Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  “What are you doing?” Maya said.

  “‘You want,’ ‘I want,’” Alex mimicked as they listened to Max descend the carpeted stairs. “Let’s ask him directly.”

  “Ask him what?” Max said, blinking twice and surveying the adults in the kitchen. He reached up and touched the side of his head gingerly. One of his Indian masks from Mexico was around his neck on its string. It was the one with the snakes coiling out of the red mouth.

  “Max, why are you wearing that mask?” his mother said.

  “I was playing,” he said.

  “He wants to go to Mexico, not Montana,” his father said. “Remember, Maxie? Turtle stakeouts after dark? We’ll take pictures this year.”

  “You can’t, it startles the babies,” Max said. He slipped the mask off his head and winced again when it grazed his temple.

  “Max, honey, stop that,” Maya said sharply. “It’s long healed.”

  Max’s hand fell from his head as if he’d touched a flame with his finger. Alex eyed his wife with the satisfaction of a winner before the contest has started.

  “Max?” Alex said. “Mama wants to ask you something.” He nodded at his wife.

  Startled, Maya cleared her throat. She tried to collect herself. “Maxie?” she said hoarsely.

  Max raised his eyebrows.

  “How would you like to go on vacation? Me, you, and Papa? Mama’s always staying behind because of the airplane, but mama wants to go somewhere with you. We’ll drive there. A road trip.”

  “Uh-huh,” Max said. He looked up and blinked twice. Every time he did that, Maya had the same thought: He didn’t get that from us. And then she fought it. “But where?” he said.

  “Montana,” Maya said. Eugene and Raisa stiffened, as if the word alone would reveal to Max everything that had been so diligently kept from him. “Do you know where that is?” Maya went on. “It’s beautiful. More stars than you’ll see here. And very different kinds of grass, too. Many more kinds, I think. We’ll be gone for my birthday. We can celebrate it out there. Isn’t that fun?”

  “It’s Mama’s birthday soon!” Raisa clapped, remembering it. She was eager to remind everyone that the future harbored good things as well.

  “But what about school?” Max said to his mother.

  “You’ll miss school,” Maya said. “How would you like that?” Alex looked at her—an unfair move. But it wasn’t—Max liked school.

  “For how long?” Max said suspiciously.

  “We’ll decide together,” Maya said. “If we like it there, we’ll stay longer. If not, we’ll come back.”

  “If we like it, we’ll stay there longer?” Alex interfered. He was done leaving the conversation to his wife. He looked at his son. “Do you want to go, Max?” he said. “We won’t go if you don’t want to.”

  Maya shot him a betrayed look. “School can wait,” she jumped in. “Did you know that your father missed the first two months of third grade because he was busy making his way to America?” She looked up at Alex, who confirmed resentfully.

  Max shrugged heavily, a little Eugene. (Why did Max demonstrate only distinctions from Maya but resemblances of the other Rubins?) “But that wasn’t vacation,” the boy said, pleasing his father. For someone who wished to commune with the wild, her son could be annoyingly pedantic, Maya thought. And from whom had he inherited this blessing?

  “And this is,” Maya said quietly. “The three of us are going.”

  Alex slapped the table: See? She was conscienceless, his wife. Without the answers she wanted, she would force the child.

  But then Max touched his ears with his shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.” Some internal switch, mysterious to the Rubins, had been touched and the cloud of skepticism was gone from his face. The adults peered at him, not sure what to make of his acquiescence.

  Maya walked to her son and embraced him. He let her. When Maya and Alex had fought as young people, Maya had her arms around Alex’s shoulders before the argument was over. Alex would cast her off: He wasn’t a robot to switch from anger to affection like that. But Max was different. Perhaps there was a trace of her in her son after all.

  +

  In the manner of a larger organism unable, to its own surprise, to fend off the negligible parasite that has beset it, the Rubins gave in to Montana, though, as the days passed, it became clear that they would go only if Maya took charge of the arrangements. Alex wandered in an itchy moroseness. Raisa banged around the kitchen, trying to memorize things and clucking her tongue in despair. She asked if Maya had all her recipes in one place.

  “I’m not dying, Mama,” Maya said. “We’ll be back.” She half believed this herself. Her unease created the impression of illness; her ears roared and there was a constant sweat on her forehead.

  “What are we going to do here without you,” Raisa said, shaking her head.

  “I’m sure you’ll survive,” Maya said. “You might even enjoy it.”

  “Maybe we should come with you,” Raisa said, her voice loading with excitement. “All together, you know?”

  Maya blanched. “No,” she said. She had blurted it out before she could soften it.

  Raisa stared at her, wide-eyed. “Of course,” she said after a moment. “What was I thinking? You children need to go off on your own.”

  It was Eugene who opened up to Montana the most, perhaps because he was certain not to be going. He became promiscuous in his advertisements of the voyage, if not the reason for it. The cashier at the Russian grocery heard about it, as well as the line of customers; so did the honey wholesaler; even Bender was called. Answering the half-curious, half-skeptical inquiries he aroused, Eugene only shrugged: More than three decades had passed in America; wasn’t it time the Rubins found out what it actually looked like? Immigrants like Bender hid out in their American port of arrival, but the Rubins did not fear change, exploration, discovery. Livingstone, Amundsen, Rubins. (On their way, the children could stop to see Eugene’s brother Karl and his wife Dora in Chicago, thereby relieving Eugene of his guilt for failing to do the same in more than a decade.) Because Eugene could only hint at his true meaning—the junior echelon of his family was about to embark on an honorable, romantic, spiritual action; and what has yours been up to?—his listeners enjoyed the possibility of not having grasped it and sent him off with tight-lipped good wishes.

  Maya spent her evenings with the Internet and the road atlas. She read that Montana was the fourth-largest state, and New Jersey the fourth-smallest. Twenty New Jerseys could fit inside a single Montana. The latter felt to her like a giant, poorly known animal that would leave New Jersey bloody and pulped. She read the road atlas like a student of English reciting the dictionary. Rudyard, Rocky Boy, Roscoe. They had a Harlem as well. “Zortman, Landusky,” she said feebly to the evening lamp, naming a pair of towns that huddled together astride a vast emptiness. The Jewish-like surnames gave her comfort.

  How did one plan for a trip of this kind? When she tried to imagine the out there that waited for them, her heart beat quickly and her palms moistened. The vision would not even resolve into discrete dangers, just a black mass of badness and trial. Only fools make unrequired journeys, Raisa had quoted a proverb. They could scrap the trip. Max hadn’t shown the enthusiasm on which she had counted. By canceling, Maya would receive a boost with the Rubins. She could show Max pictures of Montana on the computer. She could find a book about the animals of the West.

  But Maya had been telling Alex the truth—she wanted Max to see where he was from, even if he would never find out that he was. She couldn’t say why she thought this would help—but it was what Laurel was after when she drove two thousand miles. Laurel needed to see for herself where Max was going. Maybe it gave her some kind of rest.

  Maya rummaged in the rolltop desk in the home office and withdrew a note pad. On the first line of a fresh page, she wrote, DANGERS. Below, she wrote:

  1. snowstorms

  2. rainstorms

  3. h
ailstorms

  4. bad brakes

  5. snakes

  6. getting robbed

  7. one of us getting hurt

  8. all of us getting hurt

  9. running out of water

  10. running out of gas

  11. poisonous berries

  12. poisonous plants

  13. losing our bags

  14. losing money

  15. losing each other

  Outside, the enormous oak creaked with the weight of the wind. Back and forth it went, like a badly oiled swing. It was the sound of loneliness, a malevolent mystery to which the answer was you and you alone. Upstairs, Alex was snoring lightly, his mouth ajar. The wind kicked up, rustling leaves, and a branch scratched at the siding of the house as if asking for shelter.

  If they went, it would have to be now. If it was in the fifties here, it would be in the thirties there; that much Maya knew. In the morning, she would pack warm clothing. She would buy lanterns, thermoses, warmer socks. She would place herself in the hands of the clerk at the camping store. She would flirt and get a discount. She would take Eugene’s Escape without asking.

  She shut the light and lay down on the living room couch. She dreamed of a field of snow. Her house—it was not the house she shared with Alex, but she knew it as hers, a smallish log cabin with a yellow sconce outside the door—was off its foundation and sliding through the snow like a sled.

  II

  West

  10

  Maya whimpered and awoke. Her head was cantilevered over the shoulder of the passenger seat of the Escape, a ball of pain at the base. Fearfully, she angled it back. The pain was less blinding than shaming—a promise, good for days, to remind her of her carelessness. For careless behavior, you paid.

  She looked around unpleasantly—why had she passed the night in the car? The Escape, boxy as a slow animal, tilted off the sloping berm of the road, the blacktop steaming with mist, which, along with the golden light it was suffusing, indicated early morning, though sedans and pickup trucks passed regularly. Had the Escape broken down? They had barely started. Maya allowed herself to relish the tantalizing possibility of this failure: They could turn around with honor.

  She squinted against the light on the passenger side. The berm ran off into a stubbled field that dead-ended, it was difficult to tell in the morning glare how far, in the foothills of humpbacked brown elevation. On the other side of an electric fence, fat white cows marked the field like an irregular crop. Oblong white birds popped around the cows, leaping for worms in the turned-over earth. The cows were folded down in heavy-thighed, spinsterly repose, studying the creatures that had washed up at the edge of their kingdom. Maya felt observed. The mindless vacancy attributed to cows could be seen also as mindless concentration. Before Maya’s eyes adjusted to the light, she had a mirage of the brown stone humps behind the animals rapidly rearranging themselves before slumping once again into stillness.

  She turned, fresh pain blossoming in her neck. Max was supine across the backseat, his mouth open in slumber, a small blanket tossed about his feet. Several feet off the berm, his ankles covered by grass, Alex was smoking. Maya squinted: Alex was not a smoker. Carefully, expecting it to deliver fresh pain, she pulled on the door handle. The door began to ding, as if responding to an emergency.

  The bitter, piney astringency of the air, flecked with something metallic as well as the universal scent of cow shit, walloped her so that she reached out for the frame of the car. She had an afterimage of the road: The drivers were wearing jackets. One face in particular loomed retroactively, which genetics or weather or excessive inebriation had scoured with a supreme network of cross-hatching channels. That face had beamed out its last smile when Maya could walk under a table.

  The door dinging, catastrophically urgent, stirred Alex. Maya tried to close the door far enough for the cursed sound to cease but not so hard that she would rouse Max. Alex stiffened as she hobbled toward him.

  “It smells like somebody’s poking your heart with a needle,” she said, folding her arms around her chest for warmth, but it was a satisfying coldness, clean and riveting.

  “Fall is coming,” he said philosophically.

  “You kept going,” she said.

  “I wasn’t tired,” he said unpersuasively.

  “Under cover of night, you covered as much ground as you could to get this over with sooner.”

  He didn’t look up at her, instead working at something in the grass with his foot. Alex had found that, as he became older, people were more willing to take him at his word. He interpreted this as evidence of an increasing substantiveness, a coherence into someone possessed by ideas and opinions that raised no doubts among others. At the office, his father dealt with him as an equal partner, deferring to his views on Turkish versus Georgian kashkaval, and the secretary rushed to address his requests with the slight fearfulness and apology that indicated respect. At home, his mother and father stated their opinions, the former cautiously and the latter insistently, but the decisions were Alex’s. Only his wife strayed from this pattern. Not always, and when she didn’t, he thought of her reserve and cooperation as another benediction of aging, wisdom, maturity. But then the other Maya would come. He wondered if all these things worked differently for women.

  They had left Chicago the previous morning after three days of house arrest by Eugene’s older brother Karl and his wife, Dora. Each day, they awoke in a cramped corner bedroom with a low ceiling, were herded into the also low-slung living room—the house, like the woman who ran it, was short and wide, one endless floor-through—and were incarcerated there as one meal turned into another, the holes in conversation filled by the crystal carafe in Karl’s hand and aphorisms he had clipped from the Russian newspaper. Dora occasionally appeared to switch serving plates and immediately vanished back to the kitchen—she seemed unstarved for Karl’s insights—except for a period on Saturday afternoon when she left the house altogether (Alex and Maya gazed at her departing frame longingly) and came back with half a dozen silk shirts for Max and Alex from Marshall’s. Maya wondered why she had been passed over, but eventually decided it was a compliment of sorts—unlike the men, who would wear a burlap sack if it buttoned easily, women could not presume on each other’s behalf.

  Maya did not think of her own home as particularly Americanized, but next to Karl and Dora the Rubins were indigenous. In these fifteen hundred square feet of America, the Soviet Union lived on, long after it had exhaled its final breath elsewhere, a hallucinatory enclave where linoleum covered the floor and the wallpaper sagged with a Persian rug. What nation was this? Every evening, Maya and Alex staggered back to their bedroom, bloated on carp and Karl’s wisdom. It bred a beleaguered solidarity between them that had now been destroyed by Alex’s reckless action.

  “We were supposed to see places,” Maya said.

  “We are supposed to see the parents,” Alex said. The cigarette smoldered in his fingers. Maya, her back to the keening strain of motors from the road, felt that each passing driver was studying the foreign couple off on the shoulder. Studied from both sides, by cowlike humans, and humanlike cows.

  “We were supposed to observe Max,” Maya said.

  “He’s not a pelican, Maya, to be studied in his native habitat,” Alex said. “Fall is coming. Do you know what happens when fall comes to these places? It doesn’t. There’s a fart of summer and then it’s winter for nine months. Our winters back home look like a sprinkle of snow next to it. So let’s get there.”

  “But I wanted you to ask me before you did it,” Maya said.

  “Where exactly do you plan to deposit him while we go meet these people? You’re going to find a babysitter in that town?”

  “I don’t know, Alex. We’ll figure it out.”

  He shrugged and flicked the cigarette into the grass. It was a reckless trip—three voyagers into the gloom, on the doorstep of winter.

  “Why are you smoking?” she said.

  “Why are
you smoking?” he said, and nodded at the car where, indeed, the glove compartment held a pack of Parliament 100’s that Maya had impulsively bought along with the other things.

  She tightened her shawl. She craved coffee. Hot, lip-scalding coffee. Terrible coffee, weak and plain, a pale perimeter rimming the blackness. Maya had glimpsed enough movies to know this was the kind of coffee they drank out here. She wanted some.

  She stared at the humpbacked brown bestiary in the distance. The earth looked tired. Someone had spent it. Little tufts of green shrub rose here and there, like the indecisive patches on Alex’s chest. Like Rubins—erstwhile of the same square mile in Minsk—dispersed across the broad back of America: Eugene’s brother in Chicago; Eugene’s second cousin in Omaha; Raisa’s second cousin in Denver; someone, Maya could never remember who, in San Francisco. It turned out, given the chance, they all preferred to live far away from one another.

  However, the land spread voluptuously, disdainful of restrictions, and this lifted her. The openness was heedless, spoiled, uneconomizing. It sprang something in her chest, got out of her a clutching deep exhalation, transmitted a clarifying signal to the haze in her head. The white oblong birds watched the cows, the cows watched her, she watched the brown ridgeline, and the brown ridgeline watched everything. She liked being in the relay.

  “Don’t you want to know where we are?” Alex said.

  “No,” she said. It came out resentfully, a petty revenge—she was not asked where to go, and so she would not ask where they’d gone—but she didn’t mean it that way. On the cusp of inquiring, she decided not to inquire. She enjoyed not knowing. She even enjoyed not knowing why she enjoyed not knowing. There was a weightlessness to it—her husband had unwittingly kidnapped her from the designated and mapped. How could anyone try to reach her if she didn’t know where she could be reached? She watched his face struggle with the senselessness of her answer.