Vaclav & Lena (2 page)

Vaclav and Lena bow so that the audience knows to begin clapping.

“Fantastic!” says Rasia, although she is not sure which part of the trick was the trick. She is almost certain that she was not supposed to see Vaclav tip the coin out of the paper packet and into his open hand, and that she was not supposed to see him put the coin into his pocket when he went to take out the wand.

Vaclav and Lena bow again.

“Bravo!” says Rasia. Vaclav and Lena step down from the coffee table.

“Where is my quarter?” says Oleg.

“A magician never reveals the secrets,” says Vaclav.

“Oleg,” says Rasia to Vaclav’s father, meaning
do not ask about the quarter again
.

“Thank you,” says Vaclav. “I am glad you like. Lena and I will perform this on Saturday for fans at the boardwalk of Coney Island.” Vaclav is beaming.

“Vaclav.” Rasia takes a deep breath. She’s been trying to ignore this idea of a performance at Coney Island, but Vaclav won’t forget. He’s too persistent. He doesn’t know that this is a very bad idea.

“This is not such a good idea,” she says.

“Why?” asks Vaclav.

“It just is not.” How can she tell him the truth? She can’t tell him that the drunks and the teenagers at Coney Island will laugh at him. She can’t tell him that he will humiliate himself. She can’t tell him that no one will clap, that no one will do ooh and aah.

“Why?” asks Vaclav.

“It is not safe.” This is maybe close to being honest, she thinks. It is not safe, for Vaclav, out in the world, with his eyes open to everything and his heart beating right on his sleeve, with his dreams in his hands, ready to show and tell.

“That’s not fair! We must practice to do the show for a
real
audience!” he yells. This is fine, she tells herself, to let him think she is being the meanest person in the world. Let him think that she does not want him to perform his magic.

“That is the final word. I will not discuss,” she says.

“I cannot believe!” says Vaclav.

“Go wash your hands and get ready for dinner,” she says. “Lena, you too.”

Rasia stands at the door as Vaclav and Lena march toward a dinner that is not the thing they are hungry for.

DINNER
…

T
he kitchen in Vaclav’s house is very hot, and the air is thick. Breathing the air into your nose is like sucking a milkshake through a straw. Once Lena is in the kitchen, she already feels full, like the smell is filling up her belly all the way to the top. Dinner at Vaclav’s house is always like this. The smell is enough to have for dinner; you don’t even have to eat.

“What’s for dinner?” Vaclav asks.

“Is joke?” Rasia asks, because her son must know what is for dinner. The house is so full of the smell of borscht that you would expect the air to be tinted a little purply-red; you would expect that there might be condensation of borscht on the ceiling and on the walls and on the windowpanes.

Lena opens a drawer next to where Rasia’s large behind vacillates with the stirring of the borscht. She takes out four forks, four spoons, and names each one in her mind so that she’s sure she has one for each person. Mother spoon, father spoon, Vaclav spoon, me spoon. She says
mother
and
father
in her brain, but she means the mother of Vaclav and the father of Vaclav. This is not confusing to her because her own brain would never confuse the mother of Vaclav with the mother of Lena, because Lena has not seen her own mother since before she could have even remembered her.

Lena thinks about her own mother in a very different way from the way she thinks about Rasia. Rasia has a smell like strong perfume. She’s a big woman with a big rear end who wears faded, worn-out dresses and leather loafer-shoes on her feet and who makes smelly soup that she stirs and who makes chairs creak when she sits on them. Lena’s mother is an idea. Lena’s mother is a mystery.

Lena sets down the silverware and sits in the same place she always sits, next to Vaclav, across from his father, next to his mother.

Vaclav makes quick work of doing his job, setting out napkins and putting one water glass in front of each plate.

Lena sits while Vaclav fills her glass first, then Rasia’s, then his own. She watches while Vaclav fills Oleg’s glass with vodka.

Vaclav and Oleg sit down next. Vaclav quietly, Oleg with a low, embarrassing groan. Rasia will not sit down yet; she’ll remain standing until she has served borscht with meat to everyone, and then she’ll sit.

Rasia holds the pot of borscht to her side with two hands, her dark armpit exposed above it. She thuds the pot on the kitty-cat-shaped steel trivet on the table, then plunges the ladle into the borscht and brings it back like a piston. The ladle is white, stained with brown. The borscht is the color of the carpet in the school library, Lena thinks. Rasia fills her husband’s bowl. The borscht is the color of flowers. Rasia plunges the ladle into the soup again and again, serving Vaclav. The borscht is the color of a dress a queen might wear. The borscht floods Lena’s bowl. The borscht is the color of blood. The borscht is the color of blood, and in it are not pieces of meat but moles that have fallen off the many chins of Rasia. Once Lena’s mind has taken this turn, she cannot turn back.

Rasia sits heavily on her chair. She arranges her large belly above the waistband of her pantyhose. She holds her spoon above her bowl and lowers her head, but before she takes a sip, she glances at Lena. The air in the kitchen is wet and thick. Each breath Lena breathes is of borscht, of the sweaty spot between the folds of Rasia’s belly, of the breath from the back molars of Oleg, of the bits of moles floating about in the soup.

“Eat! Lena, eat!” Rasia is focused on Lena. Lena lowers her spoon into her borscht. She angles her spoon to try to get a spoonful with no moles.

“What is your problem? Can I give you personal invitation?” The yelling startles Lena, and she plunges her spoon into the borscht.

“She is so skinny like children on the streets of India. It is not cute, this skin and bones!” Rasia says, and then slurps her borscht.

Hot stomach stuff is rushing to the back of Lena’s throat, filling her mouth. She stands from the table, thinking maybe she can make it to the bathroom, where no one will see her, and she will rinse out her mouth and come back to the table maybe with her cheeks a little hot but otherwise no one will know anything. She’s thinking the bathroom is so close, the bathroom is so close, and if she can just keep her mouth closed, everything will be okay. But then there is another hot hiccup, another bubble, and she can’t keep it inside her mouth the way she thought she could, and it bursts out and onto her shirt and onto the floor, and she is barely three steps away from the dinner table.

Rasia rushes to her as Oleg throws his napkin down on the table and pushes his chair backward. Rasia’s back softens as her big, squishy arm extends around Lena, and she leads the girl, shaking, to the bathroom. Oleg takes his big glass and goes into the living room to sit on the couch and watch soap operas from Russia on the big-screen TV. Once he finishes the glass, he will start to snore, and he will snore on the couch until it is time to snore in the bedroom.

Vaclav pulls his feet up onto his chair to keep them away from the puke and looks down at the floor. Lena’s puke is not like his puke. His puke, behind the swings at school, when he has eaten too much and swung too much, is substantial and often borscht-colored. Lena’s puke is like the sea foam on the beach at Coney Island, frothy, stale, and not as yellow as pee.

Vaclav rises from his chair, careful not to step in the lovely puke of his lovely assistant, and reaches for a dishrag with which to clean up Lena’s too-small mess.

In the bathroom, Rasia dabs at Lena’s face with a wet washcloth. Are Lena’s eyes really so dark and huge, Rasia wonders, or do they just seem this way because her skin is so pale, her face so small and delicate? Lena sits on the seat-down toilet, holding her pukey T-shirt balled in her hands. Rasia decides, while cleaning Lena’s frightened face, to clean and dry Lena’s shirt, and not to mention the incident to the Aunt.

Rasia wonders if anyone has talked to Lena about the girl things that she would talk to a daughter about if she had a daughter. She wonders if one day Lena will have to ask the Aunt for a training bra to train her breasts to do what breasts are supposed to do, or if she will save her allowance money and go by herself to the department store. Rasia wonders if Lena misses having a mother, and then tells herself that this is stupid. Of course she does. It is hard, in your mind, where to put Lena; it is hard to know what to do with so much pity. Rasia tells Lena to wait in the bathroom while she fetches a clean T-shirt. Lena sits on the toilet, shirtless, arms crossed against her rib cage, staring at the tile.

HARD TO KNOW
…

W
hen Rasia walks Lena home, she notices that Lena holds her hand harder than usual. Maybe this is all in her mind. It seems, also, to Rasia that Lena is skinnier than usual, but with children, it is hard to know.

When Rasia opens the door to take Lena inside, and turns on the light, and looks around, she sees that everything is the same as it was the night before. Rasia’s best guess is that the Aunt has not been home, not to clean up the mess or to add to it. Lena has been left alone. There is no doubt in Rasia’s mind that this is not a place for a little girl to live. Of this she is sure, and this, this is hard to know.

VACLAV DOES EXCELLENT THINKING IN THE BUBBLE BATH
…

V
aclav wakes up early, without any help from his alarm clock. This morning, Vaclav has a clear, steely resolve to win his campaign for permission to perform a magic show on the boardwalk at Coney Island.

Still in his pajamas, he sits at the desk in his room, takes out his thesaurus, and begins a list.

EVIDENCE TO PARENTS OF THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF VACLAV FOR PROMOTING PERMISSION TO PERFORM MAGIC SHOW ON THE BOARDWALK OF CONEY ISLAND:

1. Room cleaning

2. Chore doing

3. Table setting

4. Homework finishing

5. Grade achieving

6. Extracurricular accomplishments

7. Devotion to career of magic

Vaclav replaces his pencil in his pencil cup, pleased for the moment with his list. He then pads gently to the bathroom to brush his teeth, careful not to wake his snoring mother and father.

Vaclav runs a bubble bath, because a bubble bath is where he does excellent thinking about his magic. He lies back, submerging himself only to the ears, and listens to the sounds of his body, the sounds of his house, through the water. His heartbeat is the same as the thump of something too heavy and hard in the clothes dryer of Mrs. Ruvinova upstairs. The gurgle of his tummy is the same as the gurgle of the pipes in the wall.

Vaclav closes his eyes, and the roar in his ears is the roar of an excited crowd. He is big and tall, now a man. He is dressed in a tuxedo that shines black and blue in the stage lights. Behind him, a curtain lifts to reveal Lena, in her own future adult body, strapped to a spinning wheel for the knife-throwing act. The audience gasps. Vaclav, from thin air, pulls out a handful of sharp knives. He fans the knives like playing cards and holds them up to the audience, to increase their anxiety. To demonstrate the sharpness and realness of the knives, he cuts a large gash in the curtain behind him. To make the audience think of the terror of such a blade piercing Lena’s beautiful skin, he throws a tomato into the air and slices it in two. Lena, spinning on the wheel, looks afraid but is not, really. Really she is trusting in Vaclav, and trusting in the precision, the perfection, of the act, for they have fine-tuned it over many years of practicing together.

Still, she is attuned completely and totally to Vaclav’s every muscle twitch, every blink of his eye. Even invisible signals he may give her with his mind—she listens for these like a radio that hears the silent songs in the air.

There is a loud knock on the bathroom door.

Oleg often needs to pee suddenly in the morning, because big glasses of vodka do not sit happily in the piss belly of a fifty-year-old man.

Vaclav is always telling his father that the word in English is
bladder
, and his father always responds that learning how to name piss and shit is not why he came all this way from Russia. He came from Russia, he is always telling Vaclav, for Vaclav to learn about stocks and dollars and American business, and to buy his papa a hot tub full of American Hooter waitresses one day.

Vaclav hoists himself out of the tub and plants one dripping foot on the bath mat, one dripping hand unlocking the door, the other dripping hand covering his you-know-what, so that his papa will not make fun.

As soon as the door is unlocked, Oleg bursts in, without giving slippery Vaclav any time to plunge back under the cover of the bubbles and water. He sees his son holding what he should not be holding, and lets out a roaring laugh.

Vaclav plops back into the tub and sinks down while Oleg pees, groaning with relief. Vaclav dunks his head under the water, to hide from the yellow smell that is in the steam, that is everywhere.

Oleg finishes his peeing and puts everything away inside of his pajama pants. Then he looks at the tub, looks at his son submerged under the water, his eyes squeezed shut. Oleg grunts and leaves the bathroom but does not close the door.

It is not easy for Vaclav to return to his vision of the future, but he keeps this vision in his mind, in the back of it, so that his dream is never far away from him. He dries his body and wraps himself in a large bath towel, then pads into the hallway, slowly, listening and sensing. His father has already fallen back to sleep; he can hear his parents snoring together in their bedroom. This is good. He will have time to lay the groundwork for his plans.

Vaclav takes great care to comb his hair, to tuck in his shirt, to wear an outfit for school that will please his mother. He tiptoes into the kitchen, and without turning on the lights, he silently sets the table. He even fills the teakettle, and puts it on the stove, and lights the stove, carefully. Because his mother has taught him that it is possible to turn the knob of the stove and leave gas pouring out with no fire to burn it up, and that this will explode the house like Chernobyl, he makes sure that the hiss of the gas meets the snap-snap-snap that makes fire to heat the water for the tea. Vaclav even slices bread and makes toast, and arranges the toast nicely on plates, and puts out his mother’s favorite jam for breakfast. Then Vaclav sits at the table and waits.