Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  When she heard the door open, Maisie looked up, registered Jane’s presence, and rolled onto her back, arms and legs flailing ecstatically. “Mama! Mama!” she cried. Jane stepped out of her boots, dropped her bag, and picked the squirming child up. Nine and a half hours was too much time apart. She held Maisie close, absorbing the sweet animal presence of her, and Maisie pressed her face violently, passionately, into Jane’s collar in return. She smelled of peanut butter and crayons. Jane kissed her sticky cheek, and Maisie curled up into a ball in Jane’s arms like a satisfied cat, the long scarf slipping off to reveal the T-shirt Billy had given her, sky blue with the Japanese character for “happiness” on it.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said to Elise. “I missed the bus.”

  “That’s all right,” Elise said, but she already had the fisherman’s hat off and her jacket on. “Bye, Maisie!” she said.

  “Let’s wave,” Jane said as Elise went out the door and down the warped front steps. “Elise will be back in the morning.”

  “Lise!” Maisie cried, wanting the sitter now as passionately as she had wanted her mother the moment before. She wanted everyone she loved with her always; who could blame her for that?

  When Elise could no longer be seen through the window, Jane carried Maisie into the kitchen. It was getting late and Jane was hungry, and she needed five minutes to get dinner together. “You play with these things, okay?” She knelt down and tried to disentangle Maisie, to distract her with the pot lids and cake pans in the bottom drawer.

  Maisie clung harder. Her sharp fingernails dug into Jane’s arm. “Mommy uppy!” she said.

  “Yes,” Jane said, “Mommy’s giving you uppy. But I need to put you down so I can make dinner.”

  Maisie pulled at Jane’s sweater and burrowed her head into Jane’s neck. “Mommy uppy,” she insisted.

  It was hard not to want Maisie to act less like a two-year-old sometimes. Jane lugged her back out into the living room and shook her off onto the couch, where she lay on her back with her thumb in her mouth while Jane turned on the TV.

  Back in the kitchen, Jane filled a pot at the sink and set it to boil for spaghetti. She chopped and sautéed an onion, added a jar of tomato sauce. The room was drafty, dingy. One of the bulbs in the ceiling fixture had gone out and the wan, watery, grayish-yellow light made the scarred countertops and scalloped curtains and striped wallpaper look tired and moribund. Once Jane had enjoyed cooking. Now they ate pasta, sandwiches, fried eggs, canned soup. There was something mean and paltry about a life of pasta and sauce out of a jar. It wasn’t the kind of life Jane wanted.

  The front door opened and Billy called, “Hello!”

  “Hello!” Jane called back. She took out the lettuce and found the bag half-full of damp, brown liquid. The refrigerator was like a marsh, pungent with pockets of moisture and unexpected flora.

  “Hello there,” came a loud familiar voice. “You like cartoons, do you?”

  Billy must have brought Vince Steadman with him. Vince was a friend of a friend of Billy’s. He’d gone to UW law school ten years earlier and now worked for the university, and Jane and Billy had seen him several times since they’d moved to Madison. He was a big man with black curly hair and a black beard. Divorced, no kids. Jane dumped the spaghetti into the pot, set the timer, and went out into the front hall where Maisie, all smiles now, was perched in Vince’s arms.

  “Hello, Jane,” Vince said.

  “Hello, Vince.” Jane turned off the television. She was embarrassed by the dirty, chaotic room, the child parked in front of Arthur. Why hadn’t Billy called to warn her he was bringing someone home? He kissed her and she pecked him back, then, contrite, put her arms around him and gave him a better kiss.

  “I invited Vince for dinner,” Billy said.

  “It’s only pasta,” Jane said.

  Vince bounced Maisie in his arms. “Hey!” He opened his eyes wide. “What’s this?” He pulled a penny out of her ear. “Oh my, my goodness! Did you know this was there?” he asked her, astonished.

  Maisie grinned. “Again,” she said.

  Vince Steadman took a penny out of her other ear. Maisie squealed with delight, her shiny curls bouncing and her wide brown eyes lit up. You would have thought she was the easiest child in the world.

  “Dinner will be ready in a minute,” Jane said, tossing toys into milk crates, turning on lamps.

  “Great,” Vince said. “I’m hungry! Are you hungry, Maisie?”

  “Hungry,” Maisie agreed.

  “You don’t mind my holding on to her, do you?” he asked Jane.

  “Of course not,” Jane said. “Keep her. Take her home with you!”

  “Would you like to come home with me?” he asked Maisie. “See my house? My kitchen? My tropical fish?”

  “One fish, two fish,” Maisie said, knowledgeably.

  The timer rang.

  “That’s the spaghetti,” Jane said.

  “I’ll get it,” Billy said, but Jane was already halfway to the kitchen. She dumped the pot out into the colander and boiling water splashed onto her arm.

  “Fuck,” she said, and thought of Sigelman as she grabbed a piece of ice to hold against the burn.

  Over dinner Billy and Vince exchanged law school gossip. “I’m not ambitious like Billy,” Vince told Jane, refilling his own wineglass. “I’m not out to save the world.”

  Billy smiled. “I don’t want to save the world,” he said. “Just enforce a couple of reasonable regulations.” He planned to be an environmental lawyer, maybe work for a nonprofit.

  “Sue the pants off a big polluter or two,” Vince said.

  “Pants!” Maisie said, banging her spoon on her high-chair tray.

  “She doesn’t miss a trick,” Vince said.

  “We think she’s brilliant, of course,” Billy said half jokingly. “She knows what a burro says and a snow monkey and a giant squid.”

  “What does a giant squid say, Maisie?” Vince asked.

  Maisie wiggled her arms and legs the way Billy had taught her and made choked glugging noises. Vince laughed. Maisie crowed with pride and began going through her repertoire: polar bear, squirrel, hummingbird. It was hard to tell what they were unless you already knew, but Vince applauded each one. Maisie was in heaven. She banged her spoon on the high-chair tray, and it slipped out of her fingers, bouncing away and landing on the floor, bits of gooey starch flying everywhere.

  “Oops!” Vince said. “Very messy!”

  “Oops!” Maisie echoed, delighted, and brushed both arms across her tray, sweeping what was left of her dinner to the ground to please him further.

  She could clean up the mess, Jane thought, or she could ask Billy to do it. Or she could wait and see if he thought of doing it himself. She thought of Masha always entertaining Grigory’s guests: local farmers and travelers; his mother and siblings, of course, who came to stay for months at a time; but also distant cousins; and young acolytes who sought him out in threadbare coats, their apprentice stories clutched under their arms. Karkov didn’t encourage them, but they wouldn’t leave of their own accord, either. Masha had to beg him to send them away.

  “Billy,” Jane said, “your daughter needs a bath!” There was so much to be got through tonight before she could get back to her desk: the dinner dishes, Maisie’s bath, the struggle over the soap. Pajamas, toothbrush, story, night-light, the door open not too much but not too little.

  “Thanks for dinner,” Vince said, appearing to take the hint. But when Jane came out of the kitchen ten minutes later, Vince and Billy were still talking.

  “Billy,” Jane said, “do you want me to give Maisie her bath?”

  “No, no,” Billy said. “I’m happy to do it.”

  Why did he sound like he was doing her a favor?

  Billy took Maisie out of her chair, excused himself, and carried her upstairs, but still Vince Steadman didn’t go.

  “That’s a terrific little girl you’ve got there,” he told Jane. “Bright and b
eautiful. She’s going to be a stunner.”

  “We like her,” Jane said. She was trying to hold on. It would be ridiculous to fall apart now, when he was almost out the door.

  “I mean it. She’s really great. I don’t know how you can bear to leave her and go to work in the mornings.”

  “Yes,” Jane agreed. “Mornings are tough.”

  “No, really,” Vince said seriously. “If I were you, I’d quit my job and stay home with her.”

  Jane kept on smiling. “Somebody has to make a living,” she said.

  He laughed. “Right,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  When he was finally gone, Jane went into the kitchen and tried to do the dishes. Instead she stood before the running water, shaking with rage. She thought about the recent letter from her father, who had lived in Hong Kong since Jane was fifteen and with whom she’d maintained a steady paper-and-pen correspondence. In the letter, inquiring about Jane’s job, he had described his own first semester of teaching, at UC Santa Cruz in 1966 before Jane was born. “On the weekends we, the junior faculty and their wives, had little dinner parties,” he wrote.

  I remember walking home from campus in the evenings, feeling how lucky I was to be embarked on my career. Your mother, I think, was happy, too, having a garden that bloomed year-round and a baby (your brother) on the way. Despite how things turned out for your mother and me, and despite all the hard work, I recall those Santa Cruz years as some of the happiest of my life.

  When Jane climbed into bed, Billy was reading. “Is the child asleep?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I would have put her to bed.”

  “It was my night.” Jane switched off her light.

  Billy put down his book and switched off his light, too.

  “You can keep reading,” Jane said. “It won’t bother me.”

  “That’s okay,” Billy said.

  They lay there, both of them wide awake in the dark. After a while Billy moved closer to Jane and kissed her. Jane knew these kisses: rafts launched across a river. It wasn’t passion that fathered them but a desire to have things be all right between them; but things weren’t all right. She was rigid with anger, and when he touched her his hands registered only dimly, like the glow of lights from a distant neighborhood.

  Sometimes it seemed to Jane that Billy and Maisie were always reaching for her body, as though they thought she was a tree laden with fruit. Didn’t he know how early she had to get up in the morning?

  When had she started counting hours of sleep as more valuable than sex? When she had to talk coherently and engagingly to a room full of bored-looking undergraduates first thing in the morning, that was when. Outlining the lectures was the kind of labor she was used to, but delivering them was something else. It was like swimming: exhilarating, exhausting. It left her breathless, her limbs rubbery, sweat trickling under her clothes. What had the university been thinking of, hiring her to do this? They’d tossed her into the classroom the way children used to be tossed into the pool to teach them to swim. She’d thought her knowledge and her confidence, her passion about the work, would get her through, but it seemed something different was required.

  “Why did you invite Vince for dinner?” she said, trying to speak neutrally but hearing the knife edge under the words.

  Billy sighed. “I don’t know, Jane,” he said. “I like him. I thought you liked him.”

  “I like him fine,” Jane said. “That’s not the point.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Billy said.

  He turned over and lay still, either asleep or pretending to sleep. Jane squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed her hands into fists. How could you fight with someone who wouldn’t fight back? Or who fought back only with apologies and silence. How did people like Billy survive their lives, pressing everything down, holding it in—anger, frustration, irritation, and fear compressed like compacted garbage?

  She got out of the bed.

  It was cold in the house, cold in her study. Boxes were still stacked against the wall under the window. She opened one and took out a pile of books, looking for her English copy of Dmitri Arkadyevich, which she needed to reread for her survey course in nineteenth-century Russian literature. She found it near the top, a tattered paperback poorly repaired with masking tape. The margins were penciled with notes, question marks, and scribbles, many of which she could no longer decipher. Some of the interior pages were coming loose.

  Jane opened it at random.

  Mitya was on the train, on his way home to Moscow after living abroad for years. A group of men was joking with him in the dining car, telling him how he would hardly recognize his country anymore, teasing him for speaking Russian with a French accent: “We may not have the fine wines you have grown used to in foreign lands, or the witty conversation,” one of them said. “But the girls! In Russia, the young girls are still as sweet and innocent as a breeze from the countryside. That’s what a young man needs—a fresh Russian flower to take to his breast.”

  How Mitya had blushed, hearing that. How he had promised himself such a wife to make up for the long, lonely years of exile. Though of course he would find himself, a couple of hundred pages later, with a different kind of wife entirely. Jane thought of her conversation with Sigelman, how she had told him that she believed Karkov had married Masha for her intelligence. Was there a day when the reasons you’d married someone became precisely the things about them you couldn’t stand? She was thinking of Billy’s scrupulousness, his patience, his glacial calm in the face of a flat tire or a screaming child or a geographical upheaval, or even a death.

  She turned some pages.

  But try as he might, Mitya could not get his mind to focus. The more he tried to concentrate, the more his mind seemed to rise up free from his body and roam about the house. Here was his old aunt in her sitting room by the fire with her icons and her broderie anglaise. Here was the cook, half drunk in the kitchen, plucking geese. Here were the sleeping dogs, paws twitching, in their warm kennels. And here at last (although he wished mightily to avoid the sight of her) was his wife, Olga Petrovna, sitting alone in her chilly bedchamber before the mirror, her lovely eyes—brilliant as sapphires—regarding their own reflection in the cold glass. Here she was, the woman to whom he had bound himself for life in the heat of a passion he understood now to have been a kind of conjurer’s trick. What he had taken for love was an illusion, an empty bubble. A deceit foisted on him by the devil, or by the ice-woman herself—it scarcely mattered which. For him, they had long since become interchangeable.

  Jane tucked her freezing feet up under her, her heart aching. She had forgotten this, the stark horror of Mitya’s agony, which grew worse as his lust for his wife ballooned even as he came to despise her. She was stupid and petty, jealous and cold. She took lovers under his own roof; she frittered away his money; she bore him no heirs. And yet Karkov had created Olga Petrovna so that she shared his own wife’s looks, her age and upbringing, even her patronymic. Could Grigory really have seen Masha that way, as a woman of ice?

  She pictured Masha with her lovely oval face and her thick hair, sailing through the big house like a ship, her gold rings glinting. This was the woman she had grown into after the hard early years had toughened her. What was Jane growing into? She didn’t want Masha’s life: deeply domestic, circumscribed by children and meals and sewing and visitors. She refused such a life, she refused to be Masha—but all the same she envied her energy, her good humor, her patience and calm.

  She turned the page. Here was the scene in which Sasha, the young girl Mitya falls in love with late in the story and tries to seduce, is walking out into the meadow on a summer morning. It was a passage Jane knew she must have read before (although it was unmarked by her pencil), but time had wiped it from her memory:

  As Sasha walked through the long grass that by afternoon would have fallen to the peasants’ scythes, she felt a great calmness descend over her. The wind shook the branches of the young a
pple trees, which looked like goat kids shaking the buds of new horns. The brook, swollen with rain, surged over the rocks, and Sasha, with the beginnings of a new life inside her, listened to it, sensing instinctively, in the way of women, her kinship with the world—the brook and the apple trees, the lark in her nest, the flowers in the grass that would soon be gone. She could not have put this feeling into words but sensed it as a rightness. She saw clearly her role in the scheme of life—wife, mother, mistress of the household, child of God—and that deep, unconscious knowledge was like a wellspring, filling her with joy.

  Jane could not believe it. She read the passage over again, and then she read it a third time. Then she got up and rooted through her boxes until she found her copy of Masha’s published diaries. There it was, more or less as she had remembered it, the passage Jane had quoted to Billy that first night in Madison, sitting on the back steps:

  We walked in the meadow through the long grass that would soon fall to the peasants’ scythes, and a great calmness descended over us. The trees shook their leaves like young goats shaking the buds of their new horns—and the river surged over the rocks—and I felt that I myself was a river, with life surging through me. Inside the house the million details—the clothes to be sewn, the meals to be ordered, the accounts to be sorted out, Vera Alexandrovna’s temper to be soothed, and always at the end of a long day Grisha’s scribbles waiting to be deciphered, interpreted, and copied—buzz around me like wasps. But out in the air I am calmer—I am myself. I seem to see clearly my role in the scheme of life—mother to my children, mistress of my household, and, above all, child of God. And I feel able to do what is required of me with joy.