Vegas Savior in a Bikini

I want my mother so badly I save every single scrap of paper or greeting card she sends me, rereading them, holding them, smelling the traces of Givinchy L'Interdit. She is a fetish.

I'm held against my will by the evil man who calls himself Dad, and my only potential Savior is my mother.

Except for occasional Alternate Savior possibilities.

I meet Mrs. Rosen, a curvy forty-ish woman in the pool, during a three-month stay in Vegas when I am eight. She is an excellent Alternate Savior possibility.

This is two years after Cairo. Adam, the Dad, has taken us to Caesar's Palace and is said by his mother, my grandmother, Beelzebubbe, to be losing something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. I am told Caesar's mistakenly believes my grandfather, Adam's father, will pay whatever is owed. As my dad sinks deeper into debt they keep moving us to glitzier comped rooms and we have no limit on our free room signing privileges. In the final few weeks we are in a penthouse suite with purple velvet everywhere.

The fact that Adam apparently never pays Caesar's the money he has lost confuses me greatly. Don't they kill people who do that?

There is a whirlpool area of the pool where you put a silver dollar into a slot and the water jets tickle your crotch if you maneuver yourself into the right position. I almost never get to use the whirlpool since getting hold of an actual dollar in cash is always hard, even as signing for a $200 meal is not a problem. One morning I treat six people to breakfast. Reminder: I am eight years old.

When I meet Mrs. Rosen at the pool she wears a blue bikini over her tanned body. Her black hair reminds me of Mom. She is warm and gregarious, an easy talker. If she thinks my paying for lunch is bizarre she doesn't say so. We talk about everything and nothing and bond thoroughly. After I walk her to her suite and say good-be, I spend the rest of the afternoon feverishly envisioning my future. My new life will start with my emotional confession to Mrs. Rosen of my Dickensian circumstances, her loving embrace with promises to adopt me, and a fresh start with her under an assumed name. (I'm uncertain whether I imagine Mr. Rosen liking me or Mrs. Rosen dumping him so she can be with me exclusively.) By the time I work up the courage to go find Mrs. Rosen and throw myself on her mercy I can't remember where her room is. I wander up and down the flocked hallways knocking on doors without success. I feel such shame. I have thrown away my one chance for happiness.

A present day note: For the record, I may have been precocious, but I did not, in fact, know the word "Dickensian" when I was eight. If I had heard the term, I would have assumed it meant Angie Dickensian.