Splash

Iberia, Iberia, the TV jingle went, siren voices wafting atop jets of air. Dutifully I memorized brochures. We’ve decided! my mother announced, finally, triumphant: Melia! We were 36 and 9. Melia was a Spanish hotel chain. My mother always longed to go abroad. My father had been dead one year.

Next came the dizzy whirl of purchases. New luggage, floppy hat. Jean Naté Friction pour le Bain, by—my mother’s awe echoing the commercial’s breathless tone—someone called Charles of the Ritz. It came in quart bottles. In the seventies you could carry anything on a plane.

My mother dubbed it Splash, and did so with abandon. Even her breakdown months before had been decidedly upbeat.

Madrid proved no Manhattan, where we’d gone to what she called The Modern, ambling back through madcap human traffic, her new Guernica photostat held safely aloft. Later we’d stop in downtown Paterson for a large dime store frame.