The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "I can't imagine how you must have felt." Sabine wanted her coffee but did not pick it up.

  "I can tell you," Dot said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "I felt bad. I felt bad that my husband was dead, even though I had prayed that he would leave or die for nearly as long as I'd been married to him, and then I felt bad for all those years of prayers. I felt bad my son had been sent off for doing it, for trying to take care of me, because that's when I realized that Guy had always been my favorite, and then I felt bad for having favorites. I felt so bad that when Bertie was born two months after all of this I named her for Albert, which was maybe the worst thing I ever did because it sent a real clear message to Guy about which one of them I was missing most. I handled it poorly, start to finish, but I've got to say life doesn't prepare you for this one. There are no examples to follow, no other families you can look to. It's all running blind. Kitty was so angry at me for not being able to keep Guy at home she said it was all on my account that he was in Lowell, which was true. But what she never understood was how lucky I was to get him in at Lowell. He was close enough to sixteen that there was talk of trying him as an adult, and that's prison, something else altogether. No one seemed to give two cents that he was a good boy trying to stop a grown man. No one cared about what Al had put Guy through all those years. Things then weren't like things now. Your husband beats you, your father beats you, you take it like it's your duty. And if you lift a finger back, well, the law is going to be so deep down your throat you'll feel it in your stomach. So Guy's gone, and I've got Kitty and then this little baby, no money." She shook her head. "Forget it. I'm feeling sorry for myself. I don't like to think like this."

  Dot was right about one thing: There were no examples to follow. No card that read, I'm so sorry your son killed your husband. "It seems (air," Sabine said helplessly. "I'm feeling sorry for myself all the time these days."

  The snow in the sun had a certain ground-down, glittery brilliance. In the white bed there were flecks of color, bright pinpricks of green and yellow and red, the colors you saw when you pressed in on your eyes as a child. Parsifal may have taken the hardest hit, but he had gotten away, safe, in his boat. Dot and Kitty had stayed, circling that same spot on the kitchen floor. Dot was crying now, and Sabine knew from too much experience that crying in the morning practically guaranteed a headache for the rest of the day. She leaned over and stroked Dot's hair, felt the stiffness of the curls beneath her fingers. Then she did something that she had seen a million times but had only done herself years before on the rarest of occasions. She extracted a hen's egg from Dot's ear.

  White and cold, it came out smoothly. She had applied just the right amount of pressure so as to give the feeling of the egg being birthed through the tympanic membrane—not too much pressure, of course. More than once she had seen an amateur crush an egg against the side of some unsuspecting head, a mixture of yolk and white slipping beneath the shirt collar. Sabine, who had been nervous about pulling this off, felt so enormously pleased with herself she considered palming it again and trying the other ear. Dot Fetters touched her ear nervously and then took the egg from Sabine's hand as if it were something more miraculous than her breakfast.

  "Oh," she said. "Sabine." She traced her finger across the chalky white shell. "This is so sweet of you."

  "Plenty more where that came from." Parsifal's line.

  "I should have told you."

  "You should have."

  "In California, it was all so overwhelming. You and that house and the palm trees."

  "So what was the story in the Sheraton? What was all that about his being gay?"

  Dot tilted her head towards her right shoulder, her ear coming close to the wool of her sweater. "Well, it's true that I knew he was gay and it used to worry me when there was free time to worry. Guy's being gay and his going to Lowell got tied up together in my mind somehow. I think that really sealed things for him. Maybe if he'd been brought up in a better home, stayed in Nebraska, it would have gone different."

  "Not a chance," Sabine said.

  "You think?"

  "He liked men. No, one knows that better than me. That's just who he was." Who he was in the bone marrow. He loved the comfort, the sameness of himself. He loved the narrow hips and the rough brush of the cheek.

  "So you aren't mad at me? You aren't leaving?"

  "I'll leave eventually." Her mind was still on the egg. "But I just got here."

  There were too many other things to know. It doesn't just happen that one day the father knocks down the mother and the son knocks down the father and then everybody goes their own way. And besides, even in this short time Sabine had gotten the thing she'd most hoped for: She felt closer to Parsifal here. It should have been in Los Angeles, in the house where they lived, in the clubs where they played, on Mulholland late at night; but all the places she knew him to be only showed up the fact that he was gone. In Nebraska, where she had never imagined him, she could see him everywhere.

  "Guy could do the silver dollar really good towards the end." Dot made the movement of taking something out of her own ear. "Smooth as silk. All the kids in the neighborhood waited around for him. They were crazy for it, even if he wouldn't let them keep the dollar. But he never could do the egg. He tried it on me, but I always saw it coming. Not that I ever told him, of course. But he knew." She patted Sabine's knee, happy and proud, like a parent. "You, on the other hand, wow. I felt that thing coming right out of the center of my head. I don't mean to compare, but you're a lot better at this magic stuff than he ever was."

  "Oh, God, no," Sabine said, strangely shaken that such a thing could even be said. "He taught this to me. I don't know a thing about magic that I didn't learn from him. Taking an egg out of somebody's ear, that's nothing. It's a kid's trick. The things he could do ... Well," she said, struck by the loss of all those things, "you wouldn't have believed them."

  Dot nodded appreciatively. "I'm not saying he wasn't good. He was wonderful. Good at everything he tried his hand at, baseball and math and cooking, even. All I'm saying is that with this magic business you've got something..." She pursed her lips together. A mother looking to be completely fair to all parties involved. "Extra. You've got a good move. I think it's because you don't ever draw attention to yourself. Beautiful as you are and elegant, you don't do anything to make people look at you. You don't show off. When you pulled that egg out of my ear, you looked just as surprised about it as me."

  "That's because I didn't think I could do it." The praise irritated Sabine. Dot didn't understand. She had missed those crucial twenty-five years in the middle of the story.

  "Well, I'll drop it, I just don't want you to sell yourself short, is all." Dot stood up energetically, relieved to have the weight of that conversation thrown off her. She kissed the shiny crown of Sabine's head and held the egg out to her. "I'll make you breakfast. Any way you want it. How about that?"

  At ten-thirty Dot left the house to go work in the cafeteria of the high school, where Kitty's boys were in the ninth and eleventh grades. She stood on the side of the hot-food line opposite the students and dished mashed potatoes and creamed corn into indented plates. Sabine believed Dot would be fast and give out fair and equal portions. "It's good work," she told Sabine. "I like seeing the kids. Not just Kitty's boys, but all of them. Kitty says I shouldn't work now that we've got this money, but I'd miss it. What's there to do at home all day? There'll be plenty of time for that." Up until four years ago, Dot did forty hours a week at the Woolrich plant and overtime when she could get it. But then the money that Parsifal sent once in a while became regular and generous, and though she could never ask him if she could count on it, after a while, she did. That was when she quit the plant and went to the high school.

  "I hate to leave you here like this," she said when she was bundled inside her coat. "You're sure you don't want to drive me over, keep the car?"

  "I'm going to be fine," Sabine said.

  "Not that
there's much to drive to, really. It's not like leaving someone alone in Los Angeles for the day."

  "Go to work."

  Dot nodded but didn't go. She stalled at the door, fussing with her gloves. It had been the same way at the airport when she didn't want to get on the plane. She was afraid that if she left Sabine alone she would lose her. Alone, Sabine would start to think. Losing Sabine would be too much like losing Parsifal again. The very idea froze Dot to the floor. "Do you have my number?"

  Sabine opened the door. The air was so cold she stepped back as if slapped. Dot, not wanting to chill the whole house, hurried outside.

  Sabine waited, craned her neck to see the car turn around the corner. Its exhaust threw a huge plume in the frigid air. Then she went to the phone and dialed her parents' number. She was glad when it was her father who answered.

  "Angel," he said. "You'll never guess who's here, who is sitting right on my lap helping me read the newspaper."

  "You'll spoil him."

  "No such thing as a spoiled bunny. This is an animal who possesses a limitless capacity for affection."

  In Alliance, Sabine curled inside the soft arm of the recliner and held the phone with both hands. She closed her eyes and studied her parents' living room. In the gold morning light of Los Angeles her father, her mother, her rabbit were together, safe, waiting. "How are you, Dad? How's Mother?"

  "We, Angel, are always the same. We are fine except for missing you. Tell me how is this Nebraska? Are there many cows?"

  Sabine told him. She told him about the snow and the house and Bertie and the snow and Dot and Parsifal's room and meeting Kitty in the middle of the night and the snow and the snow and the snow. She did not tell him about Parsifal's father, although she knew she would when she got home. There could be no association for her parents now between where she was and a violent death, no matter how long ago it had happened. They depended on Sabine to be safe, as she depended on them to be.

  "Your mother has gone to the store. I almost went and then I didn't. Maybe it is because I knew you would call."

  "Possible," Sabine said.

  "That would make your father a mind reader, a sort of magician. Maybe we could get a little act together."

  "I'd like that."

  "Well, then, come home and we'll get started. Have you seen enough of it now? I wouldn't think you'd need too much time to figure out Nebraska. Are you coming home?"

  "I just got here last night."

  Her father laughed as if she'd said something terribly funny. She wanted him to laugh. She wanted him to talk to her all day until Dot came home. She wanted to hear the sound of his voice, safe and happy. Her father, who had set his alarm for two A.M. so that he could get up and drive to the Magic Hat to pick her up because it was too late for taking buses home from work.

  "I am only wishful thinking. Nebraska is too far away to go for the night, I know that. Should I have seen Nebraska, Sabine-Love? What do you think? Your mother and I talk about vacations. You couldn't list all the places we didn't go."

  Sabine lifted her head, opened her eyes. Outside was snow and sky, a house across the street that was a mirror image of the one she was in. "There are better vacation spots."

  "Do you think you will know Parsifal better now?" His tone was confidential. Either way it would be their secret.

  Sabine's eyes were still open. Parsifal had shoveled the walk that led to that street. He had cut his face open with hedge shears in that yard. He had killed his father in one accidental second and changed the world. She told her father yes.

  "Good, then. Good. You are in the right place."

  Sabine tried to go back to sleep but could not. No matter how far she pulled the shades down the room wasn't dark. She wandered through the house, studying the pictures on the walls, looking in drawers and finding nothing that mattered. She lay across Parsifal's bed and read an entire Hardy Boys mystery. The plot involved a cave and the kidnaping of the boys' father. She shook the other books to see if anything had been left behind and found the wrapper from a stick of Doublemint gum, but that was probably from one of Kitty's sons.

  She poked through the room, lonely and restless. She looked beneath the baseball trophies, behind the pictures on the wall. When half the afternoon was gone she found something that interested her high up in the closet, a Mysto magic kit, the corners of the box held together with strips of masking tape that were themselves so old that they were nothing but dried-out pieces of paper formed to the box. On the cover was a photograph of a somewhat sinister-looking man in a top hat and cape leaning over two children. The children were looking at a small white rabbit and a couple of rubber balls. Their oblivion to the magician seemed dangerous. The live rabbit seemed misleading. This had been the kit that Parsifal talked about, "impressing your friends." Inside there was a set of interlocking rings that reminded her unpleasantly of Sam Spender and her breakdown at the Magic Castle. There was the set of rubber balls pictured on the box, a series of cups for hiding the balls, a black wand with a white tip. It had been so long since Sabine had seen anybody use a wand that it took her a minute to figure out what it was for. There was a deck of cards that didn't belong with the set. From the diagram on the lid it was clear that a few items were missing: the magic twine, the five enchanted coins, and the bouquet of silk flowers. Silk flower bouquets turned ratty the third time you used them. Over thirty years they were bound to have disintegrated.

  Sabine skimmed over the instructions, which were nearly impossible to follow. To do the cups and balls the way they described it would take eight arms, dim lighting, and an audience recently injected with Versed. What torture this must have been for a child who had never before seen magic performed. Sabine dropped the papers back in the box. She picked up the rings, hit them together and locked them, snapped them hard and set them free. It wasn't a bad set of rings. Thirty years ago there was more integrity in a cheap box of tricks than there was now. She held all three rings together in one hand and then threw one up in the air, hit it, and locked it on. She threw up the second one, hit it, and then all three were connected. That was a little bit of a trick, to throw them up, to lock them where anyone could see without anyone being able to tell. That had taken them some practice. Sabine used to throw them to Parsifal and he would lock them on in the catch. It took forever to figure out exactly how hard to throw them and at what angle. It took forever again until they could do it in their sleep. Sabine liked the sound they made, the short clang and rattle of the metal running into itself. How long had it taken little Guy Fetters to figure this one out? Was he eight then? Ten? Twelve? She turned the lid of the box over and dropped the balls inside. She covered them with their cups and sent them spinning cup to cup. She hid two extra balls in the stacked cups. It was never just three balls. Sabine had fast hands. She knew how to make her hands go in one direction and the cups skid off in another. She could have made a fortune running three-card monte at Venice Beach. A good assistant had to be that smooth; faster than the magician, even. So fast as to be completely still.

  There was no such thing as being a magician's assistant without knowing the trick. People are misguided by the assistant's surprise, the way her mouth opens in childlike delight as her glove is turned into a dove. But if you didn't know how it would all turn out, you wouldn't know where to stand, how to turn yourself to shield the magician's hand or temporarily block the light. And if, in some impossible, unimaginable circumstance, the trick was not explained to the assistant, she would get it sooner or later out of sheer repetition: The egg comes out of your ear, the rabbit is between your breasts, your head is sawed off, it happens over and over and over again. Sooner or later you are bound to know it like your name.

  But knowing a trick doesn't mean being able to pull it off. That's what Parsifal didn't understand, or maybe it was just the sickness and sadness at the end of his life that made him forget. Sabine was an encyclopedia of magic, a walking catalog of props, stage directions, cues, but she wasn't a magician.
Most people can't be magicians for the same reason they can't be criminals. They have guilty souls. Deception doesn't come naturally. They want to be caught.

  There were sounds, rustling and then the stamping of boots coming from the kitchen. Sabine quickly put everything back in the box and slid it under the bed. It was a toy, a game. Forty-one years old, what was she doing on the floor, playing with balls, feeling guilty?

  "Sabine?" Dot called from down the hall. "Are you here?"

  "I'm here," she said, scrambling up, her left leg sound asleep. She limped down the hall, hitting her thigh with her fist.

  "I've got a real treat," Dot said.

  When Sabine rounded into the kitchen, there was Dot and, on either side of her, a boy. Each was tall. Each was beautiful, so red faced from the cold that he appeared to be just that instant awake. They were swaddled in clothing, plaid wool scarves wrapped half around necks, wool sweaters over plaid shirts, down vests over wool sweaters, and coats that looked to be borrowed from Admiral Byrd. Their hands were bare and chapped. The taller of the two wore a blue knit hat. They resembled their uncle at that time in his life when Sabine had first met him, when she first saw him take a rabbit from his shirt cuff. Beautiful.

  "This is How," Dot said, putting her arm recklessly around the taller, darker of the two. "And this is Guy." Guy, slightly fairer, was smaller only from being two years younger. His body's clear intention was to outreach his brother's. When his grandmother embraced him he stiffened slightly. "Boys, this is your Aunt Sabine."

  "Aunt Sabine?" she said.

  "Well, you're their uncle's wife. That's how it works. Do you think 'Mrs. Parsifal' would be better? I should have asked you first."

  Sabine puzzled over it. Certainly not "Mrs. Parsifal." But "Aunt Sabine"? "Aunt Sabine, or Sabine, either one," she said, and stepped forward to shake their hands, both of them cold and impossibly large. Both of them with nails bitten nervously down to the quick.