The Isle of Youth: Stories (16 page)

*   *   *

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 enough, 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.

“I want my wallet back,” he said.

It was Bill, wearing black pants and a dress shirt, the armpits ringed with sweat. He turned his wedding band on his finger. I was holding the package of baby carrots in one hand and the briefcase in the other.

“I bet the owner of this place would like to know what you’ve been up to,” Bill said. “I bet he’d find it all very interesting.”

The carrots were cold. I pressed the package against my forehead like a compress. Bill touched my elbow, a little roughly. He asked if I was paying attention.

“You’re too late,” I said. “Everything’s gone.”

“Even the photo?” He squinted at me. His cheeks and forehead shone.

It wouldn’t have cost me anything to give the photo back to him, but that would be hard evidence that I had stolen and that was bad for business. I had to look out for myself in practical ways. I couldn’t rely on magic.

“I get it,” I said. “You don’t want your wife to find out you’re a sleaze. Do you know how old I am? No? I’m a minor, for your information, and I bet some people would be very interested to know about that.”

Bill took a step back. His face went slack, as though I had just slapped him. He didn’t stop me when I opened the door and went inside.

*   *   *

The first time I went to Coco Cabana, I was fifteen. The night had brought a particularly bad show: we were still doing the saw-a-lady-in-half trick, and my mother had fumbled the reassembly. I was scrunched inside a wood box on wheels, which should have been reconnected to another box with plastic feet—surprisingly lifelike from a distance—attached to the end. My mother hadn’t been able to get the blocks to click into place, and before I knew it, I was drifting across the stage. The audience started booing. Under the glare of the lights, my mother’s eyes widened with panic. Her skin paled beneath her makeup. I could feel her sinking, could feel our lives sinking, like someone had weighted us down with rocks and tossed us into the ocean. When the curtain fell, I was still inside the box, and my mother still looked empty and afraid.

The first time, I didn’t bring the suitcase. I didn’t take anything from the shelves. I didn’t even know why I was there. I just walked the aisles, gazing at the bottles and the liquids inside. It was November, but still warm and humid. I kept thinking how nice it would be to have something cold to drink.

Mr. Phillips was the only person in the store. He stood behind the counter with his paper. I was surveying a display of neon lighters near the front. I picked up a hot pink lighter and made it flame.

“It’s two for one,” he said without looking up. “But you look too young for those.”

“I don’t smoke.” I put the lighter down. I didn’t yet have money of my own.

“Listen to this.” He tapped his index finger against the paper. I walked around to the counter. He wore a gold chain under his white T-shirt and had tufts of gray hair on his knuckles.

“A man is on his way to work, is hit in the head, and gets amnesia. He wanders away, not remembering anything, and goes on to start a whole new life. A year later, he gets his memory back, remembers where he used to live, and shows up on his family’s doorstep.” Mr. Phillips took off his glasses and started cleaning them on his shirt. “What a story!”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “How did he get hit in the head?”

He put his glasses back on. He looked at the article again and frowned. “Well, it doesn’t say exactly. But look, his picture’s right here.”

He passed me the paper. There was a black-and-white photo of a man with his arm around a woman. Two young girls stood in front of them. Both had braces and pigtails. Everyone was smiling. I couldn’t wait to go home and tell my mother this story and ask if something like that could have happened to my father. I had no way of knowing that when I described the photo with the smiling family, she would hide her face in her hands and begin to cry.

*   *   *

To no one’s surprise, our next show was a disaster. Backstage, Merlin hadn’t wanted to get into the hat, and once he was inside, he wouldn’t hold still. When my mother tilted the hat toward the audience, a white ear peeked through and people snickered. A woman and her young son, the first family I’d seen in months, walked out. Bill was in the front row, holding a beer and smiling. So far he hadn’t said anything, but I imagined it was just a matter of time. Beyond the lights and the audience, I could see the dinner theater owner standing by the bar, swirling a drink and shaking his head.

When my mother pulled Merlin from the hat, he leaped out of her arms and scurried around the stage for a few minutes before diving into the audience. One man—just the kind I would have liked to buy me drinks later—shrieked and jumped out of his chair. It didn’t take long for the rest of the audience to scatter. In the end, I caught Merlin with the help of a baby carrot and stashed him in our dressing room. Through the closed door, I heard the owner shouting at my mother, telling her our days were numbered. When she came into the dressing room, she didn’t go through her usual routine. She just sat at her table, her cape pooling around her knees, and stared at herself in the mirror.

It was too sad a scene. I left Merlin on the chaise and my mother at her dressing table and went to the bar. Bill was still there, nursing another beer and reading a pamphlet on manatees. Ricky looked at Bill and then back at me, like
Now you’re in trouble.

“Are you stalking me?” I stood next to Bill and retied my bathrobe sash. “Do I need to call the police?”

He looked up from the pamphlet. “I’m the one who should be calling the police.”

“I could have you murdered, you know.” I leaned against the bar and crossed my arms, trying to look worldly and assured, which of course I was not. “I know people who do that sort of thing.”

Bill just laughed. “You’re a kid. You don’t know anything.”

“I know you want your wallet back. I know you carry a picture of some stupid tree around. I know you won’t go back to your family and forget all about this like you should.”

“I had a family,” Bill said. “A wife and a daughter and a little dog and a goldfish.”

“Where did you come from, anyway?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Appleton?” It seemed unlikely this man could be from the same place as Houdini.

“Sturgeon Bay. But I like it here, in Hollywood. I think I might stay for a while.”

“Just because you like Hollywood doesn’t mean Hollywood likes you.”

Another man came into the bar, drunk and swaying and asking about the show.
Am I too late for the magic?
His shirt was untucked, his hair mussed. I sidled up to him and swiveled my hips and soon I was drinking old-fashioneds on his tab.

He was too drunk to be coy, to ask for a magic trick. After two cocktails, he was grabbing my ass and pulling me toward him. His wallet was one of the easiest. It was sitting at the top of his pocket and went straight up my bathrobe sleeve. There was a weird kind of intimacy to the whole thing, with Bill right there, and I’d had just enough to drink to feel invincible. No one else was around. What could he do but watch?

Quite a bit, it turned out.

“Thief!” Bill stood from his barstool. He pointed at me with the manatee pamphlet. “This woman is a thief!”

The drunk man clutched his pockets. Ricky looked up from restocking maraschino cherries and lime wedges. I slipped the wallet down my sleeve and slapped it on the bar.