Surrender, Dorothy by Meg Wolitzer

Hard, shiny pears, apricots, and grapefruits as big as bowling balls littered her kitchen counters. Even Harvey Wise ambled in, mumbled and held her one last time, then fled. He said he was “no good with death.” It frightened him, and he clearly wasn’t up to being heroic with this woman he had slept with only once.
    A fountain of coffee was continually brewed and served, and the house took on the aroma of one of those new coffee boutiques that had begun to pop up everywhere lately. After the first week of mourning, the volume of visitors diminished. Soon no one wanted coffee; soon it was just two tired women in this large house in a suburb that now seemed far from civilization.
    It was Carol who suggested they go for a drive. Natalie hadn’t been outside since the trip to the cemetery. She hadn’t even gotten dressed, but had simply stayed in her nightgown, padding slowlyaround the house. But now Carol handed her a set of clothes which she dutifully donned, and combed her hair for her and walked her outside, where the sunlight struck Natalie as both pleasurable and deeply inappropriate. They went to Natalie’s dented but intact car; Carol took the wheel.
    “Where to, kiddo?” said Carol. “A movie, maybe? There’s that thing at the sixplex with Brad Pitt as Disraeli.”
    But Natalie shook her head. “No,” she said.
    “Then where?” said Carol. “Come on, I’ll take you anywhere.”
    “Anywhere? Really?” asked Natalie.
    “Yes. What did you have in mind?”
    Natalie paused a moment before answering, and then she said, “The house.”
    “But the whole point was to get you out of the house for a while,” said Carol.
    “Not my house,” said Natalie. “Sara’s.”
    “What?” said Carol. “But why?”
    “I don’t know,” said Natalie. “I just suddenly feel as though I’d like to see where she went every summer. To see the place, finally.”
    “Shouldn’t we call first?” asked Carol.
    Natalie shrugged, then quietly said, “I’m her mother.”
    The drive to the house seemed endless; Natalie felt like an impatient child needing distractions. She itched to change the radio station, even when a song came on that she liked. That was what death had done: It taken away the possibility of complex and sustained thought, leaving her simpleminded, with basic, constantly shifting needs. The only complex topic she could think about was her daughter’s death, and that was too awful, so she shut her mind off, let it lie slack. She sometimes thought she could almost feel her mind sloshing around in its own pan of chemicals.
    “Let’s stop at the grocery store first,” Natalie said, as they cameto a massive Price Chopper. “You know kids, how they like to eat.
    “They’re hardly kids,” Carol said, but then she knew enough not to say more. Sara, at least, would remain a “kid.” She was not fully formed as an adult—the shell hadn’t had time to harden. She would be a girl forever, and all of her adult traits would slowly be loosened from her, so that finally Natalie would imagine that she had lost a literal child—a preschooler drowned at a neighbor’s pool, or an infant who had succumbed in the night to crib death. Natalie would join that large, unconnected club of mourning parents. They were easy to spot; they were the ones who looked like the living dead, wandering through shopping malls and the carpeted halls of offices where they worked. People gave them a wide berth when they passed to use the water cooler or the copy machine: Step back — grieving mother coming through.
    Now, inside the supermarket, Natalie walked the wide, ice-cold aisles with a kind of wonder. “Look at this,” she said, plucking from the shelves all sorts of junk food that she hadn’t even known existed. These were the kinds of items that were always advertised during the Saturday morning cartoons. “Frooty Rollers,” she read aloud, picking up a package of some fruit-flavored candy item that contained no