Vaclav & Lena (8 page)

“I met a woman today who has a girl same age as you.” Rasia paused and looked at Vaclav, who raised one eyebrow. Skeptical.
Okay
, thought Rasia,
at least he is not angry. He is interested
.

“This girl, she is coming from Russia when she is a baby, she is having not her mother or her father around for her, and she is very shy.” Vaclav didn’t stop her, so she continued.

“She does not have many friends, and her English is not so good, so I am hoping that you will have playdate with her, maybe help with English, maybe even make friend.” Vaclav rolled his eyes in disgust, disinterest, and annoyance, all at the same time, and then asked, “What is her name?”

“Yelena. They call her Lena,” said Rasia.

“Okay,” said Vaclav. He knew who this girl was, the shy girl from ESL, but she had never spoken to him or to anyone else that he knew of.

“She is coming Saturday for playdate,” said Rasia. “Maybe for activity, we go to Coney Island.”

HOW IT WAS FOR LENA
…

L
ena woke up on a Saturday morning and went into the kitchen. Ekaterina, her aunt, was sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette and looking at the newspaper. Even though it was early in the morning, the Aunt had actually just come home from work and had not even gone to sleep yet. The Aunt looked at Lena but didn’t say anything, and Lena didn’t say anything either but reminded herself to be quiet. The Aunt didn’t feel good in the morning; mornings gave her a headache, and she hated when Lena made any sounds.

Lena looked for things to eat for breakfast, but there was not very much there, not any cereal or any pancake mix or anything like that, and in the refrigerator there was no milk or orange juice or eggs or string cheese. The only thing in the fridge was Slim-Fast, and the only thing in the freezer was vodka, and the only things in the pantry were cans of things that are not really good for eating, especially if you aren’t very good at using a can opener.

Lena closed the pantry lightly so that it didn’t make any sound at all. She was planning to give up and go back to her room and maybe lie in the bed and try to sleep a little bit more to pass the time. She was waiting for the Aunt to go to bed so that she could take a dollar bill from the Aunt’s purse to go buy a snack from the bodega on the corner, or so that she could drink one of the Slim-Fast cans from the fridge, if there were enough so that the Aunt wouldn’t notice one missing and would not yell at her.

“Get dress. You are going to your friend’s house,” said Lena’s aunt. Lena was confused, because she didn’t have any friends.

Lena also felt that she had no choice, because the Aunt told her she was going in a no-questions way, which was the way she said almost everything. So Lena went to her room and put on clothes and shoes, and made sure she was dressed and ready to go to her friend’s house.

SATURDAY MORNING
…

V
aclav woke up very early, and his mother was already awake, and Vaclav could smell furniture polish and lemons and bleach, and the house smelled like it did on mornings when there was company coming later, or the first time every year that it is nice enough outside to open all the windows and everything feels electric.

They had made a plan together. Rasia would take Vaclav and Lena to Coney Island on the subway, and they would ride the rides, and then come home and eat some sandwiches for lunch. Vaclav and his mother were very happy about this plan, both of them knowing that Vaclav would have a new friend, and both of them knowing that they were doing something nice for Lena. They could not know that many bad things would come from this day along with the good things. They did not know that the good things would happen and interact with the bad things like chemicals and make them worse, and the other way around as well. They did not know that Vaclav and Lena would wander past the famous Coney Island Sideshow and see magic tricks and Heather Holliday and her golden fringed bikini for the first time. They could not know that this would be the beginning of everything.

DING DONG HELLO
…

E
katerina walked Lena right up to the front door of Vaclav’s house, and Lena felt very bad and confused because she didn’t want the Aunt to leave her there, but she also didn’t want anyone to see the Aunt with her makeup still on for work. Unfortunately, there was nothing Lena could do. The Aunt held her wrist very tightly, and a little too high up in the air, so that Lena had to twist her body to keep her shoulder from hurting, and they stood and rang the bell. As soon as the bell chimed, Lena could hear movement behind the door.

On the other side of the door, Vaclav and his mother were both sitting on the big couch, with everything in the apartment clean and the TV off, not talking about how excited they were. When the doorbell rang, Vaclav and his mother both stood up, and Vaclav ran off to his room, pretending to suddenly need something, overcome with excitement and nervousness and not wanting to seem as if he was just sitting and waiting for Lena to come.

Rasia opened the door and stared at Ekaterina, who as the door was opening was pressing the doorbell a second time. Ekaterina had hair that started out dark brown at the scalp and became orange for a moment and then a glowing white-blond, stretched back tightly into a ponytail that started at the top of her head. She wore one of those fuzzy pink matching jumpsuits that all the young mothers were wearing, which made Rasia feel as though there was a club that she did not belong to, and on her feet she had big, high stiletto heels made out of clear plastic. Everything on her face was painted on as if she started with nothing there: big black eyebrows that did not match any of the hair that grew on her head, and thick, dark lines around her eyes, and thick pink lines around her lips, and even a thick line where her face ended at her jaw and did not blend into her neck.

Rasia looked at Ekaterina and then looked at Lena, who was gripping Ekaterina’s hand and looking terrified, and her heart broke just a little bit at first because she had no daughter, and then a moment later because of what she had heard about the story of Lena’s life and the rumors she had heard about Ekaterina’s job, and she wanted to scoop up the little girl and feed her and hold her and make her safe.

“Zdravstvuite,”
said the Aunt.

“
Zdravstvuite
, nice to meet you,” said Rasia, switching to English. The Aunt glared at her.

“I have to go now. I pick her up in the evening,” said the Aunt.

“Yes, of course,” said Rasia, embarrassed to realize that she had been imagining that Ekaterina would sit down, that she would serve her the tea that was already steeping in the kitchen, that Lena would run off to play with Vaclav, and that she and Ekaterina would discuss Lena and Vaclav, and parenthood, and the neighborhood, and the challenges of finding good after-school child care and the challenges of being in this country, and become unlikely friends. Rasia was surprised and embarrassed to feel so very lonely. This had happened before, a few times: loneliness that snuck up on her at the grocery store or on the bus and caught her off guard.

“Do svidaniya,”
said Lena’s aunt Ekaterina, turning to walk away on the crumbling, buckling sidewalk in her plastic high-heeled shoes without saying a word to Lena, like “Goodbye” or “Have a good time” or “I love you” or “Be good” or “I don’t care if I ever see you again; I hate you” or “Have a good time on the Cyclone and have fun seeing the ocean for the first time.” The Aunt just turned and left Lena there.

Rasia noticed that Lena still had tiny bits of sleep-crust in her eyes, and her heart broke a little bit more. She stood in the open doorway, watching, stunned, as the Aunt stomped away, lighting a cigarette as she walked.

“Do svidaniya,”
said Rasia, though Ekaterina was already too far away to hear.

VACLAV MAKES A GRAND ENTRANCE
…

“L
ena, come inside, is very nice to have you … Take off shoes here, please,” Rasia said, and pointed at the line of her family’s shoes next to the door: her loafers, her husband’s ugly work shoes, and Vaclav’s special new shoes with the lights on the heels and the Velcro everywhere, because in America no one, not even small children, has time to tie his own shoes, and everything must have flashing lights.

Lena walked over to the line of shoes and stood so that her feet were in line with all the empty shoes. Lena was wearing white canvas sneakers, and without reaching down with her arms at all or changing the positioning of her torso one single bit, she used the toe of her left foot to slip the shoe off her right foot, and then used the toe of her right foot to slip the shoe off her left foot. In this way, she took off her shoes without moving very much, and without taking her eyes off Rasia.

Vaclav was spying from the hallway and saw what Lena had done, that she had taken off her shoes with the minimum of effort, stepping to the exact place where she wanted the shoes to be so that she did not have to move them once they were off her feet. He smiled a little bit on the inside and came forward to introduce himself.

“Hello. I am Vaclav. It is nice to meet you. Welcome to my house. Can I get you something to drink?” he said, and tried very hard not to sound rehearsed. Lena just looked down, embarrassed.

“Okay,” said Vaclav. Vaclav started to feel embarrassed as he went over in his head why Lena maybe didn’t answer him, why she looked down at the floor, embarrassed. He had said, “Nice to meet you,” but, of course, it was not the first time he had ever met Lena, because they had been in school together and were in the same ESL class in kindergarten. Vaclav felt his face grow hot. He became worried, but he saw that Lena’s face looked hot and worried too.

The three of them, the mother, the young magician, and the tiny girl, stood silently, looking at the floor between them.

“Does anyone need to use the bathroom before we leave?” said Rasia.

“No,” said Vaclav. “I already went.” He looked at Lena, but she said nothing.

“Okay, I pee and then we go,” said Rasia, and she turned and walked to the bathroom, leaving Vaclav and Lena to stare at the floor together.

CHILDREN UNDER FORTY-FOUR INCHES
…

A
s they walked to the subway station together, Vaclav and his mother made strange efforts at having conversations that would be of interest to Lena, and that were in clear and simple English so that she could listen and feel included, but also in no way required Lena to respond or to answer questions. They talked about how they would be starting first grade at the end of the summer, about shows Vaclav liked on TV, and about how hot it was outside, but Lena did not join in.

All the way along East Sixteenth Street, onto Avenue U, all the way into the subway station and up the stairs to the platform, Vaclav and his mother did a dance around Lena, trying always to keep Lena between them, but Lena walked slowly, looking only down at the ground, and so Vaclav and his mother kept falling back to keep her between them, to keep up the illusion that they were enjoying the morning together.

Lena felt unsure of what to do. She had never been out with anyone besides her
babushka
and the Aunt. When her
babushka
was alive, they barely ever went out, because her
babushka
was weak and she had meals delivered for free from the nice volunteers at Meals on Wheels, and Lena and her
babushka
would share those. So mostly they went out only to the store on the corner for toilet paper or garbage bags, and that was only very rarely. The Aunt rarely took Lena anywhere.

Also, Lena had never taken the subway, and she felt very scared because she had no money. She didn’t think the way that Vaclav did, which was with total trust that if he needed something his mother would give it to him, would know and prepare him. Often Lena needed money for things and the Aunt did not give her any. She had only asked the Aunt for money once, and then never did it ever again.

Lena was afraid as they got closer and closer to the subway that she would have to pay in some way, and that she would be embarrassed and would have to ask Vaclav or his mother for money, and also, even if she had money, she did not know at all what was supposed to happen at the subway, she did not know how to pay to board the train, and she was terrified.

When they approached the subway station, Lena hung back and would not walk any farther, because she did not know where to go in the strange tangle of gates that looked like cages, and she saw the people rubbing yellow cards through the machine, and she did not have one.

Vaclav stood next to Lena and waved through the big metal cages to the man who sat in the booth on the other side. Vaclav pointed to his own head and to Lena, and then held up two fingers. The spinning-cage gate made a buzzing sound, and Vaclav took her hand and said, “Come, we go through together!” and then, to make sure that Lena did not feel embarrassed, “It is more fun to go two together.”

Lena was amazed that Vaclav knew the man in the booth, amazed that he knew the special hand signals to get the man to open the complicated gate to let them both in for free. She did not know yet, as Vaclav would later tell her, that up to three children forty-four inches tall and under ride for free on subways and local buses when accompanied by a fare-paying adult, and when he did tell her, the mystery of the subway went away and a new, amazing feeling of freedom took its place, but the safe feeling of Vaclav holding her hand never went away.

On the train, Vaclav showed Lena the best place to sit (in the back, facing backward, by a window), and Rasia sat across from them, with her purse in her lap, watching as Lena watched everything and Vaclav watched Lena.

RIDING ON THE Q TRAIN
…

O
n the train Lena saw: a white lady with a big leather purse and big leather boots and big, frizzy hair talking to a black man who talked to himself; a glass bottle half full of juice that rolled back and forth around the train, bumping into everyone’s feet; a man in a business suit who picked up a newspaper from the ground and read it and tucked it under his arm to take it with him when he got off; a man with one arm; a lady who wore gloves like a doctor; a skinny lady eating chicken out of a paper tray; three girls putting makeup on one another’s faces; two old ladies holding hands; a teenage boy with a tiny mustache and huge headphones; a lady with a plastic bag full of plastic bags; three men with big black hats and curls on the sides of their faces; three ladies with the same exact haircut pushing babies in strollers; a man sleeping on his own knees; a woman feeding a baby from under her shirt; a woman crying under sunglasses; and two girls wearing white shirts and red skirts, laughing and whispering.