Vaclav & Lena (14 page)

Rasia looks at Ryan, who is looking at Vaclav with wide eyes, with her thin, pink lips slightly parted, with total adoration. Rasia wants this for her son, for someone to adore him, for someone to look at him as if he is glowing. She wants all the heavy love to be on the other side.

Rasia decides that it does not matter if she likes Ryan or any other girl. What is it, for a woman who has lived for more than five decades to like some girl who is putting her little-girl hands all over her son? It is not necessary for Rasia to like this girlfriend of her son, but it is necessary for the girl to adore him.

Vaclav stands in the corner of the room, at an angle, so that his profile is facing Ryan and Rasia. Vaclav looks down at the floor, and he breathes in deeply, deeply, four deep breaths, and then suddenly he is breathing as if he has just run many miles or leaped up many flights of stairs. It looks like something is happening to him, like his heart will explode or his lungs will come apart in pieces under the strain. Rasia begins to feel worried about this trick. This worry is nothing new. She always worries about Vaclav’s tricks. Of course she knows that it is only a trick, that it is not real, but she knows that he might fail at it, and to see someone fail at something they love is very hard when you love the person and all they ever wanted for their whole life since they could walk and talk is to be a great and famous magician. Also, Rasia is a little anxious because she feels that maybe the trick is really a little magic, and who knows what might happen to a person when they dabble in this magic; they could hurt themselves.

Vaclav looks terrified. His face is still looking at the ground, but his fists are clenched, and there are veins sticking out in his neck, veins that are working too hard, doing too many things. He raises his hands a little bit, and nothing happens. He lets his hands return to his sides, and his face, it looks like he is very upset. And then he breathes the deepest breath of all and lifts his hands only a little, only an inch from his sides, and suddenly he is moving slowly upward, his hands are moving up and his head is moving up, and his feet, yes, his feet are an inch off the ground.

Rasia gasps and throws her arm across Ryan’s chest, because this is a reflex that she has had since she gave birth to Vaclav, that whenever she is surprised, like stopping short in the car, she throws out her arm to protect the child next to her. This scares Ryan, and Ryan yells a tiny little yell and then dissolves into giggles, laughing at herself, and then with an inelegant little plop, Vaclav is back with both feet on the floor, and he seems for a moment to be catching his balance, back on earth again after defying gravity and levitating, even if only two inches, up into the atmosphere.

“How are you doing that? What is that? What did you do?” Rasia sounds angry, but she is not angry, not at all. Ryan claps loudly, she is so impressed, so proud. Ryan knows exactly how this trick is done; she even helped Vaclav practice it, helped him to get the angle right, helped him to figure out how to obscure the anchor foot, the foot that stays on the ground behind the front foot, and she watched patiently as he did it over and over again until his body learned it.

What is so wonderful to Ryan about this trick, this trick she has seen so many times? It is Vaclav’s performance, his very convincing performance, all the theatrics, the deep breathing, the concentration, which he had not practiced with her or discussed with her. He does these things instinctively, and he is so perfectly amazing that she is absolutely sure that he will one day be a very famous magician, of course.

Ryan sits on the bed and feels very proud of herself, to be the girlfriend of someone so smart and so handsome, someone who will one day be so successful at something so unique.

Vaclav, ignoring the questions, takes a deep bow.

“You have been a lovely audience—really, truly lovely—and I hardly ever say that. Thank you. Without you, I am nothing.” Here he bows again, even more deeply, and to greater applause. “I do it all for you—for my fans.”

He bows one final bow, and it is clear to Rasia and Ryan that the performance is over and that now the regular Vaclav, not Vaclav the Magnificent, is back.

“That was awesome! That was awesome. When are you going to perform that?” Ryan says.

“I might be ready for the world, but is the world ready for Vaclav the Magnificent?” Vaclav says, and Ryan beams.

Ryan smiles a flirty smile at Vaclav, and Rasia is starting again to think not-nice things about this girl who is too thin, as if her mother doesn’t even feed her, this mother who has not bothered to pick up a telephone and call Rasia, and she starts to think that maybe this girl is every afternoon after school having sex or even just doing naked things on this very bed with her little boy.

Rasia is thinking that she wants so badly to be able to talk to Vaclav about things, private things, and she is feeling bad because she has planned to talk to him so many times in so many different ways, and she has not yet been able to get these things to come out of her mouth, out loud. Today, at her office, Pamela from accounting had said that she didn’t need to go into detail about the “ins and outs.” Pamela told Rasia that she just needed to set some rules so that Vaclav and she knew that they were on the same page. Pamela said that with her son, she had said just one thing: “Whether I’m home or not, you respect my house: door open and feet on the ground. And when you’re in the parking lot behind the supermarket, wrap it.” Everyone had laughed at this, but Rasia had not gotten the joke, and she had felt too embarrassed to ask what this meant and what was funny.

Jessica from HR had said, “Kids these days are all having sex. The question is not whether they’re going to do it or not but whether they’re going to do it safely. You can’t stop him, but you can give him all the information he needs.” But what information did she have to give Vaclav? What would she tell him? What did she want him to know?

Ryan and Vaclav are still talking about Ryan’s show and this Ozzie person.

“Who is this Ozzie?” Rasia asks. Rasia says this like she is sure that Ozzie is a drug dealer, or a person with earrings in his face, or a prostitute, or something like that. She is saying it like she is just wondering which of these things this mysterious Ozzie is, but she is sure absolutely that whatever Ozzie is, Ozzie’s is a terrible place for children to be going.

“Mom, you would love Ozzie’s. It’s a coffee shop in Park Slope, an independent coffee shop, where they have a million different kinds of tea. And at night they have little performances, just in the coffee shop, there are just couches and whatever over there so people can just sit and listen or read or anything. They have really good cookies. And rugelach! They have really great rugelach.” Rasia’s son says
rugelach
like an American boy. Like this is a foreign thing. And she knows for sure that she would not like this place, this coffee shop full of mothers twenty years younger than her, with their fancy strollers, where she does not know what the rules are, where she will not know the right words, mocha this or venti that, where to order, where to pay, where to sit down, and she will feel like a buffalo walking into such a place, everyone looking at her and making her feel embarrassed while she pays four dollars for a drink she throws away, it tastes so awful.

“There is alcohol there?” she says.

“No, no. It’s a coffee shop. They don’t even have a liquor license.”

“Okay. I don’t know this place,” she says.

Vaclav understands. When he was a little boy, they discovered places together. Maybe other kids had a mom who explained to them, here is where you buy your subway card, and here is where you give the prescription to the pharmacist, and here is where you pick it up, and here is where you stand on line to mail a package, but when they arrived in America, Vaclav and Rasia learned together.

Now that they do far fewer things together, he is always doing something where she doesn’t know the place. This is something that can make a bruise on a mother, but Rasia tells herself that this is not so different from regular parents of regular American teenagers. But a little, she knows, it is very different.

“You know what, Mom? You should come. Come to Ozzie’s and you can see Ryan’s band, and you can see me do the trick,” Vaclav says.

“Okay. We see. I don’t know,” Rasia says. Rasia doesn’t want to feel this way, but she is scared of the idea of going to see Vaclav do a trick at Ozzie’s, where she will feel so out of place.

A sad silence inflates in the room, because Rasia and Vaclav and Ryan all know that Rasia will not come. Ryan finds herself not knowing what to do with her hands, finds herself making excuses. Making an exit.

“Oh, I have to get home for dinner. Thank you so much for having me over,” she says. Ryan rarely stays for dinner at Vaclav’s house. She tells Vaclav that her mother likes her to be home for dinner, which he understands to be the truth but not all of it.

Ryan doesn’t mind the food at Vaclav’s house. She minds the awareness, the very acute self-awareness she feels, the slow-motion awareness of her hands, her feet, the way she reaches for something on the table, the way she uses her fork and knife, the way she says “please” and “thank you.” She minds the way Rasia serves everyone instead of letting everyone take from big bowls on the table; she minds the way this makes her too aware of how much Rasia gives her, and how much she can eat, and the enormous gap between the two amounts. She minds the difference in condiments. These are small things.

The big thing is that she is aware of every word that does and does not come out of her mouth when she talks with Rasia, and especially with Oleg. She feels hyperaware of her words, her slang, her tone of voice; she is so often unsure of what they understand; she is worried that she might be condescending to them, speaking too slowly or too fast.

What Ryan really likes is having Vaclav over at her house. She likes showing him off, how he performs magic tricks for her sisters and different magic tricks for her parents, how he charms them. She likes how her dad will say, “Now, that is something!” and then talk to Vaclav about physics, which is his favorite thing in the world besides magic, or about baseball, which Ryan’s dad thinks Vaclav likes.

It is rare, though, that Vaclav can stay at her house for dinner. Rasia wants him home every night. And Vaclav never argues, he just goes home. This is irritating to Ryan, that he won’t battle Rasia for her. So she excuses herself and refuses invitations to dinner, and has Vaclav walk her to the Q train, so she can take the subway two express stops to her house and have dinner with her family and not have to think about how she holds her knife.

Rasia thinks that Ryan will not stay because she doesn’t like to eat strange food, and that to tell the truth, Ryan does not like to eat at all—just look at her, the evidence is in her wrists, she is so thin. On nights when Rasia is making something she feels with some level of confidence is totally normal and American, and healthy, she announces this loudly to Ryan.

“You are invited for staying here, if you like. Is grilled chicken. Healthy,” Rasia says, but Ryan thanks her, says no, begins packing her backpack. This healthy American dinner is appearing on her table more and more frequently, since the doctor told her that she was too fat, that she needed to eat less meat and more things green, and lose many pounds. Rasia has much faith in doctors, especially these young American doctors, with their offices like space stations, so when the doctor told her that she needed to lose pounds (at least fifty!) she asked him directly to specify, to enumerate and write down exactly what she needed to do.

When the doctor chuckled and told her that replacing a few dinners a week with lean protein and vegetables, like grilled chicken with asparagus or spinach, or a salad with grilled chicken, would be fine, and to take a brisk twenty-minute walk each day, Rasia nodded seriously and asked how many is a few. The doctor told her that he had always thought a few meant three.

Three nights a week, Rasia prepared grilled chicken with asparagus and spinach, and every day, when she came home from work, she put on her sneakers and walked around the block for twenty minutes.

Oleg did not join her in this exercise, and he was not enthusiastic about the grilled chicken with asparagus and spinach, and he lived for the days, especially Friday nights, when there would be borscht and challah and big chunks of meat in the borscht and a big piece of meat on his plate and a big bowl of ice cream after dinner.

Vaclav walks with Ryan to the door, retrieves her coat, carries her backpack. Outside, it is not yet dark. The sun is gone, but the light is still clinging to the air and the evening is at the moment when the light is just about to slip away. It is fall, and it is still warm, even as the sun goes down. It is four weeks until Halloween, and a week until the air starts to smell each evening of burning leaves.

KISSOLOGY
…

V
aclav waits until they turn the corner to stop and kiss Ryan. Besides magic, French kissing is the greatest thing in the world to him, and these days during school he is thinking more about kissing Ryan and less about magic. No matter how many times he kisses Ryan, he feels nervous and good, like being at the top of the first big drop on the Cyclone.

Vaclav likes kissing Ryan on the corner, but he also thinks of everything else all the time, everything else that might be done between a boy and a girl, and how it would be and how many of these things they could discover together if only they had a bed and a room and a blanket and some pillows for an afternoon. To think of a whole night, of having a whole night, this to Vaclav is incredible, these ideas of the things he and Ryan might do. He feels all these things igniting inside of him when he kisses her, and so he loves this kissing more than anything. When he kisses Ryan he takes all his thoughts about the things that they could do if they had the time and the places to do them, and he puts them into the kiss. With the air from his nose he breathes them into her, with his tongue he shows her the wildness and wetness and intensity of these things. When he kisses Ryan, all of these things are inside the kiss.