Surrender, Dorothy Read Online Free PDF Page A

the time comes,” Natalie had said, stroking her daughter’s head like a dog and gazing off, “you’ll know what I mean.”
    Two years later, she learned what her mother had meant. Because she was a beautiful girl of a certain type (long, shining fair hair parted in the middle, astonishingly clear skin, turquoise beads ringing her slender neck), a certain type of soulful boy liked her. The boys actually resembled Sara; their own hair was shining and parted in the middle, too. One of them wrote out the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven” for her in painstaking calligraphy on parchment paper. She had sex with him in her white canopy bed while her mother was at her desk at the Seven Seas Travel Agency in the city, arranging a whirlwind Spain-Portugal itinerary for a honeymoon couple. Neither Sara nor this boy knew exactly what they were doing; they both fumbled around on the bed and made a few inadvertent mewing noises, then a reservoir-tip Trojan was produced with much fanfare and there was a great deal of pain and a little blood, and suddenly what had been awkward and joyless became serious, sublime.
    Over the years, both mother and daughter became involvedwith an assortment of men, and the big house in New Jersey became a place to bring them. Natalie dated amiable, divorced businessmen with middle-aged waistlines and a predilection for no-iron slacks. It amazed Sara that her mother could be attracted to these men, yet Natalie felt the same way about Sara’s boyfriends, whose mouths vacantly hung open, and whose hands smelled of all things fried. During Sara’s adolescence, sex was an open secret in the house; the teenaged daughter’s diaphragm was hidden under a stack of inorganic chemistry homework in her top dresser drawer, and the mother’s older, more weatherbeaten version was hidden under an Anne Klein scarf in her bottom dresser drawer.
    Off at Wesleyan freshman year, Sara called Natalie at seven in the morning while a boy lay beside her in her narrow dormitory bed. She put the phone up to his sleeping lips. “Listen,” she whispered to her mother. “He’s breathing.”
    And her mother held the phone up to the lips of the systems analyst lying in her own bed. “Listen,” Natalie whispered back. He’s snoring.
    This summer, neither woman had a man in her bed, at least not yet. There was time; August had barely begun.
    S HAWN BEST arrived in Springs at six o’clock, his arms and legs freezing from the aggressive air conditioner of the luxury bus. He had brought a bayberry-scented candle as a housegift, in a spun-glass vessel made to resemble a Druid. It looked like a prop from a stage version of The Hobbit. Shawn did have a cruel mouth, Sara thought, but his eyes looked too innocent to contain anything that could truly be described as sadistic.
    The men were formal around each other, careful not to touch or betray any intimacy. Shawn seemed disappointed in the summer house; he had probably imagined something palatial, even though Adam had warned him the place was nothing special.
    “Well,” said Sara, “I’m going to take a rest before Maddy andPeter and the baby get here.” She extricated herself, her smile tight.
    In the late afternoon, Maddy and Peter arrived in the red Ford pickup that Peter had been driving since college, their baby trapped into a rear-facing car seat between them. There were hurried, excited greetings, and exclamations over the baby, who had a head of spiky hair and questioning, dark eyes. Then everyone found their rooms and began to unpack their bags, working open the old dresser drawers and settling in. They could hear Duncan crying, his sobs rhythmic and cartoonish.
    Later, Peter went out and bought lobsters and beer, and another haphazard dinner got under way. Shawn brought out matches and lit his ugly bayberry candle. They all talked about the year, their jobs, the news of the world. They somehow began a discussion of the genital mutilation of girls in Africa, which had Maddy