on magic
Yesterday I tried and failed to hire a magician for my 20th birthday party. I entered my full name and phone number into a disorganized website called “Bark” – a part magician-finding database for the wider New York area, part dog care company.
Eight minutes later, I received a call from one Georgie Porgie the Magician. Georgie offered to give me and my party guests an unforgettable experience that would leave us all "thoroughly satisfied.” I suddenly was put off by the idea and decided instead on an elevated dinner party with my closest friends.
My babysitter from a while back was a clown. She went to clown school where she learned how to make little children laugh and forget their troubles. She wasn’t scary, or red-nosed. I had learned dark secrets early on in my Jewish upbringing regarding a certain jolly fellow, but it was okay because I had her, my personal Santa Claus, who sat on the plush red couches of my elementary school’s lobby each afternoon, waiting for me. One day, she gave me a black box of magic tricks with a shiny, silver handle that today collects dust in our storage unit downstairs.
It was around eight years old that I became slightly irritated at my family and told my second grade class that they were “weirdos.” I was the youngest of three girls. My eldest sister was obsessed with One Direction and wanted to marry the life-sized Harry Styles she had propped up in her room—this annoyed me. The middle sister also wanted to marry Harry, although more than that she wanted to be exactly like her older sister. This annoyed me even more. Most irritating of all was how loudly my mother swallowed when she was talking to other adults about work and politics. I was irritated, of course, until I was sad, or sick. Then her chest was pressed against my swollen cheek, and she was magic. Her fingers in my hair. My sisters and I sprawled out on a shaggy rug playing cards. My dad’s deep voice asking about the plans for dinner.
At nine I began to feel that maybe I was a little magical because I got all As in school and my teachers told my parents I was smart and unique and when I asked my mom one humid night in Florida why I was so scared of alcohol and drugs and all that big kid stuff she told me I “thought deeply” and “felt deeply,” maybe more than others. That year I read half of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone in a shoe store in Midtown while my mother hustled about, and the other half that night in bed. From then on, I was the “reader of the family,” and my godfather and grandparents gave me books every Hanukkah that I alphabetized on my shelf but never read.
A boy in my 10th grade English class and I both said at the same exact time that our favorite food we’d eaten the past summer was a fried chicken sandwich. I caught his gaze awkwardly, and that was magic. I liked him, and he liked that I liked him, and that was enough at the time for impassioned conversations with friends at a nail salon and uber rides home from parties with eyes blacker and cheeks stained with salt. I myself didn’t feel quite so special anymore and I wished my nose was smaller and I loved English class no longer for the books we read.
A few years passed and my nose became smaller (not so magically). I was on a plane last week from Bangor, Maine to New York City. There was heavy turbulence. I spent most of the hour thinking about love and friendship and the two combined. I thought about practical and pathological love. I thought about the feeling of making a friend laugh while they’re crying, and the feeling of a friend making me laugh so hard that I cry. I thought about how my hair moves heavy underwater and about losing people who are special to you and about the cookie-dough ice cream I'd have that night for dessert.
To the left of me, a fifty-year-old man lay with his eyes closed and mouth hung open, chest moving in sync with his nostrils. To my right, a sixty-year-old woman read some sort of smutty fantasy novel. Her phone lay flat atop her knee and I wondered if she knew or cared that I could see.
I am excited for my upcoming birthday party. I hate pretending I don’t like my own birthday when I love it. I love being in a small room with candles, cushions, and my friends, even if there is no bald magician with bushy eyebrows doing tricks. Magic will exist in that room without him, I’m sure.