A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

promise?”
    “A solemn promise.”
    “Come on,” Charlie whispers to Rolph. “Let’s go outside.”
    They slip from the crowded dining room and skitter onto the silvery beach. The palm trees make a slapping, rainy sound, but the air is dry.
    “It’s like Hawaii,” Rolph says, wanting it to be true. The ingredients are there: the dark, the beach, his sister. But it doesn’t feel the same.
    “Without the rain,” Charlie says.
    “Without Mom,” Rolph says.
    “I think he’s going to marry Mindy,” Charlie says.
    “No way! You said he didn’t love her.”
    “So? He can still marry her.”
    They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow. The ghost sea tumbles against it.
    “She’s not so bad,” Charlie says.
    “I don’t like her. And why are you the world’s expert?”
    Charlie shrugs. “I know Dad.”
    Charlie doesn’t know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she’ll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she’ll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking.
    But Charlie does know her father. He’ll marry Mindy because that’s what winning means, and because Mindy’s eagerness to conclude this odd episode and return to her studies will last until precisely the moment she opens the door to her Berkeley apartment and walks into the smell of simmering lentils: one of the cheap stews she and her roommates survive on. She’ll collapse on a swaybacked couch they found on the sidewalk and unpack her many books, realizing that in weeks of lugging them through Africa, she’s read virtually nothing. And when the phone rings her heart will flip.
    Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.
    But we’re getting off the subject.
    Rolph and Charlie are galloping up the beach, drawn by the pulse of light and music from the open-air disco. They run barefoot into the crowd, trailing powdery sand onto a translucent dance floor overlaid on lozenges of flashing color. The shuddering bass line seems to interfere with Rolph’s heartbeat.
    “C’mon,” Charlie says. “Let’s dance.”
    She begins to undulate in front of him—the way the new Charlie is planning to dance when she gets home. But Rolph is embarrassed; he can’t dance that way. The rest of the group surrounds them; chubby Louise, one year older than he, is dancing with Dean, the actor. Ramsey flings his arms around one of the Phoenix Faction moms. Lou and Mindy dance close together, their whole bodies touching, but Mindy is thinking of Albert, as she will periodically after marrying Lou and having two daughters, his fifth and sixth children, in quick succession, as if sprinting against the inevitable drift of his attention. On paper he’ll be penniless, and Mindy will end up working as a travel agent to support her little girls. For a time her life will be joyless; the girls will seem to cry too much, and she’ll think longingly of this trip to Africa as the last happy moment of her life, when she still had a choice, when she was free and unencumbered. She’ll dream senselessly, futilely, of Albert, wondering what he might be doing at particular times, how her life would have turned out if she’d run away with him as he’d suggested, half joking, when she visited him in room number three. Later, of course, she’ll recognize “Albert” as nothing more than a focus of regret for her own immaturity and disastrous choices. When both her children are in high school, she’ll finally resume her studies, complete her Ph.D. at UCLA, and begin an academic career at