The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Man," Bertie said, "are you good-looking or what? Not a lot of women who could pull that outfit off."

  "I wouldn't have looked good in that when I was fifteen years old," Kitty said.

  "Hush," Dot said. "This is the part."

  "Good evening," Parsifal said, his voice spilling over the room. "Thank you."

  As they walked forward a black velvet curtain crept down unnoticed over the bright silk stripes. The audience had been applauding thunderously, screeching their appreciation for two unknown performers who had done nothing to earn it. Sabine hadn't understood at the time. She was afraid they were mocking. But now she could see it was their youth that was being cheered, their beauty. That was why they got the job. It was her legs, the sweep of his hair off his high forehead. It was something they projected together but not apart. They were in love, or at least that was how it looked on television.

  "My name is Parsifal, and this is my assistant, Sabine." The camera panned to her face and then stayed there for an impossibly long time. Her mouth was wide and painted the red of her costume. Her eyes were as dark as her hair.

  "Look at you," Kitty said. As she said it the face on the television broke into a blinding smile, riches of perfect white teeth.

  Sabine looked hard at the face. She could identify it as beautiful because it knew nothing. That face believed the man beside her on the stage would always be beside her, believed she would always be that young. No one had explained anything at that point.

  The camera pulled away abruptly, a man caught staring.

  Parsifal put a board between two chairs, a blanket over the board. He took Sabine's hand and helped her lie down. She followed obediently, did everything he wanted. There was something about the sight of her body stretched out, so relaxed, eyes closed, that embarrassed her. So much leg. Parsifal crossed her arms over her chest. She did not help him, so limp and doll-like she didn't know enough to fold her own arms. He bent over to kiss her forehead, at which point her heavy eyelids dropped closed and she was assumed to be in a trance; and maybe for a moment she was, because she could not remember the feel of that kiss.

  Levitation was invented by John Nevil Maskelyne in 1867. He manually placed his wife in the air. The trick then went to Harry Kellar, who sold it, along with the rest of his act, to Howard Thurston upon retirement. After Thurston, it went to Harry Blackstone. Sabine soothed herself with facts, gave her mind over to trivia. Too many people had the trick now. It wasn't enough to just do it straight anymore. They had all seen a girl in the air.

  Parsifal wrapped her in a blanket and tied it down. He ran a hand through the air across the top of her and beneath her, and then he took the board away so that her head stayed on one chair and her feet on the other and her poker-straight body rested in between. It was a good effect, but the audience hardly found it miraculous. In fact, this was the hardest part of the trick, because Sabine was rigid; she was balanced between two chairs weighted down to hold her steady. Parsifal and Sabine looked careless, but every inch was plotted, retraced, mastered. On the television in Nebraska, Sabine watched the way her feet slipped into the blanket. There would have been no way to catch them. No way to tell the truth of their movement. The black velvet curtain made everything a mystery. Parsifal's hands swept over her, beneath her. Then he pulled away the bottom chair and held her feet in his hands. Look at the tenderness on his face, the tenderness for her! He lifted her feet to his chest, testing her at first, and then trusting, going higher and higher. He lifted her feet over his head, walked his hands down the backs of her legs and slowly to her back. His hands moved down and her feet lifted higher, and then impossibly high, until Sabine was balanced, tightly wrapped like a papoose, on the very crown of her head on the back of one chair. Oh, the audience loved this. On her head, Sabine heard the applause. The crowd in the living room loved it, too; the women clapped politely, both of the boys made appreciative sounds. Parsifal, silent, kept just the tips of his fingers on her back to give the appearance of steadying her, when in truth Sabine steadied herself. His face was the very picture of caution. So tentatively, so delicately, he pulled his hand away and then put it quickly back; then, with more confidence, took it away again and again, and then altogether. Sabine, eyes closed, hair fanning over the top of the chair, was Venus inverted. All the work of this trick was hers, staying perfectly still, asleep. Her face was easy, peaceful. She kept herself from swaying, took shallow breaths through her nose while every muscle ripped apart from its neighbor. From the studio audience in Burbank, more hearty applause. Parsifal stepped away from her. For a minute she was forgotten while he bowed. Sabine remembered feeling like the top of her head was going to crack open. Then he saw her again. He studied her, studied the chair. He bent from the waist and, with great effort, lifted the chair with the balanced Sabine up into the air with both hands; but the higher up she went, the lighter she became. Only the chair was heavy. Parsifal the actor. Sabine the gymnast. At waist level Parsifal took a hand away, and then he lifted the chair above his head. The camera pulled back and back. He was tall, and then there was the chair, and then tall Sabine, her toes pointing into the hot stage lights. The audience was not used to looking so far up, and it thrilled them. They were applauding wildly now. Parsifal bowed again, still balancing. Then he ran the entire trick in reverse. The chair grew heavier as it came down. He brought back the second chair and the board. He tipped her down, suddenly careful with this woman he had been waving like a flag. Flat on her back, all her weight returned, he unwrapped her, flicking off the blanket, uncrossing her arms. Gently, sweetly, he kissed her forehead again, at which point the magnificent eyes fluttered and opened. The generous smile spread across her face. With his help, she sat up and stood, waved and bowed. It was a beautiful trick, but it took the whole five minutes they were allotted. They were good, Parsifal and Sabine, their abilities to amaze were limitless. There were hundreds more tricks they weren't given time for.

  Then Johnny Carson was with them, applauding as he walked across the stage. This was a clear sign of approval. Usually he thanked people from the distance of his desk. They were not stars. They would not be invited to sit on the couch with Joan Rivers and Olivia Newton-John.

  "Great," he said, shaking Parsifal's hand. "Just great. That's one trick you wouldn't want to blow."

  "I haven't dropped her yet," Parsifal said. An unrehearsed line. He sounded witty, at ease.

  Then Johnny Carson turned to Sabine. "And I certainly hope you'll come back to see us."

  (In fact, two days later Mr. Carson's secretary called Sabine at home and said that her employer would like the pleasure of Sabine's company at dinner. She declined.)

  And then came her line. "Thank you, Mr. Carson." Again the camera held her.

  Johnny Carson clapped his hands together, pointed out to the cameras, said blithely, "Right back." Doc's band struck up the theme song. More applause. The color field returned, the series of numbers.

  How rolled towards the VCR and shut it off. They sat for a while in the darkness, a reverential silence that no one wanted to break. Kitty was right: religion.

  "Proudest moment of my life," Dot said finally, blowing her nose.

  "You just happened to be watching Johnny Carson that night?" Sabine asked. What were the chances?

  "Mama watched Carson every night," Bertie said. "When he had his last show, we all sat here and cried our eyes out."

  Sabine had watched the last show with Parsifal and Phan. Parsifal cried. Maybe it was hereditary.

  "Johnny Carson grew up in Nebraska," Dot said.

  "So," Guy said, clicking on the light next to his chair so that he could get a good look at Sabine. "How'd you do it?"

  "We auditioned," she said, knowing what he meant. "We had to go back twice."

  "The trick. How did you balance there for so long? How did he lift you over his head? I've been watching this since I was a little kid and I never have been able to figure it out."

  The room pressed towards
her. They were all wanting to know. Guy was just the one who had asked. Maybe this was the reason they'd come looking for her in the first place. Year after year of watching the same magic trick and not being able to figure it out would make any family restless. "I can't tell you that," Sabine said.

  "Why not?" How propped up on one elbow. His face was full of the painful earnestness of a good person receiving bad news.

  "That's the whole point, that's why it's a good trick, because you can't figure it out."

  "You can tell us," Guy said.

  "I can't. I won't," Sabine said. Was this what Parsifal had felt? All of the attention was on her. Everyone wanting the answer that only she had. No one had ever asked her how the tricks were done before, because what would the point be, asking the assistant when the magician was right there? No one asked her because no one even considered that she might know.

  "You're not going to do it anymore," Guy said, his voice taking on just the slightest edge of a whine. "We're never going to tell."

  "I was the only person your uncle ever explained the tricks to and he wouldn't have told me if he didn't absolutely have to. Magicians take this very seriously. It's like a code of honor for them." Listen to her, wouldn't Parsifal be laughing now. You never told because people wanted so desperately to know. They wanted what you had and therefore what you had was all the power. Who would give that up? What possible benefit could there ever be in telling? A minute of gratitude and then the dull falling away, the boredom that always followed knowledge. For fifteen years the Fetters had wanted to know how Parsifal balanced Sabine on the top of a chair. Waiting for the answer hadn't done them any harm.

  "I bet he told plenty of people," Kitty said. "I bet they were just people he liked better than us."

  A flicker of hurt went over Dot's face, a remnant of a very old fight.

  "I promise you," Sabine said. "He never told anyone. He didn't even tell Phan how it worked."

  The women tensed. Kitty pressed her hands between her knees.

  "Who's Phan?" How said.

  So she had made a mistake. Did they think this was hard? Did they think she didn't know how to get out? "He was my best friend. He came to all our shows. I wanted to tell him how we did some things, just a couple of tricks, but your uncle said no."

  "What kind of name is Phan?" Guy said. The word came out of his mouth like something that tasted bad.

  "Vietnamese."

  "Don't make fun," Dot said, relieved. "You can bet there are a group of Vietnamese sitting around right now wondering about a family in Nebraska who've got people named Guy and Dot."

  "And How," said How.

  "Bertie and Kitty," Bertie said.

  Hearing her own name, Kitty started and looked at her watch. "I've got to get you boys home. It's late."

  How rolled over on his stomach and laid his head down on crossed arms. Guy leaned back in his chair, as if meaning to dig himself deeper into the upholstery. Kitty stood and clapped her hands together as if she were rounding up cattle. "Come on, let's go."

  Guy stretched, pushing his long arms out in front of him, and then both boys closed their eyes. "For God's sake," Dot said, standing up and kicking How lightly on the leg. "Listen to your mother. Get up and go home."

  "I'm not going until she tells us how they got her on her head," Guy said. Eyes closed, Guy looked like a huge child, a three-year-old whose pink cheeks and round lips were large beyond reason.

  "You can sit there all night if you want to," Sabine said. "It's fine with me if you stay."

  And they might have. It was impossible to gauge their seriousness. But before there was time to try to talk them into getting up, someone was knocking on the front door, and long before there was time to answer the door, they had barely turned their heads in the direction of the sound, the man who was outside simply walked in, as if the knock had been less a request for entry than an announcement of it. He kept his head down and shook dramatically from the cold, slapping his bare, open hands against his arms, trying to coax the circulation up again. He was wearing a denim jacket over a sweatshirt. It was not enough. "Damn," he said. "Some night to be out in the cold looking for your family."

  Now the boys' eyes were open. How sat up. They looked like deer, ears pricked and alert, their noses sniffing the air.

  "I said we'd be home by eight." Kitty lifted her wrist towards the man, showing her watch as proof. "We'll be home by eight."

  "Well, you said you had company. I thought it would be nice if I came over and met your company." If he had come to see Sabine, he had not yet noticed her. His attention was fixed on his boots, which were miraculously free of snow.

  "Then you're not out looking for your family in the cold," Kitty corrected. She held her shoulders back and leaned slightly in towards the man. "Now shut the door."

  Mrs. Howard Plate (Kitty), that's what the lawyer's papers had said. Which would make this Mr. Howard Plate. Mr. Howard Plate was big like his sons, with hair that might have been red when he was their age and now was that colorless sandy brown that red hair can become. But it was his face that drew attention, the way it was fine on one side and collapsed on the other, as if he had been hit very hard and the shape of the fist in question was still lodged beneath his left eye. It had the quality of something distinctly broken and poorly repaired. The bad light cast by the living room lamps threw a shadow into the cave of his cheek, where a random interlacing of scars ended and began. He slipped one hand behind his neck and pulled down hard, as if he were trying to make himself smaller. "Do you want me to go?"

  "Sabine," Dot said, "before this gets any worse, let me introduce you to my son-in-law. This is Howard Plate. Howard, you've heard all about Sabine, Guy's wife."

  "I hear you've got a big house in Los Angeles," Howard Plate said, looking at her. Seen straight on, it was not such a bad face. It was the kind of face that in Los Angeles could make him seem exotic but in Nebraska only made him look poor.

  "It's a good-sized house," Sabine said. She held out her hand and he shook it. It was a big hand, rough on the palm and cold as the iron railing around the front porch. Did people have something against gloves?

  "Don't bother her about the size of her house," Kitty said. If she had left five minutes before then her car wouldn't have been in the driveway and Howard would have slowed down but not stopped. He would have driven on home when he didn't see her there.

  "Well, since Dot and Bertie came back from California that's all I hear about, what a big house she's got. There's no crime in having a nice house, is there?" He looked at Sabine, turning slightly to show her the better-looking part of himself. "I never met Kitty's brother. We all thought he was dead forever—I mean, a long time before he was dead. So it's been a real surprise finding out that he's been alive all this time and doing so well. Most people come and visit their families when they do well. They're proud of what they've got."

  Sabine realized that all of this was meant to insult her, that the great wave of awkwardness that came up from every corner of the room, save Howard Plate's, was the embarrassment generated on her behalf. But Sabine herself, still standing after the handshake, didn't feel insulted or embarrassed. She only felt a vaguely tired sort of depression because it wasn't summer, because she wasn't sitting next to the pool underneath the shade of the big red umbrella with Phan while Parsifal brought out three tall Beefeater tonics. How he loved to bring them out with a knife and walk to the lime tree and snap one off, slice through the thin green skin right there on the glass-topped table. "You're really living when you're living off the land," he'd say. He stirred the drink again with the knifepoint, the fuzzy effervescence of very fresh tonic looking celebratory although at the time they'd thought there was nothing in particular to celebrate. What she wanted to say to Howard Plate, what she could not say and he could not possibly understand, was this: If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better
of the two wins out.

  "Well, that's it for me," Bertie said, getting up heavily from the couch. "I'm going over to see Haas. You have a good evening." In her voice there was a tremble of barely contained rage. Every muscle in her body strained to keep her from taking on Howard Plate.

  "Bertie, don't go," her sister said. She reached up for her wrist, but Bertie deftly moved her hand aside so that even when Kitty stretched, she fell short.

  "Take Haas some cookies," Dot said. "There's a bag of them on the kitchen counter."

  "I'll be back by twelve." They all watched her go. In the lamplight Bertie's hair seemed like almost too much luxury, all those brown-and-yellow tangled curls. Haas would separate each one, comb it out gently.

  "She just can't wait to get married," Howard Plate said to Sabine, as if he were saying something dirty.

  "I know," Sabine said. "I remember that feeling exactly."

  Howard sat down on the couch in the warm spot that Bertie had left, and Sabine took her place on the other side of Kitty, but the swap of Bertie for Howard Plate had stripped everyone in the room of their language skills. Even Dot seemed at a loss as to how to rally the conversation. "Did you eat?" she asked Howard finally.

  "I did."

  The room fit them snugly now, three women, two such large boys, a man that none of them wanted to talk to. With all the windows locked tight, storm windows down, window seals caulked, curtains drawn, Sabine became aware of how much oxygen they were all taking in.