The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Everything go okay at school?" Kitty asked. She leaned over and pushed back a lank piece of hair that blocked Guy's left eye.

  "Um-huh," Guy said.

  "There was a food fight at lunch," How said, his face made bright with the memory. "Gram had to break it up. She got right in the middle of it."

  "They were only throwing their peas," Dot said modestly.

  "Nobody threw anything at her," How said.

  "Well, I'm glad to see them showing some respect for the elderly." Kitty's hands were everywhere. She ran them over Dot's shoulders and down How's arm. They settled, comforted.

  How looked up at his mother, his eyes full of a dreamy sort of love that made him look sleepy. "You feeling all right?"

  "Sure thing," Kitty said.

  "I was wondering, since you were lying down."

  "What are you," Guy said, without looking up from his reading, "the sleep police?"

  How opened his mouth, but it was Kitty who spoke. "Sabine and I bored each other out of our minds. We talked and talked until we got so dull we just passed out. We didn't even mean to. One minute we were talking and the next minute, bang." Kitty looked to Sabine in conspiracy.

  "Absolutely," Sabine said.

  Bertie came in with her arms full of colored sheets of construction paper. She was wearing a plaid wool jumper over a white sweater. She was wearing tights and flat shoes. Her curls were brushed back hard and caught in a barrette at the nape of her neck. She looked like a larger version of her students, as if she had dressed to reassure them that growing up wouldn't be so different from what they already knew. "I can't work in there. He won't turn the television off."

  Kitty looked at her sons, counting them, one, two. "Who won't turn the television off?"

  "Howard's here," Dot said. "I told him you were asleep."

  "And he didn't wake me up?" Kitty leaned over the percolator and watched the coffee shoot up into the glass dome. The room filled with the tidelike churning of its boil. "I find that hard to believe."

  "Gram told him he couldn't go back there because of Aunt Sabine," Guy whispered. "Said we all had to be on good manners."

  "Why isn't he at work?"

  "He's going to double-shift tonight," Dot said, pulling down cups. She held one up to Sabine. "You going to have some?"

  Sabine nodded and rubbed her eyes. The smell of coffee reminded her of something, the first time she and Parsifal went to Paris. They stayed in a pension over a bistro, and the smell of coffee woke them up in the mornings. It got in their clothes, in their hair. When they went walking they could close their eyes and follow the scent of coffee in the breeze. "Not just any coffee," he had said to her. "Our coffee." That was before the rug store, when he was the buyer for French Country Antiques. They spent tireless days at the flea market. Parsifal bought an eight-hundred-pound marble deer that was curled up, asleep. When they finished shopping they showered and changed into their costumes to do a magic show.

  "Bonsoir, Mesdames et Messieurs. Je m'appelle Parsifal le Magicien et void ma merveilleuse assistante."

  "'Ma merveilleuse'?" Sabine had said after the show.

  "Haas said he saw you two at Wal-Mart." Bertie poured herself a cup of coffee. "Did you get the pens?"

  "Did you get the Almond Roca?" Kitty asked, leaning against her sister.

  Sabine thought Bertie would laugh, but instead her cheeks flushed red. She turned away from her sister as if she had been caught.

  "Ohh," Guy said, suddenly alert to the potential for humiliation. "Almond Ro-ca." He gave the r a deep, Latin roll and managed to make the small, nut-crusted candies sound lascivious.

  "I found a pen," Sabine said, shifting through the bags she had left by the back door. It would be hard to be Bertie, to be so in love in this house where everyone else was inured to it. She would have been five years old when Kitty got married in the hospital ward, Howard Plate taking his morphine through drip IV while they repeated their vows back to the minister. Sabine held up the pen, which was sealed to a piece of cardboard by form-fitting plastic. "Voilà."

  "I want to pay you for it."

  Sabine smiled. "You're not going to pay me for a pen. You can think of it as a wedding present."

  "Well, you're going to have to work fast. Those things should have been in the mail a long time ago." Dot tried to sound like the mother of the bride, but she was paying more attention to making dinner than she was to the conversation. She had been mothering people in one way or another for forty-six years. Her energy for the project had faded.

  "We already know who's coming," Bertie said.

  "Hey, Dad," How said. The room got quiet and turned collectively towards the living room door, where Howard Plate leaned. His baseball cap, whose neat cursive letters said Woolrich across the front, was pulled down low so that he had to tilt his head back to see properly.

  "There still coffee?"

  Dot brushed her hands against the sides of her slacks. "There should be some. It seems like we all wanted coffee without knowing it."

  "That's because some people get so sleepy," he said. If he was looking at anyone in particular it was impossible to tell because of the angle of the cap.

  "Some people didn't get a whole hell of a lot of sleep last night." Kitty picked up the salad radishes her mother had been slicing and continued the job. The knife made a staccato tap against the cutting board.

  "Now, whose fault would that be?"

  "All right," Bertie said, and pushed up from the table. "If Howard's abandoned the television, then I think it's fair game for me and the boys. What do you say?"

  Good, obedient boys, they stood up and began to fold the newspaper, making preparations to follow their aunt into quieter regions of the ranch house. There were too many people in the room once Howard Plate had been added, like the person who makes his way late onto a too-full elevator. Everyone had begun shifting their weight, feeling boxed in.

  Kitty put down her knife. "I don't want you to run off. I haven't seen you boys all day. Everything is fine."

  "Is that my coffee?" Howard Plate pointed towards the cup Dot had left on the sink. Dot looked at it, surprised, and nodded.

  "I want Sabine to show you how she shuffles cards," Kitty said. "She showed me today. I want you boys to see it. Maybe she'll show you a card trick, too, if she feels like it. I was so impressed, I told her I thought she ought to be a magician."

  "I told her the same thing," Dot said to her grandsons. "She took an egg out of my ear, you know."

  "I didn't think women could be magicians," How said. He thought about it and started again. "I mean, I knew they could be, but they aren't, are they? I can't ever remember..."

  "In all the many, many magicians you've seen," Guy said.

  "On television," How said, his voice taking on an edge like the far-off sound of a storm. "How many women magicians have you seen on television, stupid?"

  "I really think I might scream if this goes on for one minute more," Kitty said quietly. She put down the knife and reached into her back pocket, where she had put the deck when she and Sabine had been alone. She handed it to Sabine. Howard Plate, coffee cup wrapped in both hands, was back in his spot at the doorjamb. It was easy to see how he could have been a hoodlum twenty-five years before. There was something in his posture, both hurt and menacing, that might have seemed romantic when he was young and still handsome. When he was young, it might have been enough that he was tough rather than smart, that he drank too much and went around in the winter with no jacket. Boys like that came to bad ends: They went to prison; they slapped their cars into trees late at night and never got out; they left town under the good advice of the local law enforcement agency and were not heard from again. They slipped on the ice late at night in a trainyard and fell beneath the wheels of a train. Rarely, rarely did they survive, stay with the woman they married, the children they fathered, and settle a round stomach on top of their thin legs. Howard Plate had stayed.

  Sabine opened the pack. The
cards were soft from a hundred games of gin rummy, from all of Dot's late-night solitaire played on a cookie sheet in bed. Once the cellophane was off a deck, and the seal broken, the cards were worth nothing to a magician. Everyone thought you were cheating, and even though you were, every minute, you didn't use marked cards. Parsifal ordered his cards by the case. He threw them away after a few tricks, even if it was only in practice. He had to work with new cards. Once a card was broken in he didn't know how to make it move anymore. But Sabine saved those decks. She practiced with cards until she tore them in half. She glued them together, painted them, and cut them into walls for office complexes. She gave the leftover packs to her mother, who sent them to Hillel House and the Jewish Home and, on one occasion, sent twenty decks to an orphanage in Israel.

  She handed them to How. "Ordinary deck of cards?"

  How took the deck suspiciously. He knew it. It was the deck he and Guy used to play spit-in-the-ocean on the days they were stuck inside, days it got so cold the wind could burst your eardrums. They played until one of them believed the other to be cheating, at which point they threw the cards down and began to beat each other senseless. Dot always made them count the deck in front of her once they were finished with it. Otherwise cards got lost beneath the couch. How fanned them out and did a cursory inspection, identified all four suits, did not notice an unusual number of aces. The blue-and-white deck had the softness of a well-worn baseball glove. He handed them back to her. "Okay," he said, but with no real commitment.

  Sabine started the show. She did it because she felt that Kitty was asking her for help with her family. She did it because a deck of cards always made her feel closer to Parsifal. She started slow, a simple collapsing bridge. She divided the deck into packets of cards and tripped them over in her fingers. These people were card rubes. They had never had the opportunity to be impressed before. She could make them cry out in pleasure just by cutting the deck. "It was your Uncle Parsifal who taught this to me originally."

  "God," Bertie said, leaning over the table. "I have to call Haas. He has to see this." She did not straighten up or go to the phone. She stayed fixed to her place by the flash of blue-and-white paper. "Do you think you could come to my class sometime? The kids would love this."

  "Wouldn't that be something," Dot whispered.

  How's hands stayed on the table, his chapped lips parted so that he could breathe easily through his mouth. Even Guy was quiet. Kitty was standing at the back of Sabine's chair. They were all rocked by the cards, soothed by the rhythmic motion. She could make these people bark if she wanted to. She could make them walk on their hands and knees and bark like dogs if she told them that was the next part of the trick. It wasn't even a trick, it was shuffling. She had paralyzed them by shuffling cards, which said more about Alliance than it did about her talents.

  She rolled the deck so fast they would never have caught her doing anything at all. Red cards face-in, black cards face-out, a few more showy cuts where nothing really moved. "One trick," she said. "An easy one, but I'll need a volunteer."

  It was a beautiful word, volunteer, the promise of partnership, inclusion. To volunteer was your chance to step into the light and see the people who were seated down where you used to be. The Fetters and the Plates looked up at her, hopeful, expectant. Each one was sure he or she would be chosen and so did not feel the need to ask.

  "You, sir," Sabine said, smiling like a Vegas girl to the man at the door.

  The table turned and looked at Howard Plate, who had kept his distance, staying on the far side of the kitchen. "You don't mean me."

  "I do." She patted the table, a sign to come.

  "Ah, hell," Howard Plate said.

  "Be a good sport," Kitty said to her husband.

  "I don't know anything about this stuff."

  Guy moved over to the empty chair beside him, offering his place to his father. "Come on, Dad."

  Howard Plate sighed at the tremendous burden that had been put on him. He walked his coffee cup over to the sink, rinsed it out, set it facedown on the counter, and came back to the table in no hurry at all. "I never liked games," he said, taking his place.

  "It's not a game," Sabine said, turning the deck in her hands, making them think the shuffling continued long after it was over. "This is a test."

  "I like those even less."

  The table was nervous. Maybe Sabine had made a bad pick. Their backs were all preternaturally straight, their breathing shallow, as if they were at an especially convincing séance. "This is for ESP, extrasensory perception. Very easy. It is a proven scientific fact that people can sense things they cannot see—"

  "Always tell them it's science," Parsifal had said. "People are suckers for science. If car salesmen wore white coats, they'd make a fortune."

  "—so all I'm going to do is test your abilities. If you think a card is red, I'll put it to the left. If you think it's black, I'll put it to the right. That easy. Don't think about it too much, just go on impulse, left and right."

  "I don't know what color a card is if I can't see it."

  "Maybe you do, maybe you don't." There was no way out. You don't give them one. Ever. "That's what we're going to find out."

  Howard Plate lifted his baseball cap high enough for him to comb back his hair with his hand and then set it back in place. He was looking at the spaces on the table in front of him, the right side and then the left. He was thinking it through. "All right."

  Sabine held out a card, facedown.

  "Left."

  They started into the deck, four lefts in a row and then a right; another left, but then he changed his mind and put it to the right. Howard Plate stared hard at the back of every card as if the deck were marked and he had found a way to read the code. He grew quicker, more confident. "Right, left, right, right."

  When Sabine had counted to twenty-six she stopped him. "Okay. It's good to switch the piles now. It helps to keep your thinking fresh. So now red is going to the right. Got it?"

  "Got it."

  Sabine and Howard Plate made their way to the end of the deck. When it was over the table relaxed. Bertie and Kitty both sat down. Dot stretched out her short legs in front of her. Guy slapped his brother lightly on the arm for no reason at all. "I think I did okay," Howard Plate said.

  "I have a feeling you did very well," Sabine said. She picked up the stack to the right and began going through the cards like an answer sheet. "Red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red." She flipped them down slowly at first, so that there could be the moment when people were startled not by her, but by the notion that Howard Plate was, in fact, in possession of perfect ESP. In the second it dawned on them that it was all a trick, she started going faster. She picked up the second stack and fanned it out, all black.

  "Jesus," Howard Plate said. He reached his hands out to touch the cards on the table. He was careful, as if suspicious of heat. "Would you look at that?"

  It was not uncommon. The last person to catch on was the one who stood to benefit, the one who was quickly calculating a life of previously unexplored talents.

  How laughed and broke the spell.

  Sabine had picked the wrong member of the audience. She knew it the second the last card was turned, but once it was done there was no way to undo a trick. She had meant it to include him, to bring him over to the table, and yet she had mocked him. Magic was always mocking in a way. It was the process of fooling people, making them think they saw something they couldn't have seen. Every now and then fooling people made them fools.

  "You fixed it?" Howard said.

  "It's a trick," Bertie said. "A card trick. Remember? Kitty asked Sabine to do a card trick."

  "Did you think I couldn't do it, is that why you fixed it?"

  "Couldn't do what?" Sabine asked.

  "That I couldn't do ESP, that I didn't have any?"

  "Nobody could do it." Sabine tried to make her voice kind. "There is no such thing." She was not entirely convinced of this fact, but she felt
it was important to say so.

  "Well, you wouldn't know. You're a cheat." He tilted back his head so that she could see his eyes beneath the bill of his cap, so that she could see the damage done to his face by the train track. "You wouldn't even give a person the chance to try."

  "Leave it alone," Kitty said.

  "Don't you tell me what I can't do." And with that Howard Plate's hand swept down through the air like a bat.

  Every single person at the table flinched backwards in their seat, as if the hand were coming down especially for them, but it didn't hit coming down. His hand struck as it came back up, catching the underneath edge of the table. It was the table that was struck rather than the people, and the table, which was pine stained to look like oak and lighter than it appeared, flipped up on its side, towards Guy and How and Bertie, away from Dot and Kitty and Sabine. The cards, which had brought about all the bad feelings, were the first to shoot up in a particularly spectacular twist on shuffling, followed by the coffee cups and varying amounts of coffee, both milky and black, followed by the table itself. Probably no one would have been hurt if they had just sat there and taken what was coming on. The coffee was no longer hot and the cups tumbled to the floor and slivered into pieces. How caught the table on his knees, but it wasn't very heavy and the blow was more surprising than painful. Bertie, however, saw it all coming. She watched Howard more carefully then the rest of them did, and when she saw his fist she tried to stand. In the second the table came towards her, she fell backwards in her chair, hitting her head with a dull crack against the wall. In all the confusion, the flowered pieces of coffee cups still spinning on the floor, the coffee still dripping from the edges of their chairs, they each distinctly heard the sound of Bertie hitting the wall.

  How righted the table from his knees, looking first to see that he wasn't in turn pinning someone else, and then slipped down on the floor beside his aunt. The edges of her white sweater were turning brown from where the coffee was soaking through. He picked up her hand, the one with the ring, and held it.

  "Bertie?" Dot crouched down beside her daughter and touched her forehead. Guy helped Kitty and Sabine pull the table into the center of the room, though any one of them could have managed it alone. "That was a hell of a spill."