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 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.