Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  “She told you that?” Maya said hungrily. “She told you that was the reason? Too young?”

  “No,” Mishkin said. “They do not have to explain.”

  “Why,” Maya said helplessly. “Why. That is the most important thing. The very most important thing. It is the only thing they have to explain.”

  “I don’t want to stray into psychological territory, but in life we must occasionally make peace with the fact that we simply won’t know. That is their right, not to say. However, if you allow them to come to you, you can ask them.”

  Maya did not answer. On the other end, Mishkin took a deep breath. The conversation had become intimate. She hated him less.

  “You can have this child tomorrow, Mrs. Rubin.” Mishkin said. “That is it at its plainest. Do you want to have this child tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” Maya said.

  “You’re wondering why I’m phoning so late in the night,” Mishkin dared. “For which I’m sorry, by the way.” His tone was grave, and on hearing it, Maya discovered, with petrification, that she preferred the old, unserious Mishkin. “They’re harvesting right now, or something: I don’t really get it. They’ve only got the weekend, they need to get back . . .”

  “What is it?” Maya yelled, waking up Alex, who looked up reproachfully from the La-Z-Boy.

  “They’re halfway to you already,” Mishkin said. “Now, don’t get upset, Mrs. Rubin, I just found out myself. I told you she’s impulsive. I tried to explain they had to get your okay, and, look, they’re not going to show up on your driveway, they don’t even know what town in New Jersey yet. But if you can live with this, Mrs. Rubin—”

  The soup bubbled over, hissed the flames, stained the burner, slithered down the face of the oven until it disfigured the kitchen tile. Alex sprang from the recliner intending to halt the absurd progress events had made while he had allowed himself to drift off—he could not let down his guard even for thirty minutes on the backside of the day. But, seeing the wild look in his wife’s eyes, he had his first apprehension of the fact that within twenty-four hours he might be holding his son.

  +

  It was nearly dusk when the headlights of Laurel and Tim’s coffee-and-milk Datsun swept across the Rubins’ living room. The previous evening, Alex had been made to extract the ancient United States driving atlas the Rubins had been given by the resettlement agency when they’d arrived in America. It still held together—Alex rarely opened it. The cover depicted a dark-skinned man in jeans and Native American headdress hopping around a campfire, an Alaskan iceberg, tall buildings in New York, and a curvaceous brown river.

  If they were from Montana, and they were halfway to the Rubins at ten o’clock on Friday evening, when would they reach Acrewood, New Jersey? Maya was returned to the algebra classes of her youth: If Comrade So-and-So’s train starts at Point A at eleven o’clock . . . “Maya, don’t be silly,” Alex said. “Do they stop for the night or do they keep driving? How long do they sleep? It’s not possible to answer. Don’t panic. When they come, they come.” But his voice carried a tremulous note—as superiorly acquainted with America as Alex was, he was alarmed at the prospect of two people from Montana in his home. Three people.

  She pushed the atlas at him and asked him to try. He pulled out a notepad and worked at it, finally announcing that Laurel and Tim would be in Acrewood at around seven P.M. the following day, depending.

  “So I have to make dinner.”

  “You don’t have to make dinner.”

  “You want to welcome these people with an empty table?” she said. She sank into a chair and covered her eyes. “This is absurd, every step of it.”

  He laid his palms on her shoulders. “Maya, look at me,” he said. She did, because usually he didn’t produce effort of this kind. “We’ve been reading books for a year. We have enough diapers for our child to shit himself until college. This is what you wanted. Your son is coming.”

  She began to whimper into her fist.

  “Now this makes no sense,” Alex said.

  “I made you do it,” she said.

  “Did you?” he said. He stared at his hands on her shoulders. “It’s a dramatic experience, Maya, so it’s natural you would feel upset now. But it doesn’t mean you’re upset. You’re happy.” Maya rolled her head into her husband’s shoulder, and he pawed at it.

  Maya did cook, if only out of anxiety; the dining table was filled with highlights of the Ukrainian kitchen: peppers marinated in buckwheat honey, lemon, and garlic; cabbage salad; and, for good luck, the grechanniki that Maya had made all those years before. The table also featured a Mishkin, who, for one, was glad Maya had cooked. When no one was looking, he thieved a disk from the plate of grechanniki, encountering the same problem Alex had all those years ago: It wasn’t possible to have just one. But he couldn’t have another—the Datsun bounced onto the driveway. The dense woodland of gray hair that crowned Mishkin’s heavy-jawed face doubled handily as a napkin for his oil-stained fingers—in her nervousness, Maya had forgot to lay out actual napkins. Mishkin looked like he was rubbing anxiety out of his scalp, which neatly aligned him with the Rubins. “Here come the cowboys,” Alex said mournfully. Gathered at the living room window, the Rubins could not see into the vehicle, though they believed they could be seen. For a moment, no one emerged.

  “Must we open their doors and invite them in?” Alex said.

  The two young people who eventually stepped out of the vehicle were shocking in their youthfulness. They were Maya’s age when she had come to America—was that how young she had looked then? The young woman, Laurel, wore a superfluously pleated yellow sundress under a turquoise blouse with buttons. She crouched before the passenger’s-side mirror, which showed her that her hair was unpresentable, and called out in a sharp, hoarse voice to her boyfriend to wait while she fixed. Tim, coming around the car, paused. He had a limp in his right leg and wore a baseball cap. Maya knew his eyes were blue without seeing them.

  He looked like the Slavic boys who had used to ask out Maya. She was adopting a non-Jewish child: this arrived with visceral clarity at the moment Maya saw Tim’s eyes on the other side of her doorstep. He swept off his baseball cap, revealing a blond buzz cut of a type Maya had seen on military men, and ears that stood out slightly. He had a plain face—he had a nose, and eyes, and ears, but they did not cohere into anything especially memorable—and weariness in his eyes, but otherwise you couldn’t tell, or smell, that he had been driving for two and a half days.

  “Ms. Maya, Mr. Alex,” he said, nodding shyly and extending his hand; he didn’t know their last names. “You must be Mr. Mishkin,” he called out behind them, and she knew that was the first Jewish surname he had spoken in his life.

  “Bad luck to shake across the divider,” Alex said, pointing at the threshold. “Come in, you’re tired.”

  Behind Tim stood Laurel. It must have been due to the radical emptiness of the territory they inhabited that such a plain-looking boy could seduce a girl of such prettiness. In this, maybe Montana was like the Soviet Union after the war—any man would do, twenty million having been lost.

  She wore no makeup; the white around each pellucid green iris burned with redness. Her hair was blond like Tim’s, the color of starved grass. She had finger-combed it, and it splayed everywhere; it fell from a central part like two messy sheets. The sundress, which bore a pattern of monkeys on unicycles, looked like a child’s outfit, and was even poorer on close inspection. Maya enviously eyed the two full breasts; was she feeding the child? Under the sleeve of the dress, she saw the sash of an ACE bandage; Laurel was restraining the breasts, to discourage milk.

  On the small landing behind them was a car seat with a small bundle in it. The boy was asleep, unmindful of the adults. There was a small gym bag next to him, too small to contain a person’s whole life. Tim turned back and picked up the seat. Maya and Alex stared at him, dumbfounded, and even Mishkin was overcome by a deferential silence. “Where should I put him?”
Tim asked his wife.

  “Give him to the parents,” Laurel said coldly, and stepped inside. Tim followed. From one of her pockets, she withdrew folded pieces of looseleaf: “Been writing through ten states,” she said to Maya. “Sleep, formula—it’s all in there. There’s some extra in the bag. You mind emptying it so we can have the bag?”

  Tim, as the male biological parent, extended the bundle in his arms to the male adopting parent. The male adopting parent would have preferred his wife to receive the newborn, but hesitated to appear less than authoritative before the profoundly American male before him. The tiny, affectless creature continued to sleep, the slightly upturned nose sniffing the air. His little tongue was shimmied between his lips, like a cat’s. The skin—it was newer than anything Maya had seen. That was the only word for it: new. She thought: How could someone part from this creature? What kind of person did you have to be? The little person jerked in his sleep, the shoulders shrugging invisibly, and she felt her last, unspeakable terror give way: He was living and breathing; he really existed.

  “He was cranky all afternoon,” Laurel said. She spoke with the steadiness of someone ten years older—it unnerved Maya. Is that what childbearing did to an eighteen-year-old? She wanted Laurel to be as nervous as she was. “I got him to go down just a little while ago. Let him sleep a little bit longer?” This catalog of domestic rituals and observations covered Maya with jealousy.

  “It’s safe to drive a tiny baby all that way?” Alex said skeptically.

  Of this liability, Maya had not even thought. There were so many, all of them unfamiliar, that this one had not even occurred to her. She wanted to give her husband a restraining look, but she was grateful for the question. Alex noticed things that she didn’t—by leaving unnoticed the many things that she couldn’t ignore. He allowed those to slide off him, leaving attention for those that mattered.

  “It’s seven weeks,” Laurel said. “Their necks are ready by then. That’s why we waited to come here till now. We started the paperwork only once he came out, but we found you a good while before he was born.” Together, Maya and Alex looked at Mishkin behind them, but he only shook his head—he didn’t know that Laurel and Tim had been planning to drive. Maya didn’t know whether she should resent Laurel. She looked at Alex—his eyebrows were crossed with suspicion.

  “Why did you pick us?” he said.

  “Alex,” Maya said. “Let them come in, look around.”

  “If they’ve graced us with a visit, they can tell us,” Alex said in a way that left clear that no one would be coming in or looking around until the question was answered.

  “It was one thing the most,” Laurel said. “It was what you wrote about putting your roots down here for a long time. Here in New Jersey.”

  Hearing his work praised, Alex softened. “And all the other things that go without saying,” Laurel went on. “You’re good people. Stable, and nice home. You have money. You know what’s a baby.”

  Alex looked at Maya, asking with his face what he should do with the child.

  “Please come in, won’t you?” she said to Laurel and Tim.

  The guests moved down the hallway. The young man favored his right leg. In the presence of such foreign characters, the spread Maya had spent all of Saturday preparing suddenly appeared unacceptably foreign itself. With forced casualness, she took her guests through the dishes. They nodded politely.

  “We really shouldn’t,” Tim said. “We’ve got a lot of driving ahead. They only gave us so much time at work.”

  “But you’ll stay the night,” Maya said. “We have extra bedrooms. We want you to see the house.”

  “And what is work?” Alex said, hoping to distract the guests from agreeing. He unburdened himself of the car seat on the tiled floor and quickly checked Maya to see if he shouldn’t have.

  “Laurel’s at the front desk at the Ramada,” Timothy said. “And me—” He wanted to fidget with his cap but it was long off his head. He rasped his buzz cut with a nail.

  “He does rodeo,” Laurel said.

  “That’s with the bulls,” Alex said. “And that’s a living?”

  Tim shrugged. Alex sensed that he was wearing a mask of discomfort for Laurel’s sake. “You have one out here too, once a year,” Tim said. “At Madison Square Garden. More of a show.”

  “We haven’t been to that,” Alex said.

  “But we will,” Maya reassured Tim. “We will go this year, absolutely.”

  “No, you won’t,” Laurel said. From a pocket hiding among the pleats of her dress, she withdrew a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The other four stared at her.

  “I didn’t start it till after,” she said, reading the togetherness of Maya’s brows. Also Mishkin’s—finally, Maya and Mishkin were concerned in the same way.

  “Because we were told the child was healthy,” Alex said. Maya, who had been exhaling after Laurel’s comment, froze after Alex’s.

  “The child is healthy,” Tim said curtly. His face unclenched, regretting his sharpness. “This process been stressful on Laurel.”

  “Hooray, Tim, for your heart is twenty-twenty now,” she said.

  “No one smokes in the house,” Alex observed.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Maya said, staring at her husband. She wished to reward Laurel for starting to smoke only after the birth of her—their? her Maya’s? her Laurel’s?—son.

  “I’ll go outside,” Laurel said.

  “I’ll join you,” Maya said.

  “You don’t smoke,” Alex reminded her.

  “I can stand with our guest,” she said.

  Outside, a cobalt darkness had got hold of the evening. Maya loved this hour. The last light had crept out of the sky, but the full blackness had yet to take over.

  “If you move around the corner with me,” Maya said to Laurel, “I’ll have one with you.”

  They smoked in silence. Laurel folded one arm under the other.

  “I’m sorry we did this,” Laurel said at last. “I want you to know I am.”

  Maya looked at her with surprise. She had been thinking of herself as the one in error, and only now wondered why. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “My husband and I don’t have the same views.”

  “Why his way, then?”

  “His need is greater,” Maya said.

  “I needed to see it for myself,” Laurel said. “You can understand that, can’t you?”

  Maya nodded eagerly. “Of course I can.” She pulled on her cigarette without desire. “Are you married?” she said. “The forms didn’t say.” She added hastily: “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “We fight like married people, don’t we?” Laurel said. She seemed to enjoy the thought.

  Maya watched Laurel out of the side of her eyes. This little body had brought forth a child. From where? It must have retracted immediately to its original shape: that was the meaning of youth. Maya surveyed with jealousy the pears of Laurel’s breasts, the slight knob of the nose. This body had brought forth a child. As hers never would.

  Laurel was going to chuck the butt into the grass, then remembered where she was and crushed it against the heel of her boot. She dropped it into a pocket of her dress. It had many pockets.

  “It’ll smell,” Maya said, watching Laurel light another. “Here, we’ll put it in the garbage. Oh, I must be so irritating, talking like your mother. You are half my age, but already a mother yourself.”

  “Just because we’re here,” Laurel said, “you don’t have to worry about us trying to interfere with you. I just needed to see it.” Youthfully, she added: “I promise you.”

  Maya felt relief—on Alex’s behalf. She thought that if ever she had been unfaithful to Alex, he would have wanted her to keep it a secret. And she would not have been able to.

  “Some things you should know,” Laurel said. “I haven’t been breast-feeding him even though this milk wants to come out of me like the Yellowstone. And we haven’t named him even though a nam
eless baby is a pretty Friday-the-thirteenth kind of thing.” She dragged on her cigarette hungrily, then looked around her. “I’m just going to sit down in the grass here for one minute.”

  Before Maya could object or offer a blanket, Laurel was sitting on the grass, her boots one under the other and the pleated sundress flared over her thighs. Maya had an impolite desire to touch her skin. Even in the near-bituminous darkness, she saw it was thick like rubber, just manufactured. Maya was hardly an old maid herself, thirty-four, in America that was just starting out, but Laurel was like a former version of herself come to shame her for waiting so long. Most girls in Kiev were mothers by twenty-one. Instead of a child, Maya had given birth to a new life in America. It was twelve years old now, and she was ready for another. She wanted for it a sibling.

  “This grass is soft like hand cream,” Laurel said. “It’s luscious.”

  “My husband . . .” Maya started, and trailed off. She found herself without the energy to remark on the lawn now. It was a special concern of Alex’s. He worried over it to the point of detriment. She had read that fallen leaves ought to remain—their decomposition fed the soil. But those leaves were in Home Depot bags before they hit the ground. For this, Alex had massive energy. Once, he had hauled himself out of bed with a fever because the leaves were choking his grass and had to get cleared. He was contemplating cutting down the large oak that was responsible until Maya reminded him it would probably lower the home’s resale value.

  Forgetting her earlier mindfulness, Laurel stubbed her cigarette into the grass. Then she lay down. Maya looked worriedly toward the house and the yellow light falling from the kitchen, which turned a small square of space outside the sliding doors indigo. What were those three discussing? She needed to get back inside.