Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (21 page)

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.

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.

“Maya, what is all this for?” he said. “It's a fool's errand.”

She shrugged and pulled again on the shawl, setting off a shudder of pain from her neck to her fingertips. “I thought . . .” she started, but trailed off.

“Let's just hope nothing bad happens,” Alex said.

She needed a cup of coffee, an ibuprofen for her neck, a cigarette. “We need to find a campground,” she said.

“A campground?”

“I want to camp with my son. You said cold is coming: Better to do it sooner.”

“I don't understand,” Alex said, spreading his arms.

“Your preference is to spend the night in a vehicle,” she said. “I also would like to not sleep in a bed.”

“Maya, I don't want to sleep in a tent.”

“I didn't want to sleep in a car, but you didn't ask. You can rent a hotel room. Max and I will sleep in a tent.”

“What is it you expect to find out?” Alex raised his voice. “You
think he'll sit up in the middle of the night and confess to you the secret of his being? We had a tent in the backyard.”

She looked past Alex's shoulder. If she spoke, she would say something that would scatter the last of the goodwill stored up in Chicago. The morning fog was dissipating, setting loose a golden light streaked with pink. The brown humps had turned blue. If she kinked her head—fresh stab of pain—they looked like the shoulders of a beheaded colossus, buried below the rib cage, and the stony wrinkles that ran up and down the rock were his strain at trying to lift himself from the earth. Dumpy clouds hopped above the shoulders like little white horses.

Why did the hills in the distance becalm her with their mute, maintaining consistency, but the same quality in her husband made her unhappy? Was the vision in the distance especially majestic, or was she especially impatient?

“Maya,” he called to her, a peacemaking note in his voice.

Her head was sideways in an inspection of hills.
Once upon a time there was a woman who left her husband and married a mountain. The blue giant's headless torso, inspired by her love, wrenched its fingers from the ground and pulled at a wick in her belly until it had unfurled her like a scarf and the ground was covered with the eiderdown of an unraveled Maya. Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a tree. There it grows in the shade of the blue giant's shoulders, watered by snowmelt and the brine of her tears. What the freshwater enlivens, her saltwater destroys.

There. Not only her mother could tell stories. Her mother found fairy tales annoying, however: the ticking grandfather clock, the house on stilts, the talking wolf. Her stories of their Kiev neighbors were about real people suffering real lives. Why the gloom of a fairy tale when you could have the desperation next door? That was fine, Maya thought: Fairy tales would be the daughter's department. She touched her temples. Being out of New Jersey was having a strange effect on her. Her imagination
was working, but not the remainder of her. Belatedly, she looked up at her husband. She said she was fine.

They heard Max climbing out of the car. He stood shading his eyes against the light, which, having vanquished the fog, had turned severe. Alex walked to his wife and placed a hand on her shoulder to reassure his son that mama and papa were not fighting, but it looked as if he was either leaning on Maya or keeping her in place.

“Max, honey, we're going to camp tonight,” Maya said excitedly and walked toward her son, letting Alex's hand drop from her shoulder.

“I need to go number one,” Max said unhappily.

“Max, what do those hills look like? Sleeping rhinos or a brown headless giant?”

“I need to go number one,” Max insisted, knocking his knees. He was blinking furiously. She walked over and embraced him, inhaling the sleep in his hair. He stomped his feet impatiently. She took his hand and pulled him toward a stand of trees by the fence. “There isn't a bathroom?” Max said, pulling away.

“Maya,” Alex called out in reproof.

“Honey, you'll be fine,” Maya implored Max. “Don't be fussy. There's nowhere else to go. Just quick in the bushes.”

The pair of them took the decline down to the trees. What kind of trees? Trees. Maya pointed Max toward a thick trunk good for concealment and faced back toward the road. They all heard the burp and whoop of a police cruiser at the same time. As it pulled up behind the Escape, the siren went off but the lights continued to rotate and flash, menacing in their silence. Max turned back to his mother and now she shook her head. Maya felt Alex's furious gaze and avoided it. She felt a sweat on her spine. She remained in place, as if any movement could be misinterpreted, and took Max's hand.

The policeman took time climbing out. They watched him through the windshield of the cruiser, recording their license plate
and murmuring into his radio as if they were fugitives. Maya had a panicked urge to laugh. Their first morning! She imagined the incredulous silence on the other end of the line when she called Eugene and Raisa from the local jail. Her neck ached incredibly. She remembered Max and rustled his hair. He stared at the police car inscrutably.

The policeman looked as if every grain of superfluity had been swept from him: His pale cheeks had been so closely shaved that they burned like mirrors in the cold sun. He covered the distance between his cruiser and the transgressors, Alex left in the margins, and greeted Maya, but her tongue had gone dry, so she only nodded.