Vaclav & Lena (13 page)

Vaclav doesn’t want to think anymore about doing this trick with Lena.

The man turns to the audience and announces that as an unprecedented treat, he will invite the audience to come to the stage and peer inside the box. He unlatches the lid and peers inside from above, and Vaclav and Rasia hold their breath, because they are sure that Heather Holliday is dead, impaled inside the box, but he only smiles and then beckons the audience to come to the stage.

Vaclav and Rasia get up from their seats in the theater slowly. They feel at once excited to go onto the stage and to peep inside and to see secrets, and they also feel bad for wanting to peep and to see. Vaclav feels nervous to be so close to Heather Holliday, and to look at her in the box.

Vaclav steps onto the stage first, one aluminum-foil-wrapped sneaker after the other, and turns to help Rasia up onto the stage. The stage is only a little more than a foot high, and for Vaclav it is easy, like taking stair steps two at a time, but for Rasia, who is older and thicker than other mothers, and is creaky from the changes in climates in her life, it is difficult to get on the stage.

Vaclav takes her hand firmly in two of his, and she concentrates on holding her purse and puts one foot on the stage, and they both heave a little bit so that she is on the stage, two feet and two ankles and thick-soled shoes. They both feel the hollow plywood shell of the stage beneath them; they both feel it is less solid than they would like, less solid than they had thought it would be.

They approach the box, still holding hands.

The nose-nail man tells them to get a close look.

They both inch closer.

The box is very small, and Heather is curled up inside just like a baby, except that her arms are over her head instead of at her sides. The swords are going in all directions all around her. There is one sword that fits across her middle, where her stomach sinks away from her ribs before rising up again to meet her hips. There is one sword squeezed between her thighs. There is a sword just above her cheekbone, so that she is not able to turn her head.

Vaclav and Rasia are not able to focus on the swords and the incredible way that Heather Holliday has contorted around them. They are awkwardly trying to seem comfortable looking down at a live human being in a golden bikini stuffed into a box. Heather Holliday is not able to turn her head, but she looks at them out of the corner of her eye, and she still wears the smile that is like winking.

Vaclav can’t stop staring at Heather Holliday’s exposed left armpit. There is a diamond of tiny black stubble, and lines of white crusting the folds in her skin. Vaclav feels that this is the most private part of someone he has ever seen before. Even Heather Holliday cannot see this place on Heather Holliday’s body.

They spend many seconds looking into the box while the nose-nail man looks at them, while Heather Holliday looks around, and up at the ceiling, like a person in a dentist’s chair while the dentist’s hand is in her mouth. Vaclav tries to find a good place to look, but among the golden bikini and the skin and the fishnet and the armpit, he does not know what to do.

“Is lovely,” says Rasia, with her heavy, thick voice, surprising them all.

THE LIGHT OUTSIDE
…

A
fter the show, Vaclav and Rasia leave the theater, and are blasted by the sunlight, the smell, and the rush of traffic outside. They walk toward the subway, holding hands, but they do not talk.

When they get home, Rasia tells him to change, and she goes to the kitchen, and she pours juice into two little glasses, and she sets them on the kitchen table, and then she sits. She hears the sounds of Vaclav changing into his regular clothes; she hears drawers opening and closing.

When Vaclav takes a seat across from her at the kitchen table and looks at her, so afraid and worried, she takes a deep breath and starts.

“Do you know this, what has been happening to Lena?” she says. Vaclav’s face tells her that he doesn’t know what she means. “Did you know that not-nice things were happening to Lena?” she asks.

“No,” says Vaclav, thinking
Maybe
.

“Did you know that Lena’s aunt was not taking care of her?” she asks.

“No,” says Vaclav.

“I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe. So I had to say something, because I was worry about Lena.” Rasia feels the conversation settle into the reality of the kitchen, feels that it is getting easier to talk about these things.

“What did you have to say?” says Vaclav.

“I had to say somethings to the police,” she says. This makes Vaclav feel that his mother might be crazy for reporting something not nice to the police. Vaclav thinks of the not-nice things happening all the time at his school, like when the gym teacher yells at everyone to climb the rope faster, or when kids push one another in line for the water fountain. He thinks of large SWAT teams of police like they are on TV and on Russian news, rushing all the time up and down the corridors of his school, trying to stop all the not-niceness.

“Why did you do that?” says Vaclav.

“So that if things are happening, they are stopping them.” This makes Vaclav feel that maybe the not-nice things are actually very serious, for the police to be interested.

“Right now, the police are also thinking that not-nice things are happening. So they are taking Lena away.”

“What?”

“They are protecting her.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I am not her family. They will not tell me.”

“How will we find out where she is?”

“I don’t know. I can ask the police. I don’t know. I don’t know if they will be telling me. They say they are putting her somewhere safe.”

“Who is with her?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“I cannot go because I am not her family.”

“And …”

“And you cannot go because you are not her family.”

“Is her aunt with her?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Her aunt, she was not taking care of Lena.”

“She is alone!”

“Yes.”

“Call her aunt and ask where she is!”

“Her aunt is not knowing either. No one is knowing where she is, so that she is safe.”

“Lena will want me to know! Why can’t I know?”

“No one can know.”

“I am not no one.”

“I know.”

“Who will talk for her?”

“What?”

“Who will talk for her? Who will make sure that she is okay?”

“There are people.”

“What people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she? I have to go be with her. She’s alone and she’ll be afraid. You have to tell me!”

“I don’t know,
I don’t know
. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” And now Rasia realizes that she was wrong about the parts of this conversation to be nervous about. She was as afraid as any mother is afraid both to embarrass her son and to embarrass herself, to not give him all the right information and to give him too much information, which would scare him. What she could not predict was that Vaclav would not focus on the bad things that happened to Lena at the hands of people bigger and more powerful than himself. He would focus on the very bad thing that Rasia did, which was to take away his only friend.

THE SAME BUT HORRIBLE
…

W
hen Vaclav went to school on Monday, no one knew anything about what happened over the weekend. No one knew anything about Lena, or not-nice things, or the Aunt, or about Rasia ruining everything and calling the police. No one knew anything, and everything was the same but horrible.

Mrs. Bisbano asked Marina and Kristina again about where Lena was, and they didn’t know, but they didn’t seem too bothered.

Vaclav thought they might come by to talk to him, to ask him if anything had happened to Lena, but they didn’t.

Sometimes some people just stop coming to school. Like Genesis’s half-sister, who used to come but now lives in Puerto Rico most of the time and just comes for the summer.

Lena is gone, and it is because Rasia, who knows nothing about America and American police except for what she sees on
Law & Order
, and who has made a huge mistake and told some things to the police, probably not even the right things—probably they did not understand her, with her rumbling voice and her thick tongue—and she made them take Lena away because of her stupidity; she made them take Lena away.

Vaclav is like an empty person because he has nothing.

Vaclav has nothing, except for anger.

At his mother.

All day the anger is growing, and it is making new anger, and it is burning the back of his throat.

Every day he wakes up thinking that Lena might come back. All day at school, he waits for her to walk through the door.

After school, Vaclav comes home and goes into his room directly, and he does not come out for dinner and does not come out when he is called, and does not come out or respond when his mother sits outside the door, crying quietly and saying “Please, please.”

A MAGICIAN, A MOTHER,
AN AMERICAN GIRL
…

“K
nock, knock. I am coming in,” Rasia says loudly to the closed door of Vaclav’s bedroom. Rasia has a new habit of both knocking and saying that she is knocking. This is a new habit that began when Vaclav became a person taller than she is, singing in the shower in a voice so low that on occasion Rasia hears this voice and thinks,
Oh, no, a man has broken into our home and is showering in our shower, a serial killer like the man on the
Special Victims Unit
television show who has a cleansing ritual that he must do before he brutally kills his victims, and this man is going to come out of the shower and kill me
.

She is amazed by him. When did he become seventeen? He was little forever, and now he’s suddenly big like a man, and has a girlfriend. She worries, and this is the motive for Rasia’s knocking, and this is also the motive for Rasia to enter the bedroom quite frequently.

“Mom! Come in! I want to show you something,” Vaclav shouts. Rasia can hear in his man voice the softness and insistence of the little boy who is always needing to show her this, show her that. This needing is not going away, so far.

Rasia opens the door and feels relief because the bed is made and is totally unrumpled, and her little boy and the pretty American girl are not tangled together naked in the bed as she dreads. Her son is standing and holding many dollar bills. This is part of his newest trick, which is to make dollar bills disappear. Why this is a trick he is wanting to learn, why this is a trick anyone wants to see, Rasia does not understand.

The pretty American girl is sitting on the floor of the room, sitting with her legs out to both sides like a ballerina doing stretching. This American girl, with the name Rasia always forgets, is never sitting in a chair. She is always sitting on the floor with her legs all over the room, or twisted up like Indians from India, or on top of the desk, or she is lying on her belly on the floor, reading a book for homework. Who does school-work like this, on her belly on the floor like a snake or a potato farmer?

Why does Rasia always forget the name of this girl? Because it is a boy’s name, something like Fred or Bob. It does not make any sense.

Another thing not making sense: Who are these parents who live in a fancy-shmancy brownstone house but don’t teach their daughter to sit in a chair properly like a human being? Who are these parents who can’t spend some money to buy their daughter some new blue jeans without holes all over the knees and just under the rear? Why not buy the girl a nice skirt and some pantyhose and teach her to sit in a chair?

Rasia looks at Vaclav, holding these dollar bills, smiling his goofy smile. Most people do not really mean their smiles, most of the time. For most people, their smiles are a lie, a trick, or a promise. Vaclav’s smile is just a smile, and he always means it.

The girl is sitting on the floor, looking at Vaclav, and does not even seem to have a plan to stand up to say hello to Rasia.

“Maybe if you are not sitting in this way with legs out hilter-skilter you are not needing so many patches on your jeans? No?” Rasia tells the girl. The girl smiles big, with all her teeth out. This is not the way a girl should smile, without any modesty.

“Mom! Ryan likes the holes in her jeans,” Vaclav says, and Ryan laughs, because to Ryan, everything can be a joke.

“Yeah! I do like them, actually.” Ryan is still smiling at Rasia like a showgirl or a horse. Rasia just looks down at her. All around Ryan’s long denim legs are tiny pieces of paper. In the V-shaped space Ryan has made with her legs are glue and tape and scissors and fat black markers. She is making a huge, enormous mess in Vaclav’s room, and Rasia can give guarantees that the girl will not be the person who is picking anything up. Vaclav, the boy, will be picking up from the floor this mess that the girl has made. This is not the way.

Rasia is not happy to be picking up after Oleg, no, she is not, and many times she has thought,
If he does one dish, just one dish, I will not leave him
, but still she always stands there and washes all the dishes until there are not any dishes to do, and still he sits on the couch and lifts no fingers, and still she has not left him. Or else she has thought,
If he leaves his underpants on the floor of the bathroom again I will leave him
, but does she pick up the phone to call the lawyer to make a divorce? She does not. She picks up the damp underpants and brings them to the hamper, and still she is married to him because to divorce your husband over one soggy pair of underpants, this is not something that people do. This is a marriage, this picking up a little, putting away a little, forgiving a lot, and this is good enough. Why should it not be good enough for this girl who cannot sit in a chair? She should have a boy pick up after her? She should expect this? Why should this girl with the holes in the behind of her pants be waited on hands and feet?

The only thing that Rasia can understand is that all the pretty girls want to be the girlfriends of Vaclav, who is so tall and lanky (What a surprise! Look at the father! Look at the mother! Little Soviet tanks. Try to knock one over. Impossible.) and has such a head of hair, and the eyebrows that are the eyebrows of a movie star. He is so charming and handsome, who can blame the girl? This is something to like about the girl. Good taste.

Is it nice to see Vaclav with this American girl? This girl with freckles on her face and hair that is some of it blond and some of it red? This girl who wears shiny gloss on her lips all the time and smiles like a crazy person and laughs so loud? Is this nice? No, this is not nice. But what else had Rasia expected? Why else come here, to this crazy place of opportunity, but for her son to have a blond American girlfriend who is like an alien from Mars, she is so different. Why else? A Christmas tree in the window of the brownstone house and parents who do not introduce themselves. And what do the people do to live in such a shmancy place? Consulting. Vaclav says, “Mom, they do consulting.” This is not working, giving advice to people who are rich and can pay for advice.

“What is this? Is project for school?” She points in a direct, strong way at the paper Ryan is working on. She always means to be more like the mothers on television, who are more gentle in their talk and more gentle in their bodies, but she is always too hard, she pushes too hard on the air around her with her arms, with her vocal cords, is always surprised when she crashes through this soft American air.

“No, it’s not for school. I’m just making a flyer for my band.… We have a show next week at Ozzie’s.” Ryan holds her flyer up so that Rasia can see it. “You should come!” The flyer is covered all over with Xeroxed pictures of guitars and cassette tapes that are cut out and put on with Scotch tape, and it says, in very bad handwriting,
PINK FLAMINGOS WEDNESDAY 7 P.M. OZZIE’S COFFEE SHOP FREE FREE FREE!

“Why are you not using Vaclav’s computer and printer? You can make it nice with pictures and type the words so it is looking nicer. This way people will come to see the music, not think that you are some crazy people. Okay? You do it again on the computer,” Rasia says. She is trying to make a suggestion, but her words rush out of her mouth, stomp, stomp, stomp, always sounding like a command.

“Oh, thanks. I know it looks kinda sloppy, but that’s the thing. I mean, that’s the cool thing. It’s a whole movement, like an aesthetic, you know, the whole DIY thing, from the original DIY zines, I guess,” Ryan says, and Vaclav smiles, because he knows that Ryan will have to explain, and re-explain, and further explain everything that she has just said, because Rasia will want to know what all these words mean, and Ryan will have to use more new words to explain these things, and to see Ryan try earnestly to make Rasia understand why her band poster looks homemade, for some reason this is one of his favorite things about Ryan, that she will do this.

“What is this DIY zine?” Rasia asks.

“DIY stands for
do it yourself
, and zine is from
magazine—
it’s a small, independent magazine you make yourself—and since you make it yourself, it doesn’t look like all the big, glossy magazines, it’s cooler,” Ryan says.

“Okay. You use the computer, is not do it by yourself?” Rasia asks.

“No, the computer would totally still be doing it yourself, it’s just that it wouldn’t look cool,” Ryan says.

“The computer is the new cool thing. This everyone is saying. You should make the next one on the computer, show everyone how nice it can be; this is cooler,” Rasia says.

“Well, yeah, exactly,” Ryan begins explaining. “The whole thing is a reaction to the mass-produced slickness of—”

“Mom, I want to show you this new trick I’m working on,” Vaclav says, in order to save Ryan from herself.

“Homework is done?” Rasia asks.

“Homework is done! We always do it as soon as we get home,” Vaclav says.

“This I don’t believe,” Rasia says.

“No, really!” says Ryan. “I can’t concentrate on anything else until I get my homework done and out of the way. I can’t relax, I’ll just be thinking,
I have homework to do
, you know?” Rasia smiles at her, says nothing, and then looks quickly back to Vaclav.

“All is done?”

“Okay, maybe I left some for later; it’s not important,” Vaclav admits.

“Ach! I knew it! I knew it! Magic happens after homework,” Rasia says.

Rasia started her homework crusade when Vaclav was very young, because she did not come from Russia, leaving behind her mother and her grandmother Lidia, who she would never see again in this world, so that her son could be a street beggar, which is all that this magician thing might become for all anyone knows. She keeps him doing homework, every day of his life so far, believing that this will ensure that he has this magical thing, education, which is the key to being successful in the new country. He will go to college, get degrees, and have this education knitted into his life so that he will be good and successful.

Vaclav laughs, and hugs his mother and kisses her on the cheek. He has to lean down to do this now, and he knows that this makes his mother feel that he is a big full-grown man at the same time that she feels that he is still her little boy and that this is a feeling that fills her with joy. She pretends to be annoyed, but he knows that once he has hugged her in this way, she cannot be annoyed any longer. She is a warmed-up mushy mama now, and she cannot stay mad at him.

“Watch my trick? Please? Please? Please? Sit down on the bed, please?” He takes Rasia’s hand and leads her to the bed, and sweeps his hand over the covers as if he is dusting her chair for her, and she is charmed by him as if she is just a girl.

When
, she wonders,
did my son become so charming? When did he start to wear blue jeans in the way of American boys, so that they do not look like clothes that are covering the body but that they are part of the body? Even more so that they are part of the person? When did this happen? When did his hair become shaggy in the way of American boys, and when did he stop combing it? When did he get so tall, and how, with his mother and father so close to five feet, how did he grow to be nearly six feet tall, so that he looks like he is close to the ceiling? It must be this American food he is eating so much of; constantly he is eating
.

“Okay, okay. I am watching. What is this trick?” Rasia says. Vaclav looks directly at Rasia, his eyes on her eyes, and his entire self pivots around this one point of contact, and he changes, and he becomes Vaclav the Magnificent.

Watching him, you would think that he changed his clothes, maybe into a tuxedo with tails, but you would look and be surprised that he is still wearing the same jeans and T-shirt. You would feel, irrationally, that he suddenly became taller. You would search for the physical transformation, and you would try in vain to put your finger on what is different. Nothing is different, and yet everything is different. He has become Vaclav the Magnificent and is no longer Vaclav, your son, your boyfriend, the kid down the block. He is a magician, and a magician needs a stage. His presence bursts into the air and takes up most of the bedroom, so that he seems confined, trapped, where just a moment ago he seemed right at home.

“Ahh, mother. This is absolutely the greatest trick yet. In front of your very eyes, I am going to levitate. Yes, I, Vaclav, in front of these two beautiful ladies”—Vaclav nods to Ryan and to Rasia—“will raise my body, all two hundred pounds of me”—Ryan and Rasia laugh out loud—“Correction. Correction. The audience is correct to laugh at such an exaggeration. All one hundred and sixty-seven pounds of human flesh I will raise off the ground, with no external aids, no wires, nothing, just the sheer strength of my will. I trust that an audience such as you, so obviously devoted to the truth, will aid me in verifying that there are indeed no wires or other apparatus at all in the room.”

The audience agrees.

“Now I must kindly ask you for silence. I demand silence, for this feat requires absolute concentration,” says Vaclav the Magnificent.