Vaclav & Lena

by Haley Tanner

  Going back to school was a different story. Every time Emily mentioned school, Lena became agitated. On a shopping trip for school supplies, Lena threw a tantrum, knocking down a display of dry-erase boards when Emily did not understand what kind of pencils she wanted. They left the store without buying anything.

  Nothing Emily did to prepare Lena seemed to help. They took walks to the school, met Lena’s teachers, and took a tour of the hallways, the library, the gym. Still, the morning of her first day of school, Lena’s hands shook while she tried to eat her cereal. Emily spent the entire day sitting on a bench around the corner, trying to read. At the end of the day, Emily walked Lena home. Lena refused to talk; she answered none of Emily’s questions about her teachers, the other children, the books they were reading in class.

  After the third day of school, Emily was called in for a meeting.

  “She’s throwing tantrums every day,” said Miss Rhys. Emily sat uncomfortably in a small classroom chair, holding her purse in her lap.

  “That’s surprising,” Emily said.

  “Really,” said Miss Rhys, raising an eyebrow.

  “At home, well, she’s talking, she’s expressive …” Emily said.

  “Is she angry at home?” asked Miss Rhys.

  “She gets frustrated,” said Emily, unwilling to admit that when they sat down to do homework, Lena was full of rage.

  “Well, in class, she’s disruptive; she bangs on her desk and—it’s hard to describe—she makes this sound. She screeches.” Emily knew exactly the sound Miss Rhys was referring to, a stifled raw scream that Lena produced in the back of her throat. “The other children seem afraid of her.”

  Somehow this was a relief to Emily; she had been afraid that Lena would be made fun of or bullied.

  “Listen,” Emily said, “she needs time to adjust.…” Emily was terrified that Lena’s teacher would have her removed from this school.

  “I’m sure you understand, I can’t allow a student to threaten the safety of the learning environment—”

  Emily cut her off; she didn’t want to hear the end of this sentence. “I understand. It will improve, it will. I thank you for being so compassionate.” Emily left the room enraged, she felt so upset at having to defend Lena to this woman who was threatening to have Lena expelled within the first week at a new school. As Emily walked back home, where Lena was with her new babysitter, the daughter of one of Emily’s best friends, she thought about how disappointed she was in this woman, in the school. Everyone had sworn up and down that the school was a safe, loving environment, supportive of difference, that they would be Emily’s allies on the path to Lena’s success. But Miss Rhys had suggested nothing to help Emily, to help Lena, and now Emily would have to go to the principal; she would have to describe the subtle ways in which this conversation made it clear that Lena was not accepted or supported.

  Emily was furious, but when she arrived at her house, she took a deep breath. She did not want Lena to know she was upset. As she dropped her keys in the bowl by the door, she could hear Lena in the kitchen screeching at her homework.

  In the kitchen, Lena was holding her head in both hands, pulling at her hair. Amy the babysitter sat patiently next to Lena, looking overwhelmed. When she saw Emily, she made an apologetic face, and Emily instantly said, “Amy, it’s okay. I’m so sorry, let me pay you so you can go home.” Emily handed Amy twenty dollars, far more than she was owed.

  When Amy had gone, Emily sat at the table with Lena.

  “Lena, stop pulling your hair,” she said, and Lena seemed not to hear her.

  “Lena, stop. Stop.” She felt anger building in her, anger that she had tried to leave at the door but could not, anger at Lena for hurting herself, and at the teacher, at everything.

  “Stop!” she yelled. “You’re frustrated, you’re angry, you have a right to be angry, of course you’re angry. You are smart. You’re smarter than anyone in your whole class; you’re smarter than your teacher. You just don’t have enough words, and that’s not your fault. It’s not your fault; it’s not your fault.”

  Lena cried.

  “No more tantrums at school. That’s the rule. No yelling. No screaming. That’s the rule.” She didn’t know what else to say, but she suspected that Lena liked rules. “You can yell at home; you can do whatever you want here. Not at school.”

  Lena nodded and wiped her eyes, her lip still trembling. Emily sat down at the table, and they started her homework.

  The next day, while Emily knew the students were at recess, she called the school and asked to speak to Miss Rhys. She paced her kitchen while she waited on hold.

  “Hello?” Miss Rhys was clearly annoyed at being interrupted during her lunch.

  “Hello, it’s Lena’s mom, Emily—I’m sorry if I’ve caught you at a bad time. I just want to make sure everything is going more smoothly with Lena today, so far.” It was only eleven-thirty.

  “She sat quietly at her desk all morning,” said Miss Rhys.

  “Fantastic. Just what I wanted to hear.”

  “Is there anything else?” Miss Rhys asked.

  “Certainly not,” Emily said. She knew that Lena was following her rule, and her hunch was confirmed. Lena was terrified of breaking rules.

  Lena continued to go to school and came home every day looking wounded. Emily sat her down and they went through her homework, word by word. Lena cried when it was time to do homework, and sometimes she cried the entire time they worked on it. It took hours. Lena’s math was terrible; it seemed that she had never learned even the most basic skills. Lena told Emily that she felt like an idiot, that she sounded stupid, that everyone was making fun of her behind her back. Emily knew, from frequent calls to Miss Rhys, that this was not true.

  Slowly, it got better. Lena started to understand more and more of her homework, of her classes. She was calmer. One day they finished her homework while it was still light out, and then they went for a walk, and they found a robin’s egg that had fallen out of a tree in Prospect Park. Lena took it home and put it on her night table. The next day was a little better. Eventually, they spent less time doing homework and more time taking walks, collecting things that they found.

  By middle school, her teachers were thrilled with her improvement, and her grades were perfect. Lena read voraciously, and her vocabulary expanded. One day when she was twelve she came home and told Emily that a group of girls was going into Manhattan, alone, on the train, for a birthday dinner.

  “Absolutely not, no,” Emily said.

  “What?” said Lena, seemingly incredulous, though she must have known that Emily would never have allowed this trip.

  “You can’t go, Lena, no way.”

  “Why?” Lena asked calmly.

  “Because you’re too young, and it’s dangerous.”

  “You don’t trust me?” Lena asked.

  “Of course I trust you. It has nothing to do with you, I just don’t trust the rest of the world, Lena.”

  “So why does it matter that I’m young?” Lena asked. “If it has nothing to do with me, and the world is just dangerous, then I should never go anywhere by myself, right? I should stay home forever.”

  “No,” Emily said. “Someday you’ll be old enough.”

  “But you said that it had nothing to do with me,” Lena said.

  “You’re not allowed,” Emily said. “End of discussion.” It was the first time that Emily realized that Lena could argue her into a corner, and it wasn’t the last. Lena was discovering the power of her intellect, the power of her words, and Emily often had to remind herself that she was dealing with a teenager.

  Lena had quickly made friends once she began talking in school. It seemed to Emily that it was easy for Lena to become a popular girl, because all the other children were already afraid of her. She was smart, and bossy, and fun, and had a gaggle of girls sleeping over every weekend.

  By the time she was seventeen, Lena had joined the student council, and her teachers said she le
ad class discussions, but she was still obsessing, still fragile. Homework time was like a minefield of a different kind. Lena sat for hours, sometimes until late at night, writing and rewriting, checking and rechecking. Lena had mastered English, it seemed, through sheer force of will, meticulously memorizing grammar rules and idioms. She was driven by her terror of seeming unintelligent and of her classmates’ laughing at errors in her speech. Even after her English was seamless, she couldn’t let go of this severe diligence and control. She was calm when she started her work but easily became irritable and obsessive about small glitches. Anything could set her off: an equation she couldn’t solve right away, a mildly critical comment from a teacher on a paper Lena had spent hours editing. Lena looked like a perfect teenager, but Emily felt like she was in the eye of a storm.

  BYE BYE SPOT

  …

  “But you don’t know anything about your real parents?” Serena asks. “Who did you live with until you got adopted and came here?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about my parents,” Lena says, choosing not to answer the second part of Serena’s question. Lena is getting tired of talking to Serena, she’s tired of all the things she has to patch together and hide, and she doesn’t want to try to explain anything else—Lena doesn’t like these many shades of fuzz in her life story, where everyone else’s are sharp and colorful and happy like a postcard. Lena does not like editing out the rotten spots; she doesn’t like the times she only barely remembers, or things about which she has been given sketchy information, handed down from person to person, and she especially does not like having enormous gaps missing in between, so that to think about all of the days leading up to today feels dangerous.

  She told Em about this feeling once, about not liking to think about the past for fear that she’d come upon some black ice or puddle or dead spot, and Em said that that was how a lot of grown-ups felt, all the time. Lena asked Em if anyone felt this way when they were young, and Em said no, that most people have nice childhoods behind them that they like to look back at, and it’s only when they get older and start having mistakes and regrets and unhappiness that they stop liking to remember, to think back. Most, Em said, not all. You get to look forward to your happiness, said Em, instead of back, that’s all.

  Lena doesn’t want to look only forward and not back. She wants to fill in the holes.

  “I just want to fill in the holes,” she tells Serena.

  “You go for it, man,” says Serena, meaning it.

  Lena decides that she will fill in the holes. She’s going to find Vaclav. He’s going to help her find her parents. She’s thought before about asking Em about finding her parents, and then immediately dismissed the idea. It’s not that her relationship with Em is delicate, or that Em wouldn’t let her; she can’t explain it, it’s just that she can’t bear to see Em worried, or hurt, or disappointed. She doesn’t even want to think about it.

  “Thank you,” she says to Serena.

  “No way. My pleasure,” says Serena, and suddenly Lena is ready (all of her selves are ready) to go out into the hallway and back into the day. It isn’t until Lena is in the hallway, on her way to meet her friends and have her birthday dinner, that she remembers the spot with its unknowing specificity, that she forgot to say goodbye to it, to fix it in her mind and remember it, and now she is sure that it will fade like all the others.

  AT THE VERY SAME MOMENT

  …

  At dinner with friends everything is nothing, and in the cab ride home everything is nothing, and at home with Em everything is nothing. Lena is so excited, so nervous, so jammed with adrenaline that every moment seems like an hour and every hour swells in an impossible way, and time does not pass at all. But of course the time passes; it is one of the truths of the universe: No matter how much pain, how much joy, how much nervousness, how much anxiousness, how much love, how much fear, how much itching, how much scratching, how much fever, how much falling, time passes. So the impossible event is suddenly upon her, and then those hours, even the hours that at the time seemed to be made of millennia, seem, in retrospect, to collapse upon themselves, so that the arrival of the event seems, actually, sudden, and the waiting seems to have passed impossibly quickly, and those hours seem to have never existed. That’s how Lena feels when she is finally alone in her room at ten-thirty on the night of her seventeenth birthday, picking up the phone to call Vaclav.

  Does Lena know that at the very same moment Vaclav is thinking of her (actually, thinking of not thinking of her)?

  She locks her door and sits down next to her phone. She dials Vaclav’s number without hesitation. A seven-digit number buried since the year she was nine, dialed by a powerful but quiet part of her mind, like balance, like breathing, like the squish, squish, churn of your stomach, something your body knows. Her fingers just know what to do. That’s how it is with the phone number of a boy you love. Loved. Will love. Whatever.

  While the phone rings, Lena considers the possibility that someone who is not Vaclav may answer the phone. It is ten-thirty. It is a slightly inappropriate time to call someone. And then she calmly lets it ring, because she knows who will answer. She knows, somehow, that he is waiting for her call.

  Vaclav has just fallen asleep for the very first time without saying good night to Lena when the phone by his bed rings. He grabs it, and even before he says hello his heart is tumbling about in his chest.

  “Hello?” he says, but they both know without saying who it is on the other end of the telephone wires.

  “This is Lena,” she says. What else to say?

  “This is Vaclav,” he says. What else?

  “How are you?” She is smiling big, big, big.

  “I’m good! How are you?” It seems that the conversation is moving forward on tracks neither of them can see; it is saying itself.

  “I’m good too. It’s my birthday,” she says.

  “I know,” he says. “I know.”

  “You do?” she says.

  “Yeah. Of course. Yes.”

  Vaclav and Lena have now communicated the ultimate thing, the thing that they both want to know but couldn’t ask: Did you remember me? Was I as important to you as you were to me? Was I alone in my remembering? Or were you with me the whole time?

  Of course they were with each other the whole time. Even when they weren’t looking, they never had to check. She was always there; he was always there. Outside her bedroom, somewhere in the darkness, like the moon.

  “Where are you?” Vaclav says. It seems like a strange question to Lena.

  “Home.” She realizes he does not know anything at all, where she lives, anything. “Park Slope,” she says. She knows where he lives.

  “You still live in Brooklyn?” he says, astounded that she could be so close.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Where do you go to school?” he says.

  “The Berkeley Carroll School? It’s tiny,” she says, apologizing in advance for his not knowing it, not wanting to make any gaps, any bubbles in the skin of this conversation. Vaclav, however, knows this school. Lots of his friends live in the neighborhood, and he walks by it all the time, to go to the coffee shops nearby.

  “I know it. I go by there all the time—Ozzie’s is right around the corner. I can’t believe I haven’t run into you,” he says, feeling incredulous that he has been within blocks of Lena, that he’s been on the sidewalk outside of her school while she sat inside reading, going to gym class, learning calculus. She was right there the whole time.

  “I go to Ozzie’s all the time,” she says, wondering if she’s seen him without knowing it, but it seems impossible. “Where do you go?”

  “I go to Brooklyn Tech,” he says.

  “Oh, wow. Good job,” she says, because Brooklyn Tech is a magnet school, and it’s so hard to get into. It’s a public school for super-genius science-whiz kids, and when she thinks about it, she’s not surprised that he goes there.

  “Oh, thanks. It’s a littl
e far from my house, but I like it.”

  “Do you want to get together?” she says.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Monday after school,” she says. “Three-thirty?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “I’ll meet you by your school. Across the street at Fort Greene Park,” she says.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Lena,” he says, and saying her name feels like a somersault.

  “Vaclav,” she says, and saying his name feels like singing in public.

  “I’m really glad you called.”

  “Me too.”

  “Me too.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  “Bye.”

  And they both sit still in their bedrooms, waiting for their hearts to stop beating or to explode, and they wonder why they are not getting together right then, in the middle of the night. Why not? Anything, anything, can be. The world has come apart, and come back together, and come apart again. The world is crashing into itself like cymbals. Crash, crash, crash, crash. It is hard to sleep with all that noise in the universe. Crash, crash, crash, crash.

  In the morning at breakfast with their respective mothers, mothers as different as night and day, fat and thin, dark and blond, heavy and light, Vaclav and Lena sit, and say nothing to either mother about the Phone Call, and they fail to mention the existence of the Plan to Meet. Why? Why lie to these mothers? Why keep secret this thing that does not need secrecy? Vaclav and Lena do not know. But they keep their secrets in the safe pockets between their clasped palms, protecting them and wanting instinctively to shield them like tiny shiny frogs found in the wet grass, but wanting simultaneously to share them, to show and share such an exciting new thing. Their minds run irresistibly over and over and over the same thing, they chant the words silently: Guess who I talked to last night? You won’t believe who I talked to last night. Wait until you hear about this, you know what Lena said? But they don’t say these things, they keep them to themselves, carefully, carefully.