The Fun Parts

DENIERS

“Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut,” said Mandy’s father. American traps tended to hang open. Pure crap poured out. What he and the others had gone through shouldn’t have a name, he told her friend Tovah all those years later in the nursing home. People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddamn fairy tales about children who got out alive.

Mandy’s father, Jacob, had never said anything like this to Mandy, not in any of his tongues. He’d said other things, or nothing at all. He had worked for thirty-nine years as a printer in Manhattan. The founders of the company had invented the yellow pages.

“Think about that,” he often said.

Mandy did think about it, the thick directory that used to boost her up on her stool at the kitchen counter.

She’d spent her childhood mornings at that counter, culling raisins from her cereal, surveying the remains of her father’s dawn meal, his toast crusts, the sugared dregs in his coffee mug. Sometimes she wondered if he would come home from work that day, but it was a game, because he always came home. He’d eat his dinner and take to his reclining — or, really, collapsing — chair, listen to his belly gurgle, read popular histories of the American West, maybe watch a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes, the only show he could abide.

His intestinal arias mostly stood in for conversation, but some evenings he managed a few words, such as the night he spotted Mandy’s library book on the credenza. This teen novel told the story of a suburban boy who befriends an elderly neighbor, a wanted Nazi. Mandy watched her father study the book from across the room. The way he handled it made her think he was scornful of its binding or paper stock, but then he read the dust flap, shuddered. He whispered in his original language, the one he rarely used, so glottal, abyssal.

“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.)

“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 rock 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.

“Thanks,” said the attendant.

“Goodbye, Daddy,” said Mandy.

* * *

The tall man was not in cardio ballet the next week. Mandy did not think of him. She kept to her steps and turns, the ones whose flawless demonstration maybe merely mocked the panting people before her. Though she had known some of the women in the class for years, they all seemed a blur now, a slick, jiggling blob. Even as she glided into her Funky Pirouette, she thought, I need a fucking meeting. She’d been skipping them to avoid Craig. But now she decided to forgo her post-class musing-on-the-mats routine, head straight for the Serenity Posse II meeting on Amsterdam.

She shooed all that spandex and sadness out of the studio, switched off the lights, stepped into the corridor.

The tall man stood by the water fountain.

“I just came by to apologize for being a yammering idiot last week.”

“No problem,” said Mandy, “but I really have to go.”

“Oh, okay, sure. My name is Cal, by the way.”

“Mandy. I thought maybe you’d signed up for class.”

“I’m afraid I’m not Jewish.”

“You don’t have to be Jewish to take an aerobics class.”

“Are you sure?”

Mandy thought about it.

“I think anybody can join the JCC.”

“Really?” said the man.

“Why not?” said Mandy. “But what do I know?”

“I guess it would be weird if you weren’t Jewish, though,” the man said.

He wore a scent, something for high school boys.

“Well, then,” said Mandy. “I guess we better sneak you out of here.”

“I thought you were going somewhere.”

“I am.”

* * *

It was just a nice neighborhood bistro and it was just a glass of chardonnay. She wasn’t groping under a baseboard heater for a phantom rock. She wasn’t sucking on a glass stem. Instead, she sipped from a stemmed glass. A slip, sure, her life was an endless slip, but this was civilized. This was civilization. Fuck crack. Fuck everything but chardonnay and Cal’s teeth, his azure — which meant blue, but more intense, according to Tovah — eyes.

Cal lifted his glass.

“Mazel tov,” he said.

“You mean l’chaim.”

“No, mazel tov to you sneaking me out of there.”

“Cheers,” said Mandy.

“Are you Jewish on both sides?” Cal asked.

For a moment she thought he meant both sides of her body.

“Yes,” she said.

“When did they come here?”

“Who?”

“Your people.”

“I don’t know. I think my mother’s grandfather came from Holland or something. My father grew up in Europe. He came here and rode his motorcycle to the county fair. That’s where my parents met. What about you?”

“Did your dad come after the war? Did he … was he part of the Holocaust? I mean, not in a bad way, I mean…”

“Yes, he was.”

“Unbelievable.”

“What?”

“No, just, it’s so amazing he survived.”

“It is.”

“Because — I should just get this out there — I’m absolutely convinced all of that stuff really happened.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Mandy. This Cal was an odd bird. “What’s your background?”

“I’m pure American,” said Cal.

“So am I.”

“No, of course you are,” said Cal, studied the label on their wine bottle. Soon, Mandy knew, he would peel it.

“So, you’re, like, a Jewish American.”

“Hey,” said Mandy. “What’s going on?”

“I just like to get to know people.”

“I see. Okay. Where are you from?”

“Oregon, originally.”

“What brought you to New York?”

“A job. Computer stuff. I wanted to relocate. Change my life.”

“I hear you.”

“You don’t like your life?”

“I take it one day at a time.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Cal said. The sopped wine label curled around his thumb. “You want to see a movie?”

“It’s pretty late.”

“Nah, it’s early.”

“I think the show times are over. I go to the movies a lot.”

“We could go to my place,” Cal said. “I have movies. I have a bottle of wine there. You like pinot blanc?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out,” said Cal.

“Next time,” said Mandy. “I do have to go somewhere now.”

* * *

Mandy ducked into the church basement, found a seat. There was something seriously off about Cal. She could picture him a king in the Middle Ages: Cal the Seriously Off. What a waste of a slip. She didn’t want to be here at the meeting, either, really, but some inner instrument had guided her. She would never call it a higher power. Nor would she ever share with booze in her system. You had to honor the honor code.

Adelaide waved, pointed to a free seat beside her. Mandy shook her off. They all sat in the dark, dilapidated theater built by the church during more enlightened years, when some priest thought a sanitized production of Hair might lead bohemian strays to Christ. Some nights it felt as though the meeting were, in fact, an off-off-Broadway show, feverish, vital, undisciplined. Now the addict audience nodded along with the speaker, and when he’d finished, they took turns from the seats with their woes. Newcomers bemoaned their cravings for powders, begged for release. Old-timers droned on about their sex addictions, their divorces, how fat they’d gotten on red velvet cake.

A familiar voice boomed from the back rows.

“I’m Craig, and I’ve got five weeks clean!”

“Hello, Craig!” answered the room.

“And I plan to make it this time, God willing, one day at a time, but I don’t feel safe right now, in the only place I can ever feel safe, here with my Serenity Posse II posse. Why don’t I feel safe? Let me tell you a little story. Really, it’s more like a fable or a folktale. Once, long ago, this farmer worked his fingers to the bone so his son could learn to be a warlock at the castle. Every day the farmer’s son walked many dangerous miles to the castle for his classes, but one day a beautiful girl stepped out onto the path holding a magic potion. ‘Drink this,’ said the girl, ‘and you will feel so fucking good.’ Now the farmer’s son, truth be told, had dabbled in this kind of potion before, but he knew it was wrong and had sworn off it. This girl, though, she was so sexy, he figured, what the hell? Well, I don’t have to tell you the rest, do I? Except to say that the beautiful girl turned out to be an evil skeezy witch who wanted to gobble up the farmer’s son alive, which made the farmer’s son act out in some emotionally hurtful sexual ways he couldn’t control. The farmer’s son did make amends to everyone involved, except the witch. He can’t talk to the witch, because she’s evil and contagious with spiritual cancer. Yet here she is tonight, the skank, testing me, testing me. You want war, bitch? Let’s do it. Your lame, underdeveloped humanism is no match for my tower of higher power!”

Mandy rose, bolted up the narrow stairs toward the street. She could hear Adelaide scrape across the stone floor in her heels, but Mandy didn’t look back.

She went home to vomit the wine.

* * *

The next night, after class, Cal stood in the corridor. He pointed his chin and she followed him out to the street. It felt like a music video.

Old movie stars stared out over the leatherette couch, the television, a rack of video cassettes, a card table with a few chairs. Mandy didn’t get the old movie thing, but the posters looked classy in their frames. Gold trophies with karate guys obscured the dozen books on a lone shelf.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” Cal said. He laughed, and Mandy decided the word “abode” made it funny.

The wine Cal brought from the kitchen was cold and a little tart.

“Salud,” Mandy said.

“L’chaim.”

They talked about whether they were hungry and decided to order something later. Cal ripped open a bag of that intelligent popcorn.

“So,” he said. “What do you feel like watching? Something sad, something funny? A drama?”

“How about something romantic?” Mandy said, but Cal pursed his lips in a fretful way, and she regretted it. “Or a thriller!”

“I’ve got something,” he said, tucked a tape into the slot.

Mandy knew what he’d chosen from just a flicker of it. It was black and white, but it wasn’t old. She’d dragged herself to see this film after it won every award. She thought it might help her understand her father, but she’d left the theater after that sexy British actor kept shooting Jews from his balcony.

“I don’t think so, Cal.”

“What?”

“Not this. Let’s watch something else.”

“But this is the most important movie ever made. You can’t even get this at the store. I have a friend who—”

“Please turn it off,” Mandy said.

Cal paused it.

Any excuse could work. She just needed to get her jacket from the chair.

“It’s heavy, I know,” Cal said. “I’ve seen it dozens of times. I always cry.”

“Why?”

“Why? How can you ask that, you of all people?”

“No. Why have you seen it dozens of times?”

“So I can understand,” Cal said.

Now he stood, clenched and unclenched his fists. His arm veins twitched.

“So I can understand and get well,” Cal hissed.

He stared at Mandy, and she tried to get a read, as he might have put it.

Just a beating, or a bonus rape?

But then Cal relaxed, or really kind of deflated. His breathing slowed, and he kneaded his hands.

“Man, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” The jacket would be easy now. But how many bolts were on the door?

“I need to tell you something.”

“No, you don’t,” Mandy said. “It’s all okay.”

“I do,” Cal said. “Because there is something good between us and I don’t want to mess it up.”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Six fucking million,” Cal said. “How can it be fine?”

“Don’t forget the Gypsies,” Mandy said. “Millions of Gypsies. And gay guys. Union guys. Retarded people. Tons were killed.”

“Six million Jews,” Cal said.

“I know all about it. Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

“No,” Cal said, and told her what he wanted to tell her. When he was done, he took off his shirt and showed her the tattoos, the swastikas and iron crosses and even an ingenious Heydrich who sieg heiled when Cal flexed his deltoid.

“But you say you had no choice in prison,” Mandy said. “It was the Brotherhood or get the skiv.”

“The shiv. But no, Mandy. I believed it all. I was hard core. Even before the Brotherhood. That’s how I got to prison. I beat a guy almost to death. I thought he was a Jew. Turned out he was something else. Probably would have hated him anyway. Do you get it?”

“Get what?”

“What I’m trying to do.”

“Not really.”

“I’m confessing my sins. To you. I want to get better.”

“Are you even attracted to me?”

“Not in a healthy sense,” Cal said. “I mean, I definitely went out of my way to find the cutest girl at the JCC.”

“I’d better go.”

“Please, Mandy. Stay.”

“No.”

“I’ve got other movies,” Cal sobbed.

* * *

Home, Mandy found a message on her machine from the nursing facility. It was garbled because every message was garbled on this crappy old machine that Craig had stolen off a homeless guy’s blanket and given to her with great ceremony on her birthday, but she thought she heard the words “mild” and “stroke.” She’d have to wait until morning for a bus.

She called Adelaide.

“I knew you used,” said Adelaide. “I could tell. What happened, honey?”

“I just had some wine.”

“Just some wine? Who are you talking to, Mandy? Do you want to die?”

“Not tonight.”

“Good girl. I’ll have the car pick you up in the morning, take you to the soundstage. I’ve got a read-through, but after that we can hit a meeting. I have to say, I have a crazy week. You picked a fucked time to slip. But I’ve got your back.”

“Thanks, Adelaide.”

“Don’t thank me too much. It’ll go to my head and I might relapse!”

“My father had a stroke.”

“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry, sweetie.”

“Maybe you could come out to the nursing home with me?”

“The one in New Jersey? Honey, you know I don’t go out there unless somebody has died. Is he going to die?”

“They said mild.”

“Mild is the best. Don’t worry, baby. Call me whenever. I’ll try to call back. No fucking wine, Mandy. Don’t be a victim.”

“Okay.”

“What kind of wine?”

“Chardonnay.”

“I’m not envious at all,” Adelaide said.

Her sponsor hung up before Mandy could tell her about the pinot blanc.

Tovah answered Mandy’s call on the first ring, as though waiting years for this moment.

“Of course I’ll come with you,” she said. “In fact, I have a car.”

“I don’t mean to impose.”

“I would be honored,” Tovah said.

A poem cycle.

Like what some stuck-up clown would ride.

* * *

Tovah’s Subaru had a dead battery. The garage guy offered to jump the car. He popped the hood, and they all leaned in for a better look at the massive corrosion, the split hoses, what the garage guy called a cracked block. Not that Tovah could have known. She never used her car, had loaned it out often over the years.

“I’m still going with you,” she said.

They didn’t speak much during the bus ride. Tovah scribbled in her notebook, and Mandy studied the Hudson River and hated Tovah. They got off at the town plaza and bought some calzone.

When they reached the home, they found Mandy’s father sitting up in his patio chair. Mandy had expected a weirdly folded arm, a contorted jaw, maybe some slobber, but he looked fine. He waved off the food but gestured for Tovah to join him. The attendant Mandy had tipped pulled her into a tiny dispensary to talk.

“So,” Mandy said. “He seems pretty okay. Pretty … mild.”

“The doctor was here this morning. We’re thinking now it wasn’t a stroke at all.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Well, what?”

“The doctor noticed some other things. Symptomatic things with the eyes and such. Your father described recent headaches.”

“Headaches?”

“The doctor wants to run some tests.”

“Tests for what?”

The attendant pointed to her temple, shrugged.

“What does that mean?” Mandy asked.

“Nobody knows anything. That’s why we have tests.”

Maybe if Mandy had tipped the attendant more, she would have divulged the ailment that would soon slaughter her father.

The attendant stepped out of the dispensary. Mandy paused before she followed. Craig would have known how to bang those white cabinets open, grab the goodies.

Tovah and Mandy’s father hunched together at the table. Mandy joined them, started to think of something nostalgic and uplifting to say, when she realized she couldn’t understand them at all. They spoke in what sounded like German about something very serious, but also occasionally funny, and frightening and unendurable, judging by Tovah’s face, which every so often froze like the faces of women in silent movies.

“You guys are getting on like gangbusters,” Mandy interrupted. “Tovah, I had no idea you spoke German.”

“It’s Yiddish. My grandmother taught me.”

“What are you guys talking about?”

“The whatchamacallit,” Jacob said.

He stared up at his daughter with that foul gleam. She’d never had a chance, really, could never be the daughter, the destiny you claw through the blood and feces of enslavement, of death, to claim. She consoled herself with something she’d read back in the days she still read about the whatchamacallit by the man who threw himself down the stairs: the good people died. Mostly only assholes made it out. That was how she remembered the passage anyway. That was her read.

“You must know all these stories,” Tovah said.

“Yes, I’m a child of a survivor. A survivor of a survivor.”

Mandy smiled, stood. “I need to check on some things. Are you two okay here for a while?”

“Oh, yes,” said Tovah. “Your father is amazing. I had no idea.”

“Daddy?”

“How’s your mother doing?” he said.

“She’s dead, Dad. Feel free to share your pain about it.”

Jacob’s cheeks drew in.

“You can’t share pain,” he said, put his hand on Tovah’s wrist. “This girl knows that. She’s a poet.”

* * *

It took hours to cross the towns — Nearmont, Eastern Valley, Rodney Heights — that led to Mandy’s old house. All that cardio ballet, and it still wiped her out, though she got her second wind and a floaty feeling in the bargain. Her friends, the endorphins. She wanted to leap off a boat and swim with them.

Now she stood at the end of the driveway on Duffy Lane, a lost pilgrim in front of the pea-green split-level with beige trim. She ached for a certain sensation, a sudden click in the soul’s alignment. Closure, some called it in the meetings. The more churchy addicts referred to forgiveness, but she’d always known what people meant. She’d hungered for it.

Maybe if she just knocked on the door, the family inside would bid her welcome. She’d knock, and when a beautiful Sri Lankan boy answered, she’d lean down and whisper her story.

“Is it closure you seek?” he’d say in melodious English.

Inside, the father of the family would smile and take the mother’s hand.

“You have made us happy by coming,” he would say. “We have waited many years for this.”

“Closure is not forgiveness,” the mother would say, with even more melodiousness than the child. “But you are a blessed one, for you shall enjoy both.”

Then there would be an unexpected crunching sound, but actually that noise wasn’t coming from Mandy’s movie. An SUV rolled into the gravel driveway. The doors opened and children scurried out in scout uniforms. A tired-looking woman with grocery sacks followed.

“Can I help you?” she said.

Mandy thought she might be Brazilian. Or maybe Belgian.

“Look,” the woman said, and stabbed a finger down the road. “If it’s about the nightclub, I already signed the petition. I don’t want them to build it any more than you do. Those drunks will crash into my living room. But I’m really busy right now. Take care.”

Mandy nodded, and the woman turned to her stoop.

Her legs throbbed, had gone rubbery, and the bus back to the city was in the other direction, but Mandy hiked on around a bend of firs. The Shell sign hovered, its colors dulled, a corner of it broken, or maybe bitten off. They’d shuttered the station, covered the pumps with dirty canvas hoods.

What the poor woman died for, thought Mandy, but then knew it was a rotten thought, too romantic, something for Tovah’s poem cycle. The blazer, the tan, the lost dream of American entrepreneurship, her seduction and abandonment by transnational loins — these things hadn’t killed her mother. Nor had her father, with his smeary, world-historical wound. What murdered her was her mind, a madness factory full of blast furnaces and smokestacks. Mandy’s mind had erected one, too, but Mandy would discover a way to raze it. She would grow a beautiful garden on the ashes of the factory, teach cardio ballet in more and more places, build a modest cardio ballet empire. She would forgive Craig and help him however she could. She would help everybody. She would save herself.

The bus pulled into Port Authority, and she rode the subway uptown. Cal waited near the door of her building, and again they didn’t speak but did their dance of nods and shrugs, and he followed her into the lobby, just as he must have followed her home some night to know where she lived. What was creepy to civilians was protocol for their kind. How else were you going to figure out where somebody lived, where the drugs were, or the money, or somebody to cling to long enough to forget the shame.

Inside the apartment, Cal pulled a bottle of wine from his coat, but Mandy shook her head, poured them glasses of water from the tap. They gulped them down and filled the glasses again. Then Mandy led Cal into the bedroom and lit a lavender candle. Cal stood before her and stroked her hair.

He started to take off his shirt, but Mandy whispered, “No.” He seemed to understand, even tugged his sleeves down to his wrists to better hide his tattoos. He pulled her to the bed, and his body was smooth and taut through his shirt. Toward the end, he whispered something too muffled to make out, though she heard the words “beautiful” and “feels” and “so good,” and then maybe “cabal.”

The world was what it was, one day at a time. Mandy rocked Cal to sleep and thought about this day she’d had, this stranger in her bed. She thought about pinot blanc. She thought about all the colors of the key tags, about salmon and salmon-colored blazers and the cleaver on the kitchen’s magnetic strip. Before she fell asleep, she yawned once and stretched her arm across the panzer tank, invisible to her now, that in the morning would burst forth in loud hues from Cal’s belly.

Tomorrow she’d look up tattoo removal. They were doing big things with lasers. When he was just a little more stable, she’d break up with Cal, gently, and then she’d begin her project of helping everybody she could help, and after that she’d head out on a great long journey to absolutely nowhere and write a majestic poem cycle steeped in heavenly lavender-scented closure and also utter despair, a poem cycle you could also actually ride for its aerobic benefits, and she’d pedal that fucker straight across the face of the earth until at some point she’d coast right off the edge, whereupon she’d giggle and say, “Oh, shit.”