“Why do you want them to like you?” I asked.
“So they’ll . . .”—Lazlo was distracted. Willy had commandeered the control panel and was raising and lowering the shades in time to the music—“. . . do things for me.”
“Where’s your powder room, Lazlo?” Lucy was trying to sound grown-up for Stane, who winked at her as he took off his shirt.
“What sort of things?” I persisted.
Lazlo was regretting babysitting us even before Willy broke the remote control. “Make goulash.”
Stane thought that was hilarious. The lights were dimmed, the shades down, the ambience stuck on cocktail lounge.
“You’re not going to tell my dad I broke it, are you?”
“I am many things, but not a squealer.”
“What’s so funny about goulash?” I asked.
Fiona closed The Scarlet Letter. “It’s a metaphor for sex, Zach. Lazlo means that he does all this to get women to sleep with him.”
“A good goulash is much harder to obtain than sex. Twenty-seven kinds of paprika.”
I opened the bathroom door. Lucy held up her finger to her lips. She was stuffing toilet paper in her brassiere. “Sorry, Luce.” My sisters were acting very strangely.
Having broken the control panel, Willy announced he was hungry. Lazlo had more kinds of ice cream than Howard Johnson’s. A quart of chocolate chocolate chip in one hand, a fresh bag of Oreos in the other, Willy called out, “I got dibs on the color TV.” Lazlo pointed to the den at the top of the stairs, relieved to have made one of us happy.
Lucy emerged from the bathroom two cup sizes larger and joined Stane in the garden. “How many tattoos do you have?”
“Four that you can see.” Stane shrugged off the look Lazlo gave him.
Fiona had her own agenda. “I think I’ll go up to Bleecker Street and check out the guitar store.” She’d learned the expression from Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis. Fiona reached for her purse.
Lazlo took it out of her hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Tomorrow, maybe.”
“My parents said we could see the sights.”
“They meant you can see them later. Maybe, it depends.”
“My parents don’t lie.”
Lazlo was running out of patience. “Everybody lies.”
“My mother and father are not liars.” Suddenly, Fiona was crying.
“Fiona, give me break. You know why we’re here. You know what has to happen before we can go outside and have fun. Once they call me, I don’t give a shit what you do. As long as you don’t rat me out.”
Lucy called out from the garden, “Lazlo doesn’t mean they lie about important stuff.” Fiona was crying harder than ever. I’d never seen her cry like that. When she fell on her chin skating, she’d had to get eight stitches. She hadn’t shed a tear. But now she was bawling about Lazlo saying the obvious. I liked her more for crying, and yet I wanted to make her stop.
Fiona grabbed the telephone on a long cord and locked herself in the bathroom. I listened at the door. She called the hotel my parents were staying at in Philadelphia. They hadn’t checked in yet. Fiona left a message anyway. “Please tell them that one of their children has a problem.”
I waited until she’d hung up to tap on the door. “Fiona, let me in.”
“Use another bathroom.”
“I don’t need to pee, I need to tell you something.” She let me in. “It’s going to be okay.”
“That’s what you came in here to tell me?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re seven years old, what do you know about anything?”
There was only one thing I knew more about than any of them. “Casper told me so.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he’s not going to hurt anyone ever again.” He’d said nothing of the kind.
“Why didn’t you tell Dad that?”
“Casper said Mom and Dad would never believe him. He just escaped to check on us, to find out if we were happy.” Saying it out loud made me feel almost like it was true.
“What’d you tell him?”
“I said everything was great.”
Fiona blew her nose and put her arm around my shoulder. “So you lied.”
It was at that moment I began a lifelong bad habit of laughing at things that made me want to cry.
By the time Fiona and I came out of the bathroom, Lazlo had already sent Slavo out to the guitar shop, where he’d bought a Gibson six-string and a songbook that showed her all the chords, and she said “thank you” about a hundred times and began to practice “Wimoweh.” Already being able to play the piano, by the time Lazlo ordered in Chinese, she was strumming and changing chords and singing “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight” over and over again. And instead of chanting “Wimoweh,” we all chanted in unison, “Please shut up, please shut up, please shut up. Please shut up . . .”
Lucy was jealous of Fiona’s guitar and would have shown it if she hadn’t had Stane to play with. I watched them from the kitchen window after dinner. In broad daylight, Lucy looked older than fifteen. But with her brassiere stuffed with toilet paper, hair teased up, and face painted with the lipstick, eye shadow, and mascara my mother forbade her to wear back in Greenwood because my father said it made her look cheap, Lucy, in the moonlight of the city, suddenly looked to my seven-year-old eyes grown-up and expensive next to Stane, with his tattoos and broken English.
I got the idea that Lucy was trying to look older, but I didn’t understand why, if that was how she wanted to misrepresent herself, she was leaning close and talking to Stane in a breathless, little girl voice. “I’ve always wanted to go to Yugoslavia,” she proclaimed with childlike innocence.
“Why is that?”
“Because I’m a communist.” The only two places Lucy had told Lazlo she wanted to see in New York City were Saks Fifth Avenue and the Plaza Hotel.
“You don’t look like a communist.”
“My whole family are communists. Did you ever get to meet Marshal Tito?”
“How do you know about Tito?”
“Being a communist, I find him very attractive.”
“No, I have not met the bastard, but if I had, I would have shot him.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What’s it to you?”
“When I thought you were a communist, I wanted to kiss you.” Her lips were two inches away from his.
“Just ’cause I don’t like Tito doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the ideals of communism.”
“I think you’re just saying that so you can kiss me.”
“No, it’s true, I swear.”
“Wish I could believe you.”
“Believe me.” He leaned forward, she leaned back.
“I suppose part of the reason I’m so passionate”—Lucy flared her nostrils and shook her head as she said the word “passionate,” and liked the effect so much, she did it again—“terribly passionate about communism is due to the fact that I was adopted. My real parents were famous Russian spies. You’ve probably heard of them—the Rosenbergs?”
“The bastards they put in the electric chair?”
Lucy nodded sadly as she lit the wrong end of one of Stane’s cigarette’s. Two lungfuls of burning filter and she didn’t cough.
“That’s a sad story.”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just said that.”
“Why?”
“To see if I could get you to believe it, silly.”
Me making up lies to make Fiona feel better, Lucy telling lies so she could see if Stane wanted to kiss her without having to kiss him: I agreed with Stane when he looked at her in lustful disgust. “You’re all crazy.”
Fiona had moved on to “Kumbaya.” Lazlo was on the phone trying to explain to one of his girlfriends why he’d stood her up. “I have to babysit. Family emergency.” He held the phone away fr
om his ear as she yelled at him, and made a face that cracked me up, even though I was feeling sad. “Yes, I know my family is dead. This is the emergency of another family.”
Lazlo sighed as he put down the receiver. “The only time I ever told her the truth, and she doesn’t believe me.”
Desperate to find something normal to hold onto, I went upstairs to the den to see what Willy was watching on TV. When I opened the door, he yelled, “Get out, dog breath!” Which in fact did cheer me up, because that’s what Willy always called me. But when I pushed the door open all the way, I wasn’t treated to the comforting sight of Willy noshing his way through Bonanza. The TV wasn’t even on. The Oreos and ice cream were untouched.
His pants were down around his ankles, a copy of Playboy open to the centerfold. He was breathing hard, and his right hand had a stranglehold on his dick. “What are you doing to yourself?”
“Beating my meat. Wanna try?”
“No, thanks.”
I went to bed early. It was the first night in my life I had not slept under the same roof as my parents. I missed my mom. Not like how she was, but how she would have been if she’d been a mom in a storybook, like Charlotte’s Web.
Lazlo came in to check on me. “Will you read me a story, Lazlo?” He was smoking a cigar.
“Sure, as long as it’s not the Little Red Hen. What books did you bring?”
“I didn’t bring any.”
“I’ll read you one of mine.” Lazlo eyed the bookshelf and pulled down a cracked volume and began to read. “ ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ ”
“Like now, you mean?”
“Like always.”
I fell asleep before he got to the part about chopping people’s heads off.
In the morning, Lazlo let us have ice cream for breakfast. When Fiona came downstairs, she hugged me and gave me two kisses. I could tell she appreciated the lie I had told her about Casper. I only wished there was some way to make up a story that would make me feel better.
“What’s that for?”
“First one’s from Mom, the second one’s from me.” My parents had called after I fell asleep.
Between bites of fudge ripple, Willy announced, “Dad says he’s going to buy me a microscope to make up for Fiona getting a guitar.” I imagined Willy peering at a centerfold magnified to the hundredth power.
Two new bodyguards had taken the place of Slavo and Stane. Lucy already had one of them convinced that our grandfather was Albert Schweitzer. Fiona had moved on to a new page in her songbook: “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer in the . . .”
“If I had a hammer, I’d break your damn guitar.” Lazlo laughed at Willy’s quip as he stuffed his briefcase with papers and got ready to go to work.
“What am I going to do all day?” I asked.
“Play with Willy.”
“Willy likes to play with himself.” Lazlo thought that was funnier than I did. He was the one who had told Willy about the Playboys.
“You can play with Zuza.”
“Is she my age?”
“Sometimes.” Lazlo motioned for me to follow him. English being his fourth language, he didn’t try to explain everything.
He opened a door in the kitchen and we descended a dark narrow staircase. At the bottom, there was a metal door covered in cork.
“Foot thick, lead-lined so I don’t hear her pounding.” Even though I didn’t like playing with girls, I was curious.
When Lazlo opened the door, I was greeted by a family of marble statues that looked just like naked people, except that they had eyes carved into their stone flesh in places that eyes don’t belong, eyes on the back of their heads and on the inside of their thighs and on their stomachs and feet and the palms of their hands. Some were squinting. Some were surprised, others seemed stunned by what they didn’t see. No matter where you looked, they were watching.
There was marble dust everywhere, even in the air. And the light that poured in through a pair of sidewalk-level windows at the end of the room drenched the figures in a pearly haze. I was so busy looking back at the eyes, I didn’t even realize the chalky white figure standing in their midst holding a hammer up over her head was alive until Lazlo said, “Zuza, what are you doing?”
“They’re all székés.” I knew from yesterday’s lesson that that was Hungarian for shit.
Lazlo took the hammer out of her hand. “This is Zach.”
I didn’t exist for her. “Sod off and give me back my hammer, Lazlo.” She had an English accent, but I could tell she was from somewhere else. She was taller than Lazlo, and even though she had hair shorter than mine and wore dirty men’s overalls and was covered in dust, she was pretty. The powdered stone that caked Zuza’s face made her eyes look like they belonged to a cat, and now that she’d wiped the dust from them, her lips showed purpler than red, like she’d been eating mulberries.
She bent back Lazlo’s fingers, trying to pry the hammer from his grip. When that didn’t work, she leaned over, openmouthed, and bent down to bite his hand. Lazlo laughed. She looked like a feral doll. “Get out of my studio. I made them, I can do what I want.”
“First, since you haven’t paid me rent in over two years and I pay your fucking marble bill, it is my studio and they are my naked eyeball people. Second, the last time you smashed everything up, you felt even worse afterward.” It was only then that I realized what she was going to do with the hammer.
“You were gonna wreck ’em?”
“Just her.” The statue that offended her eye was pregnant.
“What don’t you like about her?”
“Too pretty.”
“What’s wrong with pretty?”
“Ask Lazlo.” Lazlo was rummaging through her purse. “What are you doing?”
“Whenever you get like this, it means you haven’t been taking your pills.”
“They make me dumb.”
Still holding onto the hammer, Lazlo was trying to pop the lid off of her pill bottle with his teeth and talk at the same time. “Someone who’d rather break than fix is smart?” The cap popped off and the pills scattered.
Zuza gave Lazlo a surly glare as I squatted down to pick up the pills off the floor. They were lavender, and when I blew the dust off them and saw they were stamped with the letter L, I realized I’d seen them before. “My dad has a giant one of these inside a glass paperweight on his desk.” A drug company had given it to him to celebrate the sale of their millionth pill.
“Your father must be very depressed.” Lazlo thought that was funny.
I offered Zuza the handful of pills. She took one, swallowed it dry, flopped onto an old sofa, and retreated into a cloud of dust.
Lazlo handed me the hammer. “You can give it back to her in an hour.” He bent down to kiss her good-bye on the forehead, like she was the child and he was the parent. Then, at the last second, she looked up at him, scared and angry, and kissed him on the mouth. Then she pushed him away and snarled something that sounded less friendly than shit in Hungarian. He left by the little door that opened up under the front steps. Zuza waited until it slammed shut and he couldn’t hear her to call after him, “Sorry.”
Zuza chain-smoked a fresh pack of Kent cigarettes, tilting her head first to the right, then to the left, she ashed on the floor and stared at her stone-eyed statues, as if she were waiting for them to tell her what they saw. I sat across from her and waited for her to say something. After ten minutes of silence, I started to get restless. “Can I look around?”
When she didn’t answer, I began to explore. At the other end of the studio there were other things that didn’t make sense, sculpted in clay and chiseled from tree trunks. A giant terra-cotta egg that sprouted a dozen arms, all giving it a hug; and clay hands with wings draped in damp swaths of cheesecloths; and on the wall there was a poster of a medieval drawing that showed a castle and towns and mountains drawn as if the world was flat, and the ground they rose from rested upon the bac
k of a giant rhinoceros that stood on the back of an elephant that rode on the shell of a gigantic turtle that swam in an underground sea filled with tiny mermaids and monsters.
Pinned up next to it was a drawing that she had made based on her vision of the universe, only her flat world had skyscrapers and cars, but instead of the ground’s being supported by giant beasts, it teetered on a huge bomb that was held aloft by an even bigger baby that was being held up in the air by a man who stood on the shoulders of a woman who was trying to swim, but looked like she was drowning.
I looked at that drawing a long time before I asked Zuza, “Do you make goulash for Lazlo?”
Zuza smiled and lit the last cigarette in her pack. “Once upon a time, I did.”
“Did you know him when you were little?” I gave her back the hammer.
“Since I was sixteen. My mother was Hungarian, my father Czech. We met in Prague.”
“Why do you have an English accent then?”
“After the war, I attended art school in London. Lazlo sent me.”
“Do you sleep down here?” I saw a hot plate and a little refrigerator.
“Sometimes.” She put a sheet over the statue she had almost smashed, and turned on the record player. A minuet played, and she began to move among the statues as if she were dancing with a hammer.
I didn’t know exactly what my father had to do with the pill Zuza had taken, but I knew he had something to do with it. And the way it cheered up Zuza made me feel proud of my dad.
“Where do you live?”
“In a tiny apartment.”
“By yourself?”
“With a man.”
“Is he your husband?”
She laughed. “Yes. We are married. I’m more old-fashioned than I look.”
“Lazlo isn’t old-fashioned.”
“In some ways, that’s true.” She stopped dancing and tossed her partner, the hammer, onto the couch.
“Did Lazlo tell you why we’re staying with him?”
“Yes.”
It took five minutes of silence for me to well up the courage to ask, “Do you think they’ll catch him?”
“I don’t know.” She was the first grown-up who didn’t tell me everything was going to be okay, that I was safe, and that there was nothing to worry about. Knowing she might actually tell me the truth, I didn’t want to ask any more questions.
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