by Jenna Blum
Kitty looked in a couple of drawers in the kitchen and then disappeared into the living room. She came back with a blue Bicycle pack that she handed to Sabine.
"No eggs." Sabine took the cards out of the box, leaving the jokers inside. "So we'll do a different trick." She was wonderful at shuffling. That was one of the great responsibilities of an assistant. After every show they did in Vegas the house would offer her a job. She could have had the best blackjack table on the floor. "A pretty girl like you," they'd say. "You'd make ten times more dealing than whatever Mr. Magic is paying you."
"Can you imagine anything worse than dealing in Vegas?" she'd say to Parsifal. Winners slipping red plastic chips down the front of your blouse as a sign of appreciation.
Maybe it was because she had such long, slim fingers. Hands that were delicate but strong enough to open lids that were sealed onto jars. "With those hands," her mother would say, "you could have been a surgeon, a pianist. But my girl shuffles cards for a magician." In later years, her mother said it proudly instead of sarcastically.
Sabine made the cards fly on the Fetters' kitchen table. She showed off shamelessly for Kitty, who lowered herself slowly into the next chair. The cards shot up, twisted, and arched. She swept them to the left and then right, rocked them back and forth like notes held long on an accordion. She showed their faces, hid them, changed them. Each of the fifty-two was a separate object, a singular soul. That was how you had to think about them. Not one deck but fifty-two cards.
When she wanted them, they came back to her, a cozy stack. She pushed them with the tips of her fingers across the table to Kitty. "Cut?"
"I can't believe the boys weren't here to see this. You have to show them this."
"You bet."
Kitty declined to cut the deck and Sabine took it up again and fanned it out. "Pick a card, any card. Memorize it and put it back in the deck. Don't forget it, don't change your mind, don't lie about what it was later on when I need you to tell me the truth." Card banter. She knew it like a song. She sang it.
Kitty did not reach out at first. The cards still seemed to be spinning. There was not as much air in the room as there had been before. Sabine did not question the wait. She knew it. She had made it herself.
"Okay," Kitty said, blinking. "Okay." She slid one from the pack, looked at it, slipped it back.
"You've done your part, now relax. Don't relax so much that you forget your card." They were not her words, but they came out fine. Whoever really said anything for the first time, anyway? Sabine shuffled again, just a moderate riff this time. The shuffle show was already in place and now what mattered was not disturbing the order of the cards. "There are how many cards in a deck, Mrs. Plate?"
"Fifty-two."
"Fifty-two, correct. And in that deck of cards there are how many suits?" Cut.
"Four."
"And do you know the names of these suits?" Cut. Cut.
"Hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs."
"Exacdy right." Cut. Cut. Cut. Cut. Put the deck down. "So we have fifty-two cards and four suits, which leaves us how many cards in each suit?" Sabine almost didn't ask her this part. So many people got it wrong. The simple math of it froze them and they couldn't tell you to save their lives.
"Thirteen," Kitty said.
Sabine smiled at her. "Beautiful." She dealt out the entire deck into four piles. She counted to thirteen four times, made neat and even stacks without having to give the edges a straightening brush with her fingernail. Kitty watched her like she was dealing out Tarot cards, the truth of her future. The Sailor, the Drowned Man, the Queen of Wands. "So that's all of them," Sabine said. "Thirteen cards, four piles. My thought then is that this would have to be your card." Sabine turned over the top card of the first pile, a six of clubs.
Kitty looked astonished and then heartbroken. It was better than giving them their card. They believed so completely that you would not fail. Even as they tried to follow you and couldn't, they had seen a lifetime of card tricks. They were sure that the card they selected from the deck would come back to them at the end, even if they couldn't understand how. Which was true, but Sabine was not at the end.
"No."
Sabine looked pensive. She touched two fingers lightly to her lower lip. "I thought I knew how this one worked," she said, not in the magician's voice, but in her own. She tapped the second stack and turned the top card over. Six of diamonds. "This one?"
Kitty smiled. There was the pattern, the superior revelation. "No."
Sabine went on to the third. "It shouldn't be taking this long. Here?" Six of spades.
Kitty, thrilled, shook her head.
"One more chance," Sabine whispered. She flicked the card over. She barely had to touch it, because it moved beneath her hand. Six of hearts.
"Yes." Kitty nodded. "Yes, yes, yes." She fell back in her chair, exhausted from the anticipation. She was smiling like a girl, so huge and open that Sabine could see not only how beautiful she must have been when she was the assistant, but how beautiful she was now. The card trick had made Kitty beautiful. "That was wonderful. Pure genius. You are wasting yourself here with us. You have to be a magician."
Sabine was so pleased to have done well for Kitty. "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you want to."
"Bullshit." Kitty waved her hand. "You just aren't used to thinking of yourself that way. This is brilliant, Sabine. What a waste it would be not to use this."
Sabine smiled, flattered. She swept up the cards in one hand. "There are so many people who can do what I can do. To really make it work you have to have something else. Parsifal had it. He made tricks up. He could convince people of things."
"I have to wonder what would have become of Guy if he'd stayed here. I wonder if he would have been a magician in Nebraska. He could have performed at the schools, I guess. Fairs, parties, maybe."
Sabine tried to see it, the gymnasium hot and crowded, children squirming against the cold metal of folding chairs. The rabbit slips from Parsifal's hands and shoots into the tangle of feet. All of the children go onto the floor, scoot under the chairs. "No," she said. "He was a Californian through and through. He didn't even like to play in Vegas. We traveled all the time but anywhere we went, all he could talk about was going home. I think no matter what happened he would have wound up out there sooner or later."
Kitty's eyes were half closed. Sabine wondered what she dreamed about. "I'm sure you're right. It's just that I remember him here. I know that he hated it, but this is where I see him. I see him in this house. I always have." Kitty picked up the deck of cards from the table. She fanned them out and closed them up again. "Did he do a lot of card tricks?" Her hands were fluid.
"In the end. The last few years, all he wanted to do were cards."
"I didn't picture him sawing people in half."
They had sold the saw box years ago to a married couple who called themselves the Minotaurs. They still had the zigzag box, though. It was such a good one that Parsifal hated to get rid of it, even when he refused to use it. It was made out of teakwood, painted with red and yellow diamonds. The inside was lined in cool blue satin. It was in one of the guest rooms now. It made a pretty little armoire. "He sawed me in half plenty. He folded me down and stuck swords through the box. He made me disappear in a locked trunk and brought me back as a rabbit. That was in a less enlightened time, but we did it all."
Kitty spread out the cards and stacked them up, spread them and stacked them as if she were trying to figure out how they worked. "I'm surprised." She tapped the deck thoughtfully. "He didn't like to be closed in."
"He hated to be closed in. He closed me in, but he never got boxed himself. Parsifal needed a Valium just to get on an elevator, for God's sake." Sabine had looked into the dark barrel of the MRI machine. She had pressed herself into a tenth of that much space. She'd told him it didn't look so bad. "Your mother told me about the time he cut his face with the hedge shears, how they tied him up in a sack."
"I would think after something like that, small spaces are always going to make you nervous."
Kitty nodded and tapped the deck again absently. "They do." Outside, the dark clouds were making the smallest re-lease, a snow so light it looked like talcum powder. "It wasn't that sack that scared him. I'm sure it didn't help, but that wasn't it."
"The refrigerator, you mean."
Kitty blinked, startled awake. "He told you about that?"
He had told her plenty. He told her about taxes and headaches and men he was in love with. "He got trapped in an old refrigerator when he was a kid. He was playing and the door shut behind him."
Kitty folded her lips into her mouth to have the pleasure of biting down on both of them at once. The face she made was old, empty. "No."
"Oh, Christ." Sabine put her forehead down on the table. "This is going to be another one of those stories, isn't it? Parsifal's life in hell. Why can't you tell me all of them in one shot? Tell me the worst of it and let me go home."
"You already heard the worst of it. Guy killed Dad with a bat in the kitchen. Guy went to reform school. Guy left Nebraska. That's the very worst of it."
"And the refrigerator? Where does that fit into the picture? How bad on the scale of bad things is this?"
Kitty seemed to mull the question over, to see if there was some sort of rating system. "Our father locked him in the refrigerator. Guy was nine. Eight, nine. He had eaten something, I can't remember what it was now. Something he wasn't supposed to eat. Something my father wanted. He put Guy in the refrigerator."
"Nobody does that. You can't."
"Listen, I'm not making this up to provide colorful stories about the past. This is what happened to Guy. I don't know what I'm supposed to tell you. I don't think about these things. I don't think about them—and now I do. Do you want me to tell you?"
What Sabine wanted was Fairfax. Jews did not lock their children in refrigerators. She wanted her own parents, who were in their yard now, a thousand miles away, watering the azaleas while the rabbit napped at the end of a leash her mother held with two hands. "Your father put him in the refrigerator." The words came out slowly, carefully. She remembered that she wasn't angry at Kitty, though just as quickly she could feel herself forgetting.
"My father had good qualities," Kitty said, "but I can't remember them anymore. I know there were moments that I loved him but I can't remember when they were. With him, you could do something nine times in a row and it was fine, and then the tenth time it wasn't fine. The tenth time he'd kill you for it. He'd kill Guy for it, or my mother. Sometimes me, but not so much at all. I felt bad about that. Who knows what Guy ate, but when my father asked him, just by his voice you knew this was going to be time number ten. There was nothing to say except, 'What? Yeah, I ate it.'"
"So he opened up the door and stuffed him inside? That's a big boy, eight or nine." It was the magician's voice, confident, controlling. Pick a card. Sabine could feel her hands starting to shake and she sat on them.
"He made Guy take everything out first." Kitty picked up the deck and began dealing a single hand; one, two, three, four, five, she counted the cards silently out on the table.
"Made him take out the food?"
"The food, the shelves. There wouldn't have been room for him otherwise. The refrigerator was full and it all went very slow. It took him a long time. He put the food on the counter and on the breakfast table and the floor." Kitty pointed as if to say, that counter there. "Guy was crying a little and my father was harping at him, 'Always stuffing your face, always taking what doesn't belong to you.' At one point he called him a fat boy, which just made no sense. When he took his shirt off you could see his ribs, for Christ's sake."
Parsifal at the beach had taken off his shirt, raised his arms in the Southern California sun, turned in front of Sabine, who was sitting on her towel. "Tell me the truth," he'd said.
"So we were scared, but not so scared. It was crazy stuff. We thought, Guy and I thought, that he was bluffing. If things took too long he just lost interest. We thought once everything was out, he'd turn around and tell Guy to put it all back in and that would be that. That was the sort of thing he'd do, give you plenty of time to think about how you'd never eat something you weren't supposed to again."
"Did you help him take things out?"
"I wasn't allowed." Kitty scooped up the cards and tapped them on the table to straighten them out.
"But you were there."
"I was always there," Kitty said. "When I was there things didn't get so out of hand. Things didn't usually get so out of hand, but this time, I don't know. Finally all the food was out. He left the things in the shelves on the door and he left the things in the freezer. It was just one of those little freezer boxes at the top that pretty much just hold ice. He told Guy to take out the shelves and out they came. By now we're sure it's over. Dad says, 'Get in,' and Guy does. I almost laughed, I was thinking, My father has let this go too far and he's looking stupid now, it hasn't been a good lesson. Guy made a face at me like, Hell, I'm in the fridge. Then just at that minute when it's all supposed to be over, Dad shuts the door. Not even a slam, just a real normal click like he'd just gotten himself a beer. It's one of those big old refrigerators with the bar across the front like a safe and when it's shut it looks absolutely locked and I started screaming my head off. I think the neighbors must have heard me. Guy told me later that once you're in there you can't really hear anything."
Sabine did not turn to look at the refrigerator behind her. She knew it to be a Whirlpool side-by-side, ice through the door, in toasted almond. She didn't know the rest of the story, but she knew how it ended. Parsifal got out.
"My father told me to be quiet. He told me to come in the living room with him, to sit still and be quiet. I'm thinking, How long can a person last? How long until he suffocates? I was a kid, kids don't have any sense about those things. Hell, I don't even think I'd know now, how long it would take. I didn't think he could freeze to death, but it would be cold in there. It was summer when this happened, so he was in there in his T-shirt and shorts. My father picked up the paper and started to read. I look back on this now, I think about it as a parent, and there's no way to understand what happened. He read the paper and I sat there. I sat there and sat there and sat there until suddenly I did this little gulp, like a hiccup, and I realized that I hadn't been breathing, and I bolted up and ran into the kitchen and let Guy out. He was sitting on the bottom and you could see the prints of his sneakers on the inside of the door shelves where he'd tried to push it open. He'd cracked the inside of the door. I don't know, maybe he could have stayed in there another six hours. I have no idea. I remember him being perfectly white, but I don't know if that was from not getting any air or from the cold or just from being so goddamn frightened."
"What did your father do?"
"Not a thing. He didn't even look up. I was supposed to let him out. I really think that was the way he had meant for it to go. I told Guy that I'd put the food back, but he was nervous. He thought it was supposed to be his job, and if he didn't do it he'd wind up back inside. He wiped out the refrigerator, got everything all cleaned up. We threw away anything that looked rotten, and then Guy and I put the shelves back in and then all the food. Everything had gotten sweaty and wet. It was hot in the kitchen. Guy was real shaky but he didn't say anything. He wiped off the milk, he put back the milk. I don't remember where my mother was, but when she came home later she thought we'd cleaned out the refrigerator as a surprise."
"Did you tell her?"
Kitty pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. "Much, much later. Whenever I got mad at my mother, I told her everything. Before my father died, we were all a team, me and my mother and Guy. We were together against him. But after Guy was gone and Bertie was born, I blamed it all on my mother. I thought she could have done something to stop it all from happening. I never thought that at the time, but later, once thi
ngs were quiet and I could think it all through, I wanted to nail her to the wall."
Terrible things had happened to Phan. Hadn't he been sent off alone as a child? Hadn't his parents, his sisters, been killed in Vietnam? Hadn't he lost everything? Phan had stayed alone in the world until he found Parsifal, and yet his face showed none of that. His face, bright and smooth in the sun as he slept next to the swimming pool, was peaceful. When he came home from work in the evenings there was always something in his pocket for the rabbit, a carrot stick from lunch, a cluster of green grapes. He made elaborate birthday cakes with thin layers of jam in the middle. He ironed Parsifal's handkerchiefs. But what about at night? Did they hold each other tightly? Did Parsifal whisper in his ear, "My Love, my father put me in the refrigerator and left me there to suffocate. It was so dark and so cold and I heard the electricity hum." Did Phan then bury his face against Parsifal's neck and say, "Darling, they killed my mother. They killed the boys who sat next to me in school. They killed even the birds in the trees." Did they rock one another then? Was there comfort? Did they stay up until dawn, recounting things too unbelievable to say with the lights on, and then decide in the morning to keep it all a secret? Was there always a brave (ace for Sabine?
For Sabine there was always a brave face. Where had her parents met exactly? Not at the beginning of Israel, but before that. Was it on a train? Was it before that? They came from different corners of Poland, but then all of Poland was swept together. They were not from Poznan and Lublin. They were only from Poland. They were not Polish, they were only Jews. What did they say to each other in bed in Fairfax? What did they remember late at night, their voices dropping to a whisper to spare Sabine? "Darling, do you know what became of your sister?" "My Love, I cannot be reminded by the snow." Did they speak in that other language, the one Sabine studied but did not learn. Did they lull themselves to sleep with familiar words?
