Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (19 page)

“Mrs. Rubin,” Mishkin said. “Please don't take this the wrong way. But all the paperwork related to my time at the agency is under lock and key.”

She turned to face him again, wincing from the effort. “Mr. Mishkin, my son seems to have been birthed by a wolf. I came to you to plead for a clue, and you said no. Don't add insult to what I am feeling. I need a half hour without noise. Every minute that we talk extends the recovery time.” She searched out his eyes. “And now forgive
me
for being rude, Mr. Mishkin, but I am a Jewish mother. When was the last time you went outside?”

Maya looked up at her husband. Alex rose, hoping that would
stir Mishkin. “Go, please,” she said, in a voice choked by imminent tears. That did it. Confronted by the possibility of imminent tears, the men hustled into the hallway. Then the door shut behind them. Maya counted out a minute and swung her feet to the floor.

No, she was not going to look for agency paperwork. And she didn't have time to clean as she would have liked. As she passed the crowded dining room table on her way to the kitchen, she saw the cover page of Mishkin's opus:
Memoirs: An Attempt at Living
.

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—