“Hey,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”
“Smoking,” she said.
“Come inside.”
“No,” she said, although she wanted to come inside more than anything.
“I love you, Maddy,” he tried.
“More than you love Sara? Or her mother?”
“What?” he said. “I don’t love them. You know I don’t. You’re the one; that’s the total truth. It’s very simple.”
She looked at him warily. “I guess you do love me,” she said. “But it’s not simple, and it’s not good enough. It doesn’t take care of everything.” She imagined letting herself simply slide down off the roof as if on a flume ride at a water park, her arms at her sides, her legs straight out in front of her, closing her eyes as she was
shunted off into the end of her life. It would be so easy to do that now.
“I don’t know what you know,” he said. “Or where you heard it, or whether it’s true, but—”
“It
is
true,” she cut him off. “But I don’t want to hear about it. Not a single word, ever. And as far as
how
I know—” She broke off. “I don’t feel like telling you,” she said. “And maybe I never will. It will keep you on your toes.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ve fucked up, I know that. I’m a big fuck-up.” She nodded; at last they agreed on something. “For God’s sake,” he said. “You want to have this conversation out here? You’re too close to the edge; are you trying to prove something?” She didn’t say anything. “Don’t do this,” he said. “Please don’t. Look, can we at least go inside?”
She thought for a moment, bits of ash drifting into the air. Did she want to stay out here, suspended in some haze of nostalgia, fantasizing about dying, about sliding neatly down onto the lawn, or did she want to go with Peter, who was imperfect and unfaithful and full of regret? Despite all the reasons not to, she loved him still, had loved him since the day they first slept together at Dyke House at Wesleyan, when she was so happy to have something—someone—that was her own. He was hers, he
was,
despite everything. He wasn’t Sara’s. That knowledge gave comfort now. She was sleepy; she thought she could sleep against him tonight, thought she could almost imagine a time when touching him would not be a burden. She remembered her earlier self, shy at first and then thrilled to be in bed with him, noting, early on, the way one of her shaved legs was thrown over one of his hairy legs—the peculiar, complementary nature of it. There was the quiet of being in bed with him, and the noise too, unabashed and ordinary, and very much theirs. She didn’t want to lose that, to let it turn into something else, a calcified marriage, a tacit hostile arrangement, or even a phlegmatic if cheerful partnership in which husband and wife lay side by side reading their
complementary male-female magazines every night. She just wanted it to go back to what it had been before: before Sara died, before Duncan was born, before all the shifting and resettling. Maddy crushed the cigarette against the roof and took the hand that Peter offered, letting him help her into the window, as though it were a threshold and he were swiftly carrying her through.
N
ATALIE’S CAR
pounded down the narrow roads, roads she had driven with extra care since she had been here, thinking of Sara in her car during the accident. Now Natalie was driving much faster than usual. She was reckless, thinking that she wanted to die, reaching over to light a cigarette with the little circle of heat on the end of the car lighter, her hand shaking as she increased the speed and inhaled a full throatful of rolling smoke.
It didn’t matter if she were killed in her own car accident now; why should she preserve herself, what for? Did the world care if Natalie Swerdlow went on and on? She had spent weeks in the house of her daughter’s friends, doing everything she could to stay in motion, to connect, to take care of these children, to find life bearable, to both believe the terrible truth and somehow not have to believe it at all, and finally she was tired of these tasks, which seemed to her both Herculean and absurd.
Out on the road, cars were honking at Natalie. Still she went faster, trying to remember exactly how to get to the place where Sara had been killed. Maybe there would be no traffic there; maybe she could just apply more and more pressure on the gas pedal, feeling a surge as the car dumbly responded to her command. Natalie drove and drove, and for some reason she could not find the spot. She saw only the same safe, slow curvature of road.
Then, several yards up ahead, Natalie suddenly came upon the huge neon Fro-Z-Cone sign. She remembered that this was
where Sara had gone for ice cream the night she died; this was the last place Sara had ever been. Natalie quickly pulled the car into the parking lot and stepped out. There were a few other cars parked here; teenagers lounged on the hood of someone’s father’s expensive car, and a family sat at a picnic table eating ice cream in speechless, sybaritic pleasure. Behind the glass of the ice cream stand stood an old man with a beard, wiping the counter with a rag. From this distance he looked effeminate and odd, like a gay Rip Van Winkle. Natalie walked closer toward the counter and saw, with shock, that this wasn’t an old man at all, but an old woman with a vague beard.
“You want to order?” the bearded woman asked. She’d probably seen everything from her post behind this sliding glass. She’d seen teenagers come and go, and she’d pumped sauce onto ice cream, spooned out countless servings of a viscous walnut and syrup mixture, dipped a pair of tongs repeatedly into a tub to fetch out cherries saturated in red dye #2. She’d seen Sara here every summer, too, although she’d never known her name, and she’d even given Sara ice cream on her last night.
“A cup of chocolate soft-serve,” Natalie said, although she wasn’t at all hungry, but felt she ought to order just to be polite. “Small, please.”
“Ninety-eight cents,” said the bearded woman, and Natalie gave her a handful of coins. The woman went over to a large, silver ice cream machine that was as primitive-looking as a Univac.
“My daughter used to come here,” said Natalie, poking her head inside the partition. “She came here with her best friend. She came here the night she died. There was a car accident. Earlier this summer, down the road; maybe you remember. She was very pretty. She had long hair.” The bearded woman was holding a cup under the nozzle, and now she squinted out through the partition, not saying anything. “She was my little girl,” said Natalie in a voice that was almost a whisper, “and this was the last place she went to. This was
it.
She bought ice cream here and started to
drive home with her friend, and she was killed.” Natalie choked on the last words and began to cry.
The bearded woman appeared startled. “Oh, my, well… well,
here,”
she said to Natalie. “Take these.” She thrust a sheaf of napkins at Natalie from the dispenser, and Natalie gratefully blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes. She kept crying for a little while longer and the bearded woman looked on helplessly.
“I’m very sorry,” said Natalie. She leaned on the counter, her hands against its cool, dented metal surface. She stayed like that for several seconds, and the bearded woman stayed on the other side, both of them silent and thoughtful. “Well,” said Natalie finally, gathering her composure, “I guess I should go. Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m sorry I cried like this. I couldn’t help myself.”
“Wait,” said the bearded woman, and she suddenly thrust a hand out through the opening in the glass and took Natalie’s dish of ice cream back. “Here,” she said. Then she fiddled around behind the counter and produced a plastic teaspoon. She tipped it into Natalie’s dish of ice cream, letting loose a spill of jimmies that rained down in a small storm of many colors.
N
ATALIE DROVE
and drove, driving just to drive, and up ahead she suddenly saw a familiar set of well-tended bushes, and a long gravel road that wound its way up to a house she knew. As if returning to a place visited in a dream, she pulled the car into the driveway, and hoped very hard that her childhood friend Sheila Normandy was home. Sheila Normandy, of immense wealth, deep boredom, and an even deeper tan, was a perfect companion for a mourning mother. Sheila was all about distraction, someone devoted to making her own life remotely compelling, or at least amusing. Natalie arrived at the house uninvited, and a maid answered the door, took one look at this woman with wind-swept hair, a look of anguish on her face, and a cup of ice cream in her
hand, and knew that here was another one of Mrs. Normandy’s troubled friends. Sheila was home, having her nails done somewhere in the recesses of the house, and she came out to see Natalie, smelling of ketones and waving her drying fingers in the air.
“My God, Natalie, are you all right?” Sheila asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Natalie said.
“Well, you came to the right place,” said Sheila. “Inez, por favor,” she said, turning to the maid, “would you tell Scooter that Mrs. Swerdlow and I would like to go up?”
“Go up?” Natalie repeated.
Going up turned out to mean up in the helicopter, which was waiting on the back lawn, its rotors spinning slowly, a handsome young pilot named Scooter sitting inside. He helped the women inside, and within seconds the big thing had lifted up off the ground, and Natalie stared, slightly open-mouthed, as the gigantic Normandy house became smaller and the vast greenery of the island in summer revealed itself. Scooter gave them headsets so they could hear each other when they talked, and he patiently showed both women what all the different switches on the control panel were for. Mostly, though, Natalie and Sheila sat in the deep seats, drank wine, and gazed out at the acreage that once was made up of potato farms.
Here at the beach, Sheila often found herself feeling melancholic in the middle of another endless afternoon on someone’s bleached-wood deck, and so she found herself oddly comforted by Natalie, the only person out here who knew her as the daughter of a poultry man. Together, the two women discovered that in middle age they both enjoyed a good, serious drink. Several drinks. Up in the helicopter they looked down over the tiny houses and stretches of beach, and the alcohol enriched their blood, making them forget why, on land, they both felt so sad.
“I used to get dizzy when I came up here,” Sheila said. “But Paul loved it. Boys need their toys, right?” Back in their house, Paul Normandy paced the floor of their living room, his electronic
manacle digging its teeth into his ankle, a cellular phone perenially pressed against his ear.
“I have no idea what boys need,” said Natalie.
“You don’t see anybody?” asked Sheila. “I mean socially?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been out with a lot of men,” said Natalie. “And I just met someone out here.”
“Tell me,” said Sheila.
“He’s a theatrical agent,” said Natalie. “And I felt very comfortable with him; it was strange. But what does it matter now? I don’t want to be with anyone. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever want to.”
“No, not now, but later maybe,” said Sheila. “There will always be a later.”
“So they say,” said Natalie. “But I doubt it. The thing is, I need to be alone at night. I can’t bear the idea of someone being there with me. I get up and pace, I smoke, I walk around. I just wait for the night to be over half the time.” She paused. “Remember when we were Campfire Girls, and we used to lie outside in those smelly sleeping bags?”
“Oh yes,” said Sheila. “I thought I’d never get to sleep, it was so cold, and I was so excited being out there in the woods. We’d always sing our little song before bed, and the next thing I knew, I was fast asleep.” She began to sing once again. “Sit around the campfire / Join the Campfire Girls / Sing wo-he-lo, sing wo-he-lo …”
“Work … health … love,” both women sang together, in fragile, proud voices.
“You know something?” said Natalie. “I always thought ‘wo-he-lo’ was an Indian word. I never realized it was short for work, health, love.” They both laughed lightly. “I can’t believe,” said Natalie, her voice suddenly small, “that I will never see Sara again. In fact, it’s almost as though I
will
see her again; I feel as though I could search the world over and eventually find her, if I try hard enough. I mean, how can someone just leave the earth?”
Sheila looked out her window, at the careful scatter of houses below. “We just did,” she said.
“Flying isn’t the same as dying,” said Natalie, realizing she was drunk.
“Oh, you’re a poet,” said Sheila. “Little Natalie grew up to be a poet.
“Actually, what I grew up to be is nothing,” Natalie said. “A goddamn travel agent. It’s not exactly curing cancer.”
“No,
I
grew up to be nothing,” said Sheila. “A rich man’s wife. Someone who shops. What good is that? I’m just taking up space and spending Paul’s money, and don’t think I don’t know it.”
Somewhere down below was the mustard-colored house on Diller Way, but Natalie had no idea which one it was. She let herself be carried through the air, swiftly, defying gravity in this deft little hummingbird. “Maybe we’ll crash,” she said to Sheila over the chopping sound of the rotors, imagining the helicopter plummeting down to the ground, depositing them there forever.
“Oh, Scooter’s never crashed, and he never will,” said Sheila. “He’s too smooth for that. Too capable. Believe me, I know.”
She sent Natalie a knowing glance to let her know that she had slept with the pilot. Anyone would be attracted to a man who knew how to steer a helicopter, a man whose arms were bound with muscles and whose nose was created specifically so a pair of Ray-Bans could rest upon it. Although the name, Natalie thought, would have to go. How could you lie underneath this man, raking his back and muttering, “Oh, Scooter. Oh, Scooter”? She thought of the boy Peter, and how they were practically of separate species. The young should have sex with the young, the not-so-young with the not-so-young. Cross-pollination seemed freakish now, unseemly.
Kissing that boy, she had not had the same experience as Sara; she had come no closer to knowing what Sara had felt, for certainly Peter had looked at Sara differently than he had looked at her. What Sara had felt, Natalie tried for too. She could approximate it, but she couldn’t come close enough. Always, there was a barrier; always, a divide. She wanted to tell her old friend Sheila
all about it, but Sheila couldn’t understand. She had no children, and her shackled husband lived only for leveraged buyouts; he would be unshackled soon, but she would always be adrift. Sheila responded not to the specifics of Natalie’s anguish, but to the presence of anguish itself. “You and Paul never wanted to have children?” Natalie asked.