with their faded Persian runner, past the gallery of historically accurate, life-is-short family photos and school pictures, and, on the first-floor landing, past the penciled height demarcations that documented the children’s rise from the size of fire hydrants to the size of, in Michael’s case, an antelope.
Dashiell and Claudia straggled along. Claudia, age six, carried a troll doll by its shock of orange, wheaty hair, and she did not really understand what was happening; why the stealth, the need for solemnity, though she rarely questioned the authority of either Michael or Holly, who seemed to her as old as trees. As the youngest, she felt distinct from the others, even from Dashiell, who was only two years older. When she thought about Holly, she wanted to collapse and die, for Holly was so indestructibly female and beautiful, while Claudia herself was a crushable, fat, short-legged little thing, sexless and loveless.
After school Claudia often watched the four-thirty movie on channel seven, sitting alone in the den while the sky darkened outside and her brothers and sister went about their business elsewhere in the house. Movies had led her to believe, again and again, that when you became fully adult and grown, it was urgent that you find someone to love. In bed sometimes at night, Claudia embraced herself and kissed and licked her own hand, saying in a man’s voice, the voice of an actor in the four-thirty movie, “I love you, woman, and I want to marry you.”
She felt certain, even at her age, that it might be hard to find someone to marry her someday. She would have to pay him. Already, at age six, she was saving her money, stashing it neatly away in her hard white plastic Pillsbury Doughboy bank. Sometimes, on weekends, her parents would say, “Don’t you ever want to spend your allowance, Claudia?”
“Claudia’s cheap,” Holly pronounced. Then she added, gratuitously, “I hate cheapness.”
“I’m not cheap,” Claudia said. “I have plans for my money.”
Claudia Mellow saved her money quietly each week, spending nothing on herself, buying no chocolate, no Jolly Rancher watermelon stix, no little wax cola bottles whose single drop of liquid you were supposed to drink in a quick shot, your head flung back. She was parsimonious, she was a solitary nun, saving herself for the distant, swelling future.
Behind her on the stairs now came Dashiell, far more secretive than she was, and extremely contrary, walking along with one finger plugging a nostril. He knew what they were about to see, and he wanted no part of it. He tried to think of ways to get out of it, and as he thought, his finger continued to trawl. From the time he’d been born, Dashiell had seemed to be in a perpetual search for treasure of some kind. He spent entire days wandering around the Wontauket dump, sifting through old furniture and car parts. It was as though he was convinced that there was something extraordinary to be found somewhere, because this sobering life could not possibly be all there was. Or if it was—oh God, what an enormous letdown, what a tragedy.
Once, Dashiell’s nose had bled for twenty-four hours and needed to be cauterized, a disturbing procedure involving a sizzling electric needle. He’d wept in the office of the GP, Dr. Enzelman, bright blood all over his small hands and face and the crisp paper scroll of the examining table, but afterward, on the way home in the car with his mother lecturing him, he had been unrepentant.
“Dash, you’ve got to stop this habit,” his mother had said gently, though with obvious anxiety. “I’m worried that other people won’t want to be around you, and that your friends will start to leave you out of games. You know, when I was growing up in Mount Arcadia—”
“I’ve heard this.”
“No, you haven’t heard this. Not this particular bit. When I was growing up, there was a little boy at our day school who had this very same habit. His name was William, and he just couldn’t leave his nose alone. If memory serves, pretty soon he was ostracized in the school yard.”
Dashiell had ignored her, not knowing what “ostracized” meant, but assuming it involved being tied up and perhaps even being beaten. He hunched down into the bucket seat of the Volvo and stared out at the expressway. His mother was a kind but sometimes overly emotional woman who liked to tell cautionary tales from her own Gothic, upstate childhood.
“Please look at me when I talk to you,” she’d continued, and he’d turned his face to her with an expression of defiance, tilting his head up so that his nose—his nose, his—was front and center.
Dashiell felt defiant here on the stairs with his brother and sisters, too, except this time no one noticed or cared. If he resisted, he knew that his little sister Claudia would lord it over him forever. The moment she looked at the book herself, she would be pleased with the knowledge that she now possessed and that he still lacked. It wasn’t only that he was afraid the book would disgust him—at age eight he had no doubt that it would—but also that he couldn’t bear anything being imposed on him like an unwanted and sickening meal.
Out the large picture window on the landing just above the first floor of the house, they could all see the oil-spattered driveway with the station wagon missing. Their parents were indeed gone, having headed off to New York City, fifty-five miles westward along the Long Island Expressway. That was the thing about raising several children: If you waited long enough, eventually they formed their own colony and could largely take care of themselves, the older ones slapping bologna onto soft bread and handing it to the younger ones at approximately lunchtime, or else the older ones speaking in encrypted, deliberately stilted syntax over the shining heads of the younger ones.
Today, Michael shepherded the rest of them down the two flights of front hall stairs and straight into the den, that autumnally decorated room where over the years the whole family had watched Jacques Cousteau specials (“Eet eez deeficult to know when zee white shark he weel attack,” they would mimic), where shy Claudia had sat alone on the kilim rug and chanted and arranged her troll dolls in a circle like a druidic ritual, where Holly had recently stood behind the drapes in experimental breath-to-breath closeness with Adam Selig from Princeton Court, where Michael had plowed through most of Cat’s Cradle and Great Expectations, where Dashiell, wanting to make a point, had hidden behind the large Ming-like vase full of dried, crackling coins of eucalyptus for hours and hours, singing quietly to himself, and where late one night a few years earlier, after making love with particular gusto and affection on the old brown ribbed velvet sofa, the parents had hatched the idea for their book in the first place.
Now the children needed the natural world to disappear, the parents to be gone, heading off onto the expressway, the mother flipping down the passenger-side mirror that no man had ever used, applying to her lips a light coat of pearly gloss from a little pot, the father tapping a palm against the wheel to the beat of some loosey-goosey radio jazz, the car conveying them far from the house on Swarthmore Circle in Wontauket and off to the city, where they would be well out of the range of their children’s ferocious curiosity.
“Once we’ve seen it,” Holly had said a few minutes earlier when Michael announced his intention, “then we can never unsee it. It will stay in our minds. Remember when we all saw the electrocuted chipmunk? And then I had those dreams?”
“I remember.” Her brother closed his eyes against the image, the tiny racing-striped little body hanging from an electrical wire in the yard. The dreams had come to Holly serially night after night; she had cried at 3 A.M. and had been so terrified that their mother, awakened from her own sleep, had given Holly a slug of NyQuil so she would calm down. “But seeing it didn’t ruin you,” Michael added. “You’re still you.” His sister absorbed this thought, nodding slowly. Her eyelashes were white, he noticed. She herself wasn’t earthly; she herself was a mermaid.
“So then what, Michael?” she asked. “Are we supposed to tell them we’ve seen
it?”
“Why would we tell them?” he said. “They’d only want to discuss it. They always want to discuss everything. Anyway, do you tell them anything about yourself anymore?” Holly thought for a moment, and she had to admit that no, she didn’t, they knew nothing about her, and that was the way she liked it.
The parents were right now on their way to a packed auditorium at the New School in Manhattan, where they would be delivering the first of many, many lectures that they would give over time in which they discussed the genesis of the book, the research they’d done, the process of trying out sexual acts and writing about them. They would talk about what it had been like posing for the artist John Sunstein’s drawings: The mother would say how she’d been embarrassed at first, because she wasn’t an exhibitionist at all, but Sunstein had turned out to be a quiet, affable young man in his twenties with long, light brown hair and buffalo sandals, both professional and respectful, and after a while she came to look forward to the sessions. “You both look wonderful,” the artist would say to them, and then he’d disappear behind his easel and she would forget about him for the rest of the time.
“It was very peaceful, posing for him,” she’d tell the audience.
They would also speak knowledgeably about Chinese erotic art and the teachings of The Kama Sutra, some of which they had incorporated into their work. And they would talk about the new position they’d invented, and how exciting it had been first to create it and then to refine it. “All that practicing,” the father would say. “It was grueling!” Then there would be laughter, followed by questions from the wound-up audience, endless questions, everyone wanting to ask or add something even if they really had nothing to say.
Right now the parents were hurtling forward in the family car, the Volvo whose very name was itself suggestive of sex. But then again, everything was, once you realized it: a Volvo, the way you licked away your own sweat from above your lip. The world itself buzzed and bloomed into something living and carnal made of dirt, sand, water, and restless humans who filled the air with the plaintive and often indistinguishable sounds of pain and arousal.
The book was called Pleasuring: One Couple’s Journey to Fulfillment. The title, when the children had first heard it and begun to understand it, was so incontestably mortifying that it threatened to stunt them forever, leaving them locked in time and in a steadfast refusal to enter the adult world with its harrowing demands on your day, your energy, your finances, your body. In the den now they gathered around the book, Holly and Michael in front, controlling the rate and rhythm of page-turn, Dashiell and Claudia on either side, the whole group of them, at first glance, like an advertisement for homeschooling.
“Here we go,” said Michael as Holly turned the first page, and everyone made vague sounds: a trumpet introducing royalty, a snort, a snicker, a summoned kid-belch, followed by violent shushing. The front cover, aside from the title, held nothing much to frighten or excite them. It was a classic shade of white, and shiny, with a simple drawing of a rumpled white bed, that was all, the covers thrown back as though they wouldn’t be needed here, and you knew why. It was a couple’s bed, a man-woman bed, and so far they could tolerate this knowledge. The title was written out in curly gold letters, hovering in the air above the empty bed like the residue of a dream. So far, so good. Inside the book there was plenty of leisurely text, including an introduction by an academic named L. Thomas Slocum from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
“Slocum,” said Holly with contempt. “What a name.”
“What?” said Michael, uncomprehending.
“Slocum. Slow-cum?” she said again.
“Oh. Yeah. Right,” he said, finally nodding.
L. Thomas Slocum’s prefatory remarks put the Mellows’ enterprise in a social context, pronouncing the book brave and beautiful, and “exactly what is needed in times like these,” and then after that came the opening chapter, “Sexual Intercourse: First Things First,” which opened with a breathtakingly detailed description accompanied by a full-color drawing, the first of many.
It was them. Them. The parents. Lying on the creased sheets of the same large white bed from the cover of the book, him on top of her, both of them smiling and relaxed, their bodies fused together like the soldered parts of a single piece of machinery.
“Well, fuck me, Jesus,” said Holly, who had lately taken to saying such phrases. In the Wontauket Mall on weekends with her friends, a group of girls standing in front of Blooberries or Stuff n’ Nonsense and pretending to look covetously at halter tops but in fact glancing with smoldering disdain at the fleet of boys who skulked through the cavernous space, she only spoke this way for effect, but now she needed to say it, needed to respond out loud or else she feared she might split apart along some invisible seam that ran down the sides of her body.
Beside her, Dashiell looked away, furious at being here, muttering to himself, and then he quickly looked back. He went through a series of these repetitions, loathing his older brother for doing this to him, when all he had wanted today was to be lost inside the delicate, invented melodies that wafted through him. Instead, he was forced to sit here, looking at these pages, and he felt his face heat up, and he hated his entire life for the way it caged him inside it, and he vowed to show everyone, to show them, though he didn’t really have anything to show. Meanwhile, his eyes kept drifting irrevocably back to the book, pulled there as if he’d been placed under a spell. Yes, master, he thought, but who exactly was the master: His brother? His sister Holly? His parents, with their outrageous openness? It was impossible to tell, and so he just let himself look and look, wishing someone would wake him up and set him free.
Beside him, little Claudia emitted giggling shrieks. She thought of herself and her future husband lying in bed at night, and for the first time ever she wondered if she really wanted to spend her money on this after all. What was the point? So that your back would arch and your teeth would bare? It was horrible; there was no other way to view it. Tomorrow she would spend all her money on candy, on those miniature cola bottles and Dum Dum lollipops, and those orange marshmallows that were shaped like peanuts but for some reason tasted like banana, and on anything else she could find at the little candy store that she’d been snubbing for months now. She wanted nothing to do with what her parents did in bed. She had been wrong all this time. Love wasn’t for her; it wasn’t what she thought it was.
In the den now, Claudia began to slap the side of her own face, saying, “Call an ambulance! Call a policeman!”
“Oh, just be quiet over there,” said Michael lightly. Neither of the older children could bear any distraction right now. It was as though they were cramming for an urgent life exam, taking in everything that they possibly could and holding on to it for future reference.
Like all the illustrations in the book, this first one was pen and ink and shaded with lightly tinted pastel hues by that shy artist John Sunstein, who had already done a famous Rolling Stones album cover. Here he rendered the parents in all their humanness, and he drew them engaged in sexual practices both common and obscure, Western and Eastern, ancient and modern, freehand and apparatus-aided. No journalist had publicly come out and written that these pictures were actually meant to be the parents, and Sunstein had in fact tactfully altered the hair in both cases, changing the mother’s Irish setter–red hue to something more neutrally brown, and turning the father, who in real life had a thick, dark beard and mustache, into someone clean-shaven but woolly-headed. But what did any of it matter? Everyone knew it was them. Everyone. The parents’ own parents, elderly and fragile from bone loss and arrhythmia, knew. The family physician, Dr. Enzelman, knew. The mailman and the librarian and the neighbors on Swarthmore Circle and Princeton Court and Cornell Avenue knew. The children’s teachers knew. The children knew. The hair alterations in the drawings were the equivalent of a poor disguise worn by criminals who unconsciously long to be caught and punished.
I would recognize my mothe
r’s body anywhere, Holly Mellow thought, for she and her mother used to undress in front of each other, though for the past year or so Holly couldn’t bear it. In the changing room at Lord & Taylor in the mall, back before she became so self-conscious, they would slip off their blouses and jeans, standing there together in a space the size of a voting booth, with its straight pin–studded carpet and saloon doors; this female world in which henlike older women with eyeglasses on beaded chains and Kleenex tucked unaccountably into cleavage patrolled the corridor a few feet away, calling out, “How you ladies doin’?”
And at home, in the second-floor bathroom, they had once stood side by side, bare-chested, as the mother showed her daughter how to perform a breast self-exam.
“I learned how to do it from a diagram in Ms. magazine. And you should know how to do it too, Holly, because Grammy Jean had a radical. With lymph node involvement,” her mother had cryptically explained as she lifted one arm up in a salute and brought her other arm across her own chest, fingers playing with sprightliness on the surface of the breast as though it were a harpsichord.
But here, now, in the pages of a book, the mother’s breasts were available for the entire world to appraise, sloping slightly down to the sides of her chest as she lay on her back with the father astride her. Bodies, the children quickly understood, were one thing to view in isolation from other bodies, but when they were observed together, interconnecting in those ways that bodies could, then nothing could prepare you for that sight. Your eyes were simply unready.
On page after page, their mother and father gave themselves to each other in all kinds of ways. They had apparently assumed these positions in John Sunstein’s studio, and perhaps they had also assumed them countless times in the house while the children slept with the vaporizer snuffling, or fed the unresponsive sea monkeys, or smoked a joint, or else ran a hand down the interiors of their own pajama bottoms, softly cupping their genitals as if protecting them from the future stresses and burdens they would by necessity endure. There was no way out, they were starting to realize; you just headed toward it all as though you were rushing to an extremely dangerous but thrilling war.