by Sam Lipsyte
“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.)
“Remember those last, ugly moments,” Adelaide said. “That’s the part of the tape you’ve got to watch, Mand.”
So Mandy remembered how their pigeon sleep scratched up their dreams, shattered their circadian clocks, which Mandy thought might also be their moral compasses. They fought, they hit—over drugs, money, presumed betrayals. Most of the presumptions proved correct. Mandy confessed to mutual fondling with a banker from the rooms, a guy who liked to repeat the same story: how he got tired of always having to score and bought a half kilo for his apartment, but his cat found the package, clawed it to shreds—dead cat, toxic carpet, some unborn child’s college education up in pharmaceutical-grade clouds.
“That pussy saved your life!” shouted a retired East Coast Crip in a wheelchair.
Uncle Drive-By, Craig called him.
While Mandy confessed her infidelity to Craig, she caught him eyeing the high-end Austrian cleaver on the magnetic kitchen strip. A good terror run begins at home. But they did a brave thing. They quit crack together, for the weekend.
Then came the day she entered the apartment, about a year after Linda had died, and through clots of r
ock smoke saw Craig, on his knees, his face in the crotch of an obese girl with a platinum chignon. The treasurer of Mandy’s Saturday morning Clean Slate Meditations meeting jerked off in the girl’s ear. Something about seeing the afghan Linda had wrapped herself in during her last, ravaged days shift under the girl’s buttocks shook Mandy. Craig looked over, slurry eyed, asked Mandy to join the fun.
Yes, the vicissitudes.
Mandy summoned her inner banshee, threw a lamp, some decent flatware. The others fled, and Craig packed the measly possessions he’d amassed in his turd of a life—some rusted throwing stars, a box of stale marzipan, his crack pipe, his cherished coverless paperback edition of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger—and scrammed. Now she saw him at meetings, tried not to retch at his conjob shares or recall the sweetness of their precious predawn hours, when addiction itself seemed as exquisite and harmless as a unicorn foal.
* * *
Today, after she’d led the ladies of cardio ballet through a quasi-sadistic grueler, Mandy leaned on the mirrored wall of the dance studio, sipped her bottled water, thought about her father in his living rigor mortis. If they’d had them when he was younger, he might have thrived in some sort of Holocaust support group, with sponsors, chips, key tags, coffee. Just once, history could have given her father a sloppy hug.
Mandy rolled her shoulders, sank into that honeyed post-class ache. A runnel of sweat curled down her calf. The day drained out of her. Endorphins filled her floodplains. Some people in recovery couldn’t manufacture these chemicals anymore. But then her body tightened again. She sensed movement, a figure, a man maybe, tall, through the corridor window. The figure disappeared, and another, smaller person clopped toward her in chunky heels.
“You seem so peaceful, I hate to disturb you.”
Tovah Gold looked twelve, but she had a degree in creative writing and a published poetry chapbook. She’d once presented a copy to Mandy but said she should not feel obligated to read it. Mandy sometimes wondered if Tovah thought she was dumb. The chapbook was called For the Student Union Dead, and Mandy thought the poems in it were dumb, the way smart people were often dumb.
Tovah taught a memoir class at the JCC. Mostly grandmothers spilling family matzo ball secrets, she’d said, or retired men composing disturbingly dry accounts of affairs with their best friends’ wives.
“Mostly I just help them with their segues,” Tovah once said.
“Hi,” said Mandy now. “How’s it going?”
“Horribly. No immortal lines this week, and my boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, I should say, has decided that our poetics are incompatible.”
“Right there myself,” said Mandy. “I kicked Craig out. He’s bad for my recovery.”
Tovah knew the Ballad of Craig and Mandy, took anthropological delight.
“What is it you all say?” she said. “Show up until you grow up?”
“Craig won’t grow up. He can go to hell.”
“But don’t you think he needs some—”
“Girlfriend, please,” said Mandy, did that dismissive wave all the sisters favored in meetings and lately on TV, but which Mandy couldn’t master.
“What’s that other one?” said Tovah. “You’re only as sick as your secrets? Is that it? I love that one. It doesn’t know it, but it’s poetry.”
“It knows it,” Mandy said.
Tovah was a good friend, maybe her only one in the so-called civilian world, but that didn’t mean Mandy couldn’t hate her sometimes, the gooey earnestness that, along with the poetess shtick, seemed both pure and calculated, a saintly condescension. Tovah’s innocence was a type of abuse. But Tovah’s fondness for Mandy was genuine. That made it better and worse.
“Listen, Mandy,” said Tovah. “I need to tell you something. I don’t want you to feel strange about it. Because in my world, the artist’s world, it’s a common thing. But maybe not for normal people.”
“I’m normal?”
“You’re wonderful,” said Tovah.
“Thanks,” said Mandy, already mourning the rousing solitude of a few minutes earlier. Bitch had snatched her natural rush.
“Anyway,” said Tovah, “I’ve been working on a poem cycle about you.”
“A what?”
“A bunch of poems.”
“About me?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know a lot, Mandy.”
“Not really. Maybe about me and Craig.”
“Researching facts isn’t the point,” said Tovah. “It’s about my construction of you. My projection.”
“So,” said Mandy, “I don’t get it. Are you asking permission?”
“A real artist never asks permission.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t want any static between us.”
“Am I Mandy?” said Mandy.
“Pardon?”
“In your poem, am I Mandy? Do you name me? Do you say Mandy Gottlieb?”
“No. It’s addressed to a nameless person.”
“Then why would I care?”
Tovah seemed stunned.
“Well … because it’s so obviously you.”
“But you said it’s about your structure of me.”
“My construction of … yes, that’s right.”
“So who cares?”
“I don’t really understand your question.”
“It’s okay, Tovah. Write what your heart tells you to write.”
“You are so marvelous, Mandy. You see life so clearly and simply, and it makes so much sense to you. I can’t thank you enough.”
“It’s enough,” said Mandy.
Tovah clutched her leather satchel, clopped away.
* * *
Mandy had a shower and steam, ran her favorite purple comb through her hair.
All you could do was stay clean and stay fit. Cardio ballet was mostly cardio. The ballet part was more like a dream of yourself.
Outside the locker room a tall man in a hooded sweatshirt leaned against the wall. He looked about thirty, with wavy hair and light stubble on his chin. His smirk seemed oddly familiar, almost comforting. Mandy made to move past him, and he cleared his throat, for comedic effect, she figured, though she could also hear phlegm swirl.
“Good class today?”
The man’s voice was thin and kind.
“Do I know you? Have you taken cardio ballet?”
“I want to,” said the man. “I want to very much.”
“There’s a sign-up sheet at the front desk.”
“I was hoping to talk to you first. Get a read on the class.”
“A read?”
“What it’s all about,” said the man.
“It’s about cardio and ballet. Sign up. We need men.”
“Would I get to be your partner?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your ballet partner. Throw you up in the air.”
“Sorry. It’s not very advanced ballet. This is just to get the blood pumping. There are other classes where you might … What? Why are you laughing?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“You look like you’re laughing.”
“I know. It gets me in trouble sometimes. It’s just how my face goes when I’m listening to somebody kind and beautiful talk about something she cares about.”
Mandy took a few steps back.
“Oh, no.” The man palmed his mouth. “I guess I just accidentally spoke my heart! I should get out of here. I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll sign up for the class.”
The man grinned—tall, white teeth! You didn’t see many of those in meetings.
* * *
At the table on the patio, overlooking a tomato field, her father picked at bird crap.
“Daddy,” said Mandy. “That’s poop.”
Her father gave a lazy leer.
“How’s your mother?”
“You know.”
“Dead.”
“How are you, Daddy?”
; Jacob picked at the white shit flecks. “Never felt better.”
An attendant came over, young, with cornrows, patted her father’s arm. His printer’s arm, shrunken.
“Having a good visit, Mr. Gottlieb?”
“Swell,” said Mandy’s father. It sounded like “svelte.” He’d purged most of his accent nearly half a century ago, but now it crept back.
“I’m Mandy.”
“Oh, I know,” said the attendant. “I know all about you. He says sweet things about his Mandy. I take care of him.”
“Does he ever talk about his childhood?” said Mandy.
“All the time. Sounds so special—upstate, fishing, and all that good stuff.”
Mandy’s mother had said something about a summer camp for war orphans in the Adirondacks. Jacob had been older than the other children, some kind of counselor.
Mandy noticed a glint in her father’s eye now, some sour, annihilating shine. Mandy couldn’t glean the source. The Nazi death machine? Shell Oil? The fact that only Mandy would remember him?
“Does he talk about the war? The camps? He never talked about it when I was a kid.”
“What camps?”
“The one where soldiers bend you over and give you bread,” said her father. “The one where you tell the guards where other men hide a rotten apple and they shoot those men.”
“Maybe you should rest,” said Mandy.
“But I have to get to the shop. Mr. Dwyer is expecting me.”
“Better if you rest.”
“Mandy, Mr. Dwyer’s grandfather invented the yellow pages. What do you think of that? Ever have an idea like that? Your mother never visits. She still with the goy?”
“I want to thank you,” said Mandy to the attendant. “For being here for him.”
“It’s my job.”
“It’s a noble job. I’d like to give you a little extra.”
“Something extra would be appreciated.”
“Mandy,” said Jacob. “Darling. How’s the whoring? You make enough money for the drugs? You let the schvartzers stick it in you?”
“Only one,” said Mandy. “My fiancé, Craig.”
She looked up to the attendant for some flicker of solidarity, got nothing.
Mandy dug in her bag, plucked some bills out, handed them over. The attendant tucked them into her pocket, but not before noticing, just at the moment Mandy did, that it amounted to only two or three dollars.
