They were both singing now, when a car backed out of a driveway into the road and right into the driver’s side of Sara’s car. At first there was a shuddering smack of metal and a feeling that must be like giving birth, or being born—a ripping apart, a disconnection, and a pain that was bigger than you were, so that you slipped right inside it, as if in hiding. There was sound with it, too: the groaning of metal as it gives up and collapses into itself.
Her mother would kill her, Sara thought as the door of her car pushed into her, overtaking her like a tide. The Buddha on the mirror swung back and forth, and Adam’s mouth was open as if forming a question, and the carton of ice cream bounded across the seat. For some reason she thought of the bearded woman standing at the Fro-Z-Cone year after year. Nothing really changed, at least not so you could see it. Even aging was done surreptitiously, behind a smeary partition, under unnatural light. Sara Swerdlow cried out once, briefly, and then she died.
2
Girl Talk
Natalie Swerdlow had been having sex all evening, which was a daunting task if you were past your prime and on estrogen and had been at work since eight in the morning. But she had read that one of the first signs of old age was a diminished interest in sex, and was determined to ward off this fate by a regimen of sexual bombardment. Friends said she looked much younger than her age; her body was still tight and boyish and she could even fit into her daughter’s jeans, when her daughter happened to leave a pair at home. Natalie was more flamboyant than Sara, but this was only because she knew that quiet simplicity would allow the other person a reflective moment that might accidentally reveal her true age. Better to dazzle and accessorize and cover up. Better to have strenuous sex all evening than not at all.
The man in her bed was a tall, thin, widowed cutlery salesman named Harvey Wise. She had met him through friends, and they easily began a little two-step of flirtation and dating. Sex between a man and woman of fifty bore little resemblance to sex during earlier decades of life. There were no longer any starry fantasies that this lovemaking might lead to an entire life together: a house, a lawn, a few babies down the pike. Harvey Wise was handsome in a gaunt, hangdog way, and after two unmemorable dinners—one in a chophouse, one in a trattoria—she had invited him home. They traveled from the city to Jersey in separate cars; as she pulled up the driveway of her house with the lights of his car eagerly right behind her, she felt her body tense up as it often did in the moments immediately before sex.
Then he was in her bed, and as soon as they were upon each other, the telephone rang. Out of instinct she grabbed it. “Hello?” she said, and she could immediately see the annoyance register on Harvey’s face. It was her best friend, Carol, on the line, outraged about something, as always.
“Remember those contractors?” Carol was saying. “The ones I hired after the plumbing exploded and I needed a new ceiling in the den? Well, Natalie, like an idiot I called them again—”
“Carol,” said Natalie. “Carol, I can’t talk.”
“Someone there?”
“Yes,” she said. “Someone is.”
“Does he have a penis?”
“Actually, I was about to find out.”
“Well, good for you, Natalie,” said Carol. “I don’t mean to interrupt the party. Call me in the morning.” And then she clicked off.
Natalie turned to the man beside her, noticing the dark hairiness of his arms against her pale summery sheets. “Sorry about that, Harvey,” she said. “I tend to get a lot of calls.”
“Maybe we could unplug the phone tonight,” he said. “You know, not even hear it ring. Then we could really focus on each other.”
This was a novelty; Natalie Swerdlow lived by, and for, the telephone. Every day at the Seven Seas Travel Agency in midtown Manhattan, she took calls from people eager to flee their lives for all points exotic, and in the evening she talked on the phone to her friends and her daughter. To turn off the telephone would be an aberration. But when she looked at Harvey Wise, she was surprised to see just how serious he was. He wanted this time alone in bed with her; he didn’t want the telephone to ring. She realized that this was a moment of some importance, which could tip the relationship one way or the other. If she refused to unplug the telephone, he would know that the possibilities with her were limited. No matter what happened between them, she would never belong to him. And she did like him, with his long face and wrinkled suit. So, without blinking, Natalie reached out and unclicked the phone jack from the wall. Harvey Wise smiled at her, and soon brought her to orgasm.
The telephone rang and rang silently all night. Natalie Swerdlow was lying right beside its small corpse, the short cord lying coiled, and there was no sound to disturb her. Her body kept responding and clenching and reaching, while the telephone silently rang. With the bedroom door closed and the air conditioner humming, the other, plugged-in extensions in the house could not be heard. The pleasures that she felt with this man were profound, and she knew that this would make a good story to tell to Carol: the night I chose between a man and a telephone, and lived to tell the tale.
In the morning Harvey was still there in her bed, his face creased with sleep. She went into the bathroom and showered, during which time the telephone resumed its silent ringing. By the time she was dressed and downstairs, within earshot of the other extensions, it had stopped ringing altogether. Harvey woke up shortly and didn’t bother to shower, but merely came downstairs, hungry and friendly. She cooked him an egg-white omelet and they made brief conversation about their cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and then they sat reading the paper together. When they were standing in the doorway, ready to head for their Manhattan offices in separate cars, he reached his hand out and touched her collar, saying, “Natalie, I had a really nice time. I’d like to see you again very, very soon.” This pleased her; she thought it would carry her through the entire day at work.
Then they got into their cars, he into his Nissan Maxima and she into her Toyota. Natalie felt uncommonly good this morning; apparently it was worth it to make the effort with someone new, worth it not to close off your divorced, estrogen-gobbling self from the carnal world.
As she drove onto the highway, the telephone resumed ringing back in her empty house, and then after a while it gave up and stopped. Some thirty minutes later, when she was just a minute or two from the mouth of the tunnel that led into Manhattan, Natalie Swerdlow’s car phone finally rang, and this time she answered it. Almost no one ever called her on the car phone except for Carol or the office manager at Seven Seas, but it was too early for either of them. That meant it was Sara on the phone, Sara who would want to hear all about Natalie’s night with Harvey Wise, Sara who would say, “Spare me no detail.”
Why did Sara want to know everything? The answer was simple: because Natalie wanted to know everything about Sara. They had struck a bargain when Sara was young, and when Natalie became lonely after Ed left the family and moved to Ohio. They had become a couple, of sorts, watching The Wizard of Oz, doing their nails, going to the mall, and they were a couple that told each other everything. So it remained, an unusual arrangement that sometimes aroused jealousy in Natalie’s friends, whose own daughters tended to be sullen and uncommunicative.
“She never tells me anything,” her friend Carol would say of her daughter Tina, who seemed to have become a lesbian almost overnight, complete with an entirely new set of lesbian friends. What Natalie and Sara had—perhaps it had lost some of its luster over the years, or some of its usefulness—but still it held them together, made them keep picking up the telephone and starting a conversation with, “Surrender, Dorothy.”
Now the car telephone was ringing, and Natalie picked up the receiver and said the line, already starting up the old give and take, the familiar girl talk that they did best.
But instead, a man was on the line, with a tortured, stuttering voice. “Mrs. Swerdlow,” he said. “Now, Mrs. Swerdlow, you’ve got to listen to me.” It was one of Sara’s frien
ds, a boy named Peter, telling her he had something terrible to say. Then he took a ragged breath and said it, and she felt her throat catch and her hands fly to her face. Suddenly, she found herself inside the tunnel; day became night, illuminated a tundra white, tiles shining, and Natalie had the sensation that her life, which she had until this very moment taken for granted, was over.
Natalie stopped holding on to the wheel of the car, and instead passively watched as it left its lane and grazed up against another car packed full of passengers. She felt the smack, the powerful vibration of two cars momentarily meeting. Then there was loud, aggravated honking, and in the next instant her car was slanted in the middle of rush hour, while behind her other cars stopped short against one another, brakes squealing so that the whole tunnel sounded like a slaughterhouse full of panicky animals.
In the shocked moment of silence after Natalie’s car came to a halt, she put a hand up and realized her lip was split and bleeding. The policemen took her out of the car tenderly, and she kept talking to them about how her daughter Sara had been killed in a crash. They were confused by her words, thinking her daughter had been killed in this crash, and they carefully examined the car, even under the seat, in the place where gum wrappers and supermarket circulars congregate, as though another person could possibly be hiding under there.
“Ma’am, there is no one in this car with you,” said an overburdened policeman with a round, red face.
“I know,” she said. “I know.” Then, in an attempt at explanation, she pointed to the car phone, whose cord was looped around the steering wheel. But of course he couldn’t understand, and she couldn’t speak anymore in order to tell him, and he simply put his arm around her and she felt the warm skin of his upper arm in his short-sleeved uniform, and smelled his summer cop sweat. Holding her against him like a lover, or like a genial father with his little girl, the officer turned away to speak softly into his walkie-talkie. Soon the ambulance had arrived, threading its way through the stopped-up tunnel. She wondered if she might in fact be dying from some hidden, painless internal injury she’d just received; she felt as though she was about to hallucinate. Every coherent thought became liquid quickly. It had not occurred to her yet that she wasn’t really hurt, and that what she felt was only the unfamiliar new sensation of loss.
The mind tended to hallucinate to fight off the truth; it was almost like antibodies being manufactured and sent scattering to counter some profound illness. For some people, she thought, the antibodies came in the form of little angels, emissaries of God who fluttered down into you and reminded you that He has his ways. But if you didn’t believe in God, if you were a middle-aged, atheist travel agent from New Jersey with no certainty about anything other than the continued fluctuation of airfares, then you manufactured a limited kind of craziness which sent your mind back into the past, back to bathing the baby or watching The Wizard of Oz with your little girl.
Natalie pictured herself with her friend Carol, the two women standing in the stark, treeless light of a playground in the winter of 1968, pushing their daughters on bucket swings. Back then, there were no Sunday fathers lurking awkwardly in the playground; only women ever came out, and of the large group of them, Carol and Natalie had found each other and become fast friends. Their daughters never really grew to like each other; Sara was so sensitive and shyly quick, Tina impulsive and loud. But still the mothers hung on, and over the years both got divorced, both reconfigured their lives. And now Natalie had experienced the worst possible thing a mother could experience, and she knew that Carol would come running.
Carol did, that evening. Held in the hospital for observation, Natalie lay lolling in a bed with rails. Carol arrived and held Natalie’s hand and cried with her and told her that all the arrangements would be taken care of: the transportation of Sara’s body, the burial, the works. Through the thin webbing of the sedative they had given her, Natalie announced to Carol that she wanted to die. She knew exactly how to do it, too; had read a book about it once, for macabre fun.
“You’re not going to die,” said Carol. “I won’t let you. Listen to me, Natalie: I won’t let you.”
In the morning a small, crisply appointed Indian physician appeared in the doorway. His name was Dr. Chatterjee, and he was from the Department of Psychiatry. Lady Chatterjee’s Lover, Natalie thought to herself giddily as he stood over the bed. He announced that he understood Natalie had been in an accident, and that she had just lost her daughter in another accident. He wanted to ask her a few questions, in order to determine whether she was ready to be discharged tomorrow. Clearing his throat, he asked, “Can you tell me who the president is?”
She murmured the president’s name, a man she did not trust but whom she had voted for nonetheless. Idly, she wondered if she would ever vote again. She couldn’t imagine it ever mattering to her: the voting booth, with its silly curtain, seemed frivolous now, and her single vote ridiculous.
“And how old are you, Mrs. Swerdlow?” Dr. Chatterjee asked, a question that seemed to slap her in the face with its own insolence. She was old, but not too old; she would have a long way to go in life without her daughter.
“None of your business,” she said sharply.
He behaved as though he hadn’t heard, and blithely continued. “Listen to this expression,” he said. “‘None are so blind as those who will not see.’ Can you tell me its meaning?”
Natalie did not say anything, so after a moment Carol spoke. “Oh, that’s an easy one,” she said. “It refers to—”
“I was asking Mrs. Swerdlow,” said the doctor, and at that point Natalie began to weep and could not find a way to stop.
“I see,” Dr. Chatterjee said, clicking the button on his pen and replacing it in his pocket, and then he was gone from the room.
They kept Natalie in the hospital for one more day, transferring her to the psychiatric unit, where she sat among confused men and women in bathrobes, and skittish anorexic girls who refused to take their medication without first knowing its caloric content. Natalie stayed in a corner on an orange vinyl chair and cried, and although she freely admitted to Dr. Chatterjee that yes, she was probably suicidal, she was released in the morning.
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.