“I don’t know why you didn’t call . . . at the beginning,” Madam Stella said into Maya’s shoulder. The Madam lit a cigarette and blew a column of smoke at the gravel. Maya eyed the cigarette enviously, but was afraid to ask. “I offer the full suite of services,” the older woman said. “From the cradle to the grave. Infertility, difficult pregnancy, difficult birth, post-partum depression. Some people have me on retainer—they come once a week, just in case. Families stay with me for generations.” The Madam gargled out a phlegmy laugh. “That sounds as if I’ve been around since the war with Napoleon.”
Maya glanced nervously at her watch. She knew Alex would be checking the clock soon, her cell phone going off. She had brought it this time, had no cover.
“Guess my age,” Madam Stella said.
“Fifty-five?” Maya said, underestimating by twenty years in the name of politeness and a discount at the end of the hour.
Madam Stella whistled. “Try seventy-three.”
“We’re here for a game, okay?” Maya whispered though Max was out of earshot. “He doesn’t know.”
“There are demons in his head,” Madam Stella said. “We are going to very nicely, very politely, ask them to leave. Do you have any demons in your head, Mayechka?”
Maya was briefly startled by this intimate address, used only by her mother and Raisa.
“If it’s a game, everyone plays,” Madam Stella said.
Like a well-painted face that parts to reveal ruined teeth, the smooth, eggshellish exterior of the building gave way to a rotten, sagging staircase that creaked under the four climbers as they summited to a garret of the kind Maya had always imagined inhabited by a Dostoevsky consumptive. If the street was in St. Petersburg, the garret was in a lightless village deep in the Carpathians, next to which even her uncle’s Misha’s modest countryside home was vast. Maya was stunned to discover herself more correct in this than she wished: Madam Stella had them gaze through a window—the mastiff got its plate-sized paws on the windowsill—that revealed a patch of ground sealed by a cellar door. Everything that Madam Stella pickled and cured in the autumn was down there, covered in the summer months by enormous blocks of ice that the workman changed out weekly for a small fee. Madam Stella had had her residence disconnected from the electricity line, and held money only when she received payment or transferred several bills to the workman. Everything that she ate and brewed, she foraged in the botanical garden; she hardly ate meat, and for dairy she bartered.
“With whom?” Maya asked, looking anxiously around the premises: two rooms, the first of which doubled as a kitchen, bedroom, and entryway.
“With the people who have it,” Madam Stella cheerfully informed her. “Sit.”
Where? The twin bed, despite summer, was loaded with horsehair blankets and two enormous square pillows. The dining table held a log of butter the size of a loaf of bread on a triangular cutting board; a bottle of spirits that would have reached Maya’s waist; and a huge clump of tiny, yellow-tipped field flowers that resembled the frizzy hair of a giantess; but no chairs. There was a sour smell in the air that Maya traced to a bread yeasting in a large industrial sink. Her son was poking his nail into it. Maya hissed at him. He scurried back to her side, where she grasped his hand and stood like a wax figure, trying not to touch anything. She felt an attack of remorse; her decision had seemed inspired when she had seen the classified in the Russian newspaper, now reckless and rash.
On one wall hung a clumsy painting of an older woman, a black band of mourning in the corner. Above it, a display of herbs was mounted on a board of cherry-red wood, clump after clump socked into aluminum cones, a handwritten legend beneath: eucalyptus, valerian root, coltsfoot, mint, bur marigold, stinging nettle, cranberry leaves, melissa, motherwort, cabbage. The other walls were decorated with farm implements, for decoration or use who could say: a scythe; clamps with a human-height handle for extracting hot pots from a furnace; ancient, rusty mandolins; not one but two pitchforks.
Madam Stella, who was rummaging in a pantry next to the bed, noticed and said: “All of that’s from the garden.” Her hand emerged wrapped around a jar. She set it down next to the butter. “Young man, I require your help,” she said. Reluctantly, Maya let go of Max’s hand and he followed the Madam into the next room, from where they returned with three backless stools, Max’s lips pursed as he fought to keep his above ground. Madam Stella carried two while her dying cigarette bounced between her lips, the smoke wreathing the room.
“I live like this because I want to,” Madam Stella replied smokily to Maya’s bewildered expression. Max bounced onto his chair in exhaustion, his palms on his knees like a worker, resting. “I made ninety-four thousand dollars last year.”
Maya laughed nervously. Even a witch had to brandish her salary if she was a Soviet witch.
“Now, who wants to begin,” Madam Stella said, unscrewing the jar. The room was filled with a sharp smell that made Maya sneeze. She knew the mixture was slimy and gray without seeing it, perhaps because the odor was of the swamp, of seaweed.
“How about you, honey?” Maya said to her son. Max sat on his little stool with concentration, as if he needed to gather strength for the next task.
Madam Stella made a ts-ts-ts noise with her tongue. “Don’t you know that ladies go first?” she said to Maya. Finally disposing of the cigarette that had expired in her mouth, ash tumbling to the floor, she lowered herself heavily to the second of the three stools, which miraculously sustained her, and gallantly directed Maya to the third.
“This way to the gallows?” Maya said, again laughing anxiously.
“Sit, darling, sit,” Madam Stella said impatiently. Though the Madam was endowed with supernatural curative powers, she did not have supernatural levels of patience. “Your son needs to see how the game is played.”
Maya sat down. Immediately, she was assailed by a fantastic weariness. She wished the chair had a back. When the jar of gray slime appeared at her nose, she was surprised to discover that it was neither slime nor gray, but a harder, less viscous black substance that smelled like freshly paved highway, as if it had altered its scent on its journey from table to nose. Perhaps she had altered in sitting down. She tried to shake off foolish thoughts—she was so tired. If she planned to help her son, she had to be alert—she had to figure out how to sleep a full night.
Maya peered into the jar, then at Madam Stella, wondering whether the treatment was contraindicated if you weren’t the one with the problem. She remembered Soviet people who had been helped by a healer but had then taken to this doctoring with indiscriminate zeal, developing new ailments or diminishing the efficacy of earlier treatments. But Maya felt she could not bring this up without reinviting Madam Stella’s impatience and closed her eyes. Soon, she felt two fingers at her temples, each smudged with the gray substance, abrasive as a cat’s tongue. She smelled nicotine and knew Madam Stella’s face was just inches from hers, her voice reaching Maya as if muffled in cotton, the scent of cigarettes mixed with lipstick and breathing.
“Everything’s resting,” the voice was saying. Against Maya’s temples, the tar was like a salt scrub, and Madam Stella’s fingers—again Maya was reminded of a cat, for Madam Stella’s fingertips were as soft as the pads of a paw, only the sharp edge of her fingernails occasionally nicking Maya’s hair. “Everything’s resting,” Madam Stella intoned. The veins under Maya’s temples eased into a washed-out slumber—she saw a road whose markings had been wiped out by a long rain—and the bone under her eyebrows pillowed into soft clay. Maya wanted to open her eyes and check on Max, was he finding this strange or frightening, and she would in just a moment, a moment.
The fingers at her temples worked in repeating circles so that she could imagine them whorling new channels into her brain. The words intoned by Madam Stella were blurring into meaningless sound. Maya shuddered. Her embarrassment at being ministered to had vanished. She was so disarmed, so satisfied by the touch, that she actually felt wetness between h
er legs. She wasn’t sure when it had started, like looking up to realize the window is slicked up with rain.
Maya remained distantly aware that she was visible to her son, but she couldn’t resist the recollection coming upon her, as if she was being walked into water and was willing to drown. Maya slaps Alex’s belly, as flat as her own. “Hey now,” he says sleepily. “It’s your cooking. Don’t cook so richly . . .” “I’ll move it,” she says, sliding her hand down to his penis. He shudders slightly. She squeezes it like an udder. “Ow, Maya . . .” She squeezes harder. He grows hard in her hand, like a balloon filling. “Take mercy . . .” he says. “Think of our children.” She moves down over him. “No, up here . . .” he says unpersuasively. She holds him in her mouth, feels him fill out. He breathes deeply and mutters something. His hands come up on her forearms and he drives her up toward him. Alex is stronger than she is and can make her go where he wants. She wants that. He brings her lips to his and mashes them with his own. Then he notches her up by another foot so that his tongue is on her breasts. She feels the cool, slick trail of his tongue around her nipples. “Revolutions around the track . . .” she says. “Rubin is after the gold . . .” He yanks her up again. She slams into the headboard. “Ow, ow . . .” They dissolve in laughter. “But don’t stop . . .” “When they bury me,” he says, “the stone will say, ‘He loved belly buttons above all . . .’” “This belly,” she corrects him. “He loved this belly,” he repeats obediently. She continues moving above him—his mouth is on the fleece between her legs. “I am going to tell you a secret,” he whispers, lifting his mouth away. “The girls I’ve been with are all bare, but I prefer it this way.” “Put your mouth back on me,” she says. Her thighs are next, her knees, her shins, her toes. He plucks each toe with his lips. “You can’t take them,” she says. Finally, he lowers her onto himself, his legs underneath her. They rock back and forth. She buries her nose in his hair, then hiccups. They giggle. They talk about something—shelves? They slide up and down a little to make it easier to come—they try to synchronize. As they get closer, they fall away from each other, though they try halfheartedly to hold on. She feels him hit the walls of her like a warm rain. She twitches painfully in an attack of her own. They remain inside each other as Alex goes soft. “You first,” she says. “You first,” he says. “I’m not moving,” they say at the same time. They laugh.
Maya’s underwear was soaked, and she felt a cool bracelet of cum exit and trace a half-moon around her leg. She was being led somewhere—in life, not the dream. Maya felt her arms and legs meet a rough surface, as if she was being laid across the back of an animal. She swam, an anchor on each leg. She sank and sank, and though she was aware she could make a reach for the surface, she did not. She went where she was being summoned, down, down, down.
She dreamed. Her family was at the dinner table with guests, though they weren’t familiar to Maya. She eyed the group from her post behind the cooking island. Where was Alex? Not at the dinner table. Maya checked again—he was not there. As he was not in the bathroom, nor away on some trip. In addition to Eugene, Raisa, and Max, the table held three men and two women. But which man was her husband? She recognized none. How could she be married to a man she couldn’t identify? And why did Eugene and Raisa—Eugene was orating with a glass of wine in his hand—find this so untroubling?
Maya winced awake. The room was blurry and she tasted sourness. The mastiff was folded into an impressively compact circle at her feet on the horsehair bed. On the other side of the closed slats of the window, it was still daytime. Her eyes adjusted to discover her son tippy-toed on one of the stools as he rearranged the weeds that lined the cherry-red board. Maya called out for him sharply.
“But it’s mixed up,” Max said. “This is bur marigold, not coltsfoot.” He added defensively: “I waited till she left.”
Maya brought her hands up to her temples and flinched. They felt raw, as if they had been rubbed with sandpaper. She closed her eyes. What time was it? She swept away the sheet that covered her and leaped out of bed. The mastiff opened its eyes. An interrogation of her son revealed that Madam Stella had gone to use the workman’s toilet. Maya paced the room, but the door would not yield the healer. Finally, Maya counted out five twenties, wedged them under the cutting board that held the loaf-log of butter, demonically keeping its shape despite the close heat of the room, and commanded her son to follow her out, which he did, obediently unhanding the clumps in his fist.
Creaking down the stairs, Max’s hand in hers, Maya called to Madam Stella, but no answer came, and she did not wish to embarrass the older woman by banging on the door of the toilet. She yelled that she had left the money under the butter and hurried out.
She drove above the speed limit; she compensated by inquiring of Max three times whether he was wearing his seat belt. The sex Maya had remembered was twenty years old, back when Maya was still teaching Alex. Thinking of those young people was like thinking of other people entirely. The two of them had turned out to be physically matched in a way that could be explained only by luck—sometimes it went your way, too. She treated this fact as a vindication of the reckless decision she had made in marrying Alex—why weren’t things allowed to work out? Alex was not initially an adventurer in bed—the first time she mumbled arduous words into his cheek (“I want to feel it in my chest, in my throat”), his hard-on drooped, and he remonstrated with her to watch a porno film if that’s what she wanted. But he learned, even as he disliked being a student. He was solid, thick-skinned, the fleshly block of him above her like a good fact, and their unflagging desire was as responsible as anything else for moving them through the years. But over time it had cleaved from the rest of their story: an organ driving at full throttle while so much else tripped, sank, got turned around on itself. And since Max’s trouble began, they had not touched each other at all. Their disinterest seemed as mutual as their erstwhile desire; they did not discuss it, simply heeded the feeling, a bitter harmony. She glanced at the car clock: 5:47. They had left just after two. She pressed the pedal.
She berated herself. Unlike her outing on the bus, which risked sacrificing only the mother, she had now disappeared with the most precious cargo of the Rubins’ lives. And instead of paying attention to the road, she was examining the clotted shallows of her psyche. A gruesome word floated up. You are a cunt, Maya, she mouthed silently at the wheel.
Maya turned to Max. “So Madam Stella played the game with me . . .” She trailed off, hoping Max would fill in the rest, but he only nodded. “Did anything strange happen?” she said.
“You made noises,” Max said.
Maya ran a hand through her hair. It felt reedy and damp, as if she really had just emerged from a tangle of sheets.
“What kind of noises?” she said.
“Like it hurt you somewhere,” Max said. “But Madam Stella said you were fine.”
Maya nodded, the corners of her eyes filling with tears. She felt a great desire to close her eyes.
“Max, my darling,” she said. “Did Madam Stella play the game with you?”
“We didn’t have time,” he said. “She said we would after you woke up. Let you sleep.”
Maya nodded dolefully and scratched Max’s hair with a failing smile on her lips. “We will definitely go another time,” she said.
Again the gruesome word floated up.
By the time Maya was traversing the final artery between the Corolla and home, she was exceeding the speed limit less out of guilt than an anguished desire to reestablish the contours of her life as she knew them before she’d set off. Much as a lump in the breast felt at nine A.M. makes small pain of the toast burned at eight thirty, Maya recalled the uneasy home in which she lived prior to her trip to Madam Stella’s as a redoubt of solidarity next to the fury she was sure was awaiting her now. As her car pulled into the driveway, she resolved to act nonchalant but solicitous when she entered the house. No one would hear argument from Maya tonight. Then she realized she had fo
rgotten the deer repellent.
Perhaps it is when we are at our most vulnerable that life throws us a line (though not until then). When Maya stepped into the house, clutching Max’s hand for comradeship, her mind trying to measure the distance from the truth she was willing to travel in her explanation and how Max would comment, Maya was accosted by an Alex bewildered not by her tardiness or the absence of deer repellent in her hands but by the unannounced appearance of Bender and wife on their doorstep an hour before. If Alex had once been aware of how long she and Max had been absent, now he was aware only of Time Before Bender and Time After. Raisa was off on a walk around the lake—who walked around the lake for hours; well, Eugene had been on her about her weight—and it was left to the men to entertain these sudden visitors with what sense they could make of the dozen Tupperwares in the refrigerator.
If asked, only a moment before, to rate her enthusiasm for a repeat sighting of Bender, Maya would have thought twice. But now her affection nearly toppled him, also his stout, white-haired wife. Bender repeated his story—he and wife had been in Acrewood for a matinee at the community theater and had decided to drop by and ask about Max. Bender blinked, his wet eyes the color of steel wool, as if awaiting a judgment on his claim. But by then Maya was too busy rummaging in the fridge in order to supplement the pathetic table the men had set up: cold cuts, matzoh-like crackers, and a jar of roasted peppers. For life’s emergencies, some men carried condoms, Band-Aids, umbrellas. Eugene Rubin carried a jar of roasted peppers.
As Maya popped open lids and spooned out self-made hummus, Mediterranean chicken, and lemony salad, she understood that Bender’s story was an unskillful lie. The Rubins’ visit had given Bender cover for a return visit of his own, and with it a potential resuscitation of the acquaintanceship that had fallen moribund as a result of . . . what? As Eugene and his son, on a typical night, took their customary post-dinner positions in front of the living room television, the son slumping asleep long before the father, who remained alert late into the evening, staring blankly at news program after news program, Maya often wondered how this pastime acquitted itself in superiority to a cup of tea with a human being, even if that human being was Bender, even if Bender was in mortal combat with Eugene for who could exhibit the greater indifference.
Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo Page 16
