Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  “So,” Jane said. “You went to the zoo.”

  “Yes. It was such a bright day.”

  Then they were at an impasse again.

  “They don’t got rhinos at the zoo,” Maisie said informationally, poking at a plastic rhino. “Too big. Bigger than elephants!”

  Billy looked at his watch. “Half an hour till bed, Mais,” he said.

  “I’ll give her a bath,” Jane said. “Maisie, I’ll give you a bath and read you a story, okay?”

  “No bath,” Maisie said. “I not dirty!”

  “A nice warm bath with bubbles,” Jane said, and just as she was bracing herself for a no-bath tantrum, a slog through tears and soap in the eyes and water splashed everywhere, Maisie looked up from her toys and said, “Okay! Rhino coming too. He very dirty.” She picked up the rhino and ran lightly up the stairs.

  * * *

  Later when Jane came back down to the living room, Billy had put away the toys and folded the clothes and washed the dishes and was sitting at one end of the couch reading the sports section of the Capital Times. Jane sat down at the other end so that the piece of furniture seemed balanced between them like a seesaw.

  “So,” Jane said, “the zoo?”

  “Jane,” Billy said. “I’m so sorry.” He looked at her across the endless expanse of couch. It was dark outside now, and he had turned on the table lamp. Jane could see him well enough to see that he didn’t look all that sorry. Certainly not sorry enough.

  “Did Felicia go with you?”

  Billy’s face furrowed and he looked down at his lap. “No. Of course not,” he said. “Jane—”

  But she interrupted him.

  “You think that’s it?” she said. “You say you’re sorry and it’s done?” The self-righteous anger felt good, and for a moment she was so glad to be able to indulge in it that she forgot how terrible she really felt—how terrible things really were. And then with a shudder, she remembered again.

  “No,” Billy said. “I don’t think that. But I am sorry. I shouldn’t have—I never—If I’d thought . . .” But none of these sentences seemed to be sentences he could finish. He lifted his hands as if to explain something, then let them fall again.

  “If you’d thought what?” Jane said coldly. “That I’d be back early and catch you? You would have refrained that particular evening?”

  Billy said nothing. She watched him closing up like a clam, drawing his shoulders in.

  “You shouldn’t have is right!” she went on. “My god, Billy—the babysitter? You couldn’t come up with anything more banal than that? What about the secretary at that law firm you worked at, or did you ever consider one of those high school girls you used to teach?”

  He was so still now he hardly seemed to be breathing. Then he made an effort and looked up at her.

  “Jane,” he said. “Janie.” He reached a hand out toward her, but she was too far away. His arm looked weirdly disembodied, like an arm reaching out of a grave in a horror movie, and Jane recoiled, pressing back into her end of the couch.

  He tried again, reaching out with words this time. Jane wanted to shut her ears against them, but instead she sat with her back still pressed painfully into the hard arm of the couch, and she listened as he labored to explain, his phrases heaving and sputtering toward her.

  “Things had been so—so tense and wrong between us. You know they had! And you seemed as though you wanted—as though you didn’t want . . . And ever since Maisie was born—Or maybe not then, exactly! But still, it felt almost as though, as though it didn’t matter.”

  “Matter?” Jane jumped on the word. “How could you fucking my graduate student possibly, in any universe, not matter?”

  Billy bobbed his head—a nod of agreement or a tremor, Jane couldn’t tell. He brought his hands together and cracked his knuckles. The sound was very loud in the quiet room. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was just trying to explain.” But she could hear the coldness in his voice now, underneath the sadness. He wasn’t trying anymore.

  How had it come to this? Certainly things had been tense and wrong. Certainly each of them had wanted and not wanted many things. But from there to adultery was still a giant leap, a leap that defied and outraged the imagination.

  Billy moved toward her on the couch now. Bravely, he put out his hand again, and this time he touched her knee, though gingerly, as though he might get a shock.

  She jerked her leg back. “Get out of the house!” she said, while the muscles of her leg vibrated and the recoil of his touch flew galvanically through her, her whole body jangling with heartache and disgust.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A WEEK WENT BY, and then somehow another week. On Saturdays, when Maisie went to stay with Billy at Vince’s, the emptiness of the house was breathtaking. The air seemed to coalesce into a kind of sap in which it was hard to move. Jane sat at her desk with her notes on Masha’s letters spread out in front of her. In the past she had been able to sink down into the work like a weighted diver into an undersea world, but these days she floated like a cork on the blind, salty surface. She didn’t know what to do. The article she’d been drafting about nature writing, her idea about Karkov taking bits from Masha’s diaries for his own use—all of it seemed dull and paltry compared to what the letters revealed.

  Should she write an article, then, revealing Karkov’s sexuality? Should she write about the origins of Lady of the Snakes? Either way she would have to disclose her sources, but she hadn’t decided what to do about the stolen letters yet.

  In the meantime, she had been trying to get in touch with Greg Olen. She was fairly sure Sigelman had been to see him, and everyone seemed to think he had inherited some family papers. Jane knew Sigelman would do whatever he had to do to get his hands on them. Maybe he already had; how would she know? Maybe the other two letters in the egg box had come from Olen. She had assumed, because the box was battered and the underlayer of silver tape so faded, that Sigelman had had them a long time, but really she had no idea. At Olen’s house, no one ever answered the phone. She had left a couple of messages, but he hadn’t called back. She couldn’t blame him. His father had died and now people like her hounded him about his inheritance.

  Weekdays Jane was busy with Maisie. The Chestnut Lane Children’s Center—the day care she had liked all those months ago—had called with a last-minute opening, but she had declined it. “In the fall,” she’d told the director, wondering even as she said it what she thought she was doing, what she was letting herself in for. While they’d chatted on the phone, Maisie sat blank-eyed on the couch watching television, her scabby knees hugged to her chest. Her feet were dirty, and her dimpled mosquito-bitten arms were brown from the sun. She watched a lot of television since Billy had moved out. Time limits were a thing of the past.

  Would Maisie be better off at Chestnut Lane, where there would be other kids to play with, art projects, new toys, music time, story time, hot lunches? Jane didn’t know. All she knew was that life was falling apart around her and she had to keep Maisie close. For once it wasn’t the work that mattered. She watched herself letting it drift away as though from above, like someone having an out-of-body experience. Doubtless there was a price to be paid for this, but it had become clear to Jane that there was a price to be paid for everything.

  So each morning they went to the grassy park that ran downhill all the way to the lake, and Jane pretended to be a stay-at-home mom. Yesterday the playground equipment had been crowded. Two girls in apple-green dresses with their hair French-braided rode the horse swings for twenty minutes while Maisie eyed them enviously. “Does your little boy want to swing?” called one of the mothers, a plump blond in a denim jumper, from a bench in the shade.

  Maisie looked at the woman. “I’m not little!” she said. “I’m big!”

  “Of course you are,” the mom agreed. “You’re a big boy!”

  “Actually, she’s a girl,” Jane said.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said.
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  “She has flowers on her sneakers,” observed the woman beside her, who was thin, with pale skin, straight brown hair, and a big raspberry-colored straw hat.

  Jane had spoken to these same women last week. Or maybe it had been a different pair. Park moms, as indistinguishable as the beady-eyed robins that hopped across the grass looking for worms. Jane felt they were watching her, watching Maisie, and judging what kind of mother Jane was. Unlike them, she had no peanut butter sandwiches, no apple slices, no honey-sweetened animal crackers (or even conventional ones), no stale bread saved for the ducks. She felt like a raven, solitary and conspicuous, among them.

  At last the girls got tired of swinging. Jane helped Maisie up onto one of the horse swings. The sun, which had been up long before six, beat down from the clear blue sky, only a few weeks shy of the solstice. All day and deep into the night, it illuminated every blade of grass, blazed off every parked car, exposed every expression on every face just when Jane would have preferred the cool forgiveness of shadows and dusk. She shoved her sunglasses back up her perspiring nose and gave Maisie a push. Maisie’s knuckles were white on the handlebars that protruded from the sides of the horse’s face, and she hunched low over the plastic mane.

  “How old is she?” the blond mom asked Jane.

  “She’ll be three in September.”

  “Oh, really? Is she small for her age?”

  “A bit.” Actually, Jane had no idea whether this was true. She had lost track of all the benchmarks. Billy would have known. Billy always knew things like that—what pressure tires should be inflated to, how long to roast a chicken, people’s birthdays and how old they were going to be.

  Maisie dragged her feet in the gravel, slowing the swing. She pointed to the roundabout, a metal platform with arched supports where the other girls were taking turns pushing and riding. “I want to go on that,” she said.

  “Maisie,” Jane said, “you just got on the horsey swing.”

  The blond mom spoke to Maisie. “You like those girls, don’t you?” She called over to her daughters, “Caitlin! Brianna! This little one wants a ride!”

  Yes, Jane thought sadly, Maisie liked Caitlin and Brianna. She wanted French braids and an apple-green dress. She wanted to belong to a normal midwestern family, but instead, in an hour or two, she’d have to go home with Jane.

  “She’s too small!” the older of the girls called back. “She might fall off!”

  “I won’t fall off!” Maisie cried, wide-eyed and passionate.

  “You might,” the girl said sternly. “You could fall wrong and break your arm, like my cousin Emily.”

  Jane stepped over to the roundabout, grabbed one of the metal arches, and pulled it to a stop. The girls groaned. “Hop on, Maisie,” she said.

  Maisie trotted over in her baggy overalls and blue Keds and hoisted herself up.

  “Hold on tight to this pole,” Jane said.

  The girl who had been pushing jumped on, too. The round platform was heavier than it looked, and Jane pulled hard to get it going, getting gravel in her shoes.

  “Here we go!”

  The older girls shrieked, and Maisie, watching them, shrieked, too. Her face glowed and the wind ruffled her short curls as she squinted into the bright sunlight. The big girls laughed, wisps of hair coming loose from their braids.

  “Hooray!” the older one shouted, letting go of her metal pole for an instant to clap her hands and then grabbing on again.

  “Hoo-ray!” Maisie shouted and let go, too.

  Jane could hear, as if in slow motion, Maisie’s shout of joy shift registers, twisting upward into a shriek of terror. She flew sideways through the air—through the dust motes and floating pollen grains and the heavy smell of the grass—and then she hit the ground with a thump. For a drawn-out moment, there was silence as everyone turned to look at her lying there, blue dust rising around her. Jane found time to be startled by quite how blue it was—almost the color of the lake when a storm was blowing in—before Maisie’s voice cut the morning in two. She screamed, lying on her back in the gravel, her mouth a black hole edged with red. The next instant Jane was kneeling beside her, afraid to pick her up. She couldn’t speak. Blood welled and dripped down Maisie’s chin. Jane touched her chest. The denim overalls were hot. Was something broken inside, down under the cotton and the skin, inside the paltry lattice of bones? How could you know?

  “Let me see her,” someone said. It was the brown-haired mom with the raspberry hat. She was kneeling next to Jane now, brushing Maisie’s hair back from her grimy face, her own face furrowed with concern and sympathy, and also with a kind of calm reassurance that seemed to say that, even in the chaos of emergency, there was a way to proceed. A path. “It’s okay,” she told Maisie. “I know it hurts. Can you move your legs for me? How about your arms? That’s great, hon, just perfect. You’re okay. She’s okay,” she told Jane kindly. “She’ll be fine in a minute. Why don’t you pick her up?”

  Jane put her arms around Maisie, who was still screaming in loud, frantic bursts like a car alarm, and cradled her to her chest. “Where’s the blood coming from?” she managed to ask.

  “I think she bit her lip,” the hat woman said. “And there’s gravel in her hands. But that’s the worst of it.” She got up and grabbed her diaper bag, pulled out a wipe, and pressed it against Maisie’s lip. Already, Maisie was recovering. She was looking out through the tears, anxious to see what would happen next.

  Jane buried her face in her daughter’s gritty, sweaty hair and tried not to cry.

  “That was some fall,” said the mother of the girls. “She was lucky. That’s exactly how my niece broke her arm.”

  “I told her she’d get hurt,” one of the girls said.

  “Thank you,” Jane told the hat woman hoarsely.

  “I’m a nurse,” the hat woman said. “This was scary, that’s all. It wasn’t bad.”

  Jane thought of all the things this woman must have seen: severed limbs, and babies drowning in air because their lungs didn’t work, and the glassy faces of children whose parents had died in car accidents, but it didn’t make her feel lucky. It just reminded her how many horrors waited with greedy fingers in the dark.

  Maisie’s crying began to subside. She twisted her head to look around and saw everybody staring at her. Then she took a breath and sobbed out, “I want my daddy!”

  Jane felt her face go red. “Hush,” she said sternly. “You’re all right.”

  “Daddy!” Maisie wailed. “I want my da-ddy!”

  Jane stood up, hoisting Maisie onto her shoulder. “I’d better get her home,” she said.

  “Can you manage?” the woman asked.

  For once Jane was grateful she hadn’t brought anything with her. “I’m fine,” she said, grabbing hold of her stroller and pushing it one-handed up the hill. Fine! she thought. She struggled along the path, the stroller veering toward the grass, Maisie squirming on her shoulder while the park moms watched, doubtless wondering why a child would want her daddy when she had her mother right there.

  * * *

  One Saturday afternoon in the middle of May—Jane’s third weekend alone in the house—she picked up the phone and dialed Greg Olen’s number yet again. This time someone picked up.

  “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice, slightly harried, as though she’d been right in the middle of something when the phone rang.

  “Hello!” A jolt of nervous excitement ran through Jane. “Can I speak to Greg Olen, please?”

  There was a pause, and in the quiet Jane could hear a noise float through the line—a faint, familiar sound she couldn’t place. A quiet, squeaking, hamstery sound.

  “He’s busy,” the woman said.

  It wasn’t quite a squeak, though. A chirp? A chirrup? A snort?

  “My name is Jane Levitsky,” Jane said, trying to make herself sound pleasant and businesslike, warm and engaging. “Do you have any idea when I could reach him?”

  “Can I ask what it’s about?”
the woman said. She had a musical voice, low but breathy, like the bottom range of a flute.

  Chirp chirp, came the noise—or shlup shlup.

  “I want to talk to him about one of his ancestors,” she said, and then she supposed she’d better explain who she was. “I’m a Russian literature professor at the University of Wisconsin, and I’ve been studying the writings of his great-great-grandmother. That’s what I want to talk to him about.”

  “Great-great-grandmother?” the woman repeated.

  “Yes,” Jane said. “Maria Karkova. Grigory Karkov’s wife.”

  “She wasn’t a writer.” The voice on the other end was dismissive.

  Squech, squech.

  “Can I leave my number?” Jane asked. “Maybe he could call me.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I really don’t have a free hand right now.”

  What was that supposed to mean? Jane pictured her hands cuffed to the wall or else filled with something heavy and precious—towers of china plates and cups, perhaps. Or maybe she was merely washing dishes, her hands fishing around in soapy water, the phone tucked under her chin.

  “Can you suggest a good time to call back?”

  “I really can’t,” the woman said. “Greg is very unpredictable. Ouch! No, no, no.”

  The last few words were obviously not meant for Jane, who couldn’t think of anything to say except “I hope you won’t mind if I try again.” But the line had already gone dead.

  After she hung up, it came to her what the sound had been and why it was so familiar. It was the squeaky, lip-smacking sound of a baby nursing. She remembered, suddenly, sitting on the couch in the old apartment a few months after Maisie was born, with sleet coming down outside the window and a cold draft lifting across the room. She’d had her shirt up and her bra down, feeding the baby while on the phone with one of her dissertation readers, a man of about sixty with grown children.