The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

Of course, the fire wasn’t real. It was a Level 1 illusion, the best she could manage these days, despite having trained at a world-famous magic school in the real Hollywood, out in California. At the school, she had been working her way to Level 3, which was the Houdini stuff—the harrowing escapes, the ability to manipulate reality and time. She claimed her skills had weakened when my father disappeared, and left her almost entirely after I was born.

  My parents had met at magic school. In their first class, my father could make a cockatoo vanish from its cage better than anyone. He became the headmaster’s protégé. His stage name was the Great Heraldo. Once I looked up the school online, in the dinner theater owner’s office. The building resembled a castle, with a stone wall and spires. In the photos, the windows glowed with gold light. I spent a long time staring at them and wondering what was happening inside.

  After my father disappeared, my mother needed a change of scenery. She’d thought Hollywood, Florida, might be better than the one in California, but here it was swampy and flat and there were hurricanes instead of earthquakes and fires. I’d been part of her act since childhood. We used to have more families in the audience, but now the men who wandered over from nearby hotels and drank during the shows were the only ones who came to watch. According to the owner, there was stiffer competition from new venues in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. He was a slight, stooped man with a thin black mustache, and he’d been pleading with my mother to shake things up. As I watched her hold the fire, the peaked orange flames stretching upward, like a plant toward light, I hoped she was capable of a greater kind of magic. That she still had it in her.

  As the assistant, I was dressed in a gold bathing suit and red high heels. My mother wore a black pantsuit with a bow tie and a top hat. Her cape billowed behind her when she moved. She said a real magician would never be caught dead in a bathing suit, but I was seventeen and capable of handling indignity. After the fire trick, she made a quarter vanish and reappear from my cleavage. I liked having her close to me onstage. I could see the mascara crusted on her eyelashes and smell the gel that kept her blond hair shellacked under her hat. When I noticed her lips cracking beneath her red lipstick, I knew she wasn’t drinking enough water. When her pupils looked swollen, I knew she wasn’t getting enough sleep. When one man starting chanting Kiss! and my mother threw out a smile—fast, wide, full of teeth—I knew she was wishing him terrible things.

  For the grand finale, I disappeared. My mother opened a trapdoor in the center of the stage. I waved to the audience before crawling inside. She closed the door and said Shazam!—my cue to crawl into the compartment under the stage. The space was the size of a dumbwaiter and smelled like cedar. I sat with my knees pulled to my chest, so I didn’t get splinters in my legs. I listened to the trapdoor open and a volunteer lumber onto the stage to inspect the empty space. Before shows, my mother always dusted me with glitter, which left behind a fine gold grit. My skin felt like it was coated in sand.

  When she opened the trapdoor a second time, I popped up like a jack-in-the-box. The audience applauded halfheartedly. I curtsied. My mother took a bow. The heat had made her foundation run. Under the lights, it looked like her skin was melting. A black velvet curtain swung closed in front of us.

  * * *

  At the bar, men were lining up to buy me drinks. I didn’t care what they were—a beer, a warm glass of white wine, a whiskey sour. Each one made me feel like I was being carried away on a cloud. Before long, one of the men would manage to clear away the rest, the one who bought the most drinks, who told the most jokes. My name was Crystal, but sometimes they pronounced it “Cristal,” like the champagne.

  Tonight it was a man in a wrinkled suit with a thick gold band on his left ring finger. He had a fleshy jawline, little blue eyes, and big ears. A soft, decent face. He was in Hollywood on business, staying at a hotel down the street. He had once seen Penn and Teller perform in New York City. In their act, one magician fired a gun and the other caught the bullet in his mouth.

  “Can you imagine such a thing?” he said. “How much one would have to trust the other?”

  I could not.

  He was buying my third martini. At the theater, martinis were served in a clear plastic cup with a trio of tiny green olives, the smallest I’d ever seen. I wore a pink silk bathrobe over my bathing suit, the sash tied in a loose bow. I teetered in my heels. My mouth was slick with vodka and raspberry-flavored lip gloss.

  “Do a trick!” The man clutched my martini with his fat, damp hands. This kind of exchange, a little pro bono magic, was always expected. “Won’t you please do a trick?”

  I gave him the same smile my mother had flashed her audience—full of teeth and menace—and pulled a blue flower from behind my ear, the first trick she ever taught me. I tucked the flower into his shirt pocket. He handed me the drink. I swallowed the olives whole.

  Tea candles flickered on the bar. Ricky, the bartender, was rinsing out beer glasses. I knew my mother was still backstage, in our dressing room. She had an elaborate postshow routine: skin care, hair care, special stretching exercises. I could see her wiping away her lipstick and dreaming of a different life. Where was the magic for that?

  I let the man stroke my neck. He rested a hand on my waist. I didn’t know his name, but in my mind I had started calling him Bill. Poor Bill. Didn’t he know that you should never trust a half-naked girl in a bar at this hour of the night?

  Bill asked where else I could make flowers appear from. I fluttered my eyelashes. I leaned forward and slipped my hand inside his pocket. He sighed dreamily. I pulled out his wallet, rolled it up my arm, and slipped it into the back of my bathing suit. This was a variation on another trick my mother had taught me, where I vanished a wand by covering it with a handkerchief and sliding it up my sleeve. In the morning, Bill might call the theater and ask Ricky—I threw him a little cash for his silence—about the wallet. But probably Bill’s memory would be too foggy to remember where he’d been or who he’d been with. And even if it wasn’t, he might be a little embarrassed that he’d spent his night pawing a teenager in a bathing suit. He was married. He probably had a mortgage and kids. He wouldn’t want to make trouble.

  I leaned in again and told Bill that I needed to freshen up. I kissed his cheek. Why not do him that one small kindness? When I pulled away, he was smiling a sick, stupid smile. Over his shoulder, I caught Ricky rolling his eyes as he wiped down the bar.

  Of course, I never went back. Instead I found my mother sitting at the dressing table mirror and removing her makeup with cotton balls soaked in witch hazel. The table had uneven legs and cracked green paint. The oval mirror was fringed with rust. A small chandelier hung from the ceiling, but all the bulbs were missing.

  It was July. In a month, I’d be back in school. My classmates were talking about college, but maybe I would go to Hollywood and study magic instead. I would ace my classes in divining and dematerialization. I would become the headmaster’s pet. Brava, Crystal! he would say. Brava! Only I wouldn’t fall in love or get pregnant or disappear or let my powers fade away.

  I curled up on the chaise lounge my mother insisted on keeping even though it had moths. Bill’s wallet held seventy dollars in cash, a chewing gum wrapper, and a Polaroid photo of a palm tree. No credit cards, no driver’s license. For the last six months, I’d been saving up. I kept my money in a shoe box from Wholesale Magic. Something had shifted when I turned seventeen; I started to feel like I needed to make my own plans. I kept changing the location of the box—bottom dresser drawer, top closet shelf, under my bed—but that wasn’t enough to prevent my mother from dipping into my supply.

  “We should get a rabbit,” she said, out of nowhere. She moved the cotton ball in circles across her face. She had high cheekbones and a long, elegant neck. Mascara had clotted in the corners of her eyes.

  “I thought rabbit tricks were low-rent.” I fanned myself with Bill’s photo.

  “Well, Crystal, clearly we’d have to do something
out of the ordinary.” She rubbed her palm with the cotton ball. The powder that made the fake fire always left a dark ring on her skin. I remembered that Houdini had called fire the most terrible of the elements. He also said his greatest escape was leaving Appleton, Wisconsin.

  “Like what?”

  My mother told me about a magic-school classmate who trained a rabbit to climb an invisible thread; from the audience, it looked like the animal was levitating. Another time, she had seen a magician place a rabbit on a tabletop, vanish it, and then make it reappear underneath the table.

  I pointed out that what she was describing would require expensive new equipment and months of careful rabbit-training, which neither of us knew how to do.

  “A nice rabbit,” she continued. “Fat and white.” She picked up the tiny toothbrush she used to exfoliate her lips.

  In 1898, Ching Ling Foo conjured a small child from a bowl of water. For his Garden of Flowers trick, Harry Blackstone, Jr., made flowers multiply until the stage was brilliant with color. Was it possible to become famous, or even fill our dinky theater, with a rabbit? I didn’t think so.

  “This is the kind of magic that’s going to put bodies in seats,” she insisted. Bodies in seats was the owner’s motto. “Only psychopaths dislike rabbits.”

  The last time my mother was this excited about a new trick, she ordered a five-hundred-dollar guillotine from a catalogue. Naturally, I was the one in the stocks. It should have been a dramatic illusion onstage. Even though I knew it was designed for magic, I would still get nervous waiting for the blade to drop. But my mother didn’t perform the trick very well. She didn’t talk about the history of the guillotine or place a bucket underneath my head or lead the audience in a countdown. And where was the guillotine now? Collecting dust backstage.

  My mother dabbed white cream under her eyes. I examined the photo of the palm tree and wondered why someone would carry around such a thing. Over the months, I’d discovered some strange items in these wallets. One had five bucks and a surgical glove dusted in baby powder. Another held a postcard of people dressed in lobster costumes.

  “Is it ever this hot in California?” I asked. We didn’t have air-conditioning in the dressing room. My legs were sticking together.

  “It’s a different kind of heat.” She pulled off the fake diamond studs she wore during shows and placed them on the table. “Did you know your father could predict when an earthquake was coming? He’d feel a trembling in his mouth.” She tapped her bottom lip.

  I looked again at Bill’s photo and wondered if it could have been taken in California.

  My mother spritzed perfume on her throat, then rose from the table and flicked off the lights. This was the part of the night she hated the most: the show was over, the costumes peeled away, the makeup removed. Now there was nothing to do but slink upstairs, to our cramped apartment with the dusty window units and the temperamental stove. Put bodies in seats, if you want new appliances, the theater owner had told us. The apartment was cluttered with supplies: a Bible that sprouted flames, a silk rose that bloomed into a bouquet, collapsible wands. All around us was the promise of magic. I knew my mother would sit in the dark of her bedroom and have a drink. What she didn’t know was that Ricky had slipped me a mini-bottle before I left, so I would be having one with her too.

  * * *

  In the morning, I woke feeling gummy with glitter and sweat. My window unit was blowing lukewarm air. A poster of the real Hollywood, an image of a white sign nestled in green hills, fluttered on the wall. I got up and wandered into the kitchen, where I found my mother standing by the sink, holding a white rabbit. I’d fallen asleep in my bathing suit and bathrobe. My feet were sore from the heels. I scratched my arm. The glitter was always giving me rashes. In my dreams, she had conjured the rabbit from nothing; in my dreams, we had an endless supply of talent and hope.

  “I got him at PetSmart.” She bounced the rabbit in her arms. He had a sleek white coat and quick, red eyes. She had named him Merlin.

  “With my money?” In the corner, there was a defunct saw-a-lady-in-half kit covered with a white sheet. Next to it, my mother had set up a large metal cage. The bottom was covered with wood chips. She had even gotten little blue dishes for water and rabbit pellets. A hundred dollars, at least.

  “I’m the talent,” she said. “It was never your money.”

  I went to my room and checked the shoe box, smoothing the crinkled bills as I counted. I was missing three fifties. I pushed the box back under my bed, wondering if there was such a thing as a place that would be safe from my mother.

  Before our next show, she wanted to teach Merlin the levitating rabbit trick. The first step was training him to balance on his hind legs. We began that evening. By then I had showered and put on regular clothes. My mother was wearing a pink tracksuit. Her hair was in rollers. She was not looking especially magical. She placed Merlin on the kitchen floor. The air inside the apartment was heavy and still. The wall clock had been stuck at noon for a week.

  She lifted her hand over the rabbit. Merlin looked toward the S-shaped crack in the ceiling. He seemed to be paying attention.

  “Up,” she said.

  He pricked his ears. For a moment, I thought he was going to meet her hand, a miraculously trainable rabbit, but instead he bolted across the room and tried to shimmy under the stove.

  “As I suspected,” she said. “We’ll need lots of practice.”

  We went on like this for hours: my mother commanding, Merlin finding new ways to flee. She’d already told the theater owner that we would be unveiling the rabbit in our next performance, which was three days away. I wished my father was here; I felt certain he would have trained Merlin in no time at all.

  “Up,” she said for what felt like the hundredth time, looming over the rabbit, her voice baritone. It was dark out. He rolled over on his side, as though we were putting him to sleep.

  “Sleeping rabbit,” I said. “That’s a pretty lousy trick.”

  “Negativity is not a training tool, Crystal.” She got a Dr Pepper from the fridge and ran the can across her forehead. I stroked Merlin’s belly and felt the thumping of his heart.

  My mother started telling me about when she and my father were living together in California, in an apartment in Toluca Lake. He would hypnotize her and get her to do all kinds of things. He would take photos and show them to her as proof: handstands until her face was purple, squeezing mustard into a bowl and eating it with a spoon, stripping naked and numbing her body with ice cubes. The image of my mother naked made me uneasy. I wondered where that photo was now. I imagined finding it in a wallet, what I would think.

  “Maybe we could hypnotize Merlin.” I pictured a hypnotized rabbit waltzing across the stage, or peeling a banana with his paws. That would be something to see.

  I could tell my mother wasn’t listening. She was kneeling on the floor and petting the rabbit’s neck, which was glossy and rolled with fat.

  “One day,” she said. “One day I’ll tell you things about him that you would not believe.”

  * * *

  We practiced for two days without success. Merlin was always darting into the bathroom, where he would hide behind the toilet, leaving a trail of wood chips in his wake. Sometimes I pretended to not be able to find him even though I knew exactly where he was.

  With our next performance upon us, my mother settled for the usual rabbit-in-a-hat trick. She brought out her stovepipe hat with the false bottom. We just had to train Merlin to sit inside, underneath a circle of black cardboard. Onstage, my mother would show the hat was empty by tilting it toward the audience, then cover it with a handkerchief and say Shazam! Afterward, she would push past the false bottom and pull out the rabbit. Amateur magic. If her classmates from magic school could see her now, they would be ashamed.

  One evening, she sent me to the Sizzler for baby carrots. She had decided Merlin needed more positive reinforcement. I brought along a black briefcase, which looked ordinary enou
gh, but opened in two places. In a performance, the briefcase was shown to be empty and then, from the hidden opening, the magician lifted out all manner of things: a baseball, a vase, a hammer. After the Sizzler, my next stop was Coco Cabana, the twenty-four-hour liquor store, where I planned to pinch mini-bottles from the shelves.

  The store was owned by Mr. Phillips. He was always engrossed in a paper and never kept his minis behind the counter, the way other liquor stores did. I used to hang around long enough for him to tell me about what he was reading. He didn’t seem to notice the way I now went straight to the back and left without buying anything. He would just say it was a shame that I didn’t have time for stories. His son was a different matter. If he was around, he’d stand in the aisle and watch as I disappeared behind a shelf. Once he demanded I open the briefcase and I was pleased with myself for showing the empty side with a smile and a magician’s flourish. I hoped he didn’t inherit the store anytime soon.

  “Hey, Crystal,” Mr. Phillips called on my way out.

  I waved but didn’t stop. Four little vodkas were rattling around in the briefcase.

  He shook a copy of the Hollywood Gazette. “Have I got a story for you.”

  I walked home on Surf Road, past palm trees like the one in Bill’s photo and a long stretch of beach. The tide was coming in; dusk was settling over white villas and the peaks of distant high-rises. My hair was damp. I tasted salt on my upper lip. I drank two mini-bottles and tossed the empties into the recycling bin stationed outside a mint-green bungalow. Once, when I was young, my mother and I had passed a street magician on this very strip. He was making plastic balls disappear up his coat sleeves. I had tugged her hand and asked if he could be my father, and she’d laughed and said he wasn’t even close to the kind of magician my father had been, to the Great Heraldo.

  Outside the dinner theater, a man was hanging around the entrance. I didn’t think he was waiting for me—no one was ever waiting for me—but before I could slip inside, he stepped into my path.