“Just in time for what?”
“Just in time for nothing bad to have happened to your father. He was little and he wanted to be nice, but he made a bad decision. When you’re little, even if you feel like doing something—even if it’s nice—you have to tell your mama and papa. And then it’s okay.”
Max considered this information. Maya bent toward her son. “Can I ask you something now?”
He nodded and busied himself with an edge of the blanket, turning it this way and that.
“Were you scared today?” she said. “Was it ever scary?” What she wanted to ask was Did you worry you wouldn’t come back to us? But she couldn’t bring herself to ask that.
Max shrugged. “A little,” he said finally.
They said I love you and touched nose tips—how they said good night. Maya watched Max close his eyes, as if to reassure herself that, indeed, she had not disrupted his sleep lastingly. She took the steps downstairs, where, upon her entry to the kitchen, the conversation stilled.
“How is he?” Alex said.
“He’s okay now,” Maya said thickly. “He needs to see a doctor.”
“A doctor?” Alex said.
“He doesn’t understand if there’s something wrong—and why would he,” she said. “There’s a pediatric psychiatrist at the hospital. A wonderful man, Saltz. They know him around the country.”
“And tell him what?” Alex said. “Our son runs off to sit in a river? Take him, take him. He’ll tell you that Max suffers from psychotic episodes, multi-personality disorder, whatever you like. He’ll put him on—I don’t know what it’s called, but you know what I’m talking about. Those pills. And then you’ll see what fucked-up really means. Your child will never be the same.”
“Sasha!” Raisa said. “If you want to use foul language, please wait till I leave.”
You never leave, Maya nearly said, but silenced herself just in time. Alex held up a hand in apology.
“I’m afraid to leave things as they are,” Maya said. “If not Saltz, we should take him to a psychologist.”
“He can look in a crystal ball to see if Max will ever sleep in a regular bed again,” Eugene said.
“You keep saying we got a bad deal, Eugene,” Maya said. “Should we do something about it or not?” She got out the words, but her appetite for altercation had drifted away.
“So, you want ours to be the family with the boy with the”—Eugene twirled a finger into his temple in a Soviet gesture that meant: not all there.
“I spoke to him very directly,” Raisa said. “I think things are going to be very different now.”
“A psychologist?” Alex said. “And pay two hundred dollars for forty-five minutes? You’re overreacting, Maya. Do you know that expression: ‘There are no healthy people, only the undiagnosed’? You go to the doctor, the doctor will find something wrong with you. How else can they make a living?”
“What about Bender?” Raisa said. “Bender might see him for free.”
“Bender in Whippany?” Eugene said, incredulous. “Our Bender?” He meant that Bender was Russian.
“You like to find problems in others’ proposals,” Alex said to his father, “but you have none of your own.”
“Boys, please,” Raisa pleaded.
“I am so tired,” Maya said.
“Go to bed, darling,” Raisa said magnanimously.
Maya obeyed. Sometimes, she was grateful for Raisa’s mother-like agitation. She mounted the stairs once more, her thighs sore as if she had pedaled and pedaled somewhere, and sat down carefully on the edge of the bed she shared with Alex. She watched the bedside telephone for a long time and finally lifted it, expecting it to feel unbearably dense in her hand. She listened to the dial tone long enough that it failed and the impatient beeping began. She clicked off and on and dialed Nina Benton, the woman on whose property Max had lowered his head inside a creek. The line rang and rang and she was about to give up when finally the receiver clicked and a distracted voice said hello. Maya checked the clock and felt guilty. It was a farm of some kind; surely they rose early. She apologized and quickly gave her name. The voice on the other end asked her to hold it, and then Maya heard threats about tooth-brushing, stories, and bedtime.
“I imagine the kind of night you’re having,” the voice came back, now more careful and allied.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Maya said.
“We’re glad he’s fine,” she said. “It’s the most important.”
Maya asked for detail beyond what Alex had told her, but there was nothing.
“He said you have boys of your own,” Maya said, deflated but not wishing to let go.
“Three,” Nina Benton said.
“A handful,” Maya said enviously.
“Handful because each is disabled.”
“Oh,” Maya said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” the voice said. “They’re great boys.”
Maya apologized again. Apparently, she had made her husband’s view on handicaps also her own.
“I’m so scared,” she blurted out. Then she apologized a third time. “I’m sorry. I know you can’t help me.”
“Now listen to me,” Nina Benton said. “I’m putting you off only because I have to get these boys into bed. We break routine, and all hell goes loose. But you can talk to me. You can call me tomorrow. You want to come here in the afternoon and have coffee, I’ll make time.”
“Thank you,” Maya whispered. “I can’t drive.” It sounded like a disability of her own. She said another thanks and hung up. She felt envy for the happy bedlam on the other end of the line. Still wearing her clothes, she went down on the bed and collapsed into a deep, hopeless slumber, the soft rumble of the others talking below her. Her final thought was a thanks that the affliction she felt made her want to sleep instead of unable to.
+
His mother having turned to the dishes in the sink and his father to the newspaper that had gone untouched because of Max, Alex left the kitchen and took the stairs toward his son’s bedroom. The door creaked slightly when he opened it, and he reminded himself again to oil the hinges. His son—Alex felt encouragement and surprise—was in bed; Alex had kept his skepticism to himself when Raisa had declared, on her return to the kitchen, that the boy had been set up there. (She had paused shyly to give the others a chance to admire her achievement; through the affection only a grandmother could give she had managed to solve the problem.)
Max was six when he’d asked Alex to set up a tent for him to sleep outside. Alex had just finished reading a bedtime story about Arctic explorers; a satisfied silence had descended on the room, Alex seated in an old armchair and his son interred in a pile of blankets. A lamp burned softly from Max’s night table, the honeyed light casting the shadows that signal the decline of the day, a son ready to rest and a wife downstairs finishing the dishes before the adults make the last of the evening. Alex himself had nearly nodded off when Max said, with his customary directness, “Papa, would you build me a tent outside? I want to sleep there.”
Alex felt buoyed by an affirmation of which his son couldn’t be aware. Alex and Maya had argued about the language in which Max should receive his bedtime reading. English, said Maya; he was an American. Russian, said Alex; he would get plenty of America elsewhere. Alex and Maya’s magnificent homeland could rot in hell, but a second language would only help Max in the future. Alex had won, partly because he did the bedtime reading, but the victory hadn’t been satisfactory because the Russian-language books offered a somewhat selective view of history, in which the Arctic—and outer space, and medicine—were conquered exclusively by Russian and Soviet visionaries. But more, not less, Russian was necessary—Max, speaking Russian, had made an elementary mistake: He had said “build,” not “set up,” a tent.
“What?” Alex said. “You want to be like the explorers?”
Max shook his head no, the blond wind chimes swinging to and fro.
“When it gets warm,�
� Alex said. “There’s snow on the ground.”
“If you wrap up, it’s not cold,” Max said, and turned away from the light.
Alex sat, turning over this remark, until he realized Max must have been recalling something one of the explorers had done. He rose, kissed his son good night, and went downstairs.
But his son had meant “build.” Compliantly, Max had waited until that year’s snow left the ground and was found one April Saturday in the Rubins’ backyard, pulling a canvas drop cloth many times his size over a primitive contraption of acacia poles that he had scavenged in the suburban woods beyond the edge of their property. The drop cloth Max had scavenged from their neighbor Vincenzo, with whom the Rubins were adversarial due to Vincenzo’s aggressive curtailment of the pygmy pines Alex had installed on the edge of his lot. To the boy, however, Vincenzo had lent the paint-spattered drop cloth with pleasure, imagining correctly that Max was freelancing and his dickhead father would erupt upon seeing his immaculate lawn staked with poles and a drop cloth with the drippings of ten years of house paint. Max had only had to fill out a chit that the old Italian, smelling of wine, thrust at the parents when they reluctantly came to inquire. Vincenzo fermented wine in a shed at the edge of his lot, and though he offered none to the Rubins, he shared with pleasure the swarming insects the process attracted; Maya was convinced Vincenzo was to blame for the hornets that had descended on Max on the deck when he was a toddler.
Alex would not remain indebted to Vincenzo; the canvas was stripped and the poles returned to the woods; his son would have a proper tent. Alex could not believe that something that could fit, folded, in the crook of his arm, could cost so much at the camping store on Route 23. The smaller they are, the more expensive they are, the salesman told him, and Alex felt that in these words was encapsulated the full difference between Russia and America. He presented it to his son like a keepsake from the dead ice of a northern expedition. Max nodded politely, as if this, too, would do, and raced to the backyard as Maya shouted after him to remember to say what when his father gave him a gift. Alex patted Maya on the shoulder munificently and strode toward the fervent unpacking taking place on a tender patch of grass he had so recently had the mowing service attend to. “This way, this way,” he gently took the poles and fasteners from his son, but America had made great advances in tent making since Eugene and friends had set up filched army canvases on a birch-flanked clearing outside Minsk as little Alex observed, and Alex had to sheepishly give up the materials to his son, who had the contraption billowing in the crisp springtime wind in just minutes.
Now, as Alex surveyed his son from the threshold, he felt a strange cheerfulness. Now, Alex was needed for something much greater than building a tent. Maya’s love for their son was complete but wishful, and blinded by wishfulness; patiently, Alex had kept his mouth closed so that Maya could have what she wanted. But now, his insight was needed. Alex’s parents would have to receive their say, but he had no intention of allowing them anything other than that. He was Max’s father.
He strode into the bedroom and ran his hand over Max’s blanket. Max sat up, as if he would have to get dressed and go off somewhere. He put his shoulders forward and stared up at his father.
“I’m sorry I woke you,” Alex said.
“What is it?” Max said nervously.
“Nothing,” Alex said. “But now that your grandfather’s put away the tent, how are we to talk man to man? But I have something to ask you.”
Max blinked several times, chasing away sleep.
“Do you love your mama?” Alex said.
“Of course,” Max said.
“When you go away like you did today, Maksik, you make your mama so upset. She cries. She won’t eat.”
“Why won’t she eat?” Max said.
“How can you ask? Because she loves you. She’s afraid you’re not okay.”
“But I got back okay.”
“But what if something happened? You’re lucky, that’s true, I can see that. It’s a great quality in life—maybe the greatest. But you need more than luck. You need this.” Alex tapped Max’s head lightly with his finger. “Do you understand what I mean?”
Max shook his head no.
“It doesn’t matter,” Alex said. “You can’t do this anymore, son. Even if you want to, you can’t. You have to stop yourself. You have to think of your mama—and of me, and of your grandparents, who love you—and you have to come straight home from school. I am talking to you man to man about this. Do we have an agreement?”
Max didn’t say anything, but when his father also didn’t speak, he nodded.
“That’s what I like to hear. You know, if Mama and I had a daughter, I would love her just as much as I love you. But I’m glad we have you.”
Max blinked twice. “What about the tent?”
“No more tent, Max. Grown boys sleep in bed. Grown boys don’t play around in the grass like animals. You’re growing up.”
Max slid back down under the blanket and turned to face the wall. His father apologized once more for waking him. He waited for Max to say it was okay. Instead Max said: “Did you run away when you were little?”
“Never,” his father said.
“Ever?”
“Ever. Kids who don’t care about their parents run away. Who think about themselves, and only themselves. I was not like that, and neither are you.” Alex waited, then said again, “I’m sorry for waking you.”
This time his son exonerated him, and he retreated. Flushed with a positive feeling that had been difficult to imagine downstairs—he felt it most often when he finally got some time to himself, or to speak to his son without his wife’s interference—Alex shut the door to his son’s bedroom and took the steps to his own, where he discovered his wife, fully clothed and lights burning, asleep on a pitiful edge of their bed, her mouth open in fantasy. Turning the light switches with care, he went into the bathroom, where he opened the faucet only a trickle and left the toilet unflushed. When he came out, he slid the house slippers from her feet, but otherwise left her in place. This left him a smaller portion of the bed than he usually used, but he fit himself around his wife. He kissed her hair, and realized she had been smoking. Maya, Maya, he sighed. Sometimes, he felt as if he had two children. Four children.
+
After their son vanished upstairs, Eugene and Raisa sat noiselessly at the dining room table. It was late, and they felt old. Eventually, Eugene, feeling the male’s responsibility to act, stirred and gently took his wife by the soft meat under her elbow.
“Zhenya, I want to look at him one more time,” Raisa said. Eugene shrugged to say of course—how could he refuse his wife. He cherished moments like these, which usually arrived as soon as his daughter-in-law—or his son; true, his son, too—left the room. Suddenly, the proper course of action was unmuddled, the language of the room clear and direct.
They climbed the stairs, Max’s door opening for the third time since he had fallen asleep. He was wheezing softly. With satisfaction, Raisa noted that the boy remained where she’d left him. Then she remembered everything else and reclined her head against Eugene’s shoulder, rolling it back and forth in dismay.
“Did you think, when you said you’d go ice-skating with me fifty years ago,” Eugene said, “that we would be standing in America looking at our blond grandson after he spent the afternoon dunking himself in a river like a beaver?”
“I’m frightened, Eugene.”
He touched her shoulder quietingly and strode into the bedroom. “Eugene!” Raisa hissed. “Let him be.”
“I’m awake,” Max said.
“He’s awake,” Eugene forgave himself, but in a whisper, because if Alex heard, Eugene would get an earful. “I want to talk to my grandson. When can I talk to my grandson without everyone else interrupting?”
Raisa threw her hands at the ceiling: “Should I leave you two alone?”
Eugene studied his wife’s silhouette in the doorway. He perceived just ho
w much Raisa had to restrain herself so as not to antagonize their son and his wife. He wished to give her some great freedom. In seventy years, had she not earned at least that? He said to her, mocking the sudden sincerity but also sincere: “I am no one without you.”
Max watched them solemnly.
“What are you staring at, Columbus?” Eugene turned back to his grandson and lowered himself to the bed. A knee cracked, and Eugene wailed comically. He tickled Max’s belly through the blanket. “How long are you going to sleep in pajamas, heh? Are you a grown-up or what? Grown-ups sleep in briefs and nothing else. Grown-ups make the room cold, so their lungs get bigger in the night. Do you understand? Who’s going to have the biggest lungs in the world?”
“Me,” Max obeyed.
“That’s right. Now let’s talk business.” Eugene reached into the back pocket of his slacks and pulled out his wallet. “This, by the way,” he said, pulling out a square photo with foxed edges, “is your grandmother fifty years ago. Heh? Look at that.”
Max sat up and ran his fingers over the photo’s ancient matting.
“She was the most beautiful girl in the world,” Eugene said. He looked at the doorway. “And still is.” Letting Max hold on to the photo, he reached back into the billfold and withdrew twenty dollars. “Now listen. Every week you don’t do what you did today, you get one of these. You follow? You go back to sleeping in your bed and you stay there, you get two of these. Shake with me, because once you’ve shaken, it’s a shame to go back on it. Give it here.” Eugene stuck out a paw. Max placed his hand inside it.
“Do I need to teach you how to shake?” Eugene said.
“Eugene, leave him be,” Raisa pleaded from the door.
“Woman, don’t interrupt,” Eugene said playfully. Max dropped his hand, giving up.
“Come on!” his grandfather badgered him, but then let it go, shaking his head. He reached under Max’s bed and pulled out the board with the pouches of grass. He opened the one in the upper-left-hand corner and clawed out the wisps of dried grass. Raisa approached and took them from his hand as Max watched apprehensively. Eugene rolled up the twenty and stuffed it into the pouch.
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