Postparty Depression

Brenda is driving. The chauffeur has had too much to drink and is in the back seat with his son, the only member of the family who will speak to him.

Zeke thought it was funny when Daddy lunged across the room, grabbed his sister by her hair and led her off the bed and through the doorway. Daddy was so mad he hadn’t even seen his son.

Sheba is mortified. Embarrassed beyond comprehension by her pig father who lives in the last century and thinks he can boss her around. She knows a thing or two. When she was ten, she found his stash. Wasn’t sure what it was, but did know how to use the Internet. Now and then she checked up on it. He never used it. Neither did she. But it was there.

Imagine the self-control of a girl who does not blurt out this useful secret right now, right here. It would divert attention from her, and pay her father back. But our Sheba is a girl of principle.

“It’s none of your business,” she had said to his nasty questions, and now refuses to speak. About anything. She sits in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. Zeke is bouncing up and down against his seat belt, watching the scenery and the cars, enthralled by the romance of dusk.

The candidate, now herself the chauffeur, is furious. Her brow is furrowed and her face frowned. It is not because of the way Jason propelled Sheba down the stairs and out of the house; he might have had good reason. It’s because of what he did when he came back.

Still in a rage, he stomped up to Brenda and yanked her off the couch, with a clipped, “Thank you very much,” to the Wagmans. She was struck dumb. That laryngitis she was worried about on the way down finally came on. She let him lead her to the door, or he would have dragged her.

This doesn’t sound like mild-mannered Jason, does it? Just shows what fatherhood can do to a man. Father-of-daughter-hood, that is. It’s not marijuana that turned Dad into a monster; it’s sex.

Dad knows what would have come next if he were Phoenix. But he is not Phoenix, and Phoenix is not the lover-boy that Jason was. Phoenix is too private for that. He does not give of himself. His father said to be nice to her, and he was being nice. He even invited her brother to come with them, when they came upon him talking to the dog.

Jason, drunk and disorderly in the back seat, is carrying on about the summer, and how his daughter will not go slumming one more time. She is going, he announces, not quite at the top of his lungs, to Aunt Manya’s Camp, a sleep-away that’s close enough to home for visits, but not so close that she ever has to see that boy again. Or any other boy. No, that’s not true. There will be boys at the camp. There are boys everywhere! But the camp is a Jewish camp, full of Jewish boys with Jewish mothers. Jason didn’t have a Jewish mother and therefore had a love-life as a teen-ager. The boys at the camp would be no problem. She wouldn’t even like them.

Okay, you say, time for Sheba to haul out her secret weapon. Well, folks, she doesn’t want to. She is about to get away from home. Out of her house. Away from her parents.

“And Zeke, too.” Jason says.

Oh, no, thinks Sheba. Not Zeke. The little spy.

“I’m not going,” Zeke says.

“Why not?” asks Jason. Was this kid suddenly a teen-ager, too?

“I’m staying with Mommy.”

“Mommy is going to be very busy. Who’s going to take care of you?”

“You,” he says. “You’re my dad.”

Damn.

The car becomes quiet. Brenda can’t talk, Jason has nothing to say, Zeke and Sheba are holding their breaths, each getting what they want; don’t spoil it.

The next morning – the very next morning, Jason makes the call. He speaks to the proprietor herself, a very, very old lady, old Great-Aunt Manya, who used to be a terror, and now is a family symbol of fortitude.

Manya still runs her camp. She sits at the entrance to the main building, just an old house, but called The Commons. In a long white dress, like a Russian countess on summer vacation, she presides over the people passing in and out. She is the only thing fancy left on the premises.

Sheba is very efficient selecting her jeans and tops, and finding substitutes for the e-mailed list of required clothing. It’s the middle of summer. People spend months on this chore that she is accomplishing in one morning, all by herself (her mother is in bed, her cell phone turned off.)

In the afternoon, Sheba’s father will drive her to the camp, where he will leave her with a bunch of strangers. She can’t wait, but she does not want to let on. She’s playing the victim, saying not a word, somberly and obediently preparing for her punishment.

Father and daughter do not speak on the ride to camp. They can’t. Their secrets might come out – hers that she is happy, his that he is sorry. He should have been a gentleman about it – what would it have cost him – and let her leave under her own steam. Now he would be eternally in the wrong. The man. The brute. The tyrant. The pig. He went through the list as though reading her mind.

He was right. She was thinking all of those words. But she was thinking something else, too. She was thinking about Phoenix, who had, in a way, instigated her liberation. He was a lot older, in another world. It was obvious from his room that he didn’t take orders from anybody. She admired him for that. And that long red hair helped. So had her father, by tearing her away from him.

They pulled off the highway, onto a two-lane road, and from there, onto a one-lane, almost-dirt, road, which soon became a definitely dirt road. They bounced along until it ducked through some trees and emerged as a long, twisty incline that led to a big, white, ramshackle house.

On the porch sat Great Aunt Manya at a bridge table. She stood as they came up the steps, and came out from behind the table to embrace Jason and pinch Sheba’s cheek.

Sheba was immediately taken up to her room. She’s living in the Commons, as per her daddy’s request. He doesn’t want her out there where any wild animal, human or otherwise, can get at her. Keep her upstairs, under the supervision of her still sharp-eyed relation. The deal had been sealed on the phone. What he didn’t realize was that her roommates would be two other delinquent girls, whose parents had requested the sharp eye.

The Shapiros had arrived at rest time, the hour after lunch. Sheba was escorted up the rickety stairs by a counselor, who knocked on the door, and receiving no answer, ordered, “Open up.”

It took a few minutes. Then the door was opened by a girl with sleek long hair, wearing little else. “Excuse us,” she says. “We were resting. It’s rest hour.” Sheba could see, behind her, another girl with big glasses, gathering some things from the table between the two bunk-beds.

The counselor pushed past the first girl and beckoned Sheba into the room. She took a piece of paper from her pocket. “Bathsheba Shapiro,” she said, “meet your room-mates. The half-naked lady is Rosalind Jaffe. The professor here is Rowena Kaplan.”

Sheba nods at the girls. They nod back. They’ve been expecting her, but only since eight this morning, and they weren’t at all sure they wanted another roommate. The camp business has been slow because of the economy, and they’ve become used to luxuriating in their four-person room.

When the counselor leaves with the promise that Sheba’s bags will be up soon, Rowena, peering through her glasses with huge eyes, asks, “What were you sent up for?”

“Getting high with a guy in his room,” Sheba replies without a thought.

And with that, she has instantly won the respect of the two girls who’ve been sent up for far lesser crimes, one for talking back to her mother, repeatedly, and the other for refusing to be Bat Mitzvah’d, a privilege Sheba had also declined, though it was doubtful that she was even entitled.

As Jason is walking back to his car, Sheba has settled into the lower bunk on the left, and is describing, in delicious detail, Phoenix – himself, his room and his bong.