Free Surrender, Dorothy by Meg Wolitzer Page A

keep an eye on her. I think she’s big trouble; I can sense it in my bones. She’ll probably end up in prison for grand larceny, or worse.” Maddy nodded, contented at the knowing intimacy of these conversations.
    Camp Ojibway was filled with rich girls from Manhattan, children of divorce who flounced around the bunk, speaking either in code or in perfect conversational French. Maddy was part of a group of semi-outcasts, a handful of city girls whose families lived in identical high-rise rental apartments with porous walls and low, stippled ceilings. Girls who understood, through the haze of pain native to girlhood, that eventually all this wouldpass, and that if they waited long enough, the rich, stupid girls would falter and topple, and the brainy, off-kilter girls would inherit the earth. Sara was not in Maddy’s social group; she was too pretty for that, but she truly liked Maddy and admired her. The attention was flattering and unnerving. When you were with Sara, boys from Camp Iroquois across the lake stopped and hung around you, angling to engage in pointless, arch conversations. Friendship with Sara gave Maddy great pleasure but also instilled in her a budding feeling of despair. Getting dressed for a swim at camp, she would catch a flash of Sara’s smooth, white back that arched as gracefully as a seahorse, and she would think: I hate myself.
    Over the years, Sara and Maddy attempted to top each other’s intimate accounts of self-loathing. There was a requisite, mutual flirtation with bulimia in the late teens, and a period devoted to reading Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath exclusively. And always, along the way, there were excruciating tales of boys. Later, both of them wound up at Wesleyan, where they met the two men who would become central to their lives: Adam and Peter. It had surprised Maddy when Peter showed a real interest in her; he was better-looking than the men who usually liked her. He was better-looking than she was, a shirtless campus Frisbee player with tanned, hairy legs, someone who flirted easily with women. He was handsome yet slightly lost—almost homeless-seeming, in a way—and so he wasn’t intimidating in the way of many good-looking men. Sara had encouraged Maddy, telling her she clearly had an esteem problem and that Peter would be lucky to go out with her. So Maddy had been bolder than usual, surprising him by looking him over in a way that was more than playful. He responded by looking back, his eyebrows lifting, setting off something lightly percussive inside her: a quick pulse, a drumbeat signifying some strange and improbable pleasure ahead. Soon they were a campus couple, the whole transaction having taken place as quietly and discreetly as a drug deal. She didn’t really knowwhat he saw in her, although Sara said there was much to see. “You’re lovely!” Sara had said. “Don’t you know that by now?” Actually, Maddy thought of herself as an extremely decent person, and pretty in a somewhat dull, wildflower-patterned-dress-wearing way. But she was devoted to Peter, even when he seemed distracted, inattentive, off in a nebula of abstract thoughts that didn’t include her. Maddy, Peter, Adam, and Sara hung around a pizza place near campus late at night, and spent hours on the deep, springless couches of the library lounge during the reading period before exams.
    After college, Maddy and Peter lived in a terrible railroad apartment in New York City—she starting law school, he teaching ninth grade at a public high school—and Sara began what would be a long chain of unfulfilling relationships with men. The men were of the sort that had usually been unavailable to Maddy—handsome in a sculptural way, or perhaps very powerful.
    What was sex with these men like? Maddy knew she would never get the answer from personal experience. She and Peter had settled into a pattern of frequent and mostly ordinary sex; they had their gasping orgasms: first her, then him, each of them