Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  “Let no one say the bus line is not a full-service operation,” he sighed when she told him the reason. He extended a flip cell phone. As she dialed, he spoke an apology into the microphone.

  Maya knew what would greet her on the other end of the line—she had sent no word for three hours, her cell phone ringing uselessly in her purse in the front hallway closet. She was rebuked like a schoolgirl, first by Alex, who threw down the phone, then by Eugene, whom she heard exclaiming in the background, and finally by Raisa, who picked up after Alex. Only then was she told that her son had been returned home just minutes after her bus had pulled away from the curb, whereupon Alex’s cell phone rang with the jubilant news; whereupon Alex began dialing his wife, only to speak to his mother again once she traced the tinkle of Maya’s cell phone to the front hallway closet.

  “Raisa!” Maya broke in. “Is he all right?”

  “In one piece, thank God,” Raisa said. When she was relaying the news of Max’s return, she was triumphant, but now a note of hesitation appeared in her voice.

  “What is it? Maya said.

  “Who does this, darling?” Raisa said. “Eugene said, ‘The grandson we found, now we lost the mother.’”

  “Raisa—”

  “We were mindless with worry.”

  “You could have called the bus line,” Maya said sharply. “Asked them to dispatch it to the bus that I took. It only takes a little imagination. But you would rather sit there mindless with worry.”

  Raisa, who had been starting to speak, fell silent. “I am not going to pay attention to what you just said because you are upset,” she said. “And God knows where you’ve been.”

  “I’ve been looking for my son,” Maya said. “Now tell me where he was.”

  “He was in a river!” Raisa said, as if Maya’s willfulness were responsible. “They brought him here like Moses in the basket. Families that have nothing to do with ours keep bringing our boy to us.”

  “Watch your voice,” Maya said.

  “He’s upstairs in the shower. Alex rushed him into a hot shower.” A hot shower—the Rubin remedy for the humiliations of fate.

  “What do you mean he was in a river?” Maya said.

  “In a river,” her mother-in-law repeated. “Facedown in a river. All right?”

  “I don’t understand,” Maya said. “But he’s fine. He’s fine, isn’t he? You said he was fine.”

  “They got him in time,” Raisa said. “I can’t make sense of it, honestly.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Maya started to say, but Raisa cut her off, her own voice quavering—she did not make a custom of interrupting her daughter-in-law. “Just come home.”

  Maya saw Frank watching her. Meekly, he pointed at his watch. Maya hung up on Raisa and returned the phone.

  “He’s at home, just like you said,” Maya said feebly.

  Frank pressed the horn three times in celebration. Someone yelled up from the back. “I’m going to have a mutiny if I don’t get going,” Frank said. “You have a ride home?”

  She did. Her husband was busy scrubbing down her son in the shower, and her mother-in-law refused to drive in the night, let alone after her daughter-in-law had been so rude. The chore was left to Eugene, and she and her father-in-law suffered a silent quarter-hour as he ferried her back to the house.

  +

  After an hour-long shower, Max stood downstairs and watched nervously as the adults shouted at each other. Finally he was remembered and stared at nervously in return. Then he was rushed up to bed. No one pressed him with new questions—the Rubins feared they would get answered. As Raisa hustled Max into pajamas upstairs, he stared at the spot outside his window where his tent had stood only that morning.

  “Baba,” he said nervously. “Can I sleep on the floor?”

  “No, little boy,” she said as she fought with a sleeve of his pajamas. Under her hands, Max felt as bony as a fish. She regarded him a little fearfully. “Good boys sleep in bed.”

  Max was left to stand by the wall while Raisa reapplied to the mattress the bedding that had been rolled up on the floor. She did not request Max’s help, as if he could not be considered an ally, and he did not offer it. Occasionally, his grandmother looked up from the sheets to make sure her grandson was standing where she had left him. He looked the same: Floppy-haired and semitranslucent. As she worked, Raisa murmured optimistically at the sheets—now, Maksik would climb into a nice and clean bed, and he would dream of camels, and flying carpets, and tents, too, if he wanted, until he awoke the next morning and all the events of the previous day would dissipate like a dream, and probably his mother or father would make his favorite breakfast of farina with bits of turkey sausage, and if they didn’t because they were upset with him (he could understand that, couldn’t he), his grandmother would.

  When Max was wedged into the billows of his blanket—his grandmother had folded its edge under his feet so that he was “in an envelope,” just as she had done with Alex when he was a boy—Raisa sat down on the bed and studied her grandson. All Raisa’s ministrations were powerless against his strange metabolism; the more she fed him, the skinnier he became. Even at home, Max looked as fragile and unprotected as a pencil, and he had decided to go wandering in the world and lie down in a river.

  “Maksik, I am going to ask you a question,” Raisa said. “And your only job is to answer me honestly. That’s the only thing you have to do, because your grandmother loves you, and lies hurt your grandmother. Do you want to hurt your grandmother?”

  Max shook his head.

  “Exactly. People who love each other don’t hurt each other. It’s in the contract.” She guffawed sadly at her joke. “Maksik, why did you run away? It’s okay for you to tell me. If you don’t want to tell your mama or papa, it’s okay—as long as you tell me.”

  Max shrugged.

  “When did you think of it? You planned it a long time ago?”

  Max shrugged again.

  “Max, you’re not allowed to say ‘I don’t know.’ Because if you don’t know, who knows?”

  Max’s face was as expressionless as his blanket, which swam with stone-faced seagulls. Raisa could tell she was frightening him.

  “I’ll let you rest,” she said. “But right after you promise to tell me tomorrow. Will you promise me that?”

  Max nodded. His grandmother laid her wrinkled lips on the straight straw of his hair and let him be.

  After Raisa had padded away on her bunioned feet, the landing in front of Max’s room was quiet, only the floor beneath him gently reverberating with the sound of the adults in the kitchen.

  “You could have waited until he was back to roll up the tent,” Alex said.

  “The boy is indulged,” Eugene threatened.

  Alex’s resistance of his father was accompanied by glances at Maya that asked when she was going to pick up the rope of solidarity Alex was casting her despite her irresponsible disappearance. She chided herself for failing this gesture, for sloughing off onto her husband the chore of beating back his parents. She sat gloomily in the corner of the leather banquette by the kitchen table, Alex’s cognac two fingers deep in a filigreed drinking glass. Raisa, not feeling bold enough to contradict Maya out loud, eyed her daughter-in-law’s choice of seat—those who took the corner wouldn’t get married. And Maya eyed her mother-in-law, asking silently why this was worth Raisa’s attention when their child had spent the afternoon fifty miles away in a river. When Maya was already married.

  Upon entering the house an hour before, Maya had clutched her son to her soiled blouse as if Max was being sent off somewhere, or perhaps she was. They were gently unsealed from each other by a team of Rubins—“Mayechka, he’s just had a shower, look at your shirt.” But now, showered and changed into sweatpants, the alcohol setting off a buzz at her temples, Maya felt an immobile sedation, not unlike the refrigerator that droned from the wall.

  Alex rose and rummaged inside the pantry for an economy cylinder of canned pe
aches. The others watched him peel it open, envious he had a task. He ladled the contents into four bowls and set them out in front of the others. No one had had dinner. They watched him slurp away.

  “These dry your tongue, like a persimmon,” Alex said to his father. “And the juice is viscous. We should go back. Those other we sold were like velvet.”

  His father shrugged. “And the price was like velvet.”

  “Can someone please tell me what happened,” Maya cut in. “Please.”

  Eugene and Alex turned to her, remembering she was there. They exchanged looks. Even in her fog, she understood that the question of what to say to Maya had been discussed before her appearance.

  “He left school on the bus,” Alex said. He pushed away his bowl. “The town bus. The one you rode. Why he got off where he got off, obviously, the woman couldn’t say. It’s a farm. Her son came in for dinner and said there’s a boy in the river. Her son’s not all there—our Max knows how to pick them. He’s got a scent for the insulted and injured. In any case, she runs down and there’s our boy, sitting in her river. Facedown.”

  “Sitting?” Maya said.

  “He says he was counting the pebbles,” Alex said.

  “What did she say?” Maya said.

  “She said, ‘I can’t promise you your son wasn’t trying to hurt himself.’”

  Maya’s chest filled with dismay.

  “It’s just the American obsession with insurance,” Alex said.

  “If she was obsessed with liability, she would’ve been sure,” Maya said. “In the other direction.”

  “It’s like George Washington,” Alex said. “She’s American, so she can’t not tell the truth.”

  “Don’t you want the truth?” Maya said.

  Alex looked at his wife—now she would ask questions without an answer? Because he could do the same.

  No one knew what to say, so they sat silently. Eugene moved around invisible crumbs on the table, his habit. Alex stared at his clasped fingers. Raisa eyed the sink of dishes with anticipation—it would provide her distraction when it was right to absent herself from the table. Finally, Maya set aside her glass, rose, and walked out of the kitchen, the Rubins following her warily with their eyes, as if now she, too, had become a flight risk, as if during her disappearance she had picked up some kind of microbe that rendered her foreign and incomprehensible. Maya took the stairs to the second floor. Gently, she pushed open Max’s door, a triangle of light from the hall entering with her. Max was on the bed, a small hump rising and falling inside the cloud of the blanket.

  Maya closed her fist over her mouth and sank softly to the carpet. Worried her son would wake up and see her, she made herself rise and came close to the bed, where she watched Max for a long minute. Hating herself for her lack of restraint, she rustled his arm. His eyes opened quickly, as if he had been awake behind their false curtain. He blinked twice.

  “What’s happening with you, my child?” she said.

  “Am I in trouble?” he said.

  “You had us worried,” she said. “No, you’re not.” She took one of his hands between hers. “Are you okay?”

  Max blinked, shimmied his lips, and nodded. She took a palm to his cheek. He felt cool, settled. She ran her hand carefully through his hair, wanting to feel its straight spokes under her fingers. The fingers felt hot, and the spokes would be cool. Her son’s hair always occurred to her as an outbreak of pine needles, spiky and calm. She felt for the part, on the left side, that resisted every sweep in the other direction. Did Max’s father have a part in his hair—this was always her next thought. He had nothing but stubble the time Maya had laid eyes on him. Max’s hair reached his eyes—she was going to take him to the barber on Saturday, after Oliver—but she liked it this way. Then she wondered if she liked it because it made him look different from his father. His birth father. She tucked a strand behind an ear.

  “Max, why did you do that?” she said. “Why would you go off without telling us?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You have to do better than that, Max. Please. You walked out from school with everyone else.”

  He nodded.

  “And then? How did you end up on the other bus?”

  “I walked to the stop. They take us past it when we go for recess. They have brochures with the time that it comes.”

  “But why, Max, why?” she pleaded.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I wanted to go away. I was sad.”

  “But why?” she yelped. She crouched by his bedside. “Why were you sad? Darling, tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Oh, Max,” she said. “No. No.”

  “I’m sorry,” Max said, and turned to the wall.

  “There’s one thing you have to tell me,” Maya said. “You promise to tell me the truth? What were you looking for under the water?”

  He turned to face his mother again. “I was counting the pebbles,” he said.

  “Why?” Maya said.

  “They were pretty. They had different colors. Some of them looked like peas with eyes. Others were bigger—they were like the parents of the little ones. They were all there together.”

  “But you can’t put your head in the water like that, Max. I know you’re careful, but even when we’re careful, things can go wrong. Do you hear me?”

  “I tried to count them without putting my face in, but the water was moving too fast. I can hold air for more than a minute. Papa can tell you. You don’t come with us to Mexico, you don’t know. If you came with us, you would know.”

  “Papa comes with you and he’s worried,” Maya said.

  “I don’t know!” Max shouted. He buried his face inside his blanket and turned to face the wall once again.

  Maya gave up her questioning. The headache that she had been, for hours, too upset to notice finally forced her to notice. She rustled Max’s arm again, a soft something under the blanket. He looked back again and they gazed at each other. “Tell me what it was like,” Maya said.

  Max scratched his ear pensively like an old man, and his face loosened. “There was a boy there who was sick.”

  “Sick? In what way?”

  “He said funny things. Ba-ba-baa.”

  “Did he scare you?”

  “No. I liked him.”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “No. Should I have told him?”

  “I bet he could tell. I bet he liked you, too. You’re very likable. I’m sorry I woke you. I’m sorry I raised my voice just now.”

  “I wish I’d told him.”

  “Don’t be upset that you didn’t tell him. I think he knew. Very often, people know what you mean even if you don’t say anything.”

  “Is Papa mad at me?”

  “Papa doesn’t know how to be mad at you. But if you want to do that again, you have to tell us. If you want, we can come with you. I will come with you, for sure. Maybe I’ll like it, too. Can you promise me that?”

  Max nodded. She wanted to believe him, but didn’t. “If you’re sad,” she went on, “why not come to me? We’ll do something together. We’ll cook something fun. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll get the tent back out when Grandpa is gone. And we’ll call Oliver, and have a slumber party. And when one of these things makes you not sad anymore, you tell me, and from then on we’ll know how to fix it.”

  Max didn’t say anything, just lay there contemplating her words.

  “I’m sorry I woke you,” she said.

  “I don’t mind. I’ll fall asleep right away.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Hey, I like your hair this long.”

  He started rubbing the heel of a palm in an eye. He kept going, and she forced away his hand. “Come on, you’ll make it red,” she said. But really it was because she was fearful that every strange gesture meant something strange.

  “Can I ask something?” he said.

  “Of course you can.”

  “You were the sam
e age as me once, right?”

  She laughed. “Yes, I was, baby. Yes.”

  “Were you like me?” he said.

  She reached for his shoulder under the blanket. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember a lot. My mother—your grandmother—you met her when you were tiny—we spent every day in the summer together. Do you know what we would do? We would go to the department store and buy a box of the cheapest glasses they had. Twenty glasses. Each one had a different fish stenciled on it. Then we dragged this box to the garbage terminal. All the garbage in the city went there. It smelled so bad out there. The men who worked there stopped to stare at us. They were not like regular men—if you worked at the garbage terminal, that meant you couldn’t get a job somewhere else. But they weren’t mean—just puzzled. They watched as we took the glasses out of the box one by one and threw them at the back wall of the building. They smashed into tiny little pieces.”

  Max giggled. “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know, honey. But it was fun. You shouldn’t do it with any of our glasses, please. If you want to do it, please tell me—and we’ll do it together. Because you’re just eight years old. My mama wouldn’t let me anywhere by myself for another four years. Do you understand? She would have been so upset if I went off on my own. We can do so much—but together. I like so much being with you. Don’t you like it, too?”

  Max thought, and, as if truly deciding, nodded.

  “When we were done—ten glasses, each of us—my mama went and got a broom from one of the men. They laughed into their mustaches. She swept up the whole mess, put it in one of the trash bins, and we left. But when we came back the next year, she brought two boxes and she gave one to them.”

  Max seemed to be thinking about the story. She sat on the floor next to the bed, watching him.

  “Did you ever run away?” Max said.

  “No,” she said. “But when I was twelve, my mama sent me to my uncle’s for a summer. I really didn’t want to go. I wanted to be with her.”

  “Did Papa ever run away?” Max said.

  “Not exactly. He was playing in the sandbox with a friend once and two men came up to ask for directions to his school. And he volunteered to take them. He walked them all the way. He was lucky because Grandpa Eugene came outside just in time and asked his friend where Papa was. And his friend said. And Grandpa Eugene raced to the school. And he got there just in time.”