Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  The cupboards held a rich array of amber liquids but little in the way of potential ingredients. A dusty bag of dried-out apricots, two baby trays of honey of the kind they gave out at the diner, a bag of turnipy potatoes, and a dozen cans of chili. The fridge offered a half-opened container of bacon and a decent clump of carrots, but that’s all. Maya closed her eyes and thought, the clock on the wall moving with twice the usual speed. She needed a little fortune. With eyes closed, she imagined her mother at the stove, her grandmother. But it was Uncle Misha who saved her. He had started a patch of sweet potatoes the summer before Maya flew to America, and when the first plums came in in late June, he set out two dozen on a screen under a cheesecloth and two bricks. A week later, he tore some carrots out of the garden Maya had started, and of all this—sweet potatoes, sun-dried plums, carrots—made tzimmes.

  Maya didn’t have sweet potatoes, but there was a box of white sugar in the cupboard. She ran the kitchen faucet until scalding; in the meantime, she cubed the potatoes to the smallest size that would cook quickly without dissolving in boiling water. She worked on assumptions. Carrots—there was no time to peel them. The apricots were like wood under her knife, so she threw them in a bowl of hot water along with a tablespoon of sugar. Mishkin had once possessed cinnamon sticks; conveniently, they had crumbled into a cinnamon dust far more useful to her. She flavored with desperation.

  When Gabriel Mishkin and Alex Rubin returned from their constitutional—evidently, they had found something to discuss, because the door opened to a sentence in progress, spoken by Alex, no less—a rectangular baking dish steamed from a corner of the dining room table where, Maya felt, she was causing the least disturbance to Mishkin’s research.

  “What in God’s name is that—” Mishkin started to say from the hallway as the men removed their shoes. Indeed, the home was afloat with the perfume of butter, carrots, honey, and sugar. The sight of the baking dish spitting up steam toward the ceiling stopped his sentence.

  “If you are going to write about the old country, you should know how they ate,” Maya said.

  “Tzimmes,” the adoption supervisor said, his voice perturbed with wonder. “My grandmother made tzimmes. I haven’t had tzimmes in five hundred years. How in the world . . .”

  Maya looked over at Alex with pride. He was marveling—his wife could make tzimmes out of water and sticks. “The carrots are a little burnt because I had the highest heat going,” she issued the cook’s obligatory self-deprecation. “I wanted to finish it before you returned.”

  Mishkin sniffed the tzimmes and looked back at her, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “It helps with the migraines,” Maya said unconvincingly.

  “Should we set up plates?” Mishkin said.

  “No,” Maya answered quickly. “No, we have intruded on you long enough.”

  Mishkin didn’t argue, but Maya made no move toward the foyer. Alex looked from Mishkin to his wife, squared off across the expanse of the dining room. Behind Mishkin, the tzimmes continued to send up cloudfuls of steam. Then the right understanding dawned on the adoption supervisor.

  “Mrs. Rubin . . .” Mishkin said.

  “Do you want me to beg?” Maya said. “I will beg.”

  “Mrs. Rubin, there are rules!”

  “Rules such as in a closed adoption, the birth parents are not permitted to just . . . just . . . show up in our home?” Alex joined in.

  “You gave permission, Mr. Rubin. Mrs. Rubin did.”

  “We were very eager to give permission, yes,” Alex said. “Almost as eager as you to let her lie down on your couch. Did you have much say in the matter?”

  “Mrs. Rubin,” the adoption supervisor said, wheeling toward Maya. “I am not a psychologist, but you did me no favors. You—”

  “Stop calling me Mrs. Rubin!” she shrieked. A terrible silence descended again on the house, which, until just an hour before, had heard too little noise rather than too much. Maya gulped back a sob and covered her mouth. She was tired, very tired. A strand of hair had tumbled out of her ponytail and now hung in front of her eyes like a bramble missed by the gardener.

  “I am so tired of you, Gabriel Mishkin,” Maya said finally, so quietly that the denounced man himself leaned forward to hear better. “You are condescending. Like all you American Jews. You are going to write a memoir about the Old World? What do you know about the Old World? You’re an American, a complete and hopeless American. I miss Ukraine. In Ukraine, I could give you a thousand hryvnia and you would tell me what I want to know. So easy.”

  “That isn’t the way things are done in America, Mrs. Rubin,” Mishkin said softly, forced to issue the correction but wishing to inflict minimal damage by it. “The birth parents have rights, too.” He was whispering.

  “You mean the birth parents who refused this child?” Alex said. “Their rights are the rights you are so concerned about protecting? Not the mother who is standing in front of you because she is trying to do a good thing for her son? I hope they put your picture up on the wall where the saints are. Gabriel Mishkin, he never broke.” He laughed in an ugly way.

  Maya sank into the chair next to the tzimmes. It had finished steaming and was beginning to cake around the edges. She was grateful to Alex for standing up for her.

  “It’s time for us to go,” Alex said.

  Maya rose and dried her eyes with the tips of her fingers. But she remained in place.

  “It’s time for us to go,” Alex said again, and now stepped toward his wife, his hand held out.

  Maya wedged out of the glass baking dish the spoon she had lodged there and dug out a yellow-orange mound of tzimmes. She puckered her lips and blew slightly. Then she swallowed the spoonful with the hungerlessness of a sick person, the spoon clinking a tooth.

  “It’s good,” she said. “Very good.” She returned the spoon to the dish, took her husband’s hand, and, without looking at Gabriel Mishkin, stepped out of his home.

  “That’s how they are,” Alex said as he piloted the Corolla down the switchbacks of Mishkin’s mountain. “He won’t save his drowning mother if it means stealing an oar. You decided to cook the tzimmes because you thought it would melt his heart?”

  “Let it go, Alex,” she said as she stared blankly through the windshield. It was an unusually cold day for early October, December sending out an early invitation. “Let him eat some tzimmes. He hasn’t had a hot meal in I don’t know how long.” She ran her thumbs to her temples and pressed. She really did have a headache. They wouldn’t be home for two hours.

  “I hope he chokes on that tzimmes,” Alex said. “You cooked for him after he let those people into our home.”

  “We let them into our home,” Maya said.

  Alex slammed on the brakes and Maya nearly rode into the dash as they came to a squealing stop at a curve in the road. Maya had yelled out, but he hadn’t been going fast enough for her to be hurt. They sat without speaking while Alex opened and closed his hands on the steering wheel, his jawbone tight. “Maya, how many times can I ask you to wear your seat belt?” His voice carried the extra resentment of someone responsible for the situation.

  “What is it?” she said, breathing hard. “What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” he said. “I saw them pulling into our driveway. We were watching them from the window.”

  “So?” she said weakly. She was on the verge of tears.

  “So I remembered their license plate,” Alex said. “I saw the license plate as they pulled up on the driveway. Rodeo. RodeoMT1. Or maybe Rodeo1MT. But it said ‘rodeo.’”

  And with this recollection, Alex Rubin restored to himself and his wife all the hope and faith that had been sapped by their talk with Gabe Mishkin. That’s what Alex did. He noticed things it would never occur to her to notice. Yes, he was quiet and mulish, but that’s because he was busy observing. Noticing. For instance, he had noticed that Mishkin wasn’t going to help them about an hour before she did. And had kept silent so
she could unspool her act, the actress.

  Maya yelped, threw her arms around Alex, and began to cover his cheek with kisses. He smiled and tried to fight her off: “Maya . . . Maya . . .” First, she wouldn’t listen to him, was full of childish wishes, of which he was the chaperone and chauffeur, but then she wouldn’t let him alone, again like an impetuous child. It wasn’t until a hatchback nearly met them head-on around the blind spot of the curve, the other driver setting off a squeal of her own tires, that Maya let go of Alex’s neck. As the two cars gingerly passed each other at a distance of inches, the middle-aged woman at the other wheel regarded the Rubins with hatred. However, the middle-aged woman in the passenger seat of the Rubins’ car was clapping with joy.

  +

  That night, without design, they slept touching hands. They had shut their lamps at the same time, a rarity, and lay in the dark on their backs, not moving. They were thinking the same thing—the license-plate variations had been given to Eugene, who had a friend at the DMV. Eugene asked mockingly who was going to give him fifty dollars for the task—on-the-side statewide checks were twenty, national fifty. Eugene was reminded that he was the first to propose that the birth parents were responsible. Maya wondered if Eugene’s exasperated attacks were a way of covering fright, not something he could betray in front of Raisa. Or was she simply imagining fright in everyone as a way of getting a hold of her own.

  Maya and Alex lay next to each other and listened to the other’s breathing. Maya felt enclosed by the moment, as if she and Alex were down in a bowl while the world went on above. Her fingers reached for his forearm before she froze, fearing the touch would interrupt their stillness. But he allowed his arm to be covered, and then to be scratched lightly with her fingernails. She scratched in rows, up and down, until the motion ceased to register. Though her nails were not long, she was scoring his skin. He didn’t stop her. Eventually, her hand opened and slid down to cover his, palm down on the bed. In this way, they fell asleep. In the morning, Alex’s forearm had four raised welts. At breakfast, he rolled up his sleeve and shook his head.

  As they waited for the DMV information, the Rubins performed the tasks that were required of them, but without vitality. Something had broken under the weight of the mystery in their lives. In the preceding months, they had busied themselves with the dark pleasure of addressing a problem. The Rubins loved problems—the state of mild emergency they brought on, the wagon-circling they demanded, the temporary marginalization of other, less tractable problems they suddenly authorized. It was delicious to swarm upon a new problem with a thousand solutions—the solutions really were legion, as each of them insisted on a different approach, a happy babel—to batter it with the considerable persistence, ingenuity, and force of this team of survivors and prosperers. The problem of Alex’s depressive performance at the investment bank had been resolved by new employment under his father; Maya’s shock at the amount of time the elder Rubins logged in her home was addressed by the transfer of some of her kitchen duties to Raisa; and Maya’s failure to become pregnant was solved by the arrival of Max in their lives. The Rubins loved problems. They had been born under a dark star; they had been abused by circumstance. But they persevered and survived.

  But this time, they faced more than a problem. The familiar rituals of their days, the inability of someone driving by to distinguish Maya and Alex’s home from another Sylvan Gate town house: all this concealed the despair that had been settling on them since the evening with the deer. (That was the colorless designation by which the event came to be known: the evening with the deer.) A problem had finally spurred the Rubins to unanimity—in helplessness. Even Eugene seemed bereft of his usual enthusiasm. Over the previous three months their horizons had narrowed to a single point, and from this place optimism had gradually departed. On some day, the Rubins had begun to talk of almost nothing other than Max’s “difficulty.” As recently as a week before—before Gabriel Mishkin; before the Rubins took the law into their own hands by bribing a friend at the DMV; before, in other words, the matter gained a new kind of reality by involving forces beyond the family—it would have seemed perfectly sensible for, say, Raisa to propose some new remedy. However, her proposing the same now—no, the other Rubins would not have ridiculed her; exasperation and disagreement about the best solution was a luxury of more hopeful days. No, they would have simply stared in baffled silence, or nodded desultorily to avoid disrespecting her effort.

  Dinner was nearly wordless, the adults trading responsibility for the small talk that would keep Max from sensing that something was off. They were relieved if he finished first and retreated upstairs; then they could be silent. Sometimes, they tried—

  “He used to be so cheerful.”

  “Well behaved is different from cheerful. You’re rewriting the facts.”

  —but it refused to take. They trailed off because there was no way to speak about Max without conceding that they didn’t know their child and grandchild as they wished to, and that admission no one wished to make.

  Max wandered the house sullenly, occasionally lifting his fingers to the side of his head and wincing theatrically. His wound had frightened him. Maya wondered if she was watching her son come to resemble his father—his adoptive father, who was as sensitive to illness as he was suspicious of doctors. At least this made her face fill with a bereaved amusement.

  And then the information they didn’t want came from Eugene’s friend at the DMV. There were seventy-three license plates registered to Montana addresses with variations on the word rodeo. But there was only one plate that also featured the number one and the state’s abbreviation. However, the listing carried an address—2207 New Missouri Trail South, Adelaide, Montana—but no phone number. The Rubins called Information—no associated phone number. Who did not have a phone number in 2012? The printout looked too big for the miserly information it contained.

  “So, let’s go there,” Maya said.

  “Maya,” Alex said wearily. “Not again.”

  The table sat in silence, as if admitting that its authority had been exceeded.

  “You’re going to stop now?” Maya said. She rose and retreated to the kitchen counter, her fingers clutching her hair.

  “Maya,” he said sharply. “It’s one thing to make a phone call. We’re not going to—to—Montana.” He let out an amazed chuckle. “We can write them a letter.” He opened his hands, offering a compromise, though it was clear he was giving up on this approach.

  “A letter they’ll forward to the adoption agency,” Maya said. “There’s probably a law that says we can be sued for violating the agreement without their permission. Who knows what the penalty for that is. No, we have to get in front of them, Alex. I have to get in front of Laurel. I know I can speak to her. I just need to find her.”

  “So let’s hire a private investigator,” Alex said. “He’ll look and see if they’re there. Then maybe I can fly by myself.”

  “And I?” Maya said. “Do I deserve to see where my child was born? Does he?”

  “Voices,” Raisa said. “Please. He’s upstairs.”

  “We discussed this,” Alex answered his wife. “The parents is what we need.”

  “What if they want him back?” Raisa said in a conciliatory tone. “Let’s say you find them. Have you considered that?”

  “They can’t,” Alex said. “Legally, he’s no longer theirs.”

  “And what, the law is everything?” Eugene piped in. “So they can’t have him back, but they can make our lives difficult. Eight years have passed, they’re living their quiet, dead lives out there wherever they are, and suddenly you call, stir things up, give them something to do. Just the excitement they need. Think about it. Think about Max finding out. Think about a difficult situation becoming difficult in a new way.”

  “What do you propose, Papa?” Maya said, exploiting the endearment; she referred to Eugene paternally rarely. Eugene’s shoulders slumped in a new way and he looked out toward the backya
rd, simmering in the blue haze of dusk.

  Maya watched Alex. She was being forced to surrender the solidarity she had felt from her husband in Gabe Mishkin’s home; it had been tactical, not strategic. Their aims had overlapped, but in the manner of allies who share an enemy rather than a purpose. Her chest filled with helplessness. She imagined water in her lungs, frothing and burbling as she tried to breathe; she felt waterlogged with misery. She wondered if, secretly, her husband wished to go, but merely feared responsibility for another error and needed her to insist on it—then dismissed the possibility as another fantasy of alliance.

  “Alex, it can’t hurt for him to see it,” she said without energy. “If nothing else, he has a right to. He has a right to know where he was born.”

  “But he won’t know he was born there,” Alex said. “Because we aren’t going to tell him.”

  “Voices,” Raisa hissed.

  Alex’s eyes narrowed at his wife. “You’ve been wanting to leave New Jersey for twenty years. It’s like a prison to you. You want to live somewhere else, go live somewhere else.”

  “I want to live somewhere else with my family,” Maya said.

  Eugene and Raisa sat like two Buddhas; they wished they had not been around for this part of the argument. You can’t unhear what you’ve heard.

  After a long silence, Maya sat down again. Again, she wedged herself in without sliding the chair out from the table. Again, she spoke as if her parents-in-law weren’t there.

  “Yes, I do want to know what it’s like out there,” she said quietly. “Twenty-five years in America—thirty-five for you—and to never have gone farther than Florida and Chicago. Aren’t you curious? Aren’t you dying of curiosity? Okay, we won’t tell Max—but you and I know. Don’t you want to see it the same way that Laurel wanted to see this?”

  “I see you’ve been reading Bender’s book,” Alex said. His face was tight with embarrassment—to have been spoken to that way in front of his parents. “Okay,” he said with withering softness. He rose from his seat, walked to the stairs, and called for Max. They heard the door of a bedroom open upstairs. “Maxie?” his father called again. “Come down, please, okay?”