by Haley Tanner
The pretty American girl is sitting on the floor of the room, sitting with her legs out to both sides like a ballerina doing stretching. This American girl, with the name Rasia always forgets, is never sitting in a chair. She is always sitting on the floor with her legs all over the room, or twisted up like Indians from India, or on top of the desk, or she is lying on her belly on the floor, reading a book for homework. Who does school-work like this, on her belly on the floor like a snake or a potato farmer?
Why does Rasia always forget the name of this girl? Because it is a boy’s name, something like Fred or Bob. It does not make any sense.
Another thing not making sense: Who are these parents who live in a fancy-shmancy brownstone house but don’t teach their daughter to sit in a chair properly like a human being? Who are these parents who can’t spend some money to buy their daughter some new blue jeans without holes all over the knees and just under the rear? Why not buy the girl a nice skirt and some pantyhose and teach her to sit in a chair?
Rasia looks at Vaclav, holding these dollar bills, smiling his goofy smile. Most people do not really mean their smiles, most of the time. For most people, their smiles are a lie, a trick, or a promise. Vaclav’s smile is just a smile, and he always means it.
The girl is sitting on the floor, looking at Vaclav, and does not even seem to have a plan to stand up to say hello to Rasia.
“Maybe if you are not sitting in this way with legs out hilter-skilter you are not needing so many patches on your jeans? No?” Rasia tells the girl. The girl smiles big, with all her teeth out. This is not the way a girl should smile, without any modesty.
“Mom! Ryan likes the holes in her jeans,” Vaclav says, and Ryan laughs, because to Ryan, everything can be a joke.
“Yeah! I do like them, actually.” Ryan is still smiling at Rasia like a showgirl or a horse. Rasia just looks down at her. All around Ryan’s long denim legs are tiny pieces of paper. In the V-shaped space Ryan has made with her legs are glue and tape and scissors and fat black markers. She is making a huge, enormous mess in Vaclav’s room, and Rasia can give guarantees that the girl will not be the person who is picking anything up. Vaclav, the boy, will be picking up from the floor this mess that the girl has made. This is not the way.
Rasia is not happy to be picking up after Oleg, no, she is not, and many times she has thought, If he does one dish, just one dish, I will not leave him, but still she always stands there and washes all the dishes until there are not any dishes to do, and still he sits on the couch and lifts no fingers, and still she has not left him. Or else she has thought, If he leaves his underpants on the floor of the bathroom again I will leave him, but does she pick up the phone to call the lawyer to make a divorce? She does not. She picks up the damp underpants and brings them to the hamper, and still she is married to him because to divorce your husband over one soggy pair of underpants, this is not something that people do. This is a marriage, this picking up a little, putting away a little, forgiving a lot, and this is good enough. Why should it not be good enough for this girl who cannot sit in a chair? She should have a boy pick up after her? She should expect this? Why should this girl with the holes in the behind of her pants be waited on hands and feet?
The only thing that Rasia can understand is that all the pretty girls want to be the girlfriends of Vaclav, who is so tall and lanky (What a surprise! Look at the father! Look at the mother! Little Soviet tanks. Try to knock one over. Impossible.) and has such a head of hair, and the eyebrows that are the eyebrows of a movie star. He is so charming and handsome, who can blame the girl? This is something to like about the girl. Good taste.
Is it nice to see Vaclav with this American girl? This girl with freckles on her face and hair that is some of it blond and some of it red? This girl who wears shiny gloss on her lips all the time and smiles like a crazy person and laughs so loud? Is this nice? No, this is not nice. But what else had Rasia expected? Why else come here, to this crazy place of opportunity, but for her son to have a blond American girlfriend who is like an alien from Mars, she is so different. Why else? A Christmas tree in the window of the brownstone house and parents who do not introduce themselves. And what do the people do to live in such a shmancy place? Consulting. Vaclav says, “Mom, they do consulting.” This is not working, giving advice to people who are rich and can pay for advice.
“What is this? Is project for school?” She points in a direct, strong way at the paper Ryan is working on. She always means to be more like the mothers on television, who are more gentle in their talk and more gentle in their bodies, but she is always too hard, she pushes too hard on the air around her with her arms, with her vocal cords, is always surprised when she crashes through this soft American air.
“No, it’s not for school. I’m just making a flyer for my band.… We have a show next week at Ozzie’s.” Ryan holds her flyer up so that Rasia can see it. “You should come!” The flyer is covered all over with Xeroxed pictures of guitars and cassette tapes that are cut out and put on with Scotch tape, and it says, in very bad handwriting, PINK FLAMINGOS WEDNESDAY 7 P.M. OZZIE’S COFFEE SHOP FREE FREE FREE!
“Why are you not using Vaclav’s computer and printer? You can make it nice with pictures and type the words so it is looking nicer. This way people will come to see the music, not think that you are some crazy people. Okay? You do it again on the computer,” Rasia says. She is trying to make a suggestion, but her words rush out of her mouth, stomp, stomp, stomp, always sounding like a command.
“Oh, thanks. I know it looks kinda sloppy, but that’s the thing. I mean, that’s the cool thing. It’s a whole movement, like an aesthetic, you know, the whole DIY thing, from the original DIY zines, I guess,” Ryan says, and Vaclav smiles, because he knows that Ryan will have to explain, and re-explain, and further explain everything that she has just said, because Rasia will want to know what all these words mean, and Ryan will have to use more new words to explain these things, and to see Ryan try earnestly to make Rasia understand why her band poster looks homemade, for some reason this is one of his favorite things about Ryan, that she will do this.
“What is this DIY zine?” Rasia asks.
“DIY stands for do it yourself, and zine is from magazine—it’s a small, independent magazine you make yourself—and since you make it yourself, it doesn’t look like all the big, glossy magazines, it’s cooler,” Ryan says.
“Okay. You use the computer, is not do it by yourself?” Rasia asks.
“No, the computer would totally still be doing it yourself, it’s just that it wouldn’t look cool,” Ryan says.
“The computer is the new cool thing. This everyone is saying. You should make the next one on the computer, show everyone how nice it can be; this is cooler,” Rasia says.
“Well, yeah, exactly,” Ryan begins explaining. “The whole thing is a reaction to the mass-produced slickness of—”
“Mom, I want to show you this new trick I’m working on,” Vaclav says, in order to save Ryan from herself.
“Homework is done?” Rasia asks.
“Homework is done! We always do it as soon as we get home,” Vaclav says.
“This I don’t believe,” Rasia says.
“No, really!” says Ryan. “I can’t concentrate on anything else until I get my homework done and out of the way. I can’t relax, I’ll just be thinking, I have homework to do, you know?” Rasia smiles at her, says nothing, and then looks quickly back to Vaclav.
“All is done?”
“Okay, maybe I left some for later; it’s not important,” Vaclav admits.
“Ach! I knew it! I knew it! Magic happens after homework,” Rasia says.
Rasia started her homework crusade when Vaclav was very young, because she did not come from Russia, leaving behind her mother and her grandmother Lidia, who she would never see again in this world, so that her son could be a street beggar, which is all that this magician thing might become for all anyone knows. She keeps him doing homework, every day of his l
ife so far, believing that this will ensure that he has this magical thing, education, which is the key to being successful in the new country. He will go to college, get degrees, and have this education knitted into his life so that he will be good and successful.
Vaclav laughs, and hugs his mother and kisses her on the cheek. He has to lean down to do this now, and he knows that this makes his mother feel that he is a big full-grown man at the same time that she feels that he is still her little boy and that this is a feeling that fills her with joy. She pretends to be annoyed, but he knows that once he has hugged her in this way, she cannot be annoyed any longer. She is a warmed-up mushy mama now, and she cannot stay mad at him.
“Watch my trick? Please? Please? Please? Sit down on the bed, please?” He takes Rasia’s hand and leads her to the bed, and sweeps his hand over the covers as if he is dusting her chair for her, and she is charmed by him as if she is just a girl.
When, she wonders, did my son become so charming? When did he start to wear blue jeans in the way of American boys, so that they do not look like clothes that are covering the body but that they are part of the body? Even more so that they are part of the person? When did this happen? When did his hair become shaggy in the way of American boys, and when did he stop combing it? When did he get so tall, and how, with his mother and father so close to five feet, how did he grow to be nearly six feet tall, so that he looks like he is close to the ceiling? It must be this American food he is eating so much of; constantly he is eating.
“Okay, okay. I am watching. What is this trick?” Rasia says. Vaclav looks directly at Rasia, his eyes on her eyes, and his entire self pivots around this one point of contact, and he changes, and he becomes Vaclav the Magnificent.
Watching him, you would think that he changed his clothes, maybe into a tuxedo with tails, but you would look and be surprised that he is still wearing the same jeans and T-shirt. You would feel, irrationally, that he suddenly became taller. You would search for the physical transformation, and you would try in vain to put your finger on what is different. Nothing is different, and yet everything is different. He has become Vaclav the Magnificent and is no longer Vaclav, your son, your boyfriend, the kid down the block. He is a magician, and a magician needs a stage. His presence bursts into the air and takes up most of the bedroom, so that he seems confined, trapped, where just a moment ago he seemed right at home.
“Ahh, mother. This is absolutely the greatest trick yet. In front of your very eyes, I am going to levitate. Yes, I, Vaclav, in front of these two beautiful ladies”—Vaclav nods to Ryan and to Rasia—“will raise my body, all two hundred pounds of me”—Ryan and Rasia laugh out loud—“Correction. Correction. The audience is correct to laugh at such an exaggeration. All one hundred and sixty-seven pounds of human flesh I will raise off the ground, with no external aids, no wires, nothing, just the sheer strength of my will. I trust that an audience such as you, so obviously devoted to the truth, will aid me in verifying that there are indeed no wires or other apparatus at all in the room.”
The audience agrees.
“Now I must kindly ask you for silence. I demand silence, for this feat requires absolute concentration,” says Vaclav the Magnificent.
Rasia looks at Ryan, who is looking at Vaclav with wide eyes, with her thin, pink lips slightly parted, with total adoration. Rasia wants this for her son, for someone to adore him, for someone to look at him as if he is glowing. She wants all the heavy love to be on the other side.
Rasia decides that it does not matter if she likes Ryan or any other girl. What is it, for a woman who has lived for more than five decades to like some girl who is putting her little-girl hands all over her son? It is not necessary for Rasia to like this girlfriend of her son, but it is necessary for the girl to adore him.
Vaclav stands in the corner of the room, at an angle, so that his profile is facing Ryan and Rasia. Vaclav looks down at the floor, and he breathes in deeply, deeply, four deep breaths, and then suddenly he is breathing as if he has just run many miles or leaped up many flights of stairs. It looks like something is happening to him, like his heart will explode or his lungs will come apart in pieces under the strain. Rasia begins to feel worried about this trick. This worry is nothing new. She always worries about Vaclav’s tricks. Of course she knows that it is only a trick, that it is not real, but she knows that he might fail at it, and to see someone fail at something they love is very hard when you love the person and all they ever wanted for their whole life since they could walk and talk is to be a great and famous magician. Also, Rasia is a little anxious because she feels that maybe the trick is really a little magic, and who knows what might happen to a person when they dabble in this magic; they could hurt themselves.
Vaclav looks terrified. His face is still looking at the ground, but his fists are clenched, and there are veins sticking out in his neck, veins that are working too hard, doing too many things. He raises his hands a little bit, and nothing happens. He lets his hands return to his sides, and his face, it looks like he is very upset. And then he breathes the deepest breath of all and lifts his hands only a little, only an inch from his sides, and suddenly he is moving slowly upward, his hands are moving up and his head is moving up, and his feet, yes, his feet are an inch off the ground.
Rasia gasps and throws her arm across Ryan’s chest, because this is a reflex that she has had since she gave birth to Vaclav, that whenever she is surprised, like stopping short in the car, she throws out her arm to protect the child next to her. This scares Ryan, and Ryan yells a tiny little yell and then dissolves into giggles, laughing at herself, and then with an inelegant little plop, Vaclav is back with both feet on the floor, and he seems for a moment to be catching his balance, back on earth again after defying gravity and levitating, even if only two inches, up into the atmosphere.
“How are you doing that? What is that? What did you do?” Rasia sounds angry, but she is not angry, not at all. Ryan claps loudly, she is so impressed, so proud. Ryan knows exactly how this trick is done; she even helped Vaclav practice it, helped him to get the angle right, helped him to figure out how to obscure the anchor foot, the foot that stays on the ground behind the front foot, and she watched patiently as he did it over and over again until his body learned it.
What is so wonderful to Ryan about this trick, this trick she has seen so many times? It is Vaclav’s performance, his very convincing performance, all the theatrics, the deep breathing, the concentration, which he had not practiced with her or discussed with her. He does these things instinctively, and he is so perfectly amazing that she is absolutely sure that he will one day be a very famous magician, of course.
Ryan sits on the bed and feels very proud of herself, to be the girlfriend of someone so smart and so handsome, someone who will one day be so successful at something so unique.
Vaclav, ignoring the questions, takes a deep bow.
“You have been a lovely audience—really, truly lovely—and I hardly ever say that. Thank you. Without you, I am nothing.” Here he bows again, even more deeply, and to greater applause. “I do it all for you—for my fans.”
He bows one final bow, and it is clear to Rasia and Ryan that the performance is over and that now the regular Vaclav, not Vaclav the Magnificent, is back.
“That was awesome! That was awesome. When are you going to perform that?” Ryan says.
“I might be ready for the world, but is the world ready for Vaclav the Magnificent?” Vaclav says, and Ryan beams.
Ryan smiles a flirty smile at Vaclav, and Rasia is starting again to think not-nice things about this girl who is too thin, as if her mother doesn’t even feed her, this mother who has not bothered to pick up a telephone and call Rasia, and she starts to think that maybe this girl is every afternoon after school having sex or even just doing naked things on this very bed with her little boy.
Rasia is thinking that she wants so badly to be able to talk to Vaclav about things, private things, and she is feeling bad becaus
e she has planned to talk to him so many times in so many different ways, and she has not yet been able to get these things to come out of her mouth, out loud. Today, at her office, Pamela from accounting had said that she didn’t need to go into detail about the “ins and outs.” Pamela told Rasia that she just needed to set some rules so that Vaclav and she knew that they were on the same page. Pamela said that with her son, she had said just one thing: “Whether I’m home or not, you respect my house: door open and feet on the ground. And when you’re in the parking lot behind the supermarket, wrap it.” Everyone had laughed at this, but Rasia had not gotten the joke, and she had felt too embarrassed to ask what this meant and what was funny.
Jessica from HR had said, “Kids these days are all having sex. The question is not whether they’re going to do it or not but whether they’re going to do it safely. You can’t stop him, but you can give him all the information he needs.” But what information did she have to give Vaclav? What would she tell him? What did she want him to know?
Ryan and Vaclav are still talking about Ryan’s show and this Ozzie person.
“Who is this Ozzie?” Rasia asks. Rasia says this like she is sure that Ozzie is a drug dealer, or a person with earrings in his face, or a prostitute, or something like that. She is saying it like she is just wondering which of these things this mysterious Ozzie is, but she is sure absolutely that whatever Ozzie is, Ozzie’s is a terrible place for children to be going.
“Mom, you would love Ozzie’s. It’s a coffee shop in Park Slope, an independent coffee shop, where they have a million different kinds of tea. And at night they have little performances, just in the coffee shop, there are just couches and whatever over there so people can just sit and listen or read or anything. They have really good cookies. And rugelach! They have really great rugelach.” Rasia’s son says rugelach like an American boy. Like this is a foreign thing. And she knows for sure that she would not like this place, this coffee shop full of mothers twenty years younger than her, with their fancy strollers, where she does not know what the rules are, where she will not know the right words, mocha this or venti that, where to order, where to pay, where to sit down, and she will feel like a buffalo walking into such a place, everyone looking at her and making her feel embarrassed while she pays four dollars for a drink she throws away, it tastes so awful.