Vaclav & Lena (22 page)

Somehow this was a relief to Emily; she had been afraid that Lena would be made fun of or bullied.

“Listen,” Emily said, “she needs time to adjust.…” Emily was terrified that Lena’s teacher would have her removed from this school.

“I’m sure you understand, I can’t allow a student to threaten the safety of the learning environment—”

Emily cut her off; she didn’t want to hear the end of this sentence. “I understand. It will improve, it will. I thank you for being so compassionate.” Emily left the room enraged, she felt so upset at having to defend Lena to this woman who was threatening to have Lena expelled within the first week at a new school. As Emily walked back home, where Lena was with her new babysitter, the daughter of one of Emily’s best friends, she thought about how disappointed she was in this woman, in the school. Everyone had sworn up and down that the school was a safe, loving environment, supportive of difference, that they would be Emily’s allies on the path to Lena’s success. But Miss Rhys had suggested nothing to help Emily, to help Lena, and now Emily would have to go to the principal; she would have to describe the subtle ways in which this conversation made it clear that Lena was not accepted or supported.

Emily was furious, but when she arrived at her house, she took a deep breath. She did not want Lena to know she was upset. As she dropped her keys in the bowl by the door, she could hear Lena in the kitchen screeching at her homework.

In the kitchen, Lena was holding her head in both hands, pulling at her hair. Amy the babysitter sat patiently next to Lena, looking overwhelmed. When she saw Emily, she made an apologetic face, and Emily instantly said, “Amy, it’s okay. I’m so sorry, let me pay you so you can go home.” Emily handed Amy twenty dollars, far more than she was owed.

When Amy had gone, Emily sat at the table with Lena.

“Lena, stop pulling your hair,” she said, and Lena seemed not to hear her.

“Lena, stop. Stop.” She felt anger building in her, anger that she had tried to leave at the door but could not, anger at Lena for hurting herself, and at the teacher, at everything.

“Stop!”
she yelled. “You’re frustrated, you’re angry, you have a right to be angry, of course you’re angry. You are smart. You’re smarter than anyone in your whole class; you’re smarter than your teacher. You just don’t have enough words, and that’s not your fault. It’s not your fault; it’s not your fault.”

Lena cried.

“No more tantrums at school. That’s the rule. No yelling. No screaming. That’s the rule.” She didn’t know what else to say, but she suspected that Lena liked rules. “You can yell at home; you can do whatever you want here. Not at school.”

Lena nodded and wiped her eyes, her lip still trembling. Emily sat down at the table, and they started her homework.

The next day, while Emily knew the students were at recess, she called the school and asked to speak to Miss Rhys. She paced her kitchen while she waited on hold.

“Hello?” Miss Rhys was clearly annoyed at being interrupted during her lunch.

“Hello, it’s Lena’s mom, Emily—I’m sorry if I’ve caught you at a bad time. I just want to make sure everything is going more smoothly with Lena today, so far.” It was only eleven-thirty.

“She sat quietly at her desk all morning,” said Miss Rhys.

“Fantastic. Just what I wanted to hear.”

“Is there anything else?” Miss Rhys asked.

“Certainly not,” Emily said. She knew that Lena was following her rule, and her hunch was confirmed. Lena was terrified of breaking rules.

Lena continued to go to school and came home every day looking wounded. Emily sat her down and they went through her homework, word by word. Lena cried when it was time to do homework, and sometimes she cried the entire time they worked on it. It took hours. Lena’s math was terrible; it seemed that she had never learned even the most basic skills. Lena told Emily that she felt like an idiot, that she sounded stupid, that everyone was making fun of her behind her back. Emily knew, from frequent calls to Miss Rhys, that this was not true.

Slowly, it got better. Lena started to understand more and more of her homework, of her classes. She was calmer. One day they finished her homework while it was still light out, and then they went for a walk, and they found a robin’s egg that had fallen out of a tree in Prospect Park. Lena took it home and put it on her night table. The next day was a little better. Eventually, they spent less time doing homework and more time taking walks, collecting things that they found.

By middle school, her teachers were thrilled with her improvement, and her grades were perfect. Lena read voraciously, and her vocabulary expanded. One day when she was twelve she came home and told Emily that a group of girls was going into Manhattan, alone, on the train, for a birthday dinner.

“Absolutely not, no,” Emily said.

“What?” said Lena, seemingly incredulous, though she must have known that Emily would never have allowed this trip.

“You can’t go, Lena, no way.”

“Why?” Lena asked calmly.

“Because you’re too young, and it’s dangerous.”

“You don’t trust me?” Lena asked.

“Of course I trust you. It has nothing to do with you, I just don’t trust the rest of the world, Lena.”

“So why does it matter that I’m young?” Lena asked. “If it has nothing to do with me, and the world is just dangerous, then I should never go anywhere by myself, right? I should stay home forever.”

“No,” Emily said. “Someday you’ll be old enough.”

“But you said that it had nothing to do with me,” Lena said.

“You’re not allowed,” Emily said. “End of discussion.” It was the first time that Emily realized that Lena could argue her into a corner, and it wasn’t the last. Lena was discovering the power of her intellect, the power of her words, and Emily often had to remind herself that she was dealing with a teenager.

Lena had quickly made friends once she began talking in school. It seemed to Emily that it was easy for Lena to become a popular girl, because all the other children were already afraid of her. She was smart, and bossy, and fun, and had a gaggle of girls sleeping over every weekend.

By the time she was seventeen, Lena had joined the student council, and her teachers said she lead class discussions, but she was still obsessing, still fragile. Homework time was like a minefield of a different kind. Lena sat for hours, sometimes until late at night, writing and rewriting, checking and rechecking. Lena had mastered English, it seemed, through sheer force of will, meticulously memorizing grammar rules and idioms. She was driven by her terror of seeming unintelligent and of her classmates’ laughing at errors in her speech. Even after her English was seamless, she couldn’t let go of this severe diligence and control. She was calm when she started her work but easily became irritable and obsessive about small glitches. Anything could set her off: an equation she couldn’t solve right away, a mildly critical comment from a teacher on a paper Lena had spent hours editing. Lena looked like a perfect teenager, but Emily felt like she was in the eye of a storm.

BYE BYE SPOT
…

“B
ut you don’t know anything about your real parents?” Serena asks. “Who did you live with until you got adopted and came here?”

“No, I don’t know anything about my parents,” Lena says, choosing not to answer the second part of Serena’s question. Lena is getting tired of talking to Serena, she’s tired of all the things she has to patch together and hide, and she doesn’t want to try to explain anything else—Lena doesn’t like these many shades of fuzz in her life story, where everyone else’s are sharp and colorful and happy like a postcard. Lena does not like editing out the rotten spots; she doesn’t like the times she only barely remembers, or things about which she has been given sketchy information, handed down from person to person, and she especially does not like having enormous gaps missing in between, so that to think about all of the days leading up to today feels dangerous.

She told Em about this feeling once, about not liking to think about the past for fear that she’d come upon some black ice or puddle or dead spot, and Em said that that was how a lot of grown-ups felt, all the time. Lena asked Em if anyone felt this way when they were young, and Em said no, that most people have nice childhoods behind them that they like to look back at, and it’s only when they get older and start having mistakes and regrets and unhappiness that they stop liking to remember, to think back. Most, Em said, not all. You get to look forward to your happiness, said Em, instead of back, that’s all.

Lena doesn’t want to look only forward and not back. She wants to fill in the holes.

“I just want to fill in the holes,” she tells Serena.

“You go for it, man,” says Serena, meaning it.

Lena decides that she will fill in the holes. She’s going to find Vaclav. He’s going to help her find her parents. She’s thought before about asking Em about finding her parents, and then immediately dismissed the idea. It’s not that her relationship with Em is delicate, or that Em wouldn’t let her; she can’t explain it, it’s just that she can’t bear to see Em worried, or hurt, or disappointed. She doesn’t even want to think about it.

“Thank you,” she says to Serena.

“No way. My pleasure,” says Serena, and suddenly Lena is ready (all of her selves are ready) to go out into the hallway and back into the day. It isn’t until Lena is in the hallway, on her way to meet her friends and have her birthday dinner, that she remembers the spot with its unknowing specificity, that she forgot to say goodbye to it, to fix it in her mind and remember it, and now she is sure that it will fade like all the others.

AT THE VERY SAME MOMENT
…

A
t dinner with friends everything is nothing, and in the cab ride home everything is nothing, and at home with Em everything is nothing. Lena is so excited, so nervous, so jammed with adrenaline that every moment seems like an hour and every hour swells in an impossible way, and time does not pass at all. But of course the time passes; it is one of the truths of the universe: No matter how much pain, how much joy, how much nervousness, how much anxiousness, how much love, how much fear, how much itching, how much scratching, how much fever, how much falling, time passes. So the impossible event is suddenly upon her, and then those hours, even the hours that at the time seemed to be made of millennia, seem, in retrospect, to collapse upon themselves, so that the arrival of the event seems, actually, sudden, and the waiting seems to have passed impossibly quickly, and those hours seem to have never existed. That’s how Lena feels when she is finally alone in her room at ten-thirty on the night of her seventeenth birthday, picking up the phone to call Vaclav.

Does Lena know that at the very same moment Vaclav is thinking of her (actually, thinking of
not
thinking of her)?

She locks her door and sits down next to her phone. She dials Vaclav’s number without hesitation. A seven-digit number buried since the year she was nine, dialed by a powerful but quiet part of her mind, like balance, like breathing, like the squish, squish, churn of your stomach, something your body knows. Her fingers just know what to do. That’s how it is with the phone number of a boy you love. Loved. Will love. Whatever.

While the phone rings, Lena considers the possibility that someone who is not Vaclav may answer the phone. It is ten-thirty. It is a slightly inappropriate time to call someone. And then she calmly lets it ring, because she knows who will answer. She knows, somehow, that he is waiting for her call.

Vaclav has just fallen asleep for the very first time without saying good night to Lena when the phone by his bed rings. He grabs it, and even before he says hello his heart is tumbling about in his chest.

“Hello?” he says, but they both know without saying who it is on the other end of the telephone wires.

“This is Lena,” she says. What else to say?

“This is Vaclav,” he says. What else?

“How are you?” She is smiling big, big, big.

“I’m good! How are you?” It seems that the conversation is moving forward on tracks neither of them can see; it is saying itself.

“I’m good too. It’s my birthday,” she says.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

“You do?” she says.

“Yeah. Of course. Yes.”

Vaclav and Lena have now communicated the ultimate thing, the thing that they both want to know but couldn’t ask:
Did you remember me? Was I as important to you as you were to me? Was I alone in my remembering? Or were you with me the whole time?

Of course they were with each other the whole time. Even when they weren’t looking, they never had to check. She was always there; he was always there. Outside her bedroom, somewhere in the darkness, like the moon.

“Where are you?” Vaclav says. It seems like a strange question to Lena.

“Home.” She realizes he does not know anything at all, where she lives, anything. “Park Slope,” she says. She knows where he lives.

“You still live in Brooklyn?” he says, astounded that she could be so close.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Where do you go to school?” he says.

“The Berkeley Carroll School? It’s tiny,” she says, apologizing in advance for his not knowing it, not wanting to make any gaps, any bubbles in the skin of this conversation. Vaclav, however, knows this school. Lots of his friends live in the neighborhood, and he walks by it all the time, to go to the coffee shops nearby.

“I know it. I go by there all the time—Ozzie’s is right around the corner. I can’t believe I haven’t run into you,” he says, feeling incredulous that he has been within blocks of Lena, that he’s been on the sidewalk outside of her school while she sat inside reading, going to gym class, learning calculus. She was right there the whole time.

“I go to Ozzie’s all the time,” she says, wondering if she’s seen him without knowing it, but it seems impossible. “Where do you go?”

“I go to Brooklyn Tech,” he says.

“Oh, wow. Good job,” she says, because Brooklyn Tech is a magnet school, and it’s so hard to get into. It’s a public school for super-genius science-whiz kids, and when she thinks about it, she’s not surprised that he goes there.

“Oh, thanks. It’s a little far from my house, but I like it.”

“Do you want to get together?” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

“Monday after school,” she says. “Three-thirty?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I’ll meet you by your school. Across the street at Fort Greene Park,” she says.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” she says.

“Lena,” he says, and saying her name feels like a somersault.

“Vaclav,” she says, and saying his name feels like singing in public.

“I’m really glad you called.”

“Me too.”

“Me too.”

“Okay, bye.”

“Bye.”

And they both sit still in their bedrooms, waiting for their hearts to stop beating or to explode, and they wonder why they are not getting together right then, in the middle of the night. Why not? Anything, anything, can be. The world has come apart, and come back together, and come apart again. The world is crashing into itself like cymbals. Crash, crash, crash, crash. It is hard to sleep with all that noise in the universe. Crash, crash, crash, crash.

In the morning at breakfast with their respective mothers, mothers as different as night and day, fat and thin, dark and blond, heavy and light, Vaclav and Lena sit, and say nothing to either mother about the Phone Call, and they fail to mention the existence of the Plan to Meet. Why? Why lie to these mothers? Why keep secret this thing that does not need secrecy? Vaclav and Lena do not know. But they keep their secrets in the safe pockets between their clasped palms, protecting them and wanting instinctively to shield them like tiny shiny frogs found in the wet grass, but wanting simultaneously to share them, to show and share such an exciting new thing. Their minds run irresistibly over and over and over the same thing, they chant the words silently:
Guess who I talked to last night? You won’t believe who I talked to last night. Wait until you hear about this, you know what Lena said?
But they don’t say these things, they keep them to themselves, carefully, carefully.

Does Vaclav think of telling Ryan, his girlfriend, about this big thing? No, he does not.

Vaclav can only think of meeting Lena on Monday. He does not think of Ryan at all.

Lena starts to work on her plan.

VACLAV IS A HEAD TALLER THAN EVERYONE ELSE
…

L
ena never cuts school, but Monday morning, she decides that the idea of staying at school is untenable. Declaring that the argument to stay at school is untenable soothes Lena; she likes the simple categorization, the absolute quality of it: School absolutely cannot be tolerated today. The idea of staying, of sitting in calculus, is untenable today. All weekend her anxiety grew exponentially. She kept thinking of Vaclav’s voice on the phone and losing her breath. Untenable.

Lena leaves school and takes two buses to Fort Greene, to sit across the street from Brooklyn Technical High School, to sit on a bench and wait for Vaclav for three hours. She looks at the building; she counts the stories, the windows, the doors. Vaclav is inside this building, inside a classroom, sitting in a chair, listening to a teacher; he is in there. He is alive. He is a real person. He is probably nervous to see her. Does this help calm her own electric nerves? Not really.

The day is fall, definitely fall, but warm. There is no fall crispness in the air; it is a soft baked day. The leaves are changing, barely, just the tips are turning orangey, losing a bit of green, nothing wild or dramatic yet.

There are bunches of kids already passing by on the sidewalk, even though school is not out yet. They have free periods, or they are leaving early, or they are cutting class. But what it seems like most of all is that these kids are just leakage, that a school the size of Brooklyn Tech is going to ooze some kids onto the neighboring sidewalk.

Lena’s bench is under a maple tree that is sending down little whirlybirds, little brown two-winged fliers, like nature is just having a ball, designing trees that send their seeds down in a tailspin. Lena picks one up and peels it in two, folds back one of the halves of one of the wings, thinking
cotyledon
, from biology, thinking this thing is from a dicot plant but forgetting what the implications of being monocot or dicot are.

A bell rings inside the school, and this bell is so loud as to be audible to Lena. Within moments, doors are thrust open and kids are gushing out onto the street. Lena becomes agitated. There are too many kids. Their meeting is going to be impossible, he’ll never see her, and she does not want to be looking eagerly at the crowd, craning her neck, guessing. She wants him to just find her, to just be there. There is an incredible amount of noise coming from these kids; some of them seem to be yelling, screaming, just to use their voices after the day of enforced quiet; everyone is talking loudly, laughing loudly, yelling to one another, and whooping. Some boys are actually making wild bird-whooping noises at one another.

Lena can’t think of a time anyone at her school has ever been this loud. Maybe, she thinks, when you’re part of it, it doesn’t seem so loud to you. Lena’s school is tiny, gorgeous, private, and quiet.

On the sidewalk alongside the school there are several clusters of kids, and they’re all dressed in extreme ways. Instead of just people with accessories, they appear to be in costume, and it’s too much. She thinks smugly about her small school, where everyone can just be, whatever they are, and then feels a wave of something.… Privilege? Luck? It feels unfamiliar. This school where you have to be so loud in every way, so big, would be exhausting to her. It would hurt.

In one of the little clumps of people she notices a boy who is taller than everyone else. He’s taller by a head, or even by a foot, and he sticks out over the mass. He turns to talk to someone, and Lena sees his face. It’s unmistakably Vaclav, but he looks completely different. He’s an adult man, smiling Vaclav’s smile. He hasn’t seen her yet. Lena wonders about the coincidence of her attention settling on this one person, this one back of the head, and having the back of the head turn out to be Vaclav, but, of course, he’s tall, so anyone would notice him. Who would have thought Vaclav would be so tall? But then again, what are the chances that the one person Lena is looking for, her one person who is so special to her, and is also so special in the whole universe, would stand so high above everyone else, that he is so obviously spectacular, luminous, charming, and magic?

She’s sitting there wondering if Vaclav will recognize her in the same way when he starts walking across the street, charging straight through the crosswalk toward her. His hair is so dark—it is like Superman’s hair from the comics—she expects almost to see flecks of electric blue highlighting its contours. It’s wild, like he’s been twisting it into horns all day. She’s thrown by his hair, but most of all, she can’t take her eyes off his eyebrows.

Vaclav’s eyebrows are large, they are dark, but they separate from each other, they do not meld in the middle, they do not collapse into each other’s weight. They are heavy and dense but somehow light, somehow airy, like charcoal but shinier, livelier, glowing? Could they be glowing? He is smiling with his whole face, a smile that is expanding and expanding even when it is at its maximum smiling capacity, his smile is expanding, impossibly, and she is smiling too, and she is standing up from the bench, because he is right there, in front of her, and she isn’t sure if they are going to hug or not, but then, yes, they are hugging, and then, yes, she is up in his arms, and her feet are off the ground, and his face is in her hair, and she is laughing, laughing, laughing, and he is making a sound that is a little like a yell when you go down the steepest waterslide at the park, and they stay that way forever.

THEY DIDN’T STAY THAT WAY FOREVER, NOT REALLY.
BUT SOME MOMENTS DO SEEM ETERNAL, NO?
…

V
aclav had already known that she was sitting there before he even saw her. He had felt her looking at him. He had known it was her, it had to be her, because he felt, suddenly, the compulsion to turn and look at that bench, to look in her direction, like there were magnets in his eyes and she was a supermagnetized hunk of some other planet, just fallen to earth.

She was still small, she was still dark, her eyes still unsettling, but now all the parts of her face were becoming graceful. She had a head of hair so curly, so frizzy, so unruly, it was like a mane around her head; it seemed a part of her like those collars on lizards, the ones that flare up their necks when it’s time to do lizard battle. Everything else about her face had become more confident.
Here! I’m a nose, I’m a mouth; this is what I do
. It all seemed to have poise; it all seemed to belong. He couldn’t have imagined her looking this way, but now that he’s seen her he can’t imagine anything else, anything else at all. And then he’d wanted just to hug her, but when he leaned down and she leaned up it was as if she was weightless and just wanted to spring into his arms, and then he was holding her, which he had not planned on at all, and he felt worried, because the moment he put her down, they would have to get a bit awkward, he is already feeling the awkwardness nibbling at their heels, just itching, itching to spread.