The Magician's Assistant (35 page)

“Kitty comes and goes,” Dot said. “You can’t get too worked up about it. You have to remember, she’s got children, even if they’re big children. It takes a lot of effort. And she’s got Howard. Sometimes he decides she shouldn’t be spending so much time over here. He nags at her so much, it’s just easier for her to back off. I figure she doesn’t need me nagging at her, too. He’s just got his feelings hurt about Haas. He’ll forget about it. Everybody will forget about it.”

With the house getting quieter, without Kitty around to talk to, Sabine wondered how she would last until Bertie’s wedding. Every day Dot checked out books for her from the high school library, Dickens and Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen. Anything that was not about a girl’s love for her horse. Sabine was lonely and in her loneliness wondered if her gardener in Los Angeles was remembering to pinch back the pansies around the back patio. For the first time since Parsifal’s death, she worried about the pool skimmer, the rug stores, and the unfinished architectural models that cluttered her drafting table like a bombed-out village. In her loneliness she felt herself drifting towards home.

Dot did not go back on her word. She did not worry about the whereabouts of Kitty or lament the absence of Bertie. Dot, like Bertie, seemed better off, though Dot was afraid to show too much pleasure in gaining an extra room for fear of hurting Bertie’s feelings, and was certainly afraid to show that she missed her for fear of driving her home again. She didn’t tell anyone how she really felt about things, except for Sabine, to whom she revealed her true plan.

“I’m thinking about making it into a sewing room,” Dot said.

“Really?” Sabine was poaching eggs, trying to keep the water swirling at exactly the right speed. Just yesterday she had found a lone package of Canadian bacon at the grocery store, tucked away between the liverwurst and olive loaf, its date a full week before expiration. She’d decided to make eggs Benedict for breakfast. Dot claimed to never have eaten eggs Benedict before, but she had seen it often in old movies.

“Take the bed out completely, the dresser, everything. I’d leave my sewing machine out all the time, leave the ironing board up, get a love seat and a little television. I’ve even thought of getting one of those exercise bikes. I’ve just never had the room for it before. Never had the money, either, and now I’ve got both, I figure, why not?”

“Perfect,” Sabine said, speaking as much to the eggs as to Dot’s plan.

“I can sew. I should make you something. I make clothes for Bertie and Kitty all the time, clothes for the boys. I think if I had a sewing room I might even be able to do some things professionally, alterations, something. I could get one of those dressmaker dummies. I’ve always wanted one of those. My eyes should hold out for a few more years.”

“Phan sewed beautifully.” Everything was right on time. The English muffins had popped, the Canadian bacon was patted dry, and the hollandaise was smooth, lemony-tart, and not too thick. Phan had taught her how to make hollandaise.

“I thought he did something in computers.”

“He made his living sewing when he was in school.” Was that right? She couldn’t exactly remember. Had he sewn in Pàris, or was it later? “He used to sew my costumes for the show. He was brilliant in that way.”

“Maybe Guy was looking for a boy like his mother,” Dot said.

“Not impossible.” Sabine brought their breakfast to the table. A sliced orange, the little bit of parsley from thé bunch she’d bought for the occasion, knowing full well the rest of it would go to waste. She had remembered to warm the plates.

“This is how people eat in Los Angeles,” Dot said, as pleased as she would have been if Elizabeth Taylor herself had brought the meal.

“Every morning of their lives.”

“I feel like I’m in a movie.”

They cut into their eggs, spilling the sweet yellow yolks across their knives. It tasted better than the best dinner Sabine ever had at the Rex, because this morning she was hungry, she had made it herself, and she knew that no one else in Alliance was having eggs Benedict on a Tuesday morning. “I have boxes and boxes of patterns that were Phan’s, beautiful things, a lot of wedding gowns. I’ll send them to you if you’d like.”

“Wouldn’t that be great,” Dot said. “That will be the first thing I make in my new sewing room. Something that Phan liked.”

That was the last time that either of them mentioned the idea of the sewing room.

Maybe if they had gone to work on it as soon as the breakfast dishes were in the drainboard, called the church thrift store and asked them to come and haul the furniture down the snowy back stairs as soon as possible, Dot might have made it. But as nature abhors a vacuum, families are unable to leave empty bedrooms sitting idle.

Breakfast was only two hours behind them. Sabine sat at the kitchen table reading
The Return of the Native,
feeling sleepy from the combination of a large breakfast and a slow plot. She planned to take a nap as soon as Dot left to go and dish up hot cafeteria food (How could she look at the food all day?). Dot was down the hall in her bedroom getting ready to go, putting on ChapStick and combing her hair. The room that had been Bertie’s stood between them. It was free, no longer hers and not yet something else.

Kitty tapped on the window of the back door and then let herself in.

“Good,” Sabine said, slipping the Alliance high school library bookmark into place. One came inside each book that was borrowed, to discourage the dog-earing of pages. “This gives me a chance to stop.” Sabine was hoping this visit meant that Kitty was free for the day, that she wasn’t working, and that her husband was. The odd combinations of their schedules were impossible to predict.

Kitty hung her coat on the rack by the door. Her clothes were ridiculously large, as if she had mistakenly reached into the boys’ closet instead of her own. Inside the pine green sweater and black jeans there was only the faintest outline of Kitty’s bones, like a child beneath a pile of blankets. “Dot’s still home?” Kitty asked quietly, as if her mother might be both home and asleep. Kitty looked like Parsifal did before he died, too thin, brittle, and exhausted. Her blue eyes were red rimmed and damp. Her cheekbones threw shadows. It occurred to Sabine with a certain numbing horror that Kitty might be sick. There was a large yellowish patch on her neck.

“Dot’s getting ready for work.” Sabine leaned forward and pushed out a chair. Kitty sat down beside her. “You don’t look like you feel very well.”

Kitty checked to see if anyone was coming down the hall, in preparation for telling secrets. Sabine knew the look in those eyes. She had seen it when there was bad news about Phan. Kitty was getting ready to tell her things she didn’t want to know. “I think I’m going to come home with the boys for a while.”

“Are you sick?”

Kitty looked as if she didn’t understand the question exactly. “No one’s sick.”

“I just thought—” Sabine shook her head. “Nothing.”

“It’s rotten timing,” Kitty said sadly. “Bertie just about to get married. And you’re here. Come to Nebraska to get a little rest. You must already think we’re all crazy people.”

Kitty and the boys here? Around the clock? Full, long days of company, days of Kitty. “Bertie’s moved out,” Sabine said, selling the sewing room down the river. “She hasn’t been here a single night since...” She stopped. She thought of nothing to fill up the space in the sentence and so she left it empty. “Her room is free. And as far as you being crazy, I don’t think you’re any more crazy than the rest of us.”

“I must be,” Kitty said.

“What happened?”

Kitty shrugged, her bony shoulders shifting up like a coat hanger inside her sweater. “Nothing new, really.”

“There she is,” Dot said brightly, her purse held tight in one hand. Her curls had been carefully reformed with water and a little Dep from the tub on the bathroom sink. “You should have been here for breakfast. Sabine made eggs Benedict. It was brilliant, really brilliant.” Bertie was gone, Sabine was here, there was the promise of a sewing room. Breakfast had been the crowning glory.

“I’m sorry I missed it,” Kitty said.

Dot put her hand under her daughter’s chin and tilted her face up to the light. “You look like hell.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you have a reason?”

“Same old, same old.”

A cloud had passed into Dot’s good mood. She studied Kitty carefully, as if she were trying to place her. “You haven’t been around here much lately.”

“Well,” Kitty said, reaching into her purse for a pack of cigarettes. “That’s about to change.”

Dot let go of her chin and sat down at the table. “Let me have one of those, will you?” Dot didn’t smoke, but pushed far enough, most anyone will have a cigarette.

“It won’t be forever.”

“If it’s forever, it’s forever,” Dot said, because it was always best to consider what might happen. “You and I have lived together before. We did okay. You’ll bring the boys?”

“Sure.”

“Do they know it yet?”

Kitty passed out cigarettes to Dot and Sabine and then lit all three. “I’ll tell them after school. I haven’t gotten their things together yet. I need to go back over to the house.”

“Does Howard know?”

Kitty took one slow inhale and then got up to find an ashtray. “I told him. I’m not so sure that means he knows. There hasn’t been a lot of listening. I think he said a couple of times he was planning on leaving me, too.”

In her white cafeteria uniform, her cigarette balanced neatly between two fingers, Dot looked like the old Zen master of failed departures. “Well, everybody can say they’re going, but once you really go it’s a different story altogether. Still,” she patted her daughter’s wrist, “you’ve left him before, Kitten. He got along.”

“I was thinking that maybe this time would be it,” Kitty said quietly.

“If that’s what you want,” her mother told her, “then I hope it is.”

“I have to think about what’s best for the boys.”

“You do,” Dot said, but no one made it clear if “best” entailed leaving or staying. She looked at her watch. “I can take off work. Call in sick, no problem.”

Kitty shook her head. “If you took off work every time we thought it was over with me and Howard, you’d be unemployable.”

Dot laughed and reached up to brush her oldest daughter’s hair. “Oh, look at that,” she said, stopping at her neck. “He got you there.”

Kitty reached up and touched two fingers lightly to her neck. “I got off a couple of my own.”

“That’s the difference between me and Kitty. Howard socks her one, she socks him back. I never hit Al. Christ, it never even occurred to me. He would have put me through the floor.”

“Dad was a lot bigger than you,” Kitty said.

Dot shook her head. Size was not really the heart of the matter. “You’ve got more nerve than me. I never even left Al. Not really.”

Sabine volunteered to go back to the house with Kitty to pick up some things, which meant Dot could go to work and only be a few minutes late, not that anyone would even mention it to her. This time of year everyone was late anyway, cars didn’t start or they slid off driveways and lodged in snowbanks. Winter was nothing but a long excuse for tardiness.

Kitty and Sabine drove together to Kitty’s house. Even with the heater turned to High they were cold. The cold air seemed to come at them directly through the windshield.

“So,” Sabine said, “do you want to tell me?”

“Howard,” Kitty said.

How handsome he must have been at twenty-one, before the fall from the train, lean and long legged, tan in the summer; his hair truly red then, a dark, new-penny color, edged in gold from working outdoors. Howard, standing by the side of the road, a wheat field spreading out behind him in every direction, his skin freckled and burned brown. Howard from a distance. Howard in a white T-shirt. Howard not saying anything. He was strong and brave and full of dangerous fun.

“What happened with Howard?”

“Ever since Bertie fell, we’ve been going at it pretty hard. We just fight. After a while we’re not even fighting about anything.” Kitty thought about it as the snowy little ranch houses shot past their windows. “I could tell you something he said or one thing he did, but it’s not really like that. You just get tired. He keeps crossing the line, and I kept moving it back for him to try again.”

Although she would never mention it, Sabine was unclear as to how momentous this trip to pick up clothes and move Kitty and the boys into Dot’s house actually was. It sounded like departure was part of the cycle, the yearly autumn in their relationship, after which she settled back in for the winter. Kitty looked neither convincing nor convinced when she spoke of staying away this time. There was only a note of wanting in her voice, a tired desire. Staying away was a wish, like wanting a new winter coat or an extra fifteen-minute break at work or a sewing room. To Sabine it was a perfectly honorable wish: Kitty on her own, free to do better for herself; Kitty, who was in possession of all of her brother’s potential, having the opportunity to put it to use. Not that there was any sense in trying to understand another person’s marriage or to say, after two weeks of careful observation, that it seemed like the jig was up. The things that went into keeping people together and tearing them apart remained largely unknown to the parties immediately involved. Recently discovered sisters-in-law visiting from Los Angeles were more useful packing sweaters into suitcases than offering opinions.

“I hate to have you see my house,” Kitty said when they were standing on her back porch. She fumbled with her keys, her wool-covered fingers unable to chose one from the many available on the ring.

Sabine waited behind her and shivered. She had not previously been invited over to Kitty’s, although the house was pointed out to her from a distance as they drove by. The siding was a dull Dijon yellow where Dot’s was white. The yard was deeper and there were fewer box hedges beneath the front windows, but the basic fact remained that Kitty had wound up almost exactly where she started.

“I haven’t cleaned anything.” Kitty’s hand stayed on the back-door knob, waiting.