Vaclav & Lena (10 page)

2. Tuxedo

3. Aladdin-like outfit

SPECIALTIES OF HEATHER HOLLIDAY

1. Sword swallowing

2. Fire eating

COSTUME AND PHYSICAL APPEARANCE OF HEATHER HOLLIDAY
^*

Heather Holliday wears a few selected costumes, including:

1. The golden fringed bikini

*
Lena feels that important things to say about Heather Holliday are that she is the youngest sword swallower in the world, that she is lovely, and that she ran away from home because her family is Mormon, which sounds like a bad thing. Also, she has been struck by lightning. That is enough. Lena feels that it is of importance to know that Heather Holliday was struck by lightning, and it is obvious the lightning gave her some magic
.**

**
This is a nice thing for Lena to know because she is waiting for her magic, but Vaclav is already magic because he was born with it. He has had indisputable magic powers since he was only a baby just born, and that is the truth.

Vaclav looks over the lists, which are of great beauty in Vaclav’s handwriting with pictures by Lena, and one day when Vaclav the Magnificent and his assistant, the Lovely Lena, are very famous magicians selling out more arenas than even David Copperfield, the lists will be sold by an auction like this: “Sold! For one billion American dollars!”

There are more lists.

LIST OF LISTS

Costumes

Supplies needed for costumes

Places to get supplies needed for costumes

Illusions

Supplies needed for illusions

Places to get supplies needed for illusions

The schedule

Things to make

Things to conjure

Things to levitate

Things to make disappear

Things to turn into doves

Doves to turn into things

These are the lists.

ILLUSIONS TO CONFOUND
…

T
o Vaclav it is clear that the first things to plan are the illusions, so he takes the list titled “Illusions” and begins reading it over. On the list are many possible illusions. There is the incredible shrinking girl, the dove-into-quarters trick, and finally, the amazing disappearing-audience trick.

“Lena, we will practice these three illusions first for the show on the boardwalk. We need, also, I am realize, a list of possible names for the show. I will add ‘Possible Names for the Show on the Boardwalk’ to the list of lists, and then begin a list. The first possible name will be ‘The Coney Island Boardwalk Spectacular,’ and then we will add more and more names. Once we have practice and perfected the three illusions, then I think we will add a disappearing trick and a levitating trick, maybe ending show with disappearing trick. I will make a list that is a list of the order of tricks in the show, and add that list to list of lists.” As Vaclav updates his lists and his lists of lists, Lena creates her own new list.

GOLD BIKINI MAKE

Buy gold bikini

Take gold fabric secret

Glue

Fringes

Vaclav can read Lena’s list over her shoulder, and he becomes more and more nervous, even more nervous than when Lena first mentioned the golden fringed bikini, that something very bad might happen with Lena and her thinking so much all the time about it. Vaclav thinks again that this is not a thing for Lena to wear, a bikini that has two pieces and no middle piece, but Lena is in love with her idea.

“Lena, let us first be practicing, and then we will be worry with the costumes,” says Vaclav, and Lena agrees, only because she has already finished her list and is happy with the plan. Vaclav and Lena begin by practicing the disappearing-coin trick, with Vaclav narrating and instructing the patient and fascinated audience to look here and pay close attention there, while Lena assists and plans and perfects the right way to angle her wrists to draw the attention to the right place and away from the wrong place.

The show is to be secret. They decide that they can probably build the disappearing box in Vaclav’s room and hide it in Vaclav’s closet. Then they will just have to carry it out of the house when Rasia is not looking. Lena agrees with this plan, because one of the things that Heather Holliday does at the Coney Island Sideshow is disappear into the disappearing box, and Lena wants in every way to be just like Heather Holliday.

Vaclav and Lena practice until very late, because luckily, Rasia falls asleep in front of the TV and does not stop them until it is almost ten o’clock.

“Lena, your aunt called and she ask me to walk you home,” says Rasia.

BEDTIME FOR LENA
…

V
aclav knows his mother is lying, and Lena knows that she is lying, and of course Rasia knows, because she is the one who is telling the lie, but everyone pretends that Lena’s aunt really did call, and they are good at pretending, because they pretend every night.

Lena packs up her bag, happy to put away her homework that is finished and one hundred percent correct for tomorrow, and ties her shoes, while Rasia puts on her loafers. Then Rasia and Lena leave for Lena’s house. At the first intersection, Rasia takes hold of Lena’s hand, only for safety to cross the street, but she does not let go of Lena’s hand for the rest of the walk.

Each night that Ekaterina does not come for Lena, each time that Ekaterina shows that she is irresponsible, is untrustworthy, is unloving, Rasia is reassured that she has a right to love Lena as much as she does, which is very much.

Lena climbs the steps one at a time, slowly, to allow Rasia to keep up. She opens the screen door and holds it open for Rasia as she then opens the big heavy front door, and she steps inside the dark apartment. Rasia steps in behind her, mumbling about making sure Lena is safe, that there is no one in the house, that everything is okay. She mumbles this same thing every night she walks Lena home.

Tonight, Lena turns on the light in the front entrance, and all around Rasia can see that the mess is the same mess as yesterday.

Rasia waits a minute for Lena to go into the room where she sleeps, which Rasia will never, ever think of as a bedroom, only as a room where Lena sleeps, because it is not a proper bedroom for a little girl, not in the way that Rasia would have decorated a room if Vaclav had been a girl.

Rasia waits to hear the sounds of Lena getting ready, which are these:

Sounds of Lena opening and closing drawers

Sounds of Lena untilting the mattress from where it is tilted against the wall

Sounds of air scooting out of the way of the mattress so that the mattress can plop to the floor

Once Rasia has heard all these sounds, she enters the room where Lena sleeps, and without saying anything, she goes to the corner and gets the worn-out felty blanket with silky edges that is peach with yellow blotches, while Lena sits, waiting, on the bed.

“All right,” says Rasia. “Let’s make this bed.” She has said this every night since the very first night she walked Lena home, which was the day that Lena met Vaclav and saw the golden fringed bikini of Heather Holliday.

Rasia stands over the mattress and holds the blanket by two corners. Lifting her arms swiftly into the air, she billows the blanket out and over Lena, and then lets it fall softly over the whole bed, even over Lena’s head.

The first time, she did this because it was the same thing she did to Vaclav every night; it was their bedtime routine. He would climb into bed and lie very still, and she would pretend to not see him, pretend to accidentally make the bed with him inside of it, pretend to be quite aggravated by a mystery lump, and then, finally, tell a bedtime story in the hopes that it might somehow make the stubborn lump go away.

The first night, Rasia did to Lena exactly what she did to Vaclav because she did not know what else to do, having waited for someone to pick the girl up; having decided, finally, to take the girl home; having waited too long for Ekaterina to answer the ringing doorbell; having taken too long to finally see the dread and shame on the girl’s face; having paused too long in the entranceway, staring too long at the overflowing ashtrays, the sharp edges on the glass coffee table, the clothes flung over everything. She felt frozen, and she did not know what to do, and so she did the only thing she knew. Rasia told Lena to get into bed. Lena, following orders, marched straight into her bedroom. Rasia followed her. The room was empty except for a bare mattress on the floor. Rasia stood staring until she realized that Lena was waiting anxiously for her to leave the room so that she could undress and put on her pajamas.

Rasia waited in the hallway for a few minutes, and then she returned, saying, “Go lie on the bed,” and Lena did, and then she pretended to not know Lena was there.

During the bedtime routine, Lena didn’t giggle as Vaclav did when Rasia said, “Let’s make this bed” or “Where in the
world
did this lump come from?” Lena seemed to submit to and welcome the ritual but did not ever smile. Still, Rasia had never considered altering or omitting one tiny word or gesture from the routine.

This night, Rasia played the game with Lena because it was what she had done each night for five years. So she went about her futile attempts to flatten the lump, pulling the blanket tighter, smoothing the blanket next to, over, and around the lump, and then said, “Okay, lump. You are winning. Let’s have a story. If you can’t get rid of something, or someone, you should always tell long, boring story, to make it go away.”

THE LONG, BORING STORY
…

R
asia sits on the foot of Lena’s bed, which is really just Lena’s mattress on the floor.

“Okay, so here is the story.” Rasia tells Lena her bedtime story in Russian, even though at all other times Russian is strictly forbidden. Rasia does this for Lena, so that she will not have to struggle to understand, but she does it for herself too.

“Once upon a time in the faraway land called Moscow, there lived a princess. Just so you know, in case you have heard things, Moscow today is very different from how it was then, once upon a time. The Moscow in this story is beautiful. The Moscow in this story is not full of breadlines, just people buying fresh bread from the baker down the street with real money, not money worth less than the paper it is printed on. In Moscow, once upon a time, you could walk down the street without going by a man sitting in the gutter, yelling at you as you walk by and showing you the fingers he lost in the gulag.

“Okay, so where are we? There is a princess, and this princess, she likes wandering around the markets, dressed in a ratty
shmata
and some ugly pants like a peasant, because like most princesses in a story, she sometimes hated to be a princess, and she didn’t know how lucky she was. She liked to pretend that she was not a princess, because it made her feel like a normal girl.

“One nice sunny day, she was wandering around the market, and she bumped into a boy. Really, she was so busy staring at the blind old lady selling boiled eggs out of a bucket, because she was appalled that anyone would buy eggs that the old woman had touched with her dirty, knobby fingers, that she walked right into this boy. She fell, and there was a horse and cart coming by just at that moment, and it almost went right over her head and smashed it like a melon, but the boy, he grabbed her hand and pulled her to him and saved her life. Of course, she fainted in his arms.

“When the princess woke up, the boy was kneeling over her, with his face right almost touching her nose, and she was afraid of him for one second, and the next second she wondered what his name was, and the next second she wondered everything about him, and the next second she was terrified that he would go away forever and that she might lose him. She was in love with him, plus he had just saved her life. He was in love with her already, because she was a princess, even though he didn’t know she was a princess. This is how it always is with princesses, boys love them for no reason.

“Next the princess and the boy did what everyone does when they fall in love: They sat in some crummy place, on some buckets turned over in a cold alley by the market, something like that, and they didn’t care that they were hungry and that they were thirsty and that they were tired, and that their mothers were wondering where they were, and they told each other everything that they had ever known and everything they liked and everything they didn’t like, and all of their favorite colors and books, and what kind of rain was their favorite, sprinkles or downpours.

“And then the princess told the boy that she was a princess, and he told her what she already knew from his raggy clothing: that he was a peasant.

“She told him, with tears coming out of her eyes, that she had to go back to the castle.

“She told him, with her stomach twisted into terrible knots, that they could not see each other, that her father, who was a nasty old king, would not allow it.

“He told her, ‘Don’t worry. We will run away together.’

“She was confused, because she loved him, but she also really, actually loved being a princess, and she loved her mother and her sisters, and she had never lived anywhere but the castle, and she was not sure if she could really run away forever.

“He told her she could have some time to think about it.

“He told her that every night for one hundred nights he would stand outside her window, at the foot of the castle, and wait for her, and that if she came out on one of those one hundred nights, they would run away together. If, after one hundred nights of waiting, she did not come out, he would have his answer, and he would leave her alone.

“She went back to the castle. That night, he waited at her window.

“She did not come.