Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  “But you and I can get married.”

  His statement is so foolish that he snorts out a terrified laugh. Maya, however, does not laugh in return. Her amusement is now anger. The muddy water sparkles like soda around them. Maya turns and strides away. In this one way—he is a citizen, she is not—the discrepancy in their power is so implacable that Alex’s flaunting of it is heartless. The power of the powerful is tricky that way; truly, power is with the needy and meek. Unless Alex means it, of course. Does he mean it? Alex’s head swells with the possibility that he means it. It is the first great achievement of his life—his and his own. He hurtles after Maya, imploring her to stop.

  She stops. The corner of one eye fills with a tear, which makes him notice that she is wearing eyeliner. He has never noticed makeup on her; it’s one of the things he’s loved about her face without knowing it. Her face is not beautiful—he is proud of himself for not requiring beauty—but it does not need makeup. It is Maya’s face—that is all that is necessary of it. But she has put on eyeliner because she was meeting him and she wanted to appear attractive to him; otherwise, why do women apply eyeliner? And as she pushes past him again, it is this detail—eyeliner!—that fills him with the recklessness to leap onto one of the benches lining the stone wall that borders the water. He has never done such a thing, and he will never do it again.

  He has to find his balance because the planks are loose. It is quite a worn-out pedestal from which to make the announcement he is about to make, the bench’s original paint flaking under his boat shoes. Alex shouts to the walkers of Battery Park that he has just asked that girl to marry him. At these words, Maya stops walking. And she can’t make up her mind. I want her to know what you think. Maya spins around and regards Alex with an incredulity bordering on contempt.

  The walkers have stopped. Explanatory whispers go around—that boy, that girl. The observers form a half dome now, encircling Maya and Alex at the stone wall that borders the Hudson. Maya Shulman is not too shy to break through and walk away, but she does not walk away. She stands and stares at Alex Rubin. She watches Alex leap off the bench and stride toward her. As he does, the members of the semicircle around them forget themselves; their mouths crinkle in wonder; in expectation, they rustle like the lindens about them. Alex walks up to Maya and places his hands on her back, touching surely now. The back of her dress is buttoned instead of zippered and his fingers graze Maya’s skin. It is unfamiliar skin; it is warm from the sun; he feels a birthmark. He wants to get to know this skin very closely. Then he places his lips on Maya’s. The low hum of the watchers erupts into shouts and applause; they have received the show they have stopped for. This is New York.

  When Alex takes his lips from Maya’s, she wears the same expression of scornful disbelief that she wore in Battery Park three months before. This time the dress she wears is organdy and tulle. The groom’s mother bustles around the well-wishers and newlyweds trying to understand whether she feels relief or alarm, and casting worrying looks at the bride’s mother, the only Shulman to cross the ocean because there was money enough for only one ticket and the Shulmans would not take Eugene’s charity.

  Maya, suddenly eligible to become an American citizen, looks at her mother, who wears a discouraging expression. It is Galina Shulman’s first visit to America, but a week of wandering around Manhattan—she has mystified and insulted Raisa by spending her days walking around Manhattan instead of kibbitzing with Raisa at Camp Rubin in south Brooklyn—has made her understand that it is not everywhere that a woman answers an offer of marriage while thinking of more than what she feels for the man. No American has to marry because her country has walked off a cliff, as Maya must, must, must now, faced with this opportunity—this poisonous, diabolical opportunity. Diabolical because now how will Maya know whether she said yes to the man or the country? Several months more might have made it clearer, but they did not have several months more. Her visa said June 10, 1992. And she refused to take a medical job. That was her daughter.

  If Alex had not come upstairs the day of the hockey game, Maya would have ridden out her remaining months in America with Dima Niskevich, who would have kissed her on June 10 and wished her the best. Then she would have returned to Ukraine and settled back in with her parents. Maya is doing the most practical thing Maya can do for herself. Only that, for the first time in Galina’s life, the best thing for Maya has diverged from the best thing for Galina. This is what happens when you let your child leave home. Toward Alex, toward all the Rubins, Galina feels gratitude mixed with hatred. This, as much as her desire to get to know the city that will be her daughter’s new home, accounts for why she leaves the Rubins’ every morning to take the train to Manhattan. This makes Raisa only more solicitous, which sends Galina into the morning only more quickly.

  Under the wedding canopy, Maya watches her mother’s marble-faced stare from afar. She does not know her mother to fear, but her mother looks fearful, which makes Maya fearful in turn. For what both women know, but Alex does not, is that his wife—Alex constantly refers to Maya as his spouse even before they’ve been wed—will apply herself to this marriage with the constancy of an animal. Alex was wrong to imagine Maya as capricious and fickle. What Galina Shulman knows is that insubordination is only another kind of fidelity, and stays fastened as truly. And this is what she fears.

  Maya turns back to Alex. Maya thought trying to cook Ukrainian food for Americans was unlikely, but this; this is something; the two of them together younger than a single one of their parents. She thinks: Alex, you are like a flower that grows on a barren ledge of rock face five thousand feet up. Down on the ground, where there is water and the elements are more kind, you don’t thrive, you become disoriented. You grow where there is not supposed to be growth. You survive there. As the rabbi talks, she makes a prayer of her own—guiltily; to a God she has ignored until now. Let us be tenacious together. Let us be constant in a mutual way. Then she makes herself look once more at the rabbi, and mouths after him the authorized Hebrew words that sound like cries from a pack animal.

  3

  2012

  From the blue queuing stripe of the bus platform, Maya looked back at her husband. Alex watched from the Corolla, as if she were leaving on a long trip for which she alone was eligible. You could come with me, her eyes said, but Alex remained. He did not see the sense in it; she would be asking him to betray himself.

  Inside, her ticket extended to the driver, Maya surveyed the bleak collection of passengers. The 748 ran west from New York City into New Jersey and then north to the New York State line before retracing the route back to the city, a round-trip of three hours. Maya had never gone this way, only from Acrewood east toward New York. On weekends, the less mongoloid of the local Italians forced their bulges inside pleated slacks and went in for the theater matinees, each pair of bus seats a microzone of perfume and cologne. (Maya once had the transgressive thought that she could take up a lover in the city and have all the misted-up Joes and Franks on the bus to explain the hint of cologne on her skin.)

  Acrewood was on the outer edge of the city’s commuter ring; by now in its evening route west, the bus was nearly empty. The few visible faces were of unfamiliar ethnicity and peered at Maya with sleepy, malicious indifference. She was overcome by the rashness of her action, Raisa’s prejudice against the darkness and her husband’s dissent settling badly in her stomach. She would have been glad to see the Italians now, but at this hour the bus lines belonged to other kinds of riders. She felt the fright in her toes—they flexed inside the sweaty box of her flats—and she looked back at the driver imploringly.

  “Will you give me the ticket?” he said. His fingers, in a driver’s glove cut off at the knuckles, were on one end of it, hers on the other. She brought up an embarrassed smile and let go. There was something wrong with his other hand, tucked in his lap like a dead bird. Only one finger was a proper finger, the rest cauterized stumps. She wondered if this made him a reliable driver in the nighttim
e.

  “This won’t hurt a bit,” he said into his ash-colored beard. It was neatly trimmed but had an old-fashioned style, a narrow strip down the jaws. He nodded toward the darkened seats, two weak lines of blue light illuminating the floor. “The drinks cart will be down in a moment. And then our award-winning cuisine.”

  The weekend buses between Acrewood and New York that Maya took to wander through the city had two kinds of drivers: For the first, transporting passengers between the greatest city on earth and its suburbs was an imposition on talents the driver was now unable to direct toward other endeavors. This sank the driver into a scowling depression; he—often she—declined to announce the stops, apologize for delays, engage the riders.

  For the second type of driver, the cruise ship of the bus was on brief furlough from the debased preoccupations of the stationary world. It was time to fly. “Welcome on my bus, ladies and gentlemen,” this type of driver said. “I want you to buckle up. I want you to keep your food in your purses and backpacks. I want you to close your eyes.” Maya always listened. She closed her eyes and let the sun hit her eyelids through the wide square windows. “What’s my name?” the driver said. “Who looked at my name tag? I will give the cost of the ticket back to the winner.” Half a dozen shouts raced up the aisles, all wrong. “I want you to notice things, ladies and gentlemen,” the driver said. “Open your eyes now. What do you see?” Now nearly everyone shouted, though Maya was too shy: They saw the guy seated in front of them; they saw the Acrewood Park & Ride; they saw the future (always one smart-ass per bus). By then, the bus had touched off for New York City, and over the alternating rev and sigh of the engine and brakes, the driver, if Hispanic or Caribbean, told them how he had come to America (if he agreed to serve in Vietnam, he would be granted citizenship and allowed to bring his family over); and they listened respectfully. He told them about the wedding he had once had on his bus—the bride and groom had met on it (they asked him to chauffeur them on their honeymoon through the national parks, but the romantic imagination of the New Jersey state bus line ended here); and they laughed. He asked them which town near Acrewood George Washington had temporarily used as his headquarters; and they shouted guesses. “I don’t want to tire you out, so last question,” the driver would say. “Do you realize the brakes haven’t been working since Clifton?” The passengers arrived at Port Authority slightly aroused, a sweat up on their spirits.

  Invariably, somewhere around the Turnpike exit, the smart-ass would shout up, good-naturedly, How about you quit yakking and drive the goddamn bus? What this imbecile failed to understand was that he felt invited to make this stupid remark—and was rewarded with laughs—not because he was clever, but because his neighbors felt free to communicate with one another thanks to the yakking started up by the driver. The driver yakked, so they spoke. Creativity where none was required, generosity where none was required: The driver was advance notice of what you could expect on the streets of the city. As the skyline came into view, Maya’s brain bristled with all the things she would say if she had to pilot the bus toward New York. And when the driver batted the imbecile away humorously—“If I stop yakking at my passengers, it’ll be left for my wife, and she made her feelings on that clear a long time ago”—Maya swelled with satisfaction and pride. And then she wondered if the driver was telling the truth.

  Frank Sarachillo—on entering the bus, Maya now always looked at the driver’s name tag—was clearly this second type of driver, and Maya tried to shelter from the uneasy atmosphere of the bus in this fact. But tonight, she was a different kind of rider. As the bus abandoned familiar territory—for some reason, Maya couldn’t imagine Max in any of the neighboring towns; he was farther; she felt it—Maya exercised the full extent of a passenger’s privileges, yanking the yellow cord every time Frank announced a stop. When the bus came to a halt, she scrambled toward the tinted windows, startling the sleepers in her way, and searched for her son amid the wan light of the bus shelters, in whose depressing glare she was almost grateful not to discover him. The bus always drove off too quickly. In Ringwood, however, it remained by the shelter even after she had gotten a clear eyeful.

  “Would the passenger who wants to get off everywhere come up to the front?” Frank said into his microphone.

  “What gives, lady?” Frank said after Maya had shuffled up to the front, sleeping faces stirring resentfully. His face asked if his impression at the nice moment they’d shared at the beginning had to be revised because actually she was a lunatic.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, stone-faced. “There’s . . . it’s . . .” She felt tears start.

  Frank’s eyebrows, of the same gray bristly mix as his beard, slunk together. “All right, now,” he said. “Take it easy.” The night shift regularly put him in acquaintance with the glitches and flaws of human design, but Maya didn’t seem crazy, only despondent. She nodded vacantly, grateful not to be dismissed so far from home, and turned back to her seat.

  “Don’t pull the cord anymore,” he called to her. “I’ll slow down at the stops. I’m supposed to, anyway.” Maya nodded mirthlessly. At home, riding the bus had seemed zealous in the right way. Was her poor judgment a temporary function of her worry and grief, or were the worry and grief disclosing something about her true nature otherwise concealed by generally benign circumstances? She didn’t know how to answer, did not want to.

  Soon—Maya tried to keep up her vigilance, but the monotonous run of streetlights, churches, and trees lulled her—the landscape took on a different look. Neat lines of vinyl-sided homes gave way to homes spaced farther apart, and set farther back from the road, and then unpainted clapboard homes, and then homes that looked like farmhouses, some with giant red stars on the front, and then no homes at all, and then she was rolling through an inky-green blackness without regular streetlights that could have meant another country, even Ukraine. Around the next bend, forty kilometers from Kiev, Uncle Misha’s farm would appear. Maya would disembark and commence cutting down sunflowers, binding every dozen with bast and laying each bundle into the bed of Misha’s truck, resentfully driven by him to the open-air market in Kiev, a city he avoided at all costs.

  Only old people lived in the village, the young ones having run away to the city—except for Misha, who ran from the city. The family he left behind—his sister, Maya’s mother; his parents, lucky unlike so many to have survived the war—he placated by visiting one weekend a year, during which he raised a glass to everyone’s birthdays and all the national holidays in one go. He was so tormented by the city’s restlessness and pretensions that even his parents, who spent the other days of the year mourning his absence (two million people Kiev was good enough for, just not Misha), took pity and sent him away early.

  Misha was unmarried. No one asked why, though it was generally assumed that he would be able to tolerate the constant presence of a woman no better than that of the capital city. That didn’t make sense to Maya, because while Misha did wander around in an ill humor when he was in Kiev, muttering about plums and cabbage and sunflowers through the cigarette in his mouth, it took only one call of his name by his niece for the weather on his face to disperse.

  With each visit, he seemed broader and shorter, as if the earth was getting a stronger grip on him; he had the same embarrassing mullet as his draft horse; only one’s face, however, was commanded by a nose in the shape of a pear. The other villagers called him Mikol, the Ukrainian Orthodox version of Misha. This set his Jewish mother wailing. One day at the farm when Maya was visiting, Misha buried his hand in one of the furrows left by his tractor and stuck an oily lump of chocolate-black earth in her face. “You can eat this soil. If this soil says I am Mikol, what difference does it make?”

  Maya had spent with him every summer from twelve to eighteen. “I hope you are satisfied.” Maya’s grandparents shook their heads at her mother. “She is turning into him. And now you are sending her away to America.” And to think, when Maya had first been told she would be spen
ding the summer with Misha, she felt guilty for an unknown error; was her mother trying to get rid of her? And what about their summertime rituals? The TV tower, the Viennese Café, the boxful of glasses they hurled against the brick wall of the garbage terminal, because you needed to hurl something now and then. To her own parents, Maya’s mother solemnly acknowledged her dereliction, then sent Maya away all the same.

  The Warwick Bus Terminal cut into Maya’s recollection with a savage fluorescence. They were at the end of the line. She inhaled sharply. On the 8:37 to Warwick, you’ll see passengers you don’t see on the weekend matinee buses, and if you close your eyes, the unslacking roar of the engine will lull you into minutes-long vacancies during which no boy is missing. But you will not see your son.

  Maya disembarked to look around. Frank followed, lighting a cigarette out of the good hand.

  “How long does it wait here?” she said.

  “You mean we’re going back together as well?” he said.

  She urged up a stiff smile; he was trying. They listened to the replacement passengers eating potato chips by the ticket counter, the crinkle of the small plastic bags the sole proving sound of humanity in the night. The terminal was a burp of blue light into the surrounding blackness.

  “You want to tell me what’s on your mind?” Frank said. He held the cigarettes out toward her. She couldn’t remember the last time she had had one. Her first drag produced no special sensation; she remained there, in the parking lot with Frank.

  “My son is lost,” she said, toe-boxing the pavement. She drew on her cigarette as if it would give her her son. “We called the school. He rode this bus in the afternoon. That’s all we know.”

  Frank looked relieved—about this he could do something. “I’ll radio the dispatcher,” he offered.