Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  What would it have been like to have a sister? Jane had often wished she’d had one, someone to talk things through with; to confide in about motherhood and work and even, perhaps, about her marriage. But Masha didn’t seem to have confided in Varya. She had had a closer relationship with her younger sister, Sofya, but by 1878 Sofya was dead.

  * * *

  After a satisfying if not earth-shaking afternoon, Jane took the El and then the bus to Helen’s house, a large brick colonial on a pretty, quiet street in Evanston. The sycamores and oaks were bare now, and the sidewalks glittered with cold. Snow shovels stood at the ready on the porches or by the front steps. The snow itself was dingy and pocked, packed down by dogs and children’s boots. Partly melted and then frozen over again and again, it had the worn-out, exhausted look of a young mother who’s been awakened too many times in the night.

  Jane rang the bell. Footsteps pattered on the other side of the door which was thrown open by a small boy.

  “Hi,” Jane said. “I’m Jane.”

  “Jane who?” the boy asked. He had shaggy brown hair, pale skin scattered with brown freckles, and a serious blue-gray stare.

  “Jane Levitsky. I’m a friend of your mom’s.”

  “You can come in,” the boy said. “My mother is busy at the stove right this minute, so she couldn’t come to the door.”

  Jane stepped into the house. “Thanks,” she said, putting her bag down. The pale green carpet in the entryway spread off to the left into a spacious living room furnished with yellow couches and round scallop-edged occasional tables. The floor was scattered with toys and books, videocassette cases, a violin, balled-up socks, several pillows, and a red plaid sleeping bag.

  “Jane—is that you?” Helen called. “I’m back here!” Her voice sounded the same as Jane remembered it, clear, loud, enthusiastic. She might have been projecting to the back of a lecture hall rather than calling from the kitchen through the intervening rooms. Behind the living room there was a linoleum-floored playroom with a large TV and shelves full of games and art supplies and all kinds of toys. There was a big cage with two parakeets in it and another with a brown lop-eared rabbit, half blocking the pass-through to the kitchen.

  “There you are,” Helen said as Jane skirted the rabbit cage. “Of course I was right in the middle of browning the chicken the moment the bell rang! But Michael is very good about the door. Thank you, Michael. Sorry about the mess. I never notice it until someone comes in, and then I remember how awful it is.” She smiled warmly and hugged Jane hard with her soft arms.

  “What a lovely house!” Jane said. “So roomy. How long have you lived here? What smells so incredible?” She was starving, she realized. She looked at Helen. Her smile was the same, as were her sharp gray eyes, but her body had gone from rangy to thick, and her pale hair, once cut as short as a boy’s, was now long and streaked with gray, tied back with a pink scrunchie. The black jeans and faded T-shirts had been exchanged for drawstring cotton pants and a loose print blouse.

  And how about me? Jane wondered. How have I changed?

  Helen laughed. “It’s just chicken,” she said. “Come in, sit down! I’ll be done in a minute. Do you want a drink? A glass of wine? Iced tea? Michael, go find your sister and both of you please set the table.”

  “I can’t,” Michael said. “I haven’t practiced yet.”

  “You can practice later. Go.”

  “But I didn’t practice yesterday,” Michael said. “You didn’t remind me.”

  “Later!” Helen said, not angrily but impatiently, waving him away as though he were a pesky insect. And then to Jane, “You found us okay?”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “Only I forgot how big Chicago is. So huge and freezing! I feel like I’ve trekked across Antarctica to get to your neighborhood. I hope it’s okay I left my sled dogs tied up outside.”

  “Of course!”

  A pot on the stove began to boil over, and then the baby started to cry and had to be fetched, and the smoke alarm went off when Helen opened the oven door, so there wasn’t much of a chance to talk before dinner.

  At last the table was set and the food laid out, and the family assembled around it. Helen’s husband, Paul, whose entrance Jane had missed in the confusion, was a man of medium height—perhaps a shade shorter than Helen—with curly black hair growing thickly around a bald spot, and a ruddy, scrubbed-looking face above a neat beard. Jane remembered vaguely that he was some kind of doctor.

  “Nice to meet you, Jane,” he said, shaking her hand over the oval table set with laminated place mats showing views of Mount Fuji and cherry trees in bloom. “Levitsky, eh? Descended from the tribe of Levi! My cousin married a Levitsky. Nice guy, an engineer. Carl, from Boston. He wouldn’t be your husband’s—I don’t know—second cousin or something, would he?”

  “No,” Jane said, digging hungrily into the chicken with olives, the salad, the fragrant rice pilaf. The food was delicious. She wondered if they could possibly eat this well every night. “My husband’s last name is Shaw. I’m the Levitsky, and I don’t have any relatives named Carl that I know of.”

  “Abby, please stop kicking the table,” Paul said, and then to Jane, “I just assumed it was your married name.”

  “I have noticed that more women are going back to changing their names, even in academia,” Jane said.

  “Like me,” Helen said, cutting up bits of chicken for the baby.

  Jane looked at her in surprise. “I thought you kept yours.”

  “I did for a while, until Abby was born. But I got tired of having to explain who I was all the time, to doctors and teachers and people.”

  “No wonder I couldn’t find you under ‘Landis,’” Jane said, spreading butter on a piece of warm bread. (Helen couldn’t have baked the bread, could she?)

  “She’s Helen Williams now,” Paul said, smiling at his wife. “A whole different person.”

  “Better or worse?” Jane asked meaninglessly.

  “Oh, better, I hope!” Helen said. “Better all the time.”

  “I guess I might have thought about changing my name if Billy had had a more interesting one,” Jane said, which wasn’t true. “But not for Shaw.”

  “And yet it’s amazing how many things you end up doing that you never imagined considering,” Helen said, almost dreamily. “Me, quitting my job, for example! Who would have ever guessed I’d do that?”

  “You quit your job?” Jane said. She was stunned. “You’re not working anymore?”

  “I told you a lot of things had changed.” Helen looked in Jane’s direction without quite catching her eye, her expression bright, misty, faintly nostalgic. “I quit after Abby was born. I just decided I’d had enough of it. Not the work, but the politics and all of that. And as I got older, of course, I had less energy. It got to the point where I couldn’t be up all night with a baby and still do a decent job teaching in the morning.”

  “You gave up tenure?” Jane was aghast.

  “Well, the fact that I had tenure made it easier! No one could say I quit because I wasn’t good enough.” Helen’s expression hardened slightly, as though a soft filter had been pulled away from a camera lens. There were lines in the corners of her eyes and pouches around her mouth.

  Jane couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Helen put some rice on the baby’s high-chair tray and cut a piece of chicken to slivers. Her own food, neglected, cooled on her plate. “I tried working part-time after Michael,” she went on. “The department didn’t like it, but they said okay, one year, part-time. But I just couldn’t manage it! Even teaching only one class, I couldn’t get any research done. Well, I didn’t want to. Michael was so amazing, hours would just pass—days would pass. Where did the time go? And then I got pregnant with Abby, and after she was born things were just impossible!”

  “Abby was an impossible baby,” Paul said, smiling at his daughter behind his beard. He had finished his chicken leg and helped himself to another.

  The littl
e girl scowled.

  “She cried all the time,” her father teased.

  “Did not!” Abby said.

  “Yes, you did,” her brother said. “You just don’t remember.”

  “No I didn’t!”

  The baby began to fuss. She thrust her head back against the padding of the high chair and flung her spoon to the floor. Helen got up and lifted her out of her seat and bounced her.

  “Don’t you miss it?” Jane asked, her voice barely audible over the baby’s clamoring and Abby’s angry protesting and the racket of the birds, which had started squawking in the next room. “Don’t you miss having a career? An intellectual life?” She had been going to say “your own life,” but she managed to stop herself.

  “Not much. I think of this as a stage. My housewife stage. I had my intellectual stage; who knows what will come next? The kids will grow up eventually. Leonora will be in kindergarten in four years!” Oblivious to the commotion all around her, she ran a hand through her hair, which in this light looked as purely blond as when she had been a graduate student, living in a bare room without a rug or a comfortable chair, existing on cheese sandwiches and oranges. When Jane had wanted to be exactly like her.

  Chapter Eight

  AFTER DINNER Jane helped Helen clean up and get the children ready for bed. Paul was in and out of the kitchen making coffee, helping Michael find his violin music, making Abby wash her face again after she’d already washed it once. He got down on the floor and chased the baby, who, although she had been yawning, was wide awake and giggling by the time Helen came to put her to bed.

  Helen didn’t seem to mind. She seemed to like the chaos. Part of Paul’s role in the family seemed to be to create it—riling up the children, leaving coffee cups everywhere, putting on CDs and turning them up loud so he could hear them all over the house. Another part seemed to be criticizing the chaos created by others. He yelled at Michael and Abby for leaving their shoes in the middle of the floor and for not brushing their teeth right away when he told them to. He told Helen the dishes weren’t clean enough and that she should call the dishwasher repairman, and that the book he was reading had disappeared, and that something had to be done about the state of the garage.

  “Don’t talk to me about the garage!” Helen said good-naturedly. “I always park in the driveway. I never even go in there.”

  “Well, you’ll be shocked when you do, Helen. It looks like a tribe of pygmies has moved in.”

  Listening to his loud, complaining, complacent voice, Jane felt a great tenderness for Billy, trekking with her across the vast, unknown, often treacherous territory of a marriage of equals, braving its geography of unwashed laundry and refrigerator shelves crusted with flecks of dried milk. Paul seemed like a nice man and a good father, and Helen seemed happy with him, but Jane was glad to have a different kind of husband. Once again she resolved to remember to appreciate Billy, and to be more patient, and to be nicer to him. It had been a tough year for both of them; it was time to make things better. She excused herself to call him, to say hello and to see how Maisie was, but the line was busy.

  Helen asked Paul to put the children to bed. “Jane and I need some time to talk,” she told him. “But don’t keep Michael up all night reading to him. He has school in the morning.”

  “But we’re at such a good part in the book,” Paul said.

  “And don’t forget to set his alarm clock,” Helen said. “We’ll be in the sewing room.”

  Sewing room? Jane followed Helen up the plushly carpeted stairs and down the hall to a small room furnished with a shabby wicker love seat, an old-fashioned writing table, a sewing machine, and a bookshelf packed tightly with pattern books and Russian novels. Helen sat down on the love seat and slipped off her shoes.

  “I’ve taken up sewing, as you see,” she said. “I like it. My grandmother taught me when I was eight, and I made a little checked skirt that I wore everywhere. I was so proud of myself.”

  “My mother sewed a little, but she never taught me,” Jane said. “Or I never wanted to learn, maybe.” She was uncertain how to talk to Helen now that she saw how different their lives were, really: what different choices they had made. Was Helen a different kind of person than Jane was, or than she had been when Jane first knew her? And if she was, did it matter? Jane wasn’t sure.

  “I’m teaching Michael,” Helen said. “He made a little drawstring bag to keep his Yu-Gi-Oh cards in.”

  “I still can’t get over the fact that you quit your job,” Jane said. She hadn’t meant to say it, but there the words were, bursting out of her mouth. She took a sip of her coffee and looked at Helen, then down at the polished yellow floor, the faded kilim rug, the dust along the baseboards.

  “Well, it was a big decision,” Helen said.

  “Huge,” Jane said.

  Helen pulled her knees up under her on the love seat and frowned thoughtfully at the gingham curtains. “I’m glad I did it, though,” she said. “I’m not saying it would be right for everyone. But I kept running up against those things you mentioned in your e-mail. Too many balls to juggle! Too many things that were supposed to be indications of success feeling like burdens. I felt like I was walking around with all these weights strapped to me. Pulled down all the time.”

  Jane didn’t say anything. She could see that Helen was only telling her own story the way she saw it.

  “I might go back and do some teaching someday,” Helen said. “You never know.” Her gray eyes grew misty as though she still thought that all the possibilities of life were open to her.

  “Sure,” Jane said. “Why not?” But she knew, as Helen must, too, that “doing some teaching” was not the same thing as having a career.

  “I just thought you should know that it’s an option,” Helen said. Her gaze was suddenly sharp again. “That’s all. That you don’t have to continue doing something, just because you started out doing it.”

  There it was, Jane thought. She smiled and shook her head. “It’s not an option for me,” she said.

  “It took me a lot of years before I let myself consider it,” Helen said.

  “Did it.” There was a pause. Then Jane said, “So, this used to be your office, I bet.”

  They looked at each other. The moment stretched out, not hostile exactly, but tense, weighted with the decisions each of them had made, or might make. On the other side of the door, Mahler blared, voices shouted to be heard over it, a telephone rang and no one picked it up; but up here it was relatively quiet, and the lamplight was soft. Jane thought how grateful she was to have somewhere to go tomorrow, that the library waited for her. That Masha, like a lover, waited for her, making demands as any lover would. Sleeplessness, sacrifice, devotion. She knew that she could never do what Helen had done. She could never give Masha up.

  “Anyway,” Helen said, her tone shifting, acknowledging that the subject had gone as far as it was going to go. “You’re only in your first year. That’s the worst, really. Everything’s new—every single preparation, every day! And you don’t know the culture of the place yet. I remember feeling like everyone was judging me every minute and also that they were ignoring me. Surely both of those things couldn’t have been true.” She smiled and Jane smiled, too. “But Madison’s a great school,” Helen went on. “It’s a great department. Isn’t Otto Sigelman there?”

  “Retired,” Jane said, glad to move on to a different subject. “Thus, the job opening.”

  “So, you’re the new Sigelman! How exciting.”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “Sigelman’s really something. He still has an office in the department, so I’ve gotten to know him a bit. I like him, actually. He can be nasty and foul-mouthed, but I like him. He’s interesting. And he really cares about the work.”

  “Sure,” Helen said. “He’s a lonely old man. What else does he have to care about?” She pulled out the scrunchie and shook her head so that her hair spilled across her shoulders. In this light the gray was very prominent, but there was som
ething sensual about the way the hair fell around her face and down her back.

  “It’s more than that,” Jane said.

  “I’ve only met him once or twice at the occasional conference,” Helen said. “But I’ve heard things.”

  “There are a million Sigelman stories,” Jane said. “He attracts malicious gossip, but I haven’t seen anything I’d call dishonest or destructive.”

  Helen shrugged. “Even if only some of it’s true, it’s bad enough.”

  “He knows more about Karkov than anyone alive,” Jane said, more sharply than she’d meant to.

  There was another pause.

  “Speaking of Karkov,” Helen said. “I suppose you heard that Stephen Olen died.”

  Jane put down her cup. “No,” she said. “No, I hadn’t! I’d heard he was ill, that was all.” Who was it who had told her that? Oh yes, Sigelman.

  “Just a week or so ago,” Helen said. “I heard it from someone I keep in touch with at Northwestern.”

  “Isn’t that a shame,” Jane said, and after a pause she asked, “Do you think it’s true that he had some of his great-grandfather’s documents? Things that were never donated?”

  “Maybe.” Helen yawned. “It’s nice to hope so, I guess. But even if he does, one doubts if it would shed any light on the work.”

  “Everything sheds light on the work,” Jane said.

  The house was quiet when they brought their empty coffee cups down to the kitchen. Helen pressed the button on the blinking answering machine. “We can’t seem to get to the phone half the time, even when we’re home,” she said.

  Billy’s voice, so unexpected in that tall, dim room, startled Jane and filled her with longing. “Hi, this is Billy Shaw. I’m trying to reach Jane. Please ask her to give me a call when she gets a chance. Thanks.” In the background the clattering of dishes, someone coughing. Maisie, coughing.