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.