Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  But she had Maisie, so she couldn’t do that.

  She started taking Maisie to a new playground. She didn’t want to see those women again, the ones who had watched her let Maisie fall off the roundabout. This park was farther away, beyond walking distance—out past the bustling Monroe Street corridor where they lived but not so far as the new developments, cornfields until a year or two ago, where hordes of young families were buying up new construction. It was dull and square, planted with a few scrubby bushes. The new playground wasn’t as nice as the old one, but perhaps because of its unfashionable intermediate location, it was usually empty, which Jane liked and Maisie didn’t seem to mind.

  Today, though, another mother and child arrived when Jane and Maisie had been there for about half an hour. The mother was a very young woman with straight brown hair, a sallow face, and a pierced nose with a diamond stud in it that caught the morning sunlight. She pushed a heavy stroller with a fat blond baby in it. Maisie was playing on the climbing structure, lying down in the plastic tunnel with only her sneakers showing. The baby gurgled happily and clapped its hands as the young woman undid the seat belt, lifted it out, and set it on the dusty grass. Impossible, Jane thought, to consider having another baby, another small person to watch over and carry around and feed and push in a stroller! Impossible—even as the creature inside her opened itself up like a dandelion. She watched the girl in the baggy jeans, sitting in the grass with her face to the sun while the baby blinked at something on the ground, its mouth plugged with a pacifier. The baby’s skin was very fair. Jane worried that it needed a hat. She worried that the girl, the mother, wasn’t old enough to look after it. What was she doing, having a baby at her age? How had it happened? Easy enough to imagine sex in a basement or a dorm room followed by denial and panic, but after the initial rush of disbelief, why hadn’t the girl gone and had an abortion? If Jane had become pregnant at that age, she certainly would have; wouldn’t she? Even now that was what she was going to do—wasn’t it?

  The baby pulled a handful of grass out of the ground. It dropped the pacifier into its lap and began to suck on its fist, trying to slurp up the grass.

  “No, no, no,” the mother said. “You’re not a cow.” She put the pacifier back in the little mouth and lifted the baby into the air and cooed to it.

  Surely Billy would agree that a baby wasn’t an option. Surely, on this issue, they would see eye to eye.

  Still, safer not to tell him. At least not yet.

  Once she had been sure they’d always see eye to eye about everything. She remembered picking him up at the airport when he came back from Japan years ago, how he’d looked coming through the doors from customs with his hair unevenly flattened from fourteen hours on the plane. He’d looked taller than she had remembered him, and handsomer, and when he saw her, his face seemed to come alive. When he held her, the body pressed against her was both familiar and unfamiliar, his face scratchy with stubble and his smell sour from traveling. She held on to him as tightly as she could, feeling that she had not known until that moment how much she had missed him. And she had thought: This is all I want, to be held by this man this way.

  But of course, nothing was all anyone ever wanted; she had known that even then, at twenty-three, and she certainly knew it now. People were greedy, they wanted more and more all the time, as much as they could get. Life teemed with desire, and the world brimmed with the objects of desire, and you would never have everything you wanted.

  Billy had wanted what he shouldn’t have wanted; was that really what she was so angry about? So satisfying to say, as she had said to Davis: He fucked the babysitter. Nothing extenuated that. But the truth was bigger; the truth, as always, needed to be teased carefully out. Wasn’t that what she prided herself on doing so well, teasing out the truth in all its complexity? Wasn’t that what she had gone on about to Shombauer—the scholar’s allegiance to truth?

  Across the street a row of split-level houses crouched on their narrow lots wearing the blank, heat-stricken expressions of lizards. Maisie slid slowly down the slide. The baby pulled off one white sock and threw it in the grass. The mother picked it up and put it on again, scolding gently. “Your feet will get cold, Amy. You don’t want cold feet, do you?”

  The baby—Amy—laughed through the pacifier and pulled the sock off again. She sat solidly on the ground but didn’t look as if she could crawl yet. Jane wondered how old she was. She thought of asking, but if she asked, she’d have to have a conversation. Still, she was likely to have to have one in a minute or two, whether she said anything or not.

  How old is your daughter? the young mother would inquire. Or, What’s your little girl’s name? (Maisie’s hair was growing out, and she was wearing a sky blue T-shirt, so she looked more like a girl than she used to.) Jane would answer, and the other mother would remark that Maisie was cute or a nice little girl. Thank you, Jane imagined saying. Of course, she’s having a hard time right now because I kicked her father out of the house for sleeping with the babysitter. Besides which, I’m pregnant again and I’m thinking of getting an abortion. What would the other woman say to that! Exhausted by the very idea of such a conversation, Jane shut her eyes and lay back in the grass. The sun burned through her eyelids in a dazzle of white and red. The dry grass prickled through her clothes. Maisie could be running out into the middle of the street, but it didn’t seem likely. Yes, Jane imagined the woman saying, I had two abortions myself, before Amy.

  The imaginary reply was interrupted by the woman actually speaking, her high, childish voice floating on the hot air: “Thank you,” she said.

  Jane opened her eyes. Maisie was standing next to the baby, shyly holding out her sock. The mother took the sock from Maisie and put it on the baby’s foot, and the baby peeled it off and threw it again as far as she could. It fell about four feet away, on a chalky patch of ground busily patrolled by ants. She had a good arm, Jane thought, for a baby.

  “I’ll get it,” Maisie said, and she fetched the sock.

  “What a helpful girl you are,” the mother said, and Jane saw that it was true. Maisie looked very grown up, standing next to the baby. She looked like a serious, helpful, mature little person. It made Jane feel like crying. How had Maisie gotten so grown up without her noticing? She thought of the way, when she held Susannah Olen’s baby, she had felt she had missed the entire pleasure of Maisie’s babyhood. Was she, even now, repeating her mistake? Could she only really ever see Maisie in retrospect or in brief dislocations of perspective like this?

  “What’s your name?” the mother asked Maisie.

  “Maisie,” Maisie said.

  The baby pulled off her other sock.

  “That’s a pretty name,” the woman said. “Mine’s Rosemary. How old are you, Daisy?”

  But Maisie was overcome with shyness and couldn’t answer.

  “She’ll be three in September,” Jane said. She hadn’t meant to say anything; the words just slipped out of her mouth.

  Rosemary looked around in a friendly way. Dark acne scars showed through a scrim of foundation, and her diamond nose stud glowed blue in the sun. “She’s a nice little girl,” she said.

  “And how old is your daughter?” Jane asked.

  Rosemary looked confused, and then she looked alarmed. “Oh no!” she said. “I just babysit her.” She put a hand on the baby’s head to shush her as she began to whine for her missing sock, which had fallen next to Rosemary’s heavy, denim-clad thigh. The baby couldn’t reach it, and Maisie was shy about going that close.

  “I’m only a sophomore,” the girl explained, “at UW.” She picked up the sock and handed it to the baby, who immediately tossed it away again.

  Embarrassment lifted off Jane in waves, but she tried to smile. “Some people do have babies at your age,” she said.

  Then Rosemary said, “You’re Professor Levitsky. I took your nineteenth-century Russian novels class.”

  Immediately Jane recognized her. Third row, two or three seats
from the end, near the radiator. “Rosemary Watkins!” she said.

  “That was a cool class,” Rosemary Watkins said. “A ton of reading, though. I loved that one book, Dmitri Arkadyevich. It was just like a soap opera.” The undeniable soap-opera quality of Karkov’s masterpiece had often stood it in good stead where student opinion went. Jane could never decide whether the book was great partly because of this or despite it.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” she said, sitting up straighter as she tried to make the adjustment to something approximating her classroom persona. In the grass Maisie was patiently trying to put the baby’s sock back on while Amy wiggled her foot and drooled happily.

  “Of course, I have to admit I didn’t finish it,” Rosemary said. “But my friend told me what happened in the end.”

  What made people think they could say things like that? What grade had she given Rosemary Watkins? Maybe none of the students did all the reading—not a single one. Maybe the best you could hope for was that they read a little and didn’t plagiarize.

  “It’s funny seeing you here with your little girl,” Rosemary went on, holding on to Amy’s hands and making the chubby arms wave in the air. “You know professors have real lives and families and stuff, but you just never really think about it.”

  “We’re pretty much just like other people,” Jane said, watching Maisie watch the baby, waiting for her to throw the sock again. How happy she looked, proud and purposeful, her life suddenly filled with meaning!

  “If you ever need a babysitter,” Rosemary said, “give me a call. I love little kids.” She was good with the baby, Jane saw. She was gentle and patient, and just now she couldn’t resist kissing the fat white belly, making Amy squeal with pleasure. Maisie looked on slightly mournfully, as though wishing someone would kiss her belly, too.

  “Thank you,” Jane said.

  “No problem. School is so much studying and agonizing about tests and stuff. Being with kids helps you kind of keep it all in perspective.”

  Jane would need a babysitter if there was another baby. Or rather, not if, because wasn’t there one already? Easier to think not if it wasn’t you it was inside of, lodged like a fishbone. If you hadn’t experienced the link between what had once been a faceless minnow and was now the solid child climbing up the slide, her face pink with sun and pleasure. Was Jane’s new feeling more right than the old one, or was it merely more emotional, sentimental, stereotypically female? She didn’t know. She wondered what Billy would think. She couldn’t seem to get out of the habit of wondering that.

  * * *

  On Friday evening, when Billy came to pick Maisie up, Jane and Maisie were waiting for him on the porch. Jane felt nervous and tired, but she had made up her mind to talk to him. She stood with her hands on the porch rail, watching him ride up. He was wearing ordinary clothes today, jeans and a T-shirt rather than his stretchy cycling outfit. His face was brown from all the riding he’d been doing, and the sun was making his hair blond again, the color it had been when he was younger.

  “Hi, Daddy!” Maisie called.

  He waved. “Hi, Maisie! Hi, Jane.” She could tell he was trying to keep his voice the same, but Maisie’s name rolled easily off his tongue and hers clotted in his mouth.

  “Daddy, I want my own bicycle!” Maisie said.

  Billy glanced at Jane. “Maybe for your next birthday. A tricycle. Three wheels.”

  “On my next birthday, I’m going to be three,” Maisie informed him.

  “I know,” he said.

  “And then, three and a half,” Maisie said. “And I’ll have a chocolate cake.” She bounced down the steps to the sidewalk and stood there in her purple cotton shorts, trying to figure out how many fingers to hold up for three and a half.

  Since when, Jane thought, didn’t she want vanilla? “Billy,” she said quietly, while Maisie was busy with her fingers, “I need to talk to you.”

  Billy, standing on the sidewalk with his bike, looked up to where she stood on the porch. “Okay,” he said.

  “I thought maybe we could go down to the park.”

  They walked down the sidewalk toward the frozen custard place at the end of the road. Maisie danced ahead, and Jane and Billy came behind more slowly. Jane was intensely aware of the space between them. It was important to stay strictly on her side of an invisible divider, but not so far over that he would think she couldn’t bear to be near him. The air seemed charged with electricity, as though she’d get a shock if she tried to reach across. She tried to rehearse in her head what she wanted to say to him, but the words rushed away.

  At the counter they ordered cones, then set off through the park and down toward the lake, which glowed deep blue under the paler sky. Maisie’s cone dripped and her face was brown and wet with chocolate custard. Jane slowed down to let her get ahead of them, but still she couldn’t bring herself to speak. Billy watched the boats out on the water. The soft splash of oars rose up from the blue surface. Billy ate his cone very neatly, with careful swipes of his tongue. Again Jane tried to gather her words, and again they scattered, and so she opened her mouth and said the first thing that came into her head:

  “Masha Karkova wrote Lady of the Snakes. I found a manuscript copy in her handwriting that proves it.”

  Billy did not respond right away. He stood where he was and licked his cone, almost as though he hadn’t heard her. Then he turned to her and said warmly, “I always knew you would do great things.”

  Jane flushed with pleasure, and at the same time she was embarrassed that she cared so deeply what he thought. Up ahead Maisie was squatting under a tree poking at some rocks with a stick.

  “Also,” Jane said, “I’m pregnant. About eight weeks. Though you could probably do the math yourself.”

  “Oh my god,” Billy said. Melting custard dripped onto his hand, and he tossed the half-eaten cone into a trash barrel. Jane, who was hungry, licked hers and waited for him to say something. Light drained from the sky, and the air was growing clammy if not exactly cool.

  “Well?” she said. “I’m hoping you’re going to say something more than that!”

  Billy’s expression was getting harder to read as the dusk deepened. “What do you want me to say?” he said. “What do you want me to do?” His voice was very sad. It was a voice Jane hadn’t heard since the year his mother died.

  “What do you want to do?” she countered.

  Billy shook his head. “It’s your call, Janie. ”It’s your—” He broke off. Body, he meant.

  But this was not what Jane wanted to hear. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you! But I’m asking what you want to do, I’m not saying I’ll do it.” It was only now that she saw what she wanted him to say—saw that she wanted him to take her in his arms with authority and tell her that yes, of course they would have this baby! At the same time she knew that if he tried to do that, she would fight him. Her pride would not let her agree with any suggestion he made, nor permit him to hold her. And not just her pride, but her shame, too—for how could she have let herself become pregnant at a time like this? How could she have become pregnant accidentally twice (for Maisie, too, had been unplanned)—how, in this day and age?

  “But I don’t—” Billy began (making no move whatsoever to put his arms around her), when he was interrupted by Maisie, still crouching under the tree, who began to shriek.

  “Look, look, look!” she cried. “Mommy-Daddy, look!”

  They ran across the grass, but she was all right; she was fine. Her chocolate-smeared face was ecstatic, and she danced in the grass with her hands clasped together, something they couldn’t see held inside. At first she was too excited to show them, but at last she stood still and opened her hands to reveal a tiny snake, not much more than four inches long, with a greenish striped body, a red eye, and a tiny black forked tongue. Its jaws were open wide as though it thought it was a dragon breathing fire, but anyone could see it wasn’t a threat to anybody, it was so small.

  “It was under the rock!�
� Maisie cried. “I founded it!”

  “Jesus,” Billy said. “Maisie, let me see it.”

  Maisie had clasped her hands together again and held them close to her face. “Mine,” she said.

  Jane was afraid Maisie would squash the little snake in her excitement. “Yes, yours,” she said. “Honey, Daddy just wants to look at it.”

  Maisie turned her back and peeked inside her cupped hands. She whispered something that Jane couldn’t hear. It was getting dark.

  “Just show me, Maisie, okay?” Billy said. “Turn around!” But she crouched protectively over her treasure.

  “Maisie,” Jane said. “It’s late. We need to be going home.”

  Maisie turned her head and glared at her parents over her shoulder. “Which home?” she demanded. And then, “I’m not leaving Stripy!”

  Jane felt extraordinarily tired. She could see Billy trying to control his own feelings—sadness, frustration, confusion, some complicated brew of those. “You can bring Stripy home, too,” she said, not addressing the real question, just trying to get Maisie moving.

  Maisie looked at her to see if she meant it.

  “Come on!” Jane cried, as cheerfully as she could. She held out her hand, but Maisie couldn’t take it because she needed both of her own to carry the snake. Still, she followed her parents back up toward the street.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Billy said to Jane, walking closer to her now in the near dark, his breath hissing in her ear.

  “Compared to what?” Jane said. “No, of course I’m not!”

  The sky was a purplish charcoal color now, and the first stars showed over the roof of the auto repair shop on the corner. They crossed at the light and walked up the hill past fireflies glowing in front gardens and televisions flickering in living rooms where no one had yet closed the drapes. “There’s that old fish tank in the basement,” Jane said. She pronounced the word basement very carefully. “We can put the snake in that.”