The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  They stopped at the edge of the playground, with its silhouetted equipment creating a backdrop of, if not romance, then at least beauty, for all was silvered and removed from childhood, swing-chains glimmering. There are no children here, she thought as David Gupta stepped forward and kissed her with the assuredness of someone who understands that he won’t be rejected. The kiss had been earned during the exchange of emails, over the course of the afternoon with Mr. Stanton, and during dinner at Bombay Café. And it was earned here, too, in the nighttime playground of Felice P. Bolander Elementary.

  His mouth was too wet, she thought, and she was sorry, wishing that the kiss was different from other ones, so different as to ease her sexual frozenness of all these years and change the legend so that it now read: I used to be uncomfortable with myself as a sexual being, until I met a man I could love. And now I love sex, and love him, and everything that came before was just vamping as I waited for my life to begin.

  But she couldn’t say that, and so she stood with her face moving lightly against his, their mouths open together, and it was a little too wet, yes, but somehow she liked it. Then his hand found its way to her breasts, and she felt her back straighten, for now he would begin to discover who she was, what was wrong with her, how the pieces of her body fit together so imperfectly that he would have no use for it whatsoever. Already she mourned the loss of him, the way he would not want to continue with her, the kind voice he would use when he told her, later, that this couldn’t go anywhere.

  She imagined his hand getting caught in the alley between her breasts, or perhaps underneath a breast. When she was verging on adolescence, she and her friends would take the “pencil test” to see if they needed to wear a bra. They would place a pencil horizontally beneath a breast, and if it stayed there, a bra was necessary, and it would be purchased that weekend at the mall. Claudia’s friends had joked that she could keep a pencil case there, and perhaps a sharpener, too, and maybe a three-ring binder and even a book bag.

  But, of course, there were plenty of men who loved getting lost in a landscape of breasts and who felt themselves go weak at the idea of submitting to the sheer acreage of it all. David didn’t seem to be going weak and senseless now, nor was he recoiling from her. He apparently liked what he was touching, and he drew back to see her and smile at her as his hand traced the outline of both breasts, and it forced Claudia to forget her own horror for a moment, to forget her long, unscrolling list of imperfections. Her body, she had realized once when she was an adolescent, resembled one of her troll dolls. Yes, she was a troll, and she had gravitated toward those interchangeable creatures because she saw herself in them. You are my people.

  “Claudia, I love the way you look,” David said, as if in answer to a question she could never bear to ask him.

  No you don’t, she wanted to say, but if she said this, he would say right back to her, Yes I do, and his voice would be forceful and he would have the last word. He rearranged himself against her and touched her and kissed her again, and Claudia became aware that even though she was uncomfortable, she was making an unbidden dove-sound that was unnerving to her, particularly as it was the only sound in the night, unless you counted the distant, ambient static of traffic on the expressway.

  A short while later she was one of the people on that expressway, merging her little car into the flow, almost forgetting for a moment which was the gas and which was the brake and slowing down infinitesimally before she overcompensated by roaring forward into the press of cars, joining them gracelessly, but somehow safely. She was so anxious after they had kissed and said good-bye and she had driven him back to Swarthmore Circle that she didn’t know what to do with herself. For an hour now she would have to sit buckled into this car, though her legs seemed to need to move, to dance an independent dance from the rest of her. She wanted a box of jawbreakers, would have liked biting down hard, feeling the resistance and improbable give of rocks being crushed inside her head.

  It was as though she’d been kissing David Gupta for hours, or days, a marathon of kissing in which they had somehow worked out in advance every small thing that might go wrong between them, and how to set it right. She didn’t listen to music now, although the crescent edge of a CD poked out of its slot, ready to be slid in. Instead, she lowered the window a few inches, heard the mix of car noise and night noise, and thought about a wet mouth, a flock of red taillights, and the city fifty-five miles up ahead, where one day she would take him.

  Chapter Nine

  CLAUDIA CALLED again, saying, “Hi, it’s me. I need to tell you something. Things are kind of bad.” Then she made an awful croaking sound, a bitten-off sob, and vaguely Holly recalled that her sister had often cried as a child, and that the rest of the family had learned not to take these episodes too seriously, but instead to incorporate them into the atmosphere of any given meal or vacation or gathering.

  Ordinarily, the sisters spoke perhaps once a year; all three siblings and both parents stayed in touch with Holly in this unofficial, annual, ritualistic way, being sure to contact her now and then so that she couldn’t accuse them of freezing her out of their lives. Frankly, Holly Leeming knew she was a big pain in the ass, a difficult sister and daughter who had deliberately walked off the edge of the family map, and though she regretted it at times, here she was, far away in Topanga Canyon, recovered from the worst of everything but still not one of them.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked Claudia now. “Dashiell again?”

  Holly had been told of his illness weeks earlier, and she’d even telephoned him once herself. But she’d become too depressed and inarticulate by the news to call for a follow-up, so her sister was following up for her. It was ten in the morning here in L.A., and Holly and the baby were sitting in the nursery, on the plush, plum-colored carpet that was so stain-resistant that all spilled juice and ground Honey Grahams immediately seemed to fly up and away from the fiber. Holly held the cordless phone against her shoulder and gave Buddy a big plastic hand mirror, which he eagerly took from her to stare at himself for a while with the blunt interest and absence of vanity common to all babies and perhaps no other group on earth.

  “He’s worse. He needs a stem cell transplant.”

  “A transplant from me?” said Holly. “Oh shit, Claudia, I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m really not good with things like that.”

  “Relax,” Claudia said. “I actually didn’t mean from you. They’re using his own cells. They clean them and put them back in or something. It’s done all the time.”

  “Oh,” said Holly, guilty, sulking.

  Here now was the punishment for extracting yourself from the bosom of your family. True, you avoided all the sand traps of holidays and the ongoing petty melodramas that most grown children were forced to enact, but you were also denied the most basic knowledge about the rest of your family until everyone else had been told. In short, you were always the last to know, and when they finally told you, they made sure to twist the knife.

  Someone might call and say: In case you care, Mom went crazy and started shooting people with an Uzi in a mall.

  Or: Oh, by the way, Dad was in a head-on collision and he’s brain-dead.

  Or, as Michael had actually said a few months ago: They want to reissue the book.

  That one had been bad enough; Holly hadn’t wanted to hear the follow-up, the back-and-forth bickering that was surely taking place between her parents. Leave me out of it, she’d said to Michael. I don’t know why you even called me.

  But she couldn’t say such a thing to Claudia now about Dashiell being sick. In truth, when Claudia called and gave her this information, Holly primarily felt the sting of shock that accompanies anything that can truly be considered news, or, more specifically, bad news. But beyond that, the human feeling that was supposed to flood her now simply didn’t. Dashiell was so much younger than she was, and she’d never really known him well. By the time he became old enough to be interesting, Holly was an adolescent, and all
she wanted then was to be away from the family.

  She knew he was gay, and also, astoundingly, that he was a Republican, which she absolutely couldn’t deal with and couldn’t begin to understand on any level. But no one had seen fit to call before today and say he had gotten much sicker. This, Claudia insisted, was because they hadn’t known how serious it was. Cure rates were high with Hodgkin’s, they said, and he had responded immediately to the initial drugs and the radiation, and he had been expected to be fine again, to bounce right back, but instead he’d gotten worse. He was a short, handsome, fine-featured man—a boy, Holly still thought whenever she actually did think of him. It was true that the idea of Dashiell being really, really sick didn’t even seem possible. But here it was.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she said to Claudia.

  “You’re sorry?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I am. He’s my brother.”

  “Theoretically,” said Claudia.

  “No, actually,” said Holly. “So don’t fuck with me, Claudia, okay?”

  “I just thought you’d want to know,” said Claudia. “But all right, so I also felt like acknowledging your . . . absence, okay? That’s why I said ‘theoretically.’ I mean, you only called him once all these weeks, okay? You told him you’d send him some healing book or something, and you never did. It was the thought that counted, right? But no, it’s more than thoughts that he needs.”

  “All right, fine,” Holly said.

  There was a grudging moratorium. Claudia rattled off a few facts: Dashiell had been admitted to Rhode Island Hospital this morning, he’d receive some drugs first, and then he’d have to be in isolation. He wasn’t allowing any of them to come visit because he had his boyfriend Tom there with him, and he’d be too sick anyway, but if Holly wanted to send a card that might be nice.

  “He’d know you were thinking of him, at least,” Claudia said. “Even if you’re not.”

  The mirror that Buddy had been looking into was now covered in strings and smears of saliva, Holly noticed. The baby, who was actively teething, had apparently been gnawing on it the whole time Holly was on the phone. Then he’d lost interest, had waddled over to the mesh safety gate, and was now trying to pry the suction cups from the wall that separated the nursery from the hallway and the steep stairs-of-death beyond.

  “Go,” he said to his mother. “Go!”

  “Claudia,” Holly said into the phone, “I have to go.”

  “I’m sure you do,” her sister said.

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  “No, fuck you. I call to tell you something really bad, really upsetting, and as usual you still can’t get outside yourself long enough to act like a normal person.”

  “That is so unfair,” Holly said. And then she added, truthfully, “Buddy needs me.”

  This seemed to soften her sister. Though Claudia sometimes took a certain guarded, testy tone with her during her annual phone calls, as a way to lightly punish Holly for ceasing to be much of a sister, and for hurting their parents so badly, she wasn’t an angry person, really. “All right,” Claudia finally said. “So go to him, if you have to.”

  “In a sec.” Holly wanted to find some way to stall her, for the fuck you exchange suddenly seemed excessive and nasty. Claudia was allowed to be angry; Holly would just have to suck it up, and not complain. Now she tried to work her way back into a normal conversation, even briefly. “So how’s everybody else?” Holly asked. “Anything else I ought to know?”

  “They’re okay. Weird but okay. Michael’s still down there with Dad and Elise, if you can believe it. He’s moved in there, basically.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Who knows why. Male bonding. Something. And Mom and Jack are okay, though Mom’s obsessed with this book thing. Getting it back in print. You should see her.”

  “It was the highlight of her life,” said Holly, and then she added, “but not mine.”

  “Not mine either.”

  Good. Rapprochement. A sisterly moment after the hard insults and cursing each other out. The annual telephone call was like a family newsletter containing all the information that anyone needed to know about these six people who had once lived together and never would do so again. There was a pause, as both of them considered how to continue.

  “How’s the baby?” Claudia asked.

  “Fine. Fine. He’s great.”

  “I sent him something last spring for his birthday. A bunch of books, ones that I liked when I was little. Goodnight Moon, I think, and some others. Did you ever get them?”

  “Yes, I did. I meant to tell you. Thanks.”

  Claudia, who had no children, couldn’t possibly know that at this point in time Goodnight Moon was such a cliché, such a staple in every young family’s household that it was like buying someone a copy of the telephone book.

  “You’re welcome. And Marcus, how’s he?”

  “Fine. Working all the time.”

  “Go,” the baby said again. “Mom, want to go.”

  “That’s my cue,” said Holly, and she and Claudia said goodbye. They would speak again when the next bad thing happened, whatever it was.

  That night, Holly couldn’t sleep at all. She did in fact think about her brother; she had gone on the Internet after Marcus got home and was spending a couple of minutes playing with Buddy. She wanted to find out some information about Dashiell’s sickness and its survival rates. At first she kept spelling the disease “Hodgekins,” and then she tried “Hotchkins,” and finally she noticed that the search engine was asking her a question: “Do you mean Hodgkin’s and survival rates?” it asked, and she could hear the snideness in the computer’s tone, the recognition that she, the searcher, hadn’t gone to college, hadn’t gotten herself educated in the way that her three siblings had. “Do you mean Hodgkin’s and survival, you loser, you slut, you druggie fuck-up, you failure, you empty, hollow piece of nothing?”

  “What are you doing?” Marcus asked, appearing in the doorway with the baby in his arms. Translation: What are you doing when you know it’s time for me to give the baby back to you?

  “Nothing,” she said, and she put the computer into sleep mode and never remembered to look up “Hodgkin’s” and “survival rates” again. Because as far as she was concerned, Dashiell would survive. He would live on and on because he was young and strong and transplants were amazing, they basically reconstituted people, and Holly didn’t have a dark enough imagination to envision any other outcome, and because any other outcome would be unbearable, even with this thick lack of feeling that separated her from them.

  But that night in bed, she found that once again she couldn’t sleep. This happened to her periodically, and it usually heralded the beginning of a weeks-long period of cluster-insomnia, in which sleep was a holy grail that she could not locate, and that she might have to spend the rest of her life in search of.

  It sometimes seemed to Holly Leeming that she hadn’t slept in three decades. Even now, she could be found wandering the L.A. house at three in the morning, as though her lactating breasts had awakened her with the urgency of dual smoke alarms, pulling her from her warm bed. But in fact Buddy never nursed in the middle of the night, and hadn’t in ages. He still nursed during the day, which was fairly unusual among the circle of L.A. mothers and babies she’d met in a Babycize class when Buddy was just a few weeks old. One by one their babies had been weaned, but not hers. One by one the women had gone back to their studio jobs or their decorating jobs or their jobless days of driving the freeways and having lunch with friends. Holly proudly stayed put, freezing the moment, not doing much except be with Buddy, who was such a pleasure. She was proud of how long he’d gone on her milk, as though this was an endurance contest and he, among all the other babies, had won.

  But here she was, wide awake, without a baby to feed, and her sleeplessness needed to be cured or else she would start thinking about Dashiell, and her other siblings, and her parents, and about loneliness, and about death, and about
the fact that the universe was much bigger than we could ever imagine, and far more terrifying and violent. Holly Leeming walked into Buddy’s peaceful room and stood over the crib, looking in and humming to herself, pretending that she was unaware of what she was doing when in fact she was quite aware.

  She wanted him to keep her company.

  Her humming became louder, a flat, slightly minor-key version of the theme from Barney, which was really just a rip-off of “This Old Man,” and the tune reached out to him and dragged him up from sleep, as if from the bottom of a pond. Buddy stirred and blinked his eyes but only partially awoke. His big blond curlicued head, like always, was wet with perspiration, and after she had lifted him swiftly from the crib and settled him against her in the white rocking chair, he executed a graceful transition from sleep to breast, as though it were perfectly natural, at nineteen months of age, for him to find himself with someone’s nipple in his mouth in the middle of the night, without having asked for it first.

  She sat with his wet head against her and let him drain first one breast and then the other, and she thought of how impossible sleep was for her, what an effort, a feat, and how easy it was for Marcus, a fact that maddened her. Why did he get to fall into unconsciousness so easily? Who had died and made him King of Sleep?

  Sometimes at night Holly would lightly poke an elbow into her husband’s gut in order to wake him up so that they could have one of those middle-of-the-night conversations she needed from time to time, not because they were interesting but because they were soothing. She was the one who needed the breast; she was the one who, when her eyes opened at 3 or 4 A.M.—or when they never closed in the first place—needed to find solace.

  Once in a while, Holly initiated sex for just this reason. Of course Marcus was delighted at being awakened by the soft mouth of his wife on his cock; he never knew that in those moments she was using him for comfort rather than excitement. Even the most excited rhythm is of course rhythmic, and therefore calming. It was possible, she knew, to be excited as well as calm. Sex had given her both of those qualities since she was fifteen.