Read Online Surrender, Dorothy by Meg Wolitzer - Free Book Online Page A

astonishing to Maddy that even now, the baby still needed food. She took a swig of vodka from a mug, then opened her blouse and let herbreast spring out like a jack-in-the-box. While he drank milk, she drank vodka; it was the only way they could get through this terrible time. Her breasts still filled and emptied, even though Sara was dead; this fact was astonishing, but it was also a relief. As she looked down at the top of Duncan’s head, the place where the bones didn’t quite join, she thought of how fragile he was, and what a mistake it had been to bring him into the world. She was now terrified of something happening to him; when he slept in his Portacrib, she started at the receiver of the infant monitor, hypnotized by watching the red lights rise and fall with his breathing.
    She remembered how, the moment Duncan was born, Peter had turned to her, his expression clearly overwhelmed and inconsolable, although he later claimed he had been merely happy. “This is my son!” he’d explained, and he’d gone on to insist that apparently all men felt a particular sensation of being overcome when their wives delivered a boy.
    Lately Peter hovered over her again, as much a useless appendage as he had been during labor, when he had lurked in the background of the delivery room, a stooping, somewhat useless figure in green scrubs and silly paper clown shoes. He seemed useless right now, too, for although he had been crying and drinking constantly since the crash, he hadn’t been terribly close to Sara; she was Maddy’s friend, not his, and Peter had never even seemed to like her. But still, Peter was drinking along with everyone and crying and shaking his head in somber, inarticulate shock. So, for that matter, was Shawn, who had had no relationship with Sara at all—having only just met her the night she was killed. It became a house of drunks, the air itself taking on that familiar bad-breath stink of drinking.
    The only thing that saved them from falling into total disaster, Maddy thought now, as Duncan tugged rhythmically and gratingly at her left nipple, was the fact that there was a baby in the house. Duncan had his clockwork needs, regardless of anything that was going on around him, and he forced you to turn away from your sorrow and pay attention to him.
    “I know people always say this, and it doesn’t make any sense,” said Maddy as they all lay around the living room, “but the thing I can’t get over is that we just saw her. She was right here, sitting beside me on this couch, and we were discussing what we were going to do tomorrow—and then we were talking about other things, like her work. She showed me all these World War Two propaganda cartoons she’d collected, of buck-toothed, slanty-eyed evil Japanese people. She just knew so much about the war, about history, and it reminded me of how little I know about everything.”
    “You know a lot,” Peter said reflexively.
    “Oh, right,” she said. “Every dull fact they taught me in law school. And all about breastfeeding. Those are my two pathetic areas of expertise. Sara was the one who knew things,” she said. “And I just can’t believe this has happened to her.” And then her voice broke up once again into a new round of sobs.
    Peter rubbed Maddy’s shoulders and clasped her lightly in his arms. “It’s like that joke,” he said after a long moment. “Descartes walks into a bar, and the bartender asks him, Would you like a drink?’ And Descartes says, ‘I think not,’ and then he disappears.” He paused, adding, “She just disappeared.”
    No one laughed. Finally Maddy said, “I can’t believe you’re making a joke now.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
    “Then just say nothing” she said, and the subtext was that Sara had been her close friend, not his, and that he ought to shut up forever. At least I have Duncan, Maddy thought. For she could go to her baby and bury her face