Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  “He’s eight—it will mean nothing to him.”

  “You left Minsk at eight. It meant nothing to you?”

  “Yes, but I knew why I was leaving where I was leaving,” Alex said. “And going where I was going.”

  “Shouldn’t our son, too?” she said, again in a decreased tone. This is the way she spoke nowadays: up, down, up, down.

  “Please let’s not have this conversation again,” he said.

  “What if that’s why he’s acting out?” Maya said. “He senses a lie.”

  “Who’s superstitious now?” he said.

  “We were told by the adoption people—when they’re confused, sometimes they run away.”

  “He thought he was going to find his mother under that river? He was born to a pike? Come on, Maya.”

  “Okay, I want to see it,” she said. “Isn’t that good enough? I want to see it. I want to see”—she lowered her voice—“where Max was born. And I can’t take myself. Laurel got to see where we live, I want to see where she lives.”

  “Lived,” Alex said. “They’re gone. They took that money and ran. If you don’t know that, you’re a fool.”

  “Then that’s what I want to see,” Maya said.

  They heard Max descending the stairs and fell silent. He appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. He had gone back to pajamas—he didn’t like sleeping in briefs. “Are you fighting?” he said. He had never asked such a thing.

  “Because sometimes, Mama and Papa—” Maya started to say, but Alex was speaking over her.

  “Because Mama wants to make you pancakes and I want to make you eggs,” Alex said. “Tell us who wins.”

  Max blinked twice, and stared at them.

  “Who wins, Maxie?” his father said again.

  +

  For the second night in a row, Maya did not sleep. In the night, the back of Alex’s hand fell onto her belly. She was about to remove it, but changed her mind; she enjoyed its weight, as dense as a small animal. Her awareness of it made sleep impossible, but sleep was impossible without it, too. She lay in bed and felt the grooves of Alex’s skin with her white belly. His fingers trembled slightly in sleep, the cold gold of the wedding band touching her skin now and then. Other than that, it was his smooth, unworried skin on her own. She resolved that, come morning, she would approach her husband in a new way. Despite different reasons, each had come to desire the same thing: to find Laurel and Tim. They should work together, find their way back to each other, step in tandem. Maya filled with the enthusiasm of a new mission. She required only an objective; that given, she would be set free from the resolutionless murk that ate away at her spirit. In the morning, Alex found her lying as open-eyed as she had six hours before. “Maya,” he shook his head, tenderness in his reproach. “You need to sleep. Need to.” The creases of her eyes watered. With her eyes, she tried to say to him everything that she had felt in the night. Did he understand her? He must have, because he said: “I’m calling—today.”

  9

  “Rubins,” Gabe Mishkin said, astonished, from the other side of the screen door. “Boy, baby boy,” Mishkin said. “A little thing, but you didn’t pick him up. They showed up at your damn house.” Mishkin’s face opened in recollection. “That was one of the all-time doozies.”

  Maya also could not believe she was standing across from the adoption supervisor. Alex’s call to IAS had given them the news that Mishkin had retired. The woman who replaced him wore a tunic marked by gamboling nautical objects and, in her ears, two turquoise crosses—it was to this that Maya attributed their difficulty understanding each other. No matter what Maya said—and eventually even Alex spoke up, embarrassment settling on the room after the new case worker mistook a back scratch for a reach for his wallet, that is, a forthcoming bribe—the woman returned her fingernail to the bolded text in the upper-right-hand corner of their file: CLOSED ADOPTION. Eventually, she let out a long, besieged breath and walked to the doorway to ask her secretary for a Form to Request Contact. That was when Maya’s hand reached for the penholder on the woman’s desk and swept it onto the carpeted floor. Maya apologized loudly and knelt to collect the scattered pencils and clips, but not before taking a long look at the file that remained open on the desk. She got a bit of luck—her eyes landed on an address. But luck rarely comes pure—it was the address not of the birth parents but the forwarding for Gabriel Mishkin, retired.

  Mishkin had bellied out with new weight and his facial hair had taken after the woods surrounding his home: three days of messy, pebble-gray growth on his cheeks, and the stymied coiffure that he had sported as a savior of unwanted children was now out past his ears, though it managed to look elegantly disheveled instead of abandoned. Belatedly, Maya remembered that it wasn’t only Mishkin who was eight years older, and wondered what thoughts about her and Alex’s appearance passed through his mind.

  “You’re on my porch,” Mishkin noted, burying his reading glasses in the copse of his hair. His other hand held a book, a wedged finger marking his spot. The three of them listened to a fluting call from the woods. An answer came, a series of taps. “At least I called you with a warning,” Mishkin said. He smiled without opening his mouth.

  “Mr. Mishkin,” Maya said. She had practiced the simple line with Alex on their way up the Thruway, a sour fog blanketing the starting gold and red of the trees. They had decided that it would be more persuasive coming from Maya. “We need your help.”

  “They gave you my forwarding?” Mishkin said, startled.

  “Not exactly,” Maya said.

  “I see,” he said. “I’m not being very hospitable.” He unlatched and swung open the screen door. Maya thrust at him a box of cellophaned chocolates.

  “By the look on your face, I better take this,” he said.

  The home had two stories, the chimney of a rust-edged woodstove rising through a clumsily hacked opening in the ceiling. Upstairs, Mishkin must have slept. Downstairs, he was deep in written work of some kind. The oval dining room table was covered with notebooks and books in plastic library covers. An aluminum can of turkey chili nested among the hardbacks, a spoon planted in its muck like a flag. On the kitchen counter, a dozen similar cans waited around. No woman would permit this, Maya thought. Was the adoption supervisor, who had filled out so many families, unmarried himself?

  “It’s a bachelor lifestyle,” Mishkin said, watching Maya’s gaze wheel across his possessions. “You’re supposed to heat it up. Won’t you sit?” He indicated a torn leather sectional that spanned two of the walls in the living room. Maya and Alex fell into it like a final resting place, their knees higher than their waists. It would be impossible to make a formidable argument from this position, Maya thought, and tried to wedge herself out, unsuccessfully. “What can I offer you?” Mishkin said.

  “Coffee?” Alex said.

  “Actually, something stronger for me,” Maya said, “if that’s not impolite.”

  Mishkin bowed his head admiringly. “That’s the very opposite of impolite, Mrs. Rubin,” he said. “The very opposite.” He retreated to the kitchen, where the Rubins heard the kettle filling with water and the rattling of cupboards.

  “You remembered us right away,” Maya called out to him.

  “Do you know how many families and children I helped bring together?” Mishkin called back. “Guess.”

  “Twenty-five?” Maya yelled.

  “Ha!” Mishkin cried. They heard the dull seat of a bottle land on the tile of the cooking counter, then fumbling with glasses. “Try a hundred and fifty, Mrs. Rubin.” Glasses were fondled and they heard ice cracking. “I bet you’re wondering what are all those things on the dining room table. I’m writing my memoirs. And I guess it’s some kind of serendipity—do you know what serendipity means?—to have you show up on my doorstep, because if you think about it”—Mishkin leaned out of the kitchen doorway—“it started with you. Those family explorations I started in earnest after we dealt with each other.” He returned to the kitchen and
yelled again. “I took retirement early. I went to Belarus. Poland! My great-grandfather’s village is the size of your palm. And look, look—” Mishkin stepped out of the kitchen and directed the Rubins to gaze through the living room window at a small construction on the edge of the backyard painted the burnt-red of the house. It was flanked by a hammock and a portable shower. “A sauna!” Mishkin said. “Just like they had in the old country. But you folks know all about it.”

  He returned with a cuffed tray bearing a weak cup of coffee for Alex and two glasses with amber-colored liquid for Maya and himself. Unlike the coffee, the drinks were made expertly, and Maya extended her glass toward Mishkin. She did not want alcohol at two P.M. on a Sunday but she needed Mishkin off guard. However, just as she extended, Mishkin emptied his glass in one tumble. They shared an awkward laugh. “Looks like I’ll have to get another,” he said, though he remained in his chair, as if he needed Maya’s approval. Maya took a greedy gulp and stared at Alex. He looked displeased, perhaps because he had ended up with coffee when he could have used amber-colored liquid of his own. He cleared his throat.

  “I am actually from Belarus, not Russia,” Alex said. “I don’t know if I ever clarified that.”

  “Aha!” Mishkin said.

  “Many things connect us,” Alex offered feebly, trying to help.

  “They sure do,” Gabe Mishkin said, and rose. “I’ll freshen you up,” he said to Maya.

  “I still have some—” Maya said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Gabe Mishkin said. “Bottoms up.”

  Maya obeyed, the liquid scorching her tongue, and handed Mishkin her glass. He was back in a minute with refills, his glass iceless. Maya racked her brain for other ways to set Mishkin rhapsodizing on the ancestral subject, but nothing came. She exchanged glances with Alex. He closed and opened his eyes at her. She wanted to extract the necessary information from Mishkin also so that she and Alex could continue on the mutual course they’d so recently found.

  “All this time . . .” Maya said now to Mishkin. She would start open-endedly and leave it to the adoption supervisor pick up the thread.

  “How’s the boy?” Mishkin said. “It’s like the secret service, the adoption agency. After you retire, you’re not entitled to ask. I am putting that in the book. The adoption system in this country needs a reform. I’m laying out—”

  “That’s actually why we’re here,” Maya interrupted. “We need to find the parents.”

  She cursed herself. The drink that she had intended to weaken Mishkin had instead weakened her. This was not the way to bring it up! She had worked out the plan in the car with Alex: charming stories about the boy to arouse Mishkin’s sympathy; a reassertion of what a blessing Mishkin had helped bring into their lives; a laugh about that crazy visit by the birth parents. But that was it, you see, Maya would say casually, the parents had known something, the mother had made that odd comment before leaving . . .

  It was too late now. Mishkin’s wooded face, which had relaxed since their greeting, became dark with anticipation. Maya wanted to take some kind of gardening shear to it, to set free the man underneath.

  “The boy is wild,” Maya said, giving up.

  “The boy is savage,” Alex added.

  “Excuse me?” Mishkin said.

  “He runs away—”

  “All the time,” Alex said, animated.

  “They find him—”

  “Sitting in a river,” Alex finished.

  “He eats grass,” Maya declared; if such a detail was not going to get Mishkin’s attention, she didn’t know what would.

  “Are you joking?” Mishkin said.

  “We need to find the parents,” Alex said, taking over. “They know something. The young man, Tim, he was limping—you remember. And the strange thing the mother said before leaving. About rodeo. I’m not sure that was the truth. We just want the truth, so we can help our boy. We don’t want from them anything else. Or the agency—if something was missed, something was missed, let us find out about it now.” Maya was aware that Alex had tried to speak carefully, cautiously—he was trying to use her language because he was aware that his was antagonistic. “We’re not going to sue,” Alex attempted to be reassuring, but the very invocation of legal matters had the opposite effect.

  “Mr. Rubin,” Mishkin said as he tried to sit up in his rocking chair. “How long ago did this—” He stopped himself. “I don’t know where to begin.” He fell back into his chair and rocked silently. “I don’t see what it has to do with the birth parents.”

  “We want to have one conversation,” Alex said. “Is that so much to ask?”

  “You want to converse with the parents?” Mishkin said. “If I remember correctly, Mr. Rubin, you were pretty firm about a closed adoption.”

  Maya held out her glass toward Mishkin. If he had another as well, perhaps it would make him more charitable. But when he returned a moment later, he held only her glass, refilled.

  “Mr. Rubin, you know you can have the agency send them a letter,” he said.

  “No!” Alex said. “No more agency.”

  “The agency called the number they have,” Maya lied, glancing at Alex. “Someone else answered. They don’t live there anymore.”

  “So what can I do?” Mishkin said, defending his chest with his hands.

  “You can tell us the town,” Maya said.

  “Mrs. Rubin, those kids can be in Shanghai by now.”

  “If so,” Alex said, “someone in town would know.”

  “Mr. Rubin, this isn’t the Soviet Union. People are free to move about with no warning to anyone. Those kids could have spent a year in Montana on the way from California to God knows where.”

  “She said ‘rodeo,’” Maya said. “There’s no rodeo in Shanghai. There is rodeo in Montana. I looked it up. It’s only the town, Mr. Mishkin!”

  Mishkin looked over at Alex in a plea for help. Emotion was keeping Alex’s wife from seeing the full network of dead ends: Yes, those were the places for rodeo, but the young man might no longer be in rodeo . . .

  “Mrs. Rubin, when you leave the adoption agency, they take away your clearance, so to speak,” Mishkin said. “But they keep the gag order. I don’t have any of the files. I signed an agreement.”

  “Oh, yes?” Maya said. “Are you writing your memoirs from memory?”

  Mishkin tsked unhappily.

  “You brought together one hundred fifty families,” Maya said. “You remember that we didn’t get Max from the hospital. But you don’t remember the town they’re from.”

  “I don’t,” Mishkin said unpersuasively.

  “So it was all right for them to come into our house, but we can’t return the favor,” Alex said.

  “I understand that was a departure from”—Mishkin searched for the words—“the norm. But things like that happen at the eleventh hour. In retrospect, there may have been a better way to do things, sure. But you have to make the call in the moment. You want to say I made a mistake, go ahead.”

  “Make another one,” Alex said.

  “Mr. Rubin, two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “Yes, Mr. Mishkin,” Maya said. “Please explain to us how things are done in America.”

  A resentful silence settled on the room. Maya clutched her temples, which pounded with the animus of the whiskey. She swung her legs into the small space between her and her husband. Mishkin’s eyes grew wide; now, Maya Rubin was prostrate on his sectional.

  He cleared his throat. “Are you all right, Mrs. Rubin?”

  “We will leave,” she said hoarsely from the couch. “I just need fifteen minutes without noise until this migraine goes away. I am a terrible sufferer of migraines.”

  “Mrs. Rubin!” Mishkin exclaimed. “Making you feel this way is the last thing in the world . . .” He trailed away. They sat silently for a minute, until Mishkin was no longer able to bear the tableau of agonized wife and stone-faced husband.

  “How about going upstairs, Mrs. Rub
in?” he said. “There’s a guest room there.”

  Maya moaned in distress, her palm on her forehead. Mishkin consulted Alex again, but Alex was looking past all of them, out at the woods.

  Mishkin rose. “I’m going to give you some time,” he said. “I have to chop some wood for the sauna.”

  Maya turned to face Mishkin. “Please don’t,” she said. “The chopping will make it worse.”

  “Of course,” Mishkin said. “That was foolish of me. Sorry.”

  “No, it was kind of you,” Maya said. “If I can be alone without noise, it should go away quickly. Will you take a walk with my husband?” She looked fleetingly at Alex, and, catching his eyes, wished to believe that he understood her intentions—or simply that she had some, and needed his help. They had had many moments of misunderstanding, of dissent—weren’t they due for one of silent concert? “Show Alex the homes here,” she went on. “We’ve been talking about a country place to please Max. If he wants to eat grass, let him at least eat grass where the air is clear. Come back in a half hour, and I will be back to normal.”

  “Mrs. Rubin,” Mishkin said. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. But all the paperwork related to my time at the agency is under lock and key.”

  She turned to face him again, wincing from the effort. “Mr. Mishkin, my son seems to have been birthed by a wolf. I came to you to plead for a clue, and you said no. Don’t add insult to what I am feeling. I need a half hour without noise. Every minute that we talk extends the recovery time.” She searched out his eyes. “And now forgive me for being rude, Mr. Mishkin, but I am a Jewish mother. When was the last time you went outside?”

  Maya looked up at her husband. Alex rose, hoping that would stir Mishkin. “Go, please,” she said, in a voice choked by imminent tears. That did it. Confronted by the possibility of imminent tears, the men hustled into the hallway. Then the door shut behind them. Maya counted out a minute and swung her feet to the floor.

  No, she was not going to look for agency paperwork. And she didn’t have time to clean as she would have liked. As she passed the crowded dining room table on her way to the kitchen, she saw the cover page of Mishkin’s opus: Memoirs: An Attempt at Living.