“Young.” But Sabine would have married at twenty if Parsifal would have married her then.
“So young. There should be laws about getting married so young.” Far, far ahead the traffic light switched from green to yellow to red, and Kitty began to pump her brakes slowly in anticipation of the stop. “I would have done it even if there had been a law. It made my mother so mad. I couldn’t resist. We got married in the Box Butte hospital. Howard and I were dating and he fell off a train. He was working at the trainyard then. There was some ice on the runner and off he went, right on his head, smashed the whole side of his face in.”
“That must have been awful.” Sabine remembered the light from the living room lamp throwing a dark shadow into the hole of Howard’s cheek, the nest of scars like knotted fishhooks.
“Oh, you should have seen me at the hospital. I sat by his bed crying and crying, the doctor saying he was probably going to die. I grew very attached to Howard when he was unconscious. I’d lost my father and I’d lost Guy, and there I was about to lose this boy I was dating that I didn’t even especially like, but at the time it all felt very connected. He was such a sweetheart in that bed, sleeping, all bandaged up. Nobody thought he’d pull through, and then when he did the first thing he said was that he wanted to marry me. I got up from my plastic chair, went down the hall, and got the chaplain. There’s something about a boy with a smashed-in head that’s very hard to resist when you’re twenty.”
“But that’s not why Dot didn’t want you to marry him.”
“Oh, God, no, nothing like that. Howard was a hoodlum when he was young. My mother was convinced somebody threw him off that train for gambling debts or stealing cars or some such thing. I’m sure he was just drunk or stoned. I never did ask him. The truth is, he turned out better than anybody thought he would. He’s kept a job, he’s stayed with us. But pretty much as soon as the pain medication wore off, we both knew we’d made a real mistake.” Kitty eased the car into a plowed lot. “Wal-Mart.”
“Is there any sort of art-supply store?”
“The general wisdom around here is if you can’t get it at Wal-Mart, you don’t need it.”
Sabine looked up at the brown building, which was itself the size of another parking lot. “I’ve never actually been in one of these.”
“Go on,” Kitty said.
Sabine shook her head. “I’ve just never had any reason to.”
Kitty stubbed out her cigarette and replaced her mitten. “Well, you are in for a treat.”
As they walked together towards the store she told Sabine, “I bring the boys here in the dead of winter when the weather is awful and they’re bored, and I come here when I want to be alone. My mother and I come here when we want to talk privately, and Bertie and I come here when we feel like seeing people. I come here when the air conditioner goes out in the summer and I buy popcorn and just walk around. Most of the times I can remember that Howard and I were actually getting along he’d ask me if I wanted to go to Wal-Mart with him, and we’d look at stuff we wanted to buy and talk about it—wouldn’t it be nice to have a Cuisinart, wouldn’t it be nice to have a sixty-four-piece sprocket set. It’s a very romantic place, really.”
On the curb was a soda machine, all drinks a quarter. Kitty leaned in towards Sabine as they pushed open the glass-and-metal doors. The warm air smelled like popcorn and Coke. It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes. An older woman in a blue tunic who seemed to be patterned on Dot, the same plastic glasses and gray curls, the same roundness, pushed out a shopping cart for them to take. She greeted Kitty by name.
“I buy books here,” Kitty said. “I buy my shampoo and underwear and cassette tapes and potato chips, sheets and towels and motor oil.” There was something in her tone, so low and conspiratorial, that Sabine put her gloved hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
“Why?” Sabine said. “Why?”
Kitty raised a hand over her head, gestured magnificently towards the fluorescent lights, the banners hanging from the ceiling that pointed you to specific departments and special values. “There is no place else in town. No place to go. This is it, Sabine.”
The place was an airport. Not an airport, but a hangar where planes were kept. Sabine thought of the marketplace in Bangkok, everything you wanted available to you. Somewhere, if they turned the right corner, there would be a row of live rabbits and chickens to buy for their supper. There would be gauzy sarongs and bright green songbirds and huge red fruits for which there was no name. Somewhere there would be an aisle of prostitutes, women and girls and boys in different sizes that could be purchased on an hourly basis. Sabine curled her fingers around the blue push-bar on the cart, even though Kitty had been steering.
“Can you think of anything you need?” Kitty asked. “Anything at all?”
“Just the pens.”
There was not one thing that was true about all the people in the store, but so many things repeated themselves, women with perms, men in dark blue jeans and cowboy boots, the dearth of color in their skin and eyes and hair. The people began to run together. And then she realized, they were all white people. Where had she ever been in Los Angeles where all the people were white? The white people looked at Sabine. Some doubled back down the same aisle twice to see her again. In the Alliance Wal-Mart, Sabine appeared famous. Maybe, without being able to remember the exact incident, they sensed that she had been on television. Maybe they could smell all the other places she had been to in her life. They didn’t know why it was exactly, but they knew she was different.
Kitty stopped the cart and put in two three-packs of paper towels. “Sale.”
Sabine nodded. Was $2.49 a good price? To know if paper towels were a deal this time, you’d have to remember what they cost last time. Sabine could never remember. They passed through the paper products, past the baby oils, lotions, diapers, shampoos. They went through Electronics. The bank of televisions played three different channels. They were all set to soap operas because it was that time of day. Women wearing jewelry and elaborate outfits mouthed their love to handsome men with slicked-back hair. They looked like they meant it, their eyes were bright with tears. The volume was off. Sabine started watching and fell behind. Kitty was making her way towards School Supplies, and Sabine hurried to catch up with her.
“Guy needs posterboard,” Kitty said and ran her fingers over the ten available colors. “He’s doing a project on food chains.”
Ahead of them, a man bent over a stack of spiral notebooks. Sabine recognized his coat, the curve of his shoulders, but couldn’t place him until he straightened up. Her mistake had been in trying to remember him as someone she knew in Los Angeles. “Haas,” she said.
Haas looked up through his glasses and smiled. “Hey, there.” He took a step forward but didn’t quite reach them.
“Hooky?” Kitty said.
“Lunch. I needed some things.” Haas looked more comfortable in the Wal-Mart than he did in the Fetters kitchen. He smiled easily.
“We came to get some pens. Sabine is going to do your wedding invitations.”
“That’s what Bertie told me,” he said. “It’s very nice of you. I think Bertie has good handwriting but she feels self-conscious about it. She wants everything to be perfect.”
“She was just trying to give me a task,” Sabine said. “I know she could do them.”
Haas shook his head. “She’s grateful for your help. Bertie’s so glad you’re here. We both are. It means a lot to have all the family together for the wedding.”
“Won’t be long now,” Kitty said.
Haas picked up a package of gold tinfoil stars and ran his fingers over the edges thoughtfully. “We’ve waited a long time. If it was up to me we’d go ahead and get married tomorrow, but Bertie wants a nice wedding and she should have one.” Haas waited through an awkward moment of silence and then tossed the stars in his basket. “I should go. The lines looked pretty long when I came in, and I’ve got to be back in clas
s by one.”
“Sure,” Kitty said.
“It was good to see you again.” He hesitated and then held out his hand to Sabine, who shook it and said good-bye.
“He thinks you’re famous, too,” Kitty whispered as Haas was walking away. “They make him watch the video every night.”
Sabine turned to watch him recede towards Checkout. His legs were thin and long beneath his coat. “Do you think Bertie’s doing the right thing? He seems so solemn.”
“Did you look in his basket? Almond Roca. Bertie loves that stuff and it’s not cheap. He’ll buy a couple of notebooks as a cover but he was over here to get her a present, you can bet your life on it. He loves her and she loves him. If you ask me, Bertie made him wait way too long. Even if the women in my family don’t have such a good track record with men, she’s never had anything to worry about with Haas. He’s always going to be good to her.”
That’s what Parsifal had been, good to her. It was the thing that Sabine believed in, more than passion, more than tradition. Find a man you love who is good to you. She looked at the pens: razor point, fine point, ballpoint, Roller-ball, indelible. There was one felt-tipped calligraphy pen, but it wasn’t what she’d hoped for. She liked the old-fashioned kind, a set with changeable nibs and a bottle of ink. “It seems like they’re waiting kind of late to get these invitations done.”
“I don’t know why they’re bothering to send them at all.” Kitty added a box of envelopes to the cart. “Everybody knows they’re getting married two weeks from Saturday. They know when it is and where it is and whether or not they’re coming. It’s all a formality, sending out the cards.”
“Sentimental words from a woman who got married in a hospital room.”
“It was a ward,” Kitty corrected. “No private room for Howard.”
Sabine dropped the pen in the basket and was ready to push on when she was sidetracked by the glue sticks. They looked so much like ChapSticks. Next to them were the X-acto knives. The posterboard was flimsy and cheap, but there was some illustration board that was almost as good as Bristol board. She picked up a metal ruler for a straight edge. Making models of buildings was how Sabine was used to filling up her time. In Los Angeles she was in demand. There was always a greater need than she could possibly meet. “I think I’m going to buy a couple more things, just to give myself something to do.”
“Sure,” Kitty said. “We’re in no hurry.”
What she needed she already owned. She had it in triplicate at home. But she wasn’t home, and suddenly the idea of building something appealed to her. Maybe she could make something Dot would like. She filled the basket with wire and tempera paint. She found things she never knew she wanted in the hardware section, a lovely jeweler’s file and a three-ounce hammer. She doubled back to Beauty and bought Q-tips and rolled cotton. She bought straight pins in the sewing section and pushpins in School Supplies.
Kitty looked in the basket. “We always buy things we didn’t mean to. That’s the whole point of the place. It’s cold outside, there’s nowhere else to go, so you might as well stay in here and shop.”
Before they left, Sabine bought herself a pair of men’s jeans in dark blue denim.
Kitty and Sabine were home long before anyone else. The day, which had been so bright when they left the house, had clouded over while they had been shopping, and by the time they were home again they had to turn on the light in the kitchen in order to see properly. Kitty made tuna-fish sandwiches while Sabine sorted through her purchases.
“My mother told me you took an egg out of her ear,” Kitty said.
“I did.”
Kitty nodded, mixing a spoonful of mayonnaise into the bowl. “She said you did a great job. I’d like it if you could take one out of my ear sometime, not to show me how to do it, I know you wouldn’t do that, but I’d like to see the trick.”
“I can’t do it if you ask me to. It only works if you catch someone off-guard. I’ll take an egg out of your ear sometime when you’re not expecting it.”
“Guy had a hell of a time with that one. He never could get it right.”
Sabine shook her head. “I just can’t imagine that. It was the easiest thing in the world for him.” When there were omelettes for breakfast he took all the eggs out of Phan’s ear. Something about the cold shell on the soft skin of his ears made Phan crazy. He would fall on the floor, giggling and squirming, while Parsifal pulled out another and another. Sabine knew how to palm an egg so well because she had seen it done right there on her kitchen floor a hundred times. Parsifal never did the trick again after Phan died. He wouldn’t even eat eggs. “Do you have a deck of cards?” Sabine asked. Think of something else.
Kitty looked in a couple of drawers in the kitchen and then disappeared into the living room. She came back with a blue Bicycle pack that she handed to Sabine.
“No eggs.” Sabine took the cards out of the box, leaving the jokers inside. “So we’ll do a different trick.” She was wonderful at shuffling. That was one of the great responsibilities of an assistant. After every show they did in Vegas the house would offer her a job. She could have had the best blackjack table on the floor. “A pretty girl like you,” they’d say. “You’d make ten times more dealing than whatever Mr. Magic is paying you.”
“Can you imagine anything worse than dealing in Vegas?” she’d say to Parsifal. Winners slipping red plastic chips down the front of your blouse as a sign of appreciation.
Maybe it was because she had such long, slim fingers. Hands that were delicate but strong enough to open lids that were sealed onto jars. “With those hands,” her mother would say, “you could have been a surgeon, a pianist. But my girl shuffles cards for a magician.” In later years, her mother said it proudly instead of sarcastically.
Sabine made the cards fly on the Fetters’ kitchen table. She showed off shamelessly for Kitty, who lowered herself slowly into the next chair. The cards shot up, twisted, and arched. She swept them to the left and then right, rocked them back and forth like notes held long on an accordion. She showed their faces, hid them, changed them. Each of the fifty-two was a separate object, a singular soul. That was how you had to think about them. Not one deck but fifty-two cards.
When she wanted them, they came back to her, a cozy stack. She pushed them with the tips of her fingers across the table to Kitty. “Cut?”
“I can’t believe the boys weren’t here to see this. You have to show them this.”
“You bet.”
Kitty declined to cut the deck and Sabine took it up again and fanned it out. “Pick a card, any card. Memorize it and put it back in the deck. Don’t forget it, don’t change your mind, don’t lie about what it was later on when I need you to tell me the truth.” Card banter. She knew it like a song. She sang it.
Kitty did not reach out at first. The cards still seemed to be spinning. There was not as much air in the room as there had been before. Sabine did not question the wait. She knew it. She had made it herself.
“Okay,” Kitty said, blinking. “Okay.” She slid one from the pack, looked at it, slipped it back.
“You’ve done your part, now relax. Don’t relax so much that you forget your card.” They were not her words, but they came out fine. Whoever really said anything for the first time, anyway? Sabine shuffled again, just a moderate riff this time. The shuffle show was already in place and now what mattered was not disturbing the order of the cards. “There are how many cards in a deck, Mrs. Plate?”
“Fifty-two.”
“Fifty-two, correct. And in that deck of cards there are how many suits?” Cut.
“Four.”
“And do you know the names of these suits?” Cut. Cut.
“Hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs.”
“Exactly right.” Cut. Cut. Cut. Cut. Put the deck down. “So we have fifty-two cards and four suits, which leaves us how many cards in each suit?” Sabine almost didn’t ask her this part. So many people got it wrong. The simple math of it fro
ze them and they couldn’t tell you to save their lives.
“Thirteen,” Kitty said.
Sabine smiled at her. “Beautiful.” She dealt out the entire deck into four piles. She counted to thirteen four times, made neat and even stacks without having to give the edges a straightening brush with her fingernail. Kitty watched her like she was dealing out Tarot cards, the truth of her future. The Sailor, the Drowned Man, the Queen of Wands. “So that’s all of them,” Sabine said. “Thirteen cards, four piles. My thought then is that this would have to be your card.” Sabine turned over the top card of the first pile, a six of clubs.
Kitty looked astonished and then heartbroken. It was better than giving them their card. They believed so completely that you would not fail. Even as they tried to follow you and couldn’t, they had seen a lifetime of card tricks. They were sure that the card they selected from the deck would come back to them at the end, even if they couldn’t understand how. Which was true, but Sabine was not at the end.
“No.”
Sabine looked pensive. She touched two fingers lightly to her lower lip. “I thought I knew how this one worked,” she said, not in the magician’s voice, but in her own. She tapped the second stack and turned the top card over. Six of diamonds. “This one?”
Kitty smiled. There was the pattern, the superior revelation. “No.”
Sabine went on to the third. “It shouldn’t be taking this long. Here?” Six of spades.
Kitty, thrilled, shook her head.
“One more chance,” Sabine whispered. She flicked the card over. She barely had to touch it, because it moved beneath her hand. Six of hearts.
“Yes.” Kitty nodded. “Yes, yes, yes.” She fell back in her chair, exhausted from the anticipation. She was smiling like a girl, so huge and open that Sabine could see not only how beautiful she must have been when she was the assistant, but how beautiful she was now. The card trick had made Kitty beautiful. “That was wonderful. Pure genius. You are wasting yourself here with us. You have to be a magician.”