Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  “It’s so hard to choose,” Felicia complained loudly, meaning among Karkov’s heroines. “I always want all the ice-cream flavors. All the lipstick colors.” She wore a black leather miniskirt over gold lamé leggings, a tight black sweater without a bra, combat boots. Her lipstick was a dark bluish purple, the color of a bruise.

  Jane laughed. “That’s why I don’t wear lipstick. It saves energy choosing.”

  “Yes.” Felicia smiled slyly. “But I can see you want everything, too. Kids, husband, career. The whole superwoman thing.”

  Jane took a bite of her sandwich. “Think about Maria Karkova,” she said. “She did twice as much as I do, and she was pregnant the whole time she was doing it. Pregnancy,” she went on, “is like spending nine months with a chloroform handkerchief in front of your face.”

  Felicia laughed.

  “Six children,” Jane said. “Just think about it!” She wondered what Masha would make of contemporary women with their skimpy clothes and their extraordinary freedoms. Who would she be more like if she lived today and had today’s choices—Jane, with her tailored slacks and her tight schedules and her fidelity, or Felicia?

  Felicia shrugged. “Everyone did it in those days. Even the Snake Woman had five.”

  “The Snake Woman is a character in a book,” Jane said.

  “So’s Karkova,” Felicia replied.

  “She was a real person.”

  “Sure. But we only know about her through books. Her diaries aren’t objective.”

  Jane knew this, of course. Furthermore, because Karkov showed his characters from the outside and the inside, coherently, with an awareness of audience, there was a sense in which his fictional women would always seem more real than Masha. Masha’s diaries were rich, tangled, private, sometimes cryptic. They were a jumble of fragments, like a box full of shards of colored glass that were supposed to make up a mosaic. How much of a sense of a person could you get from that?

  And yet Jane felt she had a strong picture. There were early photographs of Masha looking solemn, her hair pinned up and her oval face dusky, eyes looking directly into the camera: curious, lively. Jane could picture her striding through the meadow along the river, her hair coming loose from the tight bun, a child holding each hand and more children trailing behind. “Look,” she’d say, pointing out a moorhen’s nest she’d spotted, eight perfect eggs nestled inside, pale buff with darker brown speckles. She’d tell the children about the habits of the moorhen, what it made its nest out of and how it found its food.

  Jane could picture Grigory almost as clearly, tall and thin as a knife, black hair gleaming, white, strong teeth gleaming, too, when he spoke. “I’m going out,” he’d say, or: “Keep the children quiet—I’m working.”

  Felicia finished her extra-tall chai and stood up. She seemed to take up a lot of room in the narrow coffee shop, and Jane was aware of eyes turning toward her. “I have to go by my place and feed the snake,” she said. “Want to come? My car’s just around the corner.”

  “You have a snake?”

  Felicia smiled. Her strong white teeth gleamed like the snow that was just beginning to fall in fat wet flakes outside the window, leaving dark splotches on the frozen streets. “I was in the pet store, and they had this python. I was thinking about the Snake Woman. I thought maybe, if I had my own snake, I could understand her better. Get inside her head.”

  “Karkov didn’t have a snake,” Jane said. “He just made it up.”

  Felicia hiked her big red leather purse higher onto her shoulder. “I know,” she said.

  Jane pulled her coat on and followed Felicia out onto the sidewalk.

  Felicia’s car was actually parked about eight blocks away. Jane wrapped her scarf around her head and leaned into the wind all the way up Gorham Street while dead leaves and bits of litter skittered down the pavement. Snow whipped around them as they walked, settled in their hair and on their sleeves, insinuated itself damply under their collars. The sky lowered, yellowish gray, and the air smelled of car exhaust and lake ice. Jane had never seen a big snake close-up. When she had first read Lady of the Snakes, she had been appalled and fascinated by the descriptions of the serpents wrapping themselves around the heroine, coiling around her arms and through her hair. Why had Karkov chosen snakes? What had drawn him to their ominous, unblinking malevolence, their creeping silence, their quick black forked tongues? With what misogynistic malice did he imagine them into being, slithering across a woman’s throat and breasts and bare belly?

  Felicia stopped in front of a new bright red Celica convertible and unlocked the doors with the remote.

  “This is your car?” Jane said in surprise. She put her gloved hands to her face and breathed into them, trying to thaw her cheeks. She was going to have to get a warmer coat.

  “Boyfriend’s. He’s out of town this week.” They got in and Felicia blasted the heat.

  “So,” Jane said. “Who is he? The boyfriend.”

  Felicia pulled out of the parking space and switched lanes without signaling. “His name is Douglas,” she said. “He’s a sound engineer. A nice-enough guy, but a little young for me.”

  “How young?”

  “Twenty-six. I know I’m only twenty-five, but I think I need to be dating older men. Guys in their twenties don’t know who they are yet. They don’t know what they want.”

  Jane thought this was funny. But then she thought of Billy, who was only now settling into his life.

  Felicia turned the wipers to high, peered through the snow. The car sped on through the slick, unfamiliar streets.

  She parked in front of an old frame house on the east side. The rusting fire escapes were white where the snow had begun to stick. Jane followed her up the stairs and through a battered door into a living room furnished in familiar graduate-student style: ripped armchair, lumpy futon couch, orange crates overflowing with CDs, books everywhere. And on the floor, clothes and empty yogurt containers and diet soda cans. Chipped and mismatched dishes filled the sink beyond the breakfast bar.

  “My roommate is a slob,” Felicia commented, disowning responsibility. She dropped her red purse by the door and pulled a small box out of it. Something was scuffling around inside the box. Jane followed Felicia behind the couch where a long aquarium lay against the wall, hidden from view. “It’s warmer back here,” Felicia explained. “Snakes need to stay warm. And besides, this way Karin doesn’t have to look at it.”

  “Karin is your roommate?”

  Felicia nodded. “She had kind of a fit when I brought the snake home.”

  The tank, which was about four feet long and lined with newspaper, was illuminated by a large heat lamp that cast an eerie orange glow. The snake lay along one edge, doubled back on itself like a bobby pin. It was black with white blotches, as long as a person was tall and as thick around as Jane’s arm. Its eyes were two eclipsed moons.

  “Isn’t she gorgeous?” Felicia said. “You know I have something for you, don’t you, baby?” she crooned. “A nice fat rat.” She laid her hand on the screen that served as the snake’s roof, and the snake raised its head a fraction of an inch, its tongue flicking.

  “How do you know it’s a female?” Jane asked. She started to take a step forward, then changed her mind. The truth was the sight of the snake made her skin crawl. It was alive, and yet it was so dead looking, so still and cold. Its scales were rough like bark, though even a tree looked more alive, she thought, than this creature that seemed to have crawled out of the forgotten swamp of a different age. What was it doing in this shabby apartment on a freezing afternoon in Wisconsin? What would it do when it found out it didn’t belong here?

  “I don’t, really. But I don’t know that it’s a male, either.”

  “What’s its name?”

  “She doesn’t have one.”

  Like Karkov’s Snake Woman.

  Jane stared at the python. She thought of the Snake Woman with her basket of serpents, walking barefoot along the dirt roads from villag
e to village, curing the sick. Sleeping in ditches. “It’s not quite like having a dog, is it?” she said.

  Felicia tossed her hair back over her shoulders. “Lots of people have strong reactions to her. But she’s just an animal,” she said.

  An animal, perhaps, but an animal with a voluminous résumé. Medusa and Satan, the cobras of the Egyptian pharaohs. Cleopatra’s asp. Ravenous sea serpents. The winged serpentine dragons of the Chinese dynasties.

  In Russia there was a folk tradition identifying the serpent with the stovepipe of a peasant’s house, connecting the inner world of the hut with the outer world of the field and forest. The snake was a guardian. It was an umbilical cord. Jane watched Felicia’s python move inside its cage. The front end moved forward and the tail went back, so that it slid itself apart from two directions. “Are you going to take it out?” she asked.

  “No, no,” Felicia said. “Don’t worry. She gets room service.” She unhooked the screen. “Come here, sweetheart.” She took the terrified rat out of the box and dangled it by its tail, lowering it into the tank.

  The snake struck. One moment she was sliding slowly across the newspaper and the next she was in the air, the head of the rat in her jaws and three or four coils around the body, squeezing it dead.

  “My god!” Jane said. “Aren’t you afraid it’s going to miss and get you?”

  Felicia smiled.

  Chapter Five

  AT LAST December arrived. Christmas, with the monthlong semester break, glittered on the horizon like a mirage. Amid the blizzard of exam sessions and papers and final conferences, Jane made reservations for the three of them to go to California, where the temperature, according to the computer, was fifty-eight degrees.

  Jane’s mother lived in a cramped two-bedroom condo in the Berkeley Flats. The big house on Euclid Avenue with its Mission oak cabinets and Mexican tile floors had been sold long ago. Jane and Billy, Jane’s mother, and Jane’s brother, Davis, had their Jew’s guilty Christmas dinner jammed around the kitchen table, while Maisie moved Cheerios in careful arcs around the tray of her borrowed high chair.

  Two years older than his sister, Davis—now a soft-money physicist at Stanford—had always been a loner and a science geek, devoted to his chemistry set and his robots, his comic book collection. He and Jane had never been particularly close. He’d never been particularly close to anybody, as far as Jane could tell. She’d met a number of physicists over the years, and mostly they were ordinary-enough people who had girlfriends or husbands and remembered to get their hair cut. It was only her brother, it seemed, who conformed to the stereotype (though he didn’t wear glasses). He lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment and he worked late a lot, but he seemed happy enough in a nerdy, low-expectations way.

  “I keep thinking I should apply for a job like yours,” he told Jane, mixing a thick pat of butter into his boiled potatoes. “There’s zero security with soft money.”

  “You should,” Jane said. “Absolutely.”

  “Only I can’t see myself standing up in front of all those people and talking every day. It’s kind of a drawback.” He smiled the thin, dry, self-deprecating smile that always made Jane feel a pang of helpless, protective love.

  “I think you’d be a good teacher, Davis,” their mother said. “You’re so patient.”

  Was she implying that Jane wasn’t? Or that patience was Davis’s only strength? The moment lengthened awkwardly while Davis’s fork scraped across his plate and Jane wondered if everything she ever said to Maisie would, eventually, be taken as a criticism. Now, though, Maisie sat cheerfully oblivious in the high chair. She looked up from her Cheerio art and drummed her bare heels against the rungs. “Bread?” she asked, reaching out toward her grandmother and opening and shutting her dimpled hand. “Ga-ma, bread?”

  Jane’s mother’s face lit up, and she handed Maisie a piece of bread. Davis looked at his niece as though he’d just noticed she was there, and Billy helped himself to more chicken, and Jane felt her breath move just a little more easily through her body. Maisie smiled her radiant smile and bestowed airy kisses all over the room.

  The best part about the trip was the easy way things were with Billy, who joked with her mother and tickled Maisie and asked Davis surprisingly knowledgeable questions about string theory. He was good at making people comfortable. He was a good father. It was easy to forget in the roar of daily life, but out here on the edge of the continent, Jane remembered again how lucky she was to be married to him.

  Christmas night, after the dishes were washed and her brother had gone home and Maisie was asleep in the port-a-crib jammed between the two twin beds, Jane said, “Next year let’s just stay home for Christmas.” Billy had stripped down to his boxers, and she could see the cycling muscles in his legs, the fading tan line at his bicep left over from the summer.

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s a good idea.”

  “And let’s get a big tree of our own. Wisconsin seems like the place to have a big Christmas tree. Maybe we could put candles on it, like they do in Scandinavia.”

  “Too dangerous,” Billy said.

  “Okay. But lights. Tinsel.”

  “Fine with me.” He reached out and stroked her hip.

  “I think we should celebrate all the holidays,” Jane went on. She touched his chest, took her hand away. Put it back. “I don’t think we’ve been doing enough celebrating.”

  “Not nearly enough,” Billy agreed. He slid his hand around to the small of her back, pulled her toward him.

  “Groundhog’s Day, even,” Jane said.

  Billy stroked her hair, the hair she had never learned to brush regularly and so had cut short at nineteen and worn that way ever since—the same way her mother wore hers.

  “Did you know that Groundhog’s Day used to be Candlemas?” he said. “February second. The day John baptized Jesus.”

  Jane pulled away just enough to stare at him. “How do you know that?” she said.

  Billy smiled. “I know all kinds of things,” he said. “You shouldn’t underestimate me.”

  There was a pause while they both considered whether that was what Jane had been doing or not.

  * * *

  New Year’s Eve, Jane and Billy had been invited to a party by Jane’s chair, John Lewin, but they couldn’t get a babysitter. Instead they organized a last-minute gathering of their own. They vacuumed the rug and put the piles of newspapers on the back porch and swatted the cobwebs out of the corners. They hung chili pepper lights along the archway between the living room and the dining room. Jane wasn’t comfortable inviting any of the Slavics faculty, who were presumably going to the Lewins’, but Billy called up some law school students and their next-door neighbors, Kurt and Melinda, and Jane sent an e-mail to the members of SLAV. Katie Axelrod showed up with her medical school boyfriend, and Felicia came as well, somewhat late, wearing a sleeveless, sparkly gold polyester dress and matching shoes. Wrapped around her neck like a stole, she wore the python.

  “You said to bring a date,” she said, smiling slyly as she watched Jane eyeing the snake. “You didn’t specify gender, or species.”

  Jane smiled back. She couldn’t see the point of making a fuss. Besides, conversation (except for a knot of law students arguing about politics) had largely subsided. Kurt, who was in computer programming, and Melinda, who was a fourth-grade teacher, had been cornered near the narrow stairs by Vince Steadman, who was telling them about the time he got arrested for trespassing at the ELF facility; Katie Axelrod and her boyfriend were sitting on the sagging brown couch by themselves; and one of the young law students was in the toy corner by the windows trying to distract Maisie, who was upset because Kurt and Melinda’s kids were playing with her plastic pizza and trying on her hat collection. Maybe the appearance of the snake would catalyze things, bring the disparate groups together.

  “I’ll introduce you,” she said. “Though I can’t introduce the snake, I guess, since it doesn’t have a name!” Jane was feeling gid
dy from two glasses of champagne. She was ready to be amusing, amused—brought out of herself. The reptile lay heavily across Felicia’s shoulders, thick as an arm. It was black and white as though camouflaged for the shadows of a snowy forest (though certainly it wasn’t made for snow). When you looked more closely, you could see that the white was slightly yellowed, like teeth. The muscles bulged under the rough skin, the scales looking less like armor than like stitches of an old, loosely crocheted afghan. It exuded a compelling mixture of power and decay.

  “Of course, every other python in Madison is named Monty,” Felicia said.

  “Are there many other pythons in Madison?” Jane asked. “Maisie, sweetie, come over and look at this.”

  “Dozens,” Felicia said. “Especially in frat houses.”

  Maisie, who had retrieved her plastic fire helmet from the head of one of the neighbor boys, padded over.

  “Look at the snake,” Jane said, holding Maisie by the shoulders at what seemed like a safe distance. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Though beautiful wasn’t exactly the word. Impressive, certainly. Startling. Even disturbing, the way it emerged from under Felicia’s hair and lay across her pale, freckled shoulders.

  Maisie was entranced. “Snake!” she said, and bounced up and down in her red pajamas, her face alight.

  The neighbor children, Josh and Adam, ran over, almost knocking down the coat rack.

  “Wow!” Adam said. “That’s so cool!” He was ten.

  Felicia smiled down at him tolerantly. “I’m glad you like her,” she said.

  “Don’t touch,” Jane warned the boys, who were crowding close to Felicia.