Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (15 page)

Maya looked at her with surprise. She had been thinking of herself as the one in error, and only now wondered why. “I'm glad you're here,” she said. “My husband and I don't have the same views.”

“Why his way, then?”

“His need is greater,” Maya said.

“I needed to see it for myself,” Laurel said. “You can understand that, can't you?”

Maya nodded eagerly. “Of course I can.” She pulled on her cigarette without desire. “Are you married?” she said. “The forms didn't say.” She added hastily: “It doesn't matter to me.”

“We fight like married people, don't we?” Laurel said. She seemed to enjoy the thought.

Maya watched Laurel out of the side of her eyes. This little body had brought forth a child. From where? It must have retracted immediately to its original shape: that was the meaning of youth. Maya surveyed with jealousy the pears of Laurel's breasts,
the slight knob of the nose. This body had brought forth a child. As hers never would.

Laurel was going to chuck the butt into the grass, then remembered where she was and crushed it against the heel of her boot. She dropped it into a pocket of her dress. It had many pockets.

“It'll smell,” Maya said, watching Laurel light another. “Here, we'll put it in the garbage. Oh, I must be so irritating, talking like your mother. You are half my age, but already a mother yourself.”

“Just because we're here,” Laurel said, “you don't have to worry about us trying to interfere with you. I just needed to see it.” Youthfully, she added: “I promise you.”

Maya felt relief—on Alex's behalf. She thought that if ever she had been unfaithful to Alex, he would have wanted her to keep it a secret. And she would not have been able to.

“Some things you should know,” Laurel said. “I haven't been breast-feeding him even though this milk wants to come out of me like the Yellowstone. And we haven't named him even though a nameless baby is a pretty Friday-the-thirteenth kind of thing.” She dragged on her cigarette hungrily, then looked around her. “I'm just going to sit down in the grass here for one minute.”

Before Maya could object or offer a blanket, Laurel was sitting on the grass, her boots one under the other and the pleated sundress flared over her thighs. Maya had an impolite desire to touch her skin. Even in the near-bituminous darkness, she saw it was thick like rubber, just manufactured. Maya was hardly an old maid herself, thirty-four, in America that was just starting out, but Laurel was like a former version of herself come to shame her for waiting so long. Most girls in Kiev were mothers by twenty-one. Instead of a child, Maya had given birth to a new life in America. It was twelve years old now, and she was ready for another. She wanted for it a sibling.

“This grass is soft like hand cream,” Laurel said. “It's luscious.”

“My husband . . .” Maya started, and trailed off. She found her
self without the energy to remark on the lawn now. It was a special concern of Alex's. He worried over it to the point of detriment. She had read that fallen leaves ought to remain—their decomposition fed the soil. But those leaves were in Home Depot bags before they hit the ground. For this, Alex had massive energy. Once, he had hauled himself out of bed with a fever because the leaves were choking his grass and had to get cleared. He was contemplating cutting down the large oak that was responsible until Maya reminded him it would probably lower the home's resale value.

Forgetting her earlier mindfulness, Laurel stubbed her cigarette into the grass. Then she lay down. Maya looked worriedly toward the house and the yellow light falling from the kitchen, which turned a small square of space outside the sliding doors indigo. What were those three discussing? She needed to get back inside.

“Come down here, won't you?” Laurel said.

Maya looked down, flummoxed.

“Just get down here next to me,” Laurel said.

Maya's jeans were dark—the grass stain would not show. “Where should I—” she started, and then just came down. The grass was cool under her hair.

“You're shit for stars,” Laurel said, looking up.

“There's more where you are?” Maya said.

“It's way open,” Laurel said. “You have to drive a couple of miles to see as many homes as I can see from right here. It's like a giant board. And if you do anything too sudden-like, you'll fall off. Here, hold my hand so we don't fall off the board.” Nervously, Maya allowed her hand to be fished for in the dark. If Alex saw her now. Laurel had work hands. Was she lying about the Ramada to seem more respectable? They lay listening to cicadas.

“I don't like to fly, either,” Maya said, trying to ingratiate herself. “Actually, I can't. It sends me into convulsions. I came to America on a boat, like they did a hundred years ago.”

“Oh, I'd like to try flying,” Laurel said.

Maya's cheeks colored. She was grateful for the darkness. Laurel and Tim drove not because Laurel couldn't fly—they didn't have the money for it.

Maya lifted herself partway and looked over at Laurel. “I'm sorry for asking this,” she said. “Please.” No response came from Laurel, but also no objection. “Please tell me he's healthy.”

Laurel looked over at Maya. “You've seen the medical history.”

“Please.”

“He's the healthiest boy you'll ever lay eyes on.”

Maya wanted to embrace Laurel down there on grass—then reproached herself; she was always too ready to believe. But then she darkened and said: “Why us, Laurel?”

Laurel stared back up at the sky. “I don't have to tell you he's an accident baby. Tim's eighteen years old, and he makes six thousand dollars a year riding bulls. And you saw the way that he walks. So I don't know if I'll have a husband in a wheelchair in five years. Like half of them end up in wheelchairs, making the best of it. Making the best of it—I hate those words. Being heroes about ending up in a wheelchair. Why can't he make the best of what he's got now—instead of waiting to make the best when he's got so much less? But he wants less, so I gave him less. I ain't letting him raise a child this way. Not with me, if that's what he does with his life. My own fault for getting my days wrong. But Tim and I, we have to be together. Him I can't let go of. Him”—she nodded toward the house, meaning the baby—“I can.”

“But how?” Maya said, Laurel's words so unbelievable that she smiled in astonishment.

“I'm going to find out. He'll be with good people. You're good people, I can see it. Earn real money. And don't ride bulls for a living.”

Maya wanted to tell Laurel that she was making a mistake. But if she happened to persuade her? She said with incredulity: “He won't quit? He'd rather give up the baby?”

“It's complicated,” Laurel said. “In the meantime, decisions need to get made. I made it.” She laughed coarsely. “My need was greater.”

“But if that's all it is—if it's just his rodeo—” Maya sputtered out.

“Make him stop? Why don't you persuade your husband to change the adoption to open?”

“But that's different! Alex would never—a child!”

“You don't know the first thing about rodeo, so you think it's not important,” Laurel said.

“No. Yes. Of course,” Maya hurried to appease her. She went back down on the grass. She got relief out of it; propping herself up required a keeping together of something that was allowed to dissolve when prostrate. “We are like castaways on an island here,” she said.“Only there's been no accident.”

“I guess that's why I wanted it,” Laurel said.

After a moment, Maya said: “If our form didn't say ‘closed,' would you have agreed to an open adoption?”

“I don't know that,” Laurel said. “What's done is done. We didn't specify either way. I care he's far, and with good people. It's probably better this way.” Laurel stood up and ran her hands down her thighs and back, but Alex's grass was so severely maintained that none of it had detached onto her dress. “Come on. It's time that he met you.”

But Maya wished to keep talking to Laurel. The new information made things less understandable, not more. There was so much more to talk about—enough to justify them remaining known to each other. After a moment, Maya rose, heavier than she had gone down.

Inside, Alex was speaking to Tim with an animation that surprised Maya while Mishkin busied himself on the other side of the dinner table. “We thought you ran away together,” the adoption supervisor said on sighting the women, his mouth full of
grechanniki
. “You're a genius at the stove, Maya.”

“You'll raise him in the Jewish faith, won't you,” Tim said, his idea of a tension-defusing subject change. He looked around the kitchen, as if he expected it to broadcast some signal of Jewishness. The boy continued to sleep in the car seat like a grocery bag that still needed unpacking.

“They might, being Jews,” Laurel said.

“We never met someone of the Jewish faith,” Tim said. “We read about it.”

“We don't drink the blood of Christian babies,” Alex said in a failed effort at humor.

Tim regarded him with mortification.

“We are not very Jewish,” Maya rushed in. “The Soviet Union was an atheist country. That's how we grew up.”

“We're both fairly devout,” Tim observed. He looked over at his wife. Alex frowned. Maya wished desperately to change the subject. Tim helped by asking for the bathroom. He was over six feet and had to pull his chair far from the table before his legs could swing out. He limped away.

“What happened to the leg?” Alex asked Laurel, of whom he was slightly afraid. Laurel only grunted luridly.

“Maybe you want some time with him,” Alex said, motioning to the car seat.

“We just had forty-two hours together,” Laurel said. “The long good-bye.”

When Tim returned, the four of them stood awkwardly over the small bundle, the clock clicking from the wall, Mishkin retreated into the corner, from tact or a fearfulness of his own. Laurel broke the silence. She ran her fingers through the gold sheets of her hair and tucked them behind her ears.

“Ma'am,” she said, stepping toward Maya. Maya's blood ran cold from the formal greeting. “This is your child. You're the mother. You will raise him as you see fit. But I want to ask you for one thing. This is why we drove two thousand miles. I wanted to look you in the eyes and ask you. Please don't let my baby do rodeo.”
She looked at Alex, at Tim, at Maya, at her boy, hers for only the rest of this minute. Then she spun around and walked out of their lives. She hadn't touched her son once since walking inside. And Maya understood that she had been seduced outside, apologized to and reassured and made to look at stars and hold hands, in order to become an ally—someone of whom this request could be made, and who would, through the years, honor it.

“I moved to the United States to refine my understanding of bureaucracy,” Eugene said sourly. The other Rubins buttered and chewed: Saturday breakfast. Eugene had cleaned his plate and was scratching it with the tines of his fork. “Except you can't bribe anyone here—the government must be allowed to do a poor job without interference.” He deposited the fork on his plate with a monk's carefulness—if he allowed disorder into his gestures, he might put the fork through somebody's eye. He was upset because many pallets of New Zealand honey had been held up at Port Newark over a classification error. He had taken the table through the difference between C4 and C3 sugars. “Ten thousand dollars,” he said bitterly.

“Please don't count money that hasn't come in yet,” Raisa said. “It's bad luck.”

“I'm sure it's a misunderstanding,” Maya said hesitantly. “If the labels list the right number, they'll have to—”

Eugene gave her a pitying look.

“You know better,” Maya whispered, nodding.

Eugene burped and said “Oi.” He wiped his mouth and looked at Maya. “A compliment to the cook. And no butter, unless you're not telling the truth. With butter, everyone's a chef.”

Maya smiled vanishingly at him.

Eugene turned to Alex and nodded at the backyard. “Those pines look like they've had their balls cut off. Pardon my language,” he added, making a face at Max. Then, to Alex: “Your neighbor is showing you his affection?”

“It's deer,” Alex said irritably. Three weeks later, the argument with his wife was still with him. He had tried to dispel it with
a stumpy centerpiece of hydrangea, spray roses, and carnations, which wilted amiably on the table, but it made no difference to either of them. He had done it without meaning it.

“Tie soap bars to the branches,” Eugene said. “I've seen people do it.”

“New Year's all year long,” his son observed. “With Irish Spring instead of tree ornaments.”

“You have to use Ivory,” Eugene said. “Irish Spring isn't nasty enough.”

“I do your wash with Ivory,” Raisa remarked defensively.

Mechanically, Eugene sniffed the collar of his shirt.

“There's a spray now,” Alex said. “I just haven't had time.” He looked at Max, who was trying to saw down the top of a cereal box with a butter knife. Alex looked back at his father. “Do you know what I found on my stoop a week ago? A ceramic deer half the size of this table. Guess who.”

“You should have put it back on his doorstep, the bastard. Sorry, Max.”

“No, I took it into the garage, smashed it to pieces, and lobbed them over the fence one by one.”

“If one of them landed on his face, he could sue you,” Eugene said. “The first lesson of revenge is you leave no marks.”

“Can we change the subject to something more pleasant?” Maya said.

Eugene shrugged and looked at the newspaper. “There's nothing pleasant in here.”

“Then put it away, sweetheart,” Raisa said. “Speak to the table.”

Eugene obediently folded the paper and looked at Alex. “Let's shoot one of these deer and leave that on his doorstep.”

Alex held up a pleading hand. “I'll get the spray this weekend.”

“I'll get it,” Maya volunteered.

The men turned to her.

“I have errands,” Maya said. “Max will come help. Right, Max? You just have to write it down, Alex, what to get.”

“Maya . . .” he said. He was unprepared to contend with generosity. “You won't get the right one.”

“There's only one way to learn,” she said.

“Your wife is offering to do it so you can sit at home and relax,” Eugene said. “What's wrong with you?”

Alex conceded. “It's called DeerSanta.” He nodded. “Thank you.”

Raisa cleared the table while the men dispersed. Maya sat staring out the window, pretending she still had coffee to finish. It was time to switch the flower water, though the petals were molding and puckering beyond help.

“You're going to hurt yourself, honey,” Maya said to her son, still serrating away at the cereal box. “Want to come for some errands?” She leaned toward him. “You'll have the front seat.”

Max kept sawing, as if he hadn't heard her. “Honey,” she said again. He put down his knife, slid out from under the table, and went into the hallway to find his sneakers.

For three weeks, Max had been quiet. Maya had spent them on the Internet, researching dissociative episodes. They were a kind of sleepwalking—the individual was functional and alert, but obeying a different mental channel. The descriptions terrified her. Her mind pictured a dissociative affliction as an invisible gas, a cellular sickness. Bumps, scrapes, bruises, and pimples: She could get all those out. Cutaneous infections unnerved Alex—he would worry pimples, moping until they went away—but she had a medical specialist's equanimity toward innocuous things. Things Alex could not see, he dismissed, whereas they were what terrified Maya.

When she wasn't at work or in front of the computer, Maya shadowed Max. She was clandestine not only from him, but her husband, who seemed intent on regarding continuing panic as a personal treason. Maya found an unspoken ally in Raisa. School having ended, Maya canceled her son's morning camp, saying she wanted him to spend more time with his grandmother. “Anything?” Maya would inquire fearfully of Raisa upon walking in
after work. “Nothing, daughter, stop your worry!” Raisa would exclaim from the floor, where she was demolishing Max at cards. For the welfare of her loved ones, Raisa would give away not only the chocolate in her mouth, but the tongue that was working it—with the exception of cards. A great, unsparing beast emerged when Raisa Rubin took cards in her hands; even an eight-year-old got no mercy. Maya wished to believe her mother-in-law and could not. She slept poorly.

Saltz, the pediatric psychiatrist, Maya did not dare contact—because she did not want to antagonize Alex, or because she didn't want to hear what he might tell her? Then she was seized by an alternative idea. Was it crazy? Maybe it was imaginative more than crazy. If she were found out, for some reason she felt she would have less to answer for than if she had contacted Saltz. Saltz was a betrayal. But Madam Stella—Madam Stella was just Maya being Maya. The Rubins would understand—they avoided the corners of tables, the stepping over of each other's legs, the unfurling of umbrellas indoors.

Maya had her own reason. She had been five, playing in the kitchen doorway as her mother swept the floor. Her mother yowled: There was a mouse behind the radiator. Startled by the broom, the mouse scurried out, ran chaotically in several directions, and vanished again. Maya shrieked and began stomping her feet. She tore off her underwear and T-shirt and stood naked, shivering and screaming. Her mother dropped the broom and rushed to embrace her. By that evening, they were on their way to—Tamara? Fatima? a Gypsy name—the two hexed clothing items in a grocery bag her mother held between the tips of two fingers.

The healer, who was young, tall, and heavily boned, looked nothing like the old, gaunt Gypsy women at the market, and her home looked exactly like the Shulmans': doors of frosted glass, a wall unit, and the wallpaper with bicyclists by a lake. She even wore what her own mother wore, a tracksuit, the soft protuberance of a belly distending the elastic. Her oval face, dark except for
slightly eerie eyes of sea green, was beautiful, but the way a horse is beautiful. Maya wondered if
she
had a Maya. How could she heal someone else's daughter if she did not have one of her own?

It was only later, on the walk home, that Maya realized that the woman had not touched her. At first, Maya felt discouraged by this, as if there was something so wrong with her that the woman could not risk catching it. But the terror that Maya experienced that afternoon was no longer causing the same misery in her stomach. And all it had taken was—the woman had extracted Maya's T-shirt and underwear from the grocery bag (she touched them without fright), whispered to them softly, as if Maya and her mother were not in the room, then rubbed both with water from a long-necked glass bottle, then smiled generously and returned the items, though Maya knew her mother would throw them out just in case. When would they need to return? Maya's mother asked. They wouldn't, the woman shook her head kindly, and Maya desperately wished for her to have a girl sometime soon.

Now, in the car, worry fingered Maya's chest: The drive to Madam Stella's would take her and Max slightly beyond town, and—for two exits—down a highway she had never driven before. A second worry: How would she explain their destination to Max? They were receding farther and farther from the hardware store. Max pointed this out, but without alarm; it had taken her some time to understand that Max didn't need to get his way, only declare his position. She said she would get it on the way back. He shrugged and didn't ask on the way back from where.

New emergencies—a sick child, a deceived husband—humble the old; Maya managed the highway without trouble. She had found the gate of the botanical gardens on whose grounds Madam Stella had somehow acquired property without having to stop and ask for elaboration on the instructions the Madam had given her over the phone. But the gate was closed and the two guards assigned to it inspected the Corolla with doubt. It was a private gardens bequeathed to the township by a chemist who had participated in
the discovery of antihistamines—so the plaque mounted on the gate said. It was closed on Saturdays. Maya consulted the paper crumpled in the ashtray—Saturday 12:00—but this did nothing to sway the guard in her window. He had a scar by his left eye and she did not want to contradict him.

They heard rustling up ahead. A dark gray mastiff was hurtling down to the gate. Behind him waddled the Madam, because if not the Madam, who would be wearing a sun-colored sari hemmed with coins in the middle of a private botanical garden? “Down, down,” she waved at the gate, unclear if she meant the mastiff or the guards. Both obeyed, the animal unraveling into a dung-colored slick by the gate and the guards rolling open the bars.

“I was lovers with the son,” the Madam breathed into Maya's window after the gate had closed behind the Corolla. Maya smelled cigarettes, lipstick, mint. She looked over at Max—he did not need to hear such confessions—but his eyes were fixed on the mastiff. Madam Stella had colored outside the lines with her lipstick; her eyelashes clumped together when she blinked so that for the briefest moment she seemed at risk of falling asleep. “Follow me,” she said, and jangled up the drive.

“Where are we going?” Max said as his mother inched after the Madam.

“It's a game,” Maya said, trying to sound excited.

Two hundred feet later, they arrived at a two-story pastel-yellow home with two entrances that Madam Stella shared with a workman's family, their rent reduced but hers subsidized in full in perpetuity thanks to her seduction of the chemist's son. The faint yellow, which recalled an overmilky omelet, was the color of the grand residences and palaces lining the embankment of the Neva in St. Petersburg, the wan yellow of aristocracy, and Maya was transported for a vanishing moment back to the Soviet Union, even though she had never been to St. Petersburg. Those palaces were property of the international imagination.

“I don't know why you didn't call . . . at the beginning,” Madam
Stella said into Maya's shoulder. The Madam lit a cigarette and blew a column of smoke at the gravel. Maya eyed the cigarette enviously, but was afraid to ask. “I offer the full suite of services,” the older woman said. “From the cradle to the grave. Infertility, difficult pregnancy, difficult birth, post-partum depression. Some people have me on retainer—they come once a week, just in case. Families stay with me for generations.” The Madam gargled out a phlegmy laugh. “That sounds as if I've been around since the war with Napoleon.”

Maya glanced nervously at her watch. She knew Alex would be checking the clock soon, her cell phone going off. She had brought it this time, had no cover.

“Guess my age,” Madam Stella said.

“Fifty-five?” Maya said, underestimating by twenty years in the name of politeness and a discount at the end of the hour.

Madam Stella whistled. “Try seventy-three.”

“We're here for a game, okay?” Maya whispered though Max was out of earshot. “He doesn't know.”

“There are demons in his head,” Madam Stella said. “We are going to very nicely, very politely, ask them to leave. Do you have any demons in your head, Mayechka?”

Maya was briefly startled by this intimate address, used only by her mother and Raisa.

“If it's a game, everyone plays,” Madam Stella said.

Like a well-painted face that parts to reveal ruined teeth, the smooth, eggshellish exterior of the building gave way to a rotten, sagging staircase that creaked under the four climbers as they summited to a garret of the kind Maya had always imagined inhabited by a Dostoevsky consumptive. If the street was in St. Petersburg, the garret was in a lightless village deep in the Carpathians, next to which even her uncle's Misha's modest countryside home was vast. Maya was stunned to discover herself more correct in this than she wished: Madam Stella had them gaze through a window—the mastiff got its plate-sized paws
on the windowsill—that revealed a patch of ground sealed by a cellar door. Everything that Madam Stella pickled and cured in the autumn was down there, covered in the summer months by enormous blocks of ice that the workman changed out weekly for a small fee. Madam Stella had had her residence disconnected from the electricity line, and held money only when she received payment or transferred several bills to the workman. Everything that she ate and brewed, she foraged in the botanical garden; she hardly ate meat, and for dairy she bartered.

“With whom?” Maya asked, looking anxiously around the premises: two rooms, the first of which doubled as a kitchen, bedroom, and entryway.