Surrender, Dorothy by Meg Wolitzer Page B

miss a minute, whereas a woman whose child has died can afford a long absence from life.
    Natalie lay in Sara’s bed, having no idea what time of day it was, and not particularly wanting to get up and walk across the room to consult her watch, which lay quietly ticking on Sara’s bureau. Occasionally she glanced through Sara’s red leather notebook, which Sara had filled with Japanese characters, probably notes for her dissertation, Natalie thought. She had a fantasy of someday being able to translate these words, being able to read what her daughter had written. There were Berlitz tapes in the drawer, and when Natalie could bear to get up and move aroundmore, she planned on listening to them in order to learn Sara’s second language. For now, she comforted herself with the tiny, delicate Japanese characters that Sara had painstakingly written. She kept the notebook beside her in bed as she moved in and out of sleep, holding it against her like a pillow or a stuffed animal.
    Why not sleep all day and night? At the house in New Jersey after the funeral, Natalie had been continually wired and awake. But the house in the Hamptons had a distinctly soporific effect. Dr. Chatterjee would have diagnosed clinical depression, no doubt, and would have prescribed some drug that would have monkeyed with the serotonin levels in her brain. Yes, she was alarmingly depressed, but she knew it wasn’t depression that was causing all this sleep.
    No: it was comfort. The bed, with all its associations, and the room that contained that bed, provided a sense of follow-the-dot continuity. She could picture Sara here, could see her standing before the warped mirror brushing her hair, and lying down in bed, folding up her long limbs. Natalie wasn’t sure how many days she had been lying here in Sara’s room—one, two—when there was a sharp knocking on the flimsy door. “Mrs. Swerdlow?” came a worried female voice. “It’s Maddy.”
    Natalie did not know what to say; she would have liked to simply draw the thin blanket up around her shoulders and not reply, but the knocking came again. “May I come in?” the girl asked. And then, because there was no lock on the door, the knob turned and the door swung open and there stood Sara’s friend Maddy Wernick, looking terribly worried.
    “What’s the matter?” was all Natalie could say.
    “We were getting a little concerned,” Maddy said, “because you haven’t come downstairs to eat. I mean, we heard you going across the hall to use the bathroom, so we knew you weren’t swinging from the rafters up here, ha ha, but we were getting spooked. So we chose someone to come up here and check. And I was the one.”
    “Oh,” said Natalie. “Well, you can tell your friends I’m justvery sleepy, if that’s all right.” She thought that that would be that, and in anticipation of Maddy’s departure she lay her head back against the pillow.
    But Sara’s friend simply stood in the doorway, unwilling to leave. “Mrs. Swerdlow,” she said softly, “I’d really rather that you didn’t go back to sleep, if that’s okay with you.” Her voice threaded into vagueness and an absence of nerve.
    “Pardon?” said Natalie, sitting up once again.
    “Well,” said Maddy, “I’m not just here to make sure you’re okay. We also decided that maybe somehow we could get you out of bed, too. You’ve just been sleeping and sleeping, and not eating at all. That can’t be very good for you.”
    This young woman was practically poking Natalie with a cattle prod, ordering her to move, when all she wanted to do was lie here and stew in the soft nearness of her daughter’s presence. “Whether it’s good for me or not,” Natalie said evenly, “I’m twenty years older than you, and I don’t think it’s any of your business.”
    Maddy blushed. “We promised your friend,” she said.
    “My friend?” said Natalie. “Carol? You promised her what?”
    Maddy shifted unhappily from foot to foot.