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

in his sweet neck; it was a simple and uncomplicated act. Everything was much more complicated with Peter. Maddy had often discussed her husband intimately with Sara; such talk tempered the whole exclusionary experience of marriage, made it feel less lonely.
    “You don’t know what it’s like, living with someone year after year,” Maddy had said one summer, as she and Sara went for a walk along the weedy dunes of the local beach. They were smokingand walking, two best friends, one beautiful, the other less so. “He leaves the toilet seat up,” Maddy went on. “He plays his old obnoxious CDs early in the morning. He lifts these weights and leaves them laying around where I can trip on them. And he’s male. And therefore, I don’t think he understands women. That’s the main thing.”
    “You know, it’s too bad that we’re not lesbians,” Sara had said, “because then we could be together all the time and be totally devoted.”
    “Yes,” Maddy had agreed, “it’s too bad,” and as she spoke a man ran past on the sand with a dog. His chest was bare, gleaming and hairless. His legs had a golden summer fur on them, and as he and his dog raced by he glanced over at Sara and smiled.
    “You see,” said Sara, “we need that around.” She included Maddy in the moment of male appreciation, although what the moment was really about was Sara and this man on the beach, who appreciated her right back. When men were interested in you, they made you feel you had something unique and unbearably exciting. Men winced with pleasure at the sight of a woman undressing. Even Maddy, whose body was imperfect, whose breasts had always seemed to her balloonishly large, had caused several men to wince and moan and nearly seem on the verge of having their eyes roll up in their heads. Peter had been that way the first time they slept together and he still was that way, to a lesser extent.
    Sara had been very encouraging when Peter first showed an interest in Maddy back at Wesleyan, and after their first unofficial “date” (no one called it that), Maddy rushed to Sara’s dorm room to provide a blow-by-blow account. When Maddy and Peter moved into an attic apartment with sloping ceilings off-campus, Sara grew closer to Adam by default, turning to him for the late-night companionship and availability that Maddy could no longer provide. Sara and Adam found they loved being together; what had started out as a consolation-prize friendship quickly transformedinto something very satisfying. Now Maddy suddenly didn’t know how she could stay married to Peter without having Sara to bounce everything off of. She suddenly didn’t know how she could do much of anything without Sara.
    All the reading they had done in college, all the Jung and Thomas Merton and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, all the high holidays spent neatly dressed in synagogues or churches with their families, all the Junior Year Abroad visits to Chartres to see the stained glass and reflect on the passage of time, and all the long, bloated, free-associative conversations they had taken part in over the years about the subjects of death, rebirth, and the nature of the spirit-self—none of it helped now.
    No one slept much those first days after the accident; instead, they moved from living room to kitchen, where they sat around the table, opening bottles and pouring drinks. Mrs. Moyles may have been a terrible housekeeper, but she had a cabinet impressively stocked with partially empty scotch and vodka and brandy bottles, the liquids at different levels, like the collection of a musician who taps out tunes on bottles with a spoon. They cried for a long, long time in unbroken, phlegmy sobs, and they muttered and embraced. They cried and drank, except for Shawn, who mostly just drank. Eventually the alcohol seemed to stopper the crying. There were whimpers, and mumbling, and then they actually resumed talking.
    “Oh, why did I want ice cream for that raspberry pie?” said Adam