Still Life Las Vegas Read online

  The competition started at nine in the morning. Emily needed to wake up at five thirty to get dressed and ready for Mr. Wojcik, who was going to be driving her to the Hyatt Regency in Chicago. Vee, in her flannel robe, combed Emily’s wet hair, something she had not done for almost seven years. She gathered Emily’s long black hair with one hand and pulled it away from her face, which served to accentuate Emily’s newly prominent cheekbones. Vee slipped a rubber band tight around the ponytail. “Look pretty,” she said to Emily, and took out of the utility drawer a new emerald-green ribbon. Vee slowly wound the ribbon around the ponytail and tied it off in a bow. She smoothed Emily’s hair, sighed, and gave Emily’s head a little squeeze with her fingers. “There. Pretty.” They both stared in the mirror, for proof.

  In the early-morning quiet they heard the screen door creak and Mr. Wojcik knocking lightly. He stood on the porch in a new white shirt, already darkened with sweat, and a light blue striped bow tie. Vee handed him a mug of coffee and Emily’s gown, shrouded in plastic. “Be careful with the dress.” She gave Emily a paper bag with sandwiches, apples, and a small carton of milk. “Have fun. Don’t talk to anyone,” she told Emily, and disappeared into the house.

  Through most of the ride through Wisconsin, Emily found it difficult to breathe. The air in the car was thick with stale smoke, and the windows were all rolled up to protect her dress and hair. Her ponytail pulled tight against her head, like someone had a hold of it and was yanking her back. She couldn’t concentrate, not with the smoke and the yanking and Mr. Wojcik in the front seat tapping out polkas on the steering wheel with his fingers. Bum bum-bum bum-bum. He had applied aftershave, and it wafted over to the backseat like a noxious cloud of alcohol, menthol, and sweat. She tried going over her program, getting back into the music through her twitching fingers, but they kept losing the way. Emily started to panic.

  She took out the accordion from the case beside her and pulled it onto her lap. The accordion no longer engulfed her, but she could still put her head down on it. It felt warm on her cheek. She took a deep breath and blew out slowly.

  Her dress was hanging in the plastic on the hook above the car door, blocking her view out the window. Emily reached out and slipped her hand under the plastic, fingered the soft black velvet. It felt like the misshapen mole in Mr. Wojcik’s basement. She wished she could have taken the mole along with her, for company; it could have perched on her shoulder, a knotty little extension of her dress, while she played.

  Emily thought of the photo, buried in the box in Vee’s closet, of Mr. Liberace in his dark tuxedo. His bow tie was white, glowing like his shirt and his teeth. He wouldn’t smell of aftershave, or smoke, she imagined. He would smell clean, like soap. Mr. Liberace played the piano, which was not so very far away from the accordion. They could play duets. He would nod his head and they would simultaneously place their hands on their respective keyboards, and the music would flow out. Emily smiled.

  “Ptaszku, look, we are here.”

  The car turned down Michigan Avenue, toward the bridges over the Chicago River. The Magnificent Mile spread out before her, vibrant and bustling with people. The Tribune Tower loomed to her left, the Wrigley Building’s clock tower dazzled in the morning sun. Flags along the bridge waved her closer. Emily was in love.

  She changed in the lobby bathroom of the Hyatt. When she stepped out, Mr. Wojcik, waiting with her accordion, appeared stricken, like he’d been betrayed. “Who is this, this beautiful young lady?” he said in disbelief to a floral arrangement on a table beside him. He squinted at her and shook his head. “Oh, my chinska, my chinska,” he whispered. She took the accordion out of his trembling fingers and entered the Grand Ballroom.

  Emily stepped onto the stage at 9:45 A.M. Fifteen minutes later, she was done. At 2:02 P.M., she and her Rossetti marched up the steps again, this time as the Great Lakes Division Youth Accordionist of the Year. She received a small trophy, a certificate, three hundred dollars, and an invitation to the Frankie Yankovic National Competition at the annual AAPA convention that fall. Wojcik grabbed her tightly and hugged her for so long she thought she might suffocate in his humid embrace.

  * * *

  She rode in the front seat on the way home. Mr. Wojcik had insisted: “You are big girl now! The front is for champions!” Emily felt like a champion. Her trophy was beside her; the accordion rode solo behind.

  On the long stretch of stop-and-go traffic leading out of Chicago on I-94, Emily began to yawn. “Sleep, ptaszku, you deserve it,” Mr. Wojcik said. Instead, she closed her eyes and thought about Chicago. She knew already she wanted to live there, it was just a matter of when and how. She could see clearly in her head, just like musical notes on a page, the steps she would need to take to get there:

  1. Win national competition

  2. Get scholarship to music school

  3. Become famous

  4. Meet Mr. Liberace

  5. Move to Chicago

  6. Get a cat. Maybe a mole.

  7. Perform for

  * * *

  When Emily woke up, eyes still half closed, Mr. Wojcik’s hand was on her leg, midway up her thigh. It rested on top of the velvet, just where the dress ended and her skin began, very casually, as if he’d been patting her leg and forgotten to remove his hand. Emily couldn’t see his face, but the rest of his body was still and the car was running smoothly down the highway. The only movement came from the soft, soft pressing of his fingertips into the velvet: middle finger, ring finger, pinkie, index finger; middle finger, pointer finger, middle finger. It was a polka he was caressing into her leg. The fabric gathered under his fingertips; each note pushed her dress a little farther up. The thumb and pointer landed on skin, passed the hem of the dress to the middle finger, which slid it along to the ring finger. Another verse, and his pinkie was burrowing under the velvet. It crept forward like a fat worm. Ring finger, middle finger, thumb. Pinkie. Pinkie. Pinkie. Pinkie.

  Emily jammed her eyes shut and shifted her body abruptly to the right, as if she were settling into a deeper sleep. The hand leapt from her leg at the first movement and didn’t land again. Soon Mr. Wojcik began humming, and she could hear his fingers tapping on the steering wheel—the “Clarinet Polka.” Emily stayed pressed against the passenger-side door for most of the rest of the trip, only opening her eyes when she heard the familiar crunch crunch of the car pulling into the gravel driveway of her home. “Good nap?” he asked her lightly as she shoved open the car door and jumped out.

  Vee was cooking pot roast, Emily’s favorite dish. Emily could smell it as she ran past the kitchen into her bedroom. Whether Vee had prepared it as a celebration or a consolation, Emily didn’t know. Emily kept her thoughts on Vee and dinner as she stuffed the black dress deep, deep in the back of her closet and clawed the green ribbon out of her hair.

  When she entered the kitchen Vee was by the stove, forking the meat and shuttling it to a cutting board. Mr. Wojcik was by her side, mid-expostulation, waving a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon for emphasis. “Ah! Our champion!” He turned to Emily, and he smiled wider than she had ever seen him smile; a gaping smile, a smile that could swallow her whole.

  Vee wiped her hands on a dishcloth and took measure of Emily, head to toe, crinkling her forehead at Emily’s oversize T-shirt and baggy sweatpants. “Well, you don’t look like a champion,” she noted dryly, but there was a lightness to it. She beckoned Emily closer and gave her a hug. “Congratulations. Did you hang your dress up?” Emily nodded into Vee’s collarbone. Vee gave her a quick pat on the back, but Emily didn’t let go. “Biscuits,” Vee said, releasing Emily and grabbing an oven mitt. “Set the table.”

  Emily kept her eyes focused on the floor and went around the counter to the silverware drawer. Mr. Wojcik continued his narrative. “Let me tell you, Vera, you should have seen her, up on the stage—” But Emily was no longer listening. She gathered up three forks in her left hand and three knives in the other and carried them slowly to the kitchen table.
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  “—when she goes to the national competition—”

  The three forks, each nestled smoothly into the other. A little fork family. Emily pressed her thumb slowly onto the tines of the forks and watched the skin turn white, then red upon release. White, red. White, red. The fleshy part of her thumb was dotted with tiny indentations. She pressed down again, hard, but it would only go down so far. It was impossible to force your thumb down hard enough to break the skin. A knife, though, would be different. A knife could slide through the skin easily. That’s what it was made for.

  “Absolutely not!” said Vee.

  Emily froze. Vee had raised her voice. There was a silence, and then Emily could hear Mr. Wojcik trying to muster up words, the sounds sticking in his throat before exploding out. “But, but, but she could win a scholarship!”

  There was no answer, but Emily could feel the shrug Vee must have given.

  “Frankie Yankovic himself will be there!”

  Emily could hear Vee pouring a pot of egg noodles into a colander in the sink. “I don’t care if Jesus, Mary, and Joseph will be there. She’s not going to Las Vegas.”

  Emily held herself still. It was as if her slightest breath would sway the decision being made.

  Vee continued. “It’s no place for a little girl and you know it. No way I’m letting her set foot there.”

  Mr. Wojcik spoke. “It is for the national title. She must go. Not to worry. I will make sure she is safe.”

  “NO!” The word shot out of Emily’s mouth faster and harder than she had expected. Silverware rained onto the table.

  Emily lifted her eyes slowly. They were both staring at her. Mr. Wojcik’s face reflected, in rapid succession, surprise, concern, and finally, with a sudden loosening of muscles, understanding. The color drained from his red face and he turned his head away, but by that time Emily had eyes only for Vee.

  Vee was looking intently at Emily; there was something in the girl’s gaze she couldn’t identify but knew she should. It troubled her. “Manners,” she said to Emily, knowing that she was missing something vital.

  Emily was breathing fast. “I want to go with you.”

  “Well, I’m not going,” Vee answered, “and neither are you. End of discussion.”

  Usually that would have ended it, but Emily kept staring. Vee stared back, and Emily saw in Vee’s eyes something she had never seen there before. Uncertainty. Emily jutted her jaw forward but said nothing.

  Vee took a deep breath in. “Vegas is no place for decent folk. There’s gambling, drinking, murders—” Her pursed lips would permit no further vices to escape. She continued in a more conciliatory tone. “Not going is not the end of the world. You can still play, you can still take lessons—”

  Emily stamped her foot down. “I don’t want to take lessons!”

  Vee actually flinched. She had never seen Emily stomp her foot, and didn’t like it. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded, eyes narrowing. “‘I want,’ ‘I don’t want.’ You too high and mighty for lessons?”

  Wojcik intervened, keeping his head down and mumbling to the oven mitt in Vee’s left hand. “Please, Vera, she don’t need no lessons from me. She is magnificent. Let her go to Vegas with someone else, maybe. Anything, as long as she keeps playing. She must play.” This last he directed straight to Emily, and there was pleading in his voice, but Emily kept her eyes on Vee.

  Vee was having none of it. “Nonsense. She’s just getting the big head.”

  “I am not!” yelled Emily.

  Vee lowered her head and glared at Emily, like a bull about to charge. Insubordination was something she understood. “Listen to me, you stop this nonsense right now or you can forget about playing the accordion at all. Now set. The table.”

  Emily knew the signs: the hardening of the eyes, the stillness, the furrows in Vee’s brow. She knew if she were to look down she would see Vee’s hand balled into a fist, slowly clenching and unclenching.

  Emily stamped her foot.

  “No,” she said.

  Vee’s hand swept up and cracked Emily on the side of the head, but it was Mr. Wojcik who cried out. Emily stumbled sideways, hitting her right ribs on the side of the kitchen table. Vera turned her back to Emily and walked slowly to the stove.

  “Set the table,” she said.

  But the blow that sent Emily back three paces also sent her out of the kitchen and into her bedroom, where she shut herself in for the rest of the night. She missed the compulsory meal of pot roast eaten by Vee and Joe Wojcik in stony, miserable silence. Emily didn’t come out until much later, after Wojcik had slunk home to his frozen ptaszkus and wiewiorkas, after Vee had gone to bed without so much as a pause by Emily’s bedroom.

  Emily tiptoed out of her room, grabbed the Rossetti that was still by the front door, and shoved it onto the shelf of the hall closet. She knew that it would stay there until she apologized—Vee never backed down. She’d be safe: from lessons, from Wojcik, from the “Clarinet Polka.”

  She wouldn’t take the accordion out again for another twenty-four years, and Vee wouldn’t say a word about it that entire time. On the night of the victory dinner turned no dinner at all, Emily lay in her bed, covers pulled up and gripped tight, her eyes absorbing the darkness of the room until she was floating in it. She no longer felt her heart beating hard against her ribs, or her fists pressing down; her body seemed to have dissolved into the particles of night she was staring into. She was free. She didn’t need anything; she didn’t need anything at all.

  EMILY

  VEGAS

  EARLIER

  She woke up falling. Her head was inclined downward into a dip along the car floor’s contours, where the backseat would have been. Emily jerked awake and pushed hard against the ground, tensed, like a cat flung from the bed. It was still dark. Above her, through the windows of the Volvo, she could see the night thinning out into murky gray.

  She hadn’t slept, not really, only skated along over the top of sleep, dipping in now and then but never plunging deep. Emily laid her head back down. It was very cold, there in the pit of the car. If this were Chicago, if this were the middle of a Chicago winter, they’d find her frozen there, curled into herself, blue-skinned and stiff. But here, she knew that if she were to remain in the Volvo for only a few hours, the car would turn into something else altogether. The sun would climb higher into the sky, heating up the glass, the dashboard, the steering wheel, and the seats, which would in turn radiate heat into the trapped air (this, an example of a localized greenhouse effect) and in a matter of minutes the refrigerated car would become a slowly heating oven, the air molecules speeding faster and faster, and within an hour there would be enough energy (total kinetic energy of an object’s molecules = heat) to slow-cook a standing rib roast. Given a body weight of about twenty pounds and an outdoor temperature of ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, a child (with its higher ratio of body surface area to mass) could undergo hyperthermia in surprisingly little time.

  Emily knew all of this.

  She knew all of this because she had done the research.

  She had done the research because she needed a timeline.

  She needed a timeline to know how many minutes she would have had to save her daughter.

  It was lonely, lying in the car. There was a Robert Frost poem, something about the world ending in fire or ice. She couldn’t remember how it went. This is how the world ends, she thought, shivering. It ends in the backseat of a 1998 slate-blue Volvo. Emily tucked her arms tighter into her body. Let me give you some of my cold, Little Peach, and you give me some of your heat. Mommy’s here. But that was a lie. Mommy wasn’t. Not then.

  Georgia’s head was perfectly round when she was born. Her downy, red-pink head was small and perfectly round. Emily had called her Little Peach right away. Owen insisted on the more formal “Little Miss Peach,” but to Emily, she was only ever just Little Peach.

  The sun was definitely on the way up. Emily could see the silhouette of a waywar
d Cheerio right in front of her face. It was either a Cheerio or a lost button. She reached out and popped it into her mouth. Cheerio.

  Time to go. The last stretch.

  Emily crawled out the back door and stood up on the gravel outside. Her shoulder complained but that was as it should be. She trudged toward the truck stop for the restroom key. Heavy steps. Heaviness and haze.

  Who was she?

  She was the pain in her shoulder.

  She was the dull ache in her stomach.

  She was a mother of two.

  Scratch that.

  She was a mother of two.

  She was someone who had to pee.

  * * *

  In the grimy bathroom mirror she caught sight of a hideous bag lady by the sink, a crazy Asian woman you’d find skulking around Chicago’s Chinatown, spitting on the sidewalk as she ransacked the trash cans. The desert sand had etched lines into her face; her matted hair had brambled outward into some kind of tumbleweed configuration. Bright red eyes, the skin around them bruised and swollen. It actually worked out well. She now looked like someone who should be found dead in a public bathroom. She might not even be recognized, provided she threw away her identification beforehand. Emily patted her bag, feeling the three prescription bottles pressed against the leather. She didn’t know the exact dosage of an overdose, but figured that if she took all the pills at once it would surely do the trick.

  Returning the key, Emily noticed in the free rack in front of the counter a magazine with Vegas showgirls splashed on the cover. There were three of them, all arched, sequined eyebrows and red-rouged lips snarling at the camera. And in the corner, a dog-eared image: a man in a giant cape playing the piano against a turquoise background. It wasn’t Liberace, but he had the same candelabra, the same rhinestones, and the same openmouthed smile. “Liberace Competition Winner Tony Sherbé Plays This Weekend ONLY!”