Surrender, Dorothy Read Free Page B

that with the lumpy plainness of their fully formed, adult selves. Adam thought of his own father, a businessman who had enjoyed a big success very early in his career when he invested in an electric fan company called, dully, FanCo, and how, when air-conditioning blew across the parched American landscape, his father had lost all his money.
    There was one aspect of Adam’s life that was removed from all anxiety. Sara was that aspect, as good and loyal a friend as hehad ever known. He thought that women understood the world in a way that men did not. A woman could lead you, could take you by the hand and show you which of your shirts to wear, and which to destroy. His love for her was so great that when they were apart for too long he felt as unbalanced as a newlywed and almost lightheaded. During the year they saw each other at least once a week for a cheap Tandoori meal at an Indian restaurant draped to resemble a caravan, and they usually talked on the phone a few times a day. They even watched television together on the phone late at night—explicit nature documentaries and peeks into celebrity palazzos—lying in their separate beds in separate apartments, laughing softly across miles of telephone wire.
    Now August had arrived and they would be living in the same house for a month. Adam wanted to live with Sara forever. His fantasies often placed them both in Europe; he saw them living in the South of France and having children, a boy and a girl who could romp in a vineyard and be effortlessly bilingual. The idea of marrying Sara excited him, then always burned away in the gas of its own foolishness. He didn’t want her, and she certainly didn’t want him. They would spend August together, the high point of the year, and when Labor Day came they would part, as they always did.
    When they pulled into the driveway of the house now, Adam was asleep against her shoulder, his head big and heavy and damp. She woke him up, and they carried their belongings up the weedy path, noticing that each year the small mustard-colored house looked a little worse upon approach, and that one year it would look so awful that they would back away without entering, and never return again. Sara lifted the stiff brass knocker on the front door and let it drop; the sound it made seemed tinny and insignificant, yet from inside they heard immediate footsteps, as though the landlady had been huddling by the door, awaiting their arrival.
    Mrs. Moyles looked the same as last year, only a little worse,not unlike her house. She was a pudding-faced woman whom they suspected of alcoholism or dementia, or both, and who had a head of hair that looked as though she cut it herself while blindfolded. There was nothing charming about her house, either, no details that you could point out to guests, such as a secret passageway, or a set of fireplace pokers with handles shaped like mermaids. It was a no-frills house, a place to stay if you wanted to spend a month in the vicinity of a fancy beach resort and didn’t mind the presence of linoleum and a hive of tiny, hot rooms.
    “So you made it,” she said to Sara and Adam, the same words she said every year when they arrived.
    “Yes,” they invariably said in return, nodding their heads in an attempt at politeness in the face of her indifference. Now Adam held out the pie box, but she didn’t make any attempt to lift her hands up and take it. “This is for you,” he prompted. “Raspberry.”
    Mrs. Moyles peered down at the box in his arms and said, “What am I supposed to do with that? I have diabetes!” As though they should have known. But they knew nothing about her, other than the fact that she owned this cheerless little house at 17 Diller Way, which she agreed to rent to them each summer for an uncommonly low price.
    So they kept the pie for themselves, and Mrs. Moyles handed Sara the key to the house, muttered a few things about the gas jets on the stove, the sprinkler on the back lawn, and the