Animal

and accept the lie that I was trying to date people my own age or far younger because I needed to feel normal. He brought me into his chest. I was disgusted by the expensive piqué shirt that he doubtless had bought to impress me. He held me but hated me. I could feel it. Pressing my cheek to his chest like he wanted to absorb me. What do you have to fear, kid? he asked as I sobbed. The place was BYOB and he’d gone to the liquor store next door and bought their most expensive bottle of wine, $129.99. He’d left the price on. He laughed, saying, Can you believe that was the most expensive bottle? The wine was spicy and not good; it barely tasted like a twenty-dollar bottle. I hated him for how little he knew about fine things. I hated him for coming all the way to Queens in a black car. For being cruel to me even though I deserved so much worse. What do you have to fear? he said. And I said, You’re right, we both have nothing to fear. Nothing to lose. But I have my daughter, he said. I have my daughter to lose. And I wanted to kill him because he was taunting me with fatherhood, with all that it meant. So I pushed away from his chest and said, You have to go get cash. This place is cash only. And I want to leave.

Vic had been right. I’d had nothing to fear. Now that I had a child inside of me, I finally understood what he meant.

ON A SUNDAY THE BLOOD came so rapidly and thickly that I felt like I might pass out. And then I did. My sleep was dreamless only when I took pills. There were few times I slept without them, but this was one occasion. And all of my dreams were nightmares about my parents. Even my good dreams were nightmares, as anyone who has lost someone important knows.

After passing out I dreamed of the Atlantic City boardwalk of my youth where my mother liked to play the slot machines and my father and I would pass the time walking the beach, picking shells, digging for sand crabs. On rainy days we would go to the Ocean One Mall, which was shaped like a cruise liner and full of pastel taffy and mosquito-specked skylights. But my favorite place, probably the most magical of my childhood memory, was an indoor midway at one of the casino hotels. I tried many times to remember the name and never could; it lasted only a year or two, shutting its doors around the time I was eight or nine. It was razed to make room for something less gaudy. But right then, like Lenny, I experienced a sudden clarity and remembered the name: Tivoli Pier, in the Tropicana. The name itself was garish, like everything in Atlantic City. There was a Ferris wheel, though I don’t think we ever rode it, and bumper cars, pinball machines, and a theater starring animated characters who looked like big-name entertainers, Dolly Parton and Wayne Newton, droopy faces that kids wouldn’t know. There was a saloon and a simulated space shuttle ride that was always out of order. There were boardwalk-style rolling chairs that slid you through dark tunnels illuminated with fiber-optic lighting. Along the walls were wax reproductions of Atlantic City’s heyday. Women in high-waisted polka-dot bikinis posing on ginger sand, high dives. The part I loved most was a flying-carpet ride. It was a raised dais covered with a Persian rug, and you would sit on the rug and watch a screen in front of you that showed you flying through the night sky. You could choose from a selection of backgrounds. I’d run through them all and my father would watch me and smile.

After several hours and hundreds of tokens we’d meet my mother and go out for a seafood buffet. All-you-could-eat crab legs for $29.99. Coca-Cola with a glistening cherry on top. It was heaven for me. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it enough for him?

The rest of the night in the Poconos, the last night of my life, my mother ran a bath. None of her products were expensive. In the years to come I would go to the houses of friends and shower in their parents’ master baths and I’d be impressed by the expense or the idiosyncrasy of a particular shampoo. A lotion made of white mallow. A massage oil, the color of gasoline, from the woods of Wisconsin. You can tell a lot about a woman by her bath products, by the range or the minimalism. Sometimes the stingiest lady, seemingly unconcerned about her looks, will own a ferny conditioner from Paris and you will question everything you assumed about her.

My mother’s products were mostly mementos from hotels. From our trips to Italy, all of them, from her honeymoon with my father, which was the first time she saw Rome and Venice and even Florence, though she grew up in a town less than a hundred miles away.

She had multiple shower caps, from La Lumiere in Rome and a beach hotel in San Benedetto. She had old yellow lotions from a hot-springs hotel in Castrocaro Terme and conditioner from a little albergo in Como. There was a room fragrance from a cliffside inn in Sorrento, probably the poshest of the hotels she’d ever been to, and from that same place, a satchel of lavender bath salts contained in a small terry pillow. It was this satchel that she dropped into the ugly tub of our Poconos bathroom, and it was the high, bright smell of lavender that brought me away from the She-Ra cartoon I’d been watching and up that carpeted, narrow stairwell to find my mother naked and vacant in the steamy room.

Her breasts were above the water, huge and white, and the rest of her—slim, tan, European—was below.

Many of my