Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  After her bath Maisie fell asleep on the rug in her room. That had never happened before. Jane put her in the bed and pulled the blanket up. Back downstairs Billy was sitting on the couch, studying. Jane sat down beside him and let her head fall back against the cushions. “She fell asleep on the floor,” she said.

  Billy marked his place with his finger and looked up. “Well, it’s tiring,” he said. “Being somewhere new.”

  “How was she when you picked her up?”

  “Fine. They were having snack.”

  “How much TV do you think they watch over there?”

  “We let her watch TV,” Billy said.

  “Not Barney.”

  “What’s wrong with Barney?” Billy said.

  “What do you mean, what’s wrong with it?” Jane said. “It’s aesthetically bankrupt!” She hated Barney with its condescending, saccharine, specious attitude toward learning, as though learning were not something perfect and inherently desirable, like a ripe peach, but a tasteless supermarket fruit that had to be sugared to go down.

  Billy laughed.

  “She gives them frosted flakes for breakfast,” Jane said.

  “And fruit,” Billy replied. “And milk. Anyway, I used to eat frosted flakes.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You. You grew up in Berkeley,” Billy said. He put down his book and put his arms around her.

  Jane leaned against him. “She screamed so much when I left her this morning,” she said. She wished she knew if he really felt all right about Mrs. Vlajic’s, or if he was just putting a good face on it.

  * * *

  In the morning Maisie started screaming as soon as Jane took her out to the car after breakfast. “Where we going?” she cried. “I don’t want to go dere!” She thrashed and wept. Jane felt hopeless and also angry with Maisie for putting her through this. At the sitter’s house, Maisie screamed and held on. Jane wanted to shake her, to throw her down on Mrs. Vlajic’s awful plaid sofa and run. Instead, she spoke calmly.

  “You’ll be fine, sweetheart. Mommy has to go to work. I’ll see you tonight, I promise. Daddy will pick you up.”

  Maisie screamed. The other children watched. Mrs. Vlajic smiled and held out her stubby arms.

  * * *

  Jane checked her mailbox in the department office and found the big, dusty snake encyclopedia filling it up.

  “What’s that?” asked John Lewin, on his way through with a cup of coffee.

  “Felicia Noone is taking a detour into zoology,” Jane said.

  “How’s her dissertation coming?”

  “Not bad. She’s very bright.” Jane flipped through the book. The text was dense, but the photographic plates were clear and startling. There were pictures of snakes with their pink mouths wide open, snakes slithering along beaches and dangling from tree branches, snakes devouring jelly eggs with tadpoles visible inside. Snakes emerging from papery-looking snake eggs. Snakes shedding. Snakes eating other snakes.

  John Lewin peered over her shoulder and grimaced. “Very bright is one thing,” he said. “Good judgment is something else.”

  Did Otto Sigelman have good judgment, Jane wondered, looking at a picture of a snake with a mouse tail drooping from its lips. Was it really a prerequisite for good scholarship, or did Felicia just make Lewin, with his big mustache and his khaki pants and his bow ties, uneasy?

  * * *

  Billy said, “It’s normal for a kid to take a while getting used to a new sitter. What do you expect?”

  He said, “Do you want me to bring her in the mornings?”

  He said, “She probably stops crying the moment you’re out the door. Isn’t that what Mrs. Vlajic says?”

  It was, in fact, what Mrs. Vlajic said. Furthermore, it was what Jane’s own ears told her—Maisie’s screams following her out the door and then ceasing mysteriously when Jane was halfway down the walk. Nevertheless, she was certain Maisie spent all day crying. Not playing, not eating, although every day Mrs. Vlajic returned Maisie’s lunch box empty—yogurt, cut-up apples, chocolate chip cookies, all gone. “All Mrs. Vlajic’s kids are good eaters,” Mrs. Vlajic said. But Jane knew she must throw the food away.

  Still, after a while Jane had to admit that Maisie was settling down. Waking up in the mornings, she still said first thing, “I don’t want go dere today,” and when Jane dropped her off, she still cried, but there was a kind of perfunctoriness about it, as though even she were getting tired of the performance.

  Jane’s hatred of the place, however, continued unabated. It grew, if anything—as if to compensate for Maisie’s increasing acquiescence.

  * * *

  Felicia kept asking Jane if she had looked at the candidate snakes in the snake encyclopedia yet, so Jane lugged the book home. Maisie saw it on the coffee table and looked with awe at the picture on the cover, a long green snake dangling from a tree. Gingerly, she ran her hand across it.

  “Careful,” Jane said. “That’s not our book.”

  “I’m careful,” Maisie said.

  Jane went into the kitchen. When she came back, Maisie was still looking at the snake on the cover.

  “What its name?” she asked.

  Jane opened the book and found the cover photo information. “It’s a parrot snake,” she said.

  “Parrot,” Maisie repeated. “What that one?” She pointed to another picture. “What that one?” Her hands starfished across the pages.

  “Ring-necked snake,” Jane read. “Calico snake. Stiletto snake. Black mamba.”

  “Mamba,” Maisie repeated carefully, looking up at Jane to make sure she got it right.

  Jane sat down on the couch and pulled Maisie onto her lap. “Let’s see what it says about the mamba,” she said. “‘After the king cobra, the black mamba is the largest venomous snake in the world.’ Wow, Maisie, what do you think of that?”

  Maisie leaned back into Jane’s embrace. Her warm, hard little body fit perfectly against Jane’s chest. “The mamba is the queen cobra, then, Mommy,” she said, and Jane laughed.

  * * *

  It seemed to snow every day in February. Snow inched up the trunks of the trees, accumulated on windowsills and telephone wires, piled itself in great drifts against buildings. There was so much snow, there wasn’t anywhere left to put it when Jane shoveled the driveway in the morning.

  Maisie’s hair was getting long and wispy. Jane tried to keep it out of her eyes with barrettes, but the hair was so fine the barrettes slipped out. They were all over the house, yellow and pink and turquoise plastic bows. Maisie’s hair was as soft as silk and curly, the clear, golden brown color of maple syrup. Out the window the snow had begun to fall again in big, soft, clumpy flakes. It was hard to believe it would ever be spring.

  “Sit down,” Jane said. “Let’s get that hair out of your face.”

  Maisie stopped in the middle of the room. She looked at Jane, then pulled her hair down in front of her eyes and nose. “I like it,” she said.

  “Maisie,” Jane said.

  Maisie peered out between the strands and took a step backward. “Come on, silly goose,” Jane said. “We’ll play beauty parlor. It’ll be fun.”

  Maisie looked at her with disdain and took another step back.

  “We’ll play dog groomer,” Jane amended. “You be the puppy.”

  “No,” Maisie said. “I’m not a puppy. I’m a snake! Hissss.” She threw herself down on the floor and slithered.

  “Okay,” Jane said. “I’m the snake groomer. Slither over here and I’ll make you nice and neat.”

  “Snakes don’t got haircuts.”

  “Oh, come on, Maisie,” Jane said. “It’ll take five minutes! Anyway, snakes don’t have hair, do they? If you want to be a snake, yours will have to go.”

  Maisie thought about it. “Yes,” she agreed. “Cut it off!” But she drew the line at sitting on the chair Jane offered her. “Snakes don’t sit.”

  “Fine,” Jane said.

  She got a sheet from the cl
oset and spread it on the floor. Maisie wriggled over on her stomach. Jane sat beside her and carefully snipped the soft curls until the hair was a little less than shoulder length. It was hard to tell if the sides were even, but she did the best she could. “Okay!” she said. “We’re done, snaky.”

  Maisie reached up and tugged on her hair. “It not all gone,” she said.

  “It’s much, much shorter,” Jane said.

  “No!” Maisie said. “Too long! Too long!”

  Jane cut some more, feeling doubtful. She intended to cut a kind of pageboy, but she made it too short on one side and then on the other, and by the time she got the sides reasonably even, it would have been nearly impossible to cut the hair any shorter even if Jane had wanted to.

  Maisie, putting her hands to her head, was pleased. “I’m a queen cobra,” she said, and slithered across the room, bits of hair scattering. “I’m a ma-ma-mamba!”

  Jane fetched the broom. It will grow hack, she told herself, sweeping up the brown wisps, seeing how dead they looked, lying in the dustpan.

  “It’ll grow back,” she told Billy when he got home, even before he had a chance to say anything.

  Maisie, still on her stomach, wriggled over to his feet and hissed fiercely. Melting snow and grit from his boots soaked into her clothes.

  “My god! What happened?” Billy said.

  “She wanted it short,” Jane said.

  “Well, she got her wish,” Billy said. “When’s dinner? I’m starving.”

  Jane went into the kitchen to get a pot for pasta. In the other room, she could hear Maisie hissing excitedly.

  “Guess what I am!” she said.

  “I have no idea,” Billy said. “A naked mole rat?”

  “A mamba! A mamba!”

  “Oh, good. I’ve always wanted my own mamba.”

  Jane found the damp half of an onion in the fridge and chopped it. Billy’s voice, though tired, had an affection she seldom heard in it anymore when he talked to her. These days when they smiled at each other, Jane felt the strain in her face. She was aware of a distance between them even during sex, which they had rather perfunctorily every week or two, as though not to make love would be to admit something about the state of their marriage that they weren’t ready to admit. Even so, when their eyes caught in the dark while their bodies heaved and groped and thrust, they would look quickly away from each other, like strangers whose eyes meet accidentally on a train.

  …

  A couple of days later at pickup time, Mrs. Vlajic met Jane by the door and put a hand on her arm to stop her from going into the living room, where the kids were watching cartoons. “There is a problem with the girl,” Mrs. Vlajic said. She had stopped calling Maisie “baby” lately and begun to refer to her as “the girl.” Jane didn’t know what it meant, but she didn’t like the way it sounded. It was the term her grandmother had used for the woman who came to clean.

  “What problem?” she asked warily.

  Mrs. Vlajic glanced through the doorway at Maisie, who was sitting on the floor next to Laurie, the blond preschooler, who never went anywhere without a Barbie doll. She lowered her voice. “She pretending to be a snake.” She drew out the last word with a kind of appalled wonder. “All the time! She doesn’t want to play anything else. I say, You want to play with dolls? You want to watch a video? She says no, she only wants to play snake! She lies on her belly and crawls around.”

  Jane breathed again. “She’s just playing,” she told Mrs. Vlajic, whose brow was furrowed with worry or disapproval. “She’s interested in snakes. It’s just pretend.”

  “Pretend,” Mrs. Vlajic agreed. “But I never saw a girl pretend like this! Every day same thing. Snake! It’s very—” She broke off, apparently unable to find the word she wanted in English.

  “All children go through stages,” Jane said. “This is just a stage.”

  “It’s not right,” Mrs. Vlajic said. “For a little boy, okay, I can understand it. But not a little girl. Little girls pretend to be mommies, they play house. They play sisters, kitties, babies. They aren’t snakes.”

  Jane stared at her. I knew! she thought. I knew! “Little girls can play anything little boys play,” she said.

  Mrs. Vlajic shook her head. “It’s not right,” she repeated. “Girls who want to be boys grow up and get into trouble.” She stared at Jane, a long, hostile, unblinking stare.

  “You don’t tell children what to play,” Jane said. “If Maisie wants to pretend to be a snake, that’s okay with her father and me!”

  The children had noticed something was going on. Laurie put down her doll and stared with naked interest. Thomas, the skinny boy, watched more covertly, his eyes just clearing the back of the couch. Maisie ran over to Jane and clutched at her knees.

  “Why you cut her hair?” Mrs. Vlajic said, touching Maisie’s head. “Such beautiful hair, like a princess.”

  “It got tangled,” Jane said.

  “So—you brush it,” Mrs. Vlajic said sharply. “Now she looks like a boy.”

  “She looks fine!” Jane said. “Lots of girls have short hair!”

  “Maybe you wish you had a boy,” Mrs. Vlajic suggested. “Maybe you try to turn her into one.”

  Jane stared at the babysitter, at her shrewd frown and her wrinkled apple face, her thick, clean beige apron, and her old blue Keds. She reached down and took Maisie’s hand. “We’re going,” she said. “We won’t be back.”

  “What?” Mrs. Vlajic said, suddenly angry. “You take her? You don’t like what I say, you quit?”

  “That’s right!” Jane said. “We quit.”

  “You own me two weeks’ payment!” Mrs. Vlajic shook her finger like a storybook stepmother. “It’s in the contract!”

  Jane picked Maisie up and held her tight.

  “I’ll send you a check,” she called over her shoulder, hurrying down the plowed walk.

  Jane thought Billy would hit the ceiling when she told him, but he only grew more still. He was often still, lately, as though he were consciously setting himself apart from the turmoil of the house, the flurry of cooking and bathing and laundry, Jane’s quick footsteps ringing out, and Maisie trotting or slithering around the rooms scattering toys behind her—even the windows rattling in the brisk February wind.

  “Anyhow,” she said. “I know we’re stuck now. I can get home by noon tomorrow if you can stay home in the morning. And then at least we have the weekend to deal with it. I’m sorry if you think I acted hastily.”

  Billy picked up his glass of water. He used to drink iced tea, grapefruit juice, coffee, beer, but lately (except at breakfast) he only drank water. What was that about? Purity? Was he watching his weight? “It’s done,” he said. His voice was calm, cold. It was like a stream icing over.

  “If you had been there,” Jane said, “you would have seen why I had to do it. I knew she was like that, underneath! I knew it.”

  “Jane,” Billy said, warningly. “You told me to take care of it, so I wish you wouldn’t start blaming me now.”

  “I’m not blaming you,” Jane said.

  “After all, I didn’t blame you for Elise.”

  “Elise!” Jane cried. “What was wrong with Elise?”

  “She never cleaned up!” Billy said. “She was hugely spacey! She quit with no notice!”

  “Maisie loved Elise!” Jane said.

  Jane had loved Elise. Right this moment she felt she had loved Elise more than she had ever loved Billy.

  * * *

  In the morning Billy stayed home so Jane could teach her class. Because she didn’t have to drop Maisie off first, she actually got to school early for a change. The halls were quiet, office doors shut, the only sound the hum of the fluorescent lights. She stopped outside the graduate student office to leave a note for Felicia canceling their afternoon meeting. She dug in her satchel for a pen but found instead, among the books and papers, a wooden doll, a Matchbox car, a plastic container of cereal, a mauve crayon, and a bottle of Tyleno
l. As she crouched down in the hallway to empty the satchel on the floor, a soft noise came from behind the cartoon-plastered door. Jane looked up. Something seemed to shift inside the office. There was a thump and a scuffling.

  Jane knocked softly. “Hello?” she called. “Is anyone there?”

  “What?” a voice said from the other side. A hoarse, tentative voice, but Jane recognized it.

  “Felicia?”

  “Hold on.” More scuffling, and then the sound of something heavy bumping into something else. There was a rustling, and Jane thought she heard a zipper being zipped.

  “Felicia?” she repeated. “Is that you?”

  “Hold on. I’ll just be . . .”

  Finally the door opened. Felicia stood in the doorway, pale and rumpled in ripped jeans and a heavy sweatshirt, her hair everywhere.

  “I was just going to leave you a note,” Jane said. She thought she had never seen Felicia looking so tentative and flustered, so equivocal. So almost ordinary.

  “Oh, okay. I just—got in early.”

  Jane looked past her into the crowded, windowless office that four students shared. It was close and stuffy in there, barely enough floor space for all the desks. Posters sagged from the yellow cinder-block walls: forest glades, famous writers, an artistic rendering of the Cyrillic alphabet. The desks were ugly, metal, scarred, and unmatching, covered with books, folders, Xeroxes, dried flowers, clocks, computers, photographs. A large, dusty plastic plant sat in one corner, hung with red and silver Christmas tree balls. In another corner a large backpack and a duffel bag leaned against a filing cabinet.

  “Did you sleep here?” Jane asked, aghast.

  Felicia sat down in a scuffed wooden chair. “The snake escaped,” she said. “Karin flipped. She kicked me out. So.” She pulled her hair back and knotted it behind her neck. “The snake was stronger than I thought,” she admitted. “She pushed her way out of that cage. Even with the latches on!”