The Illusionist

by Dinitia Smith

  One time, in the schoolyard, I found Brian sitting alone on a swing, sitting in a square of too-hot sunlight, blinking blinking all alone. I said, “Brian, why don’t you wait to go to the bathroom? If you have an accident, you should change your clothes.”

  He said, “Don’t have no other clothes.”

  “You do too, Brian. Why do you do it in your pants instead of waiting to go to the bathroom?”

  “Cecil, he hit me on the butt til I pee. Then he makes me wear my dirty pants to teach me a lesson.”

  “Cecil? Who’s Cecil?”

  “He’s my mom’s boyfriend. He lives with us.”

  I wondered what kind of person would do that to a boy. I was so lucky, so loved, I couldn’t understand it. I knew his secret, and it was a mystery to me.

  Being loved made me strong. Now sometimes when the other kids excluded him, I’d sit down by him in the cafeteria, in defiance of his tormentors. And when we had to choose a group for a class project and nobody picked Brian, and he was sitting there all alone pretending he didn’t care, I’d feel sorry for him and invite him into my group.

  They took Brian out of his home, away from his family, put him in a foster home for a while, but then they gave him back to his mother and Cecil. All those Perez kids were trouble. They all looked like angels, with that curly blond hair and those pale blue eyes, seemed like they all had tans, but if you looked close, their skin was covered with a thin film of dust. They were all learning disabled and truant, always getting in trouble. Brian should’ve been a beautiful boy, but was not because of that blank, hard look on his little face.

  The family lived in that strange, blue-colored house underneath the big fuel tanks by Sparta Utility. The front yard was always littered with toys and old engine parts.

  One day when we were ten, Brian arrived at our house. He had on the blank-faced look, his flat, bony face was streaked with dirt. He had only his jeans on, his skinny little chest was heaving, his ribs sticking out through the skin, the muscles on his shoulders and arms tight and sinewy even then.

  “What’s the matter?” Mommy asked him.

  “They locked me in a room, Cecil did. They won’t give me nothin’ to eat. I escaped. Climbed out the window.”

  Mommy took him in, gave him a bath, and called B.C.W. and they removed him again, and placed him in a group home. At school, he was put in Special Ed, and we didn’t have any classes together after that.

  When we were in junior high, Brian was always sitting on the bench outside the principal’s office, white-blond curls framing his face, slitty blue eyes blinking blinking. “Now what’ve you gone and done, Brian?” I asked.

  “Mohammed says I pulled a syringe on him.”

  “A syringe is a lethal weapon, Brian. Somebody could get AIDS. That’s negative attention, Brian.” I was a conflict mediator now and we’d studied “negative attention” in Conflict Resolution Workshop.

  His eyes darted to me. “You’re my only friend, Mellie,” he said.

  Around then was when he first started setting fires. The first one was in the basement at school, he and a group of boys set fire to a cardboard box and watched it burn. It set off the alarm and we were all evacuated for twenty minutes, and he got suspended. I don’t know what it was in Brian that loved fire, the warmth of it, the light, the power it gave him, to create something beautiful, to destroy.

  You must love the weak and the destitute, Mommy said. And I was a Christian, or trying to be.

  “When you get mad, Brian, just count to ten,” I told him. We’d learned that in workshop too. “Just sit there and meditate. I’ll show you how.” I touched him on the shoulder and suddenly his skinny body froze under my fingertips, all tense with love, I knew even then. “Breathe deep . . . one—two—three,” I told him. “See . . . how relaxed you feel . . .”

  Later on, after he started really getting in trouble, after he got arrested for setting the fire in that apartment building on Washington Street, where he and Jimmy were squatting, Mommy said to stay away from him, but he would come around or I’d run into him, because he was waiting for me and I’d give in out of pity.

  In a way, Brian was saved because he became a stud. As he got older, he got handsome. He was tall and thin now, with a nice long line to his torso. A lot of girls liked Brian—but they were trash girls. He’d date them a few times, then abandon them. He was always hanging around me, but I only cared about him like a brother, or like my child.

  He’d turn up at my house suddenly, just like that. Want to talk. Pour his whole heart out to me, his voice all breathless, as if he’d been storing up all those feelings for months. And I’d try to talk to him about Jesus. “Jesus accepts the most pitiful sinner,” I said. “ ‘I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’ John eight, twelve.”

  “Fuck,” he said. “I’m too far gone for Jesus!” And he laughed.

  Last August one night, he turned up at my house in his car and begged me to go for a ride with him. He’d just gotten fired from his job at Allbright’s Auto Shop. They’d accused him of stealing parts. “Fuckin’ bullshit man, they had it in for me right from the beginning!”

  I let him drive me out to the Wooden Nickel. He parked the car in the lot overlooking the river, and we sat there, the summer air around us thick with heat and moisture, kids standing in the shadows, darting in and out of the trees. You could hear the sound of voices rising, falling, car doors slamming, the sound echoing off the palisades.

  Suddenly, next to me in the shadows, Brian turned to me. “I love you, Melanie,” he cried, as if his voice was tearing out of his throat.

  “I love you too, Brian,” I said. I didn’t mean love-as-romance, or love-as-sex. I meant sympathy-love.

  Then he reached out and gripped both my arms, and his fingertips dug into my flesh and it really hurt. “Ouch!” I cried. Next thing, his lips were on mine like metal bands tight across my mouth and I couldn’t breathe.

  Brian was strong and the muscles on his arms and hands were taut as wire. I could taste peppermint on his lips as if he’d been sucking on them, and planning to kiss me.

  “Stop it, Brian!” I cried, cutting the edges of my palms down on his forearms.

  He swung around, glowering at the windshield, breathing deeply.

  “Don’t be hurt,” I said, my voice soft now, cooing at him as you would to a child. “I love you too, Brian. But I love you like a brother.”

  Ever since then, he hadn’t asked again for love. He seemed content just to drive me around in his car. And he asked nothing of me. Brian was like my bodyguard. Sometimes when he was with me, he didn’t even look at me. But he always seemed to know exactly where I was.

  I let him drive me around. I was looking for a job, but I hadn’t found anything yet.

  Now, in the car after Chrissie’s party, Brian circled around the town onto Route 7 in the direction of the mall. We were in the newest part of Sparta now, in an area built in the nineteen fifties. It used to be farmland here, and in between the car wash and the dry cleaner there was still an old wooden farmhouse, the wood gray and weathered, the windows crowded with objects as if some old hermit lived there. Beyond Route 7 were flat fields, and a muddy road leading to the skeletal form of an unfinished housing development. You could see a big wooden sign with the words Palatine Manor. But they never finished construction on the place because the developer had gone bankrupt, and now it just sat there, rows of empty townhouses in the distance, no sign of life.

  My house was right on the edge of the road. We came to a stop in front of it. The house was white, vinyl siding, no porch, no shutters, with a picture window so big it seemed from the street you were right inside it. We had a patch of lawn in front, and a little concrete fountain with a cherub perched on the lip of a curved dish that Mommy always turned on in summer.

  I opened the car door and called out over my shoulder, “Good night,” to Brian and Jimmy, and then ran up the concre
te walkway to the front door.

  I unlocked the door, and I entered the darkened house. There was a faint, sweet smell in the air, of my mother, Rosemary’s perfume always present, everywhere. Everything in our house was so feminine and clean. This was a woman’s house. No man could ever stand to live here. One particle on the rug and she was there right away with the Dust Buster. Always had a sponge in her hand and the spray cleaner, as if dirt were a horror and abomination. So were odors, she was always spraying the air with room deodorizer.

  It was a soft house, with thick wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. The toilet seat had a flower print cover over it with a ruffle. No man had ever peed in our toilet. No man had ever lifted the seat for that purpose.

  Now in the semi-darkness, I could make out her macramé hanging on the walls, the couches and chairs were draped with her afghans, knitted in bright orange and green zigzag patterns.

  I knew she was lying awake upstairs in her bed, waiting for me.

  Sometimes people took Mommy and me for sisters. Rosemary kept herself up well. She looked so young. We had the same cat’s eyes, only her hair was shiny black, cut short like a gleaming helmet on her head. Her skin was tanned and oiled even in the middle of winter. She wore little diamond studs in her ears.

  Mommy watched the world for me, her brown eyes filled with intelligence. She missed nothing.

  My dad had been night manager at the Stewart’s on new 27. I was only five years old when it happened. Some guys drove up in a van, entered the store, pulled out guns, and made everyone lie down on the floor. They emptied the cash register. And even though my dad had obeyed them and just lain down and kept quiet, they shot him anyway. The police said that my dad had offered no resistance. It took the cops only ten hours to find them, way up north near the Canadian border. Ralph Kurt Dewar, age twenty-four, Kevin Valder Leach Jr., age nineteen, their names were always present in my head. I knew their names like a mantra.

  At the wake in the funeral parlor, they hoisted me up over the coffin so I could see down at him. My legs were chapped from being lifted up so many times and rubbing the rough cloth of people’s clothes.

  I looked into the coffin and there was his pale, thin face, his straight brown hair combed flat over his forehead, he was so composed. And on one of his cheeks, I could see a wad of something, like flesh, sticking in a hole. Only it wasn’t flesh, I could tell that even then, it was plastic or rubber. There was a hole in his face, and they had plugged it up with something, and then covered it with a thick layer of makeup. I knew even then that hole was where the bullet went in.

  Otherwise, I remember almost nothing, except I’ve put together a memory from her snapshots of him. And in them he seems so young, almost frail somehow, sitting next to her, holding me, smiling at the camera joyously. And then, I remember a vague young smell of sweat, and skin and tobacco, of his body.

  Who was my father? Only twenty-six when they killed him. Never even been a person really. Six years older than I was now, and pretty soon he would be younger than me.

  On Sundays, in good weather we visited his grave at the Intercession Parish Cemetery. We had buried him there because we were Catholics before Mommy joined the People’s Mission Chapel. In good weather we still weeded the grave plot and sprinkled plant food on the flowers. . . . Ralph Kurt Dewar, age twenty-four, and Kevin Valder Leach Jr., age nineteen, were up north in prison now, in Clinton, Mommy said, in a prison that was like a dark fortress, a place where it snows most of the year and it’s impossible to escape from, and she said they would never be released as long as she lived so not to be afraid, they would never get me.

  She had never been with a man again after my dad was murdered, but she was still sexy, and yet like a nun too, a beautiful nun, who seemed to have no interest in men. Once, she went out on a date with Mr. Tedesco, who managed Cambria Buick. But when she came home that night, she sat down on the couch in the living room, brushed her knees off decisively with both her hands. “Well, that’s that,” she said. As if it had been a chore she had to do.

  She supported us by working as a secretary at Palatine Travel. I had been trying to get a job of my own now for months, but I wasn’t having any luck. Maybe I was lazy, but a lot of the jobs that were available I didn’t want. I knew I was spoiled, and I felt so guilty. I didn’t want to work at City Shop because I would always get my hands dirty, I would have to wash them all the time, and my skin was so dry, especially in winter. And I tired easier than most people. Mommy said it was because I had low blood pressure, but that was a good thing because it meant I would live a very long time. And in some way I was afraid, I guess, afraid to be out in the world, that I would fail, and that I would be hurt without her.

  She had given me everything, ballet lessons, piano lessons. She had paid for a photographer in Albany to make up a portfolio of me so I could be a model, which was something I would like to do. But in Sparta there were no opportunities for models, and I sent away some of my pictures and I heard nothing back. So I was looking for another job, something in Sparta, and I wasn’t having much luck.

  But she let me be. Maybe she didn’t want me to get a job either, so I would stay with her forever, never leave her like my father had done when she was so young. Still, I did look for work, sometimes for days at a time, and then I’d give up and I would stop for a while. I was like a prisoner in her house, a prisoner of love, and it bound me to her in all its softness and its darkness.

  In our house now, I climbed the narrow, padded stairs to her room, and entered. Here the aura of her perfume, the deep sweet scent she wore always, hung heavier in the air. That scent was everywhere, in her closet, it was in her towels, in all the linens.

  Her voice floated out to me from the shadows of the bed. “Hi, honey. I was worried.” She’d say that even if it was five o’clock in the afternoon when I got home.

  I said, “I was at a party at Chrissie Peck’s house. Brian drove me home.”

  “I don’t like you driving with Brian.” I couldn’t see her in the darkness, but I knew she would say that, it was predictable.

  “He wasn’t drinking,” I said.

  “Still . . .” She sighed.

  I walked over, leaned down, and kissed her cheek. “Good night Mommy.” Now, so close to her, I could smell even more vividly the sweetness of her cheek and her hair.

  When I was little, after my father died, I’d sleep the night with her sometimes. Sometimes still, I’d watch TV in the bed with her, and I’d fall asleep, and I’d end up sleeping the night in her warmth. Her bed was bigger, softer than mine. But tonight, I padded down the hall to my own room.

  In my bedroom, in the dark, I could detect the shapes of all my stuffed animals lined up on my bed against the wall. There was the rabbit, the monkey, the bear from my childhood. I still kept them, couldn’t stand to throw them out. Now they were waiting for me.

  I undressed, and I climbed into bed. The sheets were cold. I was grateful to be under the covers, because I could think of him uninterrupted. And soon I was back in the noise of Chrissie’s rap tapes and the smoke and smell of beer, and I could see the boy doing his magic tricks, I could re-create him in my mind, could see his fingers moving so fast, like water.

  And I could see the light shining through the lens of his large eyes, and the soft skin of his cheekbone. “You are beautiful,” he said, and it was as if he were right there with me.

  Sometimes still, I let my old rabbit sleep under the covers with me. Now I groped in the darkness with my fingertips searching for his bald, worn coat. I could recognize him by touch.

  I found him, drew him into my bed, and wrapped my body around him.

  * * *

  Next day, Saturday, was her day off, and on those days I belonged to her totally. In the morning, we went shopping for groceries. As she pushed the cart down the aisles, I lagged behind. I felt a heaviness in my body, as if his presence in my mind were dragging me down, down. I wanted to go back to sleep, tho
ugh it was morning now, wanted to sleep so I could think about him uninterrupted, without her voice penetrating me. . . . “Look, they got a sale on paper towels. . . . I got to get Ajax, remind me.”

  On Saturday afternoons sometimes, we would make each other up, or fix each other’s hair. Like animals grooming one another, mother and daughter monkeys. It was almost her only hobby, shopping for makeup. She liked to try every single product, usually on me. Like she was a painter or something and I was her blank canvas. And as she studied my face, brushed blush on my cheeks, or shadow on my eyes, I felt as if I couldn’t breathe under her hands, and I wanted to escape. But I loved her, loved her more than I wanted to leave her.

  Now, when we got home from the store, she sat me down in front of the bureau in her bedroom, and examined me in her mirror. She touched my hair with her fingertips. “Looks dull,” she said. “Your highlights have grown out. You need to have it done again.” I sat quietly, let her mold me, let her touch me as if I were her doll.

  “I don’t want to do it myself,” she said. “They do it better. They charge a fortune, but they know what they’re doing. Just around the face—get a ‘framing.’ Maybe you can get an appointment this week. I’ll give you a blank check to take.”

  I was her hobby, her project, clay in her hands. She could mold me, make me perfect. Not from my image in the mirror, but from the way people reacted to me. Like Brian. I knew it objectively like you know a fact. And it meant nothing to me. I didn’t care, didn’t care at all. Somehow, the fact that I was beautiful was outside me. I knew I should be grateful to God for my looks, that they were a gift from God. But all the beauty in the world couldn’t bring back my dad who had been taken from me.

  And now, even as she brushed my hair, I heard her say softly, “ ‘Beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.’ ”