“Daddy,” she called from the sofa, her leotard still damp from dance. She liked the way the purple fabric encased her, the sporty stink.
“Daddy,” she said.
He spat out a word that sounded like “shame” but more shameful.
That night, her mother, who’d grown up in the next town over, who’d dreamed of exotic travel only to live her adventure on home soil — the older European man, handsomely gaunt, haunted, roaring up on his motorcycle at a county fair — commanded Mandy to explore new reading topics. The great explorers, perhaps. The not-so-great explorers.
“He never talks about it,” Mandy said.
“There might be no words, honey.”
“Does he talk to you?”
“We communicate,” said her mother.
“Was he like this when you met him?”
“Yes. But it was different. He wanted to kiss me all the time.”
Mandy decided she wouldn’t read anything else about the era of her father’s agony. If he judged her not good enough to hear his story, so be it. She’d await other, more generous catastrophes.
* * *
Like, for instance, the spring day a dashing fellow in a pink blazer knocked on their door. The man worked for Shell Oil, which wanted to build a new gas station down the block. Mandy, soon to turn eleven and annoyed by any news unrelated to her birthday party, had heard murmurings. The plans called for a monstrous sign, the glowing sort more suitable for the highway, and the neighborhood had mustered for a fight. The shop owners and the old Dutch families had joined with the doctors and lawyers to battle a common nemesis whose garish sign would pillage property values.
Lawrence, with his sailing tan and smart, maybe more off-salmon blazer, had been sent to talk to the townspeople — with honesty and understanding, he told Mandy’s mother — about their misguided fears and the benefits of both the gas station and the sign, which, incidentally, would spin with incandescent beauty against the north Jersey night.
Alone, Mandy’s mother let him in, and within an hour she agreed to assist him in his campaign. Within a week they were tearing off each other’s polyfibers at Arlen’s Adult Motel near the George Washington Bridge. Mandy heard the details years later from her aunt Linda, who added odd touches, such as Mandy growing a potbelly from too much junk food, since the assignations left her mother no time to cook. Mandy didn’t remember that. She’d once seen Lawrence hunched over some papers in their kitchen — he threw her a funny, rueful look — but she did not recall a season of Whoppers and strawberry shakes. Still, for all she knew, her torments with mirrors and the malnourished beauties of fashion magazines and even her esophageal tract, all of which she had come to call, after years of therapy and therapeutic coffee dates, her “body shit,” might as well have been spawned from the high-fructose despair of those months.
The Shell-sign resistance movement grew raucous and strong. When word leaked of Mandy’s mother’s collaborationist stance, somebody egged their stucco garage. Though Lawrence’s door-to-door sorties against the skyline puritans seemed lonely and courageous to Mandy’s mother, what transpired was a legal contest between a smallish township and a transnational corporation. The debate was bitter and pointless, filled with the shouts of white men in wide ties. The council zoned the lot for the gas station and the galaxy above the lot for the sign.
Mandy’s mother chilled champagne in the motel ice bucket, but Lawrence never arrived for the victory toast. Not even Linda knew if Mandy’s mother drank the bubbly or poured it over the terrace, but everybody remembered how she sobbed herself home.
She clutched the motel’s DO NOT DISTURB card for days.
Even Jacob seemed touched by his wife’s distress. Who could refute the awfulness of what this oil bastard had done to the woman who once, long ago, after the Germans had murdered his mother and sister, had come reasonably close to being the only person Jacob could ever love. He tended to his wife with the wary compassion of a plague nurse.
One night Mandy woke near dawn to see her father yanking open her bureau drawers. He stuffed a duffel bag with her tank tops and jeans. She could count the times he had crossed the threshold of her room, but now he scooped her in his arms, as he’d once lifted their sick spaniel, Peppermint, slid her into his sedan. She fell asleep again, cozy against the cool vinyl, and woke once more in Linda’s Upper West Side apartment. Linda put a teacup to Mandy’s lips. Her mother, they told her, was dead. Running motor. Sealed garage. She’d left a note, Mandy found out, years later, on a Shell petition in the kitchen. “Oh, shit,” it read. Beneath her scrawl, boldface words exhorted: “Give American Business a Chance!”
* * *
Her father was a survivor. Her mother had not survived. And Mandy?
Nineteen years later, Mandy was semi-surviving, had three months clean, some fluorescent key-ring tags to prove it. Her ex-boyfriend Craig had tags, too, wore them snaked together off his belt. Mandy saw him at the meetings, but she worried that he wasn’t letting the program work on him, was maybe just white-knuckling it, a funny thing to say about a black man.
Craig had almost finished college before the pipe tripped him up. He possessed such a wry and gentle soul, except for the times he railed at her for being an evil dwarf witch who meant to stew his heart in bat broth (he’d majored in world folklore), and she’d always adored those horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like the professor he could still become. But if he had a discipline at the moment, an area of scholarly expertise, it was deep knowledge of how to steal electronics or lick diseased penises for the teensiest rocks. It wasn’t as if Mandy had been any better months back. But now she was, and Craig, who often shared about what he called his terror runs, appeared to be planning one, the way some people contemplated a fishing trip.
Otherwise, things were on the uptick. Linda, in such pain these last few years, had gone to a better place. If an afterlife existed, Mandy figured that for Linda it would be more of the same — cappuccinos, Chinese, films at Lincoln Center. You could do that stuff dead. Now the studio apartment on a barren stretch of upper Broadway would be Mandy’s. She deserved it — she had lived there as Linda’s caretaker, never missed a medication or her aunt’s chemo appointments, always laundered the sheets no matter how high she was off Linda’s morphine.
Jacob spent his days in stoic near paralysis in a nursing home close to their old house, since sold to a happy (though you never knew) Sri Lankan family. Clean and sober, Mandy would be able to visit him regularly now. Also, Bill Clinton had been reelected, which was what Mandy had wanted, and perhaps most exciting, people were really responding to cardio ballet, the class she taught at the Jewish Community Center.
Maybe once she’d dreamed of jazz dance stardom, roses heaped on her Capezios, but keeping it real and teaching cardio ballet constituted triumphs enough. True, her sponsor, Adelaide, was in fact a star, a regular on the afternoon soaps, but that was just normal Manhattan recovery weirdness.
The main thing for Mandy was to focus on her goals and keep her eyes peeled for Craig. She could imagine the ease of a slip, a search for that early bliss when all they did was snuggle and drink brandy and smoke crack and have their soaring but oblique conversations about — about what, the vicissitudes? Was that the word Craig favored? Then they’d fuck and cuddle and twitch until dawn, whereupon the cooing of pigeons tilted them into jittery sleep.
But of course it went bad. You had to play the whole tape, Adelaide told Mandy from her makeup chair. Mandy’s disease was just waiting for her to pick up again. Her disease was tougher than ever, did push-ups, Pilates. (The girl with the foundation paint nodded.)