“It’s okay,” Felicia said. “You guys can touch her if you want to. She’s very smooth.” The boys petted the snake where it hugged Felicia’s hip. “Wow!” Adam said again, and Josh echoed, “This is awesome!” The snake lay so still and torpid, it might have been dead.
Felicia pulled her hair back and tied it into a knot so more of the snake’s body was visible. Not to mention her own body. The boys’ parents came over to see what was going on, and Katie Axelrod and her boyfriend got up from the couch. Kurt wanted to know what the snake ate and where it was native to, and the CD changed from the Talking Heads to something older and jazzier, and Billy came out of the kitchen with a tray of spanakopita. As he set the food down on the table, the chili peppers blinked on and off all around him, lightening and darkening his body as he stood with his back to Jane.
“More food, everybody!” he said, turning. He was wearing a midnight blue shirt and a thin black tie and the new shoes he’d bought for his upcoming internship. His face was freshly shaved.
Maisie reached out and stroked the snake’s skin, then jumped back in delight and squealed. She reached out again but Jane pulled her away. “That’s enough,” she said.
Jane saw Billy register Felicia and the snake. His eyes narrowed and he moved toward them through the archway, ignoring one of the law students who was trying to speak to him.
“Billy,” Jane said, trying to behave as though she hadn’t noticed he was upset. He always looked more handsome when he was angry. His nose seemed straighter and the gray of his eyes got darker and stormier. “This is my student Felicia Noone.”
“Is that a boa constrictor?” Billy asked.
“Python.” Felicia smiled at him, a flirtatious, challenging smile, shifting the snake across her bare shoulders. Her lipstick was coral orange, and her eyelashes were thick with mascara, very black against her white skin. Her slightly protuberant green eyes glowed. “I guess you’re Mr. Levitsky,” she said.
It might have been the first time anyone had called him that. He smiled back at Felicia, but Jane could see how tight his face was.
“You can’t have the snake here,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, she’s not dangerous,” Felicia said. “Don’t worry about her.” She ran her hand along the black-and-white skin, caressing it.
Maisie was jumping up and down. “Look, Daddy!” she said. “Look, look!”
“Well, I am worried,” Billy said. “If you’re comfortable keeping something like that as a pet in your own house, that’s your business. But bringing it here—with lots of people, and children, and all— is something else. In my house anything that might happen is my responsibility.”
How much like a lawyer he sounded already! Rational, cautious, self-righteous. “Oh, Billy,” Jane said. “It’ll be okay. You can see it just lies there!”
“She’s very docile,” Felicia confirmed.
“Lookie, lookie!” Maisie shouted, pulling on her father’s leg.
“I see, sweetheart,” Billy said. “But the snake has to go. Now.” It was the same voice he used with Maisie when she misbehaved.
Felicia shrugged. “The serpent is everywhere despised,” she said, and looked around for her coat.
Maisie started to cry. “Snake!” she wailed. “I want! I want!”
Jane picked her up. It was hours past her bedtime. “Say good night, sweetie,” Jane said.
Maisie laid her head on Jane’s shoulder, suddenly spent. “Night, snaky,” she said.
Jane carried her up the steps.
Downstairs the New Year’s party lurched on like a bulldozer through the dark, cold night, plowing a relentless track into the new year.
* * *
The next week the temperature dropped well below zero, making it painful to breathe. When Jane took out the trash after dinner, the stars glittered in the black sky like chips of ice. In the morning the thermometer rose only to five above. The sky was enormous, a brilliant crystal blue that seemed to rise up forever. The wind blew, gusty and fierce, off the frozen lake, cutting through thick down coats, under scarves, nosing in between the stitches of woolen gloves. Siberia, Jane thought, riding home from work on the city bus in the early darkness, grateful for the heat blasting out of the vents but wishing she had a long hooded fur coat and fur-lined boots. The temperatures were supposed to moderate over the weekend and rise to a balmy twenty-five by Monday when she was leaving for Chicago. She thought of the thick silence of the Special Collections room at the Newberry, how she could sit at the heavy tables touching the actual pages Masha had touched: white fields where the tracks of the diarist’s pen lay like footprints across the snow, leading the reader back into the past.
The bus had passed the car repair place now. Jane pulled the cord. She lurched to her feet and down the steps, out into the brutal cold. The thin, glacial air seemed to fill her chest with frost. She put her head down and trotted awkwardly, lugging her satchel, up the icy street, past the Mitchells’ and the Fromms’ and the Petersons’, narrow two-story houses outlined still in Christmas lights. The yards were white with snow, packed down by dogs and children in some places, in others clean and drifted, marked only lightly with the delicate three-pronged prints of birds.
From outside her own brown undecorated house, Jane could see Maisie and Elise through the living-room windows. They sat together on the couch, Maisie in Elise’s lap, their heads bent together over a book. All the indoor lights were on against the winter evening, bathing them in a yellow glow and shining off Elise’s long black hair and Maisie’s brown curls. “Hello, girls!” Jane said, coming in. She peeled off her coat and dropped her satchel on the stairs, absorbing the warmth of the house into her chilled limbs.
“Mommy!” Maisie crowed.
“I have something to tell you,” Elise said.
Jane thought something must have happened to Maisie. She picked her up and looked at her, but she seemed all right.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I got a new job.” Elise pulled her long black hair back over her shoulders with both hands and knotted it. She looked like a different person suddenly, all plucked eyebrows and gold-studded ears.
“What do you mean?” Jane thought she must have misunderstood. She needed Elise. Maisie needed her. Elise could not desert them.
“I’m sorry! I should have told you sooner,” Elise said. “Maisie is great and everything. It’s just, I’m thinking of going back to school. I don’t know what I’m doing, really, but part-time is definitely what I need for now.” She smiled apologetically, and all of a sudden Jane saw her not as an indispensable piece of her own requisite luck but as a twenty-two-year-old with a disordered, casual life—the kind of life Jane herself had never had.
“Oh,” Jane said with an effort. She knew she had to say something. “What’s your timetable?”
Elise smiled again. “This is it,” she said. “This is my last day.”
It took all Jane’s concentration to keep the explosion inside her chest from showing. “Perhaps you could stay just one more week? Sitters usually give more notice.”
“I know, I know. Like I said, I’m really sorry.” Elise wrapped a long red-and-white checked scarf over her head. She didn’t have a hat. Her black ski jacket stopped at her waist.
It was hard to know how to say good-bye to her. Jane was bewildered, and as far as Maisie knew, Elise would be back on Monday. Was that okay? Should Jane make Elise stay and explain to Maisie what was happening? There wasn’t any time to think it over; Elise was opening the door, letting in the cold.
“Let’s wave,” Jane said automatically.
They stood, waving, by the front window as Elise walked unhurriedly down the frozen street, her breath billowing behind her in great white gusts. Not seeing them. Not once looking back.
Billy got home and started to cook dinner while Jane was upstairs giving Maisie a bath. When they came down, Billy was standing in the kitchen holding a cleaver, a clove of garlic half-chopped
on the cutting board. Its pungency mixed with the smells of olive oil and wet boots.
“Elise quit,” Jane said.
“What?” Billy turned from the stove. “Why?”
Jane shrugged his question away. “We have no child care, as of right now.”
“Didn’t she give any notice?” Billy said.
“No notice at all.”
Billy’s jaw tightened. He lined up the big glinting blade and hacked through the garlic, each stroke of the cleaver leaving a mark in the wood, then dumped it in the pan, where it sizzled fiercely in the smoking oil.
Jane watched Maisie stepping into Billy’s big boots that sat dripping by the back door. “We’ll have to find someone else,” she said. “I’ll look as soon as I get back. Can you miss a week at McKinley?”
“Are you joking?”
Now it starts, Jane thought. Her research time set against Billy’s responsibilities—not to mention the money he was earning. It wasn’t as if classes were in session yet; it wasn’t as if she had to teach. “Don’t blame me,” she said. “This isn’t my fault.”
Maisie had got both the boots on and was tramping gritty slush across the linoleum with a look of serious concentration. Jane understood what was going to happen. Either Billy would refuse to miss his week of work, or he would offer to forgo it—to anger the firm and let down the client he’d been assigned and give up the salary they needed—and Jane, if he did that, would decline his offer. She could see, as if it were written up somewhere, in some public document, that she would.
Maisie was out the kitchen door, tracking muddy slush all over the dining-room rug.
“Maisie! What are you doing!” Jane called.
Maisie’s face went cautious and thoughtful. She froze in her tracks for a moment.
Billy put his knife down. “Although it is true that you hired her,” he said.
Maisie took another deliberate step.
“Stop it!” Jane yelled at Maisie. The smells of garlic and chicken and wine seemed out of place in a room with so much anger. “Stop it right now!”
…
Instead of going to Chicago, Jane spent the next week visiting day-care centers. She had decided not to look for another sitter. Maisie needed to be with other children, she thought, and Jane needed the stability of child care that wouldn’t quit or call in sick. Redirecting her frustration, she approached the task with her usual compulsive organization, calling everyone she knew to ask for recommendations, talking to the various directors over the phone, narrowing down her alphabetized list.
The actual visiting, however, was a shock. Jane had never been to a child-care center before, and at first she couldn’t tell if her horror grew out of this unfamiliarity, or if the places were, indeed, horrible. It wasn’t that any of them seemed dangerous or cruel, although she knew there were such places. Nor was there any particular mode of horror. Each terrible child-care center was terrible in its own way.
The first place she went—recommended by her pediatrician—seemed big and institutional. Babies were lined up in cribs in the wide front windows like merchandise, although surely it was so they could amuse themselves taking in the view. Nobody else was amusing them. The three toddler rooms opened off a carpeted hallway, each identically furnished and arranged, their closed doors decorated with identical paper snowflakes. “We recently got a fifty thousand-dollar grant for our playground,” the admissions director told Jane, but Jane, sensing a kind of compulsive, super-orderly replication at work, wasn’t listening.
At the next place, the director showed Jane the enrichment activities: counting beads, alphabet letters for coloring, cards for matching. Classical music played. Small children crouched on mats, busy with something. They didn’t look unhappy, only quiet and intense. Jane thought this was the kind of place designed to appeal to parents like her, overachieving academic types, but it filled her instead with a creeping horror. Wouldn’t there be enough constructive tasks later on in life? Enough quiet intensity?
“What about playing?” she asked.
“Of course they play,” the director said.
The third place was dingy and sad, and at the fourth, the chirping, condescending brightness with which a teacher told Jane, “Brian is our problem child. But we’re working on that, aren’t we, Brian?” chilled her. She had thought it would be helpful to have Maisie along and be able to see her response to each place, but Maisie seemed to like them all. She had no idea why they were there, but she got into the car cheerfully every morning, asking, “Where we going today?”
“We’re going visiting,” Jane told her.
“I like visiting,” Maisie said. What she liked were all the new toys—plastic telephones, little people, buses, jumping frogs, big wooden lofts.
At last Jane found a place she liked. The Chestnut Lane Children’s Center was decorated with posters of children playing, height marks, seeds sprouting in plastic pots, collages bulging with paste, photographs of babies, muddy finger paintings. It was messy without being decrepit, noisy but with a feeling of cheerful, controlled chaos. Jane liked the director, a loud-voiced, heavy woman who greeted the children by name as she showed Jane around. “Hi, Benjamin! Hi, Leo! Hello, Kinesha, Tyler, Stevie, Jessica! The children are happy here, as you can see,” she said. “Well, not all the time! But we help them learn to get along. To communicate when they’re angry or sad. It’s hard work. A full-time job for them and for us.” She must have given this speech a hundred times, but still she sounded like she meant it. They were in the preschool room, and Jane watched two children fighting over a yellow truck.
“It’s my truck!” one yelled. “I had it first!”
“I had it before!” the other cried. “I just put it down for a minute!”
The teacher, reaching onto a shelf, produced another identical truck from a shelf, and the boys stopped screaming.
“Of course,” the director said, “sometimes the solutions are kind of simple.”
But when Jane asked about signing up, the director said, “Unfortunately, we’re full right now. But I’ll put your name on our waiting list. We usually have openings in September.”
“I don’t know what we’re going to do!” Jane said at dinner that night as Maisie turned her sippy cup upside down and tugged on the spout. Drops of milk sprayed across the tray. “Moo, moo,” she said.
Billy took the cup from Maisie and turned it right side up. “That’s not to play with,” he said.
“We went to the Children’s Museum and she milked a big plaster cow,” Jane explained. “You bring a child up in Wisconsin, that’s what you get.” She loved the way Maisie had made the connection to the sippy cup, the actual milk.
Billy watched Maisie turn the cup over again. “I thought we’d get a progressive politician,” he said.
“Well, I’ll bet it’s organic milk,” Jane said.
“Oh, ganic!” Maisie yelled. “Ganic, ganic!” She bounced up and down in her seat.
“So,” Billy said to Jane, “what’s your second choice?”
Jane tried speak calmly. “There is no second choice,” she said.
* * *
The next day after breakfast, Jane took Maisie to the toy store at the mall and let her pick out a little set of figures in a box. There were knights and dragons, pirates on rafts, shepherds and sheep, peasant women in kerchiefs pushing carts of vegetables. Maisie chose one with a bride, a wedding cake, some fiddle players, and a lot of fancy tables and chairs.
“How about this one?” Jane said, holding out the sheep scene, but Maisie stuck by the bride.
They drove over to campus and walked along the icy sidewalks to Jane’s building. Going at Maisie’s pace, it took twice as long as when Jane walked it alone.
In Van Hise no one seemed to be around. The lights were dim in the Slavics hallway, and all the doors were shut. Jane helped Maisie open the box and take the figures out of their plastic bags.
“Dis one has pretty hair,” Maisie said, sitting on the floor
near the window where the low winter sun slanted in, casting a watery parallelogram of light. “Dis one has a feather. Dis one has a purple hat.” She arranged the bride and her entourage in a small phalanx, admiring their accessories.
Jane sat at her desk and opened the volume of selections from Masha’s diaries. If she wasn’t going to be able to get to Chicago, perhaps she could find enough here for the nature paper at least—enough to hammer out a sketchy draft to be filled in later. Also she needed to start preparing her classes for the upcoming semester; really, she should have been halfway done by now.
“Mama,” Maisie said. “Who dis lady?” She stood against Jane’s knees and pushed the bride into Jane’s face.
“Sweetie,” Jane said. “I can’t see it if it’s so close.” She looked at the figure of the bride with her tight white dress, her tiny white shoes, her white plastic veil that snapped on and off. “That’s the bride,” she said. “She’s getting married.”
“But what’s her name?” Maisie wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “What do you think it is?”
“I’m asking you!” Maisie said.
“Careful of the book,” Jane said. “Maybe Lucy?”
“No,” Maisie said. “Not Lucy.”
“Tracy?”
“No.”
“I don’t know, honey,” Jane said. “You can name her anything you like.” She took Maisie’s hand and led her back to her spot on the floor. “What a pretty cake,” she said. “Do you think it’s chocolate?”
They set up the table and chairs. Jane slipped back up to her desk.
Masha was writing about how the snow had twice delayed her journey:
I will not be surprised if one of these years it snows in July. Snow is the soul of Russia made visible. Still, I will be glad when the grass in the meadow is up to my waist and the sun draws the flowers up out of the ground like young girls with ribbons in their hair drawn into the ballroom by the strains of a waltz.
“Mama,” Maisie said. “Mama, Mama! It vanilla cake. Vanilla!”
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