Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (9 page)

Alex would not remain indebted to Vincenzo; the canvas was stripped and the poles returned to the woods; his son would have a proper tent. Alex could not believe that something that could fit, folded, in the crook of his arm, could cost so much at the camping store on Route 23. The smaller they are, the more expensive they are, the salesman told him, and Alex felt that in these words was encapsulated the full difference between Russia and America. He presented it to his son like a keepsake from the dead ice of a northern expedition. Max nodded politely, as if this, too, would do, and raced to the backyard as Maya shouted after him to remember to say what when his father gave him a gift. Alex patted Maya on the shoulder munificently and strode toward the fervent unpacking taking place on a tender patch of grass he had so recently had the mowing service attend to. “This way, this way,” he gently took the poles and fasteners from his son, but America had made great advances in tent making since Eugene and friends had set up filched army canvases on a birch-flanked clearing outside Minsk as little Alex observed, and Alex had to sheepishly give up the materials to his son, who had the contraption billowing in the crisp springtime wind in just minutes.

Now, as Alex surveyed his son from the threshold, he felt a strange cheerfulness. Now, Alex was needed for something much greater than building a tent. Maya's love for their son was complete but wishful, and blinded by wishfulness; patiently, Alex had kept his mouth closed so that Maya could have what she wanted. But now, his insight was needed. Alex's parents would have to receive their say, but he had no intention of allowing them anything other than that. He was Max's father.

He strode into the bedroom and ran his hand over Max's blanket. Max sat up, as if he would have to get dressed and go off somewhere. He put his shoulders forward and stared up at his father.

“I'm sorry I woke you,” Alex said.

“What is it?” Max said nervously.

“Nothing,” Alex said. “But now that your grandfather's put away the tent, how are we to talk man to man? But I have something to ask you.”

Max blinked several times, chasing away sleep.

“Do you love your mama?” Alex said.

“Of course,” Max said.

“When you go away like you did today, Maksik, you make your mama so upset. She cries. She won't eat.”

“Why won't she eat?” Max said.

“How can you ask? Because she loves you. She's afraid you're not okay.”

“But I got back okay.”

“But what if something happened? You're lucky, that's true, I can see that. It's a great quality in life—maybe the greatest. But you need more than luck. You need this.” Alex tapped Max's head lightly with his finger. “Do you understand what I mean?”

Max shook his head no.

“It doesn't matter,” Alex said. “You can't do this anymore, son. Even if you want to, you can't. You have to stop yourself. You have to think of your mama—and of me, and of your grandparents, who love you—and you have to come straight home from school.
I am talking to you man to man about this. Do we have an agreement?”

Max didn't say anything, but when his father also didn't speak, he nodded.

“That's what I like to hear. You know, if Mama and I had a daughter, I would love her just as much as I love you. But I'm glad we have you.”

Max blinked twice. “What about the tent?”

“No more tent, Max. Grown boys sleep in bed. Grown boys don't play around in the grass like animals. You're growing up.”

Max slid back down under the blanket and turned to face the wall. His father apologized once more for waking him. He waited for Max to say it was okay. Instead Max said: “Did you run away when you were little?”

“Never,” his father said.

“Ever?”

“Ever. Kids who don't care about their parents run away. Who think about themselves, and only themselves. I was not like that, and neither are you.” Alex waited, then said again, “I'm sorry for waking you.”

This time his son exonerated him, and he retreated. Flushed with a positive feeling that had been difficult to imagine downstairs—he felt it most often when he finally got some time to himself, or to speak to his son without his wife's interference—Alex shut the door to his son's bedroom and took the steps to his own, where he discovered his wife, fully clothed and lights burning, asleep on a pitiful edge of their bed, her mouth open in fantasy. Turning the light switches with care, he went into the bathroom, where he opened the faucet only a trickle and left the toilet unflushed. When he came out, he slid the house slippers from her feet, but otherwise left her in place. This left him a smaller portion of the bed than he usually used, but he fit himself around his wife. He kissed her hair, and realized she had been smoking. Maya, Maya, he sighed. Sometimes, he felt as if he had two children. Four children.

+

After their son vanished upstairs, Eugene and Raisa sat noiselessly at the dining room table. It was late, and they felt old. Eventually, Eugene, feeling the male's responsibility to act, stirred and gently took his wife by the soft meat under her elbow.

“Zhenya, I want to look at him one more time,” Raisa said. Eugene shrugged to say of course—how could he refuse his wife. He cherished moments like these, which usually arrived as soon as his daughter-in-law—or his son; true, his son, too—left the room. Suddenly, the proper course of action was unmuddled, the language of the room clear and direct.

They climbed the stairs, Max's door opening for the third time since he had fallen asleep. He was wheezing softly. With satisfaction, Raisa noted that the boy remained where she'd left him. Then she remembered everything else and reclined her head against Eugene's shoulder, rolling it back and forth in dismay.

“Did you think, when you said you'd go ice-skating with me fifty years ago,” Eugene said, “that we would be standing in America looking at our blond grandson after he spent the afternoon dunking himself in a river like a beaver?”

“I'm frightened, Eugene.”

He touched her shoulder quietingly and strode into the bedroom. “Eugene!” Raisa hissed. “Let him be.”

“I'm awake,” Max said.

“He's awake,” Eugene forgave himself, but in a whisper, because if Alex heard, Eugene would get an earful. “I want to talk to my grandson. When can I talk to my grandson without everyone else interrupting?”

Raisa threw her hands at the ceiling: “Should I leave you two alone?”

Eugene studied his wife's silhouette in the doorway. He perceived just how much Raisa had to restrain herself so as not to antagonize their son and his wife. He wished to give her some
great freedom. In seventy years, had she not earned at least that? He said to her, mocking the sudden sincerity but also sincere: “I am no one without you.”

Max watched them solemnly.

“What are you staring at, Columbus?” Eugene turned back to his grandson and lowered himself to the bed. A knee cracked, and Eugene wailed comically. He tickled Max's belly through the blanket. “How long are you going to sleep in pajamas, heh? Are you a grown-up or what? Grown-ups sleep in briefs and nothing else. Grown-ups make the room cold, so their lungs get bigger in the night. Do you understand? Who's going to have the biggest lungs in the world?”

“Me,” Max obeyed.

“That's right. Now let's talk business.” Eugene reached into the back pocket of his slacks and pulled out his wallet. “This, by the way,” he said, pulling out a square photo with foxed edges, “is your grandmother fifty years ago. Heh? Look at that.”

Max sat up and ran his fingers over the photo's ancient matting.

“She was the most beautiful girl in the world,” Eugene said. He looked at the doorway. “And still is.” Letting Max hold on to the photo, he reached back into the billfold and withdrew twenty dollars. “Now listen. Every week you don't do what you did today, you get one of these. You follow? You go back to sleeping in your bed and you stay there, you get two of these. Shake with me, because once you've shaken, it's a shame to go back on it. Give it here.” Eugene stuck out a paw. Max placed his hand inside it.

“Do I need to teach you how to shake?” Eugene said.

“Eugene, leave him be,” Raisa pleaded from the door.

“Woman, don't interrupt,” Eugene said playfully. Max dropped his hand, giving up.

“Come on!” his grandfather badgered him, but then let it go, shaking his head. He reached under Max's bed and pulled out the board with the pouches of grass. He opened the one in the upper-left-hand corner and clawed out the wisps of dried grass.
Raisa approached and took them from his hand as Max watched apprehensively. Eugene rolled up the twenty and stuffed it into the pouch.

“Until every one of these is filled with a twenty, you can't touch the money, okay?” he said. “I see the money gone, I see the grass back, it's all over. You forfeit all the money, lose the game. Does a Rubin lose?”

“No,” Max said.

“The only person I lose to is you,” Eugene said. “Do we have a deal?”

“I am about to pull you away from him by the ears,” Raisa complained.

“My commanding officer has ordered me to retreat,” Eugene said to Max. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Max said softly. He watched his grandparents go.

+

With no Rubins left to interfere with his sleep, Max sped down a creek astride a muskellunge pike, its scales sparkling under the water. Maneuvering around deadwood and stones, the fish split the creek with the speed of an arrow, the black buttons of its eyes occasionally sweeping up toward the riders. The other passenger was the odd boy from the house—he had circled his arms around Max's waist and dropped his head against Max's shoulder. He was burbling something—
bah, bah, bah
—but didn't seem to be afraid.

They moved quickly, passing bridges, silent woods, other homes, though each one looked like the white farmhouse from where Max's parents were called, set back from the road by two or three hundred feet. Children waved at them from the bridges, drivers peeked out of their windows. They had an escort of turkey vultures, circling overhead. Max's feet were pegged to the pike's flank, and it nosed through the water so neatly that only the rare drop reached his face, a cold pinprick of wet.

Bah-bah-bah
. Max turned around and said to hold on, it
wouldn't be long now. He knew the place was coming, but when this stand of poplars ended, another began, and then a farmhouse, a swamp, a row of marshy fields, a thicket of electrical lines. It wouldn't come.

But then it did come. Max didn't have to tell the pike to slow down; it stopped and idled in place. To the unaided eye, there was little about this clearing to mark it apart from the many they'd passed, a plain field surrounded by hundred-foot trees, so tall they seemed to be talking about something up at the crowns. The roots were so thick the crowns didn't sway even when the wind gusted. Here and there wildflowers grew, winks of violet, yellow, and rose.

Max turned as far as he could inside the boy's hold. Then he put his own arms around him, and they held each other briefly. Then the boy, also knowing the moves, slid off Max, and plopped into the water. He stood up, drenched, and smiled an embarrassed, toothy smile, his eyes rolling back in their sockets. Max nodded. The boy turned away and slopped to the shore. Max called out that he would be back with the others. “Just remember, I have to take you back before morning.” The boy turned around and spoke as if no impediment addled his mind: “I'll wait for you here.”

2002

Alex and his parents had wanted children and grandchildren with the same mindless hunger with which they sat down to meals. None had prepared for the possibility that this may not be biologically possible. They believed that America was at fault; it wouldn't have happened like this back home. There—maybe it was the food, which had no preservatives; maybe the slow pace and absence of stress—everyone was fertile. America regarded adoption as a normal course, so American bodies adjusted to fit the culture's endorsement. This country all but authorized its citizens to go barren.

The Rubins' desire to become parents and grandparents was eclipsed only by their conviction that adopted children were second-class, by definition unwanted; and why would a child be unwanted? Because something was wrong. Maya was repelled by adoption no less than the Rubins; imagining it was like imagining marriage to someone one hoped one would figure out how to love. As Maya greeted the dubious outcomes married life had harbored for her—medical work, after all; all the ways in which the elder Rubins did not resemble her parents—childlessness had not even occurred to her, perhaps because she held to the same expectations about Russian fertility. She didn't know any infertile Russian couples. She knew very few people, Russian or otherwise, outside the Rubins, but the Russians among them were all fertile. Even Bender, the pulped, gray-faced psychologist in Whippany, and his snow-haired wife had a small Bender knocking around some college.

When Alex and Maya met, Maya was indifferent toward children. When she happened upon one, she spoke to him like an inattentive adult. In a woman like her, even displaced to America, the alarm should have beat sooner than in an American body—but it didn't. When children came up, she started clearing the table and made fun: Alex, should we have five? Or six? The elder Rubins loved making fun; it meant everyone was in a good mood. Maya also made a different kind of joke: “Running my cash register with one hand, turning over
grechanniki
with the other, and holding the little one with a third?” Like a sputtering engine, the Rubins' laughter caught in their throats. If Maya had to work all hours in a café, of course Raisa would look after the child. But—that idea had not gone out of Maya?

Had Maya wished childlessness on them? Now, no child possible, she had the time to open a café—a chain of cafés. That was the bitter irony for the Rubins. For Maya, the bitter irony was that now she could not. That obsession had belonged to another woman; every obsession withers if you just hold down the obsessive, she thought. She laughed at the way she had dramatized her youthful situation—could her fantasy, to cook in some café, have been any paltrier? Now, Maya would not know how to run a café if the keys were handed to her. That devil she had spoken to Alex about ten years before—he had abandoned her. Her devil giving up; the passage of time; the female clock; Moira at the hospital with her stories of Ricky and Anthony and the dean's list; also, the maternity ward was just a floor down from mammography—who knew why, but the desire for a café had been replaced by a desire for children. But the Rubins refused to consider adoption. It's not that they didn't love losing. There was a sweet surrender in it. But the loss had to be clean.

Because Maya was the interloper among them; because America had brought her to the Rubins; because she worked in medicine and occasionally expressed a contrasting opinion—the duty of persuading the Rubins to adopt fell to her, even as her own reluctance
remained. The amount of time that infertile couples spend on fertility treatments—luckily and unluckily, this was not necessary in the case of the Rubins—Maya spent instead on persuading the family out of its hostility to adoption. The Rubins would not even rent a local apartment when they went to the Mexican coast—used beds and sheets made them feel unhygienic and poor, even if a hotel performed the same changeovers—and she wanted them to take on a used human being? No. Heads shook. No, Mayechka, no. And so the name Rubin will come to an end? she asked, hitting them in a tender spot. It's already ended, Eugene sighed, and then said that it was his and Raisa's fault; they should have had more children. At which point Alex removed himself from the table, and the dinner went on in a spectral silence.

Maya stopped making her case—the appealed-to must want the appeal. Then, during one dinner, apropos of nothing, Raisa mounted another attack on adoption. She conceded that it was a fine and honorable thing to do, to give a homeless child a home and all that, and perhaps she was not only backward but obsolete to remain opposed, but she could not bring herself around. She was too old, too set. Her sin, but not one she could overcome. It was then that Maya understood that despite the show they had been giving her, they would all sign on—but only if she took on the responsibility. And so she said: “We're adopting.” She was right: They all shrugged, including Alex. They were good parents-in-law, a good husband: They would give their beloved, capricious Maya what she wanted. Everything they endured over the next two years—nine months, morning sickness, and painful labor were a favor from God by comparison—they endured for her.

They chose the adoption agency from the Yellow Pages, like a tailor. Independent Adoption Services had retenanted a former department store; the space, contrived to hold circular clothing racks, rows of registers, and banks of mirrors, was overlarge and overexposed for the more delicate task of finding new homes for children, and every time Maya attempted to navigate its fluores
cent cubicles and cream-colored hallways, she ended up at bathrooms for the handicapped. It wasn't until she strode the halls of IAS that Maya understood what people meant by auras and magnetic fields. She felt like a dog responding to an unseen but undeniable scent. It was bad.

In the waiting area, portraits of successfully placed children and their new parents, usually on the steps of the courthouse where the transfer had been blessed by the law, faced off against childless couples that aspired to migrate to the opposite wall. Maya, Alex, and their sad compatriots studied the wall of success; the pregnant women who came in, Maya observing them like the other party in a car accident, studied the Mayas and Alexes. Maya was shocked the first time she saw a pregnant woman walk in, then chastised herself for her thickness; of course, the agency would serve both sides. The effortlessly full-bellied women read the prospective-parent profiles like personal ads, savoring a power that, by their looks, they had rarely, if ever, enjoyed. She hated them because they held the power, and she hated them because they were pregnant. Feeling a modest hysteria, Maya would snatch a palmful of cookies from the center console that held the uneasy peace between the parents-already and the parents-they-wish and gnash them mindlessly, hating herself as she did it. Generally, though, she directed the anger that pooled in her throat at the agency staff, which treated women who wanted to give up their children like wounded angels, and people who wanted to turn their lives upside down to make room for a foreign child like criminals until proven otherwise. (“It's social engineering, only legal,” Mishkin, the adoption supervisor, had noted. “You Russians should know something about that.”) If Mishkin had not accosted the Rubins one afternoon, trying on them the smattering of mangled Russian in his possession—he had overheard them whispering—quite possibly they would have remained childless. The slab-faced matron to whom they had initially been assigned had been terrorizing them into confessing their unpreparedness, unwillingness, doubt.

Slab-Face could have been forty or seventy. Did the Rubins own guns? Fire extinguishers? Were the outlets sealed? Her red pen hovered over a clipboard. Maya and Alex exchanged looks: Was she joking? Slab-Face barreled on: Where had they lived? Every state would need a background check. They hadn't crossed the river to live in New York, had they? Because New York was the worst.

The Rubins, she went on, would have to produce a self-advertisement like the ones in the waiting area. “Think of it like a newspaper personal,” Slab-Face advised. “You want to go steady with the birth parents—what can you offer?” Spotting the Rubins' unease, she raised her chin: “Oh, yes. You have to.”

“How did you . . . become involved with adoptions?” Alex mustered. He coughed lightly.

“I've got two little ones,” Slab-Face whipped out a photograph of two bantam-sized brown children flanking her abundance as all three roared behind the seat rail of a roller coaster.

“It is possible to adopt at all ages?” Alex said, and Maya stared at him with mortification. “He means the children's ages,” she rushed to add.

Perhaps Slab-Face would have been willing to forgo a personal verification of the Rubins' claims regarding firearms and ammunition, but comments like these, on steady supply from Alex, guaranteed otherwise. She arrived on a rainy afternoon wearing the same housedress in which they had found her at the office and proceeded to test the edges of their countertops, flick their stove burners, measure the height of their steps. The Rubins remained glumly seated at the kitchen table. They had refused to allow Eugene anywhere near the house during Slab-Face's inspection for fear he would insult her so gravely that he would sully their chances forever. Maya experienced a great gratitude to her husband for saying nothing about what she had dragged the pair of them into. Also for not mentioning the duration and cost of the adoption—a year and around twenty thousand dollars, “depend
ing on what the birth parents want.” “What do you mean, what the birth parents want?” Alex asked, thinking of Soviet bribes. “They'll tell you that at orientation,” Slab-Face said, reluctantly marking Home Inspection Pass rather than Fail on the clipboard.

“Orientation?” Alex said.

The orientation, a statewide colloquy in an ocean-side town, was attended by nine couples and two solos, one female and one male, setting off in Alex's mind uneasy speculation about whether the solitary man's wife was merely ill, or here was a man taking on parenthood all by himself. Of the other eight couples, three were gay and two religious, the latter signified by pins that said “Building God's Army.” The Rubins' eyes clung to the remaining heterosexual parents like floaters in a cold ocean.

Alex had never touched a gay man before, but now he was holding one's hand as the twenty participants formed a grieving circle to commemorate their failed fertility. Why were the gays grieving? They hadn't been failed by fertility, they had been failed by their dicks. He and Maya had been failed by fertility, and as the assembled strode and chanted, Alex absented himself by trying to guess which half of the other two normal couples (for that is the way Alex thought of them) was the sterile one. Was it the pale-face in glasses or his zebra-faced wife? Was it the ham-shouldered redhead with the pageboy, or her equally cavernous beau, wheezing like an asthmatic as they pounded the floor? Cupid loves every kind.

After lunch, which Alex and Maya had passed eyeing with envy the camaraderie starting between the other castaways, the group received a PowerPoint presentation on the various scams they could expect to encounter as parents-in-waiting. Financial Scams, one screen said. What other kind is there? Alex wondered. Emotional Scams, the next screen said. “Women will put up profiles claiming to look for adoption,” the lecturer said. “They'll interview you, they'll spend hours with you on the phone. And in the end, there's no child. They're just lonely. Meanwhile, you've been riding the roller coaster.”

The lecturer moved on, but Maya felt that a crucial piece of information was being left out, though she was too shy to raise her hand: How could a person protect himself from this kind of scam? Should she and her husband demand photos of a sloped belly as a precondition of talks? A signed certificate from the gynecologist? A meeting? Then she disobediently realized that she would not mind talking to this woman, the emotional scammer. She would prefer to know, of course, that there was no child, but this lonely, desperate charlatan struck her as someone with whom she could have a long talk, indeed.

That night, the Rubins were given homework: the profile that would hang on the IAS wall. Like the other applicants, they got a packet of samples and an instant camera, and were instructed to capture, between then and the next morning, three images that the rest of the group, playacting birth mothers and fathers, would cull for the one that made them say: I want to give my child to
these
people.

Alex and Maya had not filled out an application since writing colleges fifteen years before, and that was colleges; they were applying for a human being this time. How could one begin to answer the question of why one deserved to become the parent of a child carried and birthed by another? It was like being asked who one was, and what one planned to do about it. Of course they were loving, and patient, and generous—why would they ask to adopt otherwise—but so was everyone else filling out these forms. One had to be oneself, but what if one's self was generic? In the seaside motel room rented with their orientation fees by the agency, Maya wondered what the other participants were writing. Alex didn't think they were writing—they were out on the town with each other. Bonding.

He was at the small table by the window, Maya curled up on the bed, which smelled of industrial laundry detergent. Daylight began to merge with dark outside. Should they emphasize their hard work as immigrants? Downplay their religion? Try to be funny?
Should they say they read books, or would that be looked upon with disfavor by mothers struggling with reduced circumstances? But they would want to donate their children to book-reading parents, wouldn't they? However, the Rubins didn't actually read books. With no forewarning, the assignment had brought on an existential self-examination they hadn't requested.

Alex proposed that they wander outside for some fresh air; it was the farthest he and Maya had gone together in a while. Maya felt soldered to the bedspread, its corners crowned with tasseled pads that looked like epaulettes. But seeing Alex awaiting her authorization, she swung forward, the bag of stones in her belly sliding into her feet. She watched herself throw water on her face, recinch her ponytail, consider and then decide against her bag. She felt like an apparition. How would that read on the adoption form? “Prospective mother occasionally feels a stonelike weight on the soul.”