Carol came to pick her up, gently shepherding her across the parking lot. “Look at you, sweetie,” Carol said. “You’re not ready to be out yet, are you? Well, tell that to your dumbass HMO.
They
think you’re ready.”
At Natalie’s request, Carol drove her directly to the funeral home. She had decided to take a look at her daughter’s body in the purplish light of that place, because if she didn’t, she knew she would always wonder: Did Sara really die? Was it her on that table, or someone else entirely? Was the whole thing a grotesque mix-up, with Sara actually sneaking off to Japan, living in a house with rice-paper screens and sleeping on a tatami mat beside a devoted and elegant Japanese husband? So she looked, and what she saw was like a vision of Sara viewed through some sort of thick material. Death blurred what was once sharp; a face lost its singularity. Sara had somehow joined that pool of placid bodies who lay flat on tables, in morgues, in police snapshots, in the cradles of open caskets.
Back at home, Natalie sat at the table with her head down all afternoon. She thought of Sara sitting at this same table as a child,
drinking juice from the collection of Flintstones jelly jars that Natalie still kept. Children loved juice; they lived on it, they were thirsty all the time. They wanted things to drink, to eat, to wear, to buy. They asked you for money, shaking you down for it, and you always gave. Their thirst never stopped; you marveled at its endurance.
The telephone rang often now and Carol answered it, speaking in a soft, worried voice in another room. Carol made burial arrangements; Natalie was aware of Carol speaking in an authoritative voice to someone at the mortuary. Sara’s friends called too, wanting to know when the funeral was. But at Natalie’s instruction, Carol told them there would be no formal funeral for Sara—just the body transported back here for a private family burial. Her friends were eager to come, of course, but it would have been too much for Natalie, all those people hovering, and so she said no; there would be a memorial at a later date, and they could all come then. They could play Sara’s favorite depressing rock songs, and the movement from Mahler’s Fifth that she liked so much. They could read aloud Japanese poems and reminisce about the first day they had met her at college. But Natalie could not tolerate any of that right now.
Ed Swerdlow flew in for the funeral from Dayton, where he practiced periodontics and lived with his dental-assistant second wife and their young children. He sobbed at the cemetery, even though his relationship with his daughter had been tenuous and vague at best. He hadn’t been a terrible father—merely, like many men of his generation, a father who was in the dark when it came to the lives of girls. Over the years since the divorce, he had made handsome payments to Natalie and had dutifully come to visit Sara twice a year, bringing gifts that demonstrated his lack of knowledge of anything young and female. When Sara was thirteen, he had brought her a Miss Tussy Cologne and Makeup Kit, even though she and her friends had long been dabbing patchouli and ylang-ylang onto their wrists and getting
ankle tattoos and smoking fat, damp joints in the parking lot behind the local Rite-Aid drugstore and hitchhiking home from school. Her father didn’t have a clue, but it didn’t really matter, for her mother was the primary parent, and her mother knew everything.
After the burial, the small group congregated at the house, eating the cheese Danish and the hard knots of rugelach that Carol had somehow found the time to buy, and speaking in shocked, muted voices. Later, when everyone was gone, Natalie knew that the only things left for her to contend with were infinite space and time; it was August, and most of Natalie’s clients were already off on the vacations she had planned for them. Friends called, but no one could speak with any real authority or conviction.
Sara’s friends kept phoning from the summer house: Adam, sobbing and apologizing and saying something incomprehensible about a raspberry pie, and Maddy, with a voice as soft and hesitant as a child’s. She cried with them on the telephone, then at the end they all hung up, feeling no better. Some of Natalie’s friends dropped by to hold her hand and bring fruit, then retreated meekly. Hard, shiny pears, apricots, and grapefruits as big as bowling balls littered her kitchen counters. Even Harvey Wise ambled in, mumbled and held her one last time, then fled. He said he was “no good with death.” It frightened him, and he clearly wasn’t up to being heroic with this woman he had slept with only once.
A fountain of coffee was continually brewed and served, and the house took on the aroma of one of those new coffee boutiques that had begun to pop up everywhere lately. After the first week of mourning, the volume of visitors diminished. Soon no one wanted coffee; soon it was just two tired women in this large house in a suburb that now seemed far from civilization.
It was Carol who suggested they go for a drive. Natalie hadn’t been outside since the trip to the cemetery. She hadn’t even gotten dressed, but had simply stayed in her nightgown, padding slowly
around the house. But now Carol handed her a set of clothes which she dutifully donned, and combed her hair for her and walked her outside, where the sunlight struck Natalie as both pleasurable and deeply inappropriate. They went to Natalie’s dented but intact car; Carol took the wheel.
“Where to, kiddo?” said Carol. “A movie, maybe? There’s that thing at the sixplex with Brad Pitt as Disraeli.”
But Natalie shook her head. “No,” she said.
“Then where?” said Carol. “Come on, I’ll take you anywhere.”
“Anywhere? Really?” asked Natalie.
“Yes. What did you have in mind?”
Natalie paused a moment before answering, and then she said, “The house.”
“But the whole point was to get you
out
of the house for a while,” said Carol.
“Not my house,” said Natalie. “Sara’s.”
“What?” said Carol. “But why?”
“I don’t know,” said Natalie. “I just suddenly feel as though I’d like to see where she went every summer. To see the place, finally.”
“Shouldn’t we call first?” asked Carol.
Natalie shrugged, then quietly said, “I’m her mother.”
The drive to the house seemed endless; Natalie felt like an impatient child needing distractions. She itched to change the radio station, even when a song came on that she liked. That was what death had done: It taken away the possibility of complex and sustained thought, leaving her simpleminded, with basic, constantly shifting needs. The only complex topic she could think about was her daughter’s death, and that was too awful, so she shut her mind
off,
let it lie slack. She sometimes thought she could almost feel her mind sloshing around in its own pan of chemicals.
“Let’s stop at the grocery store first,” Natalie said, as they came
to a massive Price Chopper. “You know kids, how they like to eat.
“They’re hardly kids,” Carol said, but then she knew enough not to say more. Sara, at least, would remain a “kid.” She was not fully formed as an adult—the shell hadn’t had time to harden. She would be a girl forever, and all of her adult traits would slowly be loosened from her, so that finally Natalie would imagine that she had lost a literal child—a preschooler drowned at a neighbor’s pool, or an infant who had succumbed in the night to crib death. Natalie would join that large, unconnected club of mourning parents. They were easy to spot; they were the ones who looked like the living dead, wandering through shopping malls and the carpeted halls of offices where they worked. People gave them a wide berth when they passed to use the water cooler or the copy machine:
Step back
—
grieving mother coming through.
Now, inside the supermarket, Natalie walked the wide, ice-cold aisles with a kind of wonder. “Look at this,” she said, plucking from the shelves all sorts of junk food that she hadn’t even known existed. These were the kinds of items that were always advertised during the Saturday morning cartoons. “Frooty Rollers,” she read aloud, picking up a package of some fruit-flavored candy item that contained no actual fruit and appeared to be made of latex. “Now,” she read, “in bright blue jazzberry flavor!”
“There is no such thing as a jazzberry,” said Carol, disapproving. “And, as you know, this color blue does not exist in nature.”
“For God’s sake,” said Natalie, “I’m not looking for nature here. I’m trying to buy them something they’ll like.”
She kept on like that, loading the cart with ranch-flavored chips and jumbo bags of red licorice. She realized that she did not know what sorts of things Sara’s friends ate, in actuality, but actual food held no appeal to her, so how could it to
them
? This was novelty food; if you ate it, it was better than nothing, better than subsisting on air. From her perch by the register at this unfamiliar
supermarket, the checkout woman in her green smock took a cursory look at the items on the belt and said, knowingly, “Houseful of teenagers?”
“Yes,” said Natalie quickly. “That’s right.”
“I can’t get mine to eat anything decent either,” the woman went on, dragging each item over the price-code light buried under glass. “Kids today, their teeth rot in their heads, they kill themselves with drugs and I don’t know what else.” She shook her head, and Natalie shook hers too, momentarily enjoying the solidarity, enjoying being able to convey the impression that she, Natalie, still had a child.
Kids today,
she thought.
But she felt sorry for these “kids,” these thirty-year-olds to whom she was bringing gifts of near-food. She had refused to let them come to the burial—it was too overwhelming to imagine them all there, standing in the sun and crying, and then she would have had to have them to the house afterward. But they had plagued her with phone calls, telling her of their sorrow, wanting her to know about it, and finally, today, she understood that their sorrow was real. So she would attempt to placate them with Frooty Rollers and other such things. Her arms full of shopping bags, she walked from the cool of the store into the startling heat of the parking lot. The blacktop felt spongy and soft in the heat.
“Natalie, wait up!” Carol said from somewhere behind her. Carol was a faithful friend who was becoming less relevant to this mission, Natalie thought as she loaded the trunk of the car with shopping bags. Carol hurried over to Natalie. “I’m here for you, you know,” Carol said, but the comment was something of a non sequitur.
“No,” said Natalie simply, “you’re not.” She closed the car door and let herself in the front passenger side.
“How can you say that?” Carol said, her voice getting shrill as she herself went around and opened the driver’s door.
The two women faced each other in the little box of heat. “Because you still have a daughter, and I don’t,” Natalie said.
“Natalie, I
barely
have a child,” Carol said. “I mean, let’s face it, Tina is not exactly what I would have chosen.”
Natalie stared. “How can
you
say that?” she asked.
Carol’s remark reminded her that the world had divided, separating the devastated-by-loss from the untouched-by-loss. Carol had a daughter; her daughter had a heart that still beat inside her chest. It was true that Carol did not approve of Tina, and that while she claimed to love her, the love seemed founded more on ancient history (a Mary Cassatt vision of bathing a pink baby) than on anything that still lasted. For the pink-complected Mary Cassatt baby had turned into a large Doberman of a woman—a lesbian with a particular interest in self-defense issues. Tina ran a dojo near her home in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her hair had been sculpted into a brush cut, giving her the look of a handsome male pilot for a commercial airline. She seemed corporate, strong-jawed, and yet she lived outside the mainstream culture, in a small two-family house with an older woman named Ronnie, who taught feminist film criticism at a local college.
Who knew why children chose the paths they did? Why had Tina become a lesbian, and Sara been attracted to men? But why, too, was Tina in a committed, live-in relationship at thirty—a marriage, of sorts—while Sara, unattached, lived every summer among her college friends?
Carol had vowed to take care of Natalie, living with her during August and continuing to heat the array of international casseroles that the neighbors had delivered. But suddenly Natalie didn’t want that sort of aid—she wanted to reject it, bitterly. It seemed unfair to hurt Carol’s feelings, she who had done so much for her already. But chance had given them separate paths: the hectic, commuter’s pace of the untouched-by-loss, and the slow, Thorazine shuffle of the devastated-by-loss.
Good-bye, Carol, good-bye, Natalie thought as they got back into the car. Suddenly she was in a hurry to get to the house of
Sara’s friends. They were a mess, they had said on the telephone, and so was she. They could all be one big, unwieldy mess together.
Natalie buckled herself into the seat, making sure she heard the unambiguous click of the safety belt, and then they drove to the house without stopping.
3
The Friends of Sara Swerdlow
For three days and nights following the accident, Sara’s sorrowing friends lived like squatters in the darkness of a tunnel. They fell easily into a pattern of drinking—repetitively lifting and lowering a glass to the mouth, something they had done in college and still knew how to do without much thought. In the rooms of the house they let themselves collectively fall. Down, down, down they went, to a place at the bottom where there was no light, just further thoughts about their friend and housemate Sara and how they would never see her again.
It was on day three that Maddy found herself up on the roof of the house with Adam. In the past, they would bring a boom box and a cooler of beer up here, and cover themselves with either a high-SPF lotion or a slick of melanoma-welcoming oil, then lie on towels spread on the slanting roof for much of the day, looking
down on the tips of trees and the street, and the thin strip of ocean in the distance. But now, when staying in the house seemed intolerable, yet going out into the real world seemed even worse, Maddy and Adam—who had both been hit the hardest by the news—opened the hatch that led to the broad slope of shingled roof. Hoisting themselves up, they sat in the early morning light with the unbearable world beneath them. This was the first air they had gotten in three days; death, by nature, was an airless event.