Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

Maya nodded silently, afraid that if she spoke, she would be cut off by tears. “Please,” she managed hoarsely.

  “I have one,” Frank said. “Seventeen. He’s not missing, but it feels that way.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m sorry—that was flippant.”

  “He’s somewhere around here,” Maya said stubbornly. “He likes grassy places.”

  Frank nodded indulgently. Maya became aware of how shallowly optimistic her words sounded. She felt no especial chagrin, for she really felt what she claimed to feel. He was somewhere around here, near the end of the line, in countryside that looked more like Ukraine than New Jersey or New York.

  She had not known that you could have such complete darkness somewhere in New York or New Jersey; she had never been anywhere else in America. Because of a vestibular imbalance aggravated by pressure changes, Maya was unable to fly, and this prevented her from going far quickly; Alex’s work prevented them from going far slowly; as a result, she was the one waving good-bye as a taxi took Alex, Raisa, Eugene, and Max to the airport for the Rubins’ annual all-inclusive week on the Riviera Maya.

  Frank called out for her. The ash was hanging off her cigarette in a barrel. She smiled with deprecation and ground it underfoot. The Warwick Bus Terminal felt like a ship at the edge of the world: a strong wind and it would tip over. “What is it like here?” Maya said.

  Frank shrugged and started on another cigarette. “It’s a farm town. Up that way is a lake full of bald eagles. On holidays, the wait time between trips is more like two hours, so I drive up there if it’s daylight. They’ve got an itty-bitty type of frog there, it’s all over the place.”

  “You smoke too much,” Maya said. “I work in a hospital.”

  “It would be my tenth if you were allowed to smoke on the bus,” he said.

  “I’m going to throw out the cigarette,” she reported, as if she feared the darkness would take her.

  “I am destroying my health, and also a litterer,” Frank said, looking down at the butt he had tossed underfoot.

  Maya walked to the edge of the terminal. From the well-lit spot where she had stood with Frank, the area beyond had seemed impenetrable, but away from the light it picked up a blue hem that softened the darkness. Maya stared at the crumpled butt in her hand, which sent up a distressed odor. On the other side of the roadway was an embankment that rose several feet above human height. It tilted at an angle that made it seem climbable; several cotoneasters spotted the bank. The roadway was freshly paved; Alex would have been pleased; Maya could not recall one vehicle passing in the time she and Frank had stood smoking, though, surely, some had. It wasn’t the swallowing darkness she feared, but her own unreliability; her attention was off.

  Maya felt Frank at her shoulder. “I am not sure do you want solitude or company,” he said watchfully.

  She conjured a weak smile that she hoped showed her gratitude. “I’m just killing time till—” He pointed at the bus. She nodded. She was standing farther from home than she had traveled in years, talking openly with a man she hadn’t known two hours before. The order of things was like the thin spots of ice on a wintertime lake. You stepped badly and the cold gleam was around your ankles. This was what Raisa was trying to ward off. Usually, Maya waited out Raisa’s admonitions: superstitions and prejudice. But it occurred to her now that the woman had lived a life, too—had not always been a round ball at the feet of her husband and son.

  “When Max was tiny,” she said to Frank, “he disliked even to be taken out of the house. When the stroller appeared, he would bawl. My father-in-law said you have to break boys—the outdoors turns little boys into healthy adults. He decorates an office chair fifty hours a week, so I guess he would know. They were sitting out on the deck one time—Max was already a walker, my father-in-law was reading the newspaper—and a swarm of hornets came down over his head. I started screaming and ran for him—and was bitten. My father-in-law reached for him—and was bitten. But Max was not bitten.

  “There were other times—we had to put a kind of harness around him so he wouldn’t swim out too far in the lake. And every time, you ask yourself: Is that him being a child, or is that him being my child? And all the months that have gone by without you remembering, the count goes back to zero.”

  “I don’t understand fully,” Frank said apologetically.

  “Max is adopted,” she said, not looking at him.

  “Oh,” Frank bounced his head.

  “No one knows,” she said. “Not even Max. And I just said it to you.”

  “Oh,” Frank said in a different way. “You ask yourself the same questions when you’re biological,” he said, wanting to help her.

  “Yes, but you can answer them,” she said.

  “I guess so,” he said. They stared at the darkened roadway and the bank beyond. “He’ll turn up,” Frank said with the resentment of someone forced into platitudes.

  Maya felt a pain climb up her right arm and go off between her shoulder and collarbone. She was grateful for the sensation—her body at its own work, beyond hers. She wanted to use it. She dropped the butt into the trash can and set off across the roadway. A feeble call rose from Frank. She ignored it.

  “Hey!” Frank called out. “Lady. I don’t know your name!”

  Her nails sank into the dried soil of the bank like a hide. She wanted something, anything, to occupy her hands, which for six hours had flitted between her mouth, her temples, her chest, as if she were restraining organs that wanted to leap out. Up above the lip of the bank, she imagined that her son awaited her in the shallows of some lake like the frog Frank watched on holiday trips. On her touch, the frog would transform into her son, as in the fairy tale. Her son turned into a frog when he left her, and now she would rescue him.

  Frank cursed, chucked his cigarette, and set off after Maya, his girth preventing direct forward movement. Some of the awaiting passengers looked up. He looked ready to burst.

  The bank shuddered slightly under her hands. She clutched roots and plants—the earth was less bare than it had looked from across the road—and prayed that they weren’t poison ivy. The soil crumbled in her fingers like dry bread and lined her fingernails. She felt a sweat start in her groin.

  She was surprised to discover herself fit enough to scamper up the bank without great difficulty; her body worked with resentful, creaking eagerness. She felt a deranged thrill. She was nearly up to the brim when Frank arrived at the bank. He stared at it uncomprehendingly.

  “Lady,” he whispered.

  “It’s Maya,” she called back from her place.

  “You’re crazy!” he yelled. “What the hell are you going to do?” He affixed himself to the bank like a crab and clung to it, as if this effort alone was noteworthy, and now some mechanism should accelerate him up the incline. He cursed all mothers and began to lumber after Maya.

  “Frank, you need to quit smoking,” Maya breathed over her shoulder as she scaled the last of the bank, panting happily. Even in the grape-colored darkness, she saw the stains on her capris. There was loose soil between her toes.

  “I don’t leave the ground,” he gasped. “I don’t take elevators. I don’t fly. I drive the bus and I go home.”

  “I don’t fly either,” she called.

  There was nothing up above the lip, only a farm field flanked by telephone posts, wires clumping between them; it was divided into furrowed rows of what looked like lettuce and an unmowed segment that looked like pasture, though she saw no animals or fencing. Maya made the outline of a house on the far edge of the field, its windows glimmering like gold icons. It was definitely pasture—she smelled shit. The air was prickly with chill, and goose bumps went up on her skin. She breathed deeply of cow shit.

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” Frank said. He was bent over the top of the bank, wheezing dangerously.

  She turned around—from the height of the embankment, the bus terminal was like a settlement on a lower flank of a mountain. She reached down and got a han
d under both of Frank’s armpits and pulled. He was heavy and her hands slid down his arms until she was within several inches of the maimed hand. Frank heaved into the sweet earth. She moved to close Frank’s hands with her own and awaited the feel of the tormented flesh, but he pulled away at the last moment.

  Frank coughed painfully. “I have a lunatic on my hands.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her brief hilarity gone. “You didn’t have to—” She stopped herself from speaking obtusely.

  She slipped back to the ground, where Frank was. The smell of shit entered her nostrils more forcefully. She was sitting in the grass like a baby, one foot splayed under the other knee as if she had yet to learn where everything went. She pulled a clump of grass out of the soil with each hand. What kind of grass was it? Her son would know. She had walked ten miles with him to gather the many grasses of New Jersey for science class. He had rained the names on her—fescue, ryegrass, bluegrass, orchard grass, bromegrass, timothy, switchgrass, bluestem big and little, deertongue. They sounded like witch potions, and she felt slightly occult in their wanders through fields with no trails but ample signage against trespassing. “What kind of grass is it, son?” she said now to no one, released the clumps, and fell onto her back. The grass was itchy beneath her, and she tried not to move. A rash of stars disfigured the night sky above.

  In the beginning, Max was so foreign to Maya that she regularly imagined slipping, knocking her head, and waking up with the delicious illusion that Max had come out of her. She came closer to this reckless action—that desk corner, this shelf—than anyone knew. Maya had gotten the one child in the universe who slept solidly through the night at twelve weeks. (Raisa rubbed a cognac-touched pinky across the boy’s gums before bed for insurance.) And he had gotten the one mother who wished he would wake, bawl, drive her mad. She wanted to roll her eyes in the supermarket with the other young mothers (though her contemporaries were now on their second and even third children). She wanted to clasp her head because she couldn’t remember the last time she had slept a full night, make jokes about how people in her condition shouldn’t operate machinery or make important decisions. But Maya had received the blessing of remaining clear-minded through her son’s flawless adjustment to her home. It was she who was failing to adjust to him. She felt like a nurse, not a mother, and even as such was only moderately needed.

  She learned that babies processed breast milk faster than formula and therefore awoke more frequently from hunger, and actually spent an afternoon on the Internet researching surgery to stimulate artificial production of breast milk. She read the testimonies of early mothers like a draft dodger reading the weary but proud reminiscences of war heroes. Officially, it was awful, just awful, but when the milk finally let down, and all those hormones swarmed through the bloodstream—the young Internet mothers had not felt that kind of elevation since high school acid. And their breasts—it was just awful what it did to their breasts. They swelled like melons, like grapefruit, like coconuts, like pumpkins, like squash—the Internet mothers were georgic metaphorists. Maya wanted her breasts to swell, to be strained by their weight. She wanted to whine to Alex about their soreness. Apparently, she had adopted a child to remind herself of all the ways she wasn’t a real woman.

  Then six months arrived, it was time for more solid foods, and the breast milk predicament was concluded. Maya wondered if this, now, would mean intimacy and attachment; it meant inconceivable boredom. She actually longed to squeeze tits at the hospital. Eugene and Alex had insisted on prolonging Maya’s permitted maternity leave, and she resented them for it. A howling emptiness from eight to six—she could not wait for Alex’s stories of import battles with Customs—mitigated only by the appearance of Raisa around nine in the morning. Maya’s social circle had somehow signed up a mute newborn and a logorrheic mother-in-law, and thrown out what few others it had. Maya imagined that she was slowly becoming Raisa. She was becoming the woman who bustles. She stared at the older woman and asked: What distinguishes me from this woman? We both live in this home, more or less; we both spend the day in the kitchen; we both watch Alex Rubin for signs of distress.

  She tried to read books, but it was impossible to focus with Raisa addressing her at five-minute intervals. (The undeclared price for Raisa’s helping was full-time interaction.) So Maya researched boredom. The Internet (Raisa was slightly fearful of the Internet and hesitated to disrupt Maya’s work at it) recommended the Eastern solution, which was the opposite of the Russian solution. Go deeper into the boredom. Maya could hardly understand what that meant. She sat with her eyes closed and tried to “go deeper into the boredom.” Invariably, she imagined boredom as a dreary, wet wine cellar and she just had to keep going deeper into it. Not much came of all this.

  Did all adoptive mothers feel this punishment, to remain aloof from their children in some unnameable but undeniable way all because they had not birthed them? If so, how did they bear it? Did they close their eyes to this truth, or persuade themselves out of it? Or maybe this was Maya’s affliction alone? Maya could not speak about what she felt to Alex or even Raisa. To the news that a woman who logged so many hours next to the child felt unclose with the child, the Rubins would only purse their foreheads and say: “But you’re with Max all the time.” Alex cooed to the child when he came home; Eugene shadow-boxed with the tiny bundle in the crib; and Raisa insisted at periodic intervals that Maya hand over the baby. But Raisa preferred to cook and scrub, and the men retreated as soon as they completed their routines. Even when the house was full, Maya was alone with Max.

  Maya experienced this as part of the problem—she felt distance with Max because they felt distance with Max—until the afternoon of an otherwise usual weekday. Max was napping. Raisa was scrubbing. Staring into the refrigerator, Maya detected an unexisting need for milk and fresh greens. She only wanted out of the house—anywhere. She asked if Raisa would keep an ear out for Max’s monitor and went off in the older Corolla they drove then—to the Russian grocery store she could manage to drive. She was holding two loaves of bread in the aisle. She could have been there for ten minutes or forty. Suddenly, she experienced a ravaging desire to be next to Max. She remained in place—she feared it would vanish when she moved. She needed to touch him, not the loaves. Finally, she dropped the bread to the floor, left her half-filled basket in the aisle, and ran out of the store, as if unsure would he be there when she reached home.

  Storming into the house, she was out of breath, her hair half out of its ponytail. Maya pretended she was dying for the bathroom. But you didn’t buy anything, Raisa asked her back. It was closed, Maya lied. Instead of the bathroom, Maya went for her son. As she looked at Max, sleeping, she imagined that he knew the truth—about why she went, why she returned, why empty-handed. He was so solid and strong, her child, the unperturbable sleeper, that he could forgive a mother who found him foreign. And this brought her closer to him. Adoptive mothers seek out explanations that birth mothers do not. Maya’s was: She and Max constituted a family of their own—a family within the larger family. They were together, alone.

  The Rubins came around. The boy was unique—because the Rubins were unique, because they had crossed an ocean and set themselves up from zero on a new shore, and now they had multiple cars and multiple homes and an import business that might never take authoritative hold of Customs regulations but would cross the million-dollar mark in revenue each year all the same. Approaching Max with shyness and embarrassment, as they had when he was an infant, was a luxury of easier days, when they could afford to indulge their anxieties instead of the family’s need for cohesion. The black halo that accompanied Max’s arrival in their lives—he wasn’t their blood—would never leave their cognizance, but they would save Max from its ever entering his. And this omission—was it not aided by the possibility that here was a recessive gift from the venturesome depths of the family gene pool? While the Rubins would admit to nothing other than delirious rage at the fair-haired Slavs who had made
their lives so painful in the Soviet Union, the back springs of at least Eugene’s mind purred with satisfaction at having such an unquestionable goy join their team. Next to the Rubins, Max was like a bleached sun crashing through a dark copse. Each of them made their adjustments.

  Frank led Maya back to the bus like a grieving widow—the field sloped down to the road about a hundred feet from where they had climbed the bank. She felt his warped fingers at her elbow like a burning spot; the Russian superstition against touching deformity burned it a second time. Because of Maya Rubin, the 10:12 to New York City left with delay. The mounting passengers avoided her gaze from the front seat, where she had been deposited by Frank, dirty and disheveled, her hair sprung from its ponytail, her hair band sacrificed to the climb.

  Raisa was right; the night proposed only loss-filled reflections, but what if, in fact, a loss had occurred? Wasn’t the night the ideal setting just then? As the bus touched off, Maya said temporary farewell to her son. She slept the entire way home.

  4

  At Acrewood, Maya felt a palm on her shoulder. The bus was idling, the door open to a better-lit night. “It’s Acrewood, isn’t it?” Frank said. Drowsily, she roused herself. Her breath was sour and something was aching after being suspended awkwardly for an hour.

  “You owe me a return ticket,” Frank said. “And laundry services. And a new hip.”

  She embraced him. He laughed, embarrassed, but then eased into it. “You go ahead now,” he said shyly from her collarbone.

  “Stop smoking, Frank.” She released him and took the stairs down to the ground. It was a day of exiting buses with hands empty. She heard the doors close behind her and felt the smeared pockets of her capris. With great belatedness, she discovered that she had taken nothing—not her bag, nor wallet, nor cell phone. Frank was disengaging the brake, the bus about to roll forward, when she spun around and banged on the glass of the door. Wearily, Frank opened the door.