Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  “You take Maya—your mama,” Alex said. “And you take Alex—me. And you add them together. What do you get?” He inclined his heads toward the backseat. No answer came.

  “You take the first two letters of your mama’s name, and the last letter of mine, and what do you get?” Alex repeated.

  “Max,” Max acquiesced.

  “See?”

  “I like it,” said Max.

  “He likes it,” Alex repeated.

  “But that’s not what Grandma and Grandpa did with you,” Max said. “Eugene. And Raisa.” He thought about it.

  “Sometimes you get named after someone your parents want to remember,” his father said. “I had a grandfather named Alex. He died before I was born. They called me Alex to honor him.”

  “What’s honor?”

  “You’ll learn all about it when you grow up,” Alex said. “Don’t crowd your head.”

  “Honor is respect,” Maya said. “It’s when you like someone very much.” She turned back to her son. He seemed less upset than when they had left. She allowed herself to be supported by this.

  “If you like another name better than Max, you can tell us,” she said. She weathered a look from Alex. “For instance, when I was little, I wanted to be called Zoya. Do you want to call me Zoya once in a while instead of Mama?”

  Max shook his head.

  “Okay—what if I call you Maximilian?”

  “No.”

  “What if I call you Sam?”

  “Noooo,” Max whined.

  Alex kept his eyes on the windshield—she could try if she wanted. He savored his success with Max and did not want to be sullied by Maya’s failure. Maya fidgeted in the front seat. Her seat belt was suffocating her. She hated seat belts. She had been told at the hospital that in some countries motorists could purchase T-shirts emblazoned with a diagonal black stripe, to fool traffic policemen.

  “What about Tim?” she said to her son.

  “What is wrong with you?” Alex hissed.

  Maya saw the beginning of tears on Max’s face. Because she had gone too far? Because Alex had raised his voice? They did not allow themselves to argue in front of Max. Alex’s eyes bored into the side of her face. “Watch the road,” she said in defeat. She asked him to pull over, knowing he didn’t like to—he didn’t wish to be in the breakdown lane unless he was really in breakdown—and climbed into the backseat next to Max, where she covered him with kisses. She cradled her son against the flat board of her chest and rocked him until he quieted down. Alex chauffeured silently the rest of the way.

  When they returned to the house, Alex shut himself in the garage, as if he had been the one whom Maya had unfairly attacked. Maya, no nerve to take on a large meal, diced fresh vegetables for a salad. She was so absentminded that after she had chopped cucumbers, carrots, and a handful of roasted red peppers, she started hacking the knife through a mound of corn kernels. She let the knife fall to the board, drew a wrist across her forehead, and closed her eyes. She was interrupted by the porch door sliding open to reveal Eugene and Raisa hefted with grocery bags. “So, are the inner demons cured?” Eugene yelled. As if Alex had been waiting for the appearance of referees, the garage door burst open.

  “Who’s got the inner demons?” he battered his wife. “Tim, she calls him.” He lowered his voice. “Why don’t you tell him his mother’s name, too? Sit him down and tell him the whole story.” He raised it again: “Meanwhile, that genius wants him to change his name and purchase an animal.” He held up a palm, fastidious and insulted; the fingers were tight with each other as if he was swearing on a sacred book. “No more quackery. I went along with this, but: enough.”

  “I told you,” Eugene said happily.

  “But Bender was your idea,” Maya said to her husband. “I wanted to take him to an American psychologist.”

  “Was taking him to a psychologist my idea?” Alex said. “Psychologists are for mentally ill people.” Alex mimed a paraplegic. “Max is fine. I’ve talked with him. We understood each other. He’s perfectly normal.”

  “Except for this one thing,” Maya said. “Which puts his life in danger.”

  Alex cast Maya a contemptuous look. “You keep taking him to Bender and the like, they’ll find what you want and ten other things. Anything to keep the checks coming.”

  “Someone’s always cheating you, Alex,” Maya said.

  “For me, this is the end of the conversation.” Alex’s look furiously offered to repay further silence with silence. Eugene and Raisa swiveled their heads between them.

  “Bender made several points in his book—” Maya began.

  “The end!” Alex bellowed. He did not allow himself to raise his voice at his wife often.

  Maya gave up and returned to the vegetables. Alex returned to the garage. Eugene unloaded the grocery bags around Maya, whistling an old tune. Raisa admonished him—it was bad luck to whistle inside.

  7

  2004

  Adopting a child, it turned out, was nearly as difficult as conceiving one. Mishkin, the new adoption supervisor, had laughed when the aspiring parents had gently inquired whether a Jewish child might be available. “A Jewish child?” he’d said. “A unicorn comes online more often than Jewish.” Even though the Rubins were participating in the last American pastime that allowed for open discrimination—they could ask for Jewish; the birth parents could ask for non-Jewish—realistically, their choice was between a Catholic, familiarly dark-haired but unfamiliarly Hispanic, and a Protestant, familiarly Caucasian but unfamiliarly blond. Asian Americans seemed to fall into the same category as Jews, though there were plenty of Asian children from Asia. There were African American children, of course, and these were—no way around it—less expensive, but the Rubins could perform only one radical departure from the familiar at a time.

  Periodically Mishkin called to haggle: raise the acceptable age; expand the list of eligible birth countries; change the adoption from “closed” to “open”—no one did “closed” anymore. Several times Maya came close to buckling, but then Alex spoke to the supervisor in such a way that Mishkin never needled again. Maya was at once grateful and angry. Grateful to be looked after, angry that Alex had disciplined the man who, Maya felt, held the keys to the kingdom. And, in fact, Mishkin, who was on speakerphone, had signed off with: “You want the impossible. You want an American newborn in five minutes or less, without a relationship with the birth parents.”

  “What, Mr. Mishkin, you work on commission?” Alex had replied. The line went dead.

  Three generations before, Mishkin’s own ancestors had made the passage from Old World to new, and the soft spot—not to say unreasonable patience—that Mishkin confessed to feeling for the Rubins he explained on account of this heritage. In fact, the Rubins had stirred in him such a fury of curiosity and nostalgia that he decided to embark on a self-discovery tour in the archives of both the Mishkin family and Ellis Island. It was because Mishkin had overheard the Rubins whispering in what he thought was Russian at IAS that he had inquired, and volunteered to take over the file from Slab-Face.

  This was a strange custom of American Jews: They assaulted recent émigrés from the former Pale with biographical thumbnails meant to produce . . . what exactly? Maya would listen politely before finally, timidly, asking if the Rubins’ profile had had any bites. It had not, Mishkin conceded, which filled Maya with a brutal sense of rejection, as if not only genetics but even other humanity had deemed the Rubins unworthy of parenthood.

  “Ask him if he knows Mishkin is the name of Dostoevsky’s idiot,” Eugene remarked after yet another Mishkin monologue about patrimony, casting a meaningful look at his wife, the former teacher of literature. Eugene, like his son, considered Mishkin tainted by the whole idea of adoption and refused to deal with him, leaving it to Maya, though the adoption supervisor’s cavalier style and self-absorbed prologues enabled Eugene to pretend that he disliked Mishkin on Maya’s behalf.

  “Dostoevsky’s idiot
is an idealistic figure,” Raisa reminded her husband.

  And then, with no ceremony—“it only takes one,” Mishkin had warned them, “like love”—the wait was suddenly over. A young couple in Montana had chosen them to receive their newborn. Maya felt rewarded, or placated. Like an addict slipping back under the spell, she had cooked prodigious amounts of food during their months of waiting for news, pressing it on the senior Rubins, Moira and the others at the hospital, the trashman, the electric-meter man, the lawn guys, the lifeguard at the Sylvan Gate pool. Periodically, Alex would wander into the kitchen, purse his lips at the bedlam, extract the cognac from the cupboard, and tiptoe out carefully. “The maternal instinct is kicking in,” Eugene observed sourly. She had pressed her kitchen, the only blandishment in her arsenal, so fervidly on the universe that God had broken down, relented, agreed to send her a child if only she’d quit. However: Montana?

  “The child must be sick in some way,” Maya had said to Mishkin when he’d told her, late one afternoon. She was just back from the hospital.

  “No!” Mishkin yelled. “Not at all. You must not think in that old-world way, Mrs. Rubin.”

  “So what is the reason?” she said, trying to ignore Mishkin’s insult. She tried to sound skeptical. How odd that a child could be announced like the win in a contest. But wasn’t that the way with normal mothers? One day they woke up and, eureka: pregnant. It was in what followed that the pathways diverged. A normal mother had nine months to get used to the result; Maya could have her child right away. She stopped herself: She was missing crucial information being transmitted by Mishkin. In the chaos of her mind, he appeared to her as a spoonbill, the huge mouth moving endlessly.

  “We don’t know the reason, Mrs. Rubin,” he was saying. “We don’t ask. But the child is healthy. Which isn’t always the case, you are right. But it is here. Full medical checkup, full family history, verified and reverified.”

  “He is just born?” she said.

  “Just about.”

  “So why don’t they want him?” Maya said.

  “Do you want him, Mrs. Rubin? Let’s not lose our eyes on the prize here. They chose you, Mrs. Rubin. They want you.”

  Maya tried to ignore the warming flush of the affirmation. “Why us?” she insisted. She tried to keep up the skepticism that Alex would have channeled were he home. (Had the adoption supervisor purposefully called when he knew he would get the gullible Rubin?)

  “I don’t know. Because you’re far. They want the baby to go far.”

  “Far from where?”

  “Montana, like I told you.”

  “What’s wrong with Montana?” Maya said. “Where is it?”

  “Again, I don’t know. I mean, I know where Montana is. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s beautiful.”

  “It can’t be more beautiful than New Jersey,” Maya said savagely, and, defeated by the mysteriousness of her ill will, sank into a chair.

  “I don’t have a dog in this fight except you getting a kid, Mrs. Rubin,” Mishkin said. “Can I ask you a question because this, actually, we didn’t discuss. Did you hope for a boy or a girl?”

  “I don’t know,” Maya said. “A boy?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. It’s a boy.”

  In the kitchen that evening, Maya and Alex sat and stared at each other. Montana? Well, they had demanded an American child; this, too, was part of America. They had imagined Chicago, Florida, even Texas. But Montana? Maya had almost asked Mishkin if English was spoken there, then lamented her idiocy.

  On the phone, she had declared that she would refuse the adoption until she spoke to the parents. With satisfaction, the adoption supervisor reminded her that she and her husband had insisted on closed. Photos would come via the agency, the medical work-over, too. But no information about the parents. At a certain point, the Rubins would have to fly to Montana and take up residence in a hotel room while the state verified their identity and dotted the i’s with New Jersey. Then the child was theirs.

  The pictures arrived with an equally perturbing lack of significance; she was looking at a newborn with sleepy eyes and a wary expression. He looked like a big cake. Why was this her child? Desperately, she studied the margins of the photographs instead of the child at their center. Who were the parents? How did they live? Were there baby wipes in Montana? How did they hold the feet when they wiped him? Did he get diarrhea? How much diarrhea was okay before getting concerned? It was the parents she wished to possess. By being denied to her, they became what she most wanted to know. She and Alex signed the papers.

  A week after, the late-evening phone call came—too late for it to mean anything good. Alex was on the La-Z-Boy clicking through channels, and Maya was making a soup to last their lunches the rest of the week. Wooden spoon fishing for cabbage leaves, she called out to Alex, but he had fallen asleep. She hustled over to the cordless and jammed the receiver under her ear. Her stomach lurched. Mishkin wouldn’t call so late unless there was terrible news, unless it could not wait till the following morning, unless it was all off.

  “Mrs. Rubin,” he said. “You sitting down?” For a moment, Maya wondered if Mishkin was going to make her sit down at nine thirty P.M. just so he could tell her: The adoption was off. Or: The ancestral Mishkins had grown plums.

  “So, look, Mrs. Rubin,” Mishkin said. “Adoptions are volatile. Emotions are high. It doesn’t mean—a person’s unstable. It drives people to act . . . in ways they wouldn’t otherwise act. In yourself—I think you’ve seen that.”

  “Excuse me?” Maya said. The choppy way in which Mishkin spoke made Maya suspicious, as if he was titrating information whose badness, should it come in a torrent, would become obvious.

  “Never mind that,” Mishkin said. “My point is, Laurel’s a firecracker. She’s eighteen, but she comes on with a force twice of that. A hole in my ear every time that we talk. You two are made for each other. You ought to meet.”

  “We can’t,” Maya reminded him.

  “Well, that’s just it,” Mishkin said.

  “What, Mishkin, what!” Maya demanded. In her condition, she had forgotten to filter his name through the sieve of diplomacy and referred to him by the shorthand used by the Rubins. But Mishkin was silent, a hesitation unbecoming the cataract of Gabriel Mishkin. Whereas a moment before Maya was angry, now she was frightened.

  “Now don’t you go cuckoo on me about this, all right?” the adoption supervisor finally said. “I’ve been in this business getting on twenty years and I’ve never seen it myself. But it’s high emotion, like I said. Makes people do funny things. The mother is a wild one. Not that—not that—please don’t think she’s irresponsible. You can tell these are responsible, well-thinking young people because they’ve chosen you to adopt their boy. That’s how you know.”

  “Please explain right now,” Maya said, stifling a wave of murderous anger.

  “Laurel and Tim,” Mishkin said. “They want to deliver the child.”

  “What do you mean ‘deliver’?” Maya said.

  “You know—like takeout.” Mishkin giggled.

  Maya wanted to tell Mishkin that he could be far more pious toward the vocation he had selected, but she didn’t dare. She felt she depended on this man’s goodwill, even as she detested both him and that fact. She didn’t say anything, for if she spoke, she would speak an insult.

  “They want to bring the child, Mrs. Rubin. Hand him over to you. And I know it doesn’t sound like it, but this is a positive development. It saves you from—if you’d gone to pick up the child, you’d have to sit in a Montana hotel room for three weeks while the states talked to each other. Otherwise, it’s kidnapping. But if the parents bring him to you?” Mishkin produced a whistling noise meant to indicate problem solved.

  Maya remained silent.

  “Mrs. Rubin, the child is a blessing,” Mishkin said. “Healthy and beautiful. The only thing holding you back now is all of a sudden you’re wondering what you got
yourself into. I know the feeling. But you’re not like your husband—I say this with all due respect. You have the drive. Leap forward, Mrs. Rubin. I know this is unconventional. But if you get past the wrapping, it’s actually a very good thing. I know you always think I am trying to push you. I have nothing to sell here except the fulfillment of what you told me you wanted. This is what I’ll never understand about you folks, no matter how much time you spend in the country. You fight like no one fights for the things that you want. And then they arrive, and you push against them like children. Why is this, Mrs. Rubin? I guess it has to wait until the next generation. Well, I am giving you the next generation. Please take it.”

  Maya was speechless. She was within rights to censure him, but he knew that before he spoke, and since he had, anyway, she would not. A long silence ruled the telephone.

  “But we are not supposed to know each other,” Maya said, enforcing a rule she hadn’t made.

  “Yes, it’s not standard,” he said. “But there’s a lot of leeway built in. You know their first names already—you won’t know their last. You’ll see what they look like, of course, but they live two thousand miles away, you don’t know what town. Unless you go looking for them, I doubt it makes a difference in practice.”

  “They’re not the only ones I am thinking about,” Maya said, defensive of her husband. “They will know where we live. What about that? The point of a closed adoption is it’s closed. This way, they can drop down on us whenever they wish! That’s not right. My husband will disagree. No, Mr. Mishkin, this won’t work.”

  “Mrs. Rubin, you can say no. Tell me no, and we will go back to the original plan. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Will the mother become upset because I said no?” Maya said. “Can she change her mind?”

  “I have no idea, Mrs. Rubin. I have a hard time with Laurel even when I’m not guessing what’s in her mind. But the papers have been signed—that makes it a lot more difficult for her to change it. Mrs. Rubin—this girl is intent on finding her boy a new home. They’re eighteen—they can’t raise a child. They’re Christian, they don’t do abortions. They’re giving him up. They’re too young. You wanted to find out about the parents; you did, I know, even if your husband and your parents-in-law didn’t. So here they are. Here’s your chance.”