Free Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney Page B

and thought she might eventually like to attend classes at the university. Your education daunted and excited her. Her desire to educate herself was touching. She asked you for reading lists. She talked about the day your book would be published. All your plans were aimed at Gotham. She wanted to live on Central Park and you wished to join the literary life of the city. She sent away for the catalogues of universities in New York and typed the résumés which you sent out.
    The more you learned of Amanda’s early life, the less surprised you were at her desire to start afresh. Her father left home when she was six. He did something on oil rigs, and the last Amanda heard he was in Libya. She got a Christmas card with a picture of a mosque. When she was ten she moved with her mother to a cousin’s farm in Nebraska. It was not much of a home. Her mother married a feed-and-grain salesman, and they moved to K.C. The salesman wasn’t home often and, when he was, he was either abusive or amorous to both mother and daughter. Amanda had to look after herself; you gathered her mother didn’t much care about her. She left home when she was sixteen and moved in with a boyfriend, who lasted until a few months before she met you. He left a note explaining that he was moving to California.
    Hers was a childhood grimmer than most, and whenever you were inclined to find her lacking, you reminded yourself to give her credit for endurance.
    In the eight months you lived together in Kansas City you visited her mother only once. Amanda was skittish and snappy on the way out. You pulled up to a trailer home on a treeless street. She introduced her mother as Dolly. The feed-and-grain salesman, you surmised, was no longer in the picture. There was tremendous tension in the cramped living room. Dolly chain-smoked Kools, flirted with you, and tossed offhand jabs at Amanda. You could see that Dolly was used to trading on her looks and that she loathed and envied her daughter’s youth. The resemblance between the two was strong, except that Dolly had a bust—a difference she alluded to several times. You could tell Amanda was ashamed of her, ashamed of the velvet painting on the wall and the unwashed dishes in the sink, ashamed that her mother was a beautician. When Dolly went to the bathroom—“to freshen up,” as she put it—Amanda picked up the souvenir Statue of Liberty on top of the television set and said, “Look at this. It’s my mother all over.” She seemed afraid that you would think it was her possession, her taste, afraid that you would identify her with Dolly.
    Two years later Dolly was invited to the wedding back East. Amanda was relieved when she couldn’t make it. Her father’s invitation was Returned to Sender bearing a collection of Arabic postmarks, Address Unknown. There was no bride’s side at the church, no one except a distant, aged aunt and uncle to indicate that Amanda’s past extended farther back than the day she arrived with you in New York. That seemed to be just how she wanted it.
    If your parents were not thrilled with the living-together arrangement, they went out of their way to give her a home when you returned to the East Coast. Your mother never turned away a stray dog, or heard about the plight of children in other parts of the world without volunteering her time or reaching for her checkbook, and she greeted Amanda as if she were a refugee. Amanda’s need to belong was part of her attraction. It was as if you came across one of those magazine ads—“You could turn the page, or you could save a child’s life”—and the child in question was right there , charming and eager to please. Long before the wedding she took to calling your parents “Mom and Dad,” and the house in Bucks County “home.” You were all suckered. Your father once asked you if you didn’t think the vast difference in your backgrounds might be a problem in the long haul, the only expressed reservation you