Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  “Nowhere,” she said after a silence. “So I guess we will put ‘closed’ on the form?”

  “It is kind to the child if he doesn’t have to wonder who his birth parents were,” Alex said, imitating Tran Caldwell. “You know what’s kind to the child?” he said. “When he doesn’t have to wonder who his birth parents are—exactly. When he lives as a happy child of parents who love him and does his schoolwork and goes to see friends and plays soccer with his dad.”

  “What if we get a six-year-old?”

  “We’re getting a baby. We’re putting that down. I’m sorry—you made the big decision, you have to let me make some little decisions.”

  “It’s true,” Maya said mournfully. “Who needs a child after that experience? It’s easier to get into the intelligence service. It could just be the four of us. Give your parents twenty years and they’ll be just like children. What more do we need?”

  “Also, I like New Jersey,” he said.

  “But we met in New York, Alex,” Maya said.

  “New York is for young people.”

  “We’re thirty-two, Alex. Thirty-three. It’s not old.”

  “That woman has three children already,” he said. “You would like to bring up your child on New York prices? Should I commute from the city to my father’s office? And which hospital is awaiting your mammography skills in Manhattan? What’s gotten into you?”

  What had gotten into her? Until now, she had imagined the arrival of a child in her life as an unconditional deliverance; the terror was of not persuading the agency people, and the full-bellied mothers, that she and Alex deserved to be parents. But what if the problems started only after the child arrived? Either because of the child, or how the child fit with her, or with Alex, or with the both of them, or a million other things. Light-headed, she had a macabre vision of putting up for adoption a child she’d just adopted. She felt crazy.

  “Can I drive, Alex?” she said.

  He looked at her helplessly. “What?” he said. “You don’t know how.”

  “I need to learn,” she said.

  “Right now?” he said, indicating the baked gray ribbon of highway before them, vehicles from a dozen tollbooth lanes slipstreaming into three. She saw herself reflected in his eyes: petulant, unsteady, impulsive.

  “I need to learn,” she repeated, but now in a summing-up way, as a note to the future. She looked back at the road and imagined one of the other cars spinning into their flank, all the activity that would bring on, all the new issues that would now need decision, management, resolution. She and Alex wouldn’t be hurt, of course, though the comfort of that certainty made her imagine the opposite—she saw her legs folded at an unnatural angle. In returning to the present moment and its unexceptional safety, she was flooded with relief. Imagining horror always helped her that way.

  6

  In the three days remaining before the weekend visit to Bender, the psychologist, each member of the Rubin family arrived at his own accommodations with the new situation. Eugene, having seen Max in bed, asked no questions about whether his grandson continued to spend his nights there. Raisa, wishing to hold on to her victory, did the same; she labored in the kitchen, grateful to be left alone. Maya allowed herself to be reassured that Max did not require a pediatric behavioral specialist, that Bender would do it. In the afternoons, instead of driving home from the hospital, she drove to the curb of Terhune Elementary and waited for her son: This far she could drive, and would have even if she couldn’t. She had proposed to the other Rubins to ask the school to put Max on watch, but they had talked her out of it: Why did she want to mark their child as a misfit? The other children would find out. So the principal was told that Max had merely gone to a friend’s without calling. The principal heard Maya out with indulgence: He had been level-headed while she panicked.

  Alex maintained routine—if no one else would stay calm, he would. Only now he didn’t know what to do with his afternoons—he noticed belatedly that he had become attached to his outdoor tent sessions with his son as a pleasurable burden: the men, alone, with the women and parents far away. Now forced to use his imagination to conjure an alternative, his mind rebelled—on principle, he did not like having to use his imagination; the need for it signified an inadequacy in the situation at hand, and he preferred to make peace with the inadequacy, to live without illusions. So he waited for his son to propose the alternative. His son did not, reverting to his afternoon duties at the side of his mother. Seeing them at the kitchen counter on his arrival from work, Alex went upstairs and turned on the television. Downstairs, they chopped and banged pots and stuffed napkins into crystal drinking glasses. Maya tried to consume her son’s attention with greater tasks than before: one afternoon, he was finally elevated to knife work. Her left hand closed his over a fleecy clump of parsley; her right steadied his as he held a small chef’s knife she had gone out to buy for his size. Obediently, Max’s hand moved under hers.

  Alex appeared in the kitchen and stared at them—their son could not be entrusted to return from school alone, but she was teaching him to be more deft with a knife? She gazed back at Alex—what was the worry if Max’s behavior was normal, as he insisted? Alex shrugged and walked out to the living room. And yet, ultimately, their eyes separated without animosity; ultimately, their eyes said to each other: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. This kinship rubbed the edge from their disagreement: the kind of understanding spouses rely on and regret in equal degree.

  As a whole, the Rubins, until now of the opinion that psychology was for quadriplegics and nut jobs alone, relented: Fine, let him go see Bender if Maya wanted it so badly. Their derision for Bender’s profession coexisted with a demand for its effectiveness; if their son and grandson had to succumb to the embarrassment, let him be healed rapidly, at the least. Any other outcome would confirm the other opinion, that it was all quackery. In this way, the Rubins forestalled the possibility of disappointment; each result would give them what they wanted.

  Alex insisted on not telling Max about the impending visit to Bender lest he be needlessly frightened, but Max knew that some judgment awaited him; that is understood even by an eight-year-old. Eugene need not have refrained from asking about where his grandson was sleeping—Max continued to spend his nights in bed, though no one seemed to notice, save his mother, who seemed either unconcerned by the original behavior or unmollified by the fix. In fact, during one afternoon’s battered whitefish, Maya knelt down, took Max by the forearms, and said: “You know, you can sleep on the floor. You don’t have to sleep in the bed.” So it did make a difference to her. That night, he returned to the floor. As a kind of insurance in case his grandfather came to complain, Max discarded his pajamas and slept in briefs like a grown-up so his lungs would get bigger in the night.

  Maya operated in glazed preoccupation; there was so often, on her face, a gathering of lines that parted only, and only sometimes, when she and Max took up cooking together, to which Max submitted every afternoon for that reason. Even at his age, he understood the cooking as a specialized task performed by a particular caste, but he was too young to understand whether the caste was lowly or high.

  Over the whitefish, he had turned up to her and said: “Would you still cook if you didn’t have to feed us?”

  She put down her knife and rubbed his shoulder. “But where would you be?”

  “Like when we go to Mexico. Do you still make dinner?”

  “No, I don’t, sweetheart. Not really.”

  “So you do it for us.”

  “In a way.”

  “So what do you do when no one’s around?”

  “What, honey?” she bent down.

  “When you’re by yourself. What do you do?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I’m not alone that often. When you go away to Mexico, I miss you. I walk around the house. I don’t do much of anything. Maybe it’s not right and I should do more with myself. Why are you asking me?”

  He said he
was curious.

  “Is that why you ran away, Max? Because you wanted to be alone?”

  “No,” he said. “I told you—I was sad.”

  “But why did that make you want to be alone—instead of with us?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She let him be.

  About Bender, Max had been told that his mother needed to see the psychologist—in the view of some, this was the truth—and could Max come along, because then they could go for bagels, his favorite; his mother had been wanting some, too. When the prescribed hour came, Max came down from his room only on the third summons. He looked pale and sleepy. His jeans hung on him like a laundry bag, and he hadn’t even hitched them with a belt. Maya let it be, but Alex stared at his son distrustfully.

  In the backseat—starting to do Bender’s work before they reached Bender, Eugene again claimed that Max was spoiled by indulgence and insisted the boy be retired from the front—Max watched the leafing trees rush by even though Eugene had affixed a DVD player to the back of the passenger seat in consolation. Max had never shown an interest in movies. He had liked blocks, picture books with popping-up animals, little mallets, buttons, and knobs—he dragged it all around, liking the feel in his hands.

  Next to Max in the backseat, like a squat, silent animal, rode a case of Turkish cherry jam, an enticement from Eugene to Bender. No Rubin had called a Bender in more than a year, and if memory served—and in such cases, at least on the aggrieved side, memory served dutifully—a Bender had been the last to issue a halfhearted invitation to socialize. So when Maya insisted that Max see a psychologist, Eugene agreed not because he thought the man could be useful—psychologists were charlatans, in his view—but because, disparage Bender or not, the ignored invitation had been eating at him. Eugene declined to be the one to call Bender, however, leaving diplomacy to Anatolian cherries.

  “We’re paying him,” Alex had said when his father had proffered the tray, each bottle blown in the shape of a laughing pasha. “I can’t believe he’s charging us, but he is. This isn’t necessary.”

  “It’s the jam they serve with tea at the steam baths,” Eugene said. “Bender can develop positive associations and charge you less.”

  Alex wanted to call no more than his father, but Bender was a Rubin-side friend—Bender’s wife and Raisa had met at a grocery store years before and dragged the men into acquaintance. More importantly, Bender was the lesser of the evils Maya had dreamed up, the other being an American therapist. And so—even though Max was seeing a psychologist on his wife’s restless urging; even though it was his mother who had drawn the first bridge to the Benders; even though it was Eugene who had insisted on ignoring Bender’s last invite—somehow the privilege of calling Bender had fallen to Alex. He knew that Bender would respond to Alex’s greeting with a long, satisfied silence. But it was even longer than Alex expected. Alex interrupted Bender’s pleasure and tried to explain the issue in a brief, halting monologue, which Bender cut off to issue the magnanimity for which Alex had hoped. “I would be more than happy to see the boy,” he had said in a narrowly professional tone. Then he clarified that it was uncustomary for him to answer the telephone—he had a receptionist; two in the morning, such was demand—and that Bella out front would take down the details. “We take cash and credit cards but no checks,” Bender specified before instructing Alex to hold the line.

  As chatty as her employer was clipped—given Max’s name and age, Bella sighed and broke into a sedative patter—the receptionist caused Alex a mild palpitation when she named the cost of a forty-five-minute session (one hundred dollars). “It’s twenty-five dollars less than the usual rate,” she said. Sensing this wasn’t enough, she added: “And a hundred and fifty less than a therapist in the city.”

  +

  “What have I been up to?” Bender asked. Alex and Maya were seated in front of him, Max outside in reception. Alex had been considering the psychologist’s office with hostility—a globe on a spindle; a foot-long replica of a sailboat replete with baby sailors; for some reason, scales of justice—and had asked the question with an excessive and insincere enthusiasm. Bender joined his hands and shrugged: “I have written a book.” He rose and extracted a slim volume from a wood-paneled bookshelf that held heavy blue tomes expressing the full range of mental disorder. Between them, the glossy white volume roosted insignificantly, though Bender had augmented its presence by stacking a dozen copies together. “You can keep it,” he said, returning to his chair. “Maybe you’ll learn something.” They watched his thin fingers scrawl out a dedication on the front page.

  In general, he had not aged. He did not look younger than his fifty-five or so, but not older, either. It occurred to Alex that it was this stranded age that made socializing difficult, for Bender and his wife (technically she was younger than Bender, but she looked like his mother, which always made Alex think of George H. W. and Barbara Bush, during whose tenure Alex and Maya had married) were older than Alex and Maya but younger than Eugene and Raisa. His own haleness Bender had once, on being faced with a less-than-salubrious table at the Rubins’, attributed to being a gourmand. (That is what he said: “I am a gourmand,” which Eugene sang out in mockery at least once a week.) Bender ate sushi three times a week and boiled greens most of the rest and did not long for any of the sinful indulgences Raisa had laid out. “You have a lucky metabolism,” he had said to Eugene, “but cholesterol is cholesterol. You are thin thanks to genes. I am thin thanks to consciousness.” “It turns out he’s a nutritionist also,” Eugene had said, flicking a slice of peppered fatback into his mouth.

  “There you are,” Bender said, extending the title. Maya and Alex both reached for it, which led to nervous laughter. The Revelation of a Russian Psychotherapist on the American Land, the cover said. It depicted, in one collapsed tableau, a kerchiefed woman in a peasant smock alighting from a ship hold with a dusty valise and a trembling smile; the Statue of Liberty, its face crossed with something other than joy on sighting this belted Madonna of steerage; and the Chrysler Building piercing the sky like a phallus. The book was self-published and written directly in English.

  “We will read it very closely,” Maya said.

  “There is a section on the psychological lessons of Russian literature,” Bender said. “I hope it meets with Raisa’s approval.” Raisa had been a literature instructor in the Soviet Union. Bender bent his head in tribute.

  “They send their greetings,” Maya rushed to add.

  “How is Eugene?” Bender’s face clouded over. “I’m grateful for the jam, but in honesty—too much sugar. There are sugarless jams—he should look into it.”

  “Since our time is so short,” Alex broke in, “we would like to tell you the situation with Max.” Alex looked at Maya, hoping she would continue.

  Maya was about to start, but Bender cut her off. “I do not care what the parents think,” he waved his hand. “I care what the child thinks. How about you switch places with the boy? Just wait outside. Bella can give you coffee, or there is a deli just a quarter mile down the road. Come back in”—he checked his watch—“thirty-five minutes.” He looked up at Alex, who fought heat in his face.

  “What are we supposed to tell him?” Alex said. “We thought you would discuss it with us. We said we are going to the doctor because his mother has an appointment.”

  “Oh, yes?” Bender smiled with pity. “Perhaps, indeed, we should begin with the parents. But when the stove is broken, you start with the stove. Then you can check the gas lines.” He fell back in his chair to allow this observation to settle on the Rubins. “You are not professionals,” he went on, “but you haven’t helped with this deception. Now the boy will feel tricked.” He shot his cuffs, gathered his hands into a steeple, and laid his elbows on the edge of his desk. “Let’s work with what we’ve got. You made white black, let’s not make it white all over again. I’ll tell him that I’ve spoken to his mother, and now I’d like to speak to him, because maybe he can t
ell me something that’ll help. Does he remember me?” Bender said.

  “We speak about you all the time,” Maya lied.

  Maya dreaded explaining to Max that Bender wanted to speak to him, but even before the psychologist came bounding out after the Rubins, the boy put down the magazine in his hands and obediently slid off his chair, as if accepting a punishment.

  The parents watched Bender’s door close. Maya’s heart tumbled. Was she doing damage? No, they had to try. What damage could a half hour with that man do? Bender, at least, seemed confident of improvement. And who knew? Her boy might walk out of the room changed; isn’t that what psychologists specialized in? She was cornering herself with worry so she could remember that things might, after all, turn out more positively. She wondered if she rang an alarm merely to feel relief at its falseness.

  Maya tried to occupy herself by flipping through Bender’s book. Bender, who seemed disapproving of so much, turned out to also contain great enthusiasms, which he allowed to pour forth within the privacy of two covers. An immigrant at the not-very-old but no-longer-so-young age of thirtysomething, Bender had been driven by immigration and a motherly wife into a responsible vocation, setting, and lifestyle. But within burned a performer, a wit, an irregular mind. “Hello, my dear fellow Americans!” his preface began. “Russians have come! Being a psychologist I had paid attention to your American psychotherapy, of course. And so many thoughts and feelings came to my mind! Once a youthful poet from one good old Russian movie said: ‘Happiness—it is when you are understood.’ And I have a strong desire to share with you my thoughts and feelings. Reading textbooks is useful, but it is boring, I will tell you. But trying to help myself and other people to adapt to your country, I wrote my book, where the rules of psychology are expressed on the basis of the examples from life, literature, and art.”

  Maya flipped the pages to see if Bender had culled any lessons from family life, but despaired to see, after the dedication—a quote about trees and flowering out that Bender had scrawled in a Soviet person’s unmistakable hand, at once florid and cramped—no such subject included in the table of contents: