The Magician’s Assistant

  “I’m awfully sorry about this,” Kitty said to her sister. “Everything falling apart right before you’re getting married. I should have waited. This morning when I left I wasn’t thinking, and then it just didn’t seem like I could go back.”

  “I don’t mean this unkindly,” Bertie said, “but you and Howard are always falling apart.” To show that there were no hard feelings intended, she moved a piece of Kitty’s hair out of her eyes and hooked it back behind her ear. “What the two of you do isn’t going to affect me and Haas. I mean, we care, we want you to be happy, but it isn’t going to spoil our wedding.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” Kitty said.

  “Where is everybody going to sleep?”

  “I know you think that I haven’t exactly noticed that you’ve moved out,” Dot said. “But as far as I’m concerned your room is up for grabs.”

  Bertie took a moment to stare at her shoes.

  “Sabine’s in your room, the boys are in Guy’s room, Kitty’s on the couch.”

  Because there was so much shifting around and so few beds, Sabine thought this would be as good a time as any to broach the topic she had so studiously avoided. “And I’m going home on Sunday, which will free up some space.” At that moment the refrigerator kicked off and Dot stopped stacking dishes, and the room was filled with a quiet unmatched in any windless Nebraska night.

  “What?” Kitty said.

  Sabine put down her pencil and tried to divide her gaze equally among her three friends. “It had to happen sooner or later. When I came here, I never thought I’d stay so long. You must all have been wondering when I was finally going to go.”

  “Don’t say that,” Bertie said.

  “The wedding is Saturday and then Sunday I’ll leave. I have to. I have to go home. I have the rabbit and the rug stores and the house to take care of. I can’t just move in here.”

  “No one’s talking about moving in,” Dot said. “But you only just got here. You can’t leave when you only just came.” She kept her voice light to let Sabine know she wasn’t taking her talk of departure seriously at all.

  “Listen to me,” Sabine said. “I’m forty-one years old. Everything I know is in Los Angeles. That’s where I live. You saved my life, letting me come up here. I was so depressed over Parsifal, but I think I’m ready to try things out at home.”

  “So you’re over him now?” Kitty said.

  The room turned and looked at Kitty. Sabine’s mouth opened and then closed, silent as a fish. She squeezed a kneaded eraser between her fingers. Over Parsifal?

  “Kitty, Jesus,” Bertie said.

  Kitty closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know what made me say that. I just don’t want you to go, is all. I didn’t mean that. We all want you to stay.”

  “We’re not going to talk about this now,” Dot said. She opened up a cupboard and began to sift randomly through cans. “There’s still plenty of time to think this over.”

  “I just wanted you to know,” Sabine said, her voice coming out hoarse.

  Dot held up her hand. “We’re talking about this later.”

  “Sabine,” Kitty said.

  Sabine shook her head. “I’m fine.” She picked up her pencil and quickly began to draw her bedroom at home, where she would be sleeping in what was only a matter of days. She marked off the French doors that looked out at the pool. She put in the indentations for the fireplace. She made a walk-in closet. Parsifal’s clothes to the right, Phan’s to the left. She had left her clothes in her bedroom upstairs.

  As the evening went on, everything went in reverse. After dinner it was Bertie who left and the Plates who stayed. Everyone thought that Howard might come by, though no one as much as mentioned his name. Every rustle in the backyard made them sit up straight and lean towards the window. They were not afraid of Howard Plate. They worried when they thought he was out there in the cold, freezing to death rather than knocking on the window to come inside.

  After dinner Sabine began measuring pieces of board and cutting them out with razor blades. She would keep the house very small, a little jewel box. Small was no good for architects, but it was perfect if somebody was actually going to keep the thing around for a while. Small was also more difficult, and she was interested in time-consuming projects.

  “You make it out of posterboard?” How asked. He sat beside her under the swag light, watching her careful fingers trace the lines.

  “Posterboard, plywood, playing cards, anything I can find. You should see the box of scraps I have at home. Everything is separated by thickness. I save the pieces of cardboard out of stocking packages, pastry boxes.”

  He watched the blade slide past the side of her hand. “Have you ever cut yourself?”

  She turned her wrist over. “Once.” The scar was still red and there were the smallest dots on either side where the thread had gone in and come out again.

  How extended one careful finger and ran it against her skin. “That’s awfully neat.”

  “How can you remember exactly what your house looks like?” Guy said.

  “Don’t you know what your house looks like?”

  “Sure I do, but I couldn’t draw it. I wouldn’t know where everything went.”

  “I have a good memory for buildings, I guess. The same way some people remember faces.” Sabine glued two pieces of board together, recessing the second piece slightly to make windowsills. Tomorrow she could look around for something to use for the glass. Sabine had never made a model of a house she had lived in before. She had very rarely modeled real houses. Making things that were already made meant that you had to suffer the burden of comparison. Usually what people needed to see was the idea of a house, the possibility. Once the poured concrete and supporting beams existed, a tiny reproduction of it was nothing more than precious.

  There was nothing to watch on that first night, drawing up plans, cutting and layering walls to dry overnight, but they sat with her at the table and watched her like a television. Finally, when it was late enough, Kitty checked the boys’ homework and then herded them towards Parsifal’s room, though they were years beyond anyone being able to put them to bed. Then she brought blankets and a pillow from the hall closet and started to make up the couch.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Sabine said. “You’re welcome to sleep in Bertie’s room.”

  “Well, she can’t sleep with me,” Dot said, stretching her arms over her head. “I’m willing to take this welcome-you-back-to-the-nest thing just so far.”

  “I’ve put many a night in on this couch. I’m going to be fine here.”

  Sabine got up to wash the glue off the razor blade and off her hands. “Well, if you change your mind, you know where I’ll be.” There was not a great deal of sincerity in the offer. She was hurt by what Kitty had said and felt that if Kitty wanted to sleep on the couch she could sleep on the couch. Sabine dried her hands on a dish towel that was covered with fat blue ducks. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Right behind you,” Dot said. She didn’t offer Sabine a drink. The drink was their all-clear sign that everyone else had finally gone.

  Kitty, who looked like the victim of some natural disaster standing there alone with her arms full of blankets, told the two of them good-night.

  Bertie’s room had been Kitty’s room. Dot and Al had been in the room beside hers, Parsifal across the hall. That was the map of the family before the great shift in sleeping arrangements came: Al down to the cemetery, Parsifal off to his bunk at Lowell, and Kitty crossing the hall to make a place for her soon-to-be-born baby sister. Or maybe she just wanted to be in her brother’s bed. Maybe she thought she would stay there when Parsifal came home and they would sleep in their matching twins, side by side.

  Sabine had had that thought herself, sleeping in one of the two narrow beds: that somehow she and Parsifal were there in that room together, united now against any danger that had previously been for him alone. Comp
aratively, Bertie’s double bed felt like a giant expanse of mattress, and she tossed and rolled, trying to find a place for herself that was safe in so much open space. How had she slept in Phan and Parsifal’s king-sized bed? A single bed was all that anyone needed if they were alone. She took the extra pillow and pressed it against her back, trying to make herself feel hemmed in. She wondered what was going on across the hall, if the boys were talking, fighting, sleeping, pretending to sleep. She wondered if they realized where they were.

  She pushed her hands into her pillow and closed her eyes. She thought about what it would be like to be home again, to have the rabbit snuggled hard against her back. She thought of her parents standing together in the airport, how they would arrive at least an hour early to make sure that they didn’t get caught in traffic.

  “Sabine?” There was a crack of light coming in from the hall and the dark outline of someone at her door. For a split second she thought Bertie had come back. She imagined herself curled up in the hallway with her pillow and blanket. “Are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  Kitty came in dressed in a dark T-shirt and a pair of shorts, or maybe they were short pajamas, it was hard to tell in the dark. She sat down on the edge of the bed, facing away from Sabine, her hands holding tightly to her kneecaps.

  “Did you decide not to sleep on the couch?” Sabine whispered, not wanting to wake up whoever else might be asleep. The walls in this house afforded all the privacy of Japanese scrims.

  “It was a terrible thing that I said.” Kitty’s voice trembled. “I’m lying out there in the living room and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “You’ve had a hard day,” Sabine said, and with a sudden, benevolent clarity, she knew that she was right. Kitty was simply in fighting mode. She had been fighting with Howard all week. She had packed up her boys and slipped out this very morning. “You’re tired. Just forget about it.”

  “It surprised me so much when you said you were leaving. I mean, I knew that sooner or later you’d go, but when you said it—I don’t know.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I know you’d never forget about Guy.”

  “No.”

  That was all there was to say about it, but Kitty stayed, hands to knees, looking at the wall in the dark in the room that had been her room three lifetimes ago. Sabine waited to see if there were something else. You never knew with these people, there was always some revelation lurking around the corner of every meaningful silence. “Are you okay?” Sabine asked.

  “Okay,” Kitty said in a way that meant, Just okay.

  “Are you thinking about Howard?”

  “Nope.”

  Sabine stifled a small yawn by pushing her mouth against her pillow. “Do you want to sleep here? You really don’t have to stay on the couch.”

  “I should go back,” Kitty said, staying perfectly still.

  “Well, all right.” Sabine would have been happy to have her stay. The bed felt so cavernous.

  “I should go back,” Kitty said again, and then stood up and turned around to face the mattress. “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  When she said it Kitty put a hand flat on the bed, leaned forward and kissed her. It was not a kiss on the cheek, or a kiss that was meant to be a kiss on the cheek but lost its way in the dark and landed gently on the lips as an accident. Kitty kissed her lightly, stopped for one second, and then kissed her again. Two soft mouths made softer by the close proximity of sleep, that dozing, nearly dreaming warmth that made people affectionate and unembarrassed. Sabine, who had not been kissed in this way for a long time, remembered the feeling and kissed back, some instinctual code patterned deeply in the cells. She kissed before thinking or understanding, and before she could think or understand, it was over. The beautiful face receded in the dark. Kitty smoothed down Sabine’s hair as if she were a feverish child needing comfort and then she left without repeating her good-nights, leaving Sabine to rattle in the four corners of her bed alone with something she had not started. The door clicked shut. There was no proof that anything had happened at all. Sabine’s body was terribly awake, every inch of it ready as it had not been two minutes before, all of it confused with wanting. Kitty had kissed her. Sabine rolled from her back to her stomach and then onto her left side. What should she have said? Kitty was out there now, alone on the sofa where the cold air came in from the windows despite Dot’s vigorous caulking. Maybe Sabine should go to her now, sit beside her, possibly take her hand, tell her something she had not yet thought of. Sabine touched her fingers to her lips. There was no evidence. She rolled back onto her stomach and waited, her eyes straining against the dark, for something else to happen.

  No one slept well in their new beds.

  In the morning only Dot seemed fresh, mixing up pancake batter from Bisquick. She was humming quietly to herself when Sabine came in, a snappy tune that Sabine did not recognize. Dot had wanted her house to herself but was so accustomed to disappointment that she took it all in graceful stride. Guy was in the shower, a steamy marathon meant to deny his brother even a tablespoon of hot water. How pounded on the bathroom door. “I said now!” he shouted.

  Dot rubbed her hands in one quick, downward wipe on the dish towel tucked into the front of her pants and hustled down the hall towards the noise. “That thing will come right off the hinges,” she said to How. “This house isn’t built for high-impact fights. That, and your mother is still asleep, so keep it down.”

  “Sorry, Gram,” How said, and twisted his bare toes into the carpet.

  Dot tapped politely on the door. “Come on out now, Guy, or I’ll come in and get you. I have the key, you know. I’ve seen you naked before.”

  The water shut off. A breath of steam rose from beneath the door.

  Sabine sat down at the table wearing Phan’s pajamas and Parsifal’s bathrobe. She was a little bit taller than Phan and her ankles showed bare under the cuffs of the short pants. Dot came down the hall just as Kitty turned in from the living room.

  “You’re not asleep,” Dot said.

  “I wish I was.” Kitty poured herself a cup of coffee and turned to Sabine. “Coffee?”

  “Sure,” Sabine said. She was looking for some recognition and hoping in a way that was weak and halfhearted that there would be none. In memory, the kiss had become less certain. It could have been friendly, familial, a good-night wish for pleasant dreams. Kitty was, after all, her sister-in-law, a married woman, however unhappily married. And Kitty was a woman. That made the kiss a trick coin, heads on both sides. Kitty and Sabine were both women, and despite their mutual lack of luck with men, they were not women naturally inclined towards women. Not that one kiss mattered. One kiss between two half-asleep women in their forties. It was best forgotten.

  Kitty handed the cup to Sabine with no brush of the hand, no secret message to decode.

  “I’m on today,” Kitty said to Sabine, to her mother, to anyone who might be listening. “I’ve got to get moving if my children will ever vacate the shower.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.” Dot flipped a pancake, a true flip, where the cake lost contact with the spatula and did one solo rotation in the air.

  The coffee was black and Sabine got up to get some milk out of the refrigerator. Even though she had not been looking for an egg, there they were. This was the bathrobe Parsifal wore on omelette Sundays. The pockets were deep and lined in fleecy flannel. The robe itself had so much fabric that one could easily hide a half dozen in the folds.

  “Sleep okay?” Sabine asked, taking back her place at the table.

  “Too much to think about,” Kitty said, her tone again implying exactly nothing. “The first night out of the house always makes me crazy.” As in, cannot be held accountable for actions?

  “So tonight will be easier. Boys!” Dot called down the hall. “Are you planning on eating this morning or are you just going to bathe?”

  “I’m going to have to drive them in.” Kitt
y looked at her watch with tired resignation. “The school bus isn’t coming here.”

  Soon enough the smell of pancakes pulled the boys towards the kitchen, the sweet perfume of maple syrup calling them by name. Guy was exhausted from water that was too hot, and How was agitated from water that was too cold. Their wet hair curled darkly and dripped down their necks and into the collars of their ironed shirts. Even now their eyes were longing for sleep, and if their mother had said the deal was off, there was no need for school today after all, they would have wandered back down the hall in their somnambulist fog and curled into their beds like bears in winter. Dot put down plates of pancakes all around.

  Kitty pushed away from the table. “I’m not going to have time.”

  “Always time for breakfast,” Dot said briskly, a recording from a thousand mornings spent giving instruction on eating habits.

  “Have something,” Sabine said.

  “You’ve been spending too much time with my mother.”

  “Something small, then.” Sabine leaned forward and let her fingers slip into Kitty’s soft hair, which had not yet been tied back for the day. The rest of them looked up. All eyes were on her, on her hand touching Kitty’s hair, and yet not one of them saw the egg until the moment it was pushed, whole and dully white, from her ear. Kitty shivered and touched the side of her head.

  They stared at the egg in wonder, as if it were the one thing that might save them all. “That is so cool,” Guy said appreciatively.