Free Surrender, Dorothy by Meg Wolitzer

at three in the morning, drunk as he hadn’t been since his bar mitzvah reception, when his cousins carried him on their shoulders and he sang “Hava Nagila” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in off-key abandon. “It would have been perfectly fine without it.”
    “It’s not your fault,” everyone chorused.
    “I always thought,” said Adam after a while, “that Sara and I were going to know each other for a very long time, probably well into our eighties. It seems so ridiculous now, so optimistic, but Inever even considered the fact that we might not get old together. At least not after I had my HIV test. Before I got tested, I thought maybe it would be me who would die when I was young, me who would leave her, all because I once got fucked without a condom by some moron named Warren, some exercise instructor who ran a class on the QE 2 . He bored me to death, comparing the QE 2 with the Princess line.” He paused. “Why am I talking about this?” he said. “There’s nothing that’s appropriate to talk about; it all seems indecent.”
    They all agreed that talk was indecent, and then they sat in silence for the next hour, the only sounds coming from the play of ice in their glasses, and Duncan gurgling and chirping in his obliviousness. Sometime in the night, it was decided that they would all leave the house. No one wanted to stay there for the summer, continuing their hellish descent in these dingy little rooms. But, as Peter pointed out, there still remained the inevitable, sheepish question of whether they would get their money back if they left.
    “Was that awful of me to mention the money?” Peter asked Maddy when they climbed into bed at dawn. Across the room, the baby now breathed softly in the downy depths of his Portacrib.
    “No,” said Maddy. “It’s not awful. But I don’t want to talk about money anymore.” She lay against the stiff, camphorous pillow. In other summers, this room had felt both terrible and comfortable, and she had always loved it; being here offered a kind of sameness, a suspension in what was familiar. But without Sara, suddenly everything felt strangely unknown.
    The two women had known each other as children, attending the same all-girls summer camp in the Adirondacks, where they sat around a bonfire at night and sang the lyrics to the Camp Ojibway song: “We will always be true to Ojibway / No matter if we’re young or old / We will always be true to Ojibway / No matter if we’re meek or bold …” There, among a sea of cunning, slightly nasty campers who competed to the death during color war, they recognized a similarity, a shared type of intelligence.
    “You read all the time,” Sara had said to her in the bunk one afternoon, and what had seemed to be an accusation was in fact a compliment. “I do, too,” she added.
    “Really?” said Maddy.
    “Yes,” said Sara. Then she said proudly, “Right now, I’m reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet”
    Maddy was suitably impressed; Sara was not only popular, she was smart too, a combination that was unusual. Whenever Sara walked across the lawn at camp, other girls stopped her to discuss their problems. From a distance, you could see another girl looking pinched with unhappiness, and Sara leaning close to her in concern.
    Under trees and by the darkening lake at dusk, the two girls talked about the other campers in exhaustive detail, making lists of those they liked and those they despised. “Erica Engels,” said Sara, “is fat on the outside, and extremely pathetic at first glance, but I think we should pay special attention to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day she became a neurosurgeon, or even Secretary of State.” Maddy nodded, impressed by Sara’s powers of observation.
    “And what about Susan Lottman?” she asked Sara. “Evil incarnate, right?”
    “Right,” said Sara. “Just because she can dive well, and her father practically owns Clinique, she thinks she’s so special. But