The Magician’s Assistant
“I’m nothing like him,” Sabine said regretfully. The list of ways they were different scrolled through her mind, overwhelming, endless. “He was a real crowd-pleaser. He could talk people up, charm them, make deals.” At the rug auctions, the way he bid so forcefully, so completely without hesitation that other people dropped out thinking that there was no point, this man would bid until the end. Then he’d take that same rug back to Pasadena and double the price, make some old lady from Glendale think he was all but giving it to her for Christmas, it was such a sweet deal. And in magic he invented misdirection, could have had the entire audience studying his kneecaps while his hands took oranges from his pockets.
Having left the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the counter by the empty blue tray, Dot was forced to stand up when she hadn’t intended to. “I have two daughters,” she said. “I know all about daughters. You remind me of my son.” She gestured the bottle towards Sabine before filling her own glass, but Sabine shook her head. “Half an inch,” Dot said, putting a splash in anyway. “Otherwise it makes me look bad. Kitty and Bertie, they can’t hold anything back. They can’t get what they want out of people, except maybe for me, because they’re too busy turning themselves inside out trying to be helpful. You think they could have stood up to a room full of people and not told them how to balance on top of a chair?”
Sabine shrugged. “If they wanted to.”
Dot tapped her finger hard in front of Sabine’s glass, nailing her point in place. “Not in a lifetime. They’d spill before the question had been all the way asked. But Guy, hell, you felt lucky if he told you what time it was. He was like you. He kept things in because we all wanted to know them. He was always entertaining us, juggling baseballs, doing impressions of people from his school or famous people or us. Guy never was a bully, but he stood up to people, he got his way. Howard could have barked at Guy all night and Guy would have never lost his head, just like you. That’s what made his father so crazy.” Dot closed her eyes and watched it all spread out before her in bright colors. “No matter how much Al screamed, how much he kicked Guy around, it always wound up looking like Guy was the one in charge. Plain and simple, Guy was smarter than Al, and god, did it make Al mad. There was no amount of punishment Al could dole out to stop him. Guy just wasn’t afraid. And I’ll tell you what, he should have been. I told him all the time. ‘Be smart,’ I’d say, ‘be afraid of your father.’ That’s all he really wanted from all of us, a little fear.”
“But he was afraid,” Sabine said. “He did lose his head. Everything that happened proves that.” Sabine looked down at the floor and saw the little black smudge where she had dropped her cigarette. Look to the other side and she would have seen the place where Dot and then her husband fell. It was like touring the beaches of Iwo Jima.
“No.” Dot had the authority of an eyewitness on a clear day. “What he did was the only thing there was to do. He hadn’t meant to kill his father, but he meant to stop him. That’s what mattered most to Guy, stopping him. He didn’t lose his head, he was thinking. He couldn’t get Al off of me and he saw there was no time to call anybody for help. Guy had to be the help himself. He saw that, understood that, and he did something. That’s not called losing your head.” Dot took a slower sip of her drink and it calmed her some. “I wish he had told you this himself, because he could have explained it so much better than me.”
“I wish he had, too.”
“I know that he didn’t have regrets about what he did. Maybe he felt sorry that Al died, and maybe he felt guilty about having done it, but he told me himself on the day he came home from Lowell that he’d done the right thing. What a grown-up boy he was, saying something like that. There he was, eighteen, and he’d already figured out all sorts of things I wouldn’t come to for years and years. I used to wish so bad I could talk to him, tell him once I’d finally put it all together, but nobody can be expected to wait around. By the time I understood what had happened he was already a famous magician. He had you. By the time I’d figured it out he had forgotten about me altogether.”
“He didn’t forget you.” But that was just something to say. Actually Sabine had no idea. Maybe he had forgotten. She never saw a trace of past in him. Maybe he had put every scrap of it to bed, including the woman sitting in front of her now. “When I think of my mother, I think of her playing the piano,” Parsifal would say to Sabine in their early days when she still bothered to ask. There was no piano in this house.
“Don’t try and make me feel better.”
“I’d love to make you feel better,” Sabine said, taking her drink down to bare ice. “I’d like to make us both feel better.”
The refrigerator made a low rumble and then resumed its deep electric grind. Dot blinked, as if suddenly awake. “You know, I gave myself a lot of comfort these last ten years or so, thinking he’d come back. Once I saw him on television and then when he started sending me money, I just knew, one of these days I was going to open up the door and there he’d be. The girls and I would talk about it all the time. Sometimes I’d be driving home from the grocery store and my palms would start to sweat on the steering wheel and I was sure, I was just absolutely sure.”
“I know,” Sabine said. If he had lived another twenty years, another forty, he would not have come back to this place. He had forgotten it. Even as he put the money into the envelope every month, it did not exist.
“And what I think is that this belief I had was what ruined everything. That’s the thing that kept me from going out and finding him, this idea that when he was ready he was going to come and find me. That’s the thing I’ve lost, that excitement, the nervousness I had from waiting. So just when I stopped waiting, that’s when you came.”
“When I came?”
“You take up that place. That’s what Kitty said, that all the years we’ve been saving a place for him and with you here, that place is full again. It is better.”
Dot smiled at her, not unlike the way Sabine’s mother used to smile when Sabine did well in ballet as a child. “I hate to bring this up,” Sabine said, and moved the ice in her glass in circles with her finger, “but you know I’m not going to stay here. Sooner or later I have to go back to L.A.”
“We’d talked about putting you in the basement, but with all the tricks you know you’d probably figure out how to escape.”
“It’s true.”
Dot patted her hand. “Go to bed, Sabine. It’s late. Nobody’s going to ask you to live in Nebraska. You have to be born in Nebraska to want to stay here, I know that. Half the time that doesn’t even do the trick. You’re my daughter-in-law, my family. You can live anywhere you want and that’s still going to be true.”
Sabine gave Dot a kiss and headed down the hallway to her room. The cold weather made her sleepy, even when she stayed inside. She would go home. She thought about walking down the long hall to her bedroom on Oriole Street. She thought about the smell of the lemon trees mixing with the smell of the chlorine from the pool as she ran her hand along the paneling of the house that Parsifal had lived in as a boy. In a couple of days, in a little while, she would go home.
In Los Angeles, every day came with a series of tasks: Pick up the Bactrim, deliver the condominium complex, lunch at Canter’s, take the rabbit to the vet. There were things she had to maintain, like the magic. Parsifal had told her in the very beginning, for magic to work it had to be a habit. Magic was food, it was sleep. Neglect made her awkward. She spun three balls in one hand while she brushed her teeth with the other. Add to that her job, the panes of glass that needed to be cut, sheets of grass to be painted. On the walls of her studio were the tacked-up drawings of buildings she would not get to for months, two dimensions she was to pull into three. Sabine made lists, things to buy, things to make, things to practice. All day long the list propelled her forward. When she went to bed at night her mind would reel through all she had forgotten, all the things there hadn’t been time for. It had been like this even when she was a child
, going from Hebrew school to painting class to ballet, working her math problems in the evenings, and then setting the table for dinner.
It wasn’t like that in Nebraska.
She slept. She memorized the black lines of the branches that brushed against the storm windows of Parsifal’s bedroom. She waited for Dot and Bertie to come home. She waited for Kitty and the boys. They were regular, punctual. She shaped herself around their coming and going. The house was clean, but when she was alone she cleaned it again. She read half of The Joy of Cooking and then made a cake from scratch, a daffodil cake. She chose the recipe because it was tedious and complicated and because she could find all the ingredients. She used every egg. In the garage, leaning alone in a corner, she found a snow shovel with a red handle and a flat tin bed. She put on her boots and hat and gloves and went outside to shovel the front walk. Then she shoveled the driveway. Sabine had never shoveled snow before. Every load surprised her with its weight, all those tiny flakes. She remembered reading somewhere that men were much more likely to have heart attacks and that it was better for women to shovel snow. What a way to die, pitching over into the soft bank, freezing there until your family came outside to find you. Her back hurt, a pain in a previously unknown muscle. She could feel the blisters rubbing beneath her soft lambskin gloves. Sabine shoveled the sidewalks well into the neighbors’ property on either side. When she was finished, she went in and worked herself out of her clothes, which were stiff with ice. She sat in a hot bath and shook from the cold. Her toes were wrinkled, white and numb. Outside, it was starting to snow again.
In Dot Fetters’ tiny ranch house, which in this blanket of heavy snow, and probably without it as well, appeared to be exactly like every other tiny ranch house in every direction, Sabine was finding a part of the husband she had lost. Guy the alter ego, the younger self. She imagined him flying down the street in the bracing cold, stomach to sled. She saw him at the kitchen table spooning through a bowl of cereal before school, his eyes fixed to the back of the box. Guy, who would someday be Parsifal, lying on the floor in the living room, reading library books on magic, frustrating books that never gave the information you really needed to have. She imagined him popular, tight with the neighborhood boys, good to his sister. At night she saw him asleep in the bed next to her bed, not the man he would be later on, the one that was gone, but this slighter, very present version of himself. She saw him in Kitty and Bertie, sometimes in Dot and How and Guy. She saw him at six years old and nine and twelve, because she needed to, every minute. Missing him was the dark and endless space she had stumbled into.
“I don’t want to put you to work,” Bertie said. “I think you should be relaxing, on vacation, but Mama thinks if we don’t give you things to do you’re going to kill yourself.” She set a stationery box on the kitchen table. “Maybe you could address some wedding invitations—only if you feel like it. I know your handwriting is better than mine.”
Sabine touched her fingers to the edge of the lid. She felt hungry.
“Go to bed,” Parsifal had said to her. “You’re going to go blind.”
“Few more,” Sabine said, not looking up. Why hadn’t she looked up? She needed two hundred ash trees, two and a half inches high. She kept a trunk pinched between tweezers.
He walked behind her, pushed his hands deep into her neck. Sabine’s neck was always aching. She spent her time hunched over. “Did you hear the one about the girl with too much work ethic?”
“No such thing.” She threaded on a branch.
He bent towards her. “I’m going to take you to the beach,” he whispered. “Make you lie on a towel all day and read trashy novels.” He touched his lips to her ear and she shivered. “You’ll go insane.”
Sabine, who had been driving the freeways of Southern California since she turned sixteen, would not drive in the snow, no matter how many times Dot offered her car. It would be like pitching an ice cube across a linoleum floor and then commanding it to stop. On Friday, Sabine’s fifth day in Alliance, when everyone was in school, Kitty came by to take her to Wal-Mart. Sabine had taken all the light fixtures off the ceilings that morning and washed them in ammonia and hot water. It had been her plan for the whole day, something to do that no one would notice that she had done. But by ten-thirty every glass cover was screwed back on the ceiling, free of dirt and dried-out flying insects, and there was nothing left. She was staring up at her work when Kitty let herself in the back. Sabine had not heard the car crunching into the recently shoveled snow. When she saw Kitty under those brighter lights she wanted for a moment to cry. It was the joy of having unexpected company, the joy of seeing Parsifal’s face, and the joy of seeing Kitty. They kissed each other in the kitchen, quickly on the cheek, as if they were old and wealthy friends meeting for lunch at the Bel Air Hotel.
“I thought you might want to get out,” Kitty said. “Mom said you wanted some pens to do Bertie’s invitations.”
Sabine did want to get out. She did want pens. Yes. “Don’t you have to work?”
Kitty shrugged and unlooped her scarf. Her hair was down, straight and shiny in the wonderful overhead light of the kitchen. “I’m working less now, now that we’re getting this money from Guy. I’m going three days a week regular, plus filling in for people when they’re sick. I figured if I didn’t cut back, Howard would. I beat him to it.”
Sabine pulled on her coat. “It is your money.”
“That’s the way I see it. I mean, most of it will go to college for the boys, assuming I can talk them into going. Neither one of them seems to think that spending their lives in Alliance working at the Woolrich plant like their parents would be such a bad way to go. How’s got good grades and Guy is smart enough, if I can just sit on him and make him work. They could go to college.”
“I don’t see why not.”
Parsifal had always been so proud of having gone to Dartmouth. He followed their mediocre football team with interest. He would sing the Dartmouth fight song in the shower.
Come stand up, men, and shout for Dartmouth.
Cheer when the team in GREEN appears;
For naught avails the strength of Harvard—
When they hear our mighty cheers:
Wah-who-wah-who-wah!
Now Sabine had no idea whether or not he had gone to college at all.
“Maybe you could mention it to the boys,” Kitty said, her face turned away. “Tell them it’s important. They’ll listen to you.”
“Why would they listen to me? They hardly know me.” Sabine pushed her feet and their two layers of socks into a pair of warmer boots she’d borrowed from Bertie.
“They’re crazy about you. They think you’re famous.”
“Famous?”
“You were married to their famous uncle. You won’t tell them how you got on your head, and besides, as far as they’re concerned, you’ve been on television with Johnny Carson every night for the last fifteen years.” She looked at Sabine. “Hat.”
Sabine touched her bare head.
If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need. It gave the world the feeling of organization and purpose. Get on one of these paths and it would take you directly to where you need to go, the ice slipping you quickly forward.
In the car Sabine fished her sunglasses out of her purse. “Do you get used to it?”
“To what?” Kitty said, one mittened hand guiding the steering wheel.
“The winter, all this snow. I think I’d feel a little panicked after a while. Trapped.”
“I can’t blame my panic on the weather,” Kitty said. “It’s bigger than that.”
Sabine smiled because it was what Parsifal would have sai
d, smiled because even if Kitty were serious, she herself had meant it as a joke. Maybe Kitty and Parsifal’s similarities were all genetic, the tilt of the eyes, the length of the leg; or maybe they had formed themselves carefully into one person those first fifteen years and it lasted them each a lifetime. Sabine looked out the window. A puff of a child, sexless in a yellow snowsuit, was pulled by a woman with a sled. It felt good to be out. The heater blew warm air on Sabine’s feet almost to the point of discomfort. The houses were painted blue, then green, then yellow, and the colors looked so good against the snow, like the green of those tough evergreens and boxwoods.
“I live down there.” Kitty pointed down one of the identical chutes.
“It’s nice that you’re so close.” Just as quickly as it had been there, Kitty’s street was gone. Sabine wanted to look over her shoulder. She hadn’t seen the name.
“Sometimes. My mother and I used to fight a lot. Now everybody’s older, it’s not so much of an issue anymore. She worries about me too much, though. I don’t like that. I have to worry about the boys and worry about myself, and then I have to worry about the fact that I make my mother worry. Wears me out.” Kitty pulled off one mitten with her teeth and punched down the cigarette lighter in the station wagon. She took a cigarette out of the pack on the dashboard while she waited for the lighter to pop back out again.
“So why is your mother worrying about you?”
“Why do you think?”
“No one seems to like your husband very much, including you, if you don’t mind my saying.”
Pop. Kitty held the hot orange coil up to light her cigarette. “We’re a fairly transparent bunch.”
“How long have you been married?”
Kitty cracked the window and exhaled. It was a long, exhausted sound that was meant to account for all of those years. The sharp, cold air outside blended with the cigarette smoke and then shot it back into the car. “I’m forty-four, so it would be twenty-four years.”