Surrender, Dorothy by Meg Wolitzer

together repeatedly over the years. It was an adventure tale that both of them could relate to; poor Dorothy, Sara had always thought—lost in the world. What would Sara have done if she had lost her mother? Would she have even survived? It seemed doubtful. When Dorothy gazed into the crystal ball and saw the face of her beloved Auntie Em, Sara had wept and wept. And when Natalie watched the movie with Sara, she remembered watching it as a little girl in the Bronx, and so she wept for the loss of her own youth. She was a middle-aged woman whose marriage had become undone. Whowould love her, and how could she manage? Mother and daughter hitched their stars to each other, for there was no one else.
    “Surrender, Dorothy,” they said back and forth on the telephone. After a while, the catchphrase stuck, becoming a tender in-joke, a reflex that began all calls. Adam had always thought this little routine was strange, and did not really understand Sara’s intimacy with Natalie, forged in the roomy, manless house so many years earlier.
    “I just want to die,” Natalie said now. “I’ll walk into the water, that’s what I’ll do.”
    “Don’t walk into the water,” said Adam. “Please don’t do anything like that. It would be really stupid, and really sad.”
    “I’ll do what I want,” she said. “Back in New Jersey, I have a houseful of pills, you know. The medicine cabinets are packed: old tranquilizers, antihistamines, although they probably expired in 1968, and even the pin worm medicine our cocker spaniel Triscuit used to take. I’m sure I could do it with them.”
    “Look,” said Adam, “I don’t know what you should do, but I know you definitely shouldn’t go back to New Jersey.” He paused, as an idea formed. It was a bad idea, certainly, but it was now too late, for he had started to say it: “You could stay here,” he said. “In Sara’s room.”
    “Oh, I couldn’t,” Natalie said.
    “Yes, you could,” he said dutifully, continuing what he had begun.
    “I guess,” she said, “maybe you’re right. Maybe I could. I have no clothes with me, but I could wear Sara’s. We wore the same size.
    At first he thought his suggestion had sprung purely from a well of altruism, but now he realized he was also looking out for himself and his friends. In some way the idea excited him too, as though having Sara’s mother in the house might save them all. But how could she save them? She was in worse shape than they were. Since the accident there was a sluggishness to the household,which Adam thought must be what old age feels like. In past summers, they would all stand in the kitchen cooking big, sloppy dinners, smoking and drinking and listening to loud music. They would wash lettuce and chop carrots and get nicely buzzed on bottled beer. Sara would cook a big Japanese meal for them once a summer, spending hours in the kitchen by herself, occasionally drafting someone to help her unroll the fragile, vaguely smelly sheets of seaweed. They would drink sake with dinner, which had a surprising potency to it, so that by the end of the evening they were all helplessly drunk and no one could bear to clean up the kitchen until the morning. Late at night Sara would come to Adam’s room and sit at the foot of his bed while he read aloud to her from his work. Adam had loved those nights, those summers; they had been a predictable part of his life that he craved during the rest of the year. Now here he was, without her, and it was just misery and sorrow. They had agreed to stay in the house for the rest of the month, but at times he was sorry. How did they think it could be manageable? How could they find a way to live with this?
    “I think it’s a good idea,” he told Natalie. “You can stay until you’re back on your feet.”
    But he knew that this was a meaningless nod toward her childless future. Grieving parents never found their footing, never found their feet, never even found their shoes, but simply