Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  Eventually, the uniformed men sat with the Rubins at the kitchen table and took down the information that no parent wishes to give. A bit over four feet, a bit under fifty pounds—thin for his age. Hay-yellow hair, straight like pine needles—it fell over his head like a cap except for a little part on the side. Which side—left side. His left. The ears stick out a little, not that you really see it under the hair, and he blinks twice very quickly when he’s nervous. Green eyes, flecks of gray. Beautiful, beautiful eyes. Maya sought out, in the officers’ expressions and gestures, hints of sympathy and reassurance, but then she understood that they had to be like the doctors in her hospital. They had seen too much despair to be able to give anything of themselves to it. If they did, she would never stop taking.

  Grateful for an assignment, Maya went off to look for printed photos—for years everything had been on their cell phones. Well behaved, shy, orderly, and obedient, Raisa pressed the police officers as Maya walked away—needlessly; they wouldn’t find him by his personality. Any other significant details? Maya turned back. She hesitated. He’s adopted, she said. He doesn’t know. The other Rubins stared at her with dismay.

  +

  As they waited for news, the Rubins dispersed to disparate corners of their panicked home and explored the forms waiting could take.

  Maya Rubin née Shulman was one of those women who, at forty-two, continued to look more or less as she had in her twenties. In her case, her body had never been distended by a child, though the women evaluating her—if they were up to candor—would have admitted that this would have made no difference. These subtleties were lost on men, who focused on the slimness of her hips; the unspeckled smoothness of her legs, save for a long vein thick as a guitar string down one thigh; and the small breasts that seemed boyish at first and then impossibly erotic. Her face confounded them: a strong nose above full lips, framed by soft, jutting cheekbones that had missed their time by a century. To some, the face was ordinary, and in others it caused an arousal no less severe for being not very explicable. In their own way, the men arrived at the same impression as the women: sufficient miscalibration to conjure a subtle, irresistible beauty.

  Her husband, possessed of a handsome wide face that remained olive-colored even in winter, was soft where Maya was slight, as if life had padded him against misfortune. And if not life, then his mother—Alex had been stocky from boyhood and finished his plate every time. He paid attention to his closet, never went to work without a blazer, and spent part of the weekend shearing coupons to Lord & Taylor and Nordstrom. His soccer legs and tennis waist—Alex’s parents had insisted on sports, though Alex was left free to choose which—had filled out, but democratically, in equal parts everywhere, as if according to blueprints.

  The mother and father were an inversion of the children: the father thin as straw, the mother heavyset despite a youth in swimming. (A photo in burnt-brown tones left on the children’s mantelpiece by Raisa showed her as a young woman just out of the Minsk city pool, the rubber cap still tight on her ears, lipstick already on her lips, a single gold tooth watting up her smile.) Raisa could pile into Eugene what she wanted and still the shoulders stayed knobby, the collarbone so taut you couldn’t look at it without thinking of the bone cutting right through its poor membrane of skin. Eugene had more hair in his eyebrows than some on their heads, and in youth Raisa called Eugene her gypsy even though his parents and grandparents were light as Slavs. The mystery of inheritance.

  Maya sat on a settee by the window and looked longingly toward the kitchen. In the afternoons, after she and Max walked through the door, they worked on dinner. It was Maya’s favorite part of the day. This she knew how to do, and could show Max without second-guessing herself. Max did all the prep that required no knife work—prying from the root the onion scales Maya had julienned, mashing potatoes (Max clutched the masher so hard his fists shook). Within a year or two, she planned to start him on knife work.

  Maya turned back to the driveway, watching the extended daylight of even this day forced to end. Is there a time of day more frightening to a parent whose child has vanished? She was grateful that her son had chosen to run off in June instead of December; the air was greasy with a slack, twinkling leisure that made it impossible to imagine a person coming to harm. Once in a while, this optimism was ruined by the sight of a car driving too quickly down their street: because it was going too quickly to avoid mowing down a child in the gathering dark, and because, moving so fast, it couldn’t be a car returning their son.

  Alex rose, the sofa giving him up with a sigh, and the others checked sluggishly in case his movement indicated some new insight. But he was going off toward the kitchen. They heard him working the kettle—he emerged with a cup of steaming water with three slices of lemon for his wife. How she liked it, just hot water and lemon, even in hot weather. Her gaze fixed on the window, she winced when he touched her shoulder, the cup trembled in his hand, and a gulp of it sailed onto the wood of the floor. They all stared at the spot—something dropped meant news on the way. Alex folded his lips with reproof. Maya smiled with pained gratitude.

  “We should look in his room,” Eugene looked up from the hands netted in his lap. Maya stared absently at her father-in-law. “Maybe there’s a note, for God’s sake,” Eugene went on. “Has anyone been up to his room?”

  “I looked in his room,” Maya said feebly.

  “Let’s look again,” Eugene said.

  Grateful for something to do, Raisa rose, followed by Eugene. Maya tried to signal Alex—his parents would see what she and Alex saw every night. But Alex only looked at her blankly. Perhaps he was disabled by worry.

  “Would Max like it if we looked in his room without him there?” she tried.

  “I don’t think he minds when you go in there with a vacuum cleaner, am I wrong?” Eugene said.

  “Don’t say that, Eugene,” Raisa said. “Maxie is so neat.”

  Maya couldn’t think how else to distract them and gave up. To remain alone downstairs after having been doubted would have expressed a greater objection than Maya felt up to. She followed. They took the stairs in a line, like a team of emergency workers. The four of them stood at the furry threshold of Max’s room, hesitant to find the clues they wanted to find.

  “I’d run away, too, if my parents painted the walls of my room the color of hand cream,” Eugene said, but the joke didn’t take. He persevered defensively: “I didn’t have these concerns as a child—my brother and I slept in the same bed.”

  One wall of Max’s room was covered with a map of America Alex and Max had hand-drawn across a quilt of printer sheets; shelves ran the height of the next: Max’s books; two menorahs and a stuffed doll in a Purim costume, halfhearted Jewish gestures whose makers hoped their ancestral religion would take better root with Max than with themselves, even though he was the only non-Jew among them; and the Indian masks Max always wanted when they went to the Riviera Maya on vacation. Just now, the one with two red lightning bolts in place of eyebrows and a snake coiling out of its mouth communicated all their unease.

  Eugene stepped inside and nodded toward the bedding, in a neat pile on the floor. “This was you, Alex,” he said. “You never had to be disciplined or told to clean up.” Maya swallowed, eager for him to misunderstand why it was all on the carpet. With satisfaction, Eugene ran a finger across the top of the dresser: no dust. He went over to the window and forced it up, sighing with the pleasure of his muscles at work, and stuck his nose into the evening air. The humidity was on its way back. The other three stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, looking around. What were they looking for? Everything seemed in place; there were no empty hangers in the closet. That could be good news because Max meant to return, or bad because Max had meant to return and had not.

  Eugene turned back to them from the window. “To voluntarily sleep on the ground.” He shook his head. “Even on the night of a Cossack pogrom a hundred fifty years ago, a Rubin slept off the ground. Maybe on a hays
tack, but not on the ground.” He meant the pup tent in the backyard, where Max was allowed to sleep on weekends when the weather was warm. Alex and Max spent afternoons there. Home from work, Alex changed into lawn-mowing clothes, and father and son journeyed outside. Maya did not resent losing her sous chef to her husband, as if, eight years later, she was still checking the glue between them. By the time she saw, through the kitchen window, her men reaching the tent, gold on the inside and forest-green on the out, like a leaf in two seasons at once, they were stumbling back to base camp after losing their men to hostile Siberians who rode wolves. Or they were on a new planet and Alex had to leave outside the flap the crystal lowball with two fingers of cognac that he sometimes brought with him because liquids turned to gas on Planet Chung. (“Why Chung, Maxie?” “I can’t tell you.”) Surgical masks Maya had been made to bring home from the hospital enabled father and son to survive the bad gas. Then—a star popping softly in the black ether—the faint call for dinner would come.

  Eugene slid his head back inside and stared at the bedding on the floor. “That’s not for laundry, is it,” he said ruefully, understanding. “It’s folded too neatly. Your son sleeps on the floor. And you know.” He stared at his son and daughter-in-law. Betrayal appeared on his face. “What else have you concealed about my grandson?” He looked at his wife. “Did you know?”

  “No,” Raisa said without joy. Alex and Maya did not answer, but Maya sought support from the wall.

  Eugene sat down on Max’s bare mattress and stared at the bedroll. “Maybe our boy is off on some adventure,” he said without believing it. “Maybe he’ll be home before long for a nice scolding.”

  “Why don’t we return downstairs,” Raisa said.

  “Genes are not water,” Eugene said. “Biologically, he is and always will be the child of those people. And the people who made them. It’s a miracle you’re seeing this only now. He came to us with programming; you can spend your whole lives changing the code, and still you are going to rewrite only fragments. I knew my great-grandparents. And who am I if not their great-grandson, buying for ten cents and selling for twenty? Faxes, e-mail, zip drives, okay. But it’s the same game.”

  His audience stood silently. Maya felt the wall with her hand. It was cool to the touch. She tried to fit all of herself into the feeling. She was a palm against the cold wall.

  “I ship everywhere,” Eugene said. “Denver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle. I like cities that end in consonants, strong names. Denver. Boston. Washington. New York—the “k” is like a nice flick in the eye. Miami, Philadelphia—feminine names. Montana.

  “They don’t have philharmonics out there. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ballet, buildings taller than a barn. They don’t have that.”

  “And, what, you go to the ballet?” Raisa said.

  “No, but I can go whenever I want,” Eugene said. “I can go this very evening.”

  “Come on, Zhenya,” she said. “Don’t get upset. Let’s go downstairs. I’ll make a cup of tea.”

  “They have horses, and rivers, and grass, and then nothing,” Eugene said. “I know because that was my village—why did I run away to the city before I finished ten grades? The countryside is for poor people. Drunk people. They subsist on drink instead of turning ten into twenty.”

  They observed one another gloomily. Outside, the light was letting go of the day.

  “You’ve called the school,” Raisa said finally, redundant in a wish to turn back the conversation.

  “Mama,” Alex said wearily.

  “The school is responsible for him until two forty-five,” Maya said. “He went outside with the rest of his bus, and then he must have walked off.”

  “The school is responsible for him until two forty-five!” Eugene exclaimed. “And if a murderer shows up at two forty-six, they’ll just fold their hands and watch with regret? No, this is a lawsuit. The school is guilty of negligence.”

  “When I was little and playing in the sandbox with Sasha, and those men stopped to ask directions to school?” Alex said. “I knew you weren’t supposed to talk to strangers, but I not only talked to them, I walked them to the school. Children do mysterious things.”

  “This is supposed to make me feel better?” Maya said. “Your father had to rescue you at the last moment.”

  “I don’t think it’s the best example, son,” Raisa said.

  Eugene rose heavily, and his ankle nicked a board peeking out from under the bed. His knees cracking, he leaned down and pulled it out, a bulletin board, its symmetrical rows of tacked plastic pouches pleasing to the eye. Each pouch had a label: Fescue. Timothy. Zoysia. They were grasses. The fescue was tufted, like the back of a porcupine, the timothy like grass everywhere. He looked up at Alex and Maya. They stared at him woefully.

  Until now, Eugene had not known that there was more than one type of grass in the world: grass. It looked like a science project. As his family watched him, Eugene fished out a faded clump from the pouch labeled “timothy” and sniffed it. He didn’t get anything except the smell of old sun. He looked again: The tawny grass looked chewed. Eugene noticed tooth marks on the other grasses. Not all; some. They had been chewed and placed back in the pouches. Some of the pouches held more grass than others, as if some of the grass had been not only tasted but eaten. Feeling foolish, Eugene looked around, as if to confirm that he was where he thought he was—a suburban bedroom where the carpet had been vacuumed recently enough that the lines remained visible. No animal had climbed to the second story and delicately pawed its way inside the pouches of grass without shredding the plastic. No, his grandson had eaten the grass. He dropped the board like a cursed object.

  “About this we didn’t know,” Maya said fearfully.

  “So he chewed some grass,” Alex said unpersuasively. “When a boy . . .” he started and trailed off.

  “He went and picked twenty pouches of grass,” Eugene said, opening his hands.

  “It was a science project,” Maya said. “I walked around with him. I didn’t know he was—he was—”

  “You didn’t know you were turning your son into an animal.”

  “Stop, Papa—please,” Maya said. Now Raisa gave up and sat down on the bed.

  Maya pushed herself away from the wall. “I’m going to ride the bus.”

  The others turned. “What bus?” Eugene said.

  “The 748,” Maya said. “The bus the girl said he was on.”

  “He’s not on the bus now,” Alex said.

  “If he took the bus to go there, maybe he would take the bus to come home,” Maya said. “Maybe I’ll see something.”

  “At least she wants to do something,” Eugene shook his head.

  “But if he will take the bus to come home, he’s going to come home,” Alex said. “What will your showing up on the bus do? It’s a futile gesture—do something just to do something. We’re at his mercy. Four adults are at the mercy of an eight-year-old.”

  “So your proposal is to do nothing,” Maya said.

  “You are all so certain he’s going to come back from where he went off to?” Eugene broke in. “To his mama and papa, who rescued him from the excellent life he had coming to him in Montana? Yes, he’s very concerned about you.”

  “My proposal is not to do things just to do things,” Alex said. “The school doesn’t know where he is. The police are looking. Until then, we wait.”

  “I am going to ride the bus,” Maya repeated.

  “Please don’t give me a look that says I don’t care,” Alex said. “I am trying to think rationally.”

  “Please drive me,” she said.

  They remembered that she did not drive past the mall. Alex, unwilling to feel as churlish as refusing would force him to feel—the upper hand was tricky that way; truly, power was with the needy and meek—nodded cumbrously.

  “Into the night, you’re going,” Raisa remarked sorrowfully. In Raisa’s view, darkness uncloaked the world’s essentially hostile nature, and br
ought about only traffic accidents and loss-filled reflections. In the evenings you stayed at home with loved ones, hunkered down against the unreliable blackness.

  “Take the Escape,” Eugene said charitably.

  “We’ll be fine in the Corolla,” Alex said.

  After the young parents walked out, Raisa slapped her hands together. She could have made a sandwich for Maya to take on the road. Her head was not on her shoulders.

  +

  The air was humid again, the evening panting out a plush weariness. Maya waited for Alex by the car. He climbed in and unlocked her door. It’s open, she heard dimly from inside. She didn’t want to ride in her son’s seat. She wanted Max to come home and take his seat, to tumble out of the school bus first, even if it meant he never interacted with the popular children. Damn the popular children. And the bus drivers who wore sweatpants to work. The fat Italians everywhere, the polo-shirted men braying about sports teams and the plucked women in velour zip-ups with immaculate nails.

  “Maya?” Alex’s face was peering up through the window of the passenger side. She climbed in.

  Alex switched on the air, but Maya kept her window down, the inside of her palm meeting the night as they drove. She counted until Alex asked her to roll it up—she was wasting air-conditioning. She had counted to thirty-seven—he was trying. Acrewood Township finished the day early, even in summer, and by this hour they passed only the occasional car, otherwise televisions flickering blue on the other side of air-conditioned curtains, the Valley Hill mall sewn up in silent languor, the night-covered trees swaying slightly as they communicated with each other. The town had taken its business inside; Acrewood belonged to the Rubins and their dread. The Corolla ate up the smooth slab of the road. This part of Bergen County had some of the highest taxes in the state, but they went to work; Alex didn’t need road signs to know he was in Passaic County because suddenly his tires were bouncing. Maya was comforted by the scratchy gray hide of her seat. Eugene was planning to change this model for an update, with a rearview camera and leather seats; she imagined her skin sticking to the leather, the bad feeling of having to find comfort in clothes too festive and crisp.