Vaclav & Lena (6 page)

Lena stands on the steps of her aunt’s house and glares at Vaclav. Vaclav stands on the sidewalk, at the bottom of the steps, and looks up at Lena, smiling. If someone were to walk by, they would think that the scene is very romantic, like Romeo and Juliet. This is exactly what Lena does not want to have happen; she wants no one to know about the time she spends with Vaclav, about the time she spends at his house working on silly and embarrassing things. She does not want anyone to know about how she and Vaclav talk about one day being husband and wife. She feels embarrassed about how she asked him to promise her, asked him over and over if those things would be true, over and over until she believed them and he believed them.

“Walk,” says Lena.

“Where?” says Vaclav.

“Home,” says Lena. “No look.”

“No look where?” says Vaclav.

“Back,” says Lena. “No look back.”

And so Vaclav turns and walks toward his house, away from the front stairs of Lena’s house, and he does not look back the entire way. Lena waits, and as soon as Vaclav turns the corner, she follows, one block behind, never on the same block, but still together. He knows, without asking and without looking, that she is there behind him. He knows it was Lena who asked, over and over and over again, if he would promise to be her husband one day, no matter what, so he’s not worried.

When Vaclav arrives at his house, he goes inside without looking behind him, and of course, two minutes later, Lena comes right in without ringing the doorbell or knocking.

FIRST NOTHING THEN HOMEWORK
…

N
o one is home at Vaclav’s house. Oleg is still at work, because he is a hack (which is a word that Vaclav likes better than
taxi driver
), and his shift most days goes from early in the morning until just before dinner. Rasia is still at work at the medical supply company on Kings Highway, where she answers the phone and makes calls and does all kinds of filing and inventory management and other things that are very boring for Vaclav to hear about.

Vaclav’s house is the bottom half of a whole house. The house looks like one big house, but there are stairs that go up to Mrs. Ruvinova’s front door, and there is also a door under the stairs, which is Vaclav’s front door. Because Vaclav’s house is underneath another house, sometimes he feels like he is hiding in a cozy place, like a fox’s den, and sometimes he feels like he is on the underground subway because it is very bangy and cramped. He can hear all the people on the roof of his house, which is the floor of their house, and even though the houses are the same size, it feels like it would be better to be the people whose floor is someone else’s roof than the people whose roof is someone else’s floor. Also, it seems that it would feel better to be the people who look out their windows at a little bit of trees instead of at a little bit of underground and a little bit of dead leaves.

Vaclav and Lena walk through the living room, which is where later Oleg will snore while he watches Russian television programs, past the bathroom and the door to Vaclav’s room and the door to Vaclav’s parents’ room, and into the kitchen, where they both slam their backpacks onto the ground with a bang.

Lena sits down at the table, and Vaclav walks to the fridge. Vaclav always holds on to the handle of the fridge and leans down to see what is in it, just like his father does, even though Vaclav is short and when he leans down he can’t see half of the refrigerator.

“First snack. Okay, for drinks we have Brita, we have grapefruit juice, we have fruit punch. What would you like to drink, Lena?” Vaclav begins to take out the carton of fruit punch for himself, and he keeps standing at the fridge and waiting for Lena’s answer, even though he knows that Lena will not want anything to eat or drink. Sometimes, though, when Vaclav’s parents are not home yet, Lena will say that she has to use the bathroom, but then she will go into the kitchen and eat something out of the refrigerator secretly, and sometimes she will even put something from the pantry into her backpack and take it with her. Vaclav notices this, but he does not say anything about it.

“First nothing. Then homework. Finish homework. Then snack, then practicing,” says Lena.

Vaclav knows that Lena will not have a snack after the homework is finished. He feels her urgency to do the homework as soon as possible. Vaclav feels a little bit of something not nice, a little bit of something angry at Lena, something that does not like for Lena to rush him, but he lets it go away, and he closes the fridge and pours the fruit punch into a glass that used to be a jelly jar, and he drinks a big sip from it and then fills the glass again.

When he sits down next to Lena and puts his glass on the table it looks like he is wearing fruit-punch lipstick and a fruit-punch mustache.

“What do you want to do first?” he asks Lena, pulling his binder from his bag and putting it on the table.

“Math,” says Lena, and she pulls from the bottom of her bag a worksheet from her math class, which is the lowest math class. Vaclav’s math class is the highest math class. The math classes are not called lowest or highest or dumbest or smartest or slowest or fastest, they are called yellow and purple and green, but everyone knows that in yellow there are more ESL kids and more pictures on the homework worksheets. The worksheet that Lena pulls out from her backpack is like a fancy fan at the bottom, because it has become smushed under all the books in Lena’s bag.

The worksheet is about long division, which Vaclav studied in his math class last year, so he can explain it to Lena. Vaclav thinks he should tell Lena that her first problem is that she is not organized and that if she was more organized, if she had some folders and labels, then she might be more organized in her head, and that if she did not mash up and wrinkle every worksheet and homework assignment, she might care more about doing them and she might get better grades. But Vaclav is feeling that Lena does not want to hear this, that things between them are strange, because even though Vaclav is doing something nice for Lena, he is having to act extra-nicely to her, feeling like he should thank her or offer her a present, and this is making the angry feeling come again, but Vaclav ignores it.

“Here,” Vaclav says, and points her eyes toward the first problem. “This is asking how many times two will go into six hundred twenty-seven.”

“What is ‘goes into’?” asks Lena.

“It is how many twos are in six hundred twenty-seven,” says Vaclav.

“One,” says Lena, pointing at the two in 627.

“No, it is like this. You are one. I am one. Together we are two, yes?”

“Da,”
says Lena.

“Together we are VacLena, one thing. But taking up two spaces—two chairs,” Vaclav says, formulating in his mind, finally, how he will show her.

“If there were six hundred twenty-seven chairs, how many VacLenas could sit?”

“I don’t know.”

“Remember, each VacLena needs two chairs, and they cannot be split up.”

“Why not?” asks Lena.

“Because,” says Vaclav, “because then there is remainder, which is the next thing.”

“What is ‘remainder’?” asks Lena.

“Is when we split up VacLena, if there is maybe only one more spot—one more chair left. Then there is just Vaclav or just Lena.”

“And this cannot be,” says Lena.

“That was very good English, Lena,” says Vaclav.

THE TIME PASSES QUICKLY AND SLOWLY
…

I
t takes a whole hour for Vaclav to teach Lena her mathematics, and then there is also a worksheet to do for ESL, and then there is also a writing assignment for Lena’s regular daytime class. By the time they get to the writing assignment, Rasia is home, and it is dark out, and Vaclav’s juice glass has been filled and emptied many times. When it is time to work on the writing assignment, Lena slumps her body down into the chair so that it seems to Vaclav that she has noodles instead of bones. Even Lena’s head falls forward, and when Vaclav asks her to look directly at a sentence they have written or at the spelling of a word, she sighs and leans her arm on the table, and then leans her head on her arm, and then barely opens her eyes.

“You must use this pen, and you must write the sentence, Lena! I can help you with it, but in my handwriting the teacher will smell cheating!” Vaclav says.

Lena sighs, loud and deep, releasing the sound from her entire body all at once.

Rasia is banging around in the kitchen, making it very hard for Vaclav to concentrate, and Lena is acting like a bag of noodles dripping all over her chair, and upstairs in Mrs. Ruvinova’s house, people are watching a movie with a lot of yelling and screaming and gun noises and crash noises. The people watching the movie are probably not Mrs. Ruvinova but Mrs. Ruvinova’s sons, who are big and have hair that always looks wet and who smell like magazines and who wear leather jackets that they never take off and that make a funny sound on Mrs. Ruvinova’s leather sofas.

Vaclav has seen these sons on trips upstairs to Mrs. Ruvinova’s for sugar or flour or vodka. He does not know how many of them there are, because they look very similar. They make him feel uncomfortable and unsafe, because when he goes upstairs and is waiting for Mrs. Ruvinova to give him a cup of sugar, the sons sit on the couch and do not say hello.

Vaclav is thinking of Mrs. Ruvinova’s sons, and of the sounds and smells of his mother cooking, and what she is cooking, which so far is something that has onions and cabbage in it, something that makes a lot of smoke and steam. He is finding it very hard to think of what Lena should write next in her homework assignment about the American Revolution, especially while Lena is not helping at all, is just sitting like a Lena-shaped lump on the chair next to him.

“Get this homework off of the table and set for dinner or else,” says Rasia. She says this in a sweet, warm voice, even though the words that she uses sound mean, because she learned a lot of her English by watching pirated episodes of
Law & Order
every night while she was still in Russia waiting for the paperwork and the stamps and the cards and the letters that would allow her to move her family to America.

Vaclav closes his binder and closes Lena’s composition notebook, and clears all of the pencils and erasers and books off the table. Lena drags her noodle body out of her chair to go count the silverware, and Rasia asks, “Lena? You are staying?”

“Da,”
says Lena.

“English!” says Rasia.

“Yee-us,” growls Lena, as she does every night, because nothing has changed even though something has changed.

Vaclav has to pack up all the homework and put it away, and he feels terrible because he has not even started his own homework and already it is dinnertime, and it feels very late. He is beginning to understand that there will be no time to finish his own homework, and Lena’s homework, and then to practice the magic act.

Vaclav brushes past Lena as he is reaching up for plates, and Lena whispers, “No finish homework, no practice nothing,” in a voice like an old mean cat.

And Vaclav understands that every night from now on he will do Lena’s homework for her, without teaching her anything. He will tell her what to write exactly in her essays, will not even ask her what she is thinking about the question—for example, if she would be a loyalist or a revolutionary if she was alive then and why—he will just do it for her without any help at all, because this is what is necessary, because this is what Lena wants. And what Vaclav wants is what Lena wants, because they are VacLena with no remainder.

EIGHT VACLENA, REMAINDER ONE LENA
…

T
he very next day Vaclav and Lena walk home from school exactly as planned. Vaclav walks home alone, while Lena walks with Marina and Kristina to the Aunt’s house and pretends to go inside. They meet up at Vaclav’s house, where Lena does not have to ring the doorbell; she just goes inside through the living room with the cushiony rug and the big, enormous TV straight to the kitchen, where Vaclav is already starting to work furiously on his homework so that there will be time to work on the act.

Lena puts her backpack down next to the kitchen table and goes to the fridge. Today Vaclav will do her homework, totally and completely. Today they will work on the act. She will not feel guilty, and she will not feel mean. She will feel finished with her homework, and she will feel friends with Marina and Kristina and with Vaclav, because they will work on the act. Vaclav is working on the homework, and he is not talking at all, not to offer snacks to Lena or to say hello. But this is okay. Today Lena wants to have a snack.

Lena opens the fridge, takes out a string cheese, and sits down at the kitchen table next to Vaclav and eats the string cheese one string at a time while Vaclav murmurs quickly over her math homework.

Vaclav does not hide from Lena how quickly he does the work that yesterday took her many hours. Lena feels bad that she doesn’t understand math, but Lena is used to this kind of feeling bad, and watching how quickly he does what she cannot do feels good because it makes her feel sure of things without any questions, without any doubt.

LENA HAS A SNACK
…

L
ena sits at the kitchen table until she finishes the whole string cheese, and then she throws away the wrapper, and then she takes down a big glass and fills it with milk from the fridge and drinks it all the way down and then puts it in the sink, and then she takes a loaf of Wonder bread from the bread box, and she takes out three slices, and she starts to eat one of the slices right away by making little bite-sized pieces with her fingers and looks into the refrigerator for something to make a sandwich with and then gives up and then puts mustard all over the two pieces of bread and then puts them together and then sits next to Vaclav at the kitchen table and then eats a mustard sandwich while Vaclav is doing her homework, and when she is done eating the mustard sandwich she gets up and goes to the refrigerator and takes out the peanut butter and takes a spoon from the silverware drawer and digs into the peanut butter and takes a big spoonful and then sits down at the kitchen table next to Vaclav and licks at it and then eats it and then goes back to the peanut butter jar and takes another big scoop and this time eats it standing up and eats another standing up and another until almost all the peanut butter is gone, and then she hears the sound of Rasia opening the front door, and then she quickly puts the lid back on the jar of peanut butter but does not even screw it down all the way and pushes it back farther in the fridge and then sits down next to Vaclav and pretends to be very interested in what he is doing and even nods.