The Magician's Assistant (27 page)

“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 said, 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.”

“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.