“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.