Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  “I’m happy he comes from you,” Maya whispered, too quietly for Laurel to hear under the roar of her engine.

  +

  Sheff City was not a city—it was smaller than Adelaide, with only one real street, and bad cell-phone service. The Yellowstone River, which Maya could hear but not see, a silver rush in the darkness, explained why the town had three motels to Adelaide’s one, and why the Hansen Motel could afford to make the Dundee in Adelaide look freshly renovated by comparison.

  There was only one window that showed burning light. Unwilling to think harder, Maya walked to it and knocked softly. She turned around to see if she could recognize Marion’s car in the parking lot, but realized she didn’t know what he drove. There were only three cars in the parking lot. The season was ending.

  She was about to knock again when Marion opened the door. He blinked repeatedly, like a child trying to waken.

  “You were asleep,” she said.

  “It’s not really a sleeping night,” he said. “I don’t know when I went under.” He squinted. “You’re standing in front of me.”

  “I’m standing in front of you. Whatever made you follow us to Adelaide, Marion—I hope it will also keep you from asking me to explain.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” he said. He moved so she could walk in.

  It was the flower room. There were flowers on the wallpaper, the towels, the bedding, even in the air, industrial jasmine hitting the room from plug-ins in the sockets.

  “I haven’t seen a hotel room in ten years,” Maya said. “And now two in one day. It’s awful, this room.”

  “It’s awful,” Marion said.

  She sat down carefully on the edge of one of the unmade beds; there were three in the room. Alex disliked street clothes mingling with sheets where they slept nearly bare. She marveled bitterly—in her lover’s hotel room, she respected her husband’s predilections. She wondered what her son had gotten from her, but she did not have to wonder what she had got from her husband. She was struck by the simple headlong power of twenty years together. She felt like a survivor.

  “Can I fix you something?” he said. “Tea? Well, it’ll be time for coffee soon.” The clock said after four.

  Maya’s eyes filled with tears. She didn’t bother to bring her hands over them. She couldn’t bear to wipe down more tears. Soon, she would have hands like Wilma Gund, only because of sadness, not work. Marion sat down and covered her. She turned into him and cried harder, cried as she would have to her mother. She used him for her mother. She felt that he knew that and didn’t mind. She loved him for that.

  “You should sleep,” he said. “A long day.”

  “I don’t believe it will end,” she said.

  “Were the parents there?”

  Maya shook her head, unclear whether she meant they were not or she could not bear to speak about it. He didn’t press. She loved him for that, too.

  “I don’t want to sleep yet,” she said. “I’ve been thinking of you since morning. You are the only person I’ve wanted to speak to all day. Even more than Laurel and Tim. How can that be? How can I be this person? And then you appeared.”

  “Come,” he said. “Stand.”

  “Why? Look at your shirt, I’ve made a mess of it.”

  “This prize number?” he said. “Stand with me. You said you wanted to dance.”

  “Dance?” she said through her tears and laughed sourly.

  “What kind of music do you like?”

  “Please don’t distract me. Alex is always steering me away. He thinks he’s committing a kindness. I used to think so, too.” She looked up. “I’m sorry to mention him.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you mention him or not,” Marion said. “And I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know what kind of music,” she said. “The kind they played in the bar. The kind that was on when we spoke—not what they were playing at first.”

  Marion rose and pulled a little radio out of his duffel bag and played with the dial. He set it on the night table and held his hand out to Maya. She came close and he wrapped her up.

  “This is going to be a disappointment if you expect much better than swaying,” he said. “My last dance was at high school prom, thirty-five years ago.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head; don’t speak.

  They swayed clumsily, though little by little they eased into it and found more of each other’s rhythm. The radio station had no short supply of bluesy, wailing songs. Marion had not pulled shut the shades, and any passing guest could get an eyeful of two people slow-dancing. Marion called out the names—Gene Autry, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Horton—as they came on. They were just sounds to Maya, pure foreignness. But she felt calmed by the plaintive, twanging music, the gentleness with which the men and women sang of ungentle things. She couldn’t make out most of the words, but what she caught did not suggest major happiness.

  She opened the top two buttons on Marion’s shirt and wedged the side of her face into the open space, up against his breastbone.

  “You have a good one,” she said.

  “Do you know?” he said.

  “It’s beating fast.”

  “Cigarettes and dancing.”

  She removed her face and looked at him. “Will you lie down with me?”

  He motioned to the three beds. “You choose.”

  “Why are there so many? Do people never come through here alone? I would come here alone and sleep for a year.”

  “You can put three snoring fishermen in here for fifteen dollars a person. Makes them feel like the away football game all over again.”

  “The one by the window,” she said. The large, three-paned window was the room’s only grace; the owner knew he could not compete with the landscape. You could see none of it now, only blackness swirling with motes of snow in the sharp triangle of light that fell from a streetlight somewhere above the motel. The motes settled like dust; evidently the wind had died down. The cold, antiseptic brightness of the fluorescent light was mellowed by the silver shadows given off by the dusting of snow.

  Marion started to unfurl the bedspread, but she motioned against it. She was in street clothes and could not muster the force to remove them. She went down and he fitted himself around her. She smelled the wood smoke with sweat. They watched the snow.

  “I’m so tired, Marion,” she said. He laid his hand on her shoulder, and it fell under his touch. “Aren’t you?” she mumbled. “Just for a minute.”

  “Shhhh,” he said.

  She dreamed of nothing.

  +

  She awoke with first light; the sun was difficult to imagine behind all the gauze in the sky, but even its gray hit her eyes with unfamiliar sharpness. The knowledge of what she had done worked its way through her with terrible force. The alarm clock was on Marion’s side of the bed, but it didn’t matter what time it was; it was light outside.

  She slid from Marion’s grasp and stepped toward the window. Now the mountains were visible; in the daylight, you could not look away from them.

  “One thing you’ll never be able to do,” he said. She looked back—she had woken him. He was propped up on an elbow, the other hand rubbing an eye. “See yourself the way I can right now.”

  “What do you see?” she said.

  He took his hand away and looked at her thoroughly. “You could stay,” he said.

  She turned back to the window and watched the snow settle. “After two days, you are ready for that?”

  “You live for fifty-two years so you can know what you want in two days,” he said.

  “Twenty years later, don’t we end up where Alex and I’ve ended up? Where you and Clarissa did? Doesn’t it all come to the same thing?”

  “In twenty years, I’ll try to save you the trouble and be dead,” he said. “But no—you are wrong about that. I can’t prove it to you because I haven’t lived it—I’ve lived the opposite. But I know.”

  She smiled weakly. “I could cook for Wilma,�
� she said. “She needs the help. We could buy a motel—make it something it should be.”

  “Why didn’t you open that café that you wanted?” he said.

  She nodded, as if agreeing with something he’d said.

  “Won’t you tell me?” he said.

  She watched him with pity. “What could be interesting about me, Marion?”

  “I look for explanations only if I need explanations,” he said.

  She turned back to the window and looked out at the morning. “When I told them I wanted to do it, they looked at me as if I’d said I wanted to take Alex and move back to Ukraine.”

  “Which them?”

  “My parents-in-law. Eugene—my father-in-law—said: ‘So you mean on the weekends?’ I explained again, but he still thought I meant I wanted to come work with him—he imports food. He thought I wanted to cook the food. ‘But why? It’s cooked already.’ Finally, I got through. So he called a friend with a restaurant, and got me on the line for a day. He said, ‘Why speculate? Educated people make decisions based on facts and experience.’ My father-in-law, the logician.

  “I had lead in my legs that day. Bricks in my hands and lead in my legs. I bumped the other cooks. I scattered an entire container of smoked eel on the floor. Smoked eel—it’s burned into my mind. Nervous, I guess. It was different from the kind of food I wanted to make—heavy sauces, all that sugar. Of course, they didn’t ask me back.

  “Soon after that, Eugene gave me an ad in the newspaper. An opening in mammography at the hospital down the road. I would be home early enough to get Max from the school bus. I already had a semester of radiology from school, and he knew the department manager because he catered their holidays. He had found a way for me to try out at the restaurant; couldn’t I try this out in turn? So I did. I intended to return the favor, and then go back to my plans. This is how I understood the new situation: I had new people to take into account; I had to try. But, you know, I liked the hospital. Because I was expecting so little? I liked being around all that sickness and death; I was alive by comparison. It was me and six or eight women, all older; Dominican, Italian, Greek, Cuban: I never had to bring lunch from home. I liked all that equipment in my hands: it was solid. I learned how to use it. I became good at it. At the end of the day, I didn’t have to wonder what the day had been worth.

  “I thought, maybe Eugene was right, and simply no one had cared about me deeply enough to open my eyes to the truth. Maybe I had been holding my breath for four years—I had come only for college, on a student visa; there are so many things you don’t know about me, Marion. Maybe cooking was just a trance of some kind—because I missed my mother, I missed home. And now that I’d found a new family, it was over, and I had a new direction. Truthfully, I was relieved. A fear went out of me. I thought: So I will not get to do that. It was like saying good-bye to a complicated lover. The love went, but so did the heartache.”

  “You keep saying your father-in-law. What about your husband? What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. I thought he was trying to respect me by not getting in the way.”

  Marion only nodded at something.

  “It sounds so bad spoken out loud. I’ve never spoken it out loud before.”

  “Why?”

  “No one’s asked. But also I didn’t tell anyone. Whom to tell? We have no friends. I have no friends. You’re my first friend in twenty-five years in America.”

  “I don’t want to be your friend.”

  “What about Max?” she said. “Have you thought of that?”

  “He would be here, with you. Where he’s from.”

  “He’s not from here anymore,” she said. “Max doesn’t want to be in Montana. He wants to be wild in New Jersey. And I have to be where he is.” She looked out the window again. “I have to protect him from his family.”

  “And where do you want to be?” he said.

  Maya exhaled. “I can’t stop looking at the mountains. It’s so easy to go your whole life without seeing them. Without seeing anything, really. I wanted to know yesterday: Do they become invisible to you? In a month or a year, would they become ordinary?”

  “Now you don’t steer away.”

  She looked back at him with love. “I want to be here, Marion.”

  “So, we’ll answer every question,” he said. “I wouldn’t say this—” he started and broke off.

  “Go ahead. If you thought I loved Alex.” She waited out a pause. “But I do love him. I thought I was marrying someone of ambition, creativity, power. The power to bewitch. He was awkward and tentative—so unlike the boys I had known. But he kept going—he kept after what he wanted even though it wouldn’t come easily. Doesn’t it count so much more that way? It did to me then, at any rate. Even though it wasn’t right, even though I had a boyfriend—he kept going. He could not stop; it was passion. He bewitched me—in the last way I thought I would be bewitched. That felt so right—I thought I knew everything, and he showed me I didn’t.” She thought for a moment. “Is that a story I tell myself? Maybe it was much simpler than that, and I only wanted to sell myself to America. Once you start looking inside yourself in this way, there’s no more hope of a clear answer.”

  She rubbed her fingertips on the glass of the window, as if trying to leave a trace of herself. “It was some time before I understood that the things that I loved were an anomaly for him. It wasn’t what he loved about himself. Then I thought he wanted help getting back to them. I was wrong. And then we just . . . stayed that way. I wouldn’t let go. Like letting go was another defeat—so young, and already so many defeats. My stubbornness about cooking—maybe I turned it into a stubbornness about us. I would change him—it would get better. And then Max . . . But the solution is not to ruin Alex’s life—this family’s. Not yet, at least. Don’t I have to unfail myself before I fail him? I am not asking you to wait. All I can say is I don’t know. And I love you. I do love you.”

  They sat with this miserable information.

  “When I told you that Max was adopted,” she said finally. “Did you think why?”

  He worked at his lip with his teeth. “Was it that you two couldn’t . . . ?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Did you wonder who?”

  “No,” he said. “I have children; that’s not what matters to me.”

  “Do you want to know who?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Tell me if you want me to know.”

  “Alex can’t have children. He has Klinefelter’s—a syndrome. They discovered it when we tried to get pregnant. But his parents think it’s me. They decided that I was infertile and that he was covering up for me, a gentleman. Little by little, that story became fact. A word here, a word there. It bothered me at first, but then you think, Who cares, anyway? If they knew their son was infertile, they would not sleep at night. They would feel as if life had laughed in their face. But I . . . they love me. In the way they know how. But I will always be the adopted daughter. So if it’s me, they can go to sleep at night. Though I am sure they worry: Will Max inherit this blemish from Maya? And then they remember Max is not Maya’s. And this helps them sleep. Max wouldn’t exist in our lives without the blemish, but they couldn’t sleep calmly if the opposite was the case, wondering if he would inherit it. The release is built into the flaw.”

  He watched her silently, absorbing the information.

  She exhaled at the glass of the window, leaving a mark that then narrowed and vanished. She turned the shades so that the room was invisible to anyone outside, but, properly angled on the bed, one could still make out the mountains a little. Crossing her arms, she raised her blouse over her head. She shivered though the room had warmed up overnight. Her skin was paler than the snow outside. She removed her bra and her small breasts fell free. She stepped out of her pants, then her underwear—she had been wearing homely white briefs, but could not induce herself to feel shame. She lowered herself onto the bed. She had forgotten to take off her socks.
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  Marion was motionless on his side of the bed. She was seeing a new expression on his face, and she thought how much more there was to learn about him. If they had a life together, she would learn something new about him over and over. It would not end for many years, and perhaps ever.

  She tried to fit him for the mask of death she had slipped so easily onto her mother, and herself, and Alex, and Max. But she could not picture Marion as anything other than there, his face taken up with a mournful amusement. He was older than her, but despite the slightly bent fingers, the tiredness around the eyes, and the loose skin she felt feeling his heart, it felt more difficult to imagine his death. Perhaps she knew him too little, had him too flimsily to be able to calmly let go. And yet, she felt she knew him. Some things, she knew. She knew that if he walked out of the room, she would love him. If he took off his clothes, but wore a condom, she would love him. If he didn’t use a condom, but nothing came of it, she would love him. If he didn’t, and something did, still she would. Every single outcome was the right one.

  Her legs parted slightly from a slow-sweeping lurch in her stomach. She felt a dull furrow open, as if by a sledgehammer dragged by someone too young to lift it. It was her—she was dragging the sledgehammer. She was on Misha’s farm, dragging the sledgehammer, everything still up ahead. From the furrow things wanted to spill. The sensation was of some sort of impending evacuation, and she turned over because it was all happening there. Her knees, pressed into the roughly starched cotton of the bedsheet, nearly buckled but she grunted and dug in. She pushed her face hard into the pillow so that no light came in—she wanted to be underwater without adequate air. She closed her fingers over the thin vertical iron slats of the headboard, such as it was, and dug her nails into her skin. She would love him if he walked out of the room, but if she heard the buckle snapping on his jeans, the flop and rustle of denim—she would love him a little bit more.